Adelaide Sophia Claxton, The Party on the Stairs (c. 1875). Watercolour with bodycolour, 50 × 45 cm. Public domain. Image via Wikimedia Commons. The staircase is one of those odd places in a house where something uncanny always threatens to happen. One’s neither in the drawing room nor the bedroom, but somewhere in the thin … Continue reading The Party on the Stairs: Ghosts in Petticoats and the Stumble of Innocence
Tag: art
The Writing Girl: A Love Letter in Marble
Giovanni Spertini, The Writing Girl, c. 19th century. Marble sculpture. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. Marble has no business being this soft. Giovanni Spertini, born in Milan in 1821, clearly never got the memo. With a chisel and an unholy amount of patience, he coaxed flesh, lace, and even stationery out of Carrara stone … Continue reading The Writing Girl: A Love Letter in Marble
The Kiss of Judee Sill: A Hymn to Love and Death
Some songs drift like smoke and some songs weigh like stone. Judee Sill’s The Kiss is the latter: not a melody you whistle while waiting for a bus, but a requiem whispered in the confessional, heavy with sorrow, radiant with a kind of bruised grace. Judee Sill herself was a paradox incarnate. Born in 1944, … Continue reading The Kiss of Judee Sill: A Hymn to Love and Death
The Scent of Empire: On the Case of Princess Margaret Teresa
Velázquez paints her as an angel of empire; the nose might have told a different story. “For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ… and to the other the savour of death unto death.” – 2 Corinthians 2:15–16 Few things are so deceptive in art as cleanliness. And few things so tragic in … Continue reading The Scent of Empire: On the Case of Princess Margaret Teresa
Ectoplasm and Ego: Reflections on Coward’s Blithe Spirit
Few things are more infuriating than being interrupted at dinner by a ghost. I say this not from experience - at least, not in the spectral sense - but because I’ve spent a good portion of my life watching Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit with the growing suspicion that I, too, may one day be haunted … Continue reading Ectoplasm and Ego: Reflections on Coward’s Blithe Spirit
Wording 