We are two part-time academics. Ellen teaches in the English department and Jim in the IT program at George Mason University.

Women's autobiography: the mother-daughter paradigm · 12 August 06

Dear Marianne,

I said I would write yet another letter on women’s memoirs. I’ve noticed a striking feature which I’ve not seen talked about, one which recurs again and again in non-fictional life-writings by women across the ages.

The daughter’s relationship with the mother is central. Central to the book and her character is her mother’s character as she presents it. The better and living documents give a true portrayal and in a number of cases the woman writer gives a devastating critique of her mother, sometimes obliquely, sometimes unconsciously. This occurs in male autobiographies to (e.g., Ruskin’s Praeterita except that the portrait of the mother is marginal). In the 17th century I’ve been carefully through 3 (Marie Mancini’s, Lucy Hutchinson’s, Ann Halkett’s) where the mother disliked the daughter and openly favored another who was not intellectual and not independent minded. Anne Murray’s mother tells her daughter she hates her and derides and laughs ather; Marie Mancini’s mother wants to put her in a nunnery permanently for being smart (reading a lot), not socializing right, talking back and (made explicit) being ugly. (Again an analogy found in a man’s text, this time a fiction: in Henry James’s Washington Square Dr Sloper really loathes Catherine instinctively for being ugly; it’s a slur on him; he deeply resents her not being an attractive sex object which allures him). Lucy Hutchinson’s mother derides and attempts by force to stop her reading.

Part of this is intrasexual antagonism. The mother does not want to be replaced and works to make her daughter not just a vicarious substitute for what she never had, but will also (not always unconsciously) works to hurt her daughter and make her emerge as damaged as she herself has been.

The opposite happens too, but the mother is as central: Margaret Oliphant presents an intensely trusting congenial respectful relationship between her and her mother. Hortense Mazarin tells us her mother admired and encouraged her, brought her to court even though she was not the oldest, and promoted her interests and public presence continually. The one I read today (for a 3rd time), Margaret Cavendish’s True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life is at least 1/2 taken up with a favorable portrait of her mother: the father died when Margaret was young, and the mother was a good manager, and better yet, knew when to be kind, to nourish, never beat, and just instill in her children genuinely ethical and even noble ideals and self-esteem and comfort; and she admired and encouraged all her children in reading and studying. She studied their natures and tried to enable whatever it was in the child that was good to flouris.

In Mary Wollstonecraft we find a woman who had an abused,
battered and beaten mother. Wollstonecraft’s response was aggressive protection and anger. Her relationship with her mother was the original fuel for her feminism and it shaped how she behaved to women friends later on.

Why hasn’t this been discussed? Well, I note that the two abridgements I have (on Elspeth Graham & Elaine Hoby’s Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen) completely misrepresent Margaret’s document by omitting precisely these long sequences of praise. Apparently the editors assume they are extraneous or boring; they excerpt a passage they call defiant of the society which would repress her writing, and another about her time at court (where she is in public they say). Both are short and not at the center of the story. At the center of the story are two supporting enabling people: her mother and the Duke whom she married. Secondarily is the Duke’s brother whom she writes a moving eulogy for. He was her closest friend when it came to her writing. So the characteristics of women’s autobiography have not been understood by this team of editors (or in reality they don’t care about the form). Since so many women’s autobiographies are read as scraps where the modern editor too has re-framed and abridged, no wonder the most characteristic concret features of women’s autobiographies are rarely categorized. Books on women’s autobiographies often analyze the more intangible themes and outlooks underlying the books, but not the literal paradigms.

So abridgement is dangerous. Harriet Martineau’s travel books
unabridged are so expensive as to be prohibitive for a group to read so abridged copies is what we’ll use on Trollope-l. I looked up her Autobiography: available at Elibron and elsewhere it’s a minimum of $60. If I bought one of the abridgment s, I couldn’t be sure that just this central portrait of the mother (and probably sisters in her case too) hasn’t been omitted as of no acount and dull. Who wants to read of women’s relationships with their mothers? It’s embarrassing.

This spills over into novels. Margaret Oliphant’s Hester shows Hester at a severe disadvantage with her vapid fatuous mother and her reserved guarded and hurt aunt (who has the money and represents a version of Oliphant); in Francis Sheridan’s Sidney Biddulph like Marie De Lafayette’s_La Princess de Cleves_ it’s fair to say it was the mother’s bad judgment and desire to keep her daughter to herself that centrally led to the tragedies of these books.

Then there’s erasure. We know nothing of George Eliot’s mother: died early. In many cases the mother is erased. Or we see her opaquely, indirectly as in jane Austen’s novels and letters of which a majority have been destroyed and what was left censored.

There are good studies of women’s psychology, among them Choderow on Reproduction of Mothering that show this paradigm. Choderow’s book is often simply described as exposing how motherhood is a construct pushed too strongly on women sociologically to keep them powerless, but it is also (first half) a psychological-sociological study of what happens to children so parented (and where intense resentment
grows on both sides).

I put into the file album of WomenWriters an excellent review article by Marianne Hirsh (from Signs) on "Mothers and Daughters" in women’s texts if anyone is interested further. The essay and I think this perspective should shed light on many women’s texts—how to read them.

I did come across a rare study by Stuart Curran of the
mother-daughter relationship in women’s poetry. It should be no
surprise that Plath’s was bad.

This of course is not intended to be universal. If you take Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to be a biography, it doesn’t work, but then it is ostensibly a wholly unrealistic novel where the central figure has no parents. The reader needs to go to the openly autobiographical in Woolf (say Moments of Being) and the novel, To the Lighthouse (there indirectly) to see a variant on what I’m discussing here.

It was pointed out to me by a member of Trollope-l, Theo N, and I’ve not forgotten the paper on Trollope by Prof Rob Polhemus where he pointed out how central supportive father-daughter relationships are in Trollope (and he thinks in all literature—universalizing from the male case) when the young woman grows up to flourish and lead a fulfilled life. Theo said she has written an autobiographical novel where the father-daughter relationship is central:

"I agree, but I also think the daughter-father relationship
potent (partly Oedipal, like the equally fraught mother-son relationship). I’ve written a fictionalized memoir. In my teen years my father was particularly influential, and I have so many of his traits; whereas my brother was more like my mother.

This is maybe more valid in ‘modern’ times, e.g. in my case, with educated, ambitious parents. Anyway I was expected by my father (and mother) to be as successful in anything I endeavored in, as they expected of my older brother. "

I responded:

Yes, fathers are central, but if you really start to read women’s autobiographies you find it’s the mother who is made to count and in many ways be pivotal. This goes for women’s autobiographies too. I think of myself as strongly influenced by my father, but when I sat down to write the first scene that came to mind was a searing one when I was 3 with my mother. I also have my father’s traits and really followed him. But remember you wrote a fiction, not an autobiography and the forms are very different.

Autobiography traces what really happened, and is often misshapen, does not end neatly, and brings out powerfully the infant’s life as remembered in the present by the adult whose life is now the result of choices made in the context of the originating paradigm. In inventing fiction, you take a paradigmatic pre-shaped plot-design, one which drives towards success or not in the adult public world, and since the 19th century this plot-design is rooted in masculinist assumptions and male experience. And that’s all the difference in the world.

Our culture erases the mother and often the woman is complicit (safety lies this way) or angry (and in indirect ways gets back, reinforcing the resentment against the powerful figure of early childhood). I want to erase my mother since like the women in Marie Mancini’s, Anne Murray’s and other autobiographers who tell the truth (Austen does in her letters that survived), in my case she resented my sexuality and probably also refusal to kowtow, to be conventional more than my reading, but she’s there and was centrally (destructively) influential. I would probably never write of her in fiction: I’ve tried and it comes out unacceptably raw and bitter. I have a hunch only those women who have had good and close relationships with the mother write of them in fiction.

I’m not saying the father doesn’t count, but for the girl the mother’s character and how she treated the daughter is crucial.
Those who write of fathers and daughters are often older men, e.g., Anthony Trollope, Giuseppe Verdi, Sophocles (we don’t know how old he was when he wrote the extant plays, but the father-daughter paradigm is important to him.

In part this is incestuous. As I wrote in the comments on George Stevens’s The Talk of the Town, the movie was conventional in mating Arthur with Grant. The young couple. I have said on list how I like how Austen mates Marianne Dashwood with Colonel Brandon (and how Emma Thompson captured my idea of them in Alan Rickman and Kate Winslett’s scenes in Ang and her 1995 S&S); I prefer Jo March ending up with Prof Bhauer than Laurie (who belongs with Amy as to manners which count in these genres—and love Gabriel Byrne with Winona Ryder kissing under the umbrella in the 1995 remark of Little Women).

So my desire to see Miss Shelley (Jean Arthur) and Prof Lightcap (Ronald Colman) become partners (mate) would be just what would quot;disappoint" thwart the archetypes in the minds of the pop audience. (Why is this? Do they so fear incest?) I misremembered the film (made up romantic scenes in my mind which don’t exist) in order at least to have Arthur and Colman yearningly tell one another face-to-face it can’t be, and look as if they really wish it could, and would prefer one another to the conventional coupling :).

Polhemus began his talk about Trollope’s treatment of fathers and daughters in "Mary Gresley" by quoting from the story to demonstrate how sexually attracted Trollope’s older male narrator is to the young woman, and how uneasy and queasy such intensely erotic passages make readers.

Marianne, my conversation with Theo, prompted me to put a picture on WWTTA’s groupsite space where I talked of this paradigm in autobiography as it’s seen in women painters:

Dear Friends,

I thought I’d pick up on the motif I mentioned yesterday: the
centrality in women’s autobiographical texts of the originating
relationship with the mother. Women of course do centrally respond to the father, and father-daughter paradigms are important in literature (fiction often) equally, but there is a tendency for such books to be written by men, and the father to be a displaced erotic partner caring for the girl. In movies like Talk of the Town the incipient incest current is thwarted by conventional ("safe") pairing off (in this light Alcott’s pairing of Jo with Prof Bhauer, Austen’s of Marianne with Colonel Brandon becomes a form of integrity in a new courageous sexual way).

When we look at women’s paintings, we find an early occurrence of the same theme (mother-daughter, 2 women pairs), becoming predominently and frankly mother-daughter or sister-sister by the later 18th century. Angelica Kauffmann likes to paint nothing better than 2 closely friendly women, and Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrun is known for her mother-daughter pairs (I heard a paper on the ambiguous relationship between her and her daugher at Montreal. (Memo to self: I must really write up all the papers I saw and recorded on this blog and put the summaries and chronologies on this website in chronological form.) I went to look at Berthe Morisot’s pictures and from my books I decided the common idea she too tended to paint mother-daughter pairs is not so; they are there a lot, but not as frequently as in some other women painters.

So for this week we return to beautiful paintings, and I’ve got two
beauties. For today, Mary Cassatt’s splendour, _Little Girl Leaning
on Her Mother’s Knee_ or (equally) Young Woman Sewing (1901):

The alternative title suggests that the woman who is a mother is in her own mind not the secondary character, but primary and living within her own subjective world just as strongly even if the world labels her as not the subject:

The blues and greens are so rich. The apron the young woman wears is lovely (too lovely to be a cover against dirt really). Those vivid orange flowers. And the woman is sewing. Cassatt has so many pictures of women sewing as well as mothers and babies and daughters. She herself never married and never paints herself with her mother. The daughter angle is often in fictions the angry rebellious one against repression.

Later this week I have a Victorian beauty by a relatively unknown artist, Margaret Carpenter (1793-1872); Anna Jameson wrote of her, and I have her Sisters.

Carpenter’s work is also usually rich in color; it shows deep love and support between the two sisters. Victorian women painters often paint two women and call them sisters (sometimes the painting is very sombre), and often idealize the relationship. Why not? What else when it worked did the individuals have to depend on? I think of the later 18th century pair, Sophia and Harriet Lee; the mid-19th century, Charlotte and Anne Bronte; the early 20th century, Virginia and Vanessa Stephens.

They also creates dream-vision out of the painful severance they as mothers experienced or dreaded from the cruelties of the punitive double-standard for sexual experience and from having no ability to earn a decent income themselves:


Emma Brownlow (flourished 1852-69_) The Foundling Restored to Its Mother, 1858

Later that day Theo wrote to me again:

"My memoire was 100% accurate/true as far as my memory goes (which is really good), but I put it into 3rd person, to ‘protect’ myself from my family. That’s what p.o’d a prospective publisher: "Why didn’t you write it in first person!:" Interestingly after that, a whole bunch of first person ‘ordinary people’ memoires came out.

Back to the daughter-father relationship, absolutely crucial during the teen years, the years when the daughter HAS to sever herself from her mother, i.e. the intense identifying with her without boundaries. At the same time the daughter has to define men, what they mean to her, what relationships she’ll enter, that kind of thing—based on father.

But yes I wrote a fiction and you are speaking of non-fiction. We might say the daughter-mother relationship is the core: what it is to be woman/Mother. The daughter-father relationship is the glue-shellac that’s integral to the core, the finishing, ‘curing’ (as with salt) of it. Without that, the young woman can be crippled for life, simply a mushy nonentity."

To which I again replied:

The father matters and "crucially" when the daughter feels he was the one who gave her self-respect, helped her to become the self she wanted to be. But when we look at both hostile and supportive (adversarial as well as loving) relationships, I suggest more for the boys than the girls in the family group. For the girls the mother’s character and how she treated the daughter is as shown in autobiographies crucial.

Remember my concern is with the forms women’s autobiographies take.

To move to our life-stories as we remember them (here in a public letter) I severed myself emotionally from my mother around age 16. Anorexia was a kind of first step which also cut me off from my father (who is actually an ambiguous figure for me too). I haven’t seen her but three times since my father died in 1989. The third was when my older daughter was married (she had a wedding and my mother came); before that the last time was 1994.

Some girls emerge without fathers very strongly. I was speaking with a good friend a week or so ago who told me she had an abusive father (violent to the mother and children, alcoholic) who left the home early; she’s a strong woman who has succeeded admirably from a low status family. I don’t think a person must have either a mother or father; they must have a loving person who supports them—or they are in deep trouble.

On C18-l, I’ve had three men protest about how the Mancini memoirs are said to be written by men, and how this is a commonplace in French criticism (that these memoirs are faked and when attributed to women often at least partly by men). And yes they said these memoirs by the Mancini are inferior.

One reason I know they are by the Mancini sisters (beyond the detail, intimacy and passion of the texts), is they show the paradigms of other women’s autobiographies. They are not beautifully written works by people who write as eminent calm public figures detailing their success, how they came to be, and how they influenced their worlds. That’s the typical male autobiography which is admired. The older res gestae is no longer necessarily military and all about how he gained power (through murder and brute force as well as cunning would be my ttake); no the man switches to himself as an artist, thinker, poet (Wordsworth, Trollope as novelist). And they need not lie the way women have, and often they get to publish and frame their memoirs themselves—which women don’t.

Not that there aren’t exceptions. One is Rousseau’s notorious Confessions; it resembles a woman’s text much more. Rousseau broke all sorts of taboos. He even tells of his masturbation and exposing himself before others (Trollope though suggests he does leave out how mean he could be, and suggests this is one area autobiographers avoid about themselves.)

Rousseau’s Confessions can be related to women’s autobiography because instead of the eminent man doing great public deeds or making great public things, or showing us how he came to be what he is (great, eminent, successful), we get a ragged story of a life, present through half-lies (veils), open-ended, about the private world. Because others paid attention to his work, his Confessions revolutionized autobiography (poured fresh live into what was often hagiography and sheer defensive apology) as no woman’s text has even been able to. Louise d’Epinay’s mid-century epistolary masterpiece autobiographical writing, Montbrillant, is as good as Richardson’s or Rousseau’s but did not get any public recognation until early in the 19th century; the first fully accurate texts was published in the 20th century: before that it was revamped, censored and presented as a novel.

I find Rousseau a figure I can sympathize with. Imagine these wealthy French houses filled with cliques of flunkies. Along comes poorly-dressed unglamorous Rousseau: he is treated as a figure of fun, a clown. His Reveries of a Solitary Walker are about the value of solititude for creativity. If he tells truths no one else in his era did (he & Theresa abandoned their new-borns to foundling hospitals upon birth), Madelyn Gutwirth’s Twilight of the Goddesses shows us how common this was in an period without effective contraception. He’s right to see the real world of the ancien regime as corrupt (he says more people died in the Lisbon earthquake because of the social arrangements they were living in and the lack of any organized help than the physical phenomena) and for him impossible to cope with.

But in Rousseau’s Confessions too, it’s not the mother which is central; the father is the man who beats and shames and drives his son out of the home. Rousseau seeks a mother figure in a sexual partner, but she is not his mother and he presents her as a treacherous whore who is caprciously kind. One of the many roots of his misogyny and determination to educate women to become toys for men, docile cows for children.

It may be thought just another instance of the blindness of many readers that women readers in the later 18th century so liked Rousseau. There’s a superb book explaining why adequately: Mary Trouille’s Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Read Rousseau The key is Rousseau thought women counted. He thought their tasks important. He took them seriously. And if his educational book, Emile dismisses the girl-child, Sophie, writers like Stephanie-Felicite de Genlis took Emile and simply applied it to girls. He’s a springboard for women: Wollstonecraft can argue with him. The men don’t write in ways woman can argue with; Rousseau enters into their conversations instead of as in the male in Cymbeline shrugging: "Who can read a woman?"

And yes, the innate character of the girl matters (it shapes how she responds); the surrounding culture matters (I will put up a paper by a young Muslim woman student from one of my classes where she talked about how her vagina was mutilitated in horrible painful "procedure" when she was 12 and lived in Sierra Leone); and I would generalize beyond western women: insofar as I’ve been able to read women’s memoirs from non-western countries (I’ve read several in translation), again the relationship with the mother figure is presented as functioning centrally.

Well I’ve said more than enough for today, Marianne,
Elinor

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Posted by: Ellen

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Comment

  1. On WWTTA, Fran asked which is better to read after Confessions, Emile or Julie,

    "I've just read your blog of women's biography and autobiography and seen you mention Aphra Behn. I happen to be finishing Rousseau's Confessions and I was interested to see that he must have read Oroonoko in translation since he mentions putting his foot in it and annoying a female writing acquaintance by pointing out that the work she had insisted he read bore suspicious similarities to the plot of Orinooko, a story that had just appeared in French. By the way, as you've probably read yourself, he's very dismissive of all these women who will insist on burdening him with their scribbles and asking him for an honest opinion they really don't want to hear, so that's in keeping with your point about male belittlement of women's writing efforts. He doesn't, however, mention Behn by name or comment on the quality of her work.

    I've avoided reading Rousseau for such a long time, but find his Confessions really have their moments, especially when he makes a categorical statement and contradicts himself with absolute sang-froid on the opposite page - something positively 'post-modern' about that. Like Mathilda, he really makes one gasp and stretch one's eyes ....

    Fran

    'There's no such thing as autobiography. There's only art and lies.' Jeanette Winterson"
    — Elinor    Aug 12, 9:37am    #
  2. To which I replied:

    Dear Fran,

    "As between Emile or Julie, I’d recommend Julie. The concluding part of Julie is just gorgeous with the descriptions of the Alps,Italy. It’s philosophical, but beautifully so :). I read it to the end when doing my dissertation an din French. It was remarkable in French. This time round I got only about 1/3 of the way through. I had to put it aside to do other things and didn’t get back. I could return eventually. It does focus on a woman and has many extended philosophical discussions. I found them fascinating about society and psychology and art. Julie was imitated a lot, and St Preux is an important male figure still. Randolph Henry Ashe (romantic hero in Possession) is a recreated St Preux.

    Emile does show what Rousseaus said that was radical: He says not to force the child to follow a path against the child’s nature. You get nowhere. You must discover the subtleties of a child’s nature and work with that to educate the child. This is a step "on" from Locke who wanted to be reasonable with children, to give them order, love, calm, prepare texts appropriate for their minds, but at the end of the day would force a child (boy) into a particular profession and does allow for beating. I read an abridged copy in English I found in the local Teacher’s College at Columbia in NYC.

    E.D.
    — Elinor    Aug 12, 9:45am    #
  3. I assume you’ve read Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John and her other work dealing with a girl’s or young woman’s conflicted relationship with her mother. These books are unusually insightful and honest, as well as beautifully written, and my women students have found them especially rewarding.
    — bob    Aug 12, 11:54am    #
  4. No I haven’t. Unfortunately WMST-l (Women Studies list) is down just now, or I’d have some conversation on books about female awakening to cite in response beyond those memoirs I can remember just now or know best. I'm hoping for a definition of what's meant by "awakening."

    Not all texts concentrate on the mother when you take novels & non-fiction studies of women into account. I cited Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls (sociological book), one that had I know it when I was young might have saved me some anguish (for I might have realized I was not alone).

    Autobiographies I’ve read recently which do just what I suggested (bring in mother-daughter and grandmother too paradigm strongly) include Bobbie Ann Mason, Clear Springs (I loved this one), Marge Piercy’s Sleeping with Cats, Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood.

    A very great novella from the mother’s point of view, now the basis for a moving musical play at Lincoln Center is Elizabeth Spencer’s Light in the Piazza.

    Nonetheless, my blog is just about the form women's autobiographies characteristically take. I've included fiction and other types just above, but that's not what I'm trying to describe the typical features of.

    E.D.

    P.S. On second thought, it may seem as if I've read no African-American autobiography. I have and remember some vivid moments in Richard Wright's Black Boy; I once taught Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings because at AU where I taught for a few years some of the books were pre-chosen for teachers. I didn't care for it (she understates a rape, and endlessly wants to uplift us, while on the other hand showing complacency about violence), but now half-remember her mother is an important figure in the book. I like James Baldwin's autobiographical writing very much and have taught a couple of his volumes by choice.
    — Elinor    Aug 12, 12:18pm    #
  5. Jamaica Kincaid isn’t an African American but someone from the West Indies. She was a staff writer for The New Yorker for a long time, until she resigned in disgust with the magazine’s shift toward middle-brow culture. She lives in Vermont and is married to a well-known musicologist. She writes with unusual candor and freshness, and it is a great pleasure to read her. I recommend Annie John, which tells of a childhood like her own, and then Lucy, about her first year in New York.
    — bob    Aug 13, 1:07pm    #
  6. Ah. I have heard the name and probably seen her picture: in Women’s Review of Books. Are Annie John and Lucy novels or memoirs?

    It matters.

    E.D.
    — Elinor    Aug 13, 1:40pm    #
  7. I’d call them fictionalized memoir, as I think is her Autobiography of My Mother, which I haven’t read but should, as what astonishes the reader in her other work is the boldness with which she rejects her mother.
    — bob    Aug 13, 2:21pm    #
  8. When I teach gothics, I have a precise definition of a ghost story. It must have a ghost in it: a revenant, someone who died and has come back as a ghost. Nothing else will do: no other kind of supernatural being.

    By doing this I show a peculiar deep pattern about ghost stories that’s fascinating. I've discovered they have a paradigm about evil, guilt and justice where we see the universe is profoundly amoral, Kakfaesque. Were I to be vague or flexible, we wouldn’t see it.

    Either Annie John is called fiction or non-fiction. Ditto Lucy. The Same thing for the Autobiography of My Mother.

    I’m aware novels are often heavily autobiographical and autobiographies use a lot of imagination. Nonetheless, I’d make the distinction. Novels are shaped by plot-designs quite different from memory from life.

    E.D.
    — Elinor    Aug 13, 7:10pm    #
  9. They’re novels. But I quite disagree with your point that "memory from life" is not shaped by plot-designs and other writerly concerns. Unless this is the case, the (auto)biography will be fairly unsuccessful—and no more honest than the alternative.
    — bob    Aug 13, 7:52pm    #
  10. But they are different; that is, the structure of the genuine autobiography is different from the paradigms of the novel: still often a product of 19th century paradigms. That was my very point.

    (But then you seem to have dismissed that out of hand. I really don't write blogs just to write them, as a form of wasting & killing time or attracting attention; I do put content in them I take seriously; I am working out what I think by writing.)

    Further, as a subgroup men’s autobiographies differ from women’s. And that’s what I’m after. What I want to uncover. Not what are men's so much since men's autobiographies have been described adequately since the criticism on autobiographies began, but not women's.

    My next blog will be partly on the importance of literal truth, of literal accuracy insofar as memory and safety allow, for women's (& men's too) autobiographies.

    E.D.
    — Elinor    Aug 13, 8:07pm    #
  11. I will warn you that I might not comment until the 24th, because I will be busy with all my FYA training and orientation week.
    — Jennica    Aug 14, 12:27am    #
  12. Dear Jennica,

    Not to worry. We have to ferry Yvette up to Buffalo this Thursday and will be gone from then until the following Monday. I have so much work to do also—I’m now doing my syllabus and putting yet more student models and material for students online.

    Sophie (as in Mrs Crofts—have you read Persuasion yet?)
    — Sophie    Aug 14, 6:57am    #

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