Testing, testing...
Hello again, everyone! Hopefully you saw my prior email about having to migrate off TinyLetter. If not, and this is how you're finding out, I promise it's still me - I just had to pick a new newsletter provider because Mailchimp decided to jettison TinyLetter. Also, deepest apologies - I fully thought I scheduled this to send about three weeks ago, but I just checked again and it was sitting in my drafts. Whoops.
Overall, I still kind of have no idea how Buttondown works, so these first few missives might be a little rough or look a little plain. Apparently there's a lot of cool formatting stuff you can do with Buttondown (you can make your own CSS stylesheet for your emails???), and I'd love to muck around with that if/when I have time. We'll see what works out.
At any rate: this will be another short dispatch, but I did want to share an absolute gem I found recently, courtesy of the Philadelphia-based magazine Godey's Lady's Book. Godey's, like most (if not all) other women's magazines of this era, had vivid fashion plates that you may have seen floating around on Pinterest and the like. It also featured scads of practical things like sewing and needlework patterns, craft ideas, homemaking advice, and hairstyles in its pages.
I haven't nailed down the exact touring schedule yet, but as of mid-1867, Euphrosyne Parepa must have been in the middle of her American tour as part of the "Bateman Concerts." Phyllis Smith, and I believe a couple other people, have credited Parepa for introducing Claribel's songs to American audiences on this tour, and thereby making her a household name. The story is a bit more complicated than that, of course -- and hopefully I'll be able to present on precisely that at the American Musicological Society conference in November! -- but it's also undeniable that in this time period, 1866-1868-ish, Claribel's name was very much linked with Euphrosyne Parepa's in America. And there's no better example of that, I think, than this excerpt from the June 1867 Godey's Lady's Book:
(Digitized volume on HathiTrust, if you want to look for yourself.)
For real:
she had
a HAIRSTYLE
named after her!!
iconic, actually!!!
Ahem. Anyway, I found that in the full-text search results for this volume, silently screeched, and immediately went to find the corresponding engraving. Here ya go:
I can't help but wonder if Claribel herself knew about this hairstyle. I do know that on at least one occasion, Parepa mailed her an American newspaper clipping with an absolutely glowing review of her song, so it doesn't seem impossible that she could have sent this along too. Regardless, I'm absolutely delighted by it. I'd love to see if I can recreate this style -- not on myself, obviously, you've all seen how short my hair is, but thankfully a dear friend has already volunteered to be my hair model for this purpose. So if at some point I do manage to successfully deploy the hairstyling skills I accumulated via a childhood chock-full of ballet classes and American Girl doll obsessions... y'all will absolutely be seeing the results.
I'll close for now, but I promise I'll be back with another dispatch much sooner this time. Ta!
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