When I was a kid, I briefly joined the Girl Scouts. I realized that while I very much enjoyed making s'mores and wearing the outfits, I didn't much enjoy sleeping outside at a campground (and I never even got to the point of selling cookies! Though I am addicted to eating them. Especially Thin Mints). So this week's Heroine is the founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA, Juliette Gordon Low, who was born on October 31, 1860.
In the UK she discovered the Girl Guide organization, and when she returned to live in the US in 1912 she decided to form an American version of the group. Her first group of recruits numbered 18, with her niece Margaret "Daisy" Gordon, as the first. The Girl Scouts were incorporated in 1915, and Juliette served as president until 1920 when she was titled "founder." The Girl Scouts brought together girls of many different backgrounds and took them outdoors, to discover the benefits of activity and exercise and self-reliance (at a time when those things were in woefully short supply for girls!). She showed girls that they could develop their talents and look beyond traditional homemaker roles to fulfill themselves out in the world. (From that 18 the Girl Scouts now number about 4 million).
She died of breast cancer at her home in Savannah on January 17, 1927 and was buried with full Girl Scout honors at Laurel Grove Cemetery in that city. Her friends then established the Juliette Gordon Low World Friendship Fund in her honor, which funds international projects for the Girls Scout and Girl Guides. (You can visit the website for her Birthplace here)
I've long been interested in the Georgian theater scene, and (hopefully!) will one day write a series with that setting (the scandals! the clothes!), so today's Heroine is actress Anne Oldfield, who died on October 23, 1730.
She was also well-known for her quiet private life and elegant fashion and deportment. Poet Alexander Pope wrote of her, "Engaging Oldfield, who, with grace and ease, Could join the arts to ruin and please." She died at the age of only 47 at her home in Grosvenor Street, leaving her considerable fortune to her 2 sons by her lovers Arthur Mainwaring (who left her half his own fortune on his death in 1712) and Charles Churchill. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, near the grave of Congreve.
Clear water; like the salt of childhood tears,
the assault on the sun by the whiteness of women’s bodies;
the silk of banners, in masses and of pure lilies,
under the walls a maid once defended;
the play of angels;—no…the golden current on its way,
moves its arms, black, and heavy, and above all cool, with grass. She
dark, before the blue Sky as a canopy, calls up
for curtains the shadow of the hill and the arch.
Ah! the wet surface extends its clear broth!
The water fills the prepared beds with pale bottomless gold.
The green faded dresses of girls
make willows, out of which hop unbridled birds.
Purer than a louis, a yellow and warm eyelid
the marsh marigold—your conjugal faith, o Spouse!—
at prompt noon, from its dim mirror, vies
with the dear rose Sphere in the sky grey with heat.
Madame stands too straight in the field
nearby where the filaments from the work snow down; the parasol
in her fingers; stepping on the white flower; too proud for her
children reading in the flowering grass
their book of red morocco! Alas, He, like
a thousand white angels separating on the road,
goes off beyond the mountain! She, all
cold and dark, runs! after the departing man!
Longings for the thick young arms of pure grass!
Gold of April moons in the heart of the holy bed! Joy
of abandoned boatyards, a prey
to August nights which made rotting things germinate.
Let her weep now under the ramparts! the breath
of the poplars above is the only breeze.
After, there is the surface, without reflection, without springs, gray:
an old man, dredger, in his motionless boat, labors.
Toy of this sad eye of water, I cannot pluck,
o! motionless boat! o! arms too short! neither this
nor the other flower: neither the yellow one which bothers me,
there; nor the friendly blue one in the ash-colored water.
Ah! dust of the willows shaken by a wing!
The roses of the reeds devoured long ago!
My boat still stationary; and its chain caught
in the bottom of this rimless eye of water,—in what mud?
When I was a kid, I was introduced to reading romance fiction by coming across a big box full of paperbacks in my grandmother's closet! (We visited her every summer, and I loved going there because she always had books for me). That box, and the ones that followed them (my grandmother haunted used bookstores, garage sales, and library sales) were filled with old Fawcett Regencies by Marion Chesney and Barbara Metzger, Barbara Cartland (which I loved!), Heyers, old Harlequins, Gothics by Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart, and a variety of classics like Emma and Jane Eyre. I have the happiest memories of those summer days reading. One of the books I came across one day was Forever Amber, the story of a wild girl in Restoration England. And today is the birthday of it's author Kathleen Winsor, born October 16, 1919.
The fifth draft of her Restoration story was bought and edited down to a fifth of its original length, but even so it was a 972-page epic of all the vivid scandals of Restoration England. This is the description of the plot from Amazon:
Winsor was divorced in 1946 and quickly remarried musician Artie Shaw (even though it was said Shaw once told his ex-wife Ava Gardner to quit reading such a "trashy novel" when she bought Forever Amber!). She divorced Shaw in 1948 and married her divorce lawyer. In 1953 they divorced and she married the former head of the FCC (they were married until his death in 1975). She went on to write many other novels, including The Lovers, Calais, Robert and Arabella, and 3 more, but none sold nearly as well as Amber. She died in New York in 2003, soon after a new edition of Forever Amber was published.
Happy Saturday, everyone! I'm on my way out to the farmer's market to buy some lovely autumn veggies, but first we have our Heroine of the Weekend! This week we look at sculptor Harriet Hosmer, born on this day in 1830. She was one of the most successful female artists of her day, and her friend Elizabeth Barrett Browning called her "a perfectly emancipated female."
While living in Rome she became friends with people like Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, George Eliot, the Brownings, and a group of women artists (including Anne Whitney, Louisa Lander, Florence Freeman, etc) that Henry James referred to as "The White Marmorean Flock" (he also said she was always "the life of the party"!). She worked in a neoclassical style, and her subjects were usually women from classical mythology, such as Daphne and Zenobia. She had immediate success with her work--in 1855 her statue called "Puck" sold thirty copies, and when she briefly returned to the US she had a line of commissions waiting. She made a reclining statue called "Beatrice Cenci" for the St. Louis Public Library in 1857, and the huge "Zenobia" (she considered this her masterpiece) in 1859, followed by a bronze statue of Thomas H. Benton for Lafayette Park, also in St. Louis. Her "Sleeping Faun" was exhibited at the Paris Exhibition in 1867. She made a great fountain of Hylas and the water nymphs, a statue of the Queen of Naples posing as "Heroine of Gaeta", and many others. She proved that the current opinion that sculpture was beyond the strength of a woman and she should stick to nice watercolors was a myth.
Saturday already, and I'm wrapping up the WIP to send in Monday, and getting ready to take my dog Victoria to Pugfest (a fundraiser for Pug Recsue) later today, but first it's time for this weekend's Heroine. We'll take a look at Italian actress Eleonora Duse, born on October 3, 1858.
As well as for her talent and elegant style, she was well-known for her series of romantic affairs. In 1879 she met the journalist Mattino Cafiero in Naples, but he left her less than a year later when she was pregnant with their child. The child and Cafiero both soon died, and Duse then joined a new theater company and met handsome actor Teobaldo Checchi, whom she married in 1881. They had a daughter, Enrichetta, but divorced in 1885. By this time her star was on the rise, and she went off on tour to South America and formed her own company. Affairs followed with Arrigo Boito, a poet best known as Verdi's librettist (they remained friends until his death many years later), and playwright Gabriele d'Annunzio, a man 5 years her junior who wrote 4 popular plays for her. Their affair ended when he dared give Bernhardt the lead in his new play La Citta morta. In 1909 she embarked on an affair with a woman, Lina Poletti, and was rumored to be involved with Isadora Duncan.
In 1916 she made a short film, Cenere ("Ashes"), and corresponded with DW Griffith about working together, though nothing came of it. In July 1923 she was the first woman to be on the cover of Time magazine. She died April 21, 1924 in Pittsburgh while on a tour with her company of the US. She lay in state in New York for 4 days before being sent back to Italy, where she is buried in the cemetery of Sant' Anna in Asolo.
