["A Woman Appeared to Me] a novel by Renee Vivien, is published in Paris, 1904.  Vivien was born Pauline Mary Tarn in Paddington in 1877 to a wealthy British father and a mother from Jackson, Michigan.  Pauline moved to Paris at 21 and changed her name, embraced the Symbolist movement and, in 1899, embraced and fell in love with the wealthy and beautiful American lesbian Natalie Clifford Barney.
 


"...the shudder which ran down my spine when my eyes met her eyes of mortal steel...I had a dim premonition that this woman would determine the pattern of my destiny, and that her face was the fearful face of my Future..." Une Femme m'apparut

"The World of Henry Orient" is the story of two school girls -- one of whom is wealthy, unhappy, in therapy, neglected and misunderstood by her shallow mother Angela Lansbury but also madcap, impetuous, fun and adventurous; the other being rather plain and repressed and fitfully earnest who will grow up to be fiercely loyal to the Neo-Conservative cause -- it's nothing less than Fate that they fall in love. 

At the end, of course, because it is 1964, the girls are separated and the unhappy one is going off to live (happy now!) with her father in Paris or London or Rome ("You pick!" he tells her), and the plain one will continue living with her mother and her mother's single female 'friend' in the West Village.  The father, played by Tom Bosley, has some misgivings, as he has been living the gay divorced high-life for some time. 

"I'm absolutely petrified with fear," he tells the two women over cocktails.  "At my age?  To take on a child and all her shenanigans, all those crazy jams they get into?"

But we know everything will work out fine.  Even with Kennedy being shot.  Even with the end of Camelot.  Those wacky 60s!  What a crazy time! 

BREAKING NEWS:  I note here with sadness the passing of Archie Roosevelt's daughter Theodora whose life, though it did not commence in 1904, surely symbolized -- nay embraced (word of the day) -- so many of the themes and issues and complicated passions of that important year.  Plus, she grew up "on the East River'!  With such an obvious connection, you can well imagine that even in the midst of my shock and grief I am preparing a tribute which will appear shortly.