Redden was a kind, practical Scot who had spent her married life in Canada and now lived in London with her son. She was as strong-willed and outspoken as Emily, and they often fought, but Emily soon began to spend most of her Sundays with the Redden family.
At the beginning of her second year, Mayo Paddon, her Canadian suitor, came to visit. When Emily arranged to meet him at church one day with Mrs. Redden, Mayo and Mrs. Redden liked each other immediately, and the older woman, with many “dear me’s!” and twinkling eyes, arranged to let the two Canadians walk home together without her.
After Mrs. Redden caught him one night on his knees in front of the fire, warming Emily’s cloak and patting the collar as if it were a kitten, she called him “The Knight of the Cloak” and liked him more than ever.
Not Emily. Five times a week Mayo asked her to marry him, and five times a week she said “no.” As he got sadder, Emily got crosser. It made her even more angry that Mrs. Redden continually urged Mayo not to give up, and urged Emily to say “yes.”
One of Emily’s favourite places in London, and one she must have shown Mayo, was the zoo in Kew Gardens. Here she would sit for hours watching the animals. Once they grew used to people, she thought, perhaps they did not really mind being kept in cages. Most of them seemed “merry” and all of them were “well tended.”
Emily knew what it was like to feel caged. Since childhood she had paced, eager to escape the bars of her family and her narrow Victorian culture. She had had a taste of freedom in California, but here the cage was subtle and enticing and right in front of her: small things like changing her accent to sound less colonial, larger things like the pressure to choose marriage over art, to yield to traditional values and to be – in the end – “well tended” if not exactly “merry.”
Mayo Paddon offered her security, companionship, and family. She truly liked him, and she was now nearly twenty-nine years old – almost an old maid. But her choice was all or nothing. If she said “yes” to Mayo, her life would be spent looking after husband and children and house, and only if she had spare time would there be a place for art.
Emily hated London but she would not marry Mayo and let him take her away. She had come here to study painting. Finally she told him to, “Go away, Mayo; please go away!”
And he did.
Years after she refused Mayo’s offer of marriage, Emily mourned about “that poor love I deliberately set out to kill.” She thought it was a “dreadful thing to do,” but she didn’t regret it. “I did it in self-defence,” she said, “because it was killing me, sapping the life from me.” Once and for all she had said “no” to what was supposed to be a woman’s highest calling: marriage and family. Emily chose art, and now she committed herself to study, day and night, more intensely than ever.
But an old injury to her toe was making it harder to walk and causing her terrible pain. At first Mrs. Redden scolded her for whining – “You homesick baby! Stop that hullabaloo! Crying over a corn or two!” – but when she saw it was serious, Mrs. Redden called in her surgeon-cousin to examine the ailing foot.
The toe was fractured and had to be amputated, and it was very, very slow to heal. For the rest of her life Emily would carry a camp stool with her when she sketched because she couldn’t paint standing up.
This time it was Alice who followed her from Victoria for a visit. At first Emily was excited. She pinned her best artwork on the walls of their rooms and waited eagerly for her sister to comment. But Alice didn’t even look. She didn’t ask about Emily’s work, either. Finally Emily said, “Not interested in my work, are you?”
“Of course,” Alice replied, “but I have not seen any.”
Emily pointed at the walls and said bitterly, “I suppose you thought these were wallpaper?”
Her family had never understood or encouraged her art, but it hurt her badly that even her favourite sister didn’t care. Now Emily decided she would “seal it from everybody.” She would keep the importance of her painting hugged closely to her own heart.
When Emily’s London classes finished, the two sisters left the city so Emily could study in small villages and sketch outdoors. Alice returned to Canada, but Emily’s health, which hadn’t been good in London, got worse. She developed headaches and gained weight.
She was not happy. She was working too hard, and with so little money she was probably not eating properly. By now she also realized that the most exciting ideas in art were not in England; she should have gone to Paris or Rome. It didn’t help that Julius Olsson, her teacher at St. Ives in Cornwall on the south coast of England, forced her to paint sun and sand until she thought her head would split.
But it was in St. Ives that Emily first painted forest. Whenever she could, she escaped the blazing sun on the beaches to sketch in the cool shade of Tregenna Wood, above the village. Olsson denounced the work she did here as “Neurotic! Morbid!” but his assistant, Algernon Talmage, encouraged her. “One works best where one is happy,” he told her.
Olsson was a good teacher, but like most teachers of the day, he greatly favoured his male students. He invited them to his studio, discussed his own art with them, and treated them like fellow artists. When Mrs. Olsson had her husband’s favourite students to tea, Emily was not invited. Emily told the other students she didn’t care, but it was one more humiliation that bit into her and fed her self-doubt.
Her health continued to get worse. Emily was happy to be in the country and was learning some new things from her teachers, but she was terribly homesick. Everywhere she went in England she felt harshly judged because she was not only from the colonies, but a woman. Even her friends in London, the Reddens, didn’t take her art seriously.
She was over thirty years old and the pressure must have been intense. She must have begun to question herself. What if everyone else was right? Was her plan to be an artist just a silly mistake? If she wasn’t going to marry, what could she do? She hadn’t learned enough yet about art, and she refused to leave England before she got what she came for. Finally, emotionally and physically exhausted, Emily had, as she put it, a “crack up.”
Sister Lizzie, hearing of Emily’s illness, came from British Columbia to be with her. But Lizzie was emotionally in as bad a state as Emily. She also represented all the forces of conformity that Emily was fighting to escape, and her efforts to help – including having prayers offered for Emily at the local church – instead of calming Emily, roused her wrath and increased her anxiety even more. By now Emily was having terrible headaches and was experiencing fatigue, depression, vomiting, stuttering, and numbness on one side.
On January 12, 1903, Lizzie took Emily to the East Anglia Sanatorium for treatment and returned alone to Canada.
The Sanatorium was a hospital mainly for people with tuberculosis but there was the occasional patient, like Emily, whose complaint was entered in the hospitals “Doom Book” as “hysteria.” This was a form of illness Emily Carr_commonly diagnosed for women at the time. It was thought to be the result of women’s emotional nature and their denial of their “God-given” and socially ordained roles as sexual beings and mothers. Today, such symptoms would be recognized as a response – by both men and women – to unendurable stress. The Sanatorium, or San as it was called, was run by Dr. Jane Walker, who was experimenting with open-air treatment for tuberculosis.
Emily arrived in the middle of a snowstorm. The front wall of her room was open from the ceiling to a foot above the floor. Above her bed, small windows opened into a corridor that was all open windows. As the wind roared through, a nurse shook the