Wednesday has (finally) had the roofers come to fix the roof
What I read
Poets and the Peacock Dinner was really rather good, in that micro-historical way where the author has taken some apparently minor odd incident and used it to reflect upon larger issues it involved. I'm not sure I agree with all the conclusions, such as they were, but it was a fun journey, and there were delights along the way. I already mentioned the Hardy thing earlier, but a central figure in the narrative is Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, traveller, anti-imperialist, pretty minor late Victorian literary figure, and MASSIVE Byron fanboy. Not only did he make pilgrimages to Byron-associated spots, some of them v hard to get to, and do a certain amount of emulating Byronic behaviour (without the incest or the bisexuality and probably, author would estimate, far fewer female conquests even given a much longer life), but he married Byron's grand-daughter. (Who eventually got pissed off and went to live in Egypt without him, she too was a traveller and also into breeding Arabian horses.) (At least she was actually Byron's descendant: when Al Alvarez married Frieda Lawrence's grand-daughter, she was the child of her daughter by her first marriage, whom she had left to run off with DH.)
Dorothy Sayers, The Wimsey Papers: The Wartime Letters and Documents of the Wimsey Family (1939) - which I discovered was available via The Faded Page. A bit slight, and very familiar territory has one read much that was written around that time.
Jane Smiley, The Strays of Paris/aka Perestroika in Paris (2020). This may be grumpy ol' me, but I thought this tipped over from 'charming' into 'twee', although I did manage to finish it without doing a Dorothy Parker.
Ann Heilmann, Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre (2018) - dealing with 'afterlives' of JMB in biographical/bio-fictional reworkings: 'interesting but tough', uses a lot of literary theory that I'm not very familiar with. However, has read pretty much all the biographical/dubious anecdotal material, and the various fictions, in various genres, explicitly or implicitly based on JMB's story (some of which sound dire and a real slog to read). I suppose it's not really remarkable that not only authors but even biographers have tended to incorporate elements of the Gothic/sensation fiction into their narratives, on top of the central story (lost heirs, forbidden unions, secret marriages, etc etc)? One tiny thing that struck me - really because it echoed with recently reading Endell Street - was one passage touching upon JMB as surgeon and hospital administrator, and thinking, wow, would so have got on with Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray.
On the go
Heather Ellis, Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831-1918 (2017) (more Palgrave Macmillan knockdown cybersale trove). Is looking at the issues around the masculinity and 'manliness' of scientists in Britain at the period and that they were seen as not conforming to certain standard modes of masculinity and were trying to Prove Things, and I have just come to an instance where a noted Man of Science ran off with the wife of an Army Officer and there really was a discourse of 'he must have used Evil Scientist Arts upon her', and he was depicted as a runty Mr Hyde-type figure vs her upstanding military husband... (I think this all adds interesting sidelights to to why male scientists might not have been anxious to admit women to their ranks...)
Up next
No idea.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3172977.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.