The new Écuyères essay is up at the Paris Review Daily’s blog: it’s about Baroness Jenny de Rahden. This is part of a series on circus horsewomen of nineteenth-century Paris. The earlier essays are on Selika Lazevski (research blog here), Sarah l’Africaine (research blog here) and my obsession with these circus horsewomen (research blog here). …
Continue reading “The Baudelairean Horsewoman: Jenny de Rahden”
Following on from essays for the Paris Review Daily about Selika Lazevski (here, with research notes here) and Sarah l’Africaine (here, with research notes here), I’ve written a third essay about my obsession with the horsewomen of the nineteenth-century Parisian circus who “lived at the center of public attention while simultaneously being marginal”. You can …
Chasing more horse ghosts in London.
UPDATE: The viral photographs of Sélika set me hunting through archives and circuses from St Petersburg to Paris to uncover the lives of elusive women who were celebrated artistes, survivors, and scapegoats of the nineteenth century. I’m telling their stories now in Amazons of Paris. You can sign up here for more information and …
Continue reading “Everything I Don’t Know About Selika Lazevski”
The more I’ve learned about research over the last decade, the more I’ve realised how easy it is to slip up. I’ve seen how one writer’s creative suggestion becomes “fact” in the next book down the line, and I’ve made that mistake myself. I’ve also endeavoured, when possible, to have the issues corrected in reprints. …
Continue reading “Who is the woman in Sir Edwin Landseer’s The Shrew Tamed?”
I’ve written something for The Atlantic‘s Object Lessons blog on the long (if potted!) history of horsemeat in America. A much fuller account is on offer in The Age of the Horse! During World War II food shortages, horse meat once again found its way to American tables, but the post-war backlash was rapid. “Horse …
Continue reading “From Taboo to “Ecoterrorism” – Horsemeat’s Troubled Political History in America”
The horse on the cover of Ulrich Raulff’s impressive new book is soaring, bridleless, riderless and all but headless. It has the fuzziness of distance but also the heft and hairiness of life; it is both figurative and real. In tracing our extended exit from the long 19th century, when horses powered nations and shaped …
Continue reading ““He had survived.” Ulrich Raulff’s Farewell to the Horse”
Very often we look back on women the Victorian era and see only the equivalent of some modern-day heroine of Cosmo magazine who wears a size zero and eats only mung beans. That’s why I loved finding this caricature from Punch in 1872 mocking “the young lady with a model figure, light as a feather”.
From Centaur or The Turn Out a practical treatise on the (humane) management of horses, either in harness, saddle, or stable; with hints respecting the harness-room, coach-house, &c. (1878) by Edward W. Gough, via Wikimedia Commons.
From Centaur or The Turn Out a practical treatise on the (humane) management of horses, either in harness, saddle, or stable; with hints respecting the harness-room, coach-house, &c. (1878) by Edward W. Gough, via Wikimedia Commons.
