classic love :: (original) (raw)
So, I am a huge fan of privileged, English, pre-1940 boys having scandalous homosexual affairs. This all started with my passionate adoration for Oscar Wilde and the lots of gay that occurred in the 1880s and 1890s, and that somehow lead to my discovery of the fabulous Brideshead Revisited and Maurice. The books are somewhat similar, but the main differences are that a.) Maurice takes place in the 1900s/1910s or so, while Brideshead is set in the 1930s/1940s (I think), and b.) Maurice is intentionally and obviously about homosexual characters, and the nature of the relationship of the two main characters in Brideshead is somewhat controversial. I interpreted them as being pretty much all about the gay lovin', but others may disagree. In any case, the former is straight up about the gay and the latter is mainly concerned with other, more boring themes, like religion and the decline of the British aristocracy. (YAWN! Like, for realsies!) It's been kind of a while since I've read either of these books or seen their movie/television adaptations, but this community simply calls for an obnoxious picspam of both, I think. That said, hurrah for lj cuts.
While I'm doing a picspam, I want to mention Dolly Wilde. I read a biography of her a year or two ago and she's just a really fascinating person, to whom I relate really well (in both bad and good ways). Her life was quite tragic; she was Oscar Wilde's niece, and like him, she was extremely witty and a talented writer who was very, very popular around Paris social circles in the 1930s. Unfortunately, she had a lot of problems, all of which were somewhat interconnected: she was in love with Natalie Barney (an interesting person in her own right, but someone I'm not too big a fan of owing to my bias toward Dolly), who never really treated her as she should have; she took heroin and was very much an alcoholic; she never took full advantage of her writing abilities (which were evident in diaries and letters to friends). Anyway, she's really one of my favorite figures in history, and she's virtually unknown to anyone, which is sad. But to get to the really important part, she was pretty hot, in her day, so here are a couple of pictures of her.
