Historical Dinner Party Guests, Post #9

[usedtobeljs]

Short version of me: exhausted, down, pollen-ridden. Let's move on.

So today in The Guardian, in advance of the National Theatre's revival of Caryl Churchill's feminist play Top Girls, there was an article in which famous contemporary women were asked which famous women from history they would invite to a dinner party. (The Churchill play famously begins with a historical dinner party, with women from Patient Griselda to explorer Isabella Bird to concubine and nun Lady Nijo.)


The list offered by the article is cool -- I am especially taken by Noma Dumezweni naming Nina Simone as someone she'd invite. If I were playing....

*Jane Austen
*Dorothy Sayers
*Lucy Madox Brown (a Pre-Raphaelite painter)
*Aphra Behn (17th-century female playwright)
*Myrna Loy

Who would you invite? :)

Comments

[anne_d]

Hmm. Keeping to five, and assuming some kind of universal translating device:

Jane Austen
Beatrix Potter*
Ada Lovelace
Maria Sybilla Merian
Mary Shelley

Five more:

Frida Kahlo
Georgia O'Keefe
Dorothy Sayers
Amelia B. Edwards
Emily Dickinson**

*I just brought home a book of her art including scientific drawings. Amazing.

**Although I suspect the two of us would go hide in separate corners and watch and listen.

[usedtobeljs]

What a cool list! I laughed at your idea of you and Emily hiding in corners; when I was making my list, I was thinking about how everyone would get along. ;)

[hugs]

[desdemonaspace]

I could not better that list. Myrna Loy! Dorothy Sayers!!

[usedtobeljs]

I'm not sure they'd get along, but it'd be awesome to try. :)

[alhbooks]

That sounds like a delightful dinner party...I would so love to chat with Myrna Loy...

[usedtobeljs]

After I made the list I almost bought Loy's autobiography off Amazon. I don't know why I hadn't gotten it before.... Anyway, I'll save it for summer. ;)

Hugs hugs!