Kristin Phelps

Kristin Nord Writes: As a young widow of means my mother would restart her life again in midlife, packing up the contents of her house this time and relocating from Grosse Pointe to Bucks County, PA. I suspect she must have decided early on — as someone who had not suffered during The Great Depression — that she would volunteer rather than engage in a career for money. Yet she did so nonetheless for a rather astonishing 40 years at the little library in New Hope, PA. Some of the choices my mother and mother-in-law made were dictated by circumstance, but they came at a time when they might still have been discouraged from truly pursuing careers of their own. more »

Ah, the Edwardians – with their sumptuous clothes and candelight dinners, their bone china, their silks, their gleaming silver. Merchant and Ivory and the BBC have made fortunes selling fanciful pastiches of this era to the viewing pubic, all the while touching lightly on a less seemly back story. more »

Kristin Nord writes: Outfitted in parkas and mittens and hats the hearty women scaling the hillsides were soon rewarded. There were meadows of trillium and foamflower, wild ginger, ginseng, and Solomon’s seal. There were Jack-in-the-pulpits, Mayapple, blue cohosh, and five varieties of violets, some 55 natives in all. The naturalist Carol Gracie was at the helm, urging the group to slow down, and look closely at the natural feast spread out like a picnic before them.  more »

If the "zone of intimacy" Lawrence fostered in his studio apparently caused anxiety among critics and potential clients alike, "it also piqued interest in his portraits of women and gave them a sense of spontaneity, liveliness and sensuality that his competitors could not match," one of the curators writes. more »