Galaxy Gals
October 10, 2024 10:49 PM Subscribe
The queen of suspense: how Ann Radcliffe inspired Dickens and Austen – then got written out of the canon - "She was all but forgotten. Now the 18th-century author's republished novels reveal why she made such an extraordinary contribution to literature."
“She offers us a heroine-centred narrative where a young, unprotected, often orphaned heroine is thrown into really dangerous situations where somebody is trying to force her into marriage and take her property rights.”also btw...
The heroines are often imprisoned in remote, atmospheric locations where supernatural events appear to take place. “That gives us a real sense of terror,” said Wright. “It’s quite psychological, before psychology was invented. She uses the image of the decayed castle or crumbling convent to explore the precarious and outmoded issue of marriage laws in England, where coverture meant a woman’s legal identity and her property effectively disappeared when she married. So she shows young women in distress, in really exciting, action-packed narratives, with the aim of showing the precarious nature of a young female’s existence who has no protection in society.”
By empowering her heroines with the strength and resilience they need to escape and marry the men they choose, Radcliffe is “very staunchly” showing that women can successfully resist domination, Wright said.
“There is a sense of Radcliffe critiquing patriarchy and men who think they can dictate to women precisely what we should do and what we should give to them in marriage. So in many ways it is feminist literature, on a par with what Mary Wollstonecraft was arguing in A Vindication of the Rights of Women.”
At one point, a Radcliffe villain tells his victim: “You speak like a heroine, let us see if you can suffer like one.”
Wright added: “There’s always a happy ending and a good resolution. But there’s a sense of a heroine being able to manoeuvre that resolution.”
- How Judy-Lynn del Rey shaped science fiction as we know it today - "Judy-Lynn del Rey (1943-1986) was a New York sci-fi and fantasy editor and a woman with dwarfism who revolutionized the world of sci-fi editing with books from luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick." (yt)
- The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due - "She reissued 'The Princess Bride' in 1977 with a dazzling, gate-folded die-cut cover and a new promotional campaign, without which the novel – and the film – might never have found its later success."
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. We will need writers who can remember freedom, the realists of a larger reality.
--Ursula K. Le Guin
From the Conversation article on Del Rey: the current narrative continues to be that Del Rey Books published mainly formulaic mass-market fiction in its science fiction and fantasy lines.
Who the hell is pushing that "current narrative"? It seems so at odds with the impact of those '70s and '80s titles—some of them rewrote the formula.
As a reader in the UK-dominated SF sphere (i.e., Sphere) I didn't see many Del Rey books directly as a kid, though I do have the Del Rey novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back by Donald F. Glut (who was that mysterious author?, I always wondered). Cheers to you, Judy-Lynn Del Rey, and your huge impact on books and authors I loved.
Fascinated to learn of Ann Radcliffe, too. This writing-out-of-history is a frustrating business, especially when you think how relatively few people were writing and publishing in the 18th century compared with today.
Thanks, kliuless, a great post as always.
posted by rory at 12:17 AM on October 11 [2 favorites]
Who the hell is pushing that "current narrative"? It seems so at odds with the impact of those '70s and '80s titles—some of them rewrote the formula.
As a reader in the UK-dominated SF sphere (i.e., Sphere) I didn't see many Del Rey books directly as a kid, though I do have the Del Rey novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back by Donald F. Glut (who was that mysterious author?, I always wondered). Cheers to you, Judy-Lynn Del Rey, and your huge impact on books and authors I loved.
Fascinated to learn of Ann Radcliffe, too. This writing-out-of-history is a frustrating business, especially when you think how relatively few people were writing and publishing in the 18th century compared with today.
Thanks, kliuless, a great post as always.
posted by rory at 12:17 AM on October 11 [2 favorites]
I think we can say that sensational gothic novels are OK without having to pretend they are feminist or great literature. And misusing quotes from Austen to try to make her derision look like admiration is outright dishonest.
posted by Phanx at 1:36 AM on October 11 [6 favorites]
posted by Phanx at 1:36 AM on October 11 [6 favorites]
I think you can argue that Austen recognised that Radcliffe's works were culturally important. I don't know whether you can go any further than that, and particularly not from Northanger Abbey which is basically making the entirely accurate point that the world of the gothic novel is different from the world that actual living people inhabit.
I also don't know whether Radcliffe was consciously writing her villains to expose the constraints on women, or she was simply writing inspired by what she saw around her and so in effect unconsciously helping us to see the constraints that then existed.
But yes, women have been important and influential contributors to fantasy and science fiction since the genres developed. Much of the best fantasy and sci fi has been written by women and that is not understood and appreciated as well as it ought to be.
posted by plonkee at 4:18 AM on October 11 [6 favorites]
I also don't know whether Radcliffe was consciously writing her villains to expose the constraints on women, or she was simply writing inspired by what she saw around her and so in effect unconsciously helping us to see the constraints that then existed.
But yes, women have been important and influential contributors to fantasy and science fiction since the genres developed. Much of the best fantasy and sci fi has been written by women and that is not understood and appreciated as well as it ought to be.
posted by plonkee at 4:18 AM on October 11 [6 favorites]
Thanks, kliuless. It's been interesting watching the reactions to the Judy-Lynn Del Rey pieces the last week or so, both from people around long enough to know and/or work with her or people who really know the field's history. I don't know enough about her to have an opinion, but I've seen more than one suggestion that she would have hated being squished into modern dis/ability/DEI discourse, let alone current genre political formations. Whatever the truth of that, I'm glad she and her work are getting this attention.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:22 AM on October 11 [2 favorites]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:22 AM on October 11 [2 favorites]
I was also alarmed by the quotation from Northanger Abbey (which, in context, is making a point about the right way of enjoying a novelist like Radcliffe, as opposed to what the heroine is doing). I've taught Udolpho, and the difficulties involved in resurrecting it for modern readers include the centrality of landscape description. very caught up in 18th-c. debates over the sublime vs. the picturesque; the inset poetry, which you cannot, in fact, skip (a student had an online edition with no poetry and I had to explain why this was a problem...); and Radcliffe's investment in so-called "rational" Gothic, in which anything that looks remotely supernatural is eventually explained by natural causes. Landscape description in particular takes up a lot of the novel, and my students were...frustrated. (Me: "Hang on! I swear, something is about to happen! Wait another fifty pages.")
The reporting is making a bit of a hash of actual scholarly conversations about Radcliffe. Udolpho does make a point of the male love interest not being all that useful, though.
posted by thomas j wise at 4:28 AM on October 11 [14 favorites]
The reporting is making a bit of a hash of actual scholarly conversations about Radcliffe. Udolpho does make a point of the male love interest not being all that useful, though.
posted by thomas j wise at 4:28 AM on October 11 [14 favorites]
I mean...it so happens that I have read The Mysteries of Udolpo recently, and I've also read other early gothic recently and I've read tons of Austen and Dickens.
If you want my unnuanced opinion, there's a lot of writers of the late 18th and 19th centuries who wrote big, splashy best-sellers that...were big splashy best-sellers, and like the big, splashy but more or less forgotten best-sellers of the 20th century, these were not necessarily the greatest books, and it's not tragic or weird that they are not per se celebrated as great literary achievements. Because writing was an avenue of expression and a way to earn that was open to at least some women, there are a number of women who wrote influential best-sellers that are great achievements in the sense that I myself could not sit down and write one in a million years, but that are not necessarily great novels that will grip you and never let you go. (People do read, eg, Marie Corelli, and I myself have read a reasonable amount of Mary Elisabeth Braddon but none of their work holds a candle to Bleak House.)
I also think that there are a lot of novels that are extremely interesting if you care about the field/subfield/etc and not that interesting if you just like to read novels. I love late 18th/early 19th novels and I'm very interested in the early gothic, so you can definitely sign me up for the castles and the [big Udolpho spoiler that isn't that shocking anymore]. Similarly, I will read almost any feminist science fiction from the seventies and eighties, even things that aren't really going to be of interest to the average fan of SF by women, and even things that are (unlike Udolpho, parallel ends here) actively kind of bad.
I personally like long novels that just sort of go on and on and things happen (like, it's not just someone's daily life or inside their head) but in a contemporary novelist's sense nothing happens. I also like Udolpho, I guess, because it is a "rational gothic" - some of those other gothics are really gory and surprisingly horrible given that they are inexplicit by 21st century standards! I found The Monk very upsetting, frankly.
Also, it's neat to read novels from before the conventions of the contemporary or even the mid-19th century novel have developed. This does mean that (again in my amateur opinion) we don't really get a lot of the kind of interiority or character development that we expect, we don't get a novel structured like we expect, we get a lot of stuff in the novel that doesn't usually belong in contemporary novels.
It also makes me really aware of novel-writing as technique and technique as something that develops over time and develops in certain directions. Like, techniques for writing interiority as in the modern novel do in fact get chosen and developed and aren't just something that people do or do not out of preference.
The more 18th and 19th century novels I've read (I'd say I grew up with the usual education - some Austen, Brontes, a little Dickens, some this and that but as a non-major no real deep dives) the more I think that...the more you read, the more you want to read, and the. more you can appreciate things that don't originally appeal to you. Of course, everyone gets into something by an unusual route - I'm sure there are people who started with English novels by reading Udolpho and thinking it was amazing - but in general, I think it's tough to foreground a big loose baggy novel like that for most people. You have to be able to read fluently and it helps to be able to care enough about some of the novel's concerns that they will grab you.
posted by Frowner at 5:49 AM on October 11 [12 favorites]
If you want my unnuanced opinion, there's a lot of writers of the late 18th and 19th centuries who wrote big, splashy best-sellers that...were big splashy best-sellers, and like the big, splashy but more or less forgotten best-sellers of the 20th century, these were not necessarily the greatest books, and it's not tragic or weird that they are not per se celebrated as great literary achievements. Because writing was an avenue of expression and a way to earn that was open to at least some women, there are a number of women who wrote influential best-sellers that are great achievements in the sense that I myself could not sit down and write one in a million years, but that are not necessarily great novels that will grip you and never let you go. (People do read, eg, Marie Corelli, and I myself have read a reasonable amount of Mary Elisabeth Braddon but none of their work holds a candle to Bleak House.)
I also think that there are a lot of novels that are extremely interesting if you care about the field/subfield/etc and not that interesting if you just like to read novels. I love late 18th/early 19th novels and I'm very interested in the early gothic, so you can definitely sign me up for the castles and the [big Udolpho spoiler that isn't that shocking anymore]. Similarly, I will read almost any feminist science fiction from the seventies and eighties, even things that aren't really going to be of interest to the average fan of SF by women, and even things that are (unlike Udolpho, parallel ends here) actively kind of bad.
I personally like long novels that just sort of go on and on and things happen (like, it's not just someone's daily life or inside their head) but in a contemporary novelist's sense nothing happens. I also like Udolpho, I guess, because it is a "rational gothic" - some of those other gothics are really gory and surprisingly horrible given that they are inexplicit by 21st century standards! I found The Monk very upsetting, frankly.
Also, it's neat to read novels from before the conventions of the contemporary or even the mid-19th century novel have developed. This does mean that (again in my amateur opinion) we don't really get a lot of the kind of interiority or character development that we expect, we don't get a novel structured like we expect, we get a lot of stuff in the novel that doesn't usually belong in contemporary novels.
It also makes me really aware of novel-writing as technique and technique as something that develops over time and develops in certain directions. Like, techniques for writing interiority as in the modern novel do in fact get chosen and developed and aren't just something that people do or do not out of preference.
The more 18th and 19th century novels I've read (I'd say I grew up with the usual education - some Austen, Brontes, a little Dickens, some this and that but as a non-major no real deep dives) the more I think that...the more you read, the more you want to read, and the. more you can appreciate things that don't originally appeal to you. Of course, everyone gets into something by an unusual route - I'm sure there are people who started with English novels by reading Udolpho and thinking it was amazing - but in general, I think it's tough to foreground a big loose baggy novel like that for most people. You have to be able to read fluently and it helps to be able to care enough about some of the novel's concerns that they will grab you.
posted by Frowner at 5:49 AM on October 11 [12 favorites]
I think we can say that sensational gothic novels are OK without having to pretend they are feminist or great literature.
Oh no, you can't simply like or dislike anything anymore. You either appreciate things that are great and virtuous or deplore things that are bad and harmful.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:48 AM on October 11 [2 favorites]
Oh no, you can't simply like or dislike anything anymore. You either appreciate things that are great and virtuous or deplore things that are bad and harmful.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:48 AM on October 11 [2 favorites]
> In prior decades, fantasy had a reputation for being unsellable – unless, of course, your name was J.R.R. Tolkien, or you wrote Conan-style barbarian fiction. Whereas the top science fiction magazines often had distinguished runs, fantasy magazines often folded due to lack of sales.
I'm so old I remember being in bookshops in the 1970s, and in particular the overwhelming omnipresence of the Tolkien revival starting 1973 I think it was. Might have been a couple of years later. If Del Ray was the only editor who looked at that and thought "there has to be more where that came from," that's more a comment on other editors than on her.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:18 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]
I'm so old I remember being in bookshops in the 1970s, and in particular the overwhelming omnipresence of the Tolkien revival starting 1973 I think it was. Might have been a couple of years later. If Del Ray was the only editor who looked at that and thought "there has to be more where that came from," that's more a comment on other editors than on her.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:18 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]
Oh no, you can't simply like or dislike anything anymore. You either appreciate things that are great and virtuous or deplore things that are bad and harmful.
The older I get, the more that this seems to me to get in the way of developing an informed readership.
It feels like there are several things in play but they weaken each other. On the one hand, it's reasonable not to want to read books that are full of bigotry and fridging and so on, and it's reasonable not to want to pay good money to authors who are known as bigots and assaulters.
That seems to apply when one is reading casually, or when you're constructing a very targeted reading list - if I were saying, "let's read some greatest hits of feminist SF as an introduction", I could choose to skew that in a "feminist SF is great, you should read more" direction by picking only the most enjoyable books rather than "feminist SF is complex, let's grapple with problems". I think it's reasonable to get people into a field by reading fun stuff only.
But then if you move past reading casually, you want to read broadly and it's both important and interesting to read work that isn't going to strike you as especially moral or even especially great from a literary standpoint. It's not that anyone has to read every bigoted or unpleasant work in a field to get a sense of it, but getting a broad sense of a field will inevitably require reading books that don't reflect your values, and will probably require reading books that aren't going to be fun and accessible to a wide audience.
There's a social media problem here too, because we all have to be fun! and funny! and ironically distanced! all the time and it drives me up the wall. For clicks and because of social media conventions, it's impossible to just say, "if you're interested in the early gothic, or in early English novels by women, or in the development of the novel, you'll find The Mysteries of Udolpho worth reading", which is perfectly true.
Social media seems to push us to justify our interests in an unhelpful way - we have to have a zingy reason or a moral reason. It's not enough to say, "I'm curious about how techniques for writing interiority developed" or "I just sort of like reading novels with lots of landscapes" or "I'm interested in best-sellers by women at the turn of the 19th century" because that's boring and specialized or personal and you have to build your brand.
posted by Frowner at 7:20 AM on October 11 [8 favorites]
The older I get, the more that this seems to me to get in the way of developing an informed readership.
It feels like there are several things in play but they weaken each other. On the one hand, it's reasonable not to want to read books that are full of bigotry and fridging and so on, and it's reasonable not to want to pay good money to authors who are known as bigots and assaulters.
That seems to apply when one is reading casually, or when you're constructing a very targeted reading list - if I were saying, "let's read some greatest hits of feminist SF as an introduction", I could choose to skew that in a "feminist SF is great, you should read more" direction by picking only the most enjoyable books rather than "feminist SF is complex, let's grapple with problems". I think it's reasonable to get people into a field by reading fun stuff only.
But then if you move past reading casually, you want to read broadly and it's both important and interesting to read work that isn't going to strike you as especially moral or even especially great from a literary standpoint. It's not that anyone has to read every bigoted or unpleasant work in a field to get a sense of it, but getting a broad sense of a field will inevitably require reading books that don't reflect your values, and will probably require reading books that aren't going to be fun and accessible to a wide audience.
There's a social media problem here too, because we all have to be fun! and funny! and ironically distanced! all the time and it drives me up the wall. For clicks and because of social media conventions, it's impossible to just say, "if you're interested in the early gothic, or in early English novels by women, or in the development of the novel, you'll find The Mysteries of Udolpho worth reading", which is perfectly true.
Social media seems to push us to justify our interests in an unhelpful way - we have to have a zingy reason or a moral reason. It's not enough to say, "I'm curious about how techniques for writing interiority developed" or "I just sort of like reading novels with lots of landscapes" or "I'm interested in best-sellers by women at the turn of the 19th century" because that's boring and specialized or personal and you have to build your brand.
posted by Frowner at 7:20 AM on October 11 [8 favorites]
Also, editors are interesting. I wish there was (or is there?) a book about women editors and publishers in general. I've got a couple about specific women, but I'd love an overview.
posted by Frowner at 7:29 AM on October 11 [2 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 7:29 AM on October 11 [2 favorites]
It seems a bit odd to me, to suggest that Ann Radcliffe is a forgotten author. She’s not well known to general readers, but there are only a handful of C19th novelists who are. Maybe a dozen, tops.
Meanwhile anyone with a deeper interest in the period, or gothic literature, will probably have heard of her, if only as an inspiration for Northanger Abbey.
I’m sure lots of us have favourite second-tier writers and artists who we think deserve to be better known, and sometimes people do get re-evaluated as tastes change; but the passing of time is brutal and unsparing in the way it erodes people’s fame. It is never surprising that someone is not widely read.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 8:30 AM on October 11 [6 favorites]
Meanwhile anyone with a deeper interest in the period, or gothic literature, will probably have heard of her, if only as an inspiration for Northanger Abbey.
I’m sure lots of us have favourite second-tier writers and artists who we think deserve to be better known, and sometimes people do get re-evaluated as tastes change; but the passing of time is brutal and unsparing in the way it erodes people’s fame. It is never surprising that someone is not widely read.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 8:30 AM on October 11 [6 favorites]
Hey, Michael Gamer was a year ahead of me in grad school.
Always good to see more Radcliffe, but I agree with Bloxworth Snout. I read Radcliffe in affordable Oxford paperbacks back in the 1990s, then taught the same to my students. (Udolpho is great, but The Italian is a better novel, I think: more focused, richer, confident.)
posted by doctornemo at 9:11 AM on October 11
Always good to see more Radcliffe, but I agree with Bloxworth Snout. I read Radcliffe in affordable Oxford paperbacks back in the 1990s, then taught the same to my students. (Udolpho is great, but The Italian is a better novel, I think: more focused, richer, confident.)
posted by doctornemo at 9:11 AM on October 11
the current narrative continues to be that Del Rey Books published mainly formulaic mass-market fiction in its science fiction and fantasy lines.
Who the hell is pushing that "current narrative"? It seems so at odds with the impact of those '70s and '80s titles—some of them rewrote the formula.
I mean, it's kind of true. Del Rey published a truly staggering quantity of mass-market paperbacks. Absolutely they were an important way genre-defining and genre-defying works got to market. But that was among what was in fact largely a mountain of crap.
It can both be true that Del Rey's mass-market fiction was a critical outlet for important work and that the majority of work published through that means was actually unimportant and terrible. That dichotomy exists for, frankly, most ways anything gets to a mass audience (see also: Sturgeon's Law).
posted by jackbishop at 12:01 PM on October 11
Who the hell is pushing that "current narrative"? It seems so at odds with the impact of those '70s and '80s titles—some of them rewrote the formula.
I mean, it's kind of true. Del Rey published a truly staggering quantity of mass-market paperbacks. Absolutely they were an important way genre-defining and genre-defying works got to market. But that was among what was in fact largely a mountain of crap.
It can both be true that Del Rey's mass-market fiction was a critical outlet for important work and that the majority of work published through that means was actually unimportant and terrible. That dichotomy exists for, frankly, most ways anything gets to a mass audience (see also: Sturgeon's Law).
posted by jackbishop at 12:01 PM on October 11
I read The Mysteries … as assigned reading for a class on the Gothic Novel. Other titles included Northanger Abbey; The Monk; Melmoth the Wanderer; The Castle of Otranto; Dracula; Vathek; and Frankenstein .
I don’t often hear from people who've read Vathek, and I recommend it as strange and exotic even among such company, as its author also was.
posted by jamjam at 12:21 PM on October 11 [3 favorites]
I don’t often hear from people who've read Vathek, and I recommend it as strange and exotic even among such company, as its author also was.
posted by jamjam at 12:21 PM on October 11 [3 favorites]
Solid syllabus, jamjam.
Vathek is a weird one, agreed. You might also have fun with Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Or, on a different level, Caleb Williams.
posted by doctornemo at 2:22 PM on October 11 [2 favorites]
Vathek is a weird one, agreed. You might also have fun with Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Or, on a different level, Caleb Williams.
posted by doctornemo at 2:22 PM on October 11 [2 favorites]
But then if you move past reading casually, you want to read broadly and it's both important and interesting to read work that isn't going to strike you as especially moral or even especially great from a literary standpoint. It's not that anyone has to read every bigoted or unpleasant work in a field to get a sense of it, but getting a broad sense of a field will inevitably require reading books that don't reflect your values, and will probably require reading books that aren't going to be fun and accessible to a wide audience.
Frowner, your whole comment is fantastic but i wanted to pull out this part because i've spent my whole life as a deep reader in the SFF genre (including the Golden/Silver Age stuff), and more recently i've been reading deeply in the crime/detective fiction genre, particularly from the interwar period up through WWII. And, yes, a lot of it is very bigoted and unpleasant! But one of the things that's been really fascinating me, especially with detective fiction (since it is grounded in a "realism" that SFF isn't), is the ways in which these genre novels are sometimes more progressive (even to contemporary sensibilities!) than you'd expect, despite their limitations. Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels, for instance, are certainly "of their time", but they are also anti-racist in a very real way, within the boundaries of Stout's cultural limitations.
So yeah, i don't think it's unreasonable to talk about Radcliffe through a lens of feminism. Was it a limited feminism? Sure. But there are feminist ideas in her work, and you will very much get a sense of how true that is by reading other contemporaneous works by people whose works did not contain those ideas.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:28 PM on October 11 [8 favorites]
Frowner, your whole comment is fantastic but i wanted to pull out this part because i've spent my whole life as a deep reader in the SFF genre (including the Golden/Silver Age stuff), and more recently i've been reading deeply in the crime/detective fiction genre, particularly from the interwar period up through WWII. And, yes, a lot of it is very bigoted and unpleasant! But one of the things that's been really fascinating me, especially with detective fiction (since it is grounded in a "realism" that SFF isn't), is the ways in which these genre novels are sometimes more progressive (even to contemporary sensibilities!) than you'd expect, despite their limitations. Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels, for instance, are certainly "of their time", but they are also anti-racist in a very real way, within the boundaries of Stout's cultural limitations.
So yeah, i don't think it's unreasonable to talk about Radcliffe through a lens of feminism. Was it a limited feminism? Sure. But there are feminist ideas in her work, and you will very much get a sense of how true that is by reading other contemporaneous works by people whose works did not contain those ideas.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:28 PM on October 11 [8 favorites]
It seems a bit odd to me, to suggest that Ann Radcliffe is a forgotten author. She’s not well known to general readers, but there are only a handful of C19th novelists who are. Maybe a dozen, tops.
Meanwhile anyone with a deeper interest in the period, or gothic literature, will probably have heard of her, if only as an inspiration for Northanger Abbey.
That was my thought.
I know it's necessary in constructing your thesis pitch to emphasize the novelty of whatever your contribution is going to be, but I'm frequently struck by people on social media describing something as "forgotten" or "overlooked" that anyone who took two English lit classes in college 25 years ago would probably have heard something about. Much like the people declaring "no one is talking about" something that's appeared recently in the NYT.
posted by praemunire at 9:23 PM on October 11 [2 favorites]
Meanwhile anyone with a deeper interest in the period, or gothic literature, will probably have heard of her, if only as an inspiration for Northanger Abbey.
That was my thought.
I know it's necessary in constructing your thesis pitch to emphasize the novelty of whatever your contribution is going to be, but I'm frequently struck by people on social media describing something as "forgotten" or "overlooked" that anyone who took two English lit classes in college 25 years ago would probably have heard something about. Much like the people declaring "no one is talking about" something that's appeared recently in the NYT.
posted by praemunire at 9:23 PM on October 11 [2 favorites]
Personally, what I like most about Radcliff is her Scooby Doo level appreciation of "It's not a fucking ghost, you guys. Why do we even need a damn ghost? Stop being such gullible shits."
posted by Jilder at 9:25 PM on October 11 [3 favorites]
posted by Jilder at 9:25 PM on October 11 [3 favorites]
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If I’d been sharp enough to pick it up they (the two large volumes) would have been a lot more interesting. In a sense, you might almost say reading them was an exercise to help young women see through men's bullshit and then cut it right down to the ground.
posted by jamjam at 11:46 PM on October 10 [3 favorites]