5. Simone Schwarz-Bart - The Bridge of Beyond

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.\

AMY HELMES, HOST: Hey, everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes...

KIM ASKEW, HOST: And I’m Kim Askew… 

AMY: … we’re best friends and co-authors of the “Twisted Lit” series of young adult novels, and we’re on a mission to unearth some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: Today we’re exploring a masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond. And Amy, I can’t believe this book wasn’t included on my reading list in grad school, because it’s just incredible. 

AMY: No kidding! And that’s exactly why we’re so excited to tell everyone about it. The book was originally published almost 50 years ago, but its author, Simone Schwarz-Bart, now 82 years old, continues to leave her literary mark on the world, having published her latest book, a marital memoir, just last year.

KIM: Hmmm.. she doesn’t sound very “lost.”

AMY: That’s a good point. But she’s not really widely known in the U.S., so I’m willing to bet there are a lot of listeners out there who have yet to discover this French-speaking, literary lodestar of Guadeloupean descent, and we’d argue that The Bridge of Beyond deserves a much more prominent place on people’s bookshelves. Now, if you’ve already read this book, then you were probably as captivated by it as we were. If you’re unfamiliar with it, we’re excited to give you your introduction today.

KIM: Jamaica Kincaid, who wrote the introduction to The Bridge of Beyond in the New York Review of Books’ edition, which came out in 2013, said this: “That a book so radical in style, in form and in content, is not widely known in this country, and its influence not deeply felt, is one of those unfortunate mysteries of Time and Place … As if from out of the blue, from the Great Beyond, from the margins, a woman from Guadeloupe has given us an unforgettable hymn to the resilience and power of women.” 

AMY:  I agree with Kinkaid that more people really ought to know about this book, which was translated beautifully from the French by Barbara Bray. There’s something transcendent about it, honestly, and I can almost feel a balmy island breeze beginning to blow as we kick off this discussion … so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

INTRO MUSIC.

AMY: I’m going to start off by saying I really wish I knew even a little bit of French going into this episode. There’s a 100 percent certainty that I am going to really botch some pronunciations over the course of the next 30 minutes.

KIM: Yeah, I’m right there with you. In fact, we just had a sidebar on how to pronounce “Guadeloupe.” So, for those of you that do speak French, try not to cringe, we’ll do our best.

AMY: And with that embarrassing caveat out of the way, let’s learn a little bit about Simone Schwarz-Bart. She was born in 1938. Her parents were both from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. The backbone of the economy in Guadeloupe was its sugar plantations, which were supported by institutional slavery from the 17th century until the mid-19th-century, and in Schwarz-Bart’s writings we clearly see how the Caribbean, French, and African influences all converge.

KIM: So, Simone’s father was abroad serving in the French army during WWII, and for the first six years of her life, she lived solely with her mother, who was a primary school teacher, in Pointe-a-Pitre, which is the main port city in Guadeloupe. One reference described their living conditions as “dilapidated,” so I can imagine that the poverty that’s front-and-center in The Bridge of Beyond is something she actually witnessed all around her as a girl. 

AMY: It’s also said that Simone was inspired by the wisdom of her grandmother during that time. Her grandparents lived in a much more remote part of the island. Schwarz-Bart has said that she did not grow up on books, but instead on tales from the oral tradition, which we learned from them, and we see directly paralleled in the book in the relationship between the main character, Telumee, and her almost-prophet-like, mythical grandmother.

KIM: So at 18, Simone went to study in Paris, and this was a turning point in her life. She met the French writer Andre Schwarz-Bart. He was ten years her senior, and their relationship became both romantic and professional. He encouraged her to write, and they collaborated on two novels that address racism, as well as a six-volume encyclopedia called Homage a la Femme Noir, which chronicled noteworthy black women. 

AMY: Your French was very good there, Kim!

KIM: Thank you!

AMY: Andre Schwarz-Bart’s parents were Polish Jews who were killed by the Nazis when he was 13. He wrote about the centuries of persecution of Jewish people in his award-winning novel Le Dernier des justes (French for The Last of the Just). It was written in 1959 and it won the Prix Goncourt, which is the highest literary award in France. So, one can imagine that these two writers, though from seemingly different cultural backgrounds, would look at the world with a fairly familiar point of view in a lot of respects. I loved going online and seeing photos of these two back in the 60s. 

KIM: They look like such a cool literary couple, and they seemed so happy together, right up to his death in 2006. It made me want to know more about their love story, and I really love the fact that, as writers, they were collaborative, rather than competitive. You hear a lot of stories about married artists who have turbulent relationships, but this doesn’t seem to be the case with the two of them ... at least as far as we know, anyway. 

AMY: No, and in fact, Schwarz-Bart has said that it was Andre who actually first encouraged her to write. He asked her to try writing a short story for him, and when she showed it to him, he basically said, “Okay, you need to start writing down everything that comes into your mind, because you are a really talented writer.” So that’s how she got her start basically.

KIM: Oh, I love that. And then, every evening — oh, wow, this is very romantic — the Schwarz-Barts would read a love poem by Pablo Neruda to each other. They also started a family, and one of their two sons is a jazz musician who lives in New York City. 

AMY: In addition to their time spent in France, the couple lived at various points in Senegal and Switzerland but eventually they settled back in her native Guadeloupe. At a certain point, he stopped writing, and her literary career really kind of eclipsed his. He died in 2006, but she’s still very much alive looking every bit as chic and cool as you would hope she would be.  And Kim, you mentioned wanting to know more about her love story with Andre, the last book she co-wrote and published just last year was a memoir about their relationship, and in this book, she also apparently gives some insight into why she and Andre sort of fell off the radar after the 1970s. It’s written in French, unfortunately for us.

KIM: I hope it’s eventually translated.

AMY: Me, too.

KIM: In 1973, Elle Magazine awarded The Bridge of Beyond its Grand Prix de Letrices award for “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year.” In 2006, Simone was awarded the rank of a Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters which recognizes significant contributions to French arts and literature.

AMY: It appears that she still divides her time between Europe and Guadeloupe these days, and she’s actually done a few interviews in the past few years which you can find on YouTube. And that’s something we’re not normally able to see with most of the featured authors on Lost Ladies of Lit, because most of them lived long before video technology was a thing. So it’s really cool that we’re able to hear her in her own words. I was thankfully able to recruit my daughter’s best friend, Eva Lew, to translate one of the interviews, so thank you, Eva! Getting to hear Simone talk really helped us get a much better sense of her.) So Simone these days has a house with a huge veranda in the middle of what looks like this jungle paradise in Guadeloupe. This property is actually where her grandparents had lived when she was a little girl, and it feels very remote. She calls it her “island on an island.” It looks incredibly peaceful and beautiful there, and you really get such a beautiful vibe from her, as a person. We’ll share that link in our notes if you want to check out what Simone looks like and has to say. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOWSJ7cSYc

AMY: So let’s start talking about “The Bridge of Beyond.” It’s narrated by a woman named Telumee, a character that is inspired by a neighbor of Schwarz-Bart’s from when she was a little girl. So, there was a woman named Stephanie Priccin, whom the locals thought was a witch. Schwarz-Bart was fascinated by this woman, and wanted to tell her story, and the opening paragraph really gives us an overview of the book. It says:

“A man’s country may be cramped or vast according to the size of his heart. I’ve never found my country too small, though that isn’t to say my heart is great. And if I could choose, it’s here in Guadeloupe that I’d be born again, suffer and die. Yet not long back my ancestors were slaves on this volcanic, hurricane swept, mosquito-ridden, nasty-minded island. But I didn’t come into the world to weigh the world’s woe. I prefer to dream, on and on, standing in my garden, till death comes and takes me as I dream, me and all my joy.”

KIM: So this paragraph touches on pretty much every aspect of the plot: her ancestors — specifically three generations of mothers and daughters. It talks about the legacy of slavery and how it impacts the island’s inhabitants. And our narrator, Telumee, comes from a long line of strong, beautiful, Guadeloupe women, the Lougandours, whose lives are peaks and valleys of great love and great tragedy, and her life is a struggle to find meaning, and even moments of joy, in the shadow of it all. 

AMY: The English-language version of the is book is called The Bridge of Beyond, but the title of the book in French is actually Pluie et Vent Sur Telumee Miracle which translates to “Rain and Wind on Telumee Miracle” which, to me is a much better indication of what the book is really all about. 

KIM: Yes, it’s like she’s the “island” in the original title, and I think representing both the individual, herself, and the whole island and its people.

AMY: So speaking of the island, I felt fully immersed in this environment that she describes. It felt like taking a little journey. It wasn’t hard to imagine any of it.

KIM: I agree. I felt immediately transported. Her prose just pulls you straight into that world.

AMY: Now the first section of the novel gives the backstory of Telumee’s great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother, all of whom have really heartbreaking trials and mental anguish that they have to overcome. When Telumee is 10 years old, her mother rejects her and sends her to live with her grandmother, Toussine, who has been nicknamed “Queen With No Name” [ed. Queen Without a Name] by the villagers of Fond-Zombi, a remote village where Toussine lives a peaceful, but impoverished life.

KIM: So this is where Telumee’s story really begins: Toussine (or, as we’ve said, Queen Without a Name) escorts Telumee over this floating “Bridge of Beyond” to Fond-Zombi, and the grandmother and granddaughter have an instant bond. Telumee adores Queen Without a Name, and her grandmother feels that Telumee is something really special, basically, a blessing given to her in her old age. And so then we’re introduced to the villagers and their lives, and it’s miserable in its poverty, but it also had this really magical feel, and there’s a bit of magical realism about the whole description and then the book itself.

AMY: Yeah, it’s almost as though the bridge is a portal to some magical fantasy world. There’s Queen Without a Name with her fables and proverbs, there’s a character Ma Cia, the witch, who can transform into animals and conjure up spirits. There’s the lush beauty of the landscape, and then there’s also, of course, extreme poverty. But everything is described in this language of folklore and allegory. It’s very mystical with ritual and songs sprinkled throughout. And this is where Telumee begins to try and understand the legacy of slavery, searching for “some way of dealing with the life Negroes bear so as not to feel it pressing down on one’s shoulders day after day, hour after hour, second after second.” There’s also this recurring theme of the process by which women become women, (what makes someone a woman?) and whether it’s okay to ever allow oneself to feel happiness. The characters in this book seem to always feel ashamed when they have moments of joy or contentment, and that sort of feels like one of the legacies that slavery has left them with, this idea that joy is ephemeral and something that they should be cautious or wary about.

KIM: Queen Without a Name basically becomes Telumee’s guide. She’s passing on all this knowledge of how to become a woman and how to transcend the inescapable suffering that is their life on the island day-to-day. And as part of this, she takes her to meet her friend, Ma Cia, who foretells that Telumee  “will rise over the earth like a cathedral” one day. Telumee’s response is to deny this and hang her head in shame because she isn’t this and she doesn’t see how she can be this. Ma Cia and Queen Without a Name, they’re going to try to teach her that she is someone to be proud of, that she should respect herself as someone truly special. Telumee also learns from Ma Cia about the island’s history of slavery. She’s actually really curious and asks her about it. Ma Cia compares slaves to poultry tied up to cages in terror and she adds, “Long ago a nest of ants that bite peopled the earth, and called themselves men. That is all.” 

AMY: There was kind of a sad matter-of-factness associated with this history. The practice of slavery may have ceased for them, but these characters still live with its impact and they all have to continuely steel themselves against the hardships they see no path around. 

KIM: Ma Cia’s advice to Telumee is to be a drum with two sides. She says, “Let life bang and thump, but keep the underside always intact.” 

And after this meeting with Ma Cia comes a passage that really stood out to me. 

Telumee says: “For the first time in my life I realized that slavery was not some foreign country, some distant region from which a very few old people came, like the two or three who still survived in Fond-Zombi. It had all happened here, in our hills and valleys, perhaps near this clump of bamboo, perhaps in the air I was breathing.”

So this resonated with me because of the time period we’re in in the U.S. where we’re really seeming to be facing up to our own history of slavery and trying to find a path forward.

AMY: One hundred and fifty years after the fact, which seems amazing, you know, but we are still dealing with the trickle-down from that. And in the book, despite the suffering of the villagers who are constantly “juggling with sorrow,” as Schwarz-Bart explains, there is also beauty, and there are piercing moments of happiness, too, and that’s kind of the wonderful hopefulness at the heart of it. It’s all the more beautiful for the transcendent moments that are woven throughout the book, even throughout the hard times.  

KIM: I completely agree. I think “transcendent” is the perfect word for it. There are so many passages and lines that just give you a chill because they’re so beautiful. One of them, for me, was when Telumee falls in love for the first time. It’s with this boy named Elie. She describes it as when her “first star appeared in the east,” which I just think is an absolutely beautiful description of the moment of falling in love and that person just instantly becoming everything to her. So together they try to understand the pain in the world around them, and Queen Without a Name is there supporting the relationship, but always trying to prepare Telumee for her future, with parables and advice for living and surviving. There’s the story of the bird and the hunter. And the parable of the Man Who Tried to Live on Air. Those are just a couple that I can think of.

AMY: Yeah, there’s a ton of these throughout the book, and I have to admit, this magical realism element and the almost biblical language at times, initially it really did trip me up when I was first reading the book. Almost every page in this book is filled with this GORGEOUS prose that is steeped in meaning, but Ithink because of that, I kept getting hung up on trying to figure it all out and figure out, “what is Queen Without a Name really really trying to say?” I kept re-reading the lines, and at times, it almost felt like an obstacle that was preventing me from connecting with the characters. Kim, I know I mentioned to you while I was reading it that I was struggling a bit at first, but just about a third of the way through, I sort of changed my approach to the book and I just let myself surrender to the words and let it just wash over me and not have such a tight grip on the whole thing. That wound up being a turning point for me with this book. The pieces started kind of falling together for me and I was able to enjoy it a lot more. Now, Kim, you had previously read this book. I wonder what your reaction was both the first time you read it, and then what was your experience reading it a second time? Because I feel like this is one of those books you could probably constantly be finding new things in with subsequent readings. 

KIM: Yeah, I think I read it about three years ago. It was part of the New York Review of Books Book Club, so it was sent to me. I didn’t even choose it, so thank you, New York Review of Books, for that serendipity. I remember loving it the first time, which is why I brought it up again, but I think I found it even more beautiful this time because, I sort of knew how the “plot” is, and there’s not really much of a strong plot, it’s more about how to live in the world and how to survive the inevitable pain of life. There are all these parables and metaphors to explain that for the inhabitants of Fond-Zombi, but also for the overall human experience. So I really, really loved that aspect of it.

AMY: Right, even though we come from a completely different era and a completely different world, time and space, there are nuggets of wisdom that you can kind of take to heart for yourself and work into your own life even though I have no relationship with this island or this history of slavery necessarily.

KIM: Yep, I completely agree. So, Telumee is happy, but she’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Things feel kind of too good to be true, and I felt that as a reader. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, too.

AMY: Right, and this goes back to what I said before about the characters always feeling like they’re not allowed to feel happy in some way. I mean, even Elie, her love interest, he kept thinking, “Something going to go wrong. I don’t deserve this.” It’s kind of sad, because you want to feel really happy for them, but they were never actually able to just fully relax and be like, “life is good,” because they knew, based on their history, that it wasn’t. So then when things do, inevitably, go terribly wrong, Telumee succumbs at first and goes through this period of grief bordering on insanity, basically. She has a breakdown in a major way, something her grandmother also had experienced. But she eventually comes back to herself again, and her grandmother tells her as she’s on her deathbed, she says: “Listen — people watch you, they always count on there being someone to show them how to live. If you are happy, everyone can be happy, and if you know how to suffer, the others will know too. Every day you must get up and say to your heart: ‘I’ve suffered enough and now I have to live, for the light of the sun must not be frittered away and lost without any eye to enjoy it.’ And if you don’t do that, you won’t have the right to say, ‘It’s not my fault,’ when someone seeks out a cliff and throws himself in the sea.” 

KIM: That’s amazing.

AMY: There’s also this push and pull among the community of women in this book, that I really thought was interesting, because on the one hand, they stand in solidarity with one another and they lift each other up at the lowest points in their lives, yet they can be vicious to one another. They tear each other down and are jealous of one another and they really cause each other a lot of heartache. At the same time, the men have their own major issues. There are some men in Fond-Zombie that are loving and gentle, and there are others that are toxic and broken to the point of being evil.

KIM: Yes, so the men seem to be battling their own demons, for sure. There’s the trickle-down effect of slavery, and the persecutions faced by the society that they live in, their employers, and even the very land they are working on. So it ends up resulting in abandonment, addiction, and domestic violence. Speaking of the harsh land, Telumee begins working in the cane fields (something she and Queen Without A Name never wanted her to do) but she eventually finds happiness with Amboise. He has a lot of insight and perspective about the ongoing plight of their people.

AMY: These are people that never stood a chance, and that’s what’s sad. “Everyone knows an empty sack cannot stand up. It falls, it cannot help but fall.” And that sort of goes back to the men in this society. You can’t depend on them. They’re broken men. But how can you expect people who have been completely depleted and unfairly treated to suddenly thrive and be successes? I mean, you can’t. There’s just too much that they’ve been through.

KIM: No, that’s true. And yet even with all that, Amboise tells Telumee at one point: “We have been beaten for a hundred years, but I tell you, girl, we have courage for a thousand.” And that’s what she basically comes to learn throughout the course of this book.

AMY: Be a drum with two sides, you know? You take a beating and a beating and a beating on the once side, but you let the underside stay strong.

KIM: Yeah, I love that imagery.

AMY: Can we just stop for a moment and discuss how, despite being really focused on grief and suffering, this book is also so beautiful? As we mentioned before, the writing is just insane. It’s so gorgeous. I don’t understand why this book wasn’t a staple in college literature courses because there’s so many things  to unpack when you think about the imagery and the symbolism here.

KIM: I agree. And what I did find here when I was researching this, that there are some instructors who use it in post-colonial literature courses, which completely  makes sense. It should be there.

AMY: It’s perfect.

KIM: Yeah, but it feels like it’s also marginalizing it, to just have it there. I think it speaks so strongly to the human experience for all of us, and the ending is so beautiful and life-affirming, even after all of the terrible things that have happened, all the things that we have told you about. She manages to come to terms with all the loss and pain and all the fleeting moments of joy, and she still realizes that in some ways, she can see her suffering as this sort of gift. 

AMY: All this really goes straight back to the “rain and wind” of the French title of this book. Tellumee tells us: “East winds and north winds have buffeted and soaked me; but I am still a woman standing on my own two legs, and I know a Negro is not a statue of salt to be dissolved by the rain.” By the end of her life, she comes to this understanding that she is indomitable, and she is happy, but she says: “As I struggled others will struggle, and for a long time yet people will know the same sun and moon; they will look at the same stars, and, like us, see in them the eyes of the dead.” Here we are reading the book 50 years after it was written, and you’re struck by the fact that we’re still having these same conversations over and over about race and oppression and what’s fair. The book does end on such a hopeful note, this idea that each new generation (like each generation of Lougandour women) offers a light to the previous generation.

KIM: So Amy, what sort of food for thought did this book leave you with?

AMY: I guess this idea of the long-lasting consequences. My experience reading this book also coincided with listening to the first three episodes of The New York Time’s podcast “Nice White Parents,” which is about racial inequality in America’s educational institutions and how well-intentioned white people can be so unaware of how our own decisions contribute to and perpetuate institutional racism. It really sort of illustrates white privilege in the most cut-and-dry, and frankly, sometimes shame-inducing of ways. Just because we think things are better, on the surface, doesn’t mean they’re any better, and I think that is part of what Simone Schwarz-Bart was getting at.

KIM: Oh yeah, absolutely. I can’t wait to listen to that podcast as well. It sounds really good and important for somebody who will eventually be thinking about sending their kid to school.

AMY: What about you, Kim? Did this book correlate at all to anything else that you’ve been looking at in life right now?

KIM: It’s so interesting, because completely unintentionally, I read another book about life on an island, but this island is the deserted one that goddess Circe is banished to for eternity by her father, Helios, after she offends Zeus. It’s the 2018 novel Circe, by Madeleine Miller, and in its own way, it’s also about witchcraft and a woman learning to find moments of joy amid suffering. A very different novel, but I highly recommend it as well. 

AMY: I remember reading about that one when it was released and thinking it sounded interesting, so i’m going to have to borrow that from you when you’re done. Are you done?

KIM: Yes, I’m done.

AMY: Okay, I’ll get it from you. So what did we learn in today’s episode? First off, we learned that a steady diet of Pablo Neruda can be a recipe for a happy marriage.

KIM: I’m going to make Eric start reading Pablo Neruda every night.

AMY: Oooh, girl!

KIM: I don’t think it’s gonna happen. We learned that sometimes, the books that challenge you can be among the most rewarding.

AMY: And we learned how to pronounce a few new words in French, at least semi-correctly? Sorry everybody.

KIM: Sorry about that. And that’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

Do you have ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really helps new listeners find us!

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Simone Schwarz-Bart and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone. Special thanks, as well, to Harriet Grant for our logo design, and Eva Lew, who helped with translations and research for this week’s episode.

4. What’s In a Name?

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone! Welcome to this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episode. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY HELMES: And I’m Amy Helmes. Thanks for tuning in! Our last featured book was Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield. The narrator in that book is never referred to by any name, and a lot of the other characters are referred to in the most generic terms, like “the Vicar’s wife,” and the name of the children’s French nurse is “Mademoiselle.” In the case of this book, it worked really well to keep a lot of the names very non-specific.

KIM: Yeah. Naming characters is tough.

AMY: I mean, when it comes to our books, I just have always agonized over the name situation. I find myself on those baby name websites dissecting the meaning of the name to see if I can work that in somehow. It’s tough, because you want it to be perfect.

KIM: Yeah, you want that name to feel like, “Oh, of course, the person was born with that name.” And the fact that we have our novels based on Shakespeare plays help us a little bit, because we have a starting point, something to riff off of. But it’s still a challenge to find something that’s exactly right. We’ve even changed some names midway through a manuscript because we were either calling them the wrong name or it sounded too much like another character’s name. So that’s happened.

AMY: Yeah. So many times in our writing, whether it’s a script or book, we’ll say, “So-and-so… but not REALLY So-and-so.” Because we know that’s not going to be their permanent name, but we have to refer to them as something. But what do you think is the key to a good character name in a book?

KIM: Well, it has to stick with you, so you don’t want to be going back and saying, “Who is that?” You want it to roll off your tongue. You want it to sound natural and apropos to the character… but unless you’re writing satire or something, you don’t really want to veer into oddball territory. Unless you’re Charles Dickens, I guess.

AMY: Oh my gosh. Yeah. So Speaking of Charles Dickens, I heard about Martin Chuzzlewit that before he chose that name he had a bunch of other names in mind, like Martin Sweezleden, Martin Sweezleback, Martin Chuzzletoe, Martin Chubblewig, Martin Chuzzlewig, before he finally settled on… what was it again? Now I don’t even know the real name… Martin Chuzzlewit. Yes.

KIM: Okay, so any of those names actually could have worked, I think, because he’s so good at naming characters, he is the undisputed master. Uriah Heep. Ebenezer Scrooge, Fezziwig….They’re all great.

AMY: Uh-huh. He actually even had a character who’s a mean schoolmaster in Hard Times that was called Mr. M’Choakumchild. I mean, so hilarious in its literalness there.

KIM: Yeah, that’s a memorable and terrifying one. So let’s talk about our favorite character names in books, but before we do, I just remembered: Did you know that HAL from 2001 Space Odyssey, the novel by Arthur C. Clarke is, consecutively and alphabetically, one letter off from IBM? 

AMY: I did know that, actually. It’s a very good “Jeopardy” question, right? But I know that because my friend’s dads worked at IBM and she told me that anecdote and I always remembered it, because how cool? “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

KIM: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” 

AMY: You’re not as creepy as Hal. Sorry.

KIM: Okay, good! I tried though! So for me, I’d have to say Raymond Chandler’s detective Phllip Marlowe is one of my favorite names in all of literature. I love the character, first of all, and I also love that the surname Marlowe is the same as Christopher Marlowe. He’s, of course, the other Elizabethan playwright. And there is a connection, too, between Chandler and Marlowe. Chandler took the name (apparently, it’s been said) from Marlowe House, which is the house he belonged to when he attended the English boarding school Dulwich College. Marlowe House at Dulwich College was named for Christopher Marlowe.

AMY: I like it! I like when they have connections or other meanings, you know… they’re not just pulled out of thin air. What about sexy leading men in books, like those characters? I’ve got to give it to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, even though when I was a kid and I read Wuthering Heights, I was always thinking of the cat Heathcliff, the cartoon cat. But now, for me, Heathcliff is just that unforgettable hottie, you know? And his name is unforgettable as well. 

KIM: Okay, aside from the cat Heathcliff, which now has completely ruined…

AMY: Have I ruined it? Oh no, I’ve ruined it for you!

KIM: I somehow didn’t really think about the two together, because I was going to say Heathcliff is a beautiful… it’s a very sexy name. It’s really good. And then there’s Fitzsimmons Darcy (a lot of people don’t actually know his first name, but it’s Fitzsimmons.). 

AMY: That’s too much of a mouthful actually, really. Can you imagine if we had to keep reading “Fitzsimmons” over and over in Pride & Prejudice? I’m glad she just stuck to Mr. Darcy. But speaking of sexy guy names from novels that are a mouthful, the one that I’ve always loved saying is Ralph de Bricassart from The Thornbirds. It’s just fun to let that roll off your tongue (And I think “Ralph” combined with “de Bricassart” is just the weirdest contrast.) So I don’t think I’ll ever forget that name. Nor will I forget watching that with you.

KIM: That’s one of our… we have so many great memories of watching that kind of stuff together.

AMY: We laughed so hard watching that movie.

KIM: We did laugh really hard. I like Sir Percy Blakeney and his pseudonym, The Scarlet Pimpernel. 

AMY: Oh, yeah, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Now, I hate to do this to you, but I have another association that’s always weird in my head with that one, which is “pumpernickel.” That always comes up too. I think when I was younger I would always equate that.

KIM: That’s great.

AMY: I think pimpernel is a flower right?

KIM: Yes, it is.

AMY: Okay, right. Actually, about that book, I just learned that that book was written by a woman! I had no idea.

KIM: Yeah, it’s Baroness Orczy. I hope I’m pronouncing that right. And she was a real person, obviously, but her name sounds straight out of fiction. 

AMY: Yeah, it does.

KIM: It’s a good name. What about Tristam... Tristram Shandy? People often get that wrong (which I did just now) and say Tristam when it’s actually Tristram.

AMY: Tristram. That’s almost a tongue-twister. It’s hard to say that way. But either way, I think it’s a good name, you’re right. But let’s talk about some ladies.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: We’ve got Hester Prynne from Scarlet Letter. That’s a pretty good name.

KIM: That’s really good. And Bathsheba Everdene from Far From the Madding Crowd. Which, many times I have accidentally said Far From The Maddening Crowd, because somehow I want to say “Maddening.” Anyway.

AMY: Yes, I agree. Anna Karenina. She has to make the list. And if we are going to talk about kids’ books, my favorites would be Pippi Longstocking — I love her name — and Hermione Granger is really good, too. She wouldn’t be the same if she was just named “Lisa” or something like that.

KIM: No. They’re so memorable. As is Inigo Montoya! 

AMY: “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.” Can you imagine if his name was just something like, “Paul Rogers?”

KIM: Or even Ralph De Briccarsart?

AMY: Yeah! “Hello, my name is Ralph De Briccasart…” What about Natty Bumppo from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales? I don’t even think I read that, but I know that name, Natty Bumppo. And then Atticus Finch, of course! (And Boo Radley) from To Kill a Mockingbird. Those are both good ones.

KIM: I have one you’re going to love! 

AMY: What?

KIM: Horatio Hornblower from the C.S. Forester series.

AMY: Ooooh, YEAH!!!!

KIM: You guys, Amy was obsessed with this series. Obsessed with it.

AMY: I mean, still am obsessed with it. I love it. That character name is flat-out ridiculous, I acknowledge that, but when I was in my 20s, I read every book in the series, and Ioan Gruffudd (I don’t know how you say his last name….)

KIM: I think it’s “Griffith.” I think it’s Welsh.

AMY: That’s the Welsh? Griffith? He played him in the television miniseries on A&E, and that whole thing is just so swoon-worthy. 

KIM: Which you got me into that, and I loved it.

AMY: I always love a good sea-faring novel, which is kind of funny because I don’t think anybody would look at me and think I’d be into that, but I have sitting on my nightstand right now William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth, which is another nautical trilogy. And that was adapted into a BBC miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which… also a good name!

KIM: Great name.

AMY: That’s a real name, but that’s one somebody would write.

KIM: True.

AMY: But yeah. Love me my British sailors.

KIM: I think you were probably in the British navy in one of your former lives.

AMY: Maybe. But I did discover that I know how to make hardtack, in case I ever need to do that, now I know that I can make bread that will last for six months.

KIM: Oh, yeah, you mentioned this a few months ago. Your attempts at pandemic bread-baking didn’t really turn out as you expected.

AMY: No. It was a tremendous fail. So this is when the pandemic was first starting and everyone was getting into baking bread and there’s no bread on the store shelves, right? Slim pickings, basically. So I was like, “Oh, I can make some bread like everybody else that I’m seeing on the Internet!” So, I used a package of yeast in my cabinet that had probably been sitting there for like twe-- 15 years. Maybe not 15, maybe seven years.

KIM: You almost said 20.

AMY: Yeah. It was a really old envelope. And I learned that, oh yeah, yeast has a shelf life and it’s not seven years. So that bread came out like a brick. By that point in time, there was no way you were going to be getting any instant yeast in your grocery orders. It was gone everywhere. I thought, “Well, maybe I should try making my own yeast from scratch.” So I looked up recipes on the Internet. It involves, like, soaking raisins and grapes on your counter in, like, sugar water. The first batch turned out a layer of mold on the top after a couple days. So I threw that out and made another batch. The second batch looked like it might actually work. So I made two loaves of bread, and they wound up, when I baked them, they looked really good. They have a nice crust, perfectly brown, then I went to cut it and it was... just…  jaw-breaker. 

KIM: Oh wow.

AMY: So I could have taken it on a six-month sailing voyage, but I gave up on the bread-baking adventure and I will be buying my bread loaves from now on, thank you very much.

KIM: Okay, that’s a great story. And making bread from a starter is truly a “Lost Art.” Kudos to everyone out there who has picked it up during this pandemic. We’re really impressed with you.

AMY: Kim, have you taken up any lost arts during this pandemic?

KIM: No, but I did start a podcast! 

AMY: Yeah, podcast, that’s pretty good. I’ll give you kudos for that as well.

KIM: Okay, but i have been daydreaming a lot about travel during this pandemic, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners have, too. It would be amazing to just go someplace tropical.

AMY: Yeah. If only. Well, how about the island of Guadeloupe in the French Antilles? You can go there next week with us on our podcast. Maybe not literally, but figuratively, in next week’s episode. That’s where we’re heading.

KIM: That’s exactly right. That was a great segue to the home of our next “lost lady,” Simone Schwarz Bart as well as the setting of her 1972 novel The Bridge of Beyond. 

AMY: She’s an author who we think is very deserving of some more recognition, and we can’t wait to discuss her. So catch up with us again next week!

KIM: For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really helps new listeners find us!

AMY: Got an idea for a “lost lady” you love to see featured on our show? Let us know. And let us know what you think about the books we’ve recommended so far. Until next time, bye everyone!

[closing music]

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 Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.

3. E.M. Delafield - Diary of a Provincial Lady

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES, HOST:

Hello, and welcome to The Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW, HOST:

And I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: We’re best friends and co-authors of the Twisted Lit series of young adult novels, and we’re here to shed a little light on some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: Today we’re taking a look at a famous fictional “diary” from the 1930s, one richly and hilariously rendered by author E.M. Delafield. 

AMY: If you’ve never heard of her, we're going to catch you up to speed, and we can assure you that rifling through her character’s private diary does NOT disappoint. So let’s raid the stacks and get started.

INTRO MUSIC.

AMY: So Kim, you have a 17-month old daughter at home. How is she doing? How’s your week been?

KIM: You know, the usual… (the usual during a pandemic, I should say). I got really excited about doing this socially-distant walk at the Hollywood Reservoir last Friday, so I pictured this beautiful location. I dressed her really cute… It was the hottest day of the year; I was overheated wearing a facemask. She was overheated, too. She was kind of whiny and miserable, and she kept wanting to walk back to the parking lot, so we ended up spending most of our time in the parking lot looking for rocks. She ended up having a great time, but it isn’t exactly what I imagined it would be.

AMY: That’s like they say, “God laughs when you have plans.” I think maybe toddlers do as well.

KIM: That makes sense. I have to try to remember that. What about you? How are things going with your elementary-school-aged children at home?

AMY: Well, we’ve had some adventures in the kitchen this week. My 8-year-old son, Jack, decided he wanted to bake, which is always like giving your kid a hand grenade and letting them trash the kitchen. I let him do it, but I was like, “You’re on your own, buddy. You figure it out.” So he made chocolate chip cookies. They were delicious, but he forgot to put baking soda or baking powder — one of those — in the mix, so it all came out like one big giant pancake of a cookie. It all kind of melted together. Then my 10-year-old daughter, Julia, one morning… she was making a Pop Tart (because we’ve devolved into eating Pop Tarts in this house during the pandemic.) I walked into the kitchen and was like, “Julia, where’s your Pop Tart that you made?” She said, “It was too hot, so I threw it in the garbage.” It was just like, “Where did I go wrong with this child?” I looked in the garbage and there was a complete Pop Tart that was ever-so-slightly singed on the ends.

KIM: She’s too smart for her own good. That’s it. Because she is one really smart cookie.

AMY: I don’t know. Maybe just not as a cook.

KIM: I think it’s pretty safe to say that for every joy of motherhood there’s an equal and opposite moment of wanting to bang your head against a wall.

AMY: It’s almost like if you can’t laugh about it sometimes, you just might cry. And it pretty much applies to every facet of life, and it’s something that E.M. Delafield really succeeds in showcasing in her book Diary of a Provincial Lady.

KIM: You are so right. But before we get into it, let’s talk a little bit E.M. Delafield. Who was she?

AMY: All right, so I’m going to give you the quick hits. She was a master of satire who published more than 40 books over a 26-year writing career. She was born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture (how’s that for a name?) in 1890, and she grew up in Sussex, England, as part of an aristocratic French Catholic family. Her father was a count...

KIM: Wow.

AMY: ...and her mother was a well-known novelist and dramatist of her day who wrote under the name Mrs. Henry de La Pasture (I looked her up. I found 14 titles for her listed on Goodreads including her best-known children’s book, The Unhappy Family.) So Edmee (or Elizabeth as she was known later in life) adopted the pen name Delafield as a nod to her maiden surname (de la Pasture). Kind of clever, huh?

KIM: That’s great.

AMY: Her first novel was published in 1917, called Zella Sees Herself . And then she  continued to publish one or two novels a year for the rest of her life, basically, or until nearly the end of her life. At the age of 29, in 1919, she married civil engineer Arthur “Paul” (I guess he went by Paul) Dashwood, and they moved to a little village called Kentisbeare in Devon, England. They lived on the Bradfield Estate where her husband was  the land agent, and this is where she became the proverbial “provincial lady, ” as this is where we start to see her life falling in line with the narrator of Diary of a Provincial Lady. By the 1930s, Delafield was also moving in more literary circles. She wrote for the progressive literary review magazine Time and Tide, and that is where Diary of a Provincial Lady first appeared in serial installments.  Like the narrator of the diary, Delafield has two children, Lionel and Rosamund. As an adult, Rosamund went on to follow in her mother’s footsteps and wrote a 1950s version of her mother’s successful diary which she called Provincial Daughter. So it’s really interesting, I think, that three generations of women in the de la Pasture family became published authors . Edmee’s son, Lionel, however, died tragically as an adult (possibly by his own hand) as an adult in WWII. Edmee really only outlived him by only a few years. She died in 1943, only 13 years after finding great success with Diary of a Provincial Lady.

KIM: When I saw that, I was so surprised. I had to look twice. I couldn’t believe the book that we’re going to be talking about was written and published and set in the 1930s, not that long before she actually passed away. So a few more interesting things that we found:  In her youth she dreamed of becoming a Catholic nun, which I guess isn’t that surprising for someone raised Catholic, but it does maybe show a little bit of a romantic streak in her. She entered a Belgian convent at the age of 21, but she only lasted 18 months there. She decided that her sister, who was entering another convent, she didn’t want to be so separated from her sister, so she decided not to do it after about 18 months. But she wrote a book about her experience there called Brides of Heaven. I actually would love to read that. I put it on my list. But just think, had she stayed, we wouldn’t have Diary of a Provincial Lady. So that was God’s loss, our gain!

AMY: Exactly. Also, like me, Delafield was fascinated with true crime stories, and she wrote a fictionalized account of a very British scandal, the Edith Thompson-Freddy Bywaters murder case. The book she wrote was called Messaline of the Suburbs, and I have to say, I just picked it up on hold from the library this afternoon, and I’m like a fourth of the way through it already. It is juicy and good, and if we do a future E.M. Delafield podcast a couple years from now when we roll back around to her, this might have to be the book we do, because I’m super into it.

KIM: That sounds great.

AMY: The same English scandal was actually fictionalized again by author Sarah Waters in 2014, who wrote a book about this same case called The Paying Guests, and I highly recommend that book as well.

KIM: I read that too and I loved it! I also want to mention that Delafield was an authority on the Bronte sisters and wrote a biography on them in 1935. So once again, a woman after our own heart in terms of her interests. Things just keep popping up that endear her to us. 

AMY: Absolutely, and so prolific, it seems like.

KIM: Yes. So if you really want to get a sense of Delafield’s life, you really only need to turn to this famous “diary” for a bit of insight. There are several books that make up the diaries of her fictional character. The [first] book, though satirical, really draws on her daily small-town life in Devon and it features this  non-stop, dry-witted social commentary on human nature and human interactions, including marriage, friendships and the trials of raising children. 

AMY: There was actually, Kim, an article in The Guardian a few months ago (in May) written by Kathryn Hughes and the title was “I wish more people would read … The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield.” I sort of did this “Yes!” in my head, because I have felt the same way for so long. The article wonders why the book isn’t more widely read and it suggests that the title seems too “dusty and quaint. Would you agree with that?

KIM: Yeah, I mean, just seeing the title completely on its own without any context, I think it would be really easy to think, “Oh, this is this boring, nonfiction diary of someone completely unrelatable.” Of course, now that I’ve read it and I know the voice of the diarist and how entertaining she is… AND I know the title is tongue-in-cheek... the diarist is called “provincial” by someone as an insult. She’s kind of turning it around and using it as the title of the diary. I think if we could come up with some other name like… I don’t know what it would be… but we could come up with another title that would actually, I think, make people realize what this diary is truly like to read.

AMY: I definitely would say that this book, it had to have influenced Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary.

KIM: Oh, yeah. I would be shocked if it didn’t.

AMY: Right. There’s even that scene that she has that’s very similar to the “Tarts and Vicars” party in Bridget Jones. The narrator of the diary receives a sort of vaguely-worded invite to a maybe/possibly fancy dress party. And all the ladies in town are in a tizzy about whether to show up in costume or not. How many times have you had that happen to you, Kim, whether it’s a Halloween party or some sort of dress-up theme party, and you’re wondering, “Am I going to be the only one?”

KIM: Absolutely. The idea of what to wear, I mean, you can pretty much take that into your daily life. It’s perfect. We’re actually going to go into a little more of that scene, which I loved, later. Amy, what did you really like about the diary format? 

AMY: I think the diary format, first of all, makes it a really easy book to read. It’s in quick portions, so if you are a busy wife and mom, like we are, and you’re pressed for time, you can sort of just get this book in little bite-sized bits. It’s sort of sectioned into these little pithy vignettes. And the diary itself even seems dashed off. She doesn’t use a lot of articles like “the” or “a” … it’s almost  as if she’s so busy she just hurried to write down about her day, however funny. And then so much of the diary deals with the mundane, but she keeps you hanging on her every word.

KIM: She has these little asides, and she uses “query,” “memo,” “nota bene” to make little notes to herself, and it’s hilarious. In fact some of those, I noted, ended up being the most memorable quotes of the book.

AMY: It’s almost her way of “breaking the fourth wall” with the reader because that’s the moment where you feel like she’s talking right to you even though it’s a diary. In that sense, it so reminded me of the TV show “Fleabag,” which, Kim, I know you haven’t had a chance to watch yet because you had a baby last year and TV marathons just aren’t high on your priority list these days, but that sort of tone and humor that Phoebe Waller-Bridge brings to that show is exactly the kind of snark and comedy that we find in this book.  

KIM: I cannot wait to watch that show eventually. 

AMY: You’ll love it. Okay, so, our narrator is never explicitly named in the book, actually, so we don’t know very much about her history prior to the events taking place in the diary. What do you make of that, Kim?

KIM: It’s really interesting. I mean, the diary format kind of allows her to do that because it really lends itself to focusing on the day to day. So she doesn’t mention her parents or her previous life. There’s talk about politics, but not really much about what’s actually going on— there are allusions to reading All Quiet on the Western Front, there’s some allusions to communism and socialism, but the diary is very in the moment of her life and family and their day-to-day challenges which I think is curious but it also helps make it really timeless and comforting. We’ve said the character is autobiographical, and we’ve also said that this book feels really quintessentially English, but then you take the biography that we’ve talked about: Delafield’s father was a count, his family fled the French Revolution, she was also Catholic. I’m just guessing here, but maybe she was a little romantic as well, because as I said, she wanted to go to a convent. Maybe I’m projecting that romanticism, but I feel like there’s a little bit of that there. So I think all these things maybe made her, on one level, a bit of an outsider, and I think that worked in her favor because she was really able to see, clearly, this Englishness and the reserve and the absurdity of all of it and really have fun with it. And I think that comes across in the diary.    

AMY: Yeah. She’s very observant about so many different little nuanced things about society and relationships. You mentioned her French background… she grew up with a series of French governesses, did you know that?

KIM: I did not know that. Oooh, intriguing!

AMY: And that was directly translated into this diary with the character’s children’s nurse, “Mademoiselle,” who is French.

KIM: I love her!

AMY: Oh, I know. She is such a hoot, and is always getting on our narrator’s last nerve but in a very funny way.  And I keep saying, “our narrator,” because she doesn’t have a name, but that almost seems fitting, in a way, because the character seems to be struggling a bit with her identity as a wife and mother. She’s got this single friend, Rose, who lives in London who seems to be living this sort of “Bright Young Things,” sophisticated, alternate life that she might have lived had she made different choices. It’s mentioned at one point, by her husband, that she and Rose were once roommates in London living the Bohemian life, so it’s clear that she did give all that up, and there’s a definite sense of “fear of missing out” that the narrator has whenever they hang out. There’s a little passage that illustrates that. She writes:

July 3rd — Breakfast enlivened by letter from dear Rose written at, apparently, earthly paradise of blue sea and red rocks, on South Coast of France. She says that she is having complete rest, and enjoying congenial society of charming group of friends, and makes unprecedented suggestion that I should join her for a fortnight. I am moved to exclaim — perhaps rather thoughtlessly — that the most wonderful thing in the world must be to be a childless widow — but this is met by unsympathetic silence from Robert, which recalls me to myself, and impels me to say that that isn’t in the least what I meant.

So funny!

KIM:  I love that passage! It cracked me up when you were reading it just now, too, as you can hear. It’s too funny, and it is also, really, very Bridget Jones.

AMY: Bridget Jones in reverse. Bridget Jones is looking to find a husband, and in some sense, she’s wistful about the life that she had before her husband.

KIM: I love that, you’re exactly right. That’s great. That fear of missing out that we just saw here is also so perfectly illustrated in the Italian Art Exhibition gag that’s going throughout the book. Everyone she runs into seems to have been to this exhibit except her, and she doesn’t want to admit that she hasn’t seen it.

AMY: She cannot help herself. She is just lie upon lie upon lie whenever anybody asks her, “Oh, have you been to the Italian Art Exhibition?”  It’s so hilarious to see how she’s constantly dissembling so that she doesn’t have to admit she hasn’t been to it. She’s both jealous that she hasn’t been, and also seriously annoyed at having to hear about it from everyone she knows. (Sort of in the same way that you’re annoyed when somebody tells you over and over that you have to read or watch something, like I do with this book.) If she was a modern-day woman, she would feel like the lady who just wants to stay home and watch some Bravo TV, but she feels like she OUGHT to be going to MoCA’s latest exhibit to feel cultured and sophisticated. 

KIM: I’ve so been there. I get that feeling a hundred percent. The more people tell you to do it the more, almost, you just get sick of hearing about it.

AMY: Yeah. She was just highly irritated by the whole thing by the end, but still lied and said she went, or she would just change the subject, deftly, to get out of having to answer one way or the other. I think there’s a touch of “Jane Austen” in this book that bubbles up in the colorful personalities of the other characters that are sprinkled throughout. Delafield certainly was pretty skilled at carving out some similar archetypes to the Austen characters. So we see the condescending snob in Lady Boxe, who is the grand dame who lives on the estate. We find the sort of pathetic drip of a woman in her acquaintance Cissy Crabbe. We see the self-righteous “barnacle” of a woman in the Vicar’s wife, who always claims she has to leave but she always winds up staying for forty more minutes, and she always overstays her welcome. Then there’s also this revolving door of indignant and impertinent servants who the narrator has to manage. I think she’s almost a little frightened of them frankly!

KIM: I mean, that’s an entire job in itself, managing the servants. They get worked up and then she gets worked up and it just keeps going on and on. 

AMY: She’s constantly having to run around to replace them when they quit and manage their emotions and their volatile tempers.

KIM: It manages to make somebody who has a house full of servants completely relatable because of all these things that she’s dealing with with them. She doesn’t show the ease of having servants. 

AMY: Exactly. You’d think, like, “Oh, she’s got a house full of servants!” but she ends up being like that woman in the “Calgon, take me away!” commercial from when we were kids, right?  

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: She’s always exasperated and pulling her hair out and at her wits’ end.

KIM: So, she’s got such a scathing private take on everyone that we get to peek into, but outwardly, she’s able to keep up this smiling, polished veneer that she shows people. And while she’s brutally honest (about both them and herself) within the pages of the diary, in real life, she is a great liar. She lies to get out of social engagements, she lies about how much she’s enjoying things, she lies about the books she’s read… she adores her children but she pretends having this modern, blase attitude. She writes for a feminist publication, but she doesn’t live as some of the feminists think she should. She has this literary knowledge and loves dropping literary references, but feels like she sounds ridiculous. She’s struggling to look and be this person she can never be. That makes her very universal, I think. 

AMY: She feels like a sham a lot of the time.

KIM: Yes, it’s like Imposter Syndrome before it had a name.

AMY: Yes, exactly, and so that makes any garden party or tennis match or, you know, acquaintanceships, the Women’s Institute meetings, they’re all so awkward in many ways, because she’s struggling on so many levels while interacting with her own insecurities, other people’s snobbishness and judgments of her.

KIM: Absolutely, and I think it gives you that tension that you would have otherwise from a normally-plotted novel. This has recurring themes, but it doesn’t have a traditional plot. But this tension in everyday things, from the Vicar’s wife’s quick visit to the house to buying a hat, it becomes fraught with tension and that makes it, you know, inherently readable. 

AMY: I love that she’s always thinking up witty comebacks or winning arguments with people long after they have gone home when she’s in bed staring at the ceiling. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve won those arguments.

KIM: I’ve been there! Probably staring at my ceiling at the same time in the middle of the night. And she’s second-guessing everything she did and said at a party later that night and beating herself up about that. Been there, too. She’s also, like most of us are, an incurable gossip, along with most of the other ladies she encounters. At one point she writes:

   Am disconcerted to find that Cook and I have been talking our heads off for the better part of forty minutes before I remember that gossip is both undignified and undesirable.

AMY: It’s a perfect example of her telling you the unvarnished truth — we were just gossiping our fool heads off — and then collecting herself very prim and properly and remembering how undignified it is, and “I’m going to stop that.” She’s also really brilliant, I think, at highlighting so many emotions that just feel universal no matter what time period you live in. So, that conversational awkwardness with other people… the inclination to self-aggrandize.... dreading certain obligations in life… saying yes to things that inwardly you really don’t want to do but you’re too wimpy to just say no.

KIM: So speaking of conversational awkwardness, I know that you have a really interesting theory about that, and I think people would like to hear it right about now.

AMY: Yeah, this came to mind when Iwas reading the book because she has so many allusions to tennis. She’s got a tennis court. Her cat is named after a famous 1930s tennis player, Helen Wills. There’s a whole scene where she goes to a tennis party and she’s mortified because she’s a terrible tennis player and it just makes everything so awkward. But those references just reminded me that I have a theory that conversation partners can be compared to the game of tennis. So there’s three types of conversation partners. The first is a fellow tennis player. If you’re having a conversation with a fellow tennis player, everything’s going great. You’re hitting the ball back and forth, you’re having fun, it’s moving, it’s fast-paced, it’s getting something and you’re giving something in return. Kim, I would say you are a fellow tennis player to me when it comes to conversation.

KIM: Phew, that’s a relief!

AMY: Okay, the second conversation partner relating to tennis would be the brick wall. You can hit the tennis ball, and it kind of bounces back to you enough so that you can hit it again, but it’s just not as fun as having another tennis player there. Probably a little conversationally boring, but you can keep it going. The third type of conversation partner, which is the worst, and  — and which I feel like our narrator runs into so many of these in the book — is the mattress. When you’re playing tennis and you can only bounce it up against a mattress. And what’s the ball do? It drops straight down, and you don’t get it back. And you are left hanging. We’ve all met those people at parties, the people that you’re like “Okay, how do I get out of this?” So I remembered that analogy as I was reading this book because I feel like she encounters all three of those types of people. 

KIM: She absolutely does. That is perfect, and I really, seriously think that could be a book. I love that idea: “How not to be a mattress.” So, our narrator is married and has two children: a son, Robin, and a daughter, Vicki. What sort of commentary do we think Delafield may be making on married, domestic life and motherhood?

AMY: What I got from it is that, by and large, it’s a thankless existence! I will say, I did identify with the narrator’s tendencies in motherhood at certain points. First of all, she says at one point, “Remember when before I had children, all of the things that I said I wasn't going to do: I wasn't going to lecture, I wasn't going to say, ‘Don’t’ all the time.” And then she makes a remark about just how often she does that now on a daily basis. Everybody thinks before they have kids that they’re going to be a certain way, and it all changes once you’re actually in it. But I also identify her tendency to downplay her pride in her kids. Now, I am extremely proud of my two kids, but I find myself doing that from time to time. At the very beginning of the book, for example, she has taken her son, Robin, back to boarding school and she’s at the hotel, and she writes:

I sit with several other mothers and we all talk about our boys in tones of disparagement, and about one another’s boys with great enthusiasm. 

I think you do that! You’re trying to downplay your own kid, but then you talk up everybody else’s kids. Later, after her daughter’s birthday party, she writes similarly:

Vicky looks nice on pony, and I receive compliments about her, which I accept in an off-hand manner, tinged with incredulity, in order to show that I am a modern mother and should scorn to be foolish about my children.

I do that all the time, also. When somebody compliments me about my kids, I try to always have a flip side: “Well, she burns her Pop Tarts and throws them in the garbage.” It reminded me that I probably shouldn’t do that as much as I do. I think there’s a happy medium. You don’t want to be like, “Yeah, of course she is! She’s amazing!” You know?

KIM: I’m still completely in the bragging phase, but she’s only 17 months, so give me time to get there. But on the point of her attitude toward marriage, children and the domestic life, it comes across as Sisyphean. Things never turn out the way she hopes. Never. It’s always constantly working, working, working, but on the other hand she never seems to lose her sense of humor and she never gives up. She says straight out that “a banking account, sound teeth, and adequate servants matter a great deal more than love,” and it does seem like she’s practical in that way. But she also has a bit of a romantic side that’s sweet. I think she looks for the best in Robert and she always tries to have a sense of humor through it all.

AMY: Yeah, so speaking of Robert, her husband in the book, what are your thoughts about him?

KIM: Wow. Talk about checked-out, insensitive, unromantic. Not necessarily the most supportive of spouses. I’ll read something to give our listeners an indication of him:

  December 10th.–Robert, this morning, complains of insufficient breakfast. Cannot feel that porridge, scrambled eggs, toast, marmalade, scones, brown bread, and coffee give adequate grounds for this, but admit that porridge is slightly burnt. How impossible ever to encounter burnt porridge without vivid recollections of Jane Eyre at Lowood School, say I parenthetically! This literary allusion not a success. Robert suggests ringing for Cook, and have greatest difficulty in persuading him that this course utterly disastrous.

He never appreciates her literary allusions, ever, and he rarely has anything to say unless it’s a complaint of some sort.

AMY: Yeah, he’s almost a doorstop. It’s almost like he’s not a person, he’s just like a blob sitting there that she’s always looking at like, “Seriously?” I love that she is able to roll her eyes at him, telling us what she really thinks a little bit about him.

KIM: Yeah, that and that she gets her way eventually in her own way, too, which you’ve got to say, “go for it.” 

AMY: Now, given that this book is said to be loosely autobiographical, you’ve got to wonder what Delafield’s husband thought of this caricature of a husband. It’s said that her relatives thought of her husband, Paul, as a sort of “clodhopper” sort of man, similar to the guy in this book, I think. I don’t know if she felt that way about him or not.

KIM: It’s not exactly the most flattering portrayal of him if it is based on him, I’ll say that. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s true.

KIM: So one of my favorite parts of the book was when Lady B invites people to this party and it “throws the entire neighborhood into consternation” when they hear it is to be a “fancy dress” party, fancy dress meaning costumes. Our narrator has already planned to wear a black taffeta dress, but Mademoiselle says that it can easily be transformed into a Dresden China shepherdess. When that idea is rejected she gets wilder and wilder, suggesting Mary Queen of Scots, or Madame du Pompadour, or even Cleopatra somehow. But the narrator goes ahead and wears her black taffeta, has a basically terrible time at this party, and then before bed is writing in her diary about how at the end of a party she doesn’t look nearly as nice as as she did at the beginning, and her husband says, “Hey, come to bed, what you’re doing is kind of a waste of time.” And she does wonder, “Is he right?”

AMY: About writing all her thoughts down… once again Robert’s just a dud.

KIM:  Yes, absolutely. Yeah, thanks Robert.

AMY: In another example where he’s a dud, which is one of my favorite parts of the book, there’s a moment where she’s having a really bad day. All these financial woes come to the forefront, and despite her money problems, she decides she needs a little retail therapy. She’s going to go buy a new hat because there ain’t nothing a new hat can’t fix, that’s her theory. As she’s trying on the hats, she’s frustrated because her hair looks awful, so from there she thinks, “I think I need to go get my hair done.” So she goes to get her hair done. While she’s at the beauty parlor, the hairdresser suggests that maybe she needs to consider dying her hair a different color. And because she’s kind of like us, Kim, in that she can’t say no sometimes when people are making suggestions like that… she’s such a people pleaser, and so she just says, “Okay, go ahead.” And she hates it. It’s just awful. Her friend Mary comes over later after the hideous hair disaster and she writes: 

Worst fears realised, as to hair. Dear Mary, always so observant, gazes at it in nerve-shattering silence but says nothing, till I am driven to make half-hearted explanation. Her only comment is that she cannot imagine why anybody should deliberately make themselves look ten years older than they need. Feel that, if she wishes to discourage further experiments on my part, this observation could scarcely be improved upon.

KIM: Ouch. Worst fears of a hairdo realized.

AMY: And throughout the rest of the book, people keep commenting on her hair color in pretty critical ways. It’s totally inappropriate. Who doesn’t have that insecurity as a woman, right?

KIM: And the dream or the fantasy that you’re going to get the haircut that’s going to change your life.

AMY: Which also, by the way, ties into a plotline in “Fleabag,” where they have to go get the haircut rectified. Her sister gets an awful cut and the main character just storms back into the salon and gives him hell. You’ve got to watch it.

KIM: We all need somebody to do that for us. So this trip to France seems like this one really important moment in the book. She finally has this chance to get away from all of these obligations bringing her down and experience the life that she might have had if she hadn’t opted to tie herself down. But when she gets there she has a comical “near-death” experience trying to swim more than she’s actually capable of. And she jokingly writes “I hope that Robert’s second wife will be kind to the children”. 

AMY: [laughing] She’s fine. She doesn’t drown, she’s just a little embarrassed by the end of it, but it seems to remind her, this episode, that she was never going to be cut out for this sort of free, sophisticated life that she dreams of. So she goes back to her life. She even brings back a souvenir, this blue dress that she buys in the south of France and thinks looks so amazing on her, and when she gets back to Devon she puts it on and realizes it looks awful on her. So it’s sort of symbolic that the grass is not necessarily greener wherever you go. The interesting thing is, she never explicitly complains about her life at all. She accepts it all with a wry and sardonic wit, that “that’s the way it is, and I’m going to make the best of it.”

KIM: I guess that’s very British.

AMY: Yeah, for sure, stiff upper lip. Stiff upper lip, but a kind of snide underbelly.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: So after this first diary, the success was so huge, both in England and America that she went on to write three sequels: The Provincial Lady Goes Further, The Provincial Lady in America, and The Provincial Lady in Wartime. So I’m interested in checking out a few more of these to see what becomes of her and Robert and the children. So sadly, for us, this book has never been adapted into a film or TV show or miniseries or anything like that. I wish it would be.

KIM: It should be, and you know what, I think you should cast this because I think you will have some good ideas for who we should cast.

AMY: Okay, so I think i’m just going to stick with the narrator and maybe Robert. For our narrator, while Iwas reading the book, the tone that she has so much reminds me of the mother from the Masterpiece series, “The Durrells.” She has that same exact politeness but sarcasm. So I could see the actress from “The Durrells,” Keeley Hawes, in this role, no problem, and that’s who I envisioned as I was reading the book. At the same time, I keep mentioning “Fleabag,” and Phoebe Waller-Bridge has the snarkiness, those little asides and everything, down pat. She would be perfect. When I was looking at old photos of Delafield, I think they bear an uncanny resemblance to one another as well, so I think that could work. 

KIM: You are right on there, I mean I haven't seen “Fleabag,” as we said, but it’s a cultural touchstone, so of course I’ve seen clips, and I know what she looks like and I think you’re exactly right. I can completely imagine that. Oh, they need to do this! It needs to happen.

AMY: They do! Yes. And if I was casting Robert, I would get a complete unknown because I don't think you want to distract by having Robert be any name or any familiar face. He’s such a …

KIM: He’s a dud, let’s face it. 

AMY: He’s a dud.

KIM: It can’t be our usual stable of British actors.

AMY: Yeah. Exactly. It just needs to be somebody’s random dad that they bring in, and don’t give him very many lines.

KIM: So what did we learn today from Diary of a Provincial Lady? We learned that having domestic help can be overrated.

AMY: We learned that a visit to a hair salon doesn’t always make a bad day better.

KIM: We learned that the essential skill for surviving motherhood is a sense of humor. 

AMY: We learned that in conversation, you never want to be a mattress.

Kim: And we learned that snooping at a fictional diary can be as gratifying as snooping through a real one! That’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

KIM: Got ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know.

AMY: Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

2. We Went, We Saw, We Concord

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY: Hey! Welcome to our first “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episode.

KIM: Woohoo!

AMY: I know, it feels pretty good to be doing this. Last week was our kick-off. This sort of germinated at the beginning of the pandemic probably, around April, that we had this idea, and now it’s coming to fruition.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Really fun. So we kicked off last week telling you guys all about Monica Dickens and her novel, Mariana, which, Kim, thank you for lending me that book back in April because it was [while] staring at that cover that the idea just sort of hit me. You had always wanted to do a podcast, but I wasn’t necessarily on board, and then for some reason, just having that book — and you had lent me a couple other books with women authors that I’d never heard of — and I started thinking, “That’s the topic! That’s what we talk about on a podcast!”

KIM: It’s one of the things that happens with us in our creative life since Day 1 when we started working together on projects. We just know when we know.

AMY: Yeah. And we feel passionate about it, and we are having so much fun with it.

KIM: And we never even questioned it. It was like, “Oh yeah. Of course that’s what we’ll do.”

AMY: So we really hope that you guys check that novel out, and if you need any further convincing, just know that it’s really only a fraction of the length of one of her great grandfather’s classics. So, you can polish off Mariana in just a couple of days. And it’s a really cute book.

KIM: It also feels really good as a read, I think, right now. It’s nice to have an escapist, cozy novel, which is what that is. You’ll feel good when you read it. 

AMY: Yeah. Especially going into fall. I think it was termed a “hot water bottle novel” right?

KIM: That’s exactly right. Yep. Yep.

AMY: So, Kim, let’s talk about what we’re doing today.

KIM: This week we’re kicking off our “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episodes, and that’s what you’re listening to right now. Every other week we’re going to publish a shorter episode. It’s going to be bite-sized, basically. We’re going to be sharing tidbits on what we’re reading, a little bit about our creative life, snippets of things we think that you all would be interested in, from lost arts to lost letters. So we’re really excited about adding this to our overall podcasting project.

AMY: Sort of like the little taste, you know.

KIM: Exactly.

AMY: The little “palate cleanser” before we move on to our next “lost lady” in the list.

KIM: I love that. That’s perfect.

AMY: So at the end of this episode, we will be announcing the next author and title in our series. That will be exciting because if you want to, then you can read ahead and be ready to roll when we’re discussing our next author. But speaking of, in the meantime, Kim, what else are you reading this week?

KIM: I don’t know how I’m having any extra time to read, but I am carving it out a little bit, and I’m reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

AMY: Yeah, I have. 

KIM: You have? Okay. It’s basically a Wolf Hall meets Lincoln In the Bardo, and it’s this fictionalized story of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet. He died when he was 11, unfortunately, but it’s the period leading up to his death and it’s a lot about Shakespeare’s wife and her origin story. It’s very fictionalized. That’s sort of what makes me say Wolf Hall, because Wolf Hall is, you know, we don’t know a lot about the characters in Wolf Hall, so the writer takes a lot of license with Wolf Hall, and it’s the same with Hamnet. It’s basically, you don’t need to know much about Shakespeare at all to really get into this book. It’s really dreamy and beautiful, and William Shakespeare is in it, but he’s actually not the primary character at all so far. It’s really his wife, who is strong and dynamic and she’s kind of witchy. I’m about halfway through, yeah, and she’s the main protagonist of the novel. Also, it involves a plague, too, so reading about a plague today feels really different than say if I had read this book maybe seven or eight months ago. Anyway, I highly recommend it. So far, I really love it.

AMY: You and I love a good Shakespeare retelling. I mean, that’s basically what we do with our books. So we went down that rabbit hole ourselves. 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: Well, I told you last week that I am slogging through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa which is like 1,500 pages, so it’s the book that never ends. I have to do it in dribs and drabs. It can’t be my main novel.

KIM: No, it’s your “Covid project novel.”

AMY: Exactly. That’s what it is. But at the same time, so my kids are of the age where we like to read books together, so we just started this book which I think could be… she could potentially fall under a “lost lady.” The author is Esther Forbes and the book is Johnny Tremain which was really a popular book in the forties and fifties. I think Disney wound up doing a movie in the 1950s. It won the Newbery medal in 1944. It actually came up recently at the Democratic National Convention because Michael Bloomberg, in his speech, was talking about the America he wanted to see and, like, patriotism, and he referred to his “favorite book when he was a kid,” which was Johnny Tremain. So me and the kids are reading that right now.

KIM: How have I not heard of that book before you?

AMY: I had heard of it over and over all my life and just never read it. You know what, we were watching “Hamilton” on Disney+ this summer and my kids were really into it, so I was like, “How else can I get them intrigued by the American Revolution? What could we read that would teach them more?” This book is basically set during the American Revolution with Paul Revere and John Hancock... all the historical characters factor into the book. So reading about the American Revolution right now is kind of getting me in the mindset of, Kim, one of our favorite little towns.

KIM: Oh! I know what you’re going to say! Concord, Massachusetts!

AMY: Concord! Yeah! And just what an amazing little literary epicenter it is. You know, I was thinking, for people in the northeast of the country, Concord right now would kind of be a really good socially-distanced day trip people could take, I think.

KIM: Yes. Oh, if I lived on the East Coast, I definitely would be doing that, for sure.

AMY: Yeah, so, for those of you that don’t know about Concord, MA, it’s about a half-hour drive outside of Boston. It’s this little historic town that is almost like this literary epicenter. You wouldn’t believe how many huge names came out of this little town.

KIM: It’s just very charming.

AMY: Yeah. It feels like you’re stepping into a time machine. Kim, I know you’ve been there more recently than I have.

KIM: Yeah, I think it was maybe three years ago, and the first thing I did was head straight for Louisa May Alcott’s house. I took a tour of it. I got the chills. It’s incredible. I mean you’ve been to it, so you know. “Amy’s” sketches are on the wall. So basically, Louisa May Alcott’s sister’s sketches are on the wall.

AMY: Yeah, I don’t think her name’s Amy, but it’s THE Amy.

KIM: Yeah, her name’s not Amy, but quote-unquote “Amy.” The Amy from the book. Yes. and it just gives you the chills. It’s incredible.

AMY: It’s like walking inside the novel. It’s exactly how I pictured Little Women, and I think when they film movie adaptations of Little Women, either they use the house or it’s a recreation. The house is called Orchard… Orchard House.

KIM: Yes. Yep.

AMY: So it’s closed to the public right now, however, they have virtual tours and if you go onto their website, for a $10 donation, which is totally worth it, they have a 15-minute video tour where you can see all the rooms in the house. There’s this cute woman who’s dressed up in period garb who takes you on a tour of the house. So anybody right now can go take a tour of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House if you wanted. 

KIM: Ooh, I love that idea, and that actually makes me think it would be fun to do like a day where you had lined up a bunch of different virtual tours of authors’ homes across the world. 

AMY: Ooh, let’s set that up! Let’s do it! We can provide that for our listeners!

KIM: We can put it in Stories. Yeah, that would be really fun.

AMY: Basically a stone’s throw from Orchard House… in my head I picture it as being right across the street, I don’t know if it’s that close.

KIM: I think it’s just down the road, if I remember correctly. Not far at all.

AMY: Yes. But take it away, Kim. Who lived there?

KIM: Oh, well, Emerson’s house.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: I mean you can see it [from Orchard House]. I think it’s definitely walkable. They were neighbors, so it’s basically across the street.

AMY: I never took the tour of Emerson’s house, so I’ve never been inside that one.

KIM: I didn’t either, and I feel like it wasn’t open when I was there. Maybe it has more limited hours or something. 

AMY: And it’s definitely not open right now because I checked, and there’s no virtual tour of that one, but really Orchard House is the one you want to look at. And then really not that far from the Alcotts’ home and Emerson’s home — I mean, maybe a five-minute drive down the road— is Walden Pond of Henry David Thoreau fame. When you go there, it’s a nice walk around the pond, just to be out in nature, but then there’s also a little replica of his tiny house which is exactly on the spot where he had built the little one-room where he lived for however long that was. He was like the original tiny-house hipster.

KIM: Oh, I love it that way. So, Walden Pond also makes an appearance in a recent book Writers and Lovers by Lily King, I don’t know if you read that book. She goes on a date to Walden Pond.

AMY: Oh, no. Interesting. Oh, yeah, and also about the Alcotts, I wanted to mention, too, earlier this year I read March. It’s about the father’s point of view. So going back to Hamnet and telling the story from a different perspective, this is Little Women, basically, as told from the March family patriarch’s point of view.

KIM: Do we need the man’s perspective of it? 

AMY: Well, it’s his back story. So it tells how he became who he became. There’s not a ton of Marmee and the girls. They’re not in it [as much]. It’s when he was off… it takes place during the Civil War.

KIM: Okay. Interesting.

AMY: And he interacts with Thoreau in the book because he lives in Concord. So there’s a little more Concord sprinkled into March as well. I want to say the author is Geraldine Brooks or something, but I might just be pulling that name out of my head.

KIM: Do you recommend it? Should we read it?

AMY: I do recommend it. I wasn’t sure. I read it after you and I went and saw Little Women in the theater.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Gosh. Remember movies?

KIM: Yes, I know. That sounds so weird.

AMY: So i was in a Little Women fit and I obviously know Little Women like the back of my hand, so I was like “What else can I read?” So I decided to get that one out, and it’s good. I liked it. It’s different. It’s … different. I always like when someone takes a different perspective on a character.

KIM: Yeah, I’m intrigued, based on your recommendation, anyway.

AMY: So then also in Concord…(again, everything’s a quick drive), you have to go visit Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I imagine this is open right now.

KIM: Oh! I love Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I could spend days there. I only had maybe an hour before we were going to dinner, so I went to the Authors’ Ridge where the Alcott family, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau are all buried. Oh my gosh… it’s so beautiful. Being from California, we just don’t have places like that. Oh, so gorgeous.

AMY: No. There’s no old history, really, in California.

KIM: Not that old. No.

AMY: I got chills at the Authors’ Ridge, because I was just like, “I cannot believe they’re all right here. All of them.

KIM: Oh, I felt the same.

AMY: Also, in Concord, not so literary but still worth checking out, there are some Revolutionary War sites. My favorite is the Old North Bridge, which is where the infamous “Shot heard round the world,” (the first shot fired in the American Revolution) took place. I highly recommend taking a tour of the battle sites in that area. You really get to visualize how it all unfolded there.

KIM: And you went to the inn there, right? I remember you telling me about the beautiful old inn.

AMY: It’s called the Colonial Inn. There’s a couple of restaurants. It’s like an old house, or boarding house kind of thing. They have Yankee fare like clam chowder and things like that, but then I saw they also have an afternoon tea, which is right up your and my alleys.

KIM: Oh yeah, we used to go have our brainstorms over afternoon tea. We will do it again one day, after Covid. But I want to go to Concord together as a Lost Ladies of Lit trip! 

AMY: We do need to go sometime together. Maybe when the leaves are changing. Which would be right now. So maybe this time next year, hopefully, when travel will be back on the agenda.

KIM: Yeah, basically we want to go everywhere as soon as we can.

AMY: Yeah, for sure. Oh, speaking of traveling… it’s not really traveling, but I found this thing that I shared with you, Kim, this week, that I thought was cool. Maybe a lot of our listeners already know about it, but I had never seen it before and I keep playing around with it. It’s a web site called Literature-map.com, and it’s this really cool tool for finding new authors, or if you are reading an author and you’re like, “Who does this remind me of?” You basically type in an author’s name and it gives you a graph, kind of, where they plot out all the other authors that are in a similar vein or are somehow connected to that person, or, people might like as well as this author. So it’s funny, because I typed in Monica Dickens, just out of curiosity. I didn’t even know if she would show up because she’s not very well known, but she did come up, and there were a lot of authors around her. I think Howard… I forget what her full name is. Something Howard who wrote The Cazalet Chronicles? 

KIM: Oh, yes. Elizabeth Jane Howard.

AMY: Yes, Elizabeth Jane Howard, she came up. Which, we love her.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Another name that came up very close, which, they put the authors in proximity to the author’s name in the middle. So an author that popped up very close to hers was E.M. Delafield, which is fascinating because E.M. Delafield is actually the next “lost lady” on our list, and that is totally coincidental. We just happened to choose her.

KIM: Okay, so pausing a moment to just reiterate: We’re announcing, officially, our next book, which is by E.M. Delafield, and it’s called Diary of a Provincial Lady. 

AMY: Yeah, basically it’s a 1930s novel. It’s hilarious, charming and I think it’s still very relatable to modern readers.

KIM: Yeah, in fact, I don’t think it’s off the mark to call it the original Bridget Jones’s Diary.

AMY: Similar format, similar comic stylings, for sure. If you are a sucker for snarky, cynical characters, this is one you’re gonna enjoy. It’s basically a book that I have, for years, turned blue in the face trying to convince people to read, so it makes sense that this is the second one we chose because I just love it.

KIM: Yeah, we had to start a podcast for you to get me to read that book, and I love it now! It’s one of my favorites! I should have listened.

AMY: I know. I think that’s the whole reason we started this podcast. We just get super excited about books and we want to tell people about them, and if there’s just even one person that turns to one of these books and then decides, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I never read this. I love it so much,” our work here is done, basically. That will make us happy.

KIM: Well, we really hope you tune in for it, and that’s all for today. We’ll see you next week on “Lost Ladies of Lit!”

1. Monica Dickens - Mariana

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES, HOST:

Hello, and welcome to The Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW, HOST:

And I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: We’re best friends and co-authors of the Twisted Lit series of Young Adult novels, and we’re here to shed a little light on some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: Starting with a great English writer by the name of Dickens.

AMY: No, not that Dickens…

KIM: Who knew there was more than one?!

AMY: Exactly! While the Dickens we’re discussing today may not be so well known, we think she should definitely be on your reading list. So let’s raid the stacks and get started.

(SOUNDBITE OF INTRO MUSIC)

KIM: Okay, so of course everyone knows who Charles Dickens is, but did you know that his great granddaughter, Monica, was also a successful writer?

AMY: I didn’t! I had never heard of Monica Dickens before  you lent me her novel, Mariana, a few months ago. This is a woman who published more than thirty books, including bestselling novels, memoirs, nonfiction books and childrens’ series. In terms of sales and popularity, she was right up there holding her own with Daphne Du Maurier in her day. So we wanted to kick off this podcast with Monica Dickens because it was while discussing Mariana that we started to formulate the idea of creating this podcast.  Over the years, Kim and I have traded and discussed so many books by women authors, books that have become our new favorite classics, and I think the common refrain that kept coming up between us was, “This author is incredible; why on earth is nobody talking about her? Why on earth had we never heard of her before now? People should be reading her.”

KIM: So that’s basically what this podcast is about. We’re going to go beyond the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen and all the authors you’ve already heard of and start discovering some of these other great women writers in history, the ones everyone seems to have forgotten.

AMY: We want to go back in time and take another look at some of these women writers who paved the way and maybe even had success in their lifetime but didn’t really get their lasting due. So this podcast is about giving these literary ladies a much-needed reintroduction.

KIM: Which brings us back to Monica Dickens.

AMY: All right, so let’s just start with a little overview of who Monica Dickens was. She was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her grandfather was Dickens’ eighth child. She was born in 1915 and grew up comfortably upper-class in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London. She never really expected that she was going to turn out to be a writer, it was actually her sister and her mother who were more the “writers” in the family. I think it’s probably good that she didn’t start out with aspirations of being a writer because I think being Charles Dickens’ great granddaughter is probably a pretty heavy legacy if that’s your ambition in life. So when she was younger, she had some troubles. She was a little lost, a little aimless. She flunked out of three different schools, and we’ll talk about that later because it relates to Mariana, the novel we’re going to be talking about. So when she was around 20 years old, she was feeling depressed and directionless, and she made the unorthodox decision, based on her background, that she was going to go into domestic service. This was a move that shocked a lot of her family members because it’s like she was going to be the “downstairs” from Downton Abbey. She went to a cooking school (London’s Petite Cordon Bleu) and she ended up working for two years as a housemaid and a cook general in more than 20 upper-class London households. She wound up taking those experiences and turning it into a memoir that she wrote in her early 20s called One Pair of Hands. I think she was sort of asked to write this book by somebody that connected her with somebody in publishing who I would imagine heard her last name, Dickens, and said, “You know, you should write all this down.” So that was her first foray into writing and she wrote that memoir, (which I have yet to read but I’m really interested in checking it out now) but that book was a huge success for her; everybody loved it. I think it was part social commentary, but also really funny. Kim, have you read it?

KIM: No, I haven’t read it, but I can say that actually it was somebody that had a Dickens-related magazine who read the first pages of this and encouraged her to move forward on it.

AMY: Oh, interesting. 

KIM: So that connection was there with her great-grandfather.

AMY: Okay. So, she wrote this kind of nonfiction book, and then her second book was a novel, Mariana, which is the book we’re going to discuss today. It was also successful. During WWII she went on to enter the nursing field and she published a book that was similar to One Pair of Hands called One Pair of Feet, which was all about her time as a nurse. She ended up marrying an American naval officer, and she moved to the States after the war in 1951. But even in America, she continued to write. In the 70s and 80s, she wrote series for children, the most famous was probably The House At World’s End series. She also published her autobiography in 1978. And then she passed away in 1992. So, before we get into some more interesting tidbits about Monica, is there anything else, Kim, that particularly struck you about her life when you were reading about her?

KIM: I would just say that overall, for someone related to “literary royalty,” like you said, she seems pretty normal, like someone we’d be friends with. And the more that we’re going to go over the novel and what happens in it and that it’s a bit of a memoir of her life, it makes me feel even more and more like that. She seems very real. She’s not larger-than-life, she seems like a normal person.

AMY: Very relatable. A few tidbits that Kim and I really love about her that we read: as I mentioned before, she got expelled or tossed-out of three different schools, and those episodes are all represented to varying degrees in Mariana. First was St. Paul’s Girls’ School. Kim, what did she do to get expelled from St. Paul’s?

KIM: She dumped her uniform over into the river (off the side of a bridge). So nothing too terrible.

AMY: She went to a Parisian finishing school. She didn’t make the cut there, either. Finally, she went to the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Arts, but she got kicked out for lack of talent, which I kind of applaud her for. I feel like that was probably the best for her, that she didn’t go on to become an actress, because I can’t see that knowing what I know about her, really. She was shy and pretty bad at small talk. There’s an anecdote where during her first debutante ball, she disappeared into a bathroom to read Vanity Fair. And I think that’s kind of why we love her: that she hid out in a bathroom at a dance.

KIM: (laughing) I love that she did that! I could see both of us doing that, for sure. We would do that now!

AMY: It sort of  speaks to what you were saying, Kim, about her being somebody that we could love. Relatable.

KIM: That would be us. I could definitely see us doing that.

AMY: She had a dog named Ugly. I just think anybody that names her dog Ugly has to be a cool chick.

KIM: She has a sense of humor.

AMY: Yeah. Exactly. She also had a mild eating disorder in her early 20s and she was almost hospitalized for it, and that sort of comes into play a little bit in Mary Shannon, the heroine of Mariana, as well. We saw some of that struggle that she had with her weight. But yes, in many ways, Monica really is like the heroine of Mariana. She’s inwardly cynical, she’s self-effacing, she’s daring and rebellious but also insecure and awkward at times. There was a lot in her that you could love. Just to give you a little background about the time that Mariana was written. It was published in 1940 when she was in her early 20s. It was republished by Persephone Books in 1999, so you can definitely get your hands on a copy. 

KIM: Shout-out to Persephone Books!

AMY: Yeah. It’s basically a coming-of-age novel. She wrote this book at the start of WWII, but the story itself goes back to the protagonist’s youth in the 1930s. So most of the novel takes place between the first and second World Wars in those sort of happy, halcyon days of England.

KIM: So, the novel was a success at the time, but imagine having your publishing career kick off right at the beginning of WWII. I mean, it’s kind of like if you had a book out right now during Covid. (We’re recording this during the middle of a global pandemic.)

AMY: Right, yeah. It would have been challenging to maybe get a bit of traction… but she did.  The book was a success. So before we get into talking about this book more, we should mention that Kim and I both have cocktails at the ready that we have  made prior to the podcast. How is yours, Kim?

KIM: It’s delicious. It tastes a little bit like sangria. 

AMY: Yes.

KIM: It’s called a Dubonnet Cassis. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that exactly correctly, but it’s from the book! It’s inspired by a drink that Mary orders when she’s trying to be sophisticated. 

AMY: Yeah. So she’s in Paris and she’s attending dress school at the time. Dress-making school… what would you call that? Dress-making school, that doesn’t sound right. Fashion school, whatever it was. She’s sort of trying to be sophisticated in Paris, but she’s brand new, English girl, and when she goes to the bar it’s really the only drink she knows to order, so that’s what she orders. So our Dubonnet Cassis is Dubonnet, which is like a sweet, wine-based aperitif, and Cassis, which is a blackberry liqueur, with a little splash of soda and a twist of lime, and yes, Kim, it tastes pretty much exactly like sangria. I was nervous, because I don’t really like super sweet, syrupy drinks, but I liked it. It’s palatable.

KIM: I think I like it because it was in the book.

AMY: I like it for that reason, but also, did you know that a Dubonnet and gin is the favorite cocktail of the Queen of England?

KIM: Well, that makes me like it even more. That makes me feel sophisticated, too.

AMY: So we will put the ingredients for a Dubonnet Cassis in our show notes, but now that we have our cocktails handy, let’s dive into Mariana! 

KIM: All right, so let’s get to the book. The structure is basically a fairly drama-free coming of age story, it’s kind of a light romance almost. In the preface the book is referred to as a “hot water bottle” genre. I looked it up and I think actually the writer of the preface might have made up that phrase herself, but I take it to mean a cozy and comfortable story.

AMY: Can I just interrupt for a second and say that I actually read this book in a hammock, outside, and it’s lovely for that as well.  

KIM: Yes, I think it could be a beach read sort of thing, a page-turner in that way, because it’s sandwiched between this high-drama, this high-tension plot: she finds out in the very beginning that her significant other’s ship has been sunk by a mine at the beginning of WWII and that most of the men on board have been killed. And she’s out in the country not near a telephone and she has to wait all night to find out if he’s alive or dead. 

AMY: Her mind is just racing at that time, because there’s nothing she can do. It’s interesting, because when I was reading that beginning, you care, you’re concerned for her, but then you’re ready to dive into the meat of the story. And then when we wind up circling back to this little dramatic plot at the tail end of the book, because we have gotten to know her and her life — the main character’s name is Mary Shannon — because we’ve gotten to know Mary, I was just on the edge of my freakin’ seat. I was white-knuckling my way, trying to read as fast as I could. We’re not going to give any spoilers about what happens to the significant other, but I just thought it was really effective to, like you said, sandwich the coming-of-age story between these two segments.

KIM: Absolutely. By the end, you’re so emotionally committed. You know who the love interest is at that point. You very much care whether or not he has survived and we aren’t going to tell you, but I will tell you that it is emotional to read the end by the time you get there. So I think it’s brilliant that she used this tactic to take this “hot water bottle” genre and make it something really special.

AMY: Also, like any young girl growing up, she has several love interests, several crushes, paramours, throughout this story. So each time you would get to a new one (there were three main gents) you kind of reflect back on the very beginning where the navy officer is potentially down and you think, “Is this the guy? Is this going to be the guy she ends up with? Oh my gosh.” So that was kind of fun. Then you finally realize which is the love of her life and you are just fighting to make sure everything’s going to be okay.

KIM: Yeah. No wonder people loved this book at the time. I’m sure a lot of people were going through similar things at the beginning of WWII, wondering where their significant other was and if they’d be okay. So you can imagine they could really relate to this.

AMY: Absolutely. And when I first started reading the book, I assumed that the heroine’s name would be Mariana, right? It’s not. She’s never called Mariana, she’s Mary. The book’s title is actually tied to a poem by Tennyson of the same name, which is pretty much a dirgeful death wish of a poem. It’s about a young woman who is pining for the man she lost. So there’s definitely a connection between Tennyson’s poem and this overarching saga of “Is her sweetheart going to come home?” which I loved. It’s a poem that, when Mary goes to acting school in the middle of the book, it’s the monologue that she winds up having to read, and she does a horrible job of it, basically, because she’s a terrible actress, but yeah, I thought that was an interesting way to spin a prior work of literature.

KIM: Yeah, the theme of powerlessness and sort of events that you can’t control. Basically it feels like she’s taking “Mariana” and making it an answer to how you can handle those things that are out of your control and still try to move forward in your life in spite of them.

AMY: Right, and I think the arc of this novel, once you get into Mary’s story of her childhood and her growing up. It’s really the journey of how she becomes her own person and becomes a strong woman. The book may be sectioned out in a way that’s kind of based on the various men who come and go in her life, but when all is said and done, it’s really a book about her finding herself. So at the end, even though there’s no major plot per se, it’s sort of a slice of her life and we are getting a window into one girl’s existence. There’s not a lot that happens that’s out of the ordinary. You sort of have to like that sort of book.

KIM: I think that’s true, because even though it is the men who come and go in her life, I don’t think too much importance is placed on the men, in a good way. I think they’re part of how she’s figuring out who she is, but it really does remain her thoughts and the things that she’s trying to overcome. It really is about her, I don’t think it gets too caught up in these other characters, which I think is a good thing. 

AMY: So what do we love about Mary? We’ve talked about what we like about Monica Dickens, but now let’s talk about her heroine.  

KIM: Okay, yeah, so what I love about Mary is that she isn’t larger than life, but she isn’t an anti-heroine either. She’s kind of an “every girl” and “every woman” throughout the novel. Her teachers report that she’s seventh in her class. That sounds great until you learn that there are ten other girls in the class. They say she has a tendency in her to resent authority to the point of resistance. I mean, I can identify with that. I definitely didn’t do much of the resisting part, but I definitely thought about it and wanted to. The teacher goes on to write in this report card home to Mary’s mom that: “Although she is popular with her fellow pupils, I am afraid she is a bad mixer, being at the same time intolerant and unconfident of others and disinclined to enter into the life of the community.” It says her heart’s in the right place and she will eventually mature into a fine woman, but it’s not the most enthusiastic review, right?

AMY: No. She’s not academically special at all and she doesn’t see herself as special at all. I mean, she has a lot of mortifying moments and she just thinks she’s very average, which is funny because as you go along in this book, there’s nothing average. She’s a remarkable young lady, but she doesn’t see herself that way at all. But I think, going back to her relatability, that’s sort of endearing.

KIM: Absolutely. 

AMY: So after this very beginning where she hears on the radio that the ship has gone down, the next chapter jumps into, would you say she’s 11 or 12 years old?

KIM: Yes. I don’t think it’s explicitly says, but I think about that age. Yeah.

AMY: We go back to sort of her family’s summer compound. I liken it to the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts. They had this cool estate that belonged to her grandparents and the whole family gathers there in the summer. This place is called Charbury in the novel, but in real life, Monica Dickens had a similar summer house that she’d go to on her mother’s side of the family called Chilworthy. Everything sounds very similar and autobiographical about this.

KIM: Yeah, very much drawn from her experiences and her memory of that and how much she loved that.

AMY: And the important thing that comes out of these summers at Charbury is her cousin, Denys. What did you make of Denys?

KIM: Oh, you know… I found him a bit annoying from the very beginning, actually. It says clearly that everyone worshipped him. All of his cousins worshipped him. He could basically do no wrong. He was great and perfect and all-powerful, but the grown-ups were kind of like, Okay, he’s going to get his when he goes to the next level of school. They’re going to basically beat him out of it, is what it sounded like. But Mary is basically…

AMY: Besotted. Totally crushing on her cousin. When I first was reading this, I was taken aback and I didn’t know what to think. In the context of this time period, was that normal? Because Mary was acting like it was completely normal, right?

KIM: I know you did some research into whether it was or wasn’t. I will say maybe I have read too many historical novels, because I felt like it wasn’t that shocking to me.

AMY: Right. I felt the same way. I thought, “How am I supposed to think about this, because this could be perfectly normal, and she’s acting like, ‘Oh, yeah, I hope Denys and I are going to be the hot ticket here and the family is going to be happy for us.’” British royalty have been marrying their cousins for centuries, even through Queen Victoria’s era. I knew Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were cousins, so i thought, “Okay, maybe in that time period it was more accepted.” So I looked it up and from what I found, after WWI in England it definitely started to be frowned upon. Up until that point, it wasn’t as big a deal. It was kind of commonplace if you wound up marrying your cousin. Not commonplace, but it wasn’t taboo necessarily, but after WWI, it started to be like, “eeeh, Maybe not.” I think I read that around that time period, one in 6,000 couples would have been married in that day. So while I was reading the book, there was some high drama between Mary and Denys. They made out after the fox hunt. Which, by the way, I’ve been to a fox hunt. Did you know that?

KIM: What????! NOoooo! How could I not have known this? Oh, my god.

AMY: That’s a story for another time. But yeah, so Denys and Mary, cousins from Charbury, they kissed at one point, and he was definitely leading her on and so she sort of put all the cards out on the table and said, “What’s going on between us?” And he laughed it off and said, “Oh, silly, we could never have a romance because that would be incest.” And he says the word. That was a complicated little thing to sort out and a little bit shocking.

KIM: it made me really like him even less at the point because I felt like he really was taking advantage of her youth and the fact that she really looked up to him.

AMY: Yes, absolutely. After that whole episode, she gets over Denys pretty quickly and is like, “Okay, he’s a player.” So like Monica Dickens, Mary is kind of aimless after finishing school as a sort of second-rate student. She decides that she’s going to follow in her Uncle Geoffrey’s footsteps (He’s an actor), and she’s going to go to acting school and see, maybe she can be a movie star. This is one of my favorite parts of the book because her description of the acting school is so hilarious.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: I have a little bit that I will read from this part, just because when they get to Miming Class… I mean, you can already imagine. “Individual Miming” is the name of the class: “This was the worst part of all. The students stood in a whispering line against the wall and each in turn had to step into the middle of the room and render in dumb show whatever Miss Dallas’s whimsical fancy conceived. One could not laugh. It was all so sad and embarrassing and too painfully suggestive of what one probably looked like oneself.” Remember the green tunics and tights was the outfit they needed to wear?

KIM:  Aw, it was hilarious.  

AMY: She paints the picture of the acting school so well.

KIM: Yeah, that and when she just has enough of it. She’s in the middle of this live performance and she goes into this blackout rage and I quote: “She began to burlesque.” And that, by the way, is how she gets kicked out of acting school.

AMY: And it’s kind of shocking because what we’ve known of her up to this time is that she’s pretty reserved and just a wallflower, so imagining her up on stage in front of all the parents and relatives of all the students and she makes a fabulous, racy display of herself to the point where she gets kicked out, and then she just runs off stage and leaves the school. It was great. It was great. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: She does not know what to do with her life, but her mother convinces her to go to Paris to study dressmaking, so that’s what she does and there, she meets Bachelor No. 2: Pierre?

KIM: Yeah, Pierre.

AMY: I have to admit, I got kind of swept up in Pierre at the beginning. 

KIM: I thought he was going to be “the one” at first, when she first met him. I thought, “He’s going to be the one somehow!”

AMY: He’s great. He’s great at first, and very sophisticated. He’s got money. It seems like he’s the answer to all Mary’s problems, because back in England, her mom is having financial issues. If she marries this guy (which is what he wants) all that will be solved.

KIM: And Mary is very uncertain about her future. She’s not really into what she’s doing, what she’s studying. She hasn’t really found anything yet so I think he kind of fills a hole there.

AMY: Right I found it an interesting scene when she took him back to England at one point to meet the whole family that usually was at Charbury and she saw him juxtaposed with all her English relatives and realized, “this is not the guy.” By that point the worm has turned a little bit with him and we are starting to see that he’s a jerk. But he reminded me at that point of Cecil Vyse in A Room With a View.

KIM: A hundred percent. Yep.

AMY: Just totally foppish. And thank god, she kicks him to the curb.

KIM: And there’s a great quote where she talks about the difference between Paris and England which is also the difference between Pierre and someone who might be her true love. It says, “If Paris had a feeling of its own in the air, so had England, but you only noticed it when you had been away. It was a feeling of damp, fresh security. Everything was so right and so comfortably unexotic, like a cabbage. It seemed that even the breezes blew there because they knew that England was the only possible country in which to blow. Mary had never been away for so long before, and she stepped down the gangway with the joyful feeling that she was returning to where she belonged.”

AMY: The interesting note about that section, because I loved that whole paragraph as well, and I thought, “Oh, god, her love for her country and just ‘England’s dampness’” — she loves it there and doesn’t want to live permanently in Paris, but I think it’s interesting that Monica Dickens ended up leaving England in the fifties and going to America. She obviously did leave if she felt that way. Kind of interesting. 

KIM: Yeah, things probably changed, maybe, with WWII and everything. Maybe she just couldn’t return to the way it was.

AMY: Okay, so she dumps Pierre, thank God, and she ends up back in England. The woman that wrote the preface for the Persephone version of this novel that was republished in 1999, Harriet Lane, she said the “plot would probably ring some bells with a certain Bridget Jones.” Let’s discuss how she meets Sam, who is the guy that ends up becoming her husband. I don’t think we’re spoiling it to talk about the men this way, that she winds up with this guy. We’re not going to spoil the ending, but Sam is the guy she ends up marrying, and their “meet-cute” is one of the best that I’ve read.

KIM: It’s amazing and so, so real compared to your typical meet-cute that happens.

AMY: Basically, we won’t even spoil this part other than to say that she gets sick to her stomach. 

KIM: It is so very Bridget Jones.

AMY: It’s just very Bridget Jones, it involves vomiting, and it’s really funny, but also your heart just goes out to her because it’s very mortifying. But it all works out in the end.

KIM: It’s very sweet, too!

AMY: So sweet. And there’s a poignant passage in the last chapter where it’s nighttime and she knows  that in the morning she’s going to find out whether her husband is alive or dead. She’s kind of thinking back on Tennyson’s poem and Mariana. In the poem, Mariana is just basically like, “I want to die. I can’t live without this guy. I can’t go on.” Mary has a different perspective and I'll just read that line. She says, “But Mariana was wrong. You couldn’t die. You had to go on. When you were born, you were given a trust of individuality that you were bound to preserve. It was precious. The things that happened in your life, however closely connected with other people, developed and strengthened that individuality. You became a person. Nothing that ever happens in life can take away the fact that I am me.” I loved that because even though we didn’t know what was going to become of her husband, we got the sense that she was going to be okay. She was a strong woman by that point, and she was going to persevere. I thought that was beautiful.

KIM: Absolutely. I agree. It gives me the chills hearing that again. I remember reading that in the moment and having that feeling. I also think that gives a real glimpse into some of the passages that you’ll read in this book. It is a coming of age story, but there are so many really great quotes in the book that I think are inspiring.

AMY: So, as we might have mentioned earlier, it’s not like this book has a really strong plotline or action that’s happening. It’s kind of a slice of this girl’s life. It’s like following along with a friend’s life that you’re catching up with. There are no film adaptations of this novel, and I wonder if it could even work.   

KIM: I think it could be a miniseries. I think it could be like a Masterpiece miniseries. 

AMY: Ohhh! Yeah!

KIM: I do think you’re right though. For a film, though, it might not be quite right. Like a two-hour typical film.

AMY: Right. Definitely Hollywood would have to ‘zhuzh’ it up a bit  in terms of the things that happened in it. The book itself is amazing, but to make it something you’d watch in one sitting, you’d need more that was happening. 

KIM: Yep.

AMY: So let’s say this is a BBC miniseries suddenly. Who would we cast as some of these characters we’ve talked about?

KIM: Okay, I wonder if we’re going to have the same people. We have not talked about this before. So I don’t know that many actors in their 20s by name, but I was thinking Saoirse Ronan for Mary and maybe Callum Turner for Denys. (He was Frank Churchhill in the recent Emma that just came out this year.) Or maybe Timothee Chalamet, but I feel like I should save him because I think I’m going to want to cast him in the future. And then for Sam, maybe Tom Holland, I think he was Superman. I can see him as Sam because Sam seems like such a sweet, personable nice guy.

AMY: Oh, yes. For sure.

KIM: What about you? What do you think? I’m dying to hear!

AMY: So for Mary, I’m saying Maisie Williams. 

KIM: Remind me of who she is?

AMY: Maisie is from Game of Thrones. She’s the youngest Stark sister.

KIM: Oh my god, yes! I love it! Okay, I want to change to that one. I love it. 

AMY: A physical description of Mary from the book, it says: “She was a shrimp of a child with no natural color so that people said triumphantly she looked delicate. When she grinned she looked like a gnome with her narrow chin and little pointed ears.” I mean, that sounds like Maisie Williams to me. Maisie could play both the younger and the grown-up Mary.

KIM: She totally could. She totally could straddle both. Absolutely. 

AMY: For Denys, I’m going to go with Harry Styles. He’s kind of like a charmer, bad boy. He’s good looking, and she always talked about the flop of hair that would hang over Denys’s  forehead and Harry Styles has that. Pierre, I would cast Louis Garrel who played Jo’s German husband in the recent Little Women.

KIM: Oh, I love that. He’s much older though.

AMY: Okay.  So yeah, he might not be young enough. For Sam, I said Harry Hadden-Paton, who, in Downton Abbey, he was the guy that married Lady Edith at the end. They kind of describe Sam in the book as not necessarily drop-dead-gorgeous, but as somebody who looks like he’d be a good husband, a nice husband. That’s how she described him.

KIM: I can see that. You know, I’m seeing a huge problem here. We are going to want to adapt and write screenplays for all of our episodes of our podcasts!

AMY: We’re doing some of the work for ourselves right now basically. We’re getting some of this out of the way.

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: So what did we discover today from reading Monica Dickens’ Mariana? We discovered that crushing on your cousin is a really bad idea.

KIM: Yes, absolutely. Especially your first cousin. We also discovered that throwing up can be wildly romantic. Who knew?

AMY: Who knew? We discovered that acting classes are pretty strange in any era…

KIM: And we’ve discovered that Charles isn’t the only “Dickens” worth reading!

AMY: So moving on, what are you currently reading this week, Kim?

KIM: Oh my gosh, I’ve been wanting to tell you about this, but I saved it. I am reading Ellen Wood’s East Lynne. It’s about an aristocratic woman who abandons her husband and children for a wicked seducer, and apparently it was devoured by everyone from the Prince of Whales to Joseph Conrad. So I’m excited to really dig into this book.

AMY: That sounds amazing, and guess what? I’VE NEVER HEARD OF IT. Sounds like a future episode, don’t you think?

KIM: That’s what I was thinking?

AMY: When this pandemic shutdown started and libraries closed, I realized I needed the fattest possible book to get me through it if I wasn’t going to be able to check books out of the library. So right now I am a third of the way through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: The History of a Young Lady. It was published in 1748, it’s over 1500 pages long in very, very small print. It’s very dramatic. It’s about a teenage girl who has three options. She can either manage this kind of dorky guy that her family is pressuring her to marry who is kind of a cross between Pride & Prejudice’s Mr. Collins and Uriah Heap. 

KIM: Oh, god.

AMY: He’s just an awful human being. Or she can run away with the sort of town cad, womanizer guy that everybody knows has a bad reputation, but he is offering to take her away in the dark of night to get her away from this impending marriage.

KIM: Don’t do it, Clarissa!

AMY: Or her third option is to kill herself! She’s a teenager and she’s very shrewd and clever, but there’s lots of teenage angst.

KIM: That’s a good pandemic read!

AMY: So that’s all for today’s podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode. 

AMY: If you have any ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see featured on our show, let us know.

KIM: Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her” into one of your new favorite authors!

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