Aspiration

I don't have a woman to hand to pose for a portrait, and I can't think of any sculptures, paintings or other representations of women in my immediate vicinity to photograph for the Mono Monday theme of "a woman". I thought about my grandmother Ada and wondered if I could devise a flat lay or still life with a photo or two and the few things I have from her; it's a project I'd like to try, but it needs more time. Today I could not even have gone through the box of photos; so it had to be a book.

My dad liked browsing in junk shops, hunting out old tools or curiosities, and one day when I was in my teens he came home with a large bound volume of the 1899 editions of The Girl's Own Paper. He thought it would amuse me, and it did: I pored over the articles and illustrations, fashion plates and answers to readers' problems (though sadly, they did not publish the readers' letters alongside the responses). I enjoyed the adventures of "Three girl chums and their life in London rooms", which must have seemed astonishingly modern in the last years of Queen Victoria's reign and revealed a very different world from the society portrayed in the stories, and as I browsed I learned something of the life to which the young women readers were expected to aspire.

This illustration, entitled "aspiration" accompanied the first of a series of lengthy articles on "Self culture for girls". The somewhat sentimental and idealised style is typical of much of the publication. The extras show an illustration from a more practical article, advising on the cultivation of different types of lily, and one of the many fashion recommendations, with the pressure to be slim and shapely clearly well-established; the readers must have been relatively affluent.  I also love the pre-Raphaelite style of the title banner. The volume gives fascinating insights into what was expected of my great-grandparents' generation, of whose lives I know almost nothing.