#Bridget Boland

[movie-titlecards]

War and Peace (1956)

My rating: 6/10

I haven't read the novel, so I can't really comment on this movie's merits as an adaptation, but in itself it's pretty good - sure, it's very long, and I occasionally struggled to tell the various male protagonists apart, but it never gets too boring - and besides, it is not very often that one gets to watch one of the classic blunders being committed

[thewarmestplacetohide]

Dread by the Decade: Gaslight

👻 You can support me on Ko-Fi! ❤️

★★★★½

Plot: Hoping to conceal a dark secret, a man tries to convince his new wife that she is losing her mind.

Review: An incredible tale of psychological manipulation and domestic abuse that emotionally drains the viewer as much as it captivates them.

Source Material: Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton Year: 1940 Genre: Psychological Horror, Mystery Country: United Kingdom Language: English Runtime: 1 hour 24 minutes

Director: Thorold Dickinson Writers: A. R. Rawlinson, Bridget Boland Cinematographer: Bernard Knowles Editor: Sidney Cole Composer: Richard Addinsell Cast: Diana Wynyard, Anton Walbrook, Frank Pettingell, Cathleen Cordell, Minnie Rayner, Jimmy Hanley

-----

Story: 4.5/5 - Its handling of mental abuse is shockingly realistic and harrowing. And, though its mystery isn't particularly difficult to figure out, the tension it invokes is thick.

Performances: 4.5/5 - Walbrook is incredible as Paul, so believable in how he portrays an abuser who flips from doting to cruel that it's often hard to watch. Wynyard is similarly great as the fraying Bella.

Cinematography: 4/5 - Good use of layering to create disorienting shots.

Editing: 4/5

Music: 4/5

Choreography & Stunts: 4/5 - The can-can sequence is brief but hypnotic.

Sets: 4.5/5 - Though limited, they're lavish and feel lived-in.

Costumes, Hair, & Make-Up: 4/5 - The costuming is just gorgeous—especially Bella's.

Trigger Warnings:

Mild violence

Domestic and emotional abuse

Implications of sex under false pretenses

Brief sexual harassment

Misogyny (period appropriate)

Mentions of institutionalization

Classism (period appropriate)

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1895 – Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her husband Michael who believed her spirit had been taken by bad faeries and replaced with a changeling.

Cleary was born Bridget Boland around 1869 in Ballyvadlea, Co Tipperary. She married Michael Cleary in August 1887. The couple met in Clonmel, where he worked as a cooper and she served as a dressmaker’s apprentice. The horrific case dominated the media in Ireland during the trial. Reports of the incident suggest that her husband (who was sentenced to 15 years for manslaughter) was the one who…

[byneddiedingo]

Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook in Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson, 1940) Cast: Anton Walbrook, Diana Wynyard, Frank Pettingell, Cathleen Cordell, Robert Newton, Jimmy Hanley, Minnie Rayner. Screenplay: A.R. Rawlinson, Bridget Boland, based on a play by Patrick Hamilton. Cinematography: Bernard Knowles. Music: Richard Addinsell. One of the more famous crimes of MGM was its attempt to destroy the negative and all existing prints of Thorold Dickinson's 1940 version of Gaslight in order to avoid any comparisons between it and the 1944 remake directed by George Cukor. It failed somehow, and the two versions can now be seen back to back. The 1944 film is superb entertainment, winning an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman and showcasing Charles Boyer to very good effect. By its side, Dickinson's version can feel a little undernourished -- or is it just that the later version is overfed, fattened up by Hollywood largesse? I feel very kindly toward the earlier film, which doesn't attempt to disguise the fact that it's sheer melodrama with backstories that try to add psychological realism. All we really need to do is accept the film's Victorian subtext and to know is that Paul Mallen (Anton Walbrook) is a foreigner and that his wife, Bella (Diana Wynyard), grew up breathing the pure air of the English countryside to see whose side the film is on. Just the way the Viennese-born Walbrook smooths his mustache is enough to let us know he's a rotter. And was anyone more born to play the gaslighted victim than Wynyard who, with her slight strabismus and her habit of staring into the distance, seems to be seeing things that no one else can? The 84-minute run time sets everything up efficiently and moves steadily through some truly suspenseful moments to its tables-turned conclusion. The 1944 remake runs half an hour longer and while its performances may be more elaborate (and in the case of the teenage Angela Lansbury's conniving maid, superior), Dickinson's  version keeps us nicely tantalized. The casting of Robert Newton as Bella's cousin is amusing, considering that Newton would go on to make his name as an actor with the terrifying Bill Sikes in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948). Those of us who saw that film first may suspect that he's up to no good in Gaslight, but we'd be wrong.

[liliannasprereadmediathek]

Don’t worry, we won’t question your reality. There really is a new episode out today ;)

Join us as we discuss Gaslight (1944) and try to shed some light on its more well-known progeny - ‘gaslighting’💡

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What can adaptation theory tell us about how language evolves, the use of therapy speak, and the role of media in our understanding of medical terms? Let us enlighten you… 🕯️

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🕯️💎🏚️🎶👰🧤🖼️ 

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To listen, head to the link in our bio, or find us on YouTube, Spotify, or your podcasting platform of choice 🔗 

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For German, English, Arabic and Turkish speakers (also available in simplified German and German Sign Language) in Germany please visit https://www.frauen-gegen-gewalt.de to find local support in cases of domestic violence

Episode content warnings: murder, domestic abuse and violence, emotional manipulation and gaslighting, including interpersonal, medical, political, and institutional gaslighting. Mentions of institutional racism and white supremacy. Neither of us is a mental health professional and we will be looking at these issues from a cultural perspective.

#Gaslight #Gaslighting #IngridBergman #AngelaLansbury #GeorgeCukor #Gaslight1944 #CharlesBoyer #JosephCotten #MGM #MoviePodcast #LiliAnnaPod #LiliAnnasPrereadMediathek #queer #FeministPodcast #QueerPodcast 

📝 Shownotes: 📝

📼 Preread text (Rowan Ellis, https://youtu.be/SMFll3aIbmo)

Primary Sources:

🎞️ “Gaslight” (1944) (dir. George Cukor, wr. John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L. Balderston) (Screenplay: https://www.scripts.com/script/gaslight_8807) 🎭 “Gas Light” (1938) (wr. Patrick Hamilton) (premiered at the Richmond Theatre in London) 🎞️ “Gaslight” (1940) (dir. Thorold Dickinson, wr. A. R. Rawlinson, Bridget Boland)

Secondary Sources:🌐 APA Dictionary of Psychology Definition of “gaslight” (dictionary.apa.org/gaslight) 📰 “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America” (2016) (Duca, Lauren) (www.teenvogue.com/story/donald-trump-is-gaslighting-america) 📼 SciShow Psych: “Gaslighting: Abuse That Makes You Question Reality” (2017) (youtu.be/ImBEhNku_YA?si=QimAV-ZdRhigQDEO) 📚“Adaptation and Appropriation” (2005) (Sanders, Julie) 📼 The Take “Gaslighting, Explained | What Does It Meme?” (2021) (youtu.be/eN4la0xOBdM?si=Fh6tClaShAVnoE8B) 🎞️ “The Truman Show” (1998) (dir. Peter Weir, wr. Andrew Niccol) 📺 “Gaslit” (2022) (Starz) (cr. Robbie Pickering, dir. Matt Ross) 📰 “The Limits of Therapy-Speak” (Volpe, Allie 2023) (www.vox.com/even-better/23769973/limits-therapy-speak-narcissist-gaslighting-trauma-toxic) 📰“‘That’s triggering!’ Is therapy-speak changing the way we talk about ourselves?” (Morgan, Eleanor 2023) (www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/20/triggered-toxic-narcissist-are-you-fluent-in-therapy-speak) 📰 “What is gaslighting?” (Wilkinson, Alissa 2017) (www.vox.com/culture/2017/1/21/14315372/what-is-gaslighting-gaslight-movie-ingrid-bergman) 📰 “How to Spot 'Medical Gaslighting' and What to Do About It.” (Caron, Christina) (www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/well/mind/medical-gaslighting.html) 📺 “Live Your Own Life” (“효심이네 각자도생”) (KBS2 2023-2024) 📰 “Time Magazine 2023 Person of the Year: Taylor Swift” (Lansky, Sam) (time.com/6342806/person-of-the-year-2023-taylor-swift/) 🎙️ “Stockholm Syndrome” (2018) (You’re Wrong About Podcast) 📰 “Bystander intervention” (Wiki) (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_intervention) 📺 “Unbelievable” (Susannah Grant, Ayelet Waldman, Michael Chabon) (2019, Netflix) 🎞️ “They Cloned Tyrone” (dir. Juel Taylor, wr. Tony Rettenmaier, Juel Taylor) 🎞️ “The Stepford Wives” (1975) (dir. Bryan Forbes, wr. William Goldman) 🎞️ “The Girl on the Train” (2016) (dir. Tate Taylor, wr. Erin Cressida Wilson) 📚 “Rosemary’s Baby” (1967) (Levin, Ira) 📚 “The Stepford Wives” (1972) (Levin, Ira)

📱Social Media Handles📱:

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🎹Intromusic🎹: "Wall" by Jahzaar, licenced under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)  

🎹Outro Music🎹: “Waterbeat” by DJ Lengua, licenced under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

🎹Transition Music🎹: gas burning stove activation and burn by EdR from Pixabay

Old fashioned clock sound by Pixabay

Walking on wooden floorboards by Pixabay

[fideidefenswhore]

Throughout their seven years' stay in Calais, the advancement of her children was one of Honor Lisle's chief concerns. Children and stepchildren were regarded as one family by everybody. The Abbess of St Mary's writes to Lady Lisle of Bridget Plantagenet as 'your daughter'; the Paris merchant, Guillaume Le Gras, writes to Lisle of James Basset as 'your son'; and all the Basset children refer to Lisle as 'my lord my father.' They were all of them Honor's responsibility rather than her husband's. It is she who sends instructions about them to Husee and to their various guardians; and it is to her that the bills come in for payment.

The Lisle Letters: An Abridgement, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, Bridget Boland

[saintmeghanmarkle]

Meghans stupid Bridget Jones reference rant by u/Objective_Tea_

Meghan’s stupid Bridget Jones reference rant Ok, I’ve been sitting on this but it just came up and I’ve to share this.In the Singleton archetypes episode Meghan lists all the synonyms for single woman. “ Old maid. Singleton - that I remember hearing from Bridget Jones’ diary. And this idea of the spinster… ”Ya moron, you remember “spinster” from BJD, not “singleton”. There’s an actual tombstone Bridget sees with her name on it: “Bridget Jones - Spinster”I had to look up in the dictionary (I was a kid) what spinster meant. I learnt the word after watching BJD. It was such a comic relief for my single young self. How do you list the words next to each other and get the reference wrong.Did nobody check her? She’s so damn thick. Rant over. BJD fans, you remember that scene?PS: no I didn’t listen to the episode. The clip came up on Daniel Boland video… post link: https://ift.tt/Z0TeVgM author: Objective_Tea_ submitted: August 24, 2023 at 04:46AM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit

[sci-firenegade]

More Welsh Theaatre Company stuff. Less plays than usual for repertory theatre, but they, hopefully, have more quality.

Sadly, that won't mean they'll break even. It's been almost 60 years, but the culture sector being underfunded and disregarded... things haven't changed much.

North Wales Weekly News - Thursday 15 June 1967

Trancription:

Season of plays, a 'challenge'

All aboard... Members of the company report for rehearsal.

Welsh Company at Colwyn

The curtain goes up on Monday, at Volwyn Bay's municipally-owned Prince of Wales Theatre, on the Welsh Theatre Company's first summer season of repertory.

It will also be their first permanent summer season at any resort. "An interesting and exciting challenge," said the company's Welsh producer, Mr. Gareth Morgan.

"The theatre is first and foremost to entertain and to stimulate the imagination, and we hope to do this. We have arranged a good crossection of British Theatre for our audiences and all the plays are classic fare," he said.

Unlike previous summers, however, Colwyn Bay theatregoers will see only six plays. Past repertory companies have done seasons of 19-21 plays.

AIM: WIDE APPEAL

"We don't think this will affect our audiences. We are hoping to attract peoole from many parts of North Wales and not only residents and holidaymakers in Folwyn Bay," said Mr. Morgan.

"One thing is certain," he said, "the standard of productions must improve because we are putting on fewer plays. In my opinion it is virtually impossible to put on a play in one week with any degree of quality. I suppose one might say we are doing a repertoire of plays rather than a repertory season."

Mr. Morgan was with the Royal Shakespeare Company for seven years. Conditions in Colwyn Bay, he said, were ideal.

"I believe that actors are very sane people and they cannot give of their best unless they are working under the right conditions. Here in Colwyn Bay I think we have the right conditions."

"ROOKERY NOOK"

The company opens their season with "Rookery Nook", Ben Travers' farce, and the other plays will be the thriller "The Man" (Mel Dinelli), a new comedy by Roger Milner; "How's the world treating you?"; the popular North country comedy "Billy Liar" (Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall); "Rattle of a simple man", the brilliant play by Charles Dyer, and finally Bridget Boland's "The prisoner", described as the most serious play in the repertoire.

Even before the curtain goes up one thing is certain—financial loss. "A profit is impossible and we can't break even either," said the company manager, Mr. John Charnley.

"But all arts run at a loss. If people were to pay a true price for a theatre tocket it would be something between 30s. and 40 shillings. The whole image of the theatre in changing and local authorities and other commercial bodies are recognising the need to subsidise the theatre to keep it alive. If they did not recognise the theatre and it were allowed to die this country would be a far poorer place."

Mr. Charnley added it was the company's intention to provide the people of Wales with the best theatre that was possible and that by the end of the season the Welah Theatre Company would have developed a group of actors and technicians worthy of the theatre.

PACKAGE DEAL

The season at Colwyn Bay is being sponsored by the borough council and the Welsh Arts Council. In an attempt to attract parties from all over North Wales, the Welsh Theatre Company, with the borough council, have devised a "package deal". Parties will be provided with a reserved theatre seat and a pre-play supper at one of the corporation's cafes for 14 shillings. In addition, the company will pay one-third of the cost of coach-hire for parties of over 20 people.

"This will help people who live outside Colwyn Bay and, after all, it is our duty to serve the whole of Wales," said Mr. Charnley.

There are 19 members of the company, many of them are well-known and accomplished. One of the leading male members is William Russell, probably best remembered as Sir Lancelot in the ITV series.

Mr. Russell has also starred in several films for the Rank Organisation and in 1961 toured Russia with the Old Vic Company.

With such an experienced company and an excellent variety of plays, the season at Colwyn Bay, in the words of Mr. Gareth Morgan, promises to be "interesting and exciting".

[audiemurphy1945]

The Prisoner(1955)

[mariocki]

The Prisoner (1955)

"You see, you represent a religion which provides an organisation outside the state. In your pulpit, you're more dangerous than a politician. With your war record, you're a national monument. You are outside the Party, and that monument must be -"

"Destroyed?"

"Defaced. You see? I show you my hand from the start."

"Do you want to see mine?"

[spectaculardistractions]

Towards a severe confrontation of conscience Peter Glenville's The Prisoner (1955) cautiously advances. In an iron curtain country, a Cardinal (Alec Guinness) is to be broken down by an interrogator (Jack Hawkins). One supposes that the playwright, Bridget Boland, intended an anti-Communist piece which would suggest an explanation for the successes of brainwashing (still so hard to understand, despite Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon). This, more thoughtfully than usual, would show it as a human process applied by humans, who might have ideals just as some Christian inquisitors did, and who might just as often be sensitive men. The spirit recalls Graham Greene in making every concession to cynical materialism, while somehow maintaining the Christian possibility. The inquisitor, here, is played by English gentleman, Jack Hawkins. He foregoes truth drugs and torture, and even the threat thereof, insists to his sidekick on the need to understand, respect and love one's - victim? convert? - and works on the unconscious guilts which will undermine his beliefs.

Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England

[bourbon-ontherocks]

Ship game

Movie/TV ship questions; answer with a GIF; no repeats

Tagged by @roxy206​ @whiskeyjack​ @riosnecktattoo​ and @juuuunaaaaoooo​ AND @purplemagic​ AND @00gangfriend00​ (wow, you guys really want to hear me ramble...)

IMPORTANT: I do not own any GIF of this post, I picked them on Google, and I don’t claim any repost, so if you’re the creator of one of these let me know and I’ll credit you.

1. First Ship - Emma Peel and John Steed in the original series of The Avengers

2. First OTP - Considering that I didn’t know what an OTP was before I joined the Good Girls fandom, it has to be these Beth x Rio idiots...

3. Favorite Current Ship - Ruth x Sam from GLOW. I miss them (and a satisfying conclusion) so much!

4. Shipped from the first minute - Beth x Bourbon. What do you think I was looking at during 1.03??

5. Wish they had been endgame - Rebecca x Nathaniel from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend...

6. Wish they had been canon - Jeff Winger x Craig Pelton from Community. Obviously. THE CHEMISTRY!!

7. Ship everyone else hates - Annie x Noah in Good Girls. People hate them so much it’s actually hard to find any gif of them to be honest...

8. Don't even watch the show but still ship - This is a weird question, how can I ship something I don’t even watch??? Okay, maybe Mulder x Scully from the X-Files because I’ve been told they have this frustrating will-they-won’t-they flirting energy, and that’s my jam???

9. Wish they had a different storyline - Max x Lucy in Good Girls. I actually couldn’t find any gif of them together because nobody but me seems to care about this ship, and I don’t know how to gif so here’s the two of them separately.

10. Actually endgame - Bridget x Mark from Bridget Jones Diary. I love them so much!!

Tagging: I don’t know who hasn’t done it yet but I’ll tag @missmaxime​ @00gangfriend00​ @sothischickshe​

[snowman-aesthetic]

In the days leading up to her death, Michael’s neighbours recalled hearing screaming coming from his house - “take It, you [bitch], you old faggot, or we will burn you” was one widely reported comment - and seeing Bridget tied to the bed, where she was doused and force-fed potions to repel fairy magic. Sometimes that meant herbs boiled in milk. Sometimes it meant urine. Fairies hated iron, so she was threatened and prodded with a hot poker; fairies hated Christianity, so a priest was called. Bridget was made to recite her name and her male relatives’ names; she had to describe herself as “Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God” over and over, as if the spell could be broken by reaffirming the proper marital relation. When she was slow to answer, they held her over the kitchen fire. 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

When she refused a third piece [of toast], Michael knocked Bridget to the ground and began forcing the bread down her throat. He began demanding that she call herself “the wife of Michael Cleary” again .... Michael then stripped his wife’s clothes off, except her chemise, and got a lighting stick out of the fire. She was lying on the floor and he held it near her mouth. 

Fairies hated fire. So Michael held fire to his wife’s mouth, telling her to take back what she’d said. Some of the witnesses remembered her crying out for Johanna - “oh, Han, Han” - and Johanna remembered Bridget saying, “give me a chance,” but then her head hit the floor, hard, and she stopped talking. So it may have been the blow to the head that killed her. We can’t know. Somehow, in the struggle, a spark got loose, and Bridget’s chemise caught fire. Over the screaming of her assembled family, Michael reached for a lamp and poured the burning oil over Bridget’s body, stoking the flames.

-/-/-/-//-/-/-/-/--/

...given what we know about the other men, the obvious pride Bridget took in herself, and the financial power she wielded - say it plainly, the fact that Bridget was not under her husband’s control - it may have been a lie, and a way to justify killing her. Men kill women every day to assert their authority. Bridget wouldn’t have been the first. 

-o-o-o-o-o-o-oo

“Fairy wives” behaved less like inexplicable creatures of the spirit world and more like women who’d figured out how to have long-term heterosexual relationships without ceding their dignity or autonomy. So if Michael Cleary had a wide who was more beautiful than ordinary women, who wielded more control than ordinary women, who acted “too fine” for him or anyone, who had a habit of disappearing - well, he knew what to call her. If tradition had taught him anything, it was that a woman who insisted too much on being treated like a person was probably not a person at all. 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

Women’s adult sexuality - the kind that comes attached to female experience, agency, power in the world - is even more heavily demonised than the adolescent variety. An adolescent girl’s sexuality is frightening because it’s a way for her to slip out of her parents’ control. But once a girl slips her chain and becomes a woman, her sexuality stops being merely worrisome and becomes a threat. Sex is a valuable resource that men can never entirely alienate her from because it resides within her body.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

...humanity, for most of recorded history, has been defined as male. In the West, white men have told our stories, written our laws, made our definitions, dominated our arts and academies; when female experience has been accounted for at all, it has usually been a man doing the accounting. Women are defined from the outside, in terms of how they seem to men, rather than from the inside, as thinking, feeling subjects. They are not fellow people, not even a different or worse variety of people, but simply the opposite of men, and hence, the opposite of human. 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

They seem beautiful and human at first glance, but when you examine them, their bodies are never quite right; they always bear some mark of the animal or the otherworldly. You can never fully understand these women, never fully pin them down, never love them; they are elusive, incomprehensible, practiced deceivers. You can live with one for years and still not see the snake that lives inside her skin.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

The twenty-first century, of course, does not really do swoons. We don’t really do fairies, either. We still have magical kidnappers, not-quite-human imposters, and inexplicable visitors from another world, but we call them aliens. 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

It is luxuriantly, gorgeously terrible. 

-o-o-o-o-o

a psychic who does things like walk up to a gorily mutilated corpse and announce, using his psychic powers, “Something bad happened here!”

-0-0-0-0-0-0

Maybe you think I am exaggerating. Maybe it’s not actually that stupid. To which I reply: no. Whatever you are imagining, [movie] is much, much stupider than that. 

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

It is an artless, timeless, accidental blueprint of all the ways men fear female sexuality.

-o-o-o-o-

Yet Sil’s quest to fulfil every single female stereotype from a bad ‘90s stand-up routine is not really meant to amuse us. It’s meant to be terrifying. The fact that she’s feminine is what makes her monstrous - a Melusine whose dragon nature is always lurking just under the surface. Once a woman is free to desire and pursue her own desires, she moves beyond the reach of our empathy; she’s a threat that must be contained or destroyed.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

Plenty of these portrayals [of animal seductress women] hint at more commonly concealed desires, which are less cannibalistic than they are “not heterosexual” .... The fear of female sexual liberation has always been partly a fear that women will develop desires that don’t include men. 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

But there is another group of marginalised women who bear the brunt of our fears nowadays - made to hold the bag for our ideas of deceptive femininity and killer shape-shifters. Transgender women have always existed. But in literature, they have seldom been anything other than monsters. 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

Monsters can be beautiful; possessed of a certain archaic, queenly violence or a joyful Lucy Western indifference to convention, .

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

[Elena] Rose calls monstrosity an ethos of “the cobbled-together, the sewn-up, the grafted-on ... the golden, the under-the-earth, the foreign, the travels-by-night; the filthy ship-sinking cave-dwelling bone-cracking gorgeousness that says hell no, I am not tidy. I am not easy.”

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1895 – Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her husband Michael who believed her spirit had been taken by bad faeries and replaced with a changeling.

#OTD in 1895 – Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her husband Michael who believed her spirit had been taken by bad faeries and replaced with a changeling.

Cleary was born Bridget Boland around 1869 in Ballyvadlea, Co Tipperary. She married Michael Cleary in August 1887. The couple met in Clonmel, where he worked as a cooper and she served as a dressmaker’s apprentice. The horrific case dominated the media in Ireland during the trial. Reports of the incident suggest that her husband (who was sentenced to 15 years for manslaughter) was the one who…

[tiffanyachings]

@thelibraryiscool tagged me to list my five favourite plays + (dis)honourable mentions AGES ago and while i haven’t read a lot of plays i have seen quite a few so here we go:

‘much ado about nothing’ by william shakespeare

‘arcadia’ by tom stoppard

‘this house’ by james graham (which you can still see here until 7pm UK time tonight!)

‘pride and prejudice* (*sort of)’ by isobel mcarthur

leaving this open for all the plays i’m super interested in but haven’t seen read or watched yet (our ladies of perpetual succour! the ferryman!  rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead! antigone! anything james graham has ever written! )

honourable mention: let’s go with some lesser known modern ones: ‘how to disappear’ by morna pearson, ‘growth’ by luke norris and ‘barber shop chronicles’ by inua ellams.

dishonourable mention: ‘cockpit’ by bridget boland, mainly for the wasted potential

i’d tag people but i don’t know who among you is into theatre, so consider yourself tagged if you are!

[dianasson]

I really love Crone's Book of Magical Words/Charms & Spells, especially for the poetry. Can you recommend any similar authors or books?

There aren't many like hers, unfortunately. At least, regarding the poetry and prose as far as I'm aware!

Similar in atmosphere, you may enjoy The Complete Old Wives Lore for Gardeners by Bridget and Maureen Boland. There's also A Victorian Grimoire by Trish Telesco - which you should definitely take with a grain of salt. More pleasant than practical.

It's rare that I find any books on practical magic worth picking up, so it's not a huge wonder I can't think of any written so poetically as Valerie Worth's. I hope you find these helpful or fun at the very least! If anyone knows others please feel free to comment!