Hadley Freeman in today's Guardian Weekend is miffed off at male columnists dissing on not just Nancy Mitford and The Pursuit of Love but anyone (silly gurliez!!) who enjoys it.
Okay, yet again this is men crapping on anything that women dare to like that they do not.
But I also take exception, or at least have problems with, the blanket dismissal ( Read more... )

Apparently some young (I think he must be relatively young?) bloke writer whose own career must so far be as the mayfly's compared to hers, has delivered himself of his opinion re Virginia Woolf (do we not think, my dearios, that Mrs W would have had him for breakfast and then desired a full English to fill up the space?): Woolf’s novels are not ( Read more... )

'Why are there no women great artists?' - okay, we know, do we not, my dearios, that there are great women artists? - but there might be more. One of the reasons why there are not as many as there might be could be that they felt they had Other Priorities (not necessarily Being A Muse). I was already apprised of the not necessarily softer side of ( Read more... )

Apparently there is a good deal of furore going on about the recently unveiled Mary Wollstonecraft Memorial in Stoke Newington.
Some of us wish to remark that, it may not be spectacular, but there is a memorial of kinds, I guess these days probably a cenotaph, and also probably no longer actually the site upon which Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin ( 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... )

I do not think I am alone among my acquaintance who goes WTF!!! upon reading this headline: The Fabulous Forgotten Life of Vita Sackville-West and beating my head on the desk wondering how The Paris Review, of all the gin-joints, let anyone get away with that.
I cannot help thinking that this is yet another instance in which 'forgotten' in fact ( Read more... )

A Degrees of Separation story and maunderings on the past.
Finished the Goldhill book on the Bensons yestereen, and he concludes with an anecdote from his time at Kings College Cambridge when the very elderly Dadie Rylands was still in residence, Rylands having been AC Benson's last crush (though Goldhill did not know at the time that he was going ( Read more... )

But somehow it makes me a bit twitchy?
Without women the novel would die.
I mean, it's really odd to write a piece about the long history of dissing on a) the novel and b) women reading and c) the kinds of novels women read without citing Jane Austen on 'o, it is only a novel' and Virginia Woolf on sneering at novels which are about women in ( Read more... )

[Y]ou may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it - in ( 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... )