A Special Gift Offer!
If you’re like me, you’re already worrying about how to deal with gift-buying during Covid times. (You really don’t want to see the number of dinosaur toys and Barbies taking up my browser windows right now– I miss just being able to go into stores and buy things!) But here’s something you can give without…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
It’s been a crazy rollercoaster of a week, hasn’t it? In between refreshing news sites, I’ve been reading Jenny Colgan’s 500 Hundred Miles from You, in which a London nurse suffering from a traumatic experience changes places with a counterpart in the Highlands and finds hope and healing there (and the usual amount of laugh out…
Read MoreHooray for Suffrage!
In the midst of this election, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Smith College Relief Unit, who went off to France in the middle of a war to save lives– but still weren’t able to vote at home. On November 6, 1917, after a strenuous, decades’ long battle, women won the right to vote…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Halloween! In honor of the impending spook-fest, I’ve been in full-on Gothic mode this week. The weather has been cooperating by raining relentlessly. I started with Patricia Wentworth’s The Benevent Treasure, which I was assured by a friend was the most Gothic of the Miss Silver novels (ingenue heroine, left penniless by the death…
Read MoreEerie– or inspiring?
When the Smith College Relief Unit arrived in Paris in 1917, one of the first things they did was tour the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly, an immense building which had previously been a school, but which had been entirely given over to the care of the wounded, ambulances constantly coming and going. When the…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday! I’m drowning in a richness of new books— so many that I can’t figure out what to read next and have been taking refuge with an old, old favorite: Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword. How to describe The Blue Sword? It’s a coming of age story, an adventure, a battle between good and…
Read MoreAutumn Cooking, Smith College Relief Unit Style
We all joke about cooking with pumpkin in October, but guess what? The Smith College Relief Unit was doing it, too, back in 1917! They might be afflicted with rationing and war bread, but the Smith College Relief Unit found themselves the object of relentless invitations to dinner from neighboring groups of lonely American and…
Read MorePink Carnation Revisited
It’s been five years now since I wrapped up the Pink Carnation series with The Lure of the Moonflower, which sometimes feels like the blink of an eye and others like an awfully long time. For the most part, the Pink characters have left me be while I’ve been writing other things. Every now and…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
The rain is pouring down today in proper Gothic fashion making today the perfect sort of day to stay in and read ghost stories. (I can totally just not pick up the kids from their schools, right?) This week, I continued my Miss Silver marathon, with the rather disappointing The Vanishing Point, but made up…
Read More“Take the blessés to the camion”: a Smithie Lexicon
The women of the Smith College Relief Unit were all changed by their experience in France– and so was their prose. Reading the letters of the Smithies in France and their compatriots, the American ambulancemen and aviators, one of the things that jumps out is the zippy new dialect they all adopt, an enthusiastic mix…
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