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No looking at my elephant

Mary Wellesley: Menageries, 15 December 2016

Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England 1100-1837 
by Caroline Grigson.
Oxford, 349 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 19 871470 5
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... In 1735​ , the Duke of Richmond was in search of a sloth bear. He took delivery of an animal but wasn’t happy with what had arrived. ‘I wish indeed it had been the Sloath that had been sent me, for that is the most curious animal I know, butt this is nothing butt a common black bear, which I do not know what to do with, for I have five of them already,’ he wrote to Hans Sloane, who had acted as his buying agent ...

This place is pryson

Mary Wellesley: Living in Her Own Grave, 23 May 2019

Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200-1550 
edited by E.A. Jones.
Manchester, 232 pp., £18.99, January 2019, 978 1 5261 2723 5
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... The cell​ was the size of a large cupboard. There wasn’t enough room to lie down. I’d come late on a winter afternoon; the light was seeping away. What light there was came through the ‘squint’ – the small window that looked onto the sanctuary. It was a cruciform shape and through it I could see a single candle standing on the altar. I turned on the torch on my phone ...

Peasants wear ultramarine

Barbara Newman: Nuns with Blue Teeth, 10 February 2022

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book 
by Elaine Treharne.
Oxford, 248 pp., £30, October 2021, 978 0 19 284381 4
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Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers 
by Mary Wellesley.
Riverrun, 372 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 1 5294 0093 9
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The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books 
by Elina Gertsman.
Penn State, 232 pp., £99.95, June 2021, 978 0 271 08784 9
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... review, each of which explores the materiality of the medieval book. Writing for a lay audience, Mary Wellesley introduces the collaborators – patrons, artists, scribes and authors – whose labour is revealed or hidden in manuscripts. She interweaves her tale of book production with the case histories of many individual works, from the Lindisfarne ...

Name the days

Marina Warner: Holy Spirits, 4 February 2021

Angels & Saints 
by Eliot Weinberger.
Norton, 159 pp., £21.99, September 2020, 978 0 8112 2986 9
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... family safely out of Sodom before destroying the city; in the New Testament, Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her she will become the mother of God and another, unnamed angel forewarns Joseph about the Massacre of the Innocents.Many angels are also famous saints. The town of Saint-Raphaël lies close to Saint-Tropez, but the two resorts’ patrons belong to ...

Mrs Perfect Awful

Mary Lefkowitz, 17 May 1984

Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour 
by Judith Martin.
Hamish Hamilton, 745 pp., £9.95, September 1983, 0 241 11100 5
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Gilbert: A Comedy of Manners 
by Judith Martin.
Hamish Hamilton, 303 pp., £8.95, January 1984, 0 241 11157 9
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... claims to have majored in (i.e., read) Gracious Living at a prestigious women’s university, Wellesley College, one of the fabled Seven Sisters – or Heavenly Seven – which also include Bryn Mawr and Smith and, perhaps for historical reasons, the now mixed Vassar. A review of the Guide in one of the English daily papers explained that ...

Write to me

Danny Karlin, 11 January 1990

The Brownings’ Correspondence. Vol. VII: March-October 1843 
edited by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson.
Athlone, 429 pp., £60, December 1989, 0 485 30027 3
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... I discovered to my alarm when I collated Kintner’s readings with the original manuscripts at Wellesley College) and the notes are of very uneven quality. The best modern editions are those which, like Kintner’s, cover specialised areas of the Brownings’ correspondence – for example, Gertrude Reese Hudson’s exemplary Browning to His American ...

Was she Julia?

Stephen Spender, 7 July 1983

Code Name ‘Mary’: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground 
by Muriel Gardiner.
Yale, 200 pp., £10.95, May 1983, 0 300 02940 3
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... involved in the Austrian underground after the bombing of the Karl Marx Hof: she was known as ‘Mary’. Muriel has never met Lillian Hellman, but they had a friend in common, Wolf Schwabacher. He knew Muriel’s family, and also visited her in Vienna. Schwabacher told her a lot about his friendships ‘with many actors, actresses, producers and ...

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