Heroine of the Weekend

This weekend's heroine is Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, born on this day in 1660! She lived a long and complex life, and was one of history's great "strong women."

Sarah Jennings was born June 5, 1660 to Richard Jennings, a Member of Parliament, and his wife Frances, at Holywell House in Hertfordshire. Richard met the Duke of York (later James II) while attempting to recover an estate that had belonged to his mother-in-law, and in 1664 James arranged for Sarah's sister Frances to be a maid of honor to his wife, Anne Hyde, Duchess of York. Frances later had to leave Court when she married a Catholic, but Sarah later took her place as maid of honor to Duchess #2, Mary of Moden, in 1673.

Sarah became friends with Princess Anne, James and Anne Hyde's second daughter, in 1675, the same year Sarah met her future husband John Churchill and danced and talked with him at balls and routs. John had once been the lover Charles II's chief mistress Barbara Palmer, and he was deeply in debt and not much of a catch financially. He was also said to be about to marry a rich mistress of James II, Catherine Sedley, a match promoted by his father who was eager to restore the family coffers. But in 1677, Sarah's brother died and she and her sister became the heirs to the Jennings estates, thus giving the young couple an income. They secretly married in the winter of 1677, a union known only to a few friends so she could keep her position as maid of honor. This became impossible when she was pregnant, and the marriage became public on October 1, 1678. Their first child, a daughter, died soon after birth, and Sarah became Lady of the Bedchamber to Princess Anne after the princess's marriage in 1683.

In 1688 came the Glorious Revolution, the overthrow of the unpopular Catholic King James in favor of his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. Amidst the initial upheaval, James ordered Anne (who he suspected of supporting her sister) and Sarah placed under house arrest, but in her memoirs Sarah described their dramatic escape: "By the backstairs which went down from her closet, her Royal Highness, my Lady Fitzharding, and I, with one servant, walked to the coach where we founf the Bishop and the Earl of Dorset. They conducted us that night to the Bishop's house in the city; and the next day to my Lord Dorset's at Copt-Hall. From there we went to the Earl of Northampton's and thence to Nottingham, where the country gathered about the Princess; nor did she think herself safe till she saw that she was surrounded by the Prince of Orange's friend." James soon fled the country altogether.

Despite this beginning, Sarah's life in the reign of William and Mary was not easy. The new monarchs gave her husband the title of Earl of Marlborough, but they still argued and Sarah's influence on Anne was thought to be too great and dangerous. Queen Mary demanded that her sister dismiss Sarah, which Anne refused (their friendship was very strong--they called each other by pet names "Mrs. Freeman" and "Mrs. Morley"), and this created a rift between the sisters that never quite healed. Sarah was evicted from her court rooms at Whitehall, and Anne left Court in response and went with Sarah to stay at Syon House. Mary died in 1694, and in an effort to ingratiate himself with the English William restored all Anne's honors and incomes and gave her an apartment at St. James's Palace. He also restored the position of the Churchills.

In 1702, William died and Anne became queen. She immediately offered John a dukedom, which Sarah refused on the grounds that their income was insufficient to the position. They were then given a pension of 5000 pounds a year for life, plus 2000 from the Privy Purse, and the dukedom was accepted. Sarah was made Mistress of the Robes, Groom of the Stole, Keeper of the Privy Purse, and Ranger of Windsor Great Park, while John became Captain-General of the army. The couple's influence was at its zenith, but during much of the reign John was abroad fighting the War of the Spanish Succession and Sarah was alone in England. She spent much of her time overseeing the building of their new estate, Woodstock Manor (later renamed Blenheim Palace), a lavish gift from the queen on John's victory at the Battle of Blenheim.

But all was not well with their close friendship as the years went on. Sarah allied herself with the Whigs, while Anne was becoming more strongly Tory, and she resented Sarah's domineering efforts to control her politically. Anne also didn't like it that Sarah was so often away from Court attending to her own business, despite Sarah's long letters and excuses. In 1703, Sarah's only son John died of smallpox, and she withdrew from publiclife even more for a time, overcome with grief. Anne was also becoming closer to another lady in waiting, Sarah's cousin Abigail Hill (who Sarah originally brought to Court in hopes of finding the impoverished girl a position), who was shy and flattering (and Tory), unlike Sarah. Anne was present at Abigail's secret wedding to Samuel Masham (groom of the bedchamber to Anne's husband) in 1707 and gave her a dowry of 2000 pounds without Sarah's knowledge. In 1711 Sarah lost her offices of Mistress of the Robes and Groom of the Stole (replaced by the Duchess of Somerset), and Abigail took over as Keeper of the Privy Purse. John also lost his positions, and the couple lost their state funding for the building of Blenheim (which came to a halt for the first time since 1705). The couple left England to travel around the Continental courts.

Queen Anne died August 1, 1714, and the Churchills returned home at last. The new king was George Ludwig, Elector of Hanover (great-grandsome of James I through his mother), who had become friends with Sarah and John when they stayed at Hanover during their travels. John regained his old position of Captain-General and Sarah became friends with Queen Caroline. She spent her time trying to find a good match for her eldest granddaughter Lady Henrietta Godolphin. When she wed the Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1717, she went on to find good matches for the rest of her grandchildren, even though she didn't get along with her own daughters Henrietta (who later inherited the dukedom in her own right, and died in 1733), Elizabeth (who died in 1714), and Mary (who outlived her mother, though they were always estranged) very well, though she did have one favorite daughter Anne Spencer (who died in 1716).

Also in 1716 John suffered 2 strokes, and Sarah spent most of her time devoted to his care, traveling with him to Tunbridge Wells and Bath until he made a recovery. He died in 1722, and Sarah's income was considerable enough that she offered a dowry of 100,000 pounds for her granddaughter Diana Spencer to marry the Prince of Wales (which didn't work out), and she went on overseeing the building of Blenheim. Her days of controversy were far from over, though. Her friendship with Queen Caroline ended when she refused the queen access through her Wimbledon estate, which lost her the post and income of Ranger of Windsor Great Park. She was also rude to George II, thinking him "too much of a German," and her Tory enemy Walpole was now in power. But she was still good-looking and sought-after and received many proposals of marriage (including from the Duke of Somerset), which she refused in favor of independence and the memory of her husband. In 1742 she saw the fall of Walpole and the publication of a biography (which she approved) titled An Account of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough from her first coming to Court to the year 1710.

She died on October 18, 1744 at 85 and was buried at Blenheim. Her husband was brought from Westminster Abbey to be laid by her side.

Some sources:
Ophelia Field, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, the queen's favorite, 2002
Virginia Cowles, The Great Marlborough and His Duchess, 1983

Portrait Friday (Sort Of)

I found a fascinating historical tidbit about this day in history--on June 4, 1784 Elisabeth Thible became the first woman to ride in a hot air balloon! Since I couldn't find an actual portrait of her, this print of a balloon ascent will have to do.

June 4, 1784 was just 8 months after the very first balloon flight and so this was probably a rather frightening undertaking for a "civilian"! Monsieur Fleurant, the pilot, was originally meant to travel with a Count de Laurencin, who had been one of the 6 passengers on the Montgolfier flight in January (a flight that did not end well--the balloon started to tear apart and smolder close to landing, though luckily no one was killed! No wonder Laurencin chickened out on the second ride). But Mademoiselle Thible took her place dressed as the goddess Minerva. The two sang arias from the latest popular opera of the day La Belle Arsene during the 45-minute flight, which traveled 4 km and reached 1500 meters. The mademoiselle injured her ankle on the bumpy landing, and spent the flight feeding the fire box as well as singing. She became a popular heroine for a time.

Source: Women Aloft, Time-Life Books, 1981

Things I Love Thursday

What I love today--hydrangea! I have two bushes in my front flower bed and they are going crazy in this hot summer weather, gorgeous pink blooms. They're some consolation for this yucky humidity!

Today in History

Today in history marks one of the first "celebrity weddings" in US history (in 1886), that between President Grover Cleveland (the first president to marry in the White House while in office) and Frances Folsom (still the youngest First Lady in history), who proved to be a style icon and object of fascination to the American public. There was a lovely display about Frances in the First Ladies exhibit at the Smithsonian, which I got to see last summer, so I thought we'd take a closer look at her life!

Frances Clara Folsom was born in Buffalo, New York on July 21, 1864, the daughter of the well-to-do lawyer Oscar Folsom and his wife Emma, descendants of some of the earliest English settlers in the area. She was their only child to survive infancy, and her future husband (27 at the time of her birth) was friends with her parents and bought her a baby carriage. When her parents died when she was a child, Cleveland became the estate administrator. Frances attended Central High School in Buffalo and then Wells College in Aurora, New York. Soon after her graduation in summer 1885, Cleveland proposed to her by letter, though they did not announce the engagement until 5 days before the wedding.

The wedding took place at the White House on June 2, 1886. Cleveland was the only president to marry in the White House, and their age difference is still the greatest of any presidential marriage. The ceremony was a small one attended by family, close friends, and the Cabinet and their wives, at 7:00 pm in the Blue Room. The officiants were the Rev. Byron Sutherland and the groom's brother Rev. William Cleveland. John Philip Sousa and his band provided the music. The couple then had their honeymoon in the Cumberland Mountains of Maryland.


Frances Cleveland then became a celebrity of the first order. She was a famously gracious White House hostess who held 2 receptions a week. The births of her children (Ruth, supposedly the inspiration for the name of the "Baby Ruth" candy bar, though she sadly died young; Esther; Marion; Richard; and Francis), her clothes, her parties were all the objects of intense interest in the media. (She also became the only First Lady to preside at 2 non-consecutive administrations, since her husband was defeated in 1888 and returned 4 years later!). After he left office for good they retired to Princeton, New Jersey.

After Cleveland's death in 1908, she went on living at Princeton. In 1913 she married Thomas Preston, a professor of archaeology (the first presidential widow to remarry). She died in Baltimore in 1947 and was buried next to her first husband.

Risky Tuesday

At the Riskies today, talking about June weddings and old traditions...

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)