Windsor Terrace in Clifton, Bristol, home of Hannah More
Monday 1 July
I had a query email from someone who is trying to find out information about a suffragette in Clevedon, Somerset. I’ve built up quite a database of names over the years, but didn’t have anything about her. I managed to make some suggestions and find a few clues though and sent those along.
This is the kind of history I love - finding out about these so-called “ordinary” people!
Tuesday 2 July
I spent the morning on Women and Fashion conference organising, sorting the papers into strands. Amazingly I managed to come up with categories into which the 18 papers all fitted. We had a quick Zoom meeting and even more amazingly the others were happy with them. There are so many ways you can categorise and organise things and I wasn’t going to be upset if my suggestions weren’t accepted. But it made for a lovely short meeting when they were.
Wednesday 3 July
I met a friend for lunch. Otherwise a quiet day working on the Biography.
Thursday 4 July
I did a talk for a local branch of the Townswomen’s Guild this afternoon. It was in a church that was also being used as a polling station – it doesn’t get more appropriate than that. It was really a bit moving to think that I was talking about some of the women who made it possible for daughters to go into a polling booth and write a cross with a pencil on a rectangle of paper on election day.
They were a lovely audience, and not only did I get a cup of tea, I also got a Tunnock’s tea cake to go with it. Now that’s what I call my kind of people.
Friday 5 July
I did some Women’s History Network chores for the conference, then finished off a blog – ‘Commemorating eighteenth-century women writers and artists in Clifton’ – which highlights Hannah More, Ann Yearsley, Hester Thrale, Ellen and Rolinda Sharples, who all lived in Clifton at various times in their lives. (It’s here if you want to read it.)
Then I did some more work on the suffragette interviews.
I’ve been reading Maeve Binchy’s To Light a Penny Candle this week, and enjoying it. I sometimes wonder why: it’s pretty ordinary; written in a straightforward “ordinary” style (no literary bells and whistles – which is of course part of its unpretentious charm – it gets wearing reading over-hyped literary fiction which too often turns out to be dreary and self-consciously writerly); the people are ordinary; the stories of lives and loves and births and marriages are ordinary. It’s nowhere near the best book I’ve ever read, or even one of the best. But it has an air of engaging realism – the characters feel true, the settings are easily recognisable, the story lines touch on feelings and events that many of us will experience at some time or other. And I keep turning the pages.
I wonder, though, if “books where the love interest males are deadbeats and still women run around after them” is a thing, and if so what readers get out of them. Johnnie, who shags his way through London and beyond, and who everyone thinks is so charming and handsome, is an irritating little tick. Also he seems to have no idea that if you have sex, babies might result. In his mind that just doesn’t happen. And then there’s Elizabeth’s husband, who is turning out to be just as whingy as her father, blaming everyone else when things don’t go his way.
Is it an “it was like that for women back then” kind of a book? If so, is it about how women overcome difficulties, or how they are beaten back by them? Or is its appeal simply that of a good soap opera: is she really going out with him, leave him love, oh no what a terrible bereavement (tears in eyes), how could he? how could she? will they, won’t they? So you read on to find out if she will dump him, if he will get that promotion, how they will live after a devastating loss…
I’m also reading Caroline Davidson’s A Woman’s Work is Never Done: history of housework in the British Isles, 1650-1950, and Brian Harrison’s Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists Between the Wars. Both are really good, and I think Harrison’s assessments of the women he writes about are sympathetic without being uncritical, and perceptive.
Saturday 6 July
Heavy rain and thunder and lightning woke me up in the night.
Since I know that a woman’s work is never done, and mites and tidemarks wait for no woman, and a dust in time saves ninety thousand, I did some cleaning and tidying. Then I worked on the novel for an hour, and did a bit on the Biography later.