Saturday linkorama

[oursin]

From today's Guardian:

Rosie Boycott on the culture of conspicuous public grief. Well yes, and I think I've posted about this before myself: but hey, people used to flock to public hangings and to pelt malefactors put in the pillory and do public shaming rituals, not to mention things like vandalising the businesses of anybody with a German-looking

Comments

[mrissa]

Yah, the ostensibly macho line sets my teeth on edge, too.

I keep reading Scando history books with ritual browbeating about how women were not treated equally, with almost no attention to how women were treated compared to the rest of Europe at the time. The amount of land a woman could claim in the settlement of Iceland was figured differently than the amount of land a man could claim -- but a woman could not just inherit land, she could claim her own. The distinction seems to me to be worth noting.

Cathar. Cuddly bunnies. Errrr...no. Gosh.

[oursin]

Yeah: I was thinking of the Significant Female Grave Goods on display in the museums, with the labels saying that they indicated important status, but the land-ownership too.

[mrissa]

The list goes on awhile, yes.

I was reading an Icelandic history book that was talking about how the urbane Danes had to tell the yokels from Iceland that of course a woman couldn't bring a lawsuit or serve in parliament even if she was a landowner. I think there's a significant difference between that culture and a culture where the "yokels" are the ones who don't support women's rights. As a speculative writer, that difference looks key to me. Many of the historians I read are too busy talking about women owning land in smaller proportions to bother with it, though.

[oursin]

I tend to blame Sir Walter Scott for a lot of the romanticisation of Scotland and the Celts generally. Ronald Hutton in Witches, Druids and King Arthur has a splendid chapter on the mythicisation of Scottish identity in the early C19th.

[coughingbear]

I confess too; I loved Jean Plaidy. And (looks around nervously) Margaret Campbell Barnes. Renault too of course, but I've never had a problem admitting that because I still love her books.

[oursin]

Oh yes, Margaret Campbell Barnes. And *blush* Anya Seton, I'd hate to try to calculate how many times I read Katharine.

[gwyneira]

I find that (for me, at least), Katherine still holds up pretty well (maybe I've just imprinted on it because I've read it so many times). I've read more of Seton's stuff in the past year and haven't found anything else nearly as good.

I tried Jean Plaidy again a couple of years ago (after devouring her as a teenager) and couldn't get through more than about twenty pages. *sigh* Her books were certainly responsible for fueling, if not perhaps initiating, my interest in English history.

[oursin]

Many years ago during my university vacation I picked up a Jean Plaidy that my sister had out from the local library, and couldn't get beyond the first few pages, and have never gone back to her to try again. I'm almost afraid to see if Katherine still works - I can still remember certain passages word for word. And I don't think anything else of Seton's came up to it.

[oursin]

Renault definitely holds up: for some quite high-powered discussion of her works, see maryrenaultfics. But agree about the perhaps unduly negative depiction of women. And the extreme slashiness of The Persian Boy may account for the contraband handing around? I read somewhere (it might be one of the bios of Renault) that at one time (pre Stonewall-era) allusion to her novels (or carrying one of them) was an equivalent of 'are you musical' - a covert identification signal for gay men.

August is good (and I too preferred it to Goodbar), partly because it does make some effort to depict the process of therapy over time and its necessarily repetitive nature, rather than going for the Hollywood 'Revelation! - Problem Solved' model (cf Hitchcock's Marnie), even if it does give the protag a somewhat baroque background to be disentangled. There was a v good novel by Lisa Alther similarly focussed on relationship between female therapist and patient, came out around the same time: ?Other Women.