Category: Uncategorized
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Into the Open Air: Barbara Newhall Follett, The House Without Windows, and Life Imitating Art
“She would be invisible forever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see. To these she is ever present, the spirit of Nature—a sprite of the meadow, a naiad of lakes, a nymph of the woods.” — The House Without Windows (p. 205) In 2002-ish, when I was graduating…
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Revolutionary Women: The Ladies of The Flight of Virtue
We’re back this week with more Flight of Virtue content, and I thought I’d make good on my threat to delve into some background information on the women who make up the core supporting cast of my novel behind Theo Burr. Because while I had a blast writing a lot of the men, this was…
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Unfinished Business: The Second Part of Mary Wroth’s Urania
A year and a half ago, I introduced all of you to Mary Wroth and her sprawling Jacobean pastoral roman à clef, Urania. In that post, I promised to keep my eyes peeled for an ultra-rare copy of Urania’s incomplete second part in the wild and report back if I successfully got my hands on…
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France’s Big Brother: The Committee of Public Safety
I wanted to get back this week into some more Flight of Virtue entries, in part because I’m happy to announce that my editor is going to start work next week on my next book: a story that started out as a medieval Crusades romance about the fall of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and…
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More Literary Runaway Lovers: Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed and the Birth of the Modern Italian Novel
“Dear readers, all twenty-five of you, imagine the impression the meeting with the two bravi must have made on the poor man!” – The Betrothed, Chapter 1 I’m arguably running a week behind schedule here because last week the other lady of the house and I were in Las Vegas trying to dip our toes…
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Stolen Valor: Museums and the Reclamation of North American Indigenous History
I did my quarterly museum walk over at the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History yesterday, with a somewhat unusual for me emphasis on the latter. CMOA is currently in major flux as the International is in the process of being taken down and boxed off to destinations unknown, so huge swathes of it…
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America’s Polymath Pirate Queen: The Brief Wondrous Life of Theodosia Burr Alston
“If I could foresee that Theo would become a mere fashionable woman, with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forewith hence. But I yet hope by, her, to convince the world what neither sex appears to believe—that women have…
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The Little House that Libertarianism Built: Myths of the American Frontier and Rose Wilder Lane’s Let the Hurricane Roar
“We are having hard times now, but we should not dwell upon them but think of the future. It has never been easy to build up a country, but how much easier it is for us, with such great comforts and conveniences, kerosene, cookstoves, and even railroads and fast posts, than it was for our…
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Amateur Historian Hour: Velleius Paterculus’ History of Rome
“His [Paterculus’] admiration of Caesar is questionable, of Augustus justified, of Tiberius excessive.” — Jacket copy to the Loeb edition “Velleius Paterculus does not rank among the great Olympians of classical literature either as a stylist or as historian.” — Introduction to the same Some of you probably breathed a sigh of relief that I…
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Babes in the Woods: Longus’ Daphnis & Chloe
“[A]bsolutely no one has ever escaped Love nor ever shall, as long as beauty exists and eyes can see.” — Daphnis & Chloe, prologue “For our part, may the gods grant us proper detachment in depicting the story of others.” (ibid—and my new writing mantra) As threatened multiple times, we’re circling back to more of…
Sarah Holz 