History is Awesome!

Okay, I suppose that maybe the model is 'Disney princess' rather than any princess in history ever, but even then, don't they display a certain degree of agency?

This is A Thing where apparently women display princessiness by performatively giving up agency - sitting in restaurants with castdown eyes being ordered for, not speaking until spoken to - also certain forms of helplessness which suggest they actually need a team of Ladies of the Bedchamber fighting over whose hereditary right it is to put on their stockings and whose to lace their stays....

This boggles the mind of someone raised in an actual monarchy in which there were two princesses around who did not, actually, model docility - I don't think Princess Margaret conceding to the strictures of the day and Giving Up The Man She Loved because he was divorced really qualifies as she'd been going around with him, as far as I can recall WITHOUT A CHAPERONE for some time.

Historian is obliged to point out that for centuries princesses - apart from bearing necessary heirs - quite often had to undertake regnal tasks, either as consort or regent, or at least aid in the general work of Being Royal, even if they did not actually take the throne themselves. Note here conference paper I heard on the preference for female regents in medieval Europe when there was a minor heir.

If you're going to Be a Princess, perhaps do not take Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst as your model, though on another hand, why not? Girl-Bossing It to the Max!

but we commend Princess Sophia Duleep Singh to your attention.

Observe also the daughters of Queen Victoria: e.g. Princess Alice, who married Louis, the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, was known for her commitment to philanthropic work, interested in nursing, met and befriended Florence Nightingale, and also set up military hospitals; Princess Louise who attended the The National Art Training School and designed a full-size statue of her mother as well as a memorial sculpture for the Boer War. No meek sitting about for them.

(I will cop to have read Alot of historical novels in my misspent youth very much contradicting the notion that princessing was sitting still and being silent.)

What I read

Well, Presidential Agent kept me going for quite a while - boy, Upton Sinclair chucks a lot in - this one was particularly gripping.

I decided not to go straight on the next one - needing a break from the grim extension of Fascism over Europe - and therefore read Jessica Stanley, Consider Yourself Kissed (2025), which was a considerable disappointment. What I'd read about it led me to expect something fresher, more original, sparkier - I found this meh and towards the cosy women's fiction end. We note that back in the 60s/70s women were trapped like woodcock in springes by getting pregnant prematurely and thus stuck in unwelcome marriages or finding themselves tied down, and the gen X/millenial narrative is Biological Clock is Ticking On, so the trajectory is a bit different. The other thing I noted is that, as with All Fours, I feel Lessing's 'To Room 19' is somewhere in the DNA and it's a bit like the Omelas revisionism thing?

On the go

I've been wondering about Elizabeth Bear's The Folded Sky (White Space #3) (2025) and there was a very tasty deal on UK/European sites for the ebook - I found it a bit slow-starting but then we got the 'murder-mystery in enclosed setting' while a whole lot of other shit goes down.

Up next

New Literary Review.

Read a review of Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays on Being Right, which made these sound intriguing, and I read the preview sample on Kobo, and fell to the temptation of preordering. Should turn up this week.

Volume in which I have a chapter has arrived - I ought to at least riffle through the other contributions.

More monks behaving badly: Head of Shaolin Temple in China under investigation on suspicion of embezzlement: plus'violated Buddhist precepts by maintaining relationships with multiple women over a long period and fathering at least one child, according to a notice from the temple’s authority on its WeChat account'.

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How unlike our own dear Cardinal Newman, St. John Henry Newman: The First Openly Gay Catholic Saint? (actually an older post, I think floating about again because he was recently declared A Doctor of the Church). Quite separately the other day I was thinking of Newman's Description of a Gentleman, and how certain recent converts fail to match up to this ideal (I think they would also - no names, no pack drill - be destroyed by early C20th convert Dr Letitia Fairfield, who unlike most of those in that category was leftwing and feminist and in a lot of respects not totally unlike sister Rebecca West for all their quarrels).

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A nice article on Barbara Hepworth - A revelatory new view of Barbara Hepworth: The Fondation Maeght’s stunning show brings the British sculptor into dialogue with European modernists. '“If the ‘Winged Figure’ in Oxford Street gives people a sense of being airborne in rain and sunlight and nightlight I will be very happy,” Hepworth said.' Bless.

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I feel this is Already Known, or perhaps not, because this sort of thing seems to keep needing being rediscovered, sigh: Darwinist feminism: Dismantling the myth of female sexual passivity: The arrival of researchers like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Amy Parish transformed not only the study of primates, but also our understanding of evolution, sexuality and gender roles in general.

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Students make one of the most subversive and experimental women writers of the Romantic era accessible for all (and kudos for not mentioning what she is probably best known to history for, being Prinny's 'Perdita', that he was financially mean towards). Having read that bio of Mrs Barbauld, suspect Robinson also had the problem of Georgian dude-bros being critically condescending if not outright dismissive with knock-on effects for reputation.