“An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”
Excerpted from: Sherrin, Ned, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, women's history
“Lilian (Mary) Baylis: (1874-1937) British theatrical manager and founder of the Old Vic. She assisted her aunt, Emma Cons, in the operation of the Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern, and on Cons’s death in 1912 she converted the hall into the Old Vic, which became famous for its Shakespearean productions. Between 1914 and 1923 the theater staged all of William Shakespeare’s plays, a feat no other playhouse had attempted. In 1931 she took over the derelict Sadler’s Wells Theatre and made it a center of opera and ballet.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Elizabeth Barret Browning: (1806-1861) English poet. In childhood she suffered a spinal injury and, until her meeting with Robert Browning, seemed to be doomed to invalidism and seclusion from the world. Barrett and Browning’s courtship under the eyes of her jealous, tyrannical father, their elopement, and subsequent happy married life in Italy form one of the most celebrated of literary romances. Hawthorne describe Mrs. Browning as ‘a pale, small person scarcely embodied at all,’ and this ethereality of her physical appearance is reflected by the palpitating fervor and unworldly tenderness and purity of her work. Often, however, these qualities decline into stridency, diffuseness, and confusion. Her themes were dictated by her broad humanitarian interests; a deep if unorthodox religious feeling, her affection for her adopted country, Italy; and her love for Browning. Her greatest work, Sonnets from the Portuguese, a sequence of love sonnets addressed to her husband, remains an extraordinary and living achievement. Her other works include Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826), a translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (1833), The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), Poems (1844), Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Aurora Leigh (1856), Poems before Congress (1860), and Last Poems (1862). See THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN, LADY GERALDINE’S COURTSHIP.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, poetry, readings/research, women's history
“Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.”
Excerpted from: Sherrin, Ned, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, women's history
“Colette in full Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette: (1873-1954) French writer. Her first four Claudine novels (1900-03), the reminiscences of a libertine ingenue, were published by her first husband, an important critic, under his pen name, Willy. She later worked as a music hall performer. Among her later works are Cheri (1920), My Mother’s House (1922), The Ripening Seed (1923), The Last of Cheri (1926), Sido (1930), and Gigi (1944; musical film, 1958), a comedy about a girl raised to be a courtesan. Her novels of the pleasures and pains of love are remarkable for their exact evocation of sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and colors. She collaborated with Maurice Ravel on the opera L’enfant et les sortileges (1925). In her highly eventful life, she freely flouted convention and repeatedly scandalized the French public, but by her late years she had become a national icon.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“Sarah Barnwell Elliott: (1848-1928) American writer and feminist activist. Elliott was one of the “local color” (or regionalist) writers, and is best known for her novel Jerry (1891). Her most powerful fiction represents the displaced slave-owning class into which she was born, as it confronts hard economic times and a new social order. Elliott was a feminist activist in the South and led the fight for Tennessee to ratify the 19th amendment. Her fiction is often valued for its liberal attitudes toward women, as in The Making of Jane (1901). Her stories about race relations during Reconstruction are extremely problematic: the portraits of ex-slaves in An Incident, and Other Stories (1899) are both nostalgic and derogatory, and seem to contradict her family’s sense of noblesse oblige and well-known resistance to virulent racism. The title story is the first representation in American literature of a black man pursued by a lynch mob for raping a white woman. Elliott’s work raises questions about the attitudes toward race among Southern white women and the roles they played in reestablishing white supremacy in the postbellum South.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“The first obligation of the demonstrator is to be legible. Miss Manners cannot sympathize with a cause whose signs she cannot make out even with her glasses on.”
Excerpted from: Sherrin, Ned, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996.
“Rebecca [Blaine] Harding Davis: (1808-1889) American author. Davis was one of the earliest American realists, known for her attempts to deal in fiction with the life of industrial workers, the problems of black Americans, and political corruption. Her first success was as a muckraker with Life in the Iron Mills, published in the Atlantic Monthly in April, 1961. This was followed by Margaret Howth (1862), a novel set in an Indiana milltown. Waiting for the Verdict (1868) was a story about racial bias; John Andross (1874) was a tale of political corruption. She also raised a large family and, from 1869 to the mid-1870s, was an associate editor of the New York Tribune.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Ruth Benedict originally Ruth Fulton: (1887-1948) U.S anthropologist. Born in New York City, she received her PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1923 and taught at Columbia from 1930 until her death. In Patterns of Culture (1934), her most famous work, she emphasized how small a part of the range of human behavior is elaborated or emphasized in any one society. She described how these forms of behavior are integrated into patterns or configurations, and she supported cultural relativism, or the judging of cultural phenomena in the context of the culture in which they occur. In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), she applied her methods to Japanese culture. Her theories had a profound influence on cultural anthropology.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged professional development, united states history, women's history
“A young playwright, who Mrs. Parker felt had been copying her themes, described his most recent to play to her as follows: ‘It’s hard to say—except that it’s a play against all isms.’
Mrs. Parker added, ‘Except plagiarism.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
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