In the Thirkell bio I was reading, the author comments that Angela did not believe in Highah Educashun for Wymmynz - 'like George Eliot'.
I have the very strongest suspicion that their reasoning was entirely different and that Ms Evans had some concerns about the campaigns of her besties to get women into Oxbridge, not out of any belief that study ( Read more... )

More queuing than last time, fortunately it was a nice sunny day as queue went right out round the corner into the street...
On the subject of vaccination, I forgot to mention, when posting last week apropos of Silas Marner, that the simple villagers of backwards Raveloe, well out of the hurly-burly march of progress of the day, nonetheless urge ( Read more... )

What I read
Did, though occasionally tempted to put it down in favour of something fluffier, finish Sarah Schulman's My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan and Bush Years, which is a work I would give five stars to as historical source material, but probably only three as something to actually read straight through. It consists ( Read more... )

A rather curious letter in The Guardian today about the recent adaptation of Black Narcissus: Black Narcissus and the white British lens:'Somehow we still ended up being told a story entirely from the perspective of the white European characters'.
However, I'm not sure, if you're adapting an original text, you could make the pretty drastic changes ( Read more... )

On that 'Let's publish a swathe of books by women who took male pseudonyms under their real names' gesture of 'reclamation -
I'm, like, you know, I think Mary Ann, or Marian, she experimented a lot with her name, might have preferred to have been Lewes rather than Evans? As far as ye patriarchy goes, we think her brother was a far worse ( Read more... )

Okay, there is a looong tradition of strict priest/clergyman/schoolmaster and novice nun/schoolgirl as a kinky scenario, no?
I'm not judging, honestly! whatever floats your boat!
But I am not sure how you get from finding that pant-pant, hot-hot, sexy-sexy, to actually eroticising Casaubon/Dorothea?
Help! My Boyfriend’s Fetish Is Inspired by ( Read more... )

For the last few weeks, it has been possible to book Sainsburys slots, no more than 3 days ahead (Waitrose seem to be booked up for weeks in advance) and we have been able to book deliveries for Friday on Tuesday mornings.
There is still a certain tremor of, will this still be so this week?
And now we have the even more exciting addition of Ocado ( Read more... )

200 years ago, the birth of Mary Ann Evans, in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, better known to posterity as George Eliot.
A nice tribute in the leaders of today's Guardian.
The final paragraph from Middlemarch: Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the ( Read more... )

But I noticed in passing a week or so ago a bit of a flurry about somebody going about Wow We Now Have A Female Hero, with Lyra in the televisation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and a lot of pushback with people listing all the books with heroine leads that they had been reading decades ago and that were a formative influence upon their ( Read more... )

In the 'Diary' section of the latest Literary Review, woezing over Teh State of Teh Novel and in particular Character in the Novel.
And we are inclined to think that by 'novel' is meant the most rarefied of litfic - But you have a feeling that the terrible thinness of most of the people in modern novels goes back even to before Leavis. It was ( Read more... )