Easter/time rejection! While I have two agents looking at the full manuscript, yet another one answered “thanks but no thanks”, so my Patrons get their festive story featuring spring, bunnies and butterflies. Well, no, not really. Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875) was a prominent Russian intellectual who worked as poet, novelist, playwright, and diplomat. He ventured […]
The artist of this painting was born at Alexandria, Egypt, from English parents but he spent most of his childhood in American after his father died and his mother moved closer to her family. He was adopted by his aunt after his mother died too, in a freak domestic accident. He came back to Europe […]
In 1880 Burne-Jones acquired a second home at Rottingdean, near Brighton, to which he often retreated from the bustle of London. Encouraged by his proximity to the sea, he conjured up a marine fantasy world, and between 1880 and 1890 he drew and painted a number of works on the theme of sea-nymphs or mermaids. […]
Piero della Francesca was born in Borgo San Sepolcro, Tuscany, in 1412. This will be important later. After spending decades honing his craft, he was hailed as both a great mathematician and an unparalleled painter, celebrated for his mastery of light and space. If we understand anything about perspective, we owe it to him. If […]
We’re taking the run-up to prepare for April 15th, when Impressionism will celebrate 150 years from its conventional birth. It was April 15th 1874 in fact, at the studio of photographer Félix Nadar in 35 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, when the group of rascals later known as the Impressionists held their first structured exhibition. It […]
New rejection, new book on Patreon! Florence Marryat (1833-1899) was a British author and actress, and perhaps one of the most underrated figures in the Victorian era. Born the daughter of famed naval captain and novelist Frederick Marryat, Florence’s life was marked by both privilege and upheaval. Her parents separated when she was young, and […]
Manea was an Etruscan goddess of the dead, of spirits and of chaos, of Oscan origin, associated with the Genetai group. Later Latin mythology incorporated her into their systems of belief, making her the mother of ghosts, of the undead, the night spirits, the Lares and the Manes. She was believed to rule the underworld […]
I was finally able to present my Patrons with a digitised, free version of one of the most underrated and yet more significant works by Jules Verne: The Castle of the Carpathians. Published five years before Bram Stoker consigned Transylvania to the public’s imagination as a land of undead creatures, Verne wrote this science fiction […]
Last week I got another rejection and I wanted to give my Patrons one of the classical Gothic books I’m annotating but it isn’t ready yet, so we’ll settle for another bunch of folktales collected by Grazia Deledda and translated by yours truly. Whom, as we’ve established on threads, is Gothic enough. The first tale, […]
Eurynome was an Ancient Greek deity traditionally connected with water, whose cult has been discovered near the confluence of the Neda and the Lymax rivers, down in Peloponnesus. She’s called an Oceanid by Pausanias, and her representation resembles a mermaid. Though Robert Graves offers us a charming theory and sees Eurynome as a lunar goddess […]