128. Margaret Oliphant — Hester with Perri Klass

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: Hey everyone. Kim, you and I recently took a brief hiatus to celebrate the end-of-year holidays. But the author we are going to be discussing today, Margaret Oliphant, would probably have chided us for taking a break, because she never did. She's routinely compared to her contemporary George Eliot, but whereas Eliot wrote seven novels, Oliphant wrote close to a hundred. That's not counting the other non-fiction biographies, histories, essays, and literary criticisms she penned. We've talked about the curse of overproduction in a previous episode. In Oliphant’s case, churning out books was a matter of financial necessity. She had a slew of dependents counting on her as the sole breadwinner of her house.

KIM: That responsibility seems to have inspired her writing, as we'll see in her 1883 novel Hester. It's about a formidable woman wielding the purse strings for not only her family, but an entire town over which she holds dominion

AMY: Yeah. It's an anthem to girl power for sure, and I kept humming [sings] “Who Run The World? (Girls); Who Run The World? (Girls)” while I was reading it. I mean that mantra kept going through my head. We're so glad one of our listeners turned us onto this book, and she's joining us today for the discussion. So before I launch into any more Beyonce tunes, let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: So we have our first medical doctor joining us today. Dr. Perri Klass is a Harvard- educated pediatrician and medical journalist. In addition to writing a column on children's health and wellbeing for The New York Times, her writing has also appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New England Journal of Medicine, among other publications.

KIM: A professor at NYU, she has also authored half a dozen nonfiction books, including The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future and Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor. In addition, she is the National Medical Director of Reach Out and Read. That's a nonprofit program promoting early literacy and distributing children's books at routine well child visits. That program reaches 4.2 million children a year, many of whom are affected by poverty. Dr. Klass, welcome to the show.

PERRI: Oh, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

KIM: So today's lost lady, Margaret Oliphant, doesn't really have anything to do with the medical field, but you actually reached out to suggest her after you discovered our podcast. And just a side note to our listeners, Amy and I love getting emails like this. It's so exciting. So when did you first discover Margaret Oliphant and what made you fall in love with her?

PERRI: I was aware of her for a long time as someone who gets listed as a Victorian novelist. And in fact, what had originally struck me about her was that she didn't write under the name of Margaret Oliphant. She mostly published under the name of Mrs. Oliphant and that always used to, I don't know, raise my hackles a little bit. Why would you do that? But her name turned up a lot. She was one of Queen Victoria's favorite authors. And I hadn't actually read her and didn't know very much about her until a few years ago when I was thinking and writing about other 19th century British writers. She did write a story about a doctor that I read, one of her best known novels, Miss Marjoriebanks, which is about the daughter of the doctor in a small town, and it's very preoccupied with the question of the doctor's position. And then I read Hester, which I'd never heard of, and I read it because it was in print in the Oxford World Classics so I could buy it. And I had that moment that you get when you think “This is the great Victorian novel that nobody has ever read, and why isn't it up there on the shelf next to the others?”

AMY: Uh, we are very familiar with that feeling. You're a little bit outraged, you know, and then you want to tell everyone about it, which is what probably prompted you to reach out to us. 

PERRI: Yes. 

AMY: Okay, so before we dive into Hester, the book itself, let's get to know Oliphant a little better. What do we know about her early life and how she first got into writing?

PERRI: Um, she's Scottish and her father, I think, is a clerk. And she's writing from a very young age. She publishes her first novel when she's about 20 and attracts a lot of attention right away. People think she's very talented. Um, she gets other offers. One of the things that we always have to say about Margaret Oliphant is that she writes a great deal. She writes many, many novels and at the same time, she writes a lot of journalism. She writes travel stuff, she writes non-fiction. And this seems to be true from fairly early on. She marries her cousin. So Margaret Oliphant Wilson marries Frank Wilson Oliphant. Um, he's an artist. He works in stained glass and they have six children together. And then, he gets tuberculosis and she's left a widow with her children all by about the age of 30.

KIM: Okay, so Blackwood's Magazine seems to have played a pivotal role in her career. She worked for the publication starting from a fairly young age as what she called a “general utility woman.” Would you say it's a collaboration that helped put her on the map?

PERRI: Absolutely, and it's a very prominent magazine. I mean, if you look at not only the people they publish, but also the people who read Blackwood's, it's very important to all of the Brontes. It's very important to Dickens. It's what people are reading. And if you look at some of the people they publish, especially in the early days, oh, they published Coleridge and they published Shelly and they publish Wordsworth. They publish all of those names. And one of the things that writing for Blackwood's does for her is it gives her a platform as a critic, and she actually becomes, I think, a very well-known and perhaps feared critic. And one of the things that this may do is it contributes to the fact that there are some literary feuds. One of the things that I learned about her that I didn't know is that there are nasty portraits, fictional portraits, of women who are writers who are supposed to be Margaret Oliphant, both in a Henry James short story and in an Anthony Trollope novel. And some people think that that's revenge on the critic.

AMY: Mm.

KIM: Interesting. Ooh.

AMY: And people kind of had some revenge on her in terms of her reception as a writer, and her reputation. Um, but we'll get into that a little bit later. You mentioned her husband's death and that was only really a small fraction of the tragedy that encompasses her life. And, uh, it was kind of pivotal in prompting her to need to write, really. So tell us a little bit more about some of these other tragedies that befell her.

PERRI: Well, that was actually part of what drew me to her. I was writing this book, The Best Medicine, about changes in infant and child mortality, and I was looking through the Victorian writers who had children to see, say someone like Charles Dickens, who writes the death of Little Nell, which is this famous famous Victorian death scene. I was interested in his letters and his behavior when his own infant daughter died. And so when I started looking people up and I got to Margaret Oliphant, I realized this is actually a tremendously tragic narrative. She and her husband had six children. Three died in infancy. So when her husband died, she had three surviving children, two sons and a daughter. So that's already, you know, by our standards, a tremendous amount of loss and tragedy. She's only around 30. Um, and so first of all, she's got to support these three children, and writing becomes the way that she's going to do this. And I think she basically becomes someone who does not turn down an assignment. You want 10,000 words on landscape painting? Here I am. You want a travel letter? You want advice? You want a supernatural short story? I mean, she does it all. And of course, one of the things you were talking about, her reputation, if you look her up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, the opening line will be “Prolific novelist…” And that word ‘prolific’ kind of gets attached to her, um, and I think it's a way of dismissing her. Whereas, say, if you look up Charles Dickens, who also wrote a huge amount of journalism, essays, travel letters, some of it good, some of it less good, you'll get, you know, “Greatest Victorian Novelist” before you get “Wrote a lot of books.” And if you look at those nasty portraits by, um, by Henry James or by Anthony Trollope, who himself was frequently attacked for his productivity, that's part of what they're making fun of her, that she writes so much. And of course, if you write so much, some of it's good, some of it's less good. She has two sons and a daughter. When her husband dies, he dies in Italy, and she goes back to Italy, I think, writing travel articles. And her daughter, who is nine or 10, gets sick and dies, I think, in Rome. So this is not a baby at this point. This is a child she knows and loves. And I think also named Margaret. This is a tremendous blow and a tremendous tragedy. And she goes on thinking about and writing about the loss of her daughter for a long time, and sometimes when I'm reading her, I think I hear echoes of that loss. And again, this is one of the things people note about her, she keeps up that productivity, writing novels, writing journalism, doing whatever she can. And she's successful. She's able to come back to England, establish herself with her two sons on sort of a high social level all by writing.

AMY: I remember reading that when one of the infants died while the husband was still alive, obviously, she had him write to Blackwood's: “my wife would like to know, you know, we've had this tragedy, uh, would it be okay if she waited until March to turn in what was supposed to be turned in in February?” And it's like, are you kidding me? That's incredible. I tried starting to read Oliphant's autobiography and it is just so gut-wrenching. She writes about the death of her children, and I had to put it down right away. I just couldn't, because you just feel it so deeply. And I think I remember her talking about the daughter, “Oh, it's my girl. My girl died.” And, and the idea that her daughter was gonna be somebody in her family that she, as a woman, would be able to relate to, you know? “My daughter, the one that I would have a kinship with for the rest of my life, she's gone.” The whole thing is just heart- wrenching when you read about it.

PERRI: Well this is one of the things that I am interested in, that I was interested in, this question of, you know, how people lived and wrote and thought at a time when, say, losing an infant was such a predictable part of being a parent, when, you know, every advice book for mothers had to have a chapter on when a child dies because so many children died. It's clear, I think, that one of the things you see with Margaret Oliphant is that fantasy in writing was also an escape. She could go into a world, sometimes a supernatural world, sometimes the life of an imaginary family, and sometimes as you're reading it, you think you're hearing moments where maybe the novelist is speaking to you more directly about her own experiences in grief, but clearly her imagination is a wonderful place.

AMY: Mm-hmm, and it's a coping mechanism.

KIM: Yeah, that completely makes sense. So, let's start diving into Hester then. It's actually her 58th novel, um, to prove your point, and that just boggles the mind. But there's nothing that Amy and I love more than a big fat Victorian novel with small print. It's the sort of thing you want to read on a cold winter's night. You can settle in with tea, a roaring fire, and maybe, you know, some Scottish shortbread cookies in honor of her heritage. I loved getting to immerse myself in this world that she created, which, as we mentioned, does feel very reminiscent of a George Eliot novel, or Anthony Trollope. If you love those, I can pretty much guarantee, listeners, you're gonna love this book. I did. As I was reading it, I just kept thinking, “How have I not read this before?” And honestly, I can't wait to read it again. I know I'm going to be reading it multiple times, so it's great.

PERRI: I just reread it, and I kept saying the same thing. I kept saying, this is like other things. It's like Trollope, it's like Eliot, but it's also different and it's brilliant and it's unexpected.

AMY: And you guys, this is a 500-page novel, so for anybody to be like, “I read it twice,” or “I read it multiple times,” or, “I'm looking forward to reading it again,” that says something right? Um, okay, so it's set in the small town or village you might say, of Redborough. There are really only a handful of locations throughout the novel. Most are residences. Perri, would you like to sort of give our listeners a spoiler free summary of the plot? 

PERRI: Absolutely. First there's a very important backstory. So you're going to think that maybe this is a spoiler, but this is actually Chapter Two. This is before any of the action of the novel. There's a family, the Vernon family, which owns the bank, Vernon's, in Redborough. And John Vernon, who has been trusted with running the bank, has gotten into trouble. He's spent money in ways he shouldn't. There's gonna be a run on the bank. They're staring ruin in the face, and the bank, and therefore the savings of everyone in town, are saved by the young woman, Catherine Vernon, who is a cousin of the man who's behaved so badly. He's in trouble, he runs away faced with disgrace. Um, his silly, pretty flibbertigibbet wife never really understands what's going on, but she goes off with him, and Catherine Vernon, the young heiress of the Vernon family, steps into the breach. She takes control and she then runs the bank for the next 40 years. And that's all the backstory. The actual novel starts when that wife, the one who was married to the man who almost ran them into the ground and ran away, comes back to town with her 14-year-old daughter, Hester. And she and Hester (she's now widowed), they're coming to live on Catherine's charity in Redborough. And the novel is what's going to happen when you bring this 14-year-old girl, Hester, into this town where she is dependent on Catherine's charity and you watch her grow up. And really, it's going to be a novel about these two women, Catherine, who is now 65 years old, and Hester, who when much of the action takes place, is going to be almost 20.

KIM: Can I just say the setup, I mean, it's almost a novel on its own. It's so well thought out, and you are so interested in what happens and watching Catherine, you know, sort of come into her own. It's such a great way to start the novel and really pull you in. I loved that.

AMY: Yeah, and it sets Catherine up with an air of mystery, like, who is this savior?

KIM: Yeah, what are her motives? What is she gonna do now? Yeah, it's great.

AMY: Okay. So while Hester, this younger woman, is the title heroine, I think we can all agree that Catherine is the real star. She is a badass. People practically genuflect in her presence. So allow me to just read a little bit here. From the beginning of the novel:

 Her name was put on everything. Catherine Street, Catherine Square, Catherine places without number. The people who built little houses on the outskirts exhausted their invention in varying the uses of it. Catherine Villas, Catherine Cottage, Catherine Mansion, were on all sides; and when it occurred to the High Church rector to dedicate the new church to St. Catherine of Alexandria, the common people, with one accord, transferred the invocation to their living patroness.

 So we see right away, she's a legend, but there's so much going on under the surface with this character in the way that Oliphant manages to humanize her. So, Perri, let's talk about that. What do you love most about this character?

PERRI: So I have to start by saying, honestly, I love that she's 65. One of my little projects when I entered in on my sixties was looking for novels in which things happened to people my age in which they're not just kind of furniture. When you think about, say, some of the interesting, powerful, remarkable older women in 19th-century novels, actually, they're not my age. If you think about Jane Austen. If you think about Pride and Prejudice, and you've got, you know, another Catherine, Lady Catherine, she's the mother of a marriageable daughter, so she's the mother of an older teenage daughter. How old do you think she is? She's, you know… brilliant actresses in their seventies want to play Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice, but she's probably in her forties. And so one of the things that I really loved was, you know, here's somebody, she's not by any means a saint, although she's compared to one. She's actually complicated and difficult, but she's the most powerful engine in this plot from start to finish. And it was just kind of fun from that point of view. As we think about the level of energy and strength that Margaret Oliphant must have had. This was, you said, what, her 58th novel? Um, I think she was interested in creating a character who could do things that other people couldn't do and then looking at that character to say, but what does that do to you over years? 

KIM: It's just so interesting how Oliphant, you know, gives her this opportunity to rise to the occasion that a lot of women don't get and how she takes it and runs with it. And that's why it's so interesting when we get to talking about Hester, and the flip side is that she wants that opportunity to come to her, too. And in that way, she is Catherine's Mini Me, only neither woman can really see it. Maybe on some level they do, but they don't want to admit it. Hester wants to make her way in the world. She desperately wants to be allowed to do something, anything, with all this energy and intellect that she has that's just like Catherine. But instead she's languishing in this house with all these pensioners with nothing to do. And there's a great passage that I'll read 

"I thought you hated Catherine Vernon," Roland cried.

"I never said so," cried Hester; and then, after a pause, "but if I did, what does that matter? I should like to do what she did. Something of one's own free will—something that no one can tell you or require you to do—which is not even your duty bound down upon you. Something voluntary, even dangerous——" She paused again, with a smile and a blush at her own vehemence, and shook her head. "That is exactly what I shall never have it in my power to do."

   "I hope not, indeed, if it is dangerous," said Roland, with all that eyes could say to make the words eloquent. "Pardon me; but don't you think that is far less than what you have in your power? You can make others do: you can inspire . . .  and reward. That is a little highflown, perhaps. But there is nothing a man might not do, with you to encourage him. You make me wish to be a hero."

He laughed, but Hester did not laugh. She gave him a keen look, in which there was a touch of disdain. "Do you really think," she said, "that the charm of inspiring, as you call it, is what any reasonable creature would prefer to be doing? To make somebody else a hero rather than be a hero yourself? Women would need to be disinterested indeed if they like that best. I don't see it. Besides, we are not in the days of chivalry. What could you be inspired to do—make better bargains on your Stock Exchange?"

So Hester already knows what Dorothea Brooks in Middlemarch has to figure out that being a muse isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Middlemarch was published in installments between 1871 and 1872. Hester in 1883. So I thought that was super interesting.

AMY: That's a conversation that she's having with one kind of younger suitor in town. And then there's another little section with another potential suitor that I wanted to read because it kind of piggybacks on that. He has gotten himself into some financial straits, and she asks him, well, explain it to me. So she says:

 “But tell me. Only, tell me a little more.” He shook his head.

“Hester, he said, that is not what a man wants in a woman. Not to go and explain it all to her with pen and ink and tables and figures to make her understand as he would have to do with a man. What he wants dear is very different. Just to lean upon you, to know that you sympathize and think of me and feel for me and believe in me, and that you will share whatever comes.”

Hester said nothing but her countenance grew very grave. 

And we won't spoil it, but especially when it gets into what Hester has to get involved in to solve the problem. It's galling , you know, that he says that. 

KIM: Yeah, they want her to be this beautiful vessel that they can fill with whatever they want, basically. 

PERRI: They do, and very deliberately, everyone is keeping her ignorant, and that includes Catherine, her aunt, who… I mean in a way, Catherine, her justification for what she's done with her life with the bank is in part that she can now take care of these various pensioners, these various poor relations. And it's complicated because they all resent her, including Hester. But part of what makes Catherine Catherine is that she's also saying to Hester, “No, my goodness, you don't have to earn a living. That's what I'm for. I can take care of you.” And Hester chafes. She doesn't want to be dependent. She resents it. She hasn't been told the backstory, and she's got all of this energy and people expect her to put it into being in love. And that's not what it's about for her. Hester doesn't want to inspire people. She wants to do something brave and big and important, or she wants to take her mother out of this position of dependency. And her idea is that she'll teach languages. And everyone's horrified. Her mother's horrified. It's almost as bad as being a governess, they keep saying.

KIM: Right, and, so with the passages Amy and I both read, you can see that there is romantic intrigue in there throughout the book that Hester's caught up in, but all the while I couldn't help but think that it's the relationship between Catherine and Hester that's actually the real love story going on here.

AMY: Yeah, 100 percent. It's Pride and Prejudice between an older woman and a younger woman. You have this hostility between them. You keep thinking, “When are they gonna have their breakthrough?” You're just rooting for that the whole novel.

PERRI: And I think you also feel that Oliphant is more interested in them. I mean, to be perfectly honest, the first time I read this book, I had trouble keeping the young men straight. It's hard to feel that Oliphant is really interested in them, and she's passionately interested in Hester's inner development and even more passionately interested in Catherine's. And that's what's really driving the plot. Oliphant recognizes you've got to marry people off. But in this book and in other books that I've read, she's not that interested in it. Um, the marriages that actually happen are often, um, you know, you feel like she's laughing. “Alright, go ahead, get married.” Or she's also capable of not telling you who marries. “They're gonna get married. I'm not sure which one,” um, as if it doesn't really matter. And one of the things that's really funny in this book is she brings in a brilliant comic character at one point, a young woman named Emma, whose role in the book is to sort of speak truth about 19th century marriage politics. She's the world's most blunt. Um, you know, “I have to get my chance. Can you get me invited to the party? Perhaps a young man will dance with me and will he speak because, you know, I don't have any money. Somebody has to marry me!” And it's very funny. Hester is full of fire and ideals about life, about love. And then you've got Emma walking beside her, analyzing the dance in the most blunt and frankly, economic terms possible.

AMY: I loved Emma. That bluntness, it was like, hey, desperate times call for desperate measures, and I'm just gonna get myself invited to this party and I'm gonna say what I need to say.

KIM: She’s working in the system that's given to her. She's like, “Okay, this is what I have to do and I'm gonna do it,” and she does!

PERRI: It's like, you know, “Why are we pretending? I'm here because I'm the youngest child and I have to live with my brothers and sisters, and they don't want me there, and I don't wanna be there. So somebody has to propose to me so I can have a house of my own. He's gonna dance with me, maybe he'll propose to me.” And she just says it.

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: And the idea of spinsterhood, it's interesting that the way she examines it in different perspectives like that because Emma is saying point blank, like, “I gotta find a man. There's no other option for me.” But yet we see Catherine who's this shining example of spinsterhood and all that it can be in a positive way, where you're like, “Go girl!” Girl power. But that at the same time you see that Catherine is lonely. You see that Catherine's friendships are all predicated on her money. And she, I, I think, deep down knows that. I think she doesn't wanna admit it, but she sees it. So it's interesting. She really explores these characters in many, from many different angles.

PERRI: Well, the other thing that this novel is really interested in is the impact of financial dependency, right? The level of resentment that Hester feels about being financially dependent on Catherine, but also all the other poor relatives who Catherine's taking care of, but it's not just them. It's not that Catherine is so good and kind and people resent it. I think she's also interested in the ways that Catherine has been a little bit poisoned by this financial setting, the way she's come to be amused and cynical about the ways that people react. And I think, um, there's a little bit in there, it's not said explicitly, but there's a little bit in there about marriage and about the question of what happens to love and affection when somebody is completely dependent on somebody else.

AMY: Catherine and Hester both have their bitchy sides, right? I mean, they can be petty and petulant, and thank God, because if this was a novel about, look at Hester and she's just everything noble in a woman, I would be bored, but they're human. They can be catty, they can be insensitive, both of these heroines. Um, I loved that about this novel, that all of the characters that we see are flawed. Yes, the peripheral characters, it's more obvious that they're flawed and they're made comical. But I like that she doesn't put Hester and Catherine up on some pedestal

PERRI: No, nobody becomes a saint. People are capable of honest affection. People are capable of heroism, but she doesn't believe in the good and pure 19-year-old girl, and she doesn't believe in the good and pure, you know, 70-year-old, white-haired lady.

KIM: Yeah, and that also makes me think about these poor relations we've been talking about. There's a lot of humor associated with them. They can be so passive aggressive and judgmental, even though on some level you might think they don't have any right to be. They're kind of living at her mercy and her generosity after all.

AMY: Yeah, they're total sycophants to Catherine's face. I mean, the ass-kissing is hilarious, but then the minute Catherine's gone, they tear her down. It's kind of that timeworn idea that any woman asserting power has to be a bitch and, you know, viewed as such by everybody else. So the whole town feels like they can voice their little private digs at her. I don't know if they would've been doing that had the head of the bank been a man.

KIM: That's an interesting point.

PERRI: Yeah, I don't know either. The people who are most clearly admiring of Catherine are actually her business associates. The clerk, the cashier, the people who've sort of seen her in action. One of the things that's interesting about the poor relations is they feel incredibly entitled. It's, you know, family money. “We're the family,” and always sort of picking at it. “But why are they allowed to be here? They're not really family. How come they get the better house or the better window?” None of these people have enough to do, right? They're living on her. They might actually be happier if they had to do the thing, which they feel would demean them so terribly, because they're gentry, and actually had to earn their livings.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. They're so bored. They're just miserable in their boredom. Do you wanna make any connections between the poor relations in the book and Oliphant's own family situation? Is there any connection there to make?

PERRI: I think so, because she was the big success, and there were plenty of family members who needed help. Her brother had a financial disaster and she took care of him and his family. She had cousins who came, and she did take it as her job to take care of everybody. So I'm sure she had thought a lot about what that does to your character and what are your illusions? When do you think you are really receiving love, but really you're buying a false affection? Who resents whom? I'm sure she'd thought about it a lot. And what she did here is make it into brilliant social comedy. But it was part of her situation in life. Her biggest ambition, of course, is for her sons, that she's going to launch them, and neither of them... the sons are what I guess you would call disappointments. They live off her, they take her money. They have expensive tastes. They've, you know, been educated . She keeps trying to make them into writers, uh, have them work with her on a project, which we assume she then writes. Neither of them actually makes it as a writer. Neither of them can hold a job. And she loses them both. I think in the 1890s, they both die. So it's a pretty sad story. It's not a unique story in the 19th century. 

AMY: It was so frustrating when I was reading her biography to hear all that she did for the men in her family, because she was such a workhorse. She wrote to the point of exhaustion just to be able to handle all these expenses. And it sort of gets us back to the takeaway from this book, Hester, which is that in times of crisis, women are gonna be the ones who will grit their teeth, clean up the mess and save the day. And in the book, the male characters literally run away when the going gets tough. And I have to wonder, because so much of this book, you know, from a woman owning a bank and the control that she has over people to Hester and her bucking different social conventions, you know, things that were expected of her as a young lady, it kind of feels pretty subversive for that time that it was written. I don't know, maybe there's an argument to be made that this sort of overtly feminist messaging contributed to her being forgotten or people dismissing the book? I don't know. Perri, what do you think?

PERRI: I don't know. She herself did not think of herself as a feminist. And just as Catherine Vernon is telling Hester, “No, no, no, you should not be earning a living,” I don't think that Oliphant necessarily felt a good deal of sympathy with people who were active for women's rights. On the other hand, remember, I said earlier, she was Queen Victoria's favorite novelist. She identified with Queen Victoria as a, I think, uh, a very hardworking widow. She wrote a piece about her, that was her formulation, right? That Queen Victoria had suffered a bereavement, she had lost her husband, and what was she going to do? She was going to work really hard. And so clearly, uh, sort of in her worldview, you've got that. The other piece of this that I think is interesting is that because she writes so many things, it's, I think, hard for people to know how to categorize her. For example, she writes supernatural stories. But it's not like if you pick up Hester, you say to yourself, “Oh, this is the person who writes supernatural stories.” So, I don't know how those different pieces connect, in how we remember her.

AMY: So I don't think that this novel, this 500 pages, seems like it was hastily dashed off at all. But critics of Oliphant over the years have used her prolificness against her, including Virginia Woolf, who basically felt that Oliphant was a hack writer because she turned out so many books instead of spending more time on a fewer number of novels, Woolf wrote: “Mrs. Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children.” And that might sound like a really harsh quote, but I think, yeah, but I think at first I was really taken aback by that. But I think she was actually trying to defend Oliphant in a way and make a broader critique about what options she had. That's the only way she had to go about it.

KIM: Right, because unlike Woolf, Oliphant didn't really have the luxury of a room of one's own. She was a single mom, like we talked about. She had all these personal obligations. Think about all the great women writers, everyone talks about Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot. They didn't have children, and that freed them up to throw themselves fully into their art. Whereas Oliphant noted at one point, “I don't think I've ever had two hours uninterrupted except at night with everybody in bed during the whole of my literary life.”

AMY: Yeah. And although I didn't read this other novel of Oliphant's, there's a novel called The Three Brothers, which features a widow who is an artist, and she churns out paintings to support her children. And in that book, the character says:

 I don’t deceive myself. I get money for my pictures, and that is about what they are worth. But… don’t you think it sometimes makes my heart sick, to feel that, if I could but wait, if I could but take time, I might do work that would be worth doing — real work?... But I can’t take time: there are six children and daily bread…!”

And I, I have, uh, like kind of embarrassing confession right now in that I just figured out what the true meaning of the term pot boiler is. I thought when you would hear potboiler novels, it meant, you know, they were kind of like mass market popular novels that were kind of just exciting or whatever. I didn't realize this term pot boiler meant they were written to keep the pot boiling, to keep coal in the house, to keep logs on the fire. That's what a potboiler was. Anyway, Perri, do you think this criticism of her is fair that her novels seem churned out?

PERRI: I don't think this one seems churned out. I don't think Miss Marjoriebanks seems churned out. I've read a fair number of them, uh, long and short, that I think are great. I think she wrote a lot and it's not all good, but I don't completely understand why that's the only tag that's on her. Charles Dickens had 10 children. He kept his family in luxury not only by writing, but by giving public lectures and charging money to have him read his famous scenes. Is everything he wrote equally good? No. Did he write, you know, continued episodic stories in magazines where he, you know, drags things out sometimes? 

AMY: But wait, let's be fair. Charles Dickens was off taking long walks all day long and having affairs. We can't say that he had anything to do with raising those 10 children. He put the food on the table maybe, but Oliphant really had to be there. 

PERRI: But he was paying the bills is all that I mean, and so I'm not sure why the idea that one of the reasons a writer writes is to, you know, pay the bills I'm not sure why that's automatically a disgrace, is what I'm saying. She may have written more that's not good than other people, although that's a hard thing to measure, but I'm not sure why that devalues the good work. I'm not sure why needing to pay the bills makes you a bad writer. I mean, if Hester felt like a hack novel: “Oh, we see flashes of something interesting, but it's just a standard 19th century romance, you know, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, that's really all she could do.” But it's nothing like that. It's a unique, strange novel in a very distinct writer's voice with I think a great deal of genius in it. And so, okay, she paid the bills, but I mean, why do we think that's a bad thing?

AMY: It's like, so we said that she wrote almost a hundred novels, I think if even a dozen of them were really, really good, that still puts her on par with all these other great writers. It's like she gets dinged because she wrote more, because not all of 'em were great. And it's frustrating because she put out enough that were good.

PERRI: Yeah.

KIM: So we are Team Oliphant, obviously, the three of us. Uh, yeah. So what else would you recommend we check out by Oliphant, speaking of that. So when we're ready for more, what are a couple books that we should read next?

PERRI: Well, there's another long novel Miss Marjoribanks, which is, uh, comic and will also give you a whole town and the point of view of a very interesting and distinctive young woman. She had a great success with, I think it's, I can't remember whether it's six or seven linked books and novelas, she was looking at, um, Trollope and what he had done with The Chronicles of Barchester and she wrote something called The Chronicles of Carlingford, which one of them is Miss Marjoriebanks. But then there are five or six others that, uh, I don't always know what's in print and what's available, but those were great successes for her. I have not read her supernatural fiction. That doesn't interest me as much, but I'm now sufficiently interested that I would be curious to read some of it and see where that fits in with sort of some of the 19th century stuff.

KIM: The series is piquing my interest because Amy and I are always looking for another series like Barchester.

AMY: I, I wanna say that that series, during her lifetime, somebody said that George Eliot had written that. And George Eliot came out and was like, “No, you're thinking of Miss Oliphant. I did not write that.”

KIM: Interesting. 

AMY: I also wanna go back and say that, when I was reading her biography there were a few moments where she was quoted as saying, [paraphrasing] “Don't call me prolific. I don't take that as a point of pride. I'm prolific because I had to be and I'm not proud of everything I wrote.” She flat out said that, “Yeah, some of it's not good,” but I needed to do it. She was constantly having to hustle, but I don't think she took it as a point of pride that she wrote close to a hundred books, It was sort of like, “I had to.”

PERRI: And again, I would say you judge people by their best. And then you say, “These other books will be more of interest to serious enthusiasts or, you know, biographers.” But if you've got a set of really good ones, why wouldn't you want to read them?

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: So Perri, before we let you go, we wanted to mention a little bit more about this charity you're involved with, Reach Out and Read. Tell us about it, and how people can potentially help out.

PERRI: So Reach out and Read, we've been around now for more than 30 years, and what we do is bring the promotion of reading aloud, early literacy, reading with young children, into standard pediatric practice. It's a very simple program model. We look at children starting at birth up till kindergarten, five years. And it's a program model in which, when you see that child come in for a checkup, for a well baby visit, for a one-year-old, two-year-old, 18-month visit, you talk to the parents about the importance of reading together. You give some guidance. What does it mean to read to a six-month old? She's gonna put the book in her mouth. That's normal. You don't read a story. You point to the page and say, “Where's the baby's nose?” And with that advice and that conversation comes a beautiful new age-appropriate, culturally-appropriate book for the child. So the board book for the baby to chew on, or the rhyming book for the toddler. And if we do that, if we have those conversations at every checkup, starting at birth, then by kindergarten there will be more than 10 beautiful books in the home. And it's a way of trying to help parents build those routines. And the reason it works for pediatricians is, we talk about bedtime and sleep and behavior, everybody who's seeing children, you know, and so you can use the book to talk about that, to talk about routines. You can use the book to talk about language. You can use the book to talk about how to build structures into children's lives. So anyway, Reach Out and Read is a wonderful organization. We have programs in every state. We have local affiliates in many states. If people are interested, you can go to reachoutandread.org. You can find programs near you. They want books. Sometimes they want volunteers. They want community connections with libraries and other programs. It has my heart. It's a wonderful organization. I love it.

KIM: It sounds fantastic.

AMY: And imagine being a toddler. The last place you wanna go is a doctor's office. But if you know that every time you go, you come home with a book, that's kind of enticing too, right?

KIM: Mm-hmm.

PERRI: It's very enticing. And honestly, I love standing in the clinic and watching the kids go out and seeing the books go out into the city and into their homes and into their bedrooms with the children.

KIM: That's lovely.

PERRI: thing.

AMY: Well, Perri, we're so glad that you joined us today and introduced us to Oliphant and Hester. And listeners, I know I referenced the biography of Oliphant a few times in this episode, so I just wanna let you know that that was by Merryn Williams. If anybody's interested in learning more about her life, you can check that out. So thank you again, Perri, for a, being a fan of the podcast and b, for reaching out to us. 

PERRI: Thank you for reading Hester. Thank you for liking Hester and Catherine and caring about them.

KIM: Loving it. Um, uh, we were just honored to have you on. So thank you.

PERRI: Thank you so much.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. Be sure to visit lostladiesoflit.com for more information and show notes. Sign up for our newsletter so you don't miss an episode.

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 x and Kim Askew.