Marilyn Jones | Emily Carr Chronicler

Emily Carr at Home: The Story Behind Carr House

Published: 28 August, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

Carr House, at 207 Government Street was built in 1863–64 for Richard and Emily Saunders Carr in James Bay. Designed in an Italianate Picturesque‑villa style by Wright & Sanders, it sat on four 1/2 acres in James Bay, then a fashionable neighbourhood in Victoria. The original address of the house was 44 Carr Street when Richard donated land to widen the road in front of his estate allowing two carriages to pass side-by-side on…

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The Artist and the Suitor: Emily Carr’s First “Heartbreak”

Published: 28 August, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

In the summer of 1898, a young Emily Carr boarded the steamship Willapa to return to Victoria with a portfolio of drawings and watercolours of the Indigenous communities of Ucluelet. She was just 27 and already deeply committed to becoming a serious artist, even though that path for women was anything but straightforward. The steamship Willipa was a slow-moving vessel, typically transporting and dropping off mixed cargo, livestock, and passengers along the coast. A…

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Between Fact and Feeling: Emily Carr’s Autobiographical Voice

Published: 28 August, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

Art historian Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, in her insightful book This Woman in Particular: Concepts for the Biographical Image of Emily Carr (1996, Wilfred University Press), argues that the composite image of Carr that emerges—across biographies, plays, films, poems, and her own words—is a “cultural artefact.” It is necessarily fragmented, constantly evolving, and reflects the wider conversations Canadians have about gender, creativity, spirituality, and nationhood. Walker suggests that the way Emily is portrayed changes over time, depending…

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