Glorious Amplitude

Lois Palken Rudnick's edited volume offers this rich nugget from Mabel Dodge Luhan....a celebration of one very large body that defies conventional expectations:

[In the summer of 1912] Gertrude and Alice came to stay at the villa. The year before, Gertrude had lived in Fiesole--and she had trudged down one hill and across town and up another to see us. She used to wear a sort of kimono made of brown corduroy in the hot Tuscan summertime, and arrive just sweating, her face parboiled. And when she sat down, fanning herself with her broad-brimmed hat with its wilted, dark brown ribbons, she exhaled a vivid steam around her. When she got up she frankly used to pull her clothes off from where they stuck to her great legs. Yet with all this she was not at all repulsive. On the contrary, she was positively, richly attractive in her grand ampleur. She always seemed to like her own fat anyway and that usually helps other people to accept it. She had none of the funny embarrassment Anglo-Saxons have about flesh.

---Mabel Dodge Luhan, European Experiences, in Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edited by Lois Palken Rudnick, 1999.