The Cotswolds caused Smedley, hitherto a Tory by inheritance, to move sharply to the left in her politics. She carried her idealism and activism back to London to run the Greenleaf Theatre and theatre school, to the USA for the years 1915-22, where she and Armfield left their impress on theatre movements in New York and California, and she was no less active in her late years back in England.
Category: Source
Lady Lucy Herbert – Prioress
… since Roman Catholic institutions were for generations illegal in Britain, parents who wanted their daughters brought up as Catholics, and who could afford it, often shipped them off to convents in France or the Low Countries. These flourishing female communities were hotbeds of talent and ability, and they recorded their own lives and those of their convents in a range of valuable historical texts. Distinctions of social rank were not quite obliterated among them, and women who rose to be leaders in the religious life were often aristocrats.
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 …
Historical Lessons from the Worsley Case
The last two posts at the blog have told the story of the Worsley scandal. This post explores some of the press reactions to the case and thinks about what sort of emotions it produced it eighteenth century audiences and…
Are Women People?
Women (With rather insincere apologies to Mr. Rudyard Kipling.) I went to ask my government if they would set me free, They gave a pardoned crook a vote, but hadn’t one for me; The men about me laughed and frowned…
Happy New Year!
Bringing in the New Year in Germany There is plenty of dancing going on in Germany. Glee-wine, a sort of negus and puneh, is brought in after supper and just before twelve o’clock. Every one is on the watch to…
An Australian Christmas.
A glorious sun rose on Christmas-day, and the moments were melting ones. The weather had been very wet through June, July and August; September, October, and November had been almost perfect. The bright beautiful green clothing the valleys and hills,…
Ruby Side Thompson and the London Blitz
I am the Great Granddaughter of Ruby Side Thompson. I inherited her forty-three diaries that span from 1909–1969. They were passed down to my grandmother, Ruth Ferris Thompson who was married to Ruby’s son, John Thompson. Ruby’s Diaries had several…
Black History Month: Witness against Slavery – The Story of Mary Prince
Oh the horrors of slavery! … the truth ought to be told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate …. I have been a slave – I have felt what a…