“The White Marmorean Flock” does not, as I initially thought, have anything to do with mammary glands or geese. It is a term, created by Nathaniel Hawthorne and then coined by Henry James, for a group of nineteenth century American expatriate lady sculptors working in the Neoclassical style: Louisa Lander, Harriet Hosmer, Anne Whitney, Emma Stebbins, Edmonia Lewis, Margaret Foley, Florence Freeman, and Vinnie Ream. Wikipedia generously divides them into the category of
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Said gentleman-scholar has re-upped his donation, so keep pitching me, academics longing for freedom.
When I came across recent debates about marriage and the security supposedly felt by
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Said gentleman-scholar has re-upped his donation, so keep pitching me, academics longing for freedom. Lara Rutherford-Morrison's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
In the opening chapters of Susan Townsend Warner’s The Wide, Wide World—a runaway bestseller upon its 1850 publication—the following exchange takes place between our lachrymose young protagonist, Ellen Montgomery, and her dying mother.
A quick fiddle with the Google ngram tool shows a rapid spike in the use of the word “exclusive” just before the 1840s. That’s because, at some point in the 1820s and for some reason that no one can quite explain--more newspapers? better roads? new money?--it became fashionable to be fashionable. Governed neither quite by money nor quite by status, this new type of society was solely and tautologically concerned with being in, which…
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Said gentleman-scholar has re-upped his donation, so keep pitching me, academics longing for freedom. Many of us are justifiably sick of vampire stories. In the last decade, popular culture has been saturated by them, in forms ranging…
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Said gentleman-scholar has re-upped his donation, so keep pitching me, academics longing for freedom. I am an unabashed reader of romances, watcher of romantic comedies, and lover of happy endings, so it’s unsurprising that I’ve always loved the…
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Said gentleman-scholar has re-upped his donation, so keep pitching me, academics longing for freedom. When you hear the word ‘extravaganza’, do you think of demonic dandies, tragic wives, intense nannies, and Byronic heroes? Well, if the extravaganza is…
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Said gentleman-scholar has re-upped his donation, so keep pitching me, academics longing for freedom. We are, I think, still wrong about the Victorians. As I write this, it occurs to me that telling The Toast’s readers this…
For a cosmic hot second in the 200+ years between Eliza Haywood’s death in 1756 and feminism rising from the murky depths of literary scholarship, we lost sight of her work and its role in the development of the English novel. The biographical facts of her life are hard to come by and harder to confirm, but what we do know portrays her as the 18th century’s J.K. Rowling: a single mom with two
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Before there was Liz Lemon, there was Avis Dobell: devoted to her career, proudly single (for a while, anyways), lovably fallible, vociferously feminist, and trying to Have It All. (Unfortunately, Avis’s sense of humor isn’t as finely…
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Jilly Gagnon last wrote for The Toast about The Surreal Housewives. I think every generation assumes, to some extent, that it is the first to invent real depravity. Yes, we have evidence that as far back…
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. Ruth Scobie last wrote for The Toast about the birth of a previous Prince George.
“And pray, Sir, what are four hundred pounds a year to maintain a woman of rank like me? Do
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. I went through a period in my tweens in which I watched the 1991 The Mummy at least once a week. Sometimes more often than that. I knew most of it by heart, including all of its…
