1. Monica Dickens - Mariana

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AMY HELMES, HOST:

Hello, and welcome to The Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW, HOST:

And I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: We’re best friends and co-authors of the Twisted Lit series of Young Adult novels, and we’re here to shed a little light on some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: Starting with a great English writer by the name of Dickens.

AMY: No, not that Dickens…

KIM: Who knew there was more than one?!

AMY: Exactly! While the Dickens we’re discussing today may not be so well known, we think she should definitely be on your reading list. So let’s raid the stacks and get started.

(SOUNDBITE OF INTRO MUSIC)

KIM: Okay, so of course everyone knows who Charles Dickens is, but did you know that his great granddaughter, Monica, was also a successful writer?

AMY: I didn’t! I had never heard of Monica Dickens before  you lent me her novel, Mariana, a few months ago. This is a woman who published more than thirty books, including bestselling novels, memoirs, nonfiction books and childrens’ series. In terms of sales and popularity, she was right up there holding her own with Daphne Du Maurier in her day. So we wanted to kick off this podcast with Monica Dickens because it was while discussing Mariana that we started to formulate the idea of creating this podcast.  Over the years, Kim and I have traded and discussed so many books by women authors, books that have become our new favorite classics, and I think the common refrain that kept coming up between us was, “This author is incredible; why on earth is nobody talking about her? Why on earth had we never heard of her before now? People should be reading her.”

KIM: So that’s basically what this podcast is about. We’re going to go beyond the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen and all the authors you’ve already heard of and start discovering some of these other great women writers in history, the ones everyone seems to have forgotten.

AMY: We want to go back in time and take another look at some of these women writers who paved the way and maybe even had success in their lifetime but didn’t really get their lasting due. So this podcast is about giving these literary ladies a much-needed reintroduction.

KIM: Which brings us back to Monica Dickens.

AMY: All right, so let’s just start with a little overview of who Monica Dickens was. She was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her grandfather was Dickens’ eighth child. She was born in 1915 and grew up comfortably upper-class in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London. She never really expected that she was going to turn out to be a writer, it was actually her sister and her mother who were more the “writers” in the family. I think it’s probably good that she didn’t start out with aspirations of being a writer because I think being Charles Dickens’ great granddaughter is probably a pretty heavy legacy if that’s your ambition in life. So when she was younger, she had some troubles. She was a little lost, a little aimless. She flunked out of three different schools, and we’ll talk about that later because it relates to Mariana, the novel we’re going to be talking about. So when she was around 20 years old, she was feeling depressed and directionless, and she made the unorthodox decision, based on her background, that she was going to go into domestic service. This was a move that shocked a lot of her family members because it’s like she was going to be the “downstairs” from Downton Abbey. She went to a cooking school (London’s Petite Cordon Bleu) and she ended up working for two years as a housemaid and a cook general in more than 20 upper-class London households. She wound up taking those experiences and turning it into a memoir that she wrote in her early 20s called One Pair of Hands. I think she was sort of asked to write this book by somebody that connected her with somebody in publishing who I would imagine heard her last name, Dickens, and said, “You know, you should write all this down.” So that was her first foray into writing and she wrote that memoir, (which I have yet to read but I’m really interested in checking it out now) but that book was a huge success for her; everybody loved it. I think it was part social commentary, but also really funny. Kim, have you read it?

KIM: No, I haven’t read it, but I can say that actually it was somebody that had a Dickens-related magazine who read the first pages of this and encouraged her to move forward on it.

AMY: Oh, interesting. 

KIM: So that connection was there with her great-grandfather.

AMY: Okay. So, she wrote this kind of nonfiction book, and then her second book was a novel, Mariana, which is the book we’re going to discuss today. It was also successful. During WWII she went on to enter the nursing field and she published a book that was similar to One Pair of Hands called One Pair of Feet, which was all about her time as a nurse. She ended up marrying an American naval officer, and she moved to the States after the war in 1951. But even in America, she continued to write. In the 70s and 80s, she wrote series for children, the most famous was probably The House At World’s End series. She also published her autobiography in 1978. And then she passed away in 1992. So, before we get into some more interesting tidbits about Monica, is there anything else, Kim, that particularly struck you about her life when you were reading about her?

KIM: I would just say that overall, for someone related to “literary royalty,” like you said, she seems pretty normal, like someone we’d be friends with. And the more that we’re going to go over the novel and what happens in it and that it’s a bit of a memoir of her life, it makes me feel even more and more like that. She seems very real. She’s not larger-than-life, she seems like a normal person.

AMY: Very relatable. A few tidbits that Kim and I really love about her that we read: as I mentioned before, she got expelled or tossed-out of three different schools, and those episodes are all represented to varying degrees in Mariana. First was St. Paul’s Girls’ School. Kim, what did she do to get expelled from St. Paul’s?

KIM: She dumped her uniform over into the river (off the side of a bridge). So nothing too terrible.

AMY: She went to a Parisian finishing school. She didn’t make the cut there, either. Finally, she went to the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Arts, but she got kicked out for lack of talent, which I kind of applaud her for. I feel like that was probably the best for her, that she didn’t go on to become an actress, because I can’t see that knowing what I know about her, really. She was shy and pretty bad at small talk. There’s an anecdote where during her first debutante ball, she disappeared into a bathroom to read Vanity Fair. And I think that’s kind of why we love her: that she hid out in a bathroom at a dance.

KIM: (laughing) I love that she did that! I could see both of us doing that, for sure. We would do that now!

AMY: It sort of  speaks to what you were saying, Kim, about her being somebody that we could love. Relatable.

KIM: That would be us. I could definitely see us doing that.

AMY: She had a dog named Ugly. I just think anybody that names her dog Ugly has to be a cool chick.

KIM: She has a sense of humor.

AMY: Yeah. Exactly. She also had a mild eating disorder in her early 20s and she was almost hospitalized for it, and that sort of comes into play a little bit in Mary Shannon, the heroine of Mariana, as well. We saw some of that struggle that she had with her weight. But yes, in many ways, Monica really is like the heroine of Mariana. She’s inwardly cynical, she’s self-effacing, she’s daring and rebellious but also insecure and awkward at times. There was a lot in her that you could love. Just to give you a little background about the time that Mariana was written. It was published in 1940 when she was in her early 20s. It was republished by Persephone Books in 1999, so you can definitely get your hands on a copy. 

KIM: Shout-out to Persephone Books!

AMY: Yeah. It’s basically a coming-of-age novel. She wrote this book at the start of WWII, but the story itself goes back to the protagonist’s youth in the 1930s. So most of the novel takes place between the first and second World Wars in those sort of happy, halcyon days of England.

KIM: So, the novel was a success at the time, but imagine having your publishing career kick off right at the beginning of WWII. I mean, it’s kind of like if you had a book out right now during Covid. (We’re recording this during the middle of a global pandemic.)

AMY: Right, yeah. It would have been challenging to maybe get a bit of traction… but she did.  The book was a success. So before we get into talking about this book more, we should mention that Kim and I both have cocktails at the ready that we have  made prior to the podcast. How is yours, Kim?

KIM: It’s delicious. It tastes a little bit like sangria. 

AMY: Yes.

KIM: It’s called a Dubonnet Cassis. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that exactly correctly, but it’s from the book! It’s inspired by a drink that Mary orders when she’s trying to be sophisticated. 

AMY: Yeah. So she’s in Paris and she’s attending dress school at the time. Dress-making school… what would you call that? Dress-making school, that doesn’t sound right. Fashion school, whatever it was. She’s sort of trying to be sophisticated in Paris, but she’s brand new, English girl, and when she goes to the bar it’s really the only drink she knows to order, so that’s what she orders. So our Dubonnet Cassis is Dubonnet, which is like a sweet, wine-based aperitif, and Cassis, which is a blackberry liqueur, with a little splash of soda and a twist of lime, and yes, Kim, it tastes pretty much exactly like sangria. I was nervous, because I don’t really like super sweet, syrupy drinks, but I liked it. It’s palatable.

KIM: I think I like it because it was in the book.

AMY: I like it for that reason, but also, did you know that a Dubonnet and gin is the favorite cocktail of the Queen of England?

KIM: Well, that makes me like it even more. That makes me feel sophisticated, too.

AMY: So we will put the ingredients for a Dubonnet Cassis in our show notes, but now that we have our cocktails handy, let’s dive into Mariana! 

KIM: All right, so let’s get to the book. The structure is basically a fairly drama-free coming of age story, it’s kind of a light romance almost. In the preface the book is referred to as a “hot water bottle” genre. I looked it up and I think actually the writer of the preface might have made up that phrase herself, but I take it to mean a cozy and comfortable story.

AMY: Can I just interrupt for a second and say that I actually read this book in a hammock, outside, and it’s lovely for that as well.  

KIM: Yes, I think it could be a beach read sort of thing, a page-turner in that way, because it’s sandwiched between this high-drama, this high-tension plot: she finds out in the very beginning that her significant other’s ship has been sunk by a mine at the beginning of WWII and that most of the men on board have been killed. And she’s out in the country not near a telephone and she has to wait all night to find out if he’s alive or dead. 

AMY: Her mind is just racing at that time, because there’s nothing she can do. It’s interesting, because when I was reading that beginning, you care, you’re concerned for her, but then you’re ready to dive into the meat of the story. And then when we wind up circling back to this little dramatic plot at the tail end of the book, because we have gotten to know her and her life — the main character’s name is Mary Shannon — because we’ve gotten to know Mary, I was just on the edge of my freakin’ seat. I was white-knuckling my way, trying to read as fast as I could. We’re not going to give any spoilers about what happens to the significant other, but I just thought it was really effective to, like you said, sandwich the coming-of-age story between these two segments.

KIM: Absolutely. By the end, you’re so emotionally committed. You know who the love interest is at that point. You very much care whether or not he has survived and we aren’t going to tell you, but I will tell you that it is emotional to read the end by the time you get there. So I think it’s brilliant that she used this tactic to take this “hot water bottle” genre and make it something really special.

AMY: Also, like any young girl growing up, she has several love interests, several crushes, paramours, throughout this story. So each time you would get to a new one (there were three main gents) you kind of reflect back on the very beginning where the navy officer is potentially down and you think, “Is this the guy? Is this going to be the guy she ends up with? Oh my gosh.” So that was kind of fun. Then you finally realize which is the love of her life and you are just fighting to make sure everything’s going to be okay.

KIM: Yeah. No wonder people loved this book at the time. I’m sure a lot of people were going through similar things at the beginning of WWII, wondering where their significant other was and if they’d be okay. So you can imagine they could really relate to this.

AMY: Absolutely. And when I first started reading the book, I assumed that the heroine’s name would be Mariana, right? It’s not. She’s never called Mariana, she’s Mary. The book’s title is actually tied to a poem by Tennyson of the same name, which is pretty much a dirgeful death wish of a poem. It’s about a young woman who is pining for the man she lost. So there’s definitely a connection between Tennyson’s poem and this overarching saga of “Is her sweetheart going to come home?” which I loved. It’s a poem that, when Mary goes to acting school in the middle of the book, it’s the monologue that she winds up having to read, and she does a horrible job of it, basically, because she’s a terrible actress, but yeah, I thought that was an interesting way to spin a prior work of literature.

KIM: Yeah, the theme of powerlessness and sort of events that you can’t control. Basically it feels like she’s taking “Mariana” and making it an answer to how you can handle those things that are out of your control and still try to move forward in your life in spite of them.

AMY: Right, and I think the arc of this novel, once you get into Mary’s story of her childhood and her growing up. It’s really the journey of how she becomes her own person and becomes a strong woman. The book may be sectioned out in a way that’s kind of based on the various men who come and go in her life, but when all is said and done, it’s really a book about her finding herself. So at the end, even though there’s no major plot per se, it’s sort of a slice of her life and we are getting a window into one girl’s existence. There’s not a lot that happens that’s out of the ordinary. You sort of have to like that sort of book.

KIM: I think that’s true, because even though it is the men who come and go in her life, I don’t think too much importance is placed on the men, in a good way. I think they’re part of how she’s figuring out who she is, but it really does remain her thoughts and the things that she’s trying to overcome. It really is about her, I don’t think it gets too caught up in these other characters, which I think is a good thing. 

AMY: So what do we love about Mary? We’ve talked about what we like about Monica Dickens, but now let’s talk about her heroine.  

KIM: Okay, yeah, so what I love about Mary is that she isn’t larger than life, but she isn’t an anti-heroine either. She’s kind of an “every girl” and “every woman” throughout the novel. Her teachers report that she’s seventh in her class. That sounds great until you learn that there are ten other girls in the class. They say she has a tendency in her to resent authority to the point of resistance. I mean, I can identify with that. I definitely didn’t do much of the resisting part, but I definitely thought about it and wanted to. The teacher goes on to write in this report card home to Mary’s mom that: “Although she is popular with her fellow pupils, I am afraid she is a bad mixer, being at the same time intolerant and unconfident of others and disinclined to enter into the life of the community.” It says her heart’s in the right place and she will eventually mature into a fine woman, but it’s not the most enthusiastic review, right?

AMY: No. She’s not academically special at all and she doesn’t see herself as special at all. I mean, she has a lot of mortifying moments and she just thinks she’s very average, which is funny because as you go along in this book, there’s nothing average. She’s a remarkable young lady, but she doesn’t see herself that way at all. But I think, going back to her relatability, that’s sort of endearing.

KIM: Absolutely. 

AMY: So after this very beginning where she hears on the radio that the ship has gone down, the next chapter jumps into, would you say she’s 11 or 12 years old?

KIM: Yes. I don’t think it’s explicitly says, but I think about that age. Yeah.

AMY: We go back to sort of her family’s summer compound. I liken it to the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts. They had this cool estate that belonged to her grandparents and the whole family gathers there in the summer. This place is called Charbury in the novel, but in real life, Monica Dickens had a similar summer house that she’d go to on her mother’s side of the family called Chilworthy. Everything sounds very similar and autobiographical about this.

KIM: Yeah, very much drawn from her experiences and her memory of that and how much she loved that.

AMY: And the important thing that comes out of these summers at Charbury is her cousin, Denys. What did you make of Denys?

KIM: Oh, you know… I found him a bit annoying from the very beginning, actually. It says clearly that everyone worshipped him. All of his cousins worshipped him. He could basically do no wrong. He was great and perfect and all-powerful, but the grown-ups were kind of like, Okay, he’s going to get his when he goes to the next level of school. They’re going to basically beat him out of it, is what it sounded like. But Mary is basically…

AMY: Besotted. Totally crushing on her cousin. When I first was reading this, I was taken aback and I didn’t know what to think. In the context of this time period, was that normal? Because Mary was acting like it was completely normal, right?

KIM: I know you did some research into whether it was or wasn’t. I will say maybe I have read too many historical novels, because I felt like it wasn’t that shocking to me.

AMY: Right. I felt the same way. I thought, “How am I supposed to think about this, because this could be perfectly normal, and she’s acting like, ‘Oh, yeah, I hope Denys and I are going to be the hot ticket here and the family is going to be happy for us.’” British royalty have been marrying their cousins for centuries, even through Queen Victoria’s era. I knew Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were cousins, so i thought, “Okay, maybe in that time period it was more accepted.” So I looked it up and from what I found, after WWI in England it definitely started to be frowned upon. Up until that point, it wasn’t as big a deal. It was kind of commonplace if you wound up marrying your cousin. Not commonplace, but it wasn’t taboo necessarily, but after WWI, it started to be like, “eeeh, Maybe not.” I think I read that around that time period, one in 6,000 couples would have been married in that day. So while I was reading the book, there was some high drama between Mary and Denys. They made out after the fox hunt. Which, by the way, I’ve been to a fox hunt. Did you know that?

KIM: What????! NOoooo! How could I not have known this? Oh, my god.

AMY: That’s a story for another time. But yeah, so Denys and Mary, cousins from Charbury, they kissed at one point, and he was definitely leading her on and so she sort of put all the cards out on the table and said, “What’s going on between us?” And he laughed it off and said, “Oh, silly, we could never have a romance because that would be incest.” And he says the word. That was a complicated little thing to sort out and a little bit shocking.

KIM: it made me really like him even less at the point because I felt like he really was taking advantage of her youth and the fact that she really looked up to him.

AMY: Yes, absolutely. After that whole episode, she gets over Denys pretty quickly and is like, “Okay, he’s a player.” So like Monica Dickens, Mary is kind of aimless after finishing school as a sort of second-rate student. She decides that she’s going to follow in her Uncle Geoffrey’s footsteps (He’s an actor), and she’s going to go to acting school and see, maybe she can be a movie star. This is one of my favorite parts of the book because her description of the acting school is so hilarious.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: I have a little bit that I will read from this part, just because when they get to Miming Class… I mean, you can already imagine. “Individual Miming” is the name of the class: “This was the worst part of all. The students stood in a whispering line against the wall and each in turn had to step into the middle of the room and render in dumb show whatever Miss Dallas’s whimsical fancy conceived. One could not laugh. It was all so sad and embarrassing and too painfully suggestive of what one probably looked like oneself.” Remember the green tunics and tights was the outfit they needed to wear?

KIM:  Aw, it was hilarious.  

AMY: She paints the picture of the acting school so well.

KIM: Yeah, that and when she just has enough of it. She’s in the middle of this live performance and she goes into this blackout rage and I quote: “She began to burlesque.” And that, by the way, is how she gets kicked out of acting school.

AMY: And it’s kind of shocking because what we’ve known of her up to this time is that she’s pretty reserved and just a wallflower, so imagining her up on stage in front of all the parents and relatives of all the students and she makes a fabulous, racy display of herself to the point where she gets kicked out, and then she just runs off stage and leaves the school. It was great. It was great. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: She does not know what to do with her life, but her mother convinces her to go to Paris to study dressmaking, so that’s what she does and there, she meets Bachelor No. 2: Pierre?

KIM: Yeah, Pierre.

AMY: I have to admit, I got kind of swept up in Pierre at the beginning. 

KIM: I thought he was going to be “the one” at first, when she first met him. I thought, “He’s going to be the one somehow!”

AMY: He’s great. He’s great at first, and very sophisticated. He’s got money. It seems like he’s the answer to all Mary’s problems, because back in England, her mom is having financial issues. If she marries this guy (which is what he wants) all that will be solved.

KIM: And Mary is very uncertain about her future. She’s not really into what she’s doing, what she’s studying. She hasn’t really found anything yet so I think he kind of fills a hole there.

AMY: Right I found it an interesting scene when she took him back to England at one point to meet the whole family that usually was at Charbury and she saw him juxtaposed with all her English relatives and realized, “this is not the guy.” By that point the worm has turned a little bit with him and we are starting to see that he’s a jerk. But he reminded me at that point of Cecil Vyse in A Room With a View.

KIM: A hundred percent. Yep.

AMY: Just totally foppish. And thank god, she kicks him to the curb.

KIM: And there’s a great quote where she talks about the difference between Paris and England which is also the difference between Pierre and someone who might be her true love. It says, “If Paris had a feeling of its own in the air, so had England, but you only noticed it when you had been away. It was a feeling of damp, fresh security. Everything was so right and so comfortably unexotic, like a cabbage. It seemed that even the breezes blew there because they knew that England was the only possible country in which to blow. Mary had never been away for so long before, and she stepped down the gangway with the joyful feeling that she was returning to where she belonged.”

AMY: The interesting note about that section, because I loved that whole paragraph as well, and I thought, “Oh, god, her love for her country and just ‘England’s dampness’” — she loves it there and doesn’t want to live permanently in Paris, but I think it’s interesting that Monica Dickens ended up leaving England in the fifties and going to America. She obviously did leave if she felt that way. Kind of interesting. 

KIM: Yeah, things probably changed, maybe, with WWII and everything. Maybe she just couldn’t return to the way it was.

AMY: Okay, so she dumps Pierre, thank God, and she ends up back in England. The woman that wrote the preface for the Persephone version of this novel that was republished in 1999, Harriet Lane, she said the “plot would probably ring some bells with a certain Bridget Jones.” Let’s discuss how she meets Sam, who is the guy that ends up becoming her husband. I don’t think we’re spoiling it to talk about the men this way, that she winds up with this guy. We’re not going to spoil the ending, but Sam is the guy she ends up marrying, and their “meet-cute” is one of the best that I’ve read.

KIM: It’s amazing and so, so real compared to your typical meet-cute that happens.

AMY: Basically, we won’t even spoil this part other than to say that she gets sick to her stomach. 

KIM: It is so very Bridget Jones.

AMY: It’s just very Bridget Jones, it involves vomiting, and it’s really funny, but also your heart just goes out to her because it’s very mortifying. But it all works out in the end.

KIM: It’s very sweet, too!

AMY: So sweet. And there’s a poignant passage in the last chapter where it’s nighttime and she knows  that in the morning she’s going to find out whether her husband is alive or dead. She’s kind of thinking back on Tennyson’s poem and Mariana. In the poem, Mariana is just basically like, “I want to die. I can’t live without this guy. I can’t go on.” Mary has a different perspective and I'll just read that line. She says, “But Mariana was wrong. You couldn’t die. You had to go on. When you were born, you were given a trust of individuality that you were bound to preserve. It was precious. The things that happened in your life, however closely connected with other people, developed and strengthened that individuality. You became a person. Nothing that ever happens in life can take away the fact that I am me.” I loved that because even though we didn’t know what was going to become of her husband, we got the sense that she was going to be okay. She was a strong woman by that point, and she was going to persevere. I thought that was beautiful.

KIM: Absolutely. I agree. It gives me the chills hearing that again. I remember reading that in the moment and having that feeling. I also think that gives a real glimpse into some of the passages that you’ll read in this book. It is a coming of age story, but there are so many really great quotes in the book that I think are inspiring.

AMY: So, as we might have mentioned earlier, it’s not like this book has a really strong plotline or action that’s happening. It’s kind of a slice of this girl’s life. It’s like following along with a friend’s life that you’re catching up with. There are no film adaptations of this novel, and I wonder if it could even work.   

KIM: I think it could be a miniseries. I think it could be like a Masterpiece miniseries. 

AMY: Ohhh! Yeah!

KIM: I do think you’re right though. For a film, though, it might not be quite right. Like a two-hour typical film.

AMY: Right. Definitely Hollywood would have to ‘zhuzh’ it up a bit  in terms of the things that happened in it. The book itself is amazing, but to make it something you’d watch in one sitting, you’d need more that was happening. 

KIM: Yep.

AMY: So let’s say this is a BBC miniseries suddenly. Who would we cast as some of these characters we’ve talked about?

KIM: Okay, I wonder if we’re going to have the same people. We have not talked about this before. So I don’t know that many actors in their 20s by name, but I was thinking Saoirse Ronan for Mary and maybe Callum Turner for Denys. (He was Frank Churchhill in the recent Emma that just came out this year.) Or maybe Timothee Chalamet, but I feel like I should save him because I think I’m going to want to cast him in the future. And then for Sam, maybe Tom Holland, I think he was Superman. I can see him as Sam because Sam seems like such a sweet, personable nice guy.

AMY: Oh, yes. For sure.

KIM: What about you? What do you think? I’m dying to hear!

AMY: So for Mary, I’m saying Maisie Williams. 

KIM: Remind me of who she is?

AMY: Maisie is from Game of Thrones. She’s the youngest Stark sister.

KIM: Oh my god, yes! I love it! Okay, I want to change to that one. I love it. 

AMY: A physical description of Mary from the book, it says: “She was a shrimp of a child with no natural color so that people said triumphantly she looked delicate. When she grinned she looked like a gnome with her narrow chin and little pointed ears.” I mean, that sounds like Maisie Williams to me. Maisie could play both the younger and the grown-up Mary.

KIM: She totally could. She totally could straddle both. Absolutely. 

AMY: For Denys, I’m going to go with Harry Styles. He’s kind of like a charmer, bad boy. He’s good looking, and she always talked about the flop of hair that would hang over Denys’s  forehead and Harry Styles has that. Pierre, I would cast Louis Garrel who played Jo’s German husband in the recent Little Women.

KIM: Oh, I love that. He’s much older though.

AMY: Okay.  So yeah, he might not be young enough. For Sam, I said Harry Hadden-Paton, who, in Downton Abbey, he was the guy that married Lady Edith at the end. They kind of describe Sam in the book as not necessarily drop-dead-gorgeous, but as somebody who looks like he’d be a good husband, a nice husband. That’s how she described him.

KIM: I can see that. You know, I’m seeing a huge problem here. We are going to want to adapt and write screenplays for all of our episodes of our podcasts!

AMY: We’re doing some of the work for ourselves right now basically. We’re getting some of this out of the way.

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: So what did we discover today from reading Monica Dickens’ Mariana? We discovered that crushing on your cousin is a really bad idea.

KIM: Yes, absolutely. Especially your first cousin. We also discovered that throwing up can be wildly romantic. Who knew?

AMY: Who knew? We discovered that acting classes are pretty strange in any era…

KIM: And we’ve discovered that Charles isn’t the only “Dickens” worth reading!

AMY: So moving on, what are you currently reading this week, Kim?

KIM: Oh my gosh, I’ve been wanting to tell you about this, but I saved it. I am reading Ellen Wood’s East Lynne. It’s about an aristocratic woman who abandons her husband and children for a wicked seducer, and apparently it was devoured by everyone from the Prince of Whales to Joseph Conrad. So I’m excited to really dig into this book.

AMY: That sounds amazing, and guess what? I’VE NEVER HEARD OF IT. Sounds like a future episode, don’t you think?

KIM: That’s what I was thinking?

AMY: When this pandemic shutdown started and libraries closed, I realized I needed the fattest possible book to get me through it if I wasn’t going to be able to check books out of the library. So right now I am a third of the way through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: The History of a Young Lady. It was published in 1748, it’s over 1500 pages long in very, very small print. It’s very dramatic. It’s about a teenage girl who has three options. She can either manage this kind of dorky guy that her family is pressuring her to marry who is kind of a cross between Pride & Prejudice’s Mr. Collins and Uriah Heap. 

KIM: Oh, god.

AMY: He’s just an awful human being. Or she can run away with the sort of town cad, womanizer guy that everybody knows has a bad reputation, but he is offering to take her away in the dark of night to get her away from this impending marriage.

KIM: Don’t do it, Clarissa!

AMY: Or her third option is to kill herself! She’s a teenager and she’s very shrewd and clever, but there’s lots of teenage angst.

KIM: That’s a good pandemic read!

AMY: So that’s all for today’s podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode. 

AMY: If you have any ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see featured on our show, let us know.

KIM: Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her” into one of your new favorite authors!

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