83. Dorothy Evelyn Smith — O, the Brave Music with Simon Thomas

Note: Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES: Hi everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes...

KIM ASKEW: ... and I'm Kim Askew. The book we're discussing today, Dorothy Evelyn Smith's O the Brave Music, takes an established look at a young English girl, a minister's daughter, at the turn of the 20th century.

AMY: Yes. And we've featured a few books on this podcast by American writers looking back at that time period. I'm thinking of Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacey books as an example. So when I started reading O the Brave Music, I was expecting another book in that vein; a sweet, witty, charming novel with maybe some swoon-worthy romance.

KIM: Yeah, me too. This book checks all those boxes for sure, but this coming- of- age tale becomes more profound and nuanced with each passing chapter. The narrator's reflections on her youth are far from idyllic, and her struggle to square her inner longings with life's many bitter disappointments will leave your heart tangled up in knots. Yet it's also quietly joyful, too. It was aptly compared to Betty Smith's novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at the time of its release, which was in 1943.

AMY: I was also getting some I Capture the Castle vibes while reading this book. And that's a novel by Dodie Smith that I absolutely love, so needless to say, it was pure delight to read O the Brave Music, and we're so glad that today's guest brought it to our attention. We can't wait to discuss it with him today, so let's read the stacks and get started! 

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Dr. Simon Thomas, who for the past 15 years has been writing about lost ladies of lit, particularly those from the interwar period of the 20th century on his blog, Stuck In a Book. You can also find him dishing on all things literary on his wonderful podcast Tea or Books? alongside his co-host, Rachel. In addition, Simon is a consultant for the British Library Women Writers Series, which curates works by forgotten female writers. It's their edition of O the Brave Music, for which Simon wrote the afterword, that we read in preparation for this episode.

AMY: And also shout out to the British Library Women Writer Series because I think they have the best book covers. They are silhouettes of each author. I'm always like, "Ooh, I like that one! I like that one!" Anyway, Kim, I can remember the exact moment -- I was walking the dog -- I got a text from you saying that Simon had given our new baby podcast, in its early days of existence, a shout- out on Instagram. We were both elated that a PhD in English from Oxford University was recommending our podcasts to others. It was just a moment, right?

KIM: Yeah. It definitely made us feel like we were doing something worthwhile and it's like, "Okay, let's keep going. Something's working." 

AMY: I also want to say that my dream would be to sublet Simon's home for about a year, especially after listening to one of your recent episodes where Rachel basically goes through your bookshelves. 

KIM: I love that. 

AMY: …hang out with your cool cat and kind of pilfer from your collection. So I don't know if you're interested in like, uh, apartment swap Simon. You can come out to LA and live with my family. 

KIM: Business idea: Airbnb, but for book lovers only. 

AMY: I love that.

SIMON THOMAS: I will say, as someone who lives in LA, you might find it's rather wet here, and there is a hole in my roof currently. So if you can take the rain coming down the walls as well... 

KIM: Ambience. We'll take it. 

AMY: What you don't know about Angelenos is that when it rains here, we all get super excited, don't we, Kim? It's like a novelty. But anyway, Simon, thank you for coming onto this podcast. We're so excited to have you here.

SIMON: Yeah, I must say I'm delighted to be invited. I sort of invited myself, really, but it's really wonderful to be here. And I don't remember how I first came across your show other than to say I was there very early and shouting it out on Instagram, but it just, when I saw even the name, Lost Ladies of Lit, I was like, "These are my girls." I think you're doing such a wonderful job of bringing these lost ladies of lit back to attention, and I'm delighted that I could be on an episode and bring my home girl, Dorothy Evelyn Smith, with me. 

KIM: So as we've established, in your line of work you are well acquainted with a lot of women writers. What is it about Dorothy Evelyn Smith that prompted you to suggest her in particular for this episode?

SIMON: So as you said earlier, I am the series consultant for the British Library Women Writers Series. And so most of the books that come out in that series are ones that I've suggested to them, and they're meant to represent women's lives in whichever period they're published. And as we'll talk about, O the Brave Music doesn't quite fit because it is written in the 1940s and set in the 1900s, 1910s. It's never quite clear, but before the First World War and in the 20th century. And I managed to just get it into that series, basically, because I just kept saying, “This book's too good for us not to include.” I know it doesn't quite fulfill all the criteria and I know I was not supposed to have favorites, but this is my favorite of the series. And it's one of my favorite books. And that's why I have suggested it for this episode. I came across it in a little bookshop in St. David's in Pembrokeshire, Wales, which is technically a city, but it is, you know, the size of a village. I'd read one book by her and I'd always kept an eye out. I didn't think the title was particularly enticing. I didn't actually recognize the quote. We'll talk about that later as well, I'm sure. But I thought I'll give it another go. And I started reading it, and almost instantly I was completely beguiled. It's one of those books that just, um, I find completely envelops you in the world that she's created. I'm glad you mentioned  I Capture the Castle in your introduction. I've been told off for comparing the two because I've been told they're not the same. They're not the same plot or anything like that, but the same feeling of bringing you into a world and just living in that world and missing it when it's finished. And that's why I just want everyone to read it, and almost everyone who does read it loves it. So I just want everyone to at least try it.

AMY: When I started the first few pages, the vibe I was getting was, "Oh, this is sweet. You know, it had some, it's cute. It's funny, blah, blah, blah." I was just like, "huh." And then once we start getting into the meat of it you realize it's not just the sweet coming of age story. There's a lot more to it than that. 

KIM: Yeah, the dark undercurrent starts to pull at you and carry you through. 

SIMON: Yeah. I will say it starts maybe like it could seem quite twee, but then it is not twee, is it? There is so much, there's so much darkness, but it's also, I think we'll talk about all this in more detail, but I think despite all the sad things that happen, I think it's such an uplifting novel as well. I think that's what I came away with --a sense of it's just suffused in hope, despite everything that Ruan, the main character, goes through. 

KIM: Yeah. And that's the best kind of book, I think, so we probably all agree. Um, so do you want to share with our listeners a bit of a spoiler-free summary of the book, introducing us to the heroine?

SIMON: So, as I say, she's called Ruan. A strange name, R- U- A- N not one I've come across elsewhere. And like Dorothy Evelyn Smith, and indeed like me, she is the child of a minister. Although my dad was an Anglican vicar, not a Nonconformist like her father is. She lives in the north of England in, I think, Yorkshire, but I'm not sure if that's ever quite stated. She is in an industrial town, which is surrounded by these wonderful, beautiful moors. At the start of the novel she is seven and it takes us until she's on the cusp of adulthood, I guess. And the first section of the novel is about her living quite unhappily with her minister father and his wife. They were briefly in love, but now the marriage is quite unhappy, really. Ruan goes through a lot more in the space of this book than most of us go through in the space of our lives, I think. 

AMY: When I was reading the first part of the book, I kept thinking, "There's no way that you would pronounce this "ruin." Who would name a child "Ruin," right? And so I kept saying "Ru-Anne" in my head, but I love that there's a little poem that one of the friends came up with about Ruan. And it all rhymes with "brewin,'" you know, things like that. So then I was like, "Oh my gosh, it is pronounced "ruin!" So, um, I was glad to have that little clarification. And then another clarification: I never knew that the word manse referred to a minister's house, right? So we did an episode on the Findlater sisters who lived in a manse. And I remember mentioning that in the episode and I thought it was like a small mansion, basically. 

SIMON: Yeah.

KIM: Yeah, 

AMY: We don't have those here. I mean, we don't use that word.

SIMON: Yeah. It's not really a term that's used that much anymore now in England, but yeah, obviously it was quite common at one point. You'll still occasionally have people referring to the manse or to "manse land," which is land belonging to the rectory or vicarage or something. But, um, certainly I grew up in vicarages or rectories, not manses. 

AMY: Okay. Um, so let's talk about Smith's life a little bit. She was born Dorothy Evelyn Jones in 1893 in the Peak District of Derbyshire. Derbyshire, I don't know how you say that. 

SIMON: "Darby-shire. "

AMY: Okay. yeah, (I'm a Yank) which was located kind of smack in the middle of the country. And I don't know much about that part of England, but Simon, I would guess that we'd find a lot of moors there?

SIMON: Um, you'd find some. As Peak District suggests you find more mountains, but, um, it sort of bleeds into moors which go across the center of the country. I guess it's also not an area of the country I know that well, although I was just staying on the edge of the Peak District last week, but, um, Yeah. The moors are more famed for Yorkshire, and as anyone who reads this will see are very significant in the book. And I think one of the interesting things about why they're chosen both in this book and in English, British literature, is that in the UK moors are the biggest uninhabited spaces. And they're pretty small, unlike, you know, America or Canada or Australia, we only have a few square miles basically scattered here and there. So to an American reader the moors are probably near the park at the end of the street, but to us, it's this wild expanse. Quite often, particularly in the north of the country, you'll get moorland near the industrial plants. So the places like where Ruan and her family live that have factories at the heart of them and quite dispiriting or smoggy areas around them will also, as soon as you've got out of that area, tend to be moorland. And I think in O the Brave Music, it's a place where Ruan can really be herself. I think she finds her sense of her identity on the moors where she doesn't feel the troubles of her family or the unhappiness echoing around her house. Later she goes to school and she also doesn't love that, so the moors are just a place of freedom for her.

AMY: I want to just chime in for a second, because yes, we don't have moors in America, but I feel like I grew up a little bit on the moors because my family, when I was in eighth grade, we moved into a newly being built subdivision, and our house was one of the first houses there. And so it was all this empty land and it was kind of hills and there were some lakes in the little subdivision, but it was all empty and we called it the moors, and there were teenagers that lived there and we would go play flashlight tag at night on the moors. I had read Wuthering Heights by that point, so I probably was like, know, fantasizing.

SIMON: Can I jump in with a British question? What is a subdivision? 

KIM: Oh, good question. 

AMY: So it's like, um, what would you call that? Like tract homes. 

KIM: People would pick out where their house was going to go and they 1 of 4 styles, you know, or whatever. So every fourth house... 

AMY: They all look the same. 

KIM: They're all plotted and planned out.

AMY: It's suburbia. 

SIMON: All your clever, straight roads and easy map sort of 

KIM: What you're talking about actually made me go to Poltergeist, because in Poltergeist it's a subdivision that's built on hallowed cemetery ground 

SIMON: Oh my gosh. Okay. 

AMY: Did you ever think Dorothy Evelyn Smith was going to lead to a Poltergeist reference?

SIMON: I always assumed she would. I mean, it's the natural next step. 

KIM: Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, and it's so funny that you said that, because in my mind, I know that England is small, you know, obviously compared to the U S and a lot of places, but in my mind, the moors do automatically make me feel like a vastness. So I guess there is something in the way that it's described, in the way it must feel to our character and also other people to be on that moor. There is a vastness to it, even though it's kind of small. 

SIMON: Yeah. I mean, I think it's all in your perception. You know, to Ruan, they are vast. I mean, you could walk across them in half a day, I imagine, or less, but yeah I think when people think of literary moors, they think Wuthering Heights. Or Kate Bush's song, you know, "out on the wild windy moors." Um, but yeah, I think It's really different in terms of the moors in Wuthering Heights are so dangerous and unsettling, and they are places where people find themselves, but it's always quite ominous. Whereas as I say, I think in O the Brave Music, they're the opposite of that. They're a friendly space. There's a lovely bit where she talks about going "up, up through the purples of the heather ," that sort of thing, and it feels like she's coming out of this dark, difficult place out into freedom. And yeah, I think as a reader, I will say I felt when we were off in the moors, you just feel lighter and happier. Almost everything that happens on the moors in the book is positive. 

AMY: Yeah. It's like the mothering side of Mother Nature, you know? Nurturing. Yeah. So anyway, we can get into Dorothy Evelyn Smith's life a little bit more as we go along, but I think we should just dive right into the story. At the beginning of this novel, we see seven-year-old Ruan sitting in church on Sunday as her father sermonizes, and she's daydreaming about cutting up a pink ribbon that she sees on a fellow churchgoer's hat. She would love to use the ribbon to make a new suit for her Little Man, which is her imaginary friend . But as lovely as the ribbon is, she knows that if she were actually to cut into it, it would be finished. No more ribbon; it's done. This little plot might seem kind of trivial, but it actually represents the crux of the entire novel. Can you explain that a little bit, Simon?

SIMON: Yeah. I think you're right. It's such a small moment, and then it recurs throughout. There's a bit later where she talks about maybe going to the circus. And I'll quote: "To go would spoil the splendor I now possess. Like the pink ribbon out of Rosie's hat, if I never had it, I could never lose it." And I think Ruan, particularly in the younger years, lives so much of her life in potential and in the possible, and is scared to grasp it. You can understand why when she's living in a really difficult situation and hasn't had a lot of experience of grasping something and it being good. So it's much easier for her to see the pink ribbon, metaphorically, whatever that might represent, in the distance. And yeah, if she never tries something, she can never fail at something. If she never trusts someone then she can never be let down by them. Over and over again, the perfection is on the horizon. Later in the novel she realizes, on the instruction of others, that she will have to grasp something real at some point, not just live in the potential, but that's a thread that lasts quite a while.

KIM: Yeah. And then unlike her seemingly perfect older sister, Sylvia, little Ruan is a bit of a misfit. She's feisty. She acts out. Um, she's reminiscent maybe of Ramona the Pest or Harriet the Spy. She's always threatening these extreme acts of violence against Sylvia, and her inner thoughts are actually wickedly funny, right? And there are lots of laugh- out- loud moments. She's passionately in love with words, and she has a wild imagination and her father actually tries to curb it to help her. He even insists she give up her imaginary Little Man, which she does actually, even though she doesn't necessarily have to. It's imaginary, but she does, even though it's painful to her. But it doesn't stop her from being her essential self.

AMY: Yeah. And all of these childhood anecdotes, I mean, even though she, in her head, is going through some difficult times and they're maybe not so funny to her, the way Smith writes them is so funny. I'm thinking about the encounter with a circus clown. And then there's a Stand By Me moment where one of her friends asks her if she wants to go see a dead body and, you know, they covertly, creep into the house of a poor family and go see an actual corpse, basically. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of that clown incident, I want to go back to that and read a passage from the book about that. Right after she gets home, after the clown has kissed her outside of a circus tent. Here I go: "There was a terrible fuss, of course. Tears and explanations from Tanner. Tears and explanations from me. I was scrubbed with carbolic soap. I gargled with Condy's fluid. The small tooth comb was brought into vigorous play. Father lectured me on the sin of forwardness. Mother searched my clothing for fleas , and at length, disinfected and prayed over and bitterly clean, I was put to bed with a good book and a dose of opening medicine and all because a clown had kissed me."

SIMON: What I love about that moment, and lots of other moments in the first half of the book, is that they add nothing to the plot. They're just there. Because you think "Oh, is it going to be a circus novel?" It's like, no, the circus, it never comes back. It's never mentioned again. 

AMY: Circuses are weird and creepy

KIM: They are. That is true. 

SIMON: No one likes a clown, do they? 

KIM: No, no. And they definitely won't after they read this. The idea of being kissed without, you know, wanting it by a clown is...

AMY: Horrifying. Yeah. Um, I probably make the mistake a little bit when I read, I kind of assume things are autobiographical. And I don't know if that's the case with this book. I don't know what she might've pulled from life or what she didn't. Simon, do you know if there are any parallels we can draw between the author and Ruan based on anything we know about her?

SIMON: It's interesting you say that, because I also felt that it seems so autobiographical and I think a lot of it has to do with the small details. They don't add to the storytelling so much as just to add to the feeling of the novel and they feel so real. And I'm afraid the truth is that I don't actually know that much. Sadly, her children have died now, but when I was writing the author bio for the British Library edition, I did get to speak to two of her grandsons, which was wonderful. So they'd only known her as children. She died when they were still children. So obviously not the most in-depth knowledge of everything about her, so they could fill me in a bit. And what is true is the area of the country she lived in and the fact, as I said, that she was the daughter of a minister. They didn't think that she'd ever had a brother. I don't know how much I'll say about Clem, her baby brother in the book, who has mental and physical disabilities that are never really specified exactly what they are. I assumed he was drawn from life, but he wasn't. Um, something that works really well the other way, sort of life taken from art, is, in real life, she named a house Cobbetts after the house in the novel, which I thought was really lovely, that the legacy of that house lived on in reality. I think ultimately the only people who'd be able to answer the question of how biographical it is not with us anymore. 

KIM: We'll never know. Yeah. You could see the grandkids not knowing if there had been, you know, a brother. But so back to Ruan, we really can't blame her for being as precocious as she is. She is actually bearing witness to the disintegration of her parents' marriage, which for a child of seven would obviously be really difficult. Smith does a really great job of putting us inside the brain of a young girl. She doesn't understand quite what's going on, but she's smart enough to see the writing on the wall. Simon, I was wondering if you have any favorite passages from this first section that we're talking about, that you'd care to share with our listeners to give them maybe a feel of both Ruan's personality and Smith's writing style. 

SIMON: Yeah. I do want to reiterate before I read this, that this is a hopeful, happy book, really, often, but the passage I wanted to read was about Clem whom I just mentioned. The passage I've chosen is where Ruan is coming to understand the severity of the illness that he has. And I've chosen it because I think it is a great example, both of the heart and the emotion of the book, but also the way in which Smith manages to combine what the seven-year-old Ruan is going through with the older perspective of the adult writing the novel, I guess, which we'll talk about in a bit. Um, yeah, here it is: That night when I was alone with father for a few minutes, I plucked up my courage and said, "Father, is Clem all right? I mean, will he walk and talk soon like other babies?" He stared at me searchingly. "Who has been talking to you?" "Annie Briggs, Father. She came through the fence and I couldn't stop her. She, she said..." "Well?" he demanded harshly. "She said Clem was only 11 pence ha'penny and a shilling, Father." For a long time Father stood still looking, not at me, but right through me. Then he said in a queer, strangled voice that was humble, yet angry. "Thy will be done, Ruan. Always." I was frightened and crept out of the room. An hour later on my way to bed I peeked around the corner to whisper goodnight and Father was still standing there, quite still, his face hidden in his hands." Oh gosh, I'm choking up just reading it. 

KIM: I feel the same way. I will never forget that passage. 

SIMON: It's just so striking, I think, such depth. Because I think Smith is fair to all her characters. She gives us the truth of all of them and doesn't just see them as being all bad or good. Things like that really add a depth to the novel, I think. 

KIM: Yeah, for sure.

AMY: There's so much that I wish I could say in regard to Ruan's mother, in particular, but it's hard to do that without giving away some major spoilers. So I'm just going to bite my knuckles and hold it in. But suffice to say, Ruan and her sister find themselves shuffled around with no concrete place to call home at a certain point. And since Ruan isn't incredibly close with her sister, she ends up cleaving to several people outside her family who seemed to know her best and love her unconditionally.

KIM: Yeah. This brings us to David, who I guess is, is sort of the Gilbert to our Anne here. Um, he's a young acquaintance of the family. Though he's about five years older than Ruan, he takes it upon himself to be a sweet friend and protector to her. And he truly becomes her lifeline through all the stuff that she's going through with her family.

AMY: I loved David, the same way Ruan does in the book. I was smitten, and he starts off at 12 years old, and I'm already, like, in love with the kid. 

KIM: He's so charming. From the get-go, he's so charming.

AMY: So it's not a romance in the traditional sense. I don't know, some readers might get a weird vibe about it because they are kids.

KIM: The big age difference. 

AMY: Yeah, but I didn't mind it. What do you think, Simon? 

SIMON: Yeah. I'm glad that you pointed out that it's not a traditional romance, because yeah, there is that five-year age gap, which at the beginning, when she's seven and he's 12 is one thing. But then later when he's an adult and she's still in her early teens, if it were a romance, it would be very unsettling. To borrow your Anne and Gilbert thing, it's kindred spirits, isn't it? And I think in some ways, David has the same function as the moors. He's the only human who's able to let her be herself and give her freedom to be herself and sees who she really is. He is so wholesome. He doesn't treat her with any sort of undue dignities. He's quite sarcastic. He calls her Tinribs all the time, a nickname. I don't really know what's going on there and I've never seen it before or since, but he latches on to it immediately. He's not the only person who's kind to her, but I think he is the only person who really recognizes who she is.

KIM: Yeah, he's really honest with her, and he can even criticize her. If he has any criticisms of her, as they start to get older, it's the fact that she's scared to fully live as we talked about. So at one point he actually says to her, "The trouble with you, my child, is that you're an idealist, which is a fancy name for a coward. You live in your imagination and you're frightened to look life in the face for fear it's not quite so attractive as your own idea of it. It doesn't seem to occur to you what a hell of a lot you may be missing."

AMY: Right. And that also, you could say, ties into the book's title. And Simon, I know that you are not a huge poetry fan, um, but can you explain where Smith got this title and how it kind of factors into the book?

SIMON: Yeah, I wish I were a poetry fan. I'd like to be that person, but you're right, I'm not. And I had to explain where the title came from when I wrote the afterword for this edition. I find it quite hard to explain exactly what it's doing in the book, but it comes from a book called The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam which was written many centuries ago, but translated by Edward Fitzgerald, I think, in the late 19th century. A very popular book at the time. The line is "O the brave music of the distant drum." I think in this novel, it's both Ruan always looking forward to the future and the narrator looking back, that is to say, to her past . She is looking at it through a certain lens, maybe elevating it. Some sort of nostalgia. She wouldn't want to go back there, I'm sure. A lot of horrible things happened, but that sort of lens that she's put on viewing her childhood, as something separate and special that she's no longer part of and can look back on differently from the way she experienced it, I guess. I hope that makes some sense.

KIM: It makes sense, that idea of music sounding so brave from a distance, but you're not seeing the brave music of the drum, maybe a drum for war or all the other things that could be coming from that drum, because it sounds so brave and so inspiring from a distance. That's how I see it. 

SIMON: Yeah. 

AMY: So in the second half of the book, Ruan ends up going to live with her uncle Alaric. Is that how you say that name? 

SIMON: Oh, I don't know. I just said Alaric, but that's not based on any actual knowledge. 

AMY: Okay, well, however you say it, uh, he's, he's a kind, but taciturn man, and the house he owns is sort of this crumbling down estate that belonged to Ruan's mother's family. That whole section is what really reminded me of I Capture the Castle. The home's glory days are long past and Alaric resorts to selling off paintings from the house to have enough money to live on. This makes Ruan upset. She doesn't like seeing the portraits of her ancestors being ushered out of the house, but her uncle gives her this advice about not becoming attached to people or things. So he basically shares Ruan's philosophy of sort of being like this insular, you know, separate, island of a guy, right, Simon?

SIMON: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I'll quote a bit where he does say that, where he says, "You must not care about Madame Margaret [that's one of the paintings] Ruan, or indeed about any possessions. They are a nuisance, a hindrance. I have found that out. The less you care about people and things, the less hurt they can do you. Always remember that you yourself are the only important thing in your life. People and possessions come and go, making a pattern around you, but nothing really touches you. You began alone and you'll end alone. The essential you is alone all the time." So I didn't think is particularly good advice, but it's certainly the advice he gives, and he does have this whole sense of being on your own and not to be pulled down by anything, but also at the same time he is pulled down or believes people are pulled down by their family lineage, even by their homes. He's still staying in Cobbetts even when any reasonable man might've left. Books, which I'm sure we all applaud, are the exception to his rules. He still has plenty of those around. He still has lots of books to pass on to Ruan. 

KIM: Yeah, I don't think we go into detail in talking about this, but there is a level of snobbery or snobbishness, I think in the book. Ruan, I feel like, has it too. Um, it's almost presented in a positive light, but I don't know, as an American reader, I don't know. 

SIMON: It is interesting. I mean, you're right, because it's a British book from the 1940s so of course there's snobbery. But I think in lots of different ways the book is surprisingly not discriminatory. We have that character, Moses, the young black boy, and Ruan passionately believes that people shouldn't discriminate against him and she wants to be friends with him. There were quite a lot of disabled characters in the book, physically or mentally disabled. And again, they're probably not written about in ways that would be published now, but they are written about compassionately and they're certainly not figures of fun. And then class.... yeah, we have lovely Luke, the, I guess servant, but he's just as deep and wonderful a character as the others, so Ruan and all the characters who are middle or upper class do have some internal snobbery, as I say, everyone did and probably still does in this country. Um, but, I think it's a surprisingly progressive work in lots of different facets.

KIM: It is progressive.

AMY: So as Ruan's growing up and becoming a young teenager, she actually does have a legitimate suitor in the book. It's one of David's friends. And he's a good guy, but she cannot deal with the idea of a romance with him. And it's partly due to the fact that she's resisting this idea of growing up. Smith writes: "Life. Grown-up life. That mysterious business that still lay far ahead of me. I knew suddenly, and quite definitely, that Stebbing's key would never unlock that door for me or his kid- gloved hands tear down that veil. Life was a lovely, a terrible thing. To be dreamed of, but not experienced. Like the pink silk I would not cut and the circus I didn't want to see, the day I knew was so sweet ...so sweet. Why trouble about tomorrow?"

KIM: That is so beautiful. And it shows what we've been talking about, this darkness and the light and everything. And it also even comes down to when Smith was writing this portrait of childhood or whatever, she says she was writing it at the kitchen table during World War II while bombs were actually dropping around her. Sadly, we're actually recording this episode while Russia is dropping bombs on the Ukraine. So that detail feels particularly poignant to me right now. 

SIMON: Yeah.

KIM: But anyway, let's back up a little bit in Smith's story and talk about her bio a little bit more. In 1914 when she was 21 years old, she married a banker named James Norman Smith. And after that she adopted the nickname Miffy. That's a play on her married name. Reminds me of Pooky, your mother-in-law.

AMY: Yeah, my mother-in-law's name is Pooky, so I can relate. So during World War I, Smith's husband signed up to fight, and then Dorothy worked as a clerk in the war office. 

SIMON: Or "clark," as we would say in the UK.

KIM: I like It it sounds even better that way. 

AMY: I feel like such an idiot trying to pretend, although I, in my heart, I wish... you know what? Somebody once gave me the best compliment. It was a British woman, and she said to me, you are very English, Amy. And I remember just being like "best compliment ever!" 

SIMON: Can I say, actually, I was listening to an episode where you mentioned Red Pottage. And I did enjoy it because I think you pronounced the author as Mary "Colemandly," not knowing that in Britain, that same name is pronounced "Chumley," which you could never have predicted, but it...

AMY: Wait, what?

SIMON: It’s spelled C H O L M O N D E L E Y. 

AMY: Yes! Yeah. Yeah. "Shallmondelay." 

SIMON: Yeah, it's pronounced, “Chumley.”

AMY: “Chumley.” Okay. Like Worcester/Wooster, okay. 

SIMON: You’d have no way of guessing that. 

AMY: See, this is why we need you! 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: Um, I'm sure there are so many moments like that in our podcast where British listeners are like, "Uggh."

KIM: I'm sure American listeners are rolling their eyes at my pronunciation, but anyway, that's why language is so fun.

AMY: Yeah. So it's interesting to me, and you mentioned it a little in regard to the title of the book that, you know, she is reflecting backward as she's writing this story, you know? She didn't have to do that. She could have just told the story chronologically and not presented herself as future Ruan. How do you think that maybe serves the story she's trying to tell?

SIMON: Yeah, I think it was such a wise decision on her part, because it enables her to just soak the narrative with wisdom. I think if it were a first-person who's just seven, you'd just see that world as a seven year old sees it. And we do get that part of it, as you say, but because she's able to look back as well with maybe a bit of world weariness, maybe a bit of things she's learned over the years, there's that sense, always, of seeing the greater reality. She doesn't have to have a childlike naivety to what she's saying. Or rather, she does have that, but combines it, I think really cleverly, and she balances the things really well of, um, also having the years of experience. I think it happens a lot when she's looking at her childhood and thinking about how she got out of that situation. But I think there's also moments like where characters are discussing whether or not there'll be a world war. And there's that small element there that we know David will probably fight in that war. And we obviously have no idea what happens to him in it. But because she's writing with the 1940s standpoint so firmly there, we can, I think, experience two narratives at once that don't take away from each other, but really enhance each other. And I think it becomes a much more sophisticated and interesting book than if it had just been a chronological book from a child's point of view. I don't know if you feel the same.

KIM: I feel completely the same. It adds complexity and depth. Yeah, it was a really great decision on her part to do that.

AMY: And I actually have one more passage that kind of relates to this. If you don't mind, I would love to read it. She's talking about memory here. She writes, " How strange a thing is memory. Something happens, something horrifically beautiful, or poignantly sad, something that changes the whole course of life and looking backwards to yesterday and through a thousand yesterdays, and the only things remembered clearly are the color of somebody's tie. A wrong note played on a piano. The tuppence lost down the back of a sofa. The heart keeps the stone that splashed into the quiet pool, but the brain remembers only the shallow ripples that ran glinting across the surface that will go on running forever and ever until they reached the ultimate shores of time."

KIM: I remember tearing up when I read that too. I'm so glad you read that for the episode, because those lines really impacted me, too. 

SIMON: When I read that, I did think I should earmark this for my funeral, which is hopefully not coming up anytime soon, but what a beautiful thing to read at a funeral. 

KIM: It's gorgeous. Okay. We're all going to be doing that. We're all going to make notes. 

AMY: It's interesting too, because I just finished a new book that's out called Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso, and Kim, I'm going to be lending it to you. Um, but the two books have nothing in common. I'm not comparing Manguso's book to this book, but she's writing about a child, a young teenage girl, who has a kind of hard life. And she tells it through these little snippets of memories, basically. And so in that sense, it kind of reminded me of this book. But both books also give the feel of how tough it is to be a child. In childhood, kind of, life happens to you. You don't have a lot of ability to change it. As an adult, when something bad happens, we have a choice of like, well, you walk away, you know? You change your situation, you do something different. Children don't have that ability. They just have to go on with what they're being told to do. And, um, so there's a sadness that runs throughout this book, as we said, but you're right, Simon. It's so life-affirming and joyful by the time you get through it. In terms of what happens with Ruan and David and whether they end up together or not, we're not going to say, but I do think the way Smith chooses to answer the question actually fits in with this whole undercurrent of the book. The idea about "Do you cut the pink ribbon or do you not cut the pink ribbon?" And we'll just leave it at that? 

KIM: Oh, yeah, so, um, Simon, you had mentioned other books that you had read. You've already read one by her when you found this book. Are their favorites of hers you'd want to recommend to our listeners? What should we read next by her?

SIMON: Sure. I'll say, I've read three other books by her. There's one other one that's in print, Miss Plum and Miss Penny, which is quite different. It's sort of a cuckoo in the nest thing about a woman who invites another woman to move in with her and that goes quite awry. That one came back in print around the same time actually as O the Brave Music but with different publishers. A lovely coincidence that she was returning to print in two different places. I think the one that I've read that I would most recommend after this one is Proud Citadel, that I've got all my fingers crossed will eventually be a British Library title. I keep recommending it to them, so I'm hoping they'll say yes, uh, which is in some ways quite similar. It's another young girl on the moors, but those are coastal moors. So the sea also plays a really important part. It goes for a much longer period. She's 20, I think, maybe even 30, at the end of the book, but similarly there's another David. He's not called David, and he's not quite as nice, but it's similarly a coming of age thing in a bigger community. We see more people for longer, I guess. So Proud Citadel is the other one of hers I recommend people hunt for, but I do think O the Brave Music is a cut above the ones I've read. It's um, yeah, the other ones are enjoyable, but this one is really something special.

AMY: And I should also add that if you want to hear more discussion about O the Brave Music Simon and Rachel in their podcast Tea Or Books? actually have a whole episode that compares O the Brave Music to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. It's funny that they have the same last name, come to think of it. Um, but yeah, so those two books are often compared to one another, right? 

SIMON: Yeah. And I hadn't actually read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn until after I read O the Brave Music. So I was seeing it more the other way around. And it's a very different setting, of course. It's very, you know, urban and American, but there are a lot of similarities. Uh, I will say, sadly, Rachel is one of the few people that hasn't liked O the Brave Music, but don't let that turn you off if you do listen to the episode.

AMY: I know, I was surprised to hear that. Yeah. 

SIMON: I was so sure she'd love it. I was astonished that she didn't.

AMY: That makes sense now that you were a little worried when you were waiting to hear back from us. You were relieved when we said we loved it.

KIM: You're like, "Am I the only one?" We absolutely loved it.

SIMON: I was so pleased that you guys did love it.

AMY: I feel like there are more things about O the Brave Music I still want to discuss with you guys, but we don't want to give any spoilers away to our listeners. Um, so I just want to say what a joy it's been having you on the show. I feel like I knew you already a little bit just from listening to your podcast, but I do wish that Kim and I could go picnic with you on a moor some sunny afternoon. We're going to figure out how to do that. 

KIM: Yeah, I love that idea.

SIMON: I hope to get you to a proper British picnic where it's far too cold and you have to go for a brisk walk halfway through because your fingers are numb. But yeah, thank you so much for having me. I love the podcast. You're doing great work, and I'm so pleased I got to be on this episode. 

KIM: My anglophile heart is about to burst right now with happiness. It's too much. I can't handle it.

SIMON: Take care. 

KIM: You too. Bye. Sad to say goodbye almost!

AMY: So 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: Yeah. And as always, you can check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of the show and further information.

AMY: 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.