Elizabeth Hopkinson's Hidden Grove

  Back in February, I wrote a piece for LGBT+ History Month about the castrati singers of the 18th century , and my character Carlo in the forthcoming Cage of Nightingales. In that piece, I said, “It’s impossible for us now to know what the leading castrati really sounded like.” That may still be true. (The intense levels of training they went through from boyhood would probably be illegal now, never mind the actual castration). But just this week, I made a discovery I can’t believe I have not made before. There are real-life male sopranos. True sopranos, as opposed to counter-tenors, who sing in their falsetto range, thereby only using part of the vocal cord. (Imagine plucking a guitar string while holding the string a long way down the bridge, to make the note extra-high). True sopranos sing with all their vocal cord vibrating (unless they go into falsetto, which is extra-extra-high!) Which means you’re going to get a much more resonant sound. Entirely by accident, I saw a news r...

  Me and Carlo: BBFs (by Kirsty Rolfe) I’d like to introduce you to Carlo. Some of you may have met him before, but he’s one of the two heroes of Cage of Nightingales , the first of my Angelio novels, which is finally due to be published this year by Deep Hearts YA . Carlo is a castrato singer. When we first meet him, he’s thirteen years old, a student at the Conservatorio Archangeli, a prestigious music school in the city-state of Angelio. He’s talented, kind, loves beautiful things, hates arguments, can be flirty, and just wants a friend who sees him as more than a beautiful voice. And he’s canonically asexual and biromantic. Just thought I’d get that out there. Carlo is named after Carlo Broschi (aka Farinelli), the most famous of the castrato singers of the 18th century. I’ve written quite a bit about Farinelli and the other castrati on this blog, but as it’s LGBT+ History Month (in the UK at least) I thought I’d share with you a few facts about them. “Portrait Group: The Singe...

The world is going through very tough times at the moment and there's a lot to make us cry, but there are always things that bring us joy in the midst of despair. For me, one of those things has been the successful crowdfunding of Asexual Myths & Tales   (the follow-up to last year's Asexual Fairy Tales ) right in the middle of Pride Month.  So, what better time to share my top five asexual icons. Just to clarify, I don't mean by this that I necessarily believe all these people and characters are historically/canonically asexual, but that to me they symbolise something about my asexuality; they are somehow poster people for my identity.  The Virgin Mary "Pearls and Roses" by Anna Hopkinson Trust me, as a Christian with both Protestant and Catholic friends and relations, I've heard all the arguments back and forth about whether Mary really was a lifelong virgin. To me, it matters less from a theological point of view than it does from a personal viewpoint....

I don't normally write about stuff like this on my blog - I hate controversy and arguments of every kind, which I find distressing - but I felt I must respond to the many adults I read of who have expressed the opinion that educating children about gender diversity somehow amounts to "child abuse." To that end, I would like to share with you some extracts from The Fieldway Five , a story I wrote when I was about nine years old.  It is my homage to the Famous Five stories, an improbable tale of gypsies and gold mines, which ends with the children triumphantly pushing enormous slabs of gold home to their parents. In my very un-subtle homage to Enid Blyton, Timmy the dog is replaced by Ann the cat, and tomboy Georgina, who you will remember dresses as a boy and insists on being called George, is replaced by Philip, who prefers to wear a dress while being addressed as Philipa.  As a child, I saw nothing sinister in this; I was just being creative.  Also, my best fr...

            Tilda Swinton as Virginia Woolf's Orlando from the film of 1992: BFI Player I recently listened to a fascinating online lecture by Cheryl Morgan about gender fluidity in science fiction and fantasy.  Regular readers will know that issues of gender and (a)sexual identity feature a lot in my blog.  So I was interested to read some of the books featured in the lecture.  Here's what I managed to find in my local library:  Orlando by Virginia Woolf This famous literary novel is quite strange, and I doubt anyone truly knows what Virginia Woolf meant by everything in it.  The title character, Orlando, begins as a 16th-century nobleman and favourite of Elizabeth I.  By the end of the book, she is a woman (still called Orlando) and living in Virginia Woolf's own day, the 1920s.  The part where Orlando becomes a woman is spectacularly unspectacular.  He goes to sleep a man and wakes up a woman.  (I...

watching the film in the mediatheque Last week, I went to try out the new mediatheque at the National Media Museum .  The film I watched made a huge impact on me.  It was a silent film from 1923 starring Ivor Novello, called The Man Without Desire . It reminded me of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, so it was interesting that the director, Adrian Brunel, based the story on an idea from an Irish playwright, Monckton Hoffe.  It also seems to draw inspiration from a poem of Robert Browning's,  "A Toccata of Galuppi's", a stanza of which is quoted in the film: As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop, Here on earth they bore the fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop: What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?  (1) Like a true fairy tale, The Man Without Desire  can be read many ways, but as it contains themes especially dear to me, those are the ones I will concentrate on in my review. The plot An Engl...