Wonder Women Wednesday! I’m in Bloomsbury today in Mecklenburgh Square outside the former home of an American-born, influential writer called Hilda Doolittle. She moved to London in the early 1900s and wrote under the pen name of H.D.
After she moved to London in 1911, H.D. co-founded the Imagist Movement with fellow expat and poet, Ezra Pound. The movement believed in succinct, sharp verse and a rejection of the sentimentality associated with Romantic poetry.
H.D.’s free verse poems brought her international acclaim and she was known as one of the greatest poets of her generation. She was the first woman to be awarded the Merit Medal for Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1960. Her complex works probed gender and myth; by re-imagining classical myths from a female perspective, she overturned traditional interpretations.
This brief sample from her 1915 poem, Storm, gives an idea of her mesmerizing use of language.
“You burden the trees
with black drops,
you swirl and crash—
you have broken off a weighted leaf
in the wind,
it is hurled out,
whirls up and sinks,
a green stone.”
Sadly, H.D. was largely forgotten after her death in 1961 but enjoyed a revival in the 1970s and ‘80s which led to the release of previously unpublished works. Her prolific output includes novels, memoirs, and essays. She also translated texts from the Greek. Hilda Doolittle is a central figure in understanding the modernist aesthetic movement.
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Wonder women Wednesday! I’m in the City of London today outside the fantastic Guildhall Art Gallery where wonder woman artist, Anne Desmet, is curremtly presenting a rather fragmented view of London and other cities as if she’s looking thru a kaleidoscope.
Anne Desmet, is a London-based artist and printmaker and only the third wood engraver ever elected to membership at the Royal Academy of Arts.
Her current exhibition shows fragmented views of well-known landmarks which bring a fresh perspective on London.
For the exhibition, Anne sliced into prints from her earlier works of London to produce new digital collages.
Anne’s interest in wood carving grew out of childhood when she endured many lengthy hospital stays. She spent the time drawing “anything and everything that I could see from my hospital bed.”
Wood engraving was a natural transition for Anne, whose early works were characterised by strong contrasts of dark and light. She explains that darkness is provided naturally by an uncut block and that there is something “beautiful and thrilling about creating an image in light out of that darkness.”
Kaleidoscope is on at the Guildhall Art Gallery until 12 January 2025.
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It’s Wonder Women Wednesday. Today I’m in Bloomsbury, outside the former home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a patron of the arts and society hostess whose gatherings in the early 1900s brought together the leading artists and writers of the day
Lady Ottoline, who was born in 1873, came from an aristocratic background and yet lived a Bohemian lifestyle, scorning conventional mores and fashion. She dedicated her life to supporting new styles of art and literature and is particularly associated with The Bloomsbury Group.
Despite her generous outpourings, she was mocked by the very people she supported, perhaps because she was over six feet tall and wore dramatic clothing, including extremely high heels and large hats. The literary critic Desmond MacCarthy once described one of Ottoline’s hats as “like a crimson tea cosy trimmed with hedgehogs.”
DH Lawrence took it a step further and modelled the tyrannical character of Hermione Roddice in “Women in Love,” after her. Apparently, Ottoline never spoke to him again.
She was a firm Pacifist and she and her husband hosted conscientious objectors during the First World War.
Ottoline is a wonder woman for living outside of convention and staying true to her conviction, that “Stagnation is what I fear, adventure and failure are far, far better.”
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Wonder Women Wednesday! I’m in Chelsea to honour the luxury handbag designer, Anya Hindmarch. She’s best known for her quirky, playful designs but there is so much more to this trailblazing entrepreneur.
She opened her first shop in Britain at age 24 but it was her 2007 launch of shopping bags stitched with the slogan “I’m not a plastic bag” that brought her to the public eye and led an industry-wide gear-shift towards sustainability. The totes sold for £5 as part of a larger campaign to replace plastic bags with re-usable ones.
Sustainability is still a keystone of her business.
In 2021, Anya launched an enterprising retail concept, Anya Village, a series of shops in Chelsea, which include her flagship handbag emporium, a café, homeware shop, and playful pop-ups at her Village Hall.
Anya has also been a leader in reforming UK maternity laws and enabling female entrepreneurship. A true wonder woman.
Image credits: Marloes Haarmans & WWD
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