The Impossible Life of Mary Benson
The Impossible Life of Mary Benson

Author: Rodney Bolt

Publisher: Atlantic Books

Published: 2013-04-01

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0857895826

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The remarkable true story of the life of Mary Benson: wife of an archbishop, friend of Queen Victoria, mother of three "unpermissably gifted" children—including E. F. Benson, and in love with dozens of women Sometimes touching and sometimes hilarious, this is the story of one lovable, brilliant woman and her trajectory through the often surprising opportunities and the remarkable limitations of a Victorian woman's life. Young Minnie Sidgwick was just 12 years old when her cousin, 12-year-old Edward Benson, proposed to her in 1853. Edward went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury and little Minnie—as Mary Benson—to preside a social world that ranged from Tennyson, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde to foreign royalty and Queen Victoria herself. Yet Mrs. Benson's most intense relationships were not with her husband and his associates, but with other women. When the Archbishop died, Mary, or "Ben" to her intimates, turned down an offer from the Queen to live at Windsor, and set up home in a Jacobean manor house with her friend Lucy Tait. Drawing on the diaries and novels of the Bensons themselves, including E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels, as well as the writing of contemporary writers and poets, this book creates a very rich portrait of Mary Benson, her family, her close female friends, and their world.

As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil
As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil

Author: Rodney Bolt

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 9781445871172

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Tells the extraordinary story of Mary Benson and her family, bringing the late Victorian and early Edwardian period vividly to life.

As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil
As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil

Author: Rodney Bolt

Publisher: Atlantic Books (UK)

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781843548614

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BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY. She is as good as God, and as clever as the Devil.' Dame Ethel Smyth, English composer and leader of the women's suffrage movement Archbishop of Canterbury, insufferable to the end, died on his knees in church saying the CoBGession, after a life of relentless success. At that moment his wife Mary became nobody... 'All this is over,' Mary wrote in her diary, 'it has fallen to pieces around us.'' her just three years later. Through her marriage to Edward, whose career would take him from success as a young head schoolmaster to become Archbishop of Canterbury, Mary Benson came to preside over Lambeth Palace and a social circle that ranged from famous politicians and celebrated writers to Queen Victoria herself. But Mrs Benson's most intense and intimate relationships were not with her husband, but with other women.

The Chaperone
The Chaperone

Author: Laura Moriarty

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-06-04

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1594631433

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Soon to be a feature film from the creators of Downton Abbey starring Elizabeth McGovern, The Chaperone is a New York Times-bestselling novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in the 1920s and the summer that would change them both. Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and an icon of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle, a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip, has no idea what she’s in for. Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous black bob with blunt bangs, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will transform their lives forever. For Cora, the city holds the promise of discovery that might answer the question at the core of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in this strange and bustling place she embarks on a mission of her own. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, she is liberated in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of Cora’s relationship with Louise, her eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive. Drawing on the rich history of the 1920s, ’30s, and beyond—from the orphan trains to Prohibition, flappers, and the onset of the Great Depression to the burgeoning movement for equal rights and new opportunities for women—Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone illustrates how rapidly everything, from fashion and hemlines to values and attitudes, was changing at this time and what a vast difference it all made for Louise Brooks, Cora Carlisle, and others like them.

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

Author: Rivka Galchen

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0374711216

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Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which award-winning author Rivka Galchen’s writing is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a tale for our time—the story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear. The year is 1619, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katherina Kepler is accused of being a witch. An illiterate widow, Katherina is known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It’s enough to make anyone jealous, and Katherina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone’s business. So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katherina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katherina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katherina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katherina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets. Provocative and entertaining, Galchen’s bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society, and a family, undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

Dr James Barry
Dr James Barry

Author: Michael Du Preez

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781786071194

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A Sunday Times Book of the Year As featured on the BBC Radio 2 Book Club Dr James Barry: Inspector General of Hospitals, army surgeon, duellist, reformer, ladykiller, eccentric. He performed the first successful Caesarean in the British Empire, outraged the military establishment and gave Florence Nightingale a dressing down at Scutari. At home he was surrounded by a menagerie of animals, including a cat, a goat, a parrot and a terrier. Long ago in Cork, Ireland, he had also been a mother. This is the amazing tale of Margaret Anne Bulkley, the young woman who broke the rules of Georgian society to become one of the most respected surgeons of the century. In an extraordinary life, she crossed paths with the British Empire's great and good, royalty and rebels, soldiers and slaves. A medical pioneer, she rose to a position that no woman before her had been allowed to occupy, but for all her successes, her long, audacious deception also left her isolated, even costing her the chance to be with the man she loved.

The Man Who Went Too Far
The Man Who Went Too Far

Author: E. F. Benson

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2021-04-11

Total Pages: 31

ISBN-13:

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The Man Who Went Too Far is a short story by E.F. Benson. A man dedicates himself to realizing "unity" in conjunction with nature. In time he gets it, but it is not at all what he expected.