In the last decade, scholars have come to see Georgina Sime (1868-1958) as an exciting and important early twentieth-century Canadian writer. A Place of Bare Necessity, a collection of Sime´s short fiction and dramatic work, adds to the richness and variety of extant Canadian writing of the early twentieth century and is of interest to scholars of women, of modernism, and of Canadian Literature alike.

Sime´s work in A Place of Bare Necessity articulates the complexities of the era of the New Woman: sexual harassment in the workplace, the manifold implications of the "Woman Question," the many forms of loyalty and love, the cost of abortion, the price of connection, the meaning of nation, and the loss of home in wartime. While its form introduces questions about morality and genre and their relationship to the edifice called Canadian Literature, its content makes it difficult to ignore pressing social questions about women in urban Canadian society, about the nuances of their lives and their economies, and about power and agency in turn-of-the-century Canada. Written in an era of Canadian boosterism and amid critical yearnings for a wholesome kind of nationalism in published work, Sime´s fiction sketches a picture of Canada as "a place of bare necessity," a stern and unyielding place in which its citizens are uneasily and inequitably entering the modern world.

Of special interest, too, is Sime´s dramatic work in which she ponders the boundaries between the new public world of paid office work for women and the private world of intimacy. A Place of Bare Necessity presents a broader range of Georgina Sime´s work and talent than has been easily available to date. Her writing is edgy, boldly about the physical side of love, about unsentimentalized love, and about the shifting poles of personal and public relationships in "modern" Canada and in a new world of technology that seemed to herald limitless possibility for women.

About the Editor

Historian and writer K.J. Watt received her PhD from the University of Alberta in 1997. She lives and works in Fort Langley, B.C. She was recently awarded the Lieutenant Governor´s Medal for Historical Writing from the British Columbia Historical Federation for her book, High Water: Living With the Fraser Floods.