Wednesday, December 11th, 2024, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Paul O’Regan Hall room at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Click here for the Zoom link. 

A graduate of Dalhousie University, Lois Yorke is the former Provincial Archivist and Director of the Nova Scotia Archives. She has spent over forty years as an archivist, editor, researcher and consultant in cultural heritage. Her long-standing involvement in women’s history has produced various articles on ‘interesting’ women from Nova Scotia’s past. Priscilla Wells is the most recent, and was discovered by accident while working on a much larger project – the first biography to explore fully the life and times of Anna Harriette Leonowens, ‘The English Governess at the Siamese Court’ – possibly the most interesting woman of them all.

Abstract: 
George Harvey lingers in our cultural history today only as a footnote, faintly remembered as the first headmaster of Halifax’s new Victoria School of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) in 1887. His wife Priscilla is remembered not at all. Their lives were lived at the intersections of Victorian art, literature and music in bohemian London, while in Halifax they were well-known and liked – but afterwards, the erasure of their memory was complete and deliberate. This illustrated presentation will revisit their world, reclaim their lives, and give them the voices they so richly deserve