Bell often picnicked for entertainment and worked as Oriental Secretary to the High Commissioner in Baghdad) and spy. Often, the two were indistinguishable. Once using the picnic as a deception, she and her companions took an official (not identified) to a lonely...
Jekyll’s recommendations for alfresco dining in “A Shooting-Party Luncheon” require forethought and preparation impractical for most of us. Her suggestions run low to high, from a wedge of cheese and a biscuit to a hotpot of game or poultry with celery, peeled...
Their marriage disintegrating, Leopold and Molly Bloom remember when they were in love and picnicked on Howth Head. They vividly remember Molly feeding Bloom a seedcake. (Joyce considered this sensual, but the visual image is of a bird feeding its young.) Bloom and...
Aaron Sissons, the protagonist of Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod, leaves his wife and three young children to find himself. He’s unsuccessful. The “rod” is his flute, which he plays well enough to earn a modest living. It is also a pun on his...
Stein is a demanding writer, especially when she experimented with eliminating adjectives, imagery, and grammar. She argued that you either got her meaning or you didn’t. The results were hit or miss. They still are. Ben Hecht reviewing Geography and Plays...
Southworth’s The Motorist’s Luncheon Book hypes motor picnicking. “The love of the great outdoors grows with each new automobile,” she writes, “The friendly road beckons, the trusty motor champs at the brake.” It’s very like...
It’s a momentous picnic for a young couple to understand they are courting in Colette’s The Ripening Seed. With the summer half gone, Phil Adebert (sixteen and a half) and Vinca Ferret (fifteen and a half) pack their picnic baskets and walk down the rocky cliffs like...
The Flüela Falls picnic is staged in May, a traditional month of spiritual renewal, but in this instance, Pieter Peeperkorn plans to announce his impending suicide. Peppercorn has invited his closest friends at the tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos: Hans Castorp,...
The Boating Party is motivated by state-instigated propaganda to boost a failing economy and patriotic spirits. Here, Gerasimov extolls Soviet agricultural abundance during a period when it was failing. The robust women enjoy a picnic in a rowboat chock-a-block with...
When Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton stop for lunch while trout fishing on the Irrazy River, it looks like a picnic. Whether it’s a lunch or a picnic doesn’t matter because it’s when Hemingway chooses to reveal Jake Barnes’ spiritual disquietude...
