77. Daisy Fellowes — Sundays with Leigh Plessner

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AMY HELMES: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes here with my writing partner, Kim Askew, and we're about to get super glamorous and sophisticated on you for this episode, right, Kim?. 

KIM ASKEW: Yes. And by super glamorous and sophisticated, we mean French. We're going to be talking about Daisy Fellowes, and while her name sounds tres English, Fellowes was half-French and half-American and spent her life in Europe where she was a French socialite as well as an acclaimed beauty and heiress and the Paris editor of Harper's Bazaar, among other things. But in addition to being the epitome of 30s chic, she was also a minor novelist, which is why we're discussing her today. And we're super excited to have the multitalented Leigh Plessner on to discuss Fellowes and her 1931 novel Sundays with us. 

AMY: Oola la la! I can't wait. So let's read the stacks and get started. 

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Leigh Plessner, the creative director of the cult favorite jewelry store Catbird. She also writes for New York Magazine's column "The Strategist." And I'm so thrilled to have you on, Leigh, because not only am I a huge fan of Catbird -- I have many tote bags in my house from all the orders -- but I also follow your beautiful Instagram account. It's romantic and charming and erudite, and, like Catbird, has this wonderful element of fantasy, which is one of the reasons why you are perfect for the discussion of this book. (The full title of it by the way is actually Sundays: A Fantasy.) Listeners, I found out about the book in the first place because Leigh posted it in her Instagram stories. So thank you for introducing us to this arch and frightfully chic little novella and for coming on the show with us to talk about it. 

LEIGH PLESSNER: Thank you so much for having me. I am an avid listener of Lost Ladies of Lit, and I'm so pleased to be here. 

AMY: Yay. Um, so now we know that you studied English lit in college, right? Is that how you first encountered this? 

LEIGH: So I did study English literature in college, and then right afterwards, I went and I worked at this really wonderful independent bookstore where I got to sort of get a second degree in the art of reading. And I had heard Daisy Fellowes's name over the years, but very much in passing. Then a snippet of Sundays turned up in this newsletter that I get called Opulent Tips, which is by a fashion writer and editor named Rachel Tashjian. And I immediately began the eBay search to try and track down a copy. 

AMY: Which is challenging! When we had agreed to do this book with you and I went to get a copy, we had a moment of panic because I was like, "Kim, we can't get this book! What are we going to do? Can listeners get this book?" And we will discuss that later. So listeners, don't worry. You're going to be able to get a copy of this book. But yeah, it's hard to find. 

LEIGH: It is indeed. It took me a few months of searching. And then there's some really expensive copies, and I got super lucky with a not-very-expensive copy. But it is very hard to find.

AMY: And I even remember you so kindly offered to let us borrow that copy, which luckily we didn't need to do..

KIM: Yeah, we were like, “No, we don't want to do that.” 

AMY: I know, because I was like, "If that got lost..." Oh my gosh. 

KIM: Yeah.

LEIGH: Well, I would love to share it. If anybody is desperate to read it, you can DM me and we can see about a little book loan. 

KIM: A little Lost Ladies of Lit lending library. I love it. 

AMY: Okay. So Kim mentioned in the introduction that Daisy was an heiress, but she was not your garden-variety heiress. She was an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune. Her grandfather was New Yorker Isaac Singer, who invented the first practical and commercially successful sewing machine. Her mother was heiress Isabel Blanche Singer, one of Isaac's 24 children. And I just needed to take a moment to let the idea of 24 children sink in. Um, but anyway, that was her mom's side of the family. Daisy's father was the Third Duke of Glucksberg, an aristocrat and sportsman. So she was actually an heiress twice over. And to say she was enormously rich does not even do it justice ... like filthy, filthy, filthy rich. Daisy was born in 1890 in Paris, and Lee, do you want to share with us, if you know anything more, about Daisy's youth? 

LEIGH: I might butcher some names, but I will try my absolute best. So Daisy was a middle child. She had an older and a younger brother. Each sibling was born within one year of each other. And when Daisy was only six years old, their mother committed suicide. The children were then raised mostly by their aunt, Winaretta, who was also known as Princess Edmond de Polignac. Winaretta had a really remarkable life of her own; she was a patron of the arts. She established a music salon in Paris where her proteges included Debussy and Ravel. Uh, she also had a couple of entirely chaste marriages and several high-profile relationships with women. 

AMY: She sounds like she could have her own episode, a mini episode, in the future, right, Kim? 

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. She's super interesting. So Daisy emerged from this "poor little rich girl" childhood to become one of the first "It Girls." She was on the cover of Vogue and Diana Vreeland said of her: "She had the elegance of the damned." I love that quote; it's so good. Karl Lagerfeld reportedly said she was "the chicest woman I ever laid eyes on." She was a friend of Coco Chanel and the muse of Elsa Schiaparelli, who invented the color shocking pink just for her. Leigh, can you tell us more about what set Daisy's style apart? 

LEIGH: Absolutely. So Daisy was very daring in her personal style, and that appealed deeply to the Surrealists of the time. She was said, also, to have directly inspired Coco Chanel. She wore clothes by Schiaperelli and she was a favorite subject of Cecil Beaton. She also had the most amazing jewelry collection. 

AMY: Which appeals to you, right?

LEIGH: It does indeed. 

AMY: Probably a bit more ostentatious than the typical Catbird design. 

LEIGH: Opposite ends of the spectrum. But, um, uh, both devoted to materials and craftsmanship. 

KIM: We're talking pieces by Van Cleef and Arpels, Belperron and, famously, Cartier. Apparently jewelry historians are fascinated with this collection. Lee, since this is your area of expertise, do you want to tell us more about that? 

LEIGH: I would love to. So I was looking at all of the photos of Daisy that I could find, and she had this amazing pair of diamond and emerald bracelets, and in the photos she would stand exactly just so, so that they fanned down perfectly around her wrist. I've never really seen bracelets quite worn like this, where they occupy the wrist and then they go somewhat down the hand as well and they wrap around either side of the fingers. They're really spectacular. So they are a matching pair and they also could be worn together as a necklace. Um, 

AMY: I want to jump in for a second because I read an anecdote about these bracelets and the reason she had them on each wrist was because she didn't like asymmetry. I don't know if that's true but yeah, 

LEIGH: But I love the juxtaposition of somebody who is inspiring the Surrealists and who was so, sort of unconventional in so many ways and yet had such a strict order about things. That makes it so much richer and more interesting. So she also owned... Cartier had this collection, this series, called the Tutti Frutti collection, and she owned the most spectacular of all of the Tutti Frutti pieces. It was full of just an enormous ruby and emerald and diamonds and some sapphires, and it tied shut with a black silk ribbon. 

KIM: That sounds gorgeous. 

AMY: I'm salivating. And also, you mentioned the Surrealists, and I had a great anecdote about Salvador Dali. She apparently told Dali that she could make anything fashionable. And he said, "Very well, take off your shoe and put it on your head." And she did, and she made a shoe hat become a sensation. There's a total style of hat called the shoe hat that springs from this anecdote, which I think is fabulous. It looks like an upside down shoe. 

KIM: That's crazy. I love it. 

AMY: Serious confidence. Anyway, uh, getting back to her personal life, Daisy was married a couple of times. Her first husband committed suicide, sadly, after his affair with a chauffeur was exposed. Then at one point, Daisy took Duff Cooper, the British ambassador to France, for her lover. And she also famously set out to seduce Winston Churchill, right? 

LEIGH: Yes. This is true. So Winston Churchill's secretary wrote a memoir, of course. And in it, he told the story of Winston telling him that one time he fled from a room when Daisy Fellowes, who had asked him to tea, received him lying on a tiger skin chaise longue. This seduction did not go well, but Daisy did end up marrying Winston's cousin, Reginald. 

KIM: Wow. She really went all out. I mean, that's kind of embarrassing. 

LEIGH: It's so not the Winston Churchill we think of, right? 

KIM: No. 

LEIGH: But apparently even Clementine forgave Daisy for this overture. So all was well, 

KIM: Yeah, there's so many great anecdotes about her. So another thing, she was also a mother, but really hands-off and by really hands-off, there's an anecdote about that as well. Do you want to tell it, Leigh? 

LEIGH: Sure. So, there's a story about Daisy that goes something like this: she saw a group of girls playing in a park and she turned to the nurse who was watching them and said, "Whose lovely little children are those?" To which the nurse replied, "Yours, Madame." 

KIM: I love it.

AMY: Oh man. So in addition to being this incredible fashion muse, she was also the editor of Paris Harpers. The Daily Mail, which is kind of known for its sensationalism, I think we can say ... they wrote of Daisy: "She lived on a diet of morphine and grouse and the occasional cocktail."

KIM: Ouch.

AMY: Yeah. And the title of that profile is "The Most Wicked Woman in High Society." I kind of think she probably saw that and loved it and almost would not have taken offense. 

KIM: It's almost like performance art. 

AMY: Yes. She was a collector of jewelry, art, lovers, erotica, you name it. But then she also wrote several novels and an epic poem, which is starting to give her a lot more depth, right? 

KIM: Yeah. And after reading Sundays and learning more about Daisy, I kind of have to wonder if there was a lot more there there, if you know what I mean. I can't wait to hear what you both think. Um, anyway, Amy, that is an excellent segue into talking about Sundays, which was not at all what I expected. I knew absolutely nothing about who Daisy Fellowes was before we started researching this episode, and based on her name and the title of the book, I kind of imagined Sundays was going to be this charming little innocent, English romp of a book, maybe set in a pastoral English countryside. And it is a romp, but it's a completely different kind of romp, right? 

AMY: It feels very French. We read an English translation, and even if you took the French names out of it, I feel like you could still tell this was French, you know? Sundays was originally published as Les Dimanches de la Comtesse de Narbonne or The Sundays of the Countess de Narbonne in 1931, it came out. But it was translated in English as Sundays in 1960. So the version we're actually using is the 1960 translation. Leigh, can you give our listeners a quick spoiler free summary?

LEIGH: I would love to. So in a spa town in the French countryside, Mademoiselle Mélanie Emperor, a gray-haired masseuse, lives in her once-grand family's home with her young servants, Germaine. One day Germaine runs away from her life with Ms. Melanie and she runs towards beauty and opulence. But the path along that road is very, very bumpy and not everything is as it seems. 

AMY: Did you have any favorite passages from the book that would maybe give listeners a little bit of a feel for the prose?

LEIGH: I do. This is from page 20, if anybody is able to get their hands on this. This is Mélanie waking up in the bedroom of this home. And it had once been her mother's bedroom. So she has all of these childhood memories of this room:  She loved them all; especially the high satin-wood cupboard incrusted with ebony that bore as a proud pediment the letter 'E' tenderly embracing the letter 'M.' Upon the serpentine chest of drawers stood a plaster bust of Napoleon the III that baby Meélanie had playfully decorated in Indian ink with sardonic eyebrows and a military moustache. The armchairs, hassocks and pri-Dieu were covered in a raised plush of Gothic design. Next to the opulent curtained bed surmounted by a circular dome stood the conjugal two-decker commode with a slate top that held a painted carafe, small vial of orange flower water and a sugar basin. Also a nightlight in the shape of a castle. The only new item, added by Mélanie, was the fancy kidney-shaped dressing table decorated all over in thick lace over rose satinette. It had a large three-sided mirror attached to the back which made it impossible for the person sitting at the table to see anything but the top of her head. 

KIM: I feel like that is the perfect passage. And it's so interesting that Daisy chose to inhabit in this book the life of a poor working girl, who's basically the subject of this novel. But it's subtitled "A Fantasy," and it is quite funny. I'm thinking of the character you're talking about in your passage, Mélanie. She cleverly uses the bridge over a passing train as a vibrator, so that's pretty funny. But it's also somewhat tragic, too. The brother's a pedophile. There's a hint of incest. Germaine has an abortion she doesn't want. Do you think the subtitle is merely ironic or is there more to it? What do you think she was doing with that?

LEIGH: I was also struck by how much it wasn't a fantasy. And I didn't leave this book feeling resolved or as if I understood it, really very much at all. There's this light tone to the book. There's like frippery, there's satin bed covers, but there's also a lot of darkness. I don't even totally know what I mean by this, but was it a fantasy of how hard life could be? We know that Daisy had so much hardship in her life alongside of so much luxury. So was she exploring that in a different setting? I truly am not quite sure. 

AMY: I have the exact same note. That there's this lightness and buoyancy to the book, but then there's this undeniable sadness. And the main character's kind of flitting from lover to lover. And we know that Daisy had lovers galore. So I'm wondering if it's a little bit of an elegy about, you know, not really being able to find what you're looking for sort of thing. I also feel like it's a book that maybe you're not meant to read so much into. I do not understand parts of this. It is weird. 

LEIGH: I thought it was really, um, noteworthy and surprising that Mélanie was such a fully developed character and that she had gray hair and she had bad feet. She was not glamorous in the way that I think the people that Daisy interacted with were. She was normal in many ways in this fantasy. And I really wasn't expecting that. And I found that very sweet and tender. I didn't feel as though she was laughing at her. 

KIM: I love the way you put that. I completely agree. 

AMY: And also for this heiress who has money galore to write about a character whose main dream in life... Germaine doesn't quite know what she wants; she's figuring it out as she goes along. She thinks she wants money. She thinks she wants the high life, but we come to find out that what she really dreams of is a little house in the country, you know, near a pine grove. She wants something very simple at the end of the day. And to look at this woman who had everything that money can buy, there's almost like a wistfulness, that life was sort of unavailable to her. So maybe that's her fantasy in a strange way.

KIM: Yeah, like Marie Antoinette and her dairy. 

AMY: A little country house. Yes. There was one little other passage that I really wanted to read because I loved it. And so if you guys don't mind... also getting back to Germaine's quest for love, there's a moment in the book where she finally, she thinks, is experiencing her first moment of truly falling in love. And I loved the description of it. I think it's a great scene. So I'm going to read it. She basically meets this sort of playboy viscount. They are at a festival and they go on the carousel, which we just recently had a mini episode on carousels. Um, so they get onto the carousel and I'm going to read what happens next: 

A stuffy family settled on the scarlet cushions of the open sledge pulled by two white swans. They immediately became an Imperial Family and smiled while bowing graciously to left and right. The merry-go-round began wheezing and turning sluggishly with the effort of an old suburban train getting going for the day. Then the organ and the machine moved faster and faster. Moving like mad, The Blue Bells of Scotland went into a crazy rhythm, one grew dizzy, the spectators became blurred, a galaxy of coloured stars. Germane cried, 'Faster, faster.' Just as she spoke, they stopped suddenly with a double hiccup that much upset the Imperial Family. When she got down Germaine found that the ground was playing at ocean waves.. She bent back a little to steady herself but lost her balance. A strong arm took her by the waist, 'Ho la' said that Playboy, for it was he. Still rather dizzy, she felt a delicious tingle that started from the small of her back and ran all over her, exactly just the opposite of what one feels when one's foot has gone to sleep. This wonderful sensation entirely pervaded her unsuspecting body. She was waking up for the first time in her life. They walked about like this closely linked, separating only for major reasons like firing a shot or throwing a hammer. Germaine's lips parted in a ravishing smile. "Myosotis," said he gently leaning close to her ear, for he was quite tall. [Myosotis is going to be his little pet name for her.] Presently they found they had strayed outside the Fair grounds on to a deserted avenue where stray paper and dust danced merrily. The avenue led past a deep declivity where the old fortifications had one stood. He took her in his arms. She realized that she knew nothing about love. 

I love that. I mean, it just gives you the feeling of what it is like to have that initial stage of being swept off your feet, literally. 

KIM: Yeah, that was gorgeous. So, um, while I was trying to find out more about Daisy and the book Sundays and what people thought about it, I thought maybe some critical, popular or academic reception of it might help me understand it. So I looked on Jstor. I Googled, I looked everywhere and I couldn't turn up anything in English or French. So I reached out to Laura Thompson, our guests for the Nancy Mitford episode. She has a new book, Heiresses: the Lives of Million Dollar Babies, and lo and behold, Daisy Fellowes is one of her subjects! So I messaged her to find out if she'd uncovered anything regarding Sundays while she was researching Heiresses. Fortunately for us, she had. Nancy Mitford actually read it and liked it! How perfect is that? She wrote in a letter to Evelyn Waugh that "old Daisy has written a nouvelle, which isn't bad at all in a sort of Firbank way." So I then had to Google Firbank, and she's referring to Ronald Firbank, an English novelist whose novels were dialogue-filled sexcapades. He had, and has, a lot of fans from Evelyn Waugh to Alan Hollinghurst, and the late Susan Sontag named his novels "part of the canon of camp" in her 1964 essay "Notes on Camp." And this is all making me think of the Met Gala's 2019 camp theme. I'd been wondering why Sundays was translated to English in 1961 and not earlier, and maybe this idea of camp as a clue... there's something very Sixties about it. I don't know. What'd you guys think about that?

AMY: I'm not sure. I don't know. She died in 1962. So this English translation is actually a few years before that, but I also kind of wonder if maybe there was, you know ... sometimes famous people are getting towards the end of their life and there's almost like a looking back at them, kind of a renewed interest. I don't know, but... 

KIM: Maybe England wasn't ready for this in the Thirties. And they were in the Sixties. 

AMY: Yeah, I don't know. I love that Laura Thompson was able to weigh in on this for us too. And it just makes total sense that there'd be a connection between Daisy and Nancy. They were both bright young things of their time. I'm sure they crossed paths a lot. 

KIM: Yeah. And I mean, the one little tidbit that I was able to get about Sundays happened to be from Nancy via Laura, and that's so cool. Also there's a little more, too. Laura said that Nancy actually got along really well with Daisy, but at one point, Nancy got chucked from one of Daisy's yachts, she had two of them, and it was to make room for one of Daisy's lovers. So all's fair in love and war. Right? 

AMY: The lover comes first. The lover du jour, we should say. And speaking of love, one of Daisy's so-called vices was her collection of erotica that she loved to show off. I think we touched on that earlier. We need a traveling exhibition of this. When is this coming to the States? Field trip, if and when it does. We should also mention that Sundays is beautifully illustrated with charming scenes and nudes by a guy named Vertes. Vertes was Marcel Vertes, a French costume designer and illustrator who won two Academy Awards for best art direction and best costume design for his work on the 1952 John Huston film Moulin Rouge. 

KIM: Yeah. And I would say that this book almost seems like it should be judged as a whole package, these lovely illustrations being an important part of the overall fantasy of the book.

AMY: What'd you think of the illustrations, Leigh? 

LEIGH: I very much agree that it's the whole package. It almost feels like a grownup picture book. And Sundays grew out of a trip that Daisy and Vertes took to take the baths in France together. And they conceived of these stories about the locals in town, and, I suppose, at the spa as well. So it was born out of working together. 

KIM: Oh, that's so playful. I can imagine them totally being like, "Oh, what do you think that person's life story is?" 

AMY: Here we are trying to read deeply and it's probably just, they were having fun. 

KIM: What a clue! I love that you found that! That's wonderful. 

LEIGH: It's on the inside flap. 

……

KIM: I think that's super illuminating. 

LEIGH: I did learn, also, from here that she, um, was friends with Cocteau, which makes so much sense. Yeah. 

AMY: She was friends with everybody; she knew everyone. Yeah. 

LEIGH: Amazing that given the world in which she inhabited and how central she was, as the center of this web in so many ways, that there hasn't been a film about her. There hasn't been a biography about her, there hasn't been even very many articles written about her. 

KIM: Yeah, it's really, really limited. I mean, we've talked about some obscure women on this show and she was one of the hardest to find anything about. And she is one of the more recent people!

AMY: I know, and she was so famous! I mean, it's really odd. 

LEIGH: Did you guys see the picture of her bathroom? 

KIM: No... 

LEIGH: I'll have to find it and send it to you, but it's very much like talking about that deluxe, double decker commode. She had, uh, this very beautiful cane chair that sat over and around the bathroom. And the whole piece was about, um, sort of the bathroom as a salon.

KIM: Oh, interesting. I love that, we'll link to it in the show notes. 

LEIGH: Seeing that photo of her bathroom really reinforced that description... 

KIM: The idea of "the throne." Okay, so we know The Daily Mail called her "the most wicked woman in high society." And she had this really extreme reputation for being sharp and hardened, for being a thief of other women's husbands, for being a bad mother, all these things that we talked about. But I read that she actually donated all of her salary as editor in chief of Harper's and a large amount of her total fortune to a local orphanage. I thought this was really interesting considering that anecdote about her not recognizing her children in the park. It's obviously a ridiculous anecdote. Probably not true, of course. But you have to wonder how many of the other stories about her were just malicious gossip?

LEIGH: I agree, I think that she was probably very complex, and complexity can get reduced , often for women, into being wicked or bad and being a bad mother. The snippets that are around her really turned her into this Cruella-like character, but, um, there was this tenderness and curiosity in Sundays that really belies this notion that she was just flip and glamorous. I also think about how her mom left her life when she was so small and what a heavy burden that is to carry. Who knows the way that that manifests itself? 

AMY: I agree completely. In terms of the anecdote about her mothering, in Sundays, we end on a portrait of the main character as mother, and it's this very sweet, poignant moment between her and her child. And she's also very mothering and nurturing to her brother. 

KIM: Yeah. I almost feel like the level of viciousness about her, The Daily Mail and things like that, it seems like it can't be true because it's just so dark and over the top, like obviously somebody was mad for some reason, you know? 

AMY: Like I said, I feel like she seems like the type of person that actually wouldn't have even cared, you know, like she would just lean into it. 

KIM: The performance is working. They're believing it.

AMY: So, as we mentioned at the top of the show, we did find it a little challenging to track down a copy of this book. Kim and I managed to borrow it from the library at Mount St. Mary's College here in LA. So, you might check your library. But affordable copies do pop up online, you just have to keep checking. So by the time we finished prepping for this episode, we were able to purchase a $25 copy online. Leigh, have you by chance read any other works by her? I know she has another title called Cats in the Isle of Mann. 

LEIGH: Um, so Sundays is all I have read, but I do have an eBay search and alerts set up right away. And you also remind me that I need to email one of my favorite book sellers here in Brooklyn to see if he ever comes across anything to let me know. 

AMY: I will say about Cats in the Isle of Mann... we haven't read it either, but I will refer back to a previous guest of ours, Brad Bigelow from neglectedbooks.com. He did a blog entry on this book and he rated it "justifiably neglected." He didn't think it was that great. 

LEIGH: Maybe that's the meanest thing anybody's ever said about her.

KIM: So while we're lucky enough to have you on with us, would you like to recommend a couple of other books that struck your fancy? 

LEIGH: Yes. I would love to. One of them is lost, but not a lost lady. So I've been reading the adult writings of -- that sounds like a euphemism for something, but it's really just the not-children writings of Ludwig Bemelmans who wrote Madaleine and illustrated Madeline. And it is so wonderful. And for all of the reasons why everybody loves Madeline and going to Bemelmans bar, it should be all of the reasons why everyone should spend some time with his other work. 

AMY: What is it? Is it fiction? Nonfiction? 

LEIGH: It's everything. So I have a collection that his wife pulled together after he died that was called, Tell Them it was Wonderful. And it comes from, I believe he wrote for The New Yorker. He wrote for many other publications, but he also published novels. And I just got off of eBay a lot of books. I think it's five of them, including The One I Love Best, which was devoted to his friendship with the decorator Elsie de Wolfe.

AMY: I feel like that name came up for us, Kim, when we were doing, um, um...

KIM: Marjorie Hillis?

AMY: Yes. Yeah. Marjorie Hillis. Yeah. Okay, um, well I don't even think of him as having written anything but Madeline books. 

LEIGH: He had such an enormous life, and did so many things. And it's all just really beautiful. 

KIM: That's wonderful. 

AMY: Yeah. Thanks for recommending that for us. And then also thank you so much for joining us today. This has been such an interesting conversation and we're so glad that you had posted that Instagram story when you did. It's been great having. 

LEIGH: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure. And I'm so glad that I got to navigate this sort of unexpected and strange book with other people. It made it so much more fun. 

KIM: Thank you for being willing to come on and do this with us. And also, merci to the ever lovely Laura Thompson for providing some great anecdotes for this episode. I pre-ordered Heiresses and I can't wait to read it. 

AMY: Yeah, same. And if you want to know more about Daisy Fellows, I think you'll find it in the pages of Heiresses. So definitely check out Laura's book for more. We'll sign off 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. 

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

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