A Bluestocking Knits

"Pioneer Girl"

For those of you who, like me, are a little out of the loop, plans have been in the works for some time now to publish Laura Ingalls Wilder's original autobiography, which she titled "Pioneer Girl", in annotated format.  Background and details can be found at "The Pioneer Girl Project" blog.  The book is to be, thankfully, a "serious, scholarly work for adult readers" -- though not, if the blog posts are anything to go by, dull.  (I'm sure that the term "adult readers" doesn't mean what it does so often nowadays, but that it isn't written for children who are doing an "about the author" report!)  "Scholarly but accessible" is how editor Pamela Smith Hill describes it in her original proposal.

Most people know that events in Wilder's life were compressed and sometimes altered a little to fit her purposes in the "Little House" books, so that Pioneer Girl will shed I think a fascinating light not only on Laura herself but on her writing.  It will include the stories Wilder later felt were not appropriate for children, or which for one reason or another were not included in the "Little House" books -- I didn't know, for instance, that the Ingalls family had lodgers with them during the hard Long Winter, a young married couple and their infant son -- and the annotations will give background on various places, people, and historical details, not leaving out the controversies surrounding how much of a hand Rose Wilder Lane had in the "Little House" books.

The publication date is November 20, 2014.

(The image of Laura's manuscript is from the video in the post "A Pioneer Girl's Treasures".)

A July 2013 interview with Smith is here.

Two Danish Girls, Knitting

Here are two paintings by the Dane Michael Ancher -- "A Young Girl Knitting (Maren Brens)" (1887) --

and "Skagen Girl, Maren Sofie, Knitting" (1882).  Socks, I think -- pretty certainly in the first painting.  The shawls -- or is it the same shawl? -- look intriguing too.  I love the quiet homeliness of both of these.  Thanks to Wendy of Spinsjal for writing about her trip to Skagen, and for reminding me of the Skagen painters, whose work I admire tremendously.

"Shakespeare and His World": "The Merry Wives of Windsor", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and "Henry V"

I recently signed up for a free online course at FutureLearn called "Shakespeare and His World", presented by renowned Shakespearean professor Jonathan Bate, taking a cultural (Elizabethan) theme and examining a particular play that illuminates it.  This is not actually the first FutureLearn course I signed up for -- I started the "Literature of the English Country House" and "England in the time of King Richard III" but although they were both interesting, I was having trouble finding the time to do even one of them, let alone two nearly simultaneously, and so I regret to say that I haven't yet finished either of them.

But Shakespeare -- but Shakespeare and Jonathan Bate! -- well!  So here are some potted reviews of the productions I'm watching as we discuss them.

After the introductory week, the second week was "Shakespeare and Stratford", with the focus play being, perhaps unsurprisingly "The Merry Wives of Windsor", since despite being nominally set in Windsor, it is very much small-town England of the time.  I watched two productions, as it happened, both that the public library had, first a production from 1980 with Gloria Grahame as Mistress Page.  It was, I'm afraid, a not especially good production, though that was perhaps more the fault of the sound man and the costume designer and the cameraman than the actors.  Despite being touted as being "Staged as seen in the 16th century" Grahame wore a gown in the style of at least a hundred years later, though everyone else was more-or-less 16th century.  More irritating was the fact that the actors' mikes picked up every movement of their bodies, so it was a lot like the scenes in "Singin' in the Rain" where Lena's pearls drown out her dialogue.  Grahame acquitted herself tolerably well with the Shakespearean prose, though she still carried herself as an indelibly 20th century woman.

I had seen the 1982 BBC production of "Merry Wives" when it was first broadcast, and I'm pretty sure I fell asleep halfway through, but I must say it improved with age.  Prunella Scales and Judy Davis play Mistress Page and Mistress Ford respectively -- Davis's very modern lipstick was a bit jarring, but Scales could do this kind of role in her sleep.  Ben Kingsley was alarmingly manic as Master Ford, but then Ford is supposed to be madly jealous; Richard Griffiths seemed surprisingly bland as Falstaff.  (Actually, it was also fun to play spot-the-actor, as there were quite a number of familiar faces, from Nigel Terry to Elizabeth Spriggs and Alan Bennett.)  The costumes were excellent, and I admired the set as well, which is supposed to have been based on Hall's Croft.

For "The Birth of Theatre" in the third week, the play was "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and I watched the 1996 Adrian Noble production currently on Netflix.  This was kind of weird.  I liked the framing of the play as a little boy's dream -- he hides under a table during Theseus's and Hippolyta's first scene, and so on -- but it doesn't seem to hold up when we are asked to believe that he's still dreaming this when the "translated" Bottom (Desmond Barrit) and Titania (Lindsay Duncan) go at it, and pretty obviously.  The fairies were quite Seussian.  The slapstick was good -- I especially liked the multiple doors when the four young lovers are wandering in the forest -- but, hmm, I'm still waiting for a really good filmed version.

This week is "The World at War" and "Henry V".  My library has a number of productions, but Kenneth Branagh's was the only one I brought home.  A cracking production -- first-rate acting, great production values, and a real sense of the both the grit and glory of war.

I Finished TWO Socks Yesterday!

Okay, so it was two different socks, not one pair.  My self-congratulation is tempered with annoyance at my losing not one but both sets of notes as to the modifications that I made in transit, so that now I must re-create my own work.  Sigh.

The first was sock 1 of my "Baltic Sea" toe-up Charades, with an only partly-successful attempt to avoid the tight cast-off by working the rib top-down and grafting it to the leg (!).  The photo is also only partly-successful in capturing the color and general air of the sock, which is actually quite pleasing -- I'm afraid I am less and less happy with the Canon PowerShot.

The second is sock 1 of a gussetted-foot school sock using the foot part of the "Barnim-Style Stocking" by Anne DesMoines in the Spring 2014 issue of "Knitting Traditions".  I was using yarn from my stash, so didn't have enough to make the full-length stockings -- hence the "school sock" designation.  Apparently this foot is very like something that Elizabeth Zimmermann came up with on her own, I mean without knowing that there was the historical sock in existence -- pretty clever -- though it seems she didn't use it much after that.  I can't think why, as it's quite comfortable.

Gosh, it's difficult to take a photo of the bottom of your own foot!

In other news, I just got from the library The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton -- was wondering not long ago atal if there are any novels about dolls' houses, and here one is.  It's an imagining of the newly-married Petronella Oortman and the mystery surrounding the cabinet house her rich merchant husband gives her -- the book is inspired, obviously, by the real house, which is now at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  I've not gotten very far into the book yet, but here are some pictures of the house, and a 1710 painting of it by Jacob Appel -- all of the images are from the Rijksmuseum except the painting, which is from the Dutch Wikipedia.  The museum dates the house c.1686-c.1710, so the painting is I assume what the house looked like a little before Petronella's death at the age of sixty in 1716.

 

The "state" kitchen, with its display of blue-and-white china, and the humbler working kitchen.

The "tapestry room".

The reception room, and hall.

The lying-in room, for the mother and newly-born baby to receive visitors; this room was a common feature of Dutch dolls' houses of the period.

The maids' room, with linens hanging from the rods on the ceiling.  Apparently the little room at the center is a peat loft -- for storing, and keeping dry, I suppose?

The bedroom.