My Particular Friend footnotes: The Start of the Affair 2

Beginning at A Singular Woman:

I quickly moved my very few belongings to No. 1 Royal Crescent, which Miss House had rented for the season.

The Royal Crescent: a magnificent row of thirty houses in Bath, designed and built by John Wood the Younger. Actually, No. 3 Royal Crescent was originally Charlotte’s home in the first drafts, but I decided to change it to No. 1 because that house is now the Royal Crescent Museum, and they will not mind the hordes of fans clutching copies of My Particular Friend and taking pictures.
In the drawing-room, I found miniatures of Miss House and her brother, whose name I learned was Michael.
drawing-room: or withdrawing-room, the room where women would withdraw to after dinner while the men remained behind to drink and talk. A less grand house would have a sitting-room.
miniatures: small portraits sometimes worn as jewelry.
The pianoforte keyboard was open and the sheet music displayed a difficult piece, Bach’s The Art of Fugue, with many notations in what I believed to be Miss House’s hand.
pianoforte: the full name of the instrument in Italian, meaning quiet and loud

Johann Sebastian Bach was not as famous during this period as he is now, although there’s some debate how far his appreciation had fallen. His son Johann Christian Bach, however, was well known in England, having lived in London and is buried there. The father’s fame was re-established after the publication of a biography in 1802. J.S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue is a work possibly uncompleted upon his death in 1750. It’s difficult to say whether Charlotte House is attempting to complete the work or whether she simply has an incomplete score.

In several piles, tied with bright red ribbon, I found Miss House’s travelling library, which was again singular. In one untied bundle, I found Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, of which I had heard but never read, and The Monk and The Castle of Otranto, both of which I had read. At the top of another bundle was an Italian translation of a Galen anatomy text. And next to the textbooks were two large cases of pinned butterflies.

The Monk is mentioned in Northanger Abbey:

Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, “Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t’other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.”

The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic novel by Horace Walpole
Dangerous Illusions: another tale of seduction and intrigue from the 18th century by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.
Galen: a second-century philospher/physician born in what is now Turkey
‘Yes, my enquiries led me to Bristol.’
‘Bristol!’ I said, intrigued. ‘Whatever could take you to Bristol?’ I had assumed she was about Bath.
Bristol: a large port city in southwest England near the mouth of the River Severn; eleven miles from Bath

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