Adopted Ancestors

I picked up ancestors at a charity shop last week for 50 p each. Now they stand on my mantelpiece.

Their personalities seem quite clear to me. So let me indulge myself & frivolously divine them.

This lady (Florence?) is wearing cheap mourning. She's beautiful but her face is petulantly furrowed. Quick but not a nuanced thinker. I surmise she has been left by her lover (a sham marriage, perhaps?) with an inconvenient baby.

This photo was taken in Oxford in August 1876. His name might be Matthew. He's definitely studying for the ministry. A sincere (if naive) face. He will probably marry and have children but nurse a hidden unspoken passion for someone else all his life. More to come...

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Tracing my steps

Has it really been eight years since I last wrote here? It was picking up Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood that reminded me. My reading diary said I read the novel in 2011, but I don’t believe it. I have no memory of it. (And you would.) I came back to this blog to cross-reference. Yes, I can see I bought it in December 2010 – for a steal – but wrote nothing on it. An old blog, like an old diary, is a shed skin, preserved by sentimentality, laziness, and neglect. For a while I was appalled at how openly I exposed my ignorance! I thought it was charming. (An Americanism?) Also for trying to speak in a register I couldn’t consistently command. But now that blogging is a dead art, that the energy that once lived there has been translated into Tiktok, or Youtube, or Substack, the blog becomes practically private. I can come back and paw over this old, shed skin. When you come across old writing, there’s an inevitable measuring up between the self you were then and the sel...

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .

My Mad Girl

[A Question I am Not the First to Ask: What is it about women and madness? Are they more susceptible to delusion than men are? The subject of many books and hypotheses, we wonder if madness dogs the steps of creative women (eg. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman…) Is it a biological coincidence or a recurring phenomenon? Is it socially reinforced? Do men fear the hysterical women? Is it the uterus (Greek “hysteria”) which turns the brain?] The reclusive writer, the late Janet Frame, winner of all of New Zealand’s literary prizes, spent much time in institutions and in therapy and, as far as I can tell, her novels commonly include themes of estrangement, mental health and madness. Frame considered her 1963 novel Towards Another Summer too personal be published in her lifetime. As she’d already written an autobiography ( Angel at My Table , made into a film by Jane Campion) and been this subject of several biographies, this is telling. Towards Another Su...

A Shelf of One's Own

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