85. Mary Taylor — Miss Miles with Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney

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AMY: Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes... 

KIM: and I'm Kim Askew and today's episode is Bronte-adjacent. I guess you could say. 

AMY: Yes. In addition to her literary siblings, Emily, Anne and Branwell, Charlotte Bronte had a very close lifelong friend who was also a writer. Her name was Mary Taylor, and in some ways Taylor bears all the hallmarks of a classic Bronte heroine. She had a stubborn and rebellious nature. She was fiercely independent and she was a vocal feminist. 

KIM: Yes. And unlike a classic Bronte heroine, she had no time for caustic jerks like Mr. Rochester. Far from being a love story, her 1890 novel Miss Miles: A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago makes the forceful argument that all women ought to have the right and the wherewithal to provide for themselves, financially speaking. She was basically fed up with the options available to women for getting by in the world.

AMY: So it's no surprise that such a girl-power themed book would have strong female friendships at the heart of its story. And I'm excited to welcome the two guests today who introduced us to Mary Taylor: Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. We mentioned them last summer in our mini episode on literary sisters. 

KIM: Right. And in that episode, we had put a wish out into the universe, just hoping these authors and friends might agree to come on the show. And we were so thrilled when they said yes. So without further ado, let's read the stacks and get started!

AMY: Our guests today are Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. Emily's work has been published in The Washington Post, the Paris Review, Lapham's Quarterly, Time and elsewhere. She is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and her most recent book, which came out last year is Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice. She teaches at New York University London. 

KIM: And Dr. Emma Claire Sweeney is a central academic at the Open University where she chairs and designs undergraduate and postgraduate creative writing courses. She's won the Society of Authors, Arts Council and Royal Literary Fund awards. And she's written for The Paris Review, Time and The Washington Post. She was named an Amazon Rising Star and a High- Rising Writer for her debut novel 2016's Owl Song at Dawn. It was inspired by her sister, who has cerebral palsy and autism, and it went on to win a Nudge Literary Book of the Year. 

AMY: Together, Emily and Emma co-authored the 2017 nonfiction book A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. In her forward to this book, Margaret Atwood described the work as "a great service to literary history." And I think I would just hyperventilate for the rest of my life if I got that kind of seal of approval. Uh, also A Secret Sisterhood was called "an exceptional act of literary espionage" by The Financial Times. So Emily and Emma, welcome to the show!

EMMA: It's a real pleasure and privilege. Thank you. 

EMILY: I'm a big fan, as you already know, so it's really particularly great to be here. 

AMY: Okay. So Charlotte Bronte's friendship with Mary Taylor is one of the four main friendships you guys focus on in your book, The Secret Sisterhood, but it does sound, in reading your book, that it required some sleuthing on your part to kind of piece together their bond. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the work involved with that. 

EMILY: Yeah. So this is Emily. So although Mary Taylor is by no means a household name, if you've read a biography of Charlotte Bronte or the Bronte sisters, you will have probably heard of Mary Taylor. She was a close friend to Charlotte Bronte and also her sisters to some extent, but we were really interested in the literary influence that she had on Charlotte Bronte, both in terms of her creative output, but also really pushing Charlotte Bronte to establish herself as a professional writer. And we could talk more about the ways that Mary did that a little bit later in the interview. Um, but it did, as you say, require some sleuthing. I mean, sadly, very few letters between the two of them have survived. Mary destroyed a number of these letters in a fit of caution, she said, which we can only assume she was concerned about the letters' incendiary contents. And Mary Taylor was not usually a particularly cautious person, so it really makes one wonder what was there. So yeah, we had to find other ways of finding out about their friendship. Looking at the letters that did survive, looking at other letters to other individuals who had hung on to the letters, and also other things that Mary Taylor had written later. 

AMY: Sounds juicy.

KIM: Yeah. So what were you able to find out about their early friendship? Do you have any favorite anecdotes about them from their school days together?

EMMA: Yeah. It's Emma here. Um, sadly they did not get off to the best start. It's actually a little bit heartbreaking reading about Charlotte Bronte's school years. She was ostracized for being shortsighted, for being diminutive in height, um, for being unable to really throw herself into the sort of playground games. And Mary Taylor didn't seem terribly impressed by Charlotte Bronte when she arrived at the school, and from what we can gather, didn't seem to do anything to defend Charlotte Bronte against the other children's laughter. And then at one point they did have an interaction and the story actually gets worse. Mary Taylor apparently told Charlotte Bronte, "you are very ugly." This was something that really haunted Charlotte Bronte for years to come, and, you know, she referred to it in later years. But at the same time, she did grow to really appreciate Mary Taylor's bluntness. She referred to "the sincere and truthful language" that her friend would use, because they did become friends. One of the anecdotes I love about them, actually, is that having got off to this terrible start, they ended up getting into political debates. Um, Charlotte Bronte was much more conservative as a school kid and she actually was really interested in politics from a sort of ridiculously young age. So they used to get into these quite fiery debates, because Mary Taylor was from a family of radical Nonconformists. So she had a much, much more progressive and liberal outlook. Um, so yeah, the idea that they were talking about these kinds of political subjects from a young age, I think said something about the two of them and perhaps shines a bit of a different light on Charlotte Bronte, because I think we often think of her as sort of quite timid. And I think in some way she was, but she also was very well-informed and not afraid to speak her mind when she felt that she knew her stuff. 

AMY: And there was also another young woman in the mix, too, their other friend, Ellen Nussey. So how did Mary fit in along with Ellen? 

EMILY: The three were very close, but Mary and Ellen were quite different individuals. Ellen was quite a gentle person, particularly as a school girl. Um, she was someone who was much more cautious than Mary Taylor. As we've already heard from Emma, Mary Taylor and Charlotte Bronte's relationship was much more robust. And Charlotte would go to Mary, you know, to thrash out thoughts on issues of the day, or maybe actually just to try and get advice of what she should do in her own life. So I think Charlotte needed both of them, but for quite different ends, I would say. 

KIM: Yeah. And in some ways you really argue that Mary was instrumental in helping Charlotte Bronte become the woman we now know and love. Is that right?

EMMA: Yeah, I think we would definitely argue that. Um, when Charlotte Bronte was working as a teacher at the school they had formerly attended together, she was desperately unhappy. And Mary Taylor said, you know, "How can you give so much of yourself for so little money?" Because she knew that Charlotte Bronte wasn't managing to, you know, put much aside. So I think that encouragement to think beyond the conventional ways in which women of that class and time could earn a living and to take herself seriously as a writer, to think of that as something that maybe she could pursue. Um, and then If we know anything about Charlotte Bronte beyond the Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire and the moors, we might know that, um, she spent some time in Brussels in Belgium, and that was a trip that was sort of instigated by Mary in many ways. Mary had planned to go there and study, and telling Charlotte Bronte about this, you know, inspired her to think maybe this could be an option for her. And she talks about Mary giving her "a wish for wings." So I think that sort of life beyond the sorts of family was a life that Mary Taylor kind of opened up in many ways. And then of course the radicalism that was inspired by Mary Taylor, you know, went on, we would argue, to shape a lot of the thoughts that we might associate with Charlotte Bronte in her later novels.

AMY: She also kind of had a tough-love attitude towards Charlotte, and that leads into her response to Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre. Can you talk a little bit about how she responded to that? 

EMILY: Well, she responded in a mixed way, I would say. She did praise it as being, you know, a wonderful work of art. Um, she clearly could see that there was some literary merit with it, but really, you know, something that she really wanted to take Charlotte Bronte to task for was at least, in Mary's eyes, she felt that she had not included a strong enough social or political message. She said to her, you know, "Has the world gone so well with you that you have no protest to make against its absurdities?" Now, this may have come as something of a shock to Charlotte. And I think, you know, to us today, it doesn't actually necessarily feel like reasonable criticism because although Jane Eyre had been hugely popular when it came out, it had also been quite controversial. And the very thing that it has been criticized for in some quarters was, you know, challenging the status quo, presenting this woman who was not going to just fit in with the way things were done. And so I think all of that is there in Jane Eyre, but it was not perhaps right on the surface, because it's all wrapped up in the storytelling. Mary, I think, wants things to be on the surface. She wanted the political message, the social message to be right there, where everyone could see it. 

AMY: That's exactly what she does with her book, Miss Miles. And so let's move on to this novel. 

EMILY: Yes. So the subtitle of Miss Miles is A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago. The book came out in 1890, so we're talking, you know, the 1830s. It's a book that looks at the whole community, but it specifically looks at some key female figures within that community. The Miss Miles of the title, so Sarah Miles, who's a working class young woman who seeks to better herself. Although initially she doesn't even really know quite what she's pursuing with this idea of bettering herself, but by educating herself and trying to become independent. I won't go through all the different female characters, but two that I think are particularly interesting are Maria Bell, who is a clergyman's daughter who falls on hard times and then establishes herself as a school mistress, and really tries to make a go of things that way. And her friend, Dora Wells, who has actually got this quite dreadful family background in the sense that her mother has been left a widow and she remarries into a family, really, just with the aim of shoring up her own financial circumstances and for her daughter, as well. And to some extent this is successful, although not to the extent that she would have envisaged, but she also brings her daughter into an environment that's extremely unwelcoming, um, and really just a complete misery for Dora. And Dora really finds herself unable to extricate herself from the situation. And I think the friendship between Maria and Dora is particularly interesting because we do see aspects of Mary and Charlotte's own friendship kind of played out in the way that these two connect with each other. So I think it's interesting in terms of portraits of women of the time, but also anyone interested in the lives of Mary and Charlotte. 

AMY: So the setup is kind of these four women from four completely different circumstances. And she's sort of using each one as an example for, you know, the difficulties that women face, including one of the ladies, Amelia is from a wealthy family, but we see a reversal of fortune in her case. But really, what Taylor's doing is exploring poverty and the workforce of the time and the fact that there were no safety nets. So a bad year at the mill meant, you know, possibly the poor house or starvation for people. 

KIM: Yeah, I mean, she really gives us a frightening vision of what can happen to women when they aren't able to support themselves. And yeah, the same threat does hang over the men in the book too, but there's this feeling that at least they have some agency in the situation that the women lack. 

AMY: Right. And Taylor kind of underscores this point when she writes about Maria, "For in truth, it amounted to this: that she had no more control over her own good will or ill luck than a little child." So what if anything from Mary Taylor's own life would account for her being so fiercely focused on this idea of wanting women to be able to support themselves?

EMMA: I think a lot of this, um, might stem from her relationship with her father. Her father had quite progressive attitudes towards marriage. He advised her not to marry for money, and not to tolerate anyone who did. And that seems to be advice that she took to heart and advice that was, you know, it was quite extraordinary at the time. But also her father went from being a really quite well-off industrialist to mounting debts and bankruptcy. And so, you know, Mary as a, as a girl, saw a real change in fortunes and, you know, went from a high level of comfort to having to take care of, I suppose, in terms of not having new clothing and looking out of place with the sort of more fashionable children at school. And then, when her father died and he had actually become bankrupt, there were tensions between her mother and her three brothers about the remaining property and assets, and the division of those. So I suppose that situation would have really highlighted to Mary the vulnerability of women when they're reliant on their menfolk to earn the money and make the financial decisions.

AMY: Right. And let's get back a little bit to this character of Dora that you brought up, Emily. This is Maria's best friend. Her mom has no other recourse to provide for them but to marry an abusive evil husband. Dora says at one point, "From what terrible destiny did she rescue me when this was the price? Once a beggar, always a beggar, she seems to have thought, and then accepted her position and took the means that are supposed to make all things right for womankind." Meaning, of course, that marriage was the only real option that she had. 

KIM: So, yeah, we mentioned Taylor complaining that Bronte had no doctrine to preach. Well, Taylor preaches in Miss Miles. Boy, does she! And oftentimes it's via Dora. She actually says to Mariah, "Darkness is ignorance, I tell you. It is what is recommended to us women. If people knew that the women in the church yards were alive, those in the coffins I mean, and were waiting for us to dig them up, do you think anyone would do it? No, they would not. They would say ladies did not want to get up. That they had all they wanted and the men did not like them to get out of their graves." 

AMY: Yeah, she really doesn't hold back. And then she has hatched this idea, like her one long shot, Hail Mary pass that is going to get her away from this horrible house she's living in. She's going to try to be a lecturer. Kim and I were cracking up because she has no experience. She doesn't even basically have a speech prepared. She's just going to wing it when she gets up there. But she gets Mariah to go out to all her neighbors and sort of gather them together, sell them on the idea of paying for this lecture. And then when Dora does give her speech, it's a moment, right? She brings the house down. 

EMILY: And do you really do get the sense that the people who have turned up for this speech, you know, they've basically come for the novelty of seeing this crazy woman getting up and, and giving a talk, which I think we do have to remember how unusual, how novel it would really be to see a woman standing up in public and speaking about anything, really, at that stage. And she talks about social issues, really in the speech. You know, she talks about the plights of working people. We get the sense that Dora has been pushed to breaking point, but we also get, of course, the sense of Mary Taylor, the author, using Dora as her mouthpiece to say, you know, what she really thinks. So it's interesting, I think again, from those two points of view, and, um, as you say it's a speech that's extremely well-received in the book, and it marks a complete shift in the way that Dora sees herself as a character, and it allows her to finally see a way forward in what has become, you know, a very long, drawn- out, dreadful situation for her. 

AMY: Yeah. And so like you said, the people in the town are not just skeptical, but a little scandalized by it too. And in fact, Maria has this would-be suitor who is trying to win her heart. And he sends her a letter, basically, lecturing her about her friendship with Dora and saying, "You should not be associating with this woman. It doesn't make you look good." A super annoying letter. And I love the fact that she writes him back with this mega "talk to the hand" moment. 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, Amy and I texted each other when we were reading that part, like, "Oh my God, this is great." She's like, "no." Um, and then also another thing that happens is Sarah punches her love interest in the face. So there's this visceral female strength happening in both of these different ways, and throughout the book. Do we know if any of this squares with Mary's relationships with men in real life? 

EMMA: Well, it's hard to imagine that Mary was the kind of woman who would put up with any kind of mansplaining. And the kind of upbringing she had from a father who encouraged her not to marry for money probably set her up quite well, that feeling that she had a right to some kind of equality and independence. I think she liked to be able to do the things that men might be able to take for granted. One of the lines from one of Mary Taylor's letters that I particularly love, and I think it gives a real sense of her character, she was talking about studying algebra and she said "it is odd in a woman to learn it, and I like to establish my rights to be doing odd things." I think that sorts of sums Mary up, really. 

KIM: What a great quote. Oh, I love that. 

AMY: She sounds like just a spitfire. 

KIM: Yeah. I love her. 

AMY: Um, in the book, I think Mary Taylor throws more than a little shade around at upper class women and even some middle-class women. They don't always come across particularly well in the book. In fact, um, the young woman, Sarah, who's decidedly from a lower class, she has these great fantasies about being like a fancy lady someday. "I want to be a fancy lady" and then she would always stop and be like, "What do they actually do?" And then people would kind of explain "Well, they do this or this." And she's like, "No, but I mean, what do they do?" I love those moments. 

KIM: Yeah. The more she found out about it, the more she was kinda like, "Hmm. I don't know about that." 

EMILY: Yeah. There was a sense of how even people who are in relatively comfortable social positions can be trapped just by the nature of being a woman and having so little agency, so little control over their own fortunes, you know, other than marrying a rich man who may or may not treat you well. Whatever you say about Miss Miles, there is a strong social message to it. You can see what the argument is, and I think that could only really have been honed through years of experience and years of thinking about the subjects that she wants to include.

AMY: Yeah, I, I kept thinking like, why did it take her so long to write this? But then when you think about her life, it does make sense because she was working, basically. It's like any career woman having to try to write on the side, and we'll get into this in a moment, but let's back it up a little. So in the autumn of 1844, Charlotte received a letter from Mary that shocked her to the core. Mary announced that she was moving to New Zealand. And Kim, I couldn't help but think of the moment, long ago, when you told me that you were moving from LA to San Francisco, and I'm pretty sure we both burst into tears. 

KIM: Yeah, I'm sure we did. 

AMY: Luckily Kim came back, but I know that feeling of like, "Oh my gosh, my best friend is leaving. Like halfway around the world." Luckily San Francisco was a lot closer. Um, can you talk a little bit though, why Mary made this move and why it was such a pivotal move for her? 

EMMA: Well, she had seen her brother make this Intrepid move, and I think she had realized that in New Zealand, British social mores had not embedded themselves. The kind of conventions were more malleable. And so I think she thought of it as a place where she could be pioneering. She could be part of a process that was defining what that culture might be, for better or worse. On the plus side, as a British woman traveling, she was afforded a huge amount more independence than she could have hoped for back in Yorkshire. So she ended up, you know, building, I assume, not with our own hands, but commissioning a five-bedroom rental property to be built. So she was able to get this, this rental income in. She helped her brother with his import-export business and she honed these entrepreneurial skills, which she then later used when a cousin of hers joined her in New Zealand and the pair of them ran a shop together, All of these things things would have been quite difficult for her to have engineered as a middle class woman in Britain at that time. And it was a pivotal moment for Charlotte Bronte, too, I think. I mean, you know, you two were talking about how devastated you were when you were going to be moving further apart. And I mean, Charlotte Bronte referred to Mary Taylor's news as "feeling like a great planet falling from the sky." And so, in a way, I think it was pivotal for Charlotte, just as it was pivotal for Mary. Partly through hearing about this alternative way of life for a woman, and it feels to me that in some subtle way shaped Charlotte's own thoughts about female independence. 

KIM: That makes sense. That makes complete sense. So when she got to New Zealand, that is when she supposedly started writing Miss Miles, maybe, um, even though she didn't finish it for 40 years. Is that right? 

EMILY: Well, there is a letter where she talks about how she's working on her novel. She doesn't specifically call it Miss Miles. Perhaps it wasn't called Miss Miles at that stage. But I think it was this book or something similar to it. But even then at this stage, she says, you know, she doesn't have that much chance to work on it. She was so busy with other things. You do get the sense that this is something that is being put on the back burner while she concentrates on doing other things.

EMMA: Yeah, she talked about how, um, active work promoted her imagination and creativity, but it's hard to think that it didn't simultaneously make it difficult for her to find the time. She was busy with her business, she was busy with, you know, the sort of practical elements of life. And also, you know, she did a lot of fun stuff. She was, um, very interested in her sort of explorations. She was dancing until three a.m. on one occasion with her cousin. So I think she, you know, she was someone who probably found that solitary occupation of, you know, sitting down with pen and paper, something that was quite difficult to sustain when life was full of so many enticing distractions for her. And she was writing other things, too. So we know in 1848 that she'd written 150 pages of a novel, which may or may not have been Miss Miles. She was also writing a political book that she thought of as being, you know, potentially seminal. She was writing radical articles and these weren't published, um, but she didn't know they weren't going to get published at the time. So she was someone who, maybe she spread herself a bit thin when it came to the writing, or maybe you could say she just had a really rich and fruitful life. 

KIM: I think the latter. I'm going to go with the latter. I love that.

AMY: But in the meantime, while she was in New Zealand, Charlotte Bronte died in 1855 and then not too long after that, Mary helped Charlotte's friend Elizabeth Gaskell with her famous biography on Charlotte's life. And in a way, her contributions to that kind of represented her first published work, you could say. Because Gaskell ended up using a lot of what Taylor had written out. But in the end, Mary Taylor was not thrilled with the final result of that biography, right? 

EMMA: Yeah. Mary embraced the opportunity to work with Elizabeth Gaskell on the first biography, because she wanted to show how Charlotte Bronte's life had been kind of inhibited and limited. She wanted readers, I think, to take a lesson from that and to see that there needed to be changes. And I think she thought that the biography could act as a source of catalyst. But unfortunately, although people did see that Charlotte Bronte had had suffering in her life, it seemed that critics read her life as a depiction of Christian suffering and a sort of heroine who had endured and that she had been full of forbearance. So rather than seeing it as a kind of call to arms that women cannot be treated in this way in the future and we must change things, it seemed as if Charlotte Bronte was being held up as this sort of mythical figure as, um, what women should aspire to. We should all be able to enjoy our suffering with such forbearance. And Mary Taylor was even more cross when there were complaints about the first edition. Um, for example, the head teacher at the first school that Charlotte Bronte attended... There was a sort of potential libel case being brought by the head teacher, and so Elizabeth Gaskell released a second edition with passages redacted and changed. And Mary Taylor felt that this was a real act of cowardice, and that for all its faults, the first edition at least contained truthful elements, whereas she felt that the changes in the second edition meant that it was a less reliable source. 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, I can clearly see why she was so frustrated. I mean, this is somebody who is really important to her and she has a vision for how it's supposed to be, and everyone completely misinterpreted it. That's super frustrating. 

AMY: Yet she was bringing her own world view onto Charlotte's life also, so then it's like, what is the right story? 

KIM: Yeah, that's true. Um, so then Taylor returned to England in her forties and she ended up living what her neighbors described as an eccentric and independent life. When she was almost 60, she led a party of women on a climb of Mont Blanc in Switzerland. The women subsequently published an account of their 10 week adventure called Swiss Notes by Five Ladies. That is so cool. I mean, I don't know that I'd actually want to do it, but I would love to read about it. That sounds amazing. 

AMY: Yeah. Is there anything else you know about the later years of Taylor's life?

EMILY: As you've also just alluded to there, she was thought of as extremely odd, I think, in her local community, including by Ellen Nussey, her old school friend. Um, she actually didn't live that far away, and she certainly subscribed to the view that Mary had become even more eccentric in her old age. But, you know, she had the freedom to do this because she had come back having enough money to build her own house when she came back and set herself up independently. She didn't have anyone to answer to. So, you know, as Emma's talked about earlier, she liked to do odd things and she now had the freedom to do that, and I think it also gave her the chance finally, after all these years of kind of putting it off to really get down and finish her book, Miss

Miles. So it came out towards the end of Taylor's life. She was in her seventies. I think, you know, she rightly realized that she probably didn't have that many years left and she wanted to get this out into the world, you know, before she was no longer able to do so. 

AMY: Um, Miss Miles, I will say, I don't think it's a perfect book. I think it had moments of brilliance. There were moments that stood out. There were also parts of the book that I'm like, "Nah, it's not a Jane Eyre- level masterpiece. I would say." What do you guys think about that? How would you rate the book overall? And do you know how the book was received when it came out?

EMILY: Yeah. So, um, I would agree with you. I don't think I would ever say to somebody, "Oh, I forgot about Jane Eyre, read Miss. Miles instead." But I think, you know, there are moments that are really interesting in the book. And particularly if you're interested in the lives of the Brontes, you could read the book as a kind of companion piece to Charlotte Bronte's works in particular. In terms of how the book was received when it came out, it didn't really sort of set the literary world on fire. I think it suffered in two different ways though. Um, as I'd already mentioned with the subtitle, it's A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago. So perhaps it was seen as a bit dated. And, conversely, I think it was also a book that was quite ahead of its time in terms of its social message. So you could argue that it sort of fell down in both of those aspects, perhaps seeming a little bit old fashioned and also just talking about things that would have just seemed so strange to people at the time or the way everything's just so there front and center with Mary Taylor's work. I think it would probably look a little bit too much for readers of the time to tell. 

AMY: It really was interesting to see all of her ideas about the oppression of women, basically. And just knowing that she was a friend of Charlotte Bronte, that is what makes it an interesting read, as you said. And I really loved reading your book, A Secret Sisterhood. Each of these four stories unfolded to me like a really riveting movie, and I could almost see some of these friendships being adapted to film, somehow. I could see like a movie version of Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot, which is crazy because they never even met as you explained in your book. And that ties into Charlotte Bronte too, because apparently Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to George Eliot and said that she was being visited by the ghost of Charlotte Bronte. And I loved George Eliot's reaction is just kind of, trying to be tactful. "I'm not sure how to react to this, but I really don't believe you." Um, so anyway, I want to encourage everyone to read A Secret Sisterhood because I thought it was going to be like, "Oh, friendship, pleasantries. Everybody's being so nice to one another, you know, like we just love each other. We have such a bond." There is drama. There is bitchiness. There is betrayal. There's cattiness. There are poignant moments too. That's what I wasn't expecting out of your book. I thought it was amazing. 

EMMA: Well, one of the things that really fascinated us was this notion that female friends, if they had hard moments, or moments of conflict, were kind of written off as being enemies or competitors. And yet all the really famous male literary friendships you could throw a stick at, you know, Hemingway and Fitzgerald or Coleridge and Wordsworth, they all had the huge rows that it was possible as readers and as consumers of literature to accommodate into their friendship as well. Of course ambitious, intelligent, creative men will have sorts of fiery tensions. That doesn't stop them being friends or collaborators. Whereas with women, when they have these kinds of robust intellectual, um, sort of bust-ups, it's suddenly like, "Okay, that can't be accommodated into the friendship." And that was something we found, really, with all the pairs that we wrote about. There were moments of tension and conflict, and yet the writers themselves continued to consider themselves to be friends, even if later commentators decided that they weren't. 

AMY: I can picture you guys writing A Secret Sisterhood and how much fun that must have been in terms of making discoveries. And the moment that I'm thinking of is the Jane Austin and Anne Sharp. I think it was that story where there was like a hidden, a little hidden envelope that you guys discovered within the binding of a book that no one knew was there. 

EMMA: Yeah. It was a real highlight of the whole process for us. So, um, I had gone to an archive on my own cause we had to share out some of the research and I had taken photographs of reams and reams of diaries that had been kept by Jane Austen's niece, who was taught by Anne Sharp and then transcribed them over many, many, many, many weeks. And there came to a moment where the niece had said she had written a description of a play that Anne Sharp had written and that Jane Austen and the children had performed along with other relatives, and that she had folded up this description and tucked it in the little pockets in the back of her diary, because it was too long to fit in the diary itself. And so I contacted the archivist and asked her, "Can you see if this is there?" She told me, "Oh, it definitely won't be. If it was there we would have found it already. But if you and Emily want to come back to the archive and take a look, then you're very welcome." So we took her up on the offer and we, we traipsed over there. Um, yeah, that moment where we, uh, first you couldn't see that it was there, then we had to really gingerly open this pocket and pluck out this really fragile piece of paper, trying to unfold it without it crumbling. And there it was this description of this play that hasn't survived. It's as close as we could get to Anne Sharp's own writing.

KIM: That's amazing. Wow. 

AMY: That would have just been still sitting there hidden away if you guys hadn't done this. Also, I wanted to find out when I saw that the foreword of the book was written by Margaret Atwood I was like, "How'd they get that? That's amazing." And then you guys talk about that in the back of the book. Can you tell that story?

EMMA: Yeah. That was really funny in a way. So we had been asked to commission a famous female writer to write the forward, and we were racking our brains, about who might, you know, be an appropriate person. And obviously Margaret Atwood was top of our list, but we were thinking, how could we get in touch with Margaret Atwood? Because neither of us had any contact with her. And then Emily helpfully reminded me that I was actually booked in to go to an event that Margaret Atwood was speaking and reading at at the British Library. Emily actually couldn't join me on that night, so we decided the best way to approach this was that we would compose a letter and we would hand write it. And I was sent off with the task to try to slip this letter to Margaret Atwood in which we were requesting her to write our forward. And you know, obviously I entered into this task with some trepidation, and I was actually going to this event with my husband. I didn't even tell him that I had this intention to pass on this letter because I just thought it's just far too embarrassing to admit to it. So Margaret Atwood gave her speech and actually during it, she mentioned how sad it was that people no longer exchanged hand-written letters very often. And at the end of this event, um, I still didn't think I'd really get to speak to her because, you know, there were hundreds of people in the audience. I didn't know how I would actually get close enough to hand her the letter, but as luck would have it, there was actually a party being hosted in her honor after the event. But Margaret Atwood herself actually could not attend it because she had a flight to catch. So everyone else went into this party and Margaret Atwood was kind of standing on her own in the lobby. If it hadn't been for having promised Emily, I think I would have chickened out, but because I'd promised Emily I would try, I felt that I had to give it go. Because I thought how likely was it that I was going to end up in an empty lobby with Margaret Atwood. So I went over and slipped this letter to her and said, "Oh, you mentioned that it's such a shame that people don't write hand-written letters and just by coincidence, I've written one to you." And I said it was to thank her because she had actually tweeted about our website when we'd launched it and it had helped generate some traffic to our site. So I said that it was a thank you letter. I didn't mention, we were actually asking her a huge favor. Um, so then much to my surprise, a few weeks later, we got an email from her saying that she'd like to read the draft and then yes, and Margaret Atwood was actually the first person to read our draft before our editors, which was a bit of a nerve- wracking moment.

AMY: Fortune favors the bold.

KIM: Yeah. Good for you. 

EMMA: Yeah. "Fortune favors the bold" is a great motto for Mary Taylor. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. She was bold as they come. So while I was preparing for this episode, I actually found something online. There's some controversy that some people think maybe Charlotte could have actually written Miss Miles and that Taylor, for whatever reason, just attached her name to it after Charlotte's death. Kim and I just can't believe this could possibly be true, but what are your thoughts? 

EMMA: Well, I don't think we have much truck with that interpretation either. I mean, we do know from Mary Taylor's letters that she was writing a novel. We do know that the subject matter accords with Mary Taylor's lifelong passions and interest, and that she's exploring issues that have long angered her. When you asked this question, it made me think of some of the negative reviews that Charlotte Bronte received on the publication of Jane Eyre and even the really negative reviews, they say things like, um, "Jane Eyre is a murmuring against the comfort of the rich and against the privations of the poor." And I think that word murmuring is really key. So, whereas with Charlotte Bronte's work, there's this subtle kind of subversiveness, with Mary Taylor you know, things are on the surface in a way that would never be described as a "murmuring." So that makes me very dubious. But Emily, I'd be interested to hear what you make of that theory. 

EMILY: Well, I mean, I think the voice of Charlotte Bronte's novels is not the same as the voice we find in Miss Miles. So, I mean, there's that for starters, you know, they don't feel as if they've been written by the same author, even though, you know, they do touch on some of the same concerns as you say, it's presented in a very sort of different way. I think sort of beyond that, I just don't think Mary Taylor would have done something like this. She was always very forthright, very honest. The idea that she would try to pass off somebody else's work as her own just, it doesn't really fit at all with anything that we know about Mary Taylor. As Emma touched on before, she could often be far too blunt, far too straightforward about things, so the idea that she would have taken part in this kind of deception, it feels nothing like the character that we researched and got to know. 

KIM: Quite a reach there. Quite a reach, I think we all agree. 

AMY: Yeah. Charlotte, if she's hearing this from her grave, she's like, "I don't want that book on me." Not that it doesn't have its merits, but It's, it's not a Bronte work. 

EMILY: It's a shame she hadn't say any of this to Harriet Beecher Stowe at the time.

And then this..

AMY: Oh yes! That could have cleared it up. Totally cleared it up. Well, anyway. It was so fun having you guys on 

KIM: This was a blast. 

AMY: Yeah. 

EMMA: Thank you so much for inviting us. 

EMILY: Thank you!

KIM: So that's all for today's podcast. Don't forget to rate and review us over at Apple Podcasts if you liked what you've been hearing. Or tell a friend. 

AMY: Bye, everyone. 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.