156. Susan Taubes — Divorcing with Rosemary Kelty

AMY FOWLER: Hey everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner Kim Askew.

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone. When the book we're going to be discussing today, Divorcing, was first published in 1969, the critic Hugh Kenner, in his review of the book in the New York Times, dismissed the author Susan Taubes "as a quick change artist with the clothes of other writers." Tragically, Taubes took her own life mere days later.

AMY: In recent years, Susan Taubes's work is being reassessed. New York Review Books published a new edition of Divorcing in 2020, and just this June they reissued her coming of age novella, Lament for Julia.

KIM: Our guest today, Rosemary Kelty, is one of our longtime listeners and a passionate advocate for literature written by women. We can't wait to discuss Taubes and Divorcing with her.

AMY: So let's raid the stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

AMY: Rosemary Kelty is a prospect research coordinator at Weill Cornell Medicine. She has also worked at New York Cares, Penn America, New York Public Radio, and Columbia University Press. She has her master's in English from Queens College in New York City, and she is a proud fifth generation New Yorker. I was expecting her to have this very thick New York accent, and you can see that she doesn't. 

ROSEMARY: I've been trained out of it.

KIM: Oh, yeah. Okay. You started 

out with one. Yeah. Rosemary is also one of our most devoted listeners from the earliest days of this podcast. If doing this podcast, Kim, is like running a marathon, Rosemary is the person on the street corner handing us water at every mile marker.

Yeah, she's got the sign 

AMY: Yeah, it's a reminder to all you other listeners out there that we love [00:02:00] to hear from you guys. And you know what? You might get asked on the show like Rosemary.

KIM: Yeah. She has made so many great suggestions for books we should cover. We just had to have her on to discuss one of them. Welcome, Rosemary. We're so happy to have you.

ROSEMARY KELTY: Thank you so much Kim and Amy, I'm thrilled to be here.

KIM: All right. So let's get down to it. How did you come across Susan Taubes and her novel, Divorcing?

ROSEMARY: It was last summer. I was browsing through the uh, Strand Bookstores. That's an independent bookstore in New York. They have a Central Park kiosk. Um, It's really beautiful. They sell books right outside Central Park. And I came across their New York Review Books Classic section. And I always look at that series. You never know what gems you're going to come across. And that's how I came across Susan Taubes's Divorcing. And I was struck by the description in the back.It says "the question that haunts Divorcing, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life." So I just thought that sounds really interesting. What is this novel about? I expected it to be completely about the dissolution of a couple's marriage, and while it is most certainly the premise of the book, it's about divorcing from so much more in your wider life. And I also saw that the author was described as having a tragic death, and I wanted to read the book and learn more about Susan Taubes and her life and works.

AMY: When we had agreed to do this book, I didn't know anything about it other than the title, and we had recently done an episode on Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife and I thought, do we want to do Ex-Wife and then do Divorcing? Is that going to be too similar of books? No, not at all.

KIM: Couldn't be more different, really. 

AMY: Alright Susan Taubes. What can you tell us about her early life?

ROSEMARY: She was originally born Judit Zsuzanna Feldmann in Hungary. In 1928, Dr. Sándor Feldman, who was a Freudian psychoanalyst, and her mother's name was Marion Batory. Pardon me if I mispronounce the name. Susan Taubes was also the granddaughter of Mózes Feldmann, who had been the Grand Rabbi of Budapest. Her mother left the family in 1939 to marry another man. Susan and her father thus emigrated. to the U. S. in 1939, and they settled in Rochester, New York. I also wanted to mention that Susan Taubes changed her name from Judit to Susan when she arrived in the U. S. And thankfully, Susan's mother also survived World War II in Hungary. I believe that she also emigrated to the U. S. eventually or at least visited her daughter and her ex husband. Susan also received a BA from Bryn Mawr College and received a PhD in history and philosophy of religion from Radcliffe And she also did various work at the Sorbonne and Hebrew University. She met and married her husband, Jacob Taubes, while she was an undergraduate student.

AMY: I've seen it pronounced “Yakob” a lot, so I don't know.

ROSEMARY: Yeah that sounds right. He was born in Europe. 

AMY: Yeah, Jacob, Yakub, take it for what you will. They had a son in 1953 and a daughter in 1957. And by 1960, she began teaching at Columbia University where she was curator for the Bush Collection of Religion and Culture. She and her husband divorced in 1963, but their relationship continued to play a significant role in her life and work. Rosemary, can you talk about the dynamics of their marriage and maybe, if you know, what influence they might have had on each other's intellectual pursuits?

ROSEMARY: This is very tricky uh, in terms of anything definite. I've read that Jacob and Susan Taubes's marriage was pretty fraught. They supposedly had an “open marriage.” Again, I can't substantiate that; I've just read that in an article. He supposedly had many affairs, and that is similar to Ezra Blind in the book Divorcing. And I haven't come across anything about Susan Taubes having any affairs. I'm not sure if she had any romantic relationships after her divorce. Did either of you come across that? 

AMY: I don't remember seeing that anywhere either. 

KIM: We know that the book is somewhat autofiction, but we don't have actual facts to know which things are specifically true. We just know the gist of it 

AMY: Even if you take away the extramarital affairs and all that, it just seems like, um, two very cerebral people getting together, it might be explosive. 

KIM: Yeah. 

ROSEMARY: And what's interesting, too, is Jacob Taubes was also an ordained rabbi as well, which I found very interesting. One thing I will say, I can't speak to marriage dynamics necessarily between Jacob and Susan in any detail other than what we know of their divorce, but at least in the novel, Sophie mentions that Ezra wins the arguments every time. 

AMY: Because he has to win the argument and she has to let him. 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, and I wonder if she's actually even convinced.

AMY: Yeah. And also the idea of him so focused on his work. In the book, the Ezra character, he's the genius at work and he must be left to be able to do his great magnum opus. At the same time, she says, “I would like to write a book someday. Will I get to? Because I have to be the woman behind this great genius.” So just the idea of she had to sideline her own ambitions a little bit. (At least Sophie Blind in the book does.) 

ROSEMARY: Yeah it's interesting, though, in terms of her career, because she taught at Columbia. She went to all these prestigious institutions, was clearly highly respected by her peers. The author had (I know it's not good to use these types of phrases) but a more successful career than Sophie Blind in the book. So the basic premise of the novel is that the main character, a woman called Sophie Blind with three children, she's in the process of getting a divorce from her husband, Ezra Blind. But from the very beginning of the novel, so this is giving away the first page, but she is killed in an accident, and she is, beheaded. And throughout the rest of the novel, this decapitated head, who still appears to have the consciousness and the awareness of the main character, is basically rolling around through the character's life. So we just go through her entire life, basically, and not necessarily in traditional chronological order. We learn of her very intimate life with her husband Ezra. How they meet, how they get engaged and married, their actual wedding. We also, as readers, get an experience of the backstories of the characters' parents and grandparents lives and families. She also takes us through her entire past as she arrives in the U.S., her brief childhood in Hungary, and her return to Hungary post-war. So it's a real whole compilation of the character’s existence on this planet. It's so wacky, too! I don't know how else to describe it. Like, how do I describe this novel?

KIM: Yeah there's this severed head, her severed head wandering through her past. There's multiple funerals um, this nightmarish fantasy trial that's going on. And this is all woven throughout this idea of marriage using (as far as we know) her own personal experience with divorce and gender dynamics with her husband and possibly other partners and sublimating it into this novel. 

ROSEMARY: I think that Sophie Blind, as well as clearly Susan Taubes was also affected by her own parents’ rather unusual marriage, their divorce. Also, it's so hard to distinguish between the character and the author sometimes. I’m trying to be very careful here. In the novel too, the discussion of Sophie's paternal grandparents’ marriage.

KIM: Yeah. She's the product of all these relationships and she's bringing that potentially into her relationship with Ezra. 

AMY: And it ties into the whole Jewish tradition too, like going back to these previous generations and the rabbi grandfather and how they lived in Hungary and things like that. 

ROSEMARY: That's another issue, too, for me, I'm not part of that religion or culture. I wondered what other issues she was addressing in the novel that I didn't understand in terms of culture. I actually love how she describes different celebrations in the novel. It's very brief, but they're very descriptive about certain foods for holidays, or certain particular religious practices at home, anyway, I just wanted to bring that up, but that's something I can't speak to in terms of religion or culture.

AMY: Same. I felt that. I feel like if you were coming to this book with more of a knowledge of that, you would probably be able to extrapolate so much more. (Not just the religious background, but also the philosophy.) I realize how ignorant I am on every level when it comes to all this philosophy she's trying to weave in.

ROSEMARY: Yeah, same here. 

KIM: Freudian psychology, the biblical, the Old Testament, everything. I know. You almost have to be a scholar of all these things, which she and her husband together did, and their um, milieu.

ROSEMARY: Yeah, that's amazing too, isn't it? Her interweaving of all of these figures from the 20th century, the 19th century, but people further back, I'm sure, as well. There's just so much going on philosophically. 

AMY: And it’s like a fever dream.

KIM: It is a fever dream. Yeah.

ROSEMARY: Yeah, in terms of the philosophical stuff at the end, I don't know if that's supposed to be before she passed, before she was so brutally decapitated, or are we supposed to assume that this was actually a dream?

KIM: It’s an episode of “Dallas!”

ROSEMARY: I've never seen that show. 

KIM: This is a Gen-X thing. 

AMY: You're too young. 

KIM: Yeah, it was a huge controversy, 'cause everyone was like, what? 

ROSEMARY: Oh. 

KIM: … or if it was true..

ROSEMARY: Oh, wow.

AMY: I'm just thinking of all of the really highbrow analysis of this book, and we are the  only one that have or will ever make a comparison between this book and “Dallas.”

ROSEMARY: That's interesting, though. 

AMY: But yes, I think there's some merit to that. 

KIM: It was all a dream. Exactly. That's what I wondered too. There's no answer. Yeah. 

AMY: There's no knowing what's real and what's not in this. 

ROSEMARY: My initial reaction is that, “Oh, wait a minute, maybe she's okay.” But there's nothing definite. Then you know that she died so young and it's so tragic, and so when you read the book and you know that, then the ending, that feeling of could it all have been, is she okay? 

AMY: It brings a whole other layer to the experience of reading thebook, knowing what her fate was. 

KIM: Considering it's about death and dying and, yeah/

AMY: And we're going to talk about the reviews this book got in a few minutes here. And some people say oh, the bad reviews prompted her to walk into the ocean. And I texted you, Kim, and I said “I can see from reading this book that maybe that was gonna happen.”

KIM: I know; it's almost like she presages her own death. Yeah.

AMY: Yes. reading the book, at least from Sophie's perspective, you're like, “Wow, she's grappling with an awful lot of big, heavy stuff.”

ROSEMARY: Yeah. I completely agree with you, Amy.

AMY: I was just gonna say, too, that… so it starts off and it's, like I said, a fever dream. You're on an acid trip, almost. It's all over the place, you have no idea at times what's going on, it's first person, it's third person, it's really jumbled. And then I felt as the book progressed and we got closer to her European origins and her reconnecting with her roots and all that, that the prose actually got so much more clear. 

ROSEMARY: Well, I agree. 

AMY: It started to read like a typical novel almost by the end, and I thought that was interesting too.

KIM: It's like she has more clarity and it feels clearer. 

ROSEMARY: I'd have to agree with that too. I found the first 80 pages a little bit difficult to get through the first time. The second time, I'm a big fan of it and I saw it as definitely, it seems like it was related to the severed head as well. I remember a few times she mentions that you go through all your life, all your memories before you die. It's very macabre, I know. But I was wondering: is that the structure she was trying to evoke?

KIM: I thought that, too. 

AMY: I also saw it, especially with the Freudian psychoanalysis stuff… I read the word “shattered” used to describe this book and I thought that was the perfect word for it. And it made me think of a broken mirror on the sidewalk or something. And she's looking at the reflection of all these different shards and seeing different sides of her life reflected back at her sort of thing. There's a mention in a New Yorker article about this book that says “it does not even attempt stability.” 

ROSEMARY: Yeah. 

KIM: That's so perfectly said, I think! You just don't know what is going on at first. And it takes a little bit to understand even a little bit what's happening. And then once you do, everything starts to make sense. So I guess then reading it again, you're going into it, knowing what to expect, and it probably makes it easier. But I was just like, wondering “What is happening??”

AMY: Yeah, Kim, you likened it to reading Joyce's Ulysses.

KIM: Yeah, definitely. And I think that also speaks to what you were saying earlier, Rosemary, about there's being so much in there. Where you almost need an annotated book that explains, just like you would read Ulysses where you understood what all these references were because you're missing out on so much without that context.

AMY: I read it halfway through the first time and I had to just put it aside. I was like, “I can't.” It's funny because I said to you, Kim, we switch off who writes the questions for each episode, like for the guest. And I was like, “Kim, I need to hand the baton to you on this one. Cause I don't even know what to say about this book. I don't even know where to begin.” Of course I went back and read it a second time and I think because it wasn't so jarring anymore, I knew there was a severed head, I knew what to expect. Then I was able to immerse myself in it, and I had no problem the second time reading it. And what's funny is I feel like now, having thought I would have nothing to say about this book. I feel like I have so muchto say about it!

KIM: Yep. I couldn't agree more. 

ROSEMARY: The topics of the book, they're difficult to get through as well, right? There's a lot of tragedy. For the Sophie Blind character and Susan Taubes herself, they both lost family members In Auschwitz and the concentration camps. She, thankfully, did not have to experience Nazi persecution of Jews firsthand, but her former neighbors, her family members did, you know? And that, when I was reading that particular section, that made me cry too. The desperation of war. It's just so vivid. 

KIM: Vivid is the perfect word for that. I've never read anything quite like that about post World II in that way.

ROSEMARY: It's so personal. You get it from the first hand accounts, and you can see the psychological trauma.

KIM: Mm hmm. Absolutely.

AMY: I was getting Sophie's Choice vibes in that section. It was almost like the inverse a little bit, where she was gonna have to leave with her father and leave her mother behind, and it wasn't like she had the option, really, of making the choice, but there was that same gut-wrenching feeling

KIM: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm.

AMY: And it just had that whole setup in that you see them in the modern era and then you go back in time to the war and it illuminates why that person is the way they are in later years.

ROSEMARY: I really wonder if … were the horrors of World War II a significant shadow for the author, as they appear to be, for the character Sophie Blind? How do you even make sense of that? I was watching, listening to this interesting panel from this other independent bookstore here in New York and Brooklyn, the Community Bookstore. They interviewed David Rieff, who wrote the introduction to this book. And he's the son of Susan Sontag… and Susan Taubes’s son, Ethan Taubes, was on that panel. And another scholar, Jess Bergman, was on that panel. They were discussing the launch of the book. And David Rieff had mentioned an author, an intellectual figure, who said “How do you write poetry after seeing Auschwitz?” After hearing that, I wondered, was this particular book something like that for Susan Taubes, I wonder? 

KIM: Mm hmm. 

AMY: so speaking of Susan Sontag, let's turn our attention to Taubes’s friendship with her. Rosemary, do you know much about that? 

ROSEMARY: Well, I know that they were very close friends. During the Taubes’s marriage and afterwards. I know that Susan was apparently a student of Jacob Taubes. Sontag was very intertwined with the Taubes couple, and I've read that Susan Sontag also identified Susan Taubes’s body when her body was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean. So clearly, they were very close. And I know that, from David Reiff's introduction, and David Reiff is Susan Sontag's son, he mentions in the introduction to the book that his mother once said she couldn't forgive Susan Taubes for taking her own life.

AMY: Also I had seen that in one of the articles I read this week that Samuel Beckett was a fan of Taubes. And that made a lot of sense to me because when I think in the book Divorcing about that trial, it's like her trial at the end of her life, but it's also the divorce proceedings, and it's very Theater of the Absurd, right?

ROSEMARY: Yeah. It's just, I can't, how do I just, how do I describe it?

AMY: Yeah, It's bonkers. To me it was like, Beetlejuice when he's in the waiting room. Same vibes. 

KIM: But also terrifying, at the same time.

AMY: Yeah. Disturbing. The other movie that kind of came to mind. So everything's, like we said, it just jumps from one thing to the next. But when it was talking about the marriage itself, I kept thinking of that Adam Driver/Scarlett Johansson A Marriage Story, just because there's a lot of discussion. Very much analyzing what went wrong, and he wants to save it. 

KIM: In a very Rabbinical scholar and Freudian way 

AMY: Who, who doesn't want to ever lose an argument. 

KIM: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 

KIM: Oh, so speaking of Rosemary, do you want to read a passage from Divorcing? Because I feel like we need to give our listeners little bit of an idea of all this that we're talking about.

ROSEMARY: Yeah, I have two sections. They're pretty short. I just thought they connected so well. [Reads a passage.]

AMY: I love that passage, because it's reassuring you, the reader, as you're reading this book, which is “baffling and blundering.” 

KIM: Absolutely. “It's just a book.” Yeah.

ROSEMARY: And then I'll just read real quick when I read this, I just thought, Oh, wow, this is exactly like the book passage. [reads passage]. It's so true! It's so true! You're gonna go on to the adult world and it's gonna be…

KIM: Yeah, at least you know that you can depend on that you're going to be in school every day, you're going to have those clocks, you're going to have the uniforms telling you what to do. And that is a sanctuary from what is reality when you hit the adult world. Beautifully, beautifully put. 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, there's a comfort in there and so you're given that structure as a kid, and then you're fooled, you're an adult, it's no, it's gonna be a wild roller coaster.

KIM: The same with marriage, as far as society she got the structure from being married and then when she was cut off from being married, it set her adrift in society. And then you know that corresponds with the severed head I think. 

AMY: Yeah, she even says in the book that “marriage is a cloak,” a disguise that you can wear, that it keeps you protected from the truth, and once you get divorced, you have to take the cloak of marriage off, and then you're forced to confront the real truth of your existence. The other thing I wanted to connect back to the passages you read, I was just thinking of this today. I mean, “divorcing.” I think you mentioned Rosemary. It's not just a book about marital divorcing. She's divorcing from her. father. She's leaving America. So it's “divorcing” on many levels. But when you think about like a “marriage plot” book, you know exactly what to expect. They conform to a certain thing that you're used to, right? They're tidy, they're simple. That's a marriage plot book. So, this is the opposite, this is a “divorcing book,” and therefore, stylistically, it has to be the opposite too. It has to be messy, not tidy, all over the place; like an explosion, almost, of what the “marriage plot” book is.

ROSEMARY: No, that's interesting, Amy. You mentioned that about the explosion. Because there's one passage or line in the book where she does actually describe the dissolution of a marriage as like a building falling apart. I'm trying to find that. Oh yeah, on page 153, she says just that “it is at a calamitous moment that the past opens into view. A block of high apartment buildings, raised in 15 years of marriage, has been bombed away, revealing a long forgotten landscape which lay hidden behind the walls.The clearing of the wreckage must wait. As for the price or damage to body, soul, and mind of fifteen years of her life blanked out. Or is it more?” And she says “the sensation of forgetting comes back first. How one walked through years sealed in oblivion.” Wow. I can't understand how anybody who reviewed this, whether you like the style of the novel or not, you have to admit how beautiful the language in this book is! I don't know how to describe it, it's just like, when I've read certain lines like that or passages, I'm like, “Oh, I get that I can identify.

AMY I highlighted in this book more than I have highlighted in any book that we've done for this podcast. There were so many lines that I, even though there was so much I was confused about, there was so much that resonated. And at the same time (and I feel like we've been going on and on marveling at this book), I haven't decided that I love this book.

KIM: No, I agree. 

ROSEMARY: You don't have to. 

KIM: Yep. 

ROSEMARY: I'm not saying that this is my favorite book, although in terms of analyzing the darker sides of the human condition, I'd have to say it's probably one of the best I've read.

KIM: I agree with you.

ROSEMARY: In analyzing, she's so open, to what she wants to say about her life, her intimacy with her husband I mean, it's, it's, wow I agree though, you don't have to love it or like it, but I mean, that's something I've come to terms with in more recent years about giving books a chance.

KIM: Yeah. 

ROSEMARY: Because even if it's not your thing doesn't mean you can't appreciate it. 

KIM: Yeah. So we had mentioned that Harsh New York Times review of Divorcing. Can you talk though about how her book was received when it was first published? 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, sure that was the first review I came across, by Hugh Kenner. When I read it (it's very short, too) I initially thought “Okay, this is very dismissive to say the least.” That's being kind about the review. But that video, which I would highly recommend to everyone to check out, it's on Community Booksters YouTube channel. In that interview or discussion, David Reiff called it “unspeakable.” He found it so offensive. And later on in that discussion, Ethan Taubes said yes, it was “extremely vile.” Those are his words. And I was like, yes, it is completely vile, because Hugh Kenner's not analyzing the book at all. I get it. The first part is…you have to get through it. You gotta keep going through it to really appreciate and understand what she was trying to do. But I was looking for other reviews. I did come across one from The Chicago Tribune by Sarah Blackburn, and she was much kinder. She loved the language, the craft. She just wasn't a big fan of the characterization. To me, reading that article, she wanted something more traditional, but it was a much more glowing review. I wonder if Susan Taubes read that review. But yeah, it does seem that Hugh Kenner's review really affected the life of the novel. David Reiff also said in panel discussion or it might have been in the intro, I'm sorry, to the book, that apparently at the time, if your book was reviewed in The New York Times, if it got thumbs up, It was popular.If it got thumbs down, you never saw it again. That was interesting to me when David Reiff said that one review basically consigned the book to oblivion until 2020. I couldn't find too many other reviews. I don't know, did you? It was frustrating. I don't know why. It was published by Random House and everything. I guess it could be very controversial at the time. It's pretty raw, like, oh, I was blushing when I was reading certain things. 

KIM: Yeah. She was pushing boundaries.

ROSEMARY: Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: Within a few days of this review, she took her own life. And I guess we don't really know why. We can make guesses. Obviously, the review did come out a few days earlier, but she was struggling with a lot probably.So it's all just surmising what may have happened. 

ROSEMARY: We'll never know. But one thing I took away from that panel discussion, you know, it was really touching, too, of her son, Ethan Taubes mentioning that she was engaged in life. He also said that he views this novel, the writing of this novel, as her way to continue to be engaged in life, and I thought that was interesting. He clearly has a positive remembrance of his mother 

KIM: And let's fast forward to 2020 and she's gaining recognition. As you mentioned, Dr. Merve Emre and Leslie Camhi, they both wrote about her novella, Lament for Julia, too in a recent issue of the New Yorker and the New York Times.

ROSEMARY: Yeah. 

KIM: And the novella sounds fascinating. Have you read it? 

ROSEMARY: Yeah. No, I haven't gotten to that, but I was super excited to see that, “Oh my goodness! There's a review of Susan Taubes’s other work, which in 2020, you know, her son and Susan Sontag's son were talking about, “We're trying to get that published,” and here we are. So clearly, people want to read more. 

KIM: Yeah. And clearly you are on the pulse, because you are the one who mentioned doing this book before those articles came out!

AMY: I know you had suggested this for the episode before that stuff started coming out. I think it's clear that everyone out there is gonna have to make up their own mind about this novel. There's a lot to it. We did our best at trying to break it down a little bit. I'm not sure if we succeeded or not, but it's that kind of book. We would encourage you to take a look, though. And Rosemary, we cannot thank you enough for coming on the show. We're so happy we finally got to meet you over Zoom. You've given so much insight today. It was really fun to have this discussion with you. 

ROSEMARY: Thank you both. I was so thrilled when you asked if I wanted to discuss something. I was like, absolutely! And this book has literally just opened up a whole new world for me in terms of literature and what’s read, what's not read, what's not published, and again I really appreciate you ladies inviting me. It's no words, it's been awesome. 

 ROSEMARY: And I would encourage readers, other listeners, just try to appreciate a book on its own merits. 

AMY: Yes. And also, just as in life, be willing to step out of your comfort zone. That's how you grow. 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, this podcast has encouraged me to do that. So thank you. I just adore this podcast. Thank you so much.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Don't forget to join our Lost Ladies of Lit forum on Facebook if you want to connect more with Kim, myself, or Rosemary. You will find her over there chatting away. It's kind of a central hub for all of our listeners to be in conversation about the Lost Ladies we've covered and books in general.

KIM: Yeah, see you over there. 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.