Good morning,

A more old school mixed bag of links this Friday, because I have spent the last I don’t even know how many days waking up at midday and playing Pokèmon. Happy new year! I hope you are enjoying similarly chill times.

I encountered Margaret Cavendish via Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, which is a wonderful novel. She (Cavendish) was one of the first women to write a secular autobiography – unlikely to be a happy story, however interesting a tradition it founded:

Margaret wanted more than anything to be recognised by the scientific community. In 1667, she enjoyed a personal triumph when she was the first woman to be invited to visit the Royal Society. Her visit was one of the best attended in the Society’s history. She and her entourage watched a programme of experiments staged by the respected scholars Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. Afterwards, the society officially banned women. The ban held until 1945.

http://www.epigenesys.eu/en/science-and-you/women-in-science/651-lady-margaret-cavendish

I explained the Diana myth repeatedly over the Christmas period, on the basis that it is what I imagine the plot of Frozen to be. Now that I am back in some semblance of the real world, this seems somewhat less likely, but please enjoy some Ovid:

She, although surrounded with the crowd of her attendants, stood sideways, and turned her face back; and how did she wish that she had her arrows at hand; and so she took up water, which she did have at hand, and threw it over the face of the man, and sprinkling his hair with the avenging stream, she added these words, the presages of his future woe: "Now thou mayst tell, if tell thou canst, how that I was seen by thee without my garments."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21765/21765-h/files/Met_I-III.html#bookIII_fableIII

This is what I post on New Year’s day, so you can be sure that I won’t be pushing my own writing in your face any more frequently than once a year. Contains recommendations on which wedding book to buy or read, and a shocking graph illustrating a general skew towards male authors:

https://medium.com/@Vincennes/vincennes-review-of-books-2014-819596c3c922

Alex.