• "I am half agony, half hope": Did you know that Jane Austen considered a different ending for Persuasion?
• Singerie: 18thc art depicting monkeys "aping" human behavior.
• Elizabeth Gould, 19thc natural history artist who traveled to Australia to execute thousands of exquisite paintings of Australian birds for her husband's publication.
• The history of that striped Breton knit shirt you've been wearing all summer.
• Faustina, Marquesa de Amboage: the ideal woman of 1899.
• Before the bookmobile: when librarians rode on horseback to deliver books to rural Americans during the Great Depression.
• Mother Goose as a Suffragette: a 1912 book of suffragette poems, digitized to read online.
• "Talking corpses": even in death, women's testimony was considered less creditable than men's.
• Puritan history-myths from the 17thc: did Oliver Cromwell ban mince pies?
• Image: Lovely Winterhalter painting of the linked hands of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
• The mysterious death of Captain Archibald Anderson.
• The colorful, historical vocabulary of beer.
• These are the world's oldest known surviving pants, dating from the thirteenth to eleventh century BC.
• It was a dark and stormy night: the strange story of "Shelley's Ghost."
• Make your own cockatrice - a terrifying animal hybrid!
• The radioactive wardrobe of Marie Curie.
• A 19thc children's picture book - in a can.
• The roots of the Hawaiian aloha shirt.
• Just for fun: Charlotte Brontë goes to yoga.
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Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.
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5 comments:
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if Marie Curie's wardrobe was radioactive. In fact, it would surprise me if it weren't, but there is no info in that link about that.
Who knew she was such a pretty, dainty little woman, ref one of the photos.
Re Elizabeth Gould, many thanks. The 84 plates of the book were produced by lithography, before she died in 1841. Post-death, 595 plates were produced by HC Richter from Elizabeth's drawings. So the book became the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia in seven volumes.
Brilliant woman!
I'd like to know what Jane Austen's alternate ending was, but there's no transcription, and I'm not so good at reading her handwriting. Anyone know "the rest of the story"?
Re Elizabeth Gould: “It would appear that the strain of motherhood, together with the executing of approximately 600 drawings for publications, had sapped her vitality.”. OMFG— Her life. Was. Amazing. And that condescending summary from the 60’s — that voice from the past— makes me want to leap on a chair and set things on fire!
Unfortunately I suspect her outcome would be typical of Loretta’s heroines whom I love. Although Loretta’s naturalist hero would USE A CONDOM DURING GLOBAL CIRCUMNAVIGATION.
Okay, so the 60’s voice wasn’t the only problem in that account...
I've got a copy of Gould's Birds of Australia, had it for decades, and I never noticed that so much of it was Elizabeth Gould's work. I'm going to check to see if she is clearly recognized in it. I wonder if she needs to be "revived" as so many women working under men's names or aegis or dominance need to be - and some have been. and what a grueling, short life she had!
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