Word: elisabet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jean Burton, who has made eccentrics her specialty (Elisabet Ney, TIME, April 5, 1943; Sir Richard Burton's Wife, TIME, June 23, 1941), has written a lucid, witty biography of the most successful, most enigmatic of these 19th-Century mediums. Daniel Dunglass Home was born in a small Highland village. His father was the illegitimate son of the tenth Earl of Home. His mother specialized in prognosticating the deaths of her best friends. In 1840 the Home family emigrated to the U.S., leaving Daniel in the care of his aunt, Mary Cook. When he was nine, Daniel...
...best living purveyors of eccentrics is Jean Burton of Berkeley, Calif. She proved it in her biography of her bristling collateral ancestor Richard and his devoted wife (Sir Richard Burton's Wife-TIME, June 23, 1941), proves it again (with Texan Jan Fortune) in a study of Elisabet...
...Elisabet was a grandniece of that intrepid Marshal of Napoleon who led a premature charge at Waterloo and who was known as the Bravest of the Brave. Elisabet herself never did anything but charge, always prematurely. If she was not brave it is because that virtue cannot be ascribed to anyone who has never suspected the existence of fear. She was tall, milk-fleshed, redhaired, chokingly beautiful. She was-she thought-an intense idealist...
...Elisabet was sustained by an appealing cast of minor eccentrics. She would never admit that she had married Edmund Montgomery, bastard of a Scottish baron, lifelong searcher for the mainspring of life in the pullulations of protoplasm. All his life he called her "Miss Ney." In his silence, his patience, his courage, his poetic nobility, he emerges as almost a saint. Crescentia ("Cencie") Simath, the maidservant, was apparently paralyzed with love for Edmund and endured, if possible, even more than he did. Lorne, the son, was a tragic, horrifying product of idealism crossed with rampant mother love...
...Elisabet used her beauty to shoehorn her way into art classes (strictly stag, up to then) and to blast men's balance. Perhaps her greatest conquest was Germany's ace misogynist, atrabilious old Arthur Schopenhauer. By the time she had worked on him a week he was babbling utter fatuities. "By God," he gloated, "I almost feel like a married man!" When Elisabet reminded him that, once his polysyllabic frock coat was stripped off, his animadversions against women were those of any Junker or farm hand, all he could manage was to blame it on his mother...