Carlile, Elizabeth 'Tina' [Canadian artist 1916-2010]

Tina Carlile lived her early life in Calgary, where she was the close friend of P K Page, later to gain fame as a Canadian poet. In Wider Boundaries of Daring: In ‘The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry: Sandra Djwa notes that Page and Carlile built a room under a stairwell where they wrote and painted and discussed becoming artists. In the late 1940s Carlile became the partner of Pearl Helen Mellows King [1918 -2015 British psychoanalyst] and in 2005 they entered into civil partnership. They had met just after the second world war. Tina, was the granddaughter of Wilson Carlile, founder of the Church Army, and was a major influence on Pearl’s life and thinking. Partly thanks to her, Pearl became interested in eastern religion and theosophy, returned to her Anglican faith and joined her local church choir, and together the two women became founding grand masters in a breakaway lodge of Co-Freemasons, in which men and women were equal.