Here are two albums I've been enjoying immensely recently. Very, very different vibes so today's Fem Fri covers both of the emotions: (1) going out to party, totally filled with the possibilities offered by life and (2) sad. You'll love both of them though.
Let's start with Georgia, to whom I was immensely grateful for her lovely LP of party-ready songs in 2020 and who absolutely delivers in 2023 as well:
And now here's The Japanese House - I really enjoyed her quite diffuse and angsty album in 2019. This album is more tightly focussed and I think I like it even more. This is an incredible live version of One for sorrow, two for Joni Jones:
I hope you are pumped for the upcoming World Cup (football/soccer), because I am even more pumped than I was after researching this newsletter of awesome goals by women. Very aware that there is more to this game than scoring goals but that is the bit of the game that makes the best videos.
Here's a truly lovely goal from Linda Caicedo (Colombia). All of these other videos have soundtracks, on this one you will hear commentary unless you press mute, but honestly it's all about the visuals:
Unusual choice of sad party banger to accompany this video of the best of Asisat Oshoala (Nigeria), but it's cool, you get to see lots of great goals while feeling emotions:
Okay sad party banger for Khadija Shaw (Jamaica) as well? Maybe this is a trend of women's footballing videos! I mean, it's working for me, and I bet it will for you as well:
HUGE FEM FRI WEEK UPCOMING, because next week dear friend of Fem Fri E. Saxey's first novel is available to all! I read an early version of this book, and it was honestly pretty creepy (i.e., good) and they then worked on making it even scarier, and now you can read it and feel the creeping dread I know you need this summer. Isn't it lovely to be sitting on a beach, feeling warm and safe, while what you are reading causes the chill hand of fear to enter your soul. Kind of like an emotional Baked Alaska. Pre-order here, you will love it.
Their novel is set in a wealthy Victorian Jewish family, so of course I looked into interesting Victorian Jewish women for you. Here is one! Judith Montefiore wrote the first Jewish cookbook in English. No recipes online but apparently at one point she goes a bit "fruit tarts are very easy to make. Why are you even reading a page entitled FRUIT TARTS". So that's Judith Montefiore's advice - make fruit tarts. 👍
Judith was born into a wealthy Jewish family and married into another. She and her husband, Moses, were passionate about their faith and education and they traveled and worked together to achieve their shared goals. But the cookbook, titled The Jewish Manual: or Practical Information in Jewish & Modern Cookery; with a Collection of Valuable Recipes and Hints Relating to the Toilette has always been associated with Judith alone. In her introduction, Judith tells us she wrote it “to guide the young Jewish housekeeper in the luxury and economy of ‘The Table,’ on which so much of the pleasure of social intercourse depends.”
If you have preordered Saxey's book, but can't wait that long to be scared, how about a creepy short by Victorian Mary Wilkins Freeman to get you in the mood FOR FEAR?
By the end of the 1880s, Mary Eleanor Wilkins had become one of America’s most popular short story writers, publishing nearly fifty selections for Harper’s several periodicals and collecting many of them in two book publications. In 1902, the year she married Charles Manning Freeman and moved to his sprawling home in New Jersey, she wrote “Luella Miller,” which describes a local woman who saps the life out of everyone who cares for her and features the narrator Lydia Anderson, whose “thoughts were clothed in the rude vernacular of her native village.”
How are you? As you know I spent last week in the charming town of Växjö, one of the highlights of which is the glass museum. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit, and here are some of the women glass artists whose work I especially liked:
Frida Fjellman makes these delightful vases that look like critters. Apparently when you put flowers in them they look really surprised, it changes how you percieve their little faces:
Firstly I need to choose the type of animal. It can come from an idea that’s been brewing over time. Then a pose that will match my design objective. I would also have to decide what the animal will project. At the same time I will have to read up on that particular animal, both facts and people’s private experiences.
There aren't any Åsa Jungnelius interviews I can find, so instead please enjoy this sculpture. These are particularly cool in the museum because you can see the exaggerated scale, which is something I really like in an artwork. Basically if you want to guarantee that I will engage with your artwork, make something very everyday but either way tinier or totally massive. Thank you Åsa Jungnelius:
There are two rooms devoted to the collaboration of Birgitta Ahlin and Sirkka Lehtonen. If they do interviews, they definitely don't do them in English, so once again here are pictures to enjoy:
How are you. I am having a lovely time at ScottFest, although in practical terms that means that I've been sitting in air conditioned rooms talking about a man for the last four days, so this will be a short Fem Fri. I have found out about some cool women who have very minimal internet presence - for example, Siri Thorngren Olin who translated many modernist texts, including The Great Gatsby which she retitled to Un Man Utan Skrupler ("the man without scruples").
Anyway, definitely a woman with definitely an internet presence is Nanna Carling and her jazz band who we saw play last night. Three of the band are sisters - I love the idea of having a creative endeavour with siblings and I'm sure so will you when you see them play jazz together on a boat in Italy:
I found this fantastic and actually quite recent article on Virginia Woolf’s convalescence diaries, so this is a Fem Fri about women’s diaries.
Love the close attention Woolf pays to everything, both in her books and in these diaries:
Having been ill, she is nurturing a convalescent quality of attention, using her diary’s economical form, its domestic subject matter, to tether herself to the world. “Happiness is,” she writes later, in 1925, “to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.” At Asheham, she strings one paragraph after another; a way of watching the days accrue. And as she recovers, things attach themselves: bicycles, rubber boots, dahlias, eggs.
I’d heard the name Fanny Burney, and it turns out she was a writer of exceptionally bitchy letters and diaries. Great stuff:
After her first encounter with the famous Dr Johnson, Frances Burney said he was ‘almost bent double’ and ‘shockingly near sighted’, with his mouth ‘almost constantly opening and shutting as if he was chewing’.
This article on Anne Lister’s diary and its history is fantastic. It’s also about cracking a genuinely secret diary sex code, unlike that of, say, Samuel Pepys, whose solution to write in Romance languages, mostly French, would have been unlikely to hoodwink his French wife. ANNE:
When Helena deciphered the passage of 12th December 1817, describing Anne’s time in York visiting Mariana Lawton, nee Belcombe, for the first time since her honeymoon, Anne’s secret was once more revealed. The passage read “I took off my pelisse and drawers, got into bed and had a very good kiss, she showing all due inclination and in less than seven minutes, the door was unbolted and we were all right again.”
Helena deduced that “kiss” was in fact code for sex and that the phrase “incurred a cross” was a reference to Anne’s orgasms, which were frequently marked in the margins with an ‘X’. The true nature of Anne’s relationship with Mariana had become clear.
How are you? I had a lovely weekend in Richmond and surrounds recently, here are two of the cool women I learned about there. Tinyletter isn't letting me do images today so you will need to click to see the floating babies and the beautiful flowers. It's worth it though.
What about Joan Carlile, one of Britain's first female artists - in fact quite a lot of firsts, as this article makes clear:
Joan Carlile’s name is often referenced with some variation of “first”—she is generally called one of the first British professional female portraitists, one of the first British female artists to work in oil and even one of the first professional female painters in England. The key word here is “professional”—what made Carlile stand out was not just her distinctive style and her gender, but the fact that she actually earned money from her craft. She even lived and likely maintained a studio in Covent Garden, a hub for artists in the 1600s.
Secondly, here's Mary Delany, who invented a new kind of collage in the 1700s to more accurately portray flowers:
By cutting minute pieces of paper and sticking them to a solid black background, Delany could build up each part of a specimen, sometimes using around 200 paper petals per flower. She used smaller pieces layered over larger ones to create shading and depth, and sometimes enhanced parts with watercolours. The glue used to stick the pieces together was likely egg white or flour and water.
I've been reading about the Polgar sisters, do you know about them? Basically their parents had a project to make their children the best at chess, and it worked very well! All of the Polgar sisters played chess at an international level, and one of them, Judit, is a top ten of all time. I'm sort of fascinated by hothoused children, and that's kind of the theme for this Fem Fri.
Honestly, if you're even a tiny bit interested in chess, this whole Judit Polgar interview is fascinating. There's a weird bit early on where they clearly ask her a question she doesn't want to answer, and she just says NOPE, but after that you get to the good stuff:
You don’t lose the game because you created a weakness, but you have to understand that it has consequences. You have to take the responsibility for that. You have to commit yourself to this move and live with this possible mistake for the rest of the game. You have to say, “that’s OK, so I blundered something.” You have to play on and live with this. And if I do things right, I can switch strategies and maybe outplay my opponent.
Obviously Serena Williams is a fairly famous hothoused child and top ten of all time as well. What I particularly enjoy is the theme, seen across both of these pullquotes, on how to deal with mistakes. I don't know if that's a being hothoused thing or just that both chess and tennis require very high degrees of mental toughness:
There were so many matches I won because something made me angry or someone counted me out. That drove me. I’ve built a career on channeling anger and negativity and turning it into something good.
It's been ages since I did a one-link Fem Fri, so I hope you're up for that today. It's a link that is well worth clicking, because it's a lovely story about being… recognised as fully yourself. Thank you to the friend and subscriber who sent this to me! Settle in:
When E. Jean peeked around the cubicle wall and told me she needed my help finding young people my age with problems, I nearly threw myself on her bosom to cry out my own woes. I didn’t, but I am sure she knew exactly what they were. She pulled up a chair and explained that she needed letters from “women like you.” Without underlining the obvious fact that I was a duckling among swans, E. Jean assured me that my life was interesting. That I had friends whose problems would be more than just “boyfriend and clothing stuff.”
Sometimes, in times of stress, it's nice to just eat cheese. Like, go to the fridge, get a block, cut it directly onto the worktop surface (important - getting a chopping board out increases hands-on time which you really don't need in this situation) and just trough into slice after slice of cheese until you're done (emotional/physical satiety).
This is a Fem Fri about cheese.
Here's an interview about the history of women and cheese, by cheese historian Bronwen Percival:
“In the Victorian era there were all these advances in microbiology and technology – and the women who were in cheese were at the cutting edge,” Bronwen enthuses. “Chemists and microbiologists were coming down from London to discover what the cheesemakers were doing, bringing their scientific understanding with them; and these cheesemakers were part of that conversation. Obviously, we have a totally different understanding of cheese on a molecular level today – but women had a feel and understanding for their cheese which made their discoveries possible.”
Here's more on Edith Cannon, late-Victorian cheese innovator:
Edith Sage, born Edith Cannon, was a prolific cheesemaker in the late 19th to early 20th century. Her Cheddar recipe, created with her father Henry, was commonly known as ‘the Cannon method’. The Cannon method helped shape the course of farmhouse Cheddar as we know it. It was widely taught and is still in use today.
Do you want to know how the actual magic happens? Here is Julie Cheyney explaining her process pretty end to end. No great pullquote so here are some test tubes full of… probably old milk at this stage, but it's on its way:
