Caroline: ? Sophie (I'm not making this up, she really said this): Look at it this way: It will improve his English.
HA.
So there was a disruption of this particular relationship from the get go. Also, while paying lip duties to believing in the highest calling for a woman being a wife and mother, she even according to an admiring and sympathetic observer had a perference for "settling points of controversional divinity" (Caroline was very much interested in philosophical and religious debates and later would be involved in a big Leipniz vs Newton and Clarke clash) over child play.
This is where Caroline started getting really interesting for me. Not least because I've had some experience in
a) not bonding with one of my children right after birth, and if I had then been separated from that child for years on end, I... well, I made a lot of fun of Caroline back when you were telling us about Lord Hervey's memoirs, but now I can really viscerally see how that could so easily have happened
b) My church culture does a lot of that "highest calling being a wife and mother" thing (fortunately my actual family never did, they were much more of the "yeah, get educated and get a career" variety) and I do feel that being a mother is important to my identity, and at the same time I am, um, not so into child play. To be fair, I know very few mothers who actually enjoy doing quite as much of it as their kids like to :P -- but anyway, so, yeah, suddenly Dennison (and you) are humanizing her a lot more for me.
(Dennison points this may have been true but was also the only thing she could do in the long term, as G2 would not have forgiven her siding with Dad against him, and he was the one she lived with and who would survive G1.)
Maaaan. Caroline. I am so into (well, reading about) women who do the "right" thing (or at least the dramatic thing!) which also happens to be the coldly practical thing, and Caroline seems like she is the master of it! (But also, ugh!)
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Re: The First Iron Lady: A life of Caroline of Ansbach- II: People Manager
Date: 2021-07-29 05:24 am (UTC)Sophie (I'm not making this up, she really said this): Look at it this way: It will improve his English.
HA.
So there was a disruption of this particular relationship from the get go. Also, while paying lip duties to believing in the highest calling for a woman being a wife and mother, she even according to an admiring and sympathetic observer had a perference for "settling points of controversional divinity" (Caroline was very much interested in philosophical and religious debates and later would be involved in a big Leipniz vs Newton and Clarke clash) over child play.
This is where Caroline started getting really interesting for me. Not least because I've had some experience in
a) not bonding with one of my children right after birth, and if I had then been separated from that child for years on end, I... well, I made a lot of fun of Caroline back when you were telling us about Lord Hervey's memoirs, but now I can really viscerally see how that could so easily have happened
b) My church culture does a lot of that "highest calling being a wife and mother" thing (fortunately my actual family never did, they were much more of the "yeah, get educated and get a career" variety) and I do feel that being a mother is important to my identity, and at the same time I am, um, not so into child play. To be fair, I know very few mothers who actually enjoy doing quite as much of it as their kids like to :P -- but anyway, so, yeah, suddenly Dennison (and you) are humanizing her a lot more for me.
(Dennison points this may have been true but was also the only thing she could do in the long term, as G2 would not have forgiven her siding with Dad against him, and he was the one she lived with and who would survive G1.)
Maaaan. Caroline. I am so into (well, reading about) women who do the "right" thing (or at least the dramatic thing!) which also happens to be the coldly practical thing, and Caroline seems like she is the master of it! (But also, ugh!)