Jessie Georgina Sime (1868-1958), Canadian author, has written "The Mistress Of All Work" (1916), "Canada Chaps" (1917), "Sister Woman" (1919), "Our Little Life" (1921), "Thomas Hardy Of The Wessex Novels" (1928), "In A Canadian Shack" (1937), "The Land Of Dreams" (1940), and "Orpheus In Quebec" (1942).

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.

A rediscovered classic, J.G. Sime´s Sister Woman, originally published in 1919, is a pioneering book of short stories, focused on the social and sexual changes in women's lives underway in the early twentieth century. Set in the Montreal of World War I, the twenty-eight stories deal with the lives of middle and lower-class women with a frankness that startled Sime's contemporaries. Sime´s characters—seamstresses, munitions workers, secretaries, cooks, charwomen and prostitutes — struggle with issues of sexuality, maternity and work, amid the immigration, urbanization and industrialization underway in the Canada of the day. Georgina Sime, herself an immigrant to Canada, used her short story cycle — interrelated stories about the "Woman's and the Man's Question" — to examine issues of gender, class, ethnicity and place and their impact on the lives of the women of her day. As a result, Sister Woman is a work of short fiction significant not only to Canadian literature, but to Canadian history and women's studies.

Sime believed that the reason the contemporary novel was so "utterly useless and unreal" was its refusal to embrace and to represent change, instead maintaining an anachronistic relation to the past by "depicting a past state of things as if it were existing today." Sime chose as her example of obsession with "past states" common literary treatments of women, explaining that while the novel almost inevitably deals with gender on some level, it often fails to impart any idea of women's reality.