It's Always More Complicated

Today I met cassandre for lunch - we had actually scheduled this for last Thursday but in view of the promised HEAT EVENT we rearranged.

We lunched at Honey & Co Daily, a deli/restaurant on the corner of Store Street and Alfred Place Gardens in Bloomsbury. Recommended.

Much catching up and good conversation.

We then flaneursed around Bloomsbury, commenting on whether Miriam/Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage would have passed through the places we did - doubt the Insect Hotel in Russell Square was there in her day - took in a ferret around Skoob Books, which still lurks behind the Brunswick Centre. Noted that there is also a new independent bookshop inside the Centre.

It was undoubtedly a much more pleasant day for the undertaking, even if the grass in the squares was still parched.

So yestere'en there was a get-together for the Fellows of the institution I have had the honour to be award a Fellowship of, so I thought I ought to Make The Effort and turn up at least for a little bit.

So I trotted off, and in spite of some hitches with the Tube (several trains going to the wrong branch) got to the right stop, and lo, the Scientologists are still infesting Tottenham Court Road, what is this thing that this thing is?

So I crossed the road, going, surely the traffic flow used to be one-way? Confusing.

And went down a side-street, and came to this lovely and surprising thing, which I am sure wasn't there last time I was in these parts, early in 2020:

Alfred Place Gardens

and was charmed.

Then on to venue, where everything seems same as it ever was.

Hearing aids still not optimum in room full of overlapping conversations: but I did manage to have some fairly coherent conversations, including one with old academic acquaintance who was most gratifyingly complimentary about The Biography, all these years later.

So I think a win, even if I did suppose that this event would also include some admin stuff relating to Fellowship, which it didn't.

The Forgotten Square of Bloomsbury: Tragedy and oddity in Regent Square:

The western end of St George’s Gardens leads out to Wakefield Street, which runs back up to Regent Square. Here, you’ll find one of London’s more unusual plaque dedications: “Stella and Fanny”, as the plaque attests, were noted cross-dressers at a time when such pursuits were considered suspicious or even "an offence against public morals and common decency". In 1870 the pair were arrested and charged with the “abominable crime of buggery”, on only the most circumstantial of evidence. They were subjected to humiliating physical examination without consent, and traduced throughout the press. They were later acquitted. The case was a landmark in British LGBT history and deserves an article in its own right. If you want to find out more, the National Archives has published an excellent account of the case and other documentation relating to their lives.

The Reverend James Mahomed, Chaplain to the London Hospital:

Reverend James Dean Kerriman Mahomed was Chaplain of the London Hospital from 1890 to 1898. James was the grandson of Sake Dean Mahomed (1759-1851), also known as Shekh Din Muhammôd, who was the first Indian to write a book in English and who had opened England’s first Indian takeaway restaurant and first ‘shampooing vapour masseur bath’, where clientele included George IV and William IV. Dean Mahomed converted from converted from Islam to Protestant Christianity in 1786, around the time of his marriage to Jane Daly, an Irish Protestant, and his seven children with Jane were brought up as Christians. His grandson James DK Mahomed was born in 1853 in Brighton, near to the fencing, gymnastics, boxing and callisthenics academy in Hove, run by his father Frederick, son of Dean Mahomed. Several of Frederick's children went on to notable careers: James’ brother, Frederick Henry Horatio Akbar Mahomed , became a doctor, studying at Guy’s Hospital, London, where he did pioneering work on hypertension. After studying at Keble College, James was ordained a minister of the Church of England. His first clerical posts were in the East End, as curate at St Anne's, Limehouse and at St Philip’s, Stepney Way, Whitechapel (now the Whitechapel Library of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, QMUL), before he moved to a post at St Anne’s, Highgate.On 7 January 1890, James' return to the East End was agreed when he was unanimously confirmed as Chaplain to the London Hospital, succeeding against a very strong field of candidates[.]

Eliza Sharples Carlile:

There, Eliza Sharples lectured in the Blackfriars Rotunda (a place ‘long devoted’, wrote the Christian Advocate, ‘to the purposes of radicalism and infidelity’) where she castigated Church and state with equal ferocity. With Carlile still imprisoned, she threw herself into his defence, fired by the twin principles which would animate her life and work: the strident pursuit of knowledge and the unhindered right to free discussion. Organised Christianity, Sharples argued, was a barrier to both, and Carlile a martyr in their name.
From the Rotunda stage Sharples declared herself ‘a free and independent woman.’ In the press, she was branded the ‘Pythoness of the temple.’ That year, Sharples also became editor of The Isis – a weekly paper dedicated ‘to the young women of England for generations to come, or until superstition is extinct’ – through which her ideals were further expounded.
....
Though venerating the memory of Carlile (who had been dead for six years), Eliza sought help. ‘Mr C. died’, she wrote, ‘leaving the three children entirely unprovided for’ and so ‘subjected to every degree of wretchedness, often without food.’ Her firm feminism was still in evidence, but she was acutely aware of her own precarious position: ‘Alas! For woman,’ she wrote, ‘hard indeed is her lot to want in her last hour what she has expended her health and her strength in bestowing.’

A women’s history guided tour along London’s Suffragette line - not 100 miles from where I sit....

Okay, it's popping up again (as it were): lately spotted (although it's actually from 2015) A Conservation inspection of Jeremy Bentham’s Mummified head:

The head is kept inside a Victorian bell jar, inside his own hand carved wooden box (with his name and various UCL logos on the outside). The box takes 4 keys and a couple of people to (carefully) open it. We don’t say exactly which safe and where, for security reasons.

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Other antique relics to be found nearby in the Bloomsbury vicinity: The 17th Century Forge by Tottenham Court Road

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De Gruyter offering some freebies and massive discounts on ebooks for Pride Month.

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Fascinating post on the 'Now You See Us' exhibition at the Tate, a particular C19th woman artist, what that says about women artists of her day more generally, and indeed, not just her day: Now You See Us: Positioning Ann Mary (Severn) Newton as a British Female Artist:

Basically, to be a successful female professional artist you needed family connections, spousal support (or to be able to not marry), a secure income, good health, have constant vigilance about your reputation as well as safeguard against sexual violence and find a place or community you can be supported in. And you will be better known today if your work has been bought by national or large regional galleries. It is some what alarming to reflect that over the last 25 years I have found that much of this is still true for women working in the arts and heritage. . .

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Intriguing article here from Journal of Popular Romance Studies: Historical Accuracy, Racism, Courtney Milan, and The Duke Who Didn’t Conform to Genre Norms.

What I read

Finished Hild, and decided a slight hiatus would be in order before commencing upon Menewood.

Simon R Green, Not of This World (Gideon Sable #4) (2023), the usual mixture and maybe phoning it in a bit, but kept the mixture moving.

Julie Schumacher, The English Experience (2023): moderately enjoyable, but alas, does not come up to Dear Committee Members.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Had I Known: Collected Essays (2020): okay, from a fairly lengthy career and some are v much of their time and others hold up more, but pretty good on the whole.

Marian Keyes, Grown-Ups (2020) which was a Kobo Deal, and extremely addictive, though I'm not sure the ending quite worked for me.

Surprise Cat Sebastian novella, Luke and Billy Finally Get a Clue (2023). Set in 1953 which just about makes it histfic I guess. The characters are professional baseball players but this is pretty much offstage details.

On the go

Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (2022). Ramsey was a brilliant genius mathematician/economist/philosopher in the 20s who died v young. I was interested by the reviews because he was clearly hanging out not only on the fringes of Bloomsbury but with various people connected with experimental schools/psychoanalysis/birth control/new forms of relationships/socialism etc in whom I Am Interested. I am not so very bothered by the technical details of what he was doing in his specialist subjects - though interestingly he sounds a bit of a precursor to that group of somewhat later Oxford women philosophers who have had 2 group bios of recent years - but the other stuff is great. Also pretty well-written if clearly for an audience which needs certain quirks about English culture explained.

Up next

There is that Robin Stevens, Menewood, a new Candas Jane Dorsey Epitome Apartments mystery, a new Annick Trent (protag is a surgeon in the 1790s, I shall be reading with critical eye), and next week, new Courtney Milan and new Alexis Hall. Also still several birthday books. Plus, latest Literary Review and volume of essays on Middlemarch by virtual acquaintance which was free on Kobo.

What I read

A lot of comfort re-reading, what with the domestic - well, not actually disaster, but certainly major hassle? - and general sense of anomie.

Also read, Jeevani Charika, Playing for Love (2022), because I have liked the other books of Charika's I've read, but this didn't quite do it for me.

Also the whole of Tansy Rayner Roberts' Teacup Magic sequence, Tea and Sympathetic Magic (#1) (2018), The Frost Fair Affair (#2) (2020), Spellcracker's Honeymoon (#3) (2021), and Lady Liesl's Seaside Surprise (#4) (2021). Clearly they hit the spot that was the spot where I was at.

On the go

The H.D. and Bryher book still languishes.

Will Loxley, Writing in the Dark: Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon Magazine (2021) and it's very readably written, and on the whole I think it's fair to Virginia Woolf and does get how misogynist/ageist some of the attitudes towards her were but even though it does get her Three Guineas critique of patriarchy slots her in as 'non-political' which I think is using a rather narrow definition perhaps??? Otherwise it's pretty much a bloke-fest, and moreover fairly privileged metropolitan blokes, and while they are interesting, I feel the shadows of the women in that Lost Girls book... and all of them banging on about How On Earth Can One Create Great Litrachur under the Blitz or write at all, when I think of all those women writing their gradually being rediscovered 'middlebrow' novels or keeping Mass Observation diaries (and Rebecca West was writing Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, you wankers, and as I recall running a dairy farm), alongside dealing with evacuees and blackout and rationing and ARP and firewatching and just bloody carrying on, and you know, the prams in the hall that might not have even contained their own offspring did not stop them, retrospective large quantitites of codfish to Cyril Connolly, really. This may be about my annoyance with the subjects...

Think I may have given up on Pin Money out of sheer irritation at the unsatisfactory pdf, which just did not play nicely.

Up next

And the good news is, the latest Slightly Foxed.

Also it turns out that there is another recent biography of Elizabeth von Arnim: Joyce Morgan, The Countess from Kirribilli, the ebook of which is a very eligible price.

This is an absolutely spiffy set of china plates: Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, The Famous Women Dinner Service, 1932 - 34.:

A bold, feminist statement
In the Famous Women Dinner Service, women are invited to sit at the head of the table, so to speak. Their lives, achievements and accomplishments become the focal point of the conversation.

A closer look at the list of women whom Bell and Grant chose to include reveals their profound understanding of the importance of female histories and stories which are often untold, suppressed, or erased completely.

In October 1931, Vanessa Bell somewhat offhandedly wrote to Roger Fry that the project ‘ought to please the feminists’. And indeed, the Famous Women Dinner Service follows in the footsteps of her sister Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, but also anticipates contemporary feminist politics.

Many of the ‘famous women’ celebrated in the plates led complex and unconventional lives, resisting tradition and societal expectations in favour of individual freedom. Some used stage names and pseudonyms to follow their chosen professional paths. Others had to do so in order to express an alternative sexual identity. Across the collection, the women crafted identities which subverted social mores and for Bell, it was ‘an illustration of women in different capacities’ and a reflection of Bloomsbury’s new sexual politics. Dr Hana Leaper, who has catalogued the plates since their rediscovery and co-curated the 2018 exhibition at Charleston, considers The Famous Women Dinner Service a joyful sorority.

But figure to yourselves my entire bogglement that this was commissioned by Kenneth Clark, later to be known as 'Lord Clark of Civilisation' from the multi-episode BBC2 series. Which, from my rather cobwebbed memories, did not give ye gentylle sexxe much part in it. (Though at least one observes that in certain respects he was not ahem distant from the mores of the Bloomsbury set.)*

In Dept, Synchronicity Synchronises, the very same day this article came to my attention: "Storming then Performing": Historical Non-Monogamy and Metamour Collaboration. I have met one of the co-authors: at the very last conference I attended before Everything Shut Down, Granada Feb '20.

[W]e suggest that while our existing societal and social-scientific norms primarily focus on competitive sexual behaviors, much can be learnt from historically documented practices of consensual non-monogamy. These practices—however flawed—point to potentially emancipatory ways of living, loving and building relationships, families, and communities.

*Dept of Six Degrees of Separation: I was once on a radio intellectual chat programme with his son Alan.

What I read

Well, I did indeed complete the Cat Sebastian binge: It Takes Two To Tumble, A Gentleman Never Keeps Score and Two Rogues Make A Right. And that is it until the next thing Ms Sebastian brings out (? sequel to Hither, Page?)

Read the Ben Aaronvitch Tales from the Folly, new collection of assorted shorts mostly written to specific remits, okay if a bit slight.

Having mentioned Angus Wilson's As If By Magic (1973) last week I dug this up for a re-read, and it is really not anywhere near the top of my list of Sir Angus' works - the whole Hamo strand of the plot was heavy going - one can bear, maybe, with his extremely specific and objectified erotic interests (I suspect this will drastically date the the novel for some readers) but not the constant string of his cringe-making misadventures. The Alexandra strand worked better for me.

The new Barbara Hambly Benjamin January, House of the Patriarch, is very good indeed. It takes January to the 'Burned-Over District' of New York State during the Second Great Awakening of weird religious movements, spiritualism, etc. Also, I approve of the way Hambly works real historical individuals into the narrative - I was complaining recently about the way Laurie R King has been doing it in recent works, scattering them wholesale more or less as set-dressing rather than particularly material to the story - Hambly is far more restrained, and tends to take them at the more obscure periods of their life. This one worked particularly well, I thought, with the wider theme.

Discovered during the resort to unvisited shelves, Olivia by 'Olivia' (Dorothy Bussy nee Strachey). My copy is actually the original 1949 Hogarth Press edition, for which I paid more or less peanuts secondhand. I first read this while minding the bookstall at a church jumble sale when I was about 13 - memory fails to recall what I made of it, except that I was engrossed. Probably about the same time as I first read Frost in May and put it in rather the same box? Anyway, one of those v good short intense novellas (I am not sure where the comparison with Claudine at School comes in, which may be about lesbian passions in a girls' school but has an entirely different feel to it.)

On the go

Re-read, first for many a year, of Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (1957).

Up next

Well, there is the new Robin Stevens forthcoming (?tomorrow?), and an intention to go on to the posthumously edited sequel volumes to The Fountain Overflows

Two dos, both in the same Bloomsberries-associated venue on Monday and Friday this week (though oddly enough, the invites gave different addresses - but several of the houses on that side of the square are all connected, and in the event, entrance was through the same main one, both times, with some matter of emergency handwritten notices.

(I observe that the last time I had occasion to visit this Hystorick Space was over 2 years ago.)

Once was a book-launch, second time was the launch of a research group falling generally within my field of interest.

At both there were two people whom I have not seen for lo, ages, and now twice within the week. At the first were several old acquaintances besides, at the second not.

One of those whom I did know this evening communicated to me a piece of gossip about my erstwhile bestie 'Q' that gave me an inward malicious smirk and the thought of 'predictable!'.

Thinking about the Bloomsberries, I was thinking about how very complicated these buildings are and how one would not wonder did anyone blunder into the wrong bedroom, or at least the bedroom not originally intended, but then realised that much of the confusion comes about through the knocking together of formerly separate residences by the Institutionz of Teh Highah Learninz that now occupy them.

And then thought about that epigram about 'living in squares and loving in triangles', which is neat, but isn't 'triangles' rather too neat and two-dimensional to describe the complexity of Bloomsbury relationships?

What I Read

Ben Aaronovitch, The Last Station (2017) - rather short - only a novella - does to be getting along with, but one would like to know where the series arc is going.

Ann Leckie, Provenance (2017) - I found this a bit of a slow starter, but then it got going and was doing some very interesting things with plot, worldbuilding, character trajectory, etc. Not sure I loved it quite as much as the Ancillary sequence.

Sandra Schwab, The Return of the Earl (2017). Okay, this was a freebie. It's an m/m romance. It's short, there's nothing much really going on besides the romance story, I was astonished that the protag believed something he was told by his horrible hateful malicious father about his lover and had been embittered for years as a result, and the first half to two thirds of the book seemed like the prose equivalent of lingering moody shots in a movie of the protag wandering about a wintery landscape that reflects his frozen heart, or meandering about a gloomy mansion symbolising the weight of the past.

KJ Charles, An Unsuitable Heir (2017). This did not have the problem of nothing going on but the romance: winding up the various threads set in motion in the preceding volumes of the trilogy. I should probably reread from the start.

On the go

Still Sexual Forensics.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Sidelines: Talks and Essays (2013). A bit repetitious, though she does state upfront that she recycled material for different occasions. Some interesting things, but somehow never gets that 'aha' moment that one comes to in Le Guin's essays.

Timothy D'Arch Smith, The Frankaus: Prejudice & Principles Within a London Literary Family (2015). This is a distinctly irreverent, very well-written and entertaining, history of the author's forebears.

Up next

Well, I seem to have several things on the go, also the recent arrival of various things I very much want to be at.

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And on literary matters more generally, this afternoon I observed that the Tavistock Hotel now has a bar called the Woolf and Whistle. The windows sport a quote from Virginia in cursive neon lettering. This, I may remind my dr rdrz, is the hotel about the noise and general inconvenience caused by which she complained copiously in her diaries.