67. Virginia Cowles — Looking for Trouble with Judith Mackrell

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

AMY HELMES: ...and I'm Amy Helmes. And Kim, I don't know if I told you this actually, but I had recently nabbed an old copy of a book called It's a Great War by a woman named Mary Lee. And I learned about her from our recent guest, Brad Bigelow. He's the editor of neglectedbooks.com who joined us a few weeks ago to discuss Gertrude Trevelyan. I hope we can eventually do a mini episode on Mary Lee, who was one of the very few women writers covering World War I. But actually by the time World War II rolled around a few decades later, there were even more women reporting on the war. (Although I think you could say they were still a dime a dozen.)

KIM: And that includes Martha Gellhorn, who we did an episode on earlier this year.

AMY: That's right. But did you know that Martha, while in Europe covering the Spanish Civil War and World War II, had a correspondent gal pal that she occasionally teamed up with over there? She was another trailblazing American reporter named Virginia Cowles. Together, Virginia and Martha Gellhorn even wrote a play together about their experience. 

KIM: Okay, wow. So most of us have heard of Gellhorn, but I wasn't familiar with Virginia Cowles until we started looking into her for this episode. 

AMY: Same here, which is why I'm very happy we've got another guest joining us today with a lot more knowledge about Cowles and her sensational wartime memoir, Looking for Trouble, which was reissued by Faber this fall. 

KIM: Yes. I can't wait to introduce her, so let's ride the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

AMY: Our guest today is Judith Mackrell. She's a former dance critic for The Guardian and the author of several nonfiction titles, including Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation, Bloomsbury Ballerina, which is a biography of Russian dancer, Lydia, Lopokova, and The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice, which tells the stories of the three famous women whose lives were connected through an abandoned Venetian Palazzo. Her most recent book is The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II, which The Daily Mail describes as "thoughtful and edge-of-your-seat thrilling" and Kirkus calls "an exhilarating read." British book retailer Waterstones named it one of the Best Books of 2021, so huge hooray for that. Judith, welcome to the show!

JUDITH MACKRELL: Thank you. I'm delighted to be invited and particularly to be part of your project, which seems so joyously to be reclaiming literary women from history or from neglect. It's fantastic and fantastic we're looking at World War II as well, where I think there are many women writers who have yet to be discovered.

AMY: Absolutely because Virginia Cowles was totally new to us. And I just want to say that I loved reading your book, The Correspondents. I felt like I was getting this really fun history lesson of World War II, you know? You sort of bring the events leading up to the war into really sharp focus, but you do it through the experience of all these women who were right in the mix. And I felt like I was living the tension right along with them. You set the tone, that sort of foreboding tension. And I also felt for the first time that I got a really good picture of how this war unfolded. The way you structured the timeline was really helpful in that way, because of course we learned about the war in history books and in school, but it was a fun way to see the bigger perspective. And I love that about your book 

KIM: And not only do you spell out this wartime history, but having the women's perspective on it all really makes it unique, I think. In your book, you note that famed journalist Dorothy Thompson said "women make the best reporters and spies." What do you think she meant by that? 

JUDITH: Well, I think she basically thought they had far better social skills than men, which meant that both as spies and as journalists, they were really intuitive when it came to interviewing people, perhaps even eliciting more confessions, more confidences. But also they were really much better at maintaining a social network, you know? Cultivating the contacts they needed for that. And of course, Virginia was actually brilliant at this. She just seemed to know everybody. Everybody seemed to love her. So the first three-quarters of the Second World War, when the Allied command were doing their best to exclude women from the official press corps, when they were trying to keep women from the front lines, having those contacts, you know, using people to help her find the loopholes in the regulations, that was essential for Virginia (as it was for the other five women in my book). And I think it also meant that because they had to use quite devious routes to get to their stories, often they came at the war from a different angle from the men who, you know… they found different issues, different stories to write about.

AMY: And it's interesting because earlier this year I read Sonia Purnell's A Woman of No Importance, which was about the spy Virginia Hall. So then in reading your book, I did see some parallels there in how they maneuvered, you know?

JUDITH: Yeah.

AMY: So per the title of your book, there are six women reporters whose stories you weave into your narrative. But for this episode, we wanted to pull focus a little bit and concentrate on Virginia Cowles. She was an American who grew up on the East Coast. And she actually started off as a society reporter, which you wouldn't necessarily think that a woman who was writing about debutantes and New York city nightclubs would, or even could segue into a career as a war correspondent. How did she end up making the switch? 

JUDITH: Well, she never wanted to remain as society columnist, but unfortunately it was the kind of ghetto to which most women journalists at that time were consigned. It was extremely difficult for them to graduate onto hard news. And she made that shift partly after her mother died, tragically young; there was a small inheritance leftover and she used it to go traveling. She spent a year traveling the world. And all the kind of travel pieces she wrote, the kind of human interest stories she wrote, convinced editors, finally, to let her stop writing about debutante balls. And the next big shift was in 1935 when Mussolini was about to take the Italian troops into an invasion of Abyssinia -- now Ethiopia -- and Virginia thought this would be a really good way to get to write about what she called more rigorous matters. And she asked her editor if he would send her. She admitted she knew nothing about international affairs, but she thought she could get her ear to the ground and write some good descriptive pieces. So her editor had said, "Okay, you can go, but you have to pay your own expenses. And I'll only pay you if you give us the skinny, as it were." When she got up there she met and fell in love with a very charming and well-connected Italian journalist who I think, partly because he felt so guilty when he discovered that despite her incredibly sophisticated veneer, he was actually the first man she had ever made love to, he felt so guilty that he said, "Oh, well, you know, I'll get you an invitation to this very high-profile political dinner." And so she's at this dinner and Mussolini's press attaché is there. And just as a matter of form, really, she feels she has to, she says, "Well, could you give me an interview with Mussolini?" Expecting, actually hoping, that nothing would come of it, but the next morning she's woken up by a telephone call saying, "Yes, you've got your interview at six o'clock in the evening." And she's petrified. She's never done a political interview like this, let alone one with a dictator of Italy who's got the whole of Europe trembling. And in truth, it's not the best interview. Mussolini, he just kind of rants at Virginia for about 10 minutes, but it is a huge scoop for her. And it's on the back of that that her editor then allows her to go to Madrid to write about the Spanish Civil War.

KIM: What an amazing early scoop. Wow. 

AMY: I can just picture her waking up that morning and getting that phone call and being like, "Crap!" 

KIM: It's totally a "Bridget Jones" moment.

JUDITH: It was! I mean, she's absolutely terrified she's going to be tongue-tied, and she spends all day trying to kind of prepare some questions and is unable to eat, you know, but of course, as it turns out, her nerves were just irrelevant, really. Mussolini just wants to use her as a kind of mouthpiece to have a rant at Britain and America.

AMY: Okay. So one of her next journalistic coups happened when she was covering the Spanish Civil War. I'd like for you to kind of explain for our listeners a little bit why her coverage of that war was seen as such a big deal and more dangerous than anything most of the other war correspondents were doing.

JUDITH: When Franco and his Nationalist army mounted a coup against Republican Spain, it was perceived as this big ideological battle between fascism and democracy. Both sides were absolutely paranoid about spies, and journalists were amongst the prime suspects. And it was very, very difficult for individual journalists to report both from behind the Republican lines and then to cross over into Franco's Spain and write about the Nationalist army. Most of those who had attempted it had ended up in jail. When Virginia came out to Spain, she was absolutely determined to try and see the war from both sides. And so she was determined to try and get behind both lines. And the fact that she did, again, using her amazing contacts, was proof of her utter determination, but also her courage. She could one have been arrested. In fact, she very nearly was. But Virginia had moral courage and physical courage. That was one of the great things about her as a writer. 

AMY: And she also had style! 

JUDITH: Yeah. Well, when she arrived in Madrid, the kind of unofficial uniform for the press there were kind of berets and workers' overalls, you know? It was a big kind of moment of egalitarian dressing. Virginia, however, arrived in Madrid wearing a little tailored wool dress, a fur jacket and high-heeled suede shoes. And to all the pro-Republican press corps, they thought she looked like she'd come for a tea party in Manhattan! How is she going to be wandering around the trenches dressed in her high heeled suede shoes? And Virginia and her glamor became a bit of a byword, certainly during the first years of the war. And she would indeed pitch up frequently in quite dangerous situations wearing these high-heeled suede shoes. When she ended up in Prague in 1938 and it looked very likely that a war might break out, the other journalists in her hotel were like, "Would you please go to the shop and buy yourself suitable footwear? Because there's going to be a lot of running if this war breaks out." But yeah, it became her trademark and, um, it certainly helped to get a number of stories. 

KIM: I mean, she is the best argument for James Bond being a woman. The next James Bond. I know they ended up choosing someone else, but I think they were discussing having a woman and they should have!

JUDITH: Absolutely. Yeah, it was very double-edged, Virginia's glamor. Some people found it very endearing. A lot of the soldiers in the front lines found it delightful. And certainly when Virginia was in Spain, she had soldiers giving her little love notes, but it made her fellow journalists suspect she was perhaps not serious. And certainly Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, who were really pro-Republican and ferocious in their political views, regarded Virginia with quite a lot of disdain. And it took a while for them to realize that actually she had real grit as a journalist, that the high-heeled shoes and the jacket did not at all reflect her qualities as a journalist or as a person. There was one classic instance in Spain when she was invited to lunch by a Soviet general, who was part of Stalin's secret army. This general was both infuriated by Virginia's Manhattan glamor, but also clearly deeply besotted by it, because once she arrived at his HQ for lunch, he then kept her kidnapped for three days during which he tried to convert her to Marxism while also feeding her bottles of Champagne. And at the end of that three days, you know, she leaves with a red rose presented by the general, but also the most amazing scoop. I mean, journalists actually out in Madrid weren't meant to have any kind of contact with the Soviets. Their presence wasn't meant to be seen. So the fact that she'd had even five minutes with the general ,let alone three days and a kind of very bizarre sort of seduction, absolutely put her ahead of the field.

AMY: I love this story. It reminded me so much of in Raiders of the Lost Ark  when Marion's held hostage by the Nazi official who's trying to woo her and he buys her the dress and he gives her the Champagne dinner, but I can picture Virginia being like, "What did I just fall into?" So she wasn't just having to defend herself from the dangers of battle, she was also having to be on guard from creepers like this! 

JUDITH: Though bless him, this general, he was so convinced that the Communist Revolution would pretty much take over the world, and he expected America to fall next. And he was so taken by Virginia. He didn't want her to be on the wrong side of the barricade. He was looking out for her.

KIM: It's so sweet!

AMY: It's true. He didn't ultimately hurt her in any way. 

JUDITH: No, I mean, women in Spain were often in very dangerous situations. I mean, rape was used as a weapon of war there as it was everywhere. But Virginia, even though she had her lipstick and her powder compact and was always beautifully coiffed, you get no sense in any of her writings or her memoir that she ever felt afraid for herself.

KIM: Wow. And then she eventually had to make a daring escape to get out of Spain, right? What happened? How did she get out? 

JUDITH: Well, that was when she'd crossed over to Franco's Spain and found that the press was being policed much more aggressively. And she had one of the fascist officers as her minders, and as he became conscious that really, her sympathies were with the Republicans, he began to get very suspicious of her, and she realized it was time for her to get out. She asked for a press car to take her back over the border, and they said, "No, there's none available. And you're not allowed to travel by train." And at that point she knew she was under investigation. People seem to crop up whenever Virginia was in a state of acute crisis in her life, almost in danger. And so this series of people just kept cropping up when she was trying to make her way back to the border with France, giving her lifts, offering her a bed for the night. And then finally she manages to get word to one of the British diplomats in France who pretends he's coming over just to give her lunch and then kind of smuggles her out of Spain in his diplomatic car.

KIM: Wow. What a great story. 

AMY: So while Virginia was reporting from the Franco side of the fighting, she was able to see what a lot of people didn't even quite know at the time, which was that Hitler, Mussolini and the Russians were all covertly lending their support and kind of pulling the strings in Spain in order to further their own agenda. And a lot of the women correspondents in your book were kind of Cassandras in that way. They were sort of seeing what was looming in the future beyond Spain and the threat that Hitler posed to the world before even any of the politicians were able to suss this out. And I know this was incredibly frustrating to Martha Gellhorn. Would you say Virginia was equally irked? 

JUDITH: Yes. I think by the time she came out of Spain and realized, as you say, exactly how much Hitler and Mussolini were backing Franco, it became very clear to her that they weren't just out to help a fellow dictator. They were actually giving their own war machines a practice run in preparation for a wider war. And having also gone into Spain determined to try and keep an open mind politically about both sides, she came out absolutely committed to the idea that fascism had to be stopped; that it was the evil force that, you know, Martha, Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway had already denounced it as. And when she'd got back to London, which is where she went next, the articles she wrote for The Sunday Times, which outlined what she thought were the dangers in Spain, were greeted with huge sort of interest and acclaim by a lot of the politicians. And yes, during the next year and a half, she was vehemently on the side of the anti-appeasers. She felt it was absolutely the moral duty of the Western democracies to go to war against Hitler and finally say enough is enough. I mean, there was a wonderful incident when she just got back to London and she'd written this huge, very analytic piece in The Sunday Times about what she'd seen in Spain. And it got all around Westminster and Whitehall; all the civil servants, all the politicians were reading it. And David Lloyd George, the former British prime minister, held a copy of her article in his hand as he was speaking very vehemently to the House saying, you know, we must be gearing ourselves up for a war sooner rather than later. But at that point, her name wasn't credited. She was just credited as an expert in Spain or something. And when Lloyd George requested to meet her, he asked a mutual friend, Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's son, if he would bring Virginia down to lunch. And at this point, Lloyd George was assuming that the writer of this highly-acclaimed article would be some kind of retired general or some military historian. And he was deeply disconcerted when Randolph Churchill drove up and out of the car came Virginia in her high-heeled shoes and lipstick, looking about 20. He was actually very offended. It was a very sticky lunch until finally Virginia won him over. And in the end he was as charmed by her as everybody else was.

AMY: We've obviously talked a lot about her social skills and her networking skills, but in terms of her writing and her reporting, what do you think made her copy so good? 

JUDITH: I mean her copy varied, depending on the context in which it was being printed. So when she was writing for the Sunday Times as their roving correspondent, her pieces were quite similar to her memoir in that they were very pacey, they were full of local color and human interest as well as political analysis. But she was also writing much more factual pieces for the newspapers as well, and in those instances, her prose was much more sort of brisk and factual and not so easy to distinguish from other journalists. Her memoir, however, which is a literary tour de force, I think, really focuses on that narrative drive; on the human interest, and really on the kind of vividness of her description. Some of her accounts, you know, you can't believe she wasn't just writing it the very next day. It's so fresh on the page! And the momentum of this memoir, you know, it's got the pace of the thriller, really.

KIM: So as Nazi Germany began to pose an existential threat, Virginia actually had a run-in with Hitler fan girl, Unity Mitford. Listeners, she's the younger sister of author Nancy Mitford, of course, and we did an episode on her last year. Can you tell us about Virginia's encounter with Unity?

JUDITH: Yeah, this is just another of those sort of brilliant, serendipitous moments in Virginia's career. It's the late summer, early autumn of 1938, and she's gone to Nuremberg to cover one of Hitler's great rallies, and already there's a real feeling of tension. And she writes fantastically well about how the whole of Nuremberg feels like the capital of some religious crusade. So full of Nazi supporters. There are people tramping and chanting through the streets. And when Hitler holds a big tea for the dignitaries and the press, Virginia's really fortunate even to get a ticket. She doesn't ever expect to talk to him, but as she is sitting down, this young, rather gauche English woman sits down next to her and introduces herself as Unity Mitford. And Unity Mitford has been an absolute acolyte of Hitler ever since she went to one of the first Nuremberg rallies, and they develop this very bizarre relationship. She's been admitted to his inner circle, and she's one of the people with whom he confides most intimately. So Virginia listens to Unity gushing about Hitler and how wonderful he is. And you know, this is September, 1938, and it looks as though Hitler's going to invade Czechoslovakia and the whole of Europe could be on the brink of war. Um, so Virginia tries to find out from Unity, you know, "What's Hitler saying?" You know, trying to get the skinny. And Unity sort of babbles on saying, oh, she doesn't think Hitler will go to war. She says, "He's very excited. He loves the idea of having the world trembling before him, but you know, he's just built all these beautiful buildings in Berlin and Munich. I don't think he'd like to have them bombed." And then she goes on and says, "But you know, he does like to plunge himself into these crises because he gets bored easily. So Virginia just drinks in this extraordinary flow of information and comes away with the conclusion that, you know, according to Unity, if Hitler does take Europe to war, it'll be just because he's suffering from a bit of ennui! 

KIM: Oh my gosh, uh, chilling on some level. 

JUDITH: Yeah. I mean, she makes wonderful comedy out of this conversation with Unity, but she then follows it up with her description of Hitler's opening speech to that mass crowd. And it's chilling. I mean, that's the great thing about Virginia: she can flip tones so fast that while you're really engaged and beguiled by all the human drama, she never lets you forget the absolute severity of the situation -- the crises that she's writing about. 

AMY: And that reminds me, also, in her memoir when she's covering the London Blitz. And she does, she juxtaposes sort of the everyday "life is normal" again with suddenly "here we go!" And I have a short little passage that I'm going to read because I think it encapsulates that really well. So yeah, she's in a London suburb, I think. She asks some homeowners if they're not worried or afraid of this. And they're like, "Oh no, if we were afraid, what good would it do us anyway?"

And she writes: There was certainly no answer to that; although I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, I thought if they could take it I ought to be able to take it too, and climbed into bed hoping that if death came it would be instantaneous. 

   The next morning, the sky was blue and innocent. If you hadn't seen the yawning craters and the wreckage, you might've thought that you had dreamt it. Traffic was normal, the shops were full, old ladies sunned themselves in the park, and soldiers and their girl friends strolled down Piccadilly arm in arm. I lunched at the Berkeley restaurant and found it as noisy and crowded as ever. Suddenly there was a bang. The room shook as a time-bomb exploded a few blocks away. A pretty girl in a saucy hat turned to the young army subaltern with her, and said, in a voice that rang across the restaurant: “Did you drop something?”

Then she goes on to say: You can write about the blinding flashes of gunfire and the long hiss of the bombs; about the deep roar of falling masonry like the thunder of breakers against the shore. You can write about the red glow of flames through the blackness, about the searchlight beams, the stars and the flares all mixed up together against the sky.You can write about these things, but it is improbable that they will convey the mixed sensations of the moment. The noise of the planes was the worst—an uneven, droning noise, like the sound of a dentist’s drill. Sometimes it grew so loud you held your breath, wondering painfully if the bomb racks would open. Once Vincent Sheean stopped in the middle of a sentence and glared angrily into space.

   “What's the matter?” I asked.

   “Nothing. I'm just waiting for that bastard to get out of the room.”

     That seemed to describe it. Best of all.

I loved that passage so good. She really brings it to life. 

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And clearly her memoir from her wartime experiences (it's called Looking for Trouble) it’s aptly named. When and why did she write it? And how was it received when it came out? 

JUDITH: She started writing it at the end of 1940. London was being bombed. She'd written heroically about the Blitz and about the battle of Britain. But at that point, it was incredibly difficult for female journalists to get to any of the British battle zones under the war office's jurisdiction. And she decided that she could set her writing to a different purpose. At this point, America was still neutral, and France had surrendered to Germany. Britain was incredibly vulnerable, and there was a huge propaganda effort to get America, if not to come to fight immediately, then at least to supply Britain with the weapons and the food stuffs that it needed. And Virginia decided that she would write her memoirs and the story of her formative years as a war correspondent as part of that same propaganda mission. So although on the one hand it's hilarious and racy and a hugely descriptive account of all her escapades, kind of beating through the book you get a sense of every war she's covered has been started by fascists. And it kind of reaches a crescendo at the end of the book where she resorts to all this Churchillian rhetoric saying, "I've given you a picture of everything I've seen. Now's your time, America, to kind of gird your loins and pick up your arms and help Britain fight this terrible menace." I think it took her six months to write and she then toured America with it and it ran into several editions. I mean, it was hugely popular, both in Britain and in America -- on both sides of the Atlantic -- and after the war was over it earned her an OBE, a British honor, for her services to the war.

AMY: She was constantly traveling into danger from which other people were fleeing and trying to escape. So, Judith, I was wondering if you had any favorite sort of white-knuckle moments from her adventures.

JUDITH: I think actually it's her Paris escapades that resonates most strongly, because it is so extraordinary. I mean, she flies to France on absolutely the last civilian flight available. But at that point, she's not really aware that the French government is about to leave the city and is about to order the French army not to defend Paris anymore. And she thinks she's going to go and report on a sort of successful defense by the French. And she starts to realize things might not be going her way when her plane is diverted to Tours, which is 250 kilometers south of Paris. And the train she's on trying to get back into Paris, there's only three other people on it! Everybody else is going south. She arrives in Paris and there's an absolute mob at the station with people just desperate for any kind of transport to get out of the city. And she writes then this almost hallucinatory account of what it's like to find a taxi and be driven around Paris where there's nobody. The hotels are all shut; the streets are empty. If there are people on the streets, it's a few stragglers carrying their baggage. She says it's like watching someone you love dying. And there's kind of page after page of bleakness, and Virginia clearly mourning for the city that she loved. And then Virginia writes this incredibly harrowing description of joining the massive exodus — millions of refugees heading south. And she has seen refugees before in this war, but nothing on this scale. And she writes of these little tragedies that she witnesses on route. And there's one really piercing moment where she sees a woman standing outside her van with her children begging for petrol, because she's run out. And of course, no one will stop. They're trying to get away from Paris, but they're also now suffering the terror of German bombers who are strafing the road periodically to try and get the refugees to turn back. And so the only people who stop for this poor woman are four men who just push her van to the side of the road to get it out of the way, and of course break... I think it's her rear axle in the process. The van topples over. All the woman's possessions are scattered all over the road and she's just left on her knees, weeping, you know, with her children around her. And you sense the hopelessness of these people, but also how desperate the situation is, that people can go from, you know, two weeks previously, Paris bars were still open. People were drinking, they believed their government was going to save them. And now suddenly they're homeless being bombed by the Luftwaffe. And Virginia is brilliant at those moments, I think, of just making you feel, you know, on your own nerve endings, how hideous this war was for the civilians, in particular. 

KIM: Reporting from a war zone, as we've heard, is challenging enough, but what were some of the added obstacles women reporters had to face during World War II?

JUDITH: When war broke out, there was definitely the perception still that, you know, women were the weaker sex and that they should be protected, essentially, from, you know, the noise, the blood, the danger, the weaponry of war. So the British War Office, and then the American War Office were both adamant that even if women were, for instance, allowed to report on the Blitz and did so heroically, they shouldn't be allowed with the official Press Corps near the front lines. But their motives were mixed. It wasn't just that they felt women needed to be protected. It was also they feared that because they would be amongst soldiers who would have been absent from their wives or girlfriends for months or even years, there was kind of a fear that these women might provoke scenes of sexual unrest. There was fear that in the thick of battle, if a soldier saw a woman journalist nearby, he might be more inclined to try and protect her rather than do his duty to fight the enemy. But, hilariously, the issue that absolutely seemed to have obsessed the military was they could not conceive how men and women could go to the toilet in close proximity to each other. And what the British called "the convenience question" and the Americans called "the latrine business" just seemed to symbolize the whole of the military's prejudices. It seemed beyond their wit to realize that if a woman was sufficiently brave and had sufficient initiative to work, to put herself in the way of bullets and bombs and shells, you know, she would not be too delicate to duck behind a tree to relieve herself or even use a mixed latrine. And as a result of that prohibition, it meant that the first four years of the war women weren't allowed to travel with the male press corps. It meant they had to make their own arrangements for transport, their own arrangements for accommodation when they were out near the war zones, and they were deprived of all the basic facilities that the male press used to deliver their copy. It meant that they weren't even allowed with the other press corps into the daily military briefings, which actually was very dangerous to them, because while they were sort of hitching around trying to get their stories, they didn't know where the fighting had spread to, which were the most dangerous zones, which weren't. And it was only in autumn, 1944 when women had protested so much and had proved themselves such great reporters that gradually those regulations were relaxed and women were allowed to travel with the male press corps. 

KIM: It's just fantastic information, and just makes you think how much more they had to go through just to do this amazing reporting that they're doing. It's really incredible. Um, I also wanted to know more about her friendship with Martha Gellhorn. We were curious about what their relationship was like and how would you say they were alike or different?

JUDITH: Well yes, having not impressed Martha at all on her first arrival, Virginia and Martha then became quite pal-y because Martha was one of the very few women in the Madrid press corps, and although she liked to think of herself as "one of the boys," she did find it kind of overbearing, the absolute "macho-ness" of Madrid. So having Virginia in town where the two of them could go and drink cocktails together while the men were kind of discussing military strategy, um... there was literally one beauty salon still open in Madrid where they went and had their nails done. And they used to go window shopping. I mean, Madrid was a very surreal place, because daily life was still going on, even though they were being bombarded .With Franco's shells. So they became quite pal-y but Martha, at that point considered Virginia to be a real lightweight, because she wasn't vehemently committed to the Republicans, because she came from this sort of a seeming socialite background. I think Martha had just thought this was going to be a kind of one-off friendship, but then their paths kept crossing through the years winding up to the Second World War, and in the Second World War they became very close. Martha obviously came to recognize Virginia's astuteness and her courage and cleverness in getting what she wanted. I mean, at one point they were in Italy together and Virginia had managed to get both passes with the Free French forces, which would allow them to bypass the British and Americans in Italy. They did come to admire each other hugely, and they remained very close. Even in the years after the war, Martha was godmother to Virginia's first child, but in some strange way, Martha's initial prejudices about Virginia seemed to resurface. They lived, by chance actually, very close to each other in London during the Sixties, and they had completely different views on the Vietnam War. And as Virginia also settled into a more domestic family life, I think Martha felt less and less connection with her, and towards the end of her life became kind of bitchy about Virginia and reneged, actually, on her admiration for Virginia's journalism and dismissed it as high level gossip, which it absolutely never was. But when Virginia died, her daughter, Harriet Crawley, received a very beautiful letter from Martha, who I think had recognized that she'd become overly-prickly and wrote of her gratitude to Virginia as her greatest friend in the war.

AMY: So a complicated relationship, as many women's relationships can be. 

JUDITH: Yes. 

AMY: Um, and they also wrote a play together at one point? 

JUDITH: Yeah. "Love Goes to Press." They started writing it in early 1945 when Martha was briefly in London and Virginia, by then, was based in London full-time. And, um, Martha was exhausted and coming back to London and meeting "Ginny" as she called Virginia and being able to laugh with her and just share their old stories had been an amazing kind of relief and contrast for Martha. And the two of them spent a lot of time together and they began to think, well, how are they going to earn their money once the war was ended? Who was going to employ them as journalists? Where would they go? What would they do? And so they decided to write a play together, a comedy, which was based on their experiences in Italy the previous year. They based the two heroines on themselves, but they each wrote the other's character. So it was a sort of very affectionate... not caricature, but an affectionate portrait of each other. But together, they also wrote very comic episodes which allowed them to take all the satirical shots they wanted at egos of the male journalists they've encountered and at the idiocy of the military bureau. They finally completed it when the war was over and it did do very well in London, actually, during its brief run, but it actually bombed on Broadway. Apparently the Americans thought it was too flippant. 

KIM: Did anyone ever think about bringing it back again?

AMY: I know you can buy it in print. 

JUDITH: Yes. You can buy it in print. I don't know if it, if it's not too of its time and place.

KIM: Right. Perhaps it didn't age well. Yeah.

AMY: Speaking of time, there isn't enough time in this episode, really, to talk about all of Virginia's accomplishments and adventures. The list goes on and on. So you need to go read Looking for Trouble, as well as Judith's book, The Correspondents, to learn all the rest of her stories. But, as you mentioned, Judith, England awarded her an Order of the British Empire medal in 1947 for the impact of her work. Now I know that some of the other women in your book had a more difficult time kind of rejoining the regular world after the war. But Virginia seems like she did pretty well when it was over. Can you tell us a little bit about her life after World War II?

JUDITH: Yeah. I think one reason why she emerged from the war with perhaps less trauma is that she had stopped frontline reporting by the end of 1944. So she didn't go into those concentration camps. She didn't witness those really searing images that, for instance, gave Lee Miller decades of PTSD. It had been difficult for her, the war, emotionally, because in the summer before it was declared she'd fallen in love with a journalist (also a pilot) called Aidan Crawley, and he had been shot down over the Libyan desert, I think in 1941. The rest of the war she didn't know if she’d actually see him again, but after the war ended, Aidan appeared on Virginia's doorstep with a proposal of marriage. To her great concern, you know, he'd been in the prisoner of war camp for the last four years so he was not looking exactly "groom material," but two weeks later she agreed to marry him and that marriage was extremely happy. He got elected as a Labor MP in the post-war election. They had three children and Virginia was genuinely devoted to her husband and family. She was a lioness, really, in defending them. And although she couldn't really continue daily journalism while being so committed to her family, she did then turn to writing biographies and popular history and did very well at it. I mean, partly because she had such great contacts, but also, you know, all her natural writing skills, that great talent for narrative and characterization that we see in her memoir, all that, you know, she was able to exploit and develop. So she did have a very successful second career. I just wish she'd written another installment of her memoir. She did have lots more adventures, uh, and her life with Aidan afterwards was equally fine. And in his biography, he quotes a little bit from her diary. It's so tantalizing. But yeah, we don't know...., it was only by talking to her daughter, Harriet, that I could really find out a lot about what happened to her after the war.

KIM: Right. And by the late 1970s and early Eighties, she was stricken with emphysema and she had to face her own mortality. She managed to take one final trip back to Spain where her reporting really all started, but she tragically died in a car accident on her way back through France. That was in 1983 and she was 68 years old. What a life she lived though! Incredible. Just incredible.

JUDITH: Yeah. And I'm so thrilled that Faber have chosen to reissue this memoir because she has been unjustly forgotten, I think, in war literature. Many people who've just recently discovered her have been overwhelmed both by the quality of her writing and by the adventures of her journalism. She was part of this extraordinary generation of journalists who was so pioneering, really, in making the way for today's generation of journalists. Broke down so many obstacles, so many prejudices, to allow women full equality as war reporters. 

AMY: As you said, Faber recently reissued Looking for Trouble. The Sunday Times' Christina Lamb, who is one of today's leading British foreign correspondents, wrote the forward to this edition. And she describes Cowles as the "Forrest Gump" of journalism, meaning if big moments in history were happening, Virginia Cowles was there. And Judith it's been so wonderful having you as our guest to tell us all about this talented and courageous woman. And I just want to say, it's hard enough to write a biography of one person, but you did six women in this book, and it's really an impressive feat. And I loved the book. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. 

JUDITH: That's so kind of you. It was marvelous to have such incredible women to write about. I have to say, um, yeah, I would have loved to have had several volumes.

KIM: This was a real honor getting to talk to you. And just to let you know a strange coincidence, my friend, Nicki, who's a literary agent, for my birthday last week sent me Bloomsbury Ballerina. And I cannot wait to read that too. So yeah, 

JUDITH: That was my first biography, so I held that in a very special affection. 

AMY: Is there anything on the horizon next? Anybody that, you know, you want to tackle next, or any projects that you have brewing?

JUDITH: Yeah. So I've started a new book which is the double biography of the two British artists, Gwen and Augustus John. They were brother and sister, and they were sort of born in the final third of the 19th century, but their careers flowered at the beginning of the 20th century. And I'm fascinated by their relationship as a brother and sister, but also the way in which Augustus John was the template of the flamboyant Bohemian promiscuous artists, while his sister was much more of a recluse. And while he, at the height of his career, was considered the most famous British artist of his generation, of his time, hardly anyone knew about Gwen's work. But after they died, they're posthumous reputations have completely reversed. So Augustus's work is now not so much seen or written about, and indeed, when he is written about people are very disapproving of his promiscuity and his kind of wicked ways with women. Whereas Gwen, she's being reclaimed by this project to rediscover lost women artists, and her reputation now rides far, far higher than his.

AMY: That sounds fascinating. And we occasionally drop in a lost lady of art in our podcast, so maybe we'll eventually have you back for that. And I was also thinking, uh, The Correspondents, what a brilliant TV series that could make. 

KIM: Yes, absolutely. 

JUDITH: You can't see, listeners, but my fingers are crossed! 

AMY: Absolutely.

KIM: Oh, amazing. Well again, thank you for joining us to talk about Virginia. 

JUDITH: Well, thank you so much. It's been great for me, and I love to think of these women having their lives continuing onwards, and I'm just so impressed by this project that you're running. I think it's brilliant. It's great.

KIM: Thank you. So we'll sign off for now, but don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter where we'll occasionally be giving out sneak peek info on which books we'll be featuring in future episodes. You can get a jump on your reading if you're inclined to read along with us. We love that 

AMY: And as always, check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com, for a transcript of this show and further information. 

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