🎃 Horrortober Challenge + Backlogathon 2022 📚
🔮 13th October: Do you believe in Friday 13th superstitions?
I don't believe in Friday 13th superstitions, no. But for some reason the broken mirror = bad luck superstition is really strong for me 🤷🏽♀️. Someone has put a broken mirror in our apartment building's hard rubbish collection, and it's been sitting to the side for a month, and it's SO UNNERVING >.< (And I wasn't even the person who broke the mirror!!!)
As part of @pastelhorroracademia and @logarithmicpanda's reading challenges, I've started a book of short stories by Barbara Baynton. This collection depicts the harsh life and ever-present fear (of personal safety, of physical health, of your child's safety) of living as a (white) female in rural Australia at the turn of the century. As Helen Garner writes in the Introduction, Baynton's stories "are driven by a contained, contemptuous rage that no woman of spirit can fail to recognise, or to share." It's not surprising that, in 1902, Baynton had to go out to London to get her stories published. White Australians, it seems, didn't want to see the mirror of their own society - even if it was only fiction.