Ouida: The Little Earl, Bimbi, and an elegy for Shanklin

The Little Earl is a fable by Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé) telling of a young French earl's 'walkabout' in the Isle of Wight - a kind of 'Prince and the Pauper' experience that teaches him a hard lesson to take on at eight: "I see I am nothing. It is the title they give me, and the money I have got, that make the people so good to me. When I am only me, you see how it is."

London Society: a Devonshire Savages sighting

The Devonshire Savages: a me-too hatchet job on a Devon rural family from an 1878 edition of London Society, a monthly periodical billed as publishing "light and amusing literature for the hours of relaxation", but which often had features and fiction that were anything but.

At a Month's End: part 1

As a follow-up to Bertha Thomas: bibliography, I decided to rescue one of her less findable stories from archive limbo: At a Month's End: leaves from the diary of a man of the time, told in three parts in London Society magazine in 1887.

A Wren-like Note: important update

I've released my book A Wren-like Note: the life and works of Maxwell Gray (Mary Gleed Tuttiett) on a Creative Commons license, as an electronic version that allows its sharing and copying, without modification and retaining attribution to me as author.

Brinjal dumbdown!

I don't normally peeve about such things, but I'm a trifle disappointed at the decision of Patak's to rebadge their veteran brand of Brinjal Pickle as Aubergine Pickle. I take it they've always assumed that aficionados of Indian cuisine know what a brinjal is, and find resonances in the traditional name. But ...

JSBlog on British Library's UK Web Archive

The British Library UK Web Archive, I'm pleased to report, has accepted JSBlog (Journal of a Southern Bookreader) for archiving in its Literature section. Actually, this happened a few months ago, but it slipped my mind. I thought I'd mention it now, as I'm engaged in a spot of 'posterity management' for the site and other work, such as the Maxwell Gray biography, that seems worth recording.

Devon Garden: RD&E Exeter

Clare and I had a potter around the "Devon Garden" - a sensory / memory garden for dementia sufferers - at the RD&E yesterday. Neither of us is a sufferer; this is more serendipity of the sort that got me to see Yeo Ward's lovely Tree of Life courtyard mosaic in June 2014.

It ain't that kind: three years on

Hwæt ... (well , Seamus Heaney thought it was a good equivalent to "So ...") ... it's been near enough three years. I was first investigated for metastatic cancer of unknown primary (CUP) in June 2012, and "three months ... to three years" was one of the few explicit figures anyone mentioned along the way. I had a scan yesterday and a solid case review today, and the news is far from good.

Mrs. Disney Leith: bibliography

Another annotated bibliography with an Isle of Wight connection: Mrs. Disney Leith is one of the several names in the literature for the Scottish author Mary Charlotte Julia Leith (née Gordon, 1840-1926) a.k.a. Mary Gordon a.k.a. "M. C. J. L." a.k.a. Mary Leith. Her chief route into history is as the first cousin of the poet Swinburne, who she corresponded with, and later recalled in memoirs.

Mrs Harcourt Roe

Ryde, Shaw's Tourist's Picturesque Guide to the Isle of Wight, 1873

"Mrs Harcourt Roe" is another forgotten novelist with an Isle of Wight connection. She's described in an 1893 Isle of Wight Observer review of her novel A Man of Mystery as "a lady, well-known in the Island”, and she lived at Ryde in the 1890s. I just researched a bit (well, more than a bit) on her life and works.