ManicDDaily

Not Rightly Re(a)d
(Bouncing off of crimson walls painted by John Singer Sargent, 1884)

Her remark was admittedly
oblique, but, she thought, daringly
witty: that her dream was ‘to wake up
each day to something black
and white
and re(a)d all over.’

She had even winked.  (Amazing.)

But a woman’s wish to be
au courant, smudged with the
badge of newsprint, inked (as it
were), was not
considered, and so, and
thus, and accordingly–
her walls
were papered instead
with the soft crimson
of the boudoir, the scarlet
that lined
her laquered jewelbox–an embered
burn that her cheeks
reflected over each morning’s coffee,
while she pondered, silently,
how little re(a)d was
her very own heart.

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Yes, the draft poem above is very anachronistic!  I don’t think that particular riddle was known in the 19th century.  However, I’m still thinking about the past from yesterday’s post about the French Olympics 1900!

This one is posted for The Mag, a writing blog hosted by Tess Kincaid, in which Tess puts up a pictorial prompt each week.  The prompt, a painting by John Singer Sargent, was painted in 1884, two years after England passed the Married Woman’s Act of 1882, giving married women legal rights in their own property and earnings.  (Such property had previously gone to their husbands.)  (The initial married women’s property law in England was passed in 1870, but was a much weaker more limited act.)  In the U.S., these laws were passed on a state by state basis beginning in the mid-19th century.