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Young Minnie Sidgwick was just twelve years old when her cousin, twenty-three-year old Edward Benson, proposed to her in 1853. Edward went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury and little Minnie - as Mary Benson - to preside over Lambeth Palace, and a social world that ranged from Tennyson and Browning to foreign royalty and Queen Victoria herself. Prime Minister William Gladstone called her 'the cleverest woman in Europe'. Yet Mrs Benson's most intense relationships were not with her husband and his associates, but with other women. When the Archbishop died, Mary - 'Ben' to her intimates - turned down an offer from the Queen to live at Windsor, and set up home in a Jacobean manor house with...
Tells the extraordinary story of Mary Benson and her family, bringing the late Victorian and early Edwardian period vividly to life.
Intimate Friends offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings. Vicinus also considers the nineteenth-century roots of such contemporary issues as homosexual self-hatred, female masculinity, and sadomasochistic desire. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and other archival sources, she brings to life a variety of well known and historically less recognized women, ranging from the predatory Ann Lister, who documented her sexual activities in code; to Mary Benson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury; to the coterie of wealthy Anglo-American lesbians living in Paris. In vivid and colorful prose, Intimate Friends offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted territory of same-sex desire.
This book provides a detailed exploration of profit-driven biblioclasm, centring on the case of a Book of Hours, part of the Brooklyn Museum’s holdings until 2021. Facing financial difficulties exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum chose to deaccession and sell various pieces, among which was a manuscript from the Mary Benson bequest of 1919, later dismembered by an American dealer who had purchased it at auction. Whilst examining the moral complexities surrounding these sales and the destruction of irreplaceable European cultural artifacts, the book uncovers the identity of the original owner of the manuscript, and provides a digital reconstruction of the original text. This book not only brings to light a critical occurrence but also discusses wider issues of cultural conservation and ethical responsibility in the art world. Its global significance and focus on a notable event in art history render it an indispensable read for those dedicated to safeguarding our collective cultural heritage.
divDomesticity is generally treated as an aspect of women’s history. In this fascinating study of the nineteenth-century middle class, John Tosh shows how profoundly men’s lives were conditioned by the Victorian ideal and how they negotiated its many contradictions. Tosh begins by looking at the experience of boyhood, married life, sex, and fatherhood in the early decades of the nineteenth century—illustrated by case studies representing a variety of backgrounds—and then contrasts this with the lives of the late Victorian generation. He finds that the first group of men placed a new value on the home as a reaction to the disorienting experience of urbanization and as a response to th...
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This work concentrates upon families with a strong connection to Virginia and Kentucky, most of which are traced forward from the eighteenth, if not the seventeenth, century. The compiler makes ample use of published sources some extent original records, and the recollections of the oldest living members of a number of the families covered. Finally. The essays reflect a balanced mixture of genealogy and biography, which makes for interesting reading and a substantial number of linkages between as many as six generations of family members.
Bourgeois Radicals explores the NAACP's key role in the liberation of Africans and Asians across the globe even as it fought Jim Crow on the home front during the long civil rights movement. In the eyes of the NAACP's leaders, the way to create a stable international system, stave off communism in Africa and Asia, and prevent capitalist exploitation was to embed human rights, with its economic and cultural protections, in the transformation of colonies into nations. Indeed, the NAACP aided in the liberation struggles of multiple African and Asian countries within the limited ideological space of the Second Red Scare. However, its vision of a "third way" to democracy and nationhood for the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa was only partially realized due to a toxic combination of the Cold War, Jim Crow, and die-hard imperialism. Bourgeois Radicals examines the toll that internationalism took on the organization and illuminates the linkages between the struggle for human rights and the fight for colonial independence.