• Cassandra Atherton


She’s a Durbeyfield from the tips of her toes to the peduncle of the strawberry on her lips. Pity the pithy pith that touches her lips but is severed by her teeth.  She prefers Demeter to Artemis but she’s no corn dolly.  On May Day she stands on the bar at Rolliver’s with a strawberry daiquiri in her hand and a horn of plenty at her feet. There’s nothing cornball about cornucopias. She’s not interested in genealogy, the Compleat Fortune-Teller or Macbethian comparisons of the Thane of Cawdor to her father.  Her ‘numbers of to-morrows just all in a line’ now belong to Polanski, smart Alecs and men called after celestial beings; she’s not anybody’s angel in the house.  She gallops away on Prince, hale and hardy.