The Death of Imagination

My attention, as they say, was drawn to this: Why Have So Many Books by Women Been Lost to History?

The question itself is reasonable, I guess, but what is downright WEIRD is they actually namecheck Persephone Press's acts of rediscovery -

- and one of the first books in their own endeavour is one that PP did early on and being Persephone is STILL IN PRINT.

And one of the others has been repeatedly reprinted as a significant work including by Pandora Press.

Do we think there is a) not checking this sort of thing b) erasure of feminist publishing foremothers?

Okay I pointed out that even Virago were not actually digging up Entirely Forgotten Works (ahem ahem South Riding never out of print and paid for a lot of gels to get to Somerville).

However, this did lead me to look up certain rare faves of mine, and lo and behold, British Library Women Writers have actually just reprinted, all praise to them, GB Stern's The Woman in the Hall, 1939 and never republished. Yay. This to my mind is one of her top works.

Also remark here that Furrowed Middlebrow are bringing back works that have genuinely been hard to get hold of, like the non-Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons, and the early Margery Sharps, and so on. (Though Greyladies had already done Noel Streatfeild as Susan Scarlett.)

Confess I am waiting for the Big Publishing Rediscovery of EBC Jones. Would also not mind maybe some attention to Violet Hunt (unfortunately her life was perhaps so dramatic it has outshone her work? gosh the Wikipedia entry is a bit thin.)

Last week was the one where there was PANIC over whether I would have new supply of prescription drug; credit card issues including FRAUD; and also bizarre phonecall from the musculo-skeletal people about scheduling an appointment which suggested they hadn't looked at my record or are very very confused about what my next session is actually for.

HOWEVER

Though I began writing a review on Wednesday, did a paragraph, and felt totally blank about where it was going from there, I returned to it the following day and lo and behold wrote enough to be considered an actual review, though have been tinkering and polishing since then. But is essentially DONE.

And in the realm of reviewing have received 3 books for essay review, have another one published this month coming sometime, and today heard that my offer to review for Yet Another Venue has been accepted, where can they send the book?

While in other not quite past it news, for many years I was heavily involved in a rather niche archival survey, which is no longer being hosted in its previous useful if rather outdated form but as a spreadsheet (I would say no use to man nor beast but it does have some value I suppose). But there is talk of reviving and updating it (yay) and I have been invited to a meeting to discuss this. Fortunately I can attend virtually rather than at ungodly hour of morning in distant reaches of West London.

Also professional org of which I am A (jolly good?) Fellow is doing a survey and has invited me to attend a virtual Focus Group.

Oh yes, and it looks as though a nerdy letter about Rebecca West I wrote to the Literary Review is likely to get published.

Actually, I can't find that the article by Molly-Jong Fast in today's Guardian Saturday is currently online, alas - clearly she had a sad and distressing childhood, even if I was tempted, and probably not the only one to be so tempted, to murmur, apologies to P Larkin, 'they zipless fuck you up...', the abrupt dismissal of her nanny, her only secure attachment figure, when Erica J suddenly remarried (again) was particularly harsh, I thought. No wonder she had problems.

And really, even if she does make a point of how relatively privileged she was, that doesn't actually ameliorate how badly she was treated.

Only the other day there was an obituary of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, who wrote Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child.

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Another rather traumatic parenting story, though this is down to the hospitals: BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.:

[V]ery gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.
"The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife," says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.
"It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well."
It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.
To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby's name, mother's name, the date and time of birth, and the baby's weight.
"Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen"

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A different sort of misattribution: The furniture fraud who hoodwinked the Palace of Versailles:

[T]his assortment of royal chairs would become embroiled in a national scandal that would rock the French antiques world, bringing the trade into disrepute.
The reason? The chairs were in fact all fakes.
The scandal saw one of France's leading antiques experts, Georges "Bill" Pallot, and award-winning cabinetmaker, Bruno Desnoues, put on trial on charges of fraud and money laundering following a nine-year investigation.
....
Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a "joke" with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, that once belonged to Madame du Barry.
Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.

I am really given a little hope for an anti-Mybug tendency among the masculine persuasion: A Man writes in 'the issue is not whether men are being published, but whether they are reading – and being supported to develop emotional lives that fiction can help foster'

While Geoff Dyer in The Books of [His] Life goes in hard with Beatrix Potter as early memory, Elizabeth Taylor as late-life discovery, and Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets as

One of those perennially bubbling-under modern classics – too good for the Championship, unable to sustain a place in the Premier league – which turns out to be way better than some of the canonical stalwarts permanently installed in the top flight.