37. Elizabeth Stoddard — The Morgesons with Rachel Vorona Cote

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, everyone, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew. 

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes. Some of the authors we discuss on this podcast were literary rock stars of their day. But the writer we're remembering today wasn't so lucky. It reminds me of something a friend of mine in the publishing industry once told me — that writing a book is a largely heartbreaking experience. I think she was referring to the discouragement of putting your heart and soul and years of your life into creating something and putting it out in the universe, only to discover that the universe doesn't want to buy any copies. 

KIM: It's a harsh reality, for sure, and it's definitely the sort of pain today's Lost Lady of Lit, Elizabeth Stoddard, felt acutely. Like her contemporary Herman Melville, this New England author was a critical success. (Nathaniel Hawthorne himself was a fan, and she was compared to Tolstoy, George Eliot, Balzac and the Bronte sisters.) But her books failed to find an audience when they were published. 

AMY: Of her first novel, The Morgesons, Stoddard later wrote, “I think one copy passed from hand to hand, but the interest in it soon blew over and I have not been noticed there since.” It's not only tragic to hear this, but it's surprising, too, because The Morgesons is brilliant. And like it's blustery heroine, it is also aggressively bold. You’d think, honestly, it would have gotten people's attention, especially because some scholars today consider her one of the most strikingly original novelists of her time next to Melville and Hawthorne. 

KIM: Right, and we just so happen to agree, but it's as if Stoddard was left screaming into the wind. Maybe the book was just too much for readers of the day. 

AMY: Lucky for us, we are joined today by a guest who happens to have written the book on “too muchness,” especially as it relates to Victorian literature, and we can't wait to introduce her. 

KIM: I'm so excited. And speaking of too much, this is too much buildup. So let's raid the stacks and get started.

[introductory music]

AMY: Our guest today, Rachel Vorona Cote, is a frequent contributor to The New Republic, Longreads, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The Poetry Foundation and Literary Hub, among many others, and she was also a contributor at Jezebel. She has an MA in literature from George Washington University, and she's All But Dissertation for a doctoral program at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied Victorian literature. 

KIM: I read her 2020 book Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today when it came out last spring, and it had me nodding my head in rigorous empathy from the first few pages. Rachel, welcome to the show. We are so glad to have you here. For the next hour or so, feel free to be as unruly, tempestuous and hysterical as you want to be. 

RACHEL VORONA COTE: Well, thank you! That is such a lovely invitation. And I'm so thrilled to be here and to be reading a lost lady of literature with you two. 

AMY: Before we get into our “lost lady,” Elizabeth Stoddard, we need to discuss your book, Rachel, I think, because it really offers us the perfect lens through which to read her book, The Morgesons. 

KIM: Absolutely, there is a real synergy here, and listeners, we definitely encourage you to read these two books in tandem. Rachel, can you describe the premise of your book, Too Much, for our listeners? 

RACHEL: Sure. It's a work of nonfiction. It's basically making the argument that there's a sort of fundamental excessiveness that is both attributed to women-identifying persons and also kind of simultaneously becomes a form of stigma. So because my background is in Victorian literature and 19th century British literature, I sort of track the way that excess of all kinds (or what I call ‘too muchness,’) the way that we see this really intensify in the Victorian period. It certainly does not begin in the Victorian period, but it takes a really interesting and pernicious form there. And so I think about that through Victorian literature and culture, but also weave in contemporary popular culture, contemporary lit and then some of my own story — my own identification as someone who has often felt too much in all sorts of ways. And it's not to say that excess is good, actually, but you know, that it just is, and the sort of stigma that gets attached to it is really ideologically and patriarchally-grounded. 

AMY: And yeah, the title, Too Much. It's so succinct. It's like a perfect, easy way of describing what this phenomenon is like. I was predicting this sort of academic read, but when I dove into it, I instantly realized like, okay, no, this is a different kind of book. It's very personal. It is poignant. It's so fun though, too, it's really funny. And it was by page 10, when you were talking about the phrase “too much” — you reference, the Heat Miser and the Snow Miser from The Year Without a Santa Claus. That's a very obscure reference, and I knew it was just going to be such a more entertaining read than I was expecting. And I was not wrong about that. 

KIM: Yes, she was texting me as she was reading it, because I had already read it and passed it on to her. And immediately when she started reading, I started getting the texts like, “Oh, my God, this is great. This is great.” And then when I went back to look at it again, after we had approached you, and we had decided we were going to do The Morgesons and I thought, “Oh, I'm just gonna go back. I know, there's a lot in there that will relate to Elizabeth Stoddard and the book.” And even more than I ever thought! I mean, just your chapter titles alone... I'll just say some of them not in any particular order, but: Nerve, Crazy, Horny, Loud, Cheat, Chatterbox. I mean, it's our heroine, which we're going to talk about more; it's Elizabeth Stoddard; it's so many women. And the way that you distill what those things are, and relate them to the Victorian period and contemporary times is just both wonderful and wickedly funny. And I noticed very early on, you call yourself almost being possessed by a demon. And we're going to find out later in our discussion that that plays a key role in our book today, which couldn't be more perfect as well. So it all comes together. 

RACHEL: It really, it seemed pretty fortuitous. It kind of sucks that I didn't know that this existed when I was writing my book. 

KIM: Yeah, I know. It's like that with all of these books as we're reading them. We're like, how do people not know about this book? So that's what makes it so fun. 

AMY: Exactly. So listeners, we’ll give you a brief outline of Stoddard’s own personal background, but suffice to say The Morgesons, her book, is really autobiographical. So it's going to paint that picture better than we can probably. Elizabeth Stoddard was born Elizabeth Barstow in 1823 and she grew up in the New England coastal town of Mattapoisett, which in The Morgesons is represented by the town of Surrey. Like the heroine in that book, Elizabeth was the granddaughter of a tailor and the daughter of a shipbuilder, but her father was often plagued by financial woes. They never knew if it was going to be feast or famine, so her family was never really accepted by the affluent families in the area. 

KIM: But Elizabeth did, however, receive a good formal education, and she attended Wheaton Female Seminary. She was also a voracious reader, and she counted the Bronte sisters among her literary idols. What's most important to know about her, however, is that she had a notoriously temperamental personality. 

AMY: Yes, she was intelligent, witty and charismatic, but she was also known for being abrasive and shockingly blunt, and this is important to know for our understanding of her novel. She was prone to these venomous outbursts, and not surprisingly, as a result of her argumentative, passionate nature, she had a lot of difficulty maintaining friendships, particularly with other women. 

KIM: And when she was 29, she married a fellow aspiring writer named Richard Stoddard. Apparently, there was some initial hesitation about this pairing, and they ended up keeping their marriage a secret from everyone for several months. 

AMY: Richard was said to be as ornery as she was. (So a match made in heaven, I guess.) This sort of pitted them against the world in some respects, though. Yet it made her fiercely loyal to him. He was actually considered the more prominent writer in the circles they ran with in New York, yet Elizabeth would undoubtedly be considered more talented than he was by academics today. That said he absolutely supported her career and he was a champion of her writing. 

KIM: That's right. And she actually wrote a lot of newspaper and magazine articles early on. Then in 1860, she wrote a short story for The Atlantic Monthly called “My Own Story.” It was apparently deemed “too much” by editor James Russell Lowe. He made her tone down the story’s sexual explicitness. I'm guessing that anecdote kind of gets your dander up, Rachel?

RACHEL: It's not a surprise, especially knowing what we do about Elizabeth Stoddard, even based on this book, which is, like, really shockingly sexy. It's interesting to get a sense of her biography and to see what an iconoclast she was. My understanding of her comes from, you know, reading this novel and reading the introduction the editor of my Penguin Classic Edition wrote. It does seem to be the case that people really just didn't know what to do with her. She had no patience for dogma for, you know, the sort of New England puritanical religion that was pervasive. I kind of got the impression that she understood all of this about herself, but also was kind of fine with it and really had no interest in adjusting her behavior. Like she knew that she probably pissed off her friends by you know, sounds like being kind of a punk. But also, she appreciated that in herself that she was so outspoken and so brazen, and so you know, go on, girl!

KIM: It's interesting, because I don't think we … we don't get enough of a sense (and that's what's great about your book, too) about how many women there were, actually, who were probably happily almost too much. And that sort of idea of somebody being like that wasn't as much of an outlier as today we think it was. We think, oh, there's Emily Dickinson, and now we know Elizabeth Stoddard and a few other people like that. But maybe there was more of that than we realized, which I think is interesting. Anyway, so two years after she had written that short story, her first novel, The Morgesons was published by a minor publishing house. It's a bildungsroman that portrays a quest for autonomy and sexual fulfillment in an incredibly restrained environment. It straddles the line between the Gothic romanticism of Hawthorne, Melville and Edgar Allan Poe, and the modern ironic realism of Henry James and George Eliot, which is why some scholars believe it may have landed in the literary dustbin, if you will. 

AMY: Yeah, so not only too much, but maybe too original also. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

AMY: What a bummer. And sadly, as if she didn't already have a lot working against her in terms of finding a foothold with this book, it happened to come out just 10 days after the Union Army’s disastrous defeat at Bull Run during the Civil War. The country became fully distracted by that, which Elizabeth believed doomed the book to obscurity. She later wrote “The Morgesons was my Bull Run.” Rachel, I'm guessing you might be able to sympathize a little bit with that unfortunate timing?

RACHEL: Yeah, my book came out on February 25, 2020, so on, you know, basically the lip of the pandemic. I sympathize with having an event that is just so much bigger and more pressing and more critical. Ultimately, I am so fortunate to be here and alive and getting vaccinated. And, you know, you have to sort of keep that perspective and understand your privilege. I'm so lucky that I got to do part of my tour and stuff, but it was a bummer. And it would be you know, it'd be disingenuous to say it wasn't. And so, I spent the beginning of lockdown just sort of sitting with that and trying to stay focused. And now, it’s like, well, you know, that's what happened. And you know, on to the next thing.

AMY: I think our hearts can definitely go out for poor Elizabeth. 

RACHEL: Absolutely. She didn't have Zoom. 

KIM: No, she didn't have Zoom. And then, although she went on to write two more novels (the novels were Two Men and Temple House) her sales were sluggish, and sadly, it proved hugely demoralizing to her to the point where she felt discouraged and bitter.

AMY: Yes, she didn't believe she could ever make it as a major writer, so she just wound up concentrating on writing kind of more shallow work for the mass market. Three years before her death, a renewed interest was sparked in her earlier work though. Novelist and legendary literary critic William Dean Howells heaped public praise on her, which in part led to her three novels being republished. 

KIM: Yeah, I'm so glad she was able to see that transpire. That's a little bit of a happy ending there. But alas, the interest in her writing didn't stand the test of time. And today, very few people know her outside of academia, which is a real shame because this book deserves to be widely read. 

AMY: Yeah, and I think that's probably a great segue into our discussion of the novel. The first line of The Morgesons basically says it all, like a bullet shot out of a gun, and I will read it here: “The child,” said my Aunt Mercy, looking at me with indigo-colored eyes, “is possessed.” So this child is our narrator, and the heroine of the novel. Her name's Cassandra. Rachel, can you tell our listeners more about Cassie and talk about the ways in which we can see immediately in these first few chapters that she is, quote unquote, “too much?” 

RACHEL: Oh, I mean, it's so striking. I mean, even if you begin with her name… an elderly man has been told her name. He's like, “That's not from Scripture.” And no, it's from Greek mythology. And I thought, you know, that is sort of interesting to bear the name of the priestess who bore the gift of prophecy, but also the curse of never being believed, and that feels appropriate. The idea of being possessed is interesting on a number of registers. It suggests off the bat that she doesn't have any self control — that something has sort of taken hold of her. And then that also, of course, connects to the idea of possession more broadly and the extent to which women were treated as possessions. At one particular point in the novel when a man is really trying to possess her and her own relationship to this idea of possession, being possessed, and being able to, you know, agentially possess is I think, right off the bat, something that is introduced to us, but in this moment, immediately, what we're getting the sense of is that she's a wild child. She kind of reminded me a little bit of a 19th century, Ramona Quimby. 

KIM: I love that. That's perfect. 

AMY: She is described as having a zigzag part in her hair, you know? It's not straight down the line. Some of her behavior at school ... there's a point where she finds a loose floorboard and she just begins creaking it with her foot over and over and over, and she's making a commotion. She's that kid in the class. She decides to trample on the flower bed because she heard that the flowers grow better that way.

RACHEL: Such a Ramona Quimby thing to do. 

KIM: Totally. Yeah. 

AMY: That should be probably the last time we mention Ramona Quimby in this conversation, because folks, this book is not a children's book. This book is super racy. And, wow. It's shocking. But that's just a little taste of what Cassandra is like as a child. Early on in the book, Cassandra has an understanding where she says, “it was in my power to escape a moral penalty by willful ignorance, that I could continue the privilege of sinning with impunity.” So basically, as a kid, she was choosing to play dumb when it comes to the Commandments so that she wouldn't be expected to abide by them. And the local clergymen, her family … none of them know what to do with this girl. 

KIM: That just has to make you laugh. I mean, she's already so clever. I'd love to talk about Stoddard’s writing style, too, for a minute. It's ironic, elliptical … it comes to a sudden halt at surprising times. And the dialogue often goes uncredited. You don't know who's saying what. It was ahead of its time, and it may be more familiar to readers of Henry James, for example, then Nathaniel Hawthorne, her contemporary. As with a Jamesian character, you don't always understand the characters’ motivation. 

AMY: And like you said, Kim, it slams on the brakes in the midst of the most turbulent scenes. There are these transitions between explosive and passive, and it feels like minor whiplash, as you're reading it sometimes. 

KIM: Exactly. And it sounds a lot like what we know of Stoddard’s own personality, right? It's like her personality is almost haunting the prose. Rachel, what did you think of Stoddard’s writing style? 

RACHEL: You know, I thought it was really interesting: pointy and angular in a way. She's playing in the way that she's let this hang together. And I did think that there was something really fascinating about Cassie as being a really cagey narrator. Like, if we're narratively speaking, I guess there'd be a gap between Cassie the character and Cassie, the narrator, but the resistance to attributing quotes and to being really oblique — there's a resistance to a very 19th century realist convention of taking the reader by the hand and leading them through the plot, which, you know, felt like you were getting when you're reading a Dickens bildungsroman, like David Copperfield. You don't get that here; you don't get the same sort of exposition. And you also get the feeling that it's difficult to understand the characters’ motivations, which often they don't seem to understand them. But there is a way that this sort of unevenness and explosiveness does, I think, interestingly, express the characterization of the sisters Cassie and Very.

AMY: You're right. The idea that it's Cassie telling the story, and somebody that's as volatile as she is would tell the story that way, and that sort of herky-jerky …. it would take a more polite woman to be the one that would always say “he said, she said” to make it so clear for the reader. And that's not who she is. You know, she's like, “Follow along people!” 

KIM: Yeah, “Keep up, keep up!” I love the mysterious aspect of that. And even though a lot of things never get solved in a certain way, and I love that feeling all the way through, but you don't exactly know what's going on or why, I'm there for it. I'm completely there for it, and all that said, I think this would be a great place for our listeners to hear a passage from the book so they can get a feel for the prose. Rachel, would you like to read a favorite passage for us?

RACHEL: Sure! This is in the first half of the book. And so Cassie has gone to Rosville to stay with her cousin, Charles, and his wife, Alice. This is a passage where — she does this here and there, and it's a really interesting move, I think, especially in bildungsromans — it's as if she's sort of taking her own pulse of sort of where she is in terms of the way that she's experiencing the world and in an emotional even, like, almost physiological way. So, here's her self assessment: I found that I was more elastic than before, and more susceptible to sudden impressions. I was conscious of the ebb and flow of blood through my heart, felt it when it eddied up to my face and touched my brain with its flame colored wave. I loved life again. The stuff of which each day was woven was covered with an arabesque which suited my fancy, I missed nothing that the present unrolled for me, but looked neither to the past nor to the future. In truth, there was little that was elevated in me, could I have perceived if there had been whichever way the circumstances of my life vacillated, I was not yet reached to the quick, whether spiritual or material influences made sinuous, the current of being, it's still flowed toward an undiscovered ocean. And so of course, we get one of the central motifs of the novel: the ocean. 

AMY: So much of this book is about her trying to find her identity, and her sexuality, but it's about her identity. And I think there's a lot of scenes where she's looking in the mirror in this book. She's self-analyzing, and trying to figure it all out, as we said, 

RACHEL: She's contemplating her own sort of limitations, the limitations to her capacity for insight, to be able to make sense of the ways that she reacts to things, the ways that she feels about things. You know, we're getting a little bit of foreshadowing of the sexual stuff with “flame-colored wave.” There's a little hint of arousal, but she's confused you know? She's confused by herself. She recognizes that she's kind of living in the present and almost kind of in a feral way, just sort of experiencing things without really fully sussing them out. 

KIM: Okay, so Cassandra goes away to school. Then when Cassandra is 18, she goes to live with a distant relative. It definitely is the beginning of a more exciting existence for her, and it reminds me a little bit of Jane Eyre. 

AMY: So Charles is this dark, brooding type. He's passionate, he's aggressive. He's also very married. He was definitely giving off some Rochester vibes, and he had a weird fascination with her from the get go, which is why he's the one that asked her parents if she could come live with him. And yeah, he just wanted to try to tame her, basically. But there was a fiery passion between them for sure. 

RACHEL: Yeah, I super hated him. 

KIM: He was creepy. 

AMY: But she was not creeped out by him. 

KIM: No.

RACHEL: No. You don't know what constitutes creepy when you're 18 and you're super hot. 

KIM: She's finally feeling something for someone. 

AMY: Yeah, he and Cassandra have this immediate sexual attraction to each other that appears to go unconsummated, physically, due to some melodramatic circumstances that happen. But Cassandra is very cool and blunt about her fascination with him, even with his wife, Alice, which is kind of amazing. She has these conversations with the wife in the house where you're like, “Girl, you did not just say that to his WIFE, did you?!!” Crazy, and it goes back to: she just can't be reined in. 

KIM: No. 

AMY: She's too much, for sure. Yet she and Alice, the wife, have a very peculiar bond, also. Alice knows she's a threat, and yet somehow they have a sympathy or an understanding with each other. 

KIM: Yeah, it actually prompts Alice to ask her if she's mad, as in crazy. And Cassandra is called “crazy,” “mad” and “possessed” throughout the entire novel. And Rachel, as I said earlier, you have a chapter called “Crazy” in Too Much. Can you talk about this and how it’s manifested in Cassandra, and how the men and women, actually, in the book react to her?

RACHEL: First I will say, I really hope that Alice has her own lover because Cassandra does not care. She does not care if people think that she's weird. I mean, we get the clearest sense with her back and forth with her bestie,Ben, and I thought they had a really adorable friendship. And you don't often see a sort of platonic friendship like that, actually, in a 19th century literature. He adores her, but kind of finds her to be a little off the rails. We know that Cassie’s mother doesn't exactly know what to do with her, even though we get the sense that maybe there's some affinity there. Her father, at one point, straight-up says that she and Veronica scare him, which is awesome. And then there are people who just don't like her, you know, like Ben and Desmond's mother. Of course, she doesn't like her because she sees her as a threat. But Cassandra also doesn't do a whole lot to recommend herself, you know? Somebody like maybe Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch — if… I mean, no one would ever dislike Dorothea, but if somebody seemed not to be keen on her, Dorothea would probably do what she could to smooth things over. Not so with Cassandra. She does not care. And in fact, she's probably just going to, you know, be a jerk to you. Because, you know, why does she care? You get the sense that everybody thinks that she's gorgeous, but unpredictable. And Cassandra is really not fazed by it. 

KIM: So eventually, Cassandra goes to stay with the family of her friend, Ben Somers, and she meets his brother Desmond. He has a violent temper like Charles did, and he's even compared to the devil as well. And Desmond and Cassandra have a mutual fascination for one another, like the one she shared with her cousin Charles. 

AMY: So Rachel in Too Much, your book, you also talk about how the Victorians, contrary to popular belief, were really obsessed with sex and sexually deviant women. Most of the time though, those portrayals in literature are written by men. So how do you think Stoddard’s novel squares up with how other contemporary novelists were writing this type of uncontrollable woman? 

RACHEL: This was pretty wild. You know, I thought what was wildest about it to me, was just how unrepentantly pissy and aggressive Cassie is. It's interesting, because I mean, you have somebody like Christina Rosetti, who wrote a poem like “The Goblin Market,” that I don't know that she was writing it to be explicitly sexual, but it absolutely, at the end, involves sisters licking juice off of each other. It's very fleshy. 

AMY: I think it was pretty pointedly sexual. 

KIM: Yeah, I agree.

RACHEL: There was a lot of wild stuff out there. Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights is just I mean, she's a complete wild woman — just nasty to the core. So we see a lot of that, but this still felt sort of singular to me. Because Cassie, I mean, she's funny, but she's not charming, really. And she's really just pugnacious in a way that I'm not used to in a book like this. I mean, even Jane Eyre, who acts out in school and talks back, doesn't just straight-up smack one of her classmates and then tell her teacher “You're a bad woman.” Like, the level of audacity, I thought was really delightfully at, like 11. 

KIM: Yeah. Cassandra and Veronica are modeled on Elizabeth and her sister. Their relationship is a really interesting aspect of the book. It reminded me, Amy, of the sisters in The Green Parrot by Marthe Bibesco from a few episodes ago. 

AMY: Yeah, I was getting major Green Parrot vibes. And in fact, when I was looking over my notes for this episode, one of my notes was just: “This is exactly like The Green Parrot.” Even the way that it was written, the sort of poetic style in some places, reminded me of Marthe Bibesco. And you would love that book, too, if you haven't read it, Rachel. Highly recommend that one. But yeah, getting back to the sisters, Cassie and Very (short for Veronica), they are almost like a “too much” version of sisterhood. Typically, we think of the sisterly relationship as potentially being volatile, but they have a love-hate dynamic that is very intense and confusing. It reminded me a lot of your chapter Rachel, on female companionship and this notion of “We are the same person.” The sisters have a hard time understanding each other, but they love each other deeply. And you remark at the start of your chapter, Rachel, “I am the composite of the women I have loved.” So what are your thoughts on this relationship in the book? 

RACHEL: I thought it was fascinating. I mean, they're both so weird! To have these two, just strikingly weird, idiosyncratic, neurotic characters at the center is just really fabulous. And I think they're both really ... at least, Cassandra is really stubborn. So if she doesn't understand Veronica, she's maybe not inclined to try. I think it takes some time for empathy to really work its way in there. And Veronica is really ... I mean, she's kind of spacey and, you know, at a certain point when when Cassandra has to take over a lot of household responsibilities, is just more or less like, “Yeah, you know, I'll stay out of your way. I'm also not going to help you at all.” She is really quite aggravating in certain ways, but it's a really tempestuous relationship. Veronica seems like she's probably kind of jealous of Cassandra. But she's also very passive, you know — she's not trying to get a job, she's not trying to go to college or anything like that. She more or less can just sort of be an eccentric at home. Whereas I think it's a little bit more complicated for Cassie, who does want all of these different experiences. But they're also you know, they're also really protective of each other. They have that one also completely wild housekeeper who at one point accuses them of not loving each other, at which point, Veronica is like, “What the hell did you say?” Like, just completely loses it at her. So, much like any relationship that we're not a part of, we can't fully understand their dynamic because the only two people who ever really understand the dynamic are the people who share it. And also, they probably don't even understand it fully. 

AMY: Lots of button-pushing. 

KIM: Yes.

AMY: She's kind of a contrast of Cassie in that she's kind of painted as pure and virginal, and she's got actually a picture of St. Cecilia that hangs on her bedroom wall. And St. Cecilia was somebody that had made a pact with an angel that would allow her to preserve her virginity. So yeah, they're kind of opposites. It’s a definite push-pull that is really fascinating. The book sort of hints that Cassandra and Very’s mom had maybe once been a “too much” girl in her past. There's some town gossip about something, but it's never explicitly stated what happened. Seems though, that she ended up stuffing it all down to become the conventional wife and mother. And Rachel, I know you write about your own mom in your book. And I'm wondering if you were able to draw any parallels while reading The Morgesons just in terms of how that mother-daughter relationship goes? 

RACHEL: Oh, you know, my mother and I shared a lot in common, but at the same time, she often didn't know what to do with me. And would say so, and actually, in ways that were not unlike the way that Cassie’s mother says that she doesn't really know what to do with Cassie. But it's always in a very loving way. Yeah, you know, she's an interesting character. She felt to me, in some ways, really checked out, as if she had come to this sort of deeply circumscribed life, but then in so doing, just kind of disassociated, almost, in order to deal with it. And so there's a sort of quiet tragedy, I think, to her that, you know? She loves her family and we get the sense she’s very capable of running the house — does it well, but this is not her passion, by a longshot. 

KIM: Yeah. And speaking of passion, as everyone who's listening can tell, there's a lot of passion in the novel, and I guess you could also say physical manifestations of it. Cassandra has a voracious appetite that's referred to, for example, and a school friend of Cassie’s has a secret tattoo on her arm of her lover’s initials, which I found really unexpected. And Ben Somers is sent down from Harvard for being in a knife fight. Also, Cassandra, herself, is left with physical scars from an accident that happens with cousin Charles. 

AMY: There's also an instance of cutting in the novel. It's not self inflicted — Desmond is the one who cuts Veronica's skin. But do you think we could draw any parallels, Rachel, with the practice of cutting in young women, which is something that you write about in your book? 

RACHEL: I think that particular instance is, I think it's expressing something different. But I absolutely think it is apt to bring up Veronica together with this idea of self-punishment, because she seems to have a sort of interesting and maybe ambivalent relationship with that. With pain. She gets sick a lot. And she says, at times, at least once she says that she needs to be sick. She seems to forego eating. She does seem to sort of pick and choose a sort of asceticism. She also loves to dress well, so I mean, she's not really an ascetic. It's almost like she sort of plays at martyrdom or plays at self denial here and there. 

KIM: Another motif, we would be remiss not to mention, probably, is the sea. It's not surprising, given that it's New England, but it's an ongoing motif throughout the novel. And it's really tempestuous and terrifying and, I think, joyful. It's basically a metaphor for what it's like to come into your power as a woman. Did you want to add anything to that, Rachel? 

RACHEL: It was Cassie’s relationship to it, I thought, was interesting and Cassie really can't fathom herself, so the ocean is a useful symbol for her to embrace. And you know, it's also the question of whether or not she'll ever cross an ocean; whether she'll ever get to make her world larger, you know? That's something that sort of looms over the course of the novel. Is she always going to just sort of stand on the shore, and, look out at all of this sort of great unknown and, you know, only ever be a passive spectator? I think the ocean is often you know, it tends to be a very feminine metaphor. And I like what Stoddard does with it here to that extent. 

AMY: Okay, so we're not going to spoil the ending for anyone, so you'll have to read The Morgesons to find out if Cassandra is successful or not in achieving empowerment and sexual fulfillment. Personally, I found this book’s twists and turns completely unexpected. Sometimes you can kind of predict how a story is going to go, especially a Victorian novel, but this one really kept me guessing. I did not know what was going to happen. It really is a unique book for its time. 

KIM: Absolutely. Amy, I felt the same way. It's truly buried treasure. And if you haven't read it, you'll want to as soon as possible. And while you're at it, please pick up a copy of Too Much. It's an essential companion if you're reading books from this era. And we know a lot of you out there are. 

AMY: Yeah, if you like the types of novels we've been featuring on this podcast, we can guarantee that you're going to find Rachel's book not only enlightening, but really entertaining also, Rachel, is there anything else? You're working on anything new? 

RACHEL: Oh, um, I just finished an essay that's out in VQR about what I'm calling “feminist anachronistic costume dramas.” So shows like “Dickinson,” “The Great”… movies like The Favorite. That was a project that I've been working on for several months. And so it's really fun to have that out. That's in Virginia Quarterly Review if people are interested. And otherwise just kind of trying to, you know, get my act together. Write a second book proposal.

KIM: I'll be waiting to read your next book, so write it for me! Thank you so much for joining us on Lost Ladies of Lit, Rachel. You were a wonderful guest. 

RACHEL: Thank you. Well, you two were wonderful co-hosts. This was such a wonderful conversation. 

KIM: Take care. 

AMY: Thanks. Bye, Rachel. 

KIM: So that's all for today's podcast. Check out our show notes for more information on Elizabeth Stoddard and The Morgesons, as well as Rachel Vorona Cote. And if you like this podcast, be sure to leave us a review where you listen. The five star reviews really help people find us.

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 Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.