Bobbie Gentry, a Mississippi singer/songwriter, wrote several great story songs. “Fancy” is my favorite, the story of a poor but beautiful girl being coached by
So the first “story song” I’d like to discuss is Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” This 1976 folk ballad is in
Story Songs I have to confess… concision isn’t one of my strengths as a writer. Even after ruthless editing, my stories are often 10% longer
Alicia’s Trollope Posts in Order Here The Palliser series by Anthony Trollope overflows with great characters and relationships, particularly the eponymous Pallisers– Plantagenet and Glencora,
The Evolution of a Toxic Friendship The Palliser novels of Anthony Trollope are all about power and connections. One common theme of the novels is
Finally the Bechdel Test! The Bechdel test is the invention of cartoonist Allison Bechdel, who in the 1980s noticed how frequently Hollywood films diminish
Trollope’s Bad Women As I’ve shown, Trollope clearly had no preference for the patriarchy. He presented the undoubted reality that men had more power, more
The Garden-Variety Bad Husband Now, after the operatically self-destructive Kennedy and Trevelyan, we come to a more conventionally bad husband, Ferdinand Lopez. He was an
Louis Trevelyan, Domestic Tyrant Trollope understood that men can be the victims of masculine power and violence too. There’s Phineas Finn, for example, who is
Bad Husbands and the Paradox of Power There are two 21st century terms which apply to Trollope’s 19th-century bad husbands: Toxic masculinity and death by
But first, a digression into postal history! (British history and literature are so charmingly replete with such odd anecdotes. Trollope most of all would approve,
Trollope’s Bad Marriages Anthony Trollope was an advocate of marriage, having famously said that a woman’s “best right” was to a husband, not the vote.
The Sexist or the Feminist? Anthony Trollope and His Women By Alicia Rasley I’m back in the mid-to-late-19th Century Britain, when ladies wore bustles and
