The Centre of Scottish Studies Lecture Series - Dr. Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir Isobel Wylie

Join us online for a fascinating session, the third in a series this fall of St. Andrew’s Society of Toronto Lectures, focused on Historical Travels in Scotland & Scottish Travellers Abroad, featuring international experts sharing their insights.

Featured Speaker:

Dr. Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir

The Scottish writer Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889-1982) was a woman of many talents. In addition to writing poetry, fiction, travel books and journal and newspaper articles, she was a botanist, photographer, filmmaker, and watercolour artist. Hutchison’s went alone on several journeys into the Arctic in the 1920s and 1930s; out of these, her extensive travels in Greenland and Alaska, often in precarious conditions, have perhaps drawn the greatest interest among scholars and historians.

However, the beginning of Hutchison’s Arctic adventure was marked by a journey to Iceland in the summer of 1925, and it was soon after this that she decided to travel further north, travelling to both the Lofoten Islands of Norway and to Greenland in the next few years. Then, in the summer of 1930, she again returned to Iceland. Hutchison’s two Iceland journeys have received little critical attention, but they clearly left a mark on her and were the source for a great deal of her writing in the following years, as she published numerous newspaper and journal articles on her travels in Iceland, as well as some poetry and short stories inspired by the places she saw, the people she met and her experiences in Iceland. In addition, she corresponded with people in Iceland, or on Icelandic topics, into the late 1940s, at least, which demonstrates the interest she continued to maintain in the country and its affairs.

This talk focuses on Hutchison’s journeys to Iceland and her engagement with the people, landscapes and culture of the country as expressed in her travel accounts and other writings inspired by Iceland.

Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir is Associate Professor in English at the University of Iceland and holds a PhD in Scottish Literature from the University of Glasgow. Her main research interests are in historical fiction and Scottish literature and she has published on Scottish writing, historical novels and fictional representations of the Tudors and Stuarts in literature and film. Her current research is focused on women’s historical fiction alongside working on a funded research project on the Arctic in Scottish literature.