Anna Alma-Tadema, teenaged daughter of the more famous Lawrence, shows her prodigious talent in these paintings of the Drawing Room at 1A Holland Park and her father’s library at Townsend House (1880s),
“Of aal the fish there iss in the sea,” said Para Handy, “nothing bates the herrin’; it’s a providence they’re plentiful and them so cheap!”
Neil Munro (1863–1930) – journalist, novelist, short-story writer, & poet – was born #OTD, 3 June. Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of Herring discusses Munro’s PARA HANDY stories, as well as giving the full text of the tale “The Herring – A Gossip”
“Widely respected – & regularly attacked (once physically) – in her lifetime, she is now largely neglected; an intriguing aside to feminism or to agnosticism. Dixie deserves better.”
Florence Dixie – novelist, poet, dramatist, war correspondent, campaigning journalist, suffragist, & more – was born #OTD, 25 May. Valentina Bold explores Dixie’s roving life
“THE DYNAMITER is a hugely inventive & brilliant book, at once a political thriller, a blackly comic satire, & a female adventure”
Robert Louis Stevenson & Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne married #OTD, 19 May, 1880. In this article, Prof Penny Fielding explores the dangerous #collaboration between RLS & his wife: granting female agency on the page & in life
The Scottish Novel in 1824
1 July, University of Edinburgh – free
This one-day in-person symposium marks the bicentenary of 1824, an ‘annus mirabilis’ in the history of Scottish fiction that saw the publication of two experimental masterpieces: James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, & Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet.
In 1889, #ArthurConanDoyle & #OscarWilde sat down for dinner with J.M Stoddart, editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine.
There, Wilde agreed to write “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, & Conan Doyle “The Sign of Four” – one of his most famous #SherlockHolmes stories.
Now, Conan Doyle’s letters recounting that fated dinner and his sole handwritten #manuscript of “The Sign of Four” are being auctioned by Sotheby’s New York.
The artist Isaac Levitan born a poor Jew in Lithuania (1860 - 1900), ventured into different genres, but his talent was only fully revealed in his depiction of nature. Like no-one else, he conveyed the mood of melancholy in landscape.
Levitan gained recognition only at the end of his short life - at 37, he became an academician of landscape painting and, at 39, died in Moscow from a heart aneurysm. A sad tale. One of the artists I most admire.
The #Gaelic poet & songwriter Màiri Nic a’ Phearsain (Mary MacPherson) – known as Màiri Mhòr nan Òran (Great Mary of the Songs) was born #OnThisDay, 10 March, 1821. Much of her work was #political & was especially focused on the struggle for land rights
Rediscovering the Poetry of Louisa Agnes Czarnecki, a 19th-Century Edinburgh Writer and Musician
A new blog post from Edinburgh University’s Centre for Research Collections on Louisa Agnes Czarnecki (1823–1877), a versatile & politically engaged 19th-century Scottish poet who married a #Polish political exile
Literary nerds rejoice! This week, we have another history/literature episode, looking at sex work in Victorian poetry with Emily Calleja.
We’re talking about how sex workers were portrayed, what that can tell us about women’s real-life frustrations, and how it impacted the suffrage movement.
Emily just finished her Master’s in Nineteenth Century Studies—Congratulations, Emily! 🎉🎉🎉
A Life in Letters: the correspondence of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
Ian Campbell examines the correspondence of Thomas (1796–1881) & Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866), covering the early years of their relationship & their lives in #19thcentury Scotland & London.
Part of READING SCOTLAND, Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz
Connections: A Hidden Iron Age Gem to Trevelyan’s Controversial Past
According to the National Trust's heritage records, this conspicuous feature is termed a "small univallate earthwork." 'Univallate' is just a fancy way of saying it's got one raised edge encircling a ditch. Usually, that word is usually associated with hillforts, but here, the lack of any visible signs of habitation insi ...
“The volume was stitched together from pieces [Barrie] had written anonymously for the St James’s Gazette, Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, and elsewhere… The only throughline to it all is how the chapters mirror the instincts of a smoker’s mind: although it may stray to other subjects, the prose always returns at steady intervals to the preoccupations of nicotine.”
This week we are mythbusting corsets with biological anthropologist Dr Rebecca Gibson — what they do to the body, why men wanted to ban them, what period dramas get wrong, and why they may actually be feminist!
Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense
What does sound, whether preserved or lost, tell us about nineteenth-century wartime? Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense pursues this question through the many territories affected by the Crimean War, including Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Dagestan, Chechnya, and Crimea.
George MacDonald (1824–1905) was born #OTD, 10 Dec. Seen by many as the forefather of modern #fantasy fiction, he was a huge influence on later writers including JRR #Tolkien & #CSLewis
“The sheer imaginative force of LILITH makes nonsense of our everyday notions of ‘good writing’. MacDonald aims not to make us read, but to make us dream”
David Melville Wingrove on LILITH, MacDonald’s last – & very strange – major work