[T]he possibilities offered by “interpretive tagging,”… enable the information about an individual writer’s life and work to be searched by time, place, genre and occupation. One can look . . . Read more
Today in Orlando
This is a small sample drawn from within and beyond the lives and careers of writers. Look again tomorrow! Read more about The Orlando Project chronology.
23 May 1618
Religious conflict began in Germany and central Europe which became known the Thirty Years’ War: it originated in acts of violence by Protestants against Catholics.
Two Catholics were thrown out of a high window to their deaths, an incident later called the Defenestration of Prague. After thirty years and hundreds of thousands of deaths (many of them of civilians) the war ended with the Peace of Westphalia in October 1648.
23 May 1710
The Tatler ironically argued that women’s chief aim in life is to be “pleasing” (to men, that is) and men’s is to be wise.
It follows that education of a girl should consist of dancing and music, and listening to her own praises. A boy’s, on the other hand, should be rigorously academic, characterized by fear and ambition. The actual purpose of the essay was to produce some re-examination of gender attitudes.
23 May 1737
Eliza Haywood had a theatre benefit night performing in Fielding’s Historical Register for the Year 1736 and the afterpiece Eurydice Hiss’d.
23 May 1770
Hester Thrale (later Hester Lynch Piozzi) gave birth quickly and easily, two months early, to another girl, christened Susanna Arabella—who surprised everyone by surviving.
23 May 1794-1 July 1795
The Habeas Corpus Act (against imprisonment without trial) was suspended in a crackdown on treasonable or radical activity. John Aikin wrote that its suspension during the war years became so frequent as to be habitual.
Suspension allowed the government to hold radical leaders in prison for lengthy periods without bringing them to trial. William Stone and Henry Redhead Yorke were kept in prison from May and June 1794 respectively till July 1795.
23 May 1807
Novelist Samuel Warren was born at The Rackery, in Wrexham, Wales.
23 May 1809
Frances Milton married Thomas Anthony Trollope, on his thirty-fifth birthday, in her father’s parish of Heckfield in Hampshire.
23 May 1810
Following the death in London of the chevalier d’Éon, the body was dissected, and the British public was shocked to discover that he was anatomically a male.
His final persona had been that of a woman heroically transgressive of prescribed gender roles.
23 May 1810
Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, USA, the eldest of seven children.
23 May-22 June 1812
Sailing from Liverpool in the ship Brilliant, Ellen Weeton spent a month visiting the Isle of Man.
23 May 1821
Felicia Skene was born at Aix-en-Provence in Southern France, the youngest in her family of seven surviving children..
23 May 1825
Maria Jane Jewsbury called on the Wordsworth family at Rydal Mount for the first time.
23 May 1829
When Marguerite Blessington’s husband, still in his forties, died of apoplexy in Paris, she found his bequest to her of £2,000 a year was nowhere near enough for her lifestyle.
23 May 1837
Sarah Stickney married author, missionary, and widower William Ellis at a small church in Burstwick in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
23 May 1849
Charlotte Brontë reluctantly set out to accompany Anne, whose health was failing rapidly, to Scarborough, together with Ellen Nussey.
23 May 1860
Elizabeth Siddal, pre-Raphaelite model-turned-artist, married writer and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti at St Clement’s Church in Hastings .
23 May 1865
The Kensington Society, a quarterly women’s discussion group devoted to social and political issues, held its inaugural meeting in London.
Emily Davies was secretary. The society’s membership of about fifty women included Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Isa Craig, Elizabeth Garrett, Helen Taylor, Jessie Boucherett, Frances Power Cobbe, Frances Mary Buss, Dorothea Beale, Sophia Jex-Blake, and Elizabeth Wolstenholme. Its name derived from the fact that the president, Charlotte Manning, lived in Phillimore Gardens in Kensington.
The Society issued questions quarterly; members’ written responses were circulated in advance of discussion. In spring of 1868 the Kensington Society dissolved, having been replaced in large part by bodies such as suffrage groups and newly formed professional associations for women.
23 May 1865
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon took great satisfaction in the first meeting of the Kensington Society in London, which she had formed, with other feminists, to facilitate political and social activism.
23 May 1867
Archibald Alison, 1792 – 1867, historian, died at Glasgow.
23 May 1906
Henrik Ibsen, dramatist, died at Christiania in Norway.
23 May 1907-4 January 1908
Florence Farr published a series of articles, mostly on drama, for the Fabian journal The New Age.
23 May 1908
Mary Augusta Ward was provided with a private Canadian Pacific Railway car for her journey across the continent; her trip is the basis for her Canadian Born.
23 May 1922
Thomas Hardy dated his Late Lyrics and Earlier, with many other Verses, published this year with Macmillan.
23 May 1935
Muriel Baker and the journalist and writer Sydney Box, who were living together, got married at Holborn chiefly because their lawyer told them this would improve their chances in a libel suit.
23 May 1959
Stevie Smith’s radio play, A Turn Outside, was broadcast.
23 May 1990
Bryony Lavery’s multiply parodic play Her Aching Heart (written for the Women’s Theatre Group) had its first performance at the Oval House, London.
23 May 1991
Helen Dunmore published with Bloodaxe Books Short Days, Long Nights: New and Selected Poems.
23 May 1996
Maggie Gee delivered the William Matthews lecture at Birkbeck College, London: How May I Speak in My Own Voice? Language and the Forbidden.
23 May 1996
Joan Aiken again partnered herself with Jane Austen, completing the earlier of Austen’s two unfinished novels as Emma Watson, The Watsons Completed.
23 May 2001
The Mask of Esther, with a libretto by Michelene Wandor and music by Malcolm Singer, was performed at St Albans near London.
