oursin | Entries tagged with bluestockings

I initially saw this because somebody on Facebook posted the video: Boyfriend proposed during the marathon she trained 6 months for, and in the list of Inappropriate Times and Places to Propose, while she is actually running a marathon is very near the top, right? it's bad enough for bloke to be waiting with ring and maybe flowers at the finish line (for many observers, marathon proposals are about men stealing the spotlight).

Run, girl, run.

***

To revert to that discussion about The Right Sort of Jawline and Breathing Properly the other day, TIL that mouth taping is (still) A Thing, and Canadian researchers say there’s no evidence that mouth taping has any health benefits and warn that it could actually be harmful for people with sleep apnea.

***

Since I see this is dated 2020, I may have posted it before: but hey, let's hear it for C18th women scholars of Anglo-Saxon Elizabeth Elstob, Old English scholar, and the Harleian Library. I think I want to know more about her years in the household of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck (1715–1785), duchess of Portland, who I know better through her connection with Mrs Delany of the botanically accurate embroidery and collages of flowers.

***

I like this report on the 'Discovery of Original Magna Carta' because it's actually attentive to the amount of actual work that goes into 'discovering', from the first, 'aha! that looks like it might be' to the final confirmation.

What I read

Finished Bluestockings, which was pretty good, even I had some cavils about her representation of certain legal issues, both divorce/separation at the period, and also women's financial position within marriage, yes, under common law women's property belonged to their husbands but given that at one point author has a woman having a settlement of independent property made on her I think the (limited) degree of wiggle room, particularly given the class position of women involved, might have been mentioned. (Perhaps more sensitised to this in wake of recent work for somewhat later period and lower class concerning legal reform enabling deserted women to be legal femes soles for purposes of running business and child custody.)

Sam Leith, The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (2024), which was a bit disappointing. There were good things in it - I thought he was sound on Kipling, e.g., but I had two issues. One is me being massive nerdy pedant within my own field of Xpertise, i.e. history, and thinking his overview on history of childhood was not all that and leaning on sources that modern historians of childhood/emotions/demography don't exactly skorn utterly but have fairly significantly nuanced (take that Aries and Stone....). Plus other quibbles - the AA Milne thing still irks me: okay, he did not have Massive Childhood Trauma like so many other famous writers in the field: but HE WENT THROUGH THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME, I think he may have carried some trauma into his post-war life that drew him into the 100-Acre Wood, no? And honestly, The Scholarship Boy/Girl thing well predates the 1944 Education Act, that was not a new phenomenon.

Which Leith might have picked up on if there hadn't been actual gaps in what bits of genre he addressed. Not entirely but predominantly what one might consider more female-coded areas ahem ahem like school stories and pony books, which get mentioned very glancingly - C19th precursors - but v little for C20th - one mention of A Brazil, v little on Blyton's work in the oeuvre, NO FOREST (infamy) - there is after all substantial existing literature. But really, hardly anything but odd mentions of boys' school stories after Tom Brown either. Seems to me to leaving quite a bit out of the tradition.

ETA And nothing on the historical novel except when timeslips are involved and it is part of the fantastical trad - wot no Rosemary Sutcliffe or Geoffrey Trease....

On the go

Emily Cockayne, Penning Poison: A history of anonymous letters (2023), which is about far more than poison-pen letters as such but the use of anonymous letters for a range of circumstances, and the role of changes in literacy, the Postal Service, etc. (The rise of the penny post seems to have facilitated a good deal of trollery, harassment, etc.)

I put this to one side as landed today, in fact very very first thing, Iona Datt Sharma, You Are Here: Nine More Stories (2025)

Up next

A bit spoilt for choice.

***

Note for the record of reading stats for last year: around 220 logged in Goodreads - not included DNFs I think.

What I read

Finished The Love Study, which I was a bit less taken by than some other works by Kris Ripper that I have read, but did move on to the sequel, The Hate Project (2021) about which I was sufficiently meh that I did not proceed to the next volume.

Tansy Rayner Roberts, Time of the Cat: An Annotated Adventure of Time Travel, Cats & Occasional Academia, with Endnotes (2023): possibly I was just not sufficiently beguiled by the intricate time-loops and conspiracies, but again, have read work by the author I liked a whole lot more.

Was also possibly - but this may be more down to having read the original series involved rather a while ago - a bit underwhelmed when I finally managed to get hold of the epub versions of Barbara Hambly's 'Further Adventures' novelettes, Cat's Paw (Winterlands) and Temporary Quarters (Windrose Chronicles).

Was tempted by Molly Clavering's Mrs Lorimer's Quiet Summer (1953, republished by Furrowed Middlebrow) - school of O Douglas, with perhaps slightly less houseporn and more problems of marriage and family, also, post WW2. I was not sure I entirely believed that the really annoying husband of the main character would turn up trumps in the crises towards the end with manly insights. Don't think I am entirely sold on Clavering.

On the go

Still dipping into Some Men in London Vol 1 - eugenics so still a thing in the early 50s - 'what a pity so many of these men of intellectual and artistic gifts are out of the breeding pool, maybe we can fix them' WTF, eh.

Have also been rather desultorily embarking upon Eliza Haywood's THE FORTUNATE FOUNDLINGS: BEING THE GENUINE HISTORY OF Colonel M——RS, and his Sister, Madam DU P——Y, the Issue of the Hon. CH——ES M——RS, Son of the late Duke of R—— L——D CONTAINING Many wonderful ACCIDENTS that befel them in their TRAVELS, and interspersed with the CHARACTERS and ADVENTURES of SEVERAL PERSONS of Condition, in the most polite Courts of Europe. The Whole calculated for the Entertainment and Improvement of the Youth of both Sexes. (1744). They do not write titles like that anymore.

Currently reading Susannah Gibson's The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women's Movement (2024), which is pretty good so far though I am irked that the author, while highly sensitive to things like class issues, the toll taken by pregnancy and child mortality, etc, has not taken the trouble to be properly informed about the law matrimonial respecting divorce at the period: conflates with post-1857 terms, in the era of Parliamentary divorce there were something like 2-3 women who ever managed to get an actual divorce, and it might be more useful to say a bit about legal separation, especially as Sarah 'Millenium Hall' Scott appears to have been legally separated from her husband.

Up next

I have quite a stack of new books including the classic 1936 account of the Ladies of Llangollen recently republished.

More than 230 years ago, the country parson celebrated the small but vital elements that gave the English landscape its ‘wild majesty’. Today, Hampshire’s farmers and volunteers are honouring his legacy:

It was more than 230 years ago that the Rev Gilbert White became the first person to identify the chiffchaff, willow warbler and wood warbler as three distinct species. The Hampshire county parson was also the first to describe the harvest mouse and the noctule bat, and to tell of swifts mating in flight, something not recorded again until the 1930s. He was fascinated by his pet tortoise, Timothy, and why he needed so much sleep.... White spent his whole life in this valley, partly because people didn’t travel as much in those days, but also because he had a problem with coach sickness. He never travelled north of the Midlands, east of Essex or west of Devon.

Bless.

***

This is a fascinating article on his more or less contemporary Mary Delany, and her life before 'the famous “paper mosaicks”, or botanically accurate flower collages'

As a woman she might have been unable to be a member of formal intellectual clubs, such as the Dublin Society, but she read extensively and had a broad network of similarly-minded acquaintances, and these networks kept her firmly ensconced within the wider intellectual world. She was a member of the extended Bluestocking circle and also was closely connected to Irish intellectual circles – especially after her marriage to Patrick Delany. She expertly walked the tightrope between the possibilities and limitations afforded by her position as an elite woman, albeit one of relatively limited financial means, engaging with intellectual life while maintaining an image of irreproachable decorum that was grounded in her Protestant faith. In this way, she utilised the creative arts as a way to deepen her exploration of contemporary scientific and philosophic culture, which aligned with her religious convictions.

We note that her first marriage was miserable, and that she was very cautious about making a second match - one wonders also if she was prudently waiting until the dangers of conception and childbirth were no longer on the agenda before making a second, though no 2 sounds like a Good Egg.

***

Also about finding a space to be a female scholar, and outside the walls of a convent at that: How to be a Classical Scholar - and a Woman - in the Fifteenth Century:

Isotta’s expressions of modesty should therefore not be taken literally simply because she was a woman. Her own behavior reveals a woman who dared address famous scholars directly – far from the timid lady she often claimed to be. It is much more plausible (and surely a more feminist claim) that she has adapted the modesty trope to help her navigate her unique situation.

Isotta never married, although she rejected a proposal in 1453. Nor did she become a nun. Instead, she lived as an independent scholar in her family home, a very rare phenomenon for women of this period. Her singleness was probably what allowed her to continue her studies. In contrast, her younger sister Ginevra (1419–68), who had once corresponded with humanists just like Isotta, ceased all literary activity after her marriage. However, her unusual lifestyle placed her squarely in the public eye, making her an easy target for Plinius’ malicious attack.

Isotta fell silent for a period following the accusations, after which her circle of correspondents narrowed and her focus turned more to Christian texts from antiquity. There is an almost ten-year gap in her extant writings before she addressed a letter to a new Venetian governor, Ludovico Foscarini (1409–80). In this letter, she introduced herself as a woman who had turned her study from the profane to the sacred.

This was entire serendipity, because I was actually doing a bit of delving into Alice Vickery (1844-1929), pioneering women physician, neo-Malthusian campaigner (from a woman's rights rather than dreary economic perspective), secularist and sexual progressive, suffragette -

And I discovered that around 1910 she published a translation of the Marquis de Condorcet's 1789 On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship.

Condorcet sounds like an all-round good guy who fell foul of competing forces during the Revolution. Anti-slavery, possibly first person to suggest the contribution of voluntary control over reproduction to human happiness, and way sound on the rights of women:

[W]ith the exception of a limited number of exceptionally enlightened men, equality is absolute between women and the remainder of the men; that this small class apart, inferiority and superiority are equally divided between the two sexes*. But since it would be completely absurd to restrict to this superior class the rights of citizenship and the power of being entrusted with public functions, why should women be excluded any more than those men who are inferior to a great number of women?
....
Women are not governed, it is true, by the reason (and experience) of men; they are governed by their own reason (and experience).

Plus points for mentioning Catharine Macaulay and Emilie du Chatelet.

Also is all about the social construction of existing gendered differences.

*Or, as I have long been wont to put it, how many men have been Newton, Beethoven, Shakespeare, etc?

I just went 'WOW' and grinned when I read this - Constancia Romilly and Benjamin Treuhaft, letter to The Guardian

We’re saddened to hear of the death of our cousin Max Mosley (Obituary, 24 May). Although we are from different branches of the infamous Mitford sisters, we have admired Max for his fight against invasion of privacy. Our mother, Jessica Mitford, would have cheered him on for his victorious trouncing of the avaricious and conscienceless Rupert Murdoch.

***

In more distressing news, it wasn't just nuns in Ireland doing this sort of thing: Hundreds of UK women demand formal apology for forced adoptions. Government urged to say sorry to mothers coerced into giving up babies in 1950s, 60s and 70s:

Many of the women were unmarried teenagers when they became pregnant, and gave birth in church-run “mother and baby homes” in the UK. An estimated quarter of a million women were coerced into having babies adopted during the period. In recent years, some have said they were made to feel shame and guilt. Three years ago, Jill Killington told the Observer: “I was never asked whether I wanted to go ahead with the adoption. It was a fait accompli.”

The UK’s forced adoption scandal was state-sanctioned abuse

[T]he long history of shame being weaponised against women in the name of organised religion is really only half the explanation for cruelty meted out not in some secretive Magdalene laundry, but to women giving birth inside British NHS hospitals, who were singled out as different from other mothers. It was effectively state-sanctioned abuse and in a week when much of the country is understandably preoccupied instead with a much more recent failure of the state, it carries urgent lessons.

***

This raises interesting questions - I think it would possibly gain for engagement with other eras of similar 'backlash'/invisibility' and what was going on under the radar as far as feminism was concerned: The Forgotten Feminists of the Backlash Decade.

On the shorthand labels we fall back on when trying to understand the past, I think I'd have a few arguments about where Houlbrook has placed some of the emphases in this revisionist view of the 20s (well, not revisionist to a lot of historians of interwar Britain, perhaps) and I'd put other things in (e.g. Sid sez Bye! with the advent of the national network of free confidential VD clinics), but still worth reading.

***

The Real Life Heroines of the Early Gothic - okay, I'm glad to see Barbauld among them, though I think more could be said about the radicalism of her writing rather than the weirdness of her husband. But I don't think Mary Robinson got that £5000 by blackmailing the Regent (could you even blackmail Prinny???) - I think that was the appropriate settlement paid to a discarded mistress.

What I read

Finished Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s, which was very good, given that not my period and somewhat outwith my usual academic disciplinary interests. The pdf format a bit irksome. Anyway, the notes alerted me to a biography of Charlotte Smith published by Palgrave which I was able to snap up before the end of their cybersale, as if I don't have a virtual tbr stack already...

Took a brief break part way through to re-read John D MacDonald, Darker than Amber (1966) - one of Travis McGee's bleaker outings, I thought.

Also off the non-fiction virtual tbr list, Wendy Moore, Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran World War One's Most Remarkable Military Hospital (2020) - and at first I wasn't sure if I was going to stick with this, because unprecedented medical horrors and organisational incompetence in dealing with same (chapter one, pretty much) was not entirely what I felt in the mood for, but I did stick with it, and okay, the ending is pretty much a downer because: a) after running a really successful military hospital the flu epidemic came upon them with devastating effect and b) that whole thing of women having done amazing things that were acknowledged at the time and then completely forgotten about appallingly fast. But it is very good - immense kudos for the amount of material she found, personal accounts and so on (even if she does acknowledge the work of a preceding scholar in the field) and pulling it all together.

On the go

The references in Endell Street to their pioneering use of BIPP for wound infection reminded me that this was name-checked in AS Byatt's The Children's Book (2009), which I have been meaning to re-read. So that's in progress.

Still keeping up with Catherine Fox's Tales from Lindford.

Up Next

There's a new Jane Smiley forthcoming but not until the end of next week, I think. So dunno.

But really, this new bio of Mrs Delany is either being badly misrepresented in this review, or just BAD: Mrs Delany: A Life by Clarissa Campbell Orr review – an 18th-century late bloomer. Mary Delany found fame for her flower ‘mosaiks’ in her 70s, but this followed decades of turbulence. I may not know that much about Mrs D, but I do know that she had already spent several decades doing exquisite and botanically accurate embroideries of flowers, had been part of a circle of female friendship/patronage which was interested in e.g. the new and exciting Linnean system, and that the 'mosaiks' did not come from nowhere. It's in bloody Wikipedia!

As a widow, Mary Delany spent even more of her time at Bulstrode, the home of her close friend, Margaret Bentinck, Dowager Duchess of Portland. The two shared an interest in botany, often going out to look for specific specimens. It was during her frequent stays at Bulstrode with the Duchess that Mary became acquainted with two well-known botanists of the time Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander. This contact with the botanists only encouraged Mary's interest in botany and also encouraged the knowledge on which many of her flower paper-cuttings are based.
....
Mary Delany had always been an artist, but during her marriage to Dr Delany she had the time to hone her skills. She was also a gardener, and did needlework, drawing, and painting; but was best known for her paper-cutting.

***

I also take my nitcomb to this, which doesn't mention Robert Sheckley's MindSwap, a classic of the genre.

***

More than a nitpick here: I think there are confusions here in the apologia of 'changing times' re literature/morality, in which 'sexism' and 'male privilege' are notably not being mentioned:

On Friday Bernard Pivot, a celebrated literary critic and journalist who interviewed Matzneff on TV many times, responded to the growing controversy about how Matzneff had been allowed to describe his relationships with teenage girls on literary talkshows without being challenged by the host.

He said: “In the 1970s and 1980s, literature came before morality; today, morality comes before literature. Morally, that’s progress. We’re all more or less the intellectual and moral products of a country and, above all, an era.”

***

In other matters:

I imagine that Kabul has changed enormously since I was there: Shadow City by Tarun Khan review – walks through Kabul: From graveyards to cinemas, bookshops to ‘poppy palaces’ … perilous walks through the Afghan capital offer a unique on-the-ground view of the city.

What I read

Finished Dead Certain, have designated Hartzmark a keeper, and wonder why the series ended there (it was not like certain other series I like, where the author had clearly painted our series protag into a serious emotional corner in the ongoing arc and possibly couldn't think how to get her out of it and still functional in crime-solving...). I am also a bit surprised at the lack of reprints.

In further Operation Crime Shelves, there were a few things that did not get read beyond a few pages before making it to the charity shop bag. I did, however, read Janet Dawson, Kindred Crimes (1992), and Barbara D'Amato, Hardball (1990), both of which were okay enough, but not, I felt, keepers, and I did not feel moved to re-read any of the rest of the series in which their respective shamuses were involved.

For a change of pace, and to have something on the go on the e-reader when I was out of the house, I read Noel Streatfeild, Myra Carrol (1944). I found the early part - Myra's childhood - a bit slow - but it picked up somewhat after that, though I still have problems with the fact that although the narrative is presented as, 'phases in Myra's life evoked as she turns out belongings stored in an old barn for purposes of War Salvage', there was quite a bit of headhopping into other points of view in the flashbacks. Also, few if any of the characters were particularly agreeable, WHOA NOEL MELODRAAAAMA, a predatory lesbian minor character, and a certain predicability about the development of the plot.

On the go

Susan Carlile, Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (2018), bio of C18th woman writer (The Female Quixote most notably) of which I read an intriguing review last year. Slightly heavy going - and a lot of gaps in the available evidence leading to a certain amount of speculation.

Operation Crime Shelves: Catherine Dain, Lay It On The Line (1992), with which I am a bit more prepossessed: I remembered this series as one I rather liked (even if it did end in that place as described above), and I think I shall continue with it.

Moray Dalton (Katherine M. Renoir), The Strange Case of Harriet Hall (1936) - freebie eversion from that publisher that keeps sending me these. The 'crime fiction expert' who writes the intros is a bit annoying (and bloopery on general matters). Not far enough in to say much yet.

Up next

Well, the Lennox bio is likely to keep me going for a while. More Dain, I guess.

In a piece in the Guardian's review section today, not, alas, available online, re books on 'our hidden past'.

'History is mostly about men, and until depressingly recently, little was written by women'.

Except - and okay, I am perhaps rather more aware of this than I might be from reading Dabby's book on women as public moralists in Britain - there were women writing history in Britain (and he doesn't even discuss the C18th bluestockings in any detail, except to mention that e.g. Catherine Macaulay was indeed writing serious history).

And various of the women Dabby discussed in detail were not just writing history but putting women into history.

And they got occluded for various reasons - political (Macaulay was associated with radicalism) or not being part of increasingly professionalised academic networks, or, you know, just being women, so they must have been just playing at it... however meticulous they were about delving into sources and documenting their findings.

It's possibly not entirely surprising given that there was a bit of a hoohah this week about a rather ill-informed article on public history and the particular lack of mention of any (contemporary) women historians.

Sigh.

What I read

Finished reread of Conspiracy Theory. Not, I think, one of the top entries in the series.

Carol Dyhouse, Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (2017) - mostly C19th-C20th and possibly trying to do a bit too much in the space, but shooting off lots of interesting ideas and materials, and to my mind to be preferred to those works with promising titles that turn out to be very close readings of 2 canonical C19th texts and one outlier. What I might have liked would have been a bit more queering of the narrative - Dyhouse foregrounds that many heartthrobs of stage and screen raved on by women were gay in their private lives, also the ways in which romantic heroes complicate received notions of masculinity (why no Scarlet Pimpernel, we ask...), and the allure of boy-bands - but I'd have liked to see some mention of women crushing on male impersonators when those were a thing in music hall, and onwards into the appeal of slash and m-m romance (possibly by way of e.g. Mary Renault). However, it is a really easy read.

JL Merrow, Muscling Through (2011) - m/m romance novella, sweet if slight.

Matt Wallace, Pride's Spell (2016), Idle Ingredients, Greedy Pigs, and Gluttony Bay (all 2017), Sin du Jour 3-6, and no 7 is not out until April, aaargh: these became cumulatively addictive.

On the go

Still Dreams of Darkness and Light, which are really pretty much do not read too many in a bunch (and some already cropped up in collections I've read of recent years, rather than back in the day).

Benjamin Dabby, Women as Public Moralists in Britain: From the Bluestockings to Virginia Woolf (2017) - not very far in, but liking it a lot.

Up next

A new episode of Tremontaine, after the break.

What I read

Finished Battle for Bittora - I was a bit *sigh* that the romance went the way it did, and I thought the ending was a bit, well, rather late in the day for her to have that epiphany. Not sure the elements meshed very happily, in all.

Elizabeth Gill (not, I may say, the currently alive novelist of that name who pops up in the GoodReads sidebar but a crime novelist who died in 1932), The Crime Coast: a Benevenuto Brown Mystery (1929, recently reissued by that publishing co that keeps sending me freebie ebooks. Aka on original publication as Strange Holiday.) Not bad - there is a bit of that info-dumping of back story that takes the form of people going on in a way that does not sound in the least like normal conversational English, but I will entirely give it points for its not being 'the dago dunnit': even if the Argentine brother and sister are both fairly dodgy in other ways. Lush descriptions of the South of France and the arty bohos that hung out there. Perhaps just that bit too much happy coincidence leading to the solution.

George Macdonald Fraser, Flash for Freedom (1971) - I collected my father's Flashman paperbacks when I went to the old homestead the other week - I thought he had more than I found, but may have been wrong about which ones he had. Anyway, I think Flashy still holds up, because, unlike too many characters, he is clearly intended to be reprehensible, so the codfish is not called for.

Molly Keane, Good Behaviour (1981). I have been aware of this book ever since it came out, and feeling fairly meh about it: but read something the other week that inspired me to get a copy, but no, it just doesn't ring my bells. I was thrown quite early on when we had a lengthy episode in more or less omniscient about the governess (and I'm not convinced Aroon is capable of making that up). I can live with unsympathetic characters and unreliable narrators, but have come across plenty I have enjoyed more.

Cassandra Khaw, Hammers on Bone (2016). I will give it points for actually following through on the noir tone with noir tropes, and the mean streets being those of Croydon, even if a) the situation of the central character was not dissimilar from something else I read recently and b) the horror elements didn't do it for me. But don't think I shall be picking up the next part.

Also discovered somewhere I did not expect two of my Florence King collections and did a bit of dipping into these.

On the go

Winifred Holtby, The Truth is Not Sober: short pieces by Holtby, I think previously uncollected - no, first came out in 1934, but I don't seem to have come across it before this reissue by Blackthorn Press, because so far, none of the stories seem familiar. Only part way in - a section of fable-type satirical stories, nice but a bit slight.

Annibel Jenkins, I'll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (2003) - not far into this yet, but seems like a solid bio of late C18th actress and woman of letters.

Up next

Dunno, really.

What I read

Finally made my way through William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (2008) which is pretty much 'what you never thought about asking about Mrs Barbauld' and is all about the redemption from the condescension of history. Barbauld (nee Aikin) was a significant literary and cultural figure from the final decades of C18th to the first few of the C19th, but had the unfortunate experience of living into a time when her politics, ethics, and aesthetics became considered outmoded if not actually condemned. It also contains a gruesome case study of how younger thrusting male aspirants diss on older female exemplars in their field (in her case, her detractors are sufficiently well-known members of the Romantic movement that their nasty backbiting is recorded for posterity), including blaming her for things she didn't write or were surely part of wider cultural changes. She also did that thing that sometimes one would get the impression did not happen maybe until the so-called 'second wave' of feminism, of being 'woman-centred' and supportive of other women, rather than rivalrous and bitchy.

Also read: picked up in the local independent bookshop sale, the last Hazel Holt Mrs Mallory mystery, Death is a Word, which came out last year (I am somewhat pissed off that Amazon Recs, which routinely recommends to me the earlier volumes in the series, never mentioned that there was a new one out). Pretty much the mixture as before, pleasant enough.

And also from the sale, Rumer Godden, Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy (1979), which is that book which, if you loved In this House of Brede and return to it for comfort reading, do not go there. I read it more or less about the time it came out, and didn't much care for it then, and while I finished it (which has not always been the case with Godden re-reads) I was still not taken with it. Maybe it just piles on the melodrama a bit too much? Whereas In this House of Brede dials that down, or has it happen off-stage, but still has drama. Or maybe it was just that I could not engage with Lise the way I could with just about all the nuns at Brede?

On the go

Still the Naomi Royde-Smith biography: I am not quite sure whether I entirely go for that thing where biographers do thematic chapters rather than following chronology - a) you get a certain amount of repetition and b) it can be hard to get a sense of what's happening when and how the various strands related to one another. Lots of fascinating stuff though.

Up next

Well, I have another freebie forgotten Golden Age mystery loaded to my Kobo. I also have, another sale bargain, The Animals: Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy.

What I read

Was finally in that particular state of mind to plug on with Grey Granite (A Scots Quair 3), in which Ewan increasingly loses the reader's sympathy, which I know is not the point. Also, while I think the Chris sections are well-done, I'm just not sure that she would be quite so much into the sear-and-withered time of life, even with the hardships she's undergone. Nonetheless, a very good trilogy, even if it does require the right frame of mind. (Also, was rather amused to see that Mitchell/'Grassic Gibbon' actually wrote it in Welwyn Garden City, you could not make it up.)

Finished Uprooted. Given that this did several tropes that I could do without, for we have seen them many times already, in particular the learned/intuitive magic gendered thing (and was a bit iffy about the denouement) I still found it a compelling read.

Melissa Scott and Jo Graham, Oath Bound, which was v good though possibly not so much as previous volume in series. (And this was second novel read within past year that is about the invasion of Ethiopia by the Italians in the 1930s. Neither of which, as I recollect, included anything about Sylvia Pankhurst.)

Last week's episode of Tremontaine.

On the go

Rather slowly, the bio of Barbauld.

(Research) John Stewart, Child Guidance in Britain, 1918-1955: The Dangerous Age of Childhood (2013).

Ovidia Yu, Aunty Lee's Delights (2013) - mystery set in Singapore, I might like it better if I had not hit a scene in which there is a good deal of POV head-hopping, which is rather putting me off.

Picked up, because I thought I hadn't read it, PD James, The Lighthouse (2005), and indeed as I began I didn't remember a thing, and then one incident rang a teeny bell and I looked at the end, because the one thing I did remember was a thing central to the solution of the mystery (the mystery itself I forgot), and it was one I had read, that clearly did not stick. Whether, that being the case, I should persist, is an open question. (The lengths to which James would go to get a situation approximating to trad country house party cut off by snow (or whatever) mystery.)

Up next

This week's Tremontaine episode.

Have now obtained Seth Koven's The Matchgirl and the Heiress but in terms of reading niches this probably comes after I've finished Anna Letitia.

What I read

Last week's episode of Tremontaine.

The next two volumes in the Protection Inc series by Zoe Chant: Defender Dragon and Protector Panther, which do what they say on the tin: BBW + shifter paranormal romance, in somewhat different genres but with a fair amount of thrillery/action type stuff.

Josephine Elder, Exile for Annis (1938), which I discovered in a local charity shop the day after a discussion of girls' school stories and their habitual tropes.

Robin Forsythe, Missing or Murdered? (1929), yet another freebie e-ARC from the press that is producing these revivals of lesser-known works from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. This was not bad, if not outstanding, but at rather over three-quarters of the way through, did a thing I really bar in crime fiction, which is introduce an entirely new character, never previously even mentioned, whose machinations finally make sense of the various pieces of evidence. (Surely this must have been one of the Detection Club no-nos?) Forsythe had the unusual background for a crime writer of actually having been in chokey, for running a scam in the course of his civil service employment.

On the go

William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment 92008). A big fat bio that seems quite good but may take me some time.

Naomi Novik, Uprooted (2015) - there is one personal and idiosyncratic bit of enjoyment I'm getting out of this: perhaps one would not relish the notion of a Malevolent and Evil Wood quite so much were one not currently researching the Woodcraft movements of the interwar years in which woods and woodcraft have to bear a lot of symbolic weight for Good Stuff vs the evils of Modern Civ.

Up next

Latest ep of Tremontaine.

I have only just been alerted to the fact that there is a new book in the Melissa Scott and Jo Graham 'Order of the Air' series.

I also think I ought to brace myself and start buckling down to some serious research reading.

What I read

Surprisingly little for some reason: finished Kipling Sahib, which I thought was a pretty good account of the earlier part of Kipling's life and career, was all over the complexity and contradictions, and would recommend even if I think the author is entirely RONG about later Kipling post c. 1900 (WOT).

I then endeavoured to get into (for a second time) a spooky-stuff-in-present-day-London thing, and okay, it is the second in a series that I happened to acquire, and I have not read the first, but usually this is the kind of thing I like, but I was just not feeling it after a very few chapters.

Frances Hardinge, Cuckoo Song (2014) - I wasn't entirely blown away by the other Hardinge I read, though I see recs to her work all over the place, but this was really pretty good.

And last week's episode of Tremontaine

On the go

Still A Scots Quair.

Up next

This week's Tremontaine episode, I have a bio of Anna Laetitia Barbauld on its way to me, but I'm in one of those not having any strong inclinations towards anything phases, which is irksome. I am sure there are things I should like, if I started them, but I'm not feeling the pull.

What I read

Finished the bio of Josephine Tey, which may have found out a good deal about her, but was still somewhat beta-minus. I already mentioned the 'giving her a lost-love het romance plot', which seemed, among other things, to be stretching the evidence; and really, turning down a lesbian pass from someone who sounded like seriously bad news and her bf's (constantly unfaithful) partner, doesn't I think constitute evidence of anything but sound emotional judgement. Also (though I think this may be down to publishing it with a firm based in Dingwall with perchance a certain agenda) trying to position her as a Scottish writer (because she lived in Inverness), when a) there is quite a bit of snark about Scotland, Gaelic Revival etc in her books and b) clearly mutual loathing between her and such figures of the Scottish Literary Renaissance/nationalist circles who were in her ambit. We also feel that she would not have been on board with the more leftwing members of the SLR like Mitchison or Grassic Gibbon - in fact I feel there's a bit of fudging generally of her small-c conservatism.

Last week's episode of Tremontaine.

Barbara Eaton, Yes Papa! Mrs Chapone and the Bluestocking Circle: A Biography of Hester Mulso - Mrs Chapone (1727-1801), a Bluestocking (2012), which was interesting and readable, although I think when you have a group of women many of whom have the same Christian name, it is probably not the greatest of ideas to use their first names when discussing them and their interactions (which Elizabeth/Hester/Fanny is this one?) - though concede that if you use surnames these tended to change with marriage/remarriage, etc. Also possibly the material about Chapone does not really sustain an entire autobiography, so there are whole chapters which are pretty much all about Some Other Bluestocking, to an extent perhaps not justified by the 'and the Bluestocking Circle' in the title. But worth reading.

Also some browsing in the Yuletide postings.

On the go

Grey Granite: Ewan has just had his Communist epiphany/conversion experience in the local museum. In further thoughts, I get that LGG is describing and not endorsing the horrible sexist misogynist and heaving with repressed sexuality attitudes towards young independent working women with modern views, but they do not add to reading enjoyment.

Charles Allen, Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling 1865-1900 (2008): recommended to me by my father, whose copy I have borrowed. Was a bit set back by a line in the early introductory parts where Allen basically diss on late Kipling WOT as having lost the electricity of the pre 1900 works, but it is actually a very readable account of the earlier life (which must take some reconstructing, given Kipling's own, and posthumously undertaken, purges of his papers) by a descendant of the owner of the Civil and Military Gazette

Up next

This week's episode of Tremontaine, otherwise, dunno.

***

Point thahr misst: Why I read Old Books, in which what I suspect to be a Very Young Man who compares modern works, which appear to be exclusively defined as litfic, nary a mention of genre, with old books, all of which cited are genre works that have stayed the course. We feel that this is someone who reads old-style crime/thriller/sensation works because 'fascinating cultural detail' or fusty charm, or something, or because it is OK to read old green or orange Penguins but not, perish the thought, modern genre works, because that might say something about someone that they do not want thought.

The 100 things blogging challenge.

Mention of this rather nifty project found in an old copy of a professional journal during pre-move tidying-up at work:
The Mary Hamilton Papers Project.
And a bit more about Hamilton, her papers, and their salvation for the nation, which I apparently totally missed at the time (poor going for an archivist + Bluestockings fangirl, wot?)

Today I hied me to the Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where I foregathered with clanwilliam, caulkhead, and nanila in a queue which I had not anticipated - last time I visited this museum it was practically deserted and the attendant in the Hogarth Room was only too happy to give one to one tutorials on the fascinating features of the paintings (in fact one could hardly dissuade him). At first I thought it must be the school holiday factor but the age of most of those waiting suggested not.

It's a town house with limited space and they only admit 50 people at a time but I still wasn't expecting quite so many people on a Wednesday morning.

When we finally effected an entrance, we met up with marykay/marykaykare, who had got there earlier and was waiting in the warm and dry (did I mention, raining? - however, the Soane staff came out with v large umbrellas as well as informative handouts).

The Soane is a fascinating place though not perhaps one I would recommend to anyone with claustrophobia issues, as many of the interior spaces are quite small, and the crowds of visitors rather slow-moving, because there is Amazing Stuff everywhere. Sir John was surely the despair of declutterers, and we felt quite faint at the thought of dusting it all. It is also a place in the windings and alcoves of which it is quite easy to temporarily mislay members of one's group!

It's a fascinating space as a space, especially Soane's use of skylights, reflecting surfaces, light and dark, etc, and perhaps we should organise another trip one day for the monthly Tuesday evening by candlelight (huh, anybody?).

The principal reason for this visit was to see the current exhibition, Mrs Delany and Her Circle. This was in a perhaps rather cramped area (but as already indicated, this is innate to the structure of the Soane), but v fascinating, and I think I may provide myself with the book of the exhibition.

Delany's work confounds the borderline between the aesthetic and the scientific - she was clearly a skilled craftswoman and designer, but she was also involved in the emergence of botany as a scientific pursuit at the time of the development of Linnean classification - it's not clear that there was any sense that horticulture and garden design, producing exquisite and accurate embroidered floral motifs for fashionable wear, and the scientific study of plant life were seen as distinct pursuits. There is a painstaking accuracy about her famous 'paper mosaics... cut-paper illustrations of flowers and plants', which the ODNB describes as ''her most important artistic achievement': but these were intended as a 'hortus siccus'. a systematic arrangement of plant specimens, rather than a purely artistic endeavour. (There was a video reconstructing the process - she cut the tiny, intricate pieces out freehand! in her 80s! until she found her sight was no long up to it.)

She knew pretty much everybody over a range of circles (arts, sciences, court) in the C18th and her letters were published in the 1860s by her great-great-niece Lady Llanover , who also preserved and exhibited Delany's embroideries. (I like the distaff cherishing of the memory.)

Recommended, but be prepared for the queue!

marykay decided that she would like to spend some more time exploring the museum, but the rest of us went off to refresh ourselves with delicious tapas at Cigala in Lamb's Conduit St. Followed by a browse in the Persephone Bookshop.

Half the garden of a clifftop house fell in the sea this week. Artist Kane Cunningham is jealous – he can't wait for his cliff-side bungalow to slip off the edge.

I wish I'd bought Ridgemont House. I thought it was a wonderful work of art. There's real beauty and poetry in landscape erosion. If you look at the photograph of the raw exposed cliff, overlooking Oddicombe Beach in Devon, it looks like a blood-red spleen, as if the landscape itself is bleeding.
....
[M]y house, which I use as a studio to work on my landscape paintings, is only 9ft away from the cliff-edge, and could fall at any moment.... I'm going to turn the moment my studio collapses into an art work: I've set up cameras to film it, and I've commissioned music and poetry to celebrate it. Both our houses punch a hole in what we think of as the value of property, and remind us of our moral and ethical responsibility to nature.... you can build a house by the edge of a cliff – or buy one – and when nature decides to do its thing, you've got no chance. When my studio disappears, I'll have no sense of loss – that will be its beautiful final act. The sooner it goes, for me, the better.

Can only respond with what the girlfriend of Steve Bell's M l'Artiste wrote in her goodbye note - 'OUANQUERE'.

***

I have created a Mrs Delany Exhibition Expedition Scheduling filter - I have put on it everybody who expressed interest in going to this. If you can see my previous post, you're on it. If not, and you would like to be, let me know in comments.

Profile

oursin

My Website

August 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Green for Basic Boxes by branchandroot

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Aug. 19th, 2026 02:11 am

It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog

Entries tagged with bluestockings

Oddments

Wednesday is luvverly wevver 4 duckz

Wednesday is happening on Thursday this week for reasons

Small corners, perhaps

My new C18th Enlightenment philosophe boyfriend

Just putting these out there

Wednesday realises that that interminable November is over

Possibly nitpickery is not in the spirit of the season...

Wednesday has been a day of assorted frustrations and minor achievements

This is, like, depressingly meta erasure

Wednesday is a bit blowy

Wednesday is no longer peering through a shaggy fringe

Wednesday thinks the Enlightenment would be a really good idea

Wednesday is here again, does it ever go away?

Wednesday is huddling up with a good book

For this be the law of the Wednesday...

Wednesday has a washing machine!

100 things blogging challenge 89

Bluestockings r us

You call it art, I call it the higher codswallop

Profile

August 2026

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags