The Content Reader

How easy is it to vanish without a trace? Well, it happens all the time as Claire says in the beginning of the time travelling series Outlander. This also happened to Barbara Newhall Follett, a free spirit, who walked out of her flat one evening, never to be seen again. When Laura Smith's wedding day was nearing she felt a little bit of panic. Was it possible to be married and still feel free? Luckily, her husband was a kindred spirit, and instead of settling down near their families, they went travelling for a year or two, before they came back to settle, temporarily, in New York. She was finishing her studies and was looking for a theme for her thesis. Someone mention Barbara Newhall Follett and she was hooked. Barbara was a very special child. Her parents taught her to read, write and use a typewriter before she was six years old. She wrote her first novel at 11 and enlisted as a deck hand on a boat heading for the China seas when she was 15. She was the first woman to h...

It is March and another chain of books for 6 Degrees of Separation , hosted by Books Are My Favourite And Best.   This month begins with a book published in 1990, The Beauty Myth  by Naomi Wolf. Summary from Wikipedia: " The basic premise of The Beauty Myth is that as the social power and prominence of women have increased, the pressure they feel to adhere to unrealistic social standards of physical beauty has also grown stronger because of commercial influences on the mass media. This pressure leads to unhealthy behaviours by women and a preoccupation with appearance in both sexes, and it compromises the ability of women to be effective in and accepted by society. " It comes well into the #metoo movement and is worth thinking of. That brings me to someone who was not happy with her looks, Charlotte Brontë and her heroine Jane Eyre. It is about a plain girl who manages to catch the hero with her brain rather than her looks. Women still fighting today to be taken for...