Elizabeth Smith is a splendid example of the way that learning could provide a challenge and an outlet to women whose daily lives were by modern standards terribly cramped … She is also an example of the women’s tradition: though she died before she was thirty, she was remembered for years, with admiration, by other women who were trying to think or write. She shows too, less pleasingly, how reactionary cultural forces would join ranks against a woman stepping out of line, even when she did so in her mind rather than her behaviour.
Category: Biography
Ahead of Her Time – Jane Johnson’s Nursery Library
Johnson wrote out her “fairy-tale” for her daughter and eldest son, and bound it like a proper book, about five or six years after the little Barbara had looked like herself rather than like her relations. This is startlingly early, before the late-eighteenth-century wave of professional writers for children, at about the same time as John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 1744, which is generally presented as a first … Johnson’s manuscript is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and it finally, in 2001, reached print as a Bodleian publication …
Love, Power & Abandonment
Is all this suitable for soap opera rather than the seriousness of ‘true’ historical research and inquiry? The number of books, films and television hours made on the subject confirm its popularity so far as a general readership is concerned. Someone must be buying the books and the cinema tickets, and watching at home! Is it material for historians?
Seymour Dorothy Fleming (1757-1818), part 2
Richard’s vengeance had badly backfired. He and his sexual proclivities were now the talk of London society. For the press, Richard’s hobby of collecting ancient art and showing it off to the public, gave rise to the question of whether…
Seymour Dorothy Fleming (1757-1818), part 1
Born in October 1757, Seymour Dorothy Fleming was the fourth of five children of Irish career soldier, Sir John Fleming and his wife, Jane Colman, granddaughter of the Duke of Somerset. Seymour was the surname of the Somerset dynasty and…
Lily, Duchess of Marlborough (1854—1909): A Portrait with Husbands
“If I had a daughter or a sister, I should teach her adaptability, and that learned I should have no further anxiety for her future,” observed Lily, Duchess of Marlborough, in 1890. “Let her please, not men alone, but people,…
Susan Cochrane, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne (c.1710-1754) Part 2
After her husband’s death and a widow probably before she was twenty, Susan settled into Castle Lyon. Like other women of her status, she had access to significant wealth and property, and indeed, spent part of the 1730s in legal…
Susan Cochrane, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne (c.1710-1754) Part 1
Susan Cochrane was the second daughter of the 4th Earl of Dundonald and Lady Anne Murray. Her parents married in April 1706 and her mother died in November 1710; she was one of four siblings. Susan was the second daughter,…
Margaret Treager and the Craft Industries
I would like to announce the publication of my new book, Embroidering History: An Englishwoman?s Experience as a Humanitarian Aid Volunteer in Post-War Poland, 1924-1925. The book provides a glimpse inside the inner workings of an early humanitarian aid project…