25. Margaret Wolfe Hungerford—Molly Bawn with Jessica Callahan

KIM: So Amy, I was wondering, have you read James Joyce’s Ulysses?

AMY: Yes, or rather, I guess I should say I tried, because it was a pretty difficult go, and I don’t think I fully understood half of it. But have you read it, Kim?

KIM: I did. I read it in grad school, and I’m so glad I read it and discussed it with a class and a professor, because it really helped me make sense of it all. And, if I remember correctly, it actually took a whole semester to read it, too. But absolutely worth it.

AMY: But, you know, our listeners might be wondering right now why we’re talking about James Joyce. He’s not exactly lost….nor is he a lady.

KIM: True, but this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” author is, and one of her novels, Molly Bawn, happens to be mentioned in Chapter 18 of Ulysses. More on that later. 

AMY: That’s right. Margaret Wolfe Hungerford was a 19th century Irish novelist who specialized in Victorian-era romance novels. In fact, she wrote at least 57 known works, and possibly there were more that she wrote anonymously. We should note that Wolfe Hungerford (also known by her nom de plume, The Duchess) wasn’t exactly celebrated for great character development or depth, but we will say her books are very fun to read. They are filled with humor and really quippy banter. And isn’t that kind of what we want sometimes? Some escapist fare? (Especially these days.)

KIM: Yeah, her books are real page turners, which is why she was an incredibly popular novelist in her day (thus, as we mentioned, her novel being name-dropped in Ulysses, one of the most critically acclaimed books of all time).  

AMY: But we’re guessing most people breeze right past that reference to Molly Bawn in Ulysses. So we were curious to learn more about The Duchess and exactly what made her novels — including Molly Bawn — so insanely popular with Victorians. We brought on a special guest for this week’s episode who is going to help us dig into all that. And bonus, she’s of Irish descent, so it’s only fitting that with St. Paddy’s Day right around the corner she jumps in on this discussion of an Irish “lost lady.”

KIM: So, Amy, let’s raid the stacks and get started! 

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]

KIM:  Who better to welcome to the show this week to chat about romance novel Molly Bawn than our good friend of many years (and fellow English major) Jessica Callahan? She is Vice President of Development at Crown Media Family Networks, home to Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, Hallmark Drama, and the on-demand streaming video service, Hallmark Movies Now. During her time at Crown Media, Jessica has directed the development of over twenty Movies of the Week. Prior to her time at the network, she spent a decade at Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions producing Movies of the Week for CBS and ABC. Before transitioning into television in 2006, she was an editor of romance and mystery novels at Penguin Group in New York City. Welcome, Jessica! 

Jessica: Hi! Thanks for having me, guys!

KIM: Okay, so thank god we’ve all had the Hallmark Channel to get us through this pandemic. I know it’s only March, but is it safe to assume you’re already hard at work on Christmas movies for this coming year? 

JESSICA: Yeah, we had a very small respite in January, but honestly, it’s never not Christmas at Hallmark. It’s always Christmas, but, you know, we’re here for your romantic needs all year long!

AMY: Is it every hard to have it be Christmas all year long?

JESSICA: Yeah! It’s exhausting, because you just have to sort of keep yourself in that spirit on some level, and we make so many of them that it’s very hard to figure out a new way to bake cookies or a new way to make a snowman or a new way to get your characters into these very sort of traditional norms that we all know but also to keep them feeling fresh and to make them feel organic within the story. So I’ve made anywhere between 8 to 6 in a year (just Christmas alone — that’s not including the out of holiday franchises), but yeah, it’s rough! Once you just get done with it, to start thinking about Christmas the next year and to keep it going… it’s a little too much sometimes!

AMY: And then you actually have Christmas in your own life to celebrate.

JESSICA: Yeah, and that’s like the craziest part because we get done with making the movies in October. Like October, beginning of November, so by the time we’re coming out of it and we’re thinking about spring movies, Christmas is actually all around. The stores are decorated! The carols are on! People are asking what you want for Christmas and all that. So it is funny and it does sort of happen every year in the same way. So it’s fun and yet really kind of weird at the same time. 

AMY: Okay, so lucky for you with all this Christmas overload, we are switching gears. Next week is St. Patrick’s Day, and since your last name is Callahan, we knew we had to bring in the “Irish girl” for this episode. I’m just wondering, how strongly do you identify with your Irish roots? Do you bust out the soda bread and corned beef next week?

JESSICA: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My mom is half Irish. Her father was Irish descent; my dad is half, because his mother was half and his father was half. So there’s definitely this pervasive Irish American-ness to both sides of my family, and we actually would celebrate St. Patrick’s Day like an Easter or a Thanksgiving growing up. It was a very big part of my childhood memories. We would not only eat the corned beef and cabbage and wear the green and all that, but my mom used to buy me a corsage back in the day. It would be a green carnation with the white ribbons around it. She would pin it to my coat and so everybody knew all day long that I was a little Irish girl. So I have really very ingrained memories of that. My grandfather used to say that the worst thing an Irish person could do was to forget where they came from. So just sort of knowing Irish history and knowing the history of Irish Americans in this country was sort of ingrained in me very early, and so there’s always sort of a bit of a lens through which I look at American history, and it’s definitely through my Irish heritage. So, yeah! Begosh, begorrah! I totally am!

KIM: So given all that, have you read many classic works from Irish women authors, and had you already heard of Margaret Wolf Hungerford before this?

JESSICA: I hadn’t heard of her before this, so I was pleasantly surprised because when you talk about classic Irish literature, you think of Yeats; you think of Oscar Wilde; you think of James Joyce. There are these names that sort of just pop into your head, and not one of them are female until you get to the 20th century and then you finally get to Edna O’Brien or even Iris Murdoch, who I don’t necessarily think of as an Irish writer because she didn’t really grow up there. She was more of an English writer. But this was the first time I’d ever heard of this woman, and she was a romance novelist, so to me, I was like “Oooh! Who’s this lady? I want to know her!!” So I was pleasantly surprised, so thank you for introducing me to her!

AMY: Of course. Let’s start off by finding out a little bit more about Margaret Wolf Hungerford, a.k.a. The Duchess. (I mean, how much do we love her pen name? That’s awesome. To clarify — she was not ACTUALLY a Duchess, we need to make that clear.) She was born Margaret Hamilton in 1855, and raised in [feigning Irish accent] County Cork, Ireland…. That’s horrible.

JESSICA: [laughing]

KIM: I thought that was great!

AMY: County Cork, Ireland — and this was just about a decade after the Great Famine had ravaged the country. Even at an early age, Margaret showed a lot of writing talent, and she won some school writing competitions. At the young age of 17, she married. She moved to Dublin and had three daughters, and then, sadly, she became a widow at just 23 years old, with all three of her children still under the age of six. Sounds like a pretty precarious position to be in, wouldn’t you say, Kim?

KIM: It sure does. So that was when she made the always bold decision to attempt writing for a living to support herself and her young family. She headed home to Milleen House in County Cork and fairly quickly had her first novel, Phyllis, published in 1877. That novel is available to order online and we’ll link to it in our show notes, but I couldn’t find a description of the plot. Molly Bawn, though, was only her second novel, out of dozens, and that was published within a year of Phyllis, in 1878. She apparently had a very methodical approach to writing, and she wrote every morning for three hours. After she moved back to Cork is also when her life takes a plot twist straight out of one of her romance novels. Do you want to fill us in on that story, Jessica?

JESSICA: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I should be saying this in my best “bodice-ripper” copy voice, honestly, because it does get very interesting.

AMY: Bodice-ripper!

JESSICA: [laughing]. On her return to Cork, Margaret actually struck up with her neighbor — the boy next door, literally, Thomas Henry Hungerford, who was the eldest son of the local landlord. So Thomas Henry lived in Cahermore House, which was situated right around the corner, and his mother was not happy with this new relationship with the Protestant minister’s daughter. He was the eldest son of Henry Jones [Hungerford] and Mary Boon Couper, and as the eldest he was trained for the army and had to go off to the Boer wars. But while he was fighting here, he gets this message from his mother that calls him home, claiming she’s worried about his father’s behavior. When he gets there, he discovers that it was all a grand matchmaking scheme. Mom just wanted to marry him off to a rich young lady by the name of Miss Townsend of Derry House. Thomas Henry turns down this idea, much to his mother’s dismay. (And just a little bit of a footnote: Miss Townsend goes on to marry George Bernard Shaw a few years later.) His mother was then appalled to find out that he then goes and secretly marries his neighbor lady who is three years his elder (Our little Margaret is quite the cougar here!) while they were in London when she went there on a business trip to meet with her publishers. Here she is a widowed writer with three children and regarded as a very disagreeable match by mom, so you can just imagine what her relationship with her mother-in-law was after that.

AMY: That is some soap-opera caliber stuff right there! And you’re right — apparently the mother-in-law never really did make peace with Hungerford. She sounds like she was a real harridan and made her life hell).  But another interesting fact about The Duchess: She is credited with being the first person to pen the phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” (It’s actually a line she wrote in Molly Bawn.) 

KIM: Right, and before I knew this, if I had to guess, I would have said it had to have come from Shakespeare, right? And he actually did write something similar. It’s in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and I’ll read it to you:

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,

Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues

AMY: I think we all like Margaret’s better. It’s just simpler. Pithier, right? But that said, she did seem to be a big fan of Shakespeare’s, and you can see a lot of his influence in her work I think, including in Molly Bawn. Sadly, the Duchess died of typhoid at the age of 42, but it’s pretty amazing when you realize how many novels she managed to write in a fairly short period of time, which, I think is a great segue into our discussion about her most famous novel, Molly Bawn. Jessica, before we get too deep into it, do you want to give our listeners a quick, spoiler-free overview of the plot? 

JESSICA: Sure. Eleanor Massereene was orphaned as a child and raised by her much older half-brother, John, who gave her the nickname “Molly Bawn,” and bawn means “fair,” according to our Molly. Since she was a fair-haired, sweet child, the nickname stuck. At the open of the story, Molly is 19 and longing for adventure when a dashing cavalry officer arrives, a young friend of John comes to visit. Tedcastle Luttrell is instantly smitten with our Molly and the novel follows the adventure of this young couple as Molly is called to her estranged yet ailing grandfather’s estate for a house party filled with grandfather’s scheming heirs. Let’s just say hijinx, drama and romance ensue.

KIM: House parties!

JESSICA: Woo! House party!

AMY: There’s always hijinx at the house party, man. Always.

KIM: So you’ll be interested maybe to hear that “Molly Bawn” is also the name of a traditional Irish folk song, and we’ll be playing it for you at the end of the episode because Molly references it in the book. So, we mentioned that Hungerford’s novels were Victorian, and her plots and love scenes certainly stayed mostly to Victorian social mores and especially expectations of women. There’s a lot of flirty dialogue, but the love scenes are quite chaste. Apparently, she very skillfully captured that tone of fashionable society of the time, which is one of the reasons that people really liked her books.

AMY: And if I may be so bold to say, Jessica, I think the first third of this book had some quintessential “Hallmark movie” moments. Would you agree?

JESSICA: Uh, yes. Romance genre tropes are eternal, it seems! As Kim just said, there’s a lot of flirty “will they/won’t they?” banter. The baking scene, of course, with the flour-throwing… nothing like a good flour-throwing to get people to gaze longingly into each other’s eyes and wipe something from a cheek! The strawberry-picking scene could have been right out of one of our “Summer Nights” movies. And then of course Letty showing up when Ted corners Molly in the school house. We call that the “Act 6 Interrupted Kiss.” So yeah, there’s a lot of things in there that I felt were right at home and still in the pocket for what we do in the romance world.

AMY: If we had the Hallmark “Bingo Game” or the Hallmark “Drinking Game” that you see going around, going viral on the Internet, we could definitely have put it to work for this novel, as well.

JESSICA: Yeah, I think you would have had a couple of shots. [laughing]

KIM: We should have done that! Jess, would you like to read one of your favorite excerpts from Molly Bawn to give our listeners a feel for what it sounds like?

JESSICA: Yeah, sure. I picked the one that starts out Chapter 5, and I think this kind of goes back to what you guys were saying about sort of Shakespearean influences and these sort of romantic notions. So I’ll just start:

   It’s four o’clock and a hush, a great stillness, born of oppressive heat, is over the land. Again the sun is smiting with hot wrath the unoffending earth; the flowers nod drowsily or lie half dead of languor, their gay leaves touching the ground. 

   “The sky was blue as a summer sea,

    The depths were cloudless overhead;

    The air was calm as it could be;

    There was no sight or sound of dread,” 

quotes Luttrell, dreamily, as he strays idly along the garden path, through scented shrubs and all the many-hued children of light and dew. His reverie is lengthened yet not diffuse. One little word explains it all. It seems to him that the word is everywhere: the birds sing it, the wind whistles it as it rushes faintly past, the innumerable voices of the summer cry ceaselessly for “Molly.”

   “Mr. Luttrell, Mr. Luttrell,” cries someone. “Look up!” And he does look up. 

   Above him, on the balcony, stands Molly, “a thing of beauty,” fairer than any flower that grows beneath. Her eyes like twin stars are gleaming, deepening; her happy lips are parted; her hair drawn loosely back, shines like threads of living gold. Every feature is awake and full of life; every movement of her sweet body, clad in its white gown, proclaims a very joyousness of living. 

   With hands held high above her head, filled with parti-colored roses, she stands laughing down upon him; while he stares back at her, with a heart filled too full of love for happiness. With a slight momentary closing of her lids she opens her hands and flings the scented shower onto his uplifted face.

   “Take your punishment,” she whispers, saucily, bending over him, “and learn your lesson. Don’t look at me another time.”

   “It was by your own desire I did so,” exclaims he, bewildered, shaking the crimson and yellow and white leaves from off his head and shoulders. “How am I to understand you?”

   “How do I know, when I don’t even understand myself? But when I called out to you ‘Look up,’ of course I meant ‘look down.’ Don’t you remember the old game with the handkerchief? — when I say ‘Let go,’ ‘hold fast;’ when I say ‘hold fast,’ ‘let go?’ You must recollect it.”

   “I have a dim idea of something idiotic like what you say.”

   “It is not idiotic, but it suits only some people; it suits me. There is a certain perverseness about it, a determination to do just what one is told not to do, that affects me most agreeably. Did I..” — glancing at the rosy shower at his feet — “did I hurt you much?” With a smile.

   There is a little plank projecting from the wood-work of the pillars that supports the balcony: resting his foot on this, and holding on by the railings above, Luttrell draws himself up until his face is almost on level with hers, — almost, but not quite: she can still overshadow him.

AMY: Oooh! Molly!

KIM: Yeah!

AMY: As we’ve said, flirty dialogue abounds in the novel, and you can see it in action there. The two main female characters wield their charm like a weapon, and where the men are concerned it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. The ladies turn flirting into an Olympic sport, and when it comes to a war of words, the women ALWAYS win. It’s so hilarious, but at the same time these men are also fully tormented by it. Jessica, what do you think Hungerford might have thought of such coquettish behavior? 

JESSICA: I think she was having oodles of fun with it honestly. I was reminded more than once of Lydia Bennett being, like, a determined flirt, and Lizzy says to her father, “If you don’t take her in hand, dad, she’s going to be the ruin of this entire family.” But in Molly Bawn, Hungerford is just letting Molly and her friend, Lady Stafford, run wild. They’re laughing, they’re flirting and they’re making all sorts of bad decisions that would be the ruin of any of them in any other novel of that time period, right? So I think she’s having fun, and further, they’re always quickly forgiven, right? So much so that I started wondering if she was actually skewering the men because she portrays them as these lovelorn fools who will basically do anything for a pretty face, right? They’ll forgive anything, and these women are doing some pretty outrageous stuff. But maybe that’s the secret to its success. The norms regarding women were so restrictive and the stakes were so high for them, so the freedoms sort of reflected in this novel must have been just both sensational and tantalizing to a female reader, right? I mean c’mon.

AMY: I had no preconceived notions at all about this book, and while I was reading the first fourth of the book and we see Molly being so flirtatious… she’s playing a dangerous game in some ways, and I kept thinking to myself, “What is Hungerford going to do here?” Is she going to suddenly have Molly have to have her comeuppance? Is she going to somehow… is there going to be some sort of victim blaming going on? And coming from our current social context, I was like, “Oh, please don’t do this. Please don’t make this a book about she gets in trouble because she was being a flirt.”

JESSICA: Yeah.

AMY: And I was happy to see that that actually doesn’t happen. 

JESSICA: Right.

AMY: I thought that that was kind of cool. It’s as if Lydia Bennett is the heroine and doesn’t run into any trouble, and it’s kind of refreshing.

JESSICA: Yeah, I mean, just to piggyback off of that, I kept thinking of House of Mirth, right? Edith Wharton. A married man just flirted with her and she refused to get married and that was the end of her. So there are these other novels that are being written at the same time period that were cautionary tales to their female reader.

KIM: She never would have sort of survived a Henry James or an Edith Wharton novel.

AMY: No! And that brings us back to the mention of this book, Molly Bawn, in Ulysses. It appears in the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom, who is Leopold Bloom’s wife. It happens at the end of Ulysses. The context is that Molly is rationalizing having flirted with her friend’s husband, and she begins listing some novels that come to mind that might have shaped her thoughts on how men and women should behave toward one another. And that includes Molly Bawn, as well as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. 

KIM: Yeah, it’s really interesting that such a modern, experimental novel like Ulysses would mention Molly Bawn. And the big takeaway from this book for me was that Hungerford really did have a lot to say about marriages, incompatibility, and the positions women are placed into because of the need for them to make a suitable marriage. Given what I’d read about Hungerford and Molly Bawn before I read it, I wasn’t expecting some of her commentary to be so modern and feminist. And as we mentioned, Molly Bawn, in spite of being a Victorian heroine, is kind of unapologetically… boy crazy, but she’s also very aware of the inequities of romance, the double standards. And here’s what Molly Bawn has to say on it: 

“‘A man may love as often as he chooses, while a woman must only love once, or he considers himself very badly used. Why not be on equal footing?’”

And later she explicitly states the idea of women being a commodity in the following lines:  

“'...who ever heard the opprobrious term 'fortune-hunter' given to a woman? It is the legitimate thing for us to sell ourselves as dearly as we can.'”

AMY: But, she does end up playing with fire in some respects. One of the men she flirts with in the book ultimately has a rage-filled reaction toward her when they’re out in the forest. And while reading that, I couldn’t help but think to myself, “Oh boy, some things don’t change…”

JESSICA: Yeah, I mean I was honestly taken aback by that scene. I didn’t expect it. It really kind of came out of nowhere after all the sort of “flirty” and “hijinx!” Especially some of the more comedic moments back at the house. Here we are back now in Molly’s home of Brooklyn and she’s going to meet Luttrell and she goes to the woods to sort of see him and who appears but her cousin, Phillip, who she had been flirting with. And he had been framed up to this point as pretty dispassionate. He was definitely flirting with her in this other way, but he was a gambler. He already had a fiancee or an understanding with another woman. And so the flirtation that kind of occurs between them is not very well drawn out in the novel so when it gets to this point and he’s shaking her and he’s grabbing her and he’s basically saying, “If I can’t have you, no one will… I’d rather kill you,” I thought, “Ooh, gosh! Here’s this guy! The guy you didn’t think would be the abuser is now the abuser.” He was supposed to be the guy that you would want at the top of the novel, and now he’s just devolved into the captain of the football team who you find out is the ever-present “football rapist.” So it was shocking, honestly.I was surprised.

KIM: It was like a Lifetime movie got mixed up in our Hallmark movie, and no! We don’t want that!

AMY: Oh, perfect! That’s right.

JESSICA: Off brand!

AMY: Off-brand! Off-brand! I did think, “Okay, here’s my moment that I was worried about.” Suddenly the tide is going to turn for Molly and she’s going to have her fall from grace and it’s going to be awful. That didn’t quite happen, but we did have that sort of scary wake-up call for her a little bit, I think.

JESSICA: I think that’s the consequence, right? She hadn’t had any consequences up until that moment, and so at some point she had to … I think Hungerford had to give her some stakes around that, that that kind of behavior isn’t okay. And that was sort of the point of the moment. 

KIM: I agree. And also, there’s another interesting that Molly proudly and unconventionally decides to make her living singing on stage in front of crowds, even though it’s considered to be something almost akin to prostitution for a lady in that time, and that’s even alluded to in the novel. What’s your take on that, Jessica?

JESSICA: It was an interesting creative choice, right? I mean, Hungerford could have skipped that whole part. That wasn’t an important part of that novel, and in fact, it felt very tangential to the rest of the story. And when she makes this assertion that she’s going to go do this, I was sort of like, “Wait, what? You can’t go do that, girl! That’s it! Your reputation is done!” But she does, and Hungerford sort of makes this a part of the novel to make a statement about women using their talents to claim some independence without censure, which was interesting, because you kind of make that parallel between the writer and her creation. Hungerford is this successful female writer of popular novels which probably was not very well celebrated in her time period. She’s not Nora Roberts like we have today, right? So it’s not hard to see her using Molly as her proxy in that way, and Molly’s unapologetic about that choice, which was kind of interesting because then it’s very clear that Hungerford is not apologetic about her choices, either, so it felt incredibly modern.

KIM: Yeah, it’s another great relief that we have: Okay… nothing bad happened there, either. And then Molly’s good friend, Lady Stafford, also seems ahead of her time in many ways. She has a clever act of deception where she manages to arrange a marriage that allows her to be completely independent, both financially self-sufficient and free of ever having to associate with her husband. Wow.

AMY: Yeah, so Lady Cecil Stafford and her husband have actually never even laid eyes on one another at the start of the book even though they’re married. (It’s really kind of a funny story laid into this plot), but once they do finally meet in person, they have their own love story set into motion and it’s really basically another Hallmark trope, isn’t it Jessica? The case of mistaken identities?

JESSICA: [laughing] Yeah, it was great.

KIM: And can we also discuss the character of Plantagenet Potts (which is an awesome name) really quickly? He’s a peripheral character not too vital to the plot, but he brought in some extra comic relief. I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the stunts he pulls to stave off boredom during the house party.

JESSICA: Yeah, you probably hit upon my two favorite characters actually, which is Lady Stafford and Plantagenet Potts. I could have read an entire novel just on the adventures of Lady Cecil and Mr. Potts, honestly. The scene in the library where he lights the gunpowder on fire and it sort of blows up and they hide behind the curtain in the alcove and they’re standing there as statues when Sir Penthony opens up the curtain. And Penthony and Ted are so upset because Potts has his arms around the ladies as he’s trying to hold them in place on the statuary. It was just comical. It had me in stitches, and I think I need a sequel actually.

AMY: In my head I was envisioning James Corden playing Plantagenet Potts. Like, how perfect would he be?

KIM: Oh, totally.

JESSICA: And they kept making a point of his red hair.

AMY: Yeah, if you’re a ginger, yeah, trigger warning a little bit. So, though the novel is set in the late 1800s, there’s a lot about the book (particularly the middle third, which is basically the months-long house party at the Amherst estate that reminded me of a Jane Austen book (complete with the requisite ball)… But, Jessica, I was wondering if there were parts of this book where you thought, okay, I can see the Irish coming through? 

JESSICA: Yeah, probably the way she handled her ensemble scenes with multiple characters. Lots of writers can go in close and do that intimate character work, but it’s harder to handle dialogue amongst three or more characters within a scene. And she often found her stride in those moments. And when I think of Irish writers like Oscar Wilde or Frank McCourt or Maeve Binchy, there’s that ear for dialogue that they have. It’s a quick-wittedness; it’s a sense of the absurd that gives their scenes fun and energy, and it doesn’t really move the plot forward, but it really gives you a sense of those characters. She definitely had that, so that’s probably where I saw it the most, was in those moments. 

KIM: That’s a great point. I love that perspective. So Jessica, what’s your verdict on Molly Bawn, to put you in the hot seat. What did you like most about it? What did you think about it overall?

JESSICA: I think the critics are right! I loved her way with characters, but I also loved her feminist take, right? As light and fluffy and sometimes even as melodramatic and soapy as it got, every once in a while she’d make these piercing social commentaries. Marrying your cousin is weird: Yeah, it is! I met you last week, I’m not going to want to marry you yet, Ted: Tell him, girl! I’m too young for this — I need to live! So I think that was probably my favorite piece of it, was just, every once in a while she’d be like, “Yes you will”/”No I won’t”/”Yes you will”/”No I won’t … I’m a feminist and I’m not going to take this anymore.” It was just like, “Where’d THAT come from?”

AMY: Yeah, you’re right; that was great. One of my favorite parts was when you mentioned the Plantagenet gunpowder fiasco where they had to hide behind the curtains and pretend to be statues so as not to be caught, whenever she would have those moments in the book, she would sort of cap off the scene by writing “Tableau!” And it was basically the equivalent of going “And… scene!” It made me laugh every time because I’ve never seen it done in a book that way. But it also reminded me that this book was made into a silent film in Britain in 1916. And putting you on the spot again, Jessica, as a Hollywood type, if you found a pitch for Molly Bawn in the slush pile, would you consider it worthy of a film adaptation today? 

JESSICA: Probably not. It’s a little too episodic and the way the characters tended to get in their own way versus having to overcome an external obstacle would make it probably very difficult for a modern viewer to watch, but you know, like I said… maybe if it’s “The Modern Adventures of Lady Stafford and Plantagenet Potts” we can talk, you know? I think with a little reshaping, right? We could get there.

KIM: I think that’s an incredibly valid and astute critique, and I would expect nothing less from Jessica.

JESSICA: Yeah, yeah, right.

AMY: It’s still a fun read, though.

KIM: It absolutely is. Completely worthwhile read. And I love the idea of taking the subplot and turning it into the mini-series or the movie. I think that would be great.

JESSICA: When I was reading it, it kind of kept bringing back my own career choices, because before being at Hallmark I was at Penguin and I was doing romance novels and mystery novels, and I also was doing classic literature; I did the Signet Classic line. So I have this broad understanding of the “canon,” the classic literature canon, but I also understand genre writing, and so I know the difference between those two writing styles and what I thought was really interesting about this novel was she was drawing from these different disciplines and these different well-known writing styles while sort of selling it into this genre and it was fun for me, because I thought, “Oh, here’s Shakespeare,” and “Here’s Edith Wharton,” and “Here’s this writer and that writer,” or “Oh, here’s this trope: the interrupted kiss.” It just sort of all fell together and I thought, “Wow, this is really interesting.” She’d have at one point, she said, “Improvise!” and I’m like, “This is like someone writing ‘Ad-lib’ in a screenplay: ‘Actors ad-lib’” So it was this sort of hodge-podge. It didn’t really stick to one thing or another, and she was just throwing it all in and she just had this expectation of her reader to go along on that ride, and you do! That was the crazy part. It was always just slightly unexpected, which I enjoyed. 

KIM: Jessica, we can’t thank you enough for coming on to talk about Molly Bawn. This was the most fun I’ve had in at least two or three weeks!

JESSICA: Well, I’ve missed you guys, and thanks for having me on. And Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Slainte!

KIM: We loved having you!

JESSICA: Thank you, ladies!

***

KIM: So what did we learn from today’s episode, Amy?

AMY: Well, we learned that if something’s referenced in Ulysses, it’s worth checking out…

KIM: Yeah, and luckily, Molly Bawn doesn’t require assistance from a grad school professor to understand it… We also learned that if flirting was an Olympic sport, Molly Bawn would have clinched the gold.

AMY: For sure. She was a pro. And finally, we learned that an unabashedly romantic novel can also be feminist at the same time.

KIM: It sure can.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode, and as promised, we’ll go ahead and play you out with a version of the Irish folk song, “Molly Bawn.” We hope you check out Hungerford’s delightful romance novel and let us know what you think. 

KIM: And don’t forget to let us know what you think of this podcast, as well, by leaving us a rating and review. It really helps.

AMY: Until next week, may the road rise to meet you… bye, everybody!