25. Margaret Wolfe Hungerford—Molly Bawn with Jessica Callahan

KIM: So Amy, I was wondering, have you read James Joyce’s Ulysses?

AMY: Yes, or rather, I guess I should say I tried, because it was a pretty difficult go, and I don’t think I fully understood half of it. But have you read it, Kim?

KIM: I did. I read it in grad school, and I’m so glad I read it and discussed it with a class and a professor, because it really helped me make sense of it all. And, if I remember correctly, it actually took a whole semester to read it, too. But absolutely worth it.

AMY: But, you know, our listeners might be wondering right now why we’re talking about James Joyce. He’s not exactly lost….nor is he a lady.

KIM: True, but this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” author is, and one of her novels, Molly Bawn, happens to be mentioned in Chapter 18 of Ulysses. More on that later. 

AMY: That’s right. Margaret Wolfe Hungerford was a 19th century Irish novelist who specialized in Victorian-era romance novels. In fact, she wrote at least 57 known works, and possibly there were more that she wrote anonymously. We should note that Wolfe Hungerford (also known by her nom de plume, The Duchess) wasn’t exactly celebrated for great character development or depth, but we will say her books are very fun to read. They are filled with humor and really quippy banter. And isn’t that kind of what we want sometimes? Some escapist fare? (Especially these days.)

KIM: Yeah, her books are real page turners, which is why she was an incredibly popular novelist in her day (thus, as we mentioned, her novel being name-dropped in Ulysses, one of the most critically acclaimed books of all time).  

AMY: But we’re guessing most people breeze right past that reference to Molly Bawn in Ulysses. So we were curious to learn more about The Duchess and exactly what made her novels — including Molly Bawn — so insanely popular with Victorians. We brought on a special guest for this week’s episode who is going to help us dig into all that. And bonus, she’s of Irish descent, so it’s only fitting that with St. Paddy’s Day right around the corner she jumps in on this discussion of an Irish “lost lady.”

KIM: So, Amy, let’s raid the stacks and get started! 

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]

KIM:  Who better to welcome to the show this week to chat about romance novel Molly Bawn than our good friend of many years (and fellow English major) Jessica Callahan? She is Vice President of Development at Crown Media Family Networks, home to Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, Hallmark Drama, and the on-demand streaming video service, Hallmark Movies Now. During her time at Crown Media, Jessica has directed the development of over twenty Movies of the Week. Prior to her time at the network, she spent a decade at Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions producing Movies of the Week for CBS and ABC. Before transitioning into television in 2006, she was an editor of romance and mystery novels at Penguin Group in New York City. Welcome, Jessica! 

Jessica: Hi! Thanks for having me, guys!

KIM: Okay, so thank god we’ve all had the Hallmark Channel to get us through this pandemic. I know it’s only March, but is it safe to assume you’re already hard at work on Christmas movies for this coming year? 

JESSICA: Yeah, we had a very small respite in January, but honestly, it’s never not Christmas at Hallmark. It’s always Christmas, but, you know, we’re here for your romantic needs all year long!

AMY: Is it every hard to have it be Christmas all year long?

JESSICA: Yeah! It’s exhausting, because you just have to sort of keep yourself in that spirit on some level, and we make so many of them that it’s very hard to figure out a new way to bake cookies or a new way to make a snowman or a new way to get your characters into these very sort of traditional norms that we all know but also to keep them feeling fresh and to make them feel organic within the story. So I’ve made anywhere between 8 to 6 in a year (just Christmas alone — that’s not including the out of holiday franchises), but yeah, it’s rough! Once you just get done with it, to start thinking about Christmas the next year and to keep it going… it’s a little too much sometimes!

AMY: And then you actually have Christmas in your own life to celebrate.

JESSICA: Yeah, and that’s like the craziest part because we get done with making the movies in October. Like October, beginning of November, so by the time we’re coming out of it and we’re thinking about spring movies, Christmas is actually all around. The stores are decorated! The carols are on! People are asking what you want for Christmas and all that. So it is funny and it does sort of happen every year in the same way. So it’s fun and yet really kind of weird at the same time. 

AMY: Okay, so lucky for you with all this Christmas overload, we are switching gears. Next week is St. Patrick’s Day, and since your last name is Callahan, we knew we had to bring in the “Irish girl” for this episode. I’m just wondering, how strongly do you identify with your Irish roots? Do you bust out the soda bread and corned beef next week?

JESSICA: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My mom is half Irish. Her father was Irish descent; my dad is half, because his mother was half and his father was half. So there’s definitely this pervasive Irish American-ness to both sides of my family, and we actually would celebrate St. Patrick’s Day like an Easter or a Thanksgiving growing up. It was a very big part of my childhood memories. We would not only eat the corned beef and cabbage and wear the green and all that, but my mom used to buy me a corsage back in the day. It would be a green carnation with the white ribbons around it. She would pin it to my coat and so everybody knew all day long that I was a little Irish girl. So I have really very ingrained memories of that. My grandfather used to say that the worst thing an Irish person could do was to forget where they came from. So just sort of knowing Irish history and knowing the history of Irish Americans in this country was sort of ingrained in me very early, and so there’s always sort of a bit of a lens through which I look at American history, and it’s definitely through my Irish heritage. So, yeah! Begosh, begorrah! I totally am!

KIM: So given all that, have you read many classic works from Irish women authors, and had you already heard of Margaret Wolf Hungerford before this?

JESSICA: I hadn’t heard of her before this, so I was pleasantly surprised because when you talk about classic Irish literature, you think of Yeats; you think of Oscar Wilde; you think of James Joyce. There are these names that sort of just pop into your head, and not one of them are female until you get to the 20th century and then you finally get to Edna O’Brien or even Iris Murdoch, who I don’t necessarily think of as an Irish writer because she didn’t really grow up there. She was more of an English writer. But this was the first time I’d ever heard of this woman, and she was a romance novelist, so to me, I was like “Oooh! Who’s this lady? I want to know her!!” So I was pleasantly surprised, so thank you for introducing me to her!

AMY: Of course. Let’s start off by finding out a little bit more about Margaret Wolf Hungerford, a.k.a. The Duchess. (I mean, how much do we love her pen name? That’s awesome. To clarify — she was not ACTUALLY a Duchess, we need to make that clear.) She was born Margaret Hamilton in 1855, and raised in [feigning Irish accent] County Cork, Ireland…. That’s horrible.

JESSICA: [laughing]

KIM: I thought that was great!

AMY: County Cork, Ireland — and this was just about a decade after the Great Famine had ravaged the country. Even at an early age, Margaret showed a lot of writing talent, and she won some school writing competitions. At the young age of 17, she married. She moved to Dublin and had three daughters, and then, sadly, she became a widow at just 23 years old, with all three of her children still under the age of six. Sounds like a pretty precarious position to be in, wouldn’t you say, Kim?

KIM: It sure does. So that was when she made the always bold decision to attempt writing for a living to support herself and her young family. She headed home to Milleen House in County Cork and fairly quickly had her first novel, Phyllis, published in 1877. That novel is available to order online and we’ll link to it in our show notes, but I couldn’t find a description of the plot. Molly Bawn, though, was only her second novel, out of dozens, and that was published within a year of Phyllis, in 1878. She apparently had a very methodical approach to writing, and she wrote every morning for three hours. After she moved back to Cork is also when her life takes a plot twist straight out of one of her romance novels. Do you want to fill us in on that story, Jessica?

JESSICA: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I should be saying this in my best “bodice-ripper” copy voice, honestly, because it does get very interesting.

AMY: Bodice-ripper!

JESSICA: [laughing]. On her return to Cork, Margaret actually struck up with her neighbor — the boy next door, literally, Thomas Henry Hungerford, who was the eldest son of the local landlord. So Thomas Henry lived in Cahermore House, which was situated right around the corner, and his mother was not happy with this new relationship with the Protestant minister’s daughter. He was the eldest son of Henry Jones [Hungerford] and Mary Boon Couper, and as the eldest he was trained for the army and had to go off to the Boer wars. But while he was fighting here, he gets this message from his mother that calls him home, claiming she’s worried about his father’s behavior. When he gets there, he discovers that it was all a grand matchmaking scheme. Mom just wanted to marry him off to a rich young lady by the name of Miss Townsend of Derry House. Thomas Henry turns down this idea, much to his mother’s dismay. (And just a little bit of a footnote: Miss Townsend goes on to marry George Bernard Shaw a few years later.) His mother was then appalled to find out that he then goes and secretly marries his neighbor lady who is three years his elder (Our little Margaret is quite the cougar here!) while they were in London when she went there on a business trip to meet with her publishers. Here she is a widowed writer with three children and regarded as a very disagreeable match by mom, so you can just imagine what her relationship with her mother-in-law was after that.

AMY: That is some soap-opera caliber stuff right there! And you’re right — apparently the mother-in-law never really did make peace with Hungerford. She sounds like she was a real harridan and made her life hell).  But another interesting fact about The Duchess: She is credited with being the first person to pen the phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” (It’s actually a line she wrote in Molly Bawn.) 

KIM: Right, and before I knew this, if I had to guess, I would have said it had to have come from Shakespeare, right? And he actually did write something similar. It’s in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and I’ll read it to you:

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,

Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues

AMY: I think we all like Margaret’s better. It’s just simpler. Pithier, right? But that said, she did seem to be a big fan of Shakespeare’s, and you can see a lot of his influence in her work I think, including in Molly Bawn. Sadly, the Duchess died of typhoid at the age of 42, but it’s pretty amazing when you realize how many novels she managed to write in a fairly short period of time, which, I think is a great segue into our discussion about her most famous novel, Molly Bawn. Jessica, before we get too deep into it, do you want to give our listeners a quick, spoiler-free overview of the plot? 

JESSICA: Sure. Eleanor Massereene was orphaned as a child and raised by her much older half-brother, John, who gave her the nickname “Molly Bawn,” and bawn means “fair,” according to our Molly. Since she was a fair-haired, sweet child, the nickname stuck. At the open of the story, Molly is 19 and longing for adventure when a dashing cavalry officer arrives, a young friend of John comes to visit. Tedcastle Luttrell is instantly smitten with our Molly and the novel follows the adventure of this young couple as Molly is called to her estranged yet ailing grandfather’s estate for a house party filled with grandfather’s scheming heirs. Let’s just say hijinx, drama and romance ensue.

KIM: House parties!

JESSICA: Woo! House party!

AMY: There’s always hijinx at the house party, man. Always.

KIM: So you’ll be interested maybe to hear that “Molly Bawn” is also the name of a traditional Irish folk song, and we’ll be playing it for you at the end of the episode because Molly references it in the book. So, we mentioned that Hungerford’s novels were Victorian, and her plots and love scenes certainly stayed mostly to Victorian social mores and especially expectations of women. There’s a lot of flirty dialogue, but the love scenes are quite chaste. Apparently, she very skillfully captured that tone of fashionable society of the time, which is one of the reasons that people really liked her books.

AMY: And if I may be so bold to say, Jessica, I think the first third of this book had some quintessential “Hallmark movie” moments. Would you agree?

JESSICA: Uh, yes. Romance genre tropes are eternal, it seems! As Kim just said, there’s a lot of flirty “will they/won’t they?” banter. The baking scene, of course, with the flour-throwing… nothing like a good flour-throwing to get people to gaze longingly into each other’s eyes and wipe something from a cheek! The strawberry-picking scene could have been right out of one of our “Summer Nights” movies. And then of course Letty showing up when Ted corners Molly in the school house. We call that the “Act 6 Interrupted Kiss.” So yeah, there’s a lot of things in there that I felt were right at home and still in the pocket for what we do in the romance world.

AMY: If we had the Hallmark “Bingo Game” or the Hallmark “Drinking Game” that you see going around, going viral on the Internet, we could definitely have put it to work for this novel, as well.

JESSICA: Yeah, I think you would have had a couple of shots. [laughing]

KIM: We should have done that! Jess, would you like to read one of your favorite excerpts from Molly Bawn to give our listeners a feel for what it sounds like?

JESSICA: Yeah, sure. I picked the one that starts out Chapter 5, and I think this kind of goes back to what you guys were saying about sort of Shakespearean influences and these sort of romantic notions. So I’ll just start:

   It’s four o’clock and a hush, a great stillness, born of oppressive heat, is over the land. Again the sun is smiting with hot wrath the unoffending earth; the flowers nod drowsily or lie half dead of languor, their gay leaves touching the ground. 

   “The sky was blue as a summer sea,

    The depths were cloudless overhead;

    The air was calm as it could be;

    There was no sight or sound of dread,” 

quotes Luttrell, dreamily, as he strays idly along the garden path, through scented shrubs and all the many-hued children of light and dew. His reverie is lengthened yet not diffuse. One little word explains it all. It seems to him that the word is everywhere: the birds sing it, the wind whistles it as it rushes faintly past, the innumerable voices of the summer cry ceaselessly for “Molly.”

   “Mr. Luttrell, Mr. Luttrell,” cries someone. “Look up!” And he does look up. 

   Above him, on the balcony, stands Molly, “a thing of beauty,” fairer than any flower that grows beneath. Her eyes like twin stars are gleaming, deepening; her happy lips are parted; her hair drawn loosely back, shines like threads of living gold. Every feature is awake and full of life; every movement of her sweet body, clad in its white gown, proclaims a very joyousness of living. 

   With hands held high above her head, filled with parti-colored roses, she stands laughing down upon him; while he stares back at her, with a heart filled too full of love for happiness. With a slight momentary closing of her lids she opens her hands and flings the scented shower onto his uplifted face.

   “Take your punishment,” she whispers, saucily, bending over him, “and learn your lesson. Don’t look at me another time.”

   “It was by your own desire I did so,” exclaims he, bewildered, shaking the crimson and yellow and white leaves from off his head and shoulders. “How am I to understand you?”

   “How do I know, when I don’t even understand myself? But when I called out to you ‘Look up,’ of course I meant ‘look down.’ Don’t you remember the old game with the handkerchief? — when I say ‘Let go,’ ‘hold fast;’ when I say ‘hold fast,’ ‘let go?’ You must recollect it.”

   “I have a dim idea of something idiotic like what you say.”

   “It is not idiotic, but it suits only some people; it suits me. There is a certain perverseness about it, a determination to do just what one is told not to do, that affects me most agreeably. Did I..” — glancing at the rosy shower at his feet — “did I hurt you much?” With a smile.

   There is a little plank projecting from the wood-work of the pillars that supports the balcony: resting his foot on this, and holding on by the railings above, Luttrell draws himself up until his face is almost on level with hers, — almost, but not quite: she can still overshadow him.

AMY: Oooh! Molly!

KIM: Yeah!

AMY: As we’ve said, flirty dialogue abounds in the novel, and you can see it in action there. The two main female characters wield their charm like a weapon, and where the men are concerned it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. The ladies turn flirting into an Olympic sport, and when it comes to a war of words, the women ALWAYS win. It’s so hilarious, but at the same time these men are also fully tormented by it. Jessica, what do you think Hungerford might have thought of such coquettish behavior? 

JESSICA: I think she was having oodles of fun with it honestly. I was reminded more than once of Lydia Bennett being, like, a determined flirt, and Lizzy says to her father, “If you don’t take her in hand, dad, she’s going to be the ruin of this entire family.” But in Molly Bawn, Hungerford is just letting Molly and her friend, Lady Stafford, run wild. They’re laughing, they’re flirting and they’re making all sorts of bad decisions that would be the ruin of any of them in any other novel of that time period, right? So I think she’s having fun, and further, they’re always quickly forgiven, right? So much so that I started wondering if she was actually skewering the men because she portrays them as these lovelorn fools who will basically do anything for a pretty face, right? They’ll forgive anything, and these women are doing some pretty outrageous stuff. But maybe that’s the secret to its success. The norms regarding women were so restrictive and the stakes were so high for them, so the freedoms sort of reflected in this novel must have been just both sensational and tantalizing to a female reader, right? I mean c’mon.

AMY: I had no preconceived notions at all about this book, and while I was reading the first fourth of the book and we see Molly being so flirtatious… she’s playing a dangerous game in some ways, and I kept thinking to myself, “What is Hungerford going to do here?” Is she going to suddenly have Molly have to have her comeuppance? Is she going to somehow… is there going to be some sort of victim blaming going on? And coming from our current social context, I was like, “Oh, please don’t do this. Please don’t make this a book about she gets in trouble because she was being a flirt.”

JESSICA: Yeah.

AMY: And I was happy to see that that actually doesn’t happen. 

JESSICA: Right.

AMY: I thought that that was kind of cool. It’s as if Lydia Bennett is the heroine and doesn’t run into any trouble, and it’s kind of refreshing.

JESSICA: Yeah, I mean, just to piggyback off of that, I kept thinking of House of Mirth, right? Edith Wharton. A married man just flirted with her and she refused to get married and that was the end of her. So there are these other novels that are being written at the same time period that were cautionary tales to their female reader.

KIM: She never would have sort of survived a Henry James or an Edith Wharton novel.

AMY: No! And that brings us back to the mention of this book, Molly Bawn, in Ulysses. It appears in the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom, who is Leopold Bloom’s wife. It happens at the end of Ulysses. The context is that Molly is rationalizing having flirted with her friend’s husband, and she begins listing some novels that come to mind that might have shaped her thoughts on how men and women should behave toward one another. And that includes Molly Bawn, as well as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. 

KIM: Yeah, it’s really interesting that such a modern, experimental novel like Ulysses would mention Molly Bawn. And the big takeaway from this book for me was that Hungerford really did have a lot to say about marriages, incompatibility, and the positions women are placed into because of the need for them to make a suitable marriage. Given what I’d read about Hungerford and Molly Bawn before I read it, I wasn’t expecting some of her commentary to be so modern and feminist. And as we mentioned, Molly Bawn, in spite of being a Victorian heroine, is kind of unapologetically… boy crazy, but she’s also very aware of the inequities of romance, the double standards. And here’s what Molly Bawn has to say on it: 

“‘A man may love as often as he chooses, while a woman must only love once, or he considers himself very badly used. Why not be on equal footing?’”

And later she explicitly states the idea of women being a commodity in the following lines:  

“'...who ever heard the opprobrious term 'fortune-hunter' given to a woman? It is the legitimate thing for us to sell ourselves as dearly as we can.'”

AMY: But, she does end up playing with fire in some respects. One of the men she flirts with in the book ultimately has a rage-filled reaction toward her when they’re out in the forest. And while reading that, I couldn’t help but think to myself, “Oh boy, some things don’t change…”

JESSICA: Yeah, I mean I was honestly taken aback by that scene. I didn’t expect it. It really kind of came out of nowhere after all the sort of “flirty” and “hijinx!” Especially some of the more comedic moments back at the house. Here we are back now in Molly’s home of Brooklyn and she’s going to meet Luttrell and she goes to the woods to sort of see him and who appears but her cousin, Phillip, who she had been flirting with. And he had been framed up to this point as pretty dispassionate. He was definitely flirting with her in this other way, but he was a gambler. He already had a fiancee or an understanding with another woman. And so the flirtation that kind of occurs between them is not very well drawn out in the novel so when it gets to this point and he’s shaking her and he’s grabbing her and he’s basically saying, “If I can’t have you, no one will… I’d rather kill you,” I thought, “Ooh, gosh! Here’s this guy! The guy you didn’t think would be the abuser is now the abuser.” He was supposed to be the guy that you would want at the top of the novel, and now he’s just devolved into the captain of the football team who you find out is the ever-present “football rapist.” So it was shocking, honestly.I was surprised.

KIM: It was like a Lifetime movie got mixed up in our Hallmark movie, and no! We don’t want that!

AMY: Oh, perfect! That’s right.

JESSICA: Off brand!

AMY: Off-brand! Off-brand! I did think, “Okay, here’s my moment that I was worried about.” Suddenly the tide is going to turn for Molly and she’s going to have her fall from grace and it’s going to be awful. That didn’t quite happen, but we did have that sort of scary wake-up call for her a little bit, I think.

JESSICA: I think that’s the consequence, right? She hadn’t had any consequences up until that moment, and so at some point she had to … I think Hungerford had to give her some stakes around that, that that kind of behavior isn’t okay. And that was sort of the point of the moment. 

KIM: I agree. And also, there’s another interesting that Molly proudly and unconventionally decides to make her living singing on stage in front of crowds, even though it’s considered to be something almost akin to prostitution for a lady in that time, and that’s even alluded to in the novel. What’s your take on that, Jessica?

JESSICA: It was an interesting creative choice, right? I mean, Hungerford could have skipped that whole part. That wasn’t an important part of that novel, and in fact, it felt very tangential to the rest of the story. And when she makes this assertion that she’s going to go do this, I was sort of like, “Wait, what? You can’t go do that, girl! That’s it! Your reputation is done!” But she does, and Hungerford sort of makes this a part of the novel to make a statement about women using their talents to claim some independence without censure, which was interesting, because you kind of make that parallel between the writer and her creation. Hungerford is this successful female writer of popular novels which probably was not very well celebrated in her time period. She’s not Nora Roberts like we have today, right? So it’s not hard to see her using Molly as her proxy in that way, and Molly’s unapologetic about that choice, which was kind of interesting because then it’s very clear that Hungerford is not apologetic about her choices, either, so it felt incredibly modern.

KIM: Yeah, it’s another great relief that we have: Okay… nothing bad happened there, either. And then Molly’s good friend, Lady Stafford, also seems ahead of her time in many ways. She has a clever act of deception where she manages to arrange a marriage that allows her to be completely independent, both financially self-sufficient and free of ever having to associate with her husband. Wow.

AMY: Yeah, so Lady Cecil Stafford and her husband have actually never even laid eyes on one another at the start of the book even though they’re married. (It’s really kind of a funny story laid into this plot), but once they do finally meet in person, they have their own love story set into motion and it’s really basically another Hallmark trope, isn’t it Jessica? The case of mistaken identities?

JESSICA: [laughing] Yeah, it was great.

KIM: And can we also discuss the character of Plantagenet Potts (which is an awesome name) really quickly? He’s a peripheral character not too vital to the plot, but he brought in some extra comic relief. I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the stunts he pulls to stave off boredom during the house party.

JESSICA: Yeah, you probably hit upon my two favorite characters actually, which is Lady Stafford and Plantagenet Potts. I could have read an entire novel just on the adventures of Lady Cecil and Mr. Potts, honestly. The scene in the library where he lights the gunpowder on fire and it sort of blows up and they hide behind the curtain in the alcove and they’re standing there as statues when Sir Penthony opens up the curtain. And Penthony and Ted are so upset because Potts has his arms around the ladies as he’s trying to hold them in place on the statuary. It was just comical. It had me in stitches, and I think I need a sequel actually.

AMY: In my head I was envisioning James Corden playing Plantagenet Potts. Like, how perfect would he be?

KIM: Oh, totally.

JESSICA: And they kept making a point of his red hair.

AMY: Yeah, if you’re a ginger, yeah, trigger warning a little bit. So, though the novel is set in the late 1800s, there’s a lot about the book (particularly the middle third, which is basically the months-long house party at the Amherst estate that reminded me of a Jane Austen book (complete with the requisite ball)… But, Jessica, I was wondering if there were parts of this book where you thought, okay, I can see the Irish coming through? 

JESSICA: Yeah, probably the way she handled her ensemble scenes with multiple characters. Lots of writers can go in close and do that intimate character work, but it’s harder to handle dialogue amongst three or more characters within a scene. And she often found her stride in those moments. And when I think of Irish writers like Oscar Wilde or Frank McCourt or Maeve Binchy, there’s that ear for dialogue that they have. It’s a quick-wittedness; it’s a sense of the absurd that gives their scenes fun and energy, and it doesn’t really move the plot forward, but it really gives you a sense of those characters. She definitely had that, so that’s probably where I saw it the most, was in those moments. 

KIM: That’s a great point. I love that perspective. So Jessica, what’s your verdict on Molly Bawn, to put you in the hot seat. What did you like most about it? What did you think about it overall?

JESSICA: I think the critics are right! I loved her way with characters, but I also loved her feminist take, right? As light and fluffy and sometimes even as melodramatic and soapy as it got, every once in a while she’d make these piercing social commentaries. Marrying your cousin is weird: Yeah, it is! I met you last week, I’m not going to want to marry you yet, Ted: Tell him, girl! I’m too young for this — I need to live! So I think that was probably my favorite piece of it, was just, every once in a while she’d be like, “Yes you will”/”No I won’t”/”Yes you will”/”No I won’t … I’m a feminist and I’m not going to take this anymore.” It was just like, “Where’d THAT come from?”

AMY: Yeah, you’re right; that was great. One of my favorite parts was when you mentioned the Plantagenet gunpowder fiasco where they had to hide behind the curtains and pretend to be statues so as not to be caught, whenever she would have those moments in the book, she would sort of cap off the scene by writing “Tableau!” And it was basically the equivalent of going “And… scene!” It made me laugh every time because I’ve never seen it done in a book that way. But it also reminded me that this book was made into a silent film in Britain in 1916. And putting you on the spot again, Jessica, as a Hollywood type, if you found a pitch for Molly Bawn in the slush pile, would you consider it worthy of a film adaptation today? 

JESSICA: Probably not. It’s a little too episodic and the way the characters tended to get in their own way versus having to overcome an external obstacle would make it probably very difficult for a modern viewer to watch, but you know, like I said… maybe if it’s “The Modern Adventures of Lady Stafford and Plantagenet Potts” we can talk, you know? I think with a little reshaping, right? We could get there.

KIM: I think that’s an incredibly valid and astute critique, and I would expect nothing less from Jessica.

JESSICA: Yeah, yeah, right.

AMY: It’s still a fun read, though.

KIM: It absolutely is. Completely worthwhile read. And I love the idea of taking the subplot and turning it into the mini-series or the movie. I think that would be great.

JESSICA: When I was reading it, it kind of kept bringing back my own career choices, because before being at Hallmark I was at Penguin and I was doing romance novels and mystery novels, and I also was doing classic literature; I did the Signet Classic line. So I have this broad understanding of the “canon,” the classic literature canon, but I also understand genre writing, and so I know the difference between those two writing styles and what I thought was really interesting about this novel was she was drawing from these different disciplines and these different well-known writing styles while sort of selling it into this genre and it was fun for me, because I thought, “Oh, here’s Shakespeare,” and “Here’s Edith Wharton,” and “Here’s this writer and that writer,” or “Oh, here’s this trope: the interrupted kiss.” It just sort of all fell together and I thought, “Wow, this is really interesting.” She’d have at one point, she said, “Improvise!” and I’m like, “This is like someone writing ‘Ad-lib’ in a screenplay: ‘Actors ad-lib’” So it was this sort of hodge-podge. It didn’t really stick to one thing or another, and she was just throwing it all in and she just had this expectation of her reader to go along on that ride, and you do! That was the crazy part. It was always just slightly unexpected, which I enjoyed. 

KIM: Jessica, we can’t thank you enough for coming on to talk about Molly Bawn. This was the most fun I’ve had in at least two or three weeks!

JESSICA: Well, I’ve missed you guys, and thanks for having me on. And Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Slainte!

KIM: We loved having you!

JESSICA: Thank you, ladies!

***

KIM: So what did we learn from today’s episode, Amy?

AMY: Well, we learned that if something’s referenced in Ulysses, it’s worth checking out…

KIM: Yeah, and luckily, Molly Bawn doesn’t require assistance from a grad school professor to understand it… We also learned that if flirting was an Olympic sport, Molly Bawn would have clinched the gold.

AMY: For sure. She was a pro. And finally, we learned that an unabashedly romantic novel can also be feminist at the same time.

KIM: It sure can.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode, and as promised, we’ll go ahead and play you out with a version of the Irish folk song, “Molly Bawn.” We hope you check out Hungerford’s delightful romance novel and let us know what you think. 

KIM: And don’t forget to let us know what you think of this podcast, as well, by leaving us a rating and review. It really helps.

AMY: Until next week, may the road rise to meet you… bye, everybody!

24. The Gilded Age

Episode 24: The Gilded Age

AMY: Hi everybody, and welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my co-host Kim Askew, and okay, so Kim, let’s talk about how thankful we are that we’ve had television during this pandemic to keep us sane. I know you don’t watch quite as much as I do, but…

KIM: Yes, but even I have my “must-see” shows, and we’ve both been watching “Bridgerton,” which we talked all about in our last mini episode.

AMY: Yeah, so much fun.

KIM: And I can’t wait to eventually watch “The Gilded Age” — we are both waiting for that, and probably all of you are, too. It’s coming from “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes. This show cannot come soon enough for me. I’m dying for it.

AMY: Yeah, I agree. It’s kind of a bummer that Covid basically had to slam the brakes on production of that one, which is, I think going to eventually air on HBO. But let’s talk about it anyway just to get ourselves excited about what we know so far — it’s something to look forward to on the horizon, and we can all use that.

KIM: Yes, for sure. Let’s talk about The Gilded Age.

AMY: We can always talk about The Gilded Age! Let’s face it.

KIM: Exactly. So knowing we’d be discussing  this this week, I took the liberty (which I know you won’t mind) of pulling the synopsis for the show straight off of HBO’s website: 

AMY: Okay, I’m dying to hear it; let’s go!

KIM: All right!

The American Gilded Age was a period of immense economic change, of huge fortunes made and lost, and the rise of disparity between old money and new.

Against this backdrop of change, the story begins in 1882 — introducing young Marian Brook, the orphaned daughter of a Union general, who moves into the New York City home of her thoroughly old money aunts Agnes van Rhijn and Ada Brook. Accompanied by Peggy Scott, an accomplished African-American woman, Marian inadvertently becomes enmeshed in a social war between one of her aunts, a scion of the old money set, and her stupendously rich neighbors, a ruthless railroad tycoon and his ambitious wife, George and Bertha Russell.

In this exciting new world that is on the brink of the modern age, will Marian follow the established rules of society, or forge her own path?

AMY: Ooh, that sounds good! You know what’s interesting is how much it actually sounds like “Bridgerton.” You have the neighbors living next door — one house is “old money,” high-society, the other house is “new money.” 

KIM: That’s true, you’re absolutely right. That’s a really good point. Hmm.

AMY: And it’s going to be a 10-episode miniseries and I think it ends at that. Which is cool, but I’d also be down for watching something that goes into more seasons. I’m kind of bummed out that it’s just going to be a limited series. 

KIM: Oh, yeah, I could stay in the Gilded Age. I’d be willing to invest in that world for much longer. We’ll all be so busy partying, though, I don’t know. Maybe 10 episodes is fine. If it were on right now, I’d want, like, 300 episodes.

AMY: That’s true, that’s true. We’ll all be hopefully traveling the globe, and oh my gosh, can you imagine if we suddenly had no time to watch this? I will always make time for it, Julian Fellowes, don’t you worry.

KIM: Absolutely. Totally. Yeah.

AMY: So in addition to being set in New York City, it’s also naturally going to take us to Newport Rhode Island, which I’m thrilled about. It’s going to be gorgeous, and you can only assume they’re going to be filming at or in, hopefully, some of those grand mansions. And they’re also going to be on location in Troy, New York, which is known for its historic Victorian homes. So, it’s going to be a lot of good backdrops.

KIM: Oh my gosh, I love it. It was sadly supposed to start production last March (so basically three weeks before the world completely shut down.)

AMY: That’s crummy timing! 

KIM: I know. So now, at the time we recorded this, they were supposed to be filming from January through June of this year, but it’s difficult to know how on-schedule  anything really is because of Covid, so I don’t know.

AMY: And you’ve got to wonder how all the new filming protocols are going to affect things. Cynthia Nixon, who is one of the stars, told Variety in the fall that things are pretty slow-going, because they had managed to get back into production in the fall (or start production in the fall) but she said they can’t have so many people on set. It sounds like it’s been challenging. She said they’ve also had to cut back a lot on the number of extras they’re going to be able to use. So hopefully it doesn’t feel too pared down. Hopefully we won’t notice that they’ve had to make cuts when we’re watching it, because for something called “The Gilded Age,” you want to feel like they just went all out, right?

KIM: Oh, absolutely. With all that said, though, even me, the ultimate optimist, is thinking maybe we won’t be able to watch this one before 2022, but I have a feeling it’s going to be worth the wait. You mentioned “Sex and the City’s” Cynthia Nixon. Who does she play in this? And who else makes up the cast? I am curious to know.

AMY: So Cynthia Nixon plays one of the rich spinster aunts that Marian goes to live with — Ada Brooke. The other aunt is played by Christine Baranski, who I think is going to be fun. She really knows how to bring her perfectly snooty A-game to any project she’s on, so that’ll be good.

KIM: I love her.

AMY: And then get this, Marian, the main young heroine, is played by Louisa Jacobson who is none other than the daughter of one Meryl Streep! 

KIM: Ooh, okay, so I knew that Meryl Streep’s daughter Mamie Gummer acted, but I did not know about her other daughter. Okay, so Louisa Jacobson. I’m going to be googling her to find out more after we record this.

AMY: How awesome would it be if Meryl made, like, a cameo?

KIM: Oh, I would love that. Everyone would love that. 

AMY: Okay, so, now, the next-door neighbors — the “railroad money” next door neighbors that you mentioned — are played by Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector, who I’m not very familiar with, but they have a lot of big credits to their name. Carrie Goon was in Gone Girl and HBO’s “The Leftovers” and Morgan Spector was in “Homeland” and “The Plot Against America.” And then we have a couple of Broadway stars in the cast in Denee Benton and Audra McDonald (love her!) and Jeanne Triplehorn shows up as a beautiful art collector with a potentially scandalous past that makes her a pariah of this high-society world. And that sounds very “Edith Wharton,” doesn’t it? 

KIM: It does. And it sounds like we’ll also be getting a bit of that “Upstairs/Downstairs” vibe in that a variety of servant characters are mentioned in the cast list. So thumbs up to that.

AMY: It will be interesting to see how much they’re incorporated into the show and if it will sort of hew to that “Downton Abbey” template. Speaking of, I had thought originally that this series was supposed to be a prequel to “Downton Abbey” (that it was going to tell the backstory of Cora Crawley back when she was living in America). Obviously, that’s not the case, but I would have liked to have seen something like that.

KIM: I had heard that there was going to be a prequel with Cora Crawley, too, and I would love that. I wonder if there will still be something like that separately, because I think that’s a great idea.

AMY: At the same time, I guess I understand Julian Fellowes going with a fresh slate here with the story, but there’s so much that they’re going to be able to work with in terms of the time period. I mean the tension between old money and new money … this desperate race to marry well … Mrs. Astor and “the 400” I believe that pops up in the show as well.

KIM: Oh, right, so that’s a good point. Did you know that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner actually coined the term “The Gilded Age?”

AMY: No, but I don’t even know who Charles Dudley Warner is.

KIM: So Mark Twain wrote a book with Charles Dudley Warner called The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. It was a novel. And “The Gilded Age” phrase was inspired by Shakespeare (as everything always comes back to Shakespeare, this does too) in the play  King John. And I’m going to quote from that play: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily … is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”  So the phrase “the Gilded Age” actually refers to the period of prosperity and greed between the 1870s and about the late 1910s. The 400 list that Amy referred to is a list of New York society from that time which included the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Morgans (as in JP Morgan). 

AMY: I know they were being wasteful and lavishly irresponsible with their money, and if you read anything about these parties in Newport, Rhode Island, they really, really went over the top. However, I just want to say I totally could have lived in that era.

KIM: I can imagine you living in that era.

AMY: Speaking of Newport, have you ever been there, Kim?

KIM: Only in my mind… I’ve never been to the “The Breakers” or “Marble House” or any of those beautiful old houses there, but I would love to go. Have you?

AMY: Yes, yes. Twice, I want to say. It’s amazing. It is just spectacular, so the fact that they’ll be filming there… I know that they put out a call for extras in Newport to come be part of the production, and they also were looking for people in the food industry that could come in and play actual kitchen servants because they wanted those people to look really accurate in what they were doing. I thought that was interesting. So..

KIM: Oh my gosh.

AMY: What?

KIM: I’m just imagining us being extras in “The Gilded Age!” We’d have to move to Newport or something, but…

AMY: How do we do it? Oh my god!

KIM: And I would not want to play a servant. I’m sorry to be snobby, but I want to play a Vanderbilt or something so I can wear a gorgeous Vanderbilt dress.

AMY: I want the costumes! Yes!

KIM: What about favorite books relating to the Gilded Age? Let’s talk about that.

AMY: Well, anything “Edith Wharton, right?” She’s got to be your go-to-gal. She’s the biggie.

KIM: True, and I have been to her house, The Mount, which we’ll probably talk about in another episode. That’s in the Berkshires. I love The Buccaneers. It’s a novel by her, and I think it was her last novel because she never finished it. And I think Amy has read it, too. We love that book, and it was turned into a  great miniseries.

AMY: I don’t know if we watched it together. You might have lent me your copy or something. But it stars Carla Gugino. It came out in 1995… if you haven’t seen it, now would be a great time to bust that one out because it’ll sort of whet your appetite to get you ready for “The Gilded Age” series. 

KIM: Yeah, okay. You really need to if you haven’t seen it because it’s literally one of my “Top 10” costume dramas. It’s wonderful. I think Carla Gugino is amazing in it. And Mira Sorvino is also in it. She plays Conchita Clausson. She’s basically inspired by the real-life Consuelo Vanderbilt. She married England’s Duke of Marlborough. She’s known as the American heiress who saved the British aristocracy.

AMY: Yeah, so she was basically “OG Meghan Markle” back in the day. The aristocracy in England was starting to be in jeopardy because they were losing their money, basically. They needed an influx of cash, and they needed it to save all their estates. And so they looked to America and these daughters, particularly daughters of some of the newly rich who were… It’s almost like an “odd couple” scenario, right? You have nobility in England looking to marry sort of brand new upper-crust Americans.

KIM: They wanted the money, and then the Americans wanted this air of aristocracy and nobility that we don’t have here in the States. So it was a “give and take” kind of thing.

AMY: Yeah, everybody got something out of it.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: But that’s basically the plot of The Buccaneers and that’s basically what Consuelo Vanderbilt ended up doing. She got engaged to the duke, went over and sort of had complete culture shock trying to fit in and learning a new way of life. There’s a biography about Consuelo and her mother, Alva, by Amanda MacKenzie Stuart that tells her story and it really transports you into this world. I think, yet again, Kim, you lent me that book, but I’m not even sure you read it yourself?

KIM: I actually got you that book, I think as a gift, and then you loaned it to me to read and I think still have it. As Amy knows, I’m not that great on nonfiction, sometimes, but it is really good, and it’s got a gorgeous cover with a painting of her on the front. 

AMY: She was beloved by Englanders. They really took to her because she was so glamorous and wonderful, and I think she lived in England for the rest of her life. But Kim, if you want another novel from this time period that is interesting, I liked also The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin. It’s sort of that same kind of “Buccaneer,” “new money” American girl that’s brought to England to find a husband. It’s also a good fictionalized account of that time.

KIM: All the girls in The Buccaneers ended up going over and basically bringing their money to England and marrying (or at least trying to marry) into the aristocracy there. It’s really interesting. The American Heiress sounds great, too. So, as we said, The Gilded Age was basically taking place in America in around the 1870s and 1880s and a little bit later, and the next novel we’re discussing, was written around the same time, but in Ireland.

AMY: Yes, and just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, we’re going to be discussing “lost lady” Margaret Wolf Hungerford and her best known book, the delightful, funny and romantic Molly Bawn. 

KIM: And with us to discuss Hungerford is our favorite Irish lass (or Irish-American lass) Jessica Callahan. She’s a development executive at Crown Media Family Networks and that’s the company behind everyone’s favorite Hallmark movies.

AMY: Ooh, it’s going to be a good one! 

KIM: We’re also having a lot of fun getting to engage with you over at our Facebook page, so if you haven’t yet, go over, check out our “Lost Ladies of Lit” Facebook page and follow it so you can be part of our updates.

[start closing music]

AMY: And don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast and leave us a review if you’re liking what you’ve been hearing! All right, bye, everybody!

KIM: 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.

23. Marthe Bibesco — The Green Parrot with Lauren Cerand

KIM: Amy, The New York Times called the novel we’re discussing today “A strange and beautiful story, with the faintly arid charm of a miniature painted on the cover of a seventeenth-century snuff box.”

AMY: That’s actually a great and (in some ways) literal description of this book — The Green Parrot by Marthe Bibesco. 

KIM: Yes. It’s also got a little bit of everything to keep a reader enthralled: forbidden love, the intrigue of war, incest, twin-mix-ups, suicide and (I never thought I’d be saying this but) an interspecies love affair.

AMY: Yeah, you heard that right, people. All right, so now all that might initially sound like a bit much, but you’ll have to trust us—it’s so artfully rendered that it absolutely works. This book is equal parts haunting and lovely, and the writing is so graceful and memorable. Really, it is a little gem.

KIM: And to add to the intrigue, as if we needed to… this book was written by an actual princess! And we’ve got a special guest with us today to help tell you all about her. We’ll introduce her in a moment. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes, and welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit. We’ve got a great show in store for you today, so grab your tiaras everyone… let’s raid the stacks and get started.

[Introductory music]

KIM: I’m especially excited to introduce our guest today, Lauren Cerand, because we go way back. We’ve been acquainted for many years, from our early days of blogging. Lauren has since founded a thriving global communications consultancy, prompting Time Out New York to dub her one of the “cultural gatekeepers in the literary world.” She also happens to be one of the most generous people I know, sharing her knowledge and connecting people in this utterly charming, witty way that feels serendipitous, but is actually thoughtful, strategic, and wise. She’s also a person who treats living itself as an art. 

AMY: True to this, in 2019, Lauren actually took a year’s sabbatical from her career as a publicist and moved to Florence, Italy to study jewelry making. (I just love a gal who pursues and lives her dreams! That’s amazing!) Now she’s returned to New York having crafted a life that includes jewelry making (she’s studying at the Pratt Institute), writing, and working as a highly-sought after communications consultant. She also serves on the advisory committee for Film Forum and the advisory board for Turtle Point Press in New York, and is a member of the City University Club in London. 

KIM: Because Lauren, who probably lives the life closest to a princess of anyone I know, actually introduced me to Princess Marthe Bibesco and The Green Parrot, I really can’t think of a better person to be our guest for this episode. Welcome, Lauren. 

LAUREN: Thank you.

AMY: Let’s start by telling you guys a little bit about Princess Bibesco because she is fascinating! She was born Marta Lucia Lahovary in 1886 in Bucharest. She was the third child of Romanian aristocrats, and she grew up on the family estates in Romania, but she summered at the stylish French beach resort Biarritz, where much of The Green Parrot is set. As was typical of Romanian aristocracy, she learned to speak French before she learned to speak Romanian, and was she extensively, though not formally, educated in history and classic literature as well as Romanian folklore. She made her debut into society in 1900, and was secretly engaged for one year to her cousin Prince George III Valentin Bibescu . Now, he came from one of Romania’s most prestigious aristocratic families, and they married when she was only 17-years-old. She wrote on her wedding day that she felt as though, through this marriage she had, “stepped onto the European stage through the grand door.” 

KIM: And that sounds glamorous (and okay, it is really glamorous), but in the early years of her marriage, she was actually pretty bored. It kind of reminds me a bit of what we now know about Charles and Diana. George was off racing cars and chasing women and Marthe was stuck at home with his mother. She almost died giving birth to a daughter in 1903, and then, in 1905, George was sent on a diplomatic mission to Iran and that changed everything for her. She basically was completely inspired by this trip to Iran and she began using the research from her journals and everything to write her first novel, which is called The Eight Paradises. She became the toast of Paris.

LAUREN: I think The Eight Paradises is one that I saw talked about on Twitter as being out of print that people quite hoped would be brought back into print.

KIM: That would be great. Maybe this podcast will help. We can only dream! So basically, at that point, she started to be known for her literary prowess in addition to her connections.

AMY: Her career as a writer kicked off from there. She was awarded the Prix de l'Académie Française (which is one of the oldest and most prestigious French literary prizes) and around that time she met Marcel Proust, who wrote her a letter praising The Eight Paradises. He said, “You are not only a splendid writer, Princess, but a sculptor of words, a musician, a purveyor of scents, a poet.” Can you imagine getting that kind of feedback?

KIM: Oh, yes.

AMY: So they became really good friends.

KIM: Proust was also lifelong friends with another of Bibesco’s cousins, Prince Antoine Bibesco. Prince Antoine was married but had a rep as a ladies man. And what makes him important, I think, in our discussion is this: Marthe dedicates The Green Parrot to him. And this fact that will be especially intriguing a bit later, when we tell you more about the novel. 

AMY: Right. So the princess, Marthe, was strikingly beautiful as well as intelligent, and she held sway over a glittering, elite social sphere, which included royalty, the politically powerful, and literary luminaries throughout Europe. Her circle of friends included Jean Cocteau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Vita Sackville West, and Winston Churchill, among many others. So she wrote about herself and her position, “I am the needle through which pass the filaments and the strands of our disjointed Europe to be threaded together in a necklace.” Lauren, I’m guessing you can dig the jewelry metaphor here.

LAUREN: I do really dig the jewelry metaphor, and actually, I find that reading memoirs by women who lived in Romania are always especially amazing to me because prior, obviously, to the forces that changed the 20th century, it was really one of the kind of unimaginably glamorous, decadent, luxurious cultures on the world stage in Europe. So it makes perfect sense to me that she would have experienced the kind of cosmopolitan and glittering scene that she lived in as being at the absolute center of everything that was happening, and of course, an enormous necklace would have made so much sense to her. In the end, when she had no access to any of her money because it was all in Romania which had become Communist, she was able to live the rest of her life, basically, I believe, just selling jewels that she had taken with her.

KIM: And she actually wasn’t joking at all about her importance in that quote Amy read for us! She was even supposedly asked to secretly mediate a political disagreement between France and Germany. (And that’s not the only story like that.) Although she was a bright light of society and the arts, unfortunately her marriage wasn’t a happy one. She did, however, have well-known men from all over Europe literally throwing themselves at her and she had a string of notable lovers over the years. One of them, Prince Charles-Louis de Beauvau-Craön was super serious about her. He wrote her many love letters and—get this——he even gifted her rose petals which he’d had inscribed with a secret message. Marthe pressed the flowers, and they remained in her possession throughout her life. 

AMY: Okay, I’m swooning over that one. Well done to him. We’ll link to an article about how the petals were discovered among her papers, actually, and the process, in 2016, by which conservators at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center were able to unfurl them to read the inscriptions. I love that stuff, and I love that they still exist.

KIM: It is really fascinating, but it’s also just sooo romantic too! Lauren, do you have any favorite anecdotes about the Princess you want to share?

LAUREN: I tried to track down a biography of her before the show, but it’s long out of print. My favorite thing about it was the only thing I was able to get access to, which were the reviews of it, which were “Why would anyone want to read about this much glamor?” When I visualize her, I think a lot about this amazing exhibition of dresses that I missed in Paris, but I saw in New York at the FIT museum maybe five or 10 years ago. It was the dresses that belonged to the Countess Greffulhe, who was a huge inspiration for Proust. And one of the dresses was the dress she was wearing at a garden party the day that she met him, and it’s so incredibly fragile that it was laid on the floor on a mirror, and you were only allowed to look at the reflection of it. So I feel like Marthe has this kind of fascination for me as well. Like, I want to know everything about her life, I want to understand everything about her life, which is actually quite sad. Even in reading up for this episode, I learned that many of the things that happen in the book that are unspeakably tragic, hence the appearance of the green parrot, actually were directly from her life. It’s quite autobiographical. And obviously, the political time that she lived through is unimaginable to us. I can imagine how glittering it was and also something of what it must have felt like to have the glass shatter.

KIM: So to get into a little more about the specifics of the tragedy that she experienced in life that also plays into The Green Parrot, in 1892 (when she was around 6 years old) her brother, the only son and heir to the family fortune, died of typhoid fever. An elder sister died of cholera in 1911, and her younger sister Marguerite killed herself a few years later. Marthe's mother and favorite cousin also took their own lives.  

AMY: During World War I, she served as a nurse in Bucharest, which is pretty interesting, and in 1948, the Communist government confiscated all of the Bibesco property in Romania. So she was exiled. She spent the remainder of her life in Paris and England, and sadly, her daughter and son-in-law didn’t make it out of Romania and were placed in detention for almost nine years. 

LAUREN: Talking about this sort of idea of finding your identity in exile reminds me of another book that I really love: Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I don’t know if you’re familiar with anything about his life. He essentially was sort of living out of a suitcase, and everything in Russia is lost to him, and he’s part of this large colony of Russians in Paris. There’s this really beautiful section about being separated from everything that you know, including all of your material possessions, that I think about all the time. And it’s: She did not really need them, for nothing had been lost. As a company of travelling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, the windy heath, the misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored.

KIM: That’s a really interesting quote, and it’s perfectly suited to this conversation about Bibesco.

AMY: So The Green Parrot was published in France in 1924, and translated into English about five years later by Malcolm Cowley.

KIM: Right. And this seems like a great place to begin our discussion of this terrific little novel. Lauren, do you remember how you were introduced to it and what your initial response was?

LAUREN: I actually came about this book in a very funny way. I was looking on this really great web site one night of a vintage and used bookstore in New York called High Valley Books that I follow on Instagram. There was something interesting, and I texted it to my friend, Tynan [Kogane], who’s an editor at New Directions, and we started having this exchange where we were looking through the inventory of the bookstore while we were also talking about the things that we like. It was actually the first time since the entire global pandemic that I had had the experience of really feeling like I was in a bookstore with a person, talking to them. And then I happened to see this copy of The Green Parrot, so I ordered it immediately. A few days later it showed up. It was incredibly beautiful. It’s leather-bound with a marble cover, and it’s got these incredible gold, gilded lilies on the spine. It’s from 1924, from an edition of, I believe it’s 500. It was published in Paris. But it’s in French, which I can read for, you know, menus and the newspaper, and, like, a text message, but I can’t really appreciate the beauty of a novel. So I was like, “Oh, I can’t believe I got so caught up in kind of the romance of that moment.” And then, I agreed to be on the board of advisers of a press in New York called Turtle Point Press. They were asking me about how to market their French back list. I said, “Oh, well, why don’t you send me the books and I’ll tell you how to hook up with all of these kind of French governmental organizations that are involved with promoting French culture that I worked with in New York.” Three or four days later, this big box showed up at my door — actually someone delivered it. And The Green Parrot was in there because they published it. I thought, “Oh, I’m really meant to have this book in my life.” So yeah, I read it and I was just completely, completely blown away. There are other books that I like that deal with a similar period. There’s The Balkan Trilogy [by Olivia Manning]. Eleanor Piryani wrote an incredible, incredible memoir called More Was Lost… this period, actually, when you could still meet a man on a boat who happens to live in a castle. She moves there with him, but, like, right before the Iron Curtain falls. I think the original version that I read was on Turtle Point Press, actually, but it was reissued by the New York Review of Books Classics. I feel that there’s kind of a shelf of books that The Green Parrot belongs on, but at the same time, it’s like absolutely nothing else I’ve ever read in my life. Like, I immediately knew that I was in the hands of someone who was just in full command of their powers, and that was the first page, you know? That was the first line. What was surprising to me was the idea that someone had been in such intimate conversation with people that we consider absolute immortals at this point, and had just kind of been swept away from history. And I found that really interesting. I really find it remarkable about women writers, because you know, history has a funny way of doing that. But I was really amazed to discover that something so rich and so vivid could have that beautiful quality of a book that is just waiting to be discovered by you, the reader, on an ordinary day.

AMY: The novel is written in first person, and begins with our young narrator describing how life in her family revolves around grieving over her dead brother, Sasha. The family lives this beautiful and seemingly lush existence in the south of France and yet there is this oppressive pall that hangs over the household, and it robs our young narrator of joy. Lauren, I had the same reaction to the first page of the book. Seldom do I have to stop and re-read twice or three times an opening paragraph, and I did it with this one, like rubbing my hands together salivating basically. So I’m going to read it for everybody:

“There are Russians of Nice, just as there are wines of Bordeaux and violets of Parma. For our part, we belonged to a closely related species, the Russians of Biarritz; we were a Muscovite family that had settled in the Gulf of Gascony. But above all, we were a family in mourning; this was our originality, the first of our titles of distinction. More than our wealth, more than the great number of children and servants, more even than the mansion built by my father between a vast garden and a private beach, our sorrow gave us a sort of superiority over the other foreign families and, as it were, a personal luster. For mourning is always brilliant; it embellishes those who wear it, and sets them forth by covering them with darkness, as night does with stars.” 

KIM: That is gorgeous. I got the chills again hearing you read it aloud. It really gives you a feel for the tone and style of the book, and it’s so gripping, just from those first few lines. Beautiful.

LAUREN: And also a sense of just how incredibly cosmopolitan this family is, you know, that there are these kind of references of this particular expat community. They are intimately familiar with the best wines available. They are totally familiar with violets of Parma, which are renowned for lasting less than a day, and there’s this incredible, incredible sense that she’s sort of speaking to you from a vanishing world that somehow exists just out of reach. It’s smoldering away, but she has the absolute full vision of everything.

KIM: It’s really a gorgeous meditation on this longing and loneliness and literal and figurative exile, like you mentioned. On the one hand, there’s these attempted and successful suicides that happen in the book, and at the same time there’s this idea of living in an emotionally closed-off way that’s also like death. Did it remind either of you at all of The Virgin Suicides [Jeffrey Eugenides] in that way? 

LAUREN: I’ve never seen it or read it.

AMY: I don’t remember enough about The Virgin Suicides to make a comparison there, but how rife is this book for a Sofia Coppola adaptation? If she were to get her hands on this, I think that would be wonderful.

LAUREN: Yeah, I mean I think it has a very cinematic quality to it. And I think, also, there’s something about a kind of texture and the tapestry of sadness in the family that is really really deep, and it has different kinds of cultural connotations and, you know, she talks in the book about how they shift from being Greek Orthodox to Roman Catholic, and there’s just all of these kind of rituals around sadness. The first pages are really devoted to really a catalogue listing of her miseries, right down to the kittens that are dying on the ledge in the cesspool and she’s forbidden to rescue them. And so I think that there was this real kind of sense that it's a kind of weight and a weather that has settled over this family. There are definitely some books that I can think of that have that quality. I think that a really good story is able to kind of take you out of yourself and to remind you that we all have those periods that are like Picasso’s Blue Period where you just remember a time in your life and you just think, “I just couldn’t imagine anything else but the kind of sadness that was sort of living in my house with me.”

AMY: So, Kim, you obviously drew that comparison though. Were you thinking of the movie or the book? 

KIM: Uh, both, but I think just the sadness that sort of reverberates throughout the family. In The Virgin Suicides, in the book, the narrator is a neighbor, and he’s trying to understand where that’s coming from. The context and everything is completely different, but just that similar idea of the deep loneliness of a family and then the resulting suicides I thought was interesting.  

AMY: So, Lauren, we asked you if you would like to read one of your favorite passages from the novel ahead of this podcast, and I’m curious to know what you’re going to select!

LAUREN: Well, I think what I would like, if it’s not too much of a kind of giveaway to introduce people to the appearance of the parrot. So this is from a chapter, Chapter 3 called “The Prodigious Birth of Love.” Also, I currently have a muff that I really love that I got as a Christmas gift, and so this story begins with a girl walking wearing her muff:

Children no less than adults prefer to believe, need to believe, that they are the objects of an exclusive preference. This illusion, which is indispensable to their happiness, is assured to them at first by their nurse and later by their mother. But never for a moment was I allowed to think that I occupied the first place in my mother’s heart: it was forever taken by another. Never did I enjoy a privileged position with any one whatsoever,and no mark of preference had ever been given me until the day when, falling from the skies, the green parrot lighted on my muff. Yes, this miracle happened! And nothing ever happened in our family; we were the four little girls in mourning, to whom every distraction was forbidden as a matter of principle; and our life, like that of the Jews, had been the memory of a great happiness in the past. I could not even assure myself that Sasha’s death, the invented misfortune that served to nourish my young emotions, had touched me directly. But now, in this life deprived of affection, empty of adventure, entirely concentrated on an event anterior to my own past, something had suddenly appeared; a prodigy had taken place; I had seen the miraculous rift in the skies through which the unpredictable future invades the present and occupies it wholly.

KIM: Beautiful.

AMY: And I think it’s interesting, Lauren, that you referenced Nabokov earlier in our talk, because this whole portion of the book where she becomes obsessed, basically, with the green parrot, I was reminded of Nabokov’s Lolita. Just the way she talks about her desire for this bird (which doesn’t yet come through in the passage you just read, but you start to see it) and it’s a desire which, I dare say borders on sexual. Am I right? Kim? 

KIM: How about I read a passage from the book? 

AMY: Okay. [laughing]

LAUREN: We can only speak to the book right now. [laughing].

KIM: Exactly.

Love at first sight, the coupe de foudre …. Neither the wildest nor the wisest of the remarks I was later to hear on this burning question were destined to surprise me in the least. I was both credulous and forewarned. I knew all about passion, though my marriage was completely unromantic, and though I had the reputation of never falling in love. I had only to think of the green parrot to understand the truth of the improbable words that the chronicler of Verona assigns to Juliet a few moments after the meeting with Romeo. “Prodigious birth of love!” she exclaims after telling her nurse: 

Go, ask his name — if he be married, 

My grave is like to be my wedding bed. 

Why were the mysteries of passion revealed to me prematurely, with the help of a green parrot? I cannot say. It was not until long afterwards that I discovered a partial explanation for this overpowering emotion. 

AMY: Basically, she finds this green parrot as a child and longs for it, and an old family doctor tells her that she has fallen in love with this bird because of the boredom and lack of love from her parents (who were obsessed with her dead older brother). And so right now I think it’s a good time to point out that the theories of Sigmund Freud were really coming into vogue when this book was published and maybe that explains a lot where this novel is concerned. Lauren, what do you think her obsession with the green parrot is really all about?

LAUREN: I mean I think the green parrot is the absolute symbol of just this kind of wave of sensuality that has absolutely no other way of expressing itself in her life. Like, she’s not even allowed kind of simple, basic sensual pleasure that we sort of associate with the sun shining on us or taking a bite of a peach. All of these things are denied to her and she sort of has the sense of being no one’s favorite and so this idea of being chosen by this kind of larger-than-life animating force that has this just incredible force of will inside of it, I think is very powerful. I went falconing once and when I was holding the hawk on my hands I actually understood completely and wholly for the first time in my life that animals are completely different from us. That we anthropomorphize them, that we make up stories about them, that we have relationships with them, but this hawk and I, we wanted nothing of the same thing. So I think that she’s sort of projecting her desire to be free from what she sees as the constraints of civility onto this bird. But I would like to better express myself with a short passage from the next page!

AMY: Okay!

LAUREN: My eye had kept the delightful impression of the green parrot resting like a bouquet of young leaves on my dark muff, and afterwards I frequently endeavored to create this harmony about me. Of all the paintings I had ever seen, the one that delighted me most was the Annunciation of Lippo Memmi and Simone Martini, which hangs in the Uffizi galleries in Florence. When I came upon this picture, I felt almost the same shock as on seeing my bird for the first time. I could not believe my eyes; instinctively I closed them to protect myself from a joy that was too keen. The gleaming angel who kneeled like a sleeping whirlwind at the feet of the terrified Virgin — this angel whose wings are as sharp as knives, whose face bears a look of malice, and whose eyes slant upwards under the crest of his diadem — resembled my lovely parrot like a brother.

That’s a painting that I know, so I find it very meaningful. 

AMY: I also just want to say, Kim, how cool is it that we have a guest on that says, “I went falconing once.”

KIM: I’m not surprised at all. It’s perfect.

LAUREN: I was in this really beautiful part of Vermont called The Northeast Kingdom with my best friend, and we were out in the woods and there were like moose everywhere and I grew up around deer in Maryland and I’m really used to deer, but everyone just sort of explained that if a moose saw you it was kind of too late, and I became really really terrified, and I couldn’t really enjoy myself and walk around. I was like, “We’re going to go falconing so we can have a new relationship with animals.” I think I was way more obsessed with it than he was, which is a direct throughline to this conversation right now, but I remember very clearly looking into the bird’s eyes and just thinking, “We are not the same.” All of the Disneyfication of my childhood was just swept away, so yeah, I do understand that idea of a sort of transformative enlightenment that’s received by a surprise arrival.

AMY: So yes, you understand our narrator’s captivity with this bird. Her fascination with the parrot just ties into everything about this book that feels very mystical. As a child, the narrator has these visions of her dead brother while staring into cloud formations that are like waking dreams. Then there’s an incident with a medium who predicts her future, there’s also a religious commune that the narrator visits, and talk of time travel and a pair of fabled Persian lovers. And then there’s also this theme of physical doubles. Lauren, would you care to elaborate on that?

LAUREN: Well, I think that part of what is so fascinating (and in some ways intoxicating) about this book is the search for understanding that the narrator undergoes. She kind of travels throughout the book looking for that in all of these different things. The parrot is a kind of grief and an overwhelming kind of introduction to her life, and then her relationships become a way to connect with other people. It’s a kind of very interesting, sort of almost like a Russian nesting doll kind of aspect to many of the relationships where there are twos, there are threes… there are people that seem to have the physical characteristics that represent the direct opposite of the person that’s being addressed, and it’s like so stark that you can’t believe it. It’s almost an allegory. So I found it very interesting when I was reading the book and re-reading it I just kept thinking “This is so incredibly surreal.” But I think it also lends it the quality of a fable because you start to see … the characters are kind of reduced sometimes to a description of the way that they are: I am the opposite of you, or I am the other half of you, or I’m a mythical figure and you’re my cosmic counterpart, and so it’s definitely an idea of doubling, but I also see it as an idea of duality that echoes back to the idea of the parrot being this sort of missing central part of her life, you know, that has suddenly come to reclaim his place.

AMY: And so we have this younger sister, Marie, who is basically a doppelganger for the narrator. She’s the narrator’s “mini me” and she is strikingly beautiful like the narrator. And because I know that Bibesco was described as gorgeous in her life, her commentary that she gives on Marie’s beauty and her own beauty really stuck out to me in the book. That it’s a sort of curse that alienates you from everyone after a certain point. I could totally imagine Bibesco feeling this way in her life. And so I’m just going to read that passage:

The first effect of beauty is the only one that is not mixed with bitterness; It puts men in unison and makes them understand one another. Later, they begin to quarrel over the ownership of this treasure, which at first was held in common. The charm is broken immediately; what had caused agreement becomes a reason for dispute; what had pleased is now a source for unhappiness; and in this second phase, which follows all too soon after the first, Marie would have to pay dearly for the joy she was thought to give. When this time comes, the girl with “looks” should, if she loves peace, hasten to disappear from the eyes of the world. The same quality that made her loved will cause her to be hated…” 

And this commentary on beauty goes on for several more pages. I just totally could picture Marthe feeling this way.

LAUREN: Yeah, I mean, to return to your jewelry metaphor, I do think that most, if not all, of the characters in the book are a facet of her consciousness that she wants to interrogate in a way that allows her to really kind of analyze the characteristics of this part of herself.

KIM: One thing I wanted to circle back to was the dedication of the novel to her cousin Antoine. I can’t help but wonder about her dedicating it to a male relative and he was a known womanizer, as we said, with whom she clearly had a close relationship. As I said, I couldn’t find anything more about it. It is a bit mysterious. It reminds me of the nesting dolls you were mentioning, Lauren. And I was also thinking back when you were speaking earlier about the fable-like quality… Amy mentioned in the beginning, I think we were talking a little bit about Marthe and the stuff that she studied. She also, I think, had a governess that taught her the Romanian folk tales, so she was immersed in that in addition to all of the other Francophile-type things. 

LAUREN: Yeah, and I mean, she would have spoken (for someone in her social level and the time that she lived in) she would have spoken at least five languages. Five or six. And certainly everyone who would have come into her orbit would have shared something of their own life, and so I can see how some of the parts of the story that feel like a bit of a pastiche, you know, for someone who probably never received any formal education, it would have been encyclopedic in a way.

KIM: There’s such a mysterious, lovely quality to her writing that is really haunting. Lauren, is there anything else you wanted to say about The Green Parrot?

Lauren: Well, I find it really interesting that this book continues to bring intriguing new people and dimensions into my life. When I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to have this conversation and I invited people to share their thoughts, I discovered another book with a green parrot as a very important plot device. It’s A Simple Heart by Flaubert, and it’s a completely different story. It’s about a woman who’s a maid in a house and it’s a very similar psychological portrait. I actually think that these two works are read really gorgeously in conversation. Flaubert has this kind of quality of telling the story of overlooked lives, and it’s just really, really incredible, and it has a very kind of similar arc. It’s about a woman who feels quite unloved, has no family, no one to look after her. She begins to admire someone’s pet parrot, so much so that they give it to her when they leave town. She nurtures it, and it dies, and the rest of her life is about her kind of keeping the parrot in an altar and then it talks about the arc of her life, but no detail is overlooked. I found it just incredibly, incredibly touching and incredibly charming. There are so many points in the book where the people in the book are determined to overlook this woman, and yet the author just keeps the focus so totally on this love story between her and her parrot, and I think that they’re both unhappy, to quote another great writer, in their own way. I started to think, “Should I read all the books with parrots in them?” And then I was like, I think two French books from more or less the same time period is enough! But I started thinking a lot about women's lives and regardless of your socio-economic class, what kind of feelings you would have been allowed to feel. Some of the kind of huge passions of French novels of the 19th century I think have a lot to do with this fact that like sensuality cannot be legislated. It was Adam Moody on Twitter who was talking about A Simple Heart, and I’m really glad that I read it. It was one of those nice connections that you have online where you think, “Oh, I remember why I’m here!” So I promised that I would give him a shout-out.

AMY: Now you’re raising memories for me of another novel where a caged bird factors in prominently, and I cannot figure it out. I don’t know if it’s The Awakening [by Kate Chopin] ... But there’s some book like that… Birds are suddenly becoming a theme.

KIM: Yeah, Michael Chabon I thought had… I don’t know if his was a green parrot but I think it’s a novella or a short story [The Final Solution]. I’ll have to look now that we’re talking about this.

AMY: Who knew parrots could stir up so much passion in people? I guess parrot owners.

KIM: Yeah. And it makes me want to read more of her books, and I don’t know… I don't know how many of them are actually translated, or Lauren, if you’ve read any of them. She wrote the popular romances under a pseudonym, Lucile Décaux. Do you know anything about other translated works by her, or have you read any other works by her in French? 

LAUREN: No, there’s very little in print. I mean, The Green Parrot is considered her towering achievement, for sure.

AMY: I just want to point out that The Green Parrot was a really quick read, but it’s also one that I can see myself going back to for another look, and I don’t typically re-read novels that I’ve read. I just move on to the next one, but this is one that has so much packed into a little tidy package. The little “snuff box” that we mention in the introduction. There’s so much involved that I think on a second or third reading I would just get more and more out of it, and it’s so gorgeously written.

LAUREN: Oh, absolutely. The level of detail alone. Like if you were looking for inspiration on how to set a scene or even a table, I mean, you can just picture these rooms, you know and the door and then the door and then the door and door and doors kind of going on forever.

AMY: And the fact that she died almost penniless is really sad given that her life was so sparkling. The ending just feels like something out of a novel in a strange way.

LAUREN: Yeah, I mean I feel that that kind of casualty of the world changing was something that was lived so closely. I studied Russian in college and actually, working as a dance publicist in my 20s, I remember reading a lot and understanding a lot about the kind of exiles in Paris from various countries across Europe, you know, that just were not able to live where they were from anymore. So I think we’ve lost a lot of stories that way, where someone just doesn’t necessarily live happily ever after, although I wouldn’t say anything about her life, you know... I feel like the thing about Marthe is that she… she always gets the last word.

KIM: Lauren, it was an absolute delight to have you. You were perfect, perfect to talk about The Green Parrot with us! I am just thrilled.

LAUREN: Thank you, it’s so great to connect. It’s great to be here and obviously, I’ve been living my life … I started the lockdown living in Florence and then I came back to New York in the middle of it and sort of restarted my life here, and the entire time, whenever I’m feeling uncertain about anything I just repeat that epitaph from Howard’s End, “Only connect.” So I have done it for today!

KIM: Thank you so much, Lauren. Thanks again. So be sure to find a copy of The Green Parrot. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and visit Lostladiesoflit.com for further reading materials. 

AMY: If you liked what you’ve heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast…

KIM: And also check out our mini episode next week because we’re going to be talking about The Gilded Age. 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

22. A Real Life Lady Whistledown

KIM (CO-HOST): Hi everyone! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Kim Askew…

AMY (CO-HOST): And I’m Amy Helmes. We’re best friends and co-authors of the Twisted Lit series of young adult novels, and though it’s been a few months since this television show became available, we’d be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to briefly dish about “Bridgerton.” What do you say, Kim?

KIM: Okay, let’s just do it. We’ve held off on discussing it until now because we really didn’t want to spoil it for anybody who didn’t get to binge it right out of the starting gate.

AMY: And actually, we’re not going to give any spoilers away today, either, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet. The Internet has been abuzz for months now with all sorts of recaps and commentary on the show. So we don’t really need to go there. But that said, we think you’re going to find this episode’s topic pretty interesting even if you have not watched “Bridgerton” and even if you don’t intend to. Kim, first things first, we never really got a chance to compare notes about the series — so what’s your verdict? Did you enjoy it?

KIM: Okay, Amy, I enjoyed every episode, and then I promptly forgot about every episode. I’d say it was like a bag of M&Ms rather than a box of Godiva. That said, sometimes — especially during a pandemic (and in L.A. where we are pretty much on “stay-at-home” orders right now) — sometimes a bag of M&Ms is just what you need. 

AMY: I couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s exactly the right analogy for this show. It’s not Godiva. It was totally a bag of M&Ms. Kind of works in a pinch when you need that chocolate fix, you know? I really appreciated the fact that the production value was so high. I mean, that kept my interest going. The casting was amazing, they did not skimp on the costumes or the scenery, the locations… anything like that. Regé-Jean Page and his chiseled bod… he’s got to be in the “Top 10 Costume Drama Hotties.” 

KIM: They’re talking about making him the next James Bond. I don’t know if it’s just the Internet, but I’m there for it honestly. I’m probably more into James Bond if he were James Bond.

AMY: I think that would actually be really good casting. And I’ve got to say, Phoebe Dynevor, who played Daphne, I thought she was incredible too. I loved her. My one problem was that she really reminded me of Wendy from Peter Pan, so then when she would go into the full-in sexy stuff, it was just really hard for me to watch because of the bangs and the innocence. You know what I mean? I just kept thinking of Disney’s Wendy!

KIM: I agree. I felt that, too. I loved the sister.

AMY: Eloise.

KIM: Yeah. Eloise.

AMY: I loved Eloise. I loved Penelope across the street.

KIM: Me too.

AMY: I thought she was really good. I also thought it was interesting to see a Regency-era story set in the heart of London because so many times, except for a few scenes here and there, it’s always set in the English countryside. In Bath or wherever. So to see it actually in the city was pretty cool. But my problem, I guess, a little bit was that it felt like, “Hollywood” was writing it. It felt like Americans were writing it.

KIM: Totally. It was not the BBC.

AMY: The English speak with a specific sort of cadence and they have a certain wit — a very specific wit — and I don’t think it was captured in that series. But I still loved it. I do think it’s funny to see people finally freaking out about costume dramas, like suddenly the rest of the world has caught on to this. If it’s going to spur production of more shows like this, then yes, I’m down for it.

KIM: Absolutely, and we’re always here to give you advice on what other things you can watch that are even better. So for those of you who weren’t aware, the premise around which “Bridgerton” is built is that there’s this anonymous gossip columnist in Regency-era London who goes by the name of “Lady Whistledown.” She loves to stir up scandal by spilling all the tea about members of high society.

AMY: And all the characters on the show are just itching to get their hands on her newsletters as they are printed, and what they read either fills them with wicked amusement or abject mortification, depending on who she’s talking about that week. They never know who will be the subject of Lady Whistledown’s high praise or the target of her scathing exposes. And this mysterious figure has the ability to make or break people’s reputations and, ergo, their very happiness.

KIM: Hmmm, sounds a little bit like “Gossip Girl,” doesn’t it? 

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Anyway, so, is “Bridgerton’s” Lady Whistledown based on a real person, Amy?

AMY: Well, there’s no specific person, historically, that we could equate with Lady Whistledown, but according to historian Catherine Curzon, who gave a recent interview to Town & Country magazine, she does take after a gossip writer from early 18th century England known as “Mrs. Crackenthorpe.”

KIM: Are you sure that’s not a Dickens character, Amy?

AMY: It does sound like that, right?

KIM: There’s the same number of syllables in their names. 

AMY: Yeah, “Whistledown.” “Crackenthorpe.” Yeah. So anyway, I decided to dig a little further to see what all I could find on Mrs. Crackenthorpe. So “Mrs. Phoebe Crackenthorpe” (her tagline is: “a lady who knows everything”) was an anonymous author who wrote the short lived magazine The Female Tatler, which was published from 1709 to 1710. (It was basically a rival of The Tatler, but it was one of the first periodicals aimed solely for a female audience). It was known for its “scandal and scurrility.” 

KIM: Oooh.

AMY: I like that word: scurrility. Mrs. Crackenthorpe, unlike Lady Whistledown, did not out people by name, however, she used codes to disguise their identities that were pretty easy to see through. 

KIM: So basically the historic equivalent of “blind items.” 

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: It reminds me actually a little bit of the anonymous “case studies” that are in the books of Marjorie Hillis, which we talked about in last week’s episode, although Marjorie Hillis’s examples are meant to be sort of self-help, cautionary tales. But as for Mrs. Crackenthorpe, I like the idea of people having to look for the clues to determine exactly who she’s talking about. That sounds really cool. 

AMY: Yeah, and interestingly, she also chastised any readers who sent in letters trying to expose people… she did not play that way. It’s fine for her to dish the dirt, because she saw herself as impartial, but if you were trying to out someone vindictively, she was NOT on board and she was not going to help you out with that.

KIM: Ooh, I like her! So do we actually know who she really was?

AMY: That remains the big question, actually: the identity of “Mrs. Crackenthorpe” has never been established. Some scholars theorize that it could have been a man, but that’s just speculation. And actually “Mrs. Crackenthorpe” had words to say about that theory. She wrote:

Whereas several ill-bred critics have reported about town that a woman is not the author of this paper, which I take to be a splenetic and irrational aspersion upon our whole sex, women were always allow'd to have a finer thread of understanding than men, which made them have recourse to learning, that they might equal our natural parts, and by an arbitrary sway have kept us from many advantages to prevent our out-vying them; but those ladies who have imbib'd authors, and div'd into arts and sciences have ever discover'd a quicker genius, and more sublime notions. These detractors cou'd never gain admittance to the fair sex, and all such I forbid my drawing room.” [Issue No. 11]

So she’s not having any “only a man could have written this.” Don’t talk to her that way. Side note on this: a baronet once referred to her drawing room as the “scandal office.” I feel like I need a placard for my office that just says “Scandal Office” on it. 

KIM: I love that. It very much makes it almost, in a salacious way, kind of business-like, which a woman, potentially, of Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s ilk, probably wasn’t actually “working” so to speak in other ways than this, so I kind of like that.

AMY: Yeah, she was brokering in scandal, in gossip, and having people come in and out of the drawing room telling her what to dish about. So as to her identity though, some people have also suggested that she could have been the playwright, best-selling novelist and political satirist  Delarivier Manley (or Delia Manley, for short). And I don’t know if it was her or not, but we could devote an entire episode to her as a “Lost Lady of Lit,” because she put out a lot of great works and she is sometimes referred to as one of the “fair triumvirate of wit” (the other two in that triumvirate at the time were the writers Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood.) 

KIM: Oh, we’ve got to research her for a potential “lost lady,” you are right. She sounds fascinating. Let’s look into that more.

AMY: She would have been in her 40s around the time Mrs. Crackenthorpe was writing, so that all pans out. And I’ve also seen scholarship that debunks the idea that Manley was Lady Crackenthorpe… what’s actually really interesting, thought, is that Delia Manley was arrested for libel at one point for lampooning certain politicians in her novel The New Atalantis, and right around that time she got arrested, the The Female Tatler’s next issue (the 52nd issue) was suddenly published under a new authorship… someone else took over — these two sisters named Lucinda and Artesia. But what happened to Lady Crackenthorpe?

KIM: Ooh, the plot thickens! 

AMY: All that said, Lady Crackenthorpe was at work in the early part of the 18th century, so that was basically a century before the time period in which Bridgerton is set. So she’s not necessarily the perfect parallel for Lady Whistledown.

KIM: Right, but if we want to look to something a little more of that Regency era, we could mention Town and Country magazine (which, by the way, is no relation to the Town & Country publication we know of today) It had a column called “Tete-A-Tete” which is another early gossip column. It was like “Page 6” in that it focused on celebrities of the day.

AMY: We’re talking celebrities like Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire…

KIM: We love her.

AMY: She was played by Keira Knightley in a biopic called The Duchess. If you haven’t seen that, it’s worth checking out. And then similar to today, there were also a lot of stories centered on the royal family, including The Prince of Wales and his lover, who was actress Mary Robinson. The gossip columns could not get enough of this couple and they referred to them as “Perdita” and “Florizel,” which were apparently their pet names for one another.

KIM: I love it! Okay, so while we’re talking Regency Era romance, Amy I think this might be a good segue to talk about the new book you have an essay featured in.

AMY: So yeah, even today’s modern newspapers love to dish about real life romances — and several years back I contributed an article to The L.A. Times’ “L.A. Affairs” column. It’s a weekly column that they publish having to do with dating, relationships and marriage in Los Angeles. Well, they have recently published a book compiling some of the “greatest hits” from the “L.A. Affairs” column, and I’m so excited that they chose to include my essay in it! 

KIM: I’m excited about the book, too. It’s called L.A. Affairs: 65 True Stories of Nightmare Dates, Love at First Sight, Heartbreak and Happily Ever Afters in Southern California. We’ll include a link in our show notes of course for that, but Amy, tells us about your essay, which I love.

AMY: It was called “Searching for Mr. Darcy,” and it’s basically about my search for a soul mate in Los Angeles and comparing it to that of a Jane Austen heroine.

KIM: Can you read us a bit of it?

AMY: Yeah! I’ll read you sort of the beginning part.

Approaching self-declared spinsterhood, I blamed Jane Austen. Having read all her novels and watched achingly gorgeous film adaptations thereof, I would consider only men who epitomized one of those gallant and stouthearted Regency-era heroes (barring the breeches and riding jackets because, well, I had to be realistic).

Yet here was the sad but universal truth: If Jane Austen couldn’t find a suitable mate in her day and age — she never married — there was no way in hell I’d ever find my “Mr. Darcy” in L.A., of all places.

Sure, you could find a regimental army’s worth of rogues at any bar in Hollywood. And this town was teeming with preening and sniveling “Mr. Collins” types, those smarmy social climbers (typically agents and aspiring screenwriters) in hot pursuit of their trophy wife. Insufferable. As for honorable gentleman callers — the kind that would make you swoon while earning your mother’s seal of approval? — they were as rare as snow on the Sunset Strip.

Occasionally, a dashing young dandy had me blushing under my nonexistent bonnet. That’s when friends would set me straight by insisting that my gentleman caller definitely wasn’t. (“His favorite movie is ‘Xanadu,’ Amy! How are you not seeing this?”) Like a foolhardy Lydia Bennet, I was briefly led astray by an L.A. transplant from England, naturally besotted by his British accent and rakish charm only to discover, to my disgrace, that he was both a coke addict and a married man. Quelle horreur!

There was only one way to meet my 18th century ideal: Use 21st century tactics. 

And it goes on from there, basically, to explain how, in fact, I did meet my husband, Mike.

KIM: I was there for all of it, from “Single Amy” to “Married Amy,” and it is a very romantic story. You’ll definitely want to read the rest of this brilliant, wonderful essay.

AMY: I did find my “Mr. Darcy.”

KIM: Yes. Thank goodness. So, speaking of love stories, I’ll segue into a rather unusual one we have coming at you next week. (You’ll want to stay around for that): The Green Parrot, by Princess (and yes, you heard that right) Princess Marthe Bibesco. And we have a wonderful guest joining us to discuss her. She’s literary publicist Lauren Cerand, who has been dubbed a “cultural gatekeeper in the literary world,” no less. 

AMY: And by the way, Lauren had these beautiful “parrot” headbands made for us by Kevin Burke who has a shop on Etsy. We’ll link to that in our show notes, and I’m sure you can find the pictures of those on our Instagram. We’ll see you next week. Until then, be sure to do all the things they tell you to do at the end of podcasts: subscribe, rate and review us. And hit us up on social media to let us know what you think!

KIM: We’d really love if you’d review us. 

AMY: Please!

KIM: Our theme song was performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by the wonderful Harriet Grant. 

AMY: Lost Ladies of Lit was produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.

21. Marjorie Hillis — Live Alone and Like It with Joanna Scutts

AMY HELMES (CO-HOST): Hi, everybody! So, as you know, we are recording this podcast in our homes during a pandemic, and in this episode, it just happens to be three moms with kids of various ages in the house while we are trying to record the podcast.

KIM ASKEW (CO-HOST): You may hear small outbursts from a child in the background.

AMY: That’s motherhood.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: With that said … Valentine’s Day. Never has a single holiday had so many wide-ranging emotions associated with it. 

KIM: Yes. Glee, dread, weird pressure and anxiety — all of those things come to mind for me, you’re right. 

AMY: There’s something a little bit off about a holiday that so obviously makes people who aren’t in a relationship feel bad. I’ve had a lot of lonely Valentine’s Days in my past, Kim. I remember one year when I opted not to wallow and instead got crafty and made all of my single friends beautiful and elaborate Valentine’s cards. And I think you got one that year.

KIM: I still have it, in fact, and it’s one of my favorite Valentines, for sure! So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off some of history’s long-forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes… and okay, listeners, as you might have guessed, we’re not selecting some long-lost romantic novel in honor of Valentine’s Day this week.

KIM: No, we wouldn’t do that to you. Instead, we’re going in the completely opposite direction. We’re going to focus on Marjorie Hillis, a writer whose book, Live Alone and Like It (a self-help guide celebrating the single life) was among the top-10 bestselling nonfiction books of 1936. 

AMY: She gave non-married women of all ages (Live-Aloners, she called them) the green light to view themselves not as spinsters but rather, as chic and sensational singletons who could waltz through life with a freedom to do exactly as they pleased — and to really savor it. Her pithy tome (along with its subsequent sequels) is charming, witty and chock-full of advice that, honestly, still seems really solid even today, no matter what your relationship status is.

KIM: It’s a delightful read, and we’re thrilled to be discussing it today, especially since we have the ultimate authority on Marjorie Hillis with us today to chat. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

AMY: So we are so very lucky to have literary critic and cultural historian Joanna Scutts here with us today. She graduated from King’s College, Cambridge, and went on to earn her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia. She helped curate exhibits and events for the New York Historical Society's Center for Women’s History, and she’s written for The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time and The Washington Post, to name just a few. Her 2017 book The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It was published to rave reviews and named one of 2018’s feminist must-reads by the UK’s Red magazine, and it’s her book that introduced me to Marjorie Hillis. Joanna, thanks so much for joining us!

JOANNA SCUTTS (GUEST): Thank you for having me! I’m so excited to talk about this.

KIM: So, Joanna in your book, you talk about how you first discovered Hillis, and it’s a really special anecdote and we were hoping you would share the story with our listeners.

JOANNA: Sure! I often say that it was a gift that came into my life. It was at a time in my life when I was kind of flailing. My father had died recently; I was single; I was almost thirty and finishing up a pHd program and had no idea what was coming next. One of my oldest friends when I was home in London gave me a copy of this book, which I read and devoured having kind of gotten over the title, because the title is kind of a bit of a punch in the gut in some ways: Live Alone and Like It? It’s like, “Oh, this is my future.” But it was so funny, and my friend sort of insisted, she was like, “Read on and listen!” So she’s reading me passages from it, and we started reading them to each other, and then I devoured the whole book and really was just fascinated by this voice. Really captivated by her sense of humor and I was just like, “Marjorie Hillis…” I had no idea who this person was, and I Googled and there was no Wikipedia page — there was not a hint of who this person was. Eventually I found somebody’s blog that had talked about it, and there’s kind of a little bit of a cult of Marjorie Hillis out there, so I tapped into that, but I sort of knew there was a story here, and I wanted to figure out what it was. 

AMY: I love the fact that not only did you write a biography of Hillis but you actually kind of used her as a sort of fulcrum to tell a larger story, about the history of women in the 20th century. What do you think makes her the perfect figure with which to tell that larger story?

JOANNA: That’s such a great question, and there’s sort of a “meta” answer and a more substantive answer. The meta answer is what I was saying about how completely she had disappeared. As I started to research, I realized how hugely famous she had been for this very brief moment and how enormously successful this book was. And that kind of interplay of fame and disappearance is something that is very common with women writers, historically, who can be famous and successful but don’t have the sort of establishment...don’t get into the “academy,” don’t get canonized in the way that men do more easily. And I was interested in that moment of fame and disappearance as a story of women’s literature even as relatively recently as the 1930s. But then she also kind of has a trajectory, a life story that we’ll talk about. The journey that she took is a very typical one in some ways. Her family was from the Midwest and sort of moved to New York at the turn of the 20th century when the city became this sort of huge metropolis. And she was a minister’s daughter and she went to work for a magazine and became this journalist/editor, really embraced her working life, her professional life, her professional identity… came of age as women were given the vote and so kind of became successful and independent in a way that hadn’t been possible for previous generations. She basically became famous by writing a self-help book about how to be more like her. (Takes a certain level of confidence and success!) Obviously, hers was a very privileged story. She was not fabulously wealthy by the standards of the time, but certainly wealthy and secure, and she had opportunities that weren’t available to poorer women; certainly weren’t available to black women, women of color at the time. So her life story is a particularly privileged white feminist story, but I think the way that she reached this much wider audience makes for a really interesting bigger story. 

KIM: Can you tell us a little bit about the origin of the title of your book, “The Extra Woman” and where that springs from? 

JOANNA: Well, it’s her subtitle. So the book, Live Alone and Like It is a “Guide for the Extra Woman.” And in a way, that extraordinarily blunt phrasing (kind of a two-punch title) but it was quite a common phrase. In the book she talks about it sort of as a “social extra”  — being sort of undesirable at dinner parties because you mess up the numbers. But also there’s a really important sense of how you sort of were legally “extra” at the time, and for many, many years, historically, the status of women in the American legal system was that you were “covered,” (the legal term is coverture — you were covered by your husband or your father) and women who were unmarried were sort of outside that system in a way that the system didn’t really have a place for. Being “extra,” being outside of the expected kind of “two by two” formation of culture and identity. She was really speaking, as she often does, of this much larger legal problem but approaching it in a very light way.   

AMY: It’s funny, too, because now, that term “extra” is almost a good thing: “She’s so extra!!” But yes, the original version of it? A little insulting.

KIM: Yeah, it’s worse than being a third wheel.

JOANNA: But it’s true, I think you’re always both. You were surplus to requirements but you also had the possibility to be bigger than life, and I think there was always some potential in there.

AMY: I think we need to give listeners a taste right off the bat of what Hillis’s book — Live Alone and Like It  — is like. 

KIM: Right. So in a nutshell, it’s an advice book, and it’s organized into 12 chapters that address key topics centered around living your best solo life, be it advice on how to set up the swankiest apartment, how to be a single party hostess and witty conversationalist, how to dress chicly, and even tips on cooking for one. It’s all about cultivating a cultured, pampered existence for yourself. 

AMY: And yeah, she even delves into the “pleasures of the single bed” (Oooh!) and takes a no-judgment attitude about sex and having affairs, which was pretty daring for her era. But I think the best way to illustrate the book is to just go ahead and share some of her fabulous advice, so to that end, Joanna, Kim and I are going to share some of our favorite nuggets of wisdom from the book. Joanna, would you care to start us off?

JOANNA: Okay! Well, one of my favorite sections is the chapter which is composed as a kind of Q&A about etiquette. There’s all kinds of arcane rules about where you’re supposed to sit at a dinner party if you have single women there. They were really apparently a big problem for dinner parties! But one of the questions was “Is it permissible for a youngish un-chaperoned woman living alone to wear pajamas when a gentleman calls?” It really depends, Marjorie says, assuming she knows one pajama from another, it’s entirely permissible. And then she goes on to give you the different kinds of pajamas. Sleeping pajamas — those are not acceptable to receive anyone; beach pajamas (which I’m still not quite sure what those are); lounging pajamas; and then hosting pajamas. I fell in love with this idea of “hostess pajamas” — I think there’s a great untapped market there.

KIM: I mean, we need this for Zoom, if someone hasn’t already written it, but which pajamas you can wear for Zoom depending on who you’re talking to on Zoom. I think that would apply. And I think we do need different types of pajamas!

JOANNA: Absolutely.

AMY: Kind of piggy-backing off that question was one of my favorite tips: Once you have a gentleman caller at your house and it’s time for him to go, how do you tactfully get him to vamoose, as they say? I will just read the little snippet that she says: If you want him to come again soon, a little tact is usually wiser. You might begin with “Let me get you a glass of water.” (Nothing stronger). “It’s hours since you had that highball.” This will get you both up and give you the advantage. You can keep on standing, which will eventually wear down any man if you don’t drop first. There is little danger that you will have to call the elevator man or open the window and scream. It may happen, but don’t get your hopes up. You have to be pretty fascinating.

KIM: This is like the opposite of “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” How do I get him out?! That’s hilarious.

AMY: Kim would you care to share one?

KIM: Yes, I have so many, but I’m going to go to the beginning of the book, Chapter One: Solitary Refinement, and it’s mentioned a little in the preface, too, but I’ll skip straight to this: You have got to decide what kind of life you want and then make it for yourself. And it sounds really simple. It could be the premise of, I guess, many self-help books, but honestly, I think if you stop to think about it, it’s about being active rather than reactive, and if you can take that little first step, then you’re sort of on your way to figuring it out. Says someone who lived alone, off and on, for two decades and finally figured it out. I wish I had had her as a guru.

JOANNA: I’m so glad you quoted that line, Kim. It’s one of my favorite lines in the book and I just love that it’s true. It’s the simplicity that kind of stops you in your tracks. She goes on to say that having traditional marriage and kids is often a way of kind of avoiding that question and the reason why it’s that much more urgent for people who live alone is that, you know, you’ve got nothing standing in the way of you and that decision. So it’s a really proactive stance that runs through the book.

AMY: Okay, Joanna, any other fascinating tidbit that you can share?

JOANNA: Well, I think we were going to talk about New York a little bit later, so I don’t want to go too much into it, but I love the pages when she’s talking about exploring your city, essentially. It’s kind of this whole litany of “Have you been here?” “Have you been to this?” “Have you hunted up the little French restaurants that are the cheap, out of the way ones?” “Have you been to the Yiddish theater?” It’s both a kind of wonderful snapshot of New York in the Thirties, but also, what’s interesting about that section is this is the part that really confused me, because the first version of the book that I read was the translation of this American book into a British context. So in the British version of the book, instead of going to Broadway, it’s the West End, instead of Central Park, it’s Regent’s Park. And so everything about it is tailored to London. I love that there’s this kind of vision of a really active, engaged life in the city, but it kind of almost doesn’t matter which city because the same thing is there wherever you are.

AMY: Which brings me to my next bit of advice that I loved, about travel. She says: A reasonable amount of travel ought of course to be listed among the necessities. And an unreasonable amount if you can manage it. (And this is my favorite part:) If you don’t agree with this, there is something wrong with you and you should see a doctor or a minister or at least read a few travel books and folders. I mean, hilarious!

KIM: I have one that, I would be surprised if Amy didn’t pick this one, too, because I could hear her saying this: Anyone who pities herself for more than a month on end is a weak sister and likely to become a public nuisance besides. Basically, like, yeah, you can feel sorry for yourself for a little bit, and I think she even goes into the details of having a good cry in your bed and everything, but wallowing in the pity is not going to get you any closer to living the life that you want. So kind of, “Chin up, now. It’s time to sort of get with it and start living.”

AMY: Also, she strongly urges you to maintain a sense of fabulousness. One of my favorite recommendations is to make sure you put a mirror at the foot of your bed so that when you wake up in the morning, you can be sure to look at yourself and make sure that you’re not falling apart.

KIM: I won’t be taking that advice!

AMY: You know, it’s a reminder to not let yourself go if you have to look at yourself in the mirror every morning.

KIM: Good advice, but no thanks.

JOANNA: So the mirror at the foot of the bed is also, I always thought, a bit of the minister’s daughter coming through. That kind of sense of like keeping yourself honest and that sense that you’re always accountable to you god or to your mirror. It’s frivolous, but this is one of those moments where I feel like the frivolity slips and there is a serious, quite tough-mind, Protestant advice here about “You’ve got to keep your standards up even if no one’s watching.”

KIM: I love that insight into it. That actually makes a lot of sense. 

JOANNA: So one thing that I’ve always liked is about the importance of friends, because one of the things that she emphasizes over and over again is that being a successful Live-Aloner is not about being a hermit. And actually, the social life that you build is vital to your happiness. She says most people’s minds are like ponds and need a constantly fresh stream of ideas in order not to get stagnant. So she has this idea that you should always be feeding your mind and you should be keeping up on books and theater and culture and also seeing your friends. Your friends are a really key part of keeping that active. She has another line about being something, doing something in the world. One that gets quoted a lot, but it’s: Be a communist, be a stamp-collector or a ladies’ aid worker if you must, but for heaven’s sake, be something. It reads very differently in 1936 than it would have in 1946, but the idea that you just go out and be a part of your community, part of your world, socially, politically. Just because you’re alone it doesn’t mean that you have to stay inside.

KIM: In some ways it feels like, “Yeah, of course,” but I feel like so many people, especially when you’re first starting out on your own, really don’t get that. I know that I didn’t, and it did take me a while to figure that out for myself. To really stop waiting for an event or a person to sort of direct my life and to take it upon myself to do all those things. So I think if women read something like this as they were starting out, especially particular types of women (maybe like me), they might have had an easier time of it from the beginning and enjoyed themselves a little bit more.  

AMY: She also talks about, you don’t want to venture into “old lady” territory. Or, you know, you don’t want to be the person at the dinner party who is a bore, because you’re not going to get invited back, and that’s a lot of the reason why she kept emphasizing to make sure you’re up on current events; make sure you have a selection of recent books that you can talk about, movies that you’ve been to, plays that you’ve been to.

KIM: The woman who treats herself like an aristocrat seems aristocratic to other people, and the woman who is sloppy at home inevitably slips sometimes in public. It sort of reminded me of that idea of dressing for the job you want to have, and I think a lot of her advice is sort of geared toward presenting yourself, but in doing so, you begin to turn inward and look at what you really want, and I love that aspect of what she’s saying.

AMY: And she’s so funny, too! Every bit of this advice, I don’t think we’re doing justice to the fact that she’s hilarious. But at the same time, she kind of gets really “tough-love” with you, too. I was reminded of the “Snap Out of It!” moment in “Moonstruck,” for anyone actually old enough to get that reference. She cautions readers against feeling sorry for themselves, writing: “...you can figure out for yourself just what you’ll become with a mental picture of ‘Poor little me, all alone in a big bad world.’ Not only will you soon actually be all alone; you will also be an outstanding example of the super-bore.”

KIM: I love that. So Joanna, when this book was published in 1936, there was really an appetite for this sort of thing. Can you tell us a little more about that?

JOANNA: Sure. Our picture of the Depression obviously is that nobody really had anything, and yet there is a lot of up and down obviously in those years. In 1936, the Depression has been dragging on for most of the decade. There was a real sense that people were on their own to kind of make their way. There’s a huge boom in self-help books in the middle of the 1930s. How to Win Friends and Influence People is also 1936. People were very eager for stories about how you could succeed and how, if you just change your mindset, you can overcome circumstance. So this is also the time when Norman Vincent Peale, who goes on to become kind of the guru of positive thinking, he’s getting his start around this time. And there’s a lot of other people. Napoleon Hill, who had a big bestseller called Think and Grow Rich. There’s just kind of this real sense of like, you can mentally overcome your circumstances and succeed. Marjorie Hillis is one of the few people who was specifically writing to women and writing in a way that isn’t about how to find a husband or how to be a thrifty housewife or how to push your family’s budget, but she’s there saying, “figure out what you want, go after it. Move, leave your family. Sell your old house and take a chic apartment in the city.” All of these things that are just very much about making your own way. She kind of capitalizes on that hunger for self-help, but sort of does it with this interesting feminist twist.

AMY: So Hillis was in her 40s when this book came out, and it might be surprising, especially for that era, to think of a woman her age writing a book about how to epitomize fabulousness, basically. But she also had a seemingly glamorous job, I think, that no doubt gave her really a specific insight for this task. 

JOANNA: Yes! Absolutely! She had been at Vogue magazine at this point for more than 20 years. She worked her way up. She was an editor. When she got started, she worked with Dorothy Parker briefly when she was at Vogue writing underwear captions. Brevity is the soul of lingerie, famously. Dorothy Parker, years later, talked about Vogue at that time and said actually back then it wasn’t a very glamorous place; it was kind of dowdy, that these women were very nice and very genteel, kind of white-glove ladies. It was over across the hall at Vanity Fair where they were much more dashing and glamorous. But over the years, Vogue did get more racy and more glamorous, and Marjorie became good friends with the editor in chief, Edna Woolman Chase, who was there for almost 40 years. And her autobiography is an interesting ride as well, but she loved her work and even when she was wealthy and when she had a family, she didn’t give it up. Marjorie was very much the same. She loved her work, and so they were sort of like-minded women. Marjorie described herself as very plain. That she was dowdy and she never had boyfriends, she never had much interest from men when she was young, but she knew how to dress, because Vogue taught you that. It taught you how to make the best of what you have and how to be confident, and she really thought of fashion as what we were saying earlier, it was really a tool for women to present themselves to the world. She has a great line about It takes a genius to make an impression in rundown heels and an unbecoming hat. She thought women should study it as a manual. As kind of, “Okay, I have to learn what goes with what,” and if you learn that, you can dress better and then you can essentially put your best foot forward. But she really didn’t think it was just something for beautiful women or young women or rich women. It was something that everyone sort of had a right and a duty to embrace.

AMY: Although Live Alone and Like It was written for women everywhere, a lot of the advice seems particularly suited to city girls, and it feels like this book is a real love letter to New York. Now, Joanna, as someone who now calls New York home, I can imagine that’s something you appreciate.

JOANNA: Absolutely. So I’m from London originally and I’ve lived in New York now for 20 years soon, so it really does speak to me as a city girl and I think that’s right, Marjorie does essentially say that part of the challenge of being single is escaping the judgment and the well-meaning help and advice of family and friends and so a large part of it is about getting to somewhere you can reinvent yourself, and of course historically, traditionally, that’s been cities. Marjorie loved New York. She wrote a book about New York, a guide book to the city, in 1939, and we actually had a friend read a passage from that at my wedding, which was in a park on the edge of the East River. She talks about the beauty of the rivers kind of wrapping around Manhattan. It’s just a wonderful, simple evocation of what it means to be at home in New York. She had talked about being in a New York apartment and she says, you can’t be lonely if you’re surrounded by all these other lives. There’s “Nowhere else, except for perhaps on a mountaintop can one feel so securely snug and remote, so sure of being able to live one’s life as one wants to, as in a New York apartment, where you never see your neighbor and choose your friends because you like them and not because they live around the corner. That always kind of struck me as a fantasy, but it’s a very powerful, enduring one, for sure. 

KIM: And even that apartment building that she moved to, there’s something just so “of the moment,” and modern. It felt like she was at the beginning of some exciting time and right in the middle of it. There’s one whole chapter in the book devoted to budgeting and finances, and Hillis cleverly titles it “You’d Better Skip This One.” (Which of course makes you want to read it.) So much of the book is about finding life’s little luxuries, but this book was written during the Great Depression as we talked about. So how did Hillis manage to square that?

JOANNA: Well, the simplest answer is that she was rich, but the serious answer is that she, I think, recognized that self-help has a lot to do with inspiration and also aspiration, so she was really aware that part of what people were looking for was something to kind of inspire them to greatness and to more than they had. Her second book, which was all about budgeting, is called Orchids on Your Budget. She’d initially called it An Orchid on Your Budget. (An orchid. A single orchid). And then she ran it by her colleagues at Vogue and they thought that that was stingy. So it became Orchids, which I love. And she does say in that book, she says explicitly that this isn’t advice for people who are struggling to survive, fairly obviously. She says it’s about people who are able to make the choice between butter on their bread; it’s not for people who are struggling to get the bread. She makes that distinction fairly self-consciously, but of course, it’s still a very privileged kind of book. But that didn’t seem to get in the way of its popularity.

KIM: And while you might think a lot of her advice would be maybe a little dated almost 100 years later, it really isn’t! You know, there are a few things …. She mentions having servants to wait on you … something most of us today DON’T have… those sections can get a bit cringey at times.

AMY: And yeah, tastes have literally changed a bit in terms of, let’s say, the chapter on cooking. I probably won’t be serving my guests noodles mixed with chicken livers and tomato sauce which was one of her recommendations. But I really loved her advice about making a habit of planning your social life out a week in advance, so that way when the weekend rolls around, you already have a ton of engagements lined up -- you’re not sitting at home twiddling your thumbs. That’s solid advice, I think!

KIM: Yeah, definitely, and I loved the chapter on serving cocktails and what to stock your liquor cabinet with — you’d still today be considered extremely cool if you followed her guidance on that today. 

JOANNA: Yeah, I mean certainly the cocktail thing is sort of: learn the classics and don’t try to improve on them. She’s very strict about that. Yeah, and I think she has a great many relevant things to say about not only pajamas but other forms of bedwear. She really… there’s a whole wardrobe out there: bed jackets she’s very keen on, so you can have breakfast in bed.

AMY: And she also says dress for bed as if you’re not going to bed alone, which I love.

JOANNA: Yes, she has a great deal of fun with the sort of prurient assumptions around single women and even though from her own life, from what I was able to glean, she clearly wasn’t especially scandalous in her own life, but she definitely understood that single women (especially financially independent women) were a scandal in some sense, and so she sort of leans into that very much with all the advice on glamorous negligees. It was clearly a kind of titillating glimpse behind the curtain of what the single lady in her apartment is doing.

AMY: And I think she said I can’t tell you whether or not to have an affair, but if you are going to have one, wait until you’re 30. That was her advice also.

JOANNA: Yes, I like that advice. She just says, “There’s just too much drama before that, but by the time you’re 30, you know what you want. You’re not going to put up with nonsense. Your family’s kind of given up on you anyway, so you’re fine.” There’s something to that! I do also think that her advice about material objects is really… i really have sort of taken that to heart since reading all of this. She genuinely believed that beautiful surroundings, beautiful clothes do have a real effect on your life and how you feel. That line about if you don’t look your best how hard it is to come across well. And also it’s very hard to be happy in an apartment surrounded by all sorts of crap that you hate. It’s about spending time and attention and daring to sort of choose the things you love.

AMY: Definitely the precursor to Marie Kondo: Find what sparks joy. So at the end of every chapter, Hillis includes these “case studies” of various women who serve as examples of either what to do or what not to do… Honestly, they were my favorite parts of the book, because she’s so dramatic and funny in telling their stories — often cautionary tales and sometimes horror stories. Now I presumed they were fictitious, but it seems from reading your book, that she really did base some of these on people she knew.

JOANNA: Yes. So they’re often sort of too well-disguised at this distance to really figure that out, but certainly there are moments where she got a little sloppy and she didn’t really disguise them enough and people recognized themselves. I think especially in the second book about budgeting. People were like, “Umm… is that me?” In Live Alone she has one which is very recognizable which is a “Miss. W.” who stands on her head at parties. Which was a reference, clearly, to this very famous interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, who was a kind of scandalous figure in various ways. She was an out lesbian; she was a big enthusiast of yoga when it was brand new, and this was her party trick, was to stand on her head. So that’s one where clearly everybody knew who she was talking about. But for the most part, I think her mix of known people and maybe there are amalgamations, but they are, I think, yeah, you’re right — very lively and really do make the case that there’s this army of women out there who are desperate for this kind of advice and stumble upon it in some way, but there’s an untapped market that she’s identified.

KIM: So, can you tell us about how this book was received when it came out? I know it was marketed in a rather unusual way?

JOANNA: Yes. This was so fascinating to look at. There was a kind of snapshot in my research about the opportunities for book marketing, which turned on the fact that every town of any size had several department stores and several newspapers. All the newspapers had women’s pages and columns to fill, and all these department stores had windows to fill. Again, Depression Era, they’re open to anything that’s going to bring people in the door. So the publisher's archive has all these amazing marketing plans that were incredibly detailed that they had their salesmen go around to these department stores with a list of quotations from the book and a list of products that they could tie in. So you had your hostessing pajamas, your bed jackets, your negligees, your cocktail shakers and all of your kind of small furniture that was appropriate for your city apartment. I love to imagine these traveling salesmen kind of going to the head of these department stores saying, “This is your new client. The housewives who were your existing client base are all pinching their pennies, but apparently there’s these young women out there who have jobs and don’t have families and they want to be glamorous. So this is what you need to put in the window.” There’s a great window display I found from San Francisco with a quote from the book about the importance of pampering yourself and there’s a mannequin in a negligee and [a sign reading] “negligees, fourth floor!” So there was this big campaign that took the book out of the realm of humor or self-help and sort of took it out of bookstores and put it in department stores.

AMY: Such a brilliant way to tie that in and I’m sure it really made her sales go through the roof, doing it that way.

JOANNA: Yeah, and she was game for all of that. So she was going around and did all kinds of public appearances and book signings and things. So it was clearly a big cultural phenomenon as well as just another book.

AMY: And speaking of “cultural phenomenon,” in your book you mention President Franklin Roosevelt at one point was seen reading this book! Was that just an apocryphal anecdote, or did that really happen?

JOANNA: There’s a photograph of him on his yacht reading this book! Probably maybe it was Eleanor’s copy of the book…

AMY: Well, that just speaks to the fact that it’s very very entertaining; it’s very funny. So I could see him getting into even though it’s written for women. I can see him getting a chuckle out of it.

JOANNA: Absolutely.

AMY: I wish, like Kim said, that I had known about this book when I was a “live-aloner” in my 20s. She seems like the ultimate cheerleader and saleswoman for the single life. For example, she notes some of the benefits here of being single:

You don’t have to turn out your light when you read, because somebody else wants to sleep. You don’t have to have the light on when you want to sleep, because somebody else wants to read. You don’t have to get up in the night to fix somebody else’s hot water bottle, or lie awake listening to snores, or be vivacious when you’re tired, or cheerful when you’re blue, or sympathetic when you’re bored. You probably have your bathroom all to yourself, too, which is unquestionably one of Life’s Greatest Blessings. You don’t have to wait till someone finishes shaving, when you are all set for a cold-cream session. You have no one complaining about your pet bottles, no one to drop wet towels on the floor, no one occupying the bathtub when you have just time to take a shower. From dusk until dawn, you can do exactly as you please, which, after all, is a pretty good allotment in this world where a lot of conforming is expected of everyone.

So apologies in advance to my husband, whom I adore, but this sounds pretty incredible after 11 months of being confined to the house with my entire family for a pandemic. I am so jealous after hearing that passage and I could not agree more.

KIM: She makes it sound really enviable. That’s all I’m gonna say.

AMY: And yet, in 1939, just a few years after finding major success with Live Alone & Like It, Hillis drops a major bombshell on her fans. Joanna, would you care to explain that for us?

JOANNA: “Live-Aloner No More!!!” This was an actual headline. She got married! I know! There were headlines all over about how she was betraying her readers. She had to take her phone off the hook. But yes, she announced in the summer of 1939 that she was getting married to a widower named Thomas Roulston who owned a big New York grocery chain. So they married when she was 50. She went from being well-off and comfortable to being rich-rich. So she moves from her independent single woman’s apartment to a huge house in Brooklyn on Prospect Park, and she settles into kind of a life of a rich man’s wife, and she seems to have enjoyed it. They were married for a decade and he was older than she was. He was in his mid-60s, and sadly after 10 years, he had a heart attack and he passed away and she was faced with living alone again! She actually writes a very moving book about what it’s like to pick up and it’s called You Can Start All Over and it kind of really speaks to people who’ve been divorced and widowed. She packed up this big mansion and she moved back to New York. She moved, I think to the Upper East side. She was back in the city.

KIM: When you were talking about her meeting her future husband and then getting all that press, it sounds like a Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movie… I could absolutely picture that, and you could see the headlines rolling up on the screen. That was great. How many sequels did she end up writing?

JOANNA: Before she was married, she wrote four books. Live Alone and Like It and then there was the budgeting book, a cookbook which she co-wrote with a colleague at Vogue which is terrifying! Oh my goodness, there’s so much potted crab meat and canned everything, it’s really quite a journey! It’s very fun, but it is really something. And then she wrote the New York guidebook to tie in with the World’s Fair which was 1939, and a book of poetry about female friends in New York. And then after she was widowed she wrote this one about picking up and carrying on and then in the mid-Sixties, she wrote a sort of light-hearted kind of reiteration about growing older glamorously and it was sort of a lighthearted capstone book, but still, she was playing the same tune right to the end.

KIM: She just sounds great. She sounds like someone really fun to spend time with. 

AMY: I kept thinking of Auntie Mame when I was thinking of Marjorie Hillis. This idea of just, “I want to live, live, live!” You know? She wants to live life to its fullest and be utterly glamorous and take advantage of everything the world has to offer. That fictional character kept coming to mind for me, so I loved that you introduce that in your book. 

KIM: One of the other tidbits from your book, Joanna, that I loved is the fact that Hillis dabbled briefly in playwriting. She wrote a three-act comedy called Jane’s Business, which is the plot of Jane Eyre set in a modern office setting. As if I didn’t already love her! I want to read that play! It Sounds great!

JOANNA: Oh, I know. I wish I had been able to track it down. That was like a little tiny notice in a newspaper that was talking about this evening of plays and I just was like, “Oh my goodness! Where is that?” So, if it’s out there, I hope it turns up and that we’re able to see it.

KIM: So, Marjorie Hillis died in 1971. She was 82-years-old, and it was just in time to see the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism take off. What legacy would you say that she left behind, Joanna?

JOANNA: Oh, that’s a big question! I think that she’s a great reminder that there’s so much fun still to be had in feminist history. There are so many untold stories and untold lives out there, and sometimes I think that gets presented to us as a duty, like, “Who are all these people we ought to know about and didn’t?” I don’t think you need to read about Marjorie Hillis in school, but there’s just such a pleasure to discovering her voice and her story and sort of understanding that there have been so many interesting women who we are grappling with the status of their lives that we overlike when we want to sort people into easy boxes of like, What did they do? What did they achieve?... What did they SAY? And so it’s really lovely to go back and find these voices, so yeah, dig around in your second-hand bookshop bins and just find these women. They’re out there! In terms of her actual life, you know, I think it’s really important in knowing about 20th century feminism that it did go back and forth, but we get very stuck into the idea that there were these waves — first wave and second wave, and sort of in between the waves there wasn’t very much happening. And of course, there absolutely was, and women in the Thirties were grappling with questions about how to be in the workplace, how to balance home and family and professional and public lives, just as they had been in previous generations and subsequent generations. 

AMY: It’s a completely empowering book, I think, and I would never have discovered Marjorie Hillis without you writing this book. Like you said, just absolute shock that somebody that was so thoroughly entertaining and witty would have been completely forgotten. So if you have not yet discovered Marjorie Hillis, listeners, just go immediately pick up a copy of Live Alone and Like It. It was reissued by Virago, and we totally promise that you will reall\y get a kick out of it, no matter your relationship status. It is smart and snappy and hilarious. And then when you finish reading it, follow up with Joanna’s book, The Extra Woman, which does an amazing job of putting it all into context in a really interesting way. What can we expect from you next… is there anything interesting you’re working on?

JOANNA: Yes! I’m actually working on another really fun feminist history. I’m writing about a group of women this time who are members of a secret club called Heterodoxy who met in Greenwich Village in the 1910s and were all activists and suffragists and feminists of various kinds, and it’s just a really fun, fabulous group, and really a wonderful moment to be digging into another set of rebellious lives, so that will be coming out when I finish it!

KIM: That sounds amazing. We can’t wait to read it and maybe have you back on to talk about that! I know these projects take a lot longer than a podcast. Thanks for joining us, Joanna, this has been really illuminating and a real joy talking to you.

Joanna: Thank you so much. This was so much fun, and I’m so glad to see more and listen to more of what you’re doing and who you’re uncovering. There’s so much out there.

AMY: And now that we’re finishing here, I’m going to go put on my lounge pajamas. Or my hostessing pajamas … one of those.

KIM: Yeah.

JOANNA: Wonderful.

AMY: And that’s all for today’s episode. If you like what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast.

KIM: Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and visit LostLadiesofLit.com for further reading materials. 

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

CLOSING MUSIC

20. Rosa Bonheur — Lost Lady of Art

KIM: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. In today’s episode, we thought we’d mix it up and talk about a woman who was once an international superstar whose genius earned her a fortune, but whom almost nobody remembers today. Royalty, statesmen and celebrities all gushed over her — including Queen Victoria, Napoleon’s wife (Empress Eugenie), and Czar Nicholas II.

KIM: She’s not a lost lady of lit, but rather, she’s a lost lady of the art world, and today we’re mixing it up today because, after learning about the 19th-century French painter Rosa Bonheur we couldn’t resist the urge to tell you about her.

AMY: Yeah, her life and her career trajectory is totally WILD — and we mean that quite literally. This woman had a pet lioness who roamed around her house, you guys!

KIM: Okay, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. She was one fascinating personality. Her life story would make a great movie.

AMY: Yeah, totally. I came across an article about her in a recent issue of Smithsonian magazine. It was written by Elaine Sciolino (and we’ll link to in our show notes), but today we’re just going to give you some of the highlights. Bonheur was best known for painting animals. She did this in lifelike (almost photographic) detail, and she was also a genius at self-promotion and she lived her life in very gender-defying, I-am-who-I-am sort of glory, which was pretty unheard of for the day.

KIM: Bonheur grew up in poverty — her mother died and was buried in a pauper’s grave when she was only 11. Her father was a struggling artist, and Bonheur trained under him. She loved to paint animals because she believed they had souls just like humans did.

AMY: So, when she was 19 years-old, a painting she did of two rabbits nibbling on a carrot was exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon. Later, her giant canvas of two teams of oxen pulling plows — this was titled Plowing in the Nivernaisˆ— was dubbed a masterpiece by critics, and it’s still on permanent display in the Musee d’Orsay.)

KIM: Although she was tiny in stature, she liked to paint these really huge paintings — her most famous is called The Horse Fair. It’s 8 feet tall and 16-and-a-half feet long and it was once referred to by an American publication as “the world’s greatest animal picture.” It was sold at auction to Cornelius Vanderbilt and now you can find it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

AMY: So she got some serious cash for this painting, and with that money she was able to buy a grand chateau about 50 miles south of Paris bordering the royal forest of Fountainbleu. She specialized in painting animals, so it’s no wonder that her property wound up becoming a veritable zoo. She kept dozens of species of animals including, you know, sort of the run of the mill sheep and horses, but also monkeys, lions and tigers at various points in time. She also spent lots of time at animal auctions and slaughterhouses in order to study her subject matter in more detail. In addition, she was obsessed with the earliest iterations of photography and had built herself a dark room in the chateau as well.

KIM: All this work didn’t really jibe with wearing fancy dresses, naturally, so she wore pants. She was a tomboy growing up and continued that trend into adulthood.

AMY: She actually received a special “cross-dressing” permit from the Paris police, which she had to get renewed every six months (which I found totally fascinating). I think the article said she had a doctor write her a note basically saying that for health reasons and going to these slaughterhouses and places like that, she needed to dress like a man. So she was often mistaken for a man when she was out and about. She rode horses astride instead of side-saddle like ladies of the day. She kept her hair short, and she also ain smoked at a time when smoking for women was associated with prostitution.

KIM: She never married, and while we can’t really make assumptions about her personal life this many years after the fact, her closest relationship as an adult was with her childhood friend, a fellow painter named Nathalie Micas. They lived together, and Bonheur did once write, “Had I been a man, I would have married her.” 

AMY: When Micas died, Bonheur went on to live with another woman — an American painter who was 34 years younger than she was — her name was Anna Klumpke. Bonheur called Klumpke “the daughter I never had,” but then in another letter she referred to her as her “wife.” Yet, at the same time, she’s also been quoted as saying, “I wed art. It is my husband.”

KIM: Right, and whether or not she was a lesbian, she does remind me a bit of English diarist Anne Lister, the women who inspired the HBO series “Gentleman Jack.”

AMY: Yes, I definitely agree. Although I read that she did wear dresses for public appearances and portraits. She wasn’t necessarily ostracized for who she was. People seemed to accept it. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor medal from Napoleon’s wife, who declared of Bonheur that, “genius has no sex.” She also received honors from Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian and Spain’s King Alfonso XII. Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra met her once at the Louvre, and she was visited by Queen Isabella of Spain. So, hanging out with tons of serious VIPs. She was befriended by Buffalo Bill Cody when he toured through France with his Wild West show. She was so popular in her day that a porcelain doll was made in her likeness, and a variety of rose was named after her. But today, she’s not a household name, even in the art world. I’d read a New York Times piece that said she sort of failed to have a lasting appeal in France because she was seen as having sold out, you know? A lot of her paintings wound up being bought by English and Americans, and she painted more in an English style. So it’s possible she was considered sort of a deserter, and no longer authentically French, even though she was still living in France.

KIM: Right. And after her death in 1899, this sort of hyper-realistic art she was known for began to really fall out of fashion and was replaced by Impressionism. What’s amazing, though, is that today, one French woman is spearheading the efforts to resurrect her legacy and turn Bonheur’s Chateau into a museum dedicated to her.

AMY: Yeah! So a woman named Katherine Brault (I’m not sure how to say her last name) bought Bonheur’s home (which was in a crumbling state of disrepair) she bought it a few years ago — it took her three years to find a bank that was willing to give her a loan for this. Now, she is slowly and painstakingly uncovering all kinds of treasures that she’s finding in the attic and elsewhere on the property as she renovates the place. She’s luckily also been awarded a financial grant for preserving French cultural heritage, which is helping her turn this dream into a reality, which I think is great. It’s a museum now, but paying guests can stay overnight in Bonheur’s bedroom and the chateau can also be rented out for special events like weddings and conferences — things like that. I loved hearing about the fact that her art studio in the house is sort of like a time capsule. When you go in, you see her painting tools, there’s an easel with one of her unfinished works. She has all sorts of taxidermied animals in that room, and then there’s a pair of her old worn, lace-up leather boots. I kind of got the chills hearing about that studio room. 

KIM: It sounds amazing, and according to the Smithsonian article, little by little the world is showing a renewed appreciation for her Bonheur’s work, too. In 2019, the Musee d’Orsay had a small exhibition of her little-known caricatures. I’m happy that people are starting to circle back to her, and it’s also nice to know that she actually knew huge success and admiration while she lived.

AMY: Crazy coincidence, Kim: When we were getting ready to record this, I happened to be watching the Netflix show “The Queen’s Gambit” — I had just started it. And in the second episode, they name-drop Rosa Bonheur! 

KIM: No way!

AMY: Yeah! The main character is going to a new home and the person that lives there is sort of giving her the quick tour and points out that the paintings on the wall are reproductions of Rose Bonheur! It makes total sense, too, because “The Queen’s Gambit” is a show about a female chess player who’s sort of fighting to make her mark in this male-dominated chess world, and so the fact that they kind of dropped her name into...Rosa Bonheur’s name in — just seems really fitting, this artist that was also trying to make a name for herself in a man’s world.

KIM: That is amazing. The coincidence is great, and I absolutely want to watch that show now that I hear that, even more. It shows that the creators are really thinking about what they’re doing.

AMY: So yeah, I think that does go to show that she is starting to come back in people’s consciousness. I love the fact that she was just a woman who lived life on her own terms, and that kind of leads us into our next “Lost Lady of Lit,” who’s another woman who didn’t just split from convention but totally OWNED IT.

KIM: That’s right. Next week, we’ll be discussing Marjorie Hillis, a writer who urged women in the 1930s to “Live Alone and Like It” with her wry manifesto that makes the single life look pretty damn awesome, at a time when unmarried women were looked upon with suspicion.

AMY: And we’ve got the authority on Marjorie Hillis coming on the show — her biographer, Joanna Scutts, is going to be here to chat with us next week, and it’s going to be a really fun one, I think.

KIM: Yeah, so until then, check out our show notes to find out more about today’s topic, Rosa Bonheur, including some links to see her greatest works of art. 

[start closing music]

AMY: It’s all on our website, Lostladiesoflit.com. And don’t forget to leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts if you’re enjoying these episodes. It really helps new listeners find us. 

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.

19. Louise Fitzhugh — Harriet the Spy with Leslie Brody and Laura Mazer

Episode 19 (Louise Fitzhugh with Laura Mazer and Leslie Brody)

AMY: So, Kim, I figured between the both of us we’d read just about every seminal children’s book worth reading, but turns out I was wrong. We both somehow missed out on one of the funniest, most endearing, socially aware and subtly subversive kids’ books to have ever made it to print.

KIM: I know! It’s a great book, and it’s also a little embarrassing to admit we’re both late to the party where this classic 1960s-era title is concerned. Especially since it’s all about a young girl who wants to be a writer. 

AMY: It is so up our alley, and we were both instantly smitten with the book when we recently read it. I feel like I had heard of the title as a kid or maybe seen it on shelves at the library, but I bypassed it a million times, and I don’t know why I never read it!

KIM: And the fact that it was kind of a radical book in children’s literature, you’d think that the author behind it — Louise Fitzhugh — would be more of a household name.

AMY: Well, we’ve thankfully got two very special guests today on Lost Ladies of Lit — literary agent Laura Mazer and biographer, Leslie Brody — to tell us all about Louise Fitzhugh and her famous children’s novel, which we’re guessing some of you are probably very familiar with. And if you’re still wondering what book we’re talking about, let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music]

INTERVIEW

AMY: Okay, so let’s just dive right into introducing our first guest. Laura Mazer is a literary agent with Wendy Sherman Associates. She was previously executive editor of Seal Press, and among the titles she helped guide through publication are Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race? as well as From Cradle to Stage: Stories From Mothers Who Rocked and Raised Rock Stars by Virginia Grohl. (And yes, that’s Dave Grohl’s mom.) Laura has worked as managing editor of Counterpoint Press and executive editor at Soft Skull Press, and prior to joining the book-publishing industry, she oversaw editorial operations for Creators Syndicate, a global news agency representing some of the most influential opinion writers and editorial cartoonists of the day. She was also a senior editor at Brill's Content magazine, as well as special sections editor at The Los Angeles Times. 

KIM: As a board member of the OpEd project she is a champion for underrepresented voices in the publishing world, and like us, she has an interest in resurrecting the legacies of forgotten women writers. Welcome to the show, Laura Mazer!

LAURA MAZER: Thank you! I’m so happy to be here!

AMY: When we first discussed having you join us for an episode of the podcast, you suggested that we could talk about Louise Fitzhugh, who wrote the 1964 children’s novel Harriet the Spy. So I have two initial questions for you: One, did you grow up with Harriet, or did you discover her after the fact the way Kim and I did? And also, what kind of impact did the book have on you when you read it?

LAURA: Oh, I definitely grew up with Harriet. In fact, I have my copy still. I keep it on my shelf all the time, right near me. I loved Harriet. Harriet gave me permission to be a little different. Harriet gave me permission to spy on people and learn what I could beyond the confines of what I was being told. I asked my parents for a toolbelt for a birthday present one year, because Harriet wears a toolbelt with her spy tools that she can wander the neighborhood. And I do remember my father looking at me a little strangely and saying, “They don’t make them in your size.” But I did grow up with Harriet. I adored her. I felt that she was something of a lifeline for kids who did not want to live up to the girly-girl expectations that, in that era, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, we were expected to be.

AMY: So I guess that leads to the fact that you were editor of the book that we’re going to be also discussing today, Leslie Brody’s biography of Louise Fitzhugh. So you must have been excited to acquire this book.

LAURA: Oh, absolutely! When Leslie and I started talking about this, I knew right away this is going to be a (excuse the idiom, but) labor of love.

KIM: So Harriet the Spy sold 2.5 million copies in its first five years in print, and by 2019, over five million copies had been sold worldwide. Laura, could you give our listeners a quick overview of what the book’s about for anyone who’s actually unfamiliar with the plot?

LAURA: Oh, I will do my best, and for anyone who is unfamiliar with the plot, please go read it, because if there’s one thing that I can assure you, it is not dull or boring, regardless of your age. Eleven-year-old Harriet Welsh lives in the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her parents and her beloved nanny, called Ol’ Golly. Harriet is sensitive and perceptive and sometimes crabby, and she aspires to be a professional writer and a spy. She takes these goals very seriously — this is not a game. This is a practice that is at first encouraged by Ol’ Golly, who is a reader of great literature and encourages her writing. Some of her observations that she writes in her notebook are unsparing caricatures — snap judgments. Others are deeper examinations of what she’s discovering around her, but regardless, Harriet really is curious about people and the way the world works, and that writing what she sees around her is seminal to her understanding of who she is and how everything functions as a society. Every day after school, after cake and milk, she goes out dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt with her toolbelt, and she goes out on a spy route. This is a route that’s regular; every day she goes to the same places. She hides in dumb waiters, and she hides in back alleys and listens to conversations and observes facial expressions. Families, children, elderly, the rich, the poor, the marketplace… she listens and watches and writes it all down. One day, a classmate finds her notebook and passes it around, and all of her friends find out what she has said about them in her notebook, and you can imagine what happens from there. Harriet is ostracized. If that weren’t bad enough, at the very same time, her beloved nanny who raised her, Ol’ Golly, she gets engaged and she moves away. She was really the one adult that Harriet had truly admired and relied upon as a child. Between losing the esteem of her classmates and her friends and Ol’ Golly going away, and suddenly the adults are telling her that her notebooks are not healthy and they’re forbidding her from writing in her notebooks — it’s all too much. And I think I should leave it there, because what happens next, if I were to tell you, would be too much of a spoiler. But I will say that by the end of the novel, she is changed, and she learns a way to hold her own truths to herself and navigate the world around her that’s so complicated. It’s a beautiful story.

AMY: Yeah, and the book is just filled with so many swings of emotion, too, like one minute you’re laughing out loud, one minute you’re fighting back tears a little bit. It’s really a must-read for anybody, child or adult, who has an interest in literature or the process of writing. I found it so fascinating, so provocative, and so too, is the story of the woman who wrote it, Louise Fitzhugh.

KIM: Which leads us to introducing our second guest (we have two today) Leslie Brody. She’s a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands in California, the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts award and the PEN Center USA West literary award for creative nonfiction. We are thrilled to get to talk with her about her latest biography: Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, which was published by Seal Press in December. This biography was among The New York Times’ list of seven new books to read in December, and The Wall Street Journal calls it an “engaging” and “highly enjoyable” read.  So good to have you here, Leslie!

LESLIE: Oh, thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.

AMY: Before we dive any deeper into Louise’s own life story, let’s focus a little on Harriet to start. Thanks to Donald Trump, feminists everywhere are happy to claim the title of “nasty woman.” And the character of Harriet is described (even by Fitzhugh, herself) as a “nasty little girl.” And Leslie, I’m guessing that connection was not lost on you, based on how you sort of started the book off.

LESLIE: Of course. Louse Fitzhugh began writing Harriet the Spy the same year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Seventeen-year-old singer Leslie Gore came out with her song “You Don’t Own Me,” with the lyrics “don’t tell me what to do and don’t tell me what to say,” and Gloria Steinem published “A Bunny’s Tale.” So Harriet is raucous, she’s unruly, she’s unwilling to compromise. She sees phonies and finks everywhere which is sort of a reflection of the early 1960s alternative counterculture. And she’s a pint-sized harbinger whose schoolroom battles for respect and understanding look, in microcosm, like the battles for equality many women and girls would wage over the coming years.

KIM: It seems like  Harriet the Spy was pretty revolutionary for a children’s book. I mean, in the earlier part of the 20th century, people were reading more sweet and wholesome books, and suddenly here we have this protagonist who is pretty much the opposite of “Pollyanna.” It seems like it broke a lot of taboos in children’s literature. Laura, can you explain a little bit about the “New Realism” movement in publishing and maybe how Harriet the Spy fits within that?

LAURA: Sure. Harriet was one of the very first children’s characters that was not saccharine, sanitized… it didn’t present a vision of children’s lives that were full of “Mommy and Daddy and a dog, Spot, skipping through the park every day.” Louise allowed Harriet to be real. She could be angry. She could be ill-mannered. Adults could be fallible. Babies could be ugly. 

AMY: Little girls can plot to blow up their school…

LAURA: Yes! Absolutely! They could be angry and resentful. Harriet has a best friend named Janie. Janie is a self-determined scientist and she has decided that she is going to blow up the school. She’s just waiting for the right time and the right materials in her laboratory to do this thing. Harriet is not necessarily against this. She thinks that Janie’s crazy, but she also understands why she wants to blow up the school, because look at all of these adults around them. Adults are feeding them a load of bunk, and the kids all know it! This is a book that allows children to speak their truth and to be suspicious of adults. It allows children to be suspicious of each other. At that era, in terms of a “spy story,” spies and girls, we had the conventional one in Nancy Drew, right? And even if you’re going to look for the so-called “tomboy” prototype character, we have Laura Ingalls. But Nancy Drew was so lovely and gracious, and her manners were always impeccable and her dress was never creased. And if you look at Laura Ingalls (who I absolutely adore, don’t get me wrong. She was also a lifeline to me in my childhood) but she was, umm… “hard work, respect for adults, do your part around the farm and don’t complain.” All these wonderful, noble attributes. Adults could look to Laura Ingalls and say, “Why can’t you be more like her?” Well, nobody’s pointing to Harriet and saying to their children, “Can you be more like Harriet, please?” Because Harriet is difficult, and she does give adults a hard time. She calls them on their crap. She curses and yells. She’s real. And we hadn’t really seen that in children’s literature until Louise came along, wrote this story, created the character. She knew adults did not have it all figured out, and that left her to figure things out for herself. If you can’t trust the people who are giving you the rules of life, then you’re going to have to figure them out yourself, and that’s what she did. She was a self-proclaimed spy trying to make sense of the world around her, all by using the written word.

AMY: I think that’s so right because I have an 11-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son, and I read out loud to them a lot. With this one, they were obsessed with it. (Case in point, they were rolling around on the carpet pretending to be onions for about a full week following our read-aloud, the way Harriet does in the book). And I think it’s true that they were just enthralled by the fact that Harriet was so outrageous and so naughty, and it felt almost a little naughty for them, by extension, to get to be a part of it. My husband would sort of be walking in and out of the room while we were reading this, and he was appalled. He was just like, “What are you reading them? This girl is awful!” He was laughing, too, but he was definitely in disbelief about Harriet’s behavior, and I think that really kind of sums up the controversy this book stirred up when it came out. So Leslie, can you weigh in on that a little bit?

Leslie: Well, Louise created Harriet to be a nasty little girl. That’s how she described her in the letters she wrote James Merrill, the poet, who was a longtime friend of hers. She wrote that she was creating “a nasty little girl who keeps notes on all her friends.” And what she intended was to create a child who was a free-thinking individual, and she mocked adults. She did it in a satirical way to make clear their flaws. So a lot of kids love it for the way she mocks authority. She’s a heroine. A liberator.

AMY: And yet, there were some parent groups, very conservative-minded people, that were kind of angry when this book came out, right?

LESLIE: Yeah! Oh yeah. Not everybody approved of her breaking and entering homes or speaking truth to power. I would say that it was more common to think that children should be seen and not heard.

LAURA: The other thing that we haven’t touched on yet, which I think is fascinating, is it’s not just Harriet’s character that is so disruptive, but it’s Harriet’s awareness of issues like money and class and race that come in and out of the narrative throughout the whole story in a way that we hadn’t really seen children being aware of these adult issues. And that’s truthful! And for me as a kid, for other people I know as a child, we were very aware of financial strains that our parents had. Marital arguments. Setbacks that adults were experiencing filtered down to kids, but then they tried to pretend that they’re shielding us from it, but are they really? Harriet wasn’t shielded, and neither were her classmates. So Louise’s acknowledgment that kids could have that kind of adult awareness of these issues… that has to be at the heart of why so many kids felt seen and heard by Harriet.

AMY: I totally wish that I had read this book when I was younger to just know that, like, my own weirdo thoughts were not so weird. You know?

KIM: Exactly.

LAURA: Yes! And she had so many weirdo thoughts! That’s what’s so great about her. We can relate to the weirdness.

KIM: Leslie, before we jump into Fizhugh’s own fascinating history, can you give us an idea of what she thought about being a “children’s author” considering it wasn’t really her game plan initially?

LESLIE: Sure. She wanted to make some money. She was on an allowance from her family and she was really eager to be independent. She was sort of embarrassed that at her age she was still receiving money from this very wealthy family, from her trust fund, and she was trying all sorts of things to earn this independence (except actually get a job). That was one thing she was not prepared to do. She had one job, as far as I could tell in all my research. She was a gift-wrapper at S. Klein on the square in New York City for about two weeks, and she had the opportunity, among other things, to wrap an entire couch with gift wrap and bows. But she quit and that was really her only job. But she thought she would try to write a children’s book as she had had some success writing Suzuki Bean with Sandra Scoppettone, who had been her collaborator then. So she kind of spent some time sketching out a proposal for a children’s book and came up with about nine pages and a couple of sketches for the characters. That was it. She thought, “Well, I’ll try this. I’ll send it to my agent and see what she can do with it.” The agent thought it was delightful, sent it off to Ursula Nordstrom, and the rest is history. Her friends said she always presented herself as an artist first. Her close friend, Maryjane Meaker, who came to be known as the author M.E. Kerr, said she didn’t even know that Louise was writing a book until Harriet was published. She had started writing Harriet as a commercial venture, and it sort of overwhelmed her life. It became the one thing that she was recognized for, and her painting was something she loved deeply and something she always wished she could be recognized for as well. But it kind of went into eclipse when Harriet emerged.

AMY: Did she begrudge at all the fact that she was most known for this children’s book, or was she happy about it? I mean, when she was younger I know she wanted to be, like, a serious poet.

LESLIE: Yeah. She always thought that poetry and fine arts were higher on the hierarchy of art. Being a novelist was something she deeply wanted to do, but she also was very funny. She was a comic writer and a satirist and somehow she just found her way into this book.

AMY: So like Harriet, Louise Fitzhugh was very much a spitfire in her own right She was outspoken and defiant and very much ahead of her time when it came to racial equality and women’s lib and class consciousness. Which is actually a little unexpected given her background, because she came from a high-society family in the Deep South. Like you said, Leslie, she was a trust fund baby. And the picture you paint of Memphis during that era in your biography is so amazingly descriptive, I loved it. It totally drew me in. But even more compelling than all that is the story of Fitzhugh’s early life. As a baby, she was at the center of a very public scandal, the truth of which she didn’t fully learn about until she was in her early adulthood. It’s quite a saga. Can you tell our listeners quickly about that story?

LESLIE: Sure. In the summer before she left Memphis to start college at Bard to study poetry and painting, she worked at the local newspaper, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, for one day as far as I can tell. She was assigned or she found her way into the newspaper morgue, which is where all the old articles are indexed, and among the archives Louise found a massive folder dedicated to the history of the Fitzhughs. She found the clippings about her parents’ scandalous divorce in 1927 and she found it traumatic. Her mother’s lawyers had been outmatched in the courtroom and her mother had been defamed outlandishly. Her father won custody, and until she was around five, had told Louise that her mother was dead. So she found this all out and she left work, and I don’t think she stayed until 5 p.m.

KIM: Yeah, one might not after reading something like that and discovering such an interesting story about yourself and your past.

AMY: And there was the one detail, I think, which really haunted her: that as a baby, I guess there was the accusation that her father’s family had made against her mother that said that her mother had thrown her onto a sofa. It’s a claim the mother denies, but it seems like Louise was always really shocked and horrified by that, in particular.

LESLIE: Yeah. I mean, she was dedicated to protecting children’s imaginations and protecting them from abuse — all kinds of abuse. Emotional abuse, physical abuse… and she felt that she had been abused in some way; although she didn’t remember it, it was something she read about.

KIM: I’m just going to read a quote here from Leslie’s book to give everyone an inkling of what Louise’s childhood was like: “There was the eccentric opera-singing grandmother who would fling money out the window while somebody stood below with a basket. A crazy uncle confined to the attic, sawing up dolls. The father who kidnapped her, then told her, falsely, that her mother was dead. Not to mention the servants who would turn her grieving mother away from the door of her father’s house.”

   So, it’s no surprise that she had a complicated relationship with her family as a result of all this. How do you think it shaped who she went on to be in life? It seems like she wanted to get as far away from the South as she possibly could.

LESLIE: Yeah, for sure. She had mixed feelings about her family. She decided in her teens that her father was controlling and took against him. She loved her grandmother, but the only people she felt comfortable with as a child were the household staff. She grew up during the Jim Crow era in Tennessee and came to abhor the milieu of white supremacy, which she fled as soon as she was able. And she always recognized, however, that the elements of her childhood made a good story, and she relied on them in her painting and writing.

AMY: So in high school then, she began having relationships with women — she was a lesbian — but I was struck by how many men she also had throwing themselves at her. She was basically swatting them away like flies at times (and she even eloped with one of them, though that marriage didn’t even last longer than 24 hours I don’t think). But it leads me to think she must have been an amazingly charismatic person to have all these people pining away for her. So what was her personality really like? Did she have a lot of “Harriet” in her?

LESLIE: She was charismatic. She was very attractive, high-spirited, charming. They said she was a wonderful dancer and she had a beautiful singing voice. She was very petite. Her friends referred to her as having a fairy-like figure. She was a sprite or a nymph. She had a swagger, though, and she didn’t suffer fools. One thing about her: she liked to play devil’s advocate. She was very quarrelsome. She didn’t like to lose an argument.

AMY: So Fitzhugh eventually settles down in New York city’s Greenwich Village. And once again, Leslie, you do a brilliant job of describing this world for us in vivid detail and historical perspective. Fitzhugh had the trust-fund to support her artistic endeavors, and she also had a series of long-term girlfriends who influenced her life. It seemed like an amazing, intellectually-and-artistically stimulating existence she was carving out for herself, and I was super jealous of her lifestyle in her 20s and all the influential people she was pal’ing around with! 

KIM: Yeah, I don’t think I had enough fun in my 20s. I wish I’d had more fun.

AMY: I wish I had that fun, and I wish I had her trust fund.

KIM: Yeah. That, too!

LESLIE: Yeah, in her youth she fell in love with France Burke, who was an artist herself and the daughter of Kenneth Burke, who was a philosopher and critic. Through the Burkes, she met Greenwich Village royalty like poet Marianne Moore, author Djuna Barnes, photographer Berenice Abbott, Dorothy Day… and later, Louise’s social circle expanded to include many high-flying, mostly queer careerwomen who, in their youth, had crashed through ceilings in literary and artistic professions. The friend circle had some grand parties and I always loved reading about those. Some costume balls were legendary, like the one with the sophisticated theme of “After Mayerling” set in late 19th-century Vienna.

AMY: I wished I had been invited to those costume parties. They sounded really fun! I don’t think I would have been on the invite list, but… Okay, so Fitzhugh’s first foray into the publishing world came about when she illustrated and collaborated on a book that was a spoof on the Eloise children’s books by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight. And Leslie, you sort of mentioned this briefly. It was called Suzuki Bean. Fill us in a little more on that, because I love the idea of this book.

LAURA: Oh, yeah, it’s a great book. Really brilliant. Louise and Sandra Scoppettone were buddies, drinking buddies mainly, in the Village. They were looking for a great idea and the way to make an impression as authors and artists. The Eloise at the Plaza books were hugely popular and really successful. It was an era of novelty books and spoofs, and they decided to try to write a downtown version of Eloise. Suzuki is a baby Beatnik. Her father is a poet, and her mother makes sculptures out of tin cans. Her best friend at school is a boy from Uptown from a family of snobby socialites, and the book is a satire about children who feel they don’t belong in the place they are raised. Eventually, they both run off to start what is essentially a Utopian commune somewhere where people will be accepted for who they are. That is obviously a theme that runs through Louse’s work. 

AMY: It’s such a clever idea, to do a spoof off those books. I love it, and I tried to find the book at the library, and did not have any luck. And you can’t buy it, except for a lot of money. What happened to it? Why is it not available anymore? Does anybody know? 

LESLIE: Sandra says that the estate was not helpful when she wanted to publish it. They had some falling out and so I guess they couldn’t agree on rights.

AMY: I feel like that book would still be popular today if it could be reissued somehow.

LESLIE: Oh, yeah. It’s a tragedy.

KIM: Yeah, that’s a real loss.

AMY: So, like many people, I really loved the character of Harriet’s nanny, Ol’Golly in Harriet the Spy. She’s not exactly Mary Poppins, but Laura, please fill our listeners in on why she’s so great in this book.

LAURA: Ol’ Golly has to be one of the most profound, special, heartening characters, and thank goodness she is there, because there really are no other adults in this book that provide some solid barometer for Harriet. Here’s Harriet with adults (teachers, parents) telling her, “Go be a good girl. Wear a pretty dress. Put a smile on your face. Be nice to your friends. Be nice to adults. Don’t cause any problems.” And Ol’ Golly is willing to go a little deeper with her. Ol’ Golly is willing to grapple with more complex issues, the philosophical pushes and pulls of daily life. And she is the one adult that nurtures her. So here we have a character, a child, being given that nurturing life-lesson program from somebody who, not only we don’t expect it from because she’s set up to be this stern, disciplinarian governess-type nanny, but underneath those top level layers, there’s all this warmth and intelligence. And meanwhile her own teachers and her own parents really aren’t getting her. They’re not understand why she won’t just fall in line and behave the way people want her to. So here’s Ol’ Golly, who spouts life lessons from Dostoevsky… who takes her on this little mini daytrip to visit her own mother, who does not behave in any way that Harriet would have expected from the life she’s seen so far in the Upper East Side, you know, this life of privilege. Ol’ Golly wants her to see more and to understand more, and that is what Harriet wants, so even if Ol’ Golly isn’t always right on the mark, and even if Ol’ Golly does leave, which she eventually does (she pursues her own life), Harriet needs her. Harriet needs her to center her, to give her just that occasional spark of confidence that even though she is looking at life in a way that other adults seem to be telling her to stop it, cut it out, that maybe she’s really onto something good, and that she should be true to herself and what she sees around her.

AMY: So that basically also takes us to the most pivotal advice that Ol’ Golly gives Harriet at the end of the book: “Sometimes you have to lie.” Laura, what do you think Fitzhugh was ultimately trying to say with that sentiment, and why do you think it’s the perfect title for Leslie’s book?

LAURA: Oh, I just love this title for her book! Leslie knows that I adore this title. We thought about a lot of different ways to title the book, and we just kept coming back to this one because it clicked. It sings the story that is Harriet and Louise. I don’t know that I can crawl inside of Louise’s head enough to really know what she was thinking, but I will say this: If you had to choose one core theme we can take away from Harriet the Spy (and maybe Louise, too, if we’re going to take it that one step further) it’s that nothing is simple. That life is complex and that the lessons we’re taught as smaller children that seem so straightforward, they seem so simple — “Always tell the truth!” When 9-year-olds lie, they feel badly, but by the time you get to 11, you’re starting to learn that sometimes you do have to lie to get by in this world. To be successful. To not be ostracized. To make connections with others. Sometimes that means that the better thing to do is to do the thing you were always taught not to do. And it allows a children’s book to actually be, like, what I consider a morality tale. Yeah, the morality at the core of it is flipped. She took the script and flipped it by saying, “Lying is sometimes the better, higher moral act, but you’re going to know that and own it now because you are an adult.” And that’s what we learned from Harriet. Harriet has always known this world is a crazy place to live. Harriet has always known that the adults are full of it, and she’s finally being allowed to own that truth for herself and for Ol’ Golly who gives her that advice. Yeah, I think that’s at the center of this book and the whole story for her.

AMY: So when I first saw the title, Sometimes You Have to Lie and found out that Fitzhugh was a lesbian, I thought for sure that she was closeted, that as a children’s writer, she was having to keep this under wraps about herself and she had, like, a double life. Then I started reading the book and I found out that wasn’t the case at all. She was actually very open about being a lesbian. So talk to me a little bit about that.

LESLIE: For one thing, she had a lot of money and she had a lot of friends, and once she left Memphis and went to what was a sort of protected environment in Greenwich Village, where it was kind of more typical that people could be themselves more often (not always), she just decided in 1950 when she received an inheritance from her grandmother that she would never wear women’s clothing again. And so, typically, she had fantastic suits made for herself. She wore a lot of capes. We’re talking about moving into the 60s, so she had a very mod look. So in 2005 there was a librarian named K.T. Horning, who published an article in the Horn Book in which she talked about Harriet the Spy’s influence on her own childhood and observed a queer subtext throughout the book. Horning interprets Ol’ Golly’s advice to Harriet (so we’re getting back to that again)  — that sometimes you have to lie, but to yourself you must always tell the truth — as evidence of Louise’s embedded instructions to gay kids: You’re not alone. You know, look around, be careful, come out when it’s safe, we’re here. You know, there were a lot of homophobes during the culture wars, and Horning suggests there are secret messages in Harriet the Spy, benign and comforting ones which offer fellowship and reassurance to young people figuring themselves out.

LAURA: Louise’s legacy is often noted by writers: “I became a writer because of Harriet the Spy.” “I became a writer because of Louise Fitzhugh.” But what is also true right next-door to that is that there are a lot of kids who grew up to come out and be confident and comfortable with their own sexuality and to say, “I always suspected that Harriet was gay.” And again, by translation, it wasn’t Harriet, it was Louise who created her. Does that mean a straight person can’t create a gay character? No, of course not. But to have understood what it meant to be a different kid in an era when fitting in was everything — that was essential to the LGBTQ movement. And I love that Louise was so willing to go against the grain. She always was. We have to remember that yes, she did live in the counterculture 60s, but she began living her own life well before that. I think that probably, to some extent, fueled her willingness to go to the space where, “I’m going to wear the men’s suits and I am going to flirt with women and be with women and be done with you men. I don’t need any more men in my bed, I’m over that!” And not worry about what people would think because she had experimented with it enough to be at home with it.

AMY: So I understand, Leslie, that you also came late to finding Harriet the Spy, and I guess you are in good company with Kim and I in that regard. So tell us a little bit about that.

LESLIE: Well, I’m exactly the same age as Harriet the Spy. When she was 11-years-old, I was 11-years old, and I was born in the Bronx, and Harriet lived in an elite quarter of Manhattan, but we still shared a lot of the cultural references around New York City in the 50s and 60s. When the book was published in 1964, I wasn’t reading kids books anymore. I had missed the wave with Harriet and the New Realism, and I was reading adult books — I liked to think they were “big books,” like The Agony & the Ecstasy or Rebecca. 

AMY: You were like a 40-year-old in an 11-year-old’s body.

LESLIE: I was. I was particularly fond of reading the memoirs of Borscht Belt comedians. That was a specialty of mine. So it was, gosh, it wasn’t until 1988. I was a playwright at the time. I was hired to write an adaptation of Harriet the Spy (I’d never read it before) for the Minneapolis Children’s Theater company. Again, I remember reading through it several times and having the response that you have had as well, as you talked about at the beginning of this program. Completely stunned at how I had somehow missed this artifact, this incredible experience and how after all this time, somehow, this rendezvous with fate had happened. I wasn’t writing biographies for another 10 or 15 years, but once I started, Louise was in my mind and I just wanted to follow her and see where she’d lead. And then I met Laura, and Laura also wanted to do that, so we came up with a project together.

KIM: If you haven’t already, go read Harriet the Spy.  And then pick up a copy of Sometimes You Have To Lie. It’s wonderful, and we should also point out that Leslie has another biography under her belt, one on author Jessica Mitford.

AMY: Leslie, we might have to invite you back for a Hons & Rebels discussion, which would be awesome!

KIM: So Laura, and Leslie, it’s been wonderful getting to talk to you about Louise Fitzhugh, and we are so grateful to you for turning us on to Harriet the Spy after all these years!

Laura: Oh, enjoy it! I’m so glad you did! It’s never too late

Leslie: Thank you so much for having us!

[Interview ends]

KIM: So, Amy, what did we learn from today’s episode? We learned that “nasty little girls” can grow up to be badass feminists.

AMY: We learned that it’s never too late to discover a great children’s book.

KIM: And we learned that sometimes… you have to lie.

AMY: And that’s all for today’s episode. If you like what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast. 

KIM: Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss a single episode. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and visit LostLadiesofLit.com for further reading materials. 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.

18. On Books We Love... and Books We Hate

KIM: Hi everybody! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode.

AMY: Today, we’re going to have a lively (and maybe a slightly controversial) discussion about our favorite (or not so favorite books). And we’re hoping that maybe some of you guys reach out to us and let us know your own thoughts on this subject. This idea came to us thanks to one of our listeners named Ruth, who confessed the following to us on Facebook. She said: “I am not a fan of Jane Austen. There, I’ve said it. I don’t care if anyone agrees with me or not. You’re welcome.”

KIM: Uh oh, them’s fightin’ words, as they used to say! Just kidding. We consider this podcast a completely safe place to air out any and all book opinions. So we don’t have any judgment, Ruth. Jane’s not your jam, and that’s A-OKAY with us.

AMY: I think we all have our own example of books that the rest of the world seems to love and admire yet, try as we might, for whatever reason we just don’t connect with, you know? What are those books that everyone you know goes wild about but you either weren’t able to finish? Or they just made you go “Meh. I don’t get it. It’s not my thing.” For example, I’m going to go out on a limb, and maybe this is going to tick people off, but there’s a book that I tried reading — I want to say I tried reading this book three different times. I gave it a good, solid go on three occasions in the last few years, and every single time, I could not get more than a fourth of the way through the book. That book was… Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend trilogy. And I’m so sorry. I’m not even going to apologize because there are so many people who love this book. She (or whatever her name is, we don’t actually know if that’s the author’s actual name) she’s going to be fine with me saying I didn’t love it. She’s wildly successful and has made a fortune off of these books, and people love them. I’m the weirdo here. There’s something wrong with me, I fully believe that I couldn’t get into these books, but I just couldn’t connect with it at all.

KIM: Okay, Amy, hold on a second. That’s my book, too!

AMY: No! Is it?

KIM: Yes! Oh my god! Literally everyone else in the world loves this book, and I want to love it because I feel like I’m missing out on an entire series of books that are supposed to be life-changing and wonderful and literary, but also a guilty pleasure at the same time. Somehow, I’ve tried, and I just never get past the first few chapters!

AMY: I’m actually surprised to hear you say that because one of the times that I tried to read this book was when I was subletting your house. Okay, so listeners, there was a point in time where my house was being renovated and I “borrowed” Kim’s house, so I got the treasure trove of her bookshelves for about four months, which was amazing, and I read so many awesome books off your bookshelf and there, staring at me scornfully, shining like it had a halo around it the whole time, was My Brilliant Friend, and I was like, “Well, Kim obviously loves it. I’m going to give it the old college try one more time.” And I sat there on your couch and I tried to read it, and I just couldn’t do it! It’s an HBO series now!

KIM: I know! And I don’t even want to watch it!

AMY: Same.

KIM: I still have the book on my bookshelf, by the way. I haven’t managed to get rid of it because I feel like there’s something wrong with me and that one day I’ll just wake up and like it. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, but good luck to everyone that loves it, and I’m happy for them, but nope. And that’s why we’re best friends and also podcasters together.

AMY: I know. We have a mind-meld thing happening there.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Okay, now on the flip side of that, is there any classic book that you put off reading or avoided for a long time because you didn’t think you’d like it, only to eventually discover that you totally love it? Kim, I’ll let you go first.

KIM: Okay, yes I do have a book exactly like that, except that it’s a modern classic. So I carried around through my many moves (I’ve moved a lot) for years, Infinite Jest. And then when I first met Eric, who is now my husband, we had similar favorite authors that we both loved, and so the fact that he liked this book made me want to give it another try. And so I had his copy. It actually had his notation in it, and I thought it was fantastic and funny this time around. And we even read it out loud to each other, which sounds really cheesy, but we did, and it was great. We did a fundraiser bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles the next year after this, and we actually called our two person team “The Howling Fantods,” which is, if you’ve read the book, it’s an expression used in the book. The thing is, apparently David Foster Wallace was kind of a jerk in real life, but I didn’t know that when I read the book. So, anyway. How about you, Amy, do you have a book like that also?

AMY: Well, I want to say, first of all, about David Foster Wallace being a jerk, that reminds me of Charles Dickens and do you like an author even though their personal life is questionable sort of thing? How does that change how you think about them? But that’s another episode. I’ve never read Infinite Jest, because it’s giant. It’s the size of a cinder block, basically, and I just cannot. I can’t. But that book, for me, which is also pretty ginormous, is The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I have never read it. All the movies came out. I did watch the movies, and I loved them, but I had never actually read it. I remember as a kid, my brother had a copy of The Hobbit, and I have this memory of sitting in my brothers’ bedroom and trying to start The Hobbit, and I don’t know if you know Tolkien very well, but he goes into these genealogies of the characters, where it’s like, “Gloin, son of Ioan… who descended from the house of Yorl!” And it goes on and on and on for like 13 pages of that before story happens again. I was very young and I just was like, “Nope. Can’t do it.” And I was turned off from Tolkien forevermore. However, my son was gifted a copy of The Hobbit for like his fifth or sixth birthday, so we read The Hobbit and we loved it so much that I decided we've got to move on. We’ve got to do the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. We are just about finished with The Two Towers. It is so good! Yes, he still does that genealogy stuff, and it’s ridiculous, and he sometimes is way too descriptive geologically for me. He’s always like “The river bent north-north-east…” But I loved the story, and I had so much fun reading the book, and I’m glad I actually got back around to it.

KIM: I am so glad you found it and loved it. That makes me really, really happy because I have a very distinct memory when I was a child. This is so funny, but my parents’ friends had all of the Lord of the Rings books, and every time we would go over to their house, my sister would play with their two daughters, who were younger than me. And I would sit on the floor and I would read the books. I literally read the entire Lord of the Rings series on their living room floor every time we went to their house. I don’t think I ever had them at my house — maybe when I re-read them later. But the first time, it was all on someone else’s living room floor. That’s how much I loved them.

AMY: That’s so you with your nose buried in a book! Baby Kim, nose buried in a book from the minute she was born.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: It’s such a monumental undertaking that you guys must have gone to their house frequently!

KIM: Yes! I have many other similar stories, but I won’t bore you with them. But yeah. It did take me a while, though, but I did finish them.

AMY: Okay. So next book-related question. Has there ever been a book that you really didn’t like the first time you read it, but then you changed your mind about it? Maybe upon a subsequent reading you now have a more favorable opinion of, or even complete affection for?

KIM: Yes, I do. I’m not sure what other people’s take on this is, but the first time I read Romola — I don’t know if I’m saying it exactly correct, but it’s a George Eliot novel — I didn’t love it. It’s a historical novel. It’s set in the 15th century, in Florence, and I thought that it was going to be more like Middlemarch, I guess. I just expected it to be more like her other books, and because it was a historical novel, it somehow didn’t take with me. And I read it all the way through, but I just didn’t love it. And then later, actually fairly recently, I re-read it, and I completely loved it. So I don’t know if it was just expectations, I think, is what happened. I just took it on its own, and I already knew at that point, that it was going to be a historical novel, and since I had already read it before, I had a feeling for what it was, and I think it allowed me space to actually appreciate it.

AMY: I read Romola as part of my assigned reading in college. Being an English major, I remember reading that one and having the same reaction. It’s dry, at times, because of the historic element. However, the professor that taught that book was my all-time favorite professor and maybe even my favorite teacher of all time. Xavier University, Dr. Ernest Fontana — he was so dramatic. He had so much flair. He was an incredible English professor, so I think he helped enliven it a bit, but yeah, it’s definitely not my favorite George Eliot book, by far. It’s kind of like that saying, “You never step in the same river twice,” you know? You never read the same book twice because you’re life experiences and who you are with age change. 

KIM: I love that. I think that’s true, because there are books we read over and over again, and it’s because we get something different from them every time. I read A Room With A View over and over, and it’s a short novella, almost, but I notice different things every time and I get something out of it every time.

AMY: Yeah. Okay, so my book that I was lukewarm about the first time I read it and then I came to appreciate it is Harry Potter. So I was in my twenties and there was this Harry Potter craze and I felt like I needed to look into it because everybody was talking about this book. Even though it was a children’s book, I was like, “You know, I’m going to give this a whirl.” And I had no interest in it. I don’t even think I finished book one. I was like, “I get it. I don’t need to go on.” But then having kids changed all that. We sat down and made a big production of reading the entire series, and when you read the entire series (first of all, Book One is not the best book. It’s just sort of the introduction. It gets better. It gets darker. It gets more involved.) There will be Harry Potter in your future, Kim, now that you have a child, so just prepare for it.

KIM: Okay.

AMY: But I will say, I think the difference is, that book came out when we were already adults. But this was an event for children. I’ll never have the experience of reading it as a child.

KIM: Right.

AMY: So I’ll never have that kind of magic associated with it, but seeing it through the eyes of my kids gave me a new appreciation for it, I think.

KIM: I’m excited to read that with Cleo one day. I actually have read I think, if not all of them, at least almost all of them, but to me, my thing is The Chronicles of Narnia, because I passionately loved those as a child, and so I was always comparing the feeling. But I think that’s the thing. It’s when you come to it as a child it’s completely different than coming to it as an adult. The magic of it is different.

AMY: Yeah. Since we’re on the subject of childhood books: Kim, I don’t think we’ve ever actually discussed this, but I’m curious. What was your sort of “gateway” novel? And by that, I sort of mean, what was the book you first read as a young person that sort of ushered you into reading more adult books, even the classics? What was the book that kind of launched you from reading, say, Judy Blume-type books into reading more sophisticated adult novels. Can you remember?

KIM: Okay, so hmm. That’s a great question. As far as Judy Blume, I read Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret a million times in sixth grade. I think I had it memorized. But other than that, I really didn’t have a Judy Blume phase or anything like that. I don’t think I even read any of her other books. My mom had a real extensive bookshelf, and it had a lot of classics in it and things she’d read in college. And so after Little Women and Rose in Bloom, I just kind of kept going with everything on her bookshelf. And then I also distinctly remember the first time I read what really was an adult novel. It was in fourth grade, and we were on a flight from Germany to California. And I’m guessing my mom didn’t have anything else to give me and all I wanted to do was read, so the only thing she could do was give me this book. But it was a historical romance. It was set among Native Americans before the arrival of the Europeans. And I’m not sure how I ended up with it, you know, but I still remember the name. It was called Mesa of Flowers. It was definitely not classic literature, by any means, but it made a huge impression on me. I still remember scenes from it today! (And also, that’s because maybe it was a little steamy for a fourth grader.) But as for classics, one of the first ones I remember reading was Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge. Do you know it? 

AMY: I’ve never heard of that, no. 

KIM: I think it might be considered a classic, but maybe it’s actually a lost classic, so we might end up putting it on our list at some point. I think it was published in the 1940s. Anyway…

AMY: That’s lost to me. I mean, I know Island of the Blue Dolphins?

KIM: Totally different.

AMY: Okay. Okay.

KIM: I don’t know. I’m going to have to look into it a little bit more now that we’re discussing this, because it’s making me think about it. But what was your gateway novel?

AMY: Well, it’s interesting that you mentioned your mom’s bookshelf because I think my mom was sort of instrumental in sort of steering me into these more mature books as well. The story I have to start is, do you remember, like, the Scholastic fliers that would come home from school where you could order books?

KIM: Yes.

AMY: They still have those, by the way.

KIM: That’s great.

AMY: I remember bringing home the flier with the books, and I wanted to buy some books out of it, and my mom… I mean, my mom didn’t really let me buy stuff like that, but she was like, “I will buy you some books if you let me choose.” She chose Little Women and she chose Heidi. And those were sort of “older books” out of the flier. Everything else was kind of like kiddy books, you know? The only reason I got them was because she chose Little Women and Heidi, and I was probably like in the third grade, and they might have been slightly abridged versions for younger children, but they were still thick books, and I remember reading them. I wore them out. I loved them so much. So Little Women: We have that in common, really. I really didn’t know that that was your book, too. But then in eighth grade, my English teacher, his classroom was just a wall of books. Maybe two walls of books, floor-to-ceiling, and he had tests on every single one of those novels. It was a massive library in his classroom. So he had this really long list of the books, and it was our job to pick out which books we wanted to read and do the tests on. So I took this list — it was like an eight-page list of books — and I gave it to my mom and I was like, “I don’t know what to read. I don’t know anything about any of these. Can you just circle the ones that you think I might like if you know any of them?” And she circled Wuthering Heights and she circled Jane Eyre.

KIM: Oh my gosh.

AMY: So those I read in eight grade, and I remember especially with Wuthering Heights, the book that was in Mr. Moning’s English class, it was so old that it was just falling apart at the seams. Clearly nobody ever got this book out. It was the dusty one. It wasn’t the popular book for kids to read. I showed him because the cover ripped off of it while I was reading it, because it was just so dilapidated. And I felt awful, and I took it up to the teacher and I was like, “I’m so sorry but the cover fell off of this.” He just looked at me and he said, “You keep that book. I can get a new one. You keep that version.” I loved it. I was so happy that I got to keep the book. So the Bronte sisters. Little Women and the Bronte sisters, for me.

KIM: Have you told your mom anything about this recently? Does she know the impact that she had?

AMY: No, I don’t think so.

KIM: You should tell her!

AMY: She’s probably listening now, so she knows, but…

KIM: Oh my gosh, I love this. Oh my gosh, this episode is dedicated to Amy’s mom.

AMY: Phyllis!

KIM: Hi, Phyllis!

AMY: And Dianne.

KIM: And my mom.

AMY: We’ll raise a toast to her, too.

KIM: Absolutely. I love that. So, talking about all the books we read when we were younger, it makes me wonder: Did you ever read Harriet the Spy when you were growing up?

AMY: Not when I was young, no. In fact, I just read it for the first time a few weeks ago in order to prepare for our next special guests.

KIM: That’s right, everyone. Next week we’ve got two more guest experts coming our way. We’re going to be talking with literary agent Laura Mazer and biographer Leslie Brody about the fascinating life of Harriet the Spy author Louise Fitzhugh.

AMY: What most people don’t realize is that Louise Fitzhugh was quite the renegade, and we’re looking forward to chatting with Laura and Leslie next week about her unexpected life story. So that’s all for today. And listeners, we’d love to hear your feedback on our questions from today’s episode. So hit us up by email or on social media to tell us what your gateway novels were and which books you’ve never quite managed to gel with despite your best efforts to enjoy them.

KIM: I can’t wait to hear some of your responses. So 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: Do you have ideas for long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know.

[closing music starts]

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 makes a difference.

KIM: 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

17. Stella Gibbons — Nightingale Wood

AMY: So it’s January, 2021, and as we discussed in last week’s episode, Kim, it feels like the time of year for fresh starts, right?

KIM: Yeah, and we really need one after last year, for sure.

AMY: Of course. Yes. Please, god. So the literary heroine we’ll be discussing in today’s episode is getting a new start in life, but “fresh start” might not be the best way to put it.

KIM: No. I mean, if there’s such a thing as a “stale start,” then I think that’s what this character is getting, sadly. At least in the beginning anyway.

AMY: Yeah, in the case of Stella Gibbons’ Nightingale Wood, a somber change in circumstances for protagonist Viola Withers sets the stage for a charmingly unorthodox 1930s-era Cinderella Story.

KIM: So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off lost classics by some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes, and we’ll be your fairy godmothers this week, discussing Stella Gibbons’ novel Nightingale Wood.

KIM: Yes, and Stella Gibbons is an author who is not particularly well known, but if you do know her, it probably means you’ve read her best-selling novel, Cold Comfort Farm, and it was adapted into a film starring Kate Beckinsale in 1995.

AMY: It’s basically about “something nasty in the woodshed,” and if you want to know what I mean by that, you have to go read the book.

KIM: Don’t scare everyone, Amy. There’s a lot more to it than that. It’s been described as a burlesque satire of the rural novel, which is a great description of it. It's completely hilarious, but I also do find myself sometimes wondering about that incident in that woodshed. It’s very mysterious. And because Cold Comfort Farm is Stella Gibbon’s most well-known work, we highly recommend you go read that one if you’re new to this author. 

AMY: Yes, you’re going to love that book. But it’s also precisely because Gibbons is really only known for Cold Comfort Farm that we wanted to use today’s episode to talk about another one of her deserving titles, we think: Nightingale Wood. 

KIM: Yes, and we can’t say anything nasty happens in the woodshed in this book, but there’s plenty of wry comedy, a realistic take on romance, and some sexcapades and high drama, too! So let’s raid the stacks, and get started!

[Intro music]

AMY: So, Kim, I want to start by saying there’s a biography about Stella Gibbons by her nephew, Reggie Oliver, called Out of the Woodshed. Duh-da-DUM!

KIM: [laughing]. Wow, that is great! That is too much! Her legacy is never going to be able to live down what happened in the woodshed.

AMY: No. And maybe something bad really did happen, because she apparently had a pretty unhappy childhood in a household of “violent egomaniacs.” She was born in 1902, the daughter of a London doctor, and she described him as “a bad man, but a good doctor.” He was apparently an alcoholic, a womanizer and physically violent and emotionally abusive.

KIM: Wow. And then we see alcoholism come into play in Nightingale Wood, so it’s sad to think she was likely drawing on her tangible experiences there.

AMY: Yeah, it was certainly not an idyllic childhood for her, and it’s easy to see where a lot of her cynicism as a writer comes into play as a result of that. But on the flip side of that, as the oldest of three children, a heavy responsibility fell on her shoulders and she said that she was inspired as a child to invent many fairy tales that she told to her two younger brothers, these happy-ending stories to help them forget their miserable circumstances. Actually, in her early twenties, both her parents died within quick succession of one another and she was basically the sole breadwinner looking after those two younger brothers.

KIM: Right. And around this time she was a journalist. She was writing articles about pretty much everything under the sun. And then when her first novel — Cold Comfort Farm, as we mentioned —  was published in 1930, it was to instant success. 

AMY: And like we said, it was a spoof on this genre of rural novels that were written by women in the 1920s. (And these were books that Gibbons hated. She thought that they were so stupid.) So she was poking fun at that, and this novel was so loved by critics that one even suggested “Stella Gibbons” was probably a pen name used by the male writer Evelyn Waugh. Nobody could believe a first-time author (and a woman) could have written such a sophisticated parody. Having become an overnight celebrity, Gibbons was assured by her agent that she’d be able to make a comfortable living writing novels for the rest of her life. (Oh my god, how much would we love to hear that?) So she quit her job at the women’s magazine she was working for, and did just that. 

KIM: Well, Cold Comfort Farm won the Prix Etranger, a French literary prize, and Virginia Woolf was actually irked by this, because Gibbons had beat out two of her good friends in the category. Woolf thought one of them ought to have won instead. And some have suggested that Gibbons was given the cold shoulder by the literati in her lifetime because she always sort of distanced herself from those circles and even mocked the literary establishment. But Gibbons does in fact reference Woolf in Nightingale Wood and not in a bad way, so maybe that’s all been a bit overblown?

AMY: I read that she actually grew to resent her association with Cold Comfort Farm because she felt like people were just ignoring the rest of her 20-some subsequent literary works and she didn’t like that.  She said the book was like, quote, "some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore." 

KIM: [laughing] I love that description.

AMY: She was widely regarded as a “one-hit wonder” of the literary world, and she hated that, because she wrote prolifically all her life, really almost until the end of her life in 1989.

KIM: As for her personal life, after a broken engagement with the first love of her life (a German man named Walter Beck), she ended up marrying an aspiring actor and opera singer named Allan Webb, and he was described in one article as a man of “frail constitution.” Her only child, a daughter named Laura, was born the same year Nightingale Wood was published.

AMY: And then, a few other fun facts about Gibbons: Despite her scathing wit and caustic sense of humor, which is what she’s really known for, she considered herself to be much more of a serious poet than a writer of comedy. She loved Keats, in particular, and Nightingale Wood could really be seen as a subtle nod to him. Gibbons also once claimed that her idea of hell was having to go shopping for fishing rods in Harrods Department Store with Ernest Hemingway. Kim, I think I would have really gotten along with this chick. She kind of just says it, consequences be damned. I like that about her.

KIM: Definitely. And if you do need another reason to love her, she was a longtime admirer of Jane Austen. In 1960, she wrote a science fiction story for Punch magazine called, Jane In Space, which was written in the style of Jane Austen. Wow.

AMY: Yeah, I saw that, and I immediately went online and tried to find a copy of it, with no success. So I would love to read it. If anybody listening is able to find that on the “interwebs,” would you please let us know and send us the link? It’s got to be out there somewhere.

KIM: Please. Yes, somewhere. Another one of her novels, Enbury Heath, is a thinly fictionalized account of her harrowing family life growing up, and that could be worth checking out too.

AMY: Yeah, it could be sad, though, given what we know about her youth. Although apparently she didn’t really wallow in her troubled childhood or have any sort of self-pitying attitude about it. She famously wrote that, “Happiness can never hope to command so much interest as distress,” which actually seems like a good segue that could bring us into our discussion of Nightingale Wood right now.

KIM: So let’s get right into it. The protagonist of Nightingale Wood, Viola Withers, seems to be at a hopeless crossroads to kick off the novel. Having wed very young to a man she wasn’t even in love with, she ends up forced by necessity to go live with his in-laws after his sudden death. And these in-laws, the Withers, are rich, but really joyless, people. The father-in-law is money-obsessed and a spendthrift, and the mother-in-law is judgmental and insipid. And then there are two sisters, Tina and Madge, whom you could maybe consider the “ugly spinster stepsisters” of the novel… at least in the beginning anyway. 

AMY: Right, and all of them judge Viola because she comes from a different class. She was a shop girl before she married into the family and they all look down their noses at her. Gibbons writes, “She wore clothes that were subtly incorrect, played no expensive games, and was not quite a lady.” So she’s basically financially dependent on this family, the Withers, and she kind of feels doomed to a life of never-ending dreariness and loneliness living at the Eagles, which is the name of their dark and stuffy old mansion. 

KIM: And that’s not to say, though, that she’s one of those perfect, fairy tale heroines at all. Gibbons makes it really clear she has very little depth even though her heart is in the right place. In one telling quote from the book, she describes Viola by writing: “She never felt cross with anyone for long; her deplorably weak nature hardly seemed capable of sustaining a healthy indignation.” 

AMY: So yeah, she’s kind of flavorless in some ways, and you find yourself (and I think it’s actually intentional on Gibbons’ part) rooting much more fervently for some of the other women in this story. But we’ll get to that momentarily. For now, suffice to say that the one bit of excitement in Viola’s life comes in the form of the dashing Victor Spring, the Bentley-driving equivalent of “Mr. Big,” basically, whose ego matches the size of his house and bank account. So, like the Shakespearean character she’s named after, Viola finds herself pining over this princely figure even though he is already engaged to one Phyllis Barlow. (Think of the Baroness Schraeder from The Sound of Music, basically. She’s a beautiful, badass bitch, and she loves that she landed one of England’s most eligible bachelors, but she sees some flaws in Victor.

KIM: And don’t we all! He is an arrogant jerk! 

AMY: He’s awful.

KIM: Yeah. Even Viola feels a strange distaste for him the first moment they meet, whereas he sees her as an easy sexual conquest. He can’t even remember her name correctly for a while. Gibbons writes: “He had stupid, old-fashioned, ultra-masculine views on women. He never lost the feeling (though of course he had to suppress it in front of Phyllis and her friends) that women ought to be kept busy with some entirely feminine occupation like sewing or arranging flowers or nursing children until a man wanted their attention. He had not a shred of admiration for women who flew the larger expanses of sea, won motor-racing trophies, wrote brilliant novels, or managed big business. He admired women only for being pretty, docile, and well-dressed.” 

AMY: Boo! Get off my page! And yet, despite his selfishness and chauvinism, Viola is completely infatuated with him for the entirety of the novel, and they end up dancing together at the proverbial ball, but their subsequent encounters upset Viola, who describes him as “beastly.” And at this point as the reader, you’re thinking: “What kind of fairy tale is this?” It’s not exactly what we were expecting.

KIM: Yes, and that’s what you should be thinking, because Gibbons is obviously subverting the whole idea of a fairy tale with this novel. There’s this sense that the ideal prize is really just an illusion that people are chasing. Maybe there is no happily ever after, even for the people who get exactly what they want?

AMY: So while Viola and Victor Spring are having their hot-and-heavy, but also disconcerting tete-a-tetes, there’s another blossoming romance in the works. 

KIM: Yes. Viola’s sister in law, Tina Withers, who is pushing forty, starts up an illicit romance with the family’s chauffeur, Saxon, who is 12 years her junior. But when the town drunk, a hermit who lives in a shack in the woods, publicly calls them out for sleeping together, Tina gets cast out of the house in disgrace. 

AMY: This is basically a riches-to-rags story, a kind of reverse “Cinderella” if you will, and it’s really sweet, I think, but my favorite scene in the whole book is when the Tina/Saxon drama comes to a head, especially when Tina launches into a whole speech about how she’s been “sexually starved for years.” It was awesome. You almost had to gasp out loud as that scene spilled onto the page. Gibbons writes, “Her family were all raw-minded about sex; their natures all had that one secret, sore place and when it was touched, they winced and ran mad. Only they themselves knew what old longings and crushed miseries her warm naked truths had let out of prison. But millions of people were like that.” Wow, girl!

KIM: Uh, yeah, I think there’s a reason people thought maybe that she was Evelyn Waugh because that rings very “Evelyn Waugh-ish.” I was so rooting for Tina in that moment, too! But she’s not the only spirited young woman in this novel. Victor’s 21-year-old cousin, Hetty, is a real spitfire, too. She always says exactly what she thinks (to the shock and horror of Victor’s mother and fiancee, Phyllis). She’s obsessed with literature and feminism and learning, and she seems to exist on this higher mental plane than anyone else in the book.

AMY: Yeah, I like to think Hetty is the character closest to Gibbons’ own personality. I’m imagining that. She’s witty, shrewd, progressive, and doesn’t give a damn about societal expectations, and she absolutely hates Victor’s fiancee, Phyllis. She calmly states over breakfast one morning, “I detest her. To me she typifies all the varnished vulgarity and falseness of this horrifying age. Everything that she is, poetry is not. I wish that she would die, preferably violently.”

KIM: Tell us what you really think! Without giving the rest of the story away, we’ll just say that, like all fairy tales, this one ends happily for pretty much everyone … or does it?

AMY: Yeah, that’s the big question. Every character, in one way or another, ends up getting exactly what they were after all along, and yet, as Gibbons catalogues their fate, we learn that no one is actually entirely satisfied, except for maybe the D.O.M. -- the dirty-old-man Hermit who lives in the woods (who, Kim, in my mind, needs to be played in the movie by Ian McShane. That’s who I pictured the whole time). 

KIM: Oh, yeah. That’s great.

AMY: So the book’s ambivalent ending really reminded me of that final scene of The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross are sitting at the back of the bus, like “Okay, now what?” and we hear the opening bars of “Hello Darkness, my old friend….” You know, it’s sort of, like, bittersweet?

KIM: That is the best comparison! That’s great. And I also wanted to bring up another interesting aspect of the book. The wooded area between the Withers’ home and the Springs’ home has special significance. While the human stories unfolding are jarringly, almost depressingly real, the wood seems to hold all of that fairy tale magic. Her description of the natural beauty and the birds living in this part of the English countryside… it’s all juxtaposed against the materialism and the general misery of these characters.

AMY: Yeah, and when I read that Gibbons was a huge fan of Keats, all those references to birdsong, and that feeling of freedom in nature versus the constraints of society, sort of made sense — especially putting it in the context of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is basically a poem all about the fact that happiness is just kind of illusory or ephemeral for humans. I think that’s maybe where she was getting the title from, frankly. And at the end of Keats’ poem, he wonders if the nightingale was actually really there or if it was all just a dream.

KIM: Right, and that ties into the last few lines of the novel, too, but we’ll leave that to you, as the reader, to experience for yourself. Now, what do we think Gibbons was trying to say with Nightingale Wood?

AMY: I think maybe that there’s just no such thing as “happily ever after,” you know? She references Shakespeare a lot in the book, including, at one point, the phrase “violent delights have violent ends.” And it’s a very cynical take on romance, I think, and it’s a rude awakening of sorts. Even Phyllis, who is Victor Spring’s fiancee at the beginning of the book, she goes on to marry a minister of parliament, but Gibbons writes: “Sometimes when she and the M.P. are going home from a party at five in the morning, she observes to the M.P. that life is very different from what you thought it was going to be when you were a kid. But the M.P. is too tired to ask her what she thought it was going to be, and even if he did, it is possible that she could not remember.” It’s kind of wistful, you know?

KIM: Yeah, I agree.

AMY: So Kim, this idea of these idyllic childhood fairytales really got me thinking about the stories that we tell our children, particularly our daughters. So, you know, Julia’s 11 now, and she’s already been through and is now past her fascination with princesses, but there was a point in time where she was all-in. Her obsession took hold when she was about two years old, without my even introducing her to it (it was her babysitter who got that ball rolling), but I was fine to let her, you know, go with that princess fantasy, because the joy she took in it. I didn’t want to throw a wet blanket on it. But what do you think though? Do you see princesses and that whole trope as problematic? Would you try to steer Cleo away from it as she grows older?

KIM: That’s interesting. I actually have thought about it. And my niece, Chloe, went through a princess phase. She’s now 11 and she is completely into the Marvel superhero thing, so it totally wore off and she went in the other direction. I think with Cleo, if she’s interested, I’d let her enjoy it and then hope when she’s a little older, it can maybe be something we can talk about a little bit more. I have a feeling trying to steer her away from it wouldn’t really work. It might do the opposite. And I’d probably also try to find some really positive, modern princess stories, too… I know there are more of those these days and you probably have some great suggestions for that, having been through that phase.

AMY: For sure, in the last decade we’re starting to have representations of more feminism in fairy tales. And I think Disney finally gets it. We’ve seen a switch in movies like Frozen and Brave and even Mulan, which was prior to 10 years ago, where the women are the heroes and it’s not solely about landing the guy. There’s also a great scene with all the Disney Princesses in the Wreck It Ralph sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet that sort of turns that idea of helpless princesses on its head in a really fun way. So I think times are changing, but I do love that Stella Gibbons, back in the Thirties, was clearly light years ahead of her time in raising some of these issues.

KIM: Yes, I think that definitely goes to show that she wasn’t just a one-hit-wonder. So what did we learn from today’s episode? 

AMY: Well, we were reminded that Ernest Hemingway really would be super annoying to go shopping with.

KIM: Yes … and probably super annoying to do most things with. But we also learned that Prince Charmings, when you scratch the surface, aren’t all they’re cracked up to be either.

AMY: We learned that the times, fortunately, are changing when it comes to modern fairytales.  

KIM: Thank goodness. And we learned that there’s a lot more to Stella Gibbons’ writing than whatever nastiness is in that woodshed. (And seriously, do read Cold Comfort Farm if you haven’t already to understand that reference.) You will thank us later.

AMY: But if you want to thank us now, there’s a way you could do that. Consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast. It’s the single most important thing you can do to help us grow our audience and help other book-minded people find us. It’s a fast and easy way to show your support for us, and we’d be so grateful.

KIM: Yes, and we really hope you enjoyed this episode. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

AMY: Do you have ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. 

[start closing music]

KIM: And tune in again next week to help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

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

16. From Jane Austen to Zadie Smith — Advice from Women Writers for a More Productive 2021

KIM: It’s the first week of January, and you know what that means, Amy…

AMY: Let me guess: I’m going to say falling off the wagon from the New Year’s Resolution you JUST made, like, five days ago.

KIM: Probably [laughs]. Everyone’s like, “Mm-hmm, that’s me.” So, what’s the key to NOT letting that happen?

AMY: I’m not sure, because I’m really not in the habit of making New Year’s resolutions. Do you?

KIM: I usually jot some things down, and then I immediately forget about them for the rest of the year. But, you know, they say that if you can do anything for 30 days it becomes habitual. So I guess that’s one place to start.

AMY: Yeah, it’s a place to start, assuming you’ve taken the first step. Which in a lot of cases, is actually the hardest thing to do. There’s a quote from C.S. Lewis who said, “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” But, I mean, really what’s the difference between setting the goal and dreaming the dream and actually making it happen? There’s a big difference, I think. And I feel like that’s a question for you, Kim, because between the two of us, you’re the one who is always thinking big for the both of us.

KIM: Hmm. Maybe that’s true, and I guess now that you mention it, I’m thinking I may have a little something in common with Mrs. Spring Fragrance. She’s actually one of the protagonists from the short story collection by Sui Sin Far that we featured in our last episode. And in case you haven’t listened to that one yet, she comes up with these unlikely, yet really creative ideas to help her friends and neighbors with their romantic problems. And she was very successful at following through and making it work! That said, in my case, sure, I can come up with ideas, but without an accountability partner, (and one who happens to be really smart, really creative, super organized, and doesn’t take any crap, I might add), I wouldn’t have made it this far I don’t think.

AMY: Oh, I’m blushing, Kim. And I am going to start calling you Mrs. Spring Fragrance, by the way.

KIM: I like it.

AMY: It’s a good analogy. You are like her. I’m the pragmatist between the two of us, I think, and that can be my own worst enemy. Sure, in many instances in life it’s very helpful to have that sort of mentality, that sort of healthy skepticism about what’s possible and what’s not possible, but when it comes to empowering yourself, those kind of mental “reality checks” that I tend do in my head, those are like a hand-brake that hampers me. I can always seem to find a MILLION reasons not to do something because I think things through way too much.

KIM: I know you do. [laughing]. But luckily I’m here with a million and one reasons why we should do it.

AMY: Yes, and listeners, you should know that Kim is the person that just comes up with these ideas like: “We need to go to Argentina next Saturday!” And you’re like, “Umm, what? I don’t think that’s going to work, Kim!” Maybe not so much anymore, now that you’re married and have a child. You’ve kind of toned that spontaneity down a little bit. But you always have these big, big, big ideas, and I’m like, “Sure….”.

KIM: I know. You humor me.

AMY: But I do think that you’re the person who first prods us into an idea and then once I’ve steadily ruminated on it for many days or weeks even, and I can distill the idea in my head, in a lot of cases I come around, and I’m like, “Yeah, we should do that!” That’s the case with the blog that we first started almost 20 years ago, and also the book series that we wrote and now, with this podcast even. You had been talking about it for a while before I was like, “Ah, yeah, that’s exactly what we should do!” But I was a little hesitant at first.

KIM: Yes, so I just want to say you did come up with the idea for the Lost Ladies of Lit, that that would be sort of the concept, so… I wanted to do a podcast, but you actually brought us around to what we would do. So. 

AMY: I think that’s part of the way that we work.

KIM: Yeah, we usually are completely in sync when we know the idea is right and we don’t look back. We could have sat around for months talking about it and planning and thinking about it and questioning ourselves, but instead, we decided to just go for it. We did it and here we are!

AMY: We’re still learning as we go, obviously, but it feels good to have set the wheels in motion. And speaking of Lost Ladies of Lit, it got me wondering whether we can sort of glean any New Year’s wisdom from our literary ladies, tips, perhaps, on how to become a “do-er” and not just a “dreamer.”

KIM: Oh, I know we can. Amy and I have compiled a list of quotes from women writers that we think can inspire us (and hopefully you) to have greater productivity in the new year. 

AMY: Alright, so we’re going to begin with George Eliot. She has a quote: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” The takeaway is just very basic: don’t make excuses, you know? It isn’t too late. I think so many times we feel like, “Oh, in another life, I could have been this…” or “If only I had done that when I was younger…” and it doesn’t matter. Don’t make excuses, just find a way and do it.

KIM: Considering I’ve always felt a little bit like a late bloomer, that one really speaks to me. So here’s one from Emily Dickinson: “The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” 

So, my takeaway from that is that you need to be flexible, ready to pivot, ready for opportunities. Actually, I have a note on my bulletin board that says: “Enjoy the experience, make it a great memory.” Luck is the convergence of preparedness and opportunity. So, Amy and I already had a manuscript for our first book. It was in a drawer, so to speak. It was actually on our computer. When the call came for a submission to the person who became our editor, it was there waiting. So you have to be ready for opportunity and be willing to keep an eye out for it when it’s about to show up. 

AMY: Yeah, actually at the start of this pandemic, I had been reading a nonfiction book that was all about the science of luck. Two scientists got together and studied why are people lucky. And those were the two main takeaways. It was about yes, being at the right place in the right time, and there are certain ways to position yourself for that, but also being prepared when that opportunity strikes, and if you don’t have both of those components, you’re going to miss the ball, basically. So I love that quote. So, of course we have to have something from Jane Austen, right?

KIM: Of course.

AMY: She said (or wrote, I guess you could say): “There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” The lesson there? Easy enough. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t say “can’t” and then also don’t let others say it for you.

KIM: I want to put that on my bulletin board, too. That’s good. Thank you, Jane. I have one from Mary Shelley, and it’s simple, but really wise: “The beginning is always today.” And I think that’s true. I love that message, it’s really freeing. So basically, don’t wait. There’s no time like the present. But also (this is really comforting), every day is a fresh start. 

AMY: So don’t beat yourself up when you feel like, oh, man, I should have been doing more on my goal, or I should have been, or I really blew it for the past few weeks (or whatever the problem is). Instead of having that mentality, have the mentality like, I get back on the tracks today. And also, just take things in little pieces sometimes. Sometimes it’s just one foot in front of the other. Today, I can write an email. Today, I can do a little brainstorming memo for myself. Whatever, even if it’s just a little bit every day towards your goal.

KIM: Yeah, I think that’s really true. I totally agree with the idea that, just taking a little step toward your goal is a lot easier to bite off than trying to envision your end goal and get there.

AMY: And it can start momentum, like a snowball rolling downhill.

KIM: Exactly.

AMY: Zadie Smith, who isn’t necessarily a “classic” lady of lit, but I thought she had a really good quote, so I wanted to include it. She said: “Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.” Now, in some ways that feels maybe a little selfish, especially if you have a family to consider, but I don’t see it like a selfish sort of way. I see it more as learning how to say “no” to the things that don’t matter. There are some things that you need to just let go and you have to prioritize your own ambitions. I think as women, sometimes we want to put everybody ahead of us. We want to serve everybody else first, and then when the time comes to work on our own things, we are just out of gas. The only way to make a switch with that, is to find time… my time and space is often the middle of the night, because that’s when it’s quiet. That’s when I know I’m not going to have anybody tugging me in a million different directions. I’m going to just have several uninterrupted hours to do what I need to do, and it sounds crazy and maybe I’m part vampire, but to me, I feel better about myself if I’m getting stuff done. I usually wake up in the middle of the night and my eyes pop open and I need to go and take care of business. And so I will, and then once I get it out of my head I can sleep. So, that’s kind of how I address it.

KIM: Okay, so I have one from Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” And the takeaway from that is, if you see a space for something, put your passion into it, do it and see what comes of it. So have a passion for what you’re trying to accomplish. See the spaces where there’s room for things, and fill them.

AMY: That’s basically what we’re trying to do with this podcast. I think if there are listeners out there (and we know that there are, which is amazing and fun and great), but really, Kim and I do it because we love doing it and it’s fun, and if we had no listeners, we probably would still do it because it’s just a passion project for us, and it’s a time that we get to spend together, so when you’re having fun doing something, you’re more likely to put the energy and effort into it.

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: Okay, I have one from Octavia E. Butler. She said: “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.” Obviously, she’s talking about writing here, but I think it applies to anything. It’s what we said at the beginning about New Year’s Resolutions. When you do something for 30 days, it starts to become ingrained in you, and suddenly it’s not an effort anymore. For me, I think, especially with writing, there is a combination of habit and inspiration. I mean, I still rely on inspiration, but I don’t think you can be inspired unless you’re putting yourself in the mindset and putting yourself in front of the computer monitor. 

KIM: One hundred percent. I think a lot of people wait for inspiration, and I think I used to do that, and I realized the only way inspiration’s going to come is if i sit down and start writing or start doing whatever it is I want to do. And then the inspiration comes while you’re there actually putting in the work. That daily practice of writing, or doing whatever it is that you want to do, it sort of makes room for inspiration to arrive a lot more often.

KIM: So I have one from Isabel Allende, and this is: “You only have what you give. It’s by spending yourself that you become rich.” I love this one. So this is twofold for me. One, it feels like the more that you put out there, the more that you have within yourself. So it’s not like you’re going to run out of inspiration. It’s not like you’re going to run out of ideas. It’s not like you’re going to run out of creativity. It’s all in there, so keep spending it. Don’t be afraid. Don’t hoard it. And then also, invest in yourself, whether it’s financially or with your time, because what you have within is the thing you have to offer the world, so it’s important to invest in that. Yeah, I sound really wise.

AMY: [laughing] You are! You are! Okay now, I have one from [I always call her An-EYE-is Nin, but is it ANA-EES Nin?]

KIM: I think it’s ANA-EES.

AMY: Okay, Anais Nin: “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” I’m practically almost choking up reading this one, Kim, because that friend, to me, is you. And I have such a clear memory of meeting you and my life changed after I met you because we started working together and I can’t imagine the path my life would have taken if I hadn’t met you that night. Just knowing that that instant changed everything because we went on to do so many great things together. 

KIM: I can still remember that moment, too, and then sometimes I just stop and think about all the things that we’ve done since we’ve known each other and it’s kind of… it’s pretty amazing. It makes me feel really good. 

AMY: Yeah, absolutely.

KIM: I’m feeling a little choked up, too.

AMY: So basically, get yourself a “Kim” or an “Amy.” Find an accountability partner or find the person that inspires you. And maybe it’s not like a partnership like Kim and I have. Maybe it’s just somebody you check in with. You each have separate goals, but you’re sort of working in parallel tracks. Somebody that you want to exercise with, somebody that you want to have be your writing buddy. Whatever it is that you’re working towards, it helps to have somebody that can be your support system and your cheerleader. And also the person that holds you accountable.

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it can be a career coach, it can be taking a class. Whatever it is that you know you’ll be accountable to, that’s a real key in accomplishing things, especially for people who are givers. I have one from Nancy Mitford, which is very dry: “Oh, how television diminishes everything.” (I can just imagine her saying that.) But the takeaway from that… I think we can broaden that and say don’t get trapped in time sucks. It can be TV. It can be social media. It can be the rabbit hole of the Internet. But basically, the idea is to be conscious of how you choose to spend your time, and spend it deliberately. I know that’s not always possible, but if you can stop yourself sometimes and just think, Okay, is this really going to add to my life? Maybe I could be writing right now or doing something else that accomplishes my goals.

AMY: That’s a tough one for me because I love television. I love television way more than you do, Kim. I know that for a fact. But I think it also goes back to an earlier tip, which was “Find your passion.” Because when you do have something that you love to do, you’re willing to tear yourself away from… the TV or the Internet is not as exciting as getting to work on what you love to work on. Uh, Virginia Woolf… this is a famous one: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” When you have been working for a while and you’re doing good, take a breather! Don’t forget to stop and smell the roses a little bit along the way, but also kind of reward yourself a bit. Kim and I like to reward ourselves when we hit certain milestones in our work, and one of our favorite things to do together is going to afternoon tea. And usually we work during the afternoon tea because we’re excited to talk about whatever project we’re doing, but that ritual of going to have this decadent high tea at a fancy hotel is one of our favorite things to do.

KIM: And I cannot wait until the pandemic that we’re in is over and we can actually go have afternoon tea again. That’s one of the things that I’ve been looking forward to.

AMY: For sure. So that’s all great advice, frankly, and hopefully we can keep that in mind for 2021 as we continue to work on projects together. Yet If anyone needs a new life plan and a path for achieving it, it’s the young heroine of our next novel. She’s a former shop girl who finds herself down and out (and living with her rich, but comically dour and depressing in-laws) following the death of her husband. 

KIM: Stella Gibbons’ Nightingale Wood is an interesting twist on the classic “Cinderella Story,” and it’s really every bit as delightful as Gibbons’ more well-known farcical gem, Cold Comfort Farm.

AMY: I so love Cold Comfort Farm (both the book and the movie) so I was so happy when you recommended I give this other book by Gibbons a read. I hadn’t really thought that she had any other books, so of course she does. I was thrilled to read it.

KIM: I knew you would love it. And until we dive into that one next week, you can check out our website, Lostladiesoflit.com. It has more information on this episode and further reading. And if you love this episode, please leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find us. Happy New Year, everyone!

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

15. Sui Sin Far — Mrs. Spring Fragrance with Victoria Namkung

KIM: Hello, and welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: … 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.

AMY: This week we’re going back a century to yet another incredible book we can’t believe we hadn’t heard about before, this one by the author Sui Sin Far. 

KIM: And it’s really interesting the way her name kept popping up on our radar in recent months. At least two people mentioned her to us, our guest last month, Anne Boyd Rioux, and today’s guest. 

AMY: And we’re so glad they did. Clearly great minds think alike — and have the same taste in books! So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music]

KIM: Okay, so full disclosure, I’m proud to say that today’s guest is a friend of mine. We’ve worked together for years. Her name is Victoria Namkung, and she’s a journalist and author who’s been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, VICE, The Washington Post, USA Today, and InStyle, among other publications.

She's also the author of two wonderful novels: The Things We Tell Ourselves and These Violent Delights, and she has a degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA. Her master’s thesis on import car racing and Asian American masculinity was published in the anthology Asian American Youth. 

Welcome, Victoria, and thank you for bringing this brilliant, but relatively unknown, author to our attention! 

VICTORIA: My pleasure! Thank you, guys, so much for having me.

AMY: So listeners, first off, when we refer to Sui Sin Far, we want you to know that that’s actually her pen name. Her real name was Edith Maude Eaton, and so you’re going to be hearing us using those two names interchangeably throughout the course of the episode. So for a little background: Eaton was a journalist and writer of Chinese and British descent. She was born in England, but lived the majority of her life in both Canada and the United States. Her father was an English merchant and her mother was a Chinese woman he’d met on a business trip to Shanghai. And honestly, her mother was a pretty amazing woman. She had formerly been enslaved and toured the world as a tightrope dancer as well as the human target of a knife-throwing act (which, I don’t know if that was voluntarily, or probably not, but wow!) She was finally rescued by missionaries from her abusive owner in London in 1855. But that’s another whole story.

KIM: Wow, that is a “truth is stranger than fiction” story right there, and also, it sounds harrowing. So Eaton’s family moved to Montreal in 1872, and her father eventually began a business smuggling Chinese into the U.S. from Montreal. The family struggled financially, but their home environment was actually intellectually stimulating. Eaton was the eldest of fourteen children, and she left school in order to help support them. She did this by writing articles about the Chinese experience for Montreal’s English-language newspapers. 

Amy: And then by age 18, she was working as a type-setter for The Montreal Star. She additionally worked as a stenographer and legal secretary, and her experience with all of this plays into the story collection we’re going to be discussing.

KIM: Right, and later, Eaton lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, before she moved to Boston. She “passed” for white (and this is actually a historical term used for a person of color who assimilated into the white majority to escape legal and social discrimination), but in 1896 she began writing articles about what it was like to live as a Chinese woman in a white America. Her collection of short stories, written mostly in the late 1800s, was published in June of 1912, as the novel Mrs. Spring Fragrance. 

AMY: Let’s toss it over to Victoria now. When did you first discover Sui Sin Far and this collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and what do you remember about reading her for the first time, Victoria?

VICTORIA: So I discovered her in an Asian American literature class at UC Santa Barbara where I was an undergrad in the late Nineties. We read her first-person essay, Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian. I, (being Eurasian myself, or biracial,) I could definitely relate to this experience of being exotified and dehumanized by white and Asian people, and I just remember, because I was a young journalist at the time who really wanted to write fiction, I just thought she was a badass. I didn’t even really know Chinese women in America wrote books at that time. So I just remember being really blown away, and then I read Mrs. Spring Fragrance shortly after that. And some of those stories have stuck with me, even though it’s been more than 20 years since I read it.

Kim: The story collection is actually the earliest known publication by a Chinese woman in the United States, and it’s a window into the lives of Chinese immigrants living in Seattle and San Francisco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eaton’s stories really humanized Chinese immigrants for her readers at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was really rampant in America. 

AMY: I want to read a short passage from the book that really illustrates that. This is from the first story in the collection, which is all about Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the title character. She is a Chinese immigrant living in Seattle who happens to be visiting San Francisco at one point in the story. A white American lady friend of hers asks Mrs. Spring Fragrance to accompany her to a lecture, the title of which is “America, the Protector of China!” So you can already imagine what this is going to be like. So Mrs. Spring fragrance later writes home to her husband to recount the whole experience, and she does so with an amazing tongue-in-cheek cynicism. I’m going to read that.

“It was most exhilarating,” [she writes] “and the effect of so much expression of benevolence leads me to beg of you to forget that the barber charges you one dollar for a shave while he humbly submits to the American man a bill of fifteen cents. And murmur no more because your honored elder brother, on a visit to this country, is detained under the roof-tree of this great Government instead of under your own humble roof. Console him with the reflection that he is protected under the wing of the Eagle, the Emblem of Liberty. What is the loss of ten hundred years or ten thousand times ten dollars compared with the happiness of knowing oneself so securely sheltered?”

Can we all just give her a slow-clap right now for the sarcasm? I mean, love it, but then at the same time, it kind of is upsetting. 

KIM: Yeah, it’s entertaining, but it also shows a little of what the Chinese newcomers were up against, both in terms of discrimination and in terms of Americans having this patronizing attitude toward them. So Victoria, can you add anything to this in terms of historical and social context? 

VICTORIA: Yeah, so Chinese immigration in this country has had a very long and fraught history. It started when predominantly male immigrants from China came to the U.S. in the 1850s to try their luck during California’s Gold Rush, so they worked in mining. And then by the 1860s, around 15,000 Chinese workers were hired to help build the Transcontinental Railroad and they also worked in agriculture and fisheries and as domestic servants and laundrymen. So by the 1870s, there was a widespread depression in the U.S. so this already-brewing hostility toward the Chinese really reached a fever pitch and you started seeing them vilified as moral heathens who were a threat to white America. This went on in speeches and cartoons and even in congressional hearings, which may sound a little familiar today. And they were also rapidly expected to assimilate, and a lot of Christians wanted to convert them as soon as possible. So then, various taxes and racist immigration laws came next to restrict their immigration. The most famous law is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which halted all Chinese immigration for 10 years and prohibited the Chinese who were here from becoming U.S. citizens. This also prevented the reunion of families who were left back in China, you know, wives and children, and anti-miscegenation laws in many western states kept them from marrying white women as well. So the earliest Chinese immigrants certainly faced plenty of discrimination.

AMY: The context you just gave already adds so much for me in terms of what I got out of this book. While I was reading the stories, I kept thinking to myself, “I really want to go back now and start reading some nonfiction about this time period,” because there’s just so much that I was unaware of, like you mentioned, the detentions. The stories give such “slice of life” tales into what these people were going through, and so yeah, I would love to dig a little bit further with some nonfiction, and maybe you have some suggestions for that which we can talk about later. But as delightfully charming as these tales are they are also really ironic in a lot of cases, but also very dark and disturbing. A lot of these stories struck me, though, as surprisingly modern and feminist in that time period. I was surprised by that. 

VICTORIA: Yeah, I think a lot of her stories are an indictment of the unrelenting patriarchy, both in the U.S. and in China. So I think she’s absolutely a feminist pioneer in that regard, just to accurately portray the Chinese community and the historical realities, including some of the atrocities committed by our government. No one had done this, to my knowledge. So yes, while some are “slice of life” stories as you mentioned, others kind of feel more like a slap in the face. I’m thinking mainly of “In the Land of the Free,” which is about a Chinese merchant who’s waiting at the San Francisco waterfront to welcome his wife and his two-year-old son, who are coming from China. Upon disembarkment, they take the child away due to a lack of paperwork, and this expensive, 10-month struggle ensues. In the meantime, the boy is sent to a missionary school and renamed, and the eventual family reunion is absolutely crushing.

AMY: Yeah, as I said, a lot of these stories are charming and delightful, but this one was probably the story that I have been thinking about long after closing the book. It was just a gut-punch for me, and it really reminded me of the awful (and pretty similar) plight facing families right now coming across our Southern border. 

VICTORIA: Yeah. The other story, in “Wisdom of the New,” you really see the culture shock faced by the Chinese women, in particular, who came to the U.S. to join their husbands. So in this story, the wife character doesn’t speak any English. She has no real life outside the home, and she’s so scared for her child to assimilate to western ways, because that just challenges everything she knows and her whole identity. So the story also highlights the differences in how Chinese and white American women were subjugated at the time.

KIM: So I wanted to talk about the story “Its Wavering Image.” In this one, a journalist woos a half-white, half-Chinese girl. Her name is Pan. And he’s doing it in order to get her to reveal the cultural “secrets” about her Chinese neighbors for a newspaper article he’s writing. I thought that was really interesting, because Eaton was also a journalist and one who could “pass” as white. She wrote articles about the Chinese experience in the U.S. Do you know if she felt any ambivalence herself about sharing the Chinese culture with non-Chinese readers?  

VICTORIA: Well, I think her approach was very intentional. Like you said, she could have passed as white and just lived her life in a more privileged way but she purposefully made her home within this Chinese American community and had a very deep interest in the lives of everyday Chinese immigrants. So I think by portraying multidimensional and realistic characters, both in the journalism and her fiction, it really was intended for a non-Chinese audience. I don’t think the Chinese immigrants at the time would have been reading books or articles like these. So I don’t think she felt an ambivalence, per se, but probably just more of a duty to accurately represent as a counterpoint to all this widespread demonization that was going on at the time.

AMY: As a writer, was it risky for her to go ahead and claim this Chinese side of herself publicly when she didn’t have to, or was there something going on in that time period where there was a fascination with Chinese culture, that it was maybe helping her as a writer? Do you happen to know?

VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I know we’re going to talk later about her sister who chose a Japanese-sounding pen name, so she sort of passed as Japanese, which is a whole different conversation, but I think for Eaton, when the Chinese first came, there was this sort of exotification, and a lot of western white people were very fascinated with the culture and thinking, “Oh, we’ll educate them. We’ll assimilate them. Great!” But as soon as the economy started going bad, Chinese just basically became demons to white America, so yes, for her to publicly claim a Chinese identity or even choose this pen name that made her sound far more Asian than maybe her looks would show someone, I think that was a revolutionary idea and certainly more dangerous than just living as a white woman, who could have reported on these communities.

AMY: Right, and we can see the conflict that a lot of these characters face as immigrants. They are so desperately trying to hang on to their Chinese culture while also adapting to the “American” way of life and, at times, being pushed into it by sort of well-meaning (I guess?) white folk. And it’s maddening for these immigrants, at times. So knowing Sui Sin Far’s own lineage, she had obviously a singular insight into this sort of crisis, straddling both cultures. And Victoria, I know you come from two seemingly disparate backgrounds yourself, which I’d love to hear a little bit more about. I’m also wondering if you can relate to Eaton on that level?

VICTORIA: Absolutely. My dad’s Korean, but he attended British and American schools in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. And then my mom is Jewish but was raised in super Catholic Dublin, Ireland. So when you’re multi-racial or multicultural like I am, I think sometimes you just have a larger world view of things. When I was young, when it was far less common to be mixed like this, people would always say to me, “Oh, you have the best of both worlds! You’re ‘East’ meets ‘West!’” They meant that as a compliment, but I think a lot of times being mixed or having a biracial identity means that you experience a lot of racism from both sides and you experience this feeling of a sort of a pressure to choose. So I think with Eaton and myself, we’ve chosen to go with this identity that I guess is more subjugated, which is a strange thing. Like, I have family members who are half-Korean, half-white, but they can pass as white and they sort of live and move through the world as a white person. But I look more Asian, so I kind of felt like that decision was made for me, because that’s how society treats me. So whether or not I feel Korean, it’s not really up to me. So yeah, I think with Eaton, our unique backgrounds give us this different insight into the world and also maybe more empathy for marginalized people because we can feel that experience on both sides.

KIM: Thank you for sharing that, Victoria. We’ve mentioned that Eaton’s writing has a lot of depth and it has all these ironic plot devices, and there’s a lot going on there, but I want to switch gears a little bit and just talk about how exquisite the prose is; how much we loved reading this book, sentence-by-sentence. And I was hoping maybe Victoria you could read one of your favorite passages from this collection.

VICTORIA: Sure! I’m going to read from the opening lines of a story called “The Three Souls of Ah So Nan” which is a story about marriage and grief:

   The sun was conquering the morning fog, dappling with gold the gray waters of San Francisco’s bay, and throwing an emerald radiance over the islands around. 

   Close to the long line of wharves lay motionless brigs and schooners, while farther off in the harbor were ships of many nations riding at anchor. 

   A fishing fleet was steering in from the open sea, scudding before the wind like a flock of seabirds. All night long had the fishers toiled in the deep. Now they were returning with the results of their labor. 

   A young Chinese girl, watching the fleet from the beach of Fisherman’s Cove, shivered in the morning air. Over her blue cotton blouse she wore no wrap; on her head, no covering. All her interest was centered in one lone boat which lagged behind the rest, being heavier freighted. The fisherman was of her own race. When his boat was beached he sprang to her side.

AMY: As you can tell from that, the description of the environment that we’re talking about — the cities, the locales — she does such a great job at just placing you right smack in the middle of it, and if you’ve visited any of these cities that she writes about (Seattle, San Francisco, that sort of Pacific Northwest region) she nails it, obviously, because she lived there as well. But Kim, so did you, actually, and I remember when visiting you when you lived in San Francisco, we basically had to walk through Chinatown every day when we were out in the city to get to your apartment. Did that sort of take you back, getting to read about that?

KIM: Yeah, definitely. So even though the “main” thoroughfare when you go to Chinatown in San Francisco is a very touristy experience — I’m sure a lot of people have been to cities and had that “Chinatown” experience — there are streets on either side of the main thoroughfare that really are where, it seemed, Chinese residents actually lived. So, to an outsider anyway, that’s what I saw. I loved walking on those streets, going to the little stores, but what I think is interesting is I was getting an outsider view of Chinatown, and I actually feel like I learned more from these stories about what the Chinese experience has been in the past than I did being so close to that community. Which I think is a shame, and it’s partly on me for not actually looking into that more. And then also, I wish that I had read this (or something like this) earlier so I could have had this window into some of the experiences of people who were living in that neighborhood.

AMY: And yeah, Kim, I understand that sort of idea of being an outsider, which Sui Sin Far shows us in the stories with a lot of these white women characters who are sort of inserting themselves (helpfully and unhelpfully in a lot of ways) which sort of takes us back to the idea of these women characters in the book if you want to touch on that a little more, Kim.

KIM: So yeah, a  running theme throughout the stories is the struggle of the independent woman, both Chinese, American, and “mixed” — and they show all the things that they’re up against. They have the weight of cultural and societal norms, but also the patriarchy that they’re working against as well.

AMY: Yeah, it’s like a double whammy, for sure.

VICTORIA: That’s so true. A lot of the stories also highlight women supporting women, which is, I think, how most of us survive living in a patriarchy for our entire lives. In these stories you see instances of white women standing up for or advocating for Chinese women, and you see women backing off from a rivalry or coming to the aid of another woman, so I’m sure that was very intentional on Eaton’s part.

KIM: She also shows a lot of sympathy for Chinese men as well, and the difficulty that they had in culturally assimilating with everything that was stacked against them. She doesn’t seem, though, to have a lot of sympathy for the white male… I’m thinking of the stenographer’s first husband and also the journalist from “Its Wavering Image.” There’s also the depiction of the American smuggler, which ties in to Eaton’s father and the fact that he earned money for a while sneaking Chinese people into America from Canada. 

VICTORIA: Yeah, I think since white men have historically been the oppressors or the colonizers, I’m not surprised to see the way she rendered them here. But Eaton does show a ton of sympathy for Chinese men, but at the same time, she doesn’t hesitate to call out China’s policies at the time of, let’s say, educating boys only or how Chinese women had to take their meals after their husbands or at a separate table, or the men who took secondary wives back home. I think it’s really worth noting that Eaton herself never married. Some scholars have read the story “The Chinese Lily” (which is about a disable homebound woman and her sudden friendship with a neighbor) with queer undertones, and I don’t know if Eaton was a lesbian, but she certainly was more concerned with promoting  and defending issues of gender and race versus the white men who already dominated society at the time.

AMY: Oh, that’s really interesting about that story you mentioned. I hadn’t read it in that context, but now looking back, I’m like, “Hmmm, yeah.” I can see that a little. And also, I think through a lot of these stories, you can tell that Eaton clearly was a romantic despite the fact that she never married. I mean, these are predominantly tales about marriage and falling in love, and the stories about the young couples struck me as really Shakespearean in a lot of respects. There was a lot of this “star-crossed lover” theme running throughout the stories; that “Romeo-and-Juliet” vibe thanks to this tradition of arranged marriages that the younger people were starting to rebel against.

KIM: Right, and a couple of stories featured women disguising themselves as boys for various reasons… also Shakespearean.

VICTORIA: Well, you guys are the experts on what’s Shakespearean, so I fully agree.

KIM: Everything’s Shakespearean!

AMY: We will find a way to work Shakespeare into everything when we have an opportunity.

VICTORIA: Totally understandable.

AMY: We should also point out, though, that the second half of this story collection are “Tales of Chinese Children.” It takes a really kind of abrupt switcheroo halfway through. These stories are all really quick reads. They’re morality tales. They’re fun, but they’re also, in many ways, I think as dark as the Brothers Grimm. I’m not sure how I felt about them as part of the full collection. I really liked the first half of this story collection a lot more.  Victoria, how were her stories received by the public at the time? And do you think she had any sort of agenda in terms of shaping public opinion with her writing, even with these children’s stories?

VICTORIA: Yeah, so she was able to earn a living from her writing and was very widely read in national publications even until her death in 1914, so I would say she was quite successful. And one of my theories is sometimes stories like this are more palatable coming from someone who has maybe a mixed background as opposed to being a Chinese woman with a thick accent or something like that. Of course back then, people would just be reading her, not seeing her in interviews or anything, but Mrs. Spring Fragrance, in particular, was very well-received by critics at the time, and I think it helped shape the reading public’s opinions of the Chinese immigrants because this is just such a different representation compared to what was out there by the U.S. government and politicians and people like that. So I think she did such a great job at just highlighting that Chinese immigrants have the same joys and pains as European Americans.

AMY: I don’t know if anybody else would have been able to successfully accomplish what she was trying to do. I think you almost had to have a writer who understood both sides. Don’t you think?

VICTORIA: I think that’s such a great point, and sometimes I’m asked if just being mixed is a hindrance when I’m working as a journalist, or if it’s impeded my life in some way, and I always say it’s the complete opposite. It just gives you so much more freedom to move between different communities, so I can feel very comfortable with white people, with Asian people, with other groups, and that’s why I love living in Los Angeles, because it’s just so incredibly diverse.

AMY: Do we know if there’s a biography written about her? There must be.

VICTORIA: There is, I don’t have the name handy, but we can maybe talk about it at the end, but yes, there is a biography on her and there’s also one on her sister that I found out. I would just love to see a book on the sisters, even if it was fictionalized because it sounds like there is a lot more to this story.

AMY: And I just think it would be fascinating because she does claim, you know, she was raised basically British, but she knows so much about Chinese culture and her mom must have been a huge influence in terms of all that. I would love to know more about how each parent influenced her, and of course, I want to know more about the mom’s life story because it sounds fascinating.

VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean the mom clearly needs her own book as well, based on what Kim explained about her background. I think, you know, here’s my theory just because I’ve been around so many half-Asian people my whole life: I think most cultures pass down from the mother to children, especially in this era when women tended to work in the house and things like that. So my theory is that when you have a mixed person, even if they look more white, if their mother is the Asian one they tend to be more connected to their Asian culture. In my case, my mother is the Jewish one, so even though I don’t feel super Jewish, I certainly have a lot of her culture and from her growing up in Ireland and living in England, that all got passed down to my sister and I. So even though Eaton didn’t look as Asian as someone who we would all recognize as an Asian person, she may have felt 100 percent Asian in her identity and culture for all we know.

AMY: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Speaking of her sister, let’s get back to that. Victoria, have you by any chance read anything by the sister? 

VICTORIA: No, I haven’t read any of her work, but I’m so eager to after learning a little more about her. Winifred chose the Japanese sounding pen name Onoto Watanna, which is a made-up Japanese name. And I think she did this to protect herself from the scorn of the Chinese at the time. So by being “Japanese,” maybe she would be more successful and palatable, and she was capitalizing on her unusual looks. I saw some pictures where she’s posing in kimono, which today might be called cultural appropriation. So she essentially became Japanese and then wrote these lighthearted and risque romance novels and short stories. Her novel A Japanese Nightingale sold thousands of copies and made her famous. It was even adapted to Broadway and to film. And she wrote other bestselling novels and was part of this New York literati scene, and then she also worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter, so both sisters found pretty real success.

AMY: I wonder how authentic she was able to write, though. We should go back and look at some of those books, A Japanese Nightingale and see, like, did she write in a lot of details. Could you tell that she was faking it as opposed to her sister, who added so many details that you were like, “this is a Chinese lady, for sure.”

VICTORIA: Well, I’m sure you both noticed as you’re reading, there’s some language that Eaton uses that’s a little outdated today, like the word oriental. Today we say Asian or Asian American. So I have a feeling if we go back and read Otana’s there’s going to be a lot of exotification of Japanese culture and maybe playing into some of the stereotypes. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I’m just guessing that she knew what the American people wanted to read, and at the time, that was sort of what would sell would be to trade on the “mysterious, submissive geisha” or something like that. So I’m dying to read it. Maybe that can be a future episode.

AMY: Yeah, absolutely! And we’ll have you back on for it.

KIM: I loved Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and I only wish (and it’s the same for all of the books that we’re talking about on the podcast) I just wish that I’d read it sooner. And I also think that although it’s over a hundred years old, it is so relatable to now. We’ve touched on that a little bit, but do you have anything to add about that, Victoria?

VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s disturbingly relatable, you know, considering it’s over a hundred years old, it shouldn’t be as relatable as it is. You know, non-white immigrants and refugees are still vilified right at this moment. The U.S. still has racist immigration laws like the Muslim ban and the Trump administration drastically cut the number of refugees that we accept. And I think Muslims and other groups that racist people mistake for Muslims have just had to deal with such an insane amount of hate crimes and scapegoating since 9/11. I feel like 9/11 was a major shift in racism in this country. And the border crisis and the child separation policy that we’re all horrified by, that experts call torture, is definitely one of the ugliest stains on the country and is so relatable in this book itself. And then the last thing that I would just add is that the Coronavirus pandemic, Asians are now vilified again like they were in Eaton’s day and at other points in history like during World War II. So now you see these racist and xenophobic incidents against Asian Americans and the Human Rights Council at the U.N. called it an alarming level, so I think it’s very clear that Mrs. Spring Fragrance is still resonating today for really upsetting reasons.

AMY: Yeah, the more things change… you know? Well, thank you, Victoria, for sharing your appreciation of Sui Sin Far with us. I don’t know if I would have come to her on my own because I’ve never heard of her, and that’s kind of why we’re doing this podcast — to find out and learn. It’s been so fun to have you on to discuss her! But are there any other Asian-American women writers, especially writers we might not be very familiar with, that you’d also recommend we check out? 

VICTORIA: Yes, there are so many! Monica Sone’s Nisei’s Daughter is a memoir of Japanese-American internment, and that book had the most profound impact on my life. I was actually going to become a criminologist prior to reading this book and I just couldn’t believe the way America treated Japanese Americans. I didn’t know anything about it from high school. I was just so stunned, and so that really changed the trajectory of my life. And then some other writers I read at the time are Lois-Ann Yamanaka, who’s from Hawaii. Diana Chang, Jessica Hagedorn, who’s a brilliant Filipina playwright and author. And then Bharati Mukherjee… those are all authors I suggest you check out. And then earlier we talked about reading more nonfiction about the era. So the definitive book that I always recommend to people is by Helen Zia and it’s called Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. That will just give you a comprehensive overview of the Asian American experience, which started with the Chinese immigrants.

AMY: Perfect. Thank you!

VICTORIA: I know we were talking earlier about a biography on Eaton, so there is a book called Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eton. I believe there’s a very thorough introduction with more biographical data, in case anyone’s interested.

AMY: And we will include that whole list that Victoria gave us in our show notes, so no worries to listeners trying to catch all that.

VICTORIA: Well, I used to teach History of Immigration at UCLA so this is my, like, jam. I never get to talk about this stuff anymore. So I could have gone on for hours.

KIM: This is like our dream, though, to just spending all this time talking about books.

VICTORIA: Oh, good!

AMY: So we highly encourage you to put Mrs. Spring Fragrance by Sui Sin Far on your 2021 reading list. And be sure to check out our mini episode next week because we’ll be talking about New Year’s resolutions and how we, as a writing team, go from an idea to a reality.

KIM: And we’ll also be revealing our next author and book title.

AMY: 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: Do you have ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know! 

[closing music starts]

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 makes a difference!

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

14. Kate Douglas Wiggin — The Birds’ Christmas Carol

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES [CO-HOST]: Happy Holidays, Kim!

KIM ASKEW [CO-HOST]: Happy Holidays, Amy! It’s been QUITE a year!

AMY: No doubt, no doubt. Boy. It’s going to be a different sort of holiday season for a lot of us this year. Sort of feels like when all the Whos down in Who-ville got robbed of their Christmas but they still held hands in a circle and celebrated. As cliche as that sounds, we’re going to have to make the best of it and remember the real meaning of the Yuletide spirit during this pandemic holiday.

KIM: I know a lot of people are going to be feeling sad about having to forego traditions, not getting to travel this year, perhaps, and also maybe not getting to see their loved ones.

AMY: I don’t know, it always feels to me like Christmas is an event that has some sad undertones to it anyway. Is it just me, or are there certain things about Christmas that just feel kind of maudlin and bittersweet? Personally, I tend to always get choked up listening to Christmas carols in my car, which is kind of embarrassing. But there’s so many sad ones!

KIM: That’s why we’re friends. I’m exactly the same way, and even George Winston’s piano music from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special feels a bit wistful to me, so I totally get it.

AMY: Yeah. The ones that really get me: “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” You’re just like, “Aww, man!”  And then Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” is a doozy.

KIM: Yep. Mm-hmm.

AMY: But the worst of all — the absolute worst — is the song about the Christmas shoes. Which, fortunately doesn’t get played too much on the radio, but do you know which one I’m talking about?

KIM: Remind me.

AMY: Okay. So the guy singing the song is telling this story about standing in line at a store on Christmas Eve buying some last-minute gifts. And there’s this little boy in front of him dressed in rags and counting out his pennies. He’s trying to buy a pair of women’s shoes and he notes that they’re for his mother for Christmas, but he doesn’t have enough money. And the little boy tells the cashier that he needs to hurry, because his daddy says there’s not much time. Mommy’s been sick for a while and I want her to look beautiful if she meets Jesus tonight!

KIM: Okay, you’ve got to stop! First of all, that’s ridiculous, and second of all, I’m going to start crying any second! I don’t know if you remembered, but Johnny Cash had a song like that, too, called “Ringing the Bells for Jim.” It’s about a little girl ringing the church bells at midnight for her dying brother.

AMY: Oh, god. But that image of the church bells makes me wonder, honestly, if Johnny Cash read the story that we’re going to be discussing on Lost Ladies of Lit this week. Everybody’s of course familiar with Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol...

KIM: Speaking of, Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, every one!” always chokes me up too.

AMY: You and Scrooge both. But the book we’re featuring this week has a similar title: The Birds’ Christmas Carol and it’s by Kate Douglas Wiggin, who I’d never heard of before.

KIM: She actually wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which I’ve read as a child.

AMY: Okay, so I have heard of that, Never read it, though, but I know  Shirley Temple starred in the movie version of it. 

KIM: I loved Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and I feel like because you like Anne of Green Gables — okay, you love Anne of Green Gables, and who doesn’t? — I think you’d really like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I’d recommend it.

AMY: Okay! Anyway, The Birds’ Christmas Carol was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1888 after being printed privately two years earlier.So Wiggin, she published the book (it was really one of her first literary endeavors) and she wrote it in order to raise money for the Silver Street Free Kindergarten which she ran in San Francisco.

KIM: Yeah, that’s really sweet. And Wiggin and her sister, Nora, establish over 60 kindergartens for children living in poverty in the San Francisco and Oakland area. This was a time when schooling wasn’t really seen as essential for kids living in poverty. So she was really ahead of her time in her thinking. She also established a training school for kindergarten teachers.

AMY: That reminds me a bit of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who we featured a few episodes ago!

KIM: Yeah, for sure. Definitely the educational interest. So you’d mentioned Charles Dickens earlier. Wiggin, who was born in Philadelphia and raised in Portland, Maine, actually met Dickens once, and it’s a really interesting anecdote as you’d expect: Her mother and a friend were going to hear Dickens speak in Portland, but Wiggin, who was only 11, was not included in that outing (the tickets were too expensive.) But the following day, she found herself on the same train as Dickens and she chatted with him for a good portion of the journey. 

AMY: That’s cute. She sounds like she was probably a pretty precocious child. I love imagining her talking his ear off on the train, and I wonder what he thought of the whole thing.

KIM: Well, she wrote a short memoir of that experience (so we can hear her side of the story) in 1912, and it’s called A Child’s Journey With Dickens.

AMY: I love that. So getting back to this other Christmas book that Wiggin wrote, The Birds’ Christmas Carol, despite its title, it doesn’t bear any relation to Charles Dickens’ story, but her book was also a hit when it was published. 

KIM: Which is kind of amazing, because it’s a bit of a downer, shall we say?

AMY: Yeah. Like I said, people are suckers for sad things at Christmas and this book is no exception. This one is about the well-to-do Bird family, who welcome a beautiful baby girl on Christmas Day at the beginning of the book. They name her Carol, after the Christmas carols her mother hears wafting through her window from the church.

KIM: But then we flash-forward a few years later to when Carol’s a little girl. We find out that she doesn’t actually have long to live. She’s a sickly child, she sits in her bedroom and she looks down into the alley at these poor children from a family that lives just a stone’s throw from them. She loves to watch them play.

AMY: Okay, and this family is called The Ruggles. There are 9 Ruggles children, and seriously, in my opinion, the Ruggles are pretty much THE reason why anybody should read this little novel. They are extremely entertaining. They’re the best part of the book.

KIM: Yeah, they’re complete scene-stealers. So, Wiggins’ depiction of the Ruggles — complete with their mom’s Irish dialect — is fantastic. The rest of the story has this high “sap” quotient, but you’ve got to love these Ruggles children and their mother is an absolute riot. Amy’s going to read a brief excerpt concerning them. This is at a point in the story when Mrs. Ruggles, the mother, is desperately trying to school them in manners and etiquette for the party at the Birds’ that’s happening later that night. So she asks them to leave the room and then enter in an orderly fashion. Amy?

AMY:

The bedroom was small, and there presently ensued such a clatter that you would have thought a herd of wild cattle had broken loose. The door opened, and they straggled in, all the younger ones giggling, with Sarah Maud at the head, looking as if she had been caught in the act of stealing sheep; while Larry, being last in line, seemed to think the door a sort of gate of heaven which would be shut in his face if he didn’t get there in time; accordingly he struggled ahead of his elders and disgraced himself by tumbling in head foremost.

   Mrs. Ruggles looked severe. “There, I knew yer’d do it in some sech fool way! Now go in there and try it over again, every last one o’ye, ‘n, if Larry can’t come in on two legs he can stay home, — d’yer hear?

   The matter began to assume a graver aspect; the little Ruggleses stopped giggling and backed into the bedroom, issuing presently with lock step, Indian file, a scared and hunted expression on every countenance.

   “No, no, no!” cried Mrs. Ruggles, in despair. “That’s worse yet; yer look for all the world like a gang o’ pris’ners! There ain’t no style ter that: spread out more, can’t yer, ‘n’ act kind o’ careless-like — nobody’s goin’ ter kill ye! That ain’t what a dinner-party is!”

KIM: I love it. That’s great, Amy.

AMY: So the Ruggles children totally reminded me of the outrageous shenanigans of the Herdman siblings from The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Kim, did you ever read that book when you were a kid?

KIM: No, I did not.

AMY: Okay, that’s a 1971 novel by Barbara Robinson, who, I guess you could say is another “lost lady of lit” we ought to mention here. It’s a really cute and comical book that you should check out if you haven’t read it yet. It’s fantastic. But the Herdman siblings in that book are very similar in that… they’re actually quite worse, to be honest, because they're known for cussing, shoplifting, drinking jug wine, smoking cigars. So they’re really unpolished.

KIM: Oh wow, yeah! I hadn’t heard of that one, but it sounds great. Getting back to Wiggin’s book and the Ruggles, though, little angelic Carol — who knows this will probably be her last Christmas, tells her parents that the only thing she really wants this year is to be able to have the Ruggles children over for a fine dinner. So she wants to plan the whole thing. So that’s just what they do. The whole family gets involved. But when the Ruggles show up, comedy ensues, and it ends, basically, with Wiggin attempting to leave her reader in tears. 

AMY: So yeah, Wiggin is really trying to turn on our waterworks and she may or she may not be successful with that, depending on how cynical of a reader you are. To be fair, little Carol is probably no more of a sympathy case than Dickens’ Tiny Tim was, but still, I was rolling my eyes during some of these maudlin moments. Yet, I will say, the Ruggles made this book totally worth the read, and it got me in the holiday mood.

KIM: Oh, for sure! I was into it from the first page. It’s a great holiday read. I definitely recommend it. It’s also a very quick read. I easily read it in one sitting one night. And since you mentioned the movie version of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the one with Shirley Temple, we should also point out that The Birds’ Christmas Carol was adapted for film as well. It was a silent movie called A Bit o’ Heaven.

AMY: If I was rolling my eyes reading the book, but I can only imagine how over the top they probably made the melodrama for movies.

KIM: Oh, yes.

AMY: But you know, a lot of Christmas stories for children are morality tales, and this one really fits the bill as well. I can totally picture this being read around the hearth by families in the late Victorian era, maybe making it a little Christmas Eve tradition It seems exactly like the sort of book people would have loved.

KIM: Absolutely. So if you’re celebrating Christmas this week, we wish you a memorable and merry one, and we’ll see you back here next week to round out our 2020 with a very special guest.

AMY: That’s right! Author and journalist Victoria Namkung will be joining us to chat about Sui Sin Far, a Chinese American writer from the late 19th century. We’ll be discussing her collection of stories entitled Mrs. Spring Fragrance.

KIM: Ooh, a whiff of spring in the dead of winter sounds pretty good to me, actually. So until next week, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com for more information as well as further reading material. And if you’re loving this podcast, make our holiday extra special by leaving us a review!

AMY: Thanks for listening, and “God bless us, everyone!”

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

13. Nathalia Crane — The Janitor’s Boy and Other Poems

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM: Hey, Amy, are you in the mood for some poetry?

AMY: That’s a loaded question. And a scary one. I mean, there’s a lot of bad poetry in the world.

KIM: Okay, but the poetry we’re going to be talking about today was written by an 11-year-old child prodigy.

AMY: Prepubescent poetry? C’mon, Kim. Now I’m absolutely terrified. Yikes.

KIM: Don’t be terrified! The writer’s name is Nathalia Crane, and her story is completely fascinating, if mostly forgotten. It’s going to spark an interesting conversation for today’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” episode, whether you actually like her poetry or not. 

AMY: Okay, if you say so… then all right, let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music]

AMY: Hi again, everyone, I’m Amy Helmes and I’m here with my writing partner, Kim Askew, for another episode dedicated to shedding light on female writers who have been buried in the shadows. Only today’s episode isn’t about a “lost lady” so much as it’s about a “lost little girl.”

KIM: You’re right. Nathalia Crane was only 9 years old, living in Brooklyn, New York in 1924 when she first began receiving attention for her poetry. She originally wrote her verses alone in her bedroom on a typewriter. But then her father convinced her to send a few to the Brooklyn Daily Times, and later, she sent some to The New York Sun. In both instances, they were accepted, but also in both cases the editors, at first anyway, had no idea that they weren’t dealing with an adult. 

AMY: Yeah, so The New York Sun editor, Edmund Leamy, recalled the moment he actually first met Crane in person. He said: “A call at the office made by the author in answer to a letter about the poem The Army Laundress disclosed to my amazement that the writer was none other than a little girl -- a shy, unassuming youngster who was as embarrassed during the interview as I was myself. For I must admit I was embarrassed -- or rather taken aback.”

KIM: Okay, so from that point, she pretty much became a sensation. She was dubbed “The Brooklyn Bard,” and journalists of the day flocked to write about this pint-sized literary phenom. 

AMY: Her first book of poetry was rushed into print. It was a collection called The Janitor’s Boy, and Pulitzer-Prize winning poet William Rose Benét wrote the foreword to the book. Although he admitted that he was usually skeptical of claims of child prodigies, he felt that Nathalia could be the real deal. He has a very measured take on her talents in this introduction. He’s not fully gushing. But at one point he does compare her to Emily Dickinson, of all people.

KIM: Yeah, and that’s pretty high praise. I mean, almost the highest to some people.  Then a year later, her publisher advertised that Nathalia had been elected into the British Society of Authors, Playwright and Composers (and that was presided over by Thomas Hardy! It was claimed that no poet since Walt Whitman himself had received this distinction… )

AMY: So that sounds pretty impressive on paper, but actually, if you do a little more looking into it, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. That society (that sounds so fancy) it had no really stringent criteria for submission and her dad basically just paid the standard dues so that she could join. (It’s sort of how it works to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If you’re willing to pay, you can get one.) That’s kind of how she got into it, and the publisher eventually backpedaled that brag a little bit, but still, she was receiving a lot of accolades for her work.

KIM: So Crane put out several other volumes of poetry in her early teens, so it wasn’t just a “one-hit-wonder” kind of thing, and that led to some controversy as well, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. First, let’s take a look at some of her early poems.

AMY: And since Nathalia was only 11-years-old when The Janitor’s Boy was published, we thought who better to help introduce us to a few of her poems than an actual 11-year-old girl. We recruited my daughter, Julia, to drop in to today’s episode to help us read a few of Nathalia’s early poems!

KIM: Hi Julia! 

JULIA: Hi!

AMY: So Julia, as you know, we’re talking about a child poet today, Nathalia Crane, and her book of poems that’s called The Janitor’s Boy. Just so you know, she lived in an apartment in Brooklyn, and she actually had a huge crush on the red-haired son of the janitor who lived in her building. His name was Roger Jones. So the first seven poems in the book are about Roger Jones. Okay, Jules, if you were ever to write poems about a boy that you had a crush on, how would you feel about having it published for all the world to read? Would you be down for that?

JULIA: Probably not.

AMY: No? Might be a little embarrassing? Well, Nathalia was cool with it, apparently. But, I want you to go ahead and read one of those initial poems in the book. It’s called “The Vacant Lot.” It’s basically about a property next door to where Nathalia and Roger used to play. And listeners, we’re going to have Julia read it so that you can keep in mind that, basically, a 10-year-old girl wrote this. So go ahead, Jules. 

JULIA: Okay. 

They’re going to build a flat house on the lot next door to me;

And Roger Jones, the janitor’s boy, is mad as he can be.

That lot was like a tropic isle, with weeds and rubbish fair,

The rusty cans and coffee pots that looked like Roger’s hair.

‘Twas oft we strolled among the weeds, we were in love, you see,

And Roger Jones was going to build a bungalow for me.

We used to rest upon a rock just where the weeds were tall;

We were engaged, I think, until the builders spoiled it all.

But now they’ve ruined Roger’s plans, they’ve dug up all the lot;

With all the brick and mortar round, you’d never know the spot.

They came with carts and horses; tore our wilderness apart;

No wonder Roger Jones is wild; it nearly broke my heart.

We could have done some wondrous things if time were not so slow;

The weeds, they might have grown to trees, fit for a bungalow.

With rusty cans and broken glass, we’d planned a home so nice;

But they dumped their brick and mortar in our little paradise.

They dumped their brick and mortar, ‘mid the smoky lakes of lime,

Yet we won’t forget, ‘twas Eden -- Eden, once upon a time.

Eden, where we dreamed supremely -- rusty can and coffee pot;

Eden, with weeds and rubbish, in a vacant city lot.

And now we’re simply waiting, oh, that janitor’s boy and me,

Until the janitor’s boy grows up and finds himself quite free

To just discover areas where builders never go,

Where we may live forever in a little bungalow.

KIM: Julia, that was beautiful.

JULIA: Thank you!

KIM: Yeah, I mean, really, poetry needs to be read. When I hear it read, I love it so much more, and I feel it so much more than reading it on the page. I have a whole new appreciation for that poem after having you read it.

AMY: And hearing it read in the voice of a child, who would have written it.

KIM: Exactly. It was perfect.

AMY: It kind of makes it a little magical.

KIM: Yeah, and you were very expressive, but not too expressive. It was really nice. A lot of these poems really give you that feel of being a kid growing up in Flatbush. Her other poems about Roger talk a lot about all the make-believe they used to play in the neighborhood. It sounded really idyllic in this poem and in the other ones that are in the book.

AMY: Yeah, and at the same time, I think this poem, in particular, represents the sort of ending of childhood innocence, which, to me, seems mature for her to have written that at the age of 10. But, by the same token, a lot of her poems are just kind of silly, and they do seem like they would have been written by a child. They rhyme, and they feel very “Ogden Nash” maybe. Definitely I get a Shel Silverstein vibe. They’re cute, but pretty basic, and we’ll have Julia read one called “Suffering,” for us. So Julia, take it away.

JULIA: 

I sat down on a bumble bee

In Mrs. Jackson’s yard:

I sat down on a bumble bee:

The bee stung good and hard.

I sat down on a bumble bee,

For just the briefest spell,

And I had only muslin on,

As any one could tell.

I sat down on a bumble bee,

But I arose again;

And now I know the tenseness of

Humiliating pain.

AMY: That was a fun one, what did you think of that one, Julia, about her sitting on a bumblebee?

JULIA: I do think it would hurt a lot if you sat on a bumblebee, so, it really explains the pain.

AMY: Now, can you picture a girl your age writing something like that?

JULIA: Well, I mean, I think it’s really cool that she can write this poetry only at the age of like 11 and 10. I just think it’s really cool, how she, like, wrote it.

AMY: And you did a good job, too, and it’s almost past your bedtime now, so we’re going to let you sign off and go to bed, okay? But it was fun having you on. 

JULIA: Okay.

KIM: Thanks, Julia. That was great.

JULIA: Thank you!

AMY: So back to the poetry now…

KIM: Okay, so there’s this other poem, “Jealousy,” which is all about her having to stand guard and be her mother’s “signal corps” whenever Nathalia goes out in the neighborhood with her dad. She knows she has to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn’t cheat on her mother. So that takes us into a whole new area from the bumblebee poem.

AMY: You just don’t expect that a 10-year-old girl is going to have concerns like that going through her mind. It was kind of funny, but it also stops you in your tracks a little. And one of the final couplets from that poem says: “And mother knows when I go out with Pa, things are O.K./For I belong to the Flatbush Guards -- we don’t let father stray.” Watch out ladies! Nathalia is on patrol!

KIM: It made me laugh, but it also kind of made me cringe that she even had to think about that! Speaking of Nathalia’s father, he was the person who probably most encouraged her writing. He was an erstwhile poet himself with a background working in newspapers, and he used to read aloud poems by Kipling to her, and he was always regaling her with stories from his own travels and adventures. He was a war veteran, both of WWI and the Spanish American War. You can see his influence in the fact that she wrote a few poems with military themes.

AMY: That seems like a pretty unexpected topic for a 10-year-old to me. There’s a whole poem about her playing “toy soldiers” with her dad on the living room floor called “The Battle on the Floor,” and I loved the last few lines from that poem, which read: “For Father feels that every girl/Should have some nerve and tone,/And know just how to manage in/A battle all her own.”

KIM: I love that. That’s good.

AMY: Yeah, like he was getting her ready, you know, ready for the world. But I’m actually going to read another poem which is about this fort that sits in the New York harbor, called Castle Williams, but I guess people know it as “Castle Bill” for short. When Nathalia was a child, it was actually serving as a prison, and so she writes about it in this sort of haunting, romantic way, as the prisoners hear the echoes from this battle in the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish American War. That seems like a history that I can’t imagine any 10-year-old girl would know about, but I have to imagine this this was inspired by tales her father told her. So I’ll go ahead and read that one:

Castle Bill

Down on Gov’nor’s Island,

Ivy etched and chill,

Hollow as a halo,

There is Castle “Bill.”

Once the pride of outfits--

Prisoners under guard,

Form for evening roll-call

In the castle yard.

Sentries with their side arms,

Counting, one by one,

While the twilight tarries

For the sunset gun.

Miles away the music

Soundeth at parade

Chanting of Cochita,

Filipino maid;

Chanting of Cochita

Of Corregidor;

Piping of the palm trees

’Long Lunetta shore.

Dusty gunners listen,

Lead and chain and wheel;

Long ago Manila

Held them all to heel;

Boys from all battalions,

Saberless and still,

Waiting on a sunset --

Down in Castle “Bill.”

AMY: So that’s an example of the fact that just a good majority of the poems in this collection don’t necessarily focus on kid themes. The acclaimed poet and critic Louis Untermeyer, who was a champion of Crane’s work, said that this book “was alternately juvenile and mature, frivolous and profound, absurd and mystical.” And I know, Kim, you kind of liked some of the poems in the second half of the book, I think, getting a little more way from some of the rhyming, cutesy stuff.

KIM: Yeah, and speaking of going back to things prior to her time, my poem that I’m going to read goes back even farther. I’m not going to say too much about it until after but I’m going to read “The First Story”:

Mid seaweed on a sultry strand, ten thousand years ago,

A sun-burned baby sprawling lay, a-playing with his toe.

The babe was dreaming of the day that he might swing a club,

When lo! He saw a fishy thing, a-squirming in the mud.

The creature was an octopus, and dangerous to pat,

But the prehistoric infant never stopped to think of that.

The baby’s fingernails were sharp, his appetite was prime,

He clutched that deep-sea monster, for ‘twas nearing supper-time,

Oh! Suddenly, from out the pulp a fluid black did flow,

‘Twas flavored like a barberry wine and gave a sort of glow;

It squirted in the baby’s eyes; it made him gasp and blink,

But to that octopus he held, and drank up all the ink.

The ink was in the baby -- he was bound to write a tale;

So he wrote the first of stories with his little fingernail.

KIM: So I loved the clever idea of this poem. There’s a prehistoric baby imbibing the ink of an octopus and writing the very first story with his fingernail. And the imagery is really great, but it also made me think of Nathalia, herself, a young child, herself, writing these stories, seemingly out of nowhere, with all this arcane knowledge.

AMY: That is a good metaphor, I guess. for Nathalia. I never really thought of that. And you’re right, that in some of these poems, in fact, her vocabulary and the knowledge she’s able to reference seems really astonishing for a girl her age. Especially in her subsequent books of poetry, we see even more of that cerebral sophistication that shines through. And yet, some of Nathalia’s own teachers remarked that she wasn't among their brightest students, or the most well-read. 

KIM: So we’ve dropped some little hints about the controversy. Let’s get completely into it right now. As more and more attention became focused on her, people started to really question whether she could actually have written the poems. In 1925, an American poet named Edwin Markham suggested it was all fake. He said:  "It seems impossible to me that a girl so immature could have written these poems. They are beyond the powers of a girl of twelve. The sophisticated viewpoint of sex, ...knowledge of history and archeology found in these pages place them beyond the reach of any juvenile mind."

AMY: And even her own publisher, Thomas Seltzer, wondered about it. He said: “I am as much mystified as anybody. Nathalia Crane is either a miracle or she is the most colossal hoax in history.” So what do we think of this? Is she a legitimate literary wunderkind or a complete hoax?

KIM: Hmm. I’m not sure. The poems really did seem to have -- as you suggested earlier -- some of these adult concepts. And hearing that her teachers didn’t consider her particularly bright or well-read, you’d think someone that precocious would really stand out at school in one way or another. (Maybe she’d just be annoying.) But that said, I didn’t think the poems were as good as some suggested. But given the evidence, we have, it’s hard to know. I guess she’d at least had some help from her father. He was described in one article as a “raconteur.” 

AMY: Hmmm. Yeah, it’s hard to know this many years later, but he definitely feels like a “stage father,” a little bit. But he also loved poetry, as we mentioned. Could he have maybe finessed or edited some of her works a little bit? Perhaps. I think it’s maybe possible. But I do think that probably most of the poems in The Janitor’s Boy  were written by her. For a normal 10-year-old child, her writing ability would be considered extremely advanced, yes. But it sounds like she was inundated with poetry by her dad growing up, and that probably could have rubbed off on her and given her a gift for writing verse. And given that I know what she does later in her life, I’m willing to say that yes, she had a passion for writing. We don’t know how much editing happened before these books were published, but you know, “the bumblebee” poem, for sure. I totally buy that an 11-year-old wrote that. And even probably the Roger Jones poems. They definitely sound like a child would have written them. But yeah, there are some poems where even I didn’t know the vocabulary words, and that’s saying something. 

KIM: Yep. It is.

AMY: So that said, at one point, Dorothy Parker, one of the founding members of the Algonquin Round Table, she commented on Crane’s talent (or lack thereof, depending on how you choose to read it.) So Parker was writing about an anthology of poems written for a contest about Charles Lindbergh, which she thought was a totally stupid idea in the first place. In The New Yorker magazine, she explains that she's holding this book of poems about Lindbergh in her left hand, and quote: “with my right hand, I am guiding the razor across my throat. Honestly, this book contains the worst stuff you ever saw in your life.” She goes on to say she hoped the aviator would be spared from having to read the “sickly, saccharine, inept, ill-wrought tributes.” This relates to Nathalia Crane because Nathalia won the top prize in this poetry contest and her poem was featured in this book. 

So Parker goes on to say: “The first prize, an award of $500, was given to Nathalia Crane, the Baby Peggy of poesy. [Which, I believe Baby Peggy was some sort of Hollywood Shirley Temple precursor.] A couple of years ago, a controversy raged,” Parker goes on to say, “as to whether or not the twelve-year-old Miss Crane wrote her own works. They were ascribed to various older poets, though whether for the purpose of taking the credit or shouldering the blame I never knew.”

KIM: Ouch! That’s pretty funny, but also, I feel sort of bad for Nathalia if she read any of this stuff. I do love Dorothy Parker, though. She’s very witty and it shows. 

Amy: The New York Times also weighed in on the Nathalia Crane debate. They were of the opinion that she did write her own poems, but like Parker, they weren’t necessarily tactful in their review of her second book of poems, Lava Lane. I’m going to read you just a portion of their review of Lava Lane: “For our own part, we have not the slightest doubt that little Miss Crane is the author of the several versifications attributed to her. We see no reason why there should not be youthful geniuses in poetry as well as musical and mathematical. And after all, poetry is not such a difficult thing to achieve as the quantity of bad verse turned out annually attests. And Nathalia’s verse is bad. Very bad. That is, just so long as it is considered to be poetry as serious-minded critics insist. As soon, however, as it is put in its proper place and treated as juvenilia, it is very good indeed.”

So, I don’t know. Maybe that’s where we fall in line with Nathalia Crane, Kim. You know, I think for a child her poetry is… blows you away. Is it Emily Dickinson? After reading Janitor’s Boy, what do you think?

KIM: No. No. I’d say it’s not Emily Dickinson, but i do think for juvenilia it is quite good. So I think a lot of people saw her as merely a gimmick. And Crane wasn’t the only “girl poet” of this time period. It was kind of a thing. There was a sort of interest around this time in uncovering prodigies in art or music or literature. In terms of poets, there was also Hilda Conkling and Sabine Sicaud, and then later Minou Drouet.

AMY: I haven’t read any of those girls, but yeah, it would be interesting to go back and look at some of their work and compare it to Crane’s and see how they sort of measured up against each other. In any case, public interest in Crane waned when she got older. When she was no longer the cute little girl sensation, people really didn’t pay her as much notice.

KIM: Amy, do we know much about what happened to her once she grew up?

AMY: I could only find bits and pieces of information, really. She studied at Barnard College and then she also attended the Universities of Madrid and Granada as well as the Sorbonne. And, interestingly enough, I read that she graduated from the Gemological Institute of America, which is in Los Angeles. Because she went on to live on the West Coast. She became an assistant professor of literature at San Diego State University, and she continued writing poetry in adulthood, but I couldn’t find too much about those titles, beyond their names, basically. She wrote two novels when she was still quite young, teenager, basically. They’re out of print though The Sunken Garden is one she wrote when she was 13 and I did find an excerpt from it in a 1926 issue of Vanity Fair. It’s about a young girl that’s ship-wrecked on a tropical island. It’s sort of a young girl Robinson Crusoe. It was okay. It was definitely sort of lyrical. It reminded me of her poetry even though it was prose. But the most interesting about this all is the fact that she was famous enough in 1926 for Vanity Fair to decide to print a portion of the book. I feel like that’s a big deal. It just shows that the public was sort of clamoring for her.

In terms of her personal life, she did not grow up to marry the Janitor’s Boy, but she did marry. Her first husband died, and then in 1973, she fell in love with Peter O’Reilly, who was a Roman Catholic priest. He was teaching philosophy professor at CSU San Diego. He gave up the priesthood so that they could get married, and this made news in The New York Times that year in a small announcement, and that’s where I found out some of these details about her life as an adult.

KIM: Oh, that’s really interesting, and I like that she sort of stayed true to her love of literature and taught. It seems to lend her more credence, like you said earlier. That’s really interesting. We also have some other interesting trivia for you. It’s said she’s related to Stephen Crane (who wrote The Red Badge of Courage) and — this one’s really good — Natalie Merchant of the 10,000 Maniacs turned “I’m in Love with the Janitor’s Boy” into a song (And we’ll link to a video of her performing that in our show notes.)

AMY: Yeah, I think it’s kind of cool that Natalie Merchant not only knew about her, but was inspired by her. And speaking of music, it’s actually time to cue our theme song and say good-bye everyone. 

[closing music]

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

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

12. Somewhere In Time On Anne’s Mackinac Island

KIM ASKEW [CO-HOST]: So, Amy, I know the time machine hasn’t been invented yet, but if it were, would you give one a whirl?

AMY HELMES [CO-HOST]: Ooh, I’ve thought about this quite a bit in my life, and the answer, I think, is yes. How cool would it be to get to go back in time to all of these places that we read about and actually experience it? Ideally, I would like to have the option to safely return to present day, if possible, but yeah, I’d be down for some Outlander-type scenario.

KIM: Yeah, a kilt or corset or something like that. All these costumes are just whirling through my head. Or maybe we could even meet up with a few of the authors we feature on “Lost Ladies of Lit.” So hey, everybody, welcome back to another one of our mini podcasts. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. Okay, so Kim, one of the next best things to having an actual time machine is getting to travel somewhere that feels like it’s another place and time. And one of those places, for me, is Mackinac Island in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

KIM: Oh yeah. I know you love that place and I can’t wait to hear all about it from you in today’s episode. I’ve definitely heard you gush about that place, and I can’t wait to hear more in today’s episode. So, Mackinac Island, we should point out, is one of the primary settings of last week’s featured novel, Anne, it’s this amazing novel by Constance Fenimore Woolson.

AMY: Yeah, and tucked away on a wooded hillside on Mackinac Island is a shrine, of sorts, dedicated to Woolson. It’s a bronze plaque called “Anne’s Tablet”  that commemorates the novel and the beloved heroine, Anne. There’s a fort on Mackinac Island (one that’s also featured in the novel) and you have to take a hike from this fort up to a scenic vista to find it. It’s kind of hidden out of the way a little bit. But it’s in the exact sort of location where I envision Anne and her childhood sweetheart, Rast, used to have their talks in the novel, if you remember that, Kim.

KIM: Oh, that is so sweet! I can picture it. And I’ve actually seen a photo of the plaque online. It features a sculpture of Anne hanging the Christmas wreath, from the opening passage of the book.

AMY: Woolson really did such a great job of describing the natural beauty of the island and so it just feels like the perfect tribute. I think it was her nephew that raised the funds to have this plaque put up, but I’m glad somebody wanted to remember her, because she’s really worth remembering, I think.

KIM: Yeah, if you haven’t listened to that episode on her, I would go back and listen to it. She, in addition to being an amazing writer that time has forgotten a bit, she really had a really interesting life which we get into during the podcast. So Amy, I have not yet visited Mackinac Island, though I really want to, and I know you love it, so could you tell us a little bit more about it?

AMY: Well, I’ve only been once. It’s perched right up at the top of the Great Lakes on the straits of Mackinac, which is where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron connect. And today, it’s obviously a tourist destination, but when you visit it, you feel like you’re entering this magical, enchanted place that’s separated from everything, you know, this sort of isolated fantasy world kind of thing. So there are no cars on the island, and that’s part of the reason that it’s so enchanting, I think. Motorized transportation of any kind is not allowed, although I do think there might be golf carts that are only allowed on the golf course. And, of course, like motorized wheelchairs, that’s fine. But you get there by ferry and then you’re either going to be walking, bicycling or riding in horse-drawn carriage to explore the island. So cool.

KIM: I would definitely be exploring the island via horse-drawn carriage, for sure! So, once I’m there and I’m in my horse-drawn carriage, where am I going? What is there to do on the island?

AMY: So when you first arrive and you’re at the docks, very nearby is the Main Street which is historic architecture, but really, you know, a lot of fudge and salt water taffy kind of shops. It’s the place where the tourists are. But once you venture a few blocks out from there and it becomes so pastoral. There are all these Victorian homes with clapboard siding dotting the whole island. And in the spring and summer, the whole place is in full bloom with flowers. There’s Lily of the Valley, bluebells, creeping myrtle. It’s like walking around in a painting, or a picture postcard. It’s so adorable. And then I’m also kind of intrigued about what the place might be like in the winter time, because after the tourists leave, the people that live on the island are pretty much shut off from the rest of the world. They’re literally snowed in and they really can’t get supplies except maybe by plane. So they kind of have to hunker down until spring and the next tourist season. It’s very much as Woolson describes it, the winter there.

KIM: It could be really magical or it could be the shining.

AMY: Exactly, exactly!

KIM: Yeah, that’s where my mind goes.

KIM: That sounds really beautiful, though. We learned from last week’s guest, Anne Boyd Rioux, that Constance Fenimore Woolson had a strong interest in botany. So no wonder she loved Mackinac and was able to describe it so beautifully! She was really into all the flora.

AMY: It’s definitely a nature-lover’s paradise. But actually, the biggest structure on the island, which you can see in all its glory when you’re approaching by ferry, is the Grand Hotel. It first opened in 1887, which is a few decades past the time period that we read about in Woolson’s novel,. but again, it’s a place that is just a complete throwback to another era. So it’s a national historic landmark and it feels incredibly old-school, but in the best way possible. You eat dinner in this magnificent dining room with formally-dressed waiters with white towels over their arm, and the Grand Hotel orchestra is playing in the background. They totally pull out all of the stops for the dinner service. It’s an experience you can’t miss if you happen to visit.

KIM: It kind of sounds almost like being on board the Titanic, only on land.

AMY: Yes, exactly. It does feel that way.

KIM: That sounds so cool. Okay, so a few weeks ago I was saying that we needed to go to Concord MA together, but now I’m thinking we also have to go here, too. So let’s put this on the list also.

AMY: Yeah, okay, that’s going on the bucket list. I know you would definitely find the whole thing exhilarating, I promise you. And the “grandness” of the grand hotel that I was trying to explain is actually captured really well in the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time starring Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve who play these star-crossed lovers from two different centuries. They actually filmed the movie at the hotel.

KIM: Yeah, whenever I hear anything about Mackinac, for better or worse, I immediately think of Somewhere In Time. 

AMY: I know. It’s been a pretty long time since I’d seen the movie, but I just always remembered it being SO SWOONWORTHY, you know? From the Mackinac scenery, which is breathtaking, to Christopher Reeve’s breathtaking blue eyes and then there’s all that sweeping Rachmaninoff music. I love it.

KIM: I love that theme song: “Rhapsody on a Theme from Paganini…” I can hear that in my head right now. I remember watching it for the first time on cable TV when I was in junior high. I was home sick with the flu, and somehow, I think it was because I was sick while I was watching it, it really stuck with me and I’ve never forgotten that.

AMY: I have this memory of just gasping all over the place the first time I saw it. I was just like, “Oh my god! It’s so dreamy!” That said, you know, we both watched this when we were young and impressionable and probably hormonal, so was it really all that good? Does it still hold up today, or is it just super cheesy and we are completely embarrassing ourselves right now? Maybe we were just suckers for those Christopher Reeve eyes. I don’t know. 

KIM: Right, so basically, Amy and I decided to put ourselves to the test, and while we were preparing for the podcast we actually embarked on the Somewhere In Time Challenge. 

AMY: Our first ever movie challenge! So Kim and I both agreed that we’d watch the movie again and decide what we really think of it some decades after first falling in love with it. Is it swoon-worthy or cringe-worthy? That’s the question we’re facing today.

KIM: Well, can it be both?

AMY: Maybe. Maybe.

KIM: To me, I mean Christopher Reeve is very swoon-worthy. It was one of his first movies. He had done Superman, the first Superman, and then this movie. But there are a lot of cheese-worthy moments in the movie, I feel like, still. It had the feel, to me, of very “TV movie of the week” even though it was a feature film. I have more to say, but maybe you should jump in.

AMY: All right, I’ll take that and then I will respond with my verdict, which is GLORIOUS.

KIM: I knew you were going to say that!

AMY: There were a few moments where I laughed. I mean, the moment where he first saw her portrait in the Hall of History…

KIM: Yes!

AMY: Okay, that one was a bit over the top. There were a few more moments like that.

KIM: That was not an Oscar-winning scene…

AMY: However, we’ve got to just talk about the fact that Jane Seymour is absolutely exquisite.

KIM: Okay, she is, but I had not remembered, even though I saw it, I thought that I remembered almost everything about the movie, because like I said, it made an imprint on me. But really, almost half the movie is Christopher Reeve’s character trying to get back to her and he has all these crazy, pretty silly ways of trying to get back to her before he actually sees her. So on the one hand, it is a big build-up and she does live up to that with her beauty, but it’s a really long time before they actually have their meet-cute.

AMY: However, Christopher Reeve, can we just say, is probably the most beautiful man of the 1980s? Yes. I will answer that for you.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: He plays the role very earnestly, at times, which I loved, but he also did bring a subtle sense of humor. I think he didn’t take himself too seriously.

KIM: I think you’re right. It had a little bit of a feel of a comedy (and not in a bad way) in his acting. In his style and the way he was responding to things.

AMY: Exactly.

KIM: He had so much charisma that even though, I will say, it was a bit cheesy, he could definitely pull it off.

AMY: And then, of course, we have Christopher Plummer, who, you can never say a bad word about that man. He plays the villain. 

KIM: Yeah, I thought it was funny seeing him (Captain Von Trapp from The Sound of Music) as this mysterious, vaguely evil character.

AMY: I know you said “TV movie…” I kept getting a Hallmark movie vibe from it…

KIM: Oh, yeah, definitely.

AMY: ...and I think, people love Hallmark movies! It brought the romance. It brought it all. It checked all the boxes for me.

KIM: Oh, I was into it. I was definitely into it. But it was not Criterion Collection, by any means. 

AMY: But the Rachmaninoff elevates it. For sure.

KIM: Yes, it does. It definitely was worth watching.

AMY: It’s a movie that I think I can always go back… if I catch it on TV, I will stop and I will watch it. It’s one of those movies.

KIM: Costumes: It’s got them. Really gorgeous music: It’s got [it]. Two gorgeous leading actors: It’s got them. Christopher Plummer: It’s got him. And a beautiful, beautiful set on this island.

AMY: Yes, the backdrop.

KIM: And going back to the Grand Hotel in its glory days.

AMY: All right, so we’ll give it a qualified “swoon-worthy,” I think.

KIM: Yeah. I’ll give it a thumbs-up.

AMY: Swoon-worthy with a dotting of cringes throughout. Campy cringes.

KIM: Yes. And cheesy is not necessarily a bad thing. 

AMY: No. Not at all. Okay, so we settled it. That was fun though. I enjoyed watching it again and I was kind of nervous watching it because I didn’t want my memory of loving it so much to be changed, and it didn’t. I still love it.

KIM: Okay, good. I hope my comments didn’t negatively impact your feelings for the movie.

AMY: Never. 

KIM: You are a hundred percent loyal.

AMY: Like Richard’s love for Elise, my love for this movie will never die.

KIM: Timeless?

AMY: Timeless.

KIM: Yes. So okay, wait. Was Somewhere In Time also based off of a book? 

AMY: Yes. There was a book called Bid Time Return, by Richard Matheson, and I actually did check it out of the library once, but I couldn’t finish it because it just didn’t come anywhere near the magic of the movie. The story is not set in Mackinac. It’s set at the Hotel Coronado. So I actually got the book out after I had visited Hotel Coronado in San Diego because I was curious about the hotel. But, meh, it didn’t do anything for me. However, since I know, Kim, that you have been to Virginia City, Nevada, and I have also, I wonder if you’ve ever been to the Opera House there. Because there’s a photo of a woman hanging at the old Opera House. It’s a portrait of a woman named Maude Adams, who was a Broadway stage actress. She was actually the very first person to play “Peter Pan” in America. The photo of Maud Adams actually inspired Matheson to write his book. So she’s actually the inspiration for Jane Seymour’s character in the movie.

KIM: Oooh. Yeah, I have been to the opera house in Virginia City. I don’t remember seeing that photo. I wish I had known. I would have looked for it when I was there. But I do know that Mark Twain, Lily Langtry, and Errol Flynn have all been on stage there. 

AMY: Yeah, it was like a place where the big names in the country would hit up when they were touring through. So that brings us back to Adams, who was a huge actress in her day. She was only 8 years old when she appeared in a play at that Virginia City Opera House, and then she went on to make her Broadway debut at age 16

KIM: And that also makes her a great segue for our next “lost lady of lit.” In next week’s episode, we’ll be chatting about Nathalia Crane, a girl poet phenom whose work was first published at the tender age of 11!

AMY:  Yeah, this is an interesting one, and I mean, my daughter’s going to be eleven in two more months so I kind of know that age of little girl and I’m very interested to hear more about her.

[theme music plays]

KIM: So for more information on this episode as well as further reading material, check out our website: Lostladiesoflit.com. And if you loved this episode, please leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find us.

KIM: 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.

11. Constance Fenimore Woolson — Anne with Anne Boyd Rioux

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES [CO-HOST]: What if I were to tell you that there’s a 19th-century American novel that combines the sweetness of Little Women, the adventure of Great Expectations, the heroine of Jane Eyre, the social drama of Age of Innocence and the mystery of a Sherlock Holmes tale?

KIM ASKEW [CO-HOST]: I’d say, “Whoa, that sounds incredible.” I’d also say it also sounds like the plot of a little-known novel called Anne by Constance Fenimore Woolson.

AMY: Get ready, everybody, for some serious fan-girl gushing on this episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, because this book totally blew our minds. 

KIM: Yeah, Amy, had you even heard of Woolson before we started researching authors for the podcast?

AMY: Not at all, no, but I did think that her name sounded pretty familiar: “Fenimore,” as in James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote The Last of the Mohicans. But I know you had heard of this author, right?

KIM: I had heard of her, but only as a little footnote to the bio of her friend, Henry James. I wrote my master’s thesis on his novel Wings of a Dove.

AMY: So, while we didn’t know much, if anything, about Woolson before we started the podcast, it’s for that reason, especially, that we’re excited to talk about it here today, because we have our very first Lost Ladies of Lit guest! 

KIM: Our guest is Dr. Anne Boyd Rioux, and she knows a LOT about Constance Fenimore Woolson. In fact, it was a review of a new edition of Woolson’s Collected Stories — that was edited by Anne, our guest — in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, that inspired me to add Woolson to our list of Lost Ladies. Anne is an expert on American women writers. She uncovers the stories of their lives and fosters renewed appreciation for their forgotten or undervalued works.

AMY: She is also the recipient of three National Endowment for the Humanities awards and has a Ph.D. in American Studies. She is a professor of English at the University of New Orleans and is on the board of directors of the Biographers International Organization. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, Lit Hub, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. She’s also been interviewed on the BBC and NPR. 

KIM: And on top of all that, her most recent book, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, is an indie bestseller and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, The Daily Mail, and A Mighty Girl. Also it’s out in paperback right now. 

AMY: So one of the reasons we wanted Anne to come chat with us today is because she actually wrote the biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Her 2016 book Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist received considerable attention. It was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The Chicago Tribune. Also, she edited a collection of Woolson’s short stories, called Miss Grief and Other Stories, and that’s also helping bring Woolson the renewed attention that she deserves.  

KIM: Okay, with all that said, it’s pretty clear Anne’s going to be able to bring a lot to our discussion of the OTHER Anne, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music] 

INTERVIEW:

AMY: Welcome, Anne, thanks so much for joining us today! 

ANNE BOYD RIOUX [GUEST]: Well, I’m excited to be here! Thank you for inviting me.

AMY: Now, it was just a few months ago that I was introduced to this book, and I’ve got to say, within… I hadn’t even reached the end of the first chapter before I was just beside myself with joy. I cannot believe I didn’t know about this author, this is so wonderful already… and the book just kept getting better and better. How did you first become interested in Woolson and when did you first read Anne?

ANNE: I was in graduate school at Purdue, and I was in the library stacks and I just saw this book with my name on it, you know, in bright gold letters: Anne. It was calling to me, and so I stopped and looked. It was an older edition, original-ish edition. They had her other works there, and nearby was a more recent collection of stories called Women Artists, Women Exiles. And I thought, “Well, that sounds right up my alley!” So I actually started with that collection of stories that was published in the Rutgers [University Press] “American Women Writers” series that was recovering a lot of lost women writers. That was published in the Eighties, just to give you a sense of how long ago she was “recovered” by scholars. It’s taken a really long time to get her into the more public consciousness. I’m just thrilled that you all found her, too. Let’s see, when did I first read Anne? I read it when I was still in graduate school, so I probably read it around the time that I went to Mackinac. The Constance Fenimore Woolson Society was having its second (I think it was their second) conference, and they were having it at Mackinac Island. I was just so keen to go and to meet all of these… I met, to me they were famous, right — Sharon Dean, Cheryl Torsney — all these people who had written about Woolson. Caroline Gebhardt was there. Nina Baym was also there. She’s a big-time scholar in American literature. She was the keynote speaker. So it was just a thrill to meet all of them. Lyndall Gordon was there. She wrote a really important book about Henry James. Anyway, going to Mackinac Island was such a treat, and getting to meet all those people when I was still a graduate student.

AMY: By the way, listeners, we’re going to be getting into Mackinac Island a lot more in our next episode because I want to dive into all of that: the little kind of shrine that exists there for Constance these days. But let’s go back and talk a little bit about Constance’s life. I know she had an interesting, kind of tragic childhood. She had three of her older sisters die of scarlet fever when she was very young,and then, when she was five years old, she had a younger sister that died in infancy. Can you tell us a little more about her youth and maybe how it impacted her adult life and her writings? 

ANNE: We don’t know tons, right? What we do know, though, is pretty tragic. So these three sisters died of scarlet fever. They started dropping off days or weeks, right after she was born. Because she was a newborn and was nursing, apparently she was protected by her mother’s antibodies. There were five girls that came before Connie, and the three youngest of those five girls died, and that was just … her mother was never the same after that. In that respect, it had a huge impact on her life, because her mother suffered periods of invalidism and she always had to look out for her. So she kind of grew up looking out for her mother. The two older girls, Georgiana and Emma, died quite young in their late teens/early 20s. And so by the time Connie was 13, even though she was the sixth child born, she was the oldest of her surviving siblings. By that point, she had a younger sister and a younger brother. So it was quite a lot of responsibility thrust on her, and it was a lot of death to witness. She learned very early that life was fragile, and particularly the deaths of those two oldest sisters had a great impact on her because she was alive and she knew exactly how it happened. In both cases, they were viewed as sacrificing their own lives for love and family: One of them had died after marrying a man who had had consumption. He died and then she died, so it was a really tragic, Shakespearean kind of story, right? And her oldest sister also died of tuberculosis (it appears) after giving birth, even though she was told she shouldn’t have another child. So you know, the idea of marriage was treacherous. The idea of having a family was treacherous. Boy, you were just setting yourself up for so much potential loss and sacrifice and potential death. Those deaths in her family had a huge impact on her, and I think we see that reflected in her work.

AMY: Did she go by “Connie?” I hadn’t ever heard that nickname associated with her.

ANNE: Hmm, yeah, sorry, “My good friend, Connie…” Yes.

KIM: I love it.

ANNE: That was the name that her family gave her. So especially when talking about her when she was little, I guess I just kind of slip into that. That was her family name. 

KIM: That’s interesting, everything you said about her sort of living with this childhood tragedy in her life, because it kind of plays into the little bit that I did know about Woolson before we started this podcast. And I think a lot of people may have heard this story and not also know much more about Woolson. But what I did know was that supposedly, her life ended when she threw herself from the third story of a palazzo in Venice because Henry James didn’t return her affection. And that sounds kind of tabloidish, but I think the real story that I learned about is just as interesting, if not more so. So I’d love to hear what you have to say about it. How did they meet? What is the real story?

ANNE: Well, I’m glad you brought that up because that is what most people seem to know about her. I decided when I wrote my biography of her to just start with that, not ignore it. And also to make this point that the real story actually is much more interesting and satisfying, I think. The problem with that story — there are a few problems with it — but it’s based on anecdotes that are not verifiable. There are no real facts there, except that we know she died and she was living in Venice in a room that was three stories up. There’s also a story about him drowning her dresses in the lagoon months later. These dresses kept ballooning up because of the air inside of them, so they just wouldn’t drown. So it’s this very interesting metaphor for how she kind of haunted him after she died. Unfortunately, she’s become a kind of ghost figure in his life and didn’t have a real presence of her own. And so, it was really important for me to tell her story and get some of her writings republished. But the real story about her friendship with James is that there’s no smoking gun here. There’s no evidence that she was in love with him romantically and there is negative evidence that she killed herself because of him. There’s plenty of other evidence to suggest that it was more complicated than that. We don’t know for sure and may never know exactly what was going through her mind before she fell and if it was intentional. My own opinion is that it probably was, but it was maybe less premeditated than some people maybe assumed. But i don’t think those final minutes of her life should define the rest of her life as tragic and as somehow thwarted and misspent. I think she had an incredible life for her time, and she was such an amazing person. The difficulty though, in uncovering what the “real” story is about her and Henry James is that they had a pact to destroy their letters to each other. Only four of her letters to him have survived. They were letters that she wrote to him when he was at home in America visiting his family. And so the letters came to him in America and he didn’t bring them back to Europe with him. They stayed behind. So it was later, then, that they developed this agreement to destroy their letters. The four letters ended up in his brother’s papers, William James’s papers, at Harvard. Henry James’s biographer, Leon Edel, found them. At that point, I think that was in the Fifties, Claire, her niece, was still alive.  And Leon Edel wrote to her and told her there were four letters that he found. Her response was, “That’s a shame.” Because these were four letters that were written early on in their friendship. There were no letters from him to her; it was one-sided. So the impression these four letters have left is that she was the one chasing after him. But it’s such a tiny picture of the story. They were friends for 12 years. They met in 1880 in Florence. She had a letter of introduction that she had brought with her from America from his cousin, whom she’d met in Cooperstown. She met “the great man.” He wasn’t even “the great man” yet even. He was kind of the darling of the Atlantic Monthly, and Woolson recognized that he was much favored, particularly by William Dean Howells, and had the kind of recognition already that she would like to have, too, but she was just as well-known at the time. She was writing in Harper’s and Scribner’s and The Atlantic Monthly. She hadn’t published any novels yet, but when she met him, she kind of hoped and expected that they would meet as writers. Unfortunately, he didn’t know who she was. He claimed he didn’t know her and hadn’t read her work. So instead they met as he’s a gallant man and she’s a damsel who needed his chivalry kind of thing, you know. Very 19th century. It was unfortunate for her that they met that way, because she wanted to get beyond that. It took her a few years to build up that kind of relationship with him. But it was clear, even though they destroyed these letters that they had a kind of… I call it a quasi-sibling relationship because I think they did love each other, but not in a mad, romantic, “let’s have sex” kind of way. Whether or not she had those kind of feelings for him, I didn’t find a single scrap of evidence to support that reading, or I would have put that in the book because that would have been interesting. But instead I think she was in love with a couple of other people that I write about in the book. And Henry James was gay, right? He wasn’t interested in women. So their relationship did become very close, and they spent a lot of time together — more so than any other women in his life at that time. But we do know that when they met in Florence in 1880, he was writing The Portrait of a Lady. It was going to be a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and he wrote to William Dean Howells and said, “Umm, I’m going to be a little bit late getting the next installment to you because of all of the distractions here in Florence.” It turned out that that was exactly when he met Woolson. We know that they started spending pretty much every day together. He was taking her to show her around the museums and the galleries and the churches. She was soaking up all of his knowledge about art, which she didn’t know a lot about yet. I think, and I wasn’t the first to point this out (Lyndall Gordon did in her book), that Woolson had a lot of similarities to Isabel Archer, the character he was writing about. The aspect of Woolson discovering Europe for the first time the way Isabel Archer does...learning about art and being sort of overwhelmed by it all...and over-awed, but also being independent. They had this great way of talking about that then; they called it a woman was “self-contained” if she wasn’t needing to be attached to a man, if she seemed to have her own sort of individuality. And that was a rare thing! That’s how James writes about Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady. She was so remarkable because she didn’t seem to need to be attached to a man, and that is what Woolson had too. So I think he was gathering material for his book. At the same time, she was collecting material, too! She wrote this great story, A Florentine Experiment, that is drawn from that period of meeting Henry James.

AMY: So as fascinating as all this is when it comes to Woolson’s relationship with James (their friendship), I think we need to jettison him now from the conversation and let her stand in her own right for the rest of the podcast. So let’s talk about Anne, her novel. As Kim said, we kind of first chose it because of the fact that it was set on Mackinac Island, which I love, but once I dove into the book I realized there are so many different settings. In the same way, the plot is very winding and very inventive, to say the least. It’s a mash-up of a lot of crazy different things. I was beside myself with all the twists and turns in this book, especially the second half of this book.

ANNE: Yeah. I think she’s trying to do everything. It was her first novel. She spent many years writing it. So we don’t know what previous incarnations of it looked like, but I imagine she was developing her ideas over such a long period of time that when it came time to make decisions about the plot it was hard to give up some things, right? Hard for her to “kill her darlings.” And so in some ways, it almost feels like there’s too much going on, but really, I mean, Middlemarch is also a really sprawling book, right, where you have two protagonists and you have these parallel plots and all of this back-and-forth and twists and turns and, you know, in some ways it’s just a good old Victorian novel, Anne is. It was written for serialization in Harper’s, so a lot of the twists and turns would maybe be for the magazine readers, to keep them engaged month-by-month. It ran for a year-and-a-half in Harper’s, which was a crazy amount of time. Really, really long. They held it for two years before they published it. She was going nuts wanting this to be published. They wanted it to appear in their first trans-Atlantic issue, so it would be published simultaneously in the U.S. and in London. So she gained all this tremendous exposure in London and after that, all of her books were published there, too, and there were great reviews. Yeah, I thought of something about Henry James, but I won’t say it. But I do want to say one thing, actually, about Henry James. I think it’s really important to recognize this: His best-selling book of his entire lengthy career was Portrait of a Lady, that sold 6,000 copies, and that came out just a few months before Anne. Anne sold 57,000 — almost ten times as much as his book did. Yet Portrait of a Lady has never been out of print and probably never will be. It’s considered a masterpiece of literature. And I’m not saying that Anne is. I’m just saying, why was it completely forgotten? It was her most popular book. It was the book she was known for throughout her life. But after she died (and we can talk about that later, because we still want to talk about Anne) but yeah, to be so completely forgotten when it was such a popular book… I think there are some reasons for it, but it’s very unfortunate because it is such a good read! I taught that book many years ago in a course on the female bildungsroman, the coming-of-age novel. Boy, my students, they just loved it, and they were all upset that they all grew up reading Jane Eyre or George Eliot and Emily Bronte but hadn’t read this. Because it is kind of in that vein. Those are the sorts of writers who were influencing her.

AMY: That’s exactly what was running through my head. I kept thinking, “This is right on par with a Bronte novel.” And George Eliot came to mind, too. I felt a little indignant as I was reading it that I had been deprived. Like, I’m halfway through my life! I read the Bronte sisters when I was in eighth grade and I’ve had them in my life this whole time. Yet this is a novel that I’m just now finding out about. Where did she go and why? It’s crazy!

ANNE: Right, and I think when we’re young we do need books like this, because Anne is the sort of heroine that has that sort of presence, I think. She is a young woman who would stand out with Jo March and Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennett. I think she would hold her own with those kinds of heroines that we all admire and adore. We can never have enough of them.

AMY: Kim, is this a good time to sort of pause and give a little overview of the plot for our listeners?

KIM: I think that’s a great idea. Just make sure you don’t give any spoilers, but a quick overview would probably help people.

AMY: This is a book that you do not want to read any summaries of before you dive in because the fun of the book lies in the shocking surprises that pop up. So you don’t want to know any of that ahead of time, but that said, here’s a little spoiler-free introduction: On Michigan’s remote, yet-idyllic Mackinac Island lives a kind, smart, and atypically beautiful young woman named Anne, who is orphaned and has to leave everything and everyone she knows and loves (including her beloved Mackinac Island) in order to make a living so she can support her half-siblings. And then, of course, adventures, including the romantic kind, ensue… 

KIM: Anne, would you like to read one of your favorite passages from that early part of the novel that’s set on Mackinac Island? 

ANNE: Sure! So, it really is a book to kind of just let yourself sink into. It’d be great, you know, to spend some rainy weekends on the couch reading this. It’s that kind of immersive book. But I think the opening is really kind of interesting. At the opening, she’s hanging up a wreath in the church on Mackinac Island, this remote place, and her father criticizes the wreath because it looks too perfect. It was looking too smooth and neat and nice. Too geometrical. It should be more natural-looking. And Anne says that she didn’t notice that. We’re introduced to Anne and she’s described: Anne, standing straight again, surveyed the garland in silence. Then she changed its position once or twice, studying the effect. Her figure, poised on the round of the ladder, high in the air, was, although unsupported, firm. With her arms raised above her head in a position which few women could have endured for more than a moment, she appeared as unconcerned, and strong, and sure of her footing, as though she had been standing on the floor. There was vigor about her and elasticity, combined unexpectedly with the soft curves and dimples of a child. Viewed from the floor, this was a young Diana, or a Greek maiden, as we imagine Greek maidens to have been. The rounded arms, visible through the close sleeves of the dark woolen dress, the finely moulded wrists below the heavy wreath, the lithe, natural waist, all belonged to a young goddess. But when Anne Douglas came down from her height, and turned toward you, the idea vanished. Here was no goddess, no Greek; only an American girl, with a skin like a peach. Anne Douglas’s eyes were violet-blue, wide open, and frank. She had not yet learned that there was any reason why she should not look at everything with the calm directness of childhood.

It’s just a wonderful description, isn’t it? I love that last line, too, because it’s like saying, you know, she hadn’t learned yet to be demure and proper and feminine. She was just being herself.

AMY: The book kept pointing out that she’s like this all-American girl, sort of from the wilderness almost, and she’s a goddess, but the characters kept describing her as not necessarily beautiful. And it kept making me laugh, because of course, all the men were falling all over her. But she had this unorthodox beauty that everybody had to remark upon, like, “She’s very plain, but in a beautiful way.”

ANNE: Right. I think at one point this analogy might be used. If not, it was used a lot in other literature of the time, that she would have been more like a wildflower whereas the other women around her later are more like hothouse flowers, greenhouse flowers. The perfect rose that has been cultivated in the hothouse, where she grows naturally on the side of the hill or something like that, right? So it’s that kind of beauty that she is meant to represent.

KIM: So we got to hear a little bit about what it was like when she was young and on the island, and then, she actually leaves. She ends up going to New York and she goes to a French finishing school. Her rich, misanthropic aunt sends her there. She’s this poor, provincial country girl, completely out of place in a totally new environment. It sounds like Woolson had a really similar experience in some ways. Can you tell us a little bit about Woolson’s experience?

ANNE: Yeah, there’s a lot of Anne in Woolson, or Woolson in Anne, I guess. She was also very physically active and physically fit and could row for a whole hour without her arms getting tired like Anne. Things like that. Woolson had a very unconventional education in Cleveland where she grew up, at the Cleveland Female Seminary. It was a sort of higher education for women. She went during her high school years and she learned all kinds of advanced science and math, geography, Latin and other languages, French and German, and she was learning literature. That’s when she began gaining praise and recognition from her teachers for her writing, but it was a very rigorous education. Very unusual for the time. That, apparently, wasn’t enough for her family. They didn’t feel quite comfortable sending Connie out into the world with a man’s education. They had to send her to a finishing school in New York, to top it all off. It’s just so incongruous, right? It’s a very severe education she had and then suddenly Connie’s family sent her to this finishing school that was filled with basically a lot of Southern belles. I think there were only a few northerners there. She felt way out of her element.

AMY: I can speak Latin, but I need to be able to sing these Italian arias and do embroidery, so I’m not complete yet, even though I’m smarter than most people in the room right now.

ANNE: She wasn’t “ornamental” enough for her day, so she had to get some finishing touches, yeah.

AMY: I really loved all the peripheral characters from Mackinac Island in that first section of the book, and that part of the book, especially, felt quintessentially “American” to me, because we had people from so many different walks of life. I was surprised at how much I really enjoyed some of the commentary at the beginning about religious faith. We have the Calvinist point of view, we have the Roman Catholics, we have the Episcopalians. Woolson writes about that in a really telling, and almost funny sort of way. These characters kind of hate each other because of that but then they also wind up coming together, rallying around Anne, and it kind of echoes the tribalism that we see a little bit today in our culture. I loved the fact that they came together despite their differences and was wondering if you knew anything about Woolson’s take on religion or what kind of commentary she might be making there.

ANNE: What she’s doing there, in some respects… she did have a tremendous interest in religion and was very, very well-read, so you see that coming out there. But what she’s also doing is commenting on the kind of regional differences that had kept Americans apart and had led to the Civil War. This is a post-Civil War book set in a pre-Civil War period. Actually, the war comes up later in the book, but her childhood in Mackinac Island is pre-Civil War. So Woolson’s writing at a time when the country is tired of division and they become extremely interested in all the different regions of the country and trying to explore them. So there’s this real boom of regionalist literature in the magazines. And she wrote a lot of stories from the Great Lakes region that were part of that movement, and from the South, as well, later when she went to the South. So she’s keenly aware. She’s actually living in the South when she writes this book, so she’s living in the midst of the aftermath of the war there. So this idea of division and tribalism is still very much on her mind because of that experience, but Americans are tired. I should say white Americans, northern Americans, are tired of talking about the Civil War, about all of the death that happened, and also about slavery and what’s happening with the freed slaves and whether or not they’ll have a place in America. All of those are questions that Woolson was very interested in and was told by publishers not to talk too much about because people were tired of that and wanted to move onto other things. (Which is why Reconstruction failed.) So I think she’s, in some ways, trying to encapsulate those tensions and divisions, maybe through looking at religion instead of region. I think it’s so fascinating that even though the book starts on Mackinac Island, she’s showing us, first of all, how diverse that region is, and then she takes her heroine and puts her on the road and she goes to all these different parts of America. This is an American novel and I think there was interest then, starting to be interest in the “great American novel,” right? Would we have a novel that kind of encapsulated this country? People were looking to their literature for a kind of great American novel, and I think Woolson had that sort of ambition when she wrote it, even though she was writing a book about a young girl becoming a woman. I think it’s so fascinating that she combined those two things together: tremendous literary ambition and this idea of a great American novel that would somehow encapsulate the country, through the figure of a girl. It’s something I’ve written a lot about in my work on Little Women. And this book is a big, big ambitious book, and if it doesn’t quite, if it didn’t quite become the great American novel, it was certainly greeted as a contender for that when it was published.

AMY: We see a lot of resilience and resourcefulness and independence in Anne Douglas in the novel. She’s determined to just do it by herself and make it on her own. And yet, she had some romantic relationships along the way. That is sort of the thing, I think, that makes this book, with all its twists and turns, a page-turner as well, because you’re trying to figure out who she’s going to end up with, if she’s going to end up with anybody. First we have Rast, who is her best friend from childhood on the island. They try to maintain this long-distance relationship. But then when she’s in society she becomes courted by these much more sophisticated suitors. I found myself completely wrapped up in that. Both of the main guys, Mr. Dexter and Mr. Heathcote, I found both of them quite swoon worthy at various points. I felt like both of them were doing a pretty good job at winning MY heart at least! But yeah, I think that contributed to the page-turner aspect of the book. But also, when you said it was serialized… I don’t think I knew that, and that makes a lot of sense because every chapter ends on such a cliffhanger moment. And I want to say I also really loved the intros to each chapter. She selected little passages from classic literature that kind of summarized what the chapter was going to be about. I really enjoyed that as well.

ANNE: It shows how well-read she was, and also, there’s a little bit of showing off going on there, right?

KIM: She’s earned it.

 ANNE: Yeah. It’s a mark of a serious work of literature, rather than just a magazine-ish kind of story.

AMY: I was expecting before I read the book that it was going to be a lot more schmaltzy than it actually was. You know, I’m so used to writers from that era sort of just dripping it on a little bit with the sentimentality. And there were moments of that in the book, but there wasn’t nearly as much as I expected. I found it was kind of modern the way it was written. It felt like it could have been written today.

ANNE: I think Woolson’s writing is incredibly modern. That was exactly the word I was going to use. It’s not particularly sentimental. I mean, she would have been horrified if anybody called her a sentimental writer. She thought that, unfortunately, most women writers wrote too sweetly and too sentimentally, and she said she wanted her writing to be strong and vigorous, even if that meant she was sacrificing her femininity as a writer. In fact, I mean this book is remarkable in that it’s about a girl because many many, many of her stories that she published — she was a very prolific short-story writer — so many of those are about a male protagonist. They’re written from a male point of view. We’ve been saying a lot about Anne before even getting to the fact that there are suitors and a potential love story here. It is not the main theme of the book. And even once she has realized who she’s in love with, he’s not even there for most of the rest of the story. It’s still about Anne, right, and her adventures and her finding her way to him, but also proving herself to be an independent person along the way.

KIM: Yeah, and female friendships are really important, too, not just the romantic relationships. She has a deep friendship with a wealthy young widow named Helen. It’s a really interesting portrayal of female friendship. They’re from two completely different backgrounds. They meet at the French finishing school. They’re singing partners. Anne becomes a little bit of a project for Helen, and reminds me a little bit of the Moffats and Meg in Little Women and Anne almost being her “pet,” but it became so much more than that. Their friendship had a lot more depth, and it was more than a minor subplot, it was kind of defining in the novel, what happens with them. I won’t say anymore about that, but…

AMY: I will say a little more about that without giving anything away, but we’ll just say that this friend, Helen, her story unfolds very dramatically in the book, to the point where I was gasping and I was a little ahead of Kim in my reading, and so I was texting her in all caps at certain points, like, “HANG ONTO YOUR HAT! YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHAT’S COMING!”

ANNE: You won’t even see it coming.

KIM: No.

ANNE: So Woolson was a fan of the dramatic plot, and that was something I think that she was told by some people like William Dean Howells, the arch-realist, to tone it down. But she’s doing it, I think, because what she’s trying to convey is not just everyday life and women talking over tea and having a social call or what have you. She’s trying to put her characters in these dramatic moments to reveal their true character. She’s very interested in the moments in which the mask comes off, right? The social veneer comes down. All the social conventions go away because, “Oh my god, this is happening! We have to do something, now! It’s a crisis!” Or what have you. That’s how true feelings are revealed. They are only revealed under severe pressure like that. Woolson was somebody who cared about those kind of eruptive, volcanic feelings inside of us and how they come out under pressure, so that’s why you get sometimes these very dramatic… and they don’t feel like they’re manipulative or plot devices, because we see character revealed through them. It’s almost the revealing of a character that’s the real drama rather than the external event, would you say? Did you feel that way about it?

AMY: Yeah, but I also felt like it was just entertainment factor. It was like watching a movie. I could visualize everything. I’m surprised it hasn’t been made into some sort of miniseries or movie. I think it would be an excellent one. But those twists, and those dramatic cliff-hangers, I should say, sometimes literally… they were very cinematic to me, and it just drew me into the story even more.

KIM: So you’ve studied Alcott. You’ve studied Woolson. You’ve written books about them. Why has Little Women stood the test of time and Anne hasn’t? Not as many people know about Constance Fenimore Woolson.

ANNE: First of all, Little Women was a bigger success. It was so, so huge. And it was a book that girls read when they were young and carried with them through their lives and passed down to their own granddaughters or nieces or whatever, right? Anne never had that chance to become that kind of book. Partially, I think, because Anne was the only book like this that she wrote. Whereas Alcott, children’s writing became an industry for her and her publishers made new editions of the book: illustrated editions, right, to kind of crystalize its status as a “classic” and promoted the book tremendously. And then there started being adaptations starting with the Broadway play in 1920. Anne on the other hand, it became her signature book, her most important book, but by the time she died, she had written so many other kinds of things. She was a varied writer. She was a writer who had some many talents and so many interests. She wasn’t writing sequels to this, right? It wasn’t becoming a cottage industry for the publisher. It’s interesting to compare it to Little Women because I hadn’t really thought about that before. I’ve thought about it more as compared to a book like Portrait of a Lady. But no one would ever compare Little Women and Portrait of a Lady.

KIM: Good point.

ANNE: But in some ways, Anne kind of exists in that middle space in between, doesn’t it?

AMY: I was going to say when you mentioned the part about daughters enjoying Little Women when they’re girls. This isn’t that book. I mean, this is not so innocent. For that time period, it was a little bit of a scandal in certain sections.

ANNE: Oh, gosh. I need to go back and reread it. So there’s spicy parts? That would be interesting, because I can see the ways in which Alcott was deliberately toning that down in Little Women. So, I went and saw the manuscript. There are two manuscripts of Little Women that have survived, and if you compare them to the published book you can see how she’s cutting out potentially spicy parts, and showing the ways in which her little women are becoming women and inspiring lustful thoughts in men and that sort of thing. Maybe having feelings themselves. But you’re right, Woolson didn’t shy away from that. She wasn’t trying to write a story for girls the way Alcott was deliberately trying to do and had been asked by her publisher to do. This was meant to be, as I said, a great American novel, or a novel like Middlemarch or something like that. Like Jane Eyre. The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre were Woolson’s favorite books when she was growing up. Yeah. And you can definitely see their influence here. She was writing much less about a girl than she was writing about a young woman. I think it’s very telling that a book like Little Women that is more about girls from whom their sort of sexual essence that’s developing had been stripped, that is the book that has stood the test of time, rather than a book like Anne, where we see it developing, and Woolson’s not afraid to show that within the Victorian context within which it was written, but you feel it there. You feel the passion and the energy that Alcott couldn’t write about. Alcott did in other things, but not in Little Women. So I think that’s fascinating, actually, these questions about what survives and what doesn’t, and I think it has everything to do with our culture’s fear of women’s sexuality. I think that could really be part of it. 

KIM: What should we read next now that we love Anne?

ANNE: Well, as I said, she never read another book quite like Anne. I think you should read her short stories. She’s particularly masterful at the short story form and her stories are exquisite works of art, I think. And they’re in print. There’s a paperback edition that I edited and also the Library of America edition that I edited. Those are in print, so you can get your hands on those pretty easily. For other novels… For the Major was her next novel. It is much, much shorter. More of a novella, and has more of the qualities of a lot of her short stories. The kind of precision and narrow focus. They’re just exquisitely wrought. Anne feels sprawling and sometimes that like it might go out of control, right? But that’s part of what you enjoy about it. The next novel that she wrote after For the Major is East Angels, that, in some ways, scholars have thought of as a response to Portrait of a Lady. But it’s set in America in Florida. Yeah, you should read East Angels next, because there’s definitely quite a bit of this restrained passion happening, or suppressed passion that comes out in interesting ways. That’s kind of the theme of that book in many ways. So yeah, yeah, you should read East Angels next.

AMY: You had me at “restrained passion.”

ANNE: Yep.

AMY: I love it.

KIM: Yeah, I’m ready. We’re going to have to do another episode with that one. So, we have you here and you know all about these lost ladies of literature so you’re the perfect person to ask if you have any recommendations for other authors that we need to put on our to-read list.

ANNE: Yes. I actually have a list that I made for subscribers when you sign up to my newsletter. A list of what I think are the best forgotten books by American women writers. These are books that I’ve taught and my students have really responded to. So some of the books that I have on there are Fanny Fern ... The Morgersons by Elizabeth Stoddard… what else is on there? Well, some of them are more contemporary like Gayl Jones’s Corregidora which is, wow, a gut punch of a book. It’s amazing! Toni Morrison said that African American women’s literature would never be the same after that book. That was when Toni Morrison was an editor. She was an editor [on that book] at Random House. Another interesting one is Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. That’s a Harlem Renaissance book. She also wrote another novel, Passing, but I really like Quicksand because she goes to Europe in that book, and I just find that element of it fascinating. There are some other interesting late 19th century writers who didn’t write novels, but wrote stories. Sui Sin Far is an Asian American, Chinese-American writer and her stories are just wonderful, and Sikala-Sa, was the Sioux name of Gertrude Bonnin who wrote some really interesting stories about her own growing up that were published in The Atlantic Monthly. As well as Alice Dunbar Nelson who was a Creole woman from New Orleans. They’re just fascinating to learn about, these women writers of the 19th century. First of all, we’ve been brought up to think there weren’t very many women writers, right? There was George Eliot and Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, Emily and Anne, but that was it, right, until we get to Virginia Woolf or something.

KIM: Yep.

ANNE: But whoa, wait a minute… there were a lot of them. And there were a lot in America, not just in England. And they weren’t all white. They weren’t all white, privileged women either. The writer I’m obsessed with right now is a 20th century writer who wrote about the World War II era. She was part of the Lost Generation in Paris, and then she didn’t come home when all the other writers came home. She stayed and witnessed the rise of fascism and the beginning of the war in France. Her name is Kay Boyle and I’m writing a book about her now. Her writing reminds me of Woolson’s, and that’s why I think I’m so drawn to her, because there’s so much empathy and passion in her work. She’s also very intense and dramatic, but also such an artist, you know? Just really an amazing, amazing writer.

AMY: I think I had a misconception for a long time that if a book didn’t withstand the test of time, there was a reason it didn’t. It was because it wasn’t very good. And now I realize that’s so not true, and that women have been shortchanged for whatever reason and I’m still trying to still get to the bottom of that a little bit, because it doesn’t make sense.

ANNE: Right. And this is what I studied in graduate school, or that’s why I went to graduate school and I was just so full of excitement to be part of this recovering women writers thing, right? All these women writers that were there… it was a very exciting time. And then, you know, I went out into the world and started teaching and you know, I just kind of naively assumed somehow that the rest of the world had caught up with me and that now people knew about these writers. My students kept coming to me year after year — it’s been 21 years now —  saying, “Who are these women writers? I thought there weren’t any women writers. I thought a book that didn’t stand the test of time wasn’t any good. Why have I never heard about Alice Dunbar Nelson or Tikala-Sun or Sui Sin Far or Constance Fenimore Woolson, for that matter?” And not only that, but at the same time that I’m hearing this over and over again, year after year from my students (who still aren’t getting it in high school and aren’t getting it from many of my colleagues that they’re taking literature courses from all over the country), at the same time, the works that were part of that first wave of recovery, that were republished like I mentioned that collection of stories which was my gateway to Woolson, Women Artists, Women Exiles, they went out of print because not enough people bought them. So we were getting them back into print, but they weren’t staying there.

KIM: I cannot imagine a better guest for this episode than you, and a better first guest for our podcast!

ANNE: She’s always been my favorite of that period, and I’m so thrilled that you all discovered her and that you’re sharing her with more readers.

AMY: Okay, so Kim, what did we learn from this episode?

KIM: Well, we learned you can sell more books than your male BFF but still be lost in his shadow.

AMY: We also learned that in the 19th century you could be the smartest woman in the room and still not be deemed “worthy” unless you’ve graduated from finishing school.

KIM: And finally, we learned that calling in an expert is always a good idea. And we’re going to link to Anne Boyd Rioux’s website in our show notes, as well as to her books that we’ve mentioned in this episode.

AMY: So be sure to check out our mini episode next week, because we’ll be talking about Anne’s Tablet, an off-the-beaten track memorial in honor of Constance Fenimore Woolson.

KIM: And we’ll be chatting about why Mackinac Island remains one of the country’s most magical travel destinations.

AMY: 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: Do you have ideas for other long-lost 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, you can check out our website: Lostladiesoflit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really makes a difference.

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Constance Fenimore Woolson 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. 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.

CLOSING: 

AMY: So, Kim, what did we learn from this episode?

KIM: Well, we learned you can sell more books than your male bff, but still be lost in his shadow.. 

AMY: That’s for sure! In the 19th century, you could be the smartest woman in the room and still not be deemed “worthy”  unless you’ve graduated from finishing school. 

KIM: And, finally, we learned that calling in an expert is always a good idea. And speaking of, we’ll link to Anne Boyd Rioux’s website in our show notes, as well as to her books that we’ve mentioned in this episode. 

AMY: Be sure to check out our mini episode next week because we’ll be talking about Anne’s Tablet, an off-the-beaten-track memorial in honor of Constance Fenimore Woolson.

KIM: And we’ll be chatting about why Mackinac Island remains one of this country’s most magical travel destinations.

AMY: 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: 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 makes a difference!

[start closing music]

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Constance Fenimore Woolson 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.

[closing music.]

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

10. A Falling Out Among Friends — Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM ASKEW [HOST]: Hi, and welcome to this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episodes. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY HELMES [HOST]: And I’m Amy Helmes. Last week we introduced you to Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Home-maker, and if you go to our show notes for that episode, you’ll see some amazing still photos from the silent film adaptation of that book. Since then, I found a review of the movie from August 8, 1925 in a publication called Moving Picture World, which sounds like the old-time version of The Hollywood Reporter, or something like that.

KIM: Yes. Very much so.

AMY: So the review is unlike anything you would find today in terms of movie criticism, so I’m just going to read a few lines. It said: “This is a box-office picture par excellence for all audiences. It is hard to conceive an audience that will dislike it. The drama is simply done but so tense and absorbing in its import that it will hold the eyes glued to the screen. Women will eat it up, and cry, and men will like it fully as well as the women, for it does man no injustice by putting woman on an unscalable pinnacle.” 

God forbid it would do that, Kim!

KIM: I know, seriously, the patriarchy is even in the review of the movie! I’m not even sure what to make of that review! That’s hilarious. Reviews have changed, as well as movies. So Canfield Fisher, as we mentioned last week, she was great friends with author Willa Cather, and we love this idea of women writers supporting one another in their careers. We are all on board with that. That said, their friendship was not without some bumps — actually, some major drama — which we’re going to tell you about.

AMY: Yeah, it was kind of crazy. In fact, these two women ended up not speaking to one another for 15 years, and I can’t imagine. I mean, Kim, I can’t imagine not talking to you for two days let alone 15 years!

KIM: I know. That’s never going to happen. It’s some serious bad blood, though. And they originally became friends in 1891, but from 1905-1921 they didn’t speak to each other hardly at all, it was “cold shoulder” time. Their feud was actually prompted by a story that Willa Cather published in 1905 in a collection called The Troll Garden, which is actually a perfect name for the collection given what Amy’s going to tell you next.

AMY: So here’s the backstory to what went wrong: In 1902, the two women were pal’ing around in Europe together, and they were joined by another friend of Canfield Fisher’s named Evelyn Osborne. Sounds great right? Sounds like a fun time.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Well, side note: Evelyn had a large and very noticeable scar on her face. So three years later, Canfield (We’ll just call her Canfield because she hadn’t married yet, so her last name was just Canfield) she was reading a manuscript of Cather’s for The Troll Garden and in a story called “The Profile” she encountered a character that was a young woman with a disfiguring facial scar. 

KIM: Mmm.

AMY: Hmm. So I’m going to read you a few sentences of what Cather wrote about this scar: It had evidently been caused by a deep burn, as if from a splash of molten metal. It drew the left eye and the corner of the mouth; made of her smile a grinning distortion, like the shameful conception of some despairing medieval imagination. It was as if some grotesque mask, worn for disport, were just slipping sidewise from her face.

So, I read the entirety of the short story, it’s very short, but it goes on to have an ending out of something from Edgar Allen Poe, honestly. It’s a pretty salacious little story.

KIM: Oooh, that’s pretty harsh. Wow. Ouch. So Canfield read this, and she immediately freaked. She of course recognized that this character had been inspired by her friend, Evelyn, and she was not having any of it. She wrote to Cather and begged her to remove it from the manuscript.

AMY: She said in that letter: “I am quite sure you don't realize how exact and faithful a portrait you have drawn of her. … Oh Willa don’t do this thing. . . . I don’t believe she would ever recover from the blow of your description of her affliction.”

KIM: Whoa, you can tell how distressed she is by those lines. So how did Cather respond?

AMY: Well, pretty indignantly, actually. She wasn’t about to change a word of her depiction, and she told Canfield that the character had very little to do with Evelyn, even though there were a couple other similarities besides the scar, mind you. But Canfield was so furious that she went over Willa Cather’s head and actually contacted her publisher directly.

KIM: That’s really bold, wow. But also, I mean, on the end of being her friend, Evelyn, that’s being a really good friend. To reach out like that and try to stop it.

AMY: And actually, the publisher listened and agreed to remove the story from the collection, so it seemed for a moment like maybe everything was settled down, however two years later, “The Profile,” this same short story appeared in McCall’s magazine. 

KIM: Uh-oh. I’m guessing Canfield wasn’t too happy when she saw that.

AMY: Nope. But it actually gets worse if you can believe that. It appears that Willa Cather basically doubled down on the insult, because she later published a story that was an obvious satire of Canfield’s own mother, Flavia, who was an artist. So that story was called, “Flavia and Her Artists,” and really, there’s no disguising the fact that she was using Canfield’s mom in her depiction. It was pretty blatant.

KIM: No, that is harsh, and it would be the last straw for Canfield. So with the exception of a few letters they exchanged, that was the last of the authors’ interaction for 15 years.

AMY: Yeah, and then at one point, the ice began to thaw. So, Canfield got married and she wound up writing a review of Cather’s latest book for the Yale Review. And that review was pretty positive and diplomatic, even given the hurt feelings. So she took the high road there, and it prompted Cather to write to Canfield Fisher and suggest that they get together. They were slowly able to make amends from there, and it seems as though Cather at long last acknowledged that maybe she had been out of line. And she said ‘I have matured a little bit since then’ so that kind of went a long way toward smoothing things over.

KIM: I’m glad they worked it out in the end, though it’s kind of amazing that they did considering how bad that was. I mean, it’s pretty rough on a friendship. I imagine it would have been pretty divisive, so good for them, just to kind of make up. 

AMY: Yeah, put it behind them. But it does sort of beg the question of a writer: Are you willing to offend or betray or hurt somebody’s feelings in the pursuit of your own writing? You always hear this edict that writers, to be any good, have to be brutally honest, you know? But I, personally, I don’t know that I’m capable of that. Which, maybe, that’s a problem, I don’t know. But I’m always too conscious of who’s reading it and what they might ultimately think of what I put down.

KIM: I know what you mean… It’s part of the reason I could never be a critic as a profession. I’d be worried about hurting someone’s feelings or somehow impacting their career. I just couldn’t live with that I don’t think.

AMY: Yeah, but Kim, you actually kind of faced this conundrum, this idea of writing about real people when you wrote a personal essay for the anthology The May Queen. So I’m wondering, was that difficult to write about your own history and relationships knowing that the people involved would read it?

KIM: That’s a great question. So the actual writing of it wasn’t difficult at all. That was just easy. But after the book came out, and I went on the book tour and read it aloud, I did have some lingering regrets. And having had that experience, I’d probably think twice before I revealed anything about my friends or family in the future, particularly in a nonfiction format. So with fiction though, there’s room for disguise. I think people could think, “Oh, maybe that’s me,” but they might think [characters] that you didn’t intend to be them are them. So it gives you a lot of room. Not that I’ve done that, friends and family who are listening! I’ve not done that!

AMY: I think it’s one thing to sort of decide for yourself whether or not you want to “go there,” so to speak, but in this case of Willa Cather, she was sort of dragging Canfield Fisher’s friends and family into it, which doesn’t really seem like fair game. 

KIM: Nope.

AMY: But then, on the other hand, as a writer, you’d kind of hate to feel as though things are “off limits” to your imagination. I mean, why can’t you be inspired by the events and people you encounter in your life?

KIM: Yeah, that’s a really difficult one. I mean, if you’re a writer on the level of Willa Cather, maybe somehow all bets are off. Your art might have to come first, but if you can stomach it. I feel like using Canfield Fisher’s mom’s unique name was probably going too far, and was unnecessary, but I think maybe Cather’s intention might have been to wound! I mean, she used her mother’s name!

AMY: Yeah, she could have changed that name.

KIM: Exactly.

AMY: Even if she’d been inspired by her mother, there was no need to use the specific name. 

KIM: Yeah, that seems purposeful.

AMY: That was pointed.

KIM: Yep. So, it’s great that we’re talking about this, and there’s a reason.

So our next “lost lady,” had a similarly contentious friendship with another famous author. Constance Fenimore Woolson’s relationship with Henry James was so fraught with drama it may even have potentially driven her to her death!

AMY: When we were first discussing her, I could not believe the story involved here, and I can’t wait to get to the bottom of it. And, actually, in order to try to figure out this mystery (and Woolson’s beautiful novel, Anne) we’re going to be joined by a special guest (our very first guest expert, in fact) — Dr. Anne Boyd Rioux.

KIM: Okay, she literally wrote the book on Constance Fenimore Woolson. We are so, so excited to talk with her about this unbelievably talented, but forgotten author!

[theme music plays]

AMY: Until then, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com for more information as well as further reading material. And if you’re loving this podcast, be sure to leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find us! Bye, everybody !

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

9. Dorothy Canfield Fisher - The Home-Maker

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit 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 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 on a mission to unearth some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: We’re all stuck inside in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic and basically staring at our filthy houses. Am I right?

AMY: I do have an anecdote relating to that. Did I tell you about my experiences this week with Old English wood polish?

KIM: No, but I can’t wait to hear it.

AMY: Okay, earlier this week, I decided on a whim that I needed to use Old English wood polish, which I have never used before. I guess maybe the name of it appeals to me? “Old English?” That sounds right up my alley. I used it on my wood desk and it was like magic to the point where I had to call my husband out of the office and be like, “Look at this! Would you look at this?” and he was like “Oh, my gosh, that’s amazing.” I spent an hour going through all the wood in my house. I have wood steps and they’re starting to look kind of worn. So i did one tread — the bottom tread — and it’s oil. And as soon as I did it, I was like, “Oh my god, my family runs up and down these stairs all day, someone is going to slip and break their neck!” So then I had to put a bath towel over the stair. At one point, I was like, “How do I dirty it up? Can I sprinkle dust on it or something?” It was just so ridiculous and stupid. 

KIM: Well, I don’t do a lot of cleaning, as my husband will happily tell you over and over. That’s his favorite joke. But i am doing a lot of childcare while I’m working, and this week, Cleo, my 18-month-old, decided to make a special unplanned guest appearance during a Zoom meeting. She’s teething, so she was not a happy camper. I got flustered. Everyone was really nice about it, but it was still really embarrassing. She is the cutest little distraction I could ever want and I am loving getting to spend so much time with her, so that is the silver lining to all this insanity, but I would be lying if I said my productivity hasn’t suffered. It has suffered. Very much.

AMY: Of course, our domestic challenges kind of feel intensified in recent months, but the book we’re going to discuss today takes “House-cleaning rage” to a whole new level.

KIM: Oh, yeah, and yet Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s novel, The Home-Maker also takes a more serious deep dive into child-rearing, women in the workplace, and gender roles in a book that was pretty eyebrow-raising in the era it was written.

AMY: I had never heard of the book before we chose it for this episode, but once I started reading it I wasn’t surprised to find out that it sold like hotcakes back in the day.

KIM: No, and it was actually among the 10 bestselling novels in the US in 1924, so it’s a pretty big deal. It’s a pretty simple story but it has relevance that makes it well worth revisiting, and I’m looking forward to diving into this discussion. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

(SOUNDBITE OF INTRO MUSIC)

KIM: So I think we could use a rundown about who Dorothy Canfield Fisher was. 

AMY: She had a pretty interesting life, I’ve gotta say. Born in Kansas in 1879, her father was kind of a big shot at several universities (including being the president of Ohio State University at one point) and her mother who was a painter, who I think was maybe a little bit of a frustrated artist. She probably wanted to spend more time pursuing that than she did, but she took Dorothy to Paris for a short while when she was a girl when she was pursuing painting there. 

KIM: It’s interesting about her father being an academic, because his favorite book was Middlemarch, and his favorite character was Dorothea, and that’s who he named his daughter, Dorothy, after. And Dorothea, in the book, is idealistic and intelligent, which seems really apt, because Dorothy received her PhD in Romance Languages from Colombia University. That’s a pretty rare accomplishment for a woman in that time period. Amy’s going to be telling us more about how she put her idealism to work. It’s almost as if she lived the very life Dorothea would have lived had she not married Casaubon. 

AMY:  Yes, as you said, I think she made a better marital match. She married John Redwood Fisher in 1907. He was a Colombia grad, just like she was. That same year is when she also inherited her great-grandfather’s farm in Arlington, Vermont. She basically spent most of the rest of her adult life in Vermont, and that’s the state she’s really most associated with. She was a highly engaged activist, particularly in the fields of education and child development. She managed America’s first adult education program. She did war relief work in Paris while her husband was a medic in the war, and it’s there that she also established a Braille press for blinded veterans. She worked for many years to improve rural public education as a member of Vermont’s board of education. She was really into prison reform — especially in women’s prisons. 

KIM: And then, think about the fact that from 1925 to 1950 she was a Member of the Book of the Month Club Book selection committee, too. She shaped, basically, what Amercians were reading for 25 years. Wow, I mean…

AMY: How did she find time to do all this? It’s incredible.

KIM: I can’t even… it makes me feel lazy.

AMY: One hundred percent. In addition to all that we just mentioned, she also became an expert on Montessori teaching methods. She brought the technique back to the States, and we definitely are going to see a shout-out to this in the book we’re talking about today, The Home-Maker. She had a clear belief system with regard to how children should be nurtured and raised — namely, with respect and with great attention paid to their feelings. This was kind of radical for a time period that still subscribed to the mentalities that “children should be seen and not heard” and “spare the rod, spoil the child” sort of thing. Over the course of her lifetime, as if she didn’t do enough, she also wrote 22 novels and 18 nonfiction books. One of the most famous that people know about is a children’s book she wrote in 1916 called Understood Betsy, which is sometimes compared to The Secret Garden which I’m intrigued by.

KIM: Okay, so she’s doing all this, all these amazing things for society. She’s writing all these books. In a 1920 review of The Age of Innocence that was in The New York Times Book Review it referred to four women writers as being “in the front rank of living American novelists.” She was up there with Edith Wharton — that was one of the other writers mentioned. I mean, come on, how do you do everything she did and also be right up there with Edith Wharton and how do we not know about her now?

AMY: Exactly. How did she just kind of fade away from our consciousness?

KIM: An interesting anecdote about her: She refused to wear corsets, calling them an “implement of the Inquisition.” I love the drama of that!

AMY: This doesn’t surprise me that she was busting out of the constraints that were put on women in her era, both figuratively and literally!

KIM: She also had a decades long friendship with Willa Cather, whom she met when both were traveling in Europe. They wrote letters to one another for almost 50 years. And she corresponded with other writers including Isak Dinesen and Robert Frost.

AMY: Also, Norman Rockwell was her neighbor and in their later years she and her husband posed for one of his portraits 

KIM: Eleanor Roosevelt called Canfield Fisher “One of the 10 most influential women in America.” Wow, her bio is just mind-blowing.

AMY: So, like many figures from previous eras, Canfield Fisher has not escaped controversy. In a few of her books she depicts Native Americans and French Canadians with the sort of insulting stereotypes that would make the modern reader kind of bristle. And though it’s difficult to tie her directly to the eugenics movement of that era, it seems likely she was in tacit agreement with the idea of having the “right people” populate the state of Vermont. 

KIM: Yikes, yeah. Not great to hear that. And you could argue, maybe, that this belief was just one blemish in an overwhelming record of admirable public service and advocacy, but it’s become increasingly problematic in the same way that people are taking a look at Laura Ingalls Wilder because of her support of eugenics. So I think it’s something important to talk about.

AMY: In 2019 the Vermont Board of Libraries opted to remove Canfield Fisher’s name from the children’s literature award that was created more than 50 years ago to honor her. There was a lot of back and forth about whether or not they should do this, and they ultimately decided to change the name of the award on the grounds that, as a writer she was “no longer relevant to today’s young people.” Regardless of what you feel about Canfield Fisher’s life, that quote feels like a blanket statement meant to make the controversy go away … it doesn’t necessarily seem accurate to me to call her writings irrelevant.

KIM: I think it’s a good time to point out right now that in the process of exploring books written in previous eras, we’re going to bump up against difficult conversations like this in the course of future podcasts. 

AMY: I guess the best course of action we can take when that happens is to just acknowledge any offensive or insensitive information that we find problematic, without necessarily shying away from it or setting it aside altogether.

KIM: Basically, our goal in such cases is to “air it out” in a way that we hope proves productive and useful for all of us. Because it feels like the only way to begin to address these issues is to confront them head on, and that’s what we want to do. And we also want to hear what you have to say about this, so if you have thoughts or suggestions on this, we would love to hear them. Please feel free to send us an email, leave a comment on our site, or message us on Instagram. We’re listening.

The Home-Maker was published in 1924 by Harcourt Brace, and wow, the first sentence throws us right into the subject matter: “SHE was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room." (She is one of the book’s main characters, a homemaker named Evangeline Knapp, or Eva for short.)

AMY: That word, “furiously” really yanks us into things. There is so much bottled-up rage in this first chapter. It feels so raw to read this depiction of an OCD mother and her frustrations with having the perfect house and the perfect children. There’s something almost unnerving about the descriptions of Eva. She literally causes her own family to cower and become physically ill as a result of her passive aggression, wouldn’t you say?

KIM: Absolutely, and then there’s a moment where all this tension boils over while she’s cleaning up after dinner, and her husband and her three children just turn white as ghosts and they try to pretend everything is normal. I’m going to read from the book here: “They heard her begin to pile up the dishes at the sink, working rapidly as she always did. They heard her step swiftly back towards the kitchen table as though to pick up a dish there. They heard her stop short with appalling abruptness; and for a long moment a silence filled the little house, roaring loudly in their ears as they gazed at each other, across the table. What could have happened? And then, with the effect of a clap of thunder shaking them to the bone, came a sudden rending outburst of sobs, strangled weeping, the terrifying sounds of an hysteric breakdown.” 

AMY: And what happens immediately after that, I found so heart-breaking. Her middle child, Henry, becomes sick to his stomach. He actually throws up, and his older sister, Helen, sort of sneaks off under cover to go clean it up because they are all so terrified that Eva will find out about it and lose her you-know-what again. It seems like the whole family is walking on eggshells around her. So yeah, what was your reaction to that whole chapter?    

KIM: One, it was so clear that this was just an almost every-night occurrence. They had such a routine for how they handled it and they were always waiting for that thing to happen — the terrifying thing. I felt awful for the entire family, but I felt the worst for the children. It almost seemed liked community-sanctioned child abuse. And it really made me think about all the women in the past, even people in my own family, who may not have felt a true calling for being a housewife or a mother, but — societal expectations being what they were at the time — they just never had a real choice in the matter. 

AMY: Eva is so carping and critical and her husband and kids are just silently flinching and trying not to anger the dragon. There’s a mention of the clock ticking and how it’s almost taunting her, because she has so much work to do. And Canfield writes, “What was her life? A hateful round of housework … which was never done. …. The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming out. And what else did she have? Loneliness; never-ending monotony; blank, gray days, one after another, full of drudgery…. These were the moments in a mother’s life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence.” Man, that’s not only intense, but it’s also true.

KIM: Oh, that makes my blood run cold. I really did feel bad for her too. I mean, she really hates her life, and she doesn’t seem to be able to see any way out of it. And then there’s her husband, Lester. He’s described as a “broken reed” by one of the other ladies in town as they gossip, and while they say that Eva is “a wonder of competence.” Lester is the epitome of a square peg in a round hole. He’s this dreamer and a poet at heart. It’s even strongly implied that there’s almost something unmanly about it, so the community is not very supportive of intellectuals at this time and this place.

So those are the parents, but what about the children? They all three have issues, Helen is a nervous, insecure wreck, Henry has terrible stomach issues, clearly as a result of Eva’s rage and emotional abuse. But the worst is Stephen! And having a toddler, oh, that was so hard! He’s a troubled child. He’s misunderstood and angry and he already has a bad reputation with everyone at the ripe old age of three or four for his rages and lashing out at neighbors. He and Eva are locked in this daily battle of wills, and actually, it does get physical, which is really hard to read! So to give you a little insight into Eva’s mindset, I’m going to read a couple lines from the book: “Eva had passionate love and devotion to give them, but neither patience nor understanding. There was no sacrifice in the world which she would not joyfully make for her children except to live with them.”

AMY: Oooh. I feel like that one stopped me in my tracks, too. In the same way that Eva is at the end of her rope, Lester also reaches a breaking point. He despises his job working at a department store (and he’s terrible at it.) He gets fired one day (not surprising) and actually contemplates suicide immediately after, but in a strange twist of fate, on his way home from work he suffers an accident that leaves him incapacitated. Of course, we’re left wondering, was it really an accident? This is where we really get to the crux of the plot.

KIM: Right, this is what everything hinges on, basically. So the owner of the department store where he worked, Jerome Willing, he feels terrible about the situation and what’s going to become of Lester’s family, so he ends up offering Eva a job at the store. The interesting thing is, she actually takes the first step by approaching him about this, and we see on several occasions that she has a really take-charge personality and he loves that.

AMY: He sees potential as soon as they meet and talk. I loved that he seemed to have a very modern attitude about hiring women. He was even willing to consider a woman for store manager at what seemed like equal pay to what a man would be offered. And his wife, Nell, she seems very much like an equal partner and sounding board to him. So I thought that couple was pretty cool. 

KIM: Yeah, she does the advertising for the business, and they have this lighthearted and fun banter between them, and they challenge each other mentally in a positive way. Unlike Eva, Nell balances being a wife and mother with this ease and confidence. I will say that that might partly be because they have the money to afford help and they have a different lifestyle because of it. They seemed like a thoroughly modern couple, though, for that time period. But even Nell, in the beginning, she has some doubts about Eva’s experience. She says that “women who have spent 15 to 20 years housekeeping are no good for anything else.”

AMY: I unfortunately think there are some bosses today who still feel that way. Kind of ludicrous, really, because if anything, motherhood should make a woman an asset to any company, right?

KIM: Definitely.

AMY: I mean, you have to be organized, you have to multi-task, manage definitely difficult personalities at times and trying situations. I personally feel like becoming a mom has made me even better at being more efficient and more focused, because I HAVE to be.

KIM:  Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it’s made me more efficient, a stronger personality. And I’ve heard some moms describe their job as being the CEO of their family, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement after experiencing it! So can we talk for a minute about how Eva kicks ass at her new job and she’s quickly promoted, so she’s blossoming at work.

AMY: It’s the opposite of Lester. And you feel so proud for her, right?

KIM: Oh, yeah. It’s like, okay, this is what she’s meant to be doing, and it’s amazing seeing her getting to use all the things that made her so miserable at home into something that makes her happy and successful and makes her customers happy, too. She still tells people, almost as an afterthought, but she says it over and over, how she hates to be away from the children. We know she’s not being genuine here but she feels like, for society’s sake, that she has to say that and that she’s supposed to feel that.

AMY: Which I can identify with because when my two kids were young, I really loved Sunday nights. Sunday nights were like what Friday nights were in my early 20s because after spending an entire weekend with children, you are absolutely exhausted and Monday morning would mean getting to go to work, sit still at a desk and think about something in a more adult sphere for eight hours. So work to me suddenly felt like a relaxing retreat! I could understand why Eva is sort of secretly reveling in getting to go to work.

KIM: I totally understand you now when you would tell me that. I have felt that, and when I was actually able to go into the office before Covid, I felt like I was going on vacation on some level. As much as I love being a mom and obviously love my baby, it is hard work — babies and toddlers especially are hard work. And just because we love our children doesn’t mean we have to love every single second of caring for them. It’s freeing to live in a time and place where we can admit that.

AMY: Amen and Hallelujah! I always sort of thought that women really didn’t find their place in the work world until WWII in America made that kind of a necessity, but when I was reading a little bit about this book, it seems like the idea of women going to work wasn’t necessarily considered outrageously radical in the 1920s. What WAS considered unthinkable, on the other hand, was for a man to stay home with the children. Which is what brings us back to Lester.

KIM: Okay, so this “Freaky Friday” situation has been great for Eva, but it’s actually equally good for poor Lester with time. He’s recovered a bit. He’s still wheelchair-bound; he’s still an invalid, but he’s actually capable of doing some of the housework and taking care of the kids and (surprise!) he LOVES it. He has time to do all the musing and ponderings his heart desires. He’s thinking poetically. And under his watch, the homelife of the entire family is thriving. Okay, so the house isn’t as clean as it was with Eva, but Eva’s too fulfilled in her new job to notice. He and the children are collaborating together to solve problems, they’re putting the newspaper down on the kitchen floor all day to keep the floors clean so all the miserable feelings that Eva had about the stuff dripping on the floor, they’ve just swept it away with an idea that actually came from the toddler. He has the time to provide the attention the children need. The whole family is even playing a card game together every night. Basically, their entire world is turned on its head, in a good way. Who would think that this family that we’ve been reading about is capable of having so much fun every night? So basically, dads can have their own ways of doing things. It’s not worse, it’s just different. So putting down the newspaper on the floor to keep it clean… it’s pretty smart, if you think about it. 

AMY: I thought that the egg-cracking scene between Helen and her dad was so adorable because they’re flying blind in the kitchen for the first time. Neither knew how to crack an egg, but they figured it out together and it was super cute. 

KIM: Yeah, to see Helen have confidence from that and actually gain it instead of being insecure. It was great! In my family, Eric is much more rough and tumble with Cleo, for example. The other day, he had her climbing up the back of the outdoor couch and up the pergola, and I was in hysterics practically, afraid she was going to fall down, but she’s learning this physical confidence, and she’s so happy. It blows my mind (and terrifies me) what she can do, and he brings that out in her, which is fantastic.

AMY: Yeah, dads can get it done, too. I mean, it’s like I’ll never forget, Kim, when you and I had that crazy deadline on our first two novels. I think we had three months to write one of the books from start to finish, and I, meanwhile, had a two-year-old and a nine-month old and a full-time job, and I had no idea how I was going to do it. So I turned to Mike and said, “Give me three days in this house without kids so that I can finish this.” And he packed some bags, hopped a flight to Northern California by himself with two babies to go visit his parents in Northern California, which to me is nothing short of a warrior because I get hives just thinking about taking two kids to the grocery store with me, so I don’t even know how he navigated that on his own. But he did!

KIM: I’ve never even taken Cleo to the grocery store because she hates the car seat, and I would be scared of taking one kid to do that, so yay, Mike, and also, yay, YOU! Oh my god, now that I have a baby, my mind is blown at all the stuff that you did, too, that I didn’t even realize how hard it was.

AMY: We did it though. You get through it, right?

KIM: Yep.

AMY: So getting back to The Homemaker, Lester’s presence at home as “Mr. Mom” has a dramatic effect on the children, as we’ve already mentioned, but particularly on little Stephen, who was described as this holy terror at the beginning of the book, but as we come to understand, through Lester’s eyes, we learn that this little boy has just been misunderstood all along.

KIM: So this is where we see a major plug for the Montessori philosophy that Canfield Fisher espoused. It has an experiential approach to learning. One day in the book, for example, when Lester and Stephen are home alone, Lester sees that Stephen is about to lose his temper. He’s just on that edge where he can see it’s going to go badly, and he decides to give him a little hand-held egg beater to try to figure out how it works. And this is an old-fashioned egg beater, not an electric egg beater. Stephen gets really into it. It magically diffuses his anger. It’s amazing. Basically, this part of the book really shows the idea of thinking of children as human, not just an extension of their family, and actually, it’s very emotional and moving.

AMY: I agree, especially when we’re reading the book from the children’s perspective. She shifts back and forth between Eva’s perspective, Lester’s perspective and then all three children. You get to see how this change in circumstances affects everyone differently. So at this point in the book, things are coming together so beautifully for the whole family. Eva is kicking butt at work, Lester is writing poetry, and the rest of the family are so happy with the new domestic arrangement. But, is it just me, or did you feel like Canfield-Fisher almost laid it on a little too thick?

KIM: Yes.In fact, that was one of the issues i had with the book from the very beginning. It does lean a little toward the melodramatic (or maybe a lot toward the melodramatic). Everything was utterly tragic and then they are all so enraptured by this new, idyllic existence.

AMY: All i know is, I could definitely picture millions of American housewives in the 1920s reading this book and saying, “Damn straight!” 

KIM: Oh yeah, can you imagine the dinner table conversations this book might have sparked in homes across America? 

AMY: Yes, probably intense, maybe not always good conversations. I do feel as though Canfield Fisher seems a little more sympathetic toward Lester in this book. Though Eva is celebrated, of course, as a wonderful career woman, she isn’t quite put up on a pedestal as much as Lester seems to be. Is that just me?

KIM: Yeah… I mean, really Lester comes out as the hero of the book, and so I wondered if maybe even with the feminist notions on display here, the simple fact that Eva wasn’t capable of nurturing her family in this traditional sense was still held against her on some level, even by the author herself? 

AMY: The Knapp family is operating like a well-oiled, happy machine, and right around this point is when I started to get like a sinking feeling in my stomach like, “Oh, no…  something’s going to happen. The other shoe is going to drop.”

KIM: Yeah, you see how many pages are left and it’s like, “Aagh!” And it actually really does drop, but maybe not in the way you might expect, which is interesting. We will not spoil it for you, but let’s just say that something happens that calls everything into question for the entire family, for Lester, Eva, and even the children.

AMY: This book kind of struck a chord with me right from the outset. Newsflash to everybody: I was laid-off from my job a few months ago. The magazine I was on staff with was a casualty of Coronavirus and, you know,  being laid-off really did, on the one hand, free me up to oversee the chaos of two kids at home trying to manage distance learning and dealing with the household, but at the same time, I now sort of find myself feeling kind of adrift in this limbo between stay-at-home mother (but not by choice necessarily) and someone who had had her own career for 25 years. I feel this weird little identity crisis, and the book appealed to me on that level because right now, cleaning the house feels like my new mandate in life basically.

KIM: I get it and I think a lot of women are in the same boat as you or at least feeling it. It seems like women’s careers are more likely to take the hit in this Covid Crisis. 

AMY: Yeah, I’ve read data on that and in terms of couples working from home, the women are still doing the bulk of the childcare. And, I mean, studies show that they did the bulk of it prior to the pandemic, as well. So yeah, women’s careers are under strain and are going to continue to be, and when it comes down to one parent having to leave their job to manage the fact that schools are not back in session, it’s predominantly the women who are walking away from their careers it seems like. The longer schools are closed, the more women will be forced to set  just aside their jobs for a while.

KIM: I mean, you’ve got to think that’s going to have lasting repercussions. 

AMY: And I think one of the reasons why women are the ones who by default are sort of having to leave their jobs is because their salary is not as high as their husband’s, and that’s another whole issue boiling down to pay disparities. So you’ve got to wonder what Dorothy Canfield Fisher would say about all this?

KIM: That’s an interesting question. Based on the theme of this book, though, I think her concern at the end of the day is about making sure that what’s done is in the best interest of children. So she didn’t see The Home-Maker as a feminist book, but she considered it to be more centered around the rights of children — that children ought to be listened to, respected and have their feelings affirmed.

AMY: That reminds me that there was one aspect of the book that I did take umbrage at when I was reading.

KIM: I think i can guess. Tell me.

AMY: So there’s this whole passage where Lester is sort of affirming his role at home (and congratulating himself on what a great job he’s doing, by the way) and he mentally notes that there’s no one who can raise a child better than its parent. I understand the root of that statement, but my experience is that my kids absolutely thrived in the care of someone else when I was working. They benefited from having exposure to someone else who also loved and cared for them. So I’m more in the “It takes a Village” camp, and I don't think working parents should ever feel like their kid is somehow being deprived or harmed in some way by not being raised by a primary parent during the day or during the work hours. If anything, I think it helps a child’s growth to have more than just the parents contributing.

KIM: Absolutely. I mean, if you hadn’t brought this up, I was going to bring it up too. I mean it affects a family, and it affects the entire society. That passage made my hackles rise too. It was a rough transition for me when I went back to work — you know this — but my daughter is so happy, and I think it’s great she is surrounded by several people who love her, not just my husband and I. Also, neither my husband nor I want to be (or would necessarily be good) full-time homemakers. 

AMY: So Universal actually made this book into a silent movie in 1925. I can’t really imagine it being a film now, but for the same reasons this book was such a conversation starter in the 1920s, I can understand how it must have been almost scandalous back then and would have made a pretty juicy movie. But it’s funny to think of the story being told without words. I have a feeling it was probably fully ridiculous.

KIM: Oh my gosh, I can completely picture it in full melodramatic glory in a silent film with dramatic music and captions. It’s perfect for that era. 

AMY: That said, in wrapping up our discussion about Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Home-Maker, what did we learn today?

KIM: Well, we learned that Old English Wood Polish is something a person can really get excited about.

AMY: Yes, that’s right! We learned that it’s okay to rage over housework.

KIM: We learned that dads, when given the opportunity, can really shine as parents. 

AMY: And we’ve learned that while women have come a long way when it comes to gender equality, we still have an awfully long way to go.

KIM: 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!

AMY: Speaking of, in our next episode, we’ll be discussing Simone Schwarz-Bart’s 1972 masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond, which spans three generations of women. 

KIM: Got 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 makes a difference!

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Dorothy Canfield Fisher 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]

8. Gossip & Heartbreak in the Letters of Emily Eden

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES [co-host]: Hi everyone! We’re back with another “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW [co-host]: And I’m Kim Askew. So, we use our phones these days for just about everything, including listening to this podcast. And technology is amazing in all of these different ways, but I do think it’s kind of turned the practice of letter writing into a lost art. Amy, when’s the last time you put pen to paper and really wrote a letter to someone?

AMY: It’s been a while, for sure. I do still like to write thank you notes when I can, but I have to admit, even that tends to slip, especially these days when you can just send a text or email. However, I am trying to teach my kids the importance of hand-written thank yous. I used to write to friends who lived in other cities back before email was commonplace, but (Oh my gosh, that’s dating me, right? Geesh.) But I only have a few of those letters saved. I never hung onto most of them.

KIM: Okay, so I’m on the same page. I’m really big on thank you notes, too, but since I had my daughter, I’m a little bit guilty of letting them slip up. Though I spend a lot of time feeling guilty when I could have probably just sent the thank you notes instead. But anyway, lesson learned. But as for the letters, I have a box full of letters that I’ve treasured for years. I have some old love letters, I have some letters from my grandmothers and from childhood friends. We moved a lot when I was a kid, so I have a lot of letters from friends, and I really do miss corresponding with people in that way. There was something really special about that.

AMY: Yeah, for sure, and I could see how back in the day, receiving a letter would have been so thrilling. That sort of connection to the outside world was so important. So, the last “lost lady” that we featured on this show, Emily Eden, she published a book of her letters from India while she lived, and after she died, another book of her letters (both those she wrote and received) from her younger days ended up getting published as well. So I’m not really always too keen on reading collections of other people’s letters. I think you have to know so much context, often, and there’s usually a lot of references to places and people and events that, if you’re not familiar with, you can kind of get lost. But I know that is the sort of thing historians love to pore over.

KIM: Yeah, that’s true, I think, typically, you might look at a letter to get some special information, but you don’t necessarily want to read the whole book… unless it’s somebody like Madame de Sevigne (I don’t know if I’m pronouncing her name right) but I love her letters to her daughters and friends. They’re really witty, and they have takes on the scandals of the day, from her privileged “courtside” view, and by “courtside,” I mean the actual court of France. That said, I know you were checking out Eden’s Letters in recent weeks in anticipation of maybe talking about them. What did you find? Did you find anything interesting in there?

AMY: Yeah, it’s definitely kind of that “slice of life” look into somebody’s existence, and I loved that in the case of Emily’s letters you could see her lighthearted, sometimes sarcastic personality on display, but we definitely got to see a sense of humor in the letters that I read. These were mostly letters from when she was a late teen and in her twenties. So for example,  at the age of 17, she wrote to one of her sisters — the family had just found out this friend had gotten engaged to marry Lord Byron, and the whole family was in a tizzy — and she wrote to her sister that the friend… “does not seem to be acting with her usual good sense, is Mama’s opinion, as by all accounts Lord Byron is not likely to make any woman very happy.” 

KIM: That’s, like, the understatement of the year, probably. I love how understatedly funny that is and probably how true from what we know about Lord Byron and his love life. I also love that they have an acquaintance engaged to Lord Byron. I mean, they can gossip about him and actually really have real gossip about somebody they know. It’s perfect. I love that.

AMY: Yeah. And since she was kind of in the upper social spheres in England, she did have these kind of VIP friends. But in another instance, she writes about a man she calls “Rogers the Poet” who came to call on the family one morning. And she says: “I never saw such a satirical, odious wretch, and I was calculating the whole time, from what he was saying of other people, what he could find ill-natured enough to say of us. I had never seen him before and trust I never shall again. Your most affection, E. Eden.”

KIM: Okay, that’s hilarious too, and I love that it brings up the idea of she’s talking about other people, but they’re probably talking about her, too, and she gets that. I would guess, and you would know, was this letter published after her death, maybe? One of the ones after her death?

AMY: Yeah, for sure. These letters didn’t come out until 1919, well after her death. They were put together by her great niece, who was named Violet Dickinson, who, incidentally, was a good friend of Virginia Woolf’s. But despite writing about sort of trivial things like dresses and neighborhood gossip, Emily also has some poignant sections in this collection of letters and sections that definitely I could tell informed her novels. We read The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple, and there are lots of incidents in the letters that you can see directly parlayed into plotlines from the novels. One example of that is after her brother’s wife gave birth, (this is kind of sad, actually), the baby, she says, was not expected to live, and she was writing to a friend to pass this sad information along. So, in the first letter, she basically says that after seeing what her sister-in-law went through, (or hearing about what her sister-in-law went through) she had no inclination whatsoever to ever have kids. She writes: “What a horrid piece of work a lying-in is! I am more and more confirmed in the idea that a life of single blessedness is the wisest, even accompanied, as Shakespeare mentions, by the necessity of chanting faint hymns to the cold lifeless [fruitless] moon, which, as I have no voice, rather discomposes me.” 

So she’s relaying sad news, but she kind of has a little sense of humor when she’s talking about that she never wants to have babies.

KIM: Yeah, and what a great person to correspond with! Clever, witty, poetic… she quotes Shakespeare in her explanation. But it also seems like she’s very honest, which is really great, too. And I also have to say, I would have been terrified to give birth in those days too, so I can really, you know, feel empathetic. 

AMY: Yeah. And sadly, in her next letter to her friend, Eden reports that the infant has passed. And I’m going to read that section, because it’s quite moving. She says: “Dearest Theresa, you will have heard before this that all is over. I could not write sooner, and I knew you would hear. To the last, the poor dear child’s sufferings were dreadful and she never had one moment’s consciousness. Lord Grantham arrived at the moment she expired. I wrote to him on Saturday to say he had better come, or rather, to ask him if he did not think so, and he came off instantly and I am so glad now, for you have no idea of the good effect it had on Mr. R [who was her brother]. Poor Sarah [the mother] surprised me more than anybody. She cried a great deal, but was perfectly reasonable in her grief and has fortunately taken the turn of feeling that it is only by her exertions her poor husband can be supported at all. And she kept repeating all the morning how much worse her calamity might have been, that at all events, she had him left and ought not to repine. She thanked sister and, in short, nothing could be better than her conduct. All hours come to an end at last. All griefs find or make a place for themselves.

So sad, you know! 

KIM: Really sad.

AMY: And people went through this all the time. It’s a reminder of how people lived back in that era. But moving on to a lighter topic, as we mentioned last week, Eden is an author who’s frequently compared to Jane Austen, and that reminded me that actually, last month, a version of Pride and Prejudice that relates to today’s topic of letters.

KIM: Oh, right, yes! So Barbara Heller, who is actually a Hollywood set decorator for film and television productions, she put this book together for Chronicle Books, which of course, always puts out these beautiful works of art in their own right. We love Chronicle Books. So the book itself is the full text of the novel along with 19 letters that are “handwritten” by Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennett and other characters in the story. How cool is that?

AMY: Yeah. The letters, with all the appropriate postmarks, etc, and they are dropped into these actual little envelope pouches within the pages of the book at the appropriate points in the story. They looked really authentic, I checked it out on Amazon to sort of see how it was all packaged. Apparently Heller and the calligraphers she worked with really studied archives of actual English correspondence from that time period to make sure that the handwriting examples would be spot-on. 

KIM: Ooh, I love that. And then she also even includes letters that are original material created by her, by Heller, and they are made to sound as though Austen’s characters would have written them. So it’s like you get some additional work from the characters that Jane Austen didn’t write but Heller has taken it upon herself to add to this, which is really cool.

AMY: Yeah, and I wondered what kind of task that was for her, you know, to add something into Pride and Prejudice? That’s quite a burden, I think, to tackle! 

KIM: That’s some confidence, to be able to do that.

AMY: Yes. There’s actually an article in the September issue of Smithsonian magazine that explains in more detail what went into making the book. And they interview Heller. She talks about creating some of that new content and says that it was “completely agonizing,” because she felt like she was “adding words to a beloved classic.” So I guess she did feel the pressure. 

KIM: Okay.

AMY: But, she apparently had help from two of her sisters (both of whom were also Austen fans), and so, as a trio, they kind of collaborated to come up with these “new” letters, which somehow, that feels very Austen appropriate to me, you know… a trio of sisters sweating over this. She mentioned that some of the lines they used for this new material were actually taken from Austen’s own personal letters, so they had some source material to work with and finesse. 

KIM: That’s so great. One, I want to read the book, and two, I’m nerding out, because I’m like, “Wow, it would be really cool to be mentioned in Smithsonian magazine.” That’s really cool. We’re going to have to link to that in our show notes, if they have it online, which I’m sure they do as well. So, that sounds like such a cute gimmick, and this would be an amazing gift. I’m going to note down that that’s something that I want to consider giving for the holidays. And apparently, Heller is going to be putting out a similar edition of Little Women, soon. Wow! She’s got a great thing going there.

AMY: Yeah! She could keep going with this. I mean, you could do a lot of books. 

KIM: Needless to say, the protagonist at the center of our next podcast had no time to be writing letters.

AMY: No, she didn’t sadly!

KIM: She was too busy scrubbing floors and screaming at her children!

AMY: Aww! [laughing] Poor Evangeline! She’s the heroine of The Home-Maker which actually was one of the top ten bestselling novels of 1924. It was written by the American author and activist, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who is our next “lost lady of lit.”

KIM: Okay, get ready: Anyone who has ever felt angst-ridden and miserable about housework and the gender inequity associated with it will find themselves deeply understood while reading this book.

AMY: I’m raising my hand… high.

KIM: Yes, I know. I’m raising my hand too, even though I said that. Yes. While I was reading it, I was thinking, “Uh-huh… uh-huh… uh-huh.” I could think of a few things today that happened that would check off the boxes for that.

AMY: But yes, we will be venting about that. Be sure to check in with us next week when we “dust off,” this classic, no pun intended. 

KIM: I obviously can’t wait for this one. So for more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, please leave a review. It really helps new listeners find us!

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

7. Emily Eden - The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

EPISODE 7: Emily Eden (The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House)

AMY HELMES: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every Jane Austen fan wishes she could find more books in the vein of Jane Austen.

KIM ASKEW: They say you can never have too much of a good thing, right? So you can imagine how excited we were when we stumbled upon a little known (to us anyway) author who has been described as the19th century’s answer to Jane Austen… with a bit of Anthony Trollope thrown in, to boot.

AMY: Sounds like the perfect subject matter for this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit,” the podcast about history’s forgotten female writers. Whether we’re introducing you to a new author or simply reminding you of one you always meant to get around to reading, our aim is to make sure these talented women don’t get overlooked. I’m Amy Helmes, and this is my pal and longtime writing partner, Kim Askew.

KIM: Hi, everyone. I can’t wait to discuss today’s “Lost Lady”: Emily Eden.

AMY: That name sounds so modern, doesn’t it, Kim? As if she should pop up in my email contacts, or, like she could be somebody I went to high school with maybe. And I wish I HAD known her in high school, because here’s a perfect example of an author I never knew existed, and as soon as I started reading her most well-known books, The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple, I thought,  “Why did it take this long for me to find out about her?” 

KIM: And that’s become a recurring theme for us, that broken-record question which basically prompted us to start this podcast in the first place. We wanted to shout these ladies’ names from the rooftops, but we thought a podcast seems like a safer place to start.

AMY: Whenever I stumble upon some new-to-me, but generally forgotten female writer, I tend to feel a little annoyed that I’ve been denied all this time.

KIM: Yeah, but isn’t it also a little exhilarating to discover somebody like Emily Eden? It’s like finding buried treasure!

AMY: True. And better late than never in this case, for sure. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

KIM: We’re guessing Emily Eden is as unknown to most of you as she was to us. Amy, what do we know about her?

AMY: Well, she’s officially known as “The Honorable Emily Eden,” because she comes from a high-ranking British family at the turn of the 19th century. Her father, William, was a diplomat… he spent time in America and Ireland, and he was a minister at the court of Versailles. (Can you imagine?)

KIM: Wow.

AMY: He was also an ambassador to Spain and Holland, and because of all that, he was given a peerage in 1789 which resulted in the title Baron of Auckland.

So by the time Emily was born in 1797, her parents had settled back on their estate in Kent called Eden Farm. Her father devoted his time to politics, and her mother was busy rearing children (she had 14 total). Eden’s mother was said to be very cheerful with a great sense of humor, which is a trait she clearly passed on to her daughter. We see a lot of humor in her books. Emily was also tutored at home by governesses, which means she was extremely well-educated, and you see that on display with all of the literary and historical references she liberally sprinkles throughout her writing.

KIM: Yeah, it’s interesting that her novels are compared to Jane Austen, because her family was actually involved in the sort of romantic scandal that one might find in an Austen novel. 

AMY: And since we all love a good scandal, I will quickly explain that one: so Eden’s older sister, Eleanor, was the subject of intense public scrutiny when it was rumored that she was going to marry Prime Minister William Pitt, but when their relationship went public, Pitt actually denied having ever proposed to Eleanor, and that sparked her father’s fury, naturally. Eleanor wound up marrying an Earl instead, so she turned out okay, but the prime minister never married…and it was said that Eden’s sister — the one that got away — was the one true love of his life.

KIM: Wow, this really does sound like a novel, and it would be so interesting to know what the real story was there. So clearly, Emily had some fodder to inspire the romantic scandals she writes about later on in life. 

And that wasn’t the only novel-worthy event in her life — not at all. After their parents’ death, Emily and her younger sister, Fanny, ended up “setting up house” for their bachelor brother, George. So when he became governor general of India in 1835, the two sisters went with him, embarking on a five-month sailing voyage to India. Emily was 39 years old at the time when she arrived, and she called it “a hot land of strangers.”  She was always a little homesick and she really did not LOVE it there (she felt very out of her element as you might imagine), but she also managed to have this keen interest in her surroundings and the goings on, and she wrote down everything she observed in her trademark witty writing style. 

AMY: She said that their residence in India looked like “a palace out of Arabian Nights.” They received so much attention there and lived a very lavish existence, hosting weekly “open houses” and balls, and they also traveled throughout India for months at a time in a procession of camels, elephants, horses, carriages and foot soldiers and that way they were able to see a great deal of the country. So when she finally returned to England six years later in 1842, Eden published a book called Portraits of the People and Princes of India, as well as a collection of letters from her time in India, both of which were massive successes.

There’s a well-researched book that delves deeper into Eden’s time in India written by Jagmohan Mahajan called The Grand Indian Tour: Travels and Sketches of Emily Eden, which really captures that era in history, and we’ll link to to that in our show notes in case anyone is interested in reading more.

Eden also was an accomplished amateur artist. She did some amazing sketches and paintings from her time in India, and those are actually still on display at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. We’ll link to slides of her artwork as well. 

KIM: That all sounds worth checking out, for sure. It goes without saying that Eden had a lot of experience in society, hob-nobbing with influential, aristocratic people. She was very familiar with and extremely engaged in British politics, despite not having the right to vote herself. (And we see politics enter the plotline of her book Semi-Attached Couple.) She was a pretty renown political hostess for her party (the Whig party) and most of her friends were members of the upper class. 

AMY: So now that’s a pretty striking difference between her and Austen. Austen’s father was a middle-class clergyman who came from a much more modest social sphere. Yet like Austen, Eden’s writing focuses a lot on class, and social standings and snobbery. Not surprisingly, Jane Austen (whose books were published when Emily was a young woman) was her favorite author. 

KIM: Unlike Austen, Eden was financially independent, so she didn’t NEED to write to earn a living, she did it out of pure passion. Yet interestingly enough, Eden was similar to Austen in that she never married. Serving as “hostess” for her single brother, in her 30s and early 40s, however, did allow her to have the sort of domestic/household management role that married women of the day would have undertaken. So she was, in fact, “lady of the house” as an adult.

AMY: So Kim, apparently some people hoped that Emily would have ended up being the second wife of British prime minister William Lamb after his wife Caroline died. So I guess there was a possibility that she could have married. He was close friends with Eden, and folks thought they might end up together, but she said she was not interested because she found him “bewildering” and she was shocked by his profanity. Oh goodness! Honestly, when I was reading Semi-Attached Couple, in particular, there were moments when I thought to myself that Eden really didn’t seem to like men very much. Her portrayal of them in this book was none too flattering at times.

KIM: Yes, which we’ll circle back to later in our discussion. So while she may have chosen a life of spinsterhood, she was happy living with her brother and sister, until they both died, within three months of one another, in 1849. This was a moment of true grief for Eden, and her health deteriorated quite a bit after that, in part stemming from some chronic conditions from her time in India. She was very frail, physically, for the next 20 years, and rarely left her house. She died in 1869 at the age of 72. She seemed to live quite a life.

AMY: Yeah, absolutely.

KIM: So, let’s dive into the books! The Semi-Attached Couple was written at the tail end of the Regency Period, in 1829, and The Semi-Detached House was written some 30 years later. However, Semi-Detached House was PUBLISHED a year before Semi-Attached Couple, which ended up throwing Amy and I into a bit of a comedy of errors as we were preparing for this episode. 

AMY: Not the first time this has happened, by the way.

KIM: No, and not the last time either, I’m sure. So to spare you, our listener, any similar confusion, we should note that it doesn’t matter which of the books you read first. Despite the similarity of their titles, they have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. They can be read in any order.

AMY: When Virago Modern Classics republished these two books in 1982, 

 which stated: “The only thing more gratifying to find than a good book is a good book which has been neglected. “The Semi-Attached Couple,” written in 1829, published in 1860, popular for years, then largely forgotten, is a comic gem about how difficult it can be to get used to being married, even if you are young and beautiful and your husband is rich and titled. ….”

KIM: Oh, yes. And  I think the best way to describe these two novels is that they’re what happens after the “happily ever after” in a Jane Austen novel. Only the “happily ever after” part is suddenly up for serious debate.

AMY: So these two books basically pick up just after a typical Austen novel would have ended, with young women who are brand new wives and who aren’t at all sure (or happy) about the future. And in the case of Semi-Attached Couple, it really gets kind of dark! We’re introduced to Helen and Lord Teviot (which, think Mr. Darcy for Lord Teviot basically)... and just prior to the nuptials, Helen confides to her sister in an early chapter that she is having some second thoughts about marrying him! The book reads: “She had accepted Lord Teviot on an acquaintance of very few weeks, and that carried on solely in a ball-room or at a breakfast. …. She found every day some fresh cause to doubt whether she were as happy engaged to Lord Teviot, as she was before she had ever seen him.”

KIM: Oh boy. “Houston, we have a problem!” When you think about it, though, how courtships worked during this time period, it’s no wonder she felt this way. Couples were pretty much never given any time alone together. It was all formalities until right up to the wedding day. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s really a pretty stilted way to get to know anyone. I mean, thank god we live in a different time period. Anyway, Helen realizes it would be a disaster (and frankly not even a viable option) to call off the wedding, so she goes through with it, but she and her new husband end up having a number of very testy exchanges in the first few weeks of marriage, which become increasingly vicious. We’re told that they are both at fault. Helen is a bit too reserved and withholding in her affections — she comes across as cold to Lord Teviot. On the other hand, he has this sort of over-the-top adulation of her that she finds a turnoff, and when she doesn’t respond in the way he wants, he just gets angry. Kim, did you find yourself landing more on “Team Helen” or “Team Teviot”?

KIM: Great question, and I must say, probably no surprise, I landed on the side of Team Helen. Teviot had this unchecked temper, and he knew it, too! He basically drives Helen to distraction. He’s really jealous of her family and her friends. I feel like she keeps trying to connect with him, but he’s too busy being SUPER dramatic and self-involved to get it. 

AMY: It’s almost like Mr. Darcy in reverse, you know? He starts off looking great on paper and then all of a sudden he’s a jerk.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: He just seems like a selfish whiner to me, really. I didn’t like his hostility one bit, but I also kept thinking, “How on earth is Eden going to manage to turn things around for this couple? How is this even going to be possible?”

KIM: Teviot’s idea for smoothing things over is to invite a large retinue of houseguests to come visit… 

AMY: Because misery loves company, I guess.

KIM: In this case, absolutely. So a collection of both his friends and Helen’s friends and family arrive for this extended stay at their grand estate. Their presence does lighten Helen’s mood to a degree because she’s feeling homesick and I think it also is a bit of a buffer from Teviot’s MOODS, but it also stirs up even more drama, thanks to the presence of the fantastically bitchy Lady Portmore.

AMY: All right, she is probably my favorite character in the book, despite the fact that she’s completely hateable. She really ranks right up there with Austen’s Miss Bingley, Mrs. Elton, and Mary Crawford, don’t you think?

KIM: For sure. She’s downright insulting to everyone except her favorites — these gentlemen whom she claims all harbor secret obsessions with her. 

AMY: Of course, right?

KIM: Yes, of course. She’s also a narcissist to a comical degree. Eden writes: “One of the odd channels scooped out by Lady Portmore’s restless vanity was a persuasion that she was the world’s universal confidante; and she would enter into long arguments to prove that she must necessarily have foreknown any piece of intelligence or gossip that was imparted to her. Like all very vain people, she was contradictory; and this, added to her pretensions to universal knowledge, rendered her conversation a glorious mass of inconsistencies. 

   “I have heaps of news,” she said one morning when she came down to breakfast. “I dote upon letters, particularly from clever people, though it is a sad thing for me having the reputation of a good letter-writer to keep up. You know there is no vanity in saying so, for my letters are very original.”

AMY: Uggh. She’s just insufferable. And though she really doesn’t help matters when it comes to the Teviots’ faltering marriage, she’s kind of a paper tiger in that most people tend to just roll their eyes at her in the book. But one of the best scenes is when a woman named Mrs. Douglas, a character who comes from a lower social stratum, basically manages to run verbal circles around her. It was, like, a Regency-era mic drop moment if ever there was one.

KIM: I loved that exchange! And Lady Portmore isn’t the only person in the house party causing problems. There are two other unattached young ladies and three young men, and the men are this annoying combination of pointedly rude and narcissistically oblivious. 

AMY: One note I ended up jotting down was: “Men are jerks!” That’s simple enough. That was my take-away. So Eliza, who is Mrs. Douglas’s daughter, has a mad crush on Helen’s cousin, Colonel Beaufort, but he can’t be bothered to even remember her name. While she is repeating in her mind every obscure detail from the conversations they have had, Eden writes, “Little did she know that the ungrateful creature had dismissed from his mind all the conversations that had ever passed between them….. So it will be when young, ignorant girls fall in love as, I grieve to say, they often do with blasés men of the world.”

KIM: Yeah, so Eden really doesn’t manage to draw her male characters as well as she does her females. And there’s also an occasional problem with the perspectives in this book. Every now and then we were thrust into the first-person narrative of Helen’s maid. It was really distracting, and perhaps it was the fault of the edition we wound up reading on Kindle.

AMY: Yeah, it felt like it needed one more editorial pass, maybe.

KIM: Mmm-hmm. In any case, getting back to the story: Lord Teviot ends up being called away to Lisbon to take care of some matters, which only deepens the chasm that’s growing between him and his wife. During this time, there’s a bit of political intrigue that takes place amongst several characters who are running for parliament — it’s pretty funny — and this is where Eden’s interest in politics takes center stage.

AMY: You’d think this might be a dry section of the book, but I actually found it pretty interesting, especially in the build-up to our own presidential election this fall. There’s a nastiness in this depiction that I found quite familiar.

KIM: By the time we circle back to the drama between Helen and Lord Teviot, he is being brought back to England having fallen ill and fighting for his very life! Helen naturally rushes to his side. Enter the literary trope of the “high-tempered man turned helpless.”

AMY: Kept thinking of Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, there, of course. 

KIM: Yep. Exactly.

AMY: Meanwhile, all the other young singletons are slowly falling into the matches they are supposed to end up in. And there’s no real surprise to the ending, but I’ll admit, I was satisfied with how Eden wraps things up… especially since earlier in the book I didn’t see how ANY of the men deserved a happy ending. So we’ve already kind of noted the similarities to Austen, obviously... 

KIM: But I also found a lot of parallels to George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, too. Semi-Attached Couple reminded me of a much lighter Middlemarch in that Helen and Teviot have such clashing personalities a la Dorothea and Casaubon and Lydgate and Rosamund. And then Semi-Detached House, meanwhile, reminded me of a much lighter The Way We Live Now, in that they both involve a financial scandal and the schemy Baron and Baroness are a little bit similar to Trollope’s Melmottes. 

AMY: Speaking of Semi-Detached House, let’s jump on over to that one. I think if I had to choose which of these two books I liked better, it might be this one. It’s just kind of fluffy and fun for the most part. 

KIM: Yeah, I actually really enjoyed them both, but I felt the same way about Semi-Detached House. It ended up being my favorite, especially the second half, because I feel like it really found its feet. There were certain characters I really loved, and I thought the subplot was a little more intriguing than in House. 

AMY: Yeah. So class divisions are even more of a focus in Semi-Detached House. We start off, once again, with a relatively new bride, Blanche, a.k.a. “Lady Chester” who finds herself on her own and pregnant when her husband, Arthur, is called away on a mission to Berlin. So Arthur arranges for her  to live in a semi-detached house while he’s away, rather than on their grand estate, and Blanche is certain that this new living arrangement is going to be a nightmare. She has this sarcastic vision of how bad it’s going to be, and all her forecasts prove absolutely correct, but she winds up, at every turn, being surprisingly delighted by the horrors she imagined. 

KIM: Yes, her “semi-detached” neighbors, whom she imagines are going to be so awful, are all in a tizzy when they hear that Pleasance, the name of the main residence, is going to have a new tenant. It kind of reminded me of the Bennett family’s exclamations that “Netherfield Park is let at last!” in Pride and Prejudice. But there’s a little comedy of errors that happens (one of several throughout the book, in fact) when they mistakenly come to believe that Blanche is some sort of fallen woman. There are a lot of these snafus that happen that are hilarious.

AMY: Yes, to me it kept feeling like some 19th century episode of “Three’s Company,” but once the misunderstandings are all cleared up, Blanche takes a real liking to these solidly suburban neighbors, the Hopkinsons, and despite the fact that they would not normally be welcome into the same social circles she usually keeps, she takes the two daughters, Janet and Rose and their little cousin Charlie, who is an invalid, under her wing. 

KIM: Of course, this doesn’t sit well with THIS book’s social-climbing “mean girl,” Baroness Sampson.

AMY: And what a piece of work she is. Whew! The unfortunate part, though, is that Eden’s portrayal of the Baroness and her husband is unmistakably anti-Semitic.

KIM: Yeah, and, sadly, casual anti-semitism is the case with all too many books from that era, and then again, all the way through the Victorian era as well..  

AMY: Yeah, it’s disappointing, but just a head’s up that this part of the book will, and should, offend the modern reader. 

KIM: Yes. Though I did really like the redeeming member of the Baron and Baroness’s household: their niece, Rachel. For one, she quotes Shakespeare constantly (which annoys the Baroness to no end ) and she ends up being a bit of a secondary heroine of the novel. Of course, the Baron and Baroness get their comeuppance in the end. 

And meanwhile Blanche ends up helping Janet and Rose have a “happily ever after” with the men of their dreams, despite the concerns of her aunt who says: “My dear Blanche, I hope you are not going to turn match-maker; of all the dangerous manufacturies in the world, that is the worst, and the most unsatisfactory.” 

AMY: By the way, I’d like to point out, Kim, that I learned a new word from this book:

KIM: Okay, what is it?

AMY: “Spoony.” Did you know what that word meant when you were reading it?

KIM: No, I actually didn’t know what it meant, but I wondered if it had something to do with spooning?

AMY: No, actually. I looked it up and it’s derived from this carved wooden spoon that, in Welsh customs, a man would present to his fiance. So, a bit of 19th century British slang there. 

KIM: Weird.

AMY: So one character no one seems to be “spoony” about in this novel is Janet and Rose’s brother-in-law, Willis, who is SO TEDIOUS to be around, and yet I couldn’t help but love the guy. He is a widower who is just completely over-the-top in his grief, which is really a surprisingly funny thing to get to laugh at. 

KIM: Eden writes about him: “He had a passion for being a victim; when he was single, he grumbled for a wife, and when he had found a wife, he grumbled for the comforts of a bachelor. He grumbled for an heir to Columbia Lodge, and when the heir was born, he grumbled because the child was frail and sickly. In short, he fairly grumbled poor gentle Mrs. Willis out of the world, and then grumbled at her for dying.” 

AMY: So he actually ends up besotted with this woman who does not return the favor, and there’s this really funny scene where he asks for her hand in marriage and she basically does a spit-take of laughter. I loved that part of the book.

KIM: Yeah, that was hilarious.

AMU: But what happens to them by the ending is actually a somewhat unusual ending, but we won’t give that part away to you.

KIM: No we don’t want to say what happened, but I would agree it is pretty unusual. Blanche and Arthur end up moving back to their grand estate, and they end their time at the semi-detached house, though Blanche says, “It is a pity that Chesterton is not semi-detached…. A semi-detached castle would be lovely.”  

AMY: Yeah, so sweet!

KIM: A happy ending. So Amy, do you think the comparisons between Emily Eden and Austen are just?

AMY: Well, I don’t know. Do Eden’s novels measure up to Austen in terms of the sheer talent on the page? Definitely not, no. But I think these books are really a nice little nibble for anyone who loves Jane Austen and tales from that time frame. They’re really charming in their own way, and it’s really clear that Eden was a true fan of her predecessor. 

KIM: She obviously read Austen many times over, and she even references Austen’s novels in her books. They are a very light and enjoyable read. Highly recommended. But given the fact that Eden isn’t very well known to contemporary readers, it’s not that surprising there haven’t been any adaptations that we could find. I would actually love to see Andrew Davies take on either of these… his version of Sanditon, which debuted on PBS this year… I don’t know?

AMY: Yeah, I think he’d be up for the task. And Sanditon, by the way? Oh my gosh, we need to take a moment and talk about that, because it is so good in a trashy sort of way! There are not many highlights of 2020, but for me, Sanditon is one. And I know not everyone is keen on the whole idea of “sexing up Austen,” which is what he basically does in this TV series, but I, for one, am here for it. 

KIM: I was hanging on to every moment. Totally into it. And I think considering that we took some liberties with Shakespeare in our Twisted Lit YA series, we obviously aren’t going to be the ones to be offended by someone getting creative with a classic work of literature. So go, Andrew Davies! 

AMY: I remember watching Episode One and practically falling off the sofa at what I was seeing and then immediately texting all my Austen-loving friends, including you, Kim.

KIM: Oh, I remember that text. You’ve got to at least watch the first episode of this.

AMY: Watch the first episode and decide if it’s for you or not, but it’s… it’s… I liked it.

KIM: So moving off of that, what, if anything, have we learned from today’s episode?

AMY: Well, first off, we learned that whiny man-babies CAN be redeemed in literature simply by having a near-death experience. 

KIM: I think that’s great. We need more of those. We learned a new word for stupidly-smitten: “spoony.”

AMY: We learned that the bitchiest characters are almost always the best.

KIM: Uh-huh. No offense to heroines, but yep. And we learned that when you run out of Jane Austen books to read, Emily Eden is a fun follow-up.

AMY: So 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! 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 makes a difference.

[start closing music]

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Emily Eden 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.

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone. Special thanks, as well, to Harriet Grant for our logo design. See you next time!

[closing music.]

6. If Books Could Talk

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM: Hi, and welcome to this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episode. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes.

KIM: Today’s episode is all about the latest films and TV shows inspired by books. The ones we’re looking forward to, anyway.

AMY: Ooh, I love it. Netflix is in our wheelhouse right now, because they are certainly keeping us entertained with, for example, the Enola Holmes movie, which came out last month. That starred Millie Bobbie Brown as Sherlock Holmes’ younger sister, and Helena Bonham Carter plays her missing mother, whom Enola is on a mission to track down.  

KIM: And this was based off “The Enola Holmes Mysteries,” which is a YA series by Nancy Springer. I haven’t read it, but I am very interested now. The director on this also was a director on “Fleabag,” which Amy loves, and we’ve talked about in a prior episode as well.

AMY: So yeah, Millie Bobbie Brown is constantly talking to the camera and it’s just a really clever premise and a cute execution. I definitely gave this one a thumbs up.

KIM: Another Netflix movie slated for release on Oct. 21 is Rebecca. This one is featuring Lily James as the second Mrs. De Winter, Armie Hammer as Max De Winter and Kristen Scott Thomas as the dreaded Mrs. Danvers. This is from the producers of Atonement. 

AMY: Ooh, that’s good casting!

KIM: Yeah, really good casting. It’s an adaptation of the 1938 Gothic novel by Daphne DuMaurier.

AMY: And I don’t think that I’ve ever seen an adaptation of Rebecca. I know that Alfred Hitchcock did the movie first, but I don’t think I’ve  seen it. Actually, no…  I did watch a miniseries version that was in the late 1990s because Diana Rigg, who just passed away, she played Mrs. Danvers in it.

KIM: Yeah, the trailer for the new Rebecca looks really good. The sets and scenery are gorgeous. It looks like the kind of thing we’d love. And Kirsten Scott Thomas is always great. And then there’s Armie Hammer, who I love, and he’s going to be Max DeWinter, so I’m excited to see it.

AMY: It looks good. I love that time period, too, like the thirties. 

KIM: So good, so good… the clothes!

AMY: I’m in. Now, Kim, I know you are way more into sci-fi novels than I am. Did you read Frank Herbert’s Dune?

KIM: No, this is embarrassing, but I’m one of the many people who started that book, but never finished it. I did watch, at one point when I was a kid, the original adaptation from 1984. It had Sting in it, but I’m also really excited for the new movie version starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya.

AMY: Yeah, but ooh, Sting! That sounds good! I know, don’t feel bad. I didn’t read it at all. It feels like one of those books that you’re supposed to read but I have a feeling a lot of people are in the same … isn’t it a really fat, fat book?

KIM: It’s really, really long and it’s known for being a book that people never end up reading.

AMY: Then maybe it’s good there’s a movie coming out, because we can all just take the shortcut. And it actually looks pretty intense and exciting. I kind of got a Star Wars vibe, but like, a more complex, dramatic, darker Star Wars, I guess.

KIM: The original director who was going to direct the movie version before the Sting version, he ended up inspiring… and some of his people, his team, actually worked on Star Wars, so there’s a big connection there.

AMY: Oh, cool. So I wasn’t off the mark there.

KIM: Not at all.

AMY: I have not been hitting movie theaters, but if I was, I would certainly have gone to see The Personal History of David Copperfield starring Dev Patel, and also featuring Hugh Laurie, Ben Whishaw and Tilda Swinton. I did see that it was briefly at a drive-in movie theater here, and I contemplated, “Okay, could Kim and I drive to the theater in two separate cars, park next to each other, sit on our hoods or the top of the cars and somehow watch it together?” But we never got our act together, obviously, to do that. It could have been fun, though. 

KIM: I love the dream of us going to the drive-in in separate cars. Maybe it will happen at some point.

AMY: Charles Dickens at a drive-in seems so anachronistic and weird.

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: It could have been fun.

KIM: It would have been. And maybe we’ll still do something like that. But I love everyone in the new David Copperfield so I’m really excited for that. It makes me think, though, of the one from 1999, where Daniel Radcliffe (this was before Harry Potter) played the young David and Maggie Smith was Betsey Trotwood. Do you remember that?

AMY: I do, because weirdly, around that time there were TWO David Copperfields that came out. There was that one that you just mentioned and then there was another one that was on some TV network. It starred Hugh Dancy as David, but then Michael Richards (who is “Seinfeld’s” Kramer) played Mr. Micawber, and Sally Field was Betsey Trotwood! It was the weirdest casting. I kind of liked the movie, but I remember thinking at the time thinking, “Why are there so many David Copperfields coming out?” It’s such an odd thing to suddenly have a glut of. But when it rains, it pours, I guess. I’m not going to complain about that, ever. I’ll always take a Dickens movie.

KIM: That makes me think of the year there were two adaptations of Dangerous Liaisons, and I love both of them, so I was glad that happened too. But back to Dickens, I digress… do you have a favorite Dickens film adaptation? Because I think we both know mine. The Bleak House mini-series with Gillian Anderson, and it is, hands-down, my favorite. I will be watching it forever. In fact, I’ll probably be watching it after we record this podcast.

AMY: Yeah, I knew you were going to say that one! It was so good! And actually, what’s interesting is that Anna Maxwell Martin, who played the lead character of Esther in that movie, she is also in the latest David Copperfield! Her name popped up there. If I was going to pick a Dickens movie, I think I would pick the one with Ioan Gruffudd and Justine Waddell…

KIM: Oh yeah, right, in Great Expectations.

AMY: Yeah, they were, to me, the perfect Pip and Stella. But I also liked Little Dorrit. That came out, I think it was around 2009 or so, with Mathew MacFayden in it. That was good as well.

KIM: I love Little Dorrit. I love the novel and I love the miniseries, too. In fact I want to watch that again right now also.

AMY: You’ve got your work cut out for you!

KIM: I know what I’m going to be doing tonight! But I know your favorite is the one with Ioan Gruffudd, because you love him, and I also want to point out that you actually did see him in real life once, too, which was very very cool. You texted me when I was in San Francisco and it was unforgettable.

AMY: Oh yeah! I forgot about that until you just said that. I didn’t remember ever seeing him, but you’re right, I saw him eating at a restaurant.

KIM: Yeah. I think you saw him with his wife.

AMY: It was a good celebrity sighting in L.A.

KIM: Yeah. And veering back to the current releases, there’s also Death On the Nile starring Kenneth Branaugh, Gal Gadot, Russell Brand and Annette Benning, and that comes out, I think, on Oct. 23. And I don’t know about this one, because Murder on the Orient Express didn’t get the best reviews a few years ago. 

AMY: Yeah, I didn’t see that one and I actually know somebody that went and saw it and they were pretty disappointed. But you never know. Agatha Christie…. I’m usually down for. So maybe I’ll give it a try. The one I really want to try to figure out how to see — I keep Googling it — it’s a BBC series or miniseries which we just don’t have here in the States yet, but it’s

The Luminaries, based on Eleanor Catton’s novel.

KIM: I loved that book.

AMY: It already aired in England, but I’m just hoping maybe PBS will end up running it? I’m sure we’ll get it eventually.

KIM: Or BBC America?

AMY: Yeah. It stars Eva Green (Eeeva, AY-va… I’m not sure how to say her name) from “Penny Dreadful,” who I think is an AMAZING actress from watching that show. I’m kind of obsessed with her. (And side note: anyone who loves classic literature should definitely watch “Penny Dreadful”… although I will say it takes a pretty strong constitution. It’s not for the faint of heart.)

KIM: No. But just a side note, if you’re trying to keep track of all this, frantically, don’t worry, we’re putting all the links to the trailers for every film we’ve discussed in our shownotes, so you’ll be able to see them there.

AMY: So my little 2020 confession that I’m kind of embarrassed about is that I still haven’t watched the new version of Emma that came out this year. I see every Jane Austen movie, without fail. I don’t know why I haven’t seen it. I think it’s maybe because I have my whole family here and we have to try to agree on what we’re watching and there’s not enough votes in this household to do Jane Austen. But I feel like I should have my Jane fan club membership revoked or something. But I will get around to seeing it. 

KIM: That’s crazy. I can’t believe you haven’t seen it, but that’s basically your homework. You need to watch that tonight.

AMY: Yeah, I’ll be watching that while you’re re-watching Bleak House. 

KIM: Exactly. So Emma was the movie I saw… the last movie I saw in the theater before the lockdown. So I’m never going to forget that I saw Emma right before everything shut down. And here’s something...this will make you want to watch it: I’ve already streamed it twice.

AMY: You never told me you loved it so much that you’ve watched it three times already!

KIM: I don’t know how I didn’t tell you that. Maybe I just thought you’d intuited it somehow. But I like it a lot.

AMY: I knew it was going to be good. I’ve seen the trailer. It’s super cute. I just have to sit down and do it. So Emma, I’M COMIN’ FOR YA, EMMA!

KIM: You have that to look forward to, which is good. But I will say, you did get a bit of a “Jane Austen” — your Jane Austen fix, anyway — in a roundabout way by reading our next “lost lady!”

AMY: That’s right! So Kim and I happily discovered the works of Emily Eden, whose two novels, The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House are both heavily influenced by Jane Austen and they bear a similar style to her writing.

KIM: And who doesn’t need a little bit more “Austen” in their life, especially Amy — or at least the flavor of Austen?

AMY: Yes. So check back in with us next week to hear all about Emily Eden and her works — and her intriguing adventures in India. 

KIM: I can’t wait! I’m so excited. 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! Bye everybody!

[theme music plays]

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