( Cut for a lengthy discussion of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Libertarian movement, footnotes, literary authorship, racism, and jaguars. It's a long post, is what I'm saying. )

William Moulston Marston was many things: a psychologist who took credit for inventing the lie detector machine, a failed academic who kept bouncing from school to school, a supporter of women's rights, a man who ended up in a happy triad, a man who insisted that his bondage activities were strictly scientific, and the creator of Wonder Woman ( Read more... )

A few weeks back, supergee discussed Call Me Burroughs, a new biography by Barry Miles of influential Beat Generation writer William Burroughs, using it to raise the fascinating question of whether an artist's work can allow us to overlook his or her life. It sounded like exactly the sort of juicy, gossipy biography that I love, so I got the book from the ( Read more... )

Ah, Victorian England: prim, proper and also touched by the occasionally horribly gruesome murder of a three year old, as detailed in Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, which I just finished and highly recommend ( Read more... )

Royal mistresses are often given a bad rap. After all, by definition they are either engaged in adultery or enjoying (or enduring) decidedly outside of marriage sex with little hope for marriage. Beyond this, many such women are accused of acting solely out of greed: why else, after all, would anyone sleep with a prince or a king? To be fair, in ( Read more... )

Brad Rizza's Super Boys tells the story of writer Jerry Siegel and his best friend artist Joe Shuster, who together created Superman. It didn't benefit them much. Infamously, as Rizza details, Siegel and Shuster were so desperate to get their creation in print that they sold the rights to Superman for a pathetically low amount, and later, worn ( Read more... )

First, thank you to whoever kindly paid to upgrade my Dreamwidth account for two months! It's much appreciated, even as it also served as a reminder that I haven't done that much blogging lately. So on that note...

The recent rather heated chatter about SFWA provided one unexpected benefit: I learned that someone named Robin Roberts had written ( Read more... )

Some science fiction writers spend their time sending off hopeful submission after hopeful submission hoping to rake in the money. Others, after a few years of this, say, screw this. I'm starting a religion ( Read more... )

Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: the Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, by Kate Summerscale ( Read more... )

First, a quick announcement: the upcoming Georgette Heyer reread on Tor.com/Heroes and Heartbreakers that I've been yammering to some of you about really is upcoming - sometime. Sometime soon. It will be accompanying, not replacing, the rereads of children's books, which is going to more than occasionally make me into a cranky
( Read more... )