Jessie Georgina Sime was born at Ivy Cottage, Hamilton, Lanark County, Scotland, on 12 February 1868, the daughter of James and Jessie Aitken Wilson Sime, who had married three years earlier at Birkenhead. She came from a literary family. Mrs. Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897), the English novelist, was her mother's second cousin, a relationship that never, apparently, bloomed into cordiality, though the connection drew technically closer when one of Mrs. Oliphant's brothers married one of Jessie Wilson Sime's sisters. Sir Daniel Wilson, for some years the influential principal of the University of Toronto, was Jessie Wilson Sime's elder brother.

Jessie Georgina Sime grew up in London. Although her birth certificate lists her father's occupation as minister, he had given up training for the ministry in 1866 and traveled to Germany to do research on Gotthold Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich von Schiller in Heidelberg and Berlin, embarking on a literary...