My daughter, Laura, at the National Building Museum, earlier this week
for there is no help for it. This is my 11th summer without him, the 5th since I can no longer drive at night. I can’t go far by myself — and have no stomach for it any more. It’s true that Jim having been cut off from fulfillments of older age, so am I. Tonight it rained and thundered and there is still lightning, I went out, walked round the block as in a circle, all the houses are lit, more people home than usual (it said on the news how crowded roads and airports are) or seeming so. I left my teeth off, counting on meeting no one, my shawl over my old clothes, my bedroom ballet slippers … an old woman walking alone I’ve become one of those women I used to see walking on the streets of NYC when I was young.
Dear friends and readers,
Remember my proposal to give a paper on Intriguing Women in Trollope at Somerville College, Oxford, between Sept 1-3 this year, and plan to go to London afterwards, all with Izzy, and visit the International War Museum, take in a play. Well I’ve been rereading Jane Nardin’s excellent (clearly written) He Knew She Was Right. The book is about Trollope breaking away from conventional and patriarchal views of women and in the latter part of his career depicting unconventional women sympathetically. Nardin writes is insightful in the intricacies of her arguments. This past week too I learned there is an overt homosexual man in Trollope’s oeuvre: Archie Clavering, and he is treated so obnoxiously by the other characters, and made a butt by Trollope so shamefully, it’s distressing. I have in my readings in archives come across real homosexual men in diaries and they are hidden in plain sight by their families so as to make them marriageable and safe — not boasted about but not ridiculed. Important sources for The Claverings include the 18th century iconoclastic sexually candid plays by Van Brugh, The Provok’d wife and The Provok’d Husband I’ve a chapter on this in my book, Trollope on the Net.
Well we are in a pickle (sometimes to me it’s a nightmare) and our trip to Oxford and then London in early September now uncertain. Izzy goofed on that application we sent in for her. She made it out in blue ink; we got back an email telling us she must make it out again in black ink but they did not send the old passport back or previous application. We did not think to scan in that old one with all the information so she can’t make out the new form since she doesn’t know the number of the book or its issue date. I’ve been on the phone three times and was told the congressman’s aides can do nothing until either 3 months after we first applied (April 29th) or 2 weeks before we are set to leave. People wouldn’t listen to me on the phone. I wanted advice: should we send the form without it being wholly made out and with a letter explain they have this information we don’t and either fill it out themselves or send back the old passport. No one will answer. Finally someone answered an email of Izzy’s who is in this congressman’s office (Don Beyer) and said he is now working on this and has begun the process with the agency but he can guarantee nothing. I tried to reach him on the phone but did not. I told our story to another aide emphasizing Izzy’s autism, and how nervous and tense we were that morning doing these applications. This is causing me great agony of mind.
Can you imagine what federal gov’t would be if Trump had had a 3rd term, or if he were re-elected. Nothing functioning; everything up for bribes after you “know” someone.
Finally we got some material from the state department (with a special envelope and case number) but again they do not return the old passport or application. So she filled it out as far as she could in black ink, and added a letter explaining why we don’t have the old passport book number or date issued, asking them to finish filling it out (as they do) or send all back again with needed information. All this takes time.
I did goof on the airplane too. I was unclear and now we land a day ahead. I have us to stay until September 8th, but if she cannot come with me I shall not go alone. I cannot face it. I did get my new passport and scanned it and her and my drivers’ licenses. So I may bow out of this conference which I did want to give a paper at. It is all too much for me. Loss of $4800 for the non-refundable tickets. This is the biggest haul the airlines have had from me since Jim died, and if I don’t get to go, it will be the last plane tickets I ever buy.
Each day on the Internet I read of this conference or that here and there (ISECS just now in Rome!), where people are going, and I remember how Jim and I for a couple of summers in NYC would drive on Tues/Thurs mornings at 9:30 to Jones Beach with our dog LLyr, bring coffee, croissants, a corner where dogs were allowed and stay for an hour and one half. The drive each way 40 minutes. Llyr would rush into the water and I would go in with her and play longer. Jim sat under an umbrella; he’d swim too.
There is no public beach near here closer than 3-4 hours. Here in Virginia all lakes are exclusive and membership price very high — so too do they have these in DC; I’ve learned of them since teaching at OLLI at AU.
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Hydrangeas (I’m told is the name) and ferns — one pink!
I bit the bullet and hired (for not that much less than the plane tickets) two black guys, tree people, and they came with a crew, and did a lot of work in my front yard and along the sides of the house. Among other things they injected the buses and flowers with some mighty compounds, mulched, fertilized, added ferns, but best of all I now realize they cut back the trees that overhang my property all along the right side. Asocial utterly selfish neighbors I’ve had over the years plant their trees at the edge of my property and then don’t cut them back. This is the second or third time I’ve let a group of guys cut back severely in a kind of line. What I didn’t realize was not only more sun would come in during the day, but in evening a plot that seemed to be only shady except the very earliest dawn is now in early evening. So here is the right side of my house — one half the plot they worked on; the other half is ferns and hydrangeas with the bouquets of white flowers at the end.
My teaching has gone very well this summer: people seemed really to enjoy The Heroine’s Journey with me (23 people), and a similar experience is emerging in the Gaskell Wives and Daughters class (25, though 40 registered). I am just loving her books; I’ve just re-watched the first part of Andrew Davies’s beautiful serial adaptation, for an umpteenth time. I’m rereading her Life of Bronte for the first time in decades. How powerful it is. It is made up heavily of Charlotte’s letters once she grows older; as I read of the deaths of Emily and Anne I thought of Jim’s death and how I watched over him in his agony of mind when not deeply drugged against the pain.
Thus far I’ve attended one class in person this summer. I’m told that those that are in person are again having trouble getting more than 6 to attend. I do miss the pizza parties they used to have at OLLI at AU.
After I wrote two blogs on Jane Austen sequels and Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister a distant (by space) friend sent me Charlie Lovett’s First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love and Jane Austen (I may have his Bookman’s Tale somewhere in the house) and will soon start it.
You see I finished the beautifully titled Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill. I have a love-hate relationship with her: I’ve loved a number of her books (not just The Woman in Black, but also In the Springtime of the Year, her Various Haunts of Men made me intensely anxious) but every time I read something she says in her own voice, I dislike her. So too here: I found myself bonding, learning from, interested in her love of certain books, why she’d reread this and not that, as a book about book reading so satisfying, but depart from this and she begin to offer her reasons for her values (not the values themselves) and I was turned off. but individual sections are worth consulting: for example, on book titles, how important, they must be appealing; how: an inner pattern, rhythms, capturing a theme or place; with a list of these (p 10), her own chapter headings exemplifying what she writes.
What else shall I say? Izzy has just risen from her early evening nap. My Clarycat is slowly getting better: she is lively all day, sits near me, trots round my chair, sits on my lap leaning against my chest while I eat; she can climb up on the desk and kitchen table once again, and jump down lightly to chair and floor. She eats a lot though so thin, drinks, uses her litter box and cleans herself though her coat is not smooth any more. She must be careful and still has problems going where she wants (her body pushes left when she wants to go right), bangs against walls. It is good I scarcely ever leave her.
Said to be Virginia Woolf’s Sappho (1947), of course it’s not — look how the birds are unafraid
How shall I end? I’ve this two weeks read a brilliantly witty, suggestive literary biography of a once famous 18th century writer, Richard Steele; it’s by Calhoun Winton (now 96): no one writes books this way in academia any more. He made me understand Steele to some extent, taught me about the milieu deeply, brought out how Steele lived, what were his finest works (the periodical essays). I ended respecting the man. All this because I’m reviewing a badly written (the jargon sentences make me blink) on captivity as everywhere in the 18th century (there’s legal as well as physical) and the author wants me to read The Conscious Lovers as about colonialism: it does have a heroine who I now realize might be a mulatto, an Indiana (played by Anne Oldfield at the time — who also played the leading roles in the Van Brugh plays I cited above). Steele owned slaves in the West Indies — from marrying as his first wife a very wealthy woman. Who knew? One source of his wealth.
A modern sexed-up conception of the 18th century play as played by 18th century actors …
Well I’m watching and re-watching Sanditon, getting to know it, getting to like it more and more and realize how in several ways what we are told about Austen’s Miss Lambe in those 12 chapters when we first meet her makes parallels to Steele’s heroine. I don’t think Andrew Davies began by reading this play, but he is probably much more steeped in 18th century literature then he gives away (he adapted Cleveland’s book, Defore’s Moll Flanders), but it’s fascinating to how some the peculiarities of Sidney’s relationship with Miss Lambe when we first meet them are analogous or similar.
The Conscious Lovers was first staged in 1722, it was the most popular play across the century, lasting well into the 1790s. In the play she is being (idealistically) kept by the hero of the play, Bevil Junior, who is having sex with her, who wants to marry her first. Maybe Austen had in mind that Sidney Parker would be involved with Miss Lambe, Sidney’s “virtue” or goodness that slowly emerges is seen in how she is boarded with a school of girls: he is protecting her reputation. The attempt to claw away her inheritance in the third season has parallels with this and other colonialist literature of the 18th century.
Solly McLeod mesmerized, Sophie Wilde eager, unsure as Tom and Sophie
Should Davies have worked the story so that the pair we were at first going to end up with were Theo James and Crystal Clarke. Imagine it …
The way Nikki Amuka-Bird was dressed as Lady Russell (Persuasion 2022) would be appropriate for Indiana
Indiana was always played by a white woman and usually the big star of the year: Anne Oldfield first played the part, but like the heroine of the recent Tom Jones, where just a few changes in Sophia’s background turned her into a mulatto, daughter of a white man and enslaved black woman. As a side comment, whether Austen ever mentioned The conscious Lovers or not, it’s improbable she didn’t know it. A number of the values underlying “true love” (respect, esteem, knowledge of the other party) are part of the discourse in CL. So there you learned something about the 18th century without having to travel to Rome.
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Oh hope very hard for Izzy and I she gets her passport back in time — or just back, we’ll settle for just back. To tell the truth I don’t know if I’m up to getting proper lodgings for Izzy and I — the way we have made a mess of what we’ve done thus far, how we’ve felt about it, shows me it’s time perhaps to concede to the realities of autism. In my Women with Autism monthly zoom I’ve now met a number of women who find travel the same ordeal I do (and Izzy at times seems to)
Last book ordered and on its way: Clara Tornvall, The Autists: How Autism is expressed in Women or Women on the Spectrum.
A generic picture that appeals to me
Ellen