Happy Memorial Day

I hope everyone is having a good Memorial Day weekend! I have to make some brownies and some deviled eggs for a cook-out this evening, but in the meantime I'm thinking about my grandparents and other friends who have gone (the pic is my grandfather, who served in WWII! Isn't he handsome?), and am on my way to put flowers on their resting places.

Sunday Historical Etsy Find

Today's find--a lovely Regency-looking necklace from Vintagechickdesigns! This would look gorgeous with a Regency evening gown...

Heroine of the Weekend One

Our heroine this weekend is La Grande Mademoiselle, born on May 29, 1627!

Anne Marie Louise d'Orleans, petite-fille de France, duchess of Montpensier (plus a slew of other titles), was called just "Mademoiselle" until the birth of Mademoiselle d'Orleans, daughter of Louis XIV's brother, after which she became "La Grande Mademoiselle," was born in the Louvre to Gaston duc d'Orleans, brother of Louis XIII, and Marie de Bourbon, duchess of Montpensier, who was daughter and only heiress of Henri de Bourbon, and who passed on her title to her daughter. She died soon after her daughter's birth, and she had little contact with her father as he was always in trouble with schemes to seize the throne of France. As a child, she was told she would probably be married to Louis XIV (11 years her junior) and thus gain the throne herself, but that never worked out (nor did other schemes to marry her to foreign royalty, including Charles II of England), and she was known for her temper and willfulness.

When she was 21, the rebellion of the nobility against the child king known as the Fronde broke out. Since she bore great enmity to the Queen Mother's advisor Cardinal Mazarin, she sympathized with the rebels and joined their cause. She herself took the city of Orleans on March 27, 1652. She wrote the tale in her memoirs of how, having failed to gain entry through the gates of the city, some boatmen on the banks of the Loire outside the city offered to break open a gate on the quay and passed her through the hole into the city, which surrendered to her. Soon after she had to retreat to Paris, where she commanded the Bastille and the adjoining part of the city walls. On July 2, 1652 there was the battle of the Faubourg Saint Antoine, between the Frondeurs commanded by Conde and the royal troops. Mademoiselle saved Conde and his troops by giving orders for the gates under her command to be opened and for the cannons of the Bastille turned on the royalists. After the battle she stayed at the Hotel de Ville and played mediator between the two opponents.

But her moment of military glory came at a high price. From 1652 to 1657 she was exiled from Court, as was her father, who installed himself at the Chateau de Blois, and they were always mistrusted by Louis XIV. During her exile she lived on her many estates, especailly at the Chateau de Saint-Fargeau in Burgundy, an inheritence from her mother, and directed many renovations and extensions. In 1657, the king granted her a pardon and she returned to Court. There were more marriage schemes for her, but she was way past the age when most princesses are wed, so she concentrated on intellectual pursuits. Until she met a nobleman named Antoine Nompar de Caumont, duc de Lazun, and embarked on an affair with him.

In 1670, after many years as a couple, Mademoiselle asked the king's permission to marry Lazun. Permission was granted, but then later rescinded, and not long after the duc was imprisoned in Pignerol. 10 years would pass before she could buy his release in 1681. By then he was nearly 50, and she was 54. In 1684 she broke up with him and never saw him again, though the reason is not entirely known. After this, she retreated from public life and lived quietly at her Paris residence of the Luxembourg Palace, where she died on April 5, 1693. She was buried with other royals at Saint-Denis.

Sources:
Vincent J. Pitts, La Grande Mademoiselle at the Court of France
Vita Sackville-West, Daughter of France: The Life of La Grande Mademoiselle
Francis Steegmuller, The Grande Mademoiselle

Portrait Friday

On May 27 in 1883, Tsar Alexander III of Russia was crowned! Read more about the event here...

Things I Love Thursday

What I love today--finding unexpected fun things on YouTube! I had read about a short, Elizabethan-set indie called "Maze" that Keira Knightley made (for free! Just because she thought it was interesting! I love that. You can read more about the project here). And I found a one-minute clip of it yesterday. It looks great, and I hope she'll decide to make a longer film set in the same period soon.

Reviews and Giveaways

The Season (a fabulous site for historical romance lovers!) has posted reviews of To Deceive a Duke AND To Kiss a Count! Go there and comment for a chance to win

My fave review quote: "This book is perfect for reading on a sunny spring day, just be prepared to daydream about handsome Italian Counts and hot kisses in darkened hallways"

Riskies Tuesday

I'm launching the last "Muses of Mayfair" book over at the Riskies today (and having a giveaway!). Come and join the fun...

Hottie Monday

It's the finals of Dancing With the Stars tonight, yay! I confess it took me longer to get into this season than usual. The gap between the good dancers and the, well, not so good was so wide it didn't seem quite fair, and I still don't like Brooke and her wooden questions and ugly dresses. But now the 3 finalists are SO good I don't know who to cheer for the most (though I'm leaning toward Evan, thanks to that rockin' paso doble last week!). Let's enjoy some Dancing hotness this Monday...

Sunday Historical Etsy Find

This week's find--an Anne Boleyn hair clip, only $8 from funckyhairclips! (They have all the other wives, too...)

Heroine of the Weekend

Our heroine this weekend is artist Mary Cassatt, born on this day in 1844! She was actually my first introduction to Impressionist art--on a school trip to a museum when I was in the third grade, I was totally captured by two of her paintings there and did a report on her life for the class. I've loved her work ever since!

Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania, one of 7 children in a well-to-do family (her father, Robert Simpson Cassatt, was a stockbroker and land speculator, and her mother Katherine Johnson came from a banking family). She began her formal schooling in Philadelphia at age 6, and grew up in a household that valued travel as a part of education. The family spent 5 years in Europe where Mary saw London, Paris, and Berlin, learned German and French, and had her first lessons in drawing and music. She saw the work of French artists Courbet, Ingres, Delacroix, and Corot at the Paris World's Fair in 1855.

For females of the time, art was considered a very nice skill to have, an "accomplishment" that showed how refined and ladylike they were and increased their worth on the marriage market. Mary began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the age of 15, but her family never considered that she would (gasp!) want to become a professional artist. She herself was impatient with the lessons and the attitude of the male teachers and students toward their female counterparts. She declared "There was no teaching" there; the female students couldn't use live, nude models and mostly worked from plaster casts and did copy work.


In 1866, she moved to Paris with her mother as chaperone. Women could not attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at this time, so she studied privately with artists, including Jean-Leon Gerome, Charles Chaplin, and Thomas Couture, and augmented her studies with daily copy work in the Louvre. In 1868 her painting A Mandoline Player, (one of only 2 paintings from these early years that can now be documented as hers) was accepted at the Paris Salon. This was a time of radical change on the Paris art scene, as artists like Courbet and Manet tried to break away from the rigidly mandated style of the Salon, and the Impressionist movement was forming.

Cassatt would be a part of this, but when the Franco-Prussian War threatened she went back to Pennsylvania to live at her family's country home at Altoona. Her father was appalled at her ambitions and refused to pay for her art supplies. Frustrated, in July 1871 she wrote to a friend, "I have given up my studio...and have not touched a brush for six weeks nor ever will again until I see some prospect of getting back to Europe." Shortly after, her work gained the attention of the Archbishop of Pittsburgh, who comissioned her to copy some Correggio paintings in Parma, giving her an advance she could travel to Europe and cover her stay in the Italian city. She then wrote in a change of tone, "O how wild I am to get to work, my fingers fairly itch and my eyes water to see a fine picture again."

Soon after her return to Europe her life brightened. Her painting Two Women Throwing Flowers During Carnival was accepted in the Salon of 1872 and got good reviews, and was even purchased. When she moved on to Parma to finish her commission she was well-received there and quite popular with the local community of artists. She then traveled to Madrid and Seville to work on a series of Spanish subjects, including the famous Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla, and then took up permanent residence in Paris. She was soon joined there by her sister Lydia, a semi-invalid who was a frequent subject of Mary's paintings.

But she quickly saw that the Salon was not particularly friendly to female artists, and she was outspoken in her criticism. In 1877, after both her entries were rejected, she was invited by Edgar Degas to show her works with the Impressionists, who had begun their own independent shows in 1874 (to much notoriety and loud criticism). She admired Degas's work, which she first saw in a gallery window in 1875, very much. She wrote, "I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it." The Impressionists also had one female member already, Bertha Morisot, who became Cassatt's friend. She showed her work with them first on April 10, 1879.

In 1877, her parents joined Mary and her sister in Paris, which provided her with a household and companionship, as she had long decided to devote herself to her work and not marry. When Lydia died in 1882, Mary was bereft and unable to work for a time. Her father, though, still insisted her studio and supply expenses be covered by her sales alone, and the Impressionist shows enabled her to gain a wider audience and make a name for herself in the art world. Revue des Deux Mondes declared "M. Degas and Mlle. Cassatt are nevertheless the only artists who distinguish themselves..." in the Impressionist show. She displayed 11 works, and used part of her profits to purchase works by Degas and Monet.

Cassatt showed in every Impressionist exhibit between 1879 and 1881, and was an active member of their circle until 1886, when she started to branch out and experiment with different techniques and styles. In 1886 she displayed 2 works in the first American exhibit of the Impressionists by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. She also became an advisor to wealthy American collectors, like her friend Louisine Elder, who married Harry Havemeyer in 1883 and with him set about amassing a great Impressionist collection (most of which is now in the Met). As she grew older she also became a friend and mentor to young American artists who came to Europe to study.

Her popularity was mostly built on her well-known scenes of tender domesticity between women and children, but in 1891 she displayed a series of colored drypoint and aquatint prints inspired by Japanese works shown in Paris the year before, which caused a sensation. She was also commissioned to paint a mural about "Modern Women" for the Women's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (which took place in 1893). The mural was lost when the building was torn down, but gained Cassatt excellent reviews.

She was awarded the Legion d'honneur in 1904, but her fame was slower to grow in her native country. In 1911 she was diagnosed with diabetes, rheumatism, and cataracts, but didn't slow down in her work until she became almost completely blind in 1914. She took up the cause of women's suffrage, and in 1915 showed 18 paintings in an exhibit benefiting the movement. She died June 14, 1926 at the Chateau de Beaufresne outside Paris, and was buried at Le Mesnil-Theribus.

Some sources on Cassatt's life and work:
Nancy Mowell Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life (1998)
Robin McKown, The World of Mary Cassatt (1972)

Portrait Friday

This week on May 19 in 1536 Anne Boleyn was executed in the Tower of London

Things I Love Thursday

"But the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend" --DH Lawrence

What I love this week--Santa Fe! Here are a few pics of a trip I took there last month. I try to get there at least a couple times a year, it's like nowhere else. The light and fresh air, the beautiful buildings and scenery, the food, the art galleries and museums, it's very inspiring and helps me fill up my "creative well." Wish I was there right now, having a margarita on a sunny patio...

Risky Tuesday

I'm over at the Riskies today, talking about pretty dresses! Nothing like frivolity when there's a deadline going on...

Heroine of the Weekend

This weekend's heroine is astronomer Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming, born on this day in 1857 in Dundee Scotland! She was sent to public schools there in Dundee until the age of 14, when she became a pupil-teacher until her marriage to James Fleming in 1877. Soon after the marriage they moved to Boston, though her scummy husband abandoned her a year later while she was pregnant with their son Edward (boo!).

Forced to support herself and her infant, she found a job as housekeeper to Edward Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory. An ambitious and driven man, he was often frustrated with his employees and assistants, and one day in a fit declared even his maid could do a better job than them! Fleming soon proved he was quite right. In 1881, she left housework to help Pickering with his clerical work and mathematical calculations at the Observatory. While working there she devised a system of assigning stars a letter according to how much hydrogen could be observed in their spectra (a distinctive pattern produced by each star when its light is passed through a prism). Stars classified A had the most hydrogen, B the next, and so on. This system was later named in her honor, and she used it to catalog over 10,000 stars in 9 years. (Later scientist Annie Cannon improved on this method by developing a simpler classification system using temperature).

This was only the beginning of Fleming's work. She went on to discover 59 gaseous nebula, over 310 variable stars, and q0 novae. In 1888 she discovered the Horsehead nebula, though at first she and Pickering were denied their rightful credit (not corrected until the publication of the second Index Catalog in 1908). She was soon placed in charge of dozens of women hired to do mathematical computations (they were called "compuiters," and did work similar to a human computer!). She also edited the observatory's publications, and in 1899 was given the title Curator of Astronomical Photographs, the first such appointment granted to a female. In 1906 she was made an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society in London (the first American woman to hold that title), and was appointed honorary fellow in astronomy at Wellesley College. At the end of her life, the Astronomical Society of Mexico awarded her the Guadalupe Almendaro medal for her discovery of new stars. In 1910 she published a work on her most famous discovery, "white dwarfs." She died in Boston on May 21, 1911.

Some sources on Fleming's life:
Mabel Armstrong, Women Astronomers: Reaching for the Stars (actually a young readers' book, but fascinating! This is where I first heard of Fleming)
G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes, ed. Women of Science
Veronica Stolte-Heiskanen, Women in Science

Poetry Friday

Tomorrow, May 15, marks the anniversary of the death of Emily Dickinson (in 1886). I love Dickinson's poetry, and her fascinatingly strange life story (one bio of her I like is Alfred Habegger's My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson). It's hard to choose just one for Poetry Friday. What's your favorite Dickinson poem?

Wild Nights! Wild Nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port, --
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in Thee!

Another review!

A particularly lovely review for To Catch a Rogue came in today! "Sparkling with wicked humor, fantastic period detail, engaging drama and heartwarming romance, you will be enchanted with To Catch a Rogue..." (right when I needed an ego boost, too! I'm nearing the end of a WIP, and it's at that point where I am sick of the characters and feel like it's all dreck. Good times)

Things I DON'T Love Thursday

What I definitely don't love today--tornadoes! We had some bad ones on Tuesday night, and I've had several emails from wonderful concerned friends, but we are fine here. The storms went around my town, though the storm sirens went off and I had to huddle in the closet with my pets for a while! Luckily we did not end up in Oz, and the winds only wreaked a little havoc with my newly-planted vegetables. May is so much fun around here. Not...

What is a tornado exactly? Look here for more info!

New review!

A new review for To Deceive a Duke (on shelves now!!)

What I'm Reading Today

Since I'm on deadline right now my "fun reading" time is restricted at the moment (ack!!!), but I've been making my way through a new historical mystery, Her Highness's First Murder. A very young Elizabeth I (she's about 14 in this story) joins forces with a young doctor's son and the captain of her father's guard to find a serial killer. So far I'm really enjoying it! The characters are well-drawn and the story twisty...

RIP Lena Horne

Her beauty, class, and talent will never be forgotten!

Hottie Monday

For Hottie Monday today, something a little different! With the moving of RWA's conference in July to Disney World (and yay to RWA for making such a complicated change so quickly! Bravo!), I am very excited. I LOVE Disney movies. So we have Disney Hottie Couples. (I know Beauty and the Beast is there twice, but it's my favorite. I mean, how can you not love a man with a library like that??)

Happy Mother's Day!

This pic is of me, my mother, my aunt (my mom's oldest sister), and my grandmother--don't we look nice in our Easter clothes??? Every Mother's Day I think of all the wonderful women who influenced my life when I was young and I'm deeply grateful to them. Especially to my mother, who bought me however many books I wanted when I was a kid (Barbies were another story...) and spent hours reading them with me! She gave me the gift of books and all the astounding places they can take us, and the gift of believing I could even write one myself one day. Thank you so much, Mom, I love you!

Heroine of the Weekend

Our heroine this weekend is French writer and political activist Olympe de Gouges, born May 7, 1748! She was born with the much duller name of Marie Gouze into a middle-class family in the town of Tarn-et-Garonne in southwestern France (her father was butcher, her mother the daughter of a cloth merchant). She believed she was the daughter of the Marquis de Pompignan, who rejected her claims.

In 1765 she married a man named Louis Aubry, a cook who came from Paris with the new Intendant of her town. In a semi-autobiographical novel, Memoire de Madame Valmont contre la famille de Flaucourt, she later wrote, "I was married to a man I did not love and who was neither rich nor well-born. I was sacrificed for no reason that could make up for the repugnance I felt for this man." So it was probably not a love match! Luckily for her, this husband died after about a year and she moved to Paris in 1770 with her son Pierre. She took on the name of Olympe de Gouges and embarked on a new life.

Around 1773 she met a wealthy man named Jaques Rozieres and embarked on a long relationship with him. She also entered the world of the Paris salons, where she befriended many writers (such as La Harpe and Chamfort) as well as budding politicans like Brissot and Condorcet. She was welcomed into the salons of Marquise de Montesson and Comtesse de Beauharnais, who were playwrights and encouraged Olympe's own talent. By 1784 she was writing essays and plays, such as the anti-slavery Zamore and Mirza (which was not performed until 1789). As an advocate of human rights she was initially enthusiastic about the Revolution, but became very disenchanted when that egalite was not extended to women, when in fact women's rights took a step backward.

In 1791 she joined the "Society of the Friends of Truth," which advocated equal political and legal rights for all citizens--including women. The members often met at the hom of Sophie Condorcet, who eventually met the same fate as Olympe in pursuit of their ideals. In response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen she wrote her famous Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen, where she declared "A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker's platform." She was angry that the new constitution didn't consider women's suffrage or issuses like legal equality in marriage, the right for a woman to divorce her spouse, and her right to property and custody of children. She followed up with her Contrat Social proposing marriage based only on gender equality.

As the Revolution went on she became louder in her ideals. On June 2, 1793 her allies the Girondins were arrested by the Jacobins and sent to the guillotine. She responded with an inflamatory poster, The There Urns, or the Salvation of the Country, which led to her own arrest. She spent 3 months in jail, managing to publish through her friends two works, Olympe de Gouges au tribunal revolutionnaire, where she detailed her interrogations, and Une patriote persecutee condemning the Terror. The Revolution had long since taken an anti-intellectual, anti-women turn, and Olympe was sentenced to death on November 2, 1793 and executed the next day, irnoically for "opposition to the death penalty."

After her death her son, General Pierre Aubry de Gouges, went to the West Indies with his wife and 5 children. He died in 1802, and his widow died on the return voyage to France. The daughters married in the islands, Genevieve de Gouges to an English officer and Charlotte de Gouges to the American politician Robert Selden Garnett, a member of Congress with plantations in Virginia. On March 6, 2004 the junction of 4 streets in Paris was renamed Place Olympe de Gouges.

Some sources on her dramatic life:
Joelle Gardes, Olympe de Gouges (2008)
Lucy Moore, Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France
L. Kelly, Women of the French Revolution (1987)
S.E. Melzer and L.W. Rabine, Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (1992)

Portrait Friday

Today's portrait--Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia, Duchess of York (and famous pet owner), born on this day in 1767! Find more info on her here

Portrait Friday

Actually we're going to have TWO Portrait Fridays today! Because May 4 marked the birthday of Audrey Hepburn in 1929. She is my style idol, not just for the way she dressed (who can live without ballet flats, capri pants, and black dresses??) but the gracious, compassionate way she lived her life. (More info on her here)

Things I Love Thursday

What I love today--spring parties! I have two this weekend, a graduation followed by an al fresco dinner (my baby brother is getting his MBA!) and a Mother's day brunch. These seem perfect for some of my very favorite warm weather clothes--Lily Pulitzer dresses. I LOVE these clothes, they are so bright and fun, and just seem to scream "rich girl's island vacation." (Not that I am rich or going to an island, sadly, but still...). I would wear them all summer long if I could.

For the graduation I have a pink dress very similar to this one, and I have a new green-yellow-pink flowered sundress (bought at a big sale, even better!) that might do for the brunch. Just putting these on, along with a basket purse and a pair of sandals (reminder: must get pedicure) makes me feel like summer is really on its way at last. There's more info about Lily here

What's your favorite warm weather outfit?

Blog Visit

I'm also over at Keira Soleore's blog today, talking about muses and giving away copies of the "Muses" trilogy. Come visit me there!

Tuesday Doings

It's Tuesday, so I am over at the Riskies, talking about a Day in the Life of an Author (warning: not so glam), and asking (begging) for title help. This is also the anniversary of the death of Napoleon. See more info about it here.

A Brief History of May Day

I missed May Day yesterday, so I am making up for it with a short post today! Even though I don't have a Maypole in my backyard (and no one would dance around it with me anyway!) I do like to think that spring is really and truly here at last. The flowers are out, the trees are green, and the sun is warm again. It feels like waking up after winter hibernation!

The origins of May Day date back many centuries. For the Druids in the British Isles, May 1 marked one of their most important holidays of the year--Beltane, which was thought to divide the year in two (the other half ended with Samhain in November). They would set a new fire which was thought to give life to the springtime sun. Cattle were passed through the smoke to purify them for the coming season, and there was dancing and partying galore.

When the Romans came along in Britain, the first of May was still a holiday. They devoted it to the worship of the goddess Flora, and it was 5-day party called (appropriately) Floralia. These traditions gradually blended with those of Beltane. By the Medieval era, every village had a Maypole, which was brought in with much rejoicing and partying (it was a point of pride for each village to have the largest, most ornate pole around!). There would be dancing, music, feasting, markets and (again) parties. A May Queen would be chosen and May baskets left on doorsteps.

The Puritans did not like the May Day traditions (predictably--they also shut down the theaters), and the Long Parliament put a stop to the public celebrations in 1644 on the grounds that they were pagan in origin. When Charles II came back to the throne, Fun was back, and the Maypole reappeared. The Puritanical influence also meant that May Day never caught on in a big way in America, but some of us like to celebrate it in our little ways...

More information can be found about the holiday here! Do you do anything to celebrate May Day??

Heroine of the Weekend

Our heroine this weekend is artist Mary Moser, who died on May 2, 1819! She was born in London on October 27, 1744, and her father, the Swiss-born artist and enameller George Michael Moser (who once served as drawing master to George III). He recognized his daughter's talent early on; she won her first Royal Society of Arts medal when she was only 14, and regularly exhibited her paintings of flowers at the Society of Artists.

In 1768, she became only of only 2 female founding members of the Royal Academy (the other being Angelica Kauffmann, and it would 1936 before another woman was elected to the Academy). Her father was also one of the 35 founders. In Johann Zoffany's famous painting The Academicians of the Royal Academy, which showed the founding members gathered around a nude model--but Kauffmann and Moser were only shown in portraits on the wall, since a female couldn't train in that area of art! In another portrait in 1795, Henry Singleton's The Royal Academicians in General Assembly, there were no nude models and the 2 women were prominently featured.

In the 1790s, Moser received several commissions from King George and Queen Charlotte, including a floral decorative scheme for Frogmore House at Windsor. The prominence of the job (for which Moser was handsomely paid) made her the envy of her colleagues, though she retired soon after when she married a man named Hugh Lloyd in 1793 (though she went on exhibiting her work as an amateur, including at the Royal Academy until 1802). Not much is known about the marriage, though it probably wasn't terribly happy since soon after it occured she went on a 6-month "sketching tour" with artist Richard Cosway (who was separated from his artist wife Maria). He wasn't very gentlemanly in his diaries, declaring she was "more sexually responsive" than his wife (among other remarks!).

It's thought that after 1802 she mostly taught quietly at home. She died in 1819. Information about the Romney portrait of Moser seen above, which is in the National Portrait Gallery, can be found here.

Sources (I had a hard time finding a huge amount about Moser and her life, so I turned to my trusty art history books left over from college!):
Wendy Slatkin, Women Artists in History
Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages