Hello dear readers—sharing some links of interest, and always, poetry for your week.
I loved Francesca Peacock’s work on Margaret Cavendish, and this essay explores how Cavendish’s brilliance and contradictions speak to a much larger context of early modern women writers.
On recovering the work of Lucretian Howe Newman: Today Coleman exists in fragments. Most of her writing has been lost and, as Harris explains, she “became in death—and in scholarship—what she never was in her own writing: a footnote.” Her absence also tells a bigger story about documenting women’s history, particularly that of Black women.
A wonderful recommendation from reader
: how Welsh women made a bold plea to unite with American women for world peace.With the very disturbing behavior of new AI mimicking Scarlett Johannson’s voice—along with a voice that is equally disturbingly eager and flirty (full cringe at the 24.30 mark. ick)—it feels timely to think again about why AI voices are nearly all female (ugh).
On the restoration of a formerly enslaved writer’s work with all its original fire, by John Swanson Jacobs (whose sister Harriet Jacobs also wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861).
The Paris Review shares some images of the late great Alice Munro’s notebooks.
Loved this essay on how people have observed how animals self-medicate with plants for millennia.
And a poem for the week:
] here to me from Krete to this holy temple where is your graceful grove of apple trees and altars smoking with frankincense. And in it cold water makes a clear sound through apple branches and with roses the whole place is shadowed and down from radiant-shaking leaves sleep comes dropping. And in it a horse meadow has come into bloom with spring flowers and breezes like honey are blowing [ ] In this place you Kypris taking up in gold cups delicately nectar mingled with festivities: pour. —Sappho trans. by Anne Carson
That piece on animals self-medicating is fascinating!
That watercolor sky is perfection.