Well I did it: I posted something for the Project on every day in June. This was, in part, thanks to tackling the longer work that could be chunked up into multiple posts. I try to do the marathon posting every year for Pride month, but this year was on hard mode due to the broken arm. The cast comes off in two days, after which there will be an unknown period of physical therapy getting back to 100%. I'll be taking a short break from the blog, even though I have another collection of articles all written up and ready to go.
LHMP
Blog entry
Sometimes when I'm summarizing the conclusion of a work it feels like I'm just being repetitive. But in this case I think an overall summary of my summary of the book helps to put all of the pieces together into a big picture.
As we come to the close of the analysis chapters of Orr's dissertation, we finally focus in on the course of Lister's courtship of Barlow and the landmarks in its progression.
In this section of Orr's dissertatioin, she traces how Lister used gradual revelations of her sexual history as past of negotiating her courtship of Mrs Barlow.
We finally get to the section of Orr's dissertation that explores in detail Anne Lister's romance with Mrs. Barlow.
Listers landlady in Paris sometimes seems almost like a caricatures. She is constantly matchmaking among her tenants, sowing discord and gossip to manipulate them, and possibly participating in her housekeepers side business of arranging for sexual services. Her failure to correctly identify Lister's social interests provided both comedy and conflict.
If there's a moment of pure comedy in Anne Lister's diary entries for her Paris stay, it's watching her continued obliviousness to the attempts of her landlady to hook her up with Mr. Franks. "Oh, we just happen to be the two odd people out in every social outing that Madame de Boyve has arranged. Ha ha. What a coincidence!"
Although the most significant romance that our Lister enjoyed during her Paris trip was with Mrs. Barlow, there are several other flirtations of various intensity that are documented in her journal. This section of the dissertation looks at her interactions with Mademoiselle de Sans.
People sometimes ask me how lesbians in the past found each other, and sounded each other out about their desires. In this section, looking at Lister's socializing with the MacKenzie mother and daughter in Paris, we see a teenager's insightful observation of Lister's personality, and how she used her classical education to carefully ask that sort of question.
There's some thing of a rolling process to setting up and posting these blogs. Even as I am in the middle of posting the sections of Orr's dissertation, I'm working ahead to finish writing up the remainder of the blogs for this document. I have one more work session to complete that work and then I can coast for the rest of the month. It looks like I've timed the blogs precisely to finish the current publication on the last day of June. Then I think I'll take a brief break before starting the next publication.
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