strange and random happenstance: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Showing posts with label Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Book Review - Gay Daly's Pre-Raphaelites in Love

Pre-Raphaelites in Love by Gay Daly
Published by: Quality Paperback Book Club
Publication Date: 1989
Format: Paperback, 468 Pages
Out of Print

"Who hasn’t been in love with the Preraphaelites? Back in Upper School, my two best friends and I were a wee bit obsessed with the Preraphs—we decorated our notebooks with La Belle Dame San Merci and William Morris prints and recited Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market to one another. (There’s a lot of clucking and clacking and mopping and mowing.) Let’s not even talk about the summer the Burne-Jones exhibit came to New York. We practically lived at the Met, and I still have the commemorative trivet.

What I loved about Gay Daly’s Preraphalites in Love is the way she situates the Preraphs in their context, looking beneath dashing legend to the individual men and their ups and downs. The period I visit in my book is the very early days of the Preraphaelite Brotherhood, back when they’re still signing their pictures PRB, before Burne-Jones, before William Morris, back when the nucleus was still John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Preraphaelites in Love captures, simultaneously, the newness of what these men were doing, and how deeply rooted they are in their culture.

Oh, yes, and those love affairs...." - Lauren Willig

Well, I knew life would catch up with me this month at sometime and one of the books would probably be unread. With an average of 556 pages for each book and most of them being Victorian, my reading speed isn't that fast... so sadly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love will be unread for awhile by me. Yet I couldn't forsake giving you Lauren's insights! So here's Lauren until I can finally finish the book and get my review up. So view this as a hopefully temporary placeholder!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gay Daly, Goblin Market, John Everett Millais, Lauren Willig, Pre-Raphaelites in Love, That Summer, William Holman Hunt, William Morris

Thursday, May 1, 2014

"This" Summer

As most of you know by now I have a deep abiding love for Lauren Willig's writing. For a fan this is an exciting time in her writing career. With last year's The Ashford Affair she officially branched out from her Pink Carnation series, which is sadly winding down, and has started to write stand-alones. That Summer is her new stand-alone which is coming out this summer (get the theme month title eh?) I have to say, if she wanted to hook me more then Kenya, choosing the Pre-Raphaelites was a sure way to do it. Everyone knows who the Pre-Raphaelites are even if they aren't aware of it. I remember back in high school my English classroom had the ubiquitous Pre-Raphaelite posters on the back bulletin board. There was Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee's La Belle Dame Sans Merci and John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott. They never removed these posters in the four years I had classes in that room on and off. There's just something so magical about these paintings, the way they convey such detail and meaning to the written word that it captures the cross pollination of artistic mediums that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood embraced and made me want to learn more versus those people who just slap the posters up on their walls.

When I was in undergrad getting a BS in Art there was a plethora of Art History courses that were required which I took to with great zeal, even adding in such classes as German Architecture: The Modern Movements, which oddly ties into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Because the classes covered such a wide range of time, literally from Ancient Egypt to Picasso, there wasn't as much time to dwell on each subject as I would have liked. What was interesting though is that later when I took my German Architecture Class so many of the ideologies of these German artists harked back to the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood believe in craftsmanship, romanticism, spiritualism, nature, ideas, and never forget that signature jawline. They believed in elevating art for the people while there was always the irony that they spent so much time and effort on their art that it wasn't the common man but the wealthy who could afford their work, much like the Arts and Crafts movement, but more on that later. The German's believed in this craftsmanship and this love that was put into every aspect of the work with amazing attention to detail, which Frank Lloyd Wright would later use, going so far as to design the clothes that the inhabitants of his houses wore. If you have ever had the honor to see some of the Brotherhood's work, they made the frames that houses the paintings because it was the only way to truly view the art. They were Victorian Renaissance men that were both craftsmen and artists.

A few years back the Pre-Raphaelites got a little buzz again off the BBC Miniseries, Desperate Romantics, which I hope Lauren has finally watched after much urging on my part. While the series plays fast and loose with facts, making it in essence "Victorian Entourage," it once again ignited my interest in these artists. It didn't hurt having Aidan Turner playing Dante Gabriel Rossetti is all I'll say on that. At the same time the Art Institute of Chicago did a fascinating exhibition called Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago. The synchronicity of the exhibition's timing was eerily awesome for me. Because any way you look at it the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Arts and Crafts are connected movements with John Ruskin and Williams Morris being figureheads in both. The centerpiece of the exhibit was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beata Beatrix. But the exhibit had innumerable sketches and paintings and even house plans that gave such insight into the movements that I just wanted to learn more. Therefore this month is all about learning more. To delve into Lauren's research material, to read what inspired her, to find out the origins of That Summer and get special insights into why this world called out to her and me. And in another wonderful twist of fate, the MET is having a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition opening this month and thankfully lasting until I go to New York in August called The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy: British Art and Design. I'm positive they did this just to coincide with That Summer.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments

Labels: Aidan Turner, Art History, Beata Beatrix, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Desperate Romantics, John William Waterhouse, Lauren Willig, Pink Carnation, Pre-Raphaelite, That Summer, The Ashford Affair, This Summer

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Book Review - Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers

The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton
Published by: Viking Books
Publication Date: 1938
Format: Hardcover, 416 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy (different edition then one reviewed)

Nan doesn't want a governess. Her sister Jinny didn't have to have one, neither did the Elmsworth girls, and the irrepressible Conchita surly never needed one, not that she would have accepted her fate as Nan does. But Nan's mother is convinced that Miss Testvalley will be able to not only help Nan, but get some good British refinement that is lacking in her little American savages and perhaps help as an entree into New York society. But New York society isn't ready for these girls. Conchita makes a match with a third son in a great British family and it gives Miss Testvalley an idea. If New York society is so shocked by these young bloods, why not take them over to England. Give them a season where anything they say or do is unique and alluring compared to the dull English roses the aristocracy is used to.

In no time at all the girls are settled into the highest echelons of the British Isles. Jinny is married to Lord Seadown, the Brightlingsea heir and older brother to Conchita's husband. Both the Elmsworth girls, while not in the peerage, make very advantageous marriages monetarily and politically. While Nan surprises everyone and marries Ushant, the Duke of Tintagel, the wealthiest man in England. Yet Nan isn't happy. It becomes clear that her husband married her not for wealth or even for love, but because she was naive as to what a duke was and wasn't hunting for a title, that and her youth makes her malleable. Though the longer she is married to Ushant, the more she realizes that their marriage is a mistake. This realization has nothing to do with the fact that she is falling in love with the young Guy Thwarte. She would be fine if Guy never knew of her love as long as he was happy and she was free once more.

Back in the days before DVRs and having anything you could possibly imagine to watch just at the flick of a switch, spending the midnight hours surfing the channels always yielded the most interesting results. On channels like A and E, before they became the home of reality programing, you could often find interesting miniseries airing at anytime of day or night. It was on this channel that I first saw Nathaniel Parker deflate a sheep in Far from the Madding Crowd. I'm not sure what channel it was on that I first stumbled across The Buccaneers, but it was definitely in one of these late night surfing sessions. Much like how I caught Louisa May Alcott's The Inheritance in bits a pieces, it wasn't until years later when it was released on DVD that I got to watch the series in all it's glory. The cast alone is a who's who of British and American actors, from the omnipresent James Frain (seriously, he was recently in Grimm, The White Queen and Sleepy Hollow AT THE SAME TIME), to Greg Wise and Michael Kitchen to Mira Sorvino and Connie Booth. This miniseries had it all, including Castle Howard!

At the time I was unaware that the miniseries was based on an incomplete manuscript of Edith Wharton's. I mean, I knew it was Wharton, I just didn't know the she died before she could finish it, much like Elizabeth Gaskell and Wives and Daughters. I do remember stumbling across the "finished" book one day at a used bookstore and picking it up. I mean, seriously, how could I NOT buy it? Firstly, I liked the miniseries, and secondly, well, it had a John Singer Sargeant painting on the cover that happens to belong to the Devonshires. What I didn't know until I was researching the book before I read it was that the miniseries and this specific book have different endings and that both endings are kind of reviled by fans of Wharton. This made me wonder if perhaps I should have read the incomplete manuscript, but then, even knowing that there was no ending, I might get that unexpected sadness that I did when reading Wives and Daughters. Also, having seen the miniseries didn't spoil me for the book. Is the wrong ending maybe acceptable because at least it is an ending? The fact that it ends "happily ever after" is what gets most Wharton fans... it wasn't her style. Edith's MO was more, and everyone is sad, some are dead, there is no striding happily into the sunset. Yet maybe it was this change up that made the book appeal to a wider audience? But what would Wharton herself think? There's a part of me that really wants Martin Scorsese to get his hands on this and come up with a bleaker ending...

The problem with a book with two authors writing the same book more then fifty years apart is the question where does Wharton end and Mainwaring begin? To me, there's a complete seismic shift at the beginning of the third section, wherein Nan hijacks the book as the heroine she was always meant to be. The book definitely falters here because until now the focus of the book had been more egalitarian. Nan taking over, while she is our heroine, is unable to shoulder the narrative much as she is unable to shoulder her duties as a duchess. How can we really connect with someone who doesn't know her own mind or even who she is? While humans are more realistic when faced with internal conflict, her conflict combined with her lack of personality made my growing love of the book falter. How can she love that Guy has this connection to his ancestral home yet not see the same connection in her husband? Is this a flaw of Ushants? Or is it a flaw in Nan? Looking to see where Wharton's writing ceased, it appears to be long after these problems start cropping up in the book. Wharton was just roughing it out and because she herself changed the feel and style of the book Mainwaring was never able to get The Buccaneers to rebound and seemed to be so desirous of tying things up quickly that the book ended abruptly and the reader is left with the sad realization that this could have been a true masterpiece if Wharton had lived.

While the book does have it's problems because of the situation it was put in because of Wharton's death, the overarching theme of the power of art and literature is captivating to me. The character of Miss Testvalley with her connection to both art and literature through her cousin Dante Gabriel Rossetti, breathes life into the book. The characters that are most alive are those with an appreciation of the beauty of the world. In fact, this might be why Nan loves Guy over Ushant, despite them both having this underlying connection and obligation to their ancestral homes, Ushant views his stewardship as an obligation and a duty, not a privilege bound in love. He never appreciates the art for it's beauty and ability to transport you, he views it as part of the house. It is this ability of beyondness that Nan talks about, this transcendence that can be found in art and literature that made me sit up and say yes! You need to look beyond, you need to expand your horizons to make yourself all that you can be. This is not an insular little world we live in, no matter how hard you might try to make it. Go out and read a book, go to a museum, capture some beauty for yourself and you will maybe find a little happiness, because as Wharton shows us, art is life.