One contentious relationship on the show is that of the Dowager Countess Violet, the Earl Robert's mother, and Robert's wife Cora, an American-born heiress. Cora, like many other wealthy American girls, came to England in search of a husband and married Robert in what was first a marriage of convenience – Robert needed the money. But creator Julian Fellowes says Violet wasn't happy with the marriage from the beginning. "She would rather have taken less of a dowry with someone who knew the ropes better," he said. Another cardinal sin in Violet's eyes: not providing a son. "In those days the selection of the sex – in fact, anything 'defective' about a child – was thought to be the woman's fault," Fellowes said. "By definition, of course, your mother-in-law had always managed to have a son."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
