Katherine Keenum

I've just been introduced by our Western Massachusetts public library system to Astrid Sheckels and her Hector Fox books. I can't tell you how delighted I was to come across Ebenezer Moose, shown here, in Hector Fox and the Giant Quest! For many years, my husband and I vacationed at a lake in Maine, where we almost always saw at least one moose and especially loved spotting them in remote marshes. Sheckels' evocation of that landscape is evocative.

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A sentence on p. 4 of the Spring 2024 issue of Almanac caught my attention: "Charlotte Randall, a mother of six, was a photographer in the small town of Clyde, Ohio." A woman making a living as a photographer for the cartes-de-visite so popular in the latter half of the 19th C? Whoo-hoo! Of course, I knew about female art photographers from Julia Margaret Cameron to Gertrude Käsebier, but women in the ordinary, everyday commercial world offers something new area to explore. One place to start is a Wikipedia Timelime of women in photography. Another is the article Zooming in on the places where early women photographers could build a career. And right off the bat, fiction writers, what do you make of these two midcentury women with the daguerreotype camera? Just look at those facial expressions!

Image via Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Are you drawn to topics in fiction? I tend to like novels in which a house is a major character. I'm also drawn to fiction written by British women during the Second World War—not historical fiction set during the war, but novels written for the home front while the outcome of the war was very much in doubt (Angela Thirkell's Cheerfulness Breaks In ends with a major character at Dunkirk and his wife unsure whether he has survived). To my great joy, I've just discovered Henrietta's War and Henrietta Makes It Through by Joyce Dennys. What's more, Dennys is a female artist new to me. Almost too good to be true!

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Although Lilias Trotter studied informally with John Ruskin, she probably thought of herself primarily as a missionary, not as an artist. Yet no one can paint with her flair without its meaning a lot to her. In other words, like many multi-talented people with strong callings, Trotter was complex. Personally, I dislike fictionalized biographies. Secondary and walk-on parts for real people in historical fiction? Of course. But it takes chutzpah to pretend to "bring them to life" as central characters. Still, if discovering someone like Lilias Trotter prompts a wholly fictional character to emerge in my imagination and demand that her story to be told, won't I be grateful!

Image via James Gurney. For a website devoted to her, click here.

Website alert: In my current fantasy novella, I have reached a point where I need to describe a votive figurine, so I went on line to look at images for inspiration. What did I find? Fidelma Massey! Her Shrine for the Mother of Birds doesn't fit my narrative; but, wow! do I admire her sculptures. If you like this sort of thing, do explore her website.

Television advertisements often involve short narratives. Print ads can carry implicit stories, too. This one for Thomson's Glove Fitting Corset is full of delicious details for an imaginary 19th C female artist. The window overlooking rooftops, the geranium on the sill, the rough wooden wall, the propped-up canvas on the left. Ah, Bohemia. But the fancy overhead lamp, the potted plant, the bow at the artist's neck, her hair: Ah, fashion. And the circlet with a crescent moon on the sculpture's head: Diana! What to make of it all?

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Blog post alert: The female artist, Fidelia Bridges, was brought to my attention by a blog post, A Method for Painting Botanical Subjects on Location. In a thirteen-minute video, James Gurney demonstrates his method of painting a blurry landscape, blowing it up to place at a distance from his easel, and then working on the actual canvas to paint a detailed botanical image of a milkweed plant in the foreground. I found it fascinating to watch, and it's interesting that he learned the method of combining two ways of seeing in one canvas from a 19th C woman.

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Magic alert: The most magical thing I've seen in a long time—the promotional trailer for Wild Folk Tales from the Stones by Jackie Morris and Tamsin Abbott. Whole worlds of inspiration about friendship, age, place, workspace, art, and myth in this five-minute video, plus word of a must-have book.

Is this a delicious scene, or what? The high life, for sure—including that androgynous figure on the right in spats with a lady's at his/her feet. I can imagine the picture's sparking any number of stories set in a park or one about the discovery of a talented relative's forgotten watercolor in an attic. The artist Thea Proctor is a certainly a discovery for me. (I love it that she painted fans.) I keep thinking, moreover, that the Australian art scene as a whole bears investigating. Learning Resources: Australian Impressionism would be a good place to start! And for more about Proctor, click here.

Ottilia Adelborg (1855–1936) is another of the Scandinavian female artists who was an almost exact contemporary of the real (and the fictional!) Jeanette. She studied at the Swedish Royal Academy at the same time Jeanette was in Paris and may have studied in France later herself. She became a children's book writer and illustrator. The English-language edition of her Clean Peter is available online.
 
She also illustrated other writer's books, such as The Wonderful Adventure of Nils Holgersson by Selma Lagerlöf, for which this watercolor is a preliminary design. I haven't read the Lagerlöf book (which is available in a new translation), but this picture of a daydreaming boy and a tiny figure climbing out of the chest could suggest a story just by itself, don't you think? Or prompt a poem about the nature of imagination?