Authors Electric

Last month my blog post  partly looked back at couple of interesting facts about my own family ancestry, including two studio photographs showing middle class women smartly dressed in the fashion of the time. In this post I want to talk about Sarah Moss ’ s follow-up novel, which continues the story of Alethea, (once ‘poor baby’), begun in Bodies of Light , the book which brought to mind for me the strange fact that the two families who would be later joined by my parents’ marriage both had connections to the Pre-Raphaelites. One thing which has really struck me reading these novels, and was brought to the fore of all our minds in the past week or so, is that the position of male and female has not changed since Victorian times. What do I mean by this? Surely today's woman is an independent person, capable of earning her own living in any field she chooses, spending her own money without necessary reference to any male relative?   Of course she has the vote, won by the hard c...