144. Theodora Keogh — Street Music with Maud Newton

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. Kim Askew…

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes. We're traveling to Paris for this week's book. Think lively cafes, the Luxembourg Gardens, Notre Dame Cathedral, and the Boulevard St. Germain. Or to quote today's lost lady, Theodora Keogh: “the tender banks of the Seine, the sidewalks thick with chestnut blossoms, and the wide splendid vistas laid out by kings.”

KIM: Paris in the spring. It all sounds so lovely. So blissful and ebullient!

AMY: Yeah, well, maybe hold that thought for a second, because while Theodora Keogh's 1952 novel Street Music is delightful in its depictions of Paris, it is also incredibly dark. 

KIM: Yeah, some might even call it lurid. The subversive nature of her writing may have shocked some who classified her novels as pulp, but it impressed many others, including novelist Patricia Highsmith. She was known to be stingy with her praise for other women writers.

AMY: Our guest today is also a big fan of Theodora Keogh's novels, and we're fans of her work, so we can't wait to introduce her and hear what she has to say. 

KIM: Cue the theme song, then it's time to raid the stacks and get started! 

[intro music plays]

KIM: Today's guest, Maud Newton, is a critic, essayist fiction writer, memoirist and pioneer of the blogosphere, whose astute online observations first caught the eye of the media and literary world in the early two thousands, and I often linked to her on my long, long defunct blog, Kim Said. Since then her writing has appeared in an array of outlets, including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's Magazine, Time, and The New York Times Book Review among others. Her first book, published just last year, is Ancestor Trouble: a Reckoning and a Reconciliation. It was named one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker, NPR, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Time, Esquire, and Entertainment Weekly. It was also a finalist for the 2023 John Leonard Prize, which was awarded by the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wow.

AMY: [facetiously] It's okayyyyy.

KIM: I feel like I, because I've read your blog since the very beginning and just watching it all happen and that it came out to such glory makes me want to cry. I have to say that.

AMY: Yeah, and I read it a few months ago. Actually, I listened to it on audiobook. The glowing reviews are so well deserved. You clearly poured so much work into the book. It's part memoir, but then also just a lot of thoroughly researched nonfiction, but told in a really entertaining way, so congrats on the book and welcome to the show.

MAUD NEWTON: Thank you so much to both of you, and thanks for reading my book. And Kim, I also, I feel like I have known you since the early two thousands because of, yeah, all of our interconnections back then and linking back and forth.

KIM: Yeah, it's great to finally meet on Zoom.

AMY: And we should add that Maud has been a writer in residence at Yaddo. We needed you around, Maud, actually; we did a mini episode on Yaddo earlier this year about like the hauntings, the ghosts and the history there. 

KIM: Yeah. Did you encounter any ghosts?

MAUD: I didn't, but I was staying in one of the newer, like standalone work sleep studios, which are, I have to say, really nice. Um, but you don't get that like Sylvia Plath, walking the halls at, you know, one o'clock in the morning. So yeah…

AMY: Maybe that's good. It let you sleep so you could get some work done. You don't wanna go to Yaddo and then be up all night like, “Oh my God, there are ghosts! I'm not getting any work done, because I'm panicked!”

MAUD: I got so much work done. I actually cried the first day I was there. I was like, “Oh my God, all I have to do here is work on my book? What? What?!”

AMY: What a luxury.

KIM: A dream come true. All right, so let's drive right into our discussion of Theodora Keogh. When did you first discover her?

MAUD: I first discovered her in, I believe she died in 2008. And there was a really, kind of shocking, in a great way, obituary in The Telegraph, and it talked about how she was Theodore Roosevelt's granddaughter and her ear had been bitten by her pet margay, which is the type of wildcat, at the Chelsea Hotel and a bunch of other details. And I was just drawn in, as one sometimes is, irrespective of literary merit by this sort of larger-than-life story. At the end of her life she was living on 10 or 20 acres in North Carolina, and I think she had a chicken farm or something. And I vibed with that because that's sort of like something someone in my family would do. And then I just started reading her and was really blown away by how much I liked her work and how forgotten it is.

AMY: And ironically, you hadn't read Street Music, the book we're discussing today, until we started talking about having you on. So I'm curious to know why you suggested that title of hers if you hadn't even read it yet.

MAUD: Yeah. Well, I was curious. I think I wanted to give myself an assignment to read it because it's the only one of her books I haven't read, and my friend Kevin Wilson…

AMY: The author.

KIM: Mm-hmm. The Family Fang. 

MAUD: Yes, and many other wonderful books. Um, it's his favorite. And he had started reading her because I told him how much I liked her. So I was just like, well, it has to be good if Kevin likes it. It's kind of a leap of faith, but I confess I was a little bit like, “I hope I like it!”

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: We often feel like that when we decide on a book, because most of the time we haven't read them before. So we're just usually very lucky. Um, we can't wait to find out what you thought of the book, and we'll get to that in a minute. But first, let's talk a little bit about the author's life. So Theodora Keogh likely wouldn't have wanted us to start with this tack or maybe even included it all, but you did hint a little at her family history talking about her obit. So maybe let's just get that out of the way right off the bat. Her name offers a hint. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more?

MAUD: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, there unfortunately is no comprehensive biography, and some of what I'm getting ready to say is, you know, from my memory of my fascination with her years ago. But that said, yes, she is Theodore Roosevelt's granddaughter. Um, she grew up in a fairly privileged home, as you might expect, in Manhattan. I believe her father's name was Archibald, but I might have made that up. 

AMY: That's correct because I just Googled it before we jumped on Zoom because I actually wanted to see if there was a family resemblance at all to the Roosevelt side of the family. And ironically, she doesn't really look like her dad, Archibald, that much, but she does kind of look like Alice Roosevelt Longworth, her aunt.

MAUD: Yes. Her, you know, kind of notorious aunt who was also kind of a rule breaker. Yeah, she really does favor her. And according to Patricia Highsmith's late biographer, Joan Schenkar, she was Alice's favorite niece, so they had a special relationship. But to sort of go back to your question, Kim, she, ended up in Paris as a young woman. She married someone who was part of The Paris Review crowd, and he was an artist. Um, I believe they were both dancers, and if memory serves, that might have been how they met each other. But he became really embedded in this Paris Review community. And actually, the first issue of The Paris Review has an illustration of her by him in it. And you can see that online. And I'm, I'm kind of going on it a little length here, but my favorite book of hers, which is called My Name is Rose, I think it satirizes The Paris Review of that era.

KIM: Ooh, I've gotta read that. That sounds great.

MAUD: It's really fascinating. So the main character, the female protagonist, has married this man who presents himself as a great writer. They move to Paris, and slowly she realizes that there's not really any “there” there, you know, that he is a critic, but he's kind of reciting ideas. Whereas she was raised by artists and has always been interested in writing, but has kind of left it behind. And as you might imagine from having read Street Music, she really turns her lens on that world in a really interesting way.

AMY: I want to go back for a second to the fact that she didn't really like connecting her name to her grandfather's because she was kind of well known, I believe. I found an old advertisement for Ponds cold cream. An illustration of her face is part of the ad. I think the text says, “You know her famous grandfather, but Theodora Keogh is also a woman who likes travel and adventure.” And, and basically her face was selling the Ponds cold cream, which I thought was interesting. And also going back to the dancing, I think she had ballet training, but didn't she wind up in Brazil at one point as a dancer? And then I think I read that she danced at the Copacabana, which, I forgot the Copacabana was even a real place. But apparently she danced there.

MAUD: That's amazing. Yeah, I mean, you're kind of jogging my memory. Well, first of all, that's fascinating about the Ponds cold cream, and it does cast this different light on things.

KIM: Nepo baby!

MAUD: I mean, I really do think it's fascinating that she wrote these books though, because, especially for the time, they were fairly salacious. They were part of like the pulp novel trend of the mid 20th century. She wrote about street kids, and she wrote a lot about queer relationships.

AMY: And I think also this first husband, Tom, who she went to Paris with, he was a famous costume designer for films also. And I know he illustrated the cover of the first edition of Street Music too, I think. It was her third novel, published in 1952 by Farrar Straus and Young. And the book is set in Paris, so yeah, I did have that moment of, “Okay, is she really drawing from her life?” But can you give us maybe a little more insight into what the literary marketplace at that time was?

MAUD: I mean the pulp era, there were so many women writing really interesting stuff that, you know, was later sort of dismissed as kind of commercial or tawdry. So I have a really old copy of Street Music and... 

KIM: Oh, yeah. The cover looks very pulpy. 

AMY: Yeah, that cover says everything, right? 

KIM: Absolutely. It feels noir or pulp. Yeah.

AMY: I don't necessarily, when I read it, if I hadn't seen that it was considered a pulp novel, it wouldn't have crossed my mind.

KIM: I agree with you because there's something lyrical and literary about it. I never would've, juxtaposed that cover with it. And if you take a picture of it, Maud, we'll put it on our social when the episode goes live so people can see what we're talking about.

MAUD: Absolutely. Yeah, and here's the back of it: "This is the subtle and terrifying story of a marriage that founders when a young bride discovers that her husband's past contains the seeds of evil that threaten to destroy their life together."

KIM: Okay. Oh my God. This is like, “Okay, make it pulp.” I mean, in my opinion they took a beautiful novel and they just wrapped it in a pulp package to sell it.

AMY: Yeah. If you look at The New York Times original mention of this book, this is the description: "A story about a young American girl who goes to live in Paris with her music critic husband, and of her endeavors to make her marriage last." So contrast those two things that we just read. I mean, they clearly just pumped it up, like you said, Kim.

MAUD: She had a good publicist, right?

KIM: Yeah. 

MAUD: It's like wink, wink, she might be Teddy Roosevelt's granddaughter, and it's a literary novel. And then on the other end for mass consumption, it's this sort of pulp packaging. 

KIM: Which may have pigeonholed her, and that might be why people don't know her today.

MAUD: Yeah. And I agree with you, Kim. I mean, the writing is so beautiful. The verbs are so perfect. The metaphor, the lyricism and the visual description... She's really a very deft writer sentence by sentence. 

AMY: All right, so let's dive into the book here. So we have the young American bride and her music critic husband, and their "endeavors to make the marriage last" as The New York Times summarized. Uh, Um, why don't we elaborate on that a little bit? Maud, uh, can you tell us about Claude and Linnet Mitan and their individual crises?

MAUD: Yeah. So Claude is a slightly older man, with a kind of ravaged face who has married Linnet, I think in New York City is where they were living. They moved to Paris. He is a radio critic, she is a young bride who attracts him in part because of her innocence and the way that the innocence connects to her beauty. And then Claude transforms when they get to Paris. He has this nostalgia for his youth, which was troubled, and she doesn't really know very much about his youth or why he is a lot more distant and doing things like going out by himself for drinks and often hanging out with this other major character who's an 11-year-old girl named Félice.

KIM: The orphan girl, Félice, she's introduced in the first chapter in a really striking passage.

AMY: Yeah, and I'll go ahead and read from that section of the book. This is the first time Linnet... she's recalling the first time she ever laid eyes on Félice. A group of boys and girls were playing wedding. They had formed an aisle down, which they were walking the bride and groom. The bride was a thin child with the kind of red hair that looks black inside. Red copper washed over the true denseness of the hair. There was something disturbing about the color, as well as the sharp tense face beneath. The child was dressed poorly, in a skimpy black apron or smock, such as school children wear in France. Her legs were encased in brown stockings that were guarded above the knee and just below the edges of her skirts. She had her hand on the arm of a young boy who was the groom. The groom's face wore a curious expression and Linnet, coming, coming near, was astounded to see, or think she saw, a stamp of real love on his features as they came abreast of the children. Claude had called out teasingly and with an exaggerated American accent, "Hello, Red." The little girl had turned her opaque brown eyes his way, and once again, Linnet had been surprised. The child had obviously read an invitation into Claude's teasing words. She had lifted her chin and then darted a glance at the man's companion. The boy groom frowned. His arm on which the bride's hand rested, grimy, yet gracious twitched. The other children giggled. Then the red-haired girl had snatched her hand away and taken to her heels up the street. "Félice!" The others called after her. "Félice!" But she kept running, the wooden soles of her boots knocking on the cobbles.

"You hurt her feelings, Claude," said Linnet as they walked on. " She can't understand English, and she must have thought you were saying something mean." "Nonsense," Claude had laughed. "You couldn't hurt her feelings if you tried. I know these Paris brats and you don't. No, it was for another reason entirely that she ran. A reason of pure caprice." So it's interesting that a wedding scene is how this child is introduced to us, right?

MAUD: Yeah, and hearing that read aloud is so fascinating, too, because it really foreshadows all of the themes of the book in a lot of ways. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: That scene had taken place in front of the house, kind of where Félice lives. Um, but I wanted to just mention it because it's described in the book, it's No. 6 Rue de Tournon, and Keogh describes it as an arched entryway that leads into the building and there's two angels carved in stone sitting over the arch. And if you Google No. 6 Rue de Tournon, you will see it. It's clear as day and you're like, “Wow, that's exactly what she was describing there.”

KIM: It really makes, yeah, it makes you go, Okay, she definitely had something in mind. I mean, she might have even like stayed across the street just like 

AMY: Living there. Yeah. exactly. So this little orphan, when I was taking notes reading this book the first time, I wrote down Little Orphan Annie, because, you know, we have this red-haired girl about the right age and she's always fantasizing about who her mother could be. You know, that sort of [sings] “Maybe far awayyyyy….”

KIM: I love when you sing! I love when you sing!

AMY: I'm thinking of this in my head and I'm like, “Oh this is so sweet,” and then a few pages later we find out that Félice is actually the neighborhood drug dealer and petty thief. So she's not quite as innocent as Little Orphan Annie.

KIM: Right, but through no fault of her own. And she is still quite innocent in a lot of ways too. So it's an interesting mix in her personality. She's only 11 after all. And she's sort of a Cinderella, with a stepmother figure that's her guardian. She has stepsisters and she has to earn a living so she can retain bed and board there in an already really impoverished household. And they all despise her. It's really complicated. And speaking of complicated, Linnet and Claude each have very different, very strong emotional responses to Félice. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that Maud, because it's interesting.

MAUD: Yeah, it's fascinating, and I'm really glad that you mentioned her stepmom, because the stepmother is like a mild villain, you know. She's treated as this sort of pitiful and disposable child. And it is really interesting how in that first passage that you read, Amy, Linnet is concerned about Félice. But for the most part, she becomes kind of suspicious of Félice, and at times, almost finds herself thinking of Félice as a rival. And Claude, his relationship to her is at times really touching and at times disturbing. It's never clear exactly what the nature of his feelings toward her is. On the one hand it seems like he's just trying to re-inhabit his own Paris childhood, and he views her as an echo of himself in some way, or of kids he knew. But then on the other hand, there is this sort of undercurrent of is he attracted to her? She's placed him on this pedestal and, in that like 11-year-old way, is infatuated with him, and he knows that and he kind of encourages it.

KIM: And he shows his hidden self to her in a way that his wife wishes that he would. 

AMY: Yeah, I think Keogh does a good job of juxtaposing the adult characters in the book with the kiddie antics of Félice's guttersnipe gang, because she hangs out with this bunch of scrappy neighborhood boys. But then at one point, Claude, he's feeling this existential need to revisit his own delinquent youth, as we said. And he asks Félice, “Hey, how can I prove to you guys that I'm really one of you? What do I need to do to prove it?” So Maud, can you explain the task that she dares him to take on?

MAUD: Yeah, so she says that he needs to get them into a locked Metro station. And so he agrees. He comes up with a plan. He is going to wear workers' clothing, he's going to go down through the tunnels, and he's going to unlock the gates and let them in. Yeah, that whole scene is, is really, really artfully done because you're not really sure what is going to happen, whether there's gonna be some terrible calamity or they're all gonna get caught. I don't wanna spoil too much of it, but I think what's interesting is that he's kind of trying to bond with all of them, but he ends up driving more of a wedge between Félice and Andre, the boy she's marrying in the beginning, and he comes into focus fully for Andre at that point as a rival, I think. 

AMY: Okay, so there's a ton of weirdness about this book. I keep thinking of the person who might have read that first New York Times blurb and been like, “Oh, that sounds nice.” And then actually read the book and been like, “Whoa!” Um, one of the weirdest characters is a woman who is also staying at the same apartment, place, boarding house as the Mitans. Uh, her name is Ms. Bush. 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, I felt some real Miss Havisham vibes going on there. Um, she tried to be androgynous, but she also had a weird sexual obsession. Maybe weird is unfair, but she had a sexual obsession with the landlord. It was intense. Yeah, it was weird. It was weird. Yeah. Let's just say it was weird.

AMY: So what's, yeah, what I mean, I just was trying to figure this woman out. Maud, what are your thoughts?

MAUD: I mean, she is so fascinating because on the one hand, she is like binding her breasts and sort of aligns herself with suffragettes, you know, and she's already an elderly woman by the time the book has taken place. But then as you say, she has this sexual obsession with the landlord, and it's unclear... mostly it seems to be something she's dreading. She's anticipating that he is going to turn his attentions from the young women he hires to clean the, uh, boarding house slash hotel, um, and forces to sleep with him. He's going to turn his attentions from them to her, that she's his ultimate object of desire. And probably that is a complete delusion, but it's not entirely clear to me that she is completely wrong. So she's, to me, a really interesting character. Like the portrayal is borderline ageist and misogynistic, but somehow it lands outside of that to me. Um, maybe, what do you two think about that?

AMY: I'll admit that it was beyond me like what the message was in terms of her purpose In the book. There are sexual undertones for sure, and she's a little bit titillated by the idea that he might ravish her, you know? Very weird. But, speaking of sexual undertones, let's get back to Félice and Claude, because there are some major ones with these two. 

KIM: Oh, yeah. 

AMY: Do you think Keogh aimed to shock readers in her books?

MAUD: Yeah, I do, and I think she enjoyed going up to lines and not crossing them, or slightly crossing them. 

AMY: Which is evidenced really well, I think, by that scene in the book with the peach.

MAUD: Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah. Do you wanna talk a little more about it?

AMY: Um, yeah, we can. Claude and Félice are sitting in Luxembourg Gardens, I believe. The tension is kind of ratcheting up. They pass a fruit stand and they get a peach off one of the stalls, and then, I don't know who takes a bite first. One of them takes a bite, and then the other one takes a bite. 

KIM: I think she takes a bite and then he takes a bite.

AMY: Okay. It's very suggestive.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And she notes it too. Félice notes that he took a bite of her peach, so it made an impression on her. It's a very big symbol. It's like, it's not subtle. 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah,

KIM: It’s a big symbol.

MAUD: Yeah, agreed. Their relationship is really, um, at best walking on fine line, you know?

AMY: I wasn't quite getting Lolita vibes, but I definitely thought of it.

MAUD: Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, and again, I don't wanna give away the whole ending, but I do feel like he comes off as an exploiter of both Félice and Linnet, sort of disturbing both of their worlds. I mean, I do have sympathy for him in a certain way, which is interesting. But he doesn't come off as any sort of hero. 

AMY: Yeah, we talked in previous episodes about noir of this time and the idea that men were coming back from the war damaged. Claude, in this book, he was a prisoner of war in some sort of concentration camp. The scar across his face is a visual representation of the fact that he's been damaged somehow. So, yeah, I think you're right that there is a certain element of sympathy, and the fact that he is so pining for his youth and like the innocence of his youth in a weird way, even though his youth wasn't completely innocent. There's like the big secret about his past for part of the book. You're like, “What did he do? What's the big secret?” And then these New York friends come over drinks one night and they find out what the big secret is. And they kind of laugh it off. 

KIM: Which is weird because it, I mean, I don't wanna spoil anything so I won't say what it is, but it's pretty bad. Um, but they're, they don't seem to be shocked by it at all. 

AMY: I expected it to be something far worse, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah.

MAUD: I expected it to be far worse too, but I also think, yeah, if she had chosen to spin it differently, It could have been a big deal. And I feel like the fact that it isn't to the New Yorkers and that it makes him somehow more intriguing underscores like their kind of cravenness and the hollowness of the enterprise that, you know, that Claude was involved in in New York in a way. 

KIM: I just had a thought about Ms. Bush going back to it. So we've got Félice, we've got Linnet, and we've got Ms. Bush. All different ages of women that are being exploited in some way by, I guess men and society or male society. I don't know, just a thought.

AMY: There's a whole scene where the women are at a bar and they're all kind of fighting with one another, and the bartender looks on and even says that I think like, Oh, you got four generations there of women at each other's throats.

MAUD: Yeah. Yeah. And I think he reduces them in some really awful way. I can't remember what slur he uses, it wasn't quite like bitches or sluts, but…

KIM: Cat-fighting or…

AMY: Hens or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I had another thought about the pulpiness. I guess I just keep going back to like, we talked about the language. Her writing style is the beauty, and if you took that away, the plot points might add up to some sort of like James-Patterson-esque story. Yeah. Um, but that's why I want to reinforce that to our listeners that it's really beautifully written and lyrical and um, I think also just the setting of Paris and how she describes it adds to all that. 

KIM: Yeah, there's almost a Lost in Translation feel to Linnet's character. She has a fantasy of what it's going to be like in Paris, and instead she's kind of alone and looking at this completely different society as an outsider. And it's very fascinating in that way. And again, very, very beautifully written.

MAUD: Yeah, and we also haven't talked about the fact that the first place we see him taking her is a lesbian bar filled with women who are very short. As a fairly short person, you know, I don't wanna praise it too much because I do think it's probably problematic in certain ways, but at the same time, it's not really like a cliche, you know, it's not like, “Oh here are some hot ladies getting it on.” I mean, he does have a male gaze, but it's also not exactly the kind of gaze that you would expect. You know, it's not like, “Oh, here we are, let's see if we can get a threesome going on” or something. It's, it's very interesting and I feel like in a way that might be one reason that her books haven't survived or like, they haven't continued to be sort of acclaimed, because there is this kind of complexity and slipperiness of perspective. So you're not getting a moral “yes” or “no” in a lot of cases. And to think about somebody writing this stuff in the fifties. I know there was like lesbian pulp and all of that, but to portray this in a complex way that wasn't necessarily centering that world, but also wasn't just presenting it as like, "Ha, haha, look at this crazy," you know, it's really interesting.

KIM: Yeah, I agree. 

AMY: I think the weirdness of the book, I mean, that scene, like you said, it wasn't just a lesbian bar, it was a lesbian bar where she explicitly says everybody here is petite, shorter. Uh, and so there's just, there's so many weird moments throughout the book that if you had told me this is an English translation of a French book, I would've believed it. Because it's weird in like if a mime had shown up… like that kind of weirdness. 

MAUD: Yeah. Yeah. All of her books are like that.

AMY: Okay. Even the ones not set in Paris.

MAUD: Yeah. They're all like that. None of them are like, “Oh, here's a straightforward story about, you know, these characters who are either relatable or villains.” It's always kind of a mess like this, which I think is part of what I like about it, that you're just never really sure what's going to happen or how you're going to feel about a character ultimately.

KIM: Yeah, that's what I loved about it. You don't expect what's going to happen to happen. You don't expect that you're going to have this bar and the slice of life be like that as you start the book. We also mentioned that Patricia Highsmith publicly praised Keogh. What exactly did she have to say, Maud, do you know? And do you see any similarities at all between Keogh and Highsmith's work?

MAUD: Yeah. Um, so I actually, I printed out something that I wrote on my blog ages ago as I was preparing for this. And it quotes Joan Schenkar and Patricia Highsmith, so I'll just read this little paragraph: “In the last sentence of her critique of Meg, Pat left no doubt how much of herself she saw in Theodora Keogh's young heroine. ‘Such an admirable personage is she with her banged up knees, her dirty sweaters, her proud vision of the universe that remembering one's own childhood, one wishes one had kept more of Meg intact.’”

KIM: That's beautiful. 

AMY: So that's her first, that's her debut novel, then, that Patricia Highsmith was bowled over by.

KIM: Wow.

MAUD: Maybe somebody listening to this podcast will be like, “Oh, you know, should I write a biography of Theodora?” Please do. And also, I have meant for many years to go to the New York Public Library, there are some Farrar/Straus letters between her and her editor in their archives. So I've always meant to go and see if there's anything juicy in there. 

AMY: You mentioned the part about this margay, the wild cat. The legend was that the cat bit her ear off?

MAUD: Yeah, Joan said that the margay just bit like a tiny bit of her ear left off.

AMY: Just a little piece. Just a little.

KIM: It makes for a good story. 

AMY: And I think in one of the things Joan wrote that I read, uh, she mentioned that Theodora was still doing her bar exercises for dancing. As a senior citizen, I mean, she was still practicing her bar work. And then I think she either, she lived on a tugboat for a while or she was married to a ferry boat captain, something like that in a later portion of her life.

MAUD: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and then there's the land in North Carolina and I can't remember the story around that. [police siren sounds in background] Here we have our siren.

AMY: Okay.

KIM: Street Music! 

AMY: Street Music! Yeah.

KIM: Maud, I can't tell you what an honor it is to have you join us. I'm so glad I finally got to meet you, um, sort of in person or at least visually. And we love learning about Theodora.

MAUD: It's really my honor to be on the show and to meet you finally, and to meet you too, Amy. Yeah, it's really wonderful. I love the show.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Please keep those five-star reviews coming. They give us so much joy. And head over to our Facebook forum. (It's not the Lost Ladies of Lit Facebook page. You have to take one extra step and go to the forum) which is where everybody's hanging out, talking about each week's episode, interacting with former guests. We have sneak peaks of future episodes. We wanna see you all. 

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