Sublime

Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty. For honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary’s reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humour enough in her to laugh

Cincinnati-born Theodosia Burr Goodman, whose father was a Jewish tailor from Poland, became Theda Bara (an acronym of “Death Arab”).

Susan Cornelia Clarke Warren,

She would be wife or servant, perhaps both.

Tom transformed her into one of his fictional characters, Esther Jack.

Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.