The Bluestocking, vol 129: Special Wimple Edition
Happy Friday!
. . . or not, as the case may be. It's been a strange couple of weeks, as I've felt repeatedly like Cassandra, or possibly Mystic Meg. It's never been clearer to me that most people - even most journalists - don't read foreign news. If you had read the reports coming out of Italy ten days ago, you would have started your panic-buying much earlier. When Yascha Mounk published this piece ten days ago - "Cancel Everything" - it was a controversial position. Now it's universal. I first started to get seriously worried on February 24, with this piece headlined "You're Likely To Get The Coronavirus", which holds up pretty well (and predicts that it will eventually become another strain of seasonal flu).
I'm not saying this to NYER NYER at anyone who hasn't listened to my doom-laden warnings, but because it reminds me of something I see all the time in trauma victims, eg Hillsborough families or rape survivors. Not being believed is itself a weird kind of injury. It's completely disorienting. You feel slightly mad. I feel an enormous sense of relief now when I watch Donald Trump talking about hand-washing (though, as ever, he's trying to deflect blame for his uselessness by starting a culture war, this time by talking of a "Chinese virus").
Frankly, I need any mood-boost I can get because I've just watched all my Difficult Women book events go up in smoke. It had all been going pretty well: great reviews, on the bestseller list, lots of people wanting signed copies. I was really enjoying talking to people about it, too. Hopefully I can have a do-over when the paperback comes out next year.
To cheer myself up, I've been reading accounts of previous epidemics. Samuel Pepys had a cracker of a plague year in 1665, describing it in his diary as the best time of his life. He quadrupled his earnings and bought a 12-inch telescope, and squeezed in three or four affairs. "I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time," he wrote on December 31. About 15 per cent of London's population died around him that year.
Incidentally, one of the strange things about the "Great Plague" is that it was the last real outbreak of the Second Pandemic period in England. During the seventeenth century, this terrible scourge just . . . disappeared. There are several theories about why, but bubonic plague was perhaps too deadly for its own good: it had a fatality rate of 70-100% in humans, and therefore ran out of hosts fairly quickly.
A cheery thought for the weekend, there.
Helen
Climbing The Greasy Pole (LRB)
With Margaret’s female peers, there is a gap between what they say and what they do, what they are and what they appear to be. In theory, after she married, a woman’s personal property and real estate were at her husband’s disposal. In practice, pre-nuptial agreements, trusts and the legally sanctioned breach of entails created some flexibility. Most aristocratic women outlived their husbands, and once a woman was widowed she was able to assert her independence and have a say in her family affairs, while cultivating the trope of the ‘defenceless widow’ in any dealings with the authorities. When historical novelists are looking for ways to empower their heroines they opt for making them hotshot herbalists or minxy witches. But literacy was their usual weapon, not spells, and many of them picked up enough legal knowledge to fight their corner in civil disputes. As widows, or as deputies to living husbands, they handled complex legal and financial affairs with aplomb, while assenting – outwardly at least – to their status as irrational and inferior beings. Gaily agreeing that the chief female virtues are meekness and self-effacement, they managed estates, signed off accounts, bought wardships and brokered marriage settlements, all the while keeping up a steady output of needlework. In some cases, they conspired against the crown while claiming, if it went badly, that their weak female brains had been addled by male influence, and that ‘fragility and brittleness’ allowed their trust to be easily abused.
The LRB 100 per cent missed a trick by not using my suggested headline on this Hilary Mantel piece about Margaret Pole. From it, I learned that Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck was actually called Peter. The Tudors nicknamed him "Perkin" to make him sound silly. No word yet if Lambert Simnel was actually called Laurence.
If you're looking for enjoyable corona-reading, you could do a lot worse than Josephine Tey's novel Daughter Of Time, btw, a kind of Rear Window meets Richard III.
Decided to go for a wimple theme to the pictures this week. Here's Margaret Beaufort.
The Accusations Were False. But Could We Prove It? (NYT)
Around the middle of April, J. learned about our lawsuit. That same day, he started telling people that he was being trolled online. Homophobic comments about him were posted on the subreddit for his university that afternoon, and an anonymous letter was sent to his university mailbox that read “Die fag professor” later that week. He even did a presentation about the harassment as part of a panel at his university on discrimination, subtext and the power of language. The audience was outraged and horrified.
“That’s a classic horror-movie move!” a friend of mine said when I told her what was happening. “The villain injures himself.”
Absolutely fascinated by this part of the story about two married academics, targeted with sexual harassment complaints, by an academic at another university who wanted the job one of them was shortlisted for. There was a story a few years ago about a teenage girl who killed herself after being bullied with cruel taunts on Ask.fm (a shortlived craze where you could ask people questions). At the inquest, it was discovered that she had posted them herself. I feel like we are still very early in understanding how people use the internet for self-harm, and as a vehicle for Munchausen's Syndrome. I'm now a cynic, I'm afraid, about some people in my peripheral vision who seem to have extraordinarily well-timed flare-ups of health conditions and troll attacks. Call it Smollett's Disease.
Hey, Philippa of Lancaster? I have some questions.
Will Coronavirus Send Us Back to the 1950s? (Atlantic)
Enough already. When people try to be cheerful about social distancing and working from home, noting that William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton did some of their best work while England was ravaged by the plague, there is an obvious response: Neither of them had child-care responsibilities.
Shakespeare spent most of his career in London, where the theaters were, while his family lived in Stratford-upon-Avon. During the plague of 1606, the playwright was lucky to be spared from the epidemic—his landlady died at the height of the outbreak—and his wife and two adult daughters stayed safely in the Warwickshire countryside. Newton, meanwhile, never married or had children. He saw out the Great Plague of 1665–6 on his family’s estate in the east of England, and spent most of his adult life as a fellow at Cambridge University, where his meals and housekeeping were provided by the college.
My Atlantic piece this week about the gendered impacts of pandemics. For more on this subject, sign up to Caroline Criado Perez's newsletter.
A severe look from Elizabeth Woodville.
Yuval Harari Sees The Really Big Picture (New Yorker)
Naama Avital, in the Tel Aviv office, told me that, on social media, fans of Harari’s books tend to be “largely male, twenty-five to thirty-five.” Bill Gates is a Harari enthusiast, but the more typical reader may be a young person grateful for permission to pay more attention to his or her needs than to the needs of others. (Not long ago, one of Harari’s YouTube admirers commented, “Your books changed my life, Yuval. Just as investing in Tesla did.”)
This is one of those profiles, the kind that editorialises through observed details rather than overt commentary. It's also a reminder that to secure the really juicy speaking gigs and "public intellectual" tag, you need a little weirdness in your brand. Want everyone to think you're a genius? Either go all meat, like Jordan Peterson, or no meat, like Harari. And that's before we get to the bone-induction headphones or the one-a-week sexual conquest target. Splendid.
Quick links
Tim Wu on the conditions we should attach to any bailout of airlines. (NYT)
Google has put a whole Frida Kahlo exhibition online.
For audio fans, I'm the guest on this week's Fortunately podcast with Jane Garvey and Fi Glover. I'm also presenting an episode of Analysis, on Radio 4 at 8.30pm on Monday, looking at postmodernism and the roots of "woke" culture.
Guest gif: every parent after two days of school closures
See you next time . . . hopefully.