230. Literary Jewelry with Leigh Batnick Plessner

Literary Jewelry with Leigh Batnick Plessner

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KIM ASKEW: Welcome to a brand new year of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off works of literature from forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes, and we're rolling back in from our holiday hiatus, and woo boy, January has been a real doozy, hasn't it Amy?

AMY: Yeah, not fun. But I think maybe we need to distract ourselves right now, perhaps with some sparkly objects. Do you think that would help at all?

KIM: I mean, we can certainly try, right? So with that in mind, today we're going to be discussing three different jewelry-themed stories written by women authors, and we've got a returning guest who knows a little something about this subject. Yes, a jewelry designer who also happens to love books. And she has graciously humored our idea for today's episode. So we're thrilled to welcome her back. So let's raid the stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

KIM: Today's returning guest is Leigh Batnick Plessner, Chief Creative Officer at Catbird Jewelry. Leigh joined us back in 2022 to discuss author and heiress Daisy Fellowes, and she was a woman who was known to always be dripping in diamonds.

AMY: Yes, last spring Leigh mentioned to us that she had stumbled upon another Lost Lady of Lit who was a contemporary of Fellows, Louise de Vilmorin. Little did Leigh know that in telling us about her, she was also volunteering herself for another guest appearance. Leigh, welcome back. We hope you don't mind that we recruited you for another episode here.

LEIGH: Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be back with you guys.

KIM: After reading de Vilmorin's novella, Madame de —., the plot of which centers around a pair of earrings, the three of us weren't sure if it was hefty enough to merit a full-length episode. So we're adding two more works to the mix: Maria Edgeworth's morality tale for children, “The Bracelets,” and also Dorothy Parker's famous New Yorker piece, “The Standard of Living,” which is about an expensive necklace.

AMY: Yeah, we're covering all the bases here. So let's kick things off with the earrings portion of the podcast and this book by Louise de Vilmorin, Madame de —. Now let me just start with the title because it's Madame de “blank,” so we don't get her last name and that's why it's kind of a funny sounding title. Madame de “fill in the blank.” Turtle Point Press reprinted this book in 1998, so you can easily get a copy, listeners. It's a thin little volume, one that Vita Sackville West once described as a soufflé. So Leigh, how did you first hear about this book? 

LEIGH: So I was reading a biography of Nancy Mitford that I think I bought on the dollar cart somewhere at a used bookstore. And, it mentioned the name Louise de Vilmorin and I was not familiar with her. And then there was just a little footnote and it said, that she was a poet, a minor novelist, and a wit. and so then I went searching and I found Madame de — and I bought my copy on eBay and that is when I messaged you guys because I thought that she might be really wonderful to talk about. When I found the book, I remembered that I had seen Max Ophuls film, The Earrings of Madame de — quite a long time ago, and I really loved the movie, and at the time I didn't know (or I had forgotten) that it was based on a book.

KIM: Yeah, we're going to be talking a little bit more about the movie later on in the episode, and we'll also share a photo of the cover of the edition that you have, because it's very cool. So would you like to do the honors, Leigh, of summarizing the plot of the book for us?

LEIGH: Sure, I would love to. The book is set in the 19th century. And there's this really beautiful woman, Madame de, who's very, like, preoccupied with elegance and glamour, and she, has racked up the debts with her dressmakers, et cetera, and so she very quietly sells this pair of heart-shaped diamond earrings that had been a wedding gift from her husband, to pay those debts off. And she concocts this whole story about how the earrings had been lost, and then the earrings come back into her husband's possession. He then gives them as a gift to his Spanish lover who is heading to South America. The lover then sells them to pay off her own debts. They're then acquired by a gentleman in South America who finds them to be very beautiful and this Italian diplomat comes from South America to the world of Madame de, and they end up back in her possession.

AMY: And it almost is like an O. Henry story that has gone tragically sideways, right? I mean, these earrings just keep turning up like a damn penny! And it's interesting too because with each new person that acquires the earrings, I feel like the earrings take on a different meaning. So by the end of this novella, the earrings ultimately lead to despair and devastation. The whole thing kind of just bites Madame de in the butt by the end, right? I mean, that's the most blunt way to put it.

KIM: Yeah. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” Leigh, why don't you read a passage from the story so our listeners can get a feel for it.

LEIGH: Sure. So this is the part of the book, which I have thought about ever since I read it and, um, it's, I think, partially for me because of my very specific relationship to jewelry that it really lodged in my head. But my relationship to jewelry is, I think like so many of us, a very emotional one of what it makes us feel, what it makes us hope for and long for. So I'm trying to, like, get this little part of it that won't give away too much. This is from the very end. 

He went straight to the jewelers. “Fasten this diamond heart onto a thin gold chain and fasten the chain around my neck so that it can never be undone. Do it quickly, for I have no time to lose.” When that had been done, he went straight home, gave certain instructions, and while his luggage was being packed, sent off a number of telegrams. Then he left the country. Monsieur de laid the other heart on the heart of his wife and then sent off for the old nurse. 

So that passage and the image of that diamond heart becoming something other than what we've seen it to be and fastened forever so that it could never be undone really sat with me. We actually had a parcel of stones at work the other day, and one of them was a heart-shaped salt and pepper diamond, and I immediately thought of this passage and was like, “Oh, I want that so much!” But I let it go.

KIM: Yeah, it's interesting, too, because when you read that passage, it made me think about women also being like jewelry at some point or treated like jewelry. 

AMY: Yeah, Madame de is described almost in comparison to a diamond, right? Throughout the book, she's sparkling, she's… 

LEIGH: Glittering. 

AMY: Brilliance and glittering, yeah, and it's almost like he sees her as his trinket or his little trophy wife, or whatever, and then when he finds out that she has pawned these earrings that he gave her for their wedding, he's not even that upset. He's like, well, let me go buy them back, And then he gives them to his mistress!

LEIGH: I think that Louise de Vilmorin, like, very intentionally set this book 100 years prior-ish to when she was writing. I think it was an aesthetic choice, but I also think that it really sort of highlighted the lack of economic autonomy. This book made me also think of Madame Bovary, and, you know, just so many women who were backed into a corner by not having any currency of their own.

AMY: Right, because the earrings, towards the end of the book, end up in the hands of Madame de’s niece, who is also going through financial straits because her husband is in debt. And it's almost like you see the cycle continuing. 

LEIGH: Yes. 

KIM: Okay, so what do we know about Louise de Vilmorin's life? Um, who was she, Leigh, and how does it relate to the story, perhaps?

LEIGH: So, Louise was born, I think it was in 1902, and she came from a really aristocratic French family. And they were deeply interested in the natural world and sciences, and my understanding is that, like, she herself didn't really have too much of an interest in writing, and then as a young woman she became friends with a circle of artists and writers. Jean Cocteau… She was um, engaged to Antoine Saint-Exupery… um, and just being in their presence inspired her to try her own hand at it. She also had a sister who, was a culinary writer, um, wrote cooking or restaurant columns in France, and she had four brothers, and one of those brothers actually was the son of the king of Spain, which is just an interesting side note.

AMY: Yeah, she definitely sounds like one of those “bright young things” of her day. And I can't help but imagine that she knew Daisy Fellowes. Don't you think? 

KIM: I was thinking the same thing.

LEIGH: They actually, yes, they had somebody very intimately in common. They were both lovers of Duff Cooper, the British ambassador. And he actually translated Madame de — from French into English. And I also think the fact that I read about her in the biography of Nancy Mitford, she was really a “bright young thing” is a perfect way to put it. She was amongst the literati and, um, I think, you know, all kinds of fascinating people.

AMY: And I think, like Daisy Fellowes, I do remember in that episode we talked about how she was kind of vilified. And I think you could almost say that of Louise as well. Um, I found an article from 2009 in The New York Times by Christopher Petkanis called “Chi-Chi Devil,” that talks a lot about her and what her peers kind of thought about her. Um, I'm just going to read a little section from this and then I'm going to link to this in the show notes because it's A really fascinating into her life, it also made me realize, like, we didn't know who she was, but apparently she was a huge, well-known deal, and across the pond, more people probably know this name than we do here in the States, maybe, So, this article starts off, “If Louise de Vilmorin knew how adoringly she would be remembered, and what an industry would be made of her life and oeuvre, she might not have been so heartsick. How desolate was this French femme de lettres, and saloniste, legendary clotheshorse and tastemaker, brilliant hostess and home wrecking manslayer. Casting about for a title of her new life of Vilmorin, Françoise Wagener, settled nicely on, I Was Born Inconsolable.”

So, there is this biography of Vilmorin. It's in French, though, so it's kind of unattainable to us unless you speak French. But, um, it goes on to talk about how she's a manslayer, you know, this article says that Evelyn Waugh and Cecil Beaton found her unbearably egocentric. Waugh described her as quote, “a maniac with the eyes of a witch.” So, yeah. So that's taking me back to Daisy Fellowes. 

KIM: Totally. Oh my gosh, how perfect. 

AMY: Their high-glam confidence about themselves gets taken down a notch by those around them.

LEIGH: Yeah. I mean, she also makes me think of Peggy Guggenheim as well. You know, any woman who lived free,

AMY: Here's another section that I'll just read. This beginning part is gonna really get your gall. “With her long face, her long, thin, ungainly body, and an overbite that the gap in her teeth did nothing to improve, Vilmorin was alluring, but not pretty.” And then he goes on to say, “It didn't seem to matter, though. Men were enslaved by her teasing sorcery, her surrealist word games, the ribald stories she told, the scribbling of poems on dinner napkins, not to mention the briskly minted bon mots.”

Then, um, there's a quote here from Vilmorin, which I thought was, uh, Kim, as you mentioned, like, how does this relate to Madame de —? Vilmorin said, “I have no faith in my fidelity.” And then she told one of her lovers, Orson Welles, She was taking him off to bed, and she said, “Darling, tonight I'll love you forever.”

KIM: She sounds amazing. 

AMY: She really does. And one more way that, um, she kind of ties into this story is that it's mentioned that she despised women who refused artifice. She didn't trust women that were dressing plainly, although I did see also that when she met Duff Cooper, she was wearing a dirndl. Which makes me really laugh, I know. So like, not at all what you'd expect. 

KIM: So de Vilmorin’s book was adapted to film in 1953 by director Max Ophuls. I hope I said that right. It stars Charles Boyer as the husband, Danielle Darrieux as Made de and Vittorio De Sica as the dashing ambassador. A very incredible movie, and you had seen it before, Leigh. Um, this was my first time, so.

LEIGH: I watched it ages ago, and it has always stuck with me. It's a jewel box. Those images are really incandescent.

KIM: It's actually a Criterion Collection movie.

AMY: Yeah, and worthy of that. The scene where, um, so basically Madame de is kind of toying with her lover for about a year at a series of balls before she finally gets together with him, and in the movie, it's conveyed in one single scene where they are dancing, but the costumes change as they go around the room. It was so brilliantly done.

KIM: Oh, the costumes, the furs, I mean, it was incredible. And I read in this article by Molly Haskell, it's on the Criterion Collection website, but basically she said that this film is like the level of The Godfather and Citizen Kane, but because it's about women's lives and women's love, she thinks that's why it is not, spoken in the same, you know, breath as those movies.

AMY: I also saw that Wes Anderson loves this movie. 

LEIGH: Oh, as in one of his little Criterion closets, yeah. I mean, the closeups of the earrings is very much of a Wes Anderson move like the opening of Royal Tenenbaums with the table, the placards.

AMY: Yes.

KIM: She hated it though. 

LEIGH: She hated it?!

KIM: She said it was like receiving a pretty box marked silk stockings. You open it and discover a pair of nail clippers. And she was mad because it was set in Paris, but she claims it was set in Vienna, but that's only in her head because the book setting is ambiguous. 

LEIGH: I hadn't really thought about it. It just feels European, you know, as an American. But Vienna makes sense. Also, Vienna has, for what it's worth, incredible antique jewelry. 

KIM: Ooh, Okay, yeah, so there's the connection there. 

LEIGH: And I understand so much how she was disappointed. I mean you've built this world, this world lives in your head, what a strange thing for somebody else to then kind of make a photocopy of it, but I think that they both work, really beautifully, as kind of, you know, a mismatched pair of earrings themselves.

AMY: Okay, so Madame de was Vilmorin's most famous work, especially because of the screen adaptation. Uh, but she did write a number of other books. I think there were 15 novels total. A few other titles are The Lovers and Julieta, which were both also adapted to film. She was awarded the Prix René Vivienne, which is an annual French literary prize in 1949. I actually ordered one of these Julieta, I think, from the library, and it came, it was on hold, and then I forgot to go pick it up, so I have to go back and get it again, because I do actually want to read something else that she did and compare it to this little one.

LEIGH: So do I. It really feels like a world that you step inside of. Like a little snow globe. And I would like to enter into another one of those worlds that she has built.

KIM: Okay, so we've got literary earrings crossed off our lists thanks to this now move on to bracelets and turn our attention to Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth.

AMY: She was one of the most celebrated women novelists of her day. I think I read, Kim, her 1812 novel, The Absentee, because you lent it to me. That's the one thing I've read of hers.

KIM: Yeah, I love that one and also, I have Castle Rackrent and Belinda, which I can loan you as well. I love those. I think we should really do a full episode on her at some later date because she kind of lurks in Jane Austen's shadows, even though at the time she was actually more famous than Austen and more commercially successful.

LEIGH: Wow, she is an entirely new name to me. 

KIM: Oh,my gosh, you've got to read her.

LEIGH: I had never, I feel like what an enormous blind spot, which is exciting because then there's other blind spots that I don't know that I have about wonderful writers But um, Yeah. totally new to me. 

AMY: I would say this little short story we're going to be discussing, “The Bracelets,” is not necessarily a good indication of her other writing, and that's just due to the fact that it's a children's story. It was originally published in 1804 in like a kind of parent's handbook manual kind of thing. The full title is “The Bracelets; or Amiability and Industry Rewarded.” So it's basically a morality tale that we're getting here in true Maria Edgeworth fashion.

KIM: Yeah, when I read it, it reminded me a lot of Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses, which we did an episode on, and that, you know, it's a morality tale in the same way, and maybe not as evocative of their other work.

AMY: Right, a little cloying. 

KIM: yeah, yeah, exactly. So please read her other works. Anyway, in relation to the book we just discussed before this, deceit also factors into this story too. Amy, do you want to give us the plot in a nutshell for this one? 

AMY: Sure. As with Madame de, it's kind of a crazy maze of stuff happening, but I'll do my best here. So the story takes place at a school for girls, where the headmistress has offered up a small prize to her class, a bracelet, for the brightest student. Now there are two top candidates in the class. Their names are Cecilia and Leonora. Cecilia wins the prize right off the bat, but here's where things get dicey. In her excitement over winning the bracelet, she ends up shoving another girl named Louisa, causing a cherished china doll that Louisa is holding to break. Cecilia just laughs. This instantly earns her the condemnation of Leonora and all the other girls in the class. They start to see her bratty true colors and they tell her so. Cecilia doesn't like this because she likes to be the best. She's already won the kind of academic bracelet, but she's realizing like, “Wow, I'm the smartest, but not the kindest.” So the always competitive Cecilia goes to the headmistress and proposes that they have another contest and another bracelet. This one could be made out of a braided lock of hair and it can be given to whichever student is the most amiable.

So I'm just going to read a passage from the bracelets that kicks off at this point. Animated with this hope of a double triumph, Cecilia canvassed with the most zealous activity. By constant attention and exertion, she had considerably abated the violence of her temper and changed the course of her habits.

Her powers of pleasing were now excited instead of her abilities to excel. And if her talents appeared less Brilliant. Her character was acknowledged to be more amiable, so great an influence upon our manners and conduct, have the objects of our ambition. Cecilia was now, if possible, more than ever desirous of doing what was right, but she had not yet acquired sufficient fear of doing wrong.

KIM: She's giving Regina George from Mean Girls vibes here, for sure.

AMY: Totally. She is a woman on a mission. “I will be the nicest girl. If it kills me.” Um, yeah, so at a certain point in the story, a peddler comes along, selling trinkets. And Cecilia, as part of her niceness campaign, decides she wants to make things up to Louisa, whose doll she broke. So, the only way she can afford to buy something for Louisa is to sell a very cherished little box that was given to her by Leonora and which she had promised to treasure always. So she sells the box that Leonora had given her in the past, and Leonora finds out. Now, Leonora is the good girl. She's the sweetheart that never does anything wrong. And instead of calling Cecilia out on what she's done, she buys the box back from the peddler, which is very similar to what had happened in Madame de, the earlier story we talked about.

KIM: Totally Madame de —. Yep, exactly.

AMY: In Madame de —, this action led to rack and ruin, but in this little short story, it winds up ending on a more uplifting note, because Leonora quietly lobbies behind the scenes to make sure that all's well, that ends well. What do we think? I mean, I always have problems where the interesting girl is kind of tempered, you know… 

KIM: It’s like how you need to learn to be a good woman by being a good girl. And being a good girl means following the rules and being an angel.

AMY: yeah. So Leonora, she practices restraint. But It also makes her sort of insipid. Like, kind of like boring, 

KIM: Yeah, totally.

LEIGH: I wrote down this line from it and I can't remember who said it and in what context but it was, “How can she know my heart?” I think it was just this tension between the veneer and what we show on the exterior versus like, what's happening underneath the surface, you know? Like swans, they glide very beautifully, but they're paddling very hard underneath. And so, I don't know, I thought that that was a really interesting tension to consider the, like, what we show and what we hold. So long as you keep it tamped down below the surface, that's fine.

AMY: I was so confused by, if this is a morality tale, what is the message?

LEIGH: What's the moral?

AMY: What are we supposed to get from this? 

LEIGH: Right.

KIM: Exactly. What are we supposed to take away from this? 

AMY: So I wound up finding a scholarly article on this, um, and shoot, I can't remember the author's name [Fiona Robinson], but I’ll include it in our show notes, but got me to thinking what was most important was that everyone was happy and that nobody was being mean to one another and things like that. Recently I lost a bracelet, because the clasp had broken. It's a chain, right? And if a part of that breaks, you can't have it anymore.So it was about the whole class coming together. 

KIM: [sings] “You can never break the chain, break the chain!”

AMY: LAUGHS 

KIM: That's usually Amy's job, but I couldn’t resist.

AMY: Look at you busting out a song!

AMY: But speaking of songs, it also reminded me of Taylor Swift bracelets. You know, like, the idea of what these bracelets symbolize for these girls and how the one that's made out of hair, which has no value, is really the one they're all competing for.

LEIGH: Well, it's also the one that is, woven together, from all of them. So it's sort of more than the sum of its parts.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Also, the same journal article this author claimed what she thought was that Maria Edgeworth was writing this book in recollection of, like, the two parts of herself that were probably grappling when she was a little kid. You know, like this, this ambitious side, the Regina George, I want things in the world, and… the nice girl… 

KIM: Oh, my gosh. This is Christina Rossetti, too! The tension was there for her, too. 

AMY: yeah, exactly, that's right. And like having to sort of remind yourself of like, no women are supposed to be nice. So like something she was working out for herself sort of thing. 

LEIGH: That makes it maybe a little bit more bearable to think that it was an internal conversation rather than being a tale meant to tell others what to do. It, yeah, perhaps feels a little bit less, um, finger-waggy.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: I love that take. 

AMY: Maybe in the future Catbird needs a whole human hair collection of friendship bracelets. 

KIM: It's so Victorian mourning!

LEIGH: That was the thing in that era… memento mori jewelry for sure, and the use of hair, um… I'll take it up with my colleagues. 

AMY: Okay. So we've talked about earrings, we've talked about bracelets, but this episode wouldn't be complete without a necklace. So now we're gonna pivot to a very pricey strand of pearls in a shop window, courtesy of Dorothy Parker.

KIM: Oh my gosh, this is a nice, exciting difference from the last one too. I love this story, “The Standard of Living.” It appeared in The New Yorker in 1941. Um, once again, the story centers around two besties. In this case though, they're two stenographers in Manhattan. They like to pal around the city. together. Uh, they each live at home with their family and they hand over half their weekly paycheck to them. But they still like to think of themselves as living high on the hog, eating decadent lunches out, turning young men's heads on the street, you know, being young women about town. Amy, would you care to read from Parker's description of Annabelle and Midge?

AMY: Sure thing, here we go. [reads] 

LEIGH: She was so good at her job.

KIM: I know. 

LEIGH: Oh my gosh.

KIM: Yeah. 

LEIGH: It's such a New York story. It feels like the place I know and love. It's just perfect.

AMY: So why don't you explain to our listeners now, Leigh, this sort of game that Annabelle and Midge always enjoy playing on their walkabouts in the city.

LEIGH: Sure. So Midge and Annabelle have this game, the essence of it is, what if you were bequeathed $1 million but the condition was you could only spend it on yourself. And so the way they play this game is they take it very seriously. They play it with an office mate and she suggests that immediately she would hire somebody to shoot the wife of Gary Cooper. Presumably she had a big crush on Gary Cooper, and, you know, she was gonna, get rid of the wife so she could swoop in. And Annabelle and Midge are horrified because there is no room for such, like, fantastical, thinking. This game is very stringent. They take it seriously. 

KIM: And it’s supposed to be guilt free too, right? Like they try to make it guilt free. Like the person that was supposed to leave them money should be someone they don't know and who dies of old age in their sleep.

LEIGH: Right, there's no unnecessary pain to get them to this windfall. So it's the September day in New York. And they're walking around as if they were young heiresses. And they're talking about these fur coats that they're going to buy and having this disagreement about what the best expenditure is around fur. And they walk past this shop and they see these pearls. And so they go into the shop. It's a double row of perfectly matched pearls. My guess is they are natural pearls. And they're closed with an emerald clasp. And they inquire about the price. And, these pearls cost $250,000, and they are alarmed by this price, realizing that it's a quarter of the budget of their imaginary windfall of $1 million. They leave the store. You can feel like the September heat starting to wilt them a little bit like flowers, Um, but then they brilliantly discover, or I don't know, they're struck by this incredible idea that actually, they ought to be bequeathed $10 million. and so they can have their pearls and anything else they desire and that their appetites call for. And it actually, it made me think of, I don't know if you guys know this, but the Cartier mansion on the corner of 5th and 52nd was acquired by the Cartier brothers. They traded a strand or a double row of pearls that were worth, I think, like $925,000 at the time in exchange for the mansion. 

KIM: Oh, I did not know that. 

AMY: Okay, so this story about the mansion is important in what I want to say next because when I was reading this story, I found myself wondering did the clerk tell them the real price or was it a kind of pretty woman moment where it was like “You can't afford anything here. Get lost.” I did find an article that said today, if there was a pearl necklace in the window it would cost $five million, that's the equivalent of what it was. That's a very expensive pearl necklace. During the Great Depression, the price of pearls actually crashed. So did he throw out a number that was super high? It could have been that the clerk took one look at them and was condescending to them and they could feel it. Sometimes I'm intimidated to go into a high end store like that, because I feel like I don't belong there. I'll take one look at a price tag and just be like, “Nope, I gotta get out of here,” you know what I mean? And they were kind of, the girls felt kind of bitter towards the clerk as they were leaving, right? 

LEIGH: It never occurred to me that they were being played with by the clerk, though I think that you're probably right that they might have been. But I just like their dream just got bigger. They're undeterred. So “okay, fine, the pearls cost $250,000, we'll have $10 million!”

AMY: Okay, that's so interesting because I took it as like a sad mockery of a certain type of New York girl that Dorothy Parker is kind of taking down, and that it's sad that the only money they really have to spend is in their imagination.

KIM: I felt more sympathy for it, I guess. 

LEIGH: She was pretty famous, you know, Dorothy Parker and that wit was pretty famous and like, not very gentle. So I don't think it's as gentle as my read on it was. I think it was probably pricklier than that. But there's also the flip side of maybe like admiration for a certain kind of New York girl who is undeterred, who will keep marching down the sidewalk in their tilted slippers.

AMY: Okay. I’m on board with that. 

LEIGH: It also goes to what Vilmorin was saying about how she didn't care for women who weren't invested in some level of artifice. This is a real jewelry conversation and it's like, you know, happening with lab diamonds right now, but lab diamonds always make me think about cultured pearls and, you know, we've been talking about what is inside of these works of fiction. What are they pulling from and mining from their real lives? So how something really tangible and an object that you can hold in your hand, um, can also be really mutable and can change over time, given social mores and our understanding of the world.

KIM: Yeah, that's absolutely true.

AMY: And I love that this story we're all coming to it from very different perspectives. That's awesome. 

LEIGH: It's also evidence of how good she was at her job, that we all walked away not feeling exactly the same thing at all.

KIM: I love that. Yeah, I absolutely love that. So speaking of different meanings, jewelry consistently is holding up a mirror to human behavior. It reveals the best and sometimes the worst in people. So whether it's a glittering heirloom or a strand of pearls in a window like in this story, these objects carry emotional weight and it ends up transcending time.

AMY: And so Leigh, as somebody who works with jewelry every day, I'm wondering if you have any deeper insight into the symbolism of jewelry in these stories, or just in general, and why does jewelry over and over again make such a good literary device?

LEIGH: Well, I think that, uh, jewelry is a reflection, like you guys were saying, of so many of our emotions. It can stand for love and connection and Hope and desire and envy and lust and it's also something that's worn on the body. It's so intimate. Pearls hold the warmth of our body in them and they benefit from being worn, they like to be worn. and so I think that that's really potent for literature as well. Um, it's ceremonial, and also jewelry is mutable. You can recut stones. You can unseat stones. You can melt the gold and turn it into something else. So over time, it can shapeshift kind of like, I don't know, I've been thinking about Orlando a lot recently, and, you know, Orlando moving through time and becoming different versions of themselves throughout time, and jewelry can do the same thing. 

AMY: I know you must take your inspiration from so many things, like art and, you know, music, whatever, but do you find that books inspire you in your work?

LEIGH: Oh my god, books inspire me and my work so so so so much. The things that I'm most inspired by are reading, um, watching generally old movies, and just walking around New York. I have some files I try and always really, pull out quotes that I read that have something really evocative about, um, jewelry. Some of my favorite ones are, James Salter has some really beautiful passages about jewelry. Virginia Woolf has so much about jewelry, um, and, uh, Naomi by a Japanese writer whose name I'm blanking on right now. But yeah, I always think about when we're making our jewelry, like, how it makes you feel and sort of, um, maybe because I'm like, kind of a little bit nearsighted and I don't wear my glasses enough what does it look like as you're sort of in a deep conversation and you're moving your hands around and how are they flashing? And, um, I think literature always captures that so well. So, we have a necklace named for the Neapolitan novels, uh, yeah, we're always pulling from literature.

AMY: Okay.

KIM: So cool. Leigh, we loved hearing your insights and we love that you've tipped us off to some utterly fabulous and glamorous forgotten women writers who, as we've talked about, just happened to have a lot of connections as well. Um, so keep them coming as you find them and we hope you'll join us again in the future. This has just been a wonderful discussion. I think we could keep talking for another hour or more.

LEIGH: Thank you guys so much. I love chatting with you. Have a really, restorative, peaceful weekend.

KIM: You too. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you enjoyed our discussion of the New Yorker story, in fact, we'll be talking a lot more about The New Yorker in two weeks when we're covering the first woman editor on staff there, Katharine White. And if you just can't wait until then, next week we'll have a bonus episode for our subscribers. You can find out how to subscribe at our Patreon page or wherever you listen to this podcast. 

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