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Janet Hobhouse
When the mother in The Furies, Janet Hobhouse’s fictional memoir of a life caught up in isolated family dependence, chooses Memorial Day to end her own life, her daughter mournfully riffs on May in an overdetermined frenzy of meaning: “month of mothers, month of Mary, month of heroes, the beginning of heat and abandonment, of the rich leaving the poor to the cities, May as in Maybe Maybe not, as in yes, finally you may, as in Mayday, the call for help and the sound of the bailout, and also, now that I think of it, as in her middle name, Maida.”
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May Days
May is blooming and fertile, spring in its full flower. Unlike the storms of March and the “uncertain glory” of April, Shakespeare’s May, with its “darling buds,” is always sweet, and ever the month for love.
Traditionally—before the international labor movement claimed May 1s...
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
The mother of them all, the Virgin Mary, was celebrated for centuries as the Queen of May, and in “The May Magnificat” Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us that “May is Mary’s month,” and asks why. “All things rising,” he answers, “all things sizing / Mary sees, sympathizing / with that world of ...
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Thomas Hardy & Anna Jarvis
It’s on a May Day that Thomas Hardy, always attuned to ancient rites, introduces Tess Durbeyfield, whose “bouncing handsome womanliness” among the country girls “under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm” still reveals flashes of the child she recently was.
May has ...
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Elizabeth Barrett
The “may” in “May” had another meaning for Elizabeth Barrett, who wrote to Robert Browning from her invalid’s bed during the “implacable weather” of March that “April is coming. There will be both a May & a June if we live to see such things, & perhaps, after all, we may.”
She...
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A "life for three"
Mary placed the "home" at the center of her philosophy, her life and her work were governed by the struggle for women's emancipation. Unfortunately, the fact that everyone was aware that she was dealing with two lovers and that she had offered them a "life for three", that she had an illegitimate...
Her Life a Continuous Experiment
Mary made her life a continuous experiment. Rejected by Fuseli, she left England and followed the French Revolution in the days of terror, like a modern journalist who goes to the front. She embarked on a trip to the Scandinavian countries and found herself with a daughter writin...
The creation of a holiday
- West Virginia activist Anna Jarvis is credited with creating the Mother's day holiday that is celebrated today.
- In 1908, she campaigned for a national observance of the holiday in honor of her mother, who was a community health advocate.
- H...
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