Miss Pym and a Friend
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
An Apologia for Countess Erzebet Bathory: The Countess Replies
An Apologia for Countess Erzebet Bathory: The Countess Replies: The Countess Replies Alright; enough is enough! What rubbish! I am as civic minded as the next member of the nobility, but m...
Free Newletter with a Link on Huguette' Clark, another Excellent Woman
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| Sewing Kit for an Antique Doll Antique Doll Collector Magazine www.antiquedollcollectormagazineblog.com |
Weekly Newsletter Doll Collecting at
About.com;collectdolls.about.com. It’s
Free!!
From Ellen Tsagaris, your Guide to Doll Collecting
Happy Halloween Week all Doll Collectors and
Enthusiasts! There are lots of chances to find interesting dolls this
time of year, I hope your spooky doll dreams come true! Get out your
witch, scarecrow, and Dracula dolls, and let the Pumpkin Heads Reign
Modern dolls sold at a farm auction. See
what happened to the estate dolls I worked on earlier this year.
Search Related Topics: auction
danbury mint patsy
The Shelter for Misfit Doll is a wonderful
site; I hope that The Little Dead Girl will refresh and add new material soon!
Search Related Topics: shelter for misfit dolls outsider dolls folk dolls
Read about a doll club's pilgrimage to the
ultimate doll store.
Search Related Topics: gigi's dolls and sherry's teddy bears selling dolls doll clothes
An Amazing Portrait in Wax of the beloved queen and doll
collector was a star in the not to distant past Theriault's auction.
Featured Articles:
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Antique Doll Collector Magazine: Vintage Dolls Group on Facebook
Antique Doll Collector Magazine: Vintage Dolls Group on Facebook: For anyone interested in Vintage Dolls; here is a great book on FB; I often share our posts, there. Very nice people and many interesting V...
Dolls from Pym's heyday; she does mention "stuffed animals" and Cylcadic idosl, and Marcia from "Quartet" is in Susan Pearce's The Collector's Voice Series; Modern Voices.
Dolls from Pym's heyday; she does mention "stuffed animals" and Cylcadic idosl, and Marcia from "Quartet" is in Susan Pearce's The Collector's Voice Series; Modern Voices.
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| Theriault's |
Monday, October 27, 2014
Doll Museum: A Video on Wax Dolls
Doll Museum: A Video on Wax Dolls: Here is a video I did on wax dolls, to continue our 19th c. history. Besides Mary Hillier's books, good information is available at Dol...
The Bronte Sisters played with these, so did Nellie Olesen of On the Banks of Plum Creek.
The Bronte Sisters played with these, so did Nellie Olesen of On the Banks of Plum Creek.
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| Courtesy, Theriault's |
Thursday, October 23, 2014
A Dried Piece of Fish Leftover
Today, I honor Pymian women everywhere, especially Mildred L., for I am having a very dry piece of leftover fish for lunch. It has been that kind of week! Would there were an excellent woman to make tea for me :)
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| Courtesy, Theriault's |
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: This Week's About.com Doll Collecting Newsletter
Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: This Week's About.com Doll Collecting Newsletter: From Ellen Tsagaris , your Guide to Doll Collecting Review our site at About.com for more. We think variety is the spice of doll coll...
Friday, October 17, 2014
More Pym Links on the Web
For those who enjoy Pym surfing; after reading and studying Pym, I can't Make room for Daddy anymore; the Feminine Mystique ruined "The Danny Thomas Show" for me! Enjoy the links:
1. Philip Hensher toasts the novelist Barbara Pym - Telegraph
1. Philip Hensher toasts the novelist Barbara Pym - Telegraph
Jun 2, 2013 - In her centenary year, Philip Hensher celebrates the uniquely English comedies of novelist Barbara Pym
2. Barbara Pym Quotes (Author of Excellent Women)
www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/104015.Barbara_Pym
60 quotes from Barbara Pym: 'Of course it's alright for librarians to smell of drink.',
'The small things of life were often so much bigger than the grea...
Marvelous Spinster by C. Frye, Pym at 100
From Last Year's June 2, 2013 100th Birthday of Pym, an excerpt:
A note in Barbara Pym's diary instructs: "Read some of Jane Austen's last chapters and find out how she manages all the loose ends." Next entry, a fairly typical one: "The Riviera Cafe, St. Austell is decorated in shades of chocolate brown. Very tasteless, as are the cakes." This was written in 1952. She was 38, had published two novels, Some Tame Gazelle and the resplendent Excellent Women, and was at work on the next. It had taken 15 years of dutiful revising and circulating it around for Some Tame Gazelle to find a publisher. During the rewrites she had tried to heed her agent's advice to "be more wicked, if necessary."
This is all so worthy, so stealth, so Pymian! Hazel Holt, her friend (and later biographer and literary executor), shared an office with her at the Institute. In her life of Pym, she describes their conjectures about the home lives and backstories of their Institute colleagues, the Anthony Powell Dance to the Music of Time quizzes they'd give each other in the long afternoons, how Pym would repurpose old galleys as stationery for typing her novels. Once an anthropologist, visiting their office, told them that years before he'd been to a party Virginia Woolf had given. The two leapt on this: glamorous brilliant Bloomsbury, what had the party been like? "But, alas, all he could remember was that the refreshment had consisted only of buns and cocoa." This, too, seems very Pymian.
Another Pym thing is always to be a little in need of a revival. One critic-friend, attempting to spark interest in her novels after they'd gone out of fashion in the early 70s, recommended them as "books for a bad day." And they are, it's true. They're comforting and deeply funny. Try to describe them, though, and they go all muzzy: curates and jumble sales, tea urns and "distressed gentlewomen." (You can make Wodehouse sound similar with this sort of inventorying: country houses and cow creamers, prize pigs and school prizes.) Their human values—modesty, compassion, generosity, stoicism—are quiet. Worse, they're so beautifully crafted, so stringently revised and edited, they appear deceptively as if they had been easy to write. What's hard to get across is that Pym's novels are, basically, spinster drag novels—the emotions quite genuine and at the same time a send-up, a pose. Love, Melancholy, Poetry, and Death, all the most Romantic Trappings, courtesy of the vaguely nice-looking lady in dowdy shoes at the next table who you didn't notice jotting down everything you said into her little spiral notebook.
"Let me… add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person," says Mildred Lathbury in Excellent Women.
http://www.theawl.com/2013/05/the-first-century-of-marvelous-spinster-barbara-pym
A note in Barbara Pym's diary instructs: "Read some of Jane Austen's last chapters and find out how she manages all the loose ends." Next entry, a fairly typical one: "The Riviera Cafe, St. Austell is decorated in shades of chocolate brown. Very tasteless, as are the cakes." This was written in 1952. She was 38, had published two novels, Some Tame Gazelle and the resplendent Excellent Women, and was at work on the next. It had taken 15 years of dutiful revising and circulating it around for Some Tame Gazelle to find a publisher. During the rewrites she had tried to heed her agent's advice to "be more wicked, if necessary."
This Sunday, June 2, marks the centenary of Barbara Pym's birth: If you aren't lucky enough to be with the Barbara Pym Society in Oxford, you could make something from her cookbook (downloadable!) or just read one of her novels with champagne, tea or your hot milky drink of choice.
For new Pym readers: I'd start with either Excellent Women or No Fond Return Of Love. Other nice starting points: A Glass of Blessings, Less Than Angels, and The Sweet Dove Died. Do not start with Crampton Hodnet.
During her 20s, she'd completed several other books, including a Finnish novel (she'd never been to Finland) and a spy novel written during WWII, which was very good except for the actual spy parts (she had never met a spy). During the war she'd been placed in the Censorship Department, then joined the Wrens; she now lived in London with her younger sister Hilary. She didn't expect to make a living off her writing. She worked at the International African Institute in the editorial department, managing its journal and ushering various "dusty academic" anthropological monographs and studies through publication. Only a handful of the anthropologists she worked with knew or appreciated that the woman overseeing their indexes and edits was one of Britain's great comic novelists. Many an acknowledgement went: "I am grateful to Miss Barbara Pym for the considerable work involved in preparing the final version of the text for the printer." For new Pym readers: I'd start with either Excellent Women or No Fond Return Of Love. Other nice starting points: A Glass of Blessings, Less Than Angels, and The Sweet Dove Died. Do not start with Crampton Hodnet.
This is all so worthy, so stealth, so Pymian! Hazel Holt, her friend (and later biographer and literary executor), shared an office with her at the Institute. In her life of Pym, she describes their conjectures about the home lives and backstories of their Institute colleagues, the Anthony Powell Dance to the Music of Time quizzes they'd give each other in the long afternoons, how Pym would repurpose old galleys as stationery for typing her novels. Once an anthropologist, visiting their office, told them that years before he'd been to a party Virginia Woolf had given. The two leapt on this: glamorous brilliant Bloomsbury, what had the party been like? "But, alas, all he could remember was that the refreshment had consisted only of buns and cocoa." This, too, seems very Pymian.
Another Pym thing is always to be a little in need of a revival. One critic-friend, attempting to spark interest in her novels after they'd gone out of fashion in the early 70s, recommended them as "books for a bad day." And they are, it's true. They're comforting and deeply funny. Try to describe them, though, and they go all muzzy: curates and jumble sales, tea urns and "distressed gentlewomen." (You can make Wodehouse sound similar with this sort of inventorying: country houses and cow creamers, prize pigs and school prizes.) Their human values—modesty, compassion, generosity, stoicism—are quiet. Worse, they're so beautifully crafted, so stringently revised and edited, they appear deceptively as if they had been easy to write. What's hard to get across is that Pym's novels are, basically, spinster drag novels—the emotions quite genuine and at the same time a send-up, a pose. Love, Melancholy, Poetry, and Death, all the most Romantic Trappings, courtesy of the vaguely nice-looking lady in dowdy shoes at the next table who you didn't notice jotting down everything you said into her little spiral notebook.
"Let me… add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person," says Mildred Lathbury in Excellent Women.
http://www.theawl.com/2013/05/the-first-century-of-marvelous-spinster-barbara-pym
Memoir; Writing your Life Story: Doll Museum: Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Antique Dol...
Here is a link to a blogpost on an excellent little girl, Betsy McCall, who reigned during Pym's time, and long before The American Girls.
Memoir; Writing your Life Story: Doll Museum: Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Antique Dol...: Doll Museum: Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Antique Doll Collector M... : Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Antique Doll Collector Magazine: Vint...
Memoir; Writing your Life Story: Doll Museum: Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Antique Dol...: Doll Museum: Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Antique Doll Collector M... : Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Antique Doll Collector Magazine: Vint...
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| 1995 Betsy; near the end of the Magazine |
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Pym on Twitter
See Below:
https://twitter.com/Barbara_Pym/status/519239910558294016
We thank them for retweeting us!
https://twitter.com/Barbara_Pym/status/519239910558294016
We thank them for retweeting us!
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| Excellent Doll Women, courtesy Antique Doll Collector magazine |
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Our Salute to More Excellent Women in TV Media
A quick salute to Aunt Bea, who could run the sheriff's house like a warden if needed, and still bake cakes for the church social, and to Jane of F-Troop, who was true to herself and could outride any of the silly men she dealt with every day. A special salute goes to Edith Bunker, who in her own gentle way, did as she pleased, got a job, made diverse friendships, lived where she wanted, and dealt with life on her own terms. She made "dingbat" a compliment, and an intellectual pursuit. If we look at things with a different perspective, we see there were strong female characters in media, even as they were written into the script of The Feminine Mystique. Finally, I salute my late, beloved mother, now of blesse memory, who worked, married, raised a family, and did it all when married women who worked were criticized every which way but loose. And, to my Dad, who macho soldier though he was, did housework, minded kids, ran the house like courts martial at times, but who believed women could work, have career, and be anything.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Memoir; Writing your Life Story: A few hints
Memoir; Writing your Life Story: A few hints: As many of my readers know, I have been very busy with my work as an expert guid for About.com, collectdolls.about.com, and as social media ...
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