Scandalous Women

Natalie Barney: An American Amazon

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Sat, 26 May 2012 17:08:00 +0000

Natalie Barney painted by her mother Alice Pike Barney

Natalie Barney (1876-1972) was probably one of the most fascinating and maddening woman of the 19^th and early 20^th century. She was a great seductress whose list of conquests sounds like a who’s who of the Belle Époque, Collette, the poet Renee Vivien, the painter Romaine Brooks, Dolly Wilde, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, just to name a few. Although her epic love life alone would be enough for a place in the history books, Natalie was much more than just a female Casanova. She was also a writer, playwright, and poet who held a salon for more than 60 years on Paris’s Left Bank, which brought together artists from around the world. Barney was a bridge between the Parisian community and the ex-pats who flocked to Paris particularly after WWI. She was what you might call a facilitator. She also worked to promote women writers by founding a “Women’s Academy” in response to the all-male French Academy.

Like Gertrude Stein, Natalie’s family was wealthy which afforded her the the freedom to live openly as a lesbian in Paris. Her father Albert Clifford Barney was the son of a wealthy manufacturer of railway cars. Her mother Alice Pike Barney, who later became an artist of some renown, also came from a moderately wealthy family. Natalie was born in the heartland, in Dayton, Ohio, on October 31, 1876. Her parents had an unhappy marriage. Natalie’s father was a heavy drinker who could be abusive when drunk; he was unfaithful, and obsessed with appearances. Her mother had a more even temperament, a live and let live attitude. The first cracks in the marriage occurred when Albert discovered letters from Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer, in a trunk. Alice and Stanley had been sweethearts until Stanley went off on another expedition to Africa. Alice had promised to wait for him, but being only 17 at that time and newly launched into society, her promises soon turned to dust. Albert was furious and jealous at that relationship, even when Alice proved to him that she hadn’t even bothered to read most of the letters that Stanley had sent back. While her mother found a way to go around Albert’s more overbearing ways, Natalie was openly rebellious.

As a young girl, Natalie had fallen in love with Paris when her parents sent her and her younger sister Laura to boarding school at Les Ruches; founded by feminist Marie Souvestre (Souvestre would later have a huge influence on Eleanor Roosevelt who attended her school in England). The school encouraged the girls to think for themselves which was unheard of in the 19^th century where women were expected, if they had opinions, to echo their fathers or their husbands. As an adult she spoke French fluently without an accent, and nearly all her written work was in French. From the age of 22 until her death at 95 in 1972, Natalie spent most of her adult life in Paris. Her father’s death in 1902 gave her the freedom to live how and wherever she chose.

While Barney published several books of poetry, a few novels, and several books of epigrams, she never seems to have taken her work as seriously as others wanted her to. She rarely revised her work, insisting that the first flush of inspiration was the best, that editing turned writing stale. Her lasting achievement is the salon that she held on Friday afternoons at her home. Although her own tastes were decidedly traditional, Natalie wasn’t afraid of new talent or new ways of thinking. During the 1920’s, she even bobbed her hair although she clung to her long skirts! Joan Shenkar described Barney’s salon as “a place where lesbian assignations and appointments with academics could coexist in a kind of cheerful, cross-pollinating, cognitive dissonance.” Natalie was a gifted hostess, able to combine a stage manager’s precision with that of a showman. She was equally at home conducting a celebration for hundreds or an intimate dinner party for four.

Even Mata Hari made an appearance at Barney’s salon, hired to dress up as Lady Godiva on a white horse harnessed with turquoise cloisonné before performing one of her Javanese numbers. Natalie would sometimes feature poetry or theatricals written by her or in co-written with her mother. During WWI, the salon became a haven for those opposed to the war, Natalie being chief amongst them. Other visitors to the salon during the ‘20’s included Andre Gide, Anatole France, Jean Cocteau, Thornton Wilder, Sinclair Lewis, Peggy Guggenheim, Nancy Cunard, Rainer Maria Rilke, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Isadora Duncan. Another American, poet Ezra Pound became a good friend of Barney’s, he met his mistress Olga Rudge at the salon. Several contemporaries including Colette, Djuna Barnes, and Radclyffe Hall created characters based on Barney

Of course, one can talk about Barney without discussing her love life. Natalie later said that she knew by the age of 12 that she was a lesbian, but even if she hadn’t been, her parents’ marriage made her determined to never get married. As a teenager, she had been courted by the painter Mary Cassatt’s nephew Bob, who wanted to marry. Natalie loved and respected him enough to let him know that she preferred women. In response, Bob offered what was known as a mariage Blanc or marriage of convenience, both parties would be able to pursue their own interests, and Natalie would have the protection of his name. However Natalie realized that Bob was too jealous of her affairs with other women.

Although she was discreet, Natalie never hid who she was, although both her parents were shocked when they found out after her first book of poetry Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes were published. With this volume, Natalie became the first woman to openly write about the love of women since Sappho. While most reviewers either didn’t get it or glossed over the subject matter, a newspaper article entitled “Sappho Sings in Washington,” alerted her father who bought and destroyed the remaining stock and the printing plates. Natalie’s mother Alice was also shocked, but she loved her daughter enough to eventually accept her sexuality. Natalie was shunned by the community of upper-class American ex-pats in Paris, as well as by the social register in Bar Harbor and Washington, DC. Not that Natalie cared, unlike her father, she didn’t give a damn what people thought.

As well as being openly lesbian, Barney also advocated against monogamy. Anyone who fell in love with Barney would have to get used to sharing her. At any given moment, she would be juggling at least two or sometimes three lovers at a time. She once wrote out a list dividing her loves into separate categories: liaisons, demi-liaisons, and adventures. Many of her former lovers evolved into lifelong friendships. Natalie was fearless in pursuit of her amours; she was not shy about making her attentions known. Quite a few heterosexual women succumbed to the allure of Barney’s charisma. While not conventionally beautiful, she had long, lustrous blonde hair, and deep blue eyes. Her close friend, the writer Remy de Gourmont dubbed her “The Amazon.”

Her first major relationship was with the courtesan Liane de Pougy. She had seen de Pougy riding her horse in Bois de Boulogne and was instantly attracted to her. Determined to win her, she showed up at de Pougy’s door dressed in a page costume, declaring that she was a “page of love,” sent by Sappho. Their brief affair ended because Barney couldn’t deal with de Pougy’s profession. The love affair was immortalized in de Pougy’s novel entitled Idylle Saphique. Published in 1901, the book was reprinted almost 70 times in its first year. Far from being hurt or offended, Barney even contributed several chapters to the novel.

After de Pougy, Barney fell in love with a fellow American Pauline Tarn who wrote poetry under the nom de plume Renee Vivien. Vivien fell deeply in love with Barney, considered her a muse, but she was unable to deal with Natalie’s infidelities. She had other demons of her own; she was anorexic, addicted to alcohol and the drug chloral hydrate. After 2 years, Vivien stopped answering Natalie’s letters. She moved on to other lovers but Natalie wouldn’t accept her decision. All throughout her life, Natalie would want what she couldn’t have. After a brief reconciliation which included a trip to the island of Lesbos, Vivien ended the relationship for good. She died in 1909. Barney later wrote, “She could not be saved. Her life was a long suicide. Everything turned to dust and ashes in her hands.” Another lover, Dolly Wilde, was almost a repeat of her relationship with Renee Vivien. Like Vivien, she seemed hell-bent on self-destruction. She drank heavily, was addicted to heroin, and attempted suicide several times. Despite her wit and charm, she never managed to write anything, preferring to be supported by others. Barney financed stays in the early 20^th century equivalent of rehab but nothing worked. After being diagnosed with breast cancer, Wilde refused surgery, committing suicide in 1941.

Not all of Barney’s love affairs ended in tragedy or publication. Her longest relationship was with the painter Romaine Brooks. Another wealthy American, Romaine and Natalie met during WWI. Less social than Natalie, she disliked Paris and most importantly she disliked most of Natalie’s friends. Brooks was a nomad who spent most of her life traveling between Europe and America. She was aloof which kept Barney interested since she never knew when Romaine was going to take off and leave. Romaine also seemed better able to tolerate Natalie’s infidelities. For most of their 50 plus relationship, they kept separate residences. To accommodate Romaine’s need for solitude, their summer home consisted of two wings joined by a dining room.

After Barney’s death in 1972, her life and work was largely forgotten. In 1979, Judy Chicago honored Barney with a place setting in The Dinner Party (now ensconced at the Brooklyn Museum of Art). In the 1980’s, her work began to be rediscovered and translated into English. Two major biographies were written, her influence on early 20^th century authors and literature was noted. Her work also began to be translated into English, allowing contemporary audiences to discover her, but her most of her plays and her poetry are still not translated. In October 2009, Natalie was honored with a historical marker in her home town of Dayton, OH, the first one in Ohio to note the sexual orientation of its honoree.

Sources:
Suzanne Rodriguez Wild Heart: A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris New York: Harper Collins (2002)

Diana Souhami: Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, New York, St. Martin's Press, 2005

Scandalous Review: Hysteria

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Sun, 20 May 2012 01:32:00 +0000

Hysteria (2012)

Directed by: Tanya Wexler

Written by: Jonah Lisa Dyer, Stephen Dyer, Howard Gensler

Running Time: 95 minutes

Cast
Felicity Jones as Emily Dalrymple
Maggie Gyllenhaal as Charlotte Dalrymple
Hugh Dancy as Dr. Mortimer Granville
Rupert Everett as Lord Edmund St. John-Smythe
Jonathan Pryce as Dr. Robert Dalrymple
Ashley Jensen as Fanny
Anna Chancellor as Mrs. Bellamy
Gemma Jones as Lady St. John-Smythe
Malcolm Rennie as Lord St. John-Smythe
Tobias Menzies as Mr. Squyers
Sheridan Smith as Molly the Lolly
Kim Criswell as Mrs. Castellari

What it’s about: The film, set in the Victorian era, is about the invention of the vibrator. The film's title refers to the once common medical diagnosis of female hysteria. Dr. Mortimer Granville gets fired from yet another hospital after he questions the father old-fashioned medical techniques of his superior who doesn‘t believe in the existence of germs. Granville moves in with his friend Lord Edmund St. John-Smythe, a rather eccentric chap who experiments with electricity and is madly in love with the new-fangled invention the telephone. After many fruitless interviews, Granville interviews with Dr. Robert Dalrymple who has built up a rather successful practice treating female hysteria. Darlrymple is desperate to hire another doctor since his practice continues to grow. It seems that ½ the women in London suffer from hysteria. After demonstrating the procedure, which basically involves masturbating the patient to orgasm, Dalrymple offers Granville a job.

Mortimer meets Dalrymple’s two daughters Emily and Charlotte. While Emily is the epitome of Victorian womanhood, demure, sweet, content to play the piano and practice phrenology, her sister Charlotte is a passionate, feisty, outspoken suffragette who works at a settlement house in the East End of London. Dr. Dalrymple insists that Charlotte suffers from hysteria since she expresses her opinions so freely. When Charlotte asks for money to pay for the coal the settlement house desperately needs, her father refuses.

At first Granville is a success, to such an extent that Darlrymple intimates that one day he might not only make Granville a partner but he might leave the practice to him, especially if he marries Emily who Granville has been courting. Unfortunately Granville soon has more patients than he can handle and begins to suffer from hand cramps which begin to affect his performance at work. Charlotte brings a woman from the settlement house late one night to her father’s practice for help with her broken ankle. Mortimer sets the ankle and he and Charlotte spar some more. Charlotte insists that Mortimer could make a real difference treating patients in the East End, rather that treating her father’s wealthy patients. She finds her father’s practice contemptuous. When Mortimer is unable to satisfy a patient, Dalrymple fires him.

At Lord Edmund’s, Mortimer discovers that his electric feather duster gives a great hand massager. It occurs to him that perhaps the massage function could take the place of the human in the treatment of female hysteria. Eureka! The vibrator is born.

My thoughts: Who knew a romantic comedy about the invention of the vibrator could be not just funny but also give the audience a bit of a little history lesson about how women were treated in the 19^th century? I would have loved this film just because it features so many of my favorite British actors such as Jonathan Pryce, and Gemma Jones, not to mention the still very handsome Rupert Everett. The film treats a very serious subject, the treatment of female hysteria in the 19^th century, with humor, but it doesn’t miss the chance to point out not just the absurdities of the treatment of female hysteria but also how much damage was done to perfectly normal women.

The film is factual to a certain extent, women were really give manual massages to relieve the systems of hysteria in the 19^th century, some were even committed to asylums and given hysterectomies, and there really was a Mortimer Granville, actually his name was Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville (1833-1900) and while he did come up with a battery powered massager, he never intended it to be used on women. In fact, he was actually appalled that his invention was used for such a purpose. It’s ironic that masturbation in the 19^th century was considered sinful, but yet doctors used it to treat hysteria.

However, in this film Granville is set up as the harbinger of modern medical techniques. Although since he such an advocate for cleanliness to get rid of germs, you would think that he would realize that hysteria was just a catch-all diagnosis, instead of really treating what ailed women in the 19^th century. Even after inventing the vibrator, he still doesn’t realize that all he’s doing is just giving women the sexual satisfaction that they aren’t given at home. It’s up to Charlotte to say out loud what the audience already know, that women do have sexual feelings. Granville grows in the film from a man who while interested in modern medical techniques, is still somewhat trapped by the what was considered the traditional roles for men and women. At first, he has a hard time understanding what drives Charlotte to give up the world of an upper middle class young woman to help those less fortunate.

The film is ably directed by Tanya Wexler, and there is just enough seriousness to counterbalance the humorous scenes in Dr. Dalrymple’s office as well as the hilarious scene where Edmund and Mortimer test out their new invention on the housemaid Molly. All the actors are wonderful, but for me, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s performance as Charlotte made the film. First of all her English accent is impeccable, and she manages to make Charlotte’s need to get up on her soapbox at every opportunity, charming not annoying which it could have been with a lesser actress. Her scenes with Hugh Dancy just sparkle, as she constantly leaves him flustered, at the same time opening his eyes to the possibility to women being the equal of men.

I suspect that this film will have more resonance for the women in the audience than the men. And I’m sure there will be people who wish that the story had not been framed in a traditional romantic comedy format. For me, I thought it was like having a really good historical romance novel with serious themes on screen, the type of story that I wish I had written. I do however wish that there had been some mention of the fact that Charlotte eschewed corsets and bustles in her work at the settlement house compared to her sister who wore costumes that often made her look like a rather fetching meringue. There is a part of me that wishes that instead of Granville, they used a fictional character as the inventor of the battery operated vibrator but one can't win them all.

Verdict: For a peek behind the velvet curtains of Victorian sexuality, I highly recommend Hysteria. Be sure to stay for the credits or you'll miss some fun bits!

The Queen's Lover

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Mon, 14 May 2012 11:13:00 +0000

Title: THE QUEEN’S LOVER
Author: Francine du Plessix Gray
Publisher: Penguin
Pub Date: June 14, 2012

　 About the author: Francine du Plessix Gray has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker and is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Simone Weil, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Rage and Fire, Lovers and Tyrants, and Soviet Women. She is most recently the author of the memoir Them: A Memoir of Parents. She lives in Connecticut.

What it’s about: The Queen's Lover begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the dashing Swedish nobleman Count Axel von Fersen first meets the mesmerizing nineteen-year-old Dauphine, Marie Antoinette. This electric encounter launches a lifelong romance that will span the course of the French Revolution.

The affair begins in friendship, however, and Fersen quickly becomes a devoted companion to the entire royal family. As he roams the halls of Versailles and visits the private haven of Le Petit Trianon, Fersen discovers the deepest secrets of the court. But the events of the American Revolution tear Fersen away. Moved by the cause, he joins French troops in the fight for American independence. When he returns, he finds France on the brink of disintegration. After the Revolution of 1789 the royal family is moved from Versailles to the Tuileries. Fersen devises an escape for the family and their young children. The failed attempt leads to a more grueling imprisonment, and the family spends its excruciating final days captive before the King and Queen meet the guillotine.

Grieving his lost love in his native Sweden, Fersen begins to sense the effects of the French Revolution in his homeland. Royalists are now targets, and the sensuous world of his youth is fast vanishing. Fersen is incapable of realizing that centuries of tradition have disappeared, and he pays dearly for his naïveté, losing his life at the hands of a savage mob that views him as a pivotal member of the aristocracy. Scion of Sweden's most esteemed nobility, Fersen came to be seen as an enemy of the country he loved. His fate is symbolic of the violent speed with which the events of the eighteenth century transformed European culture. Expertly researched and deeply imagined, The Queen's Lover is a fresh vision of the French Revolution and the French royal family as told through the love story that was at its center.

My thoughts: Ever since I heard that this novel was being published, I couldn't wait to read it, so when I saw that it was featured on TLC Book Tours, I begged for the chance to review it. As anyone who reads this blog know, I share a birthday with Marie Antoinette, so I'm a sucker for a novel that is about her or features her as a character. I can say that I was not disappointed. The Queen's Lover is one of the best historical fiction books that I have read this year. Told from the viewpoints of Axel von Fersen and his sister Sophie, the novel offers a unique take of the story of Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution. Of course, von Fersen is not a disinterested observer, due to his deep love not just for Marie Antoinette but for the whole French royal family.

The beauty of this novel is that we not only get to know Marie Antoinette through Axel's eyes, but we also get to know Fersen on a deeper level than I've seen in a novel before. One of the more enjoyable things about the novel is that we get to experience not just the French court but the Swedish court of Gustavus III Adolphus. The differences between the extravagance and the decadence of the French court and the austerity of the Swedish Court is striking, although there are similarities in that both the Swedish King and Marie Antoinette loved theatricals and balls!

There is going to be a certain segment who are going to dislike this novel without even reading it, simply because it suggests that Marie Antoinette and Axel Fersen consummated their relationship, that the book is called The Queen's Lover. However, the book is so much more than the love affair, platonic or not between the two. The book is more about how swiftly events moved in the late 18th century, and how one wrong move tumbled the whole house of cards. The style of the writing will also not be for everyone, it's a little bit old-fashioned, more reminiscent of the late Jean Plaidy's novels.

Of course there are events in the book that Fersen and Sophie didn't experience first hand. Remarkably du Plessix Gray manages to make those sections just as thrilling as those that Fersen experienced first hand. The last section of the book is the saddest as Fersen tries to find some meaning in his life after the tragic events of 1793. Fersen isn't afraid to reveal to the reader his flaws, his need for women, his aloofness that leads to his downfall.

Verdict: A deeply heartfelt and tragic novel about some of the most tumultous events in the 19th century

Lincoln Center Festival 2012 | Émilie

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:01:00 +0000

Sometimes you find the most interesting things in the oddest places. For example, I was perusing Time Out New York at work today (because I was bored) when I saw an ad for The Lincoln Center Festival. What really caught my eye was the title Emilie. For some reason, I just assumed that it had to be about one of my favorite Scandalous Women, Emilie du Chatelet. And I was right.

Here is the description:

Émilie is a modern one-singer, multimedia tour de force about an extraordinary woman: French Enlightenment thinker Émilie du Châtelet. Émilie was many things: the brilliant physicist who first defined kinetic energy; mistress to Voltaire, among other luminaries; a prodigious mathematician and the translator of Newton’s Principia Mathematica; the author of a treatise on the happiness of women; a pioneer of what are now called financial derivatives, which she invented in part to pay off a $1 million debt to card sharks accrued in an unlucky night gambling—all achieved before she died in childbirth in 1749, when she was 42.

Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho is one of the most influential composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Her signature style was largely influenced by her years studying in Paris at IRCAM, where she learned unique techniques to blend live music with electronic effects. Here, she uses elevated speech and soaring melodic arcs to convey her heroine’s rumination on life and the universe, from the tiny new life inside her womb to the vastness of interstellar space, as Émilie struggles with her place in a universe larger than most of us ever contemplate.

World-renowned soprano Elizabeth Futral sings the title role with elegant depth and extreme technical skill, singing almost continuously for the entire 75-minute work. Futral unfolds her character under the direction of Marianne Weems, best known as the artistic director of The Builders Association, whose work exploits the richness of contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater.

Doesn't it sound fascinating? I totally have to buy a ticket to see this.

May Book of the Month - Overseas by Beatriz Williams

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Wed, 02 May 2012 00:40:00 +0000

Title: Overseas

Author: Beatriz Williams

Publisher: Penguin

Pub Date: May 10, 2012

What it's about: A passionate, sweeping novel of a love that transcends time.

When twenty-something Wall Street analyst Kate Wilson attracts the notice of the legendary Julian Laurence at a business meeting, no one’s more surprised than she is. Julian’s relentless energy and his extraordinary intellect electrify her, but she’s baffled by his sudden interest. Why would this handsome British billionaire—Manhattan’s most eligible bachelor—pursue a pretty but bookish young banker who hasn’t had a boyfriend since college?

The answer is beyond imagining . . . at least at first. Kate and Julian’s story may have begun not in the moneyed world of twenty-first-century Manhattan but in France during World War I, when a mysterious American woman emerged from the shadows of the Western Front to save the life of Captain Julian Laurence Ashford, a celebrated war poet and infantry officer.

Now, in modern-day New York, Kate and Julian must protect themselves from the secrets of the past, and trust in a true love that transcends time and space.

What are they saying:

"A sensational debut! OVERSEAS is a heady blend of wit, charm, and romantic sizzle, all wrapped around a tantalizing mystery that will constantly surprise and delight readers."
—Anne Fortier, New York Times-bestselling author of Juliet

“History meets romance meets suspense! Compelling, original and wildly romantic, Beatriz Williams’ prose is stunning and the plot edge-of-your-seat gripping. OVERSEAS is an absolute triumph—I loved every page.”

—Tilly Bagshawe, New York Times-bestselling author of Adored

"Overseas is one of those addictive stories that grabs you and doesn't let go. Beatriz Williams has an amazing storytelling talent."

- Lauren Willig, author of the Pink Carnation series

Scandalous Women says: OVERSEAS is the epic love story that Titanic wanted to be, if James Cameron weren't such a hack. Julian and Kate join the pantheon of romantic leads, next to Elizabeth & Darcy, Scarlett & Rhett, Jane & Rochester.

About the Author

Beatriz Williams A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA from Columbia, Beatriz spent several years in New York and London hiding her early attempts at fiction, first on company laptops as a corporate and communications strategy consultant, and then as an at-home producer of small persons. She now lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:19:00 +0000

Mr. Harvey Weinstein
The Weinstein Company
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014

　
Dear Mr. Weinstein,

Congratulations on your recent Best Picture Oscar for The Artist. This makes the second year in a row that The Weinstein Company has won Best Picture! Not to mention sweeping the Best Actor and Actress awards as well. Along with Oscar nominations for Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh, this has been a banner year for The Weinstein Company. Why waste time making sequels to Shakespeare in Love, and Bridget Jones’ Diary not to mention Scream 5? It’s time The Weinstein Company add another classy production to hopefully add more Oscar Gold. I’m talking about making a biopic about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.

The 19^th Century is totally hot right now, not to mention poets. John Cusack’s starring as Edgar Allen Poe in The Raven soon and did you see Bright Star? I’m telling you that The Barretts of Wimpole Street is even better than Bright Star because nobody dies! The love story of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning has all the hallmarks of a Weinstein production, British accents, gorgeous costumes, a tyrannical father, handsome young leading man, an invalid heroine, a secondary love story between Elizabeth’s sister Henrietta and her suitor, a dramatic elopement, and finally a happily ever after ending in Italy. There’s even an adorable cocker spaniel. But most important is the poetry. Robert fell in love with Elizabeth before he even met her because of her poetry.

The story has been filmed twice before, once in 1934 with Norma Shearer as Elizabeth and Frederic March as Robert (the film was nominated for Best Picture), and then in 1957 by the same director with Jennifer Jones, Bill Travers and Sir Ralph Richardson as Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, Elizabeth’s father (there was also a TV version made in Britain in the 1970's) but don‘t let that deter you! I’m sure that in the hands of a strong director and writer, this story can inspire modern audiences as well.

Screenplay:
A great film needs a great script. I suggest that you get Emma Thompson to write the screenplay. Remember she won an Academy Award for another 19^th century adaptation, Sense and Sensibility. If she’s not available, then let Julian Fellowes have a shot at it but he‘s kind of hit and miss. I love Downton Abbey, Gosford Park and Vanity Fair but his 4 hour production of The Titanic made me long for James Cameron’s version and I hated that movie.

Director:
It would be awesome if Ang Lee could direct the film. He did such a great job with Sense and Sensibility. Sam Mendes would also be a good choice, it’s time he tried the 19^th century on for size. Or how about Mira Nair? I really liked her direction of Vanity Fair. Another good choice would be Tom Hooper, Roger Michell (who directed Persuasion), or Stephen Daldry. Under no circumstances hire Joe Wright because he’ll completely cock-it-up, I can just see a donkey or a raccoon running through the parlor in the Barretts home or Robert showing up at all hours of the day and night.

Now here comes the important bit, casting the leads. Who plays Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning can make or break your film. I’ve given this a lot of thought.

Our Heroine: Elizabeth Barrett was 39 at the time she met Robert Browning in 1845. She’d been an invalid for at least 15 years, suffering from a variety of ailments for which she’d been taking laudanum and later morphine. According to Wikipedia, At about age 15 Barrett Browning began to battle with a lifelong illness, which the medical science of the time was unable to diagnose. All three sisters came down with the syndrome although it lasted only with Elizabeth. She had intense head and spinal pain with loss of mobility. She is described as having "a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face; large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam".

The role requires an actress who blossoms once she meets Robert, defying her father in order to marry the man she loves, even though she knows that not only will she be disinherited, but that she may never see her father again. My top choice for the role would be Sally Hawkins who was so fabulous in Mike Leigh’s Made in Dagenham, as well as Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Other good choices would be Emily Watson, Ann-Marie Duff (who has played both John Lennon’s mother, Margot Fonteyn and Elizabeth I), Helena Bonham Carter, Samantha Morton, Jennifer Ehle, or Kate Beckinsale (when was the last time she had a really great role and I‘m not talking Underworld or Underworld 3).

Emily Watson

Sally Hawkins

Ann-Marie Duff

Please don’t, whatever you do, cast Keira Knightly. I know she’s become the automatic go-to-girl for period films, whether she’s right for the role or not, but just say no! Other actresses to avoid Gwyneth Paltrow, Anne Hathaway, Julia Roberts, Hilary Swank, or Charlize Theron.

Robert Browning in his later years

Our Hero: Robert Browning, 33, was the son of a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England making £ 150 pounds a year. He was mainly educated at home, and left University after one year. He refused a formal career and ignored his parents' remonstrations, dedicating himself to poetry. He stayed at home until the age of 34, financially dependent on his family until his marriage. His father sponsored the publication of his son's poems. Browning traveled widely, joining a British diplomatic mission to Russia in 1834, later journeying to Italy 1838 and 1844. By the time Robert meets Elizabeth, he’s not only a published poet but also a man of theatre, having had several plays produced on the English stage.

I see Tom Hiddleston in the role of Robert Browning. He’s proved with his work in War Horse and The Deep Blue Sea, that he can handle both period pieces as well as serious dramatic roles. He also went to Eton has a double-first from Cambridge, so he definitely can handle the poetry. If Hiddleston is not available or interested, than another good choice might be James McAvoy (McAvoy is married to Ann-Marie Duff so if you cast them, you have the added publicity bonus of them playing two of the greatest poets of the 19th century who are also married).

The villain: Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, 50’s. Every story, particularly has to have a villain (think of Billy Zane in Titanic) or a third person in the love triangle. In this film, it is Elizabeth’s father who vowed to disinherit his children if they married. I leave it up to the screenwriter to fill-in the psychological reasons for wanting to keep his children single forever. The original film suggested that Barrett liked Elizabeth a little too much. I don’t know about that but the Victorians were a strange bunch. My top choices for this role would be Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons.

Jeremy Irons

Alan Rickman

Of course, I'm only a non-fiction author, what do I know about film? I do know what I like, and I think that if the Weinstein Company produces a film about Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, they will have a surefire Oscar contender!

Who do you think would be good casting for The Barretts of Wimpole Street?

Sugartime - The Scandalous Romance of Sam Giancana and Phyllis McGuire

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 03:51:00 +0000

Love makes strange bedfellows doesn’t it? How else to explain the relationship between a short, middle-aged mobster and the lead singer of a wholesome singing group singing songs in perfect harmony? Was it there shared Midwestern backgrounds (he was from Chicago, she was Middletown, OH)? Retired FBI agent William Roemer, who tracked Giancana for years could never figure out what the attraction was between the two. "It's amazing that it ever took place," says Roemer, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1995 to promote the HBO film about the unlikely romance. "He was just as ugly as he can be and he wasn't a cultured, refined man. I saw no redeeming human qualities about the guy. We put microphones in his headquarters and listened to him talk all the time. She had everything. She had beauty. She had money. Yet, she fell in love with this gangster. I could never figure it out. I have talked to her several times and she's a lady. She's refined and cultured. She's intelligent and articulate. He was just the opposite." Whatever it was, it kept gossip columnists in a tizzy in the 1960’s as the lovebirds criss-crossed the country from Palm Springs to Atlantic City, and the capitols of Europe.

So how did these two crazy kids meet? Why in Sin City of course, Las Vegas, Nevada to be exact. Word is that Giancana first caught sight of McGuire during her engagement with her sisters at the Desert Inn. Giancana was 52 and a widower, Phyllis was not quite thirty. Like a many, Phyllis had succumbed to the lure of the tables, racking up a hefty marker. Giancana went to Moe Dalitz, who ran the Desert Inn and asked how much she owed. Moe supposedly told her that Phyllis owed $100,000 (Sam's daughter Antoinette Giancana in her autobiography MAFIA PRINCESS claims that it was more like $16,000, still a hefty debt). Giancana is said to told Moe to “eat it,” meaning to forgive the debt. The gesture, along with a hefty dose of expensive flowers, seems to have done the trick. Sam and Phyllis soon fell in love. Years after Sam’s death, Phyllis admitted to writer Dominick Dunne that the two greatest losses in her life were her father and Sam.

Sam Giancana (1908 - 1975) was one of the Mafia’s most notorious and high profile figures in the 1950‘s and 60‘s. Born in Chicago to Sicilian immigrants, he’d clawed his way from a juvenile street crew up to the top of the Mafia food chain. In the film and book The Godfather, Johnny Fontane asks Vito Corleone to get him out of his studio contract. That scene was supposedly based on Giancana who allegedly forced band leader Tommy Dorsey into letting Frank Sinatra out of his contract early, so that he could expand his career. By the 1960’s he’d already been involved with Judith Campbell Exner,using her as a go-between himself and JFK, and recruited by the CIA along with other mobsters to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro. Along the way, Giancana married and fathered three daughters.

While Giancana was going to the school of hard knocks and learning how to make license plates during a stint in prison, Phyllis McGuire (1931-) was growing up in Ohio along with her two older sisters, Christine and Dorothy. Their mother Lillian, a minister at the Miamisburg First Church of God, let them sing in church as kids. When Phyllis was 12, they signed a contract with Coral Records. That same year, they appeared on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, where they performed for seven years. They made numerous TV appearances on all the popular variety shows of the period. Their recordings of "Sincerely," "Picnic," and “Sugartime" all sold more than one million copies.

At first Sam and Phyllis were able to keep their romance a secret, despite Giancana popping up wherever the sisters performed. The FBI knew about the affair but chose not to expose the relationship because they knew the publicity would be detrimental to Phyllis’s career. When Sam and Phyllis were photographed together at a nightclub in London in 1962, the picture was flashed around the world. The press, not to mention the public, were outraged that Phyllis could associate with a known mobster. Trying to do damage control, Phyllis gave a tearful interview to the powerful gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen swearing that she would never see Sam again which was a total lie. The publicity put a damper on her career for a time but there were other problems besides public opinion. While Giancana wasn’t faithful, he expected Phyllis to be. He suspected her of cheating on him with comedian Dan Rowan of TV’s Laugh-In. He even went so far as to try and get his CIA contact Robert Maheu to bug her hotel room to get proof.

There was also the Fed’s who’d been after Giancana for awhile. And now Bobby Kennedy was Attorney General of the United States, making it his mission to go after the mob, which was ironic since Giancana allegedly helped JFK get elected. The FBI trailed the couple were ever they went. ‘We lock-stepped him," Roemer recalls. "He was the only guy in the history of the FBI who we lock-stepped. I would stay half a step behind him and half a step to his left. No matter where he went, I would stay that distance from him. If he went to dinner I would go with him. If he went to the restroom, I would go right up to the next urinal. We got into some situations.” They bugged Giancana’s homes, listening in on the couple’s most intimate moments. In 1961, the FBI bugged their hotel room and knew that they would be stopping over in Chicago on their way to New York. At O'Hare airport, Giancana was kept at bay while the FBI talked to McGuire to see if she would cooperate with them instead of being subpoenaed to appear in front of a federal grand jury. Phyllis agreed to do what they asked, and they took the subpoena back, but she never kept her end of the bargain.

The mob wasn’t too happy about Sam’s relationship with Phyllis. Not only because they thought he wasn’t minding the store, but because it drew too much attention. In the end the relationship couldn’t last. Giancana was sentenced to jail for refusing to testify in front of a grand jury. As a result, Giancana was deposed as boss of the Chicago outfit. After his release, he fled to Mexico. After about seven years of exile, Giancana was arrested by Mexican authorities in 1974 and deported to the United States. After agreeing to be a witness in the prosecution of organized crime in Chicago, Giancana was murdered by an unknown assailant in his Chicago home while he was cooking dinner in 1975.

Phyllis McGuire, now in her eighties, lives in Las Vegas where she is said to be working on her memoirs. She and her sisters retired in 1968 but have done occasional public appearances since reuniting on stage 1986.

RMS Titanic on Scandalous Women Radio

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 19:52:00 +0000

Since today is Easter, there will be no broadcast of Scandalous Women radion next Sunday. The show will return next week at the usual time of 4:30 p.m.

Next Sunday marks the 100th anniverary of the sinking of RMS Titanic after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City. The disaster caused the deaths of 1,514 people in one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history. At the time of her maiden voyage, she was the largest ship afloat. To mark the occasion, Scandalous Women welcomes special guest Evangeline Holland of Edwardian Promenade to discuss one of the surviors of the Titanic, the fashion designer Lucile aka as Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon.

Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon

Review: Mr. Churchill's Secretary

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:55:00 +0000

Title: Mr. Churchill's Secretary

Author: Susan Elia MacNeal

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Publication date: 4/3/2012

Bought by the Reviewer (aka moi)

Pages: 384

Synopsis: London, 1940. Winston Churchill has just been sworn in, war rages across the Channel, and the threat of a Blitz looms larger by the day. But none of this deters Maggie Hope. She graduated at the top of her college class and possesses all the skills of the finest minds in British intelligence, but her gender qualifies her only to be the newest typist at No. 10 Downing Street. Her indefatigable spirit and remarkable gifts for codebreaking, though, rival those of even the highest men in government, and Maggie finds that working for the prime minister affords her a level of clearance she could never have imagined—and opportunities she will not let pass. In troubled, deadly times, with air-raid sirens sending multitudes underground, access to the War Rooms also exposes Maggie to the machinations of a menacing faction determined to do whatever it takes to change the course of history. Ensnared in a web of spies, murder, and intrigue, Maggie must work quickly to balance her duty to King and Country with her chances for survival. And when she unravels a mystery that points toward her own family’s hidden secrets, she’ll discover that her quick wits are all that stand between an assassin’s murderous plan and Churchill himself.

My thoughts: I picked up this book yesterday at Barnes and Noble and finished it, oh about a half-hour ago. I hadn't planned on buying a book at B&N unless it was a research book since I'm a little poor right now and books are a luxury compared to say food and electricity, but I just couldn't help myself, it called out to me. You know how that is, before I knew it, I was at the cash register handing over my membership card. I didn't even NOOK it but bought the actual physical book.

Thank god I did because this is an awesome book. I'm a sucker for books set during WWII probably because my dad fought in the war. Unlike Susan Elia MacNeal who came up with the idea for Mr. Churchill's Secretary by visiting the Cabinet War Rooms, I wept through them. This book is chock-full of details about the period, and a fascinating cast of supporting characters. I now have a girl crush on Maggie Hope. British born but raised in America (a Wellesley graduate to boot, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), Maggie is brave, bold, brilliant and brash. She's not afraid to speak her mind, but she's also not without her flaws, she's prickly and stubborn, a little too certain that she's right at times. Probably because she grew up always being the smartest girl in a room. She has a passion for mathematics, and just wants to be able to use her skills for the war effort, not be stuck as a typist, even if she's typing for Winston Churchill.

Some of the best scenes in the book were Maggie's one-on-one scenes with the PM, with just a few deft strokes, MacNeal manages to convey the boundless and unrelenting energy of Winston Churchill. The book is both a fast-paced thriller with just enough surprises to keep the reader gasping, as well as an intimate portrait of Britain at war, scene through the eyes of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. The book is incredibly well-written, immensely lyrical. One of the best scenes in the book is the scene where the PM, Maggie and her friends are watching the Luftwaffe drop bombs on London from the roof of Number 10. I couldn't put this book down and I will be counting the days until the next book in the series Princess Elizabeth's Spy comes out.

Of course, there are a few quibbles, I wouldn't be me if I didn't get a bit nic-picky. The Duke of Windsor was Edward VIII not Edward VII who was his grandfather (MacNeal gets it right in the sequel), Odile is not the swan in the 2nd act of Swan Lake, it is Odette. I don't want to spoil the plot but there were a few too many cooincidences that any soap viewer would pick up on. Once would have been fine but it happens three times which is three times too much.

The back cover copy compares the book to Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series which I haven't read but to me it reminds me more of Kathryn Miller Haine's Rosie Winter series which is also set in WWII and features an American heroine.

Verdict: If you like a little history with your mystery, this book is for you.

What Jane Austen Ate: Supersizers Go Regency

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:31:00 +0000

I am hopelessly addicted to the British show Supersizers Go. One of my favorite episodes is Supesizers Go Regency. If you've wondered what Jane Austen, Emma Hamilton or Mary Wollstonecraft actually ate, you have to watch this episode. I particularly liked Sue's reaction when she tastes the jugged hare! I think you can learn a lot about periods of history by examining what they actually ate. After watching these shows, I'm kind of happy that we live in the era we do! Maggots in cheese? Ewww!

Seriously they need to do an American version of this show. I would love to see Giles and Sue tuck into one of the enormous meals that Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell used to eat at Delmonico's or Rector's. Or imagine recreating the first meal that the Pilgrims ate with the Indians or a Ante-bellum Southern barbeque. The origins of Dr. Pepper and Coca-Cola, Kellogg's corn flakes, Dr. Graham's crackers, all 19th century inventions that we still drink today. What Dolley Madison served at the White House or the Wedding breakfast of Grover Cleveland and Frances Folsom. The possibilities are endless.

What do you think? Would you watch an American version of Supersizers Go?

Tonight on American Masters: Margaret Mitchell & Harper Lee

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:53:00 +0000

Tonight on PBS, American Masters is featuring 2 new documentaries, one on Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, entitled Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel. The second is entitled Harper Lee: Hey, Boo. Check your local listings for the times.

You can watch a preview of Margaret Mitchell here. According to the web-site "Margaret Mitchell was no ordinary writer. The one book she published in her lifetime – Gone With the Wind – sold millions of copies at the height of the Great Depression in America and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, 75 years ago. With over 30 million copies sold to date, it is one of the world’s best-selling novels. Equally impressive, the film adaptation of Gone With the Wind broke all box office records when it premiered in 1939, and received 10 Academy Awards.But who was the creator behind two of the world’s greatest lovers – Scarlett and Rhett – and the tumultuous romance that left book readers and film viewers wondering about their final fate together in one of storytelling’s most talked about cliffhangers? She was certainly no ordinary woman either. "

Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel engages leading authors, historians, biographers and people with personal connections to Mitchell to reveal a complex and mysterious woman who experienced profound identity shifts in her life and who struggled with the two great issues of her day: the changing role of women and the liberation of African Americans. Interviewees include friend Sara Mitchell Parsons, Carolyn Equen Miller (daughter of Mitchell’s lifelong arch rival Anne Hart Equen), Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides), Pearl Cleage (What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day), Molly Haskell (Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited), Darden Asbury Pyron (Southern Daughter/The Life of Margaret Mitchell and the Making of Gone With the Wind), and John Wiley (Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind). Roberts shot extensive reenactments for the film based on Mitchell’s personal letters, which trace Mitchell throughout her life, starting at age three, that show how Mitchell’s upbringing influenced Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel also examines Gone With the Wind’s cultural impact. For some the work was a racial lightning rod, while for others it proved a model for survival.

Harper Lee: Hey Boo: One of the biggest bestsellers of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is the first and only novel by a young woman named Nelle Harper Lee, who once said that she wanted to be South Alabama’s Jane Austen. Lee won the Pulitzer Prize and became a mystery when she stopped speaking to press in 1964. More than 50 years after its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages worldwide, still sells nearly one million copies each year and is required reading in most American classrooms, making it quite possibly the most influential American novel of the 20th century. The 1962 film version, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, won a trio of Academy Awards.

Harper Lee: Hey, Boo chronicles how this beloved novel came to be written, provides the context and history of the Deep South where it is set, and documents the many ways the novel has changed minds and shaped history. For teachers, students or fans of the classic, Hey, Boo enhances the experience of reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

Containing never-before-seen photos and letters, Hey, Boo features insightful interviews with friends and an exclusive interview with Lee’s sister, Alice Finch Lee (age 99 at filming), who share intimate recollections, anecdotes and biographical details for the first time, offering new insight into the life and mind of Harper Lee, including why she never published again. Oprah Winfrey; Tom Brokaw; Pulitzer Prize-winners Rick Bragg, Anna Quindlen, Richard Russo, Jon Meacham, and Diane McWhorter; and civil rights leader Andrew Young address the novel’s power, influence, and popularity, and the many ways it has shaped their lives.
I, for one, can't wait to see both of these documentaries!

Scandalous Review: The Kings' Mistresses by Elizabeth Goldsmith

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:48:00 +0000

Title: The Kings' Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin

Author: Elizabeth C. Goldsmith
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Publication date: 4/3/2012

Pages: 288

From the inside cover: The Mancini Sisters, Marie and Hortense, were born in Rome, brought to the court of Louis XIV of France, and strategically married off by their uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, to secure his political power base. Such was the life of many young women of the age: they had no independent status under the law and were entirely a part of their husband’s property once married.

Marie and Hortense, however, had other ambitions in mind altogether. Miserable in their marriages and determined to live independently, they abandoned their husbands in secret and began lives of extraordinary daring on the run and in the public eye. The beguiling sisters quickly won the affections of noblemen and kings alike. Their flight became popular fodder for salon conversation and tabloids, and was closely followed by seventeenth-century European society. The Countess of Grignan remarked that they were traveling “like two heroines out of a novel.” Others gossiped that they “were roaming the countryside in pursuit of wandering lovers.”

My thoughts: I've been waiting for a long time for someone to write a biography of two of the Mancini sisters, so I was excited to get a copy of Elizabeth Goldsmith's new book The Kings' Mistresses which will be published this Tuesday. The book's title is a bit misleading, there is no evidence that Marie Mancini was Louis XIV's mistress, although he contemplated marrying her before being convinced by Mazarin, her uncle, that he needed to make a dynastic marriage to his cousin the Spanish Infanta Maria Theresa.

The book is a more than just a biography of the lives of these two Scandalous Women. It is also a fascinating look at the realities of marriage for women in the 17th century. Although both Marie and Hortense were well born, they had very little rights when it came to marriage. Both marriages were not successful. She was married off at the age of 15 just before her uncle died. Hortense's husband was obsessed with her to the point of madness, he forced her to travel with him up and down the country visiting his various properties, he restricted her movements, and who she could see. While keeping her a virtual prisoner, he then systematically began spending all the money that her uncle had left to them. In 6 years, Hortense had given birth to 4 children, and she had enough of her husband. She attempted to seperate from him using the courts, but she found herself thwarted and frustrated at every opportunity by her husband to the point that she felt that she had no choice but to flee the country.

Meanwhile Marie married an Italian prince. In the beginning her marriage seemed to be going better than Hortense's. Marie scandalized Roman society by freely roaming around the city, and taking part in theatrical productions. After giving birth to 3 sons, Marie wanted seperate bedrooms, but her husband , like Hortense's wasn't used to being thwarted. When Marie began to suspect that he was trying to kill her, she too fled first to France and then to Spain.

Both women spent years leading nomadic lives, trying to stay one step of their husbands and the courts. They published their memoirs to share their stories. This was highly unusual, very few aristocratic women published their memoirs, if they wrote them at all, they were privately published or circulated amongst their friends and family. It was an incredibly bold move for the time, and helped to engender public sympathy for the women. It also served to strengthen the attitudes of those men and women who feared independent women. In an age before newspapers, it is incredible how the story of the Mancini sisters spread across Europe. Their memoirs were translated into many languages, leaving a remarkable record of women's lives. It is not hard to sympathize with the sisters, particularly given just how awful their husband's were. It is shocking the lengths that both men went to try and bring their wives to heel, everything from keeping their children from them to keeping them impoverished. Hortense's in particular was just insane, even his children later took him to court to try and recover their inheritances that he had squandered.

Goldsmith's book is incredibly well-researched and written, if a little too academic at times. The book is filled with details from previously unpublished letters, it is most effective when Goldsmith allows the women to tell their stories in their own words. The sisters come across as bold, witty, and highly intelligent, larger than life characters but also women who in the end paid a high price for their need for independence. There are a few typos in the galley that I read, which will hopefully be corrected when the book is published. For example Goldsmith states that Henrietta Maria was Louis XIV's cousin when she was actually his aunt, James I was Charles II's grandfather not his father, at one point she states that it is 1665 and then 1675. And there were some strange omissions, not once does she discuss Cardinal Mazarin's relationship to Anne of Austria nor does she mention that one of the reason's that Louis XIV became more religious as he got older and revoked the Edict of Nantes was his relationship with Madame de Maintenon. Despite these flaws, the book is well worth reading.

Verdict: Highly recommended

Scandalous Women Radio: Hortense de Beauharnais, Queen of Holland

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:44:00 +0000

Scandalous Women is pleased to welcome author Lauren Willig this week to talk about the scandalous life of Hortense de Beauharnais (1783-1837). The only daughter of the infamous Josephine and step-daughter to Napoleon, Hortense was married off to his brother Louis and made Queen of Holland. But she was in love with another man, the Comte de Flahaut, rumored to be the illegitimate son of Talleyrand. During the Hundred Days, her support of her step-father meant that she was banished from France. She died at the age of 54 in 1837. She never lived to see her son Napoleon become the Emperor of the French as Napoleon III.

Please tune in to Scandalous Women, tomorrow, April 1 at a special time, 6:00 p.m.

A native of New York City, Lauren Willig has been writing romances ever since she got her hands on her first romance novel at the age of six. Three years later, she sent her first novel off to a publishing house—all three hundred hand-written pages. They sent it back. Undaunted, Lauren has continued to generate large piles of paper and walk in front of taxis while thinking about plot ideas.

After thirteen years at an all girls school (explains the romance novels, doesn’t it?), Lauren set off for Yale and co-education, where she read lots of Shakespeare, wrote sonnet sequences when she was supposed to be doing her science requirement, and lived in a Gothic fortress complete with leaded windows and gargoyles. After college, she decided she really hadn’t had enough school yet, and headed off to that crimson place in Cambridge, Massachusetts for a degree in English history. Like her modern heroine, she spent a year doing dissertation research in London, tramping back and forth between the British Library and the Public Records Office, reading lots of British chick lit, and eating far too many Sainsbury’s frozen dinners.

By a strange quirk of fate, Lauren signed her first book contract during her first month of law school. She finished writing "Pink Carnation" during her 1L year, scribbled "Black Tulip" her 2L year, and struggled through "Emerald Ring" as a weary and jaded 3L. After three years of taking useful and practical classes like “Law in Ancient Athens” and “The Globalization of the Modern Legal Consciousness”, Lauren received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. For a year and a half, she practiced as a litigation associate at a large New York law firm. But having attained the lofty heights of second year associate, she decided that book deadlines and doc review didn't mix and departed the law for a new adventure in full time writerdom.

Fascinating Women: Edith Minturn Stokes

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:16:00 +0000

The paintings of John Singer Sargent have gone in and out of fashion over the years. I, for one, am an unrepentant Sargentaholic! One of my favorite things to do is to go to the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art to visit my two favorite paintings of his, Madame X, and this portrait of Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes, also known as Edith Minturn Stokes. What do I love about this painting? Where do I start! I love the vitality of the subject, she just glows with health and energy. And then the slight smile on her face. She looks fresh and alive and most of all modern. Even her outfit reflects her independence, it's as if she's game for anything. Love the hands on the hips!

Edie's brother Robert once described her as 'fierce.' As a toddler, one of the games that she liked to play was to try and escape the parasol her mother held over her on the beach, running shrieking to the waves. 30 years old when this portrait was painted, she'd already had a bit of notoriety when the sculptor Daniel Chester French sculpted her for Chicago's Columbian Exposition as the face of the Republic.

The portrait was a wedding present from a family friend, James Scrimser. The couple had been on an extended honeymoon in Paris when they decided to visit London to have the portrait done. It was 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Jubilee. According to Jean Zimmerman's new mini-biography about Edith and her husband Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes entitled Love Fiercely, A Gilded Age Romance (Hougton Mifflin 2012), Edith initially wore a blue evening gown for her portrait. But after five weeks of sittings, Sargent wasn't satisfied with the painting so he scrapped it. It wasn't until Edith and her husband showed up at Sargent's studio in Chelsea in London after walking across the city that he knew how he wanted to paint her, in her every day clothes. When the painting was first exhibited, Edith's outfit caused comment. Her simple shirtwaist and skirt, mannish jacket and tie, plus the straw boater sitting on her hip reflected a more modern woman, one who rode a bicycle, possibly worked for a living as a teacher or a journalist.

One of the many things that I love about the painting is the fact that her husband stands behind her, almost as an afterthought (Sargent had initially thought of painting a Great Dane standing beside her). He stands with his arms folded, in the shadows. It's clear from the painting that Edith is the more extroverted partner in the marriage, and that her husband is quite happy and even a little amused to even be in the painting. Perhaps he was just amazed that he'd finally gotten Edith to marry him!

Both Edie and her husband Newton were contemporaries of Edith Wharton. In fact they could have stepped out of the pages of one of her novels. Theirs was a world filled with balls, mansions, summer 'cottages' and European vacatons. Both came from old money, at one time Newton's grandfather Anson owned most of the Murray Hill neighborhood in New York. The house he grew up in now houses the Morgan Library. Edith's paternal grandfather built the world's fastest clipper ship. Her maternal ancestors were equally illustrious. Her Josephine Shaw Lowell was involved with the settlement movement in New York, and her uncle was Robert Gould Shaw who led the 54th Massachusetts regiment depicted in the film Glory. The couple, both born in 1867, grew up together on Staten Island where the Minturns and the Stokes had homes before the hoi polloi moved in and made it unfashionable. Edith's father Robert suffered a reversal of fortune briefly, but luckily for Edith she was spared Lily Bart's fate. Although her debut was much simpler than the usual debutantes, in a few years, the Minturn fortunes had been restored.
Both Edith and Newton were 28 when they got married in 1895. After spending years abroad studying architecture in Paris, over New Years 1894/95, Newton finally turned his attention to his childhood friend. But he had no game! On a sleigh ride in the country, he tried to propose but Edith cut himn off at the pass. With his tail between his legs, Newton went back to Paris to lick his wounds. It was only when her sister sent him a letter hinting that he should try again, conveniently letting him know exactly where they were going to be, that Newton came back to the States. On the way, he stopped off in London for a new wardrobe! At the Minturn summer home in Canada, he pressed his suit again and this time he was accepted. Still, he wasn't sure if the marriage was actually going to take place until he saw his bride walk down the aisle. Unusually for the time, the marriage took place 2 months after the engagement. Clearly Newton wanted to get his bride down the aisle as soon as possible!

But once Edith made up her mind to marry him, she never looked back. The couple were both interested more in improving the lives of others than spending their time attending balls. Newton plied his trade as an architect (among his buildings are St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University, and the University Settlement House), as well as attempting to create decent housing for the poor. However, he's most known for a 6 volume tome called the Iconography of Manhattan Island. Edith became involved with the New York Kindergarten Association, and also ran a sewing school for immigrant women. Unable to have children, the couple adopted a little girl from England. Oh, and did I mention that they bought a house in England and had it taken down and then shipped across the Atlantic?

Edith seems to have suffered from chronic hypertension which often left her an invalid which greatly curtailed her work. In her sixties, she suffered a series of strokes, which left her almost completely paralyzed. Her husband would spend hours reading to her from her favorite books, or playing her favorite music. She finally passed away at the age of 70 in 1937. Her husband lived on for another 7 years until he passed away in 1944. Their ashes are buried together at St. Paul's Chapel. Interesting factoid, Edith's great niece was Edie Sedgwick, the 1960's and Warhol icon, who was named after her. Her other niece (daughter of her sister Gertrude who married Amos Pinchot) was Rosamond Pinchot Gaston.

Other painters such as Cecilia Beaux (see below) painted Edith but they are more conventional portraits.

and then there is this one painted by Fernand Paillet (owned by the New York Historical Society), painted in 1892 when Edith was 25.

While both are beautiful, I don't think they come close to the Sargent portrait. That woman I'd like to get to know, to hang out with. The woman in the other portraits is someone that you might see at a tea party and have a pleasant conversation with. They don't have the vitality that Sargent's portrait does.

And the Winner is......................

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:30:00 +0000

The winner of the March Madness Giveaway thanks to random.org is

WENDY

Wendy, I will be sending you an email to get your address. And I want to thank everyone for entering the giveway. Please give coming back and reading the blog as I bring you more Scandalous Women over the next few months! And maybe a few more giveaways!

Skittles - The Last Victorian Courtesan

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:55:00 +0000

Recently a friend and I were talking about Jesse James and his affair with the stripper Skittles. The lovely and talented Hope Tarr thought we were talking about another Skittles, Catherine Walters, the last Victorian courtesan. I had totally forgotten about Skittles, probably because she was less flamboyant than some of the other Victorian courtesans. Skittles wasn't necessarily interested in being famous, unlike Cora Pearl, who seemed to court notoriety.

Imagine if there were trading cards for courtesans! I imagine that the one for Skittles would look this.

Name: CatherineWalters

Nickname: Skittles or Skitsie to her intimates.

Born: June 13, 1839 in Liverpool at No. 1 Henderson Street, in a drab and dirty street near the docks.

Died: 1920

Parents: Edward Walters, a custom employee, and Mary Ann Fowler

Siblings: 3^rd of 5 children.

Religion: Baptized a Catholic

Appearance: Small and slender, with grey-blue eyes and chestnut hair.
She dressed inexpensively at first but with great taste, wearing clothing that was modest and subdued. Her riding habit was cut to so perfectly to the contours of her body that there was speculation that she wore nothing underneath it. If Cora Pearl were Versace and Vivienne Westwood, than Catherine would be more Chanel and Givenchy.

Traits: Exceptional beauty, practical nature, and riding skills, acquired while working in a livery stable. She was also effervescent, outspoken, direct and bawdy. Her naturalness was one of her chief attributes as a courtesan, she remained affectionate and sympathetic. “She had the most capacious heart I know and must be the only whore in history to retain her heart intact,” wrote journalist Henry Labouchere. Never once did she seek to revenge herself on her lovers after the affair was over. There would be no autobiography detailing her lovers such as the ones penned by Cora Pearl or Harriette Wilson.

One of her most unusual traits was her ability to bind her lovers to her not only for the night or a for a few months but for life. One of her biographers, Henry Blyth, wrote that she possessed the quality of being loved. She also never attempted to bankrupt her lovers as did Cora Pearl and some of the other grandes horizontales of the 19^th century.

Occupation: Courtesan

Lovers: Marquess of Hartington, Prince of Wales, Achille Fould, Lord Fitzwilliams, Wilfred Scawen-Blunt, Aubrey DeVere Beauclerk

Background: Not much is known about Catherine’s early life in Liverpool, what her childhood might have been, where or how long she might have been educated. Her father was heavy drinker, so whatever money he made probably was spent on drink. One of her lovers, Wilfred Scawen-Blunt wrote in his diaries that Catherine’s mother died when she was four and that she had been sent to a convent school from which she had run away. Nor where she first learned to ride, one of the great passions of her life. One story is that she worked for a time as a bare-back rider in a traveling circus. Perhaps she saw one as a child and fell in love with the horses and wanted to ride. The most credible story is that she had access to the local stables and that she taught herself to ride by helping out in the stables and by exercising the horses.

For Catherine, riding was her entry into a better world than the one she came from. While other courtesans traded on their beauty, Catherine could outride and outhunt most men. Catherine appears not to have had the Victorian female aversion to sex, which boded well for her future profession. She was selective, choosing her lovers more because she enjoyed their company than for what they could do for her. She became the mistress of George, Lord Fitzwilliam at the age of 16. He set her up in London, when the relationship ended, he made her a generous settlement of £ 300 a year and a lump sum payment of £ 2,000. By this time she was known as ‘Skittles’ probably a reference to the fact that when she was young she worked setting up skittles in a local bowling alley, the Black Jack Tavern near the docks.

At the age of 19, she became the mistress of Spencer Compton Cavendish, Lord Hartington nicknamed ‘Harty-Tarty.’ He was the eldest son of one of the premiere Dukes in the kingdom, the 7^th Duke of Devonshire. A shy and immature young man of 26 when they met, he was to become a major figure in Liberal politics and was considered by many as Gladstone‘s natural successor. By 1859, when she was 20, she was installed in a lovely little house in Mayfair, horses with a life settlement of an annual sum of £ 500 which the family continued to pay even after Hartington‘s death in 1908. Her relationship with Hartington lasted about four years and seems to have been greatly affectionate on both sides. The greatest passion that she and Hartington shared, and the only one they were able to indulge in publicly together, was hunting. While her lover occupied himself with his duties in Parliament, Catherine had lessons with a governess.

Catherine is also said to have worked as one of the celebrated ‘horse-breakers’ who paraded in Hyde Park from the hours of 5 to 7, where she first attracted widespread attention. In 1861, the future poet laureate Alfred Austin wrote a poem entitled ‘The Season’ which mentioned Skittles by name. When the painting "The Shrew Tamed," by Edwin Landseer was exhibited in 1861, it was assumed that she was the model for the womanin the painting, although it was also claimed that it was a woman named Annie Gilbert. Skittles had arrived!

Her horsemanship, for which she was passionately admired for, meant that she found acceptance on the hunting field that she was denied in other social situations. Stories about her daring abound, both on and off the field. She once cleared the 18 foot water fence at the National Hunt Steeplechase, on a bet, after three other riders tried and failed. She won £ 100 for her efforts. While the men on the hunting field were accepting of her, their wives were another story. When she rode with the Quorn, the wife of the Master of the Quorn who was the Earl of Stamford, took exception to Catherine’s presence. This despite the fact that the Countess had been a gamekeeper’s daughter and possibly a circus performer. Catherine left with good grace, but she is supposed to have remarked, ‘Why does Lady Stamford give herself such airs? She’s not the Queen of our profession, I am.”

After her relationship with Hartington ended, Catherine decided to move to Paris during the 2^nd Empire of Napoleon III for a fresh start. Here she established herself as one of that select band of grandes cocottes. In Paris, rivals such as Cora Pearl, dyed their hair yellow or pink, entertained their paramours whilst lying in solid onyx bath tubs with taps of gold, and considered nakedness shameful only if one was not covered in diamonds. Catherine preferred to dress like a lady, she had a naturalness that must have seemed like a breath of fresh air in the hothouse atmosphere of Paris. “There was something special, very select and reminiscent of London and Hyde Park,” Zed wrote, When she appeared in the avenue de l’Imperatrice, driving herself with two beautiful sparkling pure-blooded horses, followed by two grooms on horseback in splendid and elegant uniform….every head turned, and all eyes were on her.”

One of her many admirers was the young diplomat and poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840-1922) who was 23 when they met. Blunt fell deeply in love with her to the point of obsession. He was not her only lover which sent him into paroxysms of jealousy. The affair ended in a public scandal when the Ambassador to Paris, Lord Crowley discovered that while Blunt had been wooing his daughter Feodore to the point of being considered her ‘unofficial‘ fiancé, he’d been off sleeping with Skittles. Despite the family’s expectations, Blunt couldn’t bring himself to propose. Blunt was dismissed from his position at the embassy. After their relationship ended, Blunt never loved another woman the way that he loved Skittles. She was the inspiration for his narrative poem ‘Esther.’ When he married, he determined to marry for money, capturing the heart of Lady Anne King-Noel, the daughter of Ada, Countess of Lovelace and the granddaughter of Lord Byron. After several years, Blunt and Skittles resumed their friendship, corresponding until her death.

After the fall of the 2^nd Empire, Skittles returned to London, where she divided her time between hunting and entertaining at her Sunday afternoon tea parties, which were attended solely by men including the future Prime Minister William Gladstone. She also had a brief affair, with Bertie, the Prince of Wales. After their liaison ended, the Prince also paid her an allowance, and whenever she was ill, he sent his own doctor to attend her. Once when he thought she was dying, he sent his private secretary to collect and destroy over 300 hundred letters that he had sent her.

In 1872, Skittles moved to 15 South Street, Park Lane, which was to be her residence for the rest of her life. At a certain point in the 1880’s, she took up with Alexander Horatio Baillie. Although she called herself Mrs. Baillie for a time, they were probably never married. Her final love affair was with Gerald de Saumarez, who she had first met when he was a schoolboy of 16 and she was 40. When she died at the age of 81, she left her estate to him. In her later years, she became something of a recluse. Crippled by arthritis in her later years, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 5, 1920. She’s buried in the Franciscan monastery in Sussex. Her estate was worth £2764 19s. 6d at her death.

Sources:

Henry Blyth: Skittles: the last Victorian courtesan, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1970

Katie Hickman: Courtesans, Harper Collins, 2003

Cyril Pearl: The girl with the Swansdown Seat, Frederick Muller Ltd. London, 1955

Scandalous Women Presents the other Elizabeth Mahon

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:06:00 +0000

Recently I was contacted by a producer from NPR about appearing on one of his shows. As we were talking me mentioned that when he'd Googled me, another Elizabeth Mahon came up. One who played for the All-American Girls Professional Balseball League during World War II. How cool is that? The other Elizabeth 'Lib' Mahon was born the same year my mother was, 1919, in Greenville, South Carolina. Like me, Elizabeth was a Scorpio, born on November 18th.

This is her baseball card. She played outfield and second base, and batted and pitched right-handed. Truthfully, I suck at sports, particularly baseball. I think I hit the ball once in softball one summer at day camp, and let's not talk about how I played in the outfield. Lucky for me, when we played softball in gym, none of us could really hit the ball, so I spent most of my time in the outfield doing absolutely nothing! So I find it amazing that someone I share a name with was a professional athelete!

Lib played baseball from 1944 through 1954, first for the Minneapolis Millerettes and then for the Kenosha Comets and the South Bend Blue Sox. The 1992 film A League of Their Own was a fictionalized account of the women who played pro-ball during the war. The film rejuvenated interest in the AAGPBL which is why we now know so much about players like Lib. According to Wikipedia, her father was a huge baseball fan, as was her older brother. However, while her brothers played sandlot ball, Lib and her sisters played basketball. It wasn't until she was in high school that she played softball, field hockey and soccer.

She went to Winthrop College where she received a degree in phys ed in 1942. After teaching for a year, she moved back to her hometown of Greenville, where she went to work for the post office. At Winthrop, Lib became good friends with Viola Thompson, who shared her passion for baseball. In 1944, both Viola and Lib were seen by a talent scout who offered them invitations to try-out for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in Chicago. Players were to paid the princely sum of $60 a week which was a vast sum of money back in the '40's. Both women decided to try out and both were lucky enough to score jobs for the inaugural season.

Lib's first team, the Minneapolis Millerettes, didn't last long in the league. Lucky for her, she was spotted by the manager of the Kenosha Comets who traded 3 players for her mid-season. Her first year, she hit .211 with 38 runs batted in and a career-high three home runs in 107 games. She was traded to the South Bend Blue Sox where she had a hitting streak in her first year which spanned 13 games. In 1952, Lib quit playing, taking a job as a teacher at a public school in South Bend. It was a smart decision, the novelty of women playing professional baseball had worn off. Lib earned a Master's Degree at Indiana University. She remained a teacher and guidance counselor until her retirement in 1981.

She lived in South Bend until her death at 81. She was posthumously inducted into the South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame in 2005. The AAGPBL has a permanent display at The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Elizabeth Mahon is enshrined there along with the rest of the women in the league.

For more information:

AAGPBL Official Site

Sabina Spielrein: The Forgotten Woman of Psychoanalysis

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:08:00 +0000

She overcame extreme mental illness related to childhood abuse and entered medical school while she was still in psychiatric treatment. A professional paper she wrote was arguably the basis for one of Freud's best known theories. And she was one of the earliest pioneers of child psychoanalysis but today, thanks to the film A Dangerous Method, she's known more for being the lover of Carl Jung. But there is so much more to Sabina Spielrein. She was also the first woman to write a psychoanalytic dissertation, and one of the first female psychoanalysts but her contributions were lost to history for many years. Join me as we explore the torrid and tragic life of Sabina Spielrein, one of the forgotten pioneers of psychoanalysis on Sunday at 4:30 p.m. on Scandalous Women radio.

Sources:

Kerr, J. (1993) A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein.. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

March Books of the Month: The Thinking Girl's Treasury of Dastardly Dames plus a Special Giveaway

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:06:00 +0000

Happy March everyone and do I have a treat for you! March's Books of the Month are from Goosebottom Books’ second series, The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Dastardly Dames, which explores the lives of some of the most fascinating women in history, each of whom got labeled with a terrible nickname. While satisfying tweens' tastes for something a little darker, the series also appeals to its readers’ powers of analysis and sense of fairness—asking if these women’s nicknames were just. Each woman’s story is presented in rich historical and cultural context, with gorgeous original gouache paintings by Peter Malone, as well as photographs of artifacts, reproductions of archival paintings, maps, and timelines.

Just have a gander at page from Marie Antoinette: 'Madame Deficit.' Isn't it gorgeous and a perfect way to introduce your pre-teen daughter (or son) to some of the world's most dastardly dames. I'm not sure that I agree with including Marie Antoinette amongst Mary Tudor, Catherine de Medici, Cixi, Cleopatra and Agrippina. Personally, I would have included her in Goosebottom book's other series, The Thinking Girl's Treasury of Real Princesses. Still, I had fun reading these books and reacquainting myself with some of my favorite royal women.

Goosebottom books have generously sent me a copy of three of the books in their Dastardly Dames series, Marie Antoinette, Mary Tudor and Catherine de Medici. It seems a shame to keep them all to myself. Since March is Women's History Month and since Scandalous Women is about to celebrate 1,000,000 page views, I thought it only fitting that we have a little giveaway here on the blog. I can't believe I haven't given anything away since November!

One lucky winner will receive all three books, Catherine De Medici, Mary Tudor & Marie Antoinette from The Dastardly Dames series. Here are the rules for the giveaway. This giveaway is open solely to my American readers! The contest runs from today through Friday, March 23rd.

1. Leave your name and email in the comments. Email is very important so that I can contact you for your address.
2. If you are not a follower and become one, you get an extra entry
3. If you tweet about the giveaway, you get an extra entry.

Good luck!

Ettie Annie Rout (1877 - 1936) Pioneer for Safe Sex

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:45:00 +0000

Last week, I wrote about the pioneering efforts of Margaret Sanger to make birth control safe and available to all women in the United States during the early 20th century. Well, on the other side of the globe, another pioneering woman, Ettie Annie Rout (1877 – 1936) was preaching the necessity for safe sex during World War I. Like Sanger, Ettie was reviled and lauded in equal parts. While H.G. Wells called her 'that unforgettable heroine', due to her 'safe sex' campaign, she became persona non grata in her own country.

Although she was born in Tasmania, Ettie’s family immigrated to New Zealand when she was 7, settling in Wellington where her father opened a plumber's business. At the top of her class in school, Ettie won a scholarship to high school, but she had to turn it down, when her father’s business failed and the family moved to Woodville to live with relatives. After taking shorthand and typing classes, she became one of the first government-appointed shorthand writers working in the Supreme Court. Her job gave her a rare insight into a wide range of social issues. By 1904 she had set up her own typing business as well as working as a journalist. Ettie soon gained a reputation as a cyclist, vegetarian, and freethinker, who wore what, was considered unorthodox dress for the time; short skirts, men's boots, and sometimes pants. Shocking! She was also a committed socialist, who campaigned for equal pay, health issues and labor issues.

During the First World War, Ettie set up the New Zealand Volunteer Sisterhood in spite of government opposition. When she arrived in Egypt, she immediately became aware of the high rate of venereal disease among the soldiers. Ettie saw this as a medical problem which should be approached like any other disease. She recommended not only issuing prophylactic kits but also inspecting the brothels, and tried to persuade the New Zealand Medical Corps officers to adopt this view, with little success.

Realizing the venereal disease problem was still bad and that the NZMC had not adopted safe-sex measures, Ettie went to London to push it into doing so. She created her own safe-sex kit, which contained calomel ointment, condoms and Condy's crystals (potassium permanganate). She sold the kits to soldiers at the New Zealand Medical Club, which she set up near the New Zealand convalescent hospital in Essex. When a New Zealand newspaper published her letter where she suggested free safe-sex kits and brothel inspections, it caused an outcry. A deputation of women asked the prime minister to put an end to the medical club. But her letter had the desired effect, the defense minister told the New Zealand general in charge of troops in England to do whatever he thought necessary to lower the venereal disease rate.

By the end of 1917 the army had adopted her kit, distributing it to soldiers going on leave, but Ettie received no credit. Undaunted, she went to Paris where she became a one-woman sexual welfare service for soldiers. As troop trains arrived from the front, Ettie would stand on the platform, greeting soldiers with a kiss on the cheek, handing out cards recommending brothels that she had personally inspected. For her work, the French decorated her with the Reconnaissance Française medal, but back in New Zealand, newspapers could be fined 100 pounds, just for publishing her name. After the war, Ettie moved to England and married Fred Hornibrook in 1920, where she wrote a number of books, among them, Safe Marriage, which was banned in New Zealand, but was published in Britain and Australia. In her book Ettie encouraged women to own their own bodies and take responsibility for their own sexual health. She linked exercise and sex, arguing in books like Sex and Exercise, that exercise would enhance women's sex lives. Sort of a New Zealand Dr. Ruth!

Ettie died of a self-inflicted overdose of quinine in 1936, after her only return visit to New Zealand, after the breakup of her marriage. She was buried in the graveyard of the London Missionary Society church. In her obituary she was called Ettie Rout 'one of the best known of New Zealand women' but they did not say what she was best known for, implying that it was her typing speed.

During her lifetime, Ettie’s work polarized public opinion. While a French doctor regarded her as the 'guardian angel of the ANZACs', a bishop, speaking in the House of Lords, called her 'the most wicked woman in Britain'. Others accused her of trying to make 'vice' safe. Many of Ettie’s ideas which had seemed out there at the time, from ‘safe sex’ to pelvic floor exercises, are now mainstream, but her work and her legacy were forgotten in her own country until the late twentieth century, when the AIDS epidemic meant the same battle for safe-sex had to be fought all over again. The AIDS clinic in Christ Church, New Zealand is now named after her.

The above clip is from a 1983 program called "Pioneer Women" which stars Karl Urban, who later went on to star in Lord of the Rings.

The Anne Boleyn Files - The Anne Boleyn Collection

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:02:00 +0000

Almost two years ago, I had the privilege of being part of the first ever Anne Boleyn Experience, organized by Claire Ridgeway of The Anne Boleyn Files. I was fortunate enough to get to know Claire and to share our mutual love of Anne Boleyn. When Scandalous Women came out, Claire did me the honor of reviewing the book. Now it's my turn to share with my readers that Claire has just published her first book, The Anne Boleyn Collection. To celebrate she's put together a week-long virtual book tour, where all sorts of goodies are up for grabs, for next week.

Here’s the schedule:-

•5th March The Tudor Tutor – Claire will be answering questions and giving away a signed copy of “The Anne Boleyn Collection” and a Tudor themed prize over at Barb’s Tudor Tutor blog. A winner will be selected at random from entrants.

•6th March Let Them Grumble – Guest article on Anne Boleyn for Libby over at her Let Them Grumble blog. Claire will also be offering a signed copy of her book and a pair of Anne Boleyn earrings from “The Tudors” range. See Libby’s page on the 6th for details.

•7th March Anne Boleyn: From Queen to History – Over at Sarah’s Anne Boleyn: From Queen to History blog, Claire will be writing a guest article on the Boleyns and offering a signed copy of the book plus an Anne Boleyn B necklace or A necklace. All you have to do to be in the running for this give away is to either like the Anne Boleyn: From Queen to History Facebook page or leave a comment on her guest article on the 7th March.

•8th March Queen Anne Boleyn Facebook page – On the 8th March Claire will be answering your questions and giving away a signed copy of “The Anne Boleyn Collection” plus an Anne Boleyn scarf over at Sylwia’s Queen Anne Boleyn Facebook page. Sylwia is collecting questions at the moment and will be selecting a winner from those who “like” her page.

•9th March On the Tudor Trail – Claire will be rounding up the week with an interview over at Natalie’s On the Tudor Trail blog. She will also be giving away a signed copy of the book and an Anne Boleyn wine stopper.

Here are just a few of the exciting articles that you will find in the collection:

Should Anne Boleyn be pardoned and reburied as Queen?
Anne Boleyn and "The Other Boleyn Girl".
Did Anne Boleyn dig her own grave?
The Six Wives' stereotypes - are they right?
Did Anne Boleyn commit incest with her brother?

The book is currently available on Amazon.com but not yet for the Nook.

Scandalous Women Reviews: Anne of Hollywood by Carole Wolper

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:17:00 +0000

Title: Anne of Hollywood
Author: Carole Wolper
Publisher: Gallery Books

Publication date: 1/24/2012
Pages: 352

Overview:

“I wasn’t prepared for the enemies. Had I been as gorgeous as a supermodel, or as rich as an heiress, or an actress with an Oscar to my credit, people would still not be happy that I had Henry’s attention, but they’d understand. What they resented was the king coupling with a ‘nobody.’”

Skirts may be shorter now, and messages sent by iPhone, but passion, intrigue, and a lust for power don’t change. National bestselling author Carol Wolper spins a mesmerizing tale of a twenty-first-century Anne Boleyn.

Wily, intelligent, and seductive, with a dark beauty that stands out among the curvy California beach blondes, Anne attracts the attention of Henry Tudor, the handsome corporate mogul who reigns in Hollywood. Every starlet, socialite, and shark wants a piece of Henry, but he only wants Anne. The question is: can she keep him?

Welcome to a privileged world where hidden motives abound, everyone has something to sell, and safe havens don’t exist. With her older sister Mary, a pathetic example of a royal has-been, Anne schemes to win her beloved Henry in the only way that gives a promise of forever—marriage. Success will mean contending with backstabbing “friends,” Henry’s furious ex-wife, and the machinations of her own ambitious family, and staying married to a man who has more options than most and less guilt than is good for either of them will take all her skill. Anne will do anything to hold on to the man—and the lifestyle—she adores, however, even if sticking your neck out in Hollywood means risking far worse than a broken heart. With Henry’s closest confidante scheming against her, and another beautiful contender waiting in the wings, Anne is fighting for her life. Can she muster the charm and wit to pull off her very own Hollywood ending?

My thoughts: When I first heard about this book, I thought, 'You have to be kidding me! Anne Boleyn in Hollywood?' Still there was something about the idea that intrigued me. Perhaps it was the fact that this mash-up didn't turn Anne into a werewolf, a vampire or a succubus! So I downloaded a sample of the book onto my NOOK, and gave it a quick read. What I read made me want to read the whole book, but I confess, I took the book out of the library instead of buying it. A girl has to economize!

The idea of translating the Tudors into contemporary Hollywood shouldn't work but it somehow does. Henry VIII in Wolper's version is Henry Tudor who owns a studio, a web-site ala The Huffington Post, as well as other interests. He's referred to as "the King" of Hollywood by various characters in the book. But Henry is not content with just being the Kingpin of Hollywood, he's seeking the Governorship of California. All of the usual suspects that most readers will be familiar with are here, Thomas Cromwell as been reinterpreted as Theresa Cromwell, Henry's right hand woman, Cardinal Wolsey is now crooked money manager Carl Wolsey, Catherine is Catherine Aragon, the daughter of a wealthy power-broker Ferdinand, she and Henry have a daughter Maren who is boarding school. As the book opens, they are wrangling not just over the divorce but over the property settlement. Catherine, obsessed with Henry, has become a devout Catholic, who pops pills to get through her day. Mary is a former model turned party girl who failed to snag Henry, so she becomes a pot-smoking hippie. All the Boleyn hopes are now pinned on Anne. See daddy Thomas Boleyn, unlike the successful courtier of Tudor Times, is an entertainment lawyer, who failed when he started his own firm. Now he creeps around the fringes of power with his face pressed against the window, trying to get in. George is a bisexual actor, who gets a job on a cop show thanks to Henry. Jane Boleyn is now Lacy, who hates Anne because George loves her so much. And then there's Jane Seymour who is now a jewelry designer and a friend of Theresa's.

The novel is written in an easy, breezy style from the points of view of various characters, mainly Anne (in the first person), Theresa, and a hanger-on Cliff Craven. Anne is a likeable narrator, who genuinely seems to love Henry for himself, not just for what he can do for her family. Theresa Cromwell feels threatened by Anne, particulary when she takes over Henry's philanthropic foundation, which was Theresa's pet project. There are two big weaknesses in this novel, the first is that Wolper fails to make the reader understand why everyone, apart from Catherine and Lacy, hates Anne so much. She doesn't really throw her weight around, everyone agrees that she is vibrant, sexy, and charismatic. Unlike the real Anne, she doesn't confront Henry with his infidelities, she seems to roll with the punches. She's a freelance writer, but unlike Lacy, she doesn't use her position as Henry's wife to snag a cushy job. Nor is she really one of those Hollywood wives who spend most of their times lunching. We don't really see Anne doing much of anything, apart from giving birth to Elizabeth, and hoping to get pregnant with a male heir for Henry. Apparently even in 2012, a daughter isn't good enough.

The other weakness in the novel is that Henry remains off-stage throughout most of the book. He's a cipher, a Howard Hughes figure but without the OCD. It's unclear how he became so rich, or powerful. After awhile, I began to lose interest in the story, or even care how Anne was going to get her comeuppance in this version of her life. Clearly, she's not going to be executed but somehow banished from her glitzy lifestyle. I've read Jackie Collins novels with more pizzazz and punch than this book which is really a shame because it's an intriguing idea.

Verdict: Only for real fans of Anne Boleyn, or readers who love reading about Hollywood.

Scandalous Women Radio presents: Mary Seacole (1805 - 1881)

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:57:00 +0000

Tune in this Sunday, February 26th to Scandalous Women over at Blog Talk Radio where I will be talking about one of the most remarkable women of the Victorian Era: Mary Seacole.

The Times of London called her a heroine, Florence Nightingale called her a brothel-keeping quack, and Queen Victoria's newphew called her Mammy. But her name was Mary Seacole, one of the most eccentric and charismatic women of the Victorian era. Desperate to help out in the Crimean War, she was refused, but she traveled under her own steam, to help out. For more than a century after her death, the life of Mary Seacole was forgotten, but thanks to new research and biographies, her story has now been told. In 2004 Mary Seacole was voted top of a list of 100 of the greatest Black Britons and was again recognised by the public for her achievements during the Crimean War.

Sources:

Jane Robinson - Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became A Heroine of The Crimea (2004)

For more information:

Mary Seacole at the Florence Nightingale Museum
Mary Seacole

Margaret Sanger - Saint or Sinner?

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:33:00 +0000

“No woman can call herself free who doesn’t own and control her own body” – Margaret Sanger.

Almost 40 years after her death, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) is still a subject of controversy in the United States. While some people see her as a savior, the woman who created the first women’s birth control clinic in the U.S., others see her as a racist, a promoter of promiscuity and a killer of unborn babies. Given the political climate in the U.S. where the far right seeks to dismantle her entire life’s work, I thought it was a good time to take a look back at her legacy. Type Margaret Sanger’s name into “Google” and you will find just as many web-sites that revile Sanger as you will those that admire her. The clinic that bears her name on the Lower East Side of Manhattan is picketed daily by anti-abortion activists who completely ignore the good that Planned Parenthood has done in its 80 years of existence, providing free and low-cost healthcare to women who either don’t have health insurance or cannot afford it. From a personal standpoint, when I was unemployed and had no health insurance, Planned Parenthood provided me with a freely yearly gynecological exam, plus they steered me to a clinic where I could receive a free mammogram.

For Margaret Sanger the cause of birth control was a personal crusade. At the age of twenty, Margaret watched her mother Anne die of tuberculosis at the age of 50, worn out after 18 pregnancies in 22 years of which 11 children survived. During her work as a visiting nurse on the Lower East Side in New York, Sanger was asked repeatedly for help by the poor immigrant women she was treating for any way to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Lacking any means of contraception, many of these women, when faced with yet another mouth to feed, resorted to back-alley abortions. After one of her patients died due to a self-induced abortion, Sanger made it her life’s mission to making reliable contraception information available to women.

But there was a huge obstacle to her mission, namely the Comstock Act, a federal statute that made it a criminal offense to send information about contraceptives through the mail, labeling it obscene. In these early years, Sanger considered birth control a free-speech issue. She believed that the only way to change what she considered an unjust law was to break it. In 1914, she started publishing a monthly newsletter The Woman Rebel. She came by her rebellious nature honestly. Her father Michael, an Irish Catholic immigrant turned atheist, was a supporter of unions and education for women. Sanger coined the term "birth control" and began to provide women with information and contraceptives. She was arrested over 8 times during her career, starting in 1915 when she was arrested in 1915 for sending diaphragms through the mail and again in 1916 for opening the first birth control clinic in the country for which she spent 30 days in prison. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League, and spent the next three decades campaigning to bring safe and effective birth control into the American mainstream.

But there was still more work to be done as far as Sanger was concerned. She had been dreaming of a "magic pill" for contraception. Tired of waiting for science to turn its attention to the problem, Margaret Sanger found Gregory Pincus in 1951, a medical expert in human reproduction who was willing to take on the project. Their collaboration would lead to Enovid, the first oral contraceptive, in 1960. When Sanger passed away in 1966, after more than 50 years of fighting for the right of women to control their own fertility, she died knowing she had won the battle.

Margaret Sanger is a classic example of an admired public figure who is also a flawed human being. She would probably be the first person to admit it. Sanger devoted her life to legalizing birth control and making it universally available for women. At the same time, her crusade took her away from her children and contributed to the end of her first marriage. No one denies that Sanger had a prickly personality, that she was impatient, and that she often didn’t given credit to women such as Emma Goldman, who were advocating for birth control long before Margaret took up the cause. However, there are several issues that people find hard to overcome when it comes to Sanger.

Problem number one for Sanger admirers: Her support of Eugenics which is nothing short of appalling. Eugenics believed in the survival of the fittest to a certain extent, meaning that the deaf, the mentally or physically handicapped shouldn’t be allowed to breed. This concept got interpreted as a justification for racism, and eugenics was incorporated into the Nazi regime. Sanger believed in what was called “negative eugenics” including compulsory segregation or sterilization for the profoundly retarded, advocating coercion to prevent from procreating. However, Sanger wasn’t an advocate for euthanasia for the unfit. She denounced the lethal Nazi eugenics program.

Then there is the idea that Sanger was an advocate for abortion. From the beginning she advocated contraception rather than abortion. Sanger had seen the damage done to women by back-alley abortions. She believed that birth control should be available to all women; particularly the poor, because limiting the number of children would help mothers provide a better quality of life for their families, especially when resources were limited. She also opposed abortion because she felt that it was the taking of life. In her autobiography she clearly wrote, “We explained what contraception was, that abortion was the wrong way no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way.” She also wrote in her book, Woman and the New Race, “While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.” It wasn’t until the after her death, that the reproductive rights movement expanded its scope to include abortion rights as well as contraception.

Was Margaret Sanger a racist? Her critics say a big fat YES. They point to a letter that Sanger wrote a letter to a supporter named Clarence Gamble in the 1930’s when The Birth Control Federation played a supervisory role the Negro Project, which sought to deliver birth control to poor African-Americans. The letter stated “we do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” This single quote has been used by her detractors to prove that she was a racist. Last year, former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, claimed that Planned Parenthood, the visionary global movement she founded nearly a century ago, is really about one thing only: “preventing black babies from being born.” Sanger wasn’t immune to the criticism that birth control would pose a threat to the African American community. From the beginning, she wanted to involve the African American community in the formation of birth control clinics in the South, to make sure the black community didn’t associate The Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns. In 1930, she had opened a clinic in Harlem where both the staff and the board was made up entirely by African-Americans. The clinic received the approval of many prominent African-American leaders including W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP. Her critics also point out that she gave several speeches to women of the Klu Klux Klan (I have no explanation for that one). Does this mean that she was a racist? Only Sanger could tell us for sure.

Did Sanger promote promiscuity? Her work promoting birth control certainly meant that sex was no longer just for pro-creation purposes. Sanger for a time believed in ‘free love’ as did many of the bohemians that she hung around with in Greenwich Village during the pre-World War I period. Sanger adopted the view that sex was a powerful, liberating force. Of course this doesn’t mean that Sanger expected everyone to go out and shag their hearts out. She also believed that both sex and birth control should be discussed openly.

Despite her flaws, Sanger still remains an iconic figure in the struggle for women’s reproductive rights.

For more information on Sanger, take a look at the NYU Margaret Sanger Papers Project

Scandalous Women Presents: The Two Ellens

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth Kerri Mahon) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:30:00 +0000

I had mentioned a few months ago the possiblity of a Scandalous Women podcast or radio show. Well, on this Sunday, February 19th, will be the first episode of Scandalous Women on BlogTalk Radio. I and my special guest, author Leanna Renee Hieber, will be talking about The Two Ellens of Victorian Theatre, Ellen Terry, and Ellen Ternan. You tune in live to listen at 4:30 p.m. ET or catch up with the show later in the week.

Ellen Terry was one of the most famous actresses in the 19th century; her partnership with Sir Henry Irving thrilled theatregoers for years. Ellen Ternan, also an actress, was the mistress of author Charles Dickens. Since this February marks the 200th anniverary of Dickens's birth, it seemed fitting to discuss one of the more significant women in his life.

About Leanna Renee Hieber:

Author, actress and playwright Leanna Renee Hieber graduated with a BFA in Theatre, a focus in the Victorian Era and a scholarship to study in London. She adapted works of 19th Century literature for the stage and her one-act plays have been produced around the country. Her novella Dark Nest won the 2009 Prism Award for excellence in the genre of Futuristic, Fantasy, or Paranormal Romance. Her debut novel, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, landed on Barnes & Noble's bestseller lists, won two 2010 Prism Awards (Best Fantasy, Best First Book), and is currently in development as a musical theatre production with Broadway talent on board. DARKER STILL: A Novel of Magic Most Foul, first in Leanna's Gothic Historical Paranormal saga for teens (Sourcebooks Fire), hit the Indie Next List as a recommended title by the American Booksellers Association. Her books have been translated into several languages. Her short fiction has been featured in anthologies Candle In the Attic Window and Wilful Impropriety: Tales of Society and Scandal. A member of SFWA and RWA, Leanna is a co-founder of Lady Jane's Salon Reading Series in Manhattan and was named the 2010 RWA NYC Chapter Author of the Year. A member of performers unions AEA, AFTRA and SAG, Leanna works often in film and television. A devotee of ghost stories and Goth clubs, she resides in New York City with her real-life hero and their beloved rescued lab rabbit.