Quantcast
Channel: The History Girls
Viewing all 2760 articles
Browse latest View live

Fear of Puppets Overcome by Curiosity, by Louisa Young

0
0
Last year I found myself embroiled in a country & western shadow puppet production homage to Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood'. Yes I did. Really. I played a murder victim or two, whistled 'Yellow Bird', manipulated cut-outs on a lightscreen, and sang songs - including some that I had written! - in front of an audience which turned out to include David Gilmore from Pink Floyd.

But I hate puppets. They're scary. I have been scared of puppets my entire life, ever since my big siblings used to spook me with our old family glove puppets - Sooty, Sweep, that kind of evil demon. We had a strange set of Cinderella on wires as well, 1950s versions of 18th-century archetypes, wigged footmen and green-eye-shadowed Ugly Sisters, and some peculiar Neapolitans involving Roland and Oliver, with swords. I have been threatened with visits to marionette museums in Sicily and on Alicudi and Siracusa. I do not want to go. But I followed this puppet show to farthest North Norfolk, and to Wigtown in Galloway. I loved it. It made me cry.

I was lured into this unlikely escapade by a woman called Allison Ouvry. She's a clear-eyed Californian redhead, musical, passionate, obsessed, adorable. Oh heck, here she is, let her explain:  https://t.co/Hm1LXYAb7L

I mention all this because, she's done it again. She has persuaded the Victoria & Albert Museum in London to let her loose in its Puppet Archive - did you know they have one? It's just by Olympia, in  the former Post Office Savings Bank HQ. Two hundred and fifty puppets lie sleeping there on shallow shelves, behind glass, frogs and monsters, princesses and dragons, soldiers and animals, an owl and a camel, Punch and Judy, awaiting the call to jump up and dance again.. . . . . .



And the V&A has just acquired Joey the Horse from War Horse, donated by Handspring, though he's not, presumably, heading straight into pasture in the archive: 





Allison, her husband and co-puppetteer Martin Ouvry and a host of puppet talent including Max Humphries who has worked for the National theatre, the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet, have made the call. They have chosen  a three-headed Scaramouche, a girl called Pimpinella, a Turkish shadow Kharagoz, a skeleton, of course Mr Punch and a strange and handsome man called the Martinek Giant, and rescued them from the depths of oblivion. Here they are, in an 'Ellen'-style mass selfie:



And here is a close-up of Martinek. To be honest he reminds me of Martin Ouvry. But scarier.



But who are these characters? Good question. And one they themselves will be asking during Shakespeare: The Puppet Show, the plot of which looks alluringly like a cross between Toy Story and Britain's Got Talent, as they flee the archives and audition for various parts in various Shakespeare plays. 

It's half an hour of educational Easter fun. I wish I was in it. I wish I had been into the puppet archives of the V&A. Why am I telling you this? Because puppetry is not dead, and nor is it quite as scary to me as it used to be. Not quite. And I'm going to see the show








Four Sisters, by Clare Mulley

0
0
To mark ‘Women’s History Month’ I am dedicating my March blog to four Russian sisters…

A couple of years ago the Russianist, historian, translator and author Helen Rappaport decided to write about four sisters. I was researching three very different sisters at the same time, so I hoped that collectively we could write about seven sisters, and meet occasionally in north London to toast our progress. Sadly, my chosen sisters fell by the wayside (at least for now), but Helen’s wonderful book: Four Sisters: The Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses was published this week.

The British hardback of Helen Rappaport's Four Sisters


A fluent Russian speaker, Helen is a specialist in Russian history and 19th century women’s history. Her subjects have ranged from a blackmailing Victorian beautician to Lenin’s years in exile, and from the stories of women in the Crimean War of the 1850s to an encyclopedia of female social reformers.

Author Helen Rappaport, photo by John Kerrison

Four Sisters is Helen’s second look at the Imperial Romanov family. In 2009 she examined the last painful fourteen days of the dynasty in her history, Ekaterinburg. Now she widens her lens to provide a deeply moving account of the four Romanov sisters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia.

Important chiefly as dynastic assets in their own lifetime, these women were perhaps the most photographed and talked about young royals of the early twentieth century. Presented essentially as beautiful, demure figures, flanking their parents, in gauzy white dresses, it would have been unthinkable that not one of them would find a husband. However, in 1918, they were all brutally murdered, along with their parents, thirteen-year-old brother, and loyal personal staff, by members of the Bolshevik secret police. 


Olga, Maria, Nicholas II Alexandra Fyodorovna,
Anastasia, Alexei and Tatiana, 1913
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Fyodorovna_of_Hesse


The fate of the Imperial Romanov family is well-known, and yet this is a story still obscured by confusion, deceptions and myth. Inevitably perhaps, such a tragic tale of innocence and brutality has often been reduced to a binary narrative about good and evil. However, presenting the four Romanov sisters simply as innocent victims without independent character, fault or value, does little to further our understanding. The apparently irrepressible desire to believe that Anastasia escaped her family’s fate, despite all evidence to the contrary, has further romanticized the story.

I asked Helen why these four women’s lives have not been more critically examined before, despite their fame, and about the politics of writing about women who are primarily known for their relationship to, or association with, more famous men.

     ‘The perennial problem with telling the story of interesting women in history’ Helen told me, ‘is the lack of sufficient source material. Sometimes the only way we can learn anything about women is when they are shown as an adjunct to the much more famous men in their lives and the results are not always satisfactory. I don't believe in trying to aggrandize the role of such women, but by taking a close up look at the key role they played - as in the case of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife - one can find fascinating perspectives on the bigger story. Similarly, the lives and upbringing of the four Romanov sisters hopefully sheds much valuable new light on their parents and the whole dynamic of Russia's last imperial family.’

The tragic fate of the Romanov family provides a brutally direct metaphor for the end of Imperial Russia. How did you balance the focus between the personal drama, and the political context?

     ‘I think the reason that people are so endlessly fascinated by the last imperial family has a lot to do with the murder of those five innocent children in 1918. And yes, it is indeed a metaphor for the dreadful, savage and bitter civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup in October 1917. Millions of people died in the first formative years of the new Soviet Russia, many of them innocent women and children. The Romanov children represent the murder of innocence and also the difficulty, even now, that people in Russia have of coming to terms with the savagery of their own past.’

What is new in your approach to the story?

     ‘The sisters have always been perceived as an adjunct to the much bigger story of their parents and their haemophiliac brother. I had never had any interest in writing standard biographies of, say, Nicholas or Alexandra, nor have I ever considered myself to be a political historian. I was interested in the Romanovs' private, domestic life, as a family and how they interacted with each other.
     As a mother of daughters myself, I wanted to write about them as any other young women – i.e. without preoccupation with their status and titles. I wanted to view their development as one would any other developing girls - with the same interests, impulses, hopes and disappointments. I wanted to show their very different personalities and how each of them had qualities that were uniquely their own. This was no bland collective, as they are so often presented, but four very interesting young women who were on the brink of life and who, in their own very different ways, had a great deal to offer.’


How important was your fluency in Russian during your research?

     ‘My Russian was crucial. There was much that I wanted and needed to read in the Russian original, especially the girls' letters and diaries, even though a lot of source material has now been published and translated. I visited Russia several times to refuel my sense of place, but not so much to discover new things. I found much new material by other means, even without going there. Being in Russia helped me connect with the four girls and their story in an important emotional and spiritual way.’

Finally, how would you like the four Romanov sisters to be remembered?

     ‘As four very different contrasting personalities who deserve to be remembered more than as just pretty girls in white frocks and big picture hats. They were not a bland collective, they were a fascinating quartet of young women who at heart were decent, loving, honest and inherently altruistic and caring. They deserve to be remembered for the love and devotion they showed each other, their parents and their sick brother without complaint and with a gentle stoicism that I find admirable and touching.’ 


Maria, Olga, Anastasia and Tatiana
in captivity, Spring 1917
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Nikolaevna 


Helen is passionate about uncovering the neglected truths behind well-known stories and releasing women from what she calls ‘the footnotes and margins’ of history. Four Sisters gives individuality and vibrant identity back to Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, presenting them not just as pawns in the hands of their Imperial family, symbols of an out-of-touch regime, or tragic victims of the brutal revolution, but as young women with hopes, dreams, frustrations and fears of their own. Here they are actors in their own right, each responding distinctly to the circumstances, opportunities and constraints of their lives, and living without the foreknowledge that usually clouds perceptions of them. Their personal stories are told lightly but with such scholarly authority that it is easy to forget how new it is to consider them in this fresh and sensitive way. 

History like this shows how women’s lives have often been doubly marginalised, first in life, and then in their retrospective historical treatment. Helen Rappaport not only liberates the Romanov sisters to great degree but, in doing so, she shows how revisiting the lives of women living in the shadow of more powerful men can illuminate history in all sorts of new ways.

Interview with Carol Drinkwater by Kate Lord Brown

0
0
Today, I’m delighted to welcome actress, author and film-maker Carol Drinkwater to The History Girls. Here is a bit about her:

Anglo-Irish actress Carol Drinkwater is perhaps still most familiar to audiences for her award-winning portrayal of Helen Herriot in the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small. A popular and acclaimed author and film-maker as well, Carol has published twenty books for both the adult and young adult markets. She is currently at work on her twenty-first title.

When she purchased a rundown property overlooking the Bay of Cannes in France, she discovered on the grounds sixty-eight, 400-year-old olive trees. Once the land was reclaimed and the olives pressed, Carol along with her French husband, Michel, became the producers of top-quality olive oil. Her series of memoirs, love stories, recounting her experiences on her farm (The Olive Farm, The Olive Season, The Olive Harvest and Return to the Olive Farm) have become international bestsellers. Carol's fascination with the olive tree extended to a seventeenth-month, solo Mediterranean journey in search of the tree's mythical secrets. The resulting travel books, The Olive Route and The Olive Tree, have inspired a five-part documentary films series entitled The Olive Route.
Carol has also been invited to work with UNESCO to help create an Olive Heritage Trail around the Mediterranean with the dual goals of creating peace in the region and honouring the ancient heritage of the olive tree.

Q: Carol, the series and the books of All Creatures Great and Small are a cultural phenomenon - I’ve just discovered there is a James Herriot World (link: http://www.worldofjamesherriot.org/) What do you think is its enduring appeal? Do you still hear from fans?

A: I constantly hear from fans, particularly from the US and Germany. It might be that the programmes seem to run and run in those two countries. The good news is that when these viewers visit my website, to find out what I am doing now, a high percentage of them begin to buy and read my books and then join my Facebook page and then – wham – they have become a part of my more recent life. The World of James Herriot is, I think, linked to the museum in Thirsk. The building was his surgery and several years ago became a museum of his life and books and, of course, the television series.

Its enduring appeal is based on several ingredients, I think. The good humour in the material and, very importantly, Alf Wight’s genuine affection for man and beast. His ‘narrator’s voice’ is a very positive one; he draws you into his world and the optimism of it. The series was exceedingly well cast – every single minor role added to the whole – and much care was taken over the period details. It was historically accurate.


Q: You’ve worked with some remarkable directors and actors – Olivier at the National and Kubrick in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. How do you feel your career as an actress has fed your work as an author?

A: I think the training I received at Drama Centre London, now part of UAL, University of the Arts London, was exceptional in that it was a hands-on training for actors and directors, offering movement and mime classes, use of costume, approaching texts, of course, but as well, it gave a literary education. We began with the Greeks and worked our way through history from Shakespeare to Pinter, Edward Bond, O’Casey, Beckett... It included Brecht, Calderon, Lorca and many of the European classical playwrights.

I also learned the business of HARD work. We began at 8.45am and frequently did not finish till nine at night. Later, if we were performing or working backstage on plays. I learned that commitment is the first principle. Without that, little is achieved.

I had always dreamed of being a writer although I always knew I would be an actress. The theatre, the world of entertainment, was in my blood and is a strong part of my family background on my father’s side. Writing was not. It meant that I held the art of writing in a more scared place. I have been writing since I was about seven, but it was at drama school that I began to understand form – what creating drama involves - and the inner life of characters. Obviously, when I left drama school I had to be open to other ways of approaching a play, a text, and broaden my approach. Working on ACGS was also a great lesson in both writing and directing. As always on film sets, a great deal of the actors’ time is spent hanging around waiting to shoot. I used that time fruitfully. I watched and I learnt, as I had done with Olivier. I watched to see what worked and what didn’t. The pace of a scene, the inner strengths of it, the emotional content: what to contain and what to expose. All of it marvellous fodder for the Carol yet-to-be, the professional writer. I have been very privileged.

A brief word about Stanley Kubrick. Every member of his team, every technician, said that Stanley was the only director they had worked with who could do their job better than they could. He knew filmmaking inside out and every technician held him in great esteem for that. He was also a very considerate man. It was my very first job out of drama school. I had two lines and he gave me the time and attention due to one who had already earned their stripes in the profession. I am honoured to have worked with him and even during that brief time of employment, I came away with rich lessons learned.

Q: You’ve published twenty books for both the adult and young adult markets, and your latest title is ‘The Only Girl in the World’, a Young Adult novel. What was the inspiration for this story?

A: I had spent a fair amount of time researching WWII for a book set in the south of France but I got stuck and I put the material aside, wondering what to do next. It was one of those fortunate moments. Scholastic provided the answer. Jill Sawyer, my editor, offered me the opportunity to write a book set at any point in history I wanted, as long as it was a love story. Given that this is the centenary of the outbreak of WWI and my head was still full of thoughts of war, I immediately suggested a story set in 1916 in France, in the Somme region. I drove north to Arras and spent time in and around the Somme valley visiting the cemeteries and talking to local families. I was very moved by all that I discovered and the landscape is evocative and very beautiful. I was hooked!


Q: The first books I read of yours were from the wonderful series inspired by the olive farm near Cannes that you’ve brought back to life. The Olive Farm, The Olive Season, The Olive Harvest and Return to the Olive Farm have become international bestsellers. I remember reading them during a snowy, chilly winter in Cheshire and being transported to the colour and heat of the South of France. Your love for the region shines through your books – is this a part of the world you always dreamt of living in?

A: Not at all. I thought I would end up in Italy. In fact, I did live there for a short while in my twenties. I was in Rome. I loved it but for various reasons that chapter of my life ended and I returned to London and went on to shoot ACGS and from that was offered work internationally. It was during a film shoot in Australia when I was taken out to dinner by the executive producer, a Frenchman called Michel, that my life quite literally changed overnight. He asked me to marry him on that very first date. The rest is history and a bestselling collection of books. In fact, next 10th April is our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

The inspiration for the books is threefold: the love Michel and I have built together, the amazing ruin that revealed itself to be an olive farm with sixty-eight, four-hundred-year-old olive trees growing on its terraces as well as the passion I have found for the olive tree itself, its history and traditions existing all around the Mediterranean. It is an endless source of amazement and joy to me.



Q: Thinking of your fiction, like the recent number 1 ‘The Girl in Room Fourteen’, your ‘voice’ carries over, particularly the way you conjure the sensual beauty of the Mediterranean. But I wonder if it’s a case of putting on different ‘hats’ to write your historical novels and the Olive Farm series? Do you prefer writing fiction, or crafting books based on real life?

A: I see no difference between them, except to say that when I am writing ‘non-fiction’, particularly historical fiction, I need to be exacting in my research and contain my story within the bounds of the reality and period I have chosen for myself. I don’t write - or haven’t yet! – historical biography. The characters in my historical stories are invented. So, I can choose them to be as I want, except they must behave within the parameters of the society and time they live in. For example, in The Only Girl in the World, Dennis, the young English soldier who falls in love with a French girl living in the Somme valley, does not attempt to persuade Hélène into bed with him. She is a Catholic girl living in a French village in 1916. She doesn’t stand out in the street smoking or going to clubs with friends, and he is an inexperienced young lad from London. They both need to behave as people from their time, not as a couple might behave today. In fact, I think it adds spice to the tenderness of their story that they so rarely touch each other and throughout the book they only kiss once when he is going to the Front.

I enjoy telling stories. The genre is not the point. Also, I love nature in all its tiniest details and I think that is carried over into all my work. Landscape, territory, flora, fauna, these marvellous gifts of life find their way into my work. The Girl in Room Fourteen is a fictional tale of a woman living about five miles from where we are here at the olive farm. The difference is that she, Cécile, grows and sells lemons while she waits for the man she loves to return to her.

It is a fictional tale but the natural beauty of the Mediterranean plays a starring role in the piece.

Q: I understand that you made a seventeen-month, solo Mediterranean journey in search of the olive tree's mythical secrets? (The resulting travel books, The Olive Route and The Olive Tree, have inspired a five-part documentary films series entitled The Olive Route). What were your favourite moments, and what did you learn on this journey?

A: It is very hard to highlight single moments because the entire experience was exceptional. Lonely, challenging, occasionally frightening, yes; always exciting, often touching and endlessly wondrous. Spending time in war zones and discovering at grassroots level the generosity of man towards man was life-affirming. I was held up at gunpoint in Israel as I passed through Rachel’s Crossing checkpoint out of Bethlehem. I was caught in Al-Qaeda bombings in Algiers ... I shared meals with Berber women in the desert ... I have made many, many friends and talked to some of the oldest trees on earth.

Q: UNESCO has invited you to help create an Olive Heritage Trail around the Mediterranean with the goals of creating peace in the region and honouring the ancient heritage of the olive tree. Will this also be a chance to highlight your interests in ecology – I’m thinking particularly of your work with bees?

A: UNESCO gave their name in support of the making of the films once they had read my two books and they helped open many doors for us. I have attended meetings with some of their scientific experts in the hope of identifying an Olive Heritage Trail around the Med, but the economic difficulties that UNESCO is facing added to certain in-house political disagreements have meant that this project is moving very slowly. I think they count on our work and the films to dig the roots!

It has nothing to do with my fight for the plight of the honeybee, and other pollinating creatures. My OLIVEFARM Facebook page, though, seems to have attracted beekeepers worldwide and that is very exciting. A beekeeper from Georgia signed up this week. I feel all this might lead somewhere positive.

Q: Can you tell us a little about your daily routine as a writer? With all your travelling, are there any rituals you have to focus on writing wherever you are? Do you prefer silence, or music?

A: Silence, absolutely silence, or natural sounds from nature. And candles. I light candles when I am writing whatever time of day or night. I am a morning writer and like to achieve six hours. I will work longer when I am deeply into a book and particularly if I have a deadline looming. I work in my little library but obviously as I travel a great deal I have to make myself makeshift ‘dens’ wherever I am.

Q: The writing life can be quite solitary – do you find combining film and TV work with your life as an author brings balance?

A: Definitely, yes, although I am not really acting anymore. I am very sad about this and miss it deeply but that seems to be the way it has worked out and I have so much in my life that to complain would be churlish. I work on documentaries with my husband recording the narration and working on the texts. And, of course, literary events are a great excuse for me to take the stage!

Q: Which novelists and artists (or actors, film-makers etc), do you most admire? Are there particular works (books, films, plays) you return to again and again?

A: The list is SO long. I re-read Graham Greene regularly although I haven’t done so for a couple of years. I am inspired by Isabel Allende, particularly the early works. Marguerite Duras is my heroine because I so admire the rawness of her writing and the fact that she directed back when there were few female directors working in cinema. Doris Lessing, Edna O’Brien, and many more. Actresses? Gena Rowlands, Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren... Directors? Preston Sturgess, Pedro Amoldovar, Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes.. we could be here all night!

Q: In this wonderfully rich creative life of books, film and acting, what are you most proud of?

A: None of it! I love my life but the moment I have finished a project and I have shed its skin, I move on. I have never seen ACGS, for example. Odd clips or episodes, nothing more. I try not to hold on to my material – fearfully difficult in some ways. I always think ‘if only I had done this or that’.., so it is best not to give it another thought.

Q: If you could travel back in time to meet the young girl who grew up between Ireland and England, and pass on a piece of advice, what would it be? What have you learnt from your research into history, your personal journey so far?

A: GET ON WITH IT, stop procrastinating and worrying whether you are any good or not. DO IT! (and I am still saying it).

Thank you, Carol.



The Only Girl in the World is published in April by Scholastic. The moving WW1 romance tells the story of a young British soldier, Dennis, and his experiences of war on the Western Front. During his leave, he meets and falls in love with a local girl Helene, and promises he will return for her when the war is over. The book wonderfully evokes both the trauma of battle, and every day life in provincial France, and is a genuinely moving account of love and loss. I found myself rooting for ‘Denniz’ as Helene calls him, and desperately hoping he would make it home to her. It is a real achievement to get that depth of feeling within the constraints of a YA novel, and from the horror of war to craft a story that ends with hope for the future.

You can find out more about Carol’s work at: http://www.caroldrinkwater.com/



Look out for the chance to win one of five copies of ‘The Only Girl in the World’ in this month’s competition on The History Girls on 31st March.




(Kitchen) Cabinet of Curiosities by Mary Hoffman

0
0
PhotosVanRobin
I was listening to The Archers (long-running BBC radio soap for our non-English Followers) when I heard 80-year-old Jill Archer rejoicing to her daughter-in-law Ruth that she had found "the old mincer" at the back of the pantry. Jill was going to make a Shepherd's Pie by mincing up leftover lamb from the family's Sunday roast.

It reminded me of two things.

The first: two wildly successful posts written by History Girl Adèle Geras Kitchen Stuff Part One and Kitchen Stuff Part Two.

The second: my childhood now counts as History! My mother had just such a mincer and we also had a kind of coffee percolator that you put on the stove.


This happened only at the weekend; during the week my parents drank either Bev or Camp liquid coffee, the precursors of instant coffee powders and granules.


As a complete coffee snob now, I shudder at the memory. Even the percolator boiled the coffee over the gas until our kitchen was filled with an acrid smell, nothing like the delicious aroma coming from any half-decent café with an Italian machine. When I met my husband, he had a coffee grinder a bit like this one:

© Benjamin Hell – http://www.siebengang.net/photo/
Not so very different in principle from the meat mincer! These are all museum objects now so I thought I'd put them in my own little cabinet of curiosities. We have always both been fascinated by kitchen gadgets and no Cook Shop is left unvisited whenever we are in a new town.

We own (listing just off the top of my head):

A teabag squeezer
Olive spoon
Gherkin prong
Pickled onion prong
Pasta tester
Cherry/olive stoner
Icing sugar dredger (like a tiny tea-strainer)
2 jam/chutney spoons
Glass lemon squeezer
Tala measure (see Adèle's first post above) - our second one bought recently
Lemon zester
Jelly bag on stand
.....

I could go on!

This kind of thing is now apparently considered "retro." Go on, count how many of these items are in your kitchen!


Though I don't know why you'd need the glass lemon squeezer AND the wooden reamer. I have the pie funnel and the ?jam thermometer. And we do own an "egg-murderer" though only my husband can bear to use it.

If this sort of thing fascinates you, you might like to read this book:



March competition

0
0
To win one of five copies of Carol Drinkwater's The Only Girl in the World, just answer the question below:

"What is your favourite novel in which the leading character uses music or literature or a painting as a source of inspiration, of courage?"

Answers in the Comments section to this post. Closing date 11th April

Our competitions are limited to UK Followers only - sorry!

Cromwell at the Swan by Mary Hoffman

0
0
Achieving the impossible - a review of the RSC productions of Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies

Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell and Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn

When I first heard that Ben Miles was to play Thomas Cromwell in the RSC adaptations of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, my instinctive reaction was "but he's much too good-looking."

I was wrong, of course. Miles has reached that point in his acting career where a piece of imaginative casting like this gives him the chance to throw off the shackles of early romantic lead swoonworthiness and show us what he's really made of. And on the days when both plays are done he has most of six hours to do it in.

From the opening lines of Mike Poulton's brilliant adaptation of Hilary Mantel's two Man Booker prize-winning novels, you know you are a safe pair of hands. After a wordless prologue of Tudor dance when we first glimpse  Henry Vlll, Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, the scene switches to Cardinal Wolsey's house, where a very wet Cromwell enters.

"Cromwell. Late," says Stephen Gardiner, Wolsey's Secretary.

"Yes - Isn't it?" answers Cromwell, pleasantly putting his rival firmly in his place.

You sense from the beginning that this is not a man to tangle with. And then you are with Cromwell and his master, the Cardinal, and their dialogue sweeps you into the life of this busy, loyal, calculating and intelligent man. You don't need the actual beginning of the book where the young boy Thomas is brutally beaten by his father; there are enough allusions to convey that.

Although Ben Miles really is outstanding as Cromwell, the whole ensemble is strong, with not a false note. Cardinal Wolsey is Paul Jesson, a towering presence even after death, the father figure that earns Cromwell's undying devotion and informs so many of his later actions and loyalties.

Henry Vlll is Nathaniel Parker, again not an obvious choice for the role, but this in an interpretation, not an impression and his growing menace, self-deception and unpredictability are well conveyed.


Just how do you set about adapting a 653 page novel into a three hour play, with interval? Mike Poulton describes it as "taking apart a Rolls Royce engine and reassembling the parts into a light aircraft." You don't get Mantel's voice, that tone that she described to us here on the History Girls as "something between first and third person," but you do get some of the flavour of her personal touches, through the inclusion of details like  Ambassador Chapuys' fantastical Christmas hat, rendered suddenly inappropriate at court through the news of old Queen Katherine's death.

You don't see Cromwell's daughters, snatched away by illness, but they are there  in reference and in the cracking of Miles's voice when he reads the name of Anne Cromwell, written in his late wife's prayer book. We do see Lizzie Cromwell, played by Olivia Darnley, who is also - amazingly - Mary Boleyn, and we get a strong sense of Cromwell's family life, as we do in the books.

Photo by Francesco Guidicini
Hilary Mantel has been criticised for being too kind to Cromwell, for making him too believably human, but surely this is right? We know he was married with three children, two of whom died young and that he was unfailingly loyal to his old master. However ruthless he might have been in his political choices and sense of expediency and self-preservation, that doesn't mean he couldn't have been a loving family man and faithful friend. What she does is present a controversial historical figure in the round and Mike Poulton's scripts do that too.

Only at one point, in Bring up the Bodies, in the scene where Cromwell makes his pact with the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk to bring about Anne's downfall, did I feel a lack of sympathy with the main character. And I didn't feel that in the book so maybe there was there a slight loss of nuance.

It apparently took Mike Poulton nine drafts to come up with this masterly transfer from page to stage. You don't sense the effort behind it. He says that members of the audience will miss some favourite scenes and that for me included the peacock-feather Angel wings and the huge Christmas star that so terrified Mark Smeaton when he was shut up with them in Cromwell's house. But the drama worked fine without them and that is the main thing.

The roles of Cromwell's clerk Rafe Sadler and his friend's son, the poet Thomas Wyatt are enlarged to give more opportunity  for confidences and a sense of whom Cromwell trusts. And who could have guessed that mousy little Jane Seymour, played by Leah Brotherhead, could be so interesting and savvy? Well, anyone who had read the books, I suppose.

Ben Miles with Paul Jesson as Cardinal Wolsey
I did wonder about that, about how many of the people in the sold-out Swan Theatre in Stratford would have actually read both titles. I think you probably get much more from the plays if you have, though it could be that people have just been drawn there by the books' and the writer's enormous reputation. And they would have enjoyed the experience too.

What you see is the story arc of the rises and falls of reputations and the fatal consequences when Fortune's wheel spins the characters down to the bottom-most part of their circulation. First Cromwell, then Anne Boleyn and of course, when the third book, The Mirror and the Light, comes out (we hope) next year, the whole pattern will be repeated with Cromwell himself. And that must surely be staged as well, completing his remarkable trajectory from blacksmith's boy to Earl of Essex and the most powerful man in England after the king.

After the king. That is the point. We see how Henry can turn on a sixpence (?a groat) when angered by Ambassador Chapuys. He rounds on Cromwell and the blacksmith's boy nearly wallops his monarch. As Henry's reign progresses, we know he will deteriorate into even more fits of temper and irrationality: Cromwell's fate is already written in the stars if not yet on the page.

This is a fine and subtle adaptation. I particularly admired the way in which we saw only the rehearsal for Anne's execution, not the bloody act itself. Almost every choice is the un-obvious, the rejection of sensationalism and horror in this most violent of love stories.

And the recurrence of the dead Cardinal was just right, reminding us of one of Cromwell's most powerful attachments, the older man who had, unlike the blacksmith, valued him and treated him well.

The plays are transferring to the Aldwych Theatre from 1st May to 6 September and it will be another sell-out. I shall go again, even though only the most expensive seats are left. It will be interesting to see the change from a thrust stage to proscenium. Or maybe the theatre will be adapted? 

Whatever happens, I can't wait.










Writing What You Know - Lucy Inglis

0
0
When writing non-fiction, there is a definite process for constructing a body of research and then drawing upon it for a book. The more sound and extensive the research, the better for the book. The framework is also more rigid. Writing fiction is a different process in terms of creative freedom, but sometimes solid research pays off. I'm currently finishing a historical novel for Young Adults, and I was excited by the prospect of this particular project. On mentioning that I was working on a historical YA, pretty much everyone assumed it would be set in the eighteenth century and almost certainly in London. But it's not. It's set in nineteenth century America, a period I have absolutely no knowledge of. Why? I don't know. I knew the story I wanted to tell, but how to make it real was key. I also knew how irritated I get with lazy historical fiction. If I ever read another novel set in the eighteenth century where all the women are simpering misses and every surgeon a filthy-pawed walking pesthouse, I shall scream. So, when I wanted to write about Montana during the goldrush and the massacre of the American plains bison, I thought I'd better do my homework.


The internet is, of course, brilliant for images and information about flora and fauna, dates and facts, but the meat of getting to know another time is more likely provided by real stories about the people who lived then. Did you know that Civil War soldiers favoured licking morphine powder out of the palms of their hands to deal with pain because it was quick to take effect but also slower release? Or that the Colt revolving rifle, so popular during the Civil War, had a nasty habit of discharging all six shots at one if not kept immaculately clean and dry? Pretty tough during war. Or, that native Americans saw sex as a social exchange and expected a gift afterwards, even if it was a shirt or some elk teeth, as a symbol of that exchange, leading settlers to get thoroughly confused about issues of morality, consent and 'price'? I don't ever want to butcher a bison, but I think I could talk someone through which bits are used for what and how kidney fat is the real delicacy. I know far too much about corsets, pioneer marriage statistics and I've come across some fantastical given names: Relentless and Helpless my favourites so far.



Most of this research will never see the light of day. Let's face it, a lot of it is pretty dry bones. But it has given me the confidence to construct characters. It's handed me plot mechanisms that save me from relying on 'happy coincidence' - a thing that irritates even when done in a masterful fashion and shows little respect for the reader. Yes, fiction is about making things up, but it's far more satisfying to make things up that you know may have happened. Is it any good? Well, that's not for me to decide!

Invent a Punctuation Mark - and defend it: Musings on the History of Exams by Eve Edwards

0
0
This year is a long dreaded year in our family.  I knew it was coming when I had my second child in 1998.  Two children, two years apart - that meant the time would come when we would have them sitting major examinations at the same time, both asking to be let off chores, both feeling the stress...
Hormones are enough to cope with but then add GCSEs/A levels on top - who thought that was a good idea?

As an involved type of parent on the Arts side (I'm a liability when it comes to Maths or any of the science subjects) - I have been looking at past papers and timetables.  It will probably come as no news to you that there is a debate as to whether exams are 'dumbed down' in the UK from the experience of previous generations.  Many readers of this blog work in education so will be all too familiar with this dispute.  This post isn't so much about that, though I do have a view which I'll put out for comment at the end.  No, what it prompted me to ponder was just what is the longer history of exams?  When did it begin to be thought of as a good way of sorting out the educational sheep from the goats?

I suppose the first requirement of a society to have examinations (beyond the obvious one of begin developed enough to have an education system) is to believe it desirable to appoint people on merit rather than through a hereditary principle.  Your king can become one because his dad sat on the throne but you wouldn't want your doctor to operate on you for gallstones just because his father had done the odd operation or two.  No sir, you want to know he has practised and studied for himself.

Many ancient civilisations had exams for young men to pass - that surely was the seed of the Olympics - a competition for all kinds of skills.  However, for the start of my history of exams, I was thinking of a national, written test in a form that modern school children would recognise.

My money is on the Chinese being the first - as in so many things.   Their famous civil service tests may have started way back in the 7th century (we are in the mists of time here so dates are uncertain).  Then followed centuries of fluctuating fashions in education, not to mention changes in dynasty, but it seems that some basics remained in place: the idea was to find the best administrators to serve the emperor and it was possible for some of those in far-flung areas or from humble backgrounds to advance socially if they had sufficient skill.  At one point, the sought after skills included ability to compose poetry, which in my more fanciful moments I think we should introduce to our present day civil service.  Imagine your tax return coming in blank verse - or passport application as a limerick.  There was a young man from...

So if the Chinese get the prize as the society with the longest exam history, who has the most extreme?  This is a matter of opinion - medical training comes to mind - but for pure torture, I think BUD/S training for US Navy Seals might be up there - 6 months of basic underwater demotion/seal training.  It includes the aptly named 'Hell Week' when they try to put off recruits by pushing them to the edge and beyond their limits.  It fits my description because there is some paperwork among the physical torment.  And I thought my week of finals at Cambridge was bad.

And what about the most brain teasing exam in history?  I think this might go to All Soul's in Oxford who have a long an honourable tradition of interesting examinations.  The exam is held to select two Prize Fellows to hold their position for seven years.  I was just looking through the past papers and they are a hoot - especially the General Knowledge paper.  One question is 'Devise a new punctuation mark - and defend it.' I'd love to sit an exam like that - a bit like wandering into Alice in Wonderland.
There is much more to be said on this theme but I think it is time I arrived back at today's examination students - are the exams they sit dumbed down?  The first thing I noticed was the length of papers.  The longest written exam at GCSEs that most students take is English language coming in at 2 hours 15 mins.  Hang on, didn't exams all use to be 3 hours back in the day?  I think there is a removing of that intense pressure - possibly for very good reasons - but it does seem a gentler exam experience now.  And content?  Well, I've been favourable impressed by most syllabi studied by my children in the Arts - history taught thematically, some interesting course work (compare the portrayal of a disintegrating mind in Macbeth and Frankenstein), but yes, I guess that some of it seems not very stretching and answers on the tick-box scheme.  But then, thinking back, we too had our shortcuts, our set answers, our 'predict what's going to come up this year' strategies.  Maybe the dumbing down accusation is because the industry of education makes this all the plainer thanks to YouTube videos and revision guides?  The craft of taking exams is more transparent.

What do you think?


The Knight of the Tower - by Katherine Langrish

0
0


I was looking for something to write about for today’s blog post, and decided I’d try and find Thomas Tusser’s Book of Good Husbandry, that wonderful Elizabethan farmer’s guide written in pantomime-style couplets: this kind of thing, from memory:

Get home with ye brakes ere summer be gone

For tethered-up cattle to sit down upon.

But I couldn’t find it. If your bookshelves are anything like my bookshelves, you’ll understand why. Instead I spotted Caxton’s translation of ‘The Book of the Knight of the Tower’, published by the Early English Text Society.  Pulled it out, opened it, and came straight across this ridiculously wonderful anecdote – I’ve modernised the vocabulary and spelling a little.  When you’ve read it, you’ll know just why I had to write about this instead. Master Tusser must wait his turn. 



Of Her that Eat the Eele and Plumed [plucked] her Pye [Magpie]

I shall tell to you an example of the fate of women that eat the good morsels behind their husbands’ [backs].  There was a damsel that had a Pye in a cage which spake and said all that she saw.  And it happed [chanced] that the lord of the house made to keep a great Eele in a trunk in a pond. And he kept it much dearworthly [preciously, carefully] for to give it to some good lord of his, or to some friend, if they came to see him. And it happed that the lady said to the Chamberer, that it were good to eat the great Eele, and they thought that they would say to their lord that thieves had eaten him. And when the lord came home, the Pye began to tell and say to him, ‘My lady hath eaten the Eele.’  And when the lord heard this, he went to his pond and found not his Eele, and came home to his wife and demanded her what was befallen of his Eele?  And she attempted to make excuses.  And he said to her that he was certain thereof, and that the Pye had told him.  And in the house therefore was great sorrow and noise.  But when the lord was gone out, the lady and the Chamberer  came to the Pye and plucked off all the feathers of his head, saying ‘Thou hast discovered us of the eele [told on us about the eel]’, and thus was the poor Pye plucked and lost the feathers of his head.  But from then forth on, if any man came into that house that was bald, or shaved [like a monk] or had a high forehead, the Pye would say to them, ‘ye have told my lord of the Eele’.  And therefore this is a good example, that no good woman should eat for licorousness [greed] sweet or dainty morsels without the knowledge of her husband.  This damsel was after much scorned and mocked for that Eele, by cause of the Pye that so oft remembered it to such as came thither bald or shaven.

Fabulous, yes?  That’ll teach her to eat eels behind her husband’s back. I love the broad, almost slapstick comedy: ‘he went to his pond and found not his Eele’… It’s clear that this story was always intended to be a funny one: the difference between Now and Then, however, is that Nowwe enjoy the comedy but ignore the moral, whilst Then, the comedy was there only to enliven the moral and make it more memorable. The Knight of the Tower really did believe that wives had better not sneak delicacies their husbands never intended them to have. Besides, such deceit might lead to other things. It might lead to this.


by the Master of Guillebert de Mets, Walters Art Museum

The Knight of the Tower was Geoffrey IV de la Tour Landry, and he wrote this long book of advice in 1371-2 for the use and instruction of his daughters.  He was a widower, and doubtless a careful and loving parent, and he worried about his growing daughters’ reputations and morals. He opens the book in traditional medieval style, pensive in a garden, mourning his dead wife in a passage of great tenderness:

And of all good she seemed to me the best and the flower, in whom I so much me delighted: for in that time I made songs, lays, roundels, ballads, virelays and new songs in the most best wise that I could; but death which spareth none hath taken her, for whom I have received many sorrows and heaviness in such wise that I passed my life more than twenty years heavy and sorrowful…

Seeing his daughters coming towards him, ‘young and little…’, he begins to remember the days when he himself was a young man ‘and rode with my fellowship in Poitou’, how his friends (and he?) had made love to young ladies ‘for they had neither dread nor shame… and were well-bespoken … and thus they do nothing but deceive good ladies and damsels’. 

Like many a father before and since, The Knight of the Tower Landry decides his daughters have to be protected from such young men. ‘And for this cause… I have thought on my well-beloved daughters whom I see so little, to make [for] them a little book … to the end that they may learn and study and understand the good and evil that is past [ie: that has happened in the past] for to keep them from [that] which is to come.’

You can’t help but like him; and I like him even more when he adds:  “I have made two books, one for my sons and the other for my daughters.”  Sadly, I don’t think the one he wrote for his sons has made it down to us.  I dare say people have commonly been less concerned about the morals and behaviour of their boys: the book of advice for girls, however, became an instant smash hit. The introduction of the EETS edition says: “It was copied many times, and by the end of the 15thcentury it had become widely known. There are still at least twenty-one manuscripts of the French text in existence; and English translation was made during Henry VI’s reign; Caxton made a new English translation which he printed in 1484, and German version made by Marquart vom Steim, ostensibly for his own two daughters, was published at Basle in 1493”  with woodcuts like the one below, in which a fiend stalks around a young woman who is committing the sin of vanity by dressing her hair and looking in a mirror. 



The book continued to be printed right down into the 19th century, and it’s still so lively that you can see why. It must have been a popular read even for the young women who were supposed to be benefiting from it. The chapter on ‘How women ought not to be jealous’ begins with a fight between two ladies in which one of them breaks the other’s nose with a staff. Chapter 15 (xviij) is entitled ‘How a woman sprang upon the table’.  In Chapter 19 (xix), ‘Of the woman that gave the flesh to her hounds’, a lady insists on feeding her two little dogs on ‘daily dysshes of soupes and fryandyses delycyous’ (delycyous is so much more delicious than delicious, don’t you think?) in spite of the warnings of a friar who tells her not to waste food which could be given to the poor.  Naturally she then falls ‘sick unto the death’ and ‘there came upon her bed two little black dogs’ which lick her lips and mouth till they turn it ‘as black as a Cole’!  Shiver! 

Yes, there are nine chapters listing the nine follies of Eve (some of which I lifted for evil Brother Thomas to use in my medieval fantasy ‘Dark Angels’). Yes, there are plenty of pious examples taken from the Bible.  But these are constantly enlivened by tabloid stuff such as Chapter 62 (lxij) ‘Of the roper or maker of cordes and kables and of the fat Pryour that was Ryche and a great lechour’. Who wouldn’t want to read it?

A last example:

Fair daughters, see that you begin no strife to no fool [ie: don’t begin arguments with a fool], nor to them that are hasty and hot. For it is great peril. Wherof I shall show to you an example which I saw happen in a Castle wherein many ladies and damsels dwelt. And there was a damsel, daughter of a right good knight. And she wax angry [lost her temper]in playing at tables [gambling] with a gentleman, which was hot and hasty and most Riotous, and was not right wise.  And the debate was of a dice, which she said was not truly made. And so much it increased that words were enhanced, and that she said he was a coward and a fool. And so they left their play by chiding and strife.

Then said I to the damsel, My fair Cousin, anger yourself with nothing that he says, for you know well he is of high words and foolish answers … but she would not [take my advice] and she said to him that he was worth nothing and … not truth; and so the words arose, that he said, if she had been wise and good, she should not come by night into the men’s chamber and kiss them and embrace them without candles. And she … said that he lied, and he said he did not … and there was much people that heard it and knew not what to think.

It seems young people haven’t changed much down the years!  It’s a bright little glimpse of the lives of the privileged, bored and hasty-tempered young noblemen and women of the fourteenth century castle.



From a Book of Hours c. 1460 in the collection of the Walters Art Museum







"Converting Our Island into a Peninsula" - Joan Lennon

0
0
You know how it is - when I was researching the Slightly Jones Mysteries* I came across far more fascinating tidbits than could possibly fit into the stories themselves.  My publishers kindly allowed me to play with a section at the end of each book, with Did You Know?s about the 1890s, about the different cities each book was set in, interesting facts, quizzes and challenges. For example, at the back of The Case of the Hidden City there is this question:

TRUE OR FALSE?
Today many people travel to Paris from Britain by train, going through the Channel Tunnel.  The first proposal for a Channel Tunnel was put forward early in the 20th century. 

FALSE.  Out by 100 years!  As early as 1802, French engineer Albert Mathieu had come up with the idea of a tunnel under the English Channel, lit by oil lamps, with horse-drawn coaches and an artificial island halfway across for changing horses.

That was all there was room for, but here is a picture of Matthieu's vision, complete with chimneys that go up to the surface to help purify the air.



Nothing came of it, but the idea was still out there, as this 1805 cartoon of a possible invasion plan by Napoleon, by sea, in the air, and under the ground, suggests:



Fifty years later, and we see Thomé de Gamond's 1856 plan for a Channel tunnel, with a harbour and air shaft partway across on the Varne sandbank. 


The New York Times in 1866 published a report from The Railway News, which wrote about Gamond's proposal as a challenging but entirely doable project.

"The estimated cost of the whole work was 170,000,000 of francs, or rather less than £7,000,000 ... The whole work would be completed in six years.  We are by no means sanguine that the plan of M. GAMOND  will ever be carried out; but certainly the plan of converting our island into a peninsular by means of a submarine isthmus is one within the range of the engineering science and mechanical appliances of the present day.  The grave and practical question, "Will it pay?" involves the consideration of other and totally different questions."

In spite of the reporter's lack of sanguineness, the proposal was accepted by Napoleon III and Queen Victoria - until the Franco-Prussian War put paid to it.  General Wolseley was adamant that:
"A couple of thousand armed men might easily come through the tunnel in a train at night, avoiding all suspicion by being dressed as ordinary passengers, and the first thing we should know of it would be by finding the fort at our end of the tunnel, together with its telegraph office, and all the electrical arrangements, wires, batteries, etc., intended for the destruction of the tunnel, in the hands of an enemy ... The invasion of England could not be attempted by 5,000 men, but half that number, ably led by a daring, dashing young commander might, I feel, some dark night, easily make themselves masters of the works at our end of the tunnel, and then England would be at the mercy of the invader."
Finally, nearly 200 years after Mathieu's proposal, the Channel Tunnel was opened.  And the daring, dashing, young French commander?  I'm still waiting.


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.

* The Slightly Jones Mysteries are:
          The Case of the London Dragonfish
          The Case of the Glasgow Ghoul
          The Case of the Cambridge Mummy
    and The Case of the Hidden City

The Public Part of UK Author Earnings - Katherine Roberts

0
0
April 6th marks the start of a new financial year, and I have a new History Girls post to write... so you can probably guess what this one is going to be about! In the same way that I find it impossible to create anything while I'm thinking about money, I also find it impossible to blog about creativity. Instead, I thought I'd show you a graph from my finance file that counts as vaguely historical since it covers my 14-year career to date (and that feels like a long time in publishing these days).

UK library loans of my books (Year 2000 - 2013)

In case you can't read the figures up the left hand side, these show the approximate lifetime loans for my books. Years are across the bottom, and book titles are written on the curves. Here they all are, listed in order of popularity:

The Great Pyramid Robbery - 56,000 loans (heading off the top of the graph)
Spellfall - 35,800
Song Quest - 28,000
The Babylon Game - 20,000
The Mausoleum Murder - 18,800
The Amazon Temple Quest - 17,200
The Olympic Conspiracy - 15,000
Crystal Mask - 12,900
The Colossus Crisis - 8,000
The Cleopatra Curse - 8,000
I am the Great Horse - 6,800
Sword of Light - 5,500
Dark Quetzal - 5,400
Lance of Truth - 200

Notes:
1) Figures correct to June 2013, as reported by the UK Public Lending Right office.
2) My final two Pendragon titles Crown of Dreams and Grail of Stars are not shown on this graph, since they both published in 2013.
3) Data is not gathered from every library every year. Each year a different sample of UK libraries is taken, and the results are scaled up to account for the whole country - this means it's possible zero loans can show for a book that actually loans quite well in the author's local library, whereas a sample taken from an author's local library where their books are popular might skew figures for that year the other way. (Over time, though, the sampling system should be fair to authors wherever they live.)

You would probably expect books with earlier publication dates to show the most lifetime loans, and indeed my most-loaned title The Great Pyramid Robbery (historical fiction, hooray!) was published back in 2001, while my second most popular title Spellfall (fantasy)was published in 2000. You might also expect books that have had several editions to show more loans than the others, and happily my award-winning debut book Song Quest (currently in its third edition at Catnip, after being first published in hardback by Element and then in paperback by Chicken House) comes in a clear third.

Books only published in the last couple of years will obviously not show many accumulated loans yet, but already the first title of my Pendragon series, Sword of Light (published in 2012 and chosen for the Summer Reading Challenge that year), has performed one of those fascinating crossovers on the graph and is now officially out-loaning the third title of my earlier Echorium Sequence Dark Quetzal (published in 2003).

In fact, if you look carefully at the graph, you'll see several places where my historical titles have overtaken my fantasy titles in the loan stakes, which makes me wonder why children's historical fiction is not easier to place with publishers. On the other hand, this is only a UK graph, and historical books are not popular everywhere. My Echorium Sequence titles (Song Quest, Crystal Mask, Dark Quetzal), which all have surprisingly flat curves on the graph, sold better than their loans suggest particularly in the US. My Seven Fabulous Wonders books on the other hand, even the one shooting off the graph, did not sell in America - or at least only as export copies - since they were not taken on by an American publisher, although they did get translated into several European languages where their historical settings are presumably more familiar with readers.

I find library loans quite interesting, because they are - or used to be - a fairly accurate reflection of print sales, and it's true The Great Pyramid Robbery and Spellfall were my top two selling titles in print. It also used to be that loan figures for a title were higher than the UK print sales, at least in my experience - but lately there's a different pattern emerging, with books selling as many or more copies in print as are being borrowed from libraries. Also, I've had my backlist selling as ebooks with online retailers for a couple of years now, and out of those books I am the Great Horse - although flattening off now on the loans graph - last year outsold the rest of my backlist put together. So perhaps ebooks are taking over where library loans flatten off?

I am the Great Horse - now an ebook

I'll admit the flat part of the curve occurring at a lower rate of loans for each successive book is rather worrying. Is this because of the recent library closures? Cuts to public funding? Or the frustratingly slow period in my career a few years ago? I'd have to compare my graph with other authors' PLR graphs to be sure if it is a trend... but Sword of Light (second curve on the right) looks to be reversing that for me, so perhaps there is some hope yet for my future as an author. Also, this graph shows data from UK public libraries only, and does not include loans from the many excellent school libraries around the country that I know keep copies of my books on their shelves so children can  borrow and read them if they want to. That's a good thought to end on.

Right, that's enough displacement activity! Just got time for a few fun figures to warm up before tackling my accounts...

The reason this graph lives in my finance file is because each one of those loans has earned me between 4p and 6.2p under the Public Lending Right scheme (the rate per loan varies each year). So, over the course of my career to date, working with an average of 5p per loan, my most popular book so far The Great Pyramid Robbery has earned me approximately £2,800 (or £200 per year), and all of my titles added together have earned me a total of  £11,880 (or about £840 per year). I'm always a little uneasy about PLR, since it comes out of people's taxes who might never read books... on the other hand, libraries are one of the public services we pay our taxes for, and there is a cap on payments to limit the burden on the public purse.

Historically, the PLR payment has not always existed for authors, but library loans clearly account for a large section of my readership, as they must do for many other authors. I'd be interested to hear readers' views on whether authors should be paid for these loans, especially if/when ebook lending takes over from print.

***

Katherine Roberts writes historical fiction and fantasy for young readers.

Her latest series the Pendragon Legacy about King Arthur's daughter is now available from Templar in hardcover, paperback or ebook. Meet the heroine Rhianna Pendragon and her friend Prince Elphin of Avalon in the free ebook prequel Horse of Mist.

More at www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Not Five but only Four Postcards by Adèle Geras

0
0
Once upon a time, I used to collect period postcards. I have lots of them, in assorted files and boxes in my house. I picked them up at book fairs, and in second hand shops where there were often cardboard boxes full of them. It was fun to look through them and considering them now, I see that my taste ran to Victorian and Edwardian family groups, devoted engaged couples and fat babies sporting waterfalls of lace. 

Then, one day, I came across what was obviously a set. I bought all five of them. They struck a real chord with me. Since that time, which must have been in the late 80s, I've thought a lot about why these particular images meant so much to me.  I was, and still am, very interested jn photography and had written a short story called The Poppycrunch Kid about the supernatural power of the camera. [This appears in a book called Letters of Fire, long out of print.] I wrote a poem about the  men I imagined taking these haunting photographs.

Then, the IRA  bombed the centre of Manchester in June, 1996  and suddenly, the subject of ruins was once more in my mind.

That day, the day that  Manchester was bombed, I was in town. I wanted to buy a wedding present and went to Piccadilly on the bus. I found the square unusually full. When I made my way towards Debenham's I was stopped by a policeman.
"You can't cross this line,  Miss. There's been a bomb threat," he said. And as he finished speaking, the bomb went off. It was very loud and very frightening and hideously close to where we were. 

The aftermath was amazing. Crowds of silent people lined up in a very orderly manner to board any bus they could...the buses were all pressed into service to evacuate us  from the scene. There were also queues around phone boxes. Remember those?  In 1996 hardly anyone  had a mobile. I certainly didn't.  I went straight home on one of the buses. Four miles away, my husband had heard the explosion.

A few days later, we  went for a walk together through the city. Seeing all the shops, all the pubs, all the places we were used to seeing whole suddenly and shockingly broken, shattered and empty was traumatic, horrible. I can remember standing outside a pub which had a defiant notice chalked on a board outside. You can't kill  Manchester, you bastards! it said, and I was reduced to tears. No one was killed that day. Only the fabric of Manchester: the stones, the glass, the wood lay in pieces and I felt heartbroken.

I remembered these postcards. Here they are. I've copied the English words printed on each card. They are also there in French. Under the title it says: La Guerre, 1914-17 LCHParis  









Reninghe Belgium (the church bombarded by the Germans)



Pervyse (Belgium) The ruins of the church


La Panne (Belgium) Effect of a 75 on a spys (sic) house


Nieucappelle (Belgium) View of a brewery after the bombardment



There was a fifth postcard. The best of them all and I cannot find it. It may be in another file and it may surface  again one day.  It is of the same soldier who appears in the Nieucapelle Brewery photo but it's a different pose. The only description I have of it is in the poem I wrote shortly after buying all five. It gives, I hope, a good description of what was shown.  I'm sorry I have only words to convey its power.   The poem follows: 

Five Postcards: La Guerre 1914-17 LCH Paris

L.C.H Paris photographed the War,
sent men to tiptoe over stones cracked open
(but oh, the mud on patent leather shoes
accustomed to sliding
round and round the ladies! The hands
that draped silk gowns alongside cardboard urns
and tucked undying flowers into décolletages
will touch raw air outside the studio.)

Pervyse, Nieucapelle, Reninghe, La Panne,
les ruines, les ruines après le bombardement.

With difficulty on uneven ground
they found flat places,
covered their heads with black,
looked for something representative.

Here, a numbered bomb
blew the spy's house
to dust under a dune of bricks.
Only one corner, the last window
as they were.

Then, two grey church views:
free-standing arches rise in fields
of carvings scattered into shards.
Towers show white skies
through torn lace of masonry,
windows with no glass.

The brewery roof has gone, leaving
a lattice of timbers.
There's a soldier in this picture,
embarrassed by his own survival.
Behind the camera, under the dark cloth
he imagines the head, a skull's curve.
He's propped his bayonet 
against the sandbagged wall
and made his own, much smaller conflagration:
lighting a cigarette,
breathing out the smoke. 




The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2014 by Elizabeth Laird

0
0

In the five years since its inception, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has grown in every way, reflecting the increasing importance of historical fiction in the literary output of the English speaking world. Historical novels, once disdained by the cultural establishment, now regularly appear on major shortlists and scoop up the biggest prizes. Last year, for example, Eleanor Catton's extraordinary novel The Luminaries won the Booker, while Kate Atkinson's thought provoking and engaging Life After Life won the Costa.

The six judges: Kirsty Wark, Elizabeth Laird, Elizabeth Dalkeith, Alistair Moffat,
Louise Richardson and Jonathan Tweedie

More and better entries come the way of the judges every year, and 2013 produced the strongest longlist ever. It was a tough job to whittle it down to a shortlist of six, and passionate opinions flew about the table as the judges met.



THE SHORTLIST

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson



This unusual novel is sharp, funny and profound. In another writer's hands, the constant re-spooling and re-enacting of scenes to bring about different outcomes might have become tricksy, but Kate Atkinson makes the device a compelling commentary on the tiny coincidences in our lives that can have life-changing consequences. The spine of the book is the character of Ursula, who plays out the different possible events of her life with consistent courage and feeling. A very good novel and a terrific read.

The Luminaries  by Eleanor Catton


The hype over this Booker Prize winning novel has focussed on its cleverness, the youth of its New Zealander author and its length. It's true that the architecture of the book is unusual and brilliant, the author is indeed young, and the book very long, but the judges were gripped by the story, by the diverse and well-rounded characters, the hysteria of the gold rush in Hokitika, and the playing out of each of the many characters' needs and desires, all within the framework of a mystery that needed to be uncovered. This novel perfectly captures the tone of Victorian antipodean dialogue. It evokes vivid images of the gold rush town, the diggings inland, the ships that connect the miners with the outside world, and it brings to life the complexities of the place and time: the despised and exploited Chinese miners, the few options open to women, the bullies, the crooks and the honourable men. It takes a little time to get into this complex novel, but it richly rewards the effort.

Harvest by Jim Crace



Jim Crace's Harvest is as much a poem as a novel.  A remote English village is caught up in a frightening series of events after three strangers arrive and the manor house goes up in flames. The narrator, Walter Thirsk, who is himself a relative newcomer, watches his village fall victim to the brutal economies of the English clearances as the feudal order of medieval England, its kindly squire and its subsistence tenantry, are swept away.
There is a mythical, mystical quality to Jim Crace's writing. His story takes the reader beyond its particular time and place. Its depiction of a society in the grip of a profound and destructive social change is chillingly relevant to us today.

Fair Helen by Andrew Greig



This is a rumbustious adventure story, bang on the tradition of Walter Scott and R.L.Stevenson. Set in the Border region between Scotland and England in the turbulent sixteenth century, the novel tells the story behind the ballad of Fair Helen of Kirkconnel and her lover Andrew Fleming. It was a time of banditry, or "reiving" as it was known, when lawlessness ruled in the border lands, and the feuding families, intense in their loyalty to each other and their hatred for their rivals, were not unlike the Mafia clans of today.
Some people will be daunted by the Scots dialect in which the novel is written, but a little effort in the early pages pays off, and you quickly get used to the rhythm and the few unfamiliar words. The glossary at the end of the book is useful.
A good old-fashioned yarn in the grand tradition.

An Officer and Spy  by Robert Harris



The Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish officer in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongly convicted of being a German spy and consigned to viciously cruel prison on Devil's Island, still resonates today. It caused a trauma in France which still hasn't quite healed, and the continuing existence of Guantanamo Bay provides a dreadful modern parallel. 
Robert Harris, whose historical fiction includes his Cicero novels (Imperium and Lustrum) and his World War Two thriller Enigma, has surpassed himself in this powerful and shocking story. The characters of Georges Picquart, Major Henry, Count Esterhazy and Alfred Dreyfus leap off the page. The characterisation is vivid and the dialogue pitch perfect. This book had me reading until three o'clock in the morning.

The Promise by Ann Weisgerber



The Galveston Hurricane that hit Texas in 1900 killed an estimated 8000 people, four times more than those who lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina. It was the worst natural disaster ever to hit the United States. Ann Weisberger's tender novel evokes the small island of Galveston perfectly. Her characters are caught up in their own complicated lives. Catherine and Oscar, from widely different backgrounds and with very different needs, try to create a family for Oscar's son, observed by the beautifully drawn Nan Ogden, all of them unaware of the disaster soon to strike. The reader lives with the characters in this fine novel, and will never forget the description of the hurricane itself.

Three of the judges at work: Kirsty Wark, Elizabeth Dalkeith and Elizabeth Laird

Museé Gourmand by Caroline Lawrence

0
0
Mougins is a pretty village on the Cote d’Azur up in the hills behind Cannes. Until I was invited to do an author event at an international school eight years ago, I’d never heard of it. On that first trip I was received by practically the whole student body (and several teachers) dressed up as ancient Romans in honour of my Roman Mysteries series. A few months ago I got an invitation to return to Mougins School, this time to talk about my Western Mysteries. 

When I mentioned my upcoming trip to librarian Linda Huxley at Rokeby School, she urged me to visit a new museum called the Musée d'Art Classique de Mougins, or MACM for short. I’d never even heard of it, but she put me in touch with curator Mark Merrony and co-director Leisa Paoli. Mark was due to fly to England to interview an eminent expert for Minerva, the glossy archaeology magazine he edits, but Leisa kindly agreed to meet me and show me around. 


That is how I found myself looking at a mixture of Greek, Roman and Egyptian artefacts mixed in with paintings and sculptures by modern artists like Picasso, Chagall and Warhol. The common denominator? The Ancient World. 

The museum started with a boy collecting seven Victorian coins. That boy was Englishman Christian Levett. Later, having made a fortune in hedge-fund management, he began to buy more art and antiquities. By his late 30s he had amassed a fabulous collection Classical art, and some choice modern pieces. Instead of keeping these for his own private enjoyment, he decided to create a museum in the town of Mougins where he has a holiday home. 


Mougins is perfect for such a museum as it can boast an eclectic mix of creative former residents like Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Christian Dior, Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel. Pablo Picasso spent the last fourteen years of his life in Mougins. It is accessible by bus and only a half an hour from Nice airport, a two hour flight from London. 


What collector Christian Levett and curator Mark Merrony have done at MAC is put together a startling, humorous and inspiring melange of classical artefacts and modern art. Did you know that Braque painted Persephone? And that Dufy painted Orpheus? There are some real gems to be discovered here, like a charcoal sketch of Caracalla by Matisse and a pencil Hermes by a young Egon Shiele. 


As Leisa Paoli showed me around, she told me that kids love MACM. They like the big illustrated information signs in French and English. They like the arms and armour, the biggest private collection in the world. The like the interactive plasma screens. They like the sarcophagi in the barrel-vaulted Egyptian ‘basement’. Most of all, they like the challenge of spotting the ‘odd one out.’ This game is easy when you have a pop art Lichtenstein among marble altars and reliefs, but harder when you see a helmet that looks like it was used in the film Gladiator only to discover it is a genuine antique. And then you see another helmet that was used in Gladiator and is even signed by Russell Crowe. 


Even the glossy Museum Catalogue is a work of art. Not only does curator Mark Merrony write superbly, but he has nabbed some of the best living experts to talk about specialist areas. John Boardman penned the section on Greek vases. Mike Burns writes about Greek and Italian arms and armour. Dalya Alberge presents us with tasty amuse-bouches about each of the Modern Artists represented in the collection. 


And speaking of amuse-bouches… After visiting the Musée d'Art Classique de Mougins, you can go across the cobbled street to a superb restaurant called L’Amandier. Built on the site of an old olive press, it offers a ‘formule déjeuner’. For under twenty euros (at time of writing) you can have an authentic entrée of the region, a glass of wine and something called a café gourmand. What is a café gourmand? It’s a coffee with a selection of deserts, just enough to amuse your bouche


In a way the museum does the same thing: it amuses your mind with a choice selection of modern delights. So go. Enjoy a superb ‘formule classique’ at MACM.

Caroline Lawrence is the million-selling author of The Roman Mysteries and the P.K. Pinkerton Mysteries. Her next book is The Night Raid, a story from Virgil's Aeneid retold for dyslexic and reluctant readers. 

Venice on the eve of World War One, part two - Michelle Lovric

0
0

 
Having left you cruelly dangling last month– wondering both which History Girl and which lovers were in play – I am now resuming my journey down the Grand Canal, inspired by research that I undertook for Michael Portillo’s Great Continental Railway Journeys television programme.

Ever cruel, I’m still not going to tell you which History Girl or which lover. Instead, I’ll I take you straight to Casanova-ville, the San Samuele stretch of the Grand Canal. Visible from the water at the left are the church of San Samuele and Ca’ Malipiero, both the settings for formative scenes in the  life of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, including his birth in 1725 in a narrow alley behind the Malipiero palace. (In those days it was called the Calle delle Commedia).



plaque marking the birthplace of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova
Poor misunderstood Casanova, misrepresented as a Don Juan with no respect for the humanity or tenderness of women! On the contrary, Casanova adored women, body and soul. He believed a woman derived more pleasure from sex than a man, ‘because the feast is celebrated in her own house’, and declared that four-fifths of his own joy in sex was in the visible pleasure he gave. He even hoped that he might come back in another life as a woman. He loved the smell of a woman’s sweat, and he rejoiced in preparing sumptuous meals for his lovers. He wrote candidly of the sensual joy of exchanging oysters from mouth to mouth.

picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
A British visitor to Venice in 1913 might well have been aware of many such delicious details. Casanova’s memoirs, penned a century before, had been translated into English for the first time in 1894 and then again in 1902. Although somewhat censored at that stage, the twelve volume memoirs are not at all what might be expected. They constitute kind of Hello magazine for the 18th century, and are delightfully easy to read. In fact less than a third of the writing is devoted to his love life. Casanova was a scientist, an alchemist, a happy medical charlatan, a novelist and an autobiographer. He knew everyone and noticed everything from shoe buckles to salt cellars.

The picture at right was made by Casanova's brother, Francesco. It shows Casanova in his twenties.

I recorded some of the boy Casanova's San Samuele shenanigans in my earlier History Girls blog, There goes the neighbourhood.

Let us avert our eyes hastily from this scandalous behaviour and look right to Ca’ Rezzonico, an imposing structure started by Baldassare Longhena 1667 and finished by Massari in the 18th century.
Ca' Rezzonico, photo by Wolfgang Moroder, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Robert Browning
In the late 1880s, Ca’ Rezzonico became the home of Pen Browning, adored and over-coddled son of Robert and Elizabeth. Pen was by this time an undistinguished artist who had married an American heiress, Fanny Coddington. She eventually divorced him, after which the palace would be sold again.

Robert Browning had his own apartment in Ca’ Rezzonico. There he kept a parrot called Jacko who liked cake. Browning loved to feed pomegranates to the elephant at the Giardini Pubblici, often accompanied by his sister Sarianna. The pair used to go to walk or ride on the Lido in the afternoons. Pen was also an animal lover, who kept dogs and parrots and large snakes. (I’d have divorced him, too.)

Browning senior had first come to the city with his wife Elizabeth in 1851. Here is a picture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the young Pen, who also loved the city.

“I have been," she wrote, "between heaven and earth since our arrival at Venice. The heaven of it is ineffable. Never had I touched the skirts of so celestial a place.”

So it was perhaps fitting that her widower died in the city on December 12, 1889, after a cold swiftly turned nasty.

Robert Browning's funeral service held in Ca’ Rezzonico’s imposing portego with expatriate Venetian royalty in attendance: the Layards, Mrs Bronson, the Curtises. The poet had not be averse to giving readings and recitals of his works in their palazzi. And he had assisted in their campaign to set up an English church in Venice.

At this time, the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent also had a studio in the palazzo.

Later Cole Porter would rent Ca’ Rezzonico for 4000 dollars a month, engaging 50 gondoliers to act as footmen.

A few yards away from Ca' Rezzonico is a palace that always enchants visitors to Venice, seeming a perfect rosy little jewel of the Gothic. It is now a very pleasant hotel.

Palazzetto Stern, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
 
But Palazzetto Stern was quite new in 1913. Lady Enid Layard’s diary entry of 30 April 1912 records: ‘I went to the housewarming given by Mme Stern at the Palace she has just had built at S. Barnaba on the Grand Canal. It is in the Venetian gothic style & the exterior is not bad—but the interior is weird & resembles more a mosque than a dwelling house. In appears that she put the whole thing into the hands of a 2nd rate artist here Marnelta by name, a man who has evidently no idea of the wants of the life of a lady & he has therefore made domes & mosaics & put up pictures & statuettes & sheets of alabaster behind wh are electric lamps. The whole thing is one huge mistake & must be very uncomfortable to live in. Mme Stern who is an elderly lady with very good manners received her guests with great amiability & gave an excellent tea.





Renaissance and Gothic side by side.
The red shoes are gratuitous.
A little further along on the same side we see the semi-detached Ca’ Contarini degli Scrigni and the Ca’ Contarini Corfu. The family who lived here was so rich that it was thought that the palazzo was full of treasure chests (scrigni).

This was where a good Englishman would go to pray up until the late 19th century. In 1842, the Diocese of Gibraltar was established to provide visiting clergy for English-speaking communities in the Mediterranean. At the time of the unification of Italy, Rev. John Davies Mereweather, Cavaliere della Corona d’Italia, settled in Venice. He officiated at Anglican services in his apartment in Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni for 33 years until 1887.

As explained in the previous blog, many of our Edwardians would be clutching their Ruskins, and would look upon these sibling palaces with well-informed eyes. Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice championed the earlier palace’s Gothic style over that of its Renaissance neighbour. Long story criminally short, he favoured the curlicued trefoiled Gothic because it mimicked the wild perfection of God's natural creation, exemplified in the acanthus leaf, whereas Renaissance architecture showed only the hard and pitiless perfection of human geometry. Also, the Gothic style gave dignity to its artisans, who might fashion individual beauties. To Ruskin, the builders of the Renaissance were anonymous toilers with no more creative contribution allowed than to the men who built the pyramids.

 
Turning to our left, we see the unusual liagi or towers of the Ca’ Falier Canossa. This was originally a Gothic structure, and the characteristic windows are visible at the inner layer of the facade. The two towers were added in the late 18th century, lending the palazzo an oriental feel, surprisingly similar to buildings as far away as Muscat. 
a building with liagi in Muscat Old Town. Picture by Hin-Yan Wong

As the stupendously young American consul to Venice, William Dean Howells was driven out of this, his honeymoon palace by a venal maid, Giovanna. He later wrote about her depredations in his bestselling book Venetian Life which also contains a memorable account of a slanging match between two gondoliers and stories of Venetian cats, dogs, puppets. It was everyone’s favourite book about Venice for decades, and rightfully so. It is still one of mine.

We are now in sight of the Accademia Bridge. The current curved wooden structure is from the 1933. Our Edwardian travellers would have seen a much less romantic, flat iron bridge constructed by the Scottish engineer Alfred Neville in 1854. He built it at his own expense, charging tolls. For a brief period there were two bridges, while the new one was under construction.
 

Today lovers weigh the structure down with padlocks that the authorities are kept busy snipping off. Perhaps the first lock was piquant or faintly amusing, but the practice has now become a hazardous visual cliché. And smokers perpetually set fire to the wooden bridge by dropping their smouldering cigarette butts. The city periodically launches competitions to design a new bridge, and has even offered to sell its name and extensive advertising rights to a sponsor for the project. Watch this space, but do not invest much hope in it.

At the foot of the bridge, travellers in 1913 might have found rest at the Albergo Universo, inside the Palazzo Brandolin Rota. Indeed, Robert Browning used to stay here with his sister in 1880 -1, before the grandeur of Ca’ Rezzonico was available to him.
Ca' Barbaro, second on the left, at night

Whistler by Ralph Curtis
Ca’ Barbaro at left after the Accademia Bridge, was the home of the most prominent Americans to settle in Venice in the late nineteenth century: Daniele and Ariana Curtis, who rented it from 1881, bought it in 1885. Their son Ralph was a painter. Their cat was called Caterina Cornaro, after the queen of Cyprus, who brought the island to Venice.

Ca’ Barbaro was a great gathering place for literary and high society, though the Curtises were stern judges. Violet Piaget (also known as Vernon Lee) was another interesting character who was part of the community. She fell out with the Curtis family over her story about the community in Venice.

The Barbaro circle included Bernard Berenson, Isabella Stewart Gardner,
Edith Wharton and Charles Eliot Norton and the painter Whistler. Here is Anders Zorn's 1894 painting of Isabella emerging through the drapery on one of those wondrous evenings of the gilded expat society in Venice. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). Isabella would buy parts of Venetian palaces to set up her own Gothic-style museum in Boston.

Henry James in 1913
by John Singer Sargent
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Henry James stayed here, principally in 1887, and wrote many letters from his Venetian ‘nest’. He finished my personal favourite of his novels, The Aspern Papers, while a guest of the Curtises.

The Wings of a Dove (1902) was partly set there, though not written there, as is frequently supposed. Palazzo Leporelli in the novel is Palazzo Barbaro, and parts of the 1997 film adaptation were made here.

John Singer Sargent, a relative of the Curtises, painted in Venice every autumn from 1902 to 13. He created an atmospheric portrait of the palace and his hosts in in 1898.

photo of Arianna and Daniele Curtis
in the drawing room of Ca' Barbaro,
courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Later Harry Belafonte would perform at the Palazzo Barbaro, and more recently the Venetian scenes from the 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited were filmed here too.

Across the other side of the canal we see the pretty Ca’ Contarini Polignac.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it hosted the salon of  Princess Winnaretta de Polignac, a patron of the musical avant-garde in Europe. One can imagine the guests draped over the wonderful loggia and stairs on the left. Igor Stravinsky was among the guests here.

The Palazzo Balbi Valier Molin delle Trezze was the original home of Horatio Brown, an institution for educated British visitor. As mentioned in the previous blog, Horatio took over from Rawdon Brown as general fixer for British travellers Venice. He also took over from his namesake the historical research on the Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts relating to English Affairs existing in the Archives of Venice and Northern Italy. Horatio Brown was an author in his own right of various interesting books about the city. My favourite is Life on the Lagoons, 1884, which explores the customs, folk tales, superstitions and mating practices of the Venetians.

Horatio Brown moved to Ca’ Torresella on the Zattere, where he lived till 1926 when he when died, apart from a temporary evacuation during WW1. Every Monday evening (so as not to clash with Lady Layard) he gave a salon there and British visitors armed with letters of introduction could meet all the great and good.

Perhaps it was because of Horatio Brown that Walter Sickert claimed that the Zattere smelled ‘of the British and the Church of England and of Ruskin.’

One of Horatio Brown’s great friends was the writer John Addington Symonds.

Both had close relationships with Venetian gondoliers. Horatio Brown’s was Antonio Salin; Symonds loved Angelo Fusato – described in his explicitly homoerotic memoirs that were not published till 1984. Horatio Brown, acting as his executor, had suppressed much unpublished material after Symonds' death.

At right we see the open square of San Vio and the English church of Saint George. Its stern walls give the clue that the building was originally secular.

More and more Anglo Saxons were coming to Venice … there was a steamer service from India and from USA, and the huge English tourist boom. By the early 20th century, there were around 200 people wanting an Anglican service in the city every Sunday. So, as previously mentioned, Horatio Brown, Robert Browning, Henry Layard and others collected funds to buy a mosaic and glass warehouse in San Vio that became the Church of Saint George in Venice in 1892. There's a window dedicated to Browning.

Helen, Countess of Radnor, lived in the Palazzo Morosini in San Vio, and was the choir mistress of Saint George. The chaplain from 1905 till 1912 was the Rev Canon Lonsdale Ragg.

Palazzo Barbarigo. Photo by Leandro Neumann Giuffo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
 
At right, just past San Vio, we see Ca’ Barbarigo 16th century. It was fashionable to decry the mosaics (applied only in 1886) as seriously vulgar, but they continue to delight the tourists who know no better. It was for 50 years the 'town' home of Frederick and Caroline Eden, who owned the fabulous 'Garden of Eden' on Giudecca, to which they were rowed daily by gondola. Caroline Eden was the older sister the famous gardener Gertrude Jekyll.

The Edens also owned a private steam launch for excursion into the lagoon. Visitors to the Garden of Eden included Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust, who came to Venice when researching his hero, Ruskin, whom he was translating into French. He stayed in Venice from October to May of 1900.


Giovanni Boldini's portrait of Luisa Casati with
peacock feathers, from 1912
Luisa Casati in 1912
by Adolf de Meyer
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni – now better known as the Guggenheim Collection – was just a private palace on the Grand Canal in 1913. And it was at that time the home of Luisa Casati, Marquise Casati Stampa di Soncino (1881 –1957), who was one of Venice’s more colourful figures. She rather insisted on it, saying ‘I want to be a living work of art.’
Luisa Casati in 1912
by Alberto Martini

Among those who endorsed her artistry were Jean Cocteau, Cecil Beaton and her lover Gabriele D’Annunzio, who from 1914 lived just a gondola ride across the Grand Canal at the Casetta delle Rose.Luisa Casati was known for walking around with a pair of cheetahs on leashes. She wore living snakes as jewellery.

She moved into the palazzo in 1910, and immediately began a series of legendary soirées with artists, writers, fashion designers and musicians of the time. Naturally she was a patron of Fortuny, whose dresses were featured in part one of the blog. Forty years after her death, she was the inspiration for John Galliano’s 1998 summer collection for Christian Dior. Alexander McQueen revisited her style in his 2007 collection, as did Karl Lagerfield in 2009.

During her lifetime, artists were encouraged to paint Casati’s portrait or sculpt her likeness. Augustus John, among many others, obliged. In spite of her old money, and evident love of decadence, she was a muse to the Futurist Marinetti.

Luisa Casati in 1922
photographer unknown
She inspired characters in various films, including La Contessa (1965) in which she was played by Vivien Leigh, and A Matter of Time, when her role was taken by Ingrid Bergman. (All photos of Luisa Casati courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Just a little further up on the left hand side we see the austere contours of the Hotel Gritti. Ruskin and his wife Effie stayed here in five rooms at eastern end of first floor, during 1851 -2 while he was researching the second and third volumes of The Stones of Venice. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the palace was converted into a hotel.

Later Somerset Maugham would write on its terrace, ‘Few things are equally wonderful as sitting here, while the sun goes down and immerses the Canal in bright colours.’

Hemingway also favoured this hotel, as would Winston Churchill, Graham Greene, and Orson Welles.

 
Virginia Woolf by
Geoge Charles Beresford,
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
We are in the Honeymoon Hotel Mile. Palazzo Ferro Fini at left was once The Grand Hotel, where Virginia and Leonard Woolf spent part of their honeymoon in 1912 (the middle of her three visits). She found the noise and crush of Venice quite overwhelming.

The Hotel Europa Regina on the left was the site of George Elliot’s honeymoon in Venice, 1880. At 60 the writer had married John Cross, 20 years her junior, who jumped out of the hotel window. Much unfortunate hilarity has been expended on this incident which presumably resulted from intense private pain and probably illness.


Contarini Fasan
The pretty Contarini Fasan was one of Ruskin’s favourites. It is sometimes known
as Desdemona's palace.

Two palazzi up is the somewhat austere Ca’ Alvisi. It was the home of the redoubtable Mrs Katherine de Kay Bronson, American society hostess in Venice from the 1880s almost until her death in 1901, when it was inherited by her daughter, by then Countess Rucellai.

In her time Mrs Browning entertained Whistler, Browning, Sargeant and Henry James. Whistler wrote, 'Venice is only really known in all its fairy perfection to the privileged who may be permitted to gaze from Mrs Bronson's balcony'.

At right we see Ca’ Dario, a lurching 15th century structure, studded with lozenges of porphyry and serpentine. This building is famous as the most haunted house in Venice, the site of an unfair share of the city’s unexplained deaths and suicides. Rawdon Brown who lived there 1838- 42, was ruined by the restorations. But many people were fine there

In fact, Pen and Fanny Browning rented it while doing up the Rezzonico, and I have seen no untoward reports of their time there. The poet Henri Regnier also enjoyed his time there. Claude Monet made this painting of it in 1908, when a guest at Ca' Barbaro (of course). Painting courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. And Lady Enid Layard recorded that in May 1912 she went to visit the Bournes, a pleasant French family who had recently taken up residence at Ca' Dario.


A little further on the right we see Ca’ Semitecolo, a small 15th century Gothic palazzo with six arched windows opposite Giglio, left of Salviati’s mosaic-facaded town headquarters. The writer Constance Fenimore Woolson (photo right,courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) in 1894 occupied the top two floors of this building. She committed suicide there – jumping from her bedroom window onto the hard stones below. Her body was found by the gondolier Angelo Fusato. Encroaching deafness had brought depression. It is also thought she was hopelessly in love with Henry James, who was appointed one of her executors and was much traumatised by having to deal with her personal effects and her clothes after her death.


San Gregorio, visible from the Canal on the right, was an antique warehouse in 1913.

Finally, the pre-war traveller would pass the great white church of Santa Maria della Salute and come out into the bacino at the end of the canal, with the customs house, or Dogana. The scene would be very similar to today, apart from the Bagni Galleggianti– floating swimming baths with gaily striped awnings – that were anchored every summer off the tip of Dorsoduro. They were equipped with hot and cold, freshwater and saltwater showers, and fifty changing rooms. There were also ‘sirene’ – mermaids – which were specially adapted gondolas with metal cages underneath, so that ladies could bathe modestly and safely. Camillo Boito makes use of one of these boats for an amorous encounter between Raniero and Livia in his novel, Senso, of 1883. Having just downloaded a fascinating article about these structures, I see a translation and a whole blog about them coming on.

Overbearing, outsize cruise ships of today, not to mention the pollution they bring, make such a delightful installation impossible today. And more, for so many reasons, is the pity.

So this is where we leave the Grand Canal and our last wave of pre-war Grand Tourists.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride.


Michelle Lovric’s website

Great Continental Railway Journeys

The True & Splendid History of The HarristownSisters will be published by Bloomsbury on June 5th 2014

Unattributed photos are by the author or her sister, Jenny Lovric. Venetian etchings and ephemera from the author's own collection.






























Three Minutes Around Pudding Lane, by Laurie Graham

0
0

If, like me, you live in ignorance of video games, happy to leave them to a younger generation, I bring to your attention a project that has used game technology to create something rather brilliant: a fly-through of seventeenth century London. Let me explain.

A competition, called Off the Map, was sponsored last year by a videogame company, Crytek, in conjunction with GameCity and the British Library. The challenge was to take one of three themes  -  17thcentury London, the Gizeh Pyramids, or Stonehenge  - and to turn maps and old drawings into a 3D experience. The winners were six students from De Montfort University in Leicester. They call themselves Pudding Lane Productions.

You can see their winning entry here. I found it worth watching several times, to catch the painstaking, prizewinning detail. The blacksmith’s tools, the wee loaves of bread, pig carcases complete with flies, the wet mud and yes, the giblets, cabbage stalks and manure, human and animal, that would have been underfoot everywhere. If you're interested in how it was done  -  the craft, not the technology - the group also kept a blog while the work was in progress. When your cobblestones look more like the pebbles on Brighton beach, it’s back to the drawing board.

A fly-through of another era and streets that have changed beyond recognition is something historical novelists try to achieve every time they sit down to write. We may have our maps pinned up above our desks, but a map is just a map. What was it really like in those courts and alleys? Can we even begin to imagine the sounds and smells? Hollywood doesn’t help. The actors still have all their teeth.


The technology used by the Pudding Lane students cannot bring us odours. Not yet, at least.
One of my own rather pointless fears is that if I could suddenly time-travel, even the short distance to my 18th and 19thcentury creations, I wouldn’t much like it there. It would be too noisy, smelly and brutal for my 21st century sensibilities. A quick look round and I’d want to come home. The past is indeed a foreign country. I'll buy a ticket, but only if it's a guaranteed return. How about you?

Beauty and the Buerk, by H.M. Castor

0
0

Michael Buerk (a BBC broadcaster and former newsreader) has made me very cross indeed this week. He has said that television presenters who “got a job mainly because [they] look nice” should not 'cry ageism' and complain when they are sacked to make way for younger replacements. Though he hasn't mentioned the gender of the presenters he's talking about, he has said that some of them have "even" gone to tribunals over the issue, so there's no doubt about it: he's talking about women.


Grey-haired father of two Buerk (68) does not seem to realise the bind that women are in. They will not be employed as presenters or newsreaders unless they do look “nice”. Regardless of whether they have top degrees, speak several languages and have considerable political, editorial and journalistic experience, there will be plenty of people – like Buerk, presumably – who cannot see past the issue of physical appearance. It is then doubly maddeningly infuriating (yes, I am cross – did I mention that?) when those same people repackage their own short-sightedness as a shortcoming of the women themselves, dismissing a highly skilled, talented and experienced female as “just a pretty face”.


I thought of this trap – damned if you’re deemed ‘pretty’, damned if you’re not (and either way it’s the most important thing about you!) – when looking recently at this marvellous 16th-century woodcut of a Venetian woman lightening her hair.





It’s from Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni, which was published in Venice in 1590 (and is now available in a beautiful English edition, translated by Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, under the title The Clothing of the Renaissance World).


The picture shows a young woman sitting in a rooftop loggia, sunning her hair (but, crucially, not her face) with the help of a straw hat from which the crown has been cut out. The hat has a broad brim, across which the woman’s hair is draped. Vecellio's text tells us that women like this “keep their heads exposed to the sun for days at a time” in order to make their hair turn blonde:


[T]hey sit [outside] when the sun is hottest and wet their hair with a little sponge attached to a wooden handle and soaked in a liquid that they buy or make at home themselves; and over and over again, as they wet their hair, they let it dry in the sun, and in this way they turn their hair blonde so effectively that we think it is natural.


I’m not sure how Michael Buerk would feel about spending his days like this, but I imagine it must have been a tedious and, in the heat, quite possibly fairly uncomfortable way for a young woman to pass her time. Why would she do it?


For a clue, let us turn to Agnolo Firenzuola’s Dialogo delle Bellezze delle Donne (Dialogue On the Beauty of Women), 1548. “The hair… should be fine and fair,” he says, “in the similitude now of gold, now of honey, and now of the bright and shining rays of the sun…”


A bit like this, then. I wonder how many hours in the loggia these streaks took…




Young Woman with a Fanc. 1555

(possibly Titian’s daughter Lavinia)

by Titian, who was Cesare Vecellio’s cousin

[Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons



In Vecellio’s discussion of hair-lightening, the fact that women are trapped by society’s requirement that they must be beautiful is not acknowledged. Vecellio, it seems, is as blind to this as Michael Buerk. His text accompanying the woodcut instead blames women for their efforts to conform to contemporary ideas of beauty:


[A]ll women desire to increase their natural beauty through art, and the women of Venice are no different in their eagerness to do this. In doing so, however, they harm more than help themselves… [W]hen other people recognize the effort they have put into this, they mistrust even the woman’s natural beauty and judge it as artificial.


It’s a very neat Catch-22 situation. Hair dyeing is associated with vanity and a lack of ‘real’ beauty. (The Roman poet Propertius wrote, “All beauty is best as nature made it… In hell below may many an ill befall that girl who stupidly dyes her hair with a false colour!”) ‘Real’ beauty is natural… but definitions of female beauty are prescriptive and limited. Women cannot escape being judged on their looks, and yet they are criticised for making efforts to conform to the ideal.


At the bottom of this tangled prejudice lies the age-old association of the female with matter and the body, which (despite the idealisation of beauty) has long been considered fundamentally inferior to spirit (associated with the male). Jacqueline Murray, in an article on Firenzuola’s On the Beauty of Women, explains it thus:


Philosophers since the time of Plato associated women with the body and the material world, both inferior to the soul and the spiritual world. Thus women are evaluated as inferior within a framework of body-soul dualism. This is particularly significant when analysing treatises praising women in general and acclaiming women’s physical beauty in particular…


This anti-body prejudice is embedded deep within our culture, and needs examining in itself every bit as urgently as the continuing gender double standard with which it is associated. It makes the fact that beauty is more important for women than it is for men – a fact stated by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (1528) – doubly unfair. Because it means that not only are women judged on an arbitrary, superficial and (in most cases) irrelevant standard, but also that when they meet that standard, when they are deemed beautiful – as Michael Buerk implied (2014) – it turns out they aren't worth much after all.

March Competition Winners

0
0
The winners of the March competition are: 

Jo
Ruan Peat
Clare the Reader


Please send your land addresses to:

David Sanger dsanger@scholastic.co.uk

to claim your prizes. 

Congratulations!

POLITICS AND THE ART OF INTIMACY: Levina Teerlinc, a sixteenth century miniaturist – Elizabeth Fremantle

0
0
The mid-sixteenth century saw the rise of a new art form: the portrait miniature. Designed to be hidden, rather than displayed in public, miniatures were worn on ribbons tucked away from prying eyes amongst layers of clothing, in pockets and pouches, or in boxes – like Elizabeth I's collection of tiny likenesses. They often signified love and were exchanged as betrothal gifts, keepsakes or between clandestine lovers, but were also worn as covert symbols of political affiliation. It is one such portrait, an image of a woman, who many championed as Elizabeth I's successor, with her son, potentially a future King of England, that is a central symbol in my novel Sisters of Treason.



This portrait of Lady Katherine Grey and her son Lord Beauchamp is the first known English secular image of a mother and child. It is also, if you look very closely at the object Katherine wears round her neck, the first instance in painting of a miniature being worn. It is her husband's likeness and so this forms a kind of family group. When this was painted Katherine was imprisoned in the Tower of London for her unsanctioned marriage to Edward Seymour – indeed that is where she gave birth to little Lord Beauchamp.

The artist was Levina Teerlinc, the daughter of an illuminator of some renown, who came to England from Bruges, joining the household of Katherine Parr when she was queen. Teerlinc was remarkable as a sixteenth century woman earning her living as a painter, but more so in that she served as a court artist to four Tudor monarchs: Henry; Edward VI; Mary I and Elizabeth I, and would have worked on designs for jewellery, seals and documents as well as portraits. It is a great shame that more of her work has not survived but from the few images we have it is clear that she was instrumental in the spread in popularity of the limning or miniature. Specialist in portraiture of the period, Susan E James, makes a strong argument that Teerlinc was the author of A Very Proper Treatise Wherein is Briefly Set for the Arte in Limning that demonstrated the main tenets of the form. James is also of the mind, as is art historian Roy Strong, that Teerlinc may have taught Nicholas Hilliard who was to become one of the world's greatest practitioners of the art.

Teerlinc painted a number of images of the Grey family: the portrait of Lady Katherine with her son and another of her as a girl and also a much disputed miniature by Teerlinc that some, including David Starkey, believe to be a likeness of Katherine's older sister, the tragic Lady Jane Grey. This is hotly disputed and there is no definite image of Jane Grey but there is in these little portraits a clear suggestion of a relationship between Teerlinc and the Grey family.  I have built on this in my novel, weaving the painter's life with that of the two younger Grey sisters Katherine and Mary, two girls whose lives were played out at the heart of the struggle for the Tudor succession, only to be forgotten when their Stuart cousins came to power.

This brings me back to the portrait of Katherine and her son and the political significance of such an image. It was widely copied (I know of at least three similar images in existence) and would have been a covert demonstration of allegiance to the Greys and their claim to the throne. Elizabeth I, ever fearful of usurpers, had Lord Beauchamp deemed illegitimate and Katherine was to end her days in incarceration, but thanks to the intimate art of Levina Teerlinc we have an insight into a forgotten fragment of history.

Ref: Susan E James The Feminine Dynamic in English Art 1485-1603, Ashgate.

Sisters of Treason will be published by Michael Joseph on 22nd May 2014






Writers' Houses 1: Max Gate - by Sue Purkiss

0
0
Portrait of Hardy
I think it’s always interesting to visit houses furnished as they would have been in the past. It’s part of this whole thing of trying to imagine life in different periods, of trying to work out whether people are intrinsically the same whatever period they happen to have lived in.

But there’s an extra layer of interest when it comes to visiting writers’ houses. What do the houses say about the writers? Recently I visited Max Gate in Dorchester, the house into which Thomas Hardy moved in 1885, when he was forty five. Hardy actually designed this house, so there’s even more reason to expect that it will tell us something about him.


Max Gate

From the outside, it’s rather forbidding. Built of dull dark pinkish-red brick, it has a central section with a pointed gable, and on either side there’s a square tower topped with a pinnacle – slightly gothic, perhaps. The front garden has mostly gloomy trees and shrubs, which, as you approach, partially obscure the view of the house – it’s as if the house is hiding: though to the left and rear of the house is a much pleasanter, happier garden, with flowers, lawns and vegetable beds. It’s a house that would serve very well as the setting for a ghost story, with figures flitting across the small upstairs windows – particularly the Rapunzel-like casements high up in the towers. No wonder, perhaps, that Hardy wrote such gloomy, doom-ridden stories here.


The sitting room
Inside, however, the feeling is quite different. It has the most relaxed feel of any National Trust house I’ve been into: the stewards invite you to go into the kitchen and help yourself to tea, sit anywhere you like to drink it, pick up anything you want to look at. The dining room is perhaps not fully restored yet; it doesn’t feel lived in. But the sitting room is another matter. It’s colourful and cosy, with red walls covered with pictures, comfortable saggy armchairs, tables piled with books and magazines. It looks as if it’s just waiting for Hardy to sit down and have tea with a visitor – in later years T E Lawrence, perhaps, ridden over from his retreat nearby at Clouds Hill on his Brough Superior motorbike. 

Just off the sitting room is a conservatory, or garden room. The house was built on an archaeological site: when the ground was being prepared for building, an ancient grave was found, containing skeletons curled up in a foetal position. And Hardy found a stone, which he had dug up and set upright in the garden; recently, others have been found nearby, and it looks as if Max Gate was on the site of a Neolithic stone circle. Considering Hardy’s interest in ancient sites – think of the scene at Stonehenge at the end of Tess of the D’Urbervilles – this seems astonishingly fitting.

Emma as a young woman
On the first floor are various bedrooms, one of which is set out as Hardy’s study. (His actual study furniture is in Dorchester Museum, and he used several different rooms as a study.) But more poignant are two tiny rooms which you find by venturing up a rather precarious staircase into the attic – Emma’s rooms.


Emma was Hardy’s first wife. They met when Hardy, trained as an architect, went to a village in Cornwall to do a survey of a church in need of restoration; Emma was the rector’s sister-in-law, a woman of thirty, whom the rector was keen to see married off. Pictures of her show a sturdy looking girl, a little heavy-faced, but with creamy skin and a mass of thick chestnut hair. Thomas and Emma married four years later, and at first, all was well. 

As the years went on, however, they grew apart, Emma perhaps jealous of Hardy’s fame and the literary life he led in London for part of the year. Eventually she asked him to make for her these two rooms, and here in the last few years of her life she spent much of her time, sewing, reading, drawing, writing. (She wrote a lively account of her own recollections of her early life, and her drawings of St Juliot Church are better than Hardy’s. If she’d lived now, maybe she would have had her own career, and

would have seen no need to marry someone in whose shadow she would always remain. But who knows!)

On the 27thNovember 1912, Emma died in one of these rooms. Hardy hadn’t seen her death coming, and he was devastated. He went on a journey back to the places where they met and courted, and the result is an outpouring of his efforts to come to terms with his feelings of loss, in a collection of very beautiful poems: here's a verse from one of them, After a Journey.


Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;

    Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you

What have you now found to say of our past –

    Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?

Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?

    Things were not lastly as firstly well

        With us twain, you tell?

But all’s closed now, despite Time’s derision.


And perhaps that's a good place to stop.




Viewing all 2760 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images