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History – Lioness at Large

History

Literature

German Women Writers: 1900 – 1945

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE. Women writers had made great strides in the 19th century, but it still had taken them almost a millennium to really claim a place of their own in public awareness.  A fair number of the works of early 20th century German women writers exist in English […]

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Literature

German Women Writers: Historical Fiction

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE. Historical fiction is obviously an important way to visit the past; alas, while I’m happy to report that the genre is alive and extremely well in Germany, only a tiny fraction of the books published — and an even tinier fraction of those written by women […]

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Literature

German Women Writers: The 19th Century

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE. The below collection of 19th century writers incorporates the initial response to the question about women writing in German that inspired this series of blog posts; beginning with my personal late 18th / early 19th century heroine and with the ladies most closely associated with the […]

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Literature

German Women Writers: The Age of Enlightenment

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE. The Age of Enlightenment introduced new schools of philosophical and political thought and brought huge advances in scholarship and scientific knowledge — what it still didn’t bring, however, was universal education, including and in particular for women.  So writing (and reading) still remained a pursuit of […]

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Literature

German Women Writers: The Reformation Age

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE. The Reformation brought new freedoms to women: Luther published an opinion that nuns’ vows were not eternally binding (which opinion, in short order, would earn him a wife), women — both secular and (heretofore) nuns — took an active part in the Reformation movement; and the […]

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Literature

German Women Writers: The Middle Ages

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE. There is a surprising number of medieval German women writers: not in the hundreds, of course; but definitely almost 20 or perhaps even more than 20, which is not necessarily the number I’d have expected, given that literacy was not a widely-taught skill even among men […]

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Literature

German Women Writers: A Series of Blog Posts

Earlier this year, at the beginning of a buddy read of Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels (in another venue), a friend asked about German (speaking) 19th century women writers or more specifically, German women writers “in the years between the French Revolution and WWI”.  Another friend and (somewhat belatedly) I came up with a few names, […]

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Literature Reviews

Q1 / 2022 Reading Recap

Well, as it turned out 2022 began as 2021 had ended — all work and no play, albeit with the addition of a hospital detour to boot.  (Nothing serious, just way more painful and, all told, protracted, than it had any right to be.)  So I’m back to posting one summary post for the first […]

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Literature Reviews

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West: Love Letters

  The final entry of my exploration of Vita Sackville-West’s life and literature, and part 2 of circling back to Virginia Woolf, here via the two writers’ personal relationship. Both writers’ letters had previously been published individually; so had their diaries — you’d think an edition collecting their correspondence with each other in one volume, […]

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Literature Reviews

Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

An anthology giving a taste of every aspect of Sackville-West’s considerable oeuvre, from her memoirs and diaries, letters and travel writing to her literary criticism, her writing on gardening, her fiction (both longer works and short fiction), her poetry, and finally her reflection on animals (which she loved). I haven’t read the whole anthology yet […]

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Literature Reviews

Agatha Christie: Come, Tell Me How You Live

Blurb: Agatha Christie’s personal memoirs about her travels to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan, where she worked on the digs and wrote some of her most evocative novels. Think you know Agatha Christie? Think again! To the world she was Agatha Christie, legendary author of bestselling whodunits. But […]

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Literature Reviews

Isabel Wilkerson: Caste

Blurb: The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down […]

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Literature Reviews

Adrienne Mayor: The Poison King

Blurb: A National Book Award finalist for this epic work, Adrienne Mayor delivers a gripping account of Mithradates, the ruthless visionary who began to challenge Rome’s power in 120 B.C. Machiavelli praised his military genius. Kings coveted his secret elixir against poison. Poets celebrated his victories, intrigues, and panache. But until now, no one has […]

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Literature Reviews

Donna Leon: The Jewels of Paradise

Blurb: Caterina Pellegrini is a young Venetian musicologist hired by two competing cousins to find the truthful heir to an alleged treasure concealed by a once-famous, but now almost forgotten, baroque composer. Sworn to secrecy, Caterina can solve the mystery only by searching through the papers contained in the composer’s two chests that have not […]

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Fun and Games Literature Reviews

Martha Gellhorn: Travels with Myself and Another

  Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE   Festive Tasks Door 10 – Peace, Book: Read a book in which the ending of a conflict is a major theme. Gellhorn is a sharp observer and she has a way with words — I’d just wish she’d liked people and, for that matter, the places she […]

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Cooking - Food - Drink Fun and Games Lifestyle

Festive Tasks: Door 1, Task 1 – Of Chocolate, Cathedral Architecture, and Veerry Old Bones

  Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE   Task 1: In Australia, it’s common to brag about having the “biggest ‘X’ in the Southern Hemisphere!” Biggest mall, biggest prawn (don’t ask), biggest pineapple, biggest earthworm. What does your country / city / region brag about having the best or the biggest of …? I’ve never […]

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Fun and Games Lifestyle Literature

Festive Tasks: Door 1, Task 4 – Walled in by Books

Master Update Post HERE   Task 4: Australia has the world’s longest fence, the dingo fence, which at 3,436 miles (5529.7 kilometres) beats the Great Wall of China. Using an average of 12 books / meter, or 4 books / foot as a guide, if you had to build a fence of your own to […]

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Cats Literature Reviews

April 2021 Reading Recap

First things first: The persistent bug preventing followers / readers to comment on my posts straight off the post (i.e., other than by using the WP Reader) has finally been weeded out, thanks to my hosting service’s IT team … so you can, at last, comment even if you’re not using the WP Reader.  (I […]

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Literature Reviews

Ngaio Marsh: The New Zealand Books, plus Grave Mistake

The first book by Ngaio Marsh that I ever read happened to be her very last one, Light Thickens, which is as much concerned with a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as it is with the murder of one of the cast members.  To a mystery fan without any Shakespearean inclinations, this might have proved fatal, […]

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Lifestyle Literature Movies Music Reviews

February and March 2021: Reading Recap

Well, go figure.  The first quarter of 2021 is already behind us, never mind that I’m still having to remind myself on occasion to write “2021” instead of “2020” … (and we’re even a week into April already, but let that go). Anyway, since I never got around to doing a “February in review” post, […]

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