Mary Wollstonecraft (1758-97)
“I don’t believe you realise how much the war has stung our generation. We have had the bottom of things knocked out completely, we have been sent reeling into the chaos and it seems to us that none of your standards are either fixed or necessarily good because in the end they resulted in the smash-up. We have to try to make a world for ourselves, based it as far as possible on love and awareness, mentally and bodily, because it seems to us that all the repressions and formulae, all the cutting off of part of our experience, which perhaps looked sensible and even right, in those calm years have not worked. Much has been taken from us,and we will stick like fury to what is left, and lay hold on life as it comes to us” — Naomi Mitchison’s War Diaries (1940-45, quoted in Elaine Showalter’s Inventing Herself, but I am reading this book late at night)
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve been blogging under this sign for nearly 20 years now, and have completed (or broken off from) several series of blogs, viz., most strikingly actresses, foremother poets, women artists. Not all of these series were about women in the imaginative arts, though; I’ve done several serial dramas from over a single season (Wolf Hall) (however defined) to several, some based on series of books (Poldark, Outlander), original dramas. I’ve shared papers and sessions from academic conferences I’ve been to. I’ve look at types of genres (historical fiction, biography). Individual authors and individual books. Individual movies. All Austen’s letters as organized and edited by Deirdre Le Faye, biographies of her close relatives, The Austen papers, and French contexts for reading Austen. One problem is I do forget to tag, and I do these on my other blog too (Ellen and Jim have a blog, two) so the sets are scattered. My longest ones (except for Austen’s letters) are over there, viz., The Pallisers. Tom Jones.
Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (Joshua Reynolds)
Some of these were given up because I’d finished the thing I set out to do (all Austen’s letters), I was beyond my area of expertise (recent poetry) Some what with teaching, serious projects I’ve not been able to or make time to write a three part blog-essay more than once every two weeks, if that. I keep inventing things that take me into social groups, out of the house. I proposed to teach a two-part course at the Politics and Prose bookstore: 4 French women writers & eras, beginning with the poetic masterpiece by Stael, Corinne, ou l’Italie, for 3 sessions, then a break and consecutively 1 session each of George Sand’s Indiana, Marguerite Duras’s war memoir, La Guerre (occupied France from her vantage point), and then recent lesbian feeling novel about Marie Antoinette and her ladies, Farewell, My Queen by Chantal Thomas (exquisitely sensitive beautifully meditative book). I’d love to add Winter in Majorca (time spent by Sand with Chopin), but there was no go (no offer of position or classes to teach) for this non-famous person with no connections that counted. But I will still attend a few sessions on specific fine books (like Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy the first novel, Sarah Water’s Night Watch) there scattered across the spring.
Joanna Mary Boyce (died so young), The Heath Gatherer
That I’ve no idea how to sell myself or anything else much to the general public may be seen in my not having more than 176 subscribers and about half the number of followers. For individual blogs that land in some moment of popular notice, the numbers will go way up, but not from anything I’ve done. I trust, gentle reader, you and I and the other 175 enjoy or find some kind of profit from what I put here.
I’m contemplative and surveying this evening to push myself on to return to these series, especially the poets, actresses (I’ve written about singer-actresses, including Judy Garland), and painters (one scientific farmer, Beatrice Potter too).
Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
Beatrice Potter squirrel from her children’s books
I felt some stirrings recently, today over a blog on an exhibition going on right now of women Pre-Raphaelite painters, Nick Holland’s blog on an unfinished deeply imaginatively, fantastical fragment by Charlotte Bronte (how could such a spirit be localized into the demands of the realistic novel?). This week I read (for the first time) Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, watched the poignant movie, and returned to these working class English women’s writing of the 1950s (Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, A Story of Two lives anyone?)
Vera Brittain (1893-1970)
As evidence of good continuing interest in women and the arts (of all kinds) I finally finished reading Elaine Showalter’s Inventing Herself: it’s a book made up of a series of portraits (some long and some sort in a group style) women who achieved as feminists in their writing and active lives. Beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft, taking us through Margaret Fuller, Olive Schreiner, Eleanor Marx, Charlotte Gilmore Perkins (daughter hated her), Elsie Clews Parsons (?! — yes an important later 19th century writer), early 20th century Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Nora Zeale Thurston, Rebecca West and Vera Brittain, moving into the middle years, Mary MacCarthy and Hannah Arendt (more alike than you think), Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag (ditto), and then very recent, names I read as contemporaries, Nancy Miller, Adrienne Rich, Ann Douglas, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, taking us to Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton (a rousing defense) and Diana Spencer (died young spectacularly, Showalter unexpectedly sympathized). All of them had to live unconventional highly self-centered lives in order to be the writer or woman she became; demoralizing to see that before the early 20th century a woman had to be chaste to have any social capital; from the mid-20th a woman had to make herself sexually available, or seeming so to radical men to get anywhere. I was surprised at how many had become enthralled by or to a man, and this become a crucial determinant in the existence they led. There is no false idealization: Sontag was able to travel and write the books she did because she perpetually partnered with very rich people. Beauvoir’s claim she did not become a feminist until after 1947 (her trip to the US) disingenuous.
73 years old the end of this week, tiring, failing better than I used to, I shall go down with all flags flying. I do everything together with others, except meet …
I cheer myself up by keeping watching the recent Durrells of Corfu, the dose, an episode every three nights (I love the music, scripts, cartoons, actors), backed up by midnight dream reading of Laurence Durrell’s island books. Perhaps my first new actress will be Barbara Flynn, aka Aunt Hermione — pitch perfect in this series. How I find her characteristic characters so appealing. To my eyes she is beautiful still.
From the Durrells of Corfu, you see Keeley Hawes as Louisa from the back
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Happy Birthday in the coming days, Ellen. And Happy Thanksgiving to you & your family, 2 leggeds & 4s. Your blog has me jotting titles for books I might get, Elaine Showalter’s especially, which I don’t see on my shelves. I think your class outlines are intriguing, accepted or not, & your plans for what’s coming next, better failures, & unflappable flags flying are honorable & admirable. Keep on Carrying On! (Or buggering as Winston said – “KOBO”!) – Judith
I wish you a good weekend to come too. Thank you for remembering my kitties, one of which is on my lap right now as I type. She is settling in. Let us all carry on together.
Kathryn Winslow: Quite an undertaking, Ellen! I only recently discovered your blog, but I’m awed! It will take a while for me to catch up.
Me: Actually I’ve been doing these series for years; one at a time and recently I stopped. I am vowing to go back to them. If you put words like “actress” or “foremother poet” in the search engine, you’ll come up with the blogs in a row.
I prefer to do this than write academic papers – which takes at a time to do and I am often frustrated at what I am not allowed to say.
Catherine Janofsky You mentioned Mary MacCarthy—did you mean Mary McCarthy, Arendt’s great friend?
Me: Yes I meant Mary MacCarthy but I didn’t cite her because she was friendly with Hannah Arendt: I cited both of them as being of the same era and having accomplished worth books and lived unconventional lives — with other parallels between them.
Catherine; A Charmed Life and The Groves of Academe are my favorites. Ending a book with a school president quoting Cicero in Latin is a great ending.
Me: “I remember very well her Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood and liked her Stones of Venice. I knew the story of her marriage with Edmund Wilson and that he was violently abusive, but did not realize she left him, and in fact had 4 husbands. Each of the lives Elaine told, she told in a fresh new way and I learned things I hadn’t before or saw the write in a new perspective. Tellingly, one case, in fact much of Beauvoir’s life shows her living apart from Sartre, she had many lovers too, and in her writing she sharply disagrees with him (I know that from The Ethics of Ambiguity).