An early advocate for the equal status of women, but as women, not as pseudo-men, 1640–1683 her dates, and she very much goes with the Mancini sisters (see June 22), albeit from a very different social background, but all three “undertook self-publication as a form of conversation with the world, and a way of participating in other forms of public discourse” – so says one website that I foolishly closed before I had saved the hyperlink and now can’t find.
The daughter of a maid in a house of minor gentry, it was somewhat unusual that she had any education whastsoever, but she did, writing splendid love poetry as a teenager, and growing up as the authoress of novels that set the genre for the generations to come, as well as still more poetry and several plays; but it is one particular book that stands out, roman à clef long before Joyce wrote "Stephen Hero" let alone “Portrait of the Artist”, or Lawrence “Sons and Lovers”, and unquestionably significant when Proust transformed “Jean Santeuil” into “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu”: “Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière” it was titled, though what it has to do with the playwright Molière you will only understand by reading the whole novel (which you can do here).
As to the non-husband, that too is in the novel, though you might find it
more straightforward to follow the tale here.
And born on the same date, albeit several decades later, in 1740, Isabelle de Charrière, or sometimes Belle van Zuylen, and just to make it even more complex her birth certificate says Isabella Agneta Elisabeth van Tuyll van Serooskerken: complex because she started out life as Dutch, married a Swiss and moved to Le Pontet, the Charrière family home near Neuchâtel, but wrote in French, and acquired most of her fame there, somewhere in the literary-intellectual spectrum between Jane Austen and Mary-Ann Evans: “The Nobleman and Other Romances” is pure Jane Austen, social critique, the intricacies of male-female relationships: but “By A Lady” would never have written the thinly-veiled attack on Marie-Antoinette which is “Eagonlette and Suggestina”. Mary-Ann might well have done, and would have been proud to put her name to Charrière’s “Trois Femmes” or “Lettres Neuchâteloises”, though these were rather more influenced by Diderot and Rousseau than by Mary-Ann’s beloved Spinoza. Madame de Villedieu is on the Ancien-Régime page, Isabelle de Charrière, who died on December 27 1805, on the Napoleonic Age page of "Woman-Blindness".
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Amber pages
Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, born today in 1854 (see also July 10 and October 8)
Charles Ives, US composer, born today in 1874
The 49th parallel established as the border between US and Canada, today in 1818
And one of the most despicable of all the many despicable events that comprise American history, the House Un-American Activities Committee opened its hearings today in 1947, Senator Joe McCarthy in the Chair; and that is all that I intend to say here on this subject. The light, on this occasion, is stopped on red (save just that one name, which, as you can see, has been black-listed).
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