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Folks, heard from Sylvia; just as she was starting to get active on the forum again, her computer said its final farewell. She got a new computer today; it will take a few days to get everything set up and she is looking forward to no more crashes and absences!
Saw a note on the internet that today, May 19, is the anniversary of Anne Boleyn's death (in 1536). All these years later and people are still talking and writing about her. How amazed would she be?
For those of us who are "Jane Eyre" fans, I just ran across this thread that contained some great discussion. It's not real long. The topic really caught my eye: "Oh St John we do so need to talk."http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/9...
I love the St John (pronounced Sinjun for anyone not conversant with some of the odder pronunciations of English nomenclature) conversations. I always really really disliked him and thought that his proposal was frankly insulting .
Peggy, that's a great discussion; some wonderful insights there! (I didn't contribute to it, because I didn't have anything to add, but I read it with real interest.) Thanks for sharing the link!Barbara, I didn't actually dislike St. John as much as you did, and I didn't think his proposal was meant to be insulting (some real-life marriage proposals in the 19th century, when marriage was often much more a practical than a romantic matter, were about as prosaic). He meant well, and really did convince himself that he knew God's will for Jane's life better than she did. (But meaning well and doing well unfortunately aren't identical concepts, and I heartily agree that he did SO need somebody to sit him down for a long talk....)
Hi Werner , I do take your point re the marriage proposal not meaning to be insulting . Of course marriage then ( and in many place still ) is much more an alliance than romantic coupling. It's just that it denied Jane so utterly as a woman, no love, no sex and most of all, no hope of children.I imagine he might have thought he was doing a her favour - in the High Victorian mode as it were - re no sex, but no chance of children ?
Wow, Barbara, I didn't remember the "no sex" part! (Of course, the first time I read Jane Eyre was as a pre-teen child, so I didn't really pick up on that sort of thing then; but I did reread it in the 90s.) Yeah, for any healthy young lady, that would seriously weaken any attraction his proposal might have had! :-) In fact, he could probably give lessons on how NOT to do a marriage proposal....Victorians were firmly opposed (at least, theoretically) to sex outside of marriage, but not having sex IN marriage was pretty extreme even for that time. Of course childbirth, back then, was sort of like Russian roulette for a woman; she risked death to give life to the new generation, and that took a special kind of dedication and guts that we today can only look at with awestruck respect and admiration. So I suppose he might have thought he was doing her a favor in that respect.
I opened a copy of the book, which is available on several sites since the copyright is expired, and looked up the proposal and here are some excerpts from the "proposal:"St. John: God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife. It is not personal but
mental endowments they have given you; you are formed for labor, not for love."
(this is the sentence I remembered which I felt was crass, to put it mildly, although he does offer several compliments later)
Jane (to herself): "Can I receive from him the bridal ring, endure all the forms of love, (which I
doubt not he would scrupulously oberve) and know that the spirit was quite absent? Can I bear the consciousness that every endearment he bestows is a sacrifice made on principle? No! such a martyredom would be monstrous."
St. John: "I want a wife; the sole helpmeet I can influence efficiently in life, and retain
absolutely till death. It is not the insignificant private indivdual--the mere man, with the man's selfish senses--I wish to mate; it is the missionary."
Absolutely odious, isn't he? When he tells Jane that she isn't attractive (not simply that HE doesn't find her so) and " [formed] for love," she MUST be reflecting that there's someone who has found her so, and even be tempted to go back and shack up with Rochester! THEN he goes on to say that he wants a wife because one is the only assistant whom he can dominate and who can't quit! BTW, notice that he makes that proposal AFTER their uncle leaves her all his money?
St. John had such high standards for himself but his humanity was lacking in his treatment of Jane--he looked upon her as a tool rather than a living breathing human. Do you know what's up with the "sinjun" pronunciation, Barbara? Just a peculiarity of the language?
Actually Peggy's quote makes me think my memory/interpretation was at fault re no sex. It looks, at least from Jane's reading of it ,that he might be intending to grit his teeth and do the religious equivalent to thinking of England . Not sure how well that would work, for a chap I mean.... On second thoughts, Sinj'n is probably closer to the actual pronunciation Peggy. Just another , I think, instance of the vagaries of British oddity . For eg , the Irish place name Kirkudbright is pronounced Kirkoobree and Beauchamp is pronounced Beecham etc
Barbara, grit his teeth and think of England, lol! It's interesting how pronunciations evolve. I like it when you can kind of follow the reasoning; NL uses this in her books quite a bit. You can see how the names of towns and people came into being A Wayside Tavern comes to mind (Other River evolving into Triver) and Knight's Acre Tallibois (prob didn't spell this right) evolving into Tallboys.
To piggyback on Barbara's examples, the name Sinclair comes from St. Clare, Semple from St. Paul or St. Pol, and Sidney from St. Denis.
Thanks for those examples, Mary. Never would have put Sidney and St. Denis together!
Denis was a French saint, and in French all (or at least nearly all) last letters of words and names are silent. The word for saint is pronounced as "San," and Denis is pronounced as "Denny." Once you know that, the conversion of "St. Denis" into "Sidney," after the process of centuries of slurring the pronunciation of the name, becomes more understandable.
Werner, how interesting! I have a brother named Denis; I'll have to tell him this.
Peggy, your brother is the first modern person I've known of (or at least the first I've noticed) who spells his name in the French fashion! Usually nowadays it's "Dennis." Does he pronounce it as "Denny?"
Maybe Sinjun is from a French pronunuciation of Saint John ( Jean). But English oddities like Cholmondley pronounced Chumley and Wybunbury pronounced Winbree are hard to explain. Both these are Cheshire examples which is where I come from. I'm not odd though, not at all.
Barbara, I'm not odd either, it's the other people!Werner, my parents let my sister and me name our little brother and we chose Dennis (from Dennis the Menace fame). My mother was European and I think the spelling was her choice. I haven't met anyone who spelled it "Denis" either. He doesn't use "Denny" so I'm looking forward to telling him this.
Peggy, maybe he'll be glad to know that he has a saint for a namesake, as well as a Menace. :-)
My parents let me choose my sister's name when she was born too. I chose Christine, but I suspect a lot of guiding went into this,as my real choice would have been Esmeralda.Esmeralda is , as everyone knows, the patron saint of new shoes.
I must be the "odd one" because I didn't know who the patron saint of shoes was! Your comments inspired me to finally look up the pronunciation of "Worchestershire" (Sauce) which, according to inogolo is: wuus-tur-shur. I wonder if there will ever be a movement in merry old England to go to phonetic spellings and pronunciations?!
Yep, 'wustershur' is quite right. As is 'lestershur' for Lecicestershire. I made it up, the shoes thing, it's just that I went to Melbourne recently ( that's 'melbun' ) and bought some red patent leather short boots which were half price Joseph Siebels AND took orthotics in them .
Barbara, you have a future on reality tv, LOL! I thought Esmeralda was an unusual name for a saint.
Reality TV you reckon? I always secretly fancied stand up comedy actually. I think there might be a joke in the geriatric application of red boots or something dont you? I reckon I could do a whole routine on not/dressing one's age, how young shop assistanst speak to you etc.
Barbara wrote: "Reality TV you reckon? I always secretly fancied stand up comedy actually. I think there might be a joke in the geriatric application of red boots or something dont you? I reckon I could do a whol..."That sounds like a standup comedy routine in the works. Did you get a wee bit of attitude from a shop assistant???
Not really attitude in the sense of being deliberately rude, or anything, but of recent months ( years? ) I have noticed a total move away from the relatively dignified "can I help you? " or " let me know if you need some help" to a sort of maniac set of question/statements along lines of " Hi there, having a good day in town ? " or " Hi girls! to my sister and I, 60 and 65 respectively...........
(Seven months later) Short red patent leather boots? Wow! Where do you suppose I could find some up here?So far I'm having fewer negative encounters with saleswomen/shop assistants now than I had when I was younger. In fact, people seem generally to have become nicer in recent years! But I remember, about twenty years ago, going into an art supply shop with my eighty-plus mother, who painted, and having the saleswomen automatically talk to ME. Mother rather enjoyed piping, "No, I'M the customer!"
They were Joseph Siebels, Mary so should be available places where European shoes are sold. I don't seem to get any actual negative comments, apart from the implication , in one young woman's question in a trendy boutique-y kind of place " Hi and who are YOU shopping for today?!" ( imagine this to be said in a high pitched, upward lilt-at-the-end-of-sentence Australian kind of way )
Me : - Why do you ask , ( in an ominous tone)
Her :- 'Oh well, you know .. just being ...I just wondered ....well........titter titter
M:- you were implying I'm too old to shop here weren't you ?
Her :- oh no no no , No really I just well, wondererd you know .....titter titter
Me Nonsense young lady you meant too old. Well I don't care at all about being old, but it is, I should tell you, a very bad sales technicque .
And left, purchaseless.
Reminds me of an experience going into a shop that sold clothing for tiny women. My boss' wife, a very small woman, was a floor manager in this store and wore about a size 0 or 2, which I could not have squeezed into when I was 6 years old! The whole squadron of Twiggy-thin salesgirls looked down their wrinkled noses at me, until I found my friend. Oh my, how the atmosphere changed. If they had any sense, they could have imagined that I was shopping for a small relative.
Yes, it was, Mary. And I knew those snobs were also amazed that this Plus Size, Fifty Plus woman was Admin. Assistant to their manager's husband, who was handsomer and more charming than Robert Redford! Most importantly, this couple was beautiful on the inside.
RE: NEWS ABOUT KING RICHARD III! Many of you may have caught the news coming out of Leicester, England yesterday (2-4-13) about the positive identification of the skeletal remains of King Richard III. Today in London, a reconstruction of his face based on the skull was revealed, and it looks almost identical to his portrait. It gives one such a feeling of awe to actually see the remains of a famous king who died on the battlefield in 1485. There is a great deal of information on this find in the news right now. The skeleton fits so well the descriptions from history - a delicate frame and a curved spine from scoliosis, which makes you wonder why this king chose to go into battle. A comparison of DNA in the remains matched that of two family descendants, making the identification certain according to the University of Leicester.
There is a group in Leicester called the Richard III Society, which hopes to correct some of what they believe are erroneous charges against him, perpetuated they say, by the Tudors. His remains, which were found underneath a parking lot, will be reburied in Leicester Cathedral.
Josephine Tey wrote quite an interesting novel called The Daughter of Time. She wrote mystery novels involving Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant. Grant is laid up with a broken leg (ah, those were the days), is bored, and decides to research an unresolved crime--i.e. did Richard III murder his two nephews? Lots of history woven into this novel. It is obvious Tey was passionate about this and mentioned the Richard II Society in an epilogue, I believe.
Yesss! My husband and I were members of the Richard III Society for some years and even took two of their tours--the first time I had been out of the country (and he had been only across a bridge into Canada). The next-to-last day of each tour was of Bosworth Field (before the monuments were built), where people had dropped white roses into "Dickon's Well," from which Richard is said to have drunk just before he led a desperate charge across the field and was crushed by the armies of the Stanley brothers, who had actually gone to the field as his allies. So we've been following the reports closely! Until the news of the excavations began to appear, we tended to believe the account in Paul Murray Kendall's biography of Richard: that at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, his tomb at Greyfriars was destroyed and his body thrown into the Soar River. It was disappointing not to have a grave to visit on those tours, and I imagine that now the tours will be much more popular. I imagine, too, that at that memorial service planned at Leicester Cathedral, there will be mountains of white roses!Of course we've both read Daughter of Time. I think some new evidence has come to light since it was written, but the fact remains that Richard died gallantly and heroically--and that those skeletons supposedly of his nephews that were unearthed at the Tower in the 17th century were too tall to be likely have been those of boys who died at the ages the Princes would have been during his reign.
One of the news reports I read noted that some British Roman Catholics are petitioning against the planned burial of Richard's remains in Leicester Cathedral. They argue that he was a loyal member of the Roman Catholic church, and should be buried under the auspices of that communion, rather than in a cathedral belonging to the Anglican church (which didn't even exist in Richard's lifetime).A good nonfiction overview of the controversy about Richard and his alleged involvement in the murders of the boy princes in the Tower is Richard the Third. That includes the text of both Sir Thomas More's 16th-century hatchet job on Richard, which set the tone for much of the later historiography, and Horace Walpole's 18th-century revisionist case. Michael Sidney Tyler-Whittle's novel Richard III: The Last Plantagenet takes Richard as its protagonist, and treats him as a lot less villianous than later propaganda suggested. In particular, he makes a convincing (to me) case that the little princes were actually murdered by another of their uncles, the Duke of Buckingham, who had his own designs on the English throne.
Yes, Kendall discusses the case for Buckingham as the murderer, and Francis Leary, in either The Golden Longing or Fire and Morning, makes Buckingham the culprit. Incidentally, there are many other novels about Richard, among them The White Boar, by Marion Palmer, and Under the Hog, by Patrick Carleton. Werner, you can probably identify many others!As for that Catholic protest, there are MANY other famous Catholics of history entombed in (now) Anglican cathedrals! If Leicester Cathedral was there in Richard's time, it seems the ideal place for him to rest. Those skeletons thought to be his nephews were reinterred in the tomb of Elizabeth I--and so is her very Catholic sister Mary. (Elizabeth is reported to have said, more or less, "Mary wasn't very well liked, and after I'm gone, someone might desecrate her tomb. But NO ONE would desecrate MINE.")
This is all so intriguing, almost like time travel, whisking us back 500 years. To see the actual remains of this king, with his poor, crooked spine and hasty burial makes us grieve for him.I read somewhere in all the news that his reburial in the Leicester Cathedral will take place in early 2014. I hope nothing prevents it, like the protests Werner and Mary mentioned.
Thinking of Richard III being found under a parking lot makes me think that no matter where you walk in
Great Britain, you are walking over some fascinating tale of history.
Sylvia, are you familiar with the Rubaiyat? You made me think of this quatrain, from Edward Fitzgerald's translation:I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quo...
Tey is a classic, of course, but there's another good fictional treatment of Richard III.It's one of the early books by the woman who writes under Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels. This one is an Elizabeth Peters book called "The Murders of Richard III". It features an American Librarian, Jacqueline Kirby, who is invited to a party held by staunch supporters of Richard III - and then, there's a modern murder.
No, Mary, not familiar with it, except for the title, but the quote is lovely. I'm sure NL was familiar with it. Her knowledge of flowers continues to amaze me.All of these great book titles make me yearn for younger years and eyes!
"the Catte, the Ratte and Lovell our doggerulyth all Englande under a hogge." A bit of wit from the reign of Richard III although he didn't appreciate it.
We Speak No Treason by Rosemary Jarman is a pretty good fiction novel, probably styled a romance, but stays close to historical facts.
I'll have to add all these books referenced to my "to read" list.
Very intriguing quote! I wonder to whom the cat, rat, and dog are referring? Anybody have an idea?
Sylvia, according to Who's Who in Late Medieval England by Micael Hicks (Shepheard-Walwyn, 1991), these three men were Richard's leading favorites and advisors: William Catesby, Sir Richard Ratcliffe, and Richard's childhood friend Viscount Lovell. While both of the latter two were apparently honorable men, Catesby (who was the only one of Richard's advisors that Henry VII had executed) "most definitely was not." (He was born of Northamptonshire gentry, became a shady lawyer, and was originally a protege of Buckingham's, but transferred himself to Richard; it's not quite clear why the latter trusted him so much.)
Werner, I hoped you would find those references! The names were cleverly used to form "Catte" and "Ratte". I wonder why Lovell was identified as a dog? Loyalty? Was there any hint as to why Catesby was executed, and not the others? Thanks for looking it up.On Wikipedia there is a good drawing of Richard III's coat of arms using the wild boar (the "Hogg").
Like the "hogge" reference to Richard, the "dogge" image comes from a family heraldic symbol, according to Wikipedia. But I haven't been able to find any explanation (genuine or alleged) for why Catesby was singled out for execution, despite searching both online and in the BC library collection. Most of his numerous landholdings were confiscated by Henry after his execution, so that might have been the real reason.
AS I recall, Lord Lovell's badge was a dog or a wolf--I think the name Lovell came from the French word for wolf.On our first Richard III tour, Rosemary Hawley Jarman placed the wreath on the memorial plaque to Richard at Sutton Cheney Church (very near Bosworth Field, and the site of an annual memorial service on the Sunday nearest to August 22). At that time she had only recently published We Speak No Treason, which she followed with The King's Grey Mare, about Elizabeth Woodville, and then Crown in Candlelight, about Owen Tudor and Queen Katherine, the widow of Henry V. Her popularity with the society went steadily down as her subjects grew increasingly Lancastrian-Tudor! Still, she wrote well and evocatively.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Murders of Richard III--laughed with recognition! Later, however, I was astonished to learn that the society had actually threatened Ms. Peters/Michaels/Mertz with a libel suit! I can't imagine why!
Werner, in response to your comment "I haven't been able to find any explanation . . . for why Catesby was singled out for execution," the reason is simply that Ratliffe was killed at Bosworth and Lovell escaped. However, if you mean singled out from a larger number of Richard's supporters, I don't know.
Yes, Mary, I meant singled out from the total group of Richard's supporters. (His support base, court and government administration, of course, had a lot more people than just those three.)According to Mary Clive in This Sun of York: A Biography of Edward IV, reports are conflicting about whether Ratliffe (also sometimes spelled "Ratcliffe") was killed or managed to get back to his horse and escape. A warrant was issued after the battle for his arrest, and he was exempted from a royal pardon issued on Sept. 24, 1485. (Though the latter facts would seem to indicate that Henry DID possibly have a broader agenda for executing Richard's top advisors, even if circumstances limited how far he could carry it out!)
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Fans of Norah Lofts
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The Lost Queen (other topics)
Keeping Up Appearances: Hyacinth Bucket's Book of Etiquette for the Socially Less Fortunate (other topics)
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Mary, somehow I missed the news about your fire, but I join Sylvia and Barbara in extending sympathy, and wishing you a speedy return to normal!