With the exception of the lecture we heard, these films and books all focus on women—young women, angry women, and one, a queen.
BINGEING ON MOVIES AT HOME
The Chief Penguin and I are trying to catch up on some of this past year’s best films, or at least ones that got a lot of press. 
I, Tonya. I knew the story behind Tonya Harding’s career, the C.P. did not. Mostly, I wanted to see this film for Alison Janney’s performance. She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and, oh, my, did she ever deserve it for her portrayal of Tonya’s toxic mother! None of the people in this film is particularly likable—not Tonya’s husband, not her clueless bodyguard, and even Tonya herself is hard to take. But, at least, you understand from her deprived upbringing what she had to contend with and why she is driven to compete. Intense and full of vulgar language, it’s almost painful to watch.
Victoria & Abdul. I would see almost any film starring Judi Dench, and here she is the aging queen—fat, unattractive, querulous—nothing like Jenna Coleman of the current Victoria series. Long years after Albert has died and after John Brown is gone, Queen Victoria takes a shine to a young Indian servant who has been sent to England to present her with a special coin. Abdul charms her with his knowledge of poetry, leads her to believe he is a writer, and at her insistence becomes her teacher or munshi. His continued presence at court and his increasing status horrify the government and the royal household while simultaneously providing joy to the monarch. Loosely based on real events (Abdul Karim spent 15 years in the U.K. with occasional trips back home), the film is somewhat light fare, but enjoyable and a definite change of pace from I, Tonya.
HUNDRED YEAR OLD NOVEL 
Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells. This is a curious novel. Published in 1909, it’s about a modern young woman in London. Chafing under her father’s strict control over her behavior, twenty-one year old Ann Veronica Stanley very much wants to go to a ball that some of her friends are planning to attend. Both her father and her aunt forbid her to go and he goes so far as to lock her in her room. Dismayed, determined, and yet deluded about what it takes to live, she escapes to London intending to find a job and an apartment. Ann Veronica is both innocent and naive about the ways of the world and soon finds herself borrowing money from an older man, living in a spare room, subsisting on not much, but thriving on the intellectual challenges of working in the college biology lab. How she navigates her so-called romance with Mr. Manning, her entanglement with Mr. Ramage, and her attraction to Mr. Capes make up her education in life for the next six months. 
The novel is polemical (a tendency seen in other of Wells’ work) and presents an idealized view of womanhood as all wifedom and motherhood. Floundering in trying to discover who she is or who she wants to be, Ann Veronica also is briefly caught up in the women’s suffrage movement. The early chapters were too full of political exposition for me, and some of the characters mere mouthpieces for their points of view, but I found it got better and more engaging the farther in I got. But, even given that, the ending was questionable. However, Ann Veronica’s enlightened perspective on her father and aunt (they looked smaller and less threatening) was one believable outcome of her growth as a woman.
Ann Veronica was the subject of my local book group’s March meeting and it provoked a lively discussion. A few individuals thought that young women today are still too prone to being objectified by men, while others, like myself, felt that we have made a lot of progress in terms of the opportunities available to women for careers and an independent life. But then, you have the #MeToo movement which has brought to light sexual assault and harassment of women by men in positions of power. The group found AV’s extreme naivete about what Mr. Ramage might expect from her in return for the loan unbelievable and felt the happy ending with marriage to Mr. Capes unconvincing. It was noted that at the time the novel was published, Wells was in the midst of an affair with a young woman, Amber Reeves, who bore him a daughter, and later became a noted feminist. Wells was clearly attracted to intelligent women as he also had an affair and another child with author Rebecca West among others. Here are several of the various covers for this title. Which one do you think best represents the book?
TOWN HALL
The fourth speaker in this series of lectures supporting the Ringling College Library was Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene: An Intimate History. It was a talk about trends in science and medicine that are already impacting human health, especially cancer treatments. He was very engaging and a welcome change from another talk about politics!
Notes: The image of Tonya is from golfdigest.com; the book covers are all from the web and in order of appearance from Abe Books, Barnes & Noble, and the Project Gutenberg Archive. Header photo of Tiffany glass from Morse Museum.
