Books with author Cornelia Otis Skinner

Sarah Bernhardt was born in Paris in 1844, the illegitimate daughter of a pretty milliner. Her childhood was not a happy one, for her health was dangerously frail and her mother had little time for her. The book tells of her love of the theatre, her selfless work in behalf of the wounded during the siege of Paris in 1870-1871 and her courageous trips to the Front in World War I, and her role as gracious though often capricious hostess to many of the great figures of her time; one of France's most glorious ambassadors abroad.

OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY by CORNELIA OTIS SKINNER and EMILY KIMBROUGH. CHAPTER 1: WE had been planning the trip for over a year. Pinching, scraping and going without sodas, we had salvaged from our allowances and the small time jobs we each had found the preceding vacation the sum of 80.00, which was the cost of a minimum passage on a Canadian Pacific liner of the cabin class. Our respec tive families had augmented our finances by letters of credit generous enough to permit us to live for three months abroad if not in the lap of luxury, at least on the knees of comfort. For months we had been exchanging letters brimming over with rapturous plans and lyric an ticipation and now June had really rolled around and the happy expectancy of the brides-to-be of that year had noth ing on us. It was settled we could meet in Montreal at whatever hotel it is that isnt the Ritz. I, clutching and occasionally kissing our steamship passage, was arriving from New York, Emily from Buffalo. That is, I hoped Emily was arriving. Emilys notions concerning geography, like some of her other notions, were enthusiastic but lacking in ac curacy. Some weeks previous she had sent me a rhapsodic letter which ended with the alarming words, I live for the moment when our boat pushes out from that dock in Win nipeg. I had written back in a panic and block letters stating, somewhat crushingly I thought, that the CJP. O. seldom sent its ships overland, that we were sailing from Montreal, Province of Quebec, that the name of our ves sel was the Montcalm and the date June loth, the year of our Lord I shant say which, because Emily and I have now reached the time in life when not only do we lie about our ages, we forget what weve said they are. Emily wrote back not to worry, darling, she had it all straight now. Moreover she was being motored up from Buffalo by friends who had been abroad often and who wouldnt dream of driving her to the wrong place. They would arrive sometime the afternoon of the pth. No such traveled and plutocratic friends offered to motor me to Canada, so I purchased an upper on the Mon treal sleeper ... a bit of misguided economy because once aboard the train I had to pay for another upper in order to accommodate my collection of luggage. The Skinners have ever, I believe, been respectable, God-fear ing folk, but in those days my family made up for the lack of a skeleton in the closet by having extremely dis reputable-looking luggage. Mother, the most exquisite of women, was fastidious to a degree when it came to the care of her clothes and mine, but she didnt care what she packed them in as long as the receptacle was clean. Conse quently on this, the occasion of my first long trip on my own, she had, with loving care and acres of tissue-paper, stowed my effects in an assortment of containers that ranged from a canvas trunk Father had used when he played at Dalys, to a patent leather thing for hats that looked like a cover for a bass drum. There was a strap bound straw affair known for some reason as a telescope, and various other oddments. I was made to carry my good coat the one in which I traveled was my every day on a stout hanger in a voluminous green dress-bag which had a hole at the top and through that emerged the hook for hanging It up. It was a formidable looking contrivance and I used to glance nervously at that hook, half anticipat ing the sight of a human eye impaled upon it...

Excerpt from Dithers and JittersStravinsky, Oscar Wilde, and Ty Cobb, not to men tion Ibsen and Loie Fuller. What evenings! We sat about on bath mats (all of us except Yeats, who lay quietly on the stove) and discussed psychoanalysis, child labor, the Dreyfus case, and the race problem. It was very beautiful. Freud would remark, Mabel, you are extraordinary! The eternal hetaira. I can't help it. I was born that way. (aspasia Astarte Amnesia.)About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.