I can't help but think that the story of Baddeley & Steele is more fascinating than the rather sordid, mercenary mess that Rizzo presents it as. If I were still doing the more detailed notetaking that I'm trying to step back from, I'm not sure how I would have stopped on this one. It would make a fascinating movie, full of intrigue, drama, and larger than life characters. (Almost none of which is apparent in her rather thin Wikipedia entry. Though it does have a link to Steele's biography of her.)
LHMP
Blog entry
I could have sworn I posted this yesterday, but I'm so busy getting the legacy podcast episodes up it's not surprising a lose track of all the rotating tasks. I needed to take a day off anyway, it's just a matter of which one. Again, not much commentery on this one other than to recommend watching The Duchess, and not just because I'm a Keira Knightly fan-girl.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 177 (previously 50d) - 17th Century Poet Katherine Philips - transcript
(Originally aired 2020/09/26 - listen here)
Introduction
I think the "read through then dictate" process is working as intended. No really comments on this one. Written in haste...
For today’s entry, I experimented with reading through the chapter, then dictating the summary directly. It probably shows a little in the flow of the blog, even with some editorial clean-up. But it means I’m better able to condense the notes down to the highlights rather than going off into the weeds of details as I’m reading. We’ll see how it continues.
It’s always tricky to figure out what level of summary to create for a publication. Some works are so dense I throw up my hands and give only a cursory outline. Some are so scanty I can summarize the whole. In the middle, I find the structure of a book influences my approach—if only because I have an idea of a maximum blog length that people are likely to read. (Not sure what it is exactly, but I have a vague idea.)
OK, maybe that isn't the nicest tag line for this chapter in Rizzo's book, but Elizabeth Chudleigh wasn't a very nice person. And yet, as I summed up this chapter, I couldn't help but dwell on how very gendered our impressions of people's behavior can be. Someone who is strong-willed, knows what they want and goes after it in clever and single-minded ways, knows how--and when--to be charming, and when they don't have to bother with it. These are all things that can either be admirable or hateful depending on our relation to the person and our expectations for their behavior.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 176 (previously 50c) - Book Appreciation: 17-18th century Stories in England and France - transcript
(Originally aired 2020/09/19 - listen here)
As I read through Rizzo's book, a number of thoughts have been coalescing with respect to plotting out historical f/f romances. Those thoughts aren't necessarily tied directly to the subject of the chapter, but are building as the various threads weave together.
The introduction to this book uses various characters in Jane Austen's Emma to illustrate the social dynamics of companions. But once you start looking for companionate relationships in Austen, you see them all over the place. And that variety helps illustrate the function and dynamics of what's going on. Let's take a little tour.
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