Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anna Walker, Senior Arts + Culture Editor, The Conversation

This curation of The Conversation UK’s arts and culture coverage was first published in our fortnightly newsletter, Something Good.

Hollywood still has an aversion to telling older women’s stories.

Research has found that older women are frequently relegated to supporting roles, or portrayed as grumpy, frumpy or senile. So when I saw the Brazilian film The Blue Trail at the Leeds Film Festival earlier this year, it felt like a breath of fresh air.

Tereza (Denise Weinberg) lives in a chilling near-future where a totalitarian regime forcibly removes anyone over 75, relocating them to remote colonies without consultation or consent. Faced with this looming threat of exclusion and invisibility as she turns 77, Tereza refuses to comply. Instead, she embarks on a surreal journey along the Amazon River to chase one final dream before she is “put out to pasture”. As she takes the steering wheel of a boat she has commandeered to engineer her escape, she also takes control of her life.

Throughout the film, Tereza proves younger people’s assumptions about her body wrong. When she is forced to wear an adult nappy she clearly doesn’t need, she uses it to kick-start her escape. When others assume she is ready to end her life quietly, she instead embarks on a surprising and thrilling new love affair. The Blue Trail affirms the joy and novelty that can be found at any age and offers a damning indictment of ageism across the world.

The Blue Trail is in select cinemas now and streaming on Prime Video.

Read more:
The Blue Trail is a dystopian ‘coming-of-old-age’ gem

Pets and plants

I adopted a cat in January and already I can’t remember life without her. Cheddar naps on my lap while I work (when she’s not disturbing Zoom calls with her acrobatics) and snuggles up to watch films in the evening (Flow was a particular favourite). So I’m intrigued by Pets & Their People, an exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian Library that asks big questions about our furry (or feathered) companions.

What motivates pet owners – and when did we begin turning wild animals into the “fur babies” of the family? Equally importantly, what’s in it for the animals? Were their wild ancestors lured in by the promise of a warm fire, perhaps in exchange for catching mice or guarding livestock? Or did they deliberately ingratiate themselves into our homes and affections, offering companionship, comfort and even therapy?

Philip Howell, a professor who researches animal-human relations, described the exhibition as “wonderful”. He left reflecting that being human may involve “looking at our pets and asking what separates us from them”.

Pets & their People is at the Bodleian Library in Oxford until September 27.

Read more:
Pets & their People explores the long, strange history of human-animal companionship

The Garden Museum is something of an overlooked gem among London’s museums. Housed in a deconsecrated church in Lambeth, it’s a beautiful space that explores the history of flora and fauna and how they’ve shaped human society. The museum’s latest exhibition, Seeds of Exchange centres on a short-lived but fascinating collaboration between an English botanist and his Chinese counterparts. Together, they documented the plant life of Canton (modern-day Guangzhou) at a time when global trade, science and empire were becoming deeply intertwined. Our reviewer, botanist Max Carter-Brown, found it “fascinating”.

Seeds of Exchange: Canton and London in the 1700s is at the Garden Museum until May 10 2026.

Read more:
Seeds of Exchange reveals the untold story of the plant collectors who connected Canton and London in the 18th century

Fashion and freedom

Another London exhibition, Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style at The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, marks the centenary of the late monarch’s birth with the largest display of her wardrobe ever mounted.

The result, says fashion expert Hannah Rumball-Croft, is “a masterclass in what the Royal Palaces do best: celebrating the British monarchy – its pomp, pageantry and performativity – through the medium of clothes”. It also underscores why Her Life in Style, rather than in fashion, is such an apt title.

Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style is at The King’s Gallery until October 18.

Read more:
Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style – an unwavering sense of self expressed through fashion

Eighty years on from the second world war, what does freedom mean in Britain today? That question lies at the heart of Our Freedom: Then and Now, a superb photography exhibition currently touring the UK.

Our reviewer, photography professor Mark Rawlinson, appreciated the “alternative perspective” it offers to the idea that the nation is currently divided. He left the gallery struck by the many ways freedom is experienced and understood across the UK. Whether it’s a veteran in Wolverhampton or a student in Hartlepool, he found the cumulative effect of these reflections on freedom and community both fascinating and thought-provoking.

Our Freedom: Then and Now is on tour across the UK until October 30.

Read more:
Our Freedom: Then and Now explores what freedom means to Brits, 80 years after the second world war

– ref. Pets, plants and a ‘coming-of-old-age’ story – what to see and watch this week – https://theconversation.com/pets-plants-and-a-coming-of-old-age-story-what-to-see-and-watch-this-week-281370

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Helen Pleasance, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature, York St John University

To pass the time while filming, before her eyesight deteriorated, actor Judi Dench could often be found sewing. The picture of submissive femininity, she sat bent over her needlework. The finished work however, which she gave as gifts, were actually expletive-filled insults worked in ornate embroidery.

There has been a resurgence of people taking up needlecrafts of all kinds in recent years, including knitting, crochet, embroidery and sewing, as a hobby.

Much has been made of the mindful qualities of needlework. As a stitcher myself, I know how much pleasure and relaxation can be gained from the flow of yarn and thread through needles. But beyond the mindful benefits of needlework, there is a long history of needlecraft as a form of expressive protest.

Hobbies can bring joy, wellbeing and focus to our busy lives, but so many of us don’t have one. If you’re ready to replace scrolling with stitching, or hustle with horticulture, The Hobby Starter Kit (a new series from Quarter Life) will help you get going.

In December 2024, textile artist, Sue Spence posted a photograph on Facebook. It showed the words “Middle class WOMAN of a certain age” embroidered in rudimentary stitches onto a small piece of fabric. It was a response to comments made by former MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace, who claimed allegations of sexual misconduct against him came from “a handful of middle-class women of a certain age”. She later turned the design into brooches reading: “Middle class WOMAN of a certain RAGE.”

Spence subverted Wallace’s original insult so it instead became a celebration of her identity. In doing so, she was participating in a long tradition of subversive stitching. For hundreds of years, silenced women have turned to needlecraft to express taboo emotions and protest their position in the world.

Her materials – needle and thread – are significant to her act of protest. Like the words being reclaimed, the medium she is using is also being reclaimed from its containment within the sphere of patriarchal domesticity as a submissive activity for genteel women.

Art historian Rozsika Parker’s seminal book The Subversive Stitch (2019) traces the history of women and needlework. In it, she identifies how from the 17th century, needlecraft – particularly the embroidering of samplers – “had been employed to inculcate obedience, submission, passivity and piety”. Samplers were used to practise embroidery stitches and frequently involved the stitching of Bible passages and devotional images.

Resisting patriarchy

By the 19th century domestic needlework was widely practised by middle- and upper-class women. It was understood as an activity that tied mothers and daughters to the service of home, husbands and fathers. This is illustrated in the character of Rose Pargiter in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years (1937).

At the opening of the novel, in the 1880s, Rose is a little girl. Rose’s sewing – she is embroidering roses onto a boot bag for her father – solidifies her position as “a good girl”, performing submissive obedience to a patriarchal order. Rose is literally stitching the flowers with which she shares a name at the feet (or at least the footwear) of her father. When she refuses to finish her sewing, she also refuses to accept her position in the order of society.

In The Subversive Stitch, Parker identifies more subtle ways in which women could subvert this dominant meaning of needlework. The bent head and quiet activity gave the appearance of passivity, allowing their resistance to hide in plain sight.

The Changi Quilts provide a good example of this from the 20th century. Changi, a prison in Singapore, was used by the Japanese army during the second world war to detain people from Allied countries on the island.

Men and women prisoners were separated. Denied access to writing materials, they could not communicate with each other. The women prisoners were, however, allowed to sew.

They set about making a series of patchwork quilts to be sent to the military hospital. Each woman made a square, including an embroidered picture and her signature. Once they were sent to the hospital, the male patients could read the quilts to get both a list of the women who had survived and some insight, through their artwork, of their feelings about internment. Preserved by the Red Cross Society, the quilts are a testament to the women’s resistance.

A more overt challenge to the submissive meanings attached to women’s needlework can be seen in the Suffragette banners of the early 20th century. They were created by women who, like Rose Pargiter, would have been brought up with the obligation to be good girls through domestic stitching. Through the banners, they used their craft as a tool in their fight for the vote.

Much contemporary textile work draws on this subversion of the historical consignment of needlework to patriarchal domesticity. The Craftivist Collective, a global movement founded by Sarah P. Corbett in 2008, combines craft and activism to intervene for social change. Corbett defines it as “gentle activism”, but upends the meaning of gentle, not to mean “passive or weak, but gentle as in compassionate and nuanced”.

So, the next time you see someone, quiet, still and with bent head, wielding needle and thread, consider how they might be using incisive and creative tools to make a sophisticated point.

And if you’re a stitcher, you can try it yourself. Try reimagining traditional patterns or adding bold text or symbols to transform your mindful hobby into a quiet but powerful form of creative expression.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Helen Pleasance does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Needlecraft: this hobby has a long history as a subversive form of protest – https://theconversation.com/needlecraft-this-hobby-has-a-long-history-as-a-subversive-form-of-protest-247969

Source: The Conversation – UK – By John Stewart, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeoecology, Bournemouth University

As the Earth shifts to climates not seen for several hundred thousand years, we may need to look at ancient environments for clues about what could happen next.

Our new study of two whale fossils, with preserved fragments of shark teeth, suggests the modern descendants of these animals could once again roam the southern region of the North Sea, between the UK, Belgium and Denmark. Climate change may recreate the conditions that allowed the ancestors of great white sharks to hunt in these waters.

If you want information about how animals and other organisms might respond to the kind of climate changes our planet is experiencing right now, you need evidence of former responses to such changes.

Palaeoecology, the study of the interactions between organisms in the deep past, has been coopted in the service of conservation science for some years now.

One example of a past seascape which may tell us important information is that of the southern part of the North Sea, which was occupied a few million years ago by large marine animals. In modern times, the area has had a relatively low diversity in its wildlife.

But about 4-5 million years ago the North Sea was home to several large shark species, including the now locally extinct bluntnose sixgill shark and a relative of the modern great white shark. The Greenland shark used to live in this region, as well as tiny right whales, a relative of the beluga whale, and rorqual baleen whales. It was also home to extinct dolphins, such as Pliodelphis doelensis which was about the size of a common dolphin, plus porpoises and several seal species. Many of these animals, like all the cetaceans and seals, and some of the sharks, are now extinct. Others, including many other sharks, have since moved to distant oceans.

It appears that there was large-scale turnover of cetacean species in the southern North Sea during the ice age of the Pliocene-Pleistocene epoch, with the extinctions of most small baleen whales and the departure of other cetacean families (such as that of the beluga whale). This turnover may well have been responsible for the disappearance of the large sharks including the great white relatives and the bluntnose sixgill sharks, that were feeding on the smaller whales, from the North Sea.

Occasionally, the fossil record provides a glimpse of the past relationships between species. This can help scientists better understand these food webs and how ancient ecosystems worked.

Shark bite marks on fossil marine mammal bones are relatively common, revealing intervals of time when two animals interacted. However, it is often difficult to identify the predator species. Much more rarely, bite marks come with fossilised tooth fragments. This is what we found in two cetacean skulls from the Early Pliocene (approximately 5-4 million years ago) of the North Sea.

The first of these two skulls belonged to a diminutive extinct right whale which was found by father and son fossil enthusiasts (Robert and John Stewart – coauthor of this piece) in the mid-1980s in the docks in Antwerp, Belgium. Some 40 or so years later the skull was donated to the Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels where it was identified by one of us (Olivier Lambert) as one of only two fossil specimens of Balaenella brachyrhynus, a tiny right whale species only known from the North Sea.

Further examination revealed bite marks on the top of the skull and in one such mark there was a tooth fragment of a shark. In our study, with the help of the shark specialist Frederik Mollen, the tooth tip was identified using microCT scanning as belonging to part of a lower tooth of a bluntnose sixgill shark Hexanchus griseus, which today is common in the Mediterranean Sea. The position of the bites makes it likely that the whale was scavenged as it lay drifting belly-up.

The second skull, from a close relative of the extinct beluga whale Casatia thermophila was discovered in the early 1980s. It was found during the excavation of a new dock in the Port of Antwerp by another father and son team – Paul Gigase, a pathologist by profession, and his son Pierre.

In this case the whale, which also had bite marks with the tip of a shark tooth embedded, may have been attacked by an extinct mako shark, a relative of today’s great white shark. It appears that the shark was attempting to separate the whale’s head from the rest of the body and focusing on the fat-rich melon, a mass of tissue involved in echolocation on the top of the animal’s head.

These fossils represent direct evidence that relatives of sharks today fed on these whales. Even if the fossil evidence is limited to two pairs of animals, they are tangible examples of such behaviour.

The ongoing biodiversity crisis is directly related to climate change, and has (or will have) an impact on the distribution of marine mammals. Global warming is likely to affect shallow seas in particular. The southern part of the North Sea is not large or deep enough for modern baleen whales, which are larger than their ancestors and live in the North Atlantic, like the modern right whale, the humpback and fin whales. But warming seas could attract dolphins and seals, and in turn great white sharks or other large marine predators.

In the North Sea, scientists have already observed short-term changes in the distribution of porpoises and seals. New seal colonies have established along the coast of the southern North Sea and there have been abrupt fluctuations in the number of porpoises stranded yearly on Belgian beaches.

The fossilised behaviour of the disappeared whales and sharks emphasise that all is change in the ecology of the North Sea.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Could warming seas bring great white sharks back to the North Sea? A 5-million-year-old shark tooth may provide clues – https://theconversation.com/could-warming-seas-bring-great-white-sharks-back-to-the-north-sea-a-5-million-year-old-shark-tooth-may-provide-clues-279157

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Emma Linford, Honorary research associate, English literature, University of Hull

Shrinking into her yellowing wedding gown with the decay of her wedding breakfast around her, Miss Havisham, from Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel, Great Expectations, is one of the best-known characters in English literature.

Jilted on her wedding day by her unscrupulous fiancé, Havisham can be understood by modern readers as a victim of “romance fraud”, where in a fraudster manipulates someone under the guise of courtship for their own financial gain. Although romance fraud is a 21st-century term, through the character of Havisham, Dickens clearly demonstrated its often-devastating effects.

In her youth, Havisham was manipulated by her fiancé, the conman Compeyson and her half-brother Arthur, in a plan to rob her of her fortune. Both the romance itself and wedding are a ploy and she is jilted at the altar, losing not only her wealth (which she had signed away prior to her nuptials) but also any hope of future romantic prospects due to the scandal that followed.

Alone, rich and looking for a companion, Havisham was particularly vulnerable to a criminal wanting to take advantage. Though she lost her fortune, Dickens makes it clear that the romantic betrayal is what had the biggest impact on her psychology.

The romantic duplicity shapes her relationships with both her adopted daughter, Estella, and Pip, the novel’s protagonist, making her cold and hostile toward them.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books, films and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

The psychological impact of romance fraud

Since being jilted, Havisham has become a recluse, “stuck” within the moment of her abandonment. She remains in the house with the clocks all stopped, perpetually wearing her wedding gown. Her decayed hopes of romance are reflected in the decayed objects which surround her. As Pip muses:

Avoiding her eyes … I took note of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine. “Look at me,” said Miss Havisham. “You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?”

The clocks are all stopped at the time the promise of her future life ended – the moment that she received the letter from Compeyson which made the crime apparent.

Herbert (a relative of Miss Havisham and friend of Pip) recounts the story to Pip:

A certain man, who made love to Miss Havisham … Well! This man pursued Miss Havisham closely and professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not shown much susceptibility up to that time; but all the susceptibility she possessed certainly came out then, and she passionately loved him.

This description mirrors many modern elements of romance fraud. Compeyson “made love” to her and she became “susceptible”. Like contemporary romance fraudsters, Compeyson inserted himself into Havisham’s life and manipulated and controlled her to believe that he loved her.

Romance fraud in Dickensian Britain

There was a lack of progression in fraudulent law during Dickens’ time. It wasn’t until the Fraud Act of 2006, that real change came about, making fraud by misrepresentation a criminal offence in the UK. Today, romance fraud is considered a “serious crime”.

Long before this most personal form of fraud became illegal, Dickens saw its prevalence and drew attention to it. Others followed in his path, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Lady Audrey’s Secret (1862), Arthur Conan Doyle in A Case of Identity (1891) and Agatha Christie in Death on the Nile (1937).

Havisham can be viewed in two ways, either as a victim or a fool. It is hard to determine how Dickens wanted her to be interpreted. Was she the stereotypical hysterical Victorian woman, as seen in other novels such as The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1860) or the character of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847)?

I don’t think so. As he was with so many other social issues, I believe that Dickens was ahead of his time and was actively trying to raise the profile of the crime of romance fraud and the impact it has on his victims.

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Emma Linford’s suggestion:

If you’re gripped by Dickens’s depiction of fraudsters and criminals, you may also enjoy Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture by Juliet John (2003). In it, John explores the complex villains and anti-heroes of Dickens’ novels. She looks at what inspired his writing, as well as the dramaturgical characteristics of his work.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Emma Linford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is an early exploration of ‘romance fraud’ – https://theconversation.com/great-expectations-by-charles-dickens-is-an-early-exploration-of-romance-fraud-241820

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Aditi Upmanyu, PhD candidate in English Literature, University of Oxford

In his biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, written after her death, her husband William Godwin remarked of her travel writing: “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man fall in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.”

Today, however, Wollstonecraft is best known for a different work: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). While this landmark text helped lay the foundations of western feminist thought, focusing solely on it risks narrowing our view of a writer who was far more radical and prolific than this single book suggests.

Wollstonecraft wrote across genres – from fiction, travel and children’s books to literary criticism, translations and political essays. Tracing this wide-ranging authorship reveals that her lifelong concerns – women’s education, gender inequality and resistance to political authority did not start or end with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

The novelist

Wollstonecraft believed in the political power of storytelling. Writing in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, literature professor Claudia L. Johnson observes that “novels are the very bookends of Wollstonecraft’s life as a writer”.

In the preface to Mary: A Fiction (1788), Wollstonecraft declares her intention to reveal the “mind of a woman who has thinking powers”. The novel traces the fictional Mary’s emotional and intellectual life through intense relationships with both a man and a woman. The novel emphasises female intimacy and friendship – at times bordering on the homoerotic – and rejects the plot of conventional domestic fulfilment.

This reimagination of domesticity becomes even more polemical in the unfinished novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), where Wollstonecraft explores marital oppression, parental neglect, sexual violence and moral rigidity.

Maria is forcibly separated from her infant daughter and imprisoned in a “madhouse”, where she suffers further abuse and torture. The novel includes a graphic narration of sexual exploitation through Jemima, a working-class asylum attendant of illegitimate origins who has endured rape, prostitution and abortion. Maria and Jemima’s friendship introduces radical class solidarity forged through shared suffering.

The novel presents a bleak vision in which women’s most meaningful relationships lie beyond heteronormative family structures.

The travel writer

Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1798) was the most popular of her works in her own lifetime.

It was written during an intensely turbulent period, marked by her abandonment by her first lover, Gilbert Imlay, after which she made two suicide attempts. The event left her a single, unwed mother to her daughter Fanny.

Letters departs from Wollstonecraft’s usual rational tone. Instead, this book explores emotional intensity and imagination. She writes at the outset: “I determined to let my remarks and reflections flow unrestrained.” It signposted a literary style that privileges feeling and self-exploration.

But beyond personal reflection, Letters also traces her inner growth alongside her observations of society as she travels across Scandinavian terrain. She reflects on landscape, commerce and social organisation, and through them considers broader questions of civilisation and progress. Here emerges a distinctive, female romantic imagination, grounded in sensibility and subjective experience.

Wollstonecraft’s merging of the personal and the political, so central to her writing, finds its fullest expression in this work. The Letters significantly influenced Romantic poets such as Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The children’s author

A deep intellectual investment in women’s education runs throughout Wollstonecraft’s career, evident even in the self-explanatory title of her early work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787).

This commitment takes a fictional form in Original Stories from Real Life (1791), a children’s book featuring illustrations by the poet William Blake. It traces the moral and intellectual development of two young girls under the guidance of a maternal governess. Wollstonecraft drew on her own year-long experience as a governess to the aristocratic Kingsborough family in Ireland between 1786 and 1787.

Influenced by enlightenment, the book presents learning as both structured instruction and experience shaped by nature and society. For Wollstonecraft, education cultivates judgement, self-discipline and moral awareness.

Her interest in childhood care and its formative role in later years is further reflected in three unfinished works: Lessons, Hints and Fragments of Letters on the Management of Infants. The works were all published posthumously in a compilation by Godwin in 1798. These works explore the issues of women’s health and nutrition, and rethink maternity as an acquired practice, rather than innate feelings women automatically possess.

An autodidact herself, Wollstonecraft saw the improvement of women’s education as essential to their development as rational citizens. Thus, pedagogy becomes the cornerstone of broader social reform, linking the cultivation of the mind to the possibility of equality between the sexes.

The reviewer, correspondent and translator

Wollstonecraft wrote extensively for Joseph Johnson’s progressive journal, the Analytical Review, contributing reviews of contemporary poetry and novels.

These reviews reveal Wollstonecraft as an active participant in contemporary literary culture. This sustained engagement with the ideas of her time helped shape her own trajectory as a writer.

Her reviews were public yet often anonymous, but her letters offer a more intimate record of her voice. Wollstonecraft’s prolific correspondence suggests a life lived, in part, through letters. She wrote frequently to her sisters, her husband Godwin and fellow women writers such as Amelia Opie and Mary Hays. These letters reveal the complexity and contradictions of her character, and her reflections on motherhood, morality and intellectual life.

Wollstonecraft also participated in a wider transnational literary culture, translating works primarily from French, German and Dutch. Her own writings continued to circulate in translation across Europe after her death, distinctly contributing to the development of feminist thought well beyond England.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Aditi Upmanyu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The many literary lives of Mary Wollstonecraft – author of novels, travel writing and children’s books – https://theconversation.com/the-many-literary-lives-of-mary-wollstonecraft-author-of-novels-travel-writing-and-childrens-books-279885