59. G.E. Trevelyan — Appius and Virginia with Brad Bigelow

Episode 59: G.E. Trevelyan (Appius and Virginia) with Brad Bigelow

KIM: Hi everyone! Welcome back to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off history’s forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. The book we’ll be discussing today, Appius and Virginia by G.E. Trevelyan, takes place solely within the confines of one small house in an English village, and there are only two characters in the novel — a single, middle-aged woman and … (brace yourselves) an orangutan.

KIM: If your first reaction is “What?” you’re not alone. Come to think of it, this setup immediately makes me think of that old Clint Eastwood movie from the Seventies: Every Which Way But Loose.

AMY: I loved that movie as a kid, and I’m sure it’s completely inappropriate. Probably should never have been made.

KIM: Right.

AMY: But when I found out the premise of Appius and Virginia, I was expecting something along the lines of that movie, probably. You know … a madcap story with heart; maybe something like Bedtime for Bonzo. I could not possibly have been more wrong.

KIM: Yeah. I think it’s safe to say this book is a bit … darker. 

AMY: A bit? It’s like an episode of Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone, I think.. Unnerving, but also very thought-provoking.

KIM: And we have today’s guest to thank for introducing us to Gertrude Trevelyan and her unique debut novel of 1932.

AMY: I say “GER-trude.”

KIM: What did I say?

AMY: You keep saying, “Ger-TRUDE.”

KIM: I seriously think someone deprogrammed my pronunciation. “Ger-TRUDE.”

AMY: “GER-trude.”

KIM: “GER-trude!”

AMY: I’m just gonna leave it, but you keep saying, “Ger-TRUDE” every single time.

KIM: Every different way?

AMY: Yes.

KIM: That’s fine. Okay, okay. Let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

AMY: Today’s guest is Brad Bigelow, editor of NeglectedBooks.com, a website devoted to unearthing books that “have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.” Brad is basically an archaeologist of lost books, and he also endeavors to get great out-of-print books reissued by publishers. Now, if you want some really great book recommendations, you need to check out his site and subscribe because it offers a wide range of fascinating titles and is accompanied by really great deep-dive articles. I’m so excited every week when I get your newsletter, because it’s always fascinating. I need to devote a little bit of time to sitting and reading through it all, and it’s always very much a pleasure to get those emails. Brad’s obsession with obscure books was even celebrated in a New Yorker profile in 2016 (which, oh my gosh, can you imagine? That’s amazing.) It was titled “The Custodian of Forgotten Books.” Just last year, he completed a masters program in Biography and Creative nonfiction from England’s University of East Anglia and he’s now hard at work on a biography of forgotten American writer Virginia Faulkner for the University of Nebraska Press.

KIM: Okay, and we’re going to have to bring you back eventually to talk about her, too!

BRAD BIGELOW: Absolutely. She’s a great story.

AMY: So incidentally, Brad (we should mention) is also a retired U.S. Air Force officer and NATO civil servant. So we’ve got quite the Renaissance man with us today! (We’re going to get into his story a little bit more later.) But he definitely knows a lot about Gertrude Trevelyan, so we are so glad he reached out to us about her. Brad, welcome to the show!

BRAD BIGELOW: Well, thanks, Amy and Kim, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite neglected writers, Gertrude Trevelyan.

KIM: So you had initially contacted us and suggested we look into G.E. (which stands for Gertrude Eileen) Trevelyan. When did you first discover Trevelyan, and what do you remember about reading her novel Appius and Virginia for the first time?

BRAD: Well, I've always been on the lookout for books that are distinctive, but have, for whatever reason, become forgotten. And about three years ago, I read a passing reference to Appius and Virginia that said it was a story about a woman trying to raise an orangutan as a human. And that was enough to spur me to go find a copy because just how bizarre that story sounded.

AMY: Right. That was the pitch you gave me also, and I was like, “Are you kidding me? YES!”

KIM: Yeah.

BRAD: Right. So it was about three years ago (almost exactly three years ago). In fact, my wife and I were at an ayurvedic spa in Germany with no wifi. So I had three days. I had a couple of books, and that was one. So I just sat and read it straight through. I thought it was wonderful.

AMY: It’s definitely different!

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: With that said, would you mind giving our listeners a little bit of a spoiler-free summary of the plot? You kind of gave us the elevator pitch, but can you dig in there a little more?

BRAD: Sure. So the book opens in media res, as they say, in the middle of the action. Virginia Hutton, who's an English spinster, probably in her 40s, she’s sitting in this isolated country house observing a little creature sleeping under a blanket in a crib. And I say “little creature,” because we quickly learned that she's in the midst of this experiment that came to her one day when she was visiting the London Zoo. And when she decided watching the apes that if a young ape were taken at birth, and brought up completely in human surroundings, exactly as a child, it would grow up like a child (at least this is her theory), and in fact, become a child except, of course, for its appearance. And so Appius and Virginia is the story of this experiment. The spoiler, of course, would be telling how the experiment turns out.

AMY: And we’re not going to do that.

KIM: No. We should point out that you, Brad, actually wrote the introduction to the 2020 reissue of this book, and in it, you mention that Appius and Virginia was compared to another novel that was published around that time. Tell us about that.

BRAD: Sure. Not long before Appius and Virginia appeared, an English writer named John Collier published a novel with the striking title of His Monkey Wife. And in it, a rather slow-witted English schoolmaster returns from the Congo with a chimpanzee named Emily. And his intent is to give Emily as a pet to his fiancee, but Emily is actually quite smart (in fact, probably smarter than he is.) And she's also smitten with the schoolmaster. And so she concocts this elaborate scheme to win his love that centers on her dressing up and passing as a human. (So we have to buy that artifice.) What it really is, is a wonderful satire of Victorian manners. In fact, Emily, herself, is certainly the most likable character in the book. She's really a wonderful character, because she actually, you know, outwits all of these humans in carrying out her plans. So I had read that book years ago, because it's sort of what you might call a well-known forgotten book. But it's been reissued a number of times, and it's kind of a comic classic. And so when I saw that comparison, I thought, well, you know, it'd be great to find another book like that. And of course, it was nothing like that.

AMY: Yeah, as we mentioned in the introduction, I was going into Appius and Virginia expecting this comic romp. And then I was like, “Oh, boy.” It stopped me in my tracks.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

BRAD: Right.

AMY: So basically, the totality of the book takes place in a small cottage that Virginia has rented for the purpose of conducting her “experiment.” The story takes place in the nursery, the garden, around the hearth, so in that sense, it all feels very “quaint” and safe, but right off the bat, like I said, I felt a strange foreboding. So Brad, can you talk about the tone of this book a little more and the techniques that Trevelyan employs to make it (I think) a psychological thriller?

BRAD: Absolutely, because this is really how, in my opinion, Trevelyan distinguishes herself and the book. She was drawing, of course, on this stream-of-consciousness approach to narrative that had kind of been pioneered in the decade before her by people like Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclaire, etc, in which you follow the action through the eyes and thoughts, and also the blind spots of a character. And in this case, the whole story is related through Virginia, who is this willful idealist really committed to her experiment, and through Appius the orangutan. Now, of course, Virginia sees the world as we might, so channeled through her lens of the desire to see him become a human through her experiment. So as we follow the action, we see how she systematically interprets everything in terms of success of the experiment. She’s always reading into things of, “Oh, this is working or this isn't working.” Well, Appius, of course, is not a rational being and he understands nothing of this. So when Trevelyan is relating things through his eyes, what we see really is this world of sounds and shapes and sensations, which have no rational context. So when he sees the storm blowing outside his nursery windows, the way she describes it is, you know, it’s  “blackness, big moving things, big still things, big black things, stillness, whiteness, dazzle” she's just using impressions. And so they're not thoughts. And in fact, several times in the book, there's a phrase that recurs, which is “he had no thoughts,” but she relates that still so we're very convinced that we are seeing the world through In the eyes of this orangutan. And so we know that you can't bring these two very different beings together (who are seeing the world fundamentally differently) without expecting that eventually there's going to be some kind of collision taking place. And that's where you get the tension. It's how long is this gonna last?

KIM: Right? And as you said, Trevelyan alternates between the point of view of Virginia and Appius throughout the book. And despite being “motherly,” Virginia feels like a villain at times. It was really hard to witness her control over Appius, even when he’s an infant. It felt like child abuse. 

AMY: Yea, there’s actually a passage…. So we see Appius as a little tiny baby at the very beginning, in his crib, and then we start to see him growing up and becoming a toddler. There’s a passage when Appius is playing in the backyard, but he goes a little bonkers out there. He decides to climb a tree, which he had never done before, and Virginia really does not like this because she’s concerned he’s going to get away from her somehow. So she’s trying to get him to come down out of the tree. He ultimately falls and he messes up his clothes. (Which Virginia never likes when Appius gets his clothes out of sorts; and he’s always wearing, like, a cute little sailor suit.) 

BRAD: Right.

AMY: So when he lands, having fallen out of the tree, she grabs him; she shakes him violently and scolds him. And Trevelyan writes: “Appius stopped struggling and stared at her with wide-open, tearful eyes. He did not in the least understand what she was saying. It contained words — clothes, tree, socks — which he had been taught to repeat after her when she said them slowly, pointing at the objects But their connection and even their significance in this outburst altogether escaped him.” It really made me think of how many children and animals are mistreated because of a lack of understanding. That scene where she shakes him — it’s chilling. And that idea of language and the meaning of words ultimately plays a critical importance in the book, right, Brad?

BRAD: It certainly does. And Virginia we would describe as a helicopter mom, right? She's constantly hovering over him and trying to correct him. And she's focusing on the same things that any parent raising a child might, which is behavior and language. So she trains him to dress and eat like a child and tries to teach him language through this repetition of words. And these, you know, to put it bluntly, “monkey-see, monkey-do” kind of a repeating of action. And he does learn but he doesn't, of course, learn language; what he learns is patterns of activity. So it's sort of a Pavlovian programming going on. He starts to associate words with things and actions. And he associates “Mama,” he thinks of Virginia as “Mama,” but he doesn't think of her as “Mama” as a child would think of its mother. That's just the sound that he associates with her. To use a linguistic example, Noam Chomsky used to use two phrases to illustrate this concept of a phoneme, which is a sound that has a meaning. And he would have two phrases, which is “John is eager to please” and “John is easy to please.” Now we hear that and the difference between “eager” and “easy” — we know that they have different meanings. For Appius, it’s just sounds. They literally are just sounds. She really is ahead of her time in understanding you can't attribute conscious rationality, you can't associate those things with an animal. So her ability to switch back and forth between those kinds of sensibilities, I think, is one of the remarkable things in the book.

AMY: I kept thinking of my dog. That’s exactly how Appius responds to things is the way a dog would respond to the words.

BRAD: Exactly.

AMY: In getting back to Virginia’s strictness, you know, her anger stems from the fact that, like any “child,” (or wild animal) Appius really is a handful. He makes messes, he throws tantrums, he gets into trouble. (When he’s flinging oatmeal all over the dining room, I was thinking, “Okay, I’ve been there.” You know? I’ve cleaned up a lot of messes like that.) So during the time that I was reading this book I was dropping my son off at summer camp, and there was a nanny there who was dropping off a little boy and she was talking to another woman. And she said, “Yeah, the kid, you know… when they hired me, his parents said, ‘He’s always getting into trouble. You’re going to have your work cut out for you.’” And she said, “I told the parents, ‘If he wasn’t getting into trouble, he wouldn’t be a kid.’” I thought that was so insightful of her. And I was like, “Wow, what a wonderful nanny.” You know, she sort of lets him be who he is. And it really made me think about this book when I heard her say that, because she understood what Virginia doesn't. Virginia is just obsessed with molding Appius into this perfect human. (And I think a lot of even the most well-intentioned parents attempt to do that with their own children). And we know, of course, that Virginia is doomed to fail, especially with an orangutan, but also with a child. And then on the other hand, as readers, we feel tremendous empathy for Appius. And even though Brad, like you said, it’s very fragmented how she shows his consciousness, you do find yourself feeling for him. Do you have any favorite passages from the early part of the book that maybe showcases this a little bit?  

BRAD: Yeah, well, actually, let's go back to that scene that you were just talking about, which is where he gets loose and he tries to climb a tree. Virginia sees this as misbehavior, you know? She shakes him. She straightens his clothes. She doesn't like him getting messy, as you said. Well, he's seeing this in a completely different way. So to quote from the book, “he knew vaguely that he had been swinging, which was pleasant, and had almost freed himself of these extraneous skins…” [clothing to him is just, “why am I wearing two skins?”] “...which always clung to him, holding his limbs in uncomfortable positions and pulling at his growing fur. He knew that now he was being shaken, which was not at all pleasant, and that he was no more free. The skins were being fastened onto him again, very tightly all over and tucked into place, his face and hands were being rubbed clean with a handkerchief. So there was no more friendly Earth and nice smelling tree moss left on them. He was not free because of all these things. But still more he wasn't free because of the steely, scolding voice that went on and on, it would never stop until it was satisfied by his obedience. And because of the hard flat eyes that looked at him coldly and vividly following and holding his glance so that he could never get away.” I mean, we can all imagine that, that you know, when you're with this tyrannical disciplinarian. She really gives us that experience again, but through his eyes and his sensibility.

KIM: Yeah, so hearing his version of it (or reading his version of it) is actually chilling.

AMY: Yeah, it's like she's a monster. When we're seeing her version of it, she's very maternal. She only has the best intentions for him. When we flip it to Appius’s point of view, she's suddenly this monster,and you are left wondering, “What is broken within her to have made her so obsessed?” 

KIM: Yeah, seems like she has some serious mental health issues. So I’m curious, Brad, what’s your take on Virginia?

BRAD: Well, you know, earlier I described her as an idealist, and the idea that has taken hold of her — this idea of turning Appius into a human through just the same sort of training by which you might train a dog to heel if you're trying to get it to learn how to walk properly on a leash. But in her defense, we have to remember what Trevelyan tells us about what the alternative to this is, because she has this flashback early on in the book where she leads us through how she came to this idea. And the idea came to her when she is living as a middle-aged woman in this woman's boarding house in London. And she's really not doing much more than having tea from time to time and going to museums and the zoo and borrowing books from the lending library. And Trevelyan writes that Virginia “knew obscurely inarticulately, that if this experiment failed, her existence would no longer be justified in her own sight.” So if she fails, she has nothing to look forward to but growing older, and it's chilling to read how Trevelyan describes this kind of purposeless life: “..each year, a little less bright in the after dinner conversation, a little less able to remember the novels she has read, a little less able to find a listener, a little less able to live, yet no more ready for death.” I mean, it's hard to paint her as a villainess when you realize how sad the life was that she was coming away from. I mean, it was a soul-sucking life. It's hard not to see that and feel that it's as bad or worse as what's going on with this experiment with happiness.

AMY: It didn't seem like she had a lot of relationships with other people. And so when she is imagining Appius’s future, (which is, I mean, just delusional, really — she's wondering sometimes if you know, “Maybe he could grow up to be a minister of Parliament!” She has grand plans for this orangutan), but there's also a sense of like, “He's always going to be here for me.” when I get older.

BRAD: He’s going to be my companion when I get older. Yeah.

KIM: Yeah. The book becomes more and more intense as it goes along. Little-by-little, we see self-realization take hold of Appius as he pieces together the truth about who he actually is. Virginia is too in denial and too powerless to reverse course — she’s like the proverbial mad scientist who realizes too late what she has wrought. There are also many passages in the novel that show the complete misunderstandings between Virginia and Appius. They both want something from the other, but aren’t able to articulate it and they can’t understand at all where the other is coming from, no matter how hard they try (and they do try), which makes sense when you’re talking about two different species, but of course it can also be true between people. 

BRAD: That's right. And to me, this is the way that Appius and Virginia operates, I think, as a parable. Because even if we're not dealing with such a dramatic difference, as between a woman and an orangutan, there's a limit to which any two beings — men and women, for example — can understand each other. And if one fails to try to bridge that gap through empathy — and that's the one thing Virginia fails consistently to have, is to show any empathy to Appius’s way of being in the world — if you fail to bridge this gap with empathy, either because you have the lack of capacity (which Appius can't understand what Virginia is trying to do) or through this willful refusal on Virginia's part, well, then the relationship really seems destined to have a tragic end. Trevelyan understood that Virginia was setting herself up to fail by trying to get Appius to think of her as “Mama,” not “Mama” the sound but “Mother,” you know? Appius lost his real mother, remember, at some point before Virginia bought him from an animal dealer. Virginia wants to fit her interactions with Appius into this template of “mother and son,” and particularly as the story goes on into interpreting his actions as the responses of a loving son. But of course, Trevelyan knows this is delusional. Throughout her books (and I've read them all) she has this phenomenal capacity to get herself into the mind and sensibility of a very different individual, or in this case, a completely different species.

KIM: So what was the general reaction to Appius and Virginia when it was published?

BRAD: Well, as you might imagine, in that much more conservative age, many reviewers were not ready to read a book about a single, middle-aged woman and a (brace yourself) orangutan, as you put it, on its own merits. The oddity, the novelty of the story was enough to put them out. So the dean of British reviewers at the time was a guy named James Agate who wrote for The Daily Mail, and he just dismissed the book out of hand. In fact, I love this phrase, he called it “pretentious pewling twaddle,” which is about as harsh a criticism as you can imagine. 

AMY: Not great. 

BRAD: Not great, although I have to say, it's not the worst she got. One of her later books was called A War Without a Hero, and one of the reviewers said reading the book made him want to go out and shoot himself...

KIM: Ouch!

AMY: Oh my gosh. Poor Gertrude!

BRAD: ...because she was never anything but intense when she threw herself into this exercise of creating these different conceptions of the world in different books. They're very intense books.

AMY: Doesn’t the extremity of those reviews almost make you more intrigued?

BRAD: Absolutely, yeah. And in fact, I wrote something recently about that, which is, you know, one of the ways I find these books is by going through old book reviews. And very often it's not the ones that get the “Well, this is a masterpiece!” that intrigues me. It's the ones that are condemned for being odd or just not fitting into some preconceptions of the reviewer’s idea of what's proper literature. Those are the ones you go, “Huh, let me let me check into that.”

AMY: Those are going to be the ones that are kind of ahead of their time.

KIM: Yeah, Genius Method.

BRAD: Right. They're taking risks. And one of the things I really love about Trevelyan is she took a risk in every book. And I think from an artistic standpoint, she took the risk and saw the reward. But you know, there were a lot of people who said, “This is just too intense for me,” or “This is just too strange for me.”

AMY: People weren’t ready yet, but now we are.

KIM: Yeah. So when I was reading the book, it reminded me a lot of a 1958 science fiction novel called Flowers for Algernon, which was about an experiment on a developmentally disabled man. I saw a lot of connections. I was also thinking a lot about Emma Donohue’s Room as I read it, just because we see this point of view of someone who’s never known the outside world and therefore has a very limited scope on what he perceives. 

KIM: Yeah, I have to admit, I've never read Room because I didn't know if I can handle it.

AMY: Yeah. There are some similarities. 

KIM: I also kept wondering if the book was going another direction as Appius became a quote unquote “man.” (And I’m almost embarrassed to say this) but did you read the 1976 prize-winning novel Bear by Marian Engel in college? If you did, you might know where I’m going. But suffice to say this book doesn't’ go there, but it does feel really different from anything else I’ve read from this time period, particularly from women writers. 

AMY: Yeah. And Kim, I know what you're talking about. And I did have that sort of sense of like, Appius is a wild creature, he's going to have urges. What's going to happen here? I was wondering if she was actually going to go there.

KIM: I’m so glad I wasn’t the only one, but as it went on, I started to realize it probably wasn’t going to go there.

BRAD: Well, you know, it's funny, because, of course, Bear has been reissued recently. And I think there's been a lot of talk on “book Twitter” about Bear. And I'm not sure you would have necessarily had that anticipation if you weren't aware of the story of Bear, which is, as you said, quite different.

KIM: Yeah, this is a little bit of a tangent, so you can include or not, but you know, there was a time when people were adopting monkeys. And my uncle actually had … he was in the Navy and they had a monkey for a while. They put a diaper on him; he lived in the house with them. And, you know, it didn't work out well. But anyway, it was a thing.

AMY: Yeah, I have a story similar to that where the monkey lived… and he wound up going to the neighbor’s house and trashing the entire kitchen, and.. yeah, it’s crazy.

BRAD: Well, it's really just been within the last maybe 40 years that you've seen this, you know, major switch, not just in terms of our understanding of the divide between animals and humans, but also kind of the ethics of that. I mean, people weren't talking about the ethics of trying to bridge that boundary in the 70s or 80s. And now we're, of course, hyper-attuned to that. And I think, for good reasons, that we do understand that there is a limit to how far you can bridge that gap.

KIM: Yes, and how far you should try to bridge it.

BRAD: Yeah.

KIM: Anyway, back to Trevelyan, what do we know about her life or upbringing? Is there anything about her life story that would have shaped her into telling a more “out there” story like this one is?

BRAD: As far as I've been able to determine (and I think I've dug up as much material about her as anybody has ever tried to) there's no indicators. She came from a very kind of sheltered life. She was the only child; her father had a comfortable level of wealth. So he never worked. In the census of the time, you would see him listed as “independent means” and they had servants and he rode horses, and he grew flowers. And that's what his life consisted of. And she went to a girl school, boarding school, she went to Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall, which was one of the first women's colleges at Oxford, but there's no sign of where was this going to come from? She was a very quiet person, I think, as far as I can tell. She suffered from tuberculosis on and off throughout her adult life. So she went to Oxford, she got this worldwide fame because she was the first woman to win something called the Newdigate Prize, which is an award given each year for the best poem written by an Oxford undergraduate on a set topic. But in reality, she was a very, very private person. She later wrote that when she was at Oxford, she didn't play hockey, she didn’t act, row, take part in debates, literary or political parties. And she failed to conform to the social standards commonly required of women students. So she graduated, she got a degree, she had all this hoopla. She went to London, she found herself a flat in Kensington, and she went to work writing. And, you know, in many ways, she was the model of what Virginia Woolf wrote about in “A Room of One's Own,” you know — if you have talent, if you have a room of your own, and 500 pounds a year, then you can create the kind of work of art that you should aspire to create. And she had all of that. And she did create these wonderful works of art. But there's kind of a, there's a lesson to be learned from her life, which is that just turning out wonderful works of art, without having that network, doesn't guarantee that your work is going to be remembered.

KIM: Yes, and then sadly, only eight years after Appius and Virginia was published, her life was tragically cut short. Do you want to tell us what happened, Brad?

BRAD: Yeah, well, one night in October 1940 (which was early on in the London blitz … so this is right after the Battle of Britain) her flat was hit by a German bomb. She was severely injured. Probably, all of her papers were destroyed. And her parents took her home to Bath, which is where … (or Bahhhth as they would say in the UK) to be cared for, and she died a few months later. She had a couple of obituaries in some of the papers and that was the end of it. Her books fell out of print, and her name literally does not appear in any literary history of the time.

KIM: That’s so tragic. And how old was she again when she died?

BRAD: She was 37.

KIM: 37. Wow, that’s heartbreaking.

AMY: Yeah, and to think she still had so much that she could have done, you know? So much more she could have written.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: It does look like she wrote eight novels before she died. Correct me if I’m wrong there.

BRAD: That’s right.

AMY: Appius and Virginia, however, was the only one that was also published in the U.S. So I know, Brad, you’ve read her other books ... are there any others still in print somewhere that we could read or that are worth checking out? You mentioned that she kind of took a risk with all of her different books. Are they all as dark as this one?

BRAD: Well, yeah, she did write eight novels, of which there are two in print, one which is Appius and Virginia, which has been reissued. And also her second novel Hot-House, which is based on her time at Oxford. It follows this very impressionable undergraduate through three years at Oxford. Hot-House is available in print-on-demand. Somebody brought it out right after Appius came out. I have been in discussions with some publishers about some of the rest of her books. I have a feeling within the next two to three years, we'll see a number of them come out. And hopefully, as a result, people will start to really appreciate the importance of our work. As far as just to answer the other question about the dark element: No, they're not all necessarily that; they're all intense. They're absolutely all intense. In fact, one of the books that I'm hoping that we'll see in print within the next couple of years is one of the later ones called William's Wife, which is about this woman who she becomes the second wife of a very stingy man and his stinginess infects her mind and sensibility to the point that after he dies, she essentially goes through the series of downsizing so that at the end, she's living in this hovel in London surrounded by her furniture, and she spends her days combing the streets for food out of garbage cans because she doesn't want to spend any money on food. You know, as you're reading into this, you're saying this is somebody who's losing mental control of her life. And that's a very intense experience there to go through reading, you know, 300 pages of that.

AMY: Yeah, that sounds like a good one. I’m ready for a Trevelyan resurgence. We’ve got to make it happen, everybody!

KIM: Speaking of that, Appius and Virginia was actually reissued last year by Eye and Lightning Books, in association with Abandoned Bookshop. Yay for that. And Brad, we understand that you had an important role in making this happen?

BRAD: Well, it’s important, but almost purely accidental. During the first lockdown in the UK, I made contact with Scott Pack, who is the publisher of the Abandoned Bookshop and works with Eye and Lightning. I mentioned this book and he said, “Well, that sounds interesting.” So they borrowed one of the very few copies there are available worldwide in libraries and contacted me soon afterwards. And he said, “This is a great book, I want to republish it.” And so I offered to write the introduction. And so it all came to be, it was great.

AMY: So last year the Guardian ran a story on Trevelyan with the headline, “If She Was a Bloke, She’d Still Be In Print” Do you think that’s true, Brad?

BRAD: Well, yes, in part. I mean, it's clear that many women writers have been neglected over the years due to their gender. But by now I've come across enough writers who've been forgotten that I have to say the number one reason that she was forgotten is that she lacked the one thing that Virginia Woolf didn't mention in “A Room of One’s Own,” which is a network, you know?  So let's take Virginia Woolf as an example. If you were to draw a map of the literary influencer network of England in the 1920s, and 30s, all those connections would lead to Virginia Woolf. She was not only considered one of the best writers of her time, which she was, but she was a publisher with her husband through Hogarth Press. She was a reviewer, she socialized, she was involved in political movements. She was related to a whole network of people, and she had affairs with other writers and artists. So if you think about it, it's not surprising she got remembered because there were so many people connected to her. Her name pops up in everybody's memoirs, and she wrote letters to tons and tons of people. One of the exercises I did early on in studying Trevelyan was to literally go through all the memoirs and biographies of writers that we would consider her contemporaries, and her name appears in none of them. What she did was she lived in this little apartment; she had a tiny circle of unimportant friends. She put all of her energies into her fiction. It’s sort of a cautionary tale for other writers, which is: talent alone is not enough to ensure that your work is going to be remembered. And the corollary to that, which you guys know, and I know from looking after these neglected books is that being forgotten doesn't mean that the book is necessarily of lesser merit to the books that stay in print.

KIM: That’s right.

AMY: I think I always had that kind of snobbery. When I was younger, you would hear that like, “The 100 Classic Books of All Time,” and I wanted to make sure I read through all of them. And now, especially as we're doing this podcast, I'm like, “Wait a second.” I had always kind of assumed, like, “Never heard of it. Probably didn't need to hear of it,” you know? Probably not worth reading. And you're absolutely right. It's completely not true.

KIM: Thank god we were wrong, though. Now it’s like, “Okay, there’s plenty of stuff out there. We’ll never get through all of it. 

AMY: We’ll never run out, yeah.

KIM: It’s a relief, actually.

AMY: Yeah, I think you're right. It is really good advice for writers even today. I mean, there's the sort of fantasy of the writer alone and her garrett ... solitude, 

KIM: If you build it, they will come. 

AMY:  Yeah, it's not true. And anybody who's written a book these days knows also you need to be out there being your own marketer. I would draw the line at maybe having affairs with tons of men and women!

KIM: But anyway, so back to you, Brad, I’m sort of fascinated by your story, Brad. And I think Amy is, too. I should also mention, I’m an Army brat and my dad was in the military. So how did you go from being a U.S. Air Force officer (thank you for your service, by the way) to the keeper of forgotten books?

BRAD: Well, for most of my adult life, actually, the two have gone hand-in-hand. So the Air Force was very generous — they gave me a scholarship to put me through college, but the condition was I had to get a technical degree. So I took a degree in math. Now this was back in the late 70s, when college was affordable, and I loved English. And I took English electives, while I was taking my technical classes, and I loved that stuff so much that I essentially went to summer quarters and paid my way to get a second degree in parallel with that. And somewhere early on, I started finding these amazing books that had for some reason or another gone out of print, and I started amassing a collection of it. And you know, like, most English majors, I was a frustrated writer. So about 15 years ago, I decided ... I knew how to build websites by that point … and I decided that I would start writing little pieces about some of my favorite neglected books and put them up. Now, I thought that that would take a couple of years, and then, like you said, I'd run out of material. But the truth is, I now know that I'll never get through all of the good stuff that's out there that has, you know, for whatever reason, fallen out of print — has become forgotten, but you know, it's still absolutely worth reading today.

AMY: And now you’re also working on a biography of Virginia Faulkner, as we said at the top of the show. I know nothing about her. (I assume no relation to the other Faulkner, right?) 

BRAD: No relation. She grew up ... she was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her family was one of the wealthier families in Lincoln. She was this incredibly intelligent and witty woman. She published two novels by the time she was 22. She went on to write very successful magazine fiction. She worked for Hollywood, for MGM, for a while. She wrote some things for Broadway. She wrote radio shows like Fred Allen’s “Duffy's Tavern,” but then she kind of had what we would call a midlife crisis today. So when she was in her early 40s, she kind of hit a wall, compounded by alcoholism. And her brother said, “Why don’t you come home, you know? Let's see if you can kind of restart your life so to speak.” And she did, and so she actually put writing away completely and she became an editor with the University of Nebraska Press, and she built that into one of the best university publishers in America. She was very important in bringing lots of Nebraska writers (like Wright Morris), keeping their work in print or bringing it back into print. And most importantly, she was really instrumental in this kind of revival of Willa Cather studies that started in the late 60s and 70s. 

AMY: Do you know Melissa Homestead? 

BRAD: Yes, absolutely. No. I know her. And in fact, I can thank her for helping me get a Cather grant for my research.

AMY: Nice.

KIM: We love the connection.

AMY: We’ve got a little “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” going! Everybody, if you want to know who Melissa is, go back to our episode on Edith Lewis. Melissa is a professor at the University of Nebraska. So that's a great episode as well. And Brad, I loved hearing about your whole story, and I think you are truly a book lover after our own hearts. And we're so glad you're out there leading the charge to get all these forgotten authors the attention they deserve. And I would also say again, go subscribe to NeglectedBooks.com. It will really add to your to-be-read pile.

BRAD: Yeah, I mean, you know, literature's a landscape. And, you know, you're talking about the “100 great books” that you should read. Well, those are like the freeways, you know? Those are the ones that everybody's going to take if they're going to go through the land of literature. But as you know, I mean, California is a great example: some of the greatest places in California are the places that you can only get to on a two-lane road. And literature’s that whole landscape. And so if you only take the freeway, you can't really say that you've experienced the literature of a time. And what you're doing and what I'm trying to do is simply to say there are other routes to get from A to B. They might be a little slower. They might be a little windier, but they're still worth it, and in fact, in some cases, you'll see scenery that blows away anything you might see in the you know, the top 10 National Parks sort of places.

AMY: Go get lost on the dirt roads, everybody!

KIM: Yeah, seriously. Yep

BRAD: Absolutely. And thank you both for this opportunity. It's been a real delight. 

KIM: It was wonderful to have you.

BRAD: Keep up the good work, guys.

AMY: Yeah, that was fun. Thank you!

BRAD: Take care! Bye!

KIM: So that’s all for today’s episode. Listeners, we hope you check out Ger-TRUDE Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia and go subscribe… [laughs]. Okay, you say that part!

AMY: Okay. Let’s switch it. Okay.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode. And listeners, we really hope you go check out Gertrude Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia.

KIM: Got any of your own “lost lady” recommendations for us? Be like Brad and shoot us an email to tell us. We love hearing from you.

AMY: And don’t forget to leave us a five-star review where you listen to this podcast if you’re enjoying our program. Until next week, bye everyone!