114. Elsie Robinson with Allison Gilbert

AMY: Hi, everyone! Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. Today we’re discussing Elsie Robinson, a newspaper columnist from the first half of the 20th century whose daily copy reached 20 million per day (and millions more through syndication).  In her day, she was the highest-paid woman writer in the newspaper business  — although, no surprise, she was still woefully undercompensated for the staggering amount of advice columns, feature articles and breaking news stories she churned out.

AMY: “I am not a columnist. I am a factory,” she  wrote in a letter to her boss, William Randolph Hearst, in which she demanded more money after years of asking for (and being denied) a raise. Over her 40-year career, she wrote more than 9,000 columns and articles, and to top it all off, she even drew her own accompanying editorial cartoons!

KIM: Years earlier she’d walked away from a life of privilege in search of personal freedom, toiled in a gold mine as a single mother, and eventually hit rock-bottom before clawing her way to national success, becoming a household name revered by both adults and young people alike. On top of all this, she wrote poetry and short stories and penned a memoir. 

AMY: I mean, she was an Oprah-level superstar, and yet today, the name Elsie Robinson draws only blank stares. So we’re thrilled to welcome a guest today who knows more than anyone about Robinson’s inspiring life journey from misfit to miner to media maven. 

KIM: We can’t wait to introduce her, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music] 

AMY: Our guest today, Allison Gilbert, is an Emmy-Award-winning journalist and regular contributor to the New York Times. She has written several books on coping after the death of one’s parents in addition to being a co-editor on the book Covering Catastrophe: Broadcast Journalists Report September 11. Allison also hosted a 20-part documentary series called “Women Journalists of 9/11: Their Stories” in collaboration with the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, for which she also narrates the historical exhibition audio tour.

KIM: Her latest book is Listen, World! How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman, published in September by Seal Press and written in collaboration with Julia Scheeres. Allison, thank you for joining us! Welcome to the show!

ALLISON: I am so honored and pleased to be here. Thanks for having me.

AMY: Of course. So you explain in the book how you first discovered Elsie Robinson. You write about that in the afterward to Listen, World. But I would love for you to share it with our listeners right off the bat because I think it's such a touching anecdote.

ALLISON: Well, it's deeply personal, so I'm very happy to share it and honored that you would ask me. It happened rather fortuitously, and rather oddly for me to say fortuitously, because that kind of conjures that it was a very happy, uplifting moment. But it was after my mother died. I was going through her belongings, packing up my childhood home to get it ready for sale. And I was really having a tough time. I had just basically graduated college. I was 25, and I felt way too young to have lost my mom and grappling with all those emotions. I wasn't married, didn't have kids. I had this incredible long line of adulthood ahead of me without her, and I was making the chore of packing up her stuff take a really long time, and what that meant for me was going through all her books, opening each one, shaking them as vigorously as I could to see if any notes or pieces of paper or dollar bills or who knows what would have fallen out or to look at her annotations. What did she underline? Just wanting to see my mom's handwriting again. And low and behold, something did indeed fall out of one of the books. So my mom had retyped a poem on onion skin paper, and it was a poem called "Pain," and it was the most tough-love poem about grief I had ever read. It was like being slapped across the face, like that Moonstruck moment. "Snap out of it!" It was like that. And it was attributed to Elsie Robinson. And I had no idea who that was, and I had to find out.

AMY: So it's like your mom was kind of sending you a message right there. 

ALLISON: Yeah, in so many ways, writing this biography of Elsie Robinson, it began at that moment because I had to know why my mother was called to retype this poem by this writer. And the tone was so in keeping with my mom's POV of motherhood, which was also kind of do it yourself, you know, figure it out on your own. And not that she didn't love me, but she thought the best way to show love was to make sure I could be a survivor. And Elsie Robinson's voice, the way she writes, and we have uncovered, you know, 9,000 of her newspaper columns, poems, essays, and I'm sure we'll be talking about her writing, um, she is the most incredible, in my view, Lost Woman of Lit because she had this incredible voice and it helped me get through the loss of my mom. But her voice and her words also helped me raise my kids. It helped me think through even urgent issues that we still discuss today that have nothing to do with family. Her take on race and her take on antisemitism, or capital punishment. You name it, I read it, I felt it, and it made me feel incredibly lucky to have written this book with my co-partner, but, really, I don't wanna be too hokey, but with my mom.

KIM: That's beautiful. It gives me the chills. That's really wonderful. Yeah. So at what point following that discovery did you actually start researching this book? And then how hard was it to unearth Elsie's story once you began?

ALLISON: So there are three answers to the "how long did it take?" question. So my mother died nearly 30 years ago, and so it's been a slow burn of compiling information. Listen, World, our biography, is the first to be written about Elsie Robinson. So the bread crumbs were few. So we really had to do the exhumation of her life on our own, which of course is time consuming. And then about 11 years ago, I would say, the slow burn turned more serious when I said to my literary agent, "This is my next project. I really wanna write this biography. It's speaking to me in every conceivable way." Um, and I struggled. I struggled with how to tell the story. Um, it beat me. I just couldn't wrestle the story in a way that I felt was compelling enough to move forward. And then about, I would say, three years ago-ish, that's when Julia and I became incredible collaborators. And she really is the only reason why we were able to get this book over that finish line. I mean, what an incredible, you know, writer, partner in crime to have. Julia and I have actually only met in person three times. So yeah, the whole book was really done on Google Docs. It was done via email, via texting each other at all hours of the day and night. There were three times where we've actually met in person and we managed to pull off something that we are both incredibly proud of and really feel like it lifts up this forgotten woman into the realm of being reread and appreciated. And I hope once readers get their hands on it, they will feel, um, a little bit more knowledgeable about how hard it was to kind of go after your dreams. Even a hundred years ago in this country, it was tough.

AMY: Yeah. So let's dive into her story then. So like one of our previous lost ladies from this year, Miriam Michaelson, Elsie grew up in this sort of rough-and-tumble town out west. It was called Benicia, California, in the Bay Area. Allison, you write that living here gave Elsie "a radical empathy and open mindedness" that she'd use later in her writing career. So tell us how this girlhood shaped her.

ALLISON: She was born in 1883 and she grew up the way we, I think, envision the Victorian era. Constraining corsets and long dresses and high collars that she found not only literally suffocating, but of course figuratively suffocating. Yes, Benicia was by Western standards, somewhat open. It's a waterfront town. Gold miners would come in with their pockets of gold, you know. You would have people coming in by the shiploads, cargo and people of transient populations coming in from many foreign lands. This was an expansive landscape both in geography, but also in just how people of different cultures and races and religions came together. This was all in front of her. We also write there was a, you know, a red light district towards the water, and up on top of the hill there was a convent. And so there was this wonderful friction between the God-fearing souls of Benicia and those more renegade souls who were downtown. And this was all about her childhood, this push and pull of good and bad, evil and light. She wanted a bigger life that she saw. Where did those ships come from? Where do those trains go? These were the questions that she had and were occupying her mind when she was a teenager, and she wanted to see what was out there.

KIM: My ears actually perked up when I read in your book that she was a fan of the novels of Margaret Wolf Hungerford. We did an episode last year on her, and Elsie was also reading a ton and writing from an early age, right?

ALLISON: She was a voracious reader. You know, she also loved to write, and what she would say is that it was for nobody else but her. She was also an incredible illustrator and eventually, um, when she did have a child, she had a son, she would write stories and draw pictures to entertain him. And so this was something that was going on throughout her entire life.

KIM: And she wasn't just reading and writing. You kind of said a little bit earlier, um, about it, but she was out and about. She was noticing everything. She wanted to experience it all and soak it up, including, and you have a great story about this, the red light district. I mean, wouldn't you wanna know more about that?

ALLISON: It's interesting, you know, there were places and things that she wanted to see and claw her way into that were really off limits. And she found herself more comfortable playing with the boys, being with the boys, having more access when she was kind of running around with them, then being prim and proper back with the girls. She was much more comfortable in what we would call tomboy time, right? Getting dirty, as she would say, swiping watermelons from neighborhood gardens. Um, and this also informed her sensibility. We, I'm sure, will talk about her time working in the gold mines. And this is another reason why that is completely believable. At first, you're like, "Really? You worked for three years, the only woman in a gold mine amongst men?" And yes, she was always more comfortable with men, with boys. It made her feel that she could say what she wanted to say and be heard. And that was validating to her.

AMY: And so back to the red light district though, she's kinda wandering around down there with eyes wide open . It just points to like that nosy reporter instinct.

ALLISON: Yes! Oh yes. She, uh, was very happy to peer through ajar doors and if you're gonna be a reporter, you have to be very comfortable peering through ajar doors. And so I think you're right to bring up her experience with the red light district where she saw prostitutes doing their work, where she was literally seeing a transaction between adults that perhaps was unseemly to those up the hill by the convent, uh, to her was eye opening and it just showed her there were many ways of living a life.

AMY: So the memoir that Elsie goes on to write later in life is called I Wanted Out! So even though Benicia, like you said, is vibrant and exciting and there's a lot going on, it's kind of the first place from which she wants to escape. She realizes there's so much out in the world that she wants to explore. And there's a great anecdote from the book about her standing alone in a cemetery up the street from her girlhood home. Can you tell that story?

ALLISON: Yeah, it's such a great story. So one night she's in her childhood home and she is just getting antsy, antsy, antsier to leave. And she wants to kind of take her case, as she would say, to God. And so from her point of view, where would God be? Where would he hear her or she hear her, uh, the loudest? And so in her teenage estimation, that was getting out of bed in her nightgown, walking up the hill to the cemetery, taking her case directly to God, saying I wanted out, show me the way. And soon enough someone does come to show her a potential way out. There was a visitor who came to Benicia, and that was certainly a very exciting ticket, potentially, to see the rest of the country.

KIM: I can just see that scene being filmed of her in the graveyard. It's like, "Hollywood, are you listening?"

ALLISON: Oh, you know what? I'm so glad that you say that because when we were writing this book, there are so many parts of it where you're like, "Really? Did this actually happen?" The way she's talking about it really does seem so cinematic, and we, as biographers, took great pains to retrace every step. Could that have been possible? Could you have gone in your nightgown from her childhood home to this top of the hill? Like, how far really was that? Like, we wanted to make sure we were doing those types of really rigorous calculations and then some, right? So every single story that we share, um, is cited in the footnotes of how we know this is how it went down. So we feel very, um, comfortable as biographers with those citations. Because in some ways, as you just said, Kim, it's so Hollywood that sometimes you wonder did it really happen. And so Julia and I invested a great deal of time triangulating Elsie Robinson's version of events.

KIM: So listeners, you can just let go and enjoy it. You don't have to worry.

ALLISON: Yes, Yes, 

KIM: yes, 

AMY: Yeah, it's true because when you're dealing with somebody that's such a great storyteller, you do have to pause for a second and be like, "Wait, is she embellishing?" But okay, so that's good to know that we've got all this kind of fact checked for us.

KIM: So after this graveyard scene, she's excited because she thinks she's going to get to go to college. Her older sister goes to college. Um, she gets to watch that amazing experience. Her sister comes home on vacation and talks about all the stuff she's doing there. She even gets to attend her sister's graduation, but then she finds out she's not going to get to go to college.

ALLISON: Yeah, that was heartbreaking for a girl who grew up loving words. To not be able to proceed like her siblings was crushing. There was only one other option for her. It was to get married. The social strictures of the day were get married, have children.

AMY: Okay, so this brings us to this mysterious visitor to Benicia, which you alluded to earlier. A handsome stranger who comes to town, a young widower from a very wealthy East Coast family who happened to be visiting a friend in town, and he and Elsie lock eyes at church, and that's pretty much it. She feels like she's ready to marry this guy and be whisked away to a new life. However, there is one small catch. Allison, explain that for us.

ALLISON: Well, you're right. He comes from this incredibly wealthy family in Brattleboro, Vermont, and his entire family, his siblings all grew up going to Northfield Seminary and Mount Hermon School. This institution is still in existence today called Northfield Mount Hermon, and so if she was going to marry, his name is Christie, if she was gonna marry Christie, his parents made a deal. You can marry our son, you westerner you, if when you come east you attend Northfield and you get a little polish and you learn about God and you learn how to keep house and you learn all of those wifery skills that she would need in order to be a member of the Christie Crowell household. And was it a household! They lived in Lindenhurst, which was a 37-room mansion. Enormous. This incredible opulence. And in order to live there she needed to present in a certain way. And so for one year she had to apply and then matriculate, and then attend Northfield Seminary.

AMY: "You're just not quite good enough for us yet, little lady." It's kind of insulting. 

KIM: It's so insulting. Yeah. Yeah. So then she gets to the seminary and by the time her year there is over, she's already getting the sense that the marriage to Christie was not really what she wanted. She's begging her mother to let her break off the engagement, but she's ultimately pressured to go through with it. 

ALLISON: Yeah, I think that she saw the writing on the wall. She would leave Northfield with him on some weekends to go back to Lindenhurst, this mansion in Brattleboro, Vermont and to spend time with his family, like you would to get used to your boyfriend, you know, your fiance's family. And it was just somber. There was no levity, there was no gaiety. But even more so, it's a very Puritan New England home where God is first, happiness is second. It was very proper, and it just felt like the mistake was getting larger by the day.

KIM: can imagine the looks. You did kind of describe the differences in dinner tables from her home and the exuberance of it and everything to this staid environment where they're kind of looking askance at her and she's getting in trouble if she even, you know, cracks a smile or shows any sense of humor.

AMY: Paging Megan Markle.

KIM: I know.

AMY: What I kept thinking of, you know, like Megan Markle trying to fit in with these uptight Windsors when she's lived a more, you know, relaxed and carefree life. So she goes somewhere and is being stifled and told to shut up basically.

ALLISON: That is perfect. I have never heard that. That is the exact way to put it. I love it.

AMY: So once again, to reference Elsie's memoir, she wanted out. She called life in Brattleboro "hell on earth." Those are her words, and described herself as "frantic for freedom." And so she found another unlikely ticket. Uh, Alison, tell us about this.

ALLISON: So near Lindenhurst mansion where she lived, uh, there is still in existence today a hospital for the mentally insane and there was a patient there who had off campus privileges, like many people at the assignment did, where they were able to mingle with the regular towns folk.

His name is Robert. Robert Wallace. And he was also estranged from his family because of his own struggles. And he wanted to write a children's book, but every children's book needs an illustrator. And he was recommended to reach out to Elsie Robinson, who was always known as being this prolific, not only writer, but also a fantastic illustrator. And so they partnered on two children's books. He was the writer, she was the illustrator. And, um, a romance blossomed.

AMY: Again, you're reading it thinking, "No way."

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: You know, so I'm just gonna jump ahead to, they decide to skip town. They're not happy in Brattleboro anymore, so let's both just get outta here. 

ALLISON: Yeah, it wasn't immediate, but they ended up in this town called Hornitos, which is in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in the heart of the mother lode where people have gone for years to mine for gold. And Robert, being that he was, um, delusional in many ways because he was a patient again at this mental hospital, he thought he was gonna go strike it rich. And for a time he actually was successful. So Elsie ended up following him there, but then he left. But she stuck. And she wanted to make a go of it because she had no other options at this time. She was a single mom and she needed to make money. She needed to survive. And so what was she gonna do? She became a gold miner.

KIM: It's amazing.

AMY: Crazy. And yeah, so she's a single mom. We didn't really mention the birth of George, but she has one, one son.

ALLISON: And he's so cute. He's so 

KIM: He

AMY: He is cute, but he is, uh, sadly, you know, in ill health for pretty much all of his life, right?

ALLISON: He was born with a chronic bronchial issue. He had chronic asthma. This was in the days before there were any sort of easy cure for an asthma attack, right? And so an asthma attack could literally be deadly. There were many times when Elsie was caring for him where his skin would be turning blue, where she really thought that he was gasping for his last breath. I can't say, I mean, as a mom, I found some of her recollections of George's ill health to be absolutely searing, because I felt her concern for him. So she was there in Hornitos with George and part of the, um, upside of Hornitos, of course there was backbreaking labor, but part of the reason why she wanted to be there not only to make money, is that the air in Hornitos was easier for her son to breathe. Doctors at that time, at the turn of the century, were advocating geography as a cure for asthma, and Hornitos checked those boxes.

AMY: So she is in the mining business. She's swinging a pickaxe, she's doing the hard labor.

ALLISON: I know, it's crazy.

AMY: I know. And then, you know, also meanwhile taking care of her son, cooking, doing the laundry, all that. And, oh yeah, on the side, let me just start up a writing career here. So, um, Allison, let's talk about sort of how she gets her start writing, but then I also want you to talk about this "Indiana Jones" moment that you had in Hornitos.

ALLISON: Well, we had such a great time going to Hornitos. I don't wanna really call it a ghost town. I mean, there are a few people who live there, but it's basically a ghost town. So she was there and at night, after she walked, imagine, you walk four miles to your job. You are in a gold mine for what, 8, 9, 10 hours a day. You walk four miles back to your hut where you are living with your son. Cook him dinner. Make sure he's doing some sort of homework lessons, you know, making sure that he's kind of staying apace. And then once that's done, then you are turning on your kerosene can lamp. You're turning over a packing box on which to put your manual typewriter and you're typing at night. Clickety-click, clickety-click, where people could probably hear you through the cabin walls late at night. Imagine that side hustle. Imagine being so interested in pursuing your path that that's what sustained you. That's what fueled you to stay up late at night. It was incredible. And in terms of that moment that you were just describing, uh, when Julia and I went to Hornitos, we are 99.9% certain that we actually discovered the actual typewriter that Elsie Robinson learned to type on. Because she did not know how to type. She was gifted a typewriter from her one very close girlfriend that she made in Hornitos. And that woman changed the course of Elsie Robinson's life and really birthed her writing career.

KIM: Wow. 

AMY: I can just picture you guys, like, screaming at the discovery of the typewriter.

ALLISON: It was incredible. It was a Smith Premier, which is the name of the typewriter, and there was a cover that was over the top of it and it was covered in like what, an inch or two of dust.

AMY: Where exactly were you?

ALLISON: We were in the old post office of Hornitos that had actually been shuttered since the mid 1950s. And Elsie Robinson died in 1956, and that post office has not been in use since. And the reason why the post office was so important to our research, I mentioned that she was gifted this typewriter by this friend of hers, Luella Rogers. Luella ran the post office and there were lots of artifacts from Rogers in the post office, and one of them was this typewriter. So yes, when we found this, and we worked with all these typewriter experts, which there are many manual typewriter enthusiasts. Um, it was really fun to date the typewriter and we were so excited to include the images in the book.

AMY: So what was she writing on this typewriter?

ALLISON: Oh, it was amazing. We found the first fiction stories that she ever published. She wrote in magazines that we may not be familiar with today. She would write them on her typewriter, walk them to the post office, mail them off to New York or Boston to get viewed by an editor. She wrote for Black Cat Magazine. She wrote... 

AMY: Wait, didn't she send her first story to like Harper's or something like, super impressive? 

ALLISON: The Atlantic. She sent it to The Atlantic and I think her line was, her "tail feathers were immediately clipped." Like she knew that she had kind of small 

AMY: Let's start 

ALLISON: her. 

AMY: Yes, girl , you're just beginning. Yeah.

ALLISON: You know what I love that. She had moxy, right? She wasn't waiting for this invitation, this red carpet. She just thought she was bold and she had talent, and so why wouldn't you start there? That's part of Elsie Robinson's attitude that I found so intoxicating is that she was bold. She had courage, and I think that she had incredible, incredible confidence, and I find that to be many of the qualities I would love my own daughter to have. I want her to be bold and have courage and moxy and not wait for invitations and not be passive, but to be proactive. I mean, all these qualities that Elsie has, um, I feel are so timely that I just want my daughter to grow up. I want my daughter to read my biography of Elsie Robinson that Julie and I wrote, because I feel like there's life instructions for us even today.

KIM: I love it. I love it. Okay, so she is living a difficult life, but she's living it to the fullest it seems like. Um, do you think she has any regrets about leaving her cushy life on the East Coast at all or no?

ALLISON: No. In fact, I think that's part of her remarkable story. You would think that the worst part of her life was when she got to Hornitos where she had no money, where she was working as this gold miner, where her life was literally in peril, day in and day out, 600 feet below the surface of the earth, running away from dynamite blasts, getting dirty, getting bloody. And yet she says that was the best time of her life.

KIM: Bravo.

AMY: And doesn't she even kinda say , "I feel like there are a lot of nice East Coast women out there who would kill to trade lives with me"?

ALLISON: Yes. Yes. And of course, this is what's so remarkable. She could have chosen to stay in the mansion. She could have chosen to keep this cushy life. She had it. It was there. But yet what's so remarkable, it's like that is still not enough. That still wasn't fulfilling. That wasn't fueling her soul. It's like what Oprah always says, like no matter how much money you have, the money doesn't buy happiness. And it's the gratitude that is what's sustaining. And I feel that Elsie had this gratitude for being able to pursue a passion. And then once she started getting that initial success, once her fiction started to sell, once she got that first job in the newspaper business, then be got this incredible career where she became the highest paid woman writer in the entire William Randolph Hearst Media empire, that is what was fulfilling to her, to make it on her own terms. And I just find that to be incredibly inspiring.

AMY: And so she solidifies this choice, this personal choice, by divorcing Christy Crowell. A very nasty, very public divorce. So when the dust settles from that, again, I want out, I want out of Hornitos finally. So she takes her little boy and they move to San Francisco in 1918. But as soon as they do, George's asthma flares up. So now she is a single mother, new to San Francisco, no money, no prospects, a very sick child. It is really the most anguishing moment in your biography. She is contemplating taking drastic measures, right?

ALLISON: She saw there were only two choices. Either she was gonna turn to prostitution to make ends meet. She had already seen that in Benicia. She knew how that worked. She understood it. Or she was going to take her own life. She didn't see a way out.

AMY: Yeah, It's a harrowing description from her memoir that you include in the book . So obviously she didn't do either. What happened?

ALLISON: Well, she decides to, um, dig deeper. She did a mental calculation in her brain about which newspapers in the Bay Area had a children's section and which papers did. And the only one that did not have a children's section was The Oakland Tribune. And so she would cross the bay with examples of her drawings that she drew for George, examples of her drawings, and of course that she had worked on with Robert Wallace for those children's book projects. And she went to the editor and said, "Look at this work. I can do this job." And that's what gave her her first job at The Oakland Tribune. That editor gave her her first shot.

KIM: I feel like I'm gonna cry. I mean, I felt like it reading it and I feel like it hearing it. This woman is incredible. 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. All she needed was that one shot, and it turned her life around. Suddenly, she's going like gangbusters, right.

ALLISON: Originally the opportunity was to write a children's column, which she did. It became so successful that it expanded over time to a page, and then two pages, and then ultimately it became so popular they renamed a section of the newspaper Aunt Elsie's Magazine. It was eight pages. Kids joined "Aunt Elsie" Clubs all over the state of California. They would get membership cards, they would get membership pins. They were live shows that were put on in her honor. I mean, even parades were held in her honor, and children would dress up as their favorite characters in Aunt Elsie's magazine. We have actually been in touch with people who are in their seventies, in their eighties, one is even 101 years old. They remember how proud they were to have corresponded with "Aunt Elsie."

KIM: Wow, that's so cool. So in our introduction, we referenced the letter to Hearst where Elsie calls herself a factory. And this was no exaggeration. Um, can you talk a little bit about the amount of work she was actually doing in her heyday?

ALLISON: Well, in her heyday, her column... the reason why our biography is called Listen, World! Is because her column was called "Listen, World!" and we did a wild project, and I say wild because it was exhaustive and exhausting. We did a database compilation, and we have discovered that she wrote approximately 9,000 columns in her career, and that is from her "Listen, World!" Day. She also had other columns. One was called "Cry on Geraldine's Shoulder." She was Geraldine. She also had a "Cheer Up" column before she became Aunt Elsie. She also wrote poetry. She was also a breaking news reporter. William Randolph Hearst himself would send her to cover breaking news. And so she had a lot on her plate, and the quantity is what is remarkable.

AMY: And you incorporate so much of her writing throughout your book, which I love. She's just so funny and sassy, and like you said, there's like a wisdom that she brings, like a tough love. That's why I do, I compare her to Oprah a little bit, because she's this media sensation, but she's also like that maternal figure that you kind of just go to for advice. Well, literally people are going to her for advice, but there's just something comforting about her and also no nonsense. Listeners, if you want examples of what we're talking about, get a copy of Listen, World, you know, you're gonna be able to really get a feel for her writing style.

ALLISON: I love the fact that you appreciate that we brought Elsie's voice front and center in the biography. That was, um, very purposeful. We of course realized that nobody reading our book would likely go find all of Elsie's columns, all of Elsie's poems, you know. Her memoir is really hard to go and find. And so we thought the best way of telling Elsie Robinson's story was having Elsie Robinson tell her own story. And the best way to do that, because she was such a prolific writer, was to draw really nonstop from her columns, from her poems, through even some of her letters that we got access to, uh, to write this book. And so I think it really goes to the point, you know, we were aware that there's been a steady erasure of women's histories over time. And so why not let Elsie Robinson, who had something important to say, say it for herself? And so we allowed Elsie equal space, so to speak, on the page. Yes, we are the authors of the book. There's plenty of our voice in trying to create some context about what Elsie was going through. But Elsie, we really wanted her to speak for herself and she does.

AMY: And she doesn't sound old fashioned, or it's not like flowery Victoriana kind of style. It sounds like a friend right now today is talking to 

ALLISON: Yes. In fact, I'll say this, and it sounds so self-serving to say this, but The New York Times did a wonderful review of Listen, World, and one of my favorite lines from this New York Times book review is "One does not tire of spending time with Elsie Robinson." 

KIM: I would a hundred percent agree. Yeah, absolutely.

AMY: And thank God your mom loved her poem so much that she typed it out because we might still not know.

KIM: Yeah.

ALLISON: Well, isn't that the craziest thing, right? It's not lost on me that if my mother hadn't died, maybe we still wouldn't know who Else Robinson is today. And while I would want my mom back in a heartbeat, I miss her so much, I do have to recognize this unexpected gift from her death. And writing this book has made me feel one of those gifts is how close to her I felt during it. That's something I hold onto.

AMY: It feels like this whole project was meant to be, but at the same time, it's not just fate because the amount of work that you and Julia both put into this is so evident. We loved reading Listen, World. We really encourage all of our listeners to go out and get a copy, learn about Elsie, read some of her writing through the book. And just thank you so much for coming on today to give us a glimpse into her story, but also into your journey of telling her story. It's been fascinating.

ALLISON: Thank you so much. I am so grateful, Amy, Kim. This has been such a joy. I've loved getting to know you guys, and I am so honored to be here with you.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you enjoyed it, please show us your appreciation by leaving us a five-star review wherever you listen. It only takes a minute, but the joy it would give us is incalculable. 

KIM: We'll be back again next week with an episode that will appeal to all of you Sex in the City fans out there. Don't miss it.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.