Have we been getting Jane Austen wrong for all these years?: Kelly does not seem to have read any of the many Austen scholars and critics who would have shown her that some of her discoveries are not quite unprecedented. She might also have had some salutary encounters with those who have a different case to put.
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Kelly is powerfully struck by ( Read more... )

I tend to assume that, well, everybody has heard of James Miranda Barry (I'm not entirely behind that Wikipedia entry, as it attrib. to other hands material that as I recollect was originally dug up by June Rose and published in her 1977 bio of Barry, The Perfect Gentleman. The remarkable life of Dr James Miranda Barry, the woman who served as an ( Read more... )

Well into conference no 2, back to back with conference no 1, and at least I have got my paper over.

(I think it went well, but I didn't feel that the panel really hung together or clicked as having much in the way of commonality between the 3 papers.)

Other panels have been good and that Dr Oursin has been giving tongue in the questions section.

( Read more... )

John Mullan's 10 of the best: imaginary meetings:
James Barry and Florence NightingaleBarry was a pioneering doctor who made his name in British colonies but became notorious after his death when it was realised that he was in fact a woman, Margaret Bulkley, who had disguised herself to pursue a medical career. In Sebastian Barry's play Whistling ( Read more... )

The finest sight an osprey ever sees...: After 200 years, ospreys return to Northumberland.

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Looking at the ads for the latest James Bond book on the Tube (this is the cover and lady in a red leather catsuit wielding a gun is the one who features on the posters, no JB in the picture at all) I don't think 'Latest bit of expendable totty for JB': ( Read more... )

Okay, I am not the person who is ever going to jump up and down and go 'wheee!' at the prospect of a biopic of James Miranda Barry which promises that it's likely to be heavy on the 'secret forbidden lerrrrv' theme.

But while kudos to Natasha McElhone for getting this project off the ground, she is far too tall to play Barry, who was under 5 ft. ( ( Read more... )

Ursula Le Guin on botanical classification.

James Fenton on James Miranda Barry. Fenton has read, and speaks highly of, June Rose's pioneering biography of Barry (which all subsequent works pretty well rest on, not always with attribution), and has discovered some interesting things about contemporary circles that might have relevance to the ( Read more... )