* The Reform’d Coquet, Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, and The Accomplished Rake, Mary Davys, Martha F. Bowden, ed, University of Kentucky Press, 1999 – a purchase inspired by a seminar paper on the novelist, briefly discussed here

* ‘Almost a Man of Genius’, Clemence Royer, Feminism and Nineteenth-Century Science, Joy Harvey, Rutgers Uni Press, 1997, about a “thinker who wrote extensively on science, philosophy, feminism and their interaction, for both specialist and popular audiences … [on gender and science] most notably in connectionwith the widely debated implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution for man and woman’s place in both nature and society”.

* Diary of Mrs Kitty Trevylyan “A story of the times of Whitefield And the Wesleys. By the Author of “Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family”, London, T Nelson and Sons, 1866. (Ebay impulse purchase)

* Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Atlantic, London, 2004

*Christianity: A Global History, David Chidester, Penguin 2001. (Ordered when I held out hopes of a small part-time OU tutoring job, which don’t look like being realised.)

* Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles, MIT Press, 2002: Hayles is one of those people who after you’ve read a couple of paragraphs you realise they are genuinely original, brilliant figures – I leant heavily on her in my thesis (posted on my website).

The artist Gwen John when in middle age told a friend: “When I was a child I used to cry all the time and they told me ‘don’t cry now, when you’re grown up you’ll have something to cry about’. So I was afraid of growing up and I never expected any happiness in life.” (p.1)

So much for the grand old days of childrearing.

This reminded me of an article (sorry free registration required) in The New York Times about a study looking at “What Makes People Happy?”. Peculiarly the main answer was TV, but “taking care of children – bless their young hearts – is often about as much fun as housework”. (Don’t you love the way the reporter felt he had to insert that sentimental clause.)

“The study, of 909 women living in Texas, found that in general, the group woke up a little grumpy but soon entered a state of mild pleasure that increased by degrees through the day, punctuated by occasional bouts of anxiety, frustration, and anger. Predictably, they found that commuting, housework, and facing a boss rated as the least pleasant activities, while sex, socializing with friends and relaxing were most enjoyable.

Yet contrary to previous research on daily moods, the study found that the women rated TV-watching high on the list, ahead of shopping and talking on the phone, and ranked taking care of children low, below cooking and not far above housework.”

It makes sense really; the people you see in public looking really miserable are almost invariably in charge of children.

(Thanks to Rox Populi for the reference.)

To the Tate Britain for the Gwen John and Augustus John exhibition, much and justly praised, for its art and its social documentation.

He was, of course, much the better known and regarded during their lifetimes – all sorts of extravagant praise was heaped on him (no doubt to his detriment), but to my eyes, while he could certainly draw, most of his paintings are no better than local “art show and fete” jobs. (He is support for the theory, which I learnt about here, that technical skills are not necessarily good for an artist at the start of their career.)

She, however, from quite early on, was striving towards the intellectually original and technically perfect, as is now being recognised.

It seems odd in some ways, that what she arrived at was small, “domestic”, self-contained scenes, often described as very prim and “womanly”, while she was actually living a life of almost total freedom. She was a model for and lover of Rodin, and in her adult life always lived alone, by choice, supporting herself by her art and her nude modelling for artists. (Even today many still find this desire to live alone odd; I know I’m regularly told so!)

A review of the exhibition can be found here.

I was unable to resist the biog in the bookshop (Gwen John, a life, by Sue Roe, Vintage, 2002), an author who must have had a wonderful job, since huge quantities of her letters and those of her circle survive.

One of her earliest oils was of Mrs Atkinson, the cleaning lady. “She used to greet her affectionately with a kiss, shocking Edna Waugh’s sister Rosa into … ‘All barriers of differing class and occupation were silently shattered by the sight of that simple act.’ (p. 21)

She and Dorelia, her brother’s mistress, set out together to walk to Rome. “Augustus … thought they should pack a pistol. But Gwen would not listen ‘she never did.’ They set off that August ‘carrying a minimum of belongings and a great deal of painting equipment’. … They began the long walk up the River Garonne … Gwen sent home evocative accounts of their journey, lyrical descriptions of the evening light along the west coast of rural France; incidents involving the locals and bizarre, nocturnal adventure. In the villages they drew the locals for a few centimes … They lived on bread, grapes and beer, and spent their time fending off strange men who tried to take them on detours.” (p. 38) This, for a solicitor’s daughter in 1903 (albeit one who had a relatively unconventional, motherless childhood) is amazing stuff!

The painting she did of Dorelia, entitled “The Student”, after they had settled briefly in Toulouse, is one of the finest of her early works. They didn’t make it to Rome, however; but headed instead for Paris (probably because of a man Dorelia had met, although Gwen later helped get her back for her brother.)

A collection of her work can be found here.

Proving there is nothing new about keeping up with the Joneses …

A letter from Margaret Walkerne to her stepfather, Robert Armburgh, c. 1430:

My dear and well beloved father, I commend me to you, doing you to wit that I have but a little while to go and am like within a short time with the grace of God to be delivered of child.

And for as much as ladies and gentlewomen and other friends of my mother’s and mine are like to visit me while I lie in child bed and I am not purveyed of honest bedding without the which my husband’s honest [honour?] and mine may not be saved, and also my friends have been put to so grievous costs and importable changes through entangling of their adversaries, and my husband is new come into his lands and is but bare and as yet hath little profit taken thereof and hath laid great cost on his husbandry that they may not acquit your good fatherhood that you would vouchsafe in saving of mine husband’s worship and mine to lend me two marks [13s 4d] or twenty shillings unto the next term [rent[ day that my husband’s farm comes in, and then with the grace of God you shall be well and truly paid again. I can no more at this time.

(You can take a breath now – they weren’t big on full stops then.)

From Letters of Medieval Women, A. Crawford (ed) Sutton, 2002, Thrupp, p. 39-40.

The commentary says it is not known if her stepfather was able to oblige, since “he and her mother were in serious financial difficulties over a legal case and the expense of Margaret’s wedding, so she may have had to put a brave face on it and receive her visitors with what she had”.

For those not up on these times it is worth noting that clothing (and bedding) then was very expensive, particularly the fine stuff Margaret obviously wants.

Much more could probably be found in The Armburgh Papers: The Brokholes Inheritance in Warwickshire, Hertfordshire and Essex, c.1417-c.1453, Woodbridge, 1998.

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egyptiancat, originally uploaded by natalieben.

I’m far more of a dog person than a cat person, but since it is a blog tradition, I thought I’d share this late Egyptian example. (I’ve misplaced the original image but it was either 24th or 26th dynasty.) This is from the exhibition on which I posted earlier in the week.

Should you prefer the dog option, Barista pointed me to a wonderful OTT dog blogging site here.

Or you can visit the Battersea Dogs’ Home rehoming page – as I wistfully do regularly. My Beanie died in February and I’m really ready for another dog, but practical reasons mean I should wait another five months. Should I suddenly start dog blogging in earnest, you’ll know, however, that practicality lost.

(So as not to be speciest, I’ll also point you to the cats for rehoming. I should also say that the dogs advertised on the site are the most difficult to rehome – you can also get poodles, spaniels, labradors etc there.)

An advert in this week’s London Review of Books took my fancy. It was for Transforming the Public Sphere: The Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labor in 1898, by Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk.

From the blurb: “In 1898, the year Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was inaugurated, five hundred women organized an enormous public exhibition showcasing women’s contributions to Dutch society as workers in a strikingly broad array of professions. The National Exhibition of Women’s Labor, located in The Hague, was attended by more than ninety thousand visitors. Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk consider the exhibition in the international contexts of women’s history, visual culture, and imperialism.”

Antoinette Burton, from the introduction: “Despite the veritable explosion of historical work on exhibitionary culture in the last decade, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of women in organizing the transnational spectacles that dominated the culturescapes of imperial modernity . . . . Transforming the Public Sphere . . . offers an important corrective to this oversight.”

So often we talk about women being excluded from the public sphere, yet here was a very public demonstration of their economic roles.

For once this is an “academic” book that is not ridiculously expensive – £18.50 on AmazonUK and $23.95 in the US.

More on the book here, and an essay by one of the book’s authors on an aspect of the exhibition here. And another essay is here.

Wikipedia also tells me that: “The first scientific society for women was founded in Middleberg, a city in the south of the Dutch republic, in 1785.” I couldn’t find any more; anyone know a good general source (in English) for the Dutch women’s movement?