Goodbye, Marquise

 Marquise is the pseudonym, or book-reviewing nom de plume, of someone I came across on Goodreads what, about four years ago? Her reading, and reviewing, focus was on folklore and modern fantasy based on folklore, and since I had met her, had tightened more and more to retellings of Beauty and the Beast-type tales. She's "into" this enough, in a semi-academic sense even if not an academic sense, to have talked with me and others not only about the Stith Thompson, author of the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, but also the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Tale Type Index, which focuses specifically on indexing such stories by type. Aarne was a Finn who started it. Thompson is the same Thompson, who built on it and expanded it 20-plus years later, and Uther is a German who did further expansion and organization early this century.

Here's what I said on her Goodreads announcement:

On the big picture? I guess there's not as much tribalism, and other things, in the world of nonfiction, eh? To the degree there is, like American political wingnuts? I call them out on their stupid reviews and then block them. As far as GR? Yes, the elimination of direct messages and other things has degraded it in some ways. On the other hand, it's now given us the fractional stars on reviews, so I am again happier. Maybe it will adapt other things from a site like Storygraph, like buttons up front to rank reading speed and ease.

And I mean that. She's from Europe, and though I don't believe she's ever said it specifically, everything I read says the Land of Eire.

Like many Irish, and for degrees of parallelism in history, she's strongly anti-Zionist, one definite point of agreement. 

That said, maybe I've read that incorrectly. One of the comments on a post on the website she created to focus on these retellings, and where, already more than a year ago, she had told me and others that she had broader long-term goals in mind, one commenter talks about losing "a fellow Slavic sister." OTOH, she's talked about wanting a church wedding and losing the originally planned piece, and other things that scream Catholic, and the majority of non-Protestant Slavs are of course Orthodox. 

Speaking of? Once, in some general update, she made some vague reference to being a refugee. When I asked more, she said it was in a long-ago update. And, Goodreads simply doesn't provide a link to every status update a person makes. Was it from the Troubles? Something else?

I don't mean this to be nosy, but, I would like to know her as a person. And, not to say that some tragedies are worse than others, beginning with the fact that, outside of economics, tragedies are generally qualitative not quantitative, but I would have liked part of that to be more discussion of relative tragedies.

And, part of that would also be wanting to learn more about what drives the Beauty and the Beast interest. 

You have my email, Marquise, should you ever read this. 

I probably won't "pursue." And, given your GR response on your update, I probably won't "see" you a lot more.