Across an Untried Sea

Across an Untried Sea PDF

Author: Julia Markus

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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From the much acclaimed author of "Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, a new book that retrieves the lives of Victorian women--writers, actresses, poets, journalists, sculptors, and social reformers--celebrated in their day but forgotten in ours. Julia Markus focuses in particular on the American Charlotte Cushman, the most famous English-speaking actress of her day, and on the Scottish Jane Welsh Carlyle, a brilliant London hostess who gave up private ambition to become the wife of her friend Thomas Carlyle. Charlotte Cushman became an international star on the New York and London stage, and her Romeo and Hamlet were sensations. An independent woman with shrewd business sense who made her own fortune and supported her entire family, she dressed like a man from the waist up and had a succession of female lovers, each one of whom she planned to live with for life, each of whom she 'married.' Jane Welsh Carlyle, literary hostess, unparalleled letter writer and chronicler of her times--who, after a passionate youthful love affair, resolved to marry genius or not at all--became the wife of the revered and lionized philosopher Thomas Carlyle, a difficult, demanding man with whom she had a sexless marriage. Interweaving the worlds of Charlotte Cushman and Jane Carlyle--the worlds of expatriate Rome, literary London, New York, and St. Louis--Markus gathers together a number of interrelated and renowned women who were relegated in the public eye to the position of Virgin Queen (no matter how much married) or Old Maid, but who were, in fact, privately leading vibrant, independent, sexual lives. Among them: Matilda Hays, translator of George Sand; Harriet Hosmer, who resolved to become the world's first professional woman sculptor; and Emma Stebbins, whom Cushman 'married' and who created the Bethesda Fountain in New York's Central Park. Here, too, are the people who sought the friendship of Cushman and Carlyle, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Mann, Elizabeth Peabody, President Lincoln's Secretary of State William H. Seward, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Rosa Bonheur. Making use of letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, and journals of the day, many of them overlooked and unpublished, Julia Markus rediscovers lives forgotten in the shadows of convention and shows how these remarkable women--seemingly separated by nationality, class, and sexual inclination--met, formed alliances, and influenced one another, forging changes in themselves and in their time.

Across an Untried Sea

Across an Untried Sea PDF

Author: Julia Markus

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2013-02-13

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 0307832988

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From the much acclaimed author of Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, a new book that retrieves the lives of Victorian women--writers, actresses, poets, journalists, sculptors, and social reformers--celebrated in their day but forgotten in ours. Julia Markus focuses in particular on the American Charlotte Cushman, the most famous English-speaking actress of her day, and on the Scottish Jane Welsh Carlyle, a brilliant London hostess who gave up private ambition to become the wife of her friend Thomas Carlyle. Charlotte Cushman became an international star on the New York and London stage, and her Romeo and Hamlet were sensations. An independent woman with shrewd business sense who made her own fortune and supported her entire family, she dressed like a man from the waist up and had a succession of female lovers, each one of whom she planned to live with for life, each of whom she 'married.' Jane Welsh Carlyle, literary hostess, unparalleled letter writer and chronicler of her times--who, after a passionate youthful love affair, resolved to marry genius or not at all--became the wife of the revered and lionized philosopher Thomas Carlyle, a difficult, demanding man with whom she had a sexless marriage. Interweaving the worlds of Charlotte Cushman and Jane Carlyle--the worlds of expatriate Rome, literary London, New York, and St. Louis--Markus gathers together a number of interrelated and renowned women who were relegated in the public eye to the position of Virgin Queen (no matter how much married) or Old Maid, but who were, in fact, privately leading vibrant, independent, sexual lives. Among them: Matilda Hays, translator of George Sand; Harriet Hosmer, who resolved to become the world's first professional woman sculptor; and Emma Stebbins, whom Cushman 'married' and who created the Bethesda Fountain in New York's Central Park. Here, too, are the people who sought the friendship of Cushman and Carlyle, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Mann, Elizabeth Peabody, President Lincoln's Secretary of State William H. Seward, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Rosa Bonheur. Making use of letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, and journals of the day, many of them overlooked and unpublished, Julia Markus rediscovers lives forgotten in the shadows of convention and shows how these remarkable women--seemingly separated by nationality, class, and sexual inclination--met, formed alliances, and influenced one another, forging changes in themselves and in their time.

A Sisterhood of Sculptors

A Sisterhood of Sculptors PDF

Author: Melissa Dabakis

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-05-01

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 0271089334

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This project is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton penned the Declaration of Sentiments for the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, she unleashed a powerful force in American society. In A Sisterhood of Sculptors, Melissa Dabakis outlines the conditions under which a group of American women artists adopted this egalitarian view of society and negotiated the gendered terrain of artistic production at home and abroad. Between 1850 and 1876, a community of talented women sought creative refuge in Rome and developed successful professional careers as sculptors. Some of these women have become well known in art-historical circles: Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, and Vinnie Ream. The reputations of others have remained, until now, buried in the historical record: Emma Stebbins, Margaret Foley, Sarah Fisher Ames, and Louisa Lander. At midcentury, they were among the first women artists to attain professional stature in the American art world while achieving international fame in Rome, London, and other cosmopolitan European cities. In their invention of modern womanhood, they served as models for a younger generation of women who adopted artistic careers in unprecedented numbers in the years following the Civil War. At its core, A Sisterhood of Sculptors is concerned with the gendered nature of creativity and expatriation. Taking guidance from feminist theory, cultural geography, and expatriate and postcolonial studies, Dabakis provides a detailed investigation of the historical phenomenon of women’s artistic lives in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. As an interdisciplinary examination of femininity and creativity, it provides models for viewing and interpreting nineteenth-century sculpture and for analyzing the gendered status of the artistic profession.

Seward

Seward PDF

Author: Walter Stahr

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 720

ISBN-13: 1439121184

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Presents a profile of the leader of Lincoln's "team of rivals," examining the many political roles he had in his lifetime, including governor of New York, Secretary of State, and Lincoln's closest advisor during the Civil War.

J. Anthony Froude

J. Anthony Froude PDF

Author: Julia Markus

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1416586431

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Acclaimed biographer Julia Markus has written an unprecedented and illuminating portrait of the brilliant, tortured, and controversial James Anthony Froude—the quintessential Victorian, father of modern biography, historian, diplomat, and prodigal son. J. Anthony Froude expertly captures the roiling cultural history of a century through one man’s dynamic life. From his birth in 1818 to his death in 1894, J. Anthony Froude embodied the issues and complexities of his time. Through the story of his life, Markus elucidates the major ideological issues of the nineteenth century—sexuality, colonialism, and the widespread challenges to religion’s long-held cultural primacy. In beautifully crafted prose, Markus reveals the compelling life of one of the most important thinkers of the Victorian age—the brutality of his early education, his troubled relationship with his father, his expulsion from Oxford, his dramatic and dazzling literary career, his delicious political incorrectness, his two marriages, his relationships with his children, his friendships with such disparate luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Cardinal Newman, his diplomatic work for Prime Minister Disraeli, and his complex relationship with Thomas Carlyle, his spiritual father and the subject of his most famous biography. A. L. Rowse, historian and author, called Froude the “last great Victorian awaiting revival.” No life of the period is more poignant, no destiny more fascinating, than that of this man whom in his books and his actions reflected the triumphs and the errors of his society.

Lady Byron and Her Daughters

Lady Byron and Her Daughters PDF

Author: Julia Markus

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2015-10-13

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 0393248755

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A startling reevaluation of Lady Byron’s marriage and the untold story of her complex life as single mother and progressive force. The center of public attention after her tumultuous marriage to Lord Byron, Annabella Milbanke transformed herself from a neglected wife into a figure of incredible resilience and social vision. After she and her infant child were cast out of their home, she was left to navigate the stifling and unsupportive social environment of Regency England. Far from a victim or an obstacle to Byron’s work, however, Lady Byron was a rebel against the fashionable snobbery of her class, founding the first Infants School and Co-Operative School in England. A poet and talented mathematician, Lady Byron supported the education of her precocious daughter, Ada Lovelace, now recognized and lauded as a pioneer of computer science, and saved from death her “adoptive daughter” Medora Leigh, the child of Lord Byron’s incest with his sister. Lady Byron was adored by the younger abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe and by many notable friends. Yet her complex relationships with her family, including the sister Byron loved, runs like a live wire through this skillfully told and groundbreaking biography of a remarkable woman who made a life for herself and became a leading light in her century.

Lady Romeo

Lady Romeo PDF

Author: Tana Wojczuk

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1501199536

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Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Finalist for the Marfield Prize For fans of Book of Ages and American Eve, this “lively, illuminating new biography” (The Boston Globe) of 19th-century queer actress Charlotte Cushman portrays a “brisk, beautifully crafted life” (Stacy Schiff, bestselling author of The Witches and Cleopatra) that riveted New York City and made headlines across America. All her life, Charlotte Cushman refused to submit to others’ expectations. Raised in Boston at the time of the transcendentalists, a series of disasters cleared the way for her life on the stage—a path she eagerly took, rejecting marriage and creating a life of adventure, playing the role of the hero in and out of the theater as she traveled to New Orleans and New York City, and eventually to London and back to build a successful career. Her Hamlet, Romeo, Lady Macbeth, and Nancy Sykes from Oliver Twist became canon, impressing Louisa May Alcott, who later based a character on her in Jo’s Boys, and Walt Whitman, who raved about “the towering grandeur of her genius” in his columns for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She acted alongside Edwin and John Wilkes Booth—supposedly giving the latter a scar on his neck that was later used to identify him as President Lincoln’s assassin—and visited frequently with the Great Emancipator himself, who was a devoted Shakespeare fan and admirer of Cushman’s work. Her wife immortalized her in the angel at the top of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain; worldwide, she was “a lady universally acknowledged as the greatest living tragic actress.” Behind the scenes, she was equally radical, making an independent income, supporting her family, creating one of the first bohemian artists’ colonies abroad, and living publicly as a queer woman. And yet, her name has since faded into the shadows. Now, her story comes to brilliant life with Tana Wojczuk’s Lady Romeo, an exhilarating and enlightening biography of the 19th-century trailblazer. With new research and rarely seen letters and documents, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman’s life, set against the excitement and drama of 1800s New York City and featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries who changed the cultural landscape of America forever. The story of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable forgotten figures in our history and restores her to center stage, where she belongs.

Fanny Seward

Fanny Seward PDF

Author: Trudy Krisher

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2015-01-06

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 081565295X

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On April 14, 1865, the night of President Lincoln’s assassination, Booth’s conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward in his home just blocks from Ford’s Theatre. The attack, which left Seward and his son seriously wounded, is recounted in poignant detail in Fanny Seward’s diary. Fanny, the beloved only daughter of Seward, was a keen observer, and her diary entries from 1858 to 1866 are the foundation of Krisher’s vivid portrait of the young girl who was an eyewitness to one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. Fanny offers intimate observations on the politicians, generals, and artists of the time. She tells of attending dinner parties, visiting troops, and going to the theater, often alongside President Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary. Through Fanny’s writings, Krisher not only skillfully brings to life the events and activities of a progressive political family but also illuminates the day-to-day drama of the war. Giving readers a previously unseen glimpse into the era, Fanny Seward: A Life broadens our understanding of Civil War America.

Friendship's Bonds

Friendship's Bonds PDF

Author: Richard Dellamora

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2004-08-31

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0812238133

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"Systematically bringing together discourses on queer identities in Victorian England, Jewish identities in nineteenth-century literary and political culture, and the ways these powerful forms of otherness intersect, Friendship's Bonds offers an analysis of how the dream of a perfect sympathy between friends continually challenged Victorians' capacity to imagine into existence a world not of strangers or enemies but of fellow citizens."--BOOK JACKET.