Linky things
Kathryn Hughes on the history of the woman's magazine on which there is currently an exhibition at The Women's Library. Interesting, but I'm not sure I agree with the categorisation:
the home-making (Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, Prima) to the campaigning (Englishwoman's Journal, Spare Rib) by way of the liberating (the Freewoman, Cosmopolitan) to the plain entertaining (Peg's Paper, Heat).
Because surely part of the 'porousness' that Hughes invokes was the blending of these various elements in different proportions. (And doesn't mention in the text - I hope they're represented in the exhibition) such magazines as She, and later, Nova.)
Bidisha on Indian Mills and Boonerie. When I was in Pakistan many years ago, I was immensely struck by the vast stacks of yer traditional snowwhite Mills and Boons in the bookshops. And Barbara Cartland, but I think Dame B in fact boasted about how popular her pure virginal heroines were in The East.
Dickens and Fallen Women: review of new book about the refuge for fallen women that he set up (with Angela Burdett-Coutts' financial support). Am not entirely persuaded that in England women were unable to move out of prostitution back into respectable life: William Acton believed this to be a not uncommon trajectory, and I think Arthur Munby makes similar indications in his diary. In fact far from 'they manage these things better in France' once (under the licensing system) a Frenchwoman was registered as a prostitute it was very difficult indeed to get her name off it and not to be harassed by the police des moeurs to go be medically inspected at intervals. But there is long trad in UK of thinking that the French do food/sex/elegance etc so much better that we do huddling in our woad.
Lucy Mangan in Book Corner this week does The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
From yesterday - Another gruesome peek we peradventure would have preferred not to have into Peter Bradshaw's murky psychosexual depths as he squees over Twilight the movie.
Is this not hanging on to the legacy rather too long and tightly? Victor Hugo's heirs lose battle against sequels.
Landmark rulings strengthen gay rights in workplace:
Lillian Ladele, the registrar who refused to conduct same-sex civil partnership ceremonies "as a matter of religious conscience", lost her case against Islington council in north London. And Stephen English, a married man who was driven out of his job after being repeatedly called a "faggot" by colleagues had an employment tribunal ruling that he had not been the victim of sexual harassment overturned by the court of appeal.