Linkasserie
There are so many stories about girls who leave home to pursue disapproved or unconventional careers or courses of action, that it's really lovely to read a true-life story about a man who left his 'die-hard shipbuilding family' to become a nurse (at a time when male nurses were less common). Though I'm intrigued at the throwaway comment that by leaving school early he missed out on 'the opportunity to study medicine'. Was this ever on? I suspect that someone from a background like this would have been discouraged in the same way that even middle-class girls were (and they, of course, were often guided into nursing or other 'ancillary' health professions). I sometimes wonder what the nursing profession may have lost when access to medical training got somewhat more inclusive.
***
A series of Stuff About Children, Families, Etc: Naturism made me a social phobic: but was it that 'the effect of being forced to keep everything on show caused me to create walls and layers to hide behind and within'? Or is this quite a common experience among children brought up in families which pursue some interest that is non-mainstream and unconventional? Compare and contrast Ahmet Zappa (son of Frank, brother of Moon Unit, Diva and Dweezil). In spite of the wacky names, they seem to have done all right. And on related subjects, check out Maureen Freely's review of a group of books on children in modern society.
***
Forgotten or neglected women (because what is an oursin link roundup without a few forgotten women in it?): Miss Leavitt's Stars by George Johnson (scroll down):
Henrietta Leavitt was a "computer" who worked at the Harvard Observatory in the late 19th century, poring over photographic plates of stars and measuring their brightness. One day she noticed that a class of stars called the Cepheids seemed to have a longer pulsation interval the brighter they were. If this correlation held, you could figure out the intrinsic brightness of a star, and then, by comparing it to its apparent brightness, measure how far away it was. Troubled by illness and patronised by her male bosses, she died with little recognition. Yet, as Johnson shows, her groundbreaking insight was eventually used to decide the dispute over whether the Milky Way was the entire universe.
and Anne Karpf on Olive Dehn:
until recently only women's lives made up this kind of collage - so many different types of experience, quilted around the raising of four children. Political activism combined with organic pig-rearing. A long and happy marriage to the actor David Markham, who died in 1983. A glorious but often stinging lyricism to her poetry, there in the poems by her daughter, Jehane Markham, too. Though she's been fearless in standing up for what she believes, there's something very female about her quiet, relatively unsung place at the hub of a mini-dynasty.
***
And on forgotten contributions, see group review by Georgina Ferry of books on Bletchley Park, origins of the computer, etc:
Early in 1943 a senior Post Office engineer, Tommy Flowers, offered to make a faster and more reliable machine using hundreds of electronic valves to count the statistical quirks that were the fatal flaw in the way the Germans used Tunny. Despite official scepticism, he went away and built the first Colossus, even spending money from his own pocket on the necessary components. Ten months later, he installed it at Bletchley Park. It was so successful that he was immediately under pressure to build another: by the end of the war there were nine Colossi operating round the clock.
....
As a digital, electronic, programmable, special-purpose calculating machine, Colossus has a strong claim to have launched the age of the modern computer. Yet because of the obsession with secrecy, it barely rates more than a footnote in most accounts. All but two of the machines were destroyed on Churchill's orders; Flowers did as he was instructed and personally consigned all his notes and designs to the boiler. The astonishing concentration of human expertise that brought the machines into being was dissipated.
***
Mark Jackson charts the rise of allergic reactions and reveals their intimate links with the problems of progress in Allergy. And on one of those uber-civilised beings supposed to be particularly prone to allergic reactions, Proust and his Swedish Valet.
***
E M Forster fanfics himself (second letter down):
In A View Without a Room, written in 1958 and included in the Penguin Classics edition, we learn the "post novel" history of the characters created 50 years earlier. Lucy and George, who end the story apparently happily ever after, are disinherited although never disunited by the world wars. After a "squalid move to Carshalton" they await the third world war: "the one that would end war and everything else, too". A hardly uplifting postscript, but one that ends with a minor triumph for rejected suitor Cecil Vyse. In 1914 he informs a society hostess that the playing of Beethoven ("Hun music") at a party would be acceptable because "a chap who knows about these things ... told me that Beethoven is quite definitely Belgian".
***
And today's ODNB Life of the Day: Baroness Elizabeth Blackall de T'Serclaes [née Elizabeth Blackall Shapter; other married name Elizabeth Blackall Knocker]: 'Hers was a character brought sharply into focus in time of war, yet one that seems curiously diminished and lacking focus in time of peace.' (Syndicated lj feed here.)