A chest full of gold pieces and a treasure map; a voyage to tropical waters on a ship packed with secret enemies; a mutiny complete with cannon fire; X marks the spot. It is the very model of a modern major pirate tale*. If you’ve had any pop cultural contact with pirates at all, you know the outline of this story, and all that remains is to fill in the details.
It occurs to me that some people might not know who the Mitford sisters were. Do you know who the Mitford sisters were? They were the daughters of a minor peer, raised partly in London and partly in Oxfordshire, and were notable for their eccentricities, which is what you call it when rich white people do things that would be unacceptable if they were poor or black. Nancy, the eldest, had a string of husbands and lovers before settling down in Paris with a man she refused to marry but lived very happily with (scandalous at the time). Jessica eloped with an aristocratic communist, and then, much worse, with an American communist. Unity and Diana both got into fascism in a big way; Unity shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany (she survived, but later died essentially due to complications arising from the bullet that was STILL IN HER HEAD). Diana’s second wedding took place in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room. Deborah towed the line a bit more by marrying well, and ended up managing Chatsworth house in her capacity as Duchess of Devonshire. Pamela was mostly into animals, bless her, though that goes for all of them: during Unity’s debutante season, she frequently showed up at balls and parties draped in her pet grass-snake, Enid.
Continue reading The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate
Villette, Charlotte Bronte’s third published novel, was partly based on her experiences working in a school in Brussels as a young woman. Its protagonist is Lucy Snowe, orphaned at a young age and required to make her own way in the world almost friendless, who by a series of coincidences ends up working in a girls’ school in the small (fictional) town of Villette, where also dwells a childhood friend.