"And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
~ Claudine Gay
Anne Brontë's novels are not as well known as those of her more famous elder sisters, but they told truths about the abject oppression of women that English society (even her own sisters) did not want to hear, much less address. Born 1820 in Haworth, Yorkshire, Anne was the youngest of the Brontë children.
"Her second novel and the most shocking of the collective Brontë novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was published under her nom-de-plume, Acton Bell, and sold out in six weeks. Anne’s depiction of alcoholism, debauchery and what May Sinclair, a member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League, described in 1913 as “the slamming of Helen Huntingdon's bedroom door against her husband” reverberated throughout Victorian England. It is considered one of the first feminist novels.
"Anne lived for most of her life with her family apart from attending boarding school for two years when she was 16, and a six year spell as a governess in her early twenties. Her mother, Maria, had died when she was barely a year old and in Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, their father remembered her as precocious. When Anne was four, he had asked her what a child most wanted. She said, “Age and experience".
"The Brontë sisters like many women writers at the time published their poems and novels under male pen names so that their work might be taken seriously in the male-dominated literary world of the 19th century: they were Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
"Anne’s first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in 1847 under the pen name Acton Bell. It was based on her own experiences as a governess. Agnes Grey wants “to go out into the world; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my own unknown powers” but has to deal with instances of abuse of women and governesses, oppression and isolation.
"Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in 1848, went further. The book describes how the protagonist Helen Huntingdon left her husband to protect her son and support them both by painting. This flew in the face of all social conventions and English law. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, a married woman was not legally a person in her own right; she was just an extension of her husband. She could not own property, sue for divorce or have legal custody of her own children. Mr Huntingdon had the legal right to force her to return, to have her charged with kidnapping for taking her own son, and with theft for supporting herself on her own money since all of her income legally belonged to him.
“Sick of mankind and their disgusting ways," scribbled Anne Brontë in pencil at the back of her Prayer Book.
"Anne met with fierce criticism for her work despite its huge popularity. Even her sister Charlotte said the portrayal of Mr Huntingdon was overly graphic and disturbing. Anne merely remarked mildly that she "wished to tell the truth" and stuck to her guns.
"After Anne's death at the age of 29 of tuberculosis, Charlotte prevented further publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, writing: “It hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake, it was too little consonant with the character, tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring inexperienced writer.”
The last word to goes to Anne:
“When we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is doubtless the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers?
O Reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts – this whispering 'Peace, peace', when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.”
Another from the mindfulness calendar 🙂
I adore your calendar 😍 @DaveFromSussex
“When she transformed into a butterfly, the caterpillars spoke not of her beauty, but of her weirdness. They wanted her to change back into what she always had been. But she had wings.”
Dean Jackson
Sarah Paxton Ball Dodson - Butterflies, 1891.
I poop, therefore I am lighter now.
—pmvines
"My friend grew up in New England where they have pigeons. Apparently they also hate them. He was always saying bad things about pigeons until I pointed something out that he never thought of before."
"We domesticated pigeons. They are (nearly) all over the world because HUMANS BROUGHT THEM THERE. And, they were more than pets. They carried messages. People raced them. They lived spoiled lives as honored human companions for centuries.
Then we got telephones and we threw them out like trash.
Literally, we threw them away.
Their species had already been fully domesticated and they could not survive in the wild; they lost all their survival instincts during the centuries that they lived caged by people.
That is why they live in cities with people instead of in a forest somewhere. It's OUR fault. And not only did we throw them away, but now humans curse them as "winged rats;" casting them as pests.
But they don't know how to live without us, and their instincts tell us that they should trust us. So, they continue to come up to humans and beg for food, because it's the only survival skill left in their genes.
They love us because they were bred by us to feel that way, and yet we hate them."
Athena named her owl Glauce; aka, Glauca or Glaux, meaning "Blue" or "She is a Little Owl." Glauca was a name of power despite also indicating smallness, as Glauce was also the name of one of baby Zeus's nurses; the twin sister of Pluto; a Nereid; one of the Danaides; the mother of Artemis according to Cicero; an Amazon Queen (the same as Antiope) kidnapped by Theseus; and other mythological figures.
Cute li'l Blue was depicted on Athenian tetradrachm coins (as shown here) and on vases, and the award amphoras for the Panathenaic Games, and in other contexts, sometimes with no need to show Athena, as it was instantly known to be the Goddess's beloved Glauce.
The owl was also known to both Greeks and Romans as Nyctimene ("She Who Stays Awake All Night") or Nyctaea ("She is of the Night" or "Nocturnal"). Nyctimene had formerly been a princess of Lesbos but was raped by her own father. She was so distraught that Athena took pity on her, turned her into an owl, and kept her always near. An asteroid is now named for Nyctimene.
The letters AOE frequently appeared beside Athena's owl. This stands for Alethia Orno Eternia (Truth, Honor, Eternity). In the presence of her owl, Athena saw the entire truth of every matter, as Glauce illuminated for her everything she might be inclined otherwise to overlook. It also secondarily meant "of Athens."
The owl coin also depicts lubine bean pods, an angricultural item for Athens, which must have had an association with Athena, as do olives, but I can't for the life of me remember any myth that explains her or her owl's lupine connection.
The idea of an Owl-goddess dates into prehistory and is commonplace throughout the world. This may be only parallel development, but on the premise that ideas begin somewhere then spread, the Owl-goddess has been with humanity from its earliest migrations.
The species intended as Athena's owl today has her name as its genus, Athene noctua, common name The Little Owl, the subspecies A. n. indigena common throughout Attica and even today to be encountered perched among ruins and ancient places.
“The manner in which you get ready for work, go to work, and the way you are while you are there affects not only those you work with, but also the quality of your work. Everything we do in our lives has an effect on our work. I, myself, am a poet but I love working in the garden growing vegetables. One day an American scholar said to me,
"Don't waste your time gardening and growing lettuce. You should write more poems instead; anyone can grow lettuce." That is not my way of thinking.
I know very well that if I do not grow lettuce, I cannot write poems. The two are interrelated. Eating breakfast mindfully, washing the dishes, and growing lettuce in mindfulness are essential for me to be able to write poetry well. The way someone washes the dishes reveals the quality of his or her poetry. Similarly, the more awareness and mindfulness we bring to all our daily actions, including our work, the better our work will be.”
~Thich Nhat Hanh, "The Miracle of Mindfulness"
“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.” Robert Frost
Howard Sochurek - Robert Frost standing in a field in Herefordshire with his hand over his face, 1957. (The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
LOVE those! @lonelytauros
And @MissAdventurous 💗💗💗
This is a statue of Uta von Ballenstedt. A medieval nobel woman who lived in Germany around 1000 AD. She was the most beautiful woman at that time. Her statue is in Naumburg cathedral. Disney's evil queen of Snowwhite is a look alike of her. They used the image of Utta to create the Step mother.She was also long the fairest in the land... until Snowwhite became that.