putterings 213 < 214 > 215 index
the thousand and one tasks a working girl neglects
She had been puttering about her room, attending to the thousand and one tasks a working girl neglects during the week, when she heard a knock at the door.
...Would the Hsiao Chieh be gracious enough to come to the Da Jen’s presence ?
Muriel Molland Jernigan, The Two Lives of An-Marie : A Novel (1957) : 102 : link (snippet view only)
Muriel Molland Jernigan (1889-1962) : link (findagrave)
- Muriel Molland, daughter of the C. E. Mollands, our pioneer missionaries to Wuhu, lived with her mother in Nanking following the death of her father and received her early education there. Then she came to America to study. She graduated from William Woods College in 1909 and that same year went back to China as a regularly appointed missionary, the first of our second generation missionaries to return to the land of their birth. After a few months with her mother in Nanking, while she devoted herself to language study, she was stationed at Chuchow to start a school for girls. In a short while, however, the revolution of 1911 forced her to withdraw from Chuchow to the safety of Shanghai. She did not return to Chuchow and withdrew from the mission in 1913.
Later Miss Molland married Paul Jernigan, whose father was the judge of the American court in Shanghai. Her husband, connected with the Standard Oil Company in China for many years, died in 1947. Mrs. Jernigan now makes her home out from Fort Pierce, Florida. Her son is employed by the Socony-Vacuum Company and is located in Mexico. His wife and children are with him there.— The United Christian Missionary Society, “They Went To China: Biographies of Missionaries of the Disciples of Christ” (1948). StoneCampbell Books. 477 : 39 : link (pdf)
- Jernigan's first book, Forbidden City (1954), describes the experiences of Katharine Carl (1865-1938), an American artist who “spent nine months in China in 1903 painting a portrait of the Empress Dowager Cixi for the St. Louis Exposition.”
link (wikipedia) - “Muriel Molland Jernigan’s Forbidden City, 1954, accepts wholesale the femme fatale image and embroiders it with the myth of oriental inscrutability.”
— A. Owen Aldridge, “The empress dowager CI-XI in western fiction : a stereotype for the far east?” in Revue de littérature comparée 2001/1 (no 297) : 113-122 : link
- other
two novels : link (hathitrust, catalogue entry)
Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) : link (wikipedia)
hsiao chieh — a polite term of address for a young woman (means “sister”) ?