The Day After

It is Sunday, a quiet recovery day for most of Wellington.  The cleaners have been out and the streets are back to normal. New Zealand won the Rugby Sevens finals so national pride is restored. I am finishing my fascinating book on Frank Lloyd Wright and his long time mistress whom he was never able to marry.

Mistress is the wrong word although that's what the sensationalist tabloids  have called them. The puritanism in the US at the turn of the twentieth century was too great to imagine, but probably also existed in Australia. This woman he desperately loved was an early feminist, a suffragette, and a great literary scholar of many languages.

 Mamah Borthwick as she called herself after divorcing her husband whom she hardly loved at all, was certainly a forerunner of a Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer, and more should have been written of her hadn't she been in the shadow of the very egotistical Frank Wright. It is a great read and I am very impressed with the style and research of the author, her first novel, as she called it, not a biography, and I would love to meet her one day. She lives in Puget Sound and I think would be a most interesting person to meet.

Reading from my room

This great book by Nancy Horan