A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens. COVID-19 Recreational Reading

 

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens. COVID-19 Recreational Reading 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. -- A Tale of Two Cities

And so begins A Tale of Two Cities with one of the most well known, quoted, and often parodied openings in English literature. As is a hallmark with Dickens, A Tale is populated with a host of memorable characters. For me, and probably many, the broad portrayals are the most memorable. The dual poles of Jerry Cruncher and Jarvis Lorry; the indomitable Iron Lady of the Manette family, Miss Pross; and the chilling women of the Revolution, Madame Defarge and the Fury that is The Vengeance. The more staid, and "lead" characters of Lucie Manette, Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay, and of course Dr. Manette never quite rise to the level of the others. 

On this re-reading of Tale, I was focused on Dickens’ use of language. A masterful artist in capturing accents in dialog, his often baroque stylings in the narrative voice are striking in their complexity and ornateness:

Other sound than the owl’s voice there was none, save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.

Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams had driven him within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it was drawing him to itself, and he must go.

and a few lines later:

Yes. The Loadstone Rock was drawing him, and he must sail on, until he struck.

Compare the above lines with a bit of monologue from Jerry Cruncher:

Bu-u-ust me!’ said Mr Cruncher, who all this time had been putting on his clothes, ‘if I ain’t, what with piety and one blowed thing and another, been choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor devil of a honest tradesman met with! Young Jerry, dress yourself, my boy, and while I clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother now and then, and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me a call. For, I tell you,’ here he addressed his wife once more, ‘I won’t be gone agin, in this manner.

With the events of A Tale taking place a generation before the writing, A Tale is a reflection of the time of the French Revolution through Dickens' lens of history (much like Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris [1831]). London and Paris rhetorical stand-ins for the French and English cultures. Is the new world created by the Darnay family (no longer French, not totally English) a prefiguring of a new European world (would it be too much of a 21st century new world be a vision of the European Union?) being dragged into the 19th (and beyond) century on the tumbrils that carry Carton to his death

And, paring with it's iconic opening, A Tale suitable ends with eminently a quotable line by Sydney Carton:

‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.’

• Read: June 21, 2010 | Buy on Kindle

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

Archives and Special Collections Linked Data: Navigating between Notes and Nodes (2020) by @OCLC Research, @nbputnam, @KarenS_Y, et al.

OCLC Research Archives and Special Collections Linked Data Review Group. 2020. Archives and Special Collections Linked Data: Navigating between Notes and Nodes. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research. 14 pp.  https://doi.org/10.25333/4gtz-zd88. COVID-19 Professional Reading. 

Linked data offers many possibilities for enhancing access to library and archives materials. OCLC has been a leading force in examining areas that can expand and simplify access to collections through a number of collaborative projects. See, for example, Creating Library Linked Data with Wikibase: Lessons Learned from Project Passage (2019)..

While there is significant work in expanding the use of linked data in what could be called commodity level collections, it is in the area of archives and special(ized) collections that linked data has some of the most important potential applications. 

This report from the OCLC Research Archives and Special Collections Linked Data Review Group is an important step in expanding the discussion of linked data in these areas. The group, comprised of sixteen practitioners from a wide range of collections were joined by OCLC colleagues, led by Nathan Putnam and Karen Smith-Yoshimura and including team members Merrilee Proffitt, Bruce Washburn and Chela Scott Weber, who represent some of the best applied thinking on linked data in the library world. 

As noted in the introduction:

As libraries and other cultural heritage organizations plot a course to move toward a linked data future, it is important to ensure that all collections are represented in that future. While published works represented in monographs may be relatively easy to represent in linked data, this is not the case for special collections materials (rare books, manuscripts, photographs, institutional archives, etc.) that may be unique or may have special physical characteristics that are of particular interest for study (p. 5).

Though there is much promise in linked data for archives and special collections, the report specifically outlines barriers and concerns to wide-spread implementation. Among these are:

Context trapped in narrative description

• “When descriptions for these items or collections are represented in systems that were designed primarily for bibliographic description, much valuable data is recorded in unstructured notes. In either case, it is labor intensive to extract entities and relationships from these unstructured notes. This data may be well served by linked data structures, but the number of unique cases for archival and other traditions of descriptive practice may make it difficult to move forward as a community” (p. 6);

Complex models

• Issues include trying to “Problems have arisen due to trying to model everything in the description of an item,” resistance to adopting a shared model; complex or locally derived modelts “make crosswalking into flatter linked data structures more difficult” (pp. 6-7).

High-barrier infrastructure

• “Software, data, and workflows take a lot of work to establish and often lack institutional buy-in and support” and “Lack of support from identifiers in the data, such as issues with minting identifiers and persistency” (p. 7);

Scalability

• “Can linked data standards, practices, and workflows scale? Institutions that collect and steward these materials include both large, relatively well-funded institutions and small and less well-resourced repositories. There are few successful exemplars of linked data implementation in special collections; stories that exemplify success will be necessary to build support with resource allocators and to demonstrate utility to dispersed user communities who will directly benefit from linked data efforts” (p. 7).

A few issues were discussed in more depth in the report. Specifically (pp. 7-10):

• Descriptive models do not currently service special collections

• Discursive description presents a challenge to entification

• Potential for better discovery

• Prescriptive vs. permissive data modeling

• Ethical issues and community engagement

• Challenges around multilinguality

• Sustainability

• Archival issues

• The need to express relationships and change over time

• The long tail of authorities/identifiers in special collections

I would like to focus on a few of these:

• Potential for better discovery. As noted in the report, linked data will better uncover key areas for discoverability. These include identity markers for people (e.g. gender); and geographical indicators and contact networks (e.g. who worked with who). As the report notes, “Even though linked data structures will bring significant advantages to discovery, end users will need to adapt to new ways of interacting with linked data structures.” (p. 8);

• Ethical issues and community engagement. Linked data provides many opportunities to increase access, but if the means of expanding that access remains siloed in a knowledgeable, but inherently limited group of practitioners, there is a strong danger of creating a well-linked and networked collection of silos that do not accommodate diverse terms, practices, and knowledge. As noted in the report: “This moment offers an opportunity to create pathways to disrupt our constructs of authority and to provide a space and a place for others with more expertise (researchers, community members) to contribute their knowledge. Institutions should be careful when balancing risk and opportunity for those who may be impacted” (p. 9);

• Sustainability. “To date, the majority of linked data efforts have been grant-funded or special one-off projects ... Everyone wants easy-to-use and implementable tools embedded in a sustainable infrastructure.” (p. 9). No need to add more to that statement; 

• The long tail of authorities/identifiers in special collections. Much of the value of archival and special collections is in the unique content they contain. The challenge of creating authority records and identifiers that may have a single global instance is both a workload and resource issue. Expanding this to include museum collections additionally multiplies these issues. The report comments: “How do we create and manage authorities across systems and institutions in a lighter-weight way that still can take advantage of the network? It is not possible (or desirable) to create entities for everything; instead, we should develop approaches that help to balance local versus global IDs much like NACO and local authority files do now” (p. 10).

As I noted at the start, it is possible and likely that many of the issues around linked data for current publications and widely acquired materials will be solved through the application of vendor tools and distributed description processes. The huge potential for uncovering previously hidden information in archival and special collections is where linked data will have the most impact. In conclusion, the report notes: 

Libraries are in a state of moving from experimentation to production with linked data, and it is vitally important that the needs for descriptions of special collections materials are not left behind at this critical moment (p. 11).

• Read: August 8, 2020 | Find Online

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

After Henry: Essays (1992) & Where I Was From (2003) by Joan Didion. Pre-COVID-19 Recreational Reading

After Henry: Essays (1992) & Where I Was From (2003) by Joan Didion. Pre-Covid-19 Recreational Reading.

As noted earlier this year in my discussion of Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook (2017) by Joan Didion:

The non-fiction work of Joan Didion is one of my go-to reads … I think her work resonates with me as a fellow Californian (growing up between the Pacific breakers and the snowy Sierra Nevada) who leaves the West to go "Back East" to live.

These two essay collections reflect even more strongly this push/pull between the West and the East. After Henry, twelve essays grouped geographically on Washington, New York, and California and serves as a memorial to her editor, Henry Robbins of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Where I Was From is a memoir, not so much of her life, but of the California that was. 

In the Washington section of After Henry, the three essays deal primarily with the political side of Washington: “In the Realm of the Fisher King” (1989) pages through the years of the presidency of the consummate Californian (e.g. a non-native), Ronald Reagan. “Insider Baseball” (1988) finds Didion following the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns of that year; and “Shooters Inc.” (1988) speaks to the propensity of politicians to use military “sideshows” to distract the public. 

The California  series is most compelling. “Girl of the Golden West” (1982) is a meditation on Patricia Hearst’s memoir, Every Secret Thing (1982) and riffs on the relationship of the pioneer California families (like the Hearsts) to contemporary California and it’s landscape: 

The extent to which certain places dominate the California imagination is apprehended, even by Californians, only dimly. Deriving not only from the landscape but from the claiming of it, from the romance of emigration, the radical abandonment of established attachments, this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery. From “Girl of the Golden West” (1982).

“Pacific Distances” (1979-91) and “Los Angeles Days” (1988) are looks at life on the eastern edge of the Pacific Rim while “Down at City Hall” (1989) is an examination of Los Angeles mayor, Tom Bradley. “L.A. Noir” (1989) is all murders and movies. “Fire Season” (1989) an excellent depiction of a defining element (literally) of California, fire, specifically the wildfires that are ever present to the Californian, but rise in the national consciousness only when they rise to the level of cataclysm. “Times Mirror Square” (1990) a good summary history of the Los Angeles newspaper world (and its relation to the industry, “back East”):

Californians until recently spoke of the United States beyond Colorado as “back east”. If they went to New York, they went “back” to New York, a way of speaking that carried with it the suggestion of living on a distant frontier. From “Times Mirror Square” (1990)

“Sentimental Mirror” (1990) covers the Central Park Jogger crime and it’s resultant fall out.

 

* * * * * *

Where I Was From is the story of California pioneer families that was more lightly touched on in “Girl of the Golden West” from After Henry. Here, the girl from the Golden West is Didion herself. She traces the roots of her family in California to her fore-bearers from the East in the mid-19th century.

The “was” in the title is very telling. Didion portrays even the most rooted Californian as tempted by the next place, she notes her mother saying: “California, she said, was now too regulated, too taxed, too expensive. She spoke enthusiastically, on the other hand, about moving to the Australian outback.”

A telling portion of the book is Didion’s printing of a school essay (1948) she wrote on the people of her native land: 

They didn’t come west for homes and security, but for adventure and money. They pushed in over the mountains and founded the biggest cities in the west. Up in the Mother Lode they mined gold by day and danced by night. San Francisco’s population multiplied almost twenty times, until 1906, when it burned to the ground, and was built up again nearly as quickly as it had burned. We had an irrigation problem, so we built the greatest dams the world has known. Now both desert and valley are producing food in enormous quantities. California has accomplished much in the past years. It would be easy for us to sit back and enjoy the results of the past. -- "School Essay" (1948) in Where I Was From by Joan Didion (2003)

But perhaps the most important insight into the nature of the Californian (or perhaps any person) is that to understand where you are from, you need to leave. This struck me when I was 30 years removed from California and visiting Riverside in the Imperial Valley, I mentioned I was living in Washington, and it was commented, “I have a cousin in Seattle.” But even time and distance too often fail to lift the veil of the “was from”: 

Yet California has remained in some way impenetrable to me, a wearying enigma, as it has to many of us who are from there. We worry it, correct and revise it, try and fail to define our relationship to it and its relationship to the rest of the country.

But part of this enigma is the nature of time and place. The “was from” is not just a factor of place or distance, but of time and the inexorable changes that occur when you briefly close your eyes or turn to look at the inescapable present. Didion recounts driving with her mother: 

I had repeatedly assured her that we were, at last pointing out an overhead sign: 101 North. “Then where did it all go,” she had asked. She meant where did Gilroy go, where was the Milias Hotel, where could my father eat short ribs now. She meant where did San Juan Bautista go, why was it no longer so sweetly remote as it had been on the day of my wedding there in 1964. She meant where had San Benito and Santa Clara Counties gone as she remembered them, the coastal hills north of Salinas, the cattle grazing, the familiar open vista that had been relentlessly replaced (during the year, two years, three, the blink of the eye during which she had been caring for my father) by mile after mile of pastel subdivisions and labyrinthine exits and entrances to freeways that had not previously existed. For some miles she was silent. California had become, she said then, “all San Jose.”

The tragic story of the Donner-Reed Party (1846-47) resonates with Californians, especially those of us from the North and brought up in the shadows of the Sierras. For Californians, the Donner-Reed story is ultimately heroic and not tragic, perhaps, this is because, as Didion notes: 

One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.

But to get to “am from” from “was from” is a journey that can only be made over the course of a lifetime. Didion quotes from a letter from Virgina Reed, one of the surviving children of the Donner-Reed Party: 

“I have not wrote you half of the trouble we’ve had, but I have wrote you enough to let you know what trouble is … We have left everything, but I don’t care for that. We have got through with our lives. Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody. Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.”

The past admits no shortcuts to the future: “Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can”, this Didion tells us, and I believe, is the only path from “was from” to “am from.” 

• After Henry: Read: January 17, 2020 | Buy on Kindle

• Where I Was From: Read: January 12, 2020 | Buy on Kindle

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

Open Content Activities in Libraries: Same Direction, Different Trajectories (2020) by Titia van der Werf. @OCLC. COVID-19 Professional Reading

Open Content Activities in Libraries: Same Direction, Different Trajectories -- Findings from the 2018 OCLC Global Council Survey (2020) by Titia van der Werf. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research. https://doi.org/10.25333/vgmw-ba86. July 2020. 38 pages. COVID-19 Professional Reading

Open is in many ways the loadstone that the broadly defined world of the scholarly endeavor is driving towards. Whether it is in the form of repatriating to the scholarly community the thrice paid for (by academe’s unpaid authors, editors/reviewers [mostly], and libraries) research outcomes or the increasing release (with appropriate restrictions for privacy, cultural sensitivity, or locations of protected species or artifacts) by the world’s cultural and scientific institutions of collections in the public domain. Many barriers remain to removing the enclosures on the public domain or already financed research, the arc is clearly trending towards open. 

The report of a survey done in late 2018 is clear documentation from a broad spectrum of research and university libraries that open is the clear trend. With a total of 705 respondents from 82 different countries completed, or partially completed, the survey asked the meta-question of “What is the status of open access and open content in libraries across the globe?” (Forward).

As open content is important to users of all types of libraries, however, the survey included libraries of all types: national, public, special, and academic (p. 10). The report also clarifies that: 

For the purposes of the survey, open content was broadly defined as “the full range of freely available, unrestricted, online content of any kind,” acknowledging that “open” is a continuous construct (p. 10).

Focusing on the production of open content in research and university libraries, three areas stand out: 1) managing the institutional repository with open access content, 2) digitizing and making their analogue collections open (available online, in the public domain), and 3) managing their digital library with open collections (p. 8). 

Each of these areas is carefully defined and it’s best to let the report speak to the categories directly:

Producing open content

1. Advocacy and policies enabling access to open content (includes data standardization

efforts and staff training)

2. Publishing open content (i.e., the library as publisher)

3. Digitizing collections (includes efforts to clear rights and make the collections available in the public domain)

4. Data services (i.e., research data management activities)

5. Supporting authors/researchers/teachers in creating open content

6. Bibliometrics (includes measurement of research impact for the campus)

Making open content discoverable and usable

7. Supporting users/instructing/digital literacy programs

8. Selecting open content not managed by the library (includes a broad array of back-office

efforts to make externally produced open content available locally, such as linking to open content in catalogs or LibGuides and e-resource management licensing)

9. Promoting the discovery of open content (includes efforts to make open content easier to find and use, such as OA buttons)

10. Deep interactions with open content (includes the provision of services and platforms to help users interact with open content, such as APIs for text mining or data visualization tools)

11. Assessment (i.e., evaluation of the library open content activities)

Collecting and managing open content

12. Institutional repository

13. Digital collections library

14. Born-digital (legal) deposit / Web archive (p. 10-11)

Institutions surveyed were no newcomers to the various areas highlighted as important. More than three years of experience in the following areas were indicated by over 70% of respondents: 

• Institutional repositories (75%)

• Digital collections library (74%)

• Digitizing collections (72%)

• Supporting authors (71%) (p.19)

Respondents also indicated that the most mature of these technologies/programs were funded by a direct budget line item (Institutional repository  at 54% and Digital collections library at 74%, p. 21). 

The increasing focus on research data and data services is indicated in the survey. “Data services stands out as the open content activity for which the highest number of respondents (50%) report having an FTE allocation” (p. 21) and “Data services, for which 77% of respondents want to accelerate the impact” (p. 25). It should also be noted that the second highest category with an FTE allocation is bibliometrics (p. 21). This seems to indicate that the amount of data surrounding scholarly communications and related areas is a prime area for deeper analysis and creating clear metrics.

Interestingly, the flip side of data services is the response to “selecting open content not managed by the library, which only 39% want to accelerate” (p. 25). This response bears some digging into. Is the reason that the sheer amount of open content is expanding rapidly so that the manual selection process is no longer feasible or perhaps the discoverability of the open content for end-users has been so improved that, again, curating the content is neither necessary or practical.

As the report comments: 

This corresponds to the observation made above that Data services rank comparatively low among current open content activities, but highest among planned activities, while Selecting open content not managed by the library ranks much lower among planned activities. Given that both activities are rated comparatively low on successfulness, we are seeing a strong prioritization on Data services and expected growth in the future (p. 25).

An interpretation of this data is that we should expect to see more staff involved in data services and less in the more traditional area of curated lists of resources. 

The survey also digs into the relative importance of open content beyond the confines of the institutional campus. Respondents were asked to assess impact for open content in three areas: global, national/regional, and consortial. 

The top activities are somewhat self-evident: 

• Digital collections library: global (17%), national/regional (16%), consortial (16%)

• Data services: national/regional (18%), global (17%), consortial (10%)

• Publishing: global (17%), consortial (16%), national/regional (11%)

• Deep interactions with open content: global (17%), consortial (14%), national/regional (12%) (p. 27)

The clear takeaway, however, is that the impact of open collections is not limited to consortial partners or even national/regional areas. Open content is intrinsically tied to global impact.

In looking at their own open content, research and university libraries consistently rate “Discoverability of open content and Standardization of metadata are the top two research areas most relevant to their open content efforts” (p. 29). 

In summary, open content is here to stay and will continue to trend upwards:

The survey revealed widespread and growing library engagement across the full range of open content activities … They consider their open content activities as successful, and the overwhelming majority are stepping up their current activities and planning new ones. (p. 31).

COVID-19 Caveat

As with nearly all research done in the months preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, there is likelihood that the trends or outcomes originally predicted will be impacted by the still unknown long-term impacts of the pandemic. To that end the report notes: 

The survey data was collected at the end of 2018 through the beginning of 2019 and reflects a snapshot in time of a pre-COVID-19 landscape. We are seeing unprecedented initiatives to make scientific literature, findings, and datasets relating to COVID-19 available as open access to accelerate research and the development of effective medical practices and treatment. This is a huge boost for the recent trend to open research data and scientific information at scale. The importance of online access to collections has never been demonstrated so compellingly as during the pandemic. It will be interesting to see the lasting impacts of these developments on libraries’ support of open content (p. 31).

• July 29, 2020 | Find Online

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

What Happens to the Continuity and Future of the Research Enterprise?: Report of a @cni_org Executive Roundtable Series Held April 2020. COVID-19 Professional Reading

What Happens to the Continuity and Future of the Research Enterprise?:  Report of a CNI Executive Roundtable Series Held April 2020. COVID-19 Professional Reading

The annual CNI Spring 2020 membership meeting cancelled, originally scheduled for San Diego, was cancelled due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. In its place, CNI convened four sessions in April 2020 to bring together CNI participants to discuss the topic “What Happens to the Continuity and Future of the Research Enterprise?”

Much of the discussion of the impact of COVID-19 on libraries and universities has, rightfully, focused on how it affects pedagogy and students. These discussions brought together key campus players from Offices of Research, Libraries, and IT/Research Computing to focus on how the global pandemic will transform the research enterprise of higher education. 

In the sciences, much of the impact, from the start, was on lack of access to laboratories and research equipment, however, as was noted by participants, 

It is important to understand, and we will have more to say about this later in the report, that libraries (along with museums and archives) can reasonably be considered to be the laboratories of many humanists and a substantial number of social scientists (p.3).

In the first weeks after the start of the COVID-19 crisis, institutions reacted in a variety of ways. In those first weeks of confusion, different parts of the same institution often had varying responses and it was noted that:

The extent of library autonomy with regard to broader institutional policies or regulations from various governmental jurisdictions has been an important factor in determining the extent to which a facility may be open and/or able to provide services or access to resources (p. 4). 

With the closure of most libraries as the crisis deepened, a variety of responses evolved to provide researchers with access to the information now locked in hundreds of millions of volumes in quarentied library stacks. These responses ranged from more liberal access from publishers to certain content to the controversial National Emergency Digital Library from the Internet Archive. For those at top tier institutions, 

Many participants discussed the importance of the HathiTrust Digital Library Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) for access to at least a portion of their collections that otherwise would have only been available in print form (for more information on this program see here). Some of the collection's limitations were also noted: the relative lack of newer material, the availability of only a portion of an institution's physical collections (most commonly estimated as less that 50%, though we really need better data on this), and the concern about discontinuing access once normal operations resume (and questions surrounding the definition of “normal operations”) (p. 4). 

In the same vein, there seemed to be an openness around a dramatic rethinking of many assumptions about library collections: “There is certainly some recalibration about copyright, fair use, and new ideas like controlled digital lending that are taking place in light of the current emergency and public priorities” (p. 12). 

With most library staff moved to a telework environment, many institutions attempted to pivot staff unable to perform regular, place-based tasks to work that would facilitate improvements and access to existing digital collections: 

At least a few campuses are seriously recalibrating the extent of investment in digitizing special collections; additionally, some campuses with library staff working from home but unable to do their usual jobs are re-assigning them to enhance access to digitized special collections through transcription work, for example (p. 6)

Importantly, participants noted that there would unlikely be a return to the “old normal” any time soon, if ever. In the research environment, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate changes that have been underway in the research environment for the past three decades and see these changes more evenly distributed across disciplines outside of the sciences. The role of research support enterprises (libraries, IT/Computing, and offices of research) will be key to these changes and these areas need to actively engage with these changes: 

We need to collectively envision what a maximally resilient, highly distributed, low-density, and network-based research enterprise might look like. Until we develop that vision we cannot exploit it as a way to enhance resilience in our current enterprise, and we cannot begin to explore questions about what parts of this vision are desirable, and which are problematic and counterproductive (p. 14)

• June 14, 2020 | Find Online

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1666) by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne

The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1666) by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. COVID-19 Recreational Reading.

An early entry in the genre that would be, much later, called science fiction. Cavendish was not the first to explore this territory of the utopia. See for instance, the earlier The City of the Sun (Italian: La città del Sole; Latin: Civitas Solis) (1602) by Tommaso Campanella. Cavendish, however, with her engaging the topic with issues of gender, power, and especially a curious and unique take on natural history set her work apart. 

"The Empress confessed that she observed Nature was infinitely various in her works, and that though the species of Creatures did continue, yet their particulars were subject to infinite changes."

Particularly notable is the use of a female lead in the work. 

“The Spirits answered, That the lives of Fame were like other lives; for some lasted long, and some died soon. 'Tis true, said the Duchess; but yet the shortest-liv'd Fame lasts longer then the longest life of Man.”

• Read: June 10, 2020

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.