(no subject)

[shadowkat]

Today was a rainy and cold day, so didn't accomplish much. Also wasn't feeling well - gassy with an upset tummy.

Watched a lot of television:

Binged through about five episodes of Invincible on Prime, and watched two adaptations of The Scarlett Pimpernel - one on MAX (the 1934 Leslie Howard, Raymond Massey and Merl Oberon adaptation which is closer to the book of the same name), and rented one for .99 cents on Apple TV (the 1982, Anthony Andrews, Jane Seymore, Ian McKellon and Julian Fellows adaptation - which combines the Pimpernel books with Eldorado novels by the author and is closer to the stage play). In both, Marguerite St. Just is more likable and less self-involved. Actually of the three versions, the 1982 version paints Marguerite in the best light.

What is interesting about Orczy and the Scarlet Pimpernell - is at the time she was writing, [per the timeline provided in the front of the book], few female writers were being published in her genre. Or they were under male pseudonym. Geroge Elliot (is an example). [ETA: 1872]. I saw a historical time line. And she had to do it as a play first[1903]. She wrote mystery short stories - but struggled to find publishers [1901]. Her husband helped her get the play version of the Scarlet Pimpernel published and seen[1903], she'd written the book two years prior [1901 in 5 wks]. And it got published because of the play.[1905] The only other female author mentioned in this timeline is Viriginia Woolfe [ETA: to clarify? That doesn't mean there weren't other female writers at the time, obviously there were because I've read them - but Sarah Juliette Sasson, the academic hired by B&N Classics didn't feel it necessary to comment on them for some reason or other.]

[All of this information was in the Penguin Barnes & Noble Classics reproduction of the novel (copyright 2005), as introductory historical material by Sarah Juliette Sasson, in case you are a stickler for accuracy and think I'm talking out of my ass.]

Note: I've been grouchy of late regarding "nitpicking" mainly because I'm dealing with people at work who have taken nitpicking to insane levels of bureaucratic incompetency.

I also think the weather is beginning to get to me. It's either raining. Or just overcast and cold. I've not seen the sun in days. Or the blue sky. I know it is there.

Slow Horses - now on S3 - it's really good and kind of hard to stop watching.

Comments

[oursin]

I'm sorry to pick nits here, but Orczy was publishing well after George Eliot's heyday and there were a substantial number of women writing and being published, indeed my impression is that she would have been more or less contemporaneous with the 'New Woman' novelists, who overlapped a bit with the Decadent Women a mate of mine has recently written a book on, when she started, and then on into the interwar years.

I wonder who wrote that intro, honestly. And when.

Possibly the subtext is 'writing swashbuckling adventure'?

[shadowkat]

See clarifications above. I went back and found the information in the front of the B&N Classics paperback. Sarah Juliette Sasson did the timeline. It was done in 2005 or thereabouts. Only two women writers besides Orczy are mentioned - Woolfe and Eliot, but a lot of famous and not so famous male writers are listed. It's from roughly 1865 -1947. It's the historical timeline of the Baroness's life (she died in 1947), but what is odd - is Sasson only felt the need to mention two female writers in it - Eliot and Woolfe. But she notes when Rudyard Kipling is born, when various operas are done, when Sherlock Holmes was published, Mark Twain, Lewis Carrol published Alice in Wonderland...and so on.

If I were going by this timeline, I'd think not many women wrote during that period.

Per the back of the book: Sarah Juliette Sasson earned a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is a lecturer there in the Department of French and Romance Philology. She is the managing editor of the Romanic Review, a journal devoted to Romance literatures. [This information is copied word for word from the back of the paperback.]

[ETA: Hmmm, this kind of furthers my complaint about the United States East Coast Schools increasingly sexist take on the literary canon?]

[oursin]

O dear. 2005, a good 30 years or so after the 1970s explosion of rediscovery of women writers, republication by women's presses, etc. I will concede that I am probably an outlier with an amateur and dilettante knowledge of the subject anyway, but there were hordes of women writing at the time and being popular bestsellers who would be better comparisons than Eliot and Woolf and ought to be on the timeline! (If it goes up to 1947, ahem, Agatha Christie???)

As for the naming thing, by her time if women authors used men's names it was usually prefixed by 'Mrs' to show they were respectable married women (Mrs Humphrey Ward), though Mrs Braddon wrote sensationalist shockers and had a complicated private life.

That does seem an odd choice - I am sure there are people who have done work on popular bestsellers of the period who would have been better suited.

George Elliot

[shadowkat]

Well, I know from other sources that George Elliot used a man's name to become a serious novelist (she didn't want to be pigeonholed into women's fiction, which she disliked). She was actually Mary Anne Evans. "Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside."

Women did that back then. Particularly if they were trying to write non-romantic novels or outside genre. The difficulty was being pigeon-holed into women's fiction.

"While continuing to contribute pieces to the Westminster Review, Evans resolved to become a novelist, and set out a pertinent manifesto in one of her last essays for the Review, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"[36] (1856). The essay criticised the trivial and ridiculous plots of contemporary fiction written by women. In other essays, she praised the realism of novels that were being written in Europe at the time, an emphasis on realistic storytelling confirmed in her own subsequent fiction. She also adopted a nom-de-plume, George Eliot; as she explained to her biographer J. W. Cross, George was Lewes's forename, and Eliot was "a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word". Although female authors were published under their own names during her lifetime, she wanted to escape the stereotype of women's writing being limited to lighthearted romances or other lighter fare not to be taken very seriously. She also wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as a translator, editor, and critic. Another factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny, thus avoiding the scandal that would have arisen because of her relationship with Lewes, who was married."

More here - at what appears to be a fairly reliable wiki entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot

Re: George Elliot

[oursin]

The Brontes similarly started out publishing as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; while across the channel there was George Sand, though I don't think she was at all successful in concealing her very scandalous private life from her audience by that means.

As late as the 1910s and 20s women authors I've recently been working on were using initials or androgynous middle names - even the author of the prototype bodice-ripper, The Sheik, 50 Shades for the flapper generation, published as EM Hull.

Re: George Elliot

[shadowkat]

Women still do it now. Or so I've discovered. I totally understand, I've contemplated doing it myself.

Sarah Juliette Sasson

[shadowkat]

I think I know why they selected her..

They thought the book was Romantic French Literature, it's not. And that it fit within her specialty. It doesn't. I've run into this kind of stupidity a lot within the NY Publishing Industry. (I applied for a job with B&N publishing back in 2002, and I've met a lot of people who work in the field.) They have a tendency to think - oh French Revolution, Baroness Orczy - French. When in reality Baroness Orczy was a Hungarian born, British novelist.

At any rate, I agree - they chose the wrong person to write the historical introduction and notes. Because the woman skipped over Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gillman...I mean really? Not to mention Mary Shelly, Agatha Christie, and the Brontes.

Instead she lists people like Kipling, Lewis Carroll, and a bunch of Opera composers such as Wagner.

I know more than she does, and it's not my field. And I can look it up on the internet pretty quickly.

I think Penguine might have done a better job - well before they merged with Random House, at any rate.

Re: Sarah Juliette Sasson

[oursin]

So I think I can safely guess that she completely missed the influence of Sir Percy on later writers - he's surely in the DNA of Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond, for starters.

Re: Sarah Juliette Sasson

[shadowkat]

I don't think she's broadly read? Probably just reads within her own curriculum, or non-fiction?

[rose_griffes]

I've seen that 80s Scarlet Pimpernel adaptation, although it's been... a very long time. But I was quite fond of it back in the day!

[shadowkat]

Anthony Andrews is very good in it. Actually it is very well cast and kind of fun to watch. We taped it, and watched it incessantly.

It holds up pretty well considering - it's filmed in square television box format, and not HD.
Also, it wisely blends more than one of her stories together, providing more roles for women, and allowing Marguerite to have a bit more power and agency.