Hello, hello. It’s been a minute, but as the subheader reads, Cornflake Victorians back.
About a month ago, when we believed Twitter—recently and horribly Elon Muskified—to be in its death throes, nearly every writer I know, self included, scurried to accumulate a few viable forwarding addresses (I was just recently approved to join Post—are we still joining Post?). Now, having had space to reflect, I don’t actually believe that Twitter will become unusable, to the extent that it is a useful tool in the first place.
I’m ambivalent on this point. On the one hand, Twitter is terrible for writing: It harpoons one’s focus and drains one’s energy for ends that are, for the most part, trivial. I don’t actually need to know why someone has allegedly committed a great moral and social transgression by bringing her neighbor a bowl of chili. I don’t need to know why a (very cute) orange cat has been deemed the site’s “main character” for the day. I need to use the particular, highly inflexible windows of time available to me, when my 13-month-old is either sleeping or in the care of my husband—I had a baby, by the way—to read and write and think. Thankfully, I’ve grown more disciplined in curtailing the amount of time I spend scrolling my Twitter feed, at least when I know I need to be working.
Yet it would be disingenuous if I were to pretend as if I have not been commissioned for many writing assignments because an editor saw my work on Twitter. My latest essay, which I’ll introduce more in a minute, came to be precisely in this way. I’d written an essay on the phenomenon of feminist anachronistic costume dramas for the Spring 2021 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, which an editor at Lapham’s Quarterly read once it became available online—and thus, accessible via a Twitter link. She liked it enough to get in touch about working together, and so, when I came up with an idea that suited Lapham’s, I pitched it to her. Despite its considerable drawbacks, for a freelance critic like me who has a modest platform (that is to say, under 10K Twitter followers), and who does not live in New York City, the broad and varied access that Twitter fosters is undeniably helpful. Also, I enjoy the community! I’ve made prodigiously dear friends on the site, friends I now take planes and trains to visit.
All the same, I thought it might be useful to have a more direct way to get in touch with people who are interested in keeping up with my work (bless you for that), and perhaps other disparate things, like what I’m reading or listening to, and what’s on my mind. Often what’s on my mind is connected to Victorian literature and culture and/or the pop culture atmosphere of my adolescence, so I think the newsletter name can stand. But I’m going to keep the vibe loose, and as such, I’m no longer going to charge a subscription fee (I paused payments for everybody some time ago, as soon as I realized it would be hard for me to both fulfill multiple freelance deadlines and write newsletters on a consistent basis). From now on, Cornflake Victorians is free for everybody, and I’ll write when I have something interesting to share or say (insert crappy joke about how you’ll hear from me again in five years).
But presently, I do have something exciting to share, the aforementioned essay for Lapham’s Quarterly! Last summer I pitched an essay about early-twentieth-century British writer and Bloomsbury Group mainstay Lytton Strachey and his “indiscreet” way of writing biographies. (For Strachey, this was an intentional methodology: he believed “discretion was not the better part of biography.”) The piece considers both Eminent Victorians—a quartet of short biographies on esteemed Victorian figures—and his biography of Queen Victoria, which I read for the first time for this assignment and found to be absolutely wild, albeit in different ways from Eminent Victorians, which veers from delicious bitchiness to empathy to laugh-out-loud hilarity to astounding human insight. I first read Eminent Victorians the summer before my senior year, while at Cambridge (Strachey’s alma mater) for a summer program through my college, William and Mary. I appreciated it then, but was too preoccupied with both keeping up with my workload and, well, partying in England to give it the time it deserved. In the intervening years, I’ve found myself thinking more about Strachey, and feeling miffed on his behalf that Eminent Victorians has so little cultural footprint. I hope my essay encourages a few people to pick it up. Strachey was an extraordinary, singular mind, and he died far too young (at 51, of stomach cancer).
As is always the case after I publish anything, I’m thinking about all the ways the work falls short. For instance, a longer and more comprehensive essay might have incorporated Strachey’s bestie, Virginia Woolf, who also had plenty to say about biography, and whose 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography is both a provocative meditation on the genre and a love letter to Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. (And I could have included the fun little tidbit about Strachey, who was gay, and Woolf being engaged for five seconds.) In any case, I’ve only scratched the surface as far as this topic goes, and I’d love to give it more time.
But for now, I’m working on a couple of other assignments, including a review essay on a forthcoming collection of Oscar Wilde’s critical work (Wilde makes a cameo appearance in the Strachey essay too). I’ve also been thinking for some time about a longer project on metaphors (yes, you read that right. Invite me to your parties, I’m fun and cool), as well as another on the Pre-Raphaelites. Here’s hoping that my husband and I can soon incorporate at least a bit of childcare into the mix so that I am able to accomplish these various writerly endeavors with minimal gnashing of teeth!
One more time, here’s my essay on Lytton Strachey, “indiscreet biography,” and his works Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria. I very much hope you will read it, and—dare I say—share it on Twitter, perhaps with a word or two about what you liked about it (that is, if you do like it—I hope you will, but make no assumptions on that front). You are welcome to tag me.
Oh, and as you might recall, I wrote a book in 2020. It’s called Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. I think it does the job, as books go. Perhaps you know someone who might like it as a holiday gift.
Last but not least, if you haven’t incorporated MUNA’s latest self-titled album into your life, I strongly encourage you to give yourself that pleasure. Second to therapy, it is responsible for my mental health.
More soon (probably). Take care, and stay healthy.
Yours, Rachel