Miss Brown Research Articles

1894 revisited: Cross-education of skilled muscular control in women and the importance of representation.

In 1894 foundational work showed that training one limb for "muscular power" (i.e. strength) or "muscular control" (i.e. skill) improves performance in both limbs. Despite that the original data were exclusively from two female participants ("Miss Smith" and "Miss Brown"), in the decades that followed, such "cross-education" training interventions have focused predominantly on improving strength in men. Here, in a female cohort, we revisit that early research to underscore that training a task that requires precise movements in a timely fashion (i.e. "muscular control") on one side of the body is transferred to the contralateral untrained limb. With unilateral practice, women reduced time to completion and the number of errors committed during the commercially available game of Operation® Iron Man 2 with both limbs. Modest reductions in bilateral Hoffmann (H-) reflex excitability evoked in the wrist flexors suggest that alterations in the spinal cord circuitry may be related to improvements in performance of a fine motor task. These findings provide a long overdue follow-up to the efforts of Miss Theodate L. Smith from more than 125 years ago, highlight the need to focus on female participants, and advocate more study of cross-education of skilled tasks.

Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction

Irena Yamboliev, “Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction” (pp. 346–371) This essay proposes that we understand Vernon Lee’s debut novel, Miss Brown (1884), as enacting a theory of literary language’s constructive potency that Lee develops in her critical essays. Those critical essays offer a vibrant nineteenth-century formalism, suggesting how fiction constructs and formalizes our realities, shaping readers’ mental and emotional circuits as it arranges phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In Miss Brown, Lee crafts a prose style that meticulously tracks the protagonist’s formation—the “little dramas of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment,…of tensions and relaxations”—rendering that formation as a drama of sentence-level structuration. The resulting “representation” of Anne Brown is interrupted with adjective-rich stretches conspicuously geared toward defining, formulating, and theorizing what is being represented, essay-like. By treating the protagonist as an occasion to foreground syntax’s active building and abstracting, Miss Brown’s prose partakes in the kind of literary practice that has recently been described as nonmimetic realism—realism that does more than denote and refer and reflect what is, and instead performs, meditating on form’s process, to project and inform new potentialities.

Vernon Lee’s Hideous Roman à Clef

Following Henry James, literary-critical practices presume the autonomy and integrity of the literary text. The roman à clef meanwhile troubles this autonomy by presuming a transparent and concrete relation between text and world. By turning to the late nineteenth-century writer Vernon Lee, who elevates reference as a vital principle of all literary representation, this essay argues that the roman à clef challenges our assumptions about the value of reference. Lee’s novel Miss Brown (1884), a roman à clef about British aestheticism, is treated as a privileged case study for reading this alternative history of the novel. By focusing on the provisionality of literature, which Lee calls a “half-art,” this essay argues that literature’s reference to an external context provides a point of departure for thinking about women’s disempowerment and vulnerability in late nineteenth-century British culture. At the same time, it argues that provisionality offers a model for considering the broader consequences of limitation and determination in the history of the novel.

Prohibitive Cost of HIV/AIDS Therapy in the United States

Case Miss Brown had recently been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and was a new patient in Dr. Chen’s infectious diseases clinic. When going over her chart, he noted that her CD4 count was below 350, the threshold for beginning antiretroviral treatment, according to U.S. care standards. Dr. Chen counseled Miss Brown to begin treatment as soon as possible, and she subsequently met with a medication counselor to discuss starting the highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART).

Être et paraître dans Miss Brown De Vernon Lee

In her first novel Miss Brown (1884), Vernon Lee painted a critical picture of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement and the Aesthetic circle. She critiqued the ideological underpinnings of the Aesthetic movement, analyzing in particular how the supposedly disinterested artistic creed of art for art’s sake often consisted in intellectualizing and repressing reality by objectifying the body in all its forms. Through the description of the career of Anne Brown, this anti-Bildungsroman particularly exposed the social, political, intellectual and sexual exploitation of female models and muses.

Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, edited by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham

Reviewed by: Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics Kristin Mahoney (bio) Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, edited by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham; pp. x + 189. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, £45.00, $69.95. While a number of Victorian authors felt comfortable wearing several generic and disciplinary hats, Vernon Lee's interests and positions were particularly multiple. Consequently, a recurring concern voiced in Vernon Lee studies is that if we pay too much attention to one Lee, we may lose sight of another. If, for example, we focus our attention on the Lee of Miss Brown (1884), whom Dennis Denisoff refers to as the "dandy-aesthete-basher Lee," we might become blind to the Lee who was willing to think through rather than against decadence (75). Or, according to Jo Briggs, if we focus too much on the Lee who forged intense bonds with other women, we stand to lose sight of the intellectual Lee who played an integral role in the dissemination of German psychological aesthetics in England. The greatest strength of Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics is that it aggravates rather than allays potential anxieties about Lee's multiplicity, attending not only to the Lee who offended an entire circle of aestheticist intellectuals but also the Lee who sympathized with the imprisoned Oscar Wilde, to the pacifist Lee and the socialist Lee, to the prominent 1880s intellectual and the Lee whom Richard Dellamora has called a "Victorian modern." The essays in this collection also grapple with the sometimes baffling heterogeneity of individual texts by Lee. It is not simply that Lee's thought developed and changed so much during her career; as Catherine Wiley notes, even the sentences within a single passage of Lee's writing often complicate and contradict one another. Wiley's attention to Lee's conversational yet discomforting style is particularly welcome, as not enough has been said about the "excesses in Lee's prose," her "unbridled writing" (67). Patricia Pulham teases out the covert expressions of homoerotic desire in the representation of heterosexual relationships in Louis Norbert (1914), arguing that the [End Page 108] doublings of past and present loves in Lee's mystery novel "deface, or perhaps efface, Lee's homosexual desires even as they express them" (134). Grace Brockington, in her discussion of Maxwell Armfield's aestheticist illustrations for Lee's aggressively political Ballet of the Nations (1915), highlights the fact that Lee's willingness to collaborate allowed divergent political positions to coexist within individual works. The contradictions and purposeful incoherence of her oeuvre point toward an openness to difference and inconsistency, a neglect of the fixed in favor of the shifting and multiple. In their discussions of Lee's empathy, duality, and "outsiderism," the contributors to this collection enlarge our sense of Lee as an incredibly—almost exasperatingly—prolific, capricious, well-read, and wide-ranging intellectual. As Catherine Maxwell and Pulham note in their introduction, Lee has lately become an "increasingly conspicuous" figure, as evidenced by a new edition of Hauntings (1890), a new biography by Vineta Colby, a monograph by Christa Zorn, and the 2003 "Vernon Lee: Literary Revenant" conference from which these essays are drawn (xi). The Oscholars website also recently introduced an online journal, The Sibyl, devoted entirely to Lee. Maxwell and Pulham rightly argue that this new interest in Lee has "reshape[d] our understanding of the literary and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (xi). Denisoff's essay, for example, shifts our attention away from Lee's anti-aestheticist tirades and examines the critique of aggressive, productivist, masculine decadence that is accompanied by a celebration of a more empathetic, historically minded feminine decadence in the short story "Oke of Okehurst" (1890). Reading this story in relationship to Lee's extensive work on economics, Denisoff shows that Lee was drawn to certain modes of decadence as an alternative to the logic of capitalism; he thus sharpens our understanding of Lee's relationship to aestheticism while also demonstrating that politicized critiques of modern commerce emerged from the supposedly apolitical aesthetic movement. Reading Lee not only alters our understanding of the aesthetic movement, but also illuminates the fluidity of the boundaries between "late...

Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle, and: Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle, and: Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics Martha Vicinus (bio) Kirsten MacLeod , Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), ix +222 pages, hardback, £45 (ISBN 0 333 97700 9). Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), xii + 210 pages, hardback, £45 (ISBN 0 333 97700 9). These books are representative of the current critical reappraisal of the fin-de-siècle, usually defined as the years 1880-1913. Until recently, its literature and authors were condemned to the status of irretrievably minor, haunted by scandal (the trial of Oscar Wilde), suicide (Ernest Dowson and John Davidson), and alcohol (Lionel Johnson died after falling off a bar stool). But then feminist critics discovered the 'New Woman' novels of the period, and Sarah Grand, 'George Egerton', 'Lucas Malet' and others enjoyed a second life. Influential studies by Regenia Gagnier and Jonathan Freedman placed Aestheticism in the context of the market place, demonstrating the power of modern capitalism to turn art and literature into commodities. James A. Nelson and Margaret Stetz unravelled the economics of fine-art publishing, concluding that avant-garde publishers always hoped to turn a profit. Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow, among many others, did much to recuperate forgotten poets, many of whom lived long and vigorous lives. Critics have emphasized the variety of work published during these decades, its marked refusal of Victorian literary norms, and its formal experimentation. Aestheticism was the single most powerful literary movement ofthe late nineteenth century. The groundwork for privileging art over materialism had been laid by that great Victorian moralist, John Ruskin, but a younger generation insisted upon creating art without a moral lesson. Writers such as Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds and Bernard Berenson assumed that their work would appeal only to the enlightened intelligentsia. They laid the ground for professionals – the art connoisseur, interior decorator and high-brow literary critic, who could advise the reader on the best works to admire and purchase. [End Page 158] Karin MacLeod points out in her useful survey, the aesthetic goals of the 1870s and 1880s led naturally to the Decadent movement of the 1890s. Unlike Aesthetes, the Decadents flaunted their dilettantism and desire to shock the bourgeoisie. Following Baudelaire, the Decadents boldly insisted on the beauty of ugliness. The music hall was discovered, and its ribald jokes and saucy lyrics praised as the quintessence of urban life. Writers flaunted their adherence to an aristocratic dilettantism and a working-class sensuality; their notoriety made good copy, even if it did not sell books, as MacLeod astutely notes. MacLeod considers the interpenetration of aesthetic, high art and popular fiction. She shrewdly notes that popular writers such as Marie Corelli exploited the fascination with the lives of the Decadents by proclaiming her superior morality and creating attractively decadent villains. Other women writers found it more difficult to capitalize on the hunger for titillating characters. Such New Women writers as Sarah Grand attacked the trivialization of art by 'clever young men', and argued the importance of literature with a purpose. Nevertheless, her negative portrait of Decadence in The Beth Book (1897) was condemned by some as too preachy and by others as lewd and suggestive. Vernon Lee had attempted to create a satiric portrait of a misogynistic aesthete in her novel Miss Brown (1884). She too had met with a chilly critical reception, even though she was an admired member of London's top literary circles. MacLeod effectively traces the continuing power of male critical authority throughout the period, and the difficulty women faced if they wished to gain both critical respect and a male readership. MacLeod's most original contribution to fin-de-siècle studies is her chapters on two neglected writers, Arthur Machen and M.P. Shiel. Both men began as Decadents, publishing their best known works in John Lane's Keynote series. Machen's The Great God Pan (1894) and Shiel's Prince Zaleski (1895) are what she calls 'a collaboration of high and low' literary elements (128). Machen specialized in combining...

Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (review)

Reviewed by: Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography Janice Schroeder (bio) Vineta Colby , Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 432, b&w illustrations, $39.50 cloth. In an 1899 letter to Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck (later the literary hostess Lady Morrell), Vernon Lee wrote, "I have often had a little passing dream of trying to give you the benefit ... of my additional twenty years of reading, thinking, and in practical life. ... I can teach you infinitely less than any person at Oxford, but I think we might think things out together, which is sometimes quite as fruitful." Cavendish-Bentinck declined the offer. Several of the main themes of Vineta Colby's impressive study are expressed in this invitation: Lee's outsider status as a woman intellectual; her confidence in her intellectual prowess; and her lifelong search for female love and companionship through the life of the mind. Before she was twenty Violet Paget adopted the pen name "Vernon Lee" for a series of articles on English novelists for the Italian journal La rivista europea. She did so because she was convinced "no one reads a woman's writing on art, history or aesthetics with anything but unmitigated contempt." Born in France in 1856, Lee was an English national who chose to live in Italy most of her life, feeling it to be her true spiritual and intellectual home. Although she is now known chiefly for her writing on art and aesthetics and for a series of ghost stories published during the1890s, she wrote in nearly every genre but poetry. Taking her cue from Lee's own description of the human psyche as protean, Colby renders Lee a complex, often lonely figure, born "too late to be a Victorian, too early to be a Modernist." Fluent in several languages, Lee wrote mainly for English audiences. Her first article for the English press, "Tuscan Peasant Plays," appeared in Fraser's Magazine in February 1877. According to Colby's calculation, nearly every year from then until 1933 (she died in 1935) saw Lee's work in English, American, or European periodicals. Lee's journalism was stronger than her book publications and her conversation; readers and listeners alike were often alienated by her idiosyncratic prose and pedantic, unceasing talk. She was no stranger to negative, sometimes hostile [End Page 434] reviews, partly owing to her abrasive personality and insensitivity to others' feelings, even those of her friends. In one fascinating chapter Colby describes how Lee incensed much of the literary and artistic establishment with her 1884 novel Miss Brown, dedicated to Henry James (to his chagrin). The novel attacked the aesthetic movement for its moral hedonism, and featured thinly veiled, unflattering characterizations of her peers. Lee's friendship with James ended permanently over her 1892 short story "Lady Tal," in which she crudely caricatured him as the "dainty but frugal bachelor" Jervase Marion. In contrast with her fiction, Colby notes that Lee's journalism was more "lucid and informative." She published on art, literature, history, aesthetics, travel, music, economics, politics, and social issues in such venues as the Fortnightly Review, Contemporary Review, Quarterly Review, North American Review, and New Statesman. Here too she invited controversy. Her pacifist stance during World War I led to a fierce debate with H. G. Wells in 1914 in the Labour Leader and the Nation, spelling the end of their friendship. Although she published broadly, Lee never enjoyed a wide audience. She was esoteric, uncompromising, often quick to conclude, a resolute generalist in a time of increasing specialization. From London in 1893 she wrote to her brother, "At thirty-seven I have no public." This was something of an overstatement on Lee's part. In any case, Lee wrote not for money but for intellectual satisfaction to a small and elite audience. Although Mary Ward had advised her to write literary criticism on new publications more regularly, in order to establish "a clear identity before the public," Lee demurred: "I find that I should have to write on actualities, new books, new editions, at the choice of an Editor. ... I cannot sacrifice all intellectual private life to reading up for articles." Colby's biography opens...

Determining "Fluctuating Opinions"

Acknowledged for the originality and scope of her critical writing and recognized as one of the leading intellectuals of her age, Vernon Lee (1856 -1935) has rarely been viewed as a credible novelist, and critics have rarely seen an engagement with fiction as central to her literary craft. In this essay I reexamine Vernon Lee's theory and practice of fiction and argue that she increasingly depended upon access to novel readers in order to disseminate her more complex theoretical ideas and thereby shape an ideal and perceptive readership. In the first section I demonstrate the influence of popular novelists-particularly the romance writer Henrietta Camilla Jackson Jenkin (1805-1885)-on Lee's literary training, and I also show Lee's desire to identify a potential readership for writing both fiction and nonfiction. In the second section I show both Lee's fidelity to the originality of her emerging literary voice and her commitment to the influence of fiction in determining ideas. I locate critical debates over the function of fiction and the formation of the reader in my discussion of her fictional writing (Ottilie[1883] and Miss Brown [1884]) and her nonfictional dialogues (Belcaro [1881],Baldwin [1886], and The Gospels of Anarchy [1908]). In the third section I explore Lee's delineation of a "moral economy of reading" in a close reading of two short stories-"Lady Tal" (1892) and "A Worldly Woman" (1890)-that are explicitly concerned with the influence of the fictional work on the reader.

The Adventures of Miss Brown, Miss Jones and Miss Robinson: tourist writing and tourist performance from 1860 to 1914

The Adventures of Miss Brown, Miss Jones and Miss Robinson: tourist writing and tourist performance from 1860 to 1914

Victorian fiction: writers, publishers, readers

Preface - List of Illustrations - Thackeray's Errors - Writing The Woman in White - Dickens, Reade, Hard Cash, and Maniac Wives - Dickens's Serialising Imitators - Eliot, Lytton, and the Zelig Effect - Trollope at Work on The Way We Live Now - Miss Bretherton, Miss Brown, and Miss Rooth - The Victorian Novelists: Who Were They? - Plot Summaries - Notes - Index

Involuntary Medication and the Case of Joyce Brown

In October 1987, Joyce Brown became the first homeless person removed from New York City's streets and hospitalized under a city initiative that authorized evaluation of "gravely disabled" homeless persons for admission to inpatient psychiatric treatment. Miss Brown's highly publicized and ultimately successful court battle to prevent a course of forced medication is described. Her refusal of medication was upheld based on her capacity to understand the proposed treatment and to express a partially rational opinion about it. The author, who served as independent psychiatric consultant to the court on the decision about Miss Brown's involuntary medication, uses the case to illustrate some of the problems of involuntary psychiatric intervention, including the commitment of competent patients and the lack of a coherent approach to persistent treatment refusal.

The automated solution of logic puzzles

This paper describes an attempt to automate the solution of the class of logic puzzles such as those appearing in Logic Problems (published by B.E.A.P., Ltd. and widely available through newsagents). The general problem is as follows. We are given a number of objects (say m) from each of a set of (say n) domains, such that objects from one domain have some relation to objects in others (for example, a set of cars, their colours and owners). In addition, there is a set of constraints (clues) which enable us to determine which objects are related to each other (i.e., we deduce from the clues a partitioning of the total set of objects such that each set in the partition contains one member from each domain). The clues are of two types: (a) definite statements of objects that are or are not related, (b) a relation on the values of elements of a domain in different partition sets. As a small example, the following is a problem over the domains 'first name', 'surname' and ' age'. 1 Example (see Fig. 1). Three children live in the same street. From the two clues given below, can you discover each child's full name and age? First names: Anne, Brian, Mary. Surnames: Brown, Green, White. Ages: 7, 9, 10. Clues: (1) Miss Brown is three years older than Mary. (2) The child whose surname is White is 9 years old.

Erratum

The new Chairman of the South-East Regional Group is Miss P. Yetton, M.A.O.T., The Medway Hospital, Gillingham, Kent. Owing to a misunderstanding, Miss M. Keer was named as the new Chairman in the S.B. Regional Group's report in the November issue (see page 8). Miss Keer has taken Miss Brown's place on Council.

Account of a South American Journey, 1898

An adventuresome human experience unfolds in telling the life story of Granville Stuart, a genuine pioneer of the American West and United States minister to Uruguay and Paraguay from 1894 to 1898. Three years after his birth in Virginia in 1834, Stuart's parents moved to Iowa where he grew up in a frontier community. His father went to California in the first year of the Gold Rush, returned to Iowa in 1851 and the next spring the senior Stuart and two of his sons, Granville and James, crossed the continent to the Pacific gold fields where they mined with indifferent luck until 1857 when Stuart's sons decided to return to Iowa. The “ Mormon War ” diverted then? progress across the Great Basin, causing them to detour north into Southeastern Montana where they mined for a while and became part of that wave of settlers that pushed back the frontier in the Rocky Mountains. Stuart's first wife, an Indian woman he had married in 1862, died in 1887, leaving him with several grown children. Three years later he married Mrs. Allis Brown Fairfield, a Montana school teacher, nearly thirty years his junior, and who, like himself, had been born in Virginia and reared in Iowa. Miss Brown's parents had moved to Montana in 1879 after she had attended Sioux City (Iowa) public schools; she later studied at Vassar College and Northern Indiana Normal School, and before her marriage to Granville Stuart she taught in several one-room rural Montana schools.

Nursing School Pins

Miss Brown (Provident Hospital School of Nursing, Chicago) is chief physical therapist at Provident Hospital. Interested in the many different pins she'd seen, Miss Brown made inquiries about a few to find out what they mean and “enjoyed every minute” of her investigation.

Rural Field Trips

Miss Brown and Miss Forsell arc senior students at the Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Oh, For That Spark!

O UR THANKS to the many excellent junior high school teachers who see teaching in these grades as a difficult task, a challenge calling for the best of their ability. May we remember to express to them our appreciation as they so skillfully blend the WHAT, the How, and the WHY into effective learning situations. Their classes are a joy to them and to the boys and girls who are fortunate enough to draw schedules in their roomsl So wrote Miss Helper, the assistant principal of Amalgam Junior High, as she worked on a term paper for a graduate course in supervision. Then she sighed, Why, I didn't visit a teacher like that today and I should have done so! Tomorrow I'm going to see Miss Brown and Mr. Burns and Miss Gibbs just to enjoy their classes. The next morning groups had gone from homerooms to classes and the halls were

Miss Brown Teaches the Piano Class

Miss Brown Teaches the Piano Class

Memoirs: An Account of Amoeba Discoides; its Culture and Life History

1. A large free-living amoeba found by Mr. Harry Watkinson in the tropical fish tanks of Mr. Albert Sutcliffe of Grimsby has been identified as Amoeba discoides (Schaeffer, 1916) = Metachaos discoides (Schaeffer, 1926). 2. From the inoculation material obtained from these tanks Amoeba discoides has been successfully cultivated in the Notre Dame Training College Laboratory by a technique similar to that used for the cultivation of Amoeba proteus: wheat being the pabulum employed. In contrast to what obtains in the cultivation of Amoeba proteus , however, Amoeba discoides flourishes more luxuriantly in shallow Petri dishes, than in deeper troughs. 3. The nucleus in the resting and dividing stages is described; division is amitotic. 4. The more important cytoplasmic contents, including nutritive spheres, and crystals are likewise described. 5. The life-history has been worked out. The adult amoeba becomes an agamont giving rise to agametes which eventually grow into adult amoebae, the life-cycle occupying roughly about four months. 6. Descriptions of the nucleus of the newly hatched and developing amoebae are deferred. I wish to offer my sincerest thanks to Professor Graham Kerr under whom this work was begun, and who has continued from afar to watch over it with ever kindly interest and encouragement and who has read the paper in typescript. My thanks are also extended to Professor Hindle, under whom the work was completed, for his kind advice and for reading the paper in typescript. In conclusion I would like to express my appreciation of her skill and of the care and trouble bestowed by Miss Brown Kelly in the execution of the original drawing of fig. 1, PI. 31.