45. Edna Ferber — So Big with Dr. Caroline Frick

AMY: Welcome, everyone, to Lost Ladies of the Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. So the Lost Lady we’re discussing today wrote about the beauty of cabbages.

AMY: Okay, I hate to break it to you, Kim, but you’re not really selling it.

KIM: You’re right. Okay, I could see that wouldn’t really be selling it. But what if we were to tell you that this book, which extols the virtues of (literally) your garden-variety produce, was the top-selling novel of 1924, selling hundreds of thousands of copies the year it was published? How do you like them apples?… or should I say… cabbages?

AMY: And what if we were to tell you that it also won the Pulitzer Prize the following year? Pretty good deal, right? But we are a little embarrassed to say we hadn’t read this book until quite recently, and we’re guessing many people today haven’t. This episode, we hope, will rectify that, at least for those of you who are listening. Because how good is Edna Ferber’s book? SOOO GOOOOD!

KIM: That’s right. (And Amy’s baby talk will eventually make sense in this episode, I promise. There’s a reason to this.) Actually, Ferber’s novel, “So Big,” which she herself categorized as being a story about the “the triumph of failure” was so wildly popular in its day that it was adapted three times for film, the second of which (in 1932) starred Barbara Stanwyck and featured a young Bette Davis in one of her earliest roles.

AMY: And I’m so excited that our guest today, who is an expert in films from this era, is going to be able to offer us an interesting perspective on Edna Ferber (and this book) through that Hollywood lens.

KIM: I can’t wait to introduce her, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

KIM: Okay, I’m SO EXCITED to introduce our guest, Dr. Caroline Frick. She’s an Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at University of Texas, Austin and the founder and Executive Director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. She’s worked in film preservation at Warner Bros., the Library of Congress, and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and she also programmed films for the American Movie Classics (AMC) channel! (How cool is that?) Caroline’s book, "Saving Cinema," was published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. Those things are all impressive, but the real reason I’m excited is because she used to be my roommate once upon a time, many moons ago, in San Francisco when we were practically babies! She taught me a lot about movies, especially “pre-code” movies, which we’ll be discussing later on in the show. I think one of my first trips to Los Angeles was to visit her after she moved here, and do you remember, Caroline? You took me to The Ivy for dinner--I think  you might have been working at Warner Bros. at the time and probably on a tight budget, but  I immediately felt like I was in L.A. Story… That’s just the kind of classy person she is. We’d lost touch over the last few years, but I’m loving that we are reconnected! Caroline, welcome to the show! 

DR. CAROLINE FRICK: Thanks so much for having me, and thanks for such a nice introduction. This is a great opportunity to talk and actually learn a little bit more about a topic that I kind of have been peripherally around but didn't know that much about which is Edna Ferber. I thought this was such a great opportunity to dig down a little bit to learn a little bit more about her. I know the movies, but I didn't know that much about her, so I really appreciate this invitation.

AMY: Yeah, sure! And so actually, Kim and I were really new to Edna Ferber heading into this episode; we’d never read anything by her. But it does seem like she was one of those writers that Hollywood really took a liking to straightaway — for decades, in fact. So can you tell us anything about that?

CAROLINE: Well, sure. I mean, what's interesting, and I thought a lot about this, is there's lots of reasons why Edna Ferber would have been a really solid choice for the Hollywood studios at this particular time, right? If you look at when they started adapting her work, it was in the 1920s, 1930s. She's a really big deal. She's publishing. She's very popular. She is the author of really sprawling (I kept coming to the word “sprawling,”) like sprawling dramas, right, that take place over decades. And so there are many reasons why the industry at this point in time would have logically gone to her. The fact that she wins a Pulitzer for this particular novel is going to be a real attraction. What's fascinating also, though, to me was how many times these films were remade (well, the adaptations were remade) over and over again, whether it's Showboat, whether it's Cimarron, whether it is So Big with three adaptations, right? So she was a really popular author for them, and I think there are reasons why — we can get into this later — why I think So Big came out at this particular moment for this particular studio and with these particular stars. I think there's a lot that kind of comes together here. 

KIM: Wow, okay, I’m excited. So, Amy, what else do we know about Edna Ferber’s life?

AMY: Okay, so basically, by the time of her death in 1968, she was considered one of the most successful women writers of her time. She had a proverbial seat at the Algonquin Round Table. She’d won the Pulitzer, as Caroline said. But let’s go back in time. She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1885. She was from a Jewish family. Her dad was a Hungarian-born shopkeeper and her mom was of German descent. Her father lost his eyesight and experienced a lot of business failures, prompting the family to move a lot. So they lived for a time in the Chicago area, where So Big is set, and then they eventually settled in Wisconsin. But Edna and her family experienced a lot of Anti-Semitic bigotry. People mocked her Yiddish accent. It really helped her to understand the immigrant experience and what it felt like to be persecuted, which is a theme that she returns to a lot in her writing. But she also features strong female characters in a lot of her work.

KIM: Right, which we love, of course! So initially, Edna wanted to study acting, but she ended up switching gears and dropping out of college so that she could help her struggling family. Based on the strength of articles she’d written for her high school paper, she landed a reporting gig at the local paper The Appleton Daily Crescent and worked her way up to reporting gigs for The Milwaukee Journal and the United Press Association. By the time she was 35, she covered the 1920 Democratic and Republic national conventions. But it was as early as 1911 and 1912 that she started publishing some of her fiction… mostly short stories (including a collection of stories called Buttered Side Down) and then a few novels, the first of which was called Dawn O’Hara, The Girl Who Laughed (this was about a young woman newspaper reporter, so she’s drawing from life here). 

AMY: Yeah, and like other writers who started off as journalists, her writing style at this time was fairly pithy and to-the-point; you know, fairly journalistic. And it’s safe to say she didn’t know the extent of her talent. So when she wrote So Big (which came out in 1924 and which we mentioned, received a Pulitzer) she initially had told her publisher Doubleday, “You probably aren’t going to want to publish this.”

KIM: Yeah, she later claimed, “Not only did I not plan to write a Bestseller when I wrote So Big, but I thought, when I had finished it, that I had written the world’s worst seller. I thought I had written a complete Non-Seller. I didn’t think anyone would ever read it.” She figured nobody would be interested in a middle-aged woman who sells cabbages, but it was one of those stories she had been carrying around in her head and she just needed to get it out, I guess.

AMY: And since we’re on the topic of So Big, maybe we should familiarize our listeners with the basic plot.

KIM: Sure. The heroine of the novel is Selina Peake, a young Midwestern woman who (thanks to her father’s reputation as a gambler) is both accustomed to the finer things in life and also can easily make do with very little depending on which way the wind blows. At the start of the book she bemoans the fact that she has to eat mutton and cabbage for dinner one night. 

AMY: (Oh, girl, just you wait — you’re going to be overloaded with vegetables soon!) So early on in the book, Selina’s father shares a bit of wisdom with her about life, and it’s something she carries with her and reflects back on throughout the course of the book. He says, “I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. A fine show. The trick is to play in it and look at it at the same time.” … “The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they’re not pleasant things. That’s living. Remember, no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s just so much…. Just so much velvet.”

KIM: I love that quote. “Just so much velvet.”

CAROLINE: I thought this line was really interesting, and it gets used in the film as well, right? They use it. What do you think it means, “so much velvet?”

KIM: I took it as luxurious … rich … royal, almost.

AMY: You think of nobility being shrouded in velvet. The character, over the course of time, she has this nobility (an unexpected nobility) and by the end of the book, it's gonna make a lot more sense.

KIM: Yeah, because there are a lot of people with varying degrees of money and, who is really a noble person by the end of the book? He follows that up with another nugget of wisdom when he tells her, “There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind’s wheat and the other kind’s emeralds.” That becomes prophetic for Selina. When her father dies unexpectedly, the newly orphaned Selina must leave Chicago and try to eke out a living working as a rural school teacher in the Dutch-immigrant farming community of High Prairie (which was loosely based on the present-day suburb of South Holland, Illinois). On the wagon ride that brings her to this rural area, Selina (who is trying to make the best of the situation), optimistically describes the endless rows of cabbages as “beautiful,” a comment that sets her host family, the Pools, roaring with laughter. It’s a big joke for them after she says that.

AMY: Yeah, and actually … so, Caroline, what I’m going to do is, I have snippets of the film recorded, so let me cue up the cabbages quote.

[plays clip]

CAROLINE: The actor that plays Mr. Pool is Alan Hale, and a lot of the listeners might know his son because he was the Skipper on “Gilligan's Island.” And so when you hear him laugh, he's very familiar and he looks very familiar to those who were fans of “Gilligan's Island.” You might not know his father. His father was a very famous actor at this particular moment in time, but when he popped up in this film, I burst out laughing because I thought, “Oh, here we go. It's gonna be a classic Alan Hale laugh.”

AMY: Okay, so basically, as we can tell by his laughter, these pragmatic Dutch country folk think that Selina’s crazy to take such a romanticized view of their back-breaking lives in the fields. But Ferber writes that for a woman like Selina, who can find beauty in cabbages, “life has no weapons against a woman like that.” I love that quote. So the eldest son in the family, Roelf, he’s the only one who doesn’t laugh at Selina’s romanticism. He’s kind of a sensitive, artistic soul, and although he’s quite a bit younger than Selina (he’s 12 and she’s 19) they form a very special bond. And am I the only one who was maybe a little initially weirded-out at this part of the book? Because I thought they were going to find romance, and he was so young.

KIM: Caroline, what did you think?

CAROLINE: It was real weird. And then I was like, you know that the movie is gonna just mimic it. And then it was even weirder in the film! At first, I was like, “This is odd.” And then I thought, “No, they're finding each other's souls. This is like a beautiful friendship.”

AMY: I'm so used to reading books, especially books from this era. And you're like, “I know exactly where they're going with this. She's gonna fall in love with Roelf.” And what's great about Ferber’s book is you can't predict it. You don't know where stuff is going in this book at all. So needless to say, false alarm. There is no inappropriate romance with a 12-year old, so no worries about that.

KIM: Right. And Selina is obviously a very idealistic woman with big dreams, but life in High Prairie is definitely a harsh reckoning for her. When she discovers the farmers use actual dried blood to fertilize the fields, it couldn’t be more symbolic. Life on the farm is tough.

AMY: Yeah, and the hardships of farm life, combined with the immigrant characters (their command of the English language is very halting)… it reminded me a bit of Willa Cather’s My Antonia. 

KIM: Yeah, and in the same way, I think you could say that Ferber’s novel is a real tribute to immigrants. She emphasizes the fact that it’s these simple, hard-working people who are literally feeding the nation and keeping all the fancy-pants privileged people in the cities alive. 

AMY: Caroline, did you have any favorite passages that would sort of help give our listeners a taste of Ferber’s writing style?

CAROLINE: You know, when we were talking about kind of this, celebrating the immigrants and celebrating the rural people at this point in time, I think one of the things that strikes me in some ways — she's really mourning the 19th century's past into the 20th. It's very much, I think, an indictment about modernity and kind of the 20th century’s rapid pace and kind of modernism. And one of the things I loved reading about, which is evocative, and it's interesting that it relates very much to the fact that she, ironically, was adapted so many times in cinema, but she talks a lot how as a young girl her father took her to the theater and this is an ongoing thing. She obviously, once she's in the middle of nowhere, she's not going to see theater, she's not going to see burlesque, she's not going to see any of these kinds of shows. And so it says strangely enough, “considering the lack of what the world calls romance and adventure in her life, she did not like the motion pictures. “All the difference in the world,” she would say, “between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theatre. My, yes! Like fooling with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.” And I thought I am so going to use this in my classes, because the idea that she's like, “movies are like paper dolls when you could have a real live baby.” And I think there's some of this kind of, again, mourning of a more agrarian past, when it kind of collides with the urban modernity of the 20th century.

KIM: So speaking of film, the three of us actually watched the 1932 film So Big in preparation for this, and Caroline, you’re an expert in pre-code Hollywood, so let’s weigh in on what we thought of the film up to this point in the story with Selina ending up living with the Pools in High Prairie.

CAROLINE: Well, I just want to say how brilliant it is that you're like, we actually watched this movie, which I think sums up perhaps the sacrifice that the three of us had in watching this movie, I think? I'll defer to Amy here. But I was cracking up the way you just said that because it was, like, it was a struggle. It was a struggle. I’m not going to lie.

AMY: I would liken it to when you have to go see a cousin’s son’s high school play. You’re like, “Oh, I would love to go!” And then you sit there and you’re like, “Okayyy… Yeah.”

KIM: Yeah. But then you have to say something nice.

AMY: But first of all, Caroline, I’m not even really familiar with the term “pre-code Hollywood” by the way. So can you film me in on exactly what that even means?

CAROLINE: Sure, sure. Pre-code is a designation that gets used for films that were produced before the adoption of the do's and don'ts, what you can do and what you cannot do (or portray) on film. In essence, think of it as the adoption of the MPAA rating systems, right? Think of it as like the “wild west” of cinema production. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but in essence, it's essentially looking at a period of time where things got a little bit more charged in terms of the coverage of sex of violence, etc, etc, right. In the early ’30s, a little bit after this film was released, that changes. Now there's a little bit more of a cynical take that I would use in terms of So Big being listed somewhere as a pre-code is that it's also an attempt by more contemporary marketing people to get you to be interested in older films, right? So in the case of Barbara Stanwyck’s career, probably the most famous pre-code film (and one that holds up very, very well, and one that really makes your eyebrows go up and go, “Really?”) is a film called Baby Face, which she did very closely to this one ... a little bit later. In this particular case, though, it's interesting to me that they're labeling this a pre-code. Yes, in terms of dates, it makes sense that it's a pre-code. But for the most part, this is a pretty tame film and a pretty darn tame adaptation of the book. So pre-code, I would say, (and I guess we're all ladies here — I'll go ahead and say it.) I think what's interesting is when you look at the history of pre-code, it's actually far more than a film being sexy. It's actually that the first generation of film historians that looked at this issue were largely men, and they were largely looking at the films that were a little bit more pervy ... because remember, this is not the government censor. This is studios self censoring. And they were very shrewd. They knew (especially if you look at the date, the year 1932), they had to be careful, because this is the height of the Depression, and Hollywood product was losing money. And so they did not want to offend any of those Catholic mothers, and they were largely Catholic mothers who were up in arms over the movie.

AMY: Can I just say, though, I'm pretty glad they kept this one tame, because I don't think I could have stomached racy scenes between Selina and Pervis in this movie. 

KIM: Absolutely. yeah. 

AMY: So we'll get to Pervis in a minute. But first of all, what do we think of Barbara Stanwyck as Selina? I know, Caroline, I think you have strong opinions, maybe.

CAROLINE: I have such strong opinions. That’s why you should start.

KIM: Oh my gosh.

AMY: I liked her. I thought she kept my interest. Your eyes are drawn to her. She's beautiful. They have to age her over time, which is a little weird, but I thought she did a good job relative to the other actors, you know?

KIM: Yeah, definitely. I thought she was much better than ... I thought she was a star. And, you know, she had that glowing look that they have where they look like they're in a different movie. But it was like she was acting in a different movie. And there was a big juxtaposition there for me. Anyway, I want to hear what Carolyn has to say, though.

CAROLINE: Well, you know, it's funny. I'm going to tell one of my colleagues here in Austin about this podcast, because he and I fight all the time over Barbara Stanwyck. This is the curator of the Austin Film Society, and he loves Barbara Stanwyck, and I just roll my eyes and go, “Uggh.” Yeah. So here's what I would say. I thought she was interesting in this role, but even the audio that you just used, I couldn't get over her voice. Now remember, this is an early talkie. So one of the reasons the film looks the way it does is that you're in the first couple years of sound. So even original reviews of this film, we're going to talk about it being a “talking picture, a talking picture,” and you have to hear her Brooklyn sounding voice. So she's like, “Look! Cabbages! Beautiful!” and I was like, take it down a notch Brooklyn-born!

AMY: [laughing] She does have a very deep voice. Yeah.

KIM: She’s not who I pictured, at all, as Selina when I was reading the book.

AM: Yeah, but like we said, she’s head and shoulders above some of the rest of this cast. So yeah, getting back into the book, in time, Selina sheds her sophisticated city ways (she's coming from Chicago), and she now is permanently entrenched in the toil and struggle of life as a farmer's wife after marrying a struggling bachelor named Pervis DeJong, which I thought it was De-JONG until I saw the movie and apparently it's De-YONG. What did we think of Pervis, and Selina’s choice of marrying him? …. Caroline's laughing. I mean, she can't even get to the microphone, 

KIM: Right. Yeah, she's just laughing.

CAROLINE: Kim, you are a more elegant woman I admire and what ON EARTH was going on in the film? So you have to take the lead.

KIM: In the film, there's no attraction. I mean, no. No. No. It doesn't make any sense. Meanwhile, in the book, there is this great sexual tension between the two of them, and he's so handsome that she can't even, you know, realize the fact that intellectually, they're completely incompatible. But in the film, there's no way she wouldn't know they're incompatible and there is no sexual tension and he is, you know…

AMY: He’s a doofus. 

KIM: Yeah, it's messed up.

CAROLINE: He is definitely an intriguing character in the book, even though as you say, they're not intellectual … they don't meet intellectually. She's only, what, 19 I think when she meets him? And she had lived such a kind of cloistered existence, and so you kind of appreciate it. But then the movie, I literally was like, “Him?!” Like, “What? That guy?!” And he's about as interesting as a toad. (Actually a toad would be more interesting.) A rock that's just sitting there. It was sad. It was sad. The good news is he's not around very long.

KIM: Yeah, that is good news.

AMY: Yeah, they move him along fast.

KIM: Yes. So after getting married, Selina DeJong, our heroine, has a baby named Dirk. Here’s where the book’s title comes in… his nickname becomes “SoBig” because his mother always asks, “How big is baby?”

AMY: And we actually have a little film audio of this moment. They are in the cabbage patch. He’s a Cabbage Patch kid.

CAROLINE: Literally!

[plays film clip]

CAROLINE: It’s like she’s assaulting him! “HOW BIG ARE YOU? HOW BIG ARE YOU?” It’s like, “Relax, sister!” He is a precious child, and she’s like, “HOW BIG?!!!!”

KIM: Oh my gosh. So back to Selina’s young artist friend that Amy had been mentioning, Roelf, by this point in time, he has gone off to see what the great wide world has to offer. And her husband, Pervus, is a kind of failure as a farmer and sort of as a husband. Selina has all sorts of ideas and suggestions for how they might make improvements, but he has no interest in humoring her in that.

AMY: And then, due to unforeseen circumstances, she finds herself all alone having to raise her little boy and eke out a living on this poor excuse for a farm. And it’s really terrifying for her (especially the first time she has to drive her produce into Chicago on her own and try to sell it. It’s scary.) But before long we discover that Selina is a total entrepreneur when it comes to figuring out how to run this farm, you know, drain the fields so the harvest will improve, grow new types of crops. She’s got all these ideas and she’s got some serious hustle. 

KIM: Yes, she’s completely into it. It actually reminded me a little bit of The Home-Maker episode that we did last year. And I loved the scene where she’s driving her first crops to Haymarket Street by herself, and she takes special care to make her vegetables stand out. 

AMY: Yeah, she’s positioning herself to have the pricey “Whole Foods” version of produce.

CAROLINE: I think it’s totally the Whole Foods! She was like, “I’m going to make this beautiful,” and they’re like, “Rubbish! Who cares?” But I do blame both of you for when I was at the grocery store this weekend and I started strolling amongst the asparagus and I was like, “Look at that asparagus in beautiful bunches!”

AMY: Look at how it’s bundled!

KIM: So Ferber writes: “They had picked and bunched only the best of the late crop — the firmest, reddest radishes, the roundest, juiciest beets; the carrots that tapered, a good seven inches from base to tip; kraut cabbages of the drumhead variety that were flawless green balls; firm juicy spears of cucumber; cauliflower (of her own planting; Pervus had opposed it) that looked like a bride’s bouquet. Selina stepped back now and regarded this riot of crimson and green, of white and gold and purple. “Aren’t they beautiful! Dirk, aren’t they beautiful!”

AMY: And Dirk’s like, “Whatyoutalkinabout, Woman?” Just like the Pool family at the beginning of the book, Dirk can’t see his mother’s vision. He doesn’t understand where there’s any beauty in a wagon full of produce. And this is what sets up the conflict that continues in the rest of the book as Dirk grows up. So Caroline, what are your thoughts on what Ferber’s trying to impart here, with Selena’s dedication to her life on the farm?

CAROLINE: Well, you know, probably what you all have seen is important there, right, which is even in this kind of dull environment, she still tries to find beauty. And I think Ferber is very romantic about this, like, it's setting up this kind of romantic notion about how you can find beauty in, you know, vegetables. And I think it's interesting. It's cabbage of all things, because it's very evocative of the immigrant experience, right? What is the vegetable that the poorest people eat? That's cabbage. She's doubling down on this. She was a laughing stock for saying this earlier in the book, and then with Dirk, she's trying to impart this, she's trying to say, “You're not just your father's son, you're my son as well. And you need to see the beauty.” And he's not having it. 

KIM: But she was glorifying the people in this country that aren’t often celebrated. Laborers, farmers, people who are eking out a living ... I can see them reading this novel (if they had time. I don’t think they did…)

AMY: I think they probably were, because of how many copies it sold. I mean, it was a huge bestseller. So were they more like the Pool family and rolling their eyes at the “cabbages is beautiful,” or were they feeling validated?

CAROLINE: That's a great question. My family's originally from Kansas, so those flat fields feel very familiar to me. And, you know, I'm not sure this book would have appealed. I think they would have rolled their eyes at a lot of that. But who knows? Who knows? The majority of people in the United States at this point in time were rural. It's so different from what we experience now ... you have a huge, again, kind of nostalgia here, where they're saying “the agrarian past,” because in the 20th century is when we become as a nation, predominantly urban.

AMY: Along the same lines here, in researching Edna Ferber I kept coming across the term “middlebrow” author, which annoyed me a little bit. It was sort of like the fact that her book was popular with everyday folk made it somehow “lesser.” Apparently some of her later writing was definitely less literary and more mainstream, but Caroline, what do you think the film industry saw in her works (beyond just the fact that she sold a lot of books) which would have appealed to them?

CAROLINE: For So Big, there's a large kind of backstory to Warner Brothers’ history at this moment, but they would have said, “Okay, we're in the height of the Depression. This is really bankable. We're going to do this. And we're going to put some of the key talent into this.” Whether or not it was as successful as they hoped … (it was certainly not as successful as Cimarron) … but certainly over time when they were remaking it this proved to be a good investment.

AMY: We should mention, also, that Cimarron, that won an Academy Award, right? Best Picture.

CAROLINE: Yes. And in fact, it was one of the most successful films from this period of time.

KIM: You’re making me want to watch Cimarron.

AMY: Or read it.

KIM: So back to the novel, Selina DeJong goes from being this beautiful young woman to a woman who is physically diminished: she’s old before her years, weathered, beaten-down. And getting back to the movie, we see that transformation take hold of Barbara Stanwyck… sort of, anyway.

CAROLINE: I actually liked her more at the latter part of the film when she was somehow a little bit softer. And part of that was just makeup. She was somehow elegantly more beautiful to me at the latter part of the film, but I think that was pretty effective. I was like, “Let's see who did makeup and costumes.” Like, I’ll do a slow clap for them. I'm not sure I’d do it so much for the screenplay and or casting department. But you know, makeup ...?

Bang on. 

AMY: Watching this movie made you understand why it’s important for film-makers to take some license independent of the book. But Caroline, what do you think this film version did well, and where do you think it fell completely flat other than the casting? Because you mentioned Edna Ferber’s books are so sprawling, and I felt like if we were to see this movie made today, we would get the “sprawling,” right? We’d get the wide shots of the fields; we’d get the panoramic of the farm. And you’re not really getting this … a lot of it felt like it was on a soundstage. There were some outside moments, but it didn’t have the epic cinematography that I wanted. 

CAROLINE: No, and I would say here (this is where the film nerd comes in) so this was the second adaptation of this book, which is really interesting. In the silent era (... and this film does not exist, right? It, sadly, is completely lost at this point in time) they would have had the capacity to shoot those exteriors, because this is a book that takes place basically outside. And this particular adaptation feels claustrophobic in a way, because they had to be inside because of sound technology. I started to go back and count how many exterior scenes, and there's basically none, because of the sound technology. Just like in the podcast, you have to be really close to your microphone, and there was no way they would have been able to do it, particularly with the way and the technology employed by Warner Brothers. By the time you get to the third adaptation in the ’50s, it's a much more expansive as you say, the ability to tell that story outside. And I think that definitely contributes to the challenges that this adaptation faced.

KIM: So as we said, when “Sobig,” a.k.a Dirk DeJong grows up, there’s a real philosophical disconnect between the way he lives his life and the way his mother lives. He makes a success of himself in a white-collar, stock-broking job (even though he’s not passionate about it), and clearly our girl Edna Ferber has ZERO respect for this.

AMY: She writes: “He sat looking down at his hands — his fine strong unscarred hands. Suddenly and unreasonably, he thought of another pair of hands — his mother’s — with the knuckles enlarged, the skin broken — expressive — her life written on them. Scars. She had them.”

KIM: Yeah, I loved the way the Dirk character was, you know, even though he was making some bad choices, it's like he really was aware of his bad choices and the conflict that he had. And you know, his feelings about his mom and he did really respect her. But his soft hands prove problematic when he falls for a beautiful young artist named Dallas O’Mara — she has opinions of her own about Dirk’s choices in life, right?

AMY: She is not turned on by men with soft hands. No.

KIM: No, she’s not! And she’s played by Miss Bette Davis, who pops up in the last third of the 1932 movie. Do we have a clip of Bette Davis, Amy?

AMY: I do! Let me play it for us.

[plays film clip]

KIM: Okay, you guys can disagree with me, but to me, that performance and her coming in like that, and her cool, edgy, city vibe and independent woman … and she looked incredible. I was like, “Yeah, give me a movie about Dallas O’Mara. That's the movie I want to see. That's the passion I want to see right there. What do you guys think? 

CAROLINE: That was when the movie started for me. At the end. I'm just saying ... I was ready to not only watch that movie, I wanted to hang out with her. This is why Bette Davis was a star, because she is cute as a button.

KIM: Yes! It changed my perception. I want to go back and watch Bette Davis movies now in a way that I never did before. I have a whole new appreciation for her. She was just the best. 

AMY: That’s why she’s a star.

CAROLINE: She’s a star. Yeah. She wrote about this film and how honored she was and excited she was to be in a Stanwyck vehicle. And she also said for all of the roles in her entire career, this was the one that was most like her as a person. You almost get a sense of that. She's so kind of, I don't know, has such an authority about her. It doesn't feel like a performance. And I thought it was really interesting looking at that quote, which was: “She, of all the roles I've played, is the closest to me as a person,” and I thought, “You kind of ... you kind of get that!”

AMY: And when she tells Dirk what her worth is. When he said, “I'm not paying you $1500 for a painting,” and she's like, “Well, that's what I'm worth.” That was such a great moment.

KIM: It’s so feminist, right there.

CAROLINE: That character, it popped off the page for me in Ferber’s book, because I thought, “My gosh, this book was written 100 years ago. And yet, this argument is still fresh.” And it's still almost shocking that she was so comfortable in saying, “That's what I'm worth.” I just thought, “This is wild!” There's another aspect to maybe why Ferber was useful for the film industry, and it is that strong feminist voice. I think there's something about Ferber’s work that is useful for an industry that is going to be catering to a lot of women.

KIM: Yeah. And then thematically with the book, Selina is sort of a certain type of person. And Dallas is like the new version of that person. She's how you can go into the world with what Selina brings, in a way where you can own it and be a success at it and live your life.

AMY: The modern successor, yes, of Selina. Yeah, I like that. So, without giving away the ending of this book, I’m wondering what you guys actually thought of the way it ended. It’s kind of abrupt.

CAROLINE: Kind of? I literally, I was reading on a Kindle and I kept kind of swiping because I was like, “Wait, what? Huh?” So um, yeah. What do you think, Kim?

KIM: Oh, you know, it's so funny. I'm like thinking back. I mean, I guess it kind of sews it up. 

AMY: I mean, in the case of the movie, we needed it to be over by then. 

KIM: Yeah. It doesn't lessen the book for me at all, the ending. I'll just put it that way. It's not like one of those endings, I think, where you're like, “Oh. My. God.” It's more like, “Okay, the book finished.” But the book is just wonderful throughout.

CAROLINE: 

AMY: And if we're talking about going back to the idea of like, missing in the movie, this sort of sweeping depiction of farm life … for me, there's actually a really different movie that I was thinking of the whole time I was reading So Big. It's a documentary by David Sutherland that came out in 1998 called The Farmer’s Wife. It aired on PBS on Frontline and I remember that movie really got under my skin. I think it's a three-part movie. So like six hours. It was amazing. It follows this woman named Juanita Bushkoetter. (I always remember her name.) She lives with her farmer husband and their daughters in rural Nebraska. Her story is so anguishing as the farmer's wife and all the struggles, the financial struggles, she has all the backbreaking labor that she has to do on the farm. And at the same time, it's so beautiful ...  you see her on the farm, and the sun's rising up, you know, behind her. So I kept thinking of her when I was reading about Selina DeJong, not Barbara Stanwyck. And you can find that documentary on Amazon Prime, and I think it really would be a good companion movie, also, to reading So Big.

CAROLINE: You know, it’s funny, I think, in some ways, that documentary … (and I don’t know — I haven’t seen it) … is it also equally romanticizing the beauty there? Because on one hand, I think that the farming and this kind of this notion of American settlers, right, even Cimarron and Giant, these are all similar stories that she's telling, which is these sweeping, very European-focused stories about the settling of the West. And I think there is such a romanticization of that in her work that doesn't hold up today, when we're poking holes in that narrative a little bit. I do think it would be interesting to see if that documentary shares a little bit of that romanticizing of it. In some ways, it goes back to the ending for me: what I liked about the ending of the book was that it seemed to go so well with the difficulties of being a farmer. It was just like, there's an abruptness of life, you know? An abruptness of life and death. And, you know, I worked with a guy in Los Angeles, who has passed away, sadly, now, but he worked in the film laboratories, worked with all the major studios, and he worked so hard. And I said to him, “How do you do it? You work so hard.” He said, “Oh, please, I grew up on a farm.” He said, “That's the people that work hard.” You have to get up and milk the cow. You have to get up and do it. Because if you don't, it'll be a disaster. And I thought that was really interesting in terms of a modern perspective on that, for sure.

KIM: That's true. Yeah, this is going to digress a little bit, to earlier in the book, but I actually was surprised at the direction the book took when she ended up inheriting the farm basically, and trying to turn it over. The actual joy that she took in the hard work. She actually really chose to keep that life. There's a choice all throughout the middle of the book where she could have chosen differently, she had friends, (and that part of the story isn't in the movie so much) but she had other opportunities later and she really became in love with that life of the farm. 

AMY: That's true. 

KIM: I also think, like in a Thomas Hardy movie or something like that, the choices that she made would have ended disastrously. But you know, what we talked about with her, you know, sort of making this choice of marrying the wrong guy? Obviously, it doesn't end up killing her, you know? I mean, she sort of makes a triumph of a failed choice in marriage. And in a lot of books that we've read in movies that we've seen, you know, that doesn't happen.

AMY: Yeah, she has that nobility at the end, which we talked about when we were discussing the velvet. I know Kim and I both were commenting to each other when we read this, that it was really a pleasurable experience to read the book. And I’m really glad that we selected it. I think I might not have been intrigued enough to pick it up just based on the plot summary (which goes back to what Ferber told her publisher, you know -- this probably won’t sell). But reading it was really enjoyable. And I think I would be interested to read more of her work after this.

CAROLINE: I was just dumbfounded, having seen so many adaptations of her work, but, I mean, feeling kind of guilty that I hadn't read her. Here's this kind of a feminist icon from this era. And here, I just kind of blindly looked over this. I was sort of thinking of this as like my work; I need to do my work. And then I was like, “This isn't work. I'm enjoying this book — everybody in my house, be quiet. I'm focusing on this really enjoyable book right now.” And I think in some ways, maybe that's why the film (this adaptation from the ’30s) struck me so hard, because I thought, “How did they suck the joy out of this book?”

KIM: This book won a Pulitzer Prize. It was adapted three times, as Caroline was saying. We found it incredible. We all three loved reading it, yet none of us had read it before. I don't know if Amy and I even had heard of it. It goes back to the whole question of this podcast, which is like, why did we not know about this book? Why hadn't we read it? It just got lost in time. And it's really interesting. And we would tell everyone out there to read this book. It's fabulous. it deserved a Pulitzer, as far as I'm concerned.

CAROLINE: And again, this notion of what's lost ... I think if my grandmother were here she'd be like, “Oh, yeah, of course, I've read all that.” Is it generational, that gets lost in this way? And one person's “lost” is another person's “passion,” right? I was thinking about how struck I was with the adaptation of Ferber and I hadn't put all this together. But you know, the star of the 1920s version of So Big would be the person that I would recommend in terms of a “lost movie star.” The star of that is, I think, one of the most gifted actresses or Hollywood stars from the Silent Era Colleen Moore — and that it is so tragic to me that not only is this film lost, but it was in particular, it was Colleen Moore in this title role, who would have brought, I think, exactly what you were saying, Kim, about what you in your head would have pictured as this particular performance, right? She would have had a very different look and would have had a very different sort of manner. And it was interesting, because I thought, well, maybe the listeners wouldn't know who Colleen Moore is, that this is a lost person to them. But I've been following her career for 30 years. It's such an interesting kind of question of loss or misremembered or rediscovered, and the politics of rediscovery … what have you.

KIM: Good point? Yeah. Who does it belong to?

AMY: It was so nice meeting a blast from Kim’s past, Caroline, and we’re so glad you could take time out of your schedule to read some Edna Ferber with us.

KIM: Yes, we are so happy to have had you. This was really, really fun.

CAROLINE: No, thank you! I am so honored to be included. And I just want to say thank you and agree with everything that we've said, that if anybody listening has not read this book or seen an adaptation it was such a pleasure and great opportunity to have this excuse. So thank you both.

AMY: Kim, I feel like I need to go hit up a farmers market or something after this episode.

KIM: Yeah, or throw together a big salad… with cabbages in it.

AMY: So anyway, that’s all for today’s episode. We hope you’re loving the authors and book suggestions we’ve been offering up each week -- if you do, head over to wherever you listen to this podcast and click that five-star review!

KIM: Yes, it’s a HUGE help! And let us know what you think by sending us an email or connecting with us on Instagram. And don’t forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter for more fun stuff!

AMY: We’ll be back next week! Bye, everybody!

Disaster to the Wench with Nina Berry & Brenda Pontiff

KIM: Hi everyone! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m your host, Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m your other host, Amy Helmes. If you’ve been listening to our podcast for a while, you know that we’re a little obsessed with giving forgotten women writers their due. But what about remembering some of the women from the Golden Age of Hollywood?

KIM: Right, there are so many amazing actresses: “Greta Garbo and Monroe...”

AMY: “Lauren, Katherine, Lana too… Bette Davis, we love you.” Okay, clearly we’re just ripping off Madonna right now. Truth be told, we’re not your go-to gals on old Hollywood and all those “ladies with an attitude.” 

KIM: No, but, we know a few women who are, and they have a really incredibly fun new YouTube Channel called “Disaster to the Wench” — two of the hosts of that show are with us today to talk a little about it, and we can’t wait to introduce them.

AMY: So first off, we have the creator and executive producer of “Disaster to the Wench,” Brenda Pontiff. She is a writer and stand-up comic who has worked as a joke polisher for several studios and A-list screenwriters. This whole idea is her brainchild, so Brenda, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit! We’re so excited to talk to you!

BRENDA PONTIFF: Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be a part of anything where the term “lost ladies” is part of the title. 

AMY: Yeah, we're kind of simpatico in what we're doing a little bit, right?

BRENDA: Yeah. 

KIM: Yep. We’ve also got Nina Berry with us, who is one of the co-executive producers of the show. In addition to being an all-around film buff and film history phenom, Nina is the author of the popular Pagan Jones  YA book series published by Harlequin Teen, as well as the paranormal YA series Otherkin. By day, she works for Warner Bros. television. Kim and I met Nina years ago when we did a joint reading of our books at Vroman’s bookstore in Pasadena. We’ve kind of virtually kept in touch since then, but it’s so nice to get to officially reconnect face to face (or well, Zoom to Zoom)... so welcome, Nina!

NINA BERRY: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here and I can't remember whose silver bowl I still have leftover from that event. Remember?

KIM: I think it’s mine!

NINA: Yeah, I think it is.

KIM: You can keep it. It’s your honorary bowl.

NINA: Thank you for the silver bowl, Kim.

AMY: Okay, there are two more women involved with “Disaster to the Wench,” and we’re going to give them shout-outs here in a second as well, but first I want to just explain what it is you all are doing. When I first heard about Disaster to the Wench,” my first thought was “OMG, it’s like “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” only chick-centric!” (And that’s a compliment because I love “Mystery Science Theater.”) But I think you guys will probably do a better job than I can at explaining what you’re all about. Brenda, can you tell us what is “Disaster to the Wench,” and how did you come up with the idea?

BRENDA: It is a little bit like “Mystery Science Theater 3000” meets TCM, with a twist of Ms. magazine. It's curation, a little bit of comedy … and we wanted to take a look at Old Hollywood and the treatment of women through the actual movies themselves and the women in that story, but the film actress playing the part had her own drama going on often in how she was dealing with the studio. And because this was happening during the pandemic, I was lonely, and couldn't watch movies with my friends ... and a person that I know in my other life, Rob Kates, who I know, professionally in the legal marketing world, was doing a podcast/show that I was a guest on and I said, “Hey, Rob, can people watch a movie together on Zoom and have it be recorded like a show?” He said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, what would that look like?” And he goes, “Oh, it could look like a lot of different things. We could pull a movie off of YouTube and we could play around with it, we could play with the sound and we could do captions.” And so we just started playing around with the idea. And you know, we had several different iterations of what it looked like and then we came up with what we have now.

KIM: I think we actually have a clip of your channel’s trailer, so let’s go ahead and play it ... It’ll give our listeners a little taste of what it’s like.

[plays trailer audio]

AMY: So as you can tell, it’s a very sassy little program. Brenda, you’re the show’s creator and an executive producer and you also provide a lot of the comedy relief, you know … that sort of commentary. Nina, I would tend to call you “the professor” of the group… You have these tidbits of trivia and history that you are dropping throughout the movie, and it’s so great. You are just a font of film knowledge! Then we also have two more women who round out the panel for each screening with you. Tell us who they are and what they bring to the table, also?

BRENDA: Well, Cynthia Levin is a stand up comic who I've known for years, and she's hilarious. She's also an actress and a director, and she's really known for being an improv-er … very off the cuff. And Beth Szymkowski is a working television writer; she created a show on Hulu called “Freakish.” And so she really knows the inner workings of how a script gets to the final stage. What I like is that all four women bring something different to it, like, I didn't want four stand-up comics … four stand- up comics would have been just out of control. And we really needed the depth and the wisdom of someone like Nina to give us the background that makes it richer. And then you've got Beth, who's telling us, you know, from a writer's perspective, like motivation, and, “Oh, I bet the executives wanted this.” And then we've got Cynthia just spurting off something hilarious, you know? And I'm a little bit kind of also trying to, as the executive producer, a little bit trying to keep people kind of focused as well.

NINA: Brenda keeps us focused, and Brenda also really has a lot of film knowledge herself. Like, Brenda knows a lot of film history. So the two of us are also, you know, contributing that.

AMY: All four of you guys are really unique in what you bring to the show, but you’re all collectively really funny, smart … You call yourselves “the wenches” which we will get to in a second... And I have to just give a little anecdote really quick that Kim and I, on Saturday night (you know, we're finally able to get together), we met up with about three other girlfriends, and we watched a movie. And just being in one room watching a movie with friends, you know, you're just having, like, belly laughs, basically. And it just made me think of you guys. And we had such a great time. Right, Kim?

KIM: Yeah, totally. I mean, when you get those snarky clips throughout the movie from your friends, it just ends up being so much better, and such a great experience. So this is the essence that you guys are basically creating, and it's great. 

NINA: Well, thank you. I mean, that is totally the vibe we are going for, like hanging out watching a movie with your friends. And I'm the “know it all” over in the corner going, “Well, this is, you know, the star of blah, blah, blah.” And then you've got your funny friends with Cynthia and Brenda. So thank you. That's exactly what we're going for.

AMY: And lest you think this is just four women drinking wine and making wisecracks, like we said, there actually is a ton of film history disseminated. It's almost like being in a film class or something, and it’s really cool. There's a lot of in-depth discussion on character and the choices the director is making and what they think is working and what's not working. So it's not just some superficial viewing party, and I love that about it, also. You really do learn some things. 

KIM: Exactly. And I think our listeners will appreciate that aspect of it. So where does the title of your show, “Disaster to the Wench” come from? 

BRENDA: It comes from the movie Gilda. There is a wonderful toast where Rita Hayworth is about to get her comeuppance, and women often get their comeuppance in the world if they do something that's not in line with what a woman should do, right? And I just thought, like, that title is just this “Disaster to the Wench” ... Well, who's to say she's a wench or not? I just think that speaks volumes about so many things in the world then and today, you know? 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. You’re reclaiming that word.

NINA: We've embraced it. And yeah, these movies, you see bad things happen to women who are doing things that shouldn't necessarily ... (well, some of them sometimes, if you're killing someone, maybe there should be a comeuppance.) But in some of our movies, really, these women are not deserving of bad things that happened to them. And yet, this is a woman’s lot in these movies, and we are examining why women are punished or treated a certain way in films, as well as lifting the glass to them while we toast. So, yeah...

AMY: Right. And so far, you guys have put out three episodes … three old movies that are in the public domain. So far you’ve done Rain, which stars Joan Crawford. Then there’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers with Barbara Stanwyck, and then there was Pygmalion, starring Wendy Hiller (who was an actress I wasn’t familiar with at all until I sat down with you guys and watched the episode). I will say, I was not really sure, when I watched Pygmalion, how it was going to work. I was kind of worried, like, “Oh, man, you know … four women, they’re all going to be talking. Is it going to be too much to hear their commentary during the movie?” But absolutely not … it worked so great. I think it really helps that you include the captions for the movie, so, you know, I can follow along with the dialogue while you guys are adding your remarks. But also, I think you guys jump at just the right times, you know? You give it a little breathing room. I think within probably the first two minutes of watching, I  was totally in the zone and totally with you and following, and I loved it. And the Pygmalion one, you guys had the drinking game. So anytime they called her a “poor girl” or a “good girl,” everybody got to take a drink. So if you were the viewer at home, you would get to, you know, play along with that.

NINA: And you would be schnockered, too, because they say it a lot in Martha Ivers … we did it every time someone on screen took a drink or lit a cigarette, and oh, my goodness, like I'm taking tiny, tiny little sips, because these people are drinking and smoking like crazy! But yeah, it makes it fun if you're in the mood, if it's the right time of day for you to have a drink with us. It's a lot of fun.

AMY: So then, in addition to getting to see this whole running commentary through the course of the actual movie, you also do an after-show about each movie. Tell us a little about that.

BRENDA: We didn't want to talk too much during the movie, I mean, especially getting into those deeper issues, because then you start having a real conversation and the movie’s going on and you've got to listen to the dialogue and watch what's going on. So we thought, “Well, we'll have, like, the ‘after chat’ the way they do on TCM,” and then it's just the four of us. And we take time; we tape it, like, a week after so we have time to watch the movie again (or at least parts of it). And then we take a week after and we try to keep it down to about 18 minutes or so.

KIM: Yeah, it reminds me of going to screenings of films where they have the director or the screenwriter speaking afterward. And I love that idea of getting to dissect what we watched a little bit after watching it. So that's right up my alley. 

AMY: On your website, you say “the Golden Age of Hollywood was a man's world.” Why do you think it's important to go back and look at some of these classic movies from a woman's perspective? What can that offer us?

NINA: Well, I feel like the things that were going on then are still going on today. The commentary may be about these movies that are very old, but it's still terrifyingly relevant, in a lot of ways. And so looking at movies in the past can shed light on current pop culture and on current attitudes toward women. So I really feel like it gives you perspective on these films that you're not going to get any other way and perspective on films and culture today as well.

KIM: Yeah, I mean, we're finding the same thing out as we do all these lost classics. They're actually so relevant in many cases, unfortunately. But it's important to keep talking about it. And your website also mentions that there might eventually be some live screenings in L.A. at some point, once the pandemic is fully over. I think that would be so much fun. 

NINA: So fun. It’d be hilarious. You can all laugh together. And there's nothing like a live audience, right?

KIM: Yep.

BRENDA: It would be a fun party, you know? So yeah, that definitely, definitely is one of the goals, for sure. 

AMY: So listeners, we really just want to stress how much we have enjoyed watching “Disaster To the Wench’s” YouTube Channel. And we tend to think that if you like us, you will like a lot of the same things that we like. So you are just going to have to check it out for yourself to see if you agree with us. I would recommend grabbing a glass (or even a bottle) of wine if it’s the right time of day, curling up on the sofa with a blanket and joining “the wenches” for an evening of fun.

BRENDA: We appreciate that.

NINA: Yes. Thank you so much. And yeah, I want to do it right now. I want to grab a glass of wine and watch a movie with you all. I wish we could.

KIM: We can't wait to watch more of them and see some future installments. We really love what you're doing. So thank you for dropping by to tell us about it. Thank you. 

BRENDA: Thank you for having us.

NINA: Yes, thank you ladies, so much. It’s been a delight.

KIM: Also, listeners, we’ll be talking a little more about Hollywood next week with another film historian — Dr. Caroline Frick from the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas, Austin. She’s joining us to discuss Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1924 novel, So Big, which was adapted for film three different times over the years, including a 1932 version starring Barbara Stanwyck (so that’s a name close to your heart Nina and Brenda, right?)

NINA: Absolutely. She’s the best.

KIM: We think you will love this discussion. It's a phenomenal book and not enough people have read it. So be sure to tune in and don't forget if you have 10 seconds to leave us a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts. It's the number one way you can show us some love.

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.

43. Lorraine Hansberry — A Raisin in the Sun with Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert

KIM: Amy, The Washington Post called the work we’re going to be discussing today, “one of a handful of great American plays—it belongs in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and The Glass Menagerie.”

AMY: Yes, and while its author is certainly not lost, per se, our guest today has uncovered a lot more about her and her still-very-relevant work. 

KIM: Right, and so, not to leave you in too much suspense, the play is A Raisin in the Sun and the playwright is Lorraine Hansberry. Our guest today, Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert, has written an incredible new biography on Hansberry called Radical Vision which came out in April. 

AMY: It’s actually the first scholarly biography of Hansberry which is kind of amazing given the play’s cultural impact.  

KIM: Right, and that’s just one of the reason’s Dr. Colbert’s book is so important. Among other things, it contextualizes Lorraine Hansberry within the Black radical movement. 

AMY: I can’t wait another second to talk about Hansberry, the play, and this fascinating biography, so let’s raid the stacks and get started! 

[Opening theme music plays] 

KIM: So, as we said, today’s guest is Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert. She is the Interim Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University, as well as the Idol Family Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts. She is also an Associate Director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington. In addition to her new biography on Hansberry, Dr. Colbert has written several other books and articles, and she’s currently working on the co-written volume, Black Existentialism.

AMY: Dr. Colbert has served as a dramaturg for productions at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage of the work we’re discussing today, A Raisin in the Sun. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, and her research interests span the 19th through 21st centuries, from Harriet Tubman to Beyoncé, and from poetics to performance. We’re so glad to have her on the show today. Welcome, Dr. Colbert!  

DR. SOYICA COLBERT: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here!

KIM: Dr. Colbert, I want to start off our discussion by telling our listeners that if they look through my copy of your book, they would see so much highlighting and underlining. It’s a biography, but Radical Vision is packed with ideas and I could almost feel my mind expanding with every sentence. There’s so much to talk about, so we thought we’d start off with a recap of Lorraine Hansberry’s life as our entry point. Amy, do you want to give it a go?

AMY: Absolutely. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born in Chicago in 1930; she was one of four children, and the baby of the family by seven years. Her mom was a schoolteacher and her father was a successful real estate broker. Both parents were active in the civil rights movement and contributed large sums of money to the NAACP and the Urban League. Then in 1938, Hansberry's family moved to a white neighborhood where they were attacked by a violent mob of their so-called “neighbors.” Among other things, the mob threw a concrete mortar through their window, almost hitting 7-year old Hansberry. Her family refused to move, though, until a court ordered them to do so, and this case made it to the Supreme Court. It was called Hansberry v. Lee — the court ruled, ultimately, against the restrictive covenants in this case, and they were later made illegal. Is that right, Soyica?

SOYICA: That’s absolutely right, and although Hansberry’s father won the battle, they lost the war, because the Supreme Court found that the Hansberrys, it was legal for them to buy that house in that neighborhood, but they did not rule that racially restrictive housing covenants were illegal in general.

AMY: Okay, got it. So this whole traumatic experience with hostile neighbors figures into the plot of Hansberry’s most well-known work, A Raisin in the Sun, which we will be discussing a bit later on. And as a young adult, Hansberry broke with family tradition — she attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison instead of a Southern Black college. After two years there though, she dropped out and moved to New York City. So Dr. Colbert, would you tell our listeners a bit about Hansberry’s life in New York?

SOYICA: So Hansberry moves to New York in 1950. She's only 20 years old, and she moves there and begins to work for a periodical called Freedom, which was owned by Paul Robeson, who at the time was a well-known musician and actor, and who had also been blacklisted because of his affiliation with the Communist Party. And so by this point, Paul Robeson’s passport had been revoked, and so he was unable to travel and earn money as a musician. And so Hansberry comes to New York in the midst of the Cold War, and she begins to work with leftist organizations, including Paul Robeson’s Freedom, and begins her education as an activist. And so she not only works at Freedom she also takes classes with at the new school and with W.E.B.Dubois — he calls her one of his favorite students — and she also begins to organize with the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, which is the leftist black organization run by women that Hansberry learns about when she's reporting on them for Freedom and becomes friends and a mentee of Alice Childress, who's also a black leftist and who was blacklisted for a time as well.

AMY: And it’s around this time, in New York, when Hansberry meets the producer and songwriter Robert Nemiroff, her future husband. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about their relationship and what role he may have played in shaping her artistic life?

SOYICA: So I describe Nemiroff as using a phrase in Toni Morrison's Beloved, that he was “a friend of her mind.” So Hansberry meets Robert Nemiroff, (or as she calls him, Bobby), on a picket line. I mean, I think the strongest articulation of their relationship was their shared political beliefs. They started off as friends and comrades and then started a romantic relationship. And once they got married, both of them worked doing odd jobs, but eventually he was able to sell a song, “Cindy, Oh Cindy”, that gave Hansberry the time she needed to work completely on her artistic work. And that's when she started writing A Raisin in the Sun. And so she stopped writing for periodicals that she had been doing since she moved to New York, and she started working on A Raisin in the Sun. And even though Hansberry and Bobby didn't have a traditional relationship (because by this time, in 1957, they're already living separate lives somewhat) when she starts working on A Raisin in the Sun.) They always remain partners in terms of their work and their artistic work. And so Nemiroff helps Hansberry get Raisin produced on Broadway; it's through some of their shared friendships they meet the producers that produce the play. And then in 1964, well, after their romantic relationship was over, you see in the archive, that Nemiroff is giving her feedback on her final play that's produced during her life. And so even though their romantic relationship was never traditional, and certainly they stopped living together as husband and wife well before A Raisin in the Sun, they continue to be partners in terms of their political and artistic work throughout her life. 

AMY: And we should have mentioned also probably that Bobby's white.

SOYICA: Yes, yes. So it's untraditional in all senses of the word. It’s an interracial relationship. Hansberry famously writes, in 1957, a letter to The Ladder (which is a lesbian periodical) that she is “a heterosexual, married lesbian.” And so again, before Raisin, before she becomes famous, both of them are aware of her same-sex desire and how that complicates their relationship.

KIM: In your book, you posit that life and work for Hansberry were a set of “practices” that were, above all, dedicated to a “radical vision” of transformation. And I was so inspired by this—this act of living and working toward this radical vision—and the idea that the process was more important than the destination. Her friend Nina Simone wrote in her memoir that when she and Hansberry got together, “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls’ talk.” Can you tell our listeners more about Hansberry’s “radical vision” and how it fits into Black Radicalism? What and who were some of the influences that shaped her thinking? 

SOYICA: So Black Radicalism accounts for the fundamental imprint that slavery left on American democracy and capitalism. So one way of thinking about this is we think about capitalism as an economic system. We often think of it as having free markets that are uninformed by political or personal investments. But if you account for the history of slavery, you see how that's not the case in the United States. And so when we think about will and transformation, um, you know, these key American ideals of the individual, we have to think about them and the relationship to capitalism as it plays out in the US. And so that's what Hansberry was thinking about. She was thinking about the history of slavery and how it intertwined with American democracy and our economic systems. And so although Hansberry believed that individuals, through their affirmative actions, could transform the world, she also understood that transformation as being part of networks. And she saw her individual work as part of a longer network of activity that she called the Movement that traced back to slave insurrections and into the present. And so you see Hansberry both being influenced by figures like W. E.B. Dubois, who is one of the key figures in thinking about Black Radicalism, but then also existentialist like Simone de Beauvoir, that Hansberry writes about as one of the key figures in transforming her work, particularly when Hansberry reads The Second Sex and talks about how it helps her to think about gender in new ways. And so, in part, Hansberry is influenced by Black Radicals like Dubois, but then she's also influenced by the existentialists that are coming to the forefront in the mid 20th century.

AMY: So, let’s circle back now to A Raisin in the Sun. Can you give us a little more context on what was going on in Hansberry’s life leading up to the play being produced and how it ended up on Broadway?

SOYICA: So Hansberry had stopped working for periodicals, and, as I said before, she was working a bunch of odd jobs when she first came to New York and as a writer, but by the time she began working on A Raisin in the Sun in earnest, she had carved out enough resources (thanks to Nemeroff’s hit song) to just focus on her writing. And so she writes this play, and Bobby and Lorraine had a shared friend named Philip Rose (whom Hansberry actually met at a communist camp called Camp Unity that she had attended earlier in the 50s.) And so they invite him over for spaghetti dinner, they read the play, Philip Rose loves it and says, “We're going to put it on Broadway.” And you can imagine the naivete and the vigor of their youth, because they're all young in their 20s. No one has ever produced a play before. Hansberry has not, you know, published any or produced any of her work as a playwright before, but they decided they're going to put it on Broadway. And it's their pure chutzpah and determination that gets it there. She's the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. And it's one of these tales where at so many different turns, things could have gone a different direction, but the brunt of the play shines through. And so it has brilliant previews in New Haven and Chicago, and it's because of those reviews that, ultimately, it's produced at a Broadway house.

AMY: The show opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, and it was immediately a huge success. Like you said, it was the first play produced on Broadway by an African-American woman, and Hansberry was the first Black playwright (and at age 29, the youngest American) to win a New York Drama Critics’ Circle award. The film version of A Raisin in the Sun was completed in 1961, starring Sidney Poitier, and received an award at the Cannes Film Festival. So I’m just going to read a little overview of the plot from your book, Dr. Colbert, for anyone who hasn’t seen it or who needs a refresher: A Raisin in the Sun depicts three generations of the Younger family buckling under the pressure of their deferred dreaming. The family reflects a long history of Black people's foreclosed desires and denied opportunities. Similar to many Black families in America, the Youngers had become accustomed to waiting for change to come. The death of the family's patriarch, Big Walter, however, results in an insurance payment to his widow Lena Younger (also known as Mama) that has the potential to change each member of the family's life. Lena’s son, Walter Lee, dreams of becoming an entrepreneur by opening a liquor store. His sister Beneatha aspires to attend medical school. Ruth, Walter Lee's wife, shares with Lena the vision of buying a home so that the family can escape the cramped quarters of their small apartment. Each dream is personal, seemingly individual, and in line with what we have come to call the “good life” in American society. Higher education, entrepreneurship and homeownership: all stepping stones on the family's ascension to the middle class. In addition, the set, style, and narrative of the play domesticates the Younger’s dreams and deemphasizes the way their yearning participates in a global movement for Black freedom. 

Okay, so the play really hinges around this money that's coming to the family and this idea of potentially a new home in a new neighborhood. Why would Hansberry, as a Black woman and a Black radical, focus on this idea of the new house?

SOYICA: So it seems a little counterintuitive, because as I said earlier, Hansberry is very critical of capitalism and really sees it as a roadblock to Black people's freedom. But Hansberry also understood, as a woman living in the 1950s, that women were understood as having a place in the home. And if you think about space, women are often associated with the home, and men were more associated with public space. And this is part of the reason why you see many of the leaders that we think of as leaders in the Civil Rights movement, as being men. And of course, we know that's not true today, but in terms of gender in the 1950s, women were more associated with the home. And so one of the things that A Raisin in the Sun asks us to consider is: What does it mean to desegregate private space? So not just the public spaces of a Woolworth or a bus stop, or a bus, but what does it mean to desegregate private spaces as a whole — women's spaces? And so setting the play in that context allows us to not only consider desegregation as a central part of the Civil Rights Movement, but also its specific impact on women.

AMY: Okay, so now’s the time — I call it “Lost Ladies of Lit Theater,” everyone, and I want our listeners to be able to hear a little bit of the play read aloud. So Soyica and I are going to do the honors. Would you like to sort of set up this passage that we’re about to read?

SOYICA: Yes. So in the play, one of the main characters is the youngest sister of the protagonist — her name is Beneatha Younger — and she has two suitors in the play. One is African American, and one is an African exchange student. And so in the play, all of the family’s striving emerges around this insurance payment that they're going to use to fulfill their dreams. But unfortunately, Beneatha’s older brother loses a good sum of the money and so the family has to decide what they will do now that they don't have all the money they thought they would have. And so this scene is a conversation between Beneatha and her African suitor about what they will do now, now that Walter Lee has lost a good portion of the insurance. 

AMY: And we should add that Beneatha’s dreams are to go to medical school and become a doctor. She was hoping that part of the money would be able to be put towards that.

SOYICA: Yes. So I’m going to play Asagai, and Amy has generously agreed to play Beneatha.

AMY: Alright, we’ll do our best here.

SOYICA: We’ll see. Okay, um, so Act One, Scene One.

BENEATHA: He gave away the money, Asagai ...

ASAGAI: Who gave away what money?

BENEATHA: The insurance money. My brother gave it away.

ASAGAI: Gave it away?

BENEATHA: He made an investment! With a man even Travis wouldn’t have trusted with his most worn-out marbles.

ASAGAI: And it’s gone?

BENEATHA: Gone.

ASAGAI: I’m very sorry ... And you, now?

BENEATHA: Me? ... Me? ... Me, I’m nothing … Me. When I was very small ... we used to take our sleds out in the wintertime and the only hills we had were the ice-covered stone steps of some houses down the street. And we used to fill them in with snow and make them smooth and slide down them all day … and it was very dangerous, you know  … far too steep … and sure enough one day a kid named Rufus came down too fast and hit the sidewalk and we saw his face just split open right there in front of us … And I remember standing there looking at his bloody open face thinking that was the end of Rufus. But the ambulance came and they took him to the hospital and they fixed the broken bones and they sewed it all up … and the next time I saw Rufus he just had a little line down the middle of his face … I never got over that …

ASAGAI: What?

BENEATHA: That that was what one person could do for another, fix him up — sew up the problem, make him all right again. That was the most marvelous thing in the world … I wanted to do that. I always thought it was the one concrete thing in the world that a human being could do. Fix up the sick, you know — and make them whole again. This was truly being God.

ASAGAI: You wanted to be God?

BENEATHA: No — I wanted to cure. It used to be so important to me. I wanted to cure. It used to matter. I used to care. I mean about people and how their bodies hurt …

ASAGAI: And you’ve stopped caring?

BENEATHA: Yes — I think so.

ASAGAI: Why?

BENEATHA: Because it doesn’t seem deep enough, close enough to what ails mankind! It was a child’s way of seeing things — or an idealist’s.

ASAGAI: Children see things very well sometimes — and idealists even better.

BENEATHA: I know that’s what you think. Because you are still where I left off. You with all your talk and dreams about Africa! You still think you can patch up the world. Cure the Great Sore of Colonialism with the Penicillin of Independence — !

ASAGAI: Yes!

BENEATHA: Independence and then what? What about all the crooks and thieves and just plain idiots who will come into power and steal and plunder the same as before — only now they will be black and do it in the name of the new Independence — WHAT ABOUT THEM?!

ASAGAI: That will be the problem for another time. First we must get there.

BENEATHA: And where does it end?

ASAGAI: End? Who even spoke of an end? To life? To living?

BENEATHA: An end to misery! To stupidity! Don’t you see there isn’t any real progress, Asagai, there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us — our own little mirage that we think is the future.

ASAGAI: That is the mistake.

BENEATHA: What?

ASAGAI: What you just said about the circle. It isn’t a circle — it is simply a long line — as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end — we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd but those who see the changes — who dream, who will not give up — are called idealists … and those who see only the circle we call them the “realists!”

BENEATHA: Asagai, while I was sleeping in that bed in there, people went out and took the future right out of my hands! And nobody asked me, nobody consulted me — they just went out and changed my life!

ASAGAI: Was it your money?

BENEATHA: What?

ASAGAI: Was it your money he gave away?

BENEATHA: It belonged to all of us.

ASAGAI: But did you earn it? Would you have had it at all if your father had not died?

BENEATHA: No.

ASAGAI: Then isn’t there something wrong in a house — in a world — where all dreams, good or bad, must depend on the death of a man? I never thought to see you like this, Alaiyo. You! Your brother made a mistake and you are grateful to him so that now you can give up on the ailing human race on account of it! You talk about what good is struggle, what good is anything! Where are we all going and why are we bothering!

BENEATHA: AND YOU CANNOT ANSWER IT!

ASAGAI: I LIVE THE ANSWER! In my village at home it is the exceptional man who can even read a newspaper … or who ever sees a book at all. I will go home and much of what I will have to say will seem strange to the people of my village. But I will teach and work and things will happen, slowly and swiftly. At times it will seem that nothing changes at all … and then again the sudden dramatic events which make history lieap into the future. And then quiet again. Retrogression even. Guns, murder, revolution. And I even will have moments when I wonder if the quiet was not better than all that death and hatred. But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and I will not wonder long. And perhaps … perhaps I will be a great man … I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course … and perhaps for it I will be butchered in my bed some night by the servants of the empire …

BENEATHA: The martyr!

ASAGAI: … or perhaps I shall live to be a very old man, respected and esteemed in my new nation … And perhaps I shall hold office and this is what I’m trying to tell you, Alaiyo: Perhaps the things I believe now for my country will be wrong and outmoded, and I will not understand and do terrible things to have things my way or merely to keep my power. Don’t you see that there will be young men and women — not British soldiers then, but my own black countrymen — to step out of the shadows some evening and slit my then useless throat? Don’t you see they have always been there … that they always will be. And that such a thing as my own death will be an advance? They who might kill me even … actually replenish all that I was.

BENEATHA: Oh, Asagai! I know all that.

ASAGAI: Good! Then stop moaning and groaning and tell me what you plan to do. 

AMY: And… scene!

KIM: I think I was holding my breath! I’m glad you did that, Amy, and not me. You were incredible. You both did such a beautiful job. And let’s tell our listeners, there’s a reason that you read that conversation, specifically, because it actually, it is the crux of the play, right?

SOYICA: Yes, so Hansberry, in an interview, says that Asaga is the thesis of the play. It draws attention, also, that moment, to the relationship between what's happening in Chicago and how it relates to independence movements happening throughout the world, throughout Africa, which Hansberry was aware of because of her work for freedom and her covering of independence movements in Africa in the 1950s. And you also hear two other important points in that portion. You hear Hansberry’s ideas around how individuals could transform things. So she's really interested in depicting doctors and engineers in her work, because she sees them as fixing things. And she's interested in how individuals have the capacity to transform a human condition. And she's also interested in thinking about how individual action helps to restructure society, and so you hear that Asagai’s talking about, you know, he may be useful to his country for a while, and then he may no longer be useful, and that's all a part of the grander scheme of things.

KIM: And in Radical Vision, you explain how Hansberry used her art to showcase encounters (they could be political, sexual, personal, and historical) with witnesses. And theater audiences were, of course, a built-in witness to the encounters that Hansberry created with her art. Although her play was a massive success, were there some disconnects, then, between Hansberry’s intentions and the things the audience actually took away from it? 

SOYICA: Absolutely. So Hansberry was called an assimilationist. People thought of her as a one-hit wonder. In an interview with Mike Wallace, he calls her “a housewife that just wrote a play.” So there are lots of misconceptions about Hansberry and her work. Often people associated Hansberry with her middle class upbringing, and so wondered about her depicting a working class family and the authenticity of that vision, as well. And I think that part of what is missed is how Hansberry saw the relationship between Black people in the US across class lines, and Black people throughout the world. Again, it's a part of a larger freedom movement, because most people were just focusing on this individual family and this “kitchen sink drama” as depicting this one family rather than this family as emblematic of a larger set of struggles that Hansberry was interested in exploring.

AMY: And that’s why Asagai is important. In some ways, you’re like, “Well, does he really factor into the plot in terms of what’s actually happening to the family?” Not necessarily, but it’s that speech that sort of connects to her beliefs.

SOYICA: Right, her beliefs about the world, and I think that, you know, people trying to understand Hansberry… if you look at A Raisin in the Sun without considering the character of Asagai, you’ve missed a big part of what she was trying to communicate.

AMY: And also, I want to tell our listeners, if you want to just spend 30 minutes of your life that will blow your mind, you need to go find the YouTube recording of the interview between Hansberry and Mike Wallace, because this girl schools him. She was only what, like, 24? How old was she, during that interview? 

SOYICA: Oh, this was 1959. So she was 29. 

AMY: Oh, okay. So it's still, I mean ... first of all, she's handling it with such eloquence and poise. But you can sense that she's thinking like, “Oh, my God, this guy is such a clown.” And she just very calmly and rationally just tells him to take a seat.

KIM: Yeah, she's way up here, and he's down there, you know, trying to talk to her. But her ideas are so beyond, it seems like what he can even comprehend or feels like he can explain to his audience.

SOYICA: It's brilliant. I mean, the thing that that interview also shows us is that there was no point of reference for Lorraine Hansberry in 1959. And so he's trying to make sense of her given the terms that he has at the time, but she doesn't fit into those boxes. And so even as she tries to redirect him to think about her in a different way, he just doesn't have the capacity to do so because there's no point of reference from what she can draw to understand her.

AMY: Also, let’s talk about the ending of the play, and the debates the audiences had about it. Because I know I had my own conflicted feelings as I was reading it.

SOYICA: So whenever I teach A Raisin in the Sun, I take a poll of my students and I ask them whether or not the Younger family should move at the end of the play; the play hinges, again, on them buying this house and then deciding, ultimately, whether or not they're moving into the house in a segregated neighborhood. And we know from history and from Hansberry’s own personal history that if they move, they're going to face violence in the neighborhood. It's not going to be a happy, you know, neat, ending to a melodrama. And so the question is whether or not they should move or whether or not they should stay. And if they stay, then they could also take a bribe from the community, because they try to repurchase the home to prevent the Youngers from desegregating the community. And so, in the book, I talk about how the decision is not whether or not the Youngers should move. The decision is really understanding that Hansberry thought each affirmative act was a building block in the movement for Black freedom. And so the question is not about whether or not the Youngers should move, but whether or not they should assert themselves in history in this way, even if it means they're going to face violence once they move to Clybourne Park. And so their choice to move is really about them changing the course of history, one decision at a time.

AMY: And that's what makes Walter’s... I feel like he has two speeches there towards the end: one that's sort of in favor of staying and sort of sticking it to this new community. And then the other one where he changes his mind. And he ultimately has a change of heart and decides they need to go. Both of those are so powerful, and both of those, there's truth to it, you know? That's what made it difficult. But then when you see the second speech, you're like, “That is what you have to ... you have to do it, you have to do it.”

KIM: It’s so powerful, even though it’s not a “happy ending,” per se. And people might have taken it, if they just, you know, saw the ending and thought, “Oh, that’s a happy ending because it can sort of complete the idea.” You realize that they’re going to be facing potential violence and lots of discrimination and everything going forward.

AMY: Didn’t Hansberry have an alternate ending, where it shows that?

SOYICA: She did. So in the alternate ending of the play, they move into the neighborhood and they're barricaded and ... the Younger family’s barricaded in their new home, protecting themselves with a gun. That imagery alludes to her own experience because one of the things that Hansberry learned when her parents desegregated a neighborhood as a child is while her father was off in Washington DC fighting for freedom in the courts, her mother was at home protecting the family with a pistol from the mobs jeering at them and so forth. And so Hansberry saw an example both of Civil Rights activism in the courts as a child, but she also saw the possibility of self-defense. And so she replicates that scene with her mother in one of the versions of the play (ending to the play) and ultimately that's not the version that gets produced on Broadway, but it is something that Hansberry remembers.

KIM: And in Radical Vision, you explore this divergence between Hansberry’s private life and her public life. She had love affairs with women—her friendship circle included the lesbian author of Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh, whom we did an episode on last year—and Hansberry even wrote letters to her husband about one day finding her dream woman. So can you talk a bit about her unconventional private life and how it squared with her public life, particularly after she became so well known? (She was profiled in Vogue and the New York Times)

SOYICA: So no one knew when Hansberry was alive, outside of her intimate circle, that she was a lesbian. So as I mentioned before, she had an unconventional marriage. She wrote her letters to The Ladder, which she signed with her initials so that again, the public didn't have a record that Hansberry is one who wrote them. But her inner circle, including Nemiroff, was aware of her same-sex desire even prior to them getting married. And so after A Raisin in the Sun is produced on Broadway, Hansberry purchases an apartment and her and Nemiroff begin to live separate lives and another apartment in the village and in that building lives one of her long term on-again, off-again lovers, Dorothy Secules, and also in that building lives Phil Rose, who is the producer of A Raisin in the Sun, so it's, you know, a very small circle people. But Hansberry had, what we would call today queer circles a friends (lesbian women, gay men — James Baldwin is one of her closest friends), but Hansberry also, for the most part, most of her circle of friends were white women. And so Hansberry often struggled with finding her place in the world, because she had her Civil Rights activist friends, who were predominantly black, she had her queer friends, who were predominantly white. And she often found herself out of place amongst all the groups in which she interacted. And so you see Hansberry struggling with that in some of her private writing, but none of that comes to the fore in any of her public self. It does emerge some in some of the characters she depicts in some of her writing, so there's a queer character in her play, LeBlanc, which is produced after her death, there's a queer character and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which is produced, um, you know, right at the end of her life. Her identity as a queer woman, as a lesbian, isn't discovered until after her death when people begin to realize that the letters to The Ladder were written by Lorraine Hansberry, and her archive becomes public where you have a lot of queer writing that was never published.

KIM: So I’d like to talk a little bit more about the idea of encounters that we discussed earlier. You write that, “Encounter serves as a moment of friction that may result in greater clarity for all, those involved in the encounter, and those that bear witness to it” and that it can “disrupt history.” And it made me think of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Derek Chauvin trial. It became, on some level, a collective, global experience of witnessing. Do you see these viral “encounters” between police and Black citizens as an extension of Hansberry’s “radical vision?” 

SOYICA: Absolutely. So several commenters who have been reflecting on George Floyd's death and then the trial have noted that the young teenage girl, Darnella Frazier, who captured the video of George Floyd's death, who bore witness to his death, is one of the reasons that we have the conviction. And so the idea of Black people bearing witness to America’s atrocities emerges in our contemporary moment via the recording of George Floyd's death, but also has a longer historical trajectory. If you think about Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, who famously allowed Jet magazine to run an image of her son's mutilated corpse on its cover in 1955, because she said she wanted the nation to see what was done to her son. And so you know, that idea of witnessing atrocities is very much a part of the Black Radical tradition, and certainly, I think, what Hansberry is getting at. But I also think there's another piece of this story in terms of witnessing, because I think Hansberry was also interested in the idea of Black people being able to see one another, to be able to bear witness to one's point of view. And so there's this really, I think, important moment in Hansberry’s life where she's in a meeting with Robert Kennedy, who is at the time, the Attorney General, and he has gathered her and James Baldwin, Lena Horne, (a bunch of famous Black people at the time) to discuss the quote-unquote, “Civil Rights issue.” And there's a lesser known figure in the room named Jerome Smith, who's an activist. And so at one point, Bobby Kennedy asked Hansberry a question, and she directs him that he should be talking to the activists on the ground, he should be talking to Jerome Smith, rather than asking, you know, these famous Black people for what they should do about the Civil Rights issue. And so I also see that as a moment of witnessing, because it's a moment where Hansberry is able to recognize the point of view of someone else in the room and give them space to speak for their experience rather than her taking up all the space in the world. 

KIM: Yeah, it’s like the idea of letting someone use your platform today.

SOYICA: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

KIM: And I’m curious, maybe, how some contemporary movies Get Out and Us for example… Sorry to Bother You..  how you might see them fitting into the radical vision that Lorraine Hansberry espoused during her time.

SOYICA: So I love the idea of thinking about Get Out and Sorry to Bother You as depictions of radical vision, because what they do in part is to use genre to help to translate the experience of Black people, which in some ways can seem, you know, difficult to understand, and can be hard to translate. And so they use genre to get at what some sometimes can be understood to be the terror of Black life. And Hansberry, she was always interested in trying to connect across difference and articulate a vision for Black people of what is possible. And so she was both very much invested in creating coalitions with people who are different from herself, but then also with connecting with Black people. And so I think that, you know, her decision around using realism, as I say, in the book was both about depicting what is but also what is possible. And that's part of the reason why she liked to use witness, both in the sense of bearing witness, but then also a sense of being able to connect with people.

AMY: There was something in your book about this idea of encounter is not meant to necessarily bring about a resolution. It’s just supposed to bring some clarity and start the ball rolling, which is kind of what Asagai was talking about, too. It’s not about fixing it all instantly. It’s going to take a really long time. And these encounters that you have are just one step along the way.

KIM: They’re building upon each other.

SOYICA: Exactly. Exactly. It’s that friction and realizing that we disagree and trying to understand the other person’s perspective that Hansberry was trying to get at.

KIM: That brings up I wanted to ask about LeBlanc too, I saw that it's the first time in 15 years in the UK, they're doing a production of that and also A Raisin in the Sun. They haven't had any Lorraine Hansberry’s work in 15 years. And I saw in the article that said that, that Nemiroff had said that LeBlanc was Lorraine Hansberry’s greatest work. So I wanted to hear what you had to say about LeBlanc and how it fits into her work. And I have not read that, so I'm interested to hear about it.

SOYICA: The National Theater did a production of LeBlanc — it’s a really powerful production. As I said before, LeBlanc isn’t produced in the U.S. until after Hansberry dies. It's about an independence movement in a fictional African country. And it's a brilliant play that features around the story of three brothers, and in some ways has allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet. But the play is really struggling with this central figure, who similar to Hamlet, who comes home after his father's death, and deals with a ghost that his father leaves. But in this case, it's the ghost of the revolution rather than the ghost of the monarchy. And so his son has to deal with, or reconcile, the independence movement that's happening in his home country, even though he's moved on and become an expat living in Europe at the time.

KIM: Do you agree with Nemiroff about it being her greatest work?

SOYICA: I  don't know. It definitely has a full version of her radicalism expressed explicitly in the play. But I think that there's parts of A Raisin In the Sun that I really love, because it has a young woman character that's such a strong and well-rounded figure, whereas LeBlanc focuses on three male characters, which are also you know, fascinating, but I love the fact that Hansberry gives us Beneatha, a young black woman in 1959, who doesn't want to make the world through marriage. She says, “I want to make myself,” and I think that is a really powerful statement, particularly for the time period. So I don't know if I could give a ranking of my Hansberry plays. I think they all have their amazing qualities. But I do think that there's something special to me about the character of Beneatha in Raisin.

AMY: It does seem, though, that the time is ripe now for more of her plays to start getting more exposure and being produced in theaters again.

SOYICA: I hope so! You know, before the pandemic there was in the US, there was a plan to have a cycle of her plays, so Sign, LeBlanc and Raisin, all we're planning on being produced in 2020. And of course, that didn't happen. And so I'm hopeful that that will happen, hopefully in the near future, because I do think the timing is right.

AMY: Okay, so Hansberry died young, at the age of 34, from cancer. It was a terrible loss for us all because you really can’t help but think about how wonderfully she might have been able to still speak to us and guide us, especially today). So Dr. Colbert, how can studying her work and learning from her practice continue her legacy and further her radical vision?

SOYICA: So the biggest takeaway and gift I had from writing this book and learning about Hansberry was a lesson in how to live a life of integrity as a daily practice. And so Hansberry really saw quotidian, day-to-day choices and activities as part of the building blocks of transformations of society. And so you hear that Asagai speech, of him saying these big changes that happen by way of these small integral steps that we take. The other thing that I'll say is that the Hansberry we find in the archive adds to what we know and offers us a model for how to use and access knowledge in an ethical way. And so, you know, Hansberry left for us breadcrumbs of future possibilities, and they're all located in her archive. And so, I'm grateful to Robert Nemeroff, who, even though he was divorced from his wife at the time, she named him as executor of her estate — again, you know, a friend of her mind — and he kept her papers meticulously. And now the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust has made them available to the public via the Schomburg Public Library. And so again, it's a great gift that we all have to be able to read her published and unpublished work and get a fuller sense of her radical vision in the archives.

KIM: Dr. Colbert, we want to thank you so much for joining us for this fantastic discussion today. 

SOYICA: Thank you so much for having me! And thank you so much for the care you took with my book. I deeply appreciate it.

AMY: So 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. It’s the single most important thing you can do to help us grow our audience and help other book-minded people find us. 

KIM: Also, I just wanted to share with you that I’m teaching a one-day online workshop through the UCLA Extension program, it’s on November 6th. The workshop is called Adapting Literature, Myths, and Fairy Tales for New YA Audiences. I’ve taught it a few times and it’s a lot of fun. It’s about three hours, and you can take it from anywhere. We’ll put a registration link in the show notes for you. 

AMY: And don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don’t miss a single episode, guys, and we will see you next week! 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.

42. Mary Astell — The First Feminist

AMY: Hey, everybody, we are back with another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes….

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. And before we begin, we wanted to share a cool update about the episode we did a few weeks ago on the Federal Writers Program. It was a New Deal program that put American writers to work. Apparently, there’s an effort in Congress right now to revive this program (or something like it).

AMY: Yeah, so apparently there’s this guy named David Kipen who is the former literature director for the National Endowment of the Arts. He now teaches writing at UCLA and he runs a lending library called Libros Schmibros in Los Angeles (I love that name). But he’s been pushing pretty vocally for a new version of the Federal Writers Project.

KIM: Right, and an article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times caught the eye of two U.S. Representatives — Ted Lieu and Teresa Leger Fernandez — and together they’ve introduced the 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project Act to allocate $60 million in grants to writers who could chronicle the impact of the pandemic.

AMY: It will be interesting to see if this can actually get passed, or what will become of it. But I love the idea that there are people out there trying to get this going

KIM: Yeah, I'd like to think that we're in the zeitgeist for that, because I do believe we did recommend this. We'll be sure to also send this episode to them and lend them our support for this amazing project. Anyway, now back to our regularly scheduled mini episode, which is all about the first feminist…  

AMY: And honestly, before we started researching for this episode, I maybe would have vaguely guessed that perhaps it was Mary Wollstonecraft, who was Mary Shelley’s mom, that would have earned the title of the first feminist.

KIM: Yeah, that’s absolutely what I would have guessed too, before we started looking into this, and it turns out it was actually a different Mary altogether. 

AMY: Yeah, and this Mary — Mary Astell was her name — she predated Mary Wollstonecraft by about a century. Mary Astell was born in 1666, Mary Wollstonecraft in 1759. But both Marys are generally considered to be the earliest feminist philosophers, and their work set the foundation for the women’s rights movement worldwide. 

KIM: Yes, and Astell is considered what’s called a protofeminist (and it means she anticipated the idea of modern feminism before it was even a concept). And she’s most known for two of her books, one of them is a two-part Serious Proposal to the Ladies, (the first part was published in 1694), and then there’s an indictment of early modern marriage called Some Reflections upon Marriage. And that last one is circa 1700. So let’s find out more about Astell and why we should know who she is. 

AMY: So she was born in Newcastle, England. Her family was middle class, but they had kind of fallen in the world, as they say. The area of Newcastle, before the Reformation, was sort of a center for monasticism, and this was a concept that Mary would actually seize upon and incorporate into her own philosophical thinking. And we’ll delve into this a little bit further in a minute.

KIM: Yes. And so, back to Mary’s life, her father died in 1678, and then she was really surrounded primarily by a household primarily composed of women. However her uncle was her tutor, and he was a clergyman-poet who had been educated at the University of Cambridge. This is important because the fact that he educated her in mathematics, philosophy, literature, history, theology, and even modern languages was pretty exceptional at a time when you think about it, most women were functionally illiterate at that time. But back to our favorite subject, reading: she loved it. She spent her childhood and teens basically in solitude enjoying the pleasure of reading. Amy, I can just picture her sitting under a tree in a grass-stained 17th century gown with her nose stuck in a book, right?

AMY: Yeah, totally. And actually, I read an anecdote that if she happened to be in her house and saw a visitor approaching the house while she was in the middle of some serious reading, she’d lean out the window and jokingly tell them, “Miss Astell is not at home.” I love that story; I think it’s so funny!

KIM: I have to jump in to say that when I was a kid, I was sometimes rude to my sister when I was reading and I wanted to just get out, like I would throw something at her or something. And my mom taught me to say, “Come back later, please.” So I would just say it over and over again. “Come back later, please. Come back later, please.” Anyway, half the time it worked, and half the time it didn't. But anyway, so I totally get Mary Astell.

AMY: Yes. So, “Miss Astell is not at home,” is her version of “Come back later.” And actually, in learning that she received such an impressive education, thanks to her uncle, that really reminds me of Anna Komnene, the historian whom we did an episode on earlier this year, right?

KIM: Yes, exactly. That’s right. 

AMY: But getting back to Mary when she was about 20 she made the decision to move to London, and she vowed that she was going to remain single and devote her life to literature. She felt that although she had been born a woman, she aspired for something greater than the very limited options imposed on women of the day.  

KIM: And as a side note, I also read that her mother probably didn’t have enough money after Astell’s father died to pay her dowry anyway… And there was rumor that at one point she had been engaged to a clergyman, but she never married. So if either of those things are true, kudos to her for flipping a negative situation into a positive one.

AMY: Yeah, I guess you could maybe see it that way. Like she’s like, “I’m just never going to marry” because it didn’t work out for her. But I can also understand if she was really reluctant to marry… I mean, it typically wasn’t a fairytale arrangement for most women back then. [It’s like an episode of “The Bachelorette” where all your options are not necessarily great and your PARENTS get to pick the winner. I shudder.] 

KIM: Oh, I shudder too, both of us are shuddering right now! Yeah, right, I’m going to go with the idea that she actually didn’t want to get married. I believe that. I don’t believe those rumors.

AMY: “Dowry, schmowry,” right? Like Libros Schmibros. But anyway, once Astell had moved to London, she met William Sancroft. He was the Archbishop of Canterbury. (So she started making friends in high places, clearly.) He was  kind of a renegade, and he helped support her financially and he even introduced her to her future publisher. So then she also began corresponding with a contemporary philosopher, John Norris, regarding the moral and metaphysical ideas of a French philosopher named Nicolas Malebranche. Her correspondence with Norris was later published as a book called, Letters Concerning the Love of God. 

KIM: When she was about 28 years old, she published part one of her Proposal that we mentioned, and that was followed a few years later by part two, which offered an actual method for the improvement of women’s reason. It was built on the ideas of Decartes and his followers. It was published anonymously and signed, “By a Lover of Her Sex.” 

AMY: Yes, so it seems that she had taken great pains to conceal her identity, which you can kind of understand. I mean, she’s probably expecting some backlash for these radical ideas that she’s writing about. But eventually, the public picked up on who she really was… and actually, people in educated circles tended to be complimentary of her and her work. The general consensus seemed to be, “Yes, she’s got some really shocking ideas, but dang if she isn’t really artful in the way she presents it.”

KIM: That’s so impressive when you think what she was up against. Together with the Letters, the first and second Proposals turned Astell into a minor celebrity in London. She was celebrated for her wit and eloquence and even openly praised by men like Daniel Defoe (He was, of course, the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders). At the height of her career, she also had several upper class female patrons who supported her work, and they helped to sustain her writing career for several years. Yay for women supporting women! That’s cool. Amy, I thought it would be interesting if we read an excerpt from Astell’s Proposal to the Ladies, to give readers a taste, and since you have such a great reading voice, will you do the honors for us.

AMY: Yes, I’ll try. It’s a little challenging because it’s kind of got some 17th-century syntax to it. So listeners, please stay awake for this little section, and we will summarize this in a second. But I keep thinking, people it’s called A Proposal to the Ladies, I just want to start off with, “HEY LAAAAADY!”

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: It didn’t start that way, though. But she writes: 

  The Incapacity, if there be any, is acquired not natural; and none of their Follies are so necessary, but that they might avoid them if they pleas'd themselves. Some disadvantages indeed they labour under, and what these are we shall see by and by and endeavour to surmount; but Women need not take up with mean things, since (if they are not wanting to themselves) they are capable of the best. Neither God nor Nature have excluded them from being Ornaments to their Families and useful in their Generation; there is therefore no reason they should be content to be Cyphers in the World, useless at the best, and in a little time a burden and nuisance to all about them.  And 'tis very great pity that they who are so apt to over-rate themselves in smaller matters, shou'd, where it most concerns them to know, and stand upon their Value, be so insensible of their own worth.

       The Cause therefore of the defects we labour under, is, if not wholly, yet at least in the first place, to be ascribed to the mistakes of our Education; which like an Error in the first Concoction, spreads its ill Influence through all our Lives.

And it goes on from there.

KIM: I would have butchered that completely. But anyway, I mean, she read it so beautifully, you almost don’t need a summary because it was so well done. But in summary, Astell is making this eloquent appeal for the higher education of women in early modern England. And the second part offers a method, as we said, for the improvement of their minds, with a further plea to ladies of quality to practice Cartesian rules for thinking in order to obtain virtue and wisdom. 

AMY: So I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t remember enough Descartes from philosophy class to really understand what that means… hell, I don’t remember ANY Decartes from philosophy class really. But it sounds like she was using logic so that people were like, ‘Hmmm… that makes total sense, I can’t really refute it.”) 

KIM: Well, I just want to say I did actually visit Descartes, France, at one point, with a philosophy professor, and I got a sticker from there that said, “I think, therefore I am.” So it always reminds me that he was arguing that because you can think, you exist, and basically arguing that reason is fundamental to being human. And so that's sort of what she was building on. Anyway, here we go….

AMY: Okay. So wait. Descartes is a place in France, too?

KIM: Well, the town is named after his family.

AMY: Okay. Okay.

KIM: The town is very old, so it probably predates his name….

AMY: Okay, got it..

KIM: ... but that’s where he lived

AMY: So then in her other important publication, Reflections, Astell analyzes some of the most common causes of marital discontent in her time. And to avoid such discontent, she suggests, women ought to be thoroughly educated so that they can make a better choice of husband—or else not marry at all. That makes sense. Pick a good guy, right?

KIM: Yes.

AMY: Since she was talking to single ladies, basically, so I’m thinking in my head, “All the single ladies! All the single ladies!”

KIM: Literally, I mean, the whole idea of “putting a ring on it” is 20th, 21st century (I don’t know when that song came out) but it’s like, she was here in the 17th century saying, “No thanks. I think I’ll try something else.”

AMY: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I love that one of her takeaways for women is basically, “Choose wisely, girls.” You know? It can make or break.

KIM: And don't we see that in every other work of literature that we've pretty much talked about on this show?

AMY: Exactly. And a few that are coming up in the next few months, you'll see this theme.

KIM: Yeah. Her big idea to accomplish all this was what she dubbed a monastery. So that's the idea of the monastic living that we were talking about earlier, really coming into play. And it focused on education, and without this traditional hierarchical structure of like a confessor and all that. And I can imagine the TED talk for this right? Cue the PowerPoint. “Here's the monastery. Here's you…” anyway... 

AMY: In front of a screen with a clicker. 

KIM: Yeah, I mean, if she did a TED talk on this now, I think it would go viral.

AMY: Totally. Totally. Okay, so anyway, getting back to this idea of this monastery for women, like what was that going to be about?

KIM: Yeah, rather than, like I said, the traditional hierarchical structure, the bonds of the teachers and students would be based on friendship and affection and personal development rather than, like, a confessional-type authoritarian figure with acolytes. Women could stay as long as they wanted, and (this is key) they were free to leave at any time. (It seems obvious, now, but maybe not so much.) Then there would be prayer, meditation, and fasting, as well as charitable works and studying. The idea was that women would learn to become self-sufficient both emotionally and intellectually. I mean, radical for that time, right?

AMY: Yeah, and yet you can also totally see why the idea never really got off the ground. I can’t see most men of that era really supporting this idea…I think, rather, they’d be quite threatened by it, in fact!

KIM: Oh, absolutely!

AMY: And it also kind of sounds like a sort of, like, secular convent, which I think given the whole Catholic/Protestant tension that was happening at the time, maybe that also would make people a little wary of this idea of, like, a secular convent, you know?

KIM: That makes sense.

AMY: But in London, though, Astell was able to sort of create an idea of this educational community she proposed. As we said earlier, she had this wealthy circle of friends and patrons who supported her emotionally in addition to economically, and some of them had also chosen a life similar to Astell in that they either didn’t want to get married or they refused to remarry after becoming widows. So together they helped less fortunate women, housing homeless widows and teaching their maids to read and write. And though Astell was never able to create this “monastery” of education that she envisioned, she was able to start a charity school for the daughters of retired soldiers, and that was in existence until 1862. She designed the school’s curriculum and it may have been the first school in England with an all-women Board of Governors. 

KIM: That’s really cool, too. When she was about 60 years old, she went to live with one of her close friends and patrons, Lady Catherine Jones. 

AMY: And I read up a little bit more about Lady Catherine, who also never married, and there are some people that speculated that their relationship may have been something more than just platonic. It’s impossible to say for sure, but we do know that Lady Catherine ended up being buried in Westminster Abbey with another close female friend named Mary Kendall. So who knows? Maybe she didn’t want to get married for other reasons.

KIM: So for her part, Astell died in London a few months after a mastectomy. She is remembered for her groundbreaking method of negotiating the position of women in society by engaging in philosophical debate— (and that’s rather than basing her arguments in historical evidence as had been done previously.) Astell drew on Descartes' theory of dualism, a separate mind and body, and used it to underscore the idea that women, too, had the ability to reason. Her most famous quote is, “If all Men are born Free, why are all Women born Slaves?" Among 21st-century scholars, there is also a growing appreciation for her poetry and rhetoric as well as her use of figurative language. Some have said she’s a successor to John Milton and that she influenced Samuel Richardson’s masterpiece Clarissa! It’s been a while since I’ve read Clarissa, but I could see that. Amy, you read it more recently right, so what do you think?

AMY: Okay, first of all, confession time, because we mentioned that I was reading Clarissa in the very first Lost Ladies of Lit episode, right? It was my pandemic novel, and I am still not finished with it! It's so long. And granted, because when we started this podcast, we were like having to read all these other books. And so it's kind of sitting on my nightstand, and I just started back on it. I'm about 500 pages in right now. But yeah, it's really illuminating to hear that Astell inspired him, because the whole time I've been reading Clarissa it has always struck me as pretty remarkable that a man wrote this very sympathetic portrait of a young woman who is doomed by marital expectations, basically, and I kept thinking, “How can he crawl inside a teenage girl's head like this?” Because he has such, really kind of feminist ideas in the book. Now, it makes a ton of sense if he had read some of Astell's work and elaborated on that, and elaborated and elaborated for 1200 pages and at some point, I will give everybody an update when I finally crossed the finish line on this novel and finish it I'll probably have a lot more gray hairs.

KIM: I don’t blame you. I mean, we have had a lot of extra stuff to read since we started this podcast. But I think I remember liking Clarissa, but you know how I re-read stuff? I don’t think I’m ever going to re-read that book.

AMY: No. It’s actually a really good book, but it could definitely be shorter.

KIM: Anyway, I hope you all loved learning about Mary Astell as much as we did. And basically, I just want to have another baby just so I can name him or her Astell. Someone out there, please name your kid Astell for me! 

AMY: Oh my god, Kim. That’s so you.

KIM: I know it is.

AMY: Do you remember when you used to dream of naming a child Waverly? This is like that… little Waverly and Astell. (Kim is very inspired by literature). Anway, next week we’ll be discussing another writer who was dedicated to the practice of living and writing, and in her case it was to further the goals of Black Radicalism. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, I love the episode, so I’m excited for everyone to hear it. We’ll be discussing Lorraine Hansberry. She's the author of one of the 20th century’s most important plays, A Raisin in the Sun. And with us is guest and biographer Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert. 

AMY: Until then, feel free to review us wherever you listen to podcasts, because those five star reviews really help new listeners find us. 

KIM: Yes, and also, we just want to say that we LOVE hearing directly, from you, our listeners! Oh my gosh, thank you. Thank you!

AMY: And I just want to give a big shout-out to one of our listeners named Susan. She is a former English teacher and fellow Masterpiece Theater lover from Rhode Island who recently wrote to us. She said, “Thank you for all of your pods! I have been adding so many books and authors to my TBR list and shelves. My favorite episodes have been the ones on Amy Levy, Charmian Kittredge, Sui Sin Far, and Constance Fenimore Woolson.  Actually, I've enjoyed them all!  I just received the stories of Constance Fenimore Woolson yesterday.” Okay, so Susan, please write us back again and let us know what you think of Anne. I’m particularly interested to hear what you thought of the last third of the book, which gets kind of crazy.

KIM: And listeners, we also want you to follow Susan’s lead and drop us an email at info@lostladiesoflit.com whenever you feel like adding your own two cents about one of our episodes, weighing in on one of our author recommendations or even to point us in the direction of an author we might not know about. We’re all ears! And until our next episode, have a great week everybody! 

41. Edith Lewis & Willa Cather with Melissa Homestead

KIM: Hi everyone! Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit. I’m Kim Askew….

AMY: ...and I’m Amy Helmes. We’re a podcast dedicated to uncovering some of history’s forgotten women writers, and in today’s episode, we’re taking a closer look at a forgotten writer whose association with one of America’s greatest female authors has long been both misunderstood and, at times, purposefully misconstrued.

KIM: Yeah, Edith Lewis (when she is remembered at all) has often been identified as the secretary of writer Willa Cather — a label that isn’t just a simplification; it’s flat-out wrong.

AMY: Absolutely. The fact that they are buried side-by-side should tell you just how mistaken that notion is. For almost four decades, Lewis’s editorial input helped shape Cather’s writing — and for that same length of time, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis were life partners, too. Their lesbian relationship was tacitly accepted during their lifetime, only to be erased (along with Lewis’s legacy) in the second half of the 20th century.

KIM: Lewis and Cather were both aspiring writers when they met, but they each chose distinctly different career paths. Lewis’s own trajectory (first as a magazine editor and later as an advertising copywriter) is in many ways equally impressive.

AMY: Yeah, and the dichotomy between their respective careers is something that fascinates me, because I think every writer comes to this personal crossroads at some point. Edith Lewis went the pragmatic route — opting for the steady paycheck — while Willa Cather aimed for a more artistic, literary ideal. The tendency is to categorize Cather’s pursuits as the more “noble” of the two (and obviously history remembers her for that reason), but could she have accomplished what she did without that stability that Lewis’s career brought to the table?

KIM: That’s a great question, Amy, and I’m sure our guest expert today can help answer it. We can’t wait to introduce her, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

KIM: Our guest today is Dr. Melissa Homestead, a professor of English and program faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research specializes in the history of American women writers from the Early Republic through the early 20th century, including lesser-known authors like Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Fanny Fern,  and E.D.E.N. Southworth. She is the director of The Cather Project, which promotes research and teaching about the university’s famed literary alumna, Willa Cather. Homestead’s latest book, published by Oxford University Press is titled The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. Thanks so much for joining us, Melissa! Welcome to the show!

MELISSA: Thanks! I’m glad to be here.

AMY: I know you first discovered Willa Cather when you were in high school, and your career brought you, serendipitously, to the very part of the country where Cather grew up. (You are teaching at the same school that Cather graduated from). Can you share with our listeners, though, how you happened upon Edith Lewis? Because it’s a very special anecdote that you explain in the introduction to your book.

MELISSA: Sure. Well, actually, Edith Lewis also attended the University of Nebraska for a year, but then she transferred to Smith College, which is where I went to college, and in my junior year in college, I was looking forward to writing a senior honors thesis on Willa Cather. So I was stocking up on all the books at the library book sale that had anything to do with Willa Cather, and it was the last day and they were all half price. So it was just 50 cents for hardback books -- it was great for students. And I stumbled on this book, Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record. And I didn't even look inside the book; I got back to my dorm, and it was inscribed by this author, Edith Lewis, to Mary Virginia. And I had no idea who either of them were. And I thought, you know, “What is this?” I didn't know. And it wasn't until later that I realized that Edith Lewis was Cather's partner and she had gone to Smith College like me. And Mary Virginia was Mary Virginia Auld, Willa Cather's niece. And so this all brought me to Edith Lewis through a kind of unexpected route.

AMY: As you explained, like Cather, Lewis had grown up in Nebraska. She really wanted to escape the conventional life expected of women (especially in that part of the country), which is why she eventually transferred, I guess, to Smith College on the East Coast. And I totally loved the portrait you paint in your book of Lewis’s time there. Smith College at the turn of the century was so fun to read about. Can you talk a little bit about her early aspirations to be a writer and her time there? Was her early writing any good?

MELISSA: Well, her earliest writing was actually published when she was 16 years old and still in Lincoln. And it's about as good as you'd expect a 16-year-old’s short stories would be, which is to say it's it's a little rough, but there's just an incredibly wide range, and she's clearly read a lot and she's also imagined herself living a grand bohemian life in a city somewhere, not Lincoln, Nebraska. And then she goes off to college, and she doesn't publish as much while she's in college. I think it's a little harder than getting into a weekly paper owned by your parents’ friends to get published in the Smith College monthly. But I'd say that her work during this period, it's at least as good as Cather's work that she published when she was 18 or 19 years old. And mostly, it just tells you something about her ambition, and what she wants to be. And the fact that she's out there really thinking about craft and experimenting a lot. So when Edith Lewis got to Smith, her first year, she couldn't be elected to a literary society, because you had to have a year's record to be in a literary society, but she was elected as soon as she could be, which happened to be her junior year. If she'd started out as a freshman, she would have been elected her sophomore year, probably. But she clearly had become somebody that people understood that ... they had to rate everybody on their abilities in different categories, and her literary ability category was nearly a 4.0. So she had a rep, you know? People were with her in classes where she's writing stories, and then she becomes involved as an officer. And she's one of the people who gets to select other people to get into the literary society. So she's a gatekeeper. So yes, she has quite the experience in college. And there's one professor Mary Jordan, who teaches classes that, if you just looked at the catalogue, you'd think it would be expository essays and argument. But they were kind of creative writing classes, too. And Lewis was clearly just taking these classes. Every semester, she took a class with Mary Jordan, this one professor, over and over, and you just know that she is pouring all of her effort into writing literary prose.

KIM: So after she graduated from Smith, Lewis returned to Lincoln, Nebraska, and this is when Cather and Lewis were first introduced by a mutual friend when Cather (who was 8 years older than Lewis) happened to be passing through town. Cather wasn’t “the great author” yet, right? How did they end up reconnecting and living together in New York City?

MELISSA:  Well, so at this point, Cather was teaching high school in Pittsburgh, and she was placing some stories in national magazines. In fact, one of them, I think it was “The Sculptor's Funeral.” Or maybe it was “A Death in the Desert.” But one of her stories placed in a national magazine Edith Lewis had read when she was there in Lincoln, and was inspired. She really wanted to meet this person, and they had that mutual friend who edited a newspaper. So it's interesting, though, because at this point, like I said, Cather is doing okay, but she's getting frustrated with teaching high school; she thinks she should already be so much more successful as an author. In fact, at this point, she starts shaving several years off her age already, because she thinks that she isn't advanced enough in her career. And so when she meets Edith Lewis, Edith Lewis is eight years younger than her and she's like, you know, “Hell yeah! I'm going to New York! I'm just going.” And you know, Willa hasn't done that yet. She's being more cautious. So I think that she finally does get the call to New York to be an editor at McClure's magazine. And then Edith Lewis, who's working in publishing and has experience, also takes a job at McClure's, and they end up together there, but I think it's Edith Lewis who's more audacious at that moment when they meet.

AMY: And Edith was living in New York first, and so she was kind of acting like a tour guide for Willa Cather whenever Willa wanted to come visit. Edith would show her around town. So was Edith living in Greenwich Village yet or the Washington Square area yet?

MELISSA: Yeah, she’s living on Washington Square.

AMY: Clearly it inspired Cather to be like, “You know what? I’m going to take the leap and move here.”

KIM: That’s a really good point. That she, you know, she was leading her to take this step — or helping her take the steps she needed to take to become even better, I think, at her craft. So to back up our timeline just for a second, I wanted to remind viewers that Cather had written a short story which we mentioned in Episode #10 of this podcast last year. It actually sparked a feud between Cather and author Dorothy Canfield Fisher. (That feud is an interesting story, so if you haven’t listened to that episode yet, we’d encourage you to go back and check it out.) Actually, Melissa, you mention in your book that Edith Lewis was unwittingly caught up in the circumstances of that “Troll Garden” disagreement?

MELISSA: Indeed, she was! So that's before Cather moved to New York. She spent the summer of 1904 in New York with Lewis and she let Lewis read her “Troll Garden” short story collection and manuscripts. Clearly they were exchanging stories. Edith Lewis had written a story that got published the next year, and Willa Cather clearly read that story. So at the end of the year, Dorothy Canfield (so she hadn't married John Fisher yet) she and Lewis had known each other since they were kids in Lincoln, Nebraska. They played in the youth orchestra in the violin section together. And Canfield had just moved to New York in late 1904, to work at the Horace Mann School, and she asked Lewis out to dinner, so Lewis is like, “Oh, sure, let's go to dinner.” And she's telling her about these short stories that Willa Cather shared with her, and she's particularly enthusiastic about the story “The Profile,” and there's a woman with a disfiguring scar on one side of her face who never wants it to be seen when she's painted or photographed, and Canfield was like, “Whoa, Cather modeled that story on one of my friends that she met in Europe when I was there studying for grad school!” And this whole episode, of course, blew up Cather and Canfield’s friendship, but at the most basic level, it tells you how Dorothy Canfield found out about a story that wasn't published yet, because Edith Lewis had read it in manuscript and happened to share the story.

AMY: Wow. And what an awkward position for Edith Lewis to be in suddenly, sitting at the table like, “Umm, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: But anyway, so Cather and Lewis (jumping ahead again to when they are both living together in New York City) they have the McClure’s jobs and they are roommates. They seem to be on somewhat parallel paths as aspiring writers early on in their relationship, but then a few things happen that end up spinning them off in different directions, professionally. Can you explain that a little bit?

MELISSA: Well, Edith Lewis actually seems to have stopped writing for publication by the end of 1905. Or maybe stuff that she wrote after that just didn't get placed. It's not clear. So she published two poems in national magazines in 1905. They're pretty accomplished, traditional rhymed verse. And she published an interesting short story in Collier's as the result of a prize story submission. It's kind of an odd story for a young woman to write. It's about this young man struggling to make it as an author in New York City. But I think she just knew what the judges wanted. They’re a bunch of guys -- established male authors and editors -- and so she gave them what they wanted. And they, she was paid nearly $400 for the story, which was an enormous amount of money. But then her father's business enterprises in Nebraska were just going down, down down. The family was totally a mess, because her father was just, like, losing money. This is the classic story: go to New York to try to break into the big time ... you've got parents who give you some money. No. There was no money coming from her family, it's quite clear to me. Then she and Cather are working together at McClure’s for a few years, and Cather decided she's going to become a full-time writer. But Edith Lewis, I think, you know, she's just going to be more practical. And it's not just because of Cather. (I think there's this idea that, you know, there could only be one author.) And so Edith Lewis steps aside and sacrifices her ambitions, but I also think, you know, her family stuff is just really, really sad and stressful. And I think she just knows, “Okay, I have to do something else.” And so she doubles down on it, right? And she also then, she edits Willa Cather when she submits a poem. So when Cather is about to leave McClure's (authors had to submit stuff under pseudonyms in order to not have them get an advantage) and she's about to walk out the door, and she submits a poem anonymously, and Edith Lewis actually edits it for McClure’s magazine. She's the one who writes Cather's name on it on the copy they use to set the type for the magazine. So here again, we have Cather doubling down on literary authorship and Lewis stepping away, but she sticks with magazine editing, and she's quite successful at it.

AMY: I totally identify with her here. I mean, Kim and I both were English majors, and of course, everybody wants to be the one that goes off and is writing novels. But for most of us, it's just not practical. You have to pay the rent. You have to find a job that pays. So I understand. And I found your book really interesting to trace both women's journeys as they kind of split off to do these two separate ways of being a writer. And that's not to say that what Edith was doing, that she wasn't as talented — she clearly was, and she was very well-respected as an editor. 

KIM: Meanwhile the two women are living together in a flat near Washington Square. Cather early on describes Lewis as “the girl who is in partnership-housekeeping in a flat with me.” As you acknowledge in your book, there’s no documentary evidence proving that they identified as lesbians, but they lived together for 38 years. Can you maybe help put their relationship into some context for us?

MELISSA: Well, I see their relationship differently than most Cather biographers or people writing about queer history have seen it, mostly because they don't actually see Edith Lewis at all. So when Cather was in Boston on assignment for McClure's magazine in 1908, she met author Sarah Orne Jewett, and Annie Fields, who was Jewett’s partner in what was known as a “Boston marriage.” So in the 19th century, there was this social convention of accepting committed relationships between women who lived together like Jewett and Fields did. So now, most scholars say the Boston marriage declined in the late 19th century. So Jewett and Fields were kind of holdovers from that earlier time period. And then there's a moment when lesbianism is identified as a deviant sexuality and named as “lesbianism” (that's kind of like a new invention of thinking about human relationships). So Cather has been generally understood as a 20th century lesbian, right? So she's the person who realizes that she's a lesbian, understands that people think that's deviant, and then hides her sexuality. But if you pay attention to Edith Lewis and the fact that she's there with her, it looks like an entirely different person in so many ways. So for me, I think that they were in something very much like a Boston marriage well into the 20th century. And there's also the idea of a “closet” that people think is this long-standing idea about homosexuality. But the idea of the closet, that metaphor arises in the middle of the 20th century, and there are certainly people who are hiding their relationships in same sex relationships in the early 20th century, but they don't. They don't name their relationship, but they just are there. There's absolutely no hiding.

AMY: And it seemed like the people around them were totally, again, like you said, it wasn't openly discussed, but everyone was fine with their living arrangement. Everyone loved them. It wasn't a big deal. They were going on vacations together. I mean, it was pretty obvious now that you look back. I have to admit, I didn't know a lot about Willa Cather prior to this. I didn't even know that she was a lesbian. I had read her books, but it just didn't even occur to me. And I think maybe part of that also is biographers, until recently, I don't know if it was the 1980s or 1990s … nobody wanted to acknowledge this. So when was it that finally people started being like, “You know what, let’s take a look at this relationship?”

MELISSA: Well, people started saying, “Let's take a look at Cather’s sexuality,” which is not the same thing as taking a look at her relationship with Edith Lewis, right? The biographers who “out” Cather, as it were, are Phyllis Robinson in 1983, and Sharon O'Brien in 1987. But Edith Lewis is pretty much not there, in either of those books.

AMY: Oh, really?

MELISSA: Yeah, they focus on her earlier relationship with Isabelle McClung in Pittsburgh. And that's a relationship that, you know, Isabelle gets married in 1916? 1917? And I think the fact that she gets married, then Cather is “pining for a woman that she lost.”

AMY: That is so crazy! Look at the woman that is in the house! Oh my God, that's really crazy. Um, so okay, even once Willa Cather started writing novels, she had to continue to submit pieces occasionally to magazines, as well, just to pay the bills. Lewis, meanwhile, left McClure’s, and she took a job at kind of a cheap, mainstream magazine called Every Week, and she became their buyer of fiction. It seems like her editorial skills were really honed through this job, although I guess you could say it didn't have the respect maybe of a McClure's.

MELISSA: Well, if anyone wants to take a deep dive into some early 20th century popular fiction, my university's Digital Humanities Center helped me to construct a free digital archive of Every Week. So you can read short stories that Edith Lewis helped to edit. But Lewis knew her business and she knew her audience, right? She's a professional, so she wasn't editing high art. She knows that, and her correspondence, I did find her correspondence with two authors. It's hard to find magazine editors corresponding with relatively low-prestige authors, right? But I found her correspondence with Conrad Richter, who actually becomes quite famous later, and Philip Curtis. But she, even though she was being practical, and giving them practical advice and only buying stuff that her readers would want to read, she still cared a lot about craft. And so one of the executives of the company that owned the magazine, when the magazine shut down and she needed a recommendation for another job, this is what he said: He said that she had “a very fine mind, a really brilliant mind, that she was one of the best judges of fiction they had ever known,” that she had rewritten a great deal of the stuff that had come into them. So it tells you that she had a lot of experience with the craft and editing of fiction.

AMY: So we know that Lewis, at the same time, is continuing to give editorial guidance to Cather. How do you think she influenced Cather's work as an editor? Do you have any good examples of improvements she made?

MELISSA:  Yeah, I was gonna say there's plenty of evidence of Edith Lewis rewriting Cather, and quite aggressively sometimes. As it happens, though, the first surviving evidence after that poem that I mentioned before is from a decade after she left Every Week. It's an edited typed draft of The Professor's House. So that was published in ’25. She was at Every Week from 1915 to 1918. And this has long been one of my favorite examples of Lewis editing Cather, and I'll just read a little thing here that gives you an idea. I mean, Cather's known for her stripped-down, clear style. But listen to some Willa Cather before Edith Lewis dug in there. So this is the beginning of the third section of the novel, and Godfrey St. Peter is thinking. “The most disappointing thing about life, St. Peter thought, was the amazing part blind chance played in it. After one had attributed as much as possible to indirect causation, there still remained so much, even in a quiet and sheltered existence like his own, that was irreducible to any logic.”  So Edith Lewis picks up her pen, she crosses out that whole baggy mess, and she writes, “All the most important things in his life had been determined by chance, St. Peter thought.”

KIM: Wow. That’s huge!

MELISSA: She does other things too. On some of the edited drafts, you see them kind of going back and forth. She does an edit, Willa Cather reverses that or does something else. But I've even found some examples, though, where she does an edit, Willa Cather reverses it, then she reverses Willa Cather reversing her! So you know, they're working very hard together. And it is a big change. But on the other hand, I think what she's doing is something like what she was doing with the authors at Every Week magazine, too, which is helping Cather to live up to her own ideas of what good prose and good fiction is like. So Cather gets out there and goes “blah,” right, you know, as everybody does at some point. And then she's like, “Alright, let's get this down to what is really going to be what you would want to say.”

KIM: Yeah, exactly what you hope your editor would do for you, right? Yep.

After Every Week folded, Lewis landed a job as a copywriter for an advertising firm and she remained there for many years until her ultimate retirement. How did Willa feel about the fact that Edith worked for more “commercial” endeavors? Was she ever dismissive of her work? Or did Edith ever harbor any resentment that Willa ended up becoming the famous author while her writing was always behind-the-scenes?

MELISSA: Well, I actually think they kind of had a healthy respect for each other's work, although I think there's also some good-natured ribbing, and some inside jokes between the two of them. I mean, Lewis was already a skilled editor when she started working at the J. Walter Thompson company. But she had to be even more aggressive about space constraints when she was writing advertising copy, right, because as they say, in the advertising trade, every word costs money. So she was learning some skills that were valuable to Cather I think. Now in the 1920s, though, Cather wrote these important essays that people quote all the time about the craft of fiction. And she criticized in one of them the novel manufactured to entertain a great multitude as being like cheap soap. Well, Lewis, at that very moment, was writing advertising copy for cheap soap! But Lewis also wrote this delightful essay about the theory of advertising around the same time that Cather was complaining about cheap novels, right? So Lewis is explaining how you can kind of gin up emotion in consumers who look at advertisements, because emotion is what makes you want to buy stuff. So she's writing about soap, right? But soap was easy. Women want the social advantage of being beautiful. That's an easy sell. But then she's talking about things like soup can produce emotion. “You can write as emotionally about ham as about Christianity.” And I think she's having some fun there when she's writing that, because Cather also writes about the emotional aura that you get from fiction. So I think they're having a little dialogue that only they can hear. Cather doesn't say a whole lot directly that you can track about Lewis's advertising work. There's a few instances, but I mean, they live together. Of course, they talked about it. Can you imagine if Edith Lewis came home and didn't say anything and Cather never asked her?  No! That wouldn't happen. But I think one of my favorite little examples is from the 1940s. Cather was blurbing another author's book, and she wrote to her publisher, “Miss Lewis always jeers at me when I attempt to write advertising, but this is not professional. It is simply how I feel about the book.” So Lewis was a professional. And so you can just imagine her being like, “You don't know how to write advertising.” But you know, Cather knew that she was a professional, and I think she understood that, and of course, Lewis who contributed to Cather's fiction, also respected Cather's professionalism as an author.

AMY: Didn’t Edith have some ad copy in the same actual issue as Willa had part of her novel?

MELISSA: Yeah, well, there's copy that Lewis wrote for Woodbury’s facial soap that was in McCall's magazine when Willa Cather's novelette, as they call it, (it's sort of a short novel), My Mortal Enemy appeared. And then actually, I think my favorite one is, there's a story, “Uncle Valentine,” that actually is ad-stripped with one of you Lewis's ads for Jergens lotion,

AMY: I mean, so that just goes back to the fact that, literally, they had these side-by-side writing careers. They're different, but they are just in tandem with each other in this unique way. I love it. Melissa, in one section of your book, you compare what Cather was doing in the 1920s with writing that Lewis was doing in the 1920s. And what they were each writing about was kind of at odds with one another in some respects, but then it also mirrored one another in other respects. Can you talk about that a little bit? 

MELISSA: Well, sure. A lot of Cather's fiction in the 1920s is pretty cynical about heterosexual love and romance. So like, in One of Ours, the protagonist makes a really bad choice for a wife and then he runs off to war on the battlefields of France, basically, to get away from this disastrous marriage. The protagonist in A Lost Lady, she's married to a man who's much older than her who becomes disabled. She has a piece on the side, a younger man, and there's a disillusioned young man who watches this all unfold. Godfrey St. Peter in The Professor's House, he's totally disillusioned with his marriage. And this goes on. But you know, cynicism about romance doesn't sell soap and hand lotion, right? You've got to actually make consumers feel like it's going to enrich their lives. So [Lewis’s] ads are all about how these products are going to make women happy and make their lives great. You know, you're going to have a good first impression because your complexion is beautiful, and so you'll get that man. So that's the Woodbury’s facial soap ads, and then the Jergens lotions advertisements, it's like, you know, “you're married and you wash dishes and you diaper the baby and your hands get chapped. But if you put on Jergens lotion, your man can still admire your beautiful hands.” So you'll stay married, then your life will be great. So these are very different kinds of stories. But I think it's also you know, both of them also enjoyed the pleasure of describing female beauty. And they both did it in these contexts through the male gaze, right? So they're kind of subverting the male gaze, both in the advertising and the fiction.

AMY: So Lewis is kind of selling the fantasy of romance, whereas Cather, with some of her stories, at least, is tearing it down and reminding us that it's not all great!

KIM: You’re going to need more than some Jergens to keep it together! So the couple ended up building a small vacation home on Grand Manan Island in Canada in Whale Cove. And it was a sort of female-centric community. It was their favorite place to be. It looks like you can now actually rent out this cottage to stay in! Have you been, Melissa?

MELISSA: Yep, I've actually been there twice. The first time I only saw the outside of their cottage, but the second time I was on a formal research trip, and so I managed to rent the cottage, and I stayed there with my two basset hounds. So that was kind of entertaining. The scenery is just really pretty spectacular. There's these cliffs. You know where cobblestones in all of the American cities come from? They come from Grand Manan Island, because there are all these big cliffs, and the tides in the Bay of Fundy are huge. They just roll in and out, rip back and forth, and so all of these rocks just get thrown against the cliffs over and over, until they're sort of polished and round the way that cobblestones are. So they love that, and the cottage itself is charming. So going there in person really helped me to understand their place in that community. Like, I could see how far it was to go to the dining room at the end where they took a lot of their meals or how far it was to their little neighbors’ houses. And it was also just interesting to be able to imagine, you know, “Wait, wait, where did Willa Cather write? What could she see out the window?” There's all sorts of descriptions of what they see in the Whale Cove. It's called Whale Cove and whales actually would come and spout in the cove. So you just kind of imagine them. You know, I sat there on the lawn in front of their cottage and thought, “Okay, this is what they saw. What was it like for them to see all of this?”

AMY: And it really is a cottage. It's a pretty modest little house, but cozy. 

MELISSA: And it was much more modest when they were there. They had no indoor plumbing, they had no electricity.

KIM: I guess they liked roughing it a little for fun.

MELISSA: I mean, they did want vigorous outdoor recreation. They liked outdoor recreation, but also when they first built there, I mean, there wasn't electricity at first, and there wasn't a telephone line until later. (They didn’t have a telephone either.) So the island was pretty remote for everybody and pretty rustic in a lot of ways for everybody.

KIM: Sounds great.

AMY: And we're not getting into it too much in this podcast, but a portion of your book also talks about some of their travels. So they were really enamored with the American southwest and you have a chapter or two devoted in your book to their travels there, which was really fun to read about. I also want to talk about the letter that Catherine wrote to Lewis that inspired the title of your book, Melissa, The Only Wonderful Things. Do you want to share a little bit about that for our listeners, how you came upon that and what that story is? It's very moving. 

MELISSA: Sure. So this letter was written in 1936. I do have to say that there isn't a big body of correspondence between the two women that survived. There's just the one letter which I'll read in a minute, and five postcards. (And you don't write your deepest feelings on the back of a postcard that just goes through the mail where everybody can read it.) So that made my research challenging. But I feel like that one letter says so much about their relationship; so much about the emotional tenor of it. So I want to set the scene: Like I said, 1936 it's October, Cather and Lewis had spent a couple of months on Grand Manan that summer, but you know, Edith Lewis had to go back to work. So they go down to New York, and then Cather packs up again and goes to Jaffrey, New Hampshire where they also spend a lot of time, and Cather liked to write there and you know, autumn in New England — if you could just hang out in a lovely hotel in October in New England, you know, I sure as heck would do it. But let me read the letter: “My darling Edith,” (and other letters aren't addressed that way, I have to say.) 

   “My darling Edith, I am sitting in your room, looking out on the woods you know so well. So far, everything delights me. I'm ashamed of my appetite for food, and as for sleep — I had forgotten that sleeping can be an active and very strong physical pleasure. It can! It has been for all of three nights. I wake up now and then saturated with the pleasure of breathing clear mountain air (not cold, just chill air) of being up high with all the woods below me sleeping, too; in stil white moonlight. It's a grand feeling. 

   One hour from now, out of your window, I shall see a sight unparalleled — Jupiter and Venus both shining in the golden-rosy sky and both in the West; she not very far above the horizon, and he about mid-way between the zenith and the silvery lady planet. From 5:30 to 6:30 they are of a superb splendor — deepening in color every second, in a still-daylight-sky guiltless of other stars, the moon not up and the sun gone down behind Gap mountain; those two alone in the whole vault of heaven. It lasts for about an hour (did last night). Then the Lady, so silvery still, slips down into the clear rose colored glow to be near the departed sun, and imperial Jupiter hangs there alone. He goes down about 8:30. Surely it reminds one of Dante's “eternal wheels.” I can't but believe that all that majesty and all that beauty, those fated and unfailing appearances and exits are something more than mathematics and horrible temperatures. If they are not, then we are the only wonderful things because we can wonder.”

KIM: Oh my gosh. So beautiful!

MELISSA: Now, the little comedown is the last couple of paragraphs. She talks about the suitcases and the clothes and what they packed up. In biographies, you will see this as a letter about astronomical phenomenon and Edith Lewis packing suitcases.

AMY: Oh my gosh, that's not what it is! It makes me so sad that this is really the only letter that remains. I mean, can you imagine what some of their other letters must have been? Like if they had been saved? Oh, my gosh. 

MELISSA: Well, I'm not convinced they were destroyed. They still might be out there. If anyone listening to this podcast knows where they are, please let me know. But I think it's also important to know that you don't write letters when you're together, right? 

AMY: It's true. Once you're with someone, you're a domestic partner with somebody, you're not writing letters constantly. You know, I'm not writing my husband love letters every day. So...

KIM: You’re not?

AMY: I do love that letter. Oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful.

MELISSA: I do think it is a love letter.

KIM: It is. Yeah, very much. So they clearly had a long and beautiful relationship with one another. How then, did Lewis become so forgotten? Why did she vanish from the narrative of Cather’s story?

MELISSA: So Cather died in 1947, just after the end of World War II, and she left a widow, basically. And she also made her widow, Lewis, her literary executor. Now after World War II, this was the beginning of the Cold War era, and there was this rise and persecution of gay people. And so this is part of the world... you know, they started living together in Greenwich Village, in the Aughts, and here we are in the ’40s, after World War II. So I think that for some people, (not Lewis's family, not some of the members of Willa Cather's family who are all very respectful of her and feel deeply her pain at Willa Cather’s death), but some of these other people who are interested in Cather's reputation and legacy, you know, they want Cather's lesbianism, they want to cover it up. They don't want it to be visible. So what better way to make her lesbianism invisible than to make her partner of nearly 40 years invisible, or to make her risible, right? To make her look ridiculous? Or to turn her into a secretary? All of those things are ways that you just make Edith Lewis go “poof,” right? You make her vanish for what she was.

AMY: And I hate to say that I feel like Dorothy Canfield Fisher didn’t have a great part in that as well.

MELISSA: Yeah, yeah. Dorothy Canfield Fisher ... I truly think that she was responsible for a lot of the misinformation about Edith Lewis, that it really rests on her. That's the part of the story I heard first, I was just like, “Nuh-uh.” And it took me 18 years to get from hearing that to let's tell a different story than the one that Dorothy Canfield Fisher tells.

AMY: And it's further complicated by the fact that when Edith Lewis died, she was buried next to Willa Cather, but the headstone (and correct me on this) that I want to say the headstone for Edith Lewis was placed at the feet of Willa’s grave, right?

MELISSA: Well, it was a foot marker, not a headstone. And it was placed by people who actually did not know her. It's a crazy, crazy story. She didn't want a headstone. I have a whole, you know, interpretive theory about why she opted not to have a headstone — you have to read the whole book to get to the end and understand what my theory is about. But so then people started to think that she was like, you know, some sort of lap dog who got herself buried at Willa Cather's feet.

KIM: So you mentioned “18 years,” and that this biography took you 18 years to complete. What was your primary motivation in telling it? And is there anything you discovered that made you see Cather in a different light?

MELISSA: Well, just imagine if biographers writing a biography of say, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote biographies in which, you know, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, his wife, was practically invisible. I mean, that would just be ludicrous, right? That's what had happened over the years. And that's kind of the version of Cather that everybody has; the lonely isolated artist who turned her back on the world. But, you know, that's just not the life she lived. And then you put Edith Lewis back in the picture and you've got a much more engaged Willa Cather, and I think, a much more interesting Willa Cather than the one that we've been told about for so many years.

AMY: Yeah, they were having their Friday teas. I loved the idea of this salon that they had in Greenwich Village. I mean, they lived quite a life. I was thoroughly impressed by how much information you had on Edith Lewis, especially because there were no letters, like you said, but you have so much detail about her life going back through her childhood, even her parents’ lives. I was really impressed with the amount of research that you did in this book. And I'm also wondering, I hope that the Edith Lewis biography of Willa has a prominent place on your bookshelf still to this day.

MELISSA: It’s sitting right over there.

AMY: Okay. Is that biography any good?

MELISSA: It's, you know, people say all sorts of things about it. I mean, I think that the people whose judgment mattered to Edith Lewis valued the book. And I think one of the things that, for me, is the most interesting is that even though she's writing the memoir of the great author, she has opinions — she has decided opinions. And she expresses them even in that memoir. So she's not the sort of cowed person that she's presented to be. She has a definite voice. I mean, she's not much in that book, and there are very complicated reasons why it's not about her life. I mean, it's a memoir of Willa Cather. It's not her memoir, but I think there's a lot more of her there than most people give credit for.

AMY: So yeah, there’s a quote in your book from a friend of the couple’s from Whale Cove… she mentions something to the effect of “how dependent a ‘genius’ is on the unfailing devotion of someone else.” In the case of Willa Cather, it’s so clear that Edith Lewis is the unfailingly loyal someone else in question. Of course, there are lots of examples of romantic partners being either muse or editor or just “the wind beneath the wings” of a great writer, and I’ll admit that that was kind of the story I was expecting here, but I think there’s something equally interesting about following the journey that these two women from similar backgrounds took together. Their careers ran on separate, but parallel tracks, and it was really interesting to follow that learn about.

KIM: Yes, thank you so much for bringing Edith Lewis to our attention! It was wonderful to have you on the show. This has been really great. 

MELISSA: I know that some people think that books written by university professors must be intimidating, but a number of non-academic readers have already told me that they've finished the book and they enjoyed reading it. And I don't think anyone will be sorry to meet Edith Lewis by reading my book, and I think you'll meet a very different Willa Cather than the one that you thought you knew.

AMY: I love reading biographies, but I like reading biographies of people that I pick up and I had never even heard of the person before. Sometimes that's almost a more magical experience because you're going in without any preconceived ideas of this person. And yeah, I felt like I really knew her by the end. And I identified with her as a writer myself. I think I'm probably more of an Edith. And that's fine.

KIM: Most of us probably are.

AMY: Yeah, and that’s okay, because she had an amazing career and life.

MELISSA: Yeah, I’m neither an Edith nor a Willa. I never had aspirations to creative writing, myself. I've published a lot of scholarly prose, but writing this book made me think of myself as a writer for the first time, because I realized that I was constructing a narrative arc and doing things that are not normally a part of scholarly prose. And I'm like, “Oh, I’m a writer!”

AMY: Absolutely. The book is wonderful. Everyone, we would really encourage you, if you have any interest in Willa Cather, especially, to check out Melissa Homestead’s book, The Only Wonderful Things. Again, Melissa, thanks so much for being here. 

MELISSA: All right, thanks.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode -- don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter, where we’ll occasionally be giving out sneak-peek info on which books we’ll be featuring in future episodes. And please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts if you like what you’re hearing.

KIM: And as always, check out our website, Lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of this show as well as our show notes. 

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

40. Judith Love Cohen — a.ka. Jack Black’s Mom

AMY: Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode, everyone! I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. Amy, the woman we’re going to be discussing today is someone you discovered randomly on the Internet.

AMY: Yeah, someone posted an anecdote about her to Facebook (it’s sort of gone viral this spring) and I’ll admit I was initially skeptical when I read it.

KIM: Understandable. So much of what’s on the Internet is complete bunk.

AMY: Right. So I headed over to Snopes.com to feel this story out, and they confirmed it, and then when I researched this woman a bit more, I was bowled over by her many accomplishments. I was like, “This woman was incredible!” She was a prolific author, she was an aerospace engineer and also, for a time, a professional ballerina in New York City. But when you Google her, basically all the headlines about her sum her up in three words: “Jack Black’s mom.”

KIM: As in, Jack Black the Hollywood actor?

AMY: Exactly. And as much as I love Jack Black (He’s hilarious and seems generally adorable), we’re not going to be referring to her as “Jack Black’s mom” in the rest of this episode; she deserves to be called by her actual name: Judith Love Cohen.

KIM: She was a writer of children’s books in the later part of her life, and we’ll get to that in a bit, but growing up in New York (she was born in Brookly in 1933) she was considered a math whiz. According to her Wikipedia page, by 5th grade, her fellow classmates were begging her to do their math homework for them. She majored in math at Brooklyn College but eventually realized that she preferred engineering, and think about this for a second. How many women in the early 1950s were studying engineering?

AMY: Not many, I’m sure, but also, how many were studying engineering while also a member of the Corps de Ballet for the New York Metropolitan Opera? It seems that lasted only a short while, but I mean, that’s incredible.

KIM: It’s amazing. And also to think of her as excelling in these extremely different spheres… the scientific world and also the arts. I love that. Also, seeing old pictures of her, you can totally picture her on the stage. She looked a bit like Audrey Hepburn.

AMY: After two years at Brooklyn College she ended up moving to Southern California in 1952 and worked as a junior engineer at North American Aviation while attending engineering school at the University of Southern California at night. She got her bachelors and masters degrees there. And to go back to the point you made earlier, Kim, she said she didn’t recollect ever meeting another female engineering student while she was studying there. 

KIM: She went on to an aerospace engineering job at Space Technology Laboratories, where she worked until she retired in 1990, and when you read about some of the projects she worked on, it’s impressive. 

AMY: She was on the team that created the guidance computer for the Minuteman Missle. She worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. But most famously, she worked on the Abort-Guidance System that was used to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts safely home after an explosion crippled their spacecraft. The astronauts later went to her place of employment to thank the whole team for helping to rescue them. And circling back to the first internet story that sparked my interest in Judith Cohen in the first place, legend has it that she was at work the day she went into labor with her fourth child, Jack (Jack Black’s actual name is Thomas). She brought a printout of a problem she’d been working on at work to the hospital with her. Apparently she called her boss later from the hospital to let him know she’d solved the problem — and oh, yeah, she’d had a baby, too. This anecdote was recalled by her oldest son, Neil Seigel in his obituary to her, so it’s not just the stuff of urban legend. (But this just drives home the point that she was a working mom while she was earning her degrees and saving astronauts in outer space…. And frankly, I would imagine that Jack Black was probably a handful in his youth, so that’s just one more credit to all she accomplished.) 

KIM: [Responds.]

AMY: She served as president of the L.A. chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. Again, according to her son, Neil, “During her engineering career, she was a vigorous and tireless advocate of better treatment for women in the workplace. Many things that today we consider routine – the posting of job openings inside of a company so that anyone could apply, formal job descriptions for every position, and so forth – were her creations. She had a profound impact on equality in the workforce.”

KIM: When she retired in 1990 from her engineering job, she was ready for her second act, as a writer and publisher. She had already been writing a monthly column for Engineer of California magazine, and she had written a play, “A Passover To Remember,” which was staged twice in Los Angeles. So upon retirement she wrote a book targeted at 10-year-old girls called “You Can Be an Engineer” but she couldn’t find any publisher who wanted it, so she and her third husband ended up creating their own publishing house called Cascade Press, through which she began writing nonfiction aspirational books for young girls. 

AMY: Yes, she created the You Can Be series of books to encourage young girls to pursue careers in science and engineering. Titles include You Can Be a Woman Chemist, You Can Be a Woman Video Game Producer, You Can Be a Woman Architect. She wrote at least 20 of these books — I love the idea of little girls stumbling across them in the library and being inspired. She sold more than 100,000 copies of these books.

KIM: [responds] She also wrote the “Green” series, which were books for young children that promoted environmentalism. 

AMY: She died in 2016 from cancer, but I’d like to note that in the mid 1960s she had taken up dancing again — recreational folk dancing, which she continued to enjoy into old age. 

KIM: [responds]

AMY: And just a little side note: the company Cohen had worked for as an aerospace engineer (TRW) was eventually acquired by Northrop Grumman, where my own Aunt Carol works as a software engineer, so this episode is dedicated to Aunt Carol and all the other women who are still breaking glass ceilings in the STEM fields. Women still only make up less than a third of the workforce in science, technology, engineering and math-related fields.

KIM: [responds… she’s amazing, etc.] She was so much more than just “Jack Black’s mom.” Which reminds me of our next Lost Lady whom we’ll be discussing next week — Edith Lewis is a woman who has been lost in the shadow of her great love, author Willa Cather, but Lewis had a fascinating writing career of her own, and we’ll be discussing her — and her relationship with Cather in our next episode. 

AMY: We’ll be joined by special guest, Dr. Melissa Homestead, whose recently published book, The Only Wonderful Things examines this partnership in great detail.

KIM: I can’t wait! Until next week, don’t forget to tell your book-loving friends about our podcast to help us spread the word about these amazing forgotten women. And leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts if you’re enjoying the episodes!

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

Nancy Mitford — The Pursuit of Love/Love In a Cold Climate with Laura Thompson

KIM: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes, and Amy, I really don’t think our author today — Nancy Mitford — needs much “dusting off.”  She was a very well-known English novelist from an equally famous socialite family. She and her five sisters were gorgeous and sensational Bright Young Things: The tabloids tracked their every move, and scandal followed them everywhere. And in fact, TV adaptations of Nancy’s famous novels are returning to TV courtesy of Amazon and the BBC -- (the first one has already aired in the UK and we can’t wait to watch it when it airs here.)

AMY: Yes, for true book nerds, Nancy Mitford really doesn’t need any introduction. Yet I’m a little embarrassed to say I didn’t discover her until I was in my 30s when you lent me her books, Kim. It was like this epiphany in my life, you know, that common refrain — “How am I just now discovering her?” So I don’t know that she’s as well-read as she should be — particularly here in America. In fact, whenever I have friends ask me for book recommendations, my first response is: “Have you read Nancy Mitford?” And they almost invariably haven’t, and so I then turn into a raving lunatic trying to convince them that they need to drop everything and go read her. It’s why I’ve desperately wanted to do an episode on her.

KIM: Yes, once you discover Nancy Mitford, it’s like “the thin edge of the wedge,” to quote one of her most unforgettable characters, Uncle Matthew — you just can’t get enough of her. Her semi-autobiographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are outrageously funny, and they’re perceptive social satires of the British upper class. 

AMY: They’re actually part of a trilogy, and there’s just so much comedy packed into these novels  —  really morbid, dark humor at times (which is my favorite kind). But there’s a real poignancy to these coming-of-age stories, too. And once you know more about the life Nancy lived prior to writing them and the real people who inspired her fictional worlds, you get an even greater appreciation for her books.

KIM: And we are “chuffed,” as the Brits say, because joining us today, we’ve got a New York Times bestselling author to help us take an even closer look at Nancy Mitford and the magic of her writing. 

AMY: I’ve been excited for this conversation for the last three months, I can’t wait! So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

INTERVIEW BEGINS

AMY: Our guest today, Laura Thompson, is the author of 2004’s Life in a Cold Climate, which was reissued by Pegasus books in October of last year and was dubbed “the gold standard” of Nancy Mitford biographies by The Wall Street Journal. She also wrote The Six, which tells the story of the Mitford sisters, collectively — that book was a New York Times bestseller in 2016. Among her other works are a biography of Agatha Christie, which was shortlisted for an Edgar Allan Poe award in 2019, and Rex V Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders, which re-examines the famous Thompson-Bywater murder of 1922. (And you might remember that we briefly talked about that case in our episode on E.M. Delafield last year. I am reading Laura’s book on that case right now and I’m flat-out obsessed with it. So definitely recommend that.) Thompson also published The Last Landlady, a critically-acclaimed 2018 memoir about her grandmother, who was the first woman in England granted a license to run a pub. And wow, if we had a few days, I would totally talk to her on all these subjects and then some, but for now, we’ll stick to Nancy Mitford. Laura Thompson, welcome to our show!

LAURA: How lovely of you to have me. I’m thrilled. Thank you.

KIM: Laura, I think when you meet a fellow Nancy Mitford fan, you can instantly say to yourself, “Okay, on some level this person and I are going to ‘get’ each other.” When did you first discover her and what made you compelled to write about her and her family?

LAURA: For me, it was The Pursuit of Love. It's the obvious entry point in a way, and I read the book when I think I was about 14. And up to that point, I was quite, you know, puritanical about literature in some ways. You know, I sort of thought it had to be Thomas Hardy, or George Eliot; you had to be quite miserable about the whole thing. You know, I'd never read a novel up to that point that I knew was good, you know, but was so pleasurable, and so much fun, and so light on the page. Nancy Mitford makes lightness into a thing of absolute value. It's not superficiality, this lightness. It’s something glorious. And this book, as we know, is fairly heavily autobiographical — obviously we'll talk about all that. But that got me into the sisters. Later on, I just had this yearning to write about Nancy Mitford. And oddly enough, when I got the idea, which was 2002, her reputation in this country was, you know ... we're obsessed with class, you know that. And there was a slight sort of, “Oh, she's a silly posh woman who writes silly posh books, and you know, they’re jolly good fun, but they're just silly and posh.” (As if posh people aren't entirely human.) And I really wanted to challenge this view and to sort of talk about her as a real writer with an authorial voice like no other which enchants, in my view, more than any other. I was lucky enough to meet the two surviving Mitford girls, which was Diana (Wow, one of the most memorable afternoons of my life!) and Deborah, who was also fantastic. And so it kind of went from there. And then later on, I was asked to write the group biography, which I thought, “God, there's nothing more to say about them.” But they're kind of was, because it's kind of like: Why are we still so interested in them, when they represent so much that we hold rather the opposite of dear, like being upper class, being privileged, being all those kinds of things that we're supposed to not really care for anymore? Yet, they still fascinate. So there we go. And the Mitfords … you know, a whole new generation of younger women are now fascinated by the Mitfords. It's extraordinary.

AMY: Absolutely. And once you get a little touch of it, you can't help but become obsessed with the whole family.

LAURA: See, this is what I really wanted, if you don't mind me asking a question... I mean, obviously, my book The Six did really well in America, and praise God for that. But they’re so English. I'm so interested as to how Nancy’s writing — The Pursuit of Love, which is an image of England that doesn't really exist anymore — how it strikes an American reader when it must be so alien or what?

AMY: Well, first of all, we have this fantasy, right, of the aristocracy. But then when you learn about them, they are so real. They're so like, if you come from a big family, that's how you and your siblings are. I was saying to Kim before you jumped on the podcast, there like an English version, almost of if you know, David and Amy Sedaris…

LAURA: Oh, god, that’s… YES!

AMY: The madcap-ness of their family. Not only is it hysterical, but it also makes them relatable. Suddenly, they're not up on a higher stratosphere than the rest of us. Anyway, Nancy’s breakout novel, The Pursuit of Love, tells the story of Linda Radlett, her colorful, aristocratic family and her meandering quest to find true love. It was published in 1945 at a time when readers were sick of all the deprivation of WWII. People wanted to read about luxury and privilege, and they were desperate to laugh. (I think that also factors into, you know, why it’s still appealing, to this day.) Mitford’s book proved the answer to that collective need and cemented her career as a writer. So the story is told through the point of view of the Radletts’ cousin, Fanny, who spends a great deal of time at Alconleigh, the estate of her “Uncle Matthew” and “Aunt Sadie” (who, in real life would be Nancy’s parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale). The book, which covers the span of about 15 years, is semi-autobiographical, as Laura said, and so Linda is representative of Nancy, herself, while other characters in the Radlett family are nods to the rest of the Mitford clan. Largely left to their own devices in this huge, ancient house, the children sort of run unchecked to do and say the most wildly hilarious things. 

KIM: Right, and like the real-life Mitford children, the Radlett kids in the book seem borderline feral — especially the girls, because their father (as in real life) refuses to educate them beyond a finishing school in most cases, though he does send their brother to Eton. So they categorize people as “Hons,” or “Counter-Hons” (Trust us, you want to be a “Hon.”) The kids occasionally hole up in the “Hon’s cupboard” (it’s a linen cupboard) where they attempt to decipher grown-up gossip or figure out the mysteries of sex. It’s really funny.

AMY: Yeah, and at one point when one of the youngest girls can’t get any official answers on the topic, one of them declares, “Very well then, we shall go to our marriage beds in ignorance, like Victorian ladies, and in the morning we shall be found stark, staring mad with horror and live sixty more years in an expensive bin, and then perhaps you’ll wish you had been more helpful.” They are all so funny, and they have all sorts of hilarious inside jokes — the siblings love tormenting one another (and their parents) and it seems like their mission in life is to see just how inappropriate or obnoxious they can be without actually getting in trouble. This is made extra comical by the fact that their father (Fanny’s Uncle Matthew) is both a terrifying tyrant and yet seemingly toothless in carrying out any of his threats. (His bark is far greater than his bite, and he’s arguably the most entertaining character in the book, in my opinion. If I could bring any literary character to life and spend the day with them, it would be Uncle Matthew, without a doubt. I have a weird affection for grumpy older men.) 

LAURA: Yeah. No, same here!

KIM: I think you could take him on.

AMY: I think I could. Yeah, I would be interested to see if I got his seal of approval. Anyway, this curmudgeonly patriarch plus a gaggle of intractable teenage daughters equals comedy gold.

KIM: Yeah, Meanwhile, their mother, Sadie (the kids disrespectfully call her by her first name), seems a bit “out to lunch” in the midst of her exasperating brood. If you grew up in a household with siblings, you will identify with Mitford’s realistic portrayal of the kids’ perpetual shenanigans.

AMY: And Laura, I’m wondering if you would care to read us, maybe, one of your favorite passages from The Pursuit of Love to give our listeners an idea of the kind of humor we’re describing?

LAURA: Sure, well, this is just a short passage just from the beginning to give a sense of the relationship with Uncle Matthew and how they all carried on. So they live in the Cotswolds (so in the heart of England) on his land, basically, of which he had a great deal, and Fanny, who gets to visit them (who comes from a much more conventional upbringing — she goes to school and is not posh/feral in the same way) but you know, they are portrayed as more glamorous, more enticing, etc, etc. and more, in a way, sharper. So Fanny turns up and the eldest child, Louisa says, “‘Child hunt tomorrow, Fanny.’ My Uncle Matthew had four magnificent bloodhounds, with which he used to hunt his children. Two of us would go off with a good start to lay the trail, and Uncle Matthew and the rest would follow the hounds on horseback. It was great fun. Once he came to my home and hunted Linda and me over Shenley Common. This caused the most tremendous stir locally, the Kentish week-enders on their way to church were appalled by the sight of four great hounds in full cry after two little girls. My uncle seemed to them like a wicked lord of fiction, and I became more than ever surrounded with an aura of madness, badness, and dangerousness for their children to know.”

This idea of the child hunt … when you read that for the first time, it's sort of like... you know, I grew up in the country, but the idea of hunting children with bloodhounds? It's portrayed as completely the norm. There's no, “Wow, it's unbelievable. This man's hunting his children.” You get this overview from Fanny, whose upbringing is more conventional. But really, you're in the world of the Radletts. You so rightly said that Uncle Matthew … he is like an ogre. But at the same time, he's kind of powerless in the face of their personalities, really. And that was pretty much as it was in real life. What I love about Uncle Matthew (and I think, Amy, you would probably have got on with him pretty well), because although he rants and raves, and all the rest of it, there's a vulnerability about him. And there's this dependence on his wife Sadie, who's in a way, the real head of the household. You also feel his dependence upon her, which in real life was true with Lord Redesdale; how uneasy he became away from home, how uneasy he became away from his wife. Here, it's done for comedic value. The sense that although he's (as Fanny says) “The wicked lord of fiction,” there is a vulnerability inside him. And that's what I think makes him such a brilliant character, really. He's not purely a caricature. The same as Lady Montdore in Love in a Cold Climate, who's his kind of female counterpart. She's an ogress, but she's also vulnerable. Nancy does that so brilliantly.

KIM: Yeah, the self awareness that Nancy has as she's explaining all this, that it's insane and dark, but that she finds it humorous, and if you have a sense of humor, you're going to get that and come along with her ride, basically. I love that self-awareness of her about the perception of the outside world. And then I was going to say, in relation to what you were saying about Uncle Matthew, I think another passage, the one about Linda attempting suicide over the Border Terrier, and basically, there's all this punishment, but then she ends up with a new Labrador puppy. So I think it shows us that there are conflicting sides of Uncle Matthew, like, he can be like this harsh punisher to them, but they also know that he has this soft side for the people he loves and this soft side for animals.

LAURA: Absolutely. But the Britishness of the countryside is not shirked. The memories that pour forth in this book of Nancy's (which she wrote in three months -- that's how ready it was to come out). And she writes about, you know, you hear the branding of the lambs and you hear the fox going off with a hen; all the realities of the countryside are a kind of undercurrent of the book all the way through. And her descriptions of the countryside, which are really, really ... she talks about a ‘moleskin sky,’which is exactly what it does look like at certain times of year. It's so direct; she's got this wonderful, childlike directness of description. Nothing is shirked. I mean, where they grew up, the house that I think outwardly, in a sense, is meant to be [Alconleigh], which is Asthall house, which is not far from Oxford. It's next to the church, and their bedrooms overlooked a graveyard. And I think that motif permeates The Pursuit of Love. You know, it's the most joyful book you'll ever read, and all the time there’s this drag of melancholy. And that is what makes it a masterpiece, in my view.

KIM: And that’s a great segue to, how would you characterize Mitford’s brand of humor? And can you talk a bit about why humor was so vital to her? It seems like joking and sarcasm was how she navigated life — maybe it was even her defense mechanism against some of the things you’re talking about.

LAURA: Yes, you know, it's so hard to imagine that upbringing. These six girls. So Nancy was born in 1904, and the youngest, Deborah, was born in 1921 (The maid said, “I knew it was a girl by the look on his lordship’s face,” because he’d got you know, six girls and only one son, Tom. The son is a very important character in the family — not spoken about enough, I don't think. I think he was hugely influential, Tom, within the family.) So they grow up, and only Tom goes to school. He's coach for Eaton, which meant that the sisters closest in age to him, which were Nancy, Diana, and Pam, (who's a little bit the odd one out, but nevertheless), they kind of got the overflow of his education in a way. And Nancy and Diana both grew up to be extremely intelligent. I mean, Diana was trilingual, Nancy was completely bilingual. By anybody's standards, they're extremely clever, well-read women. But I think growing up and never really going anywhere... And in one sense, they were completely free, completely wild — could do whatever they liked, as in the book, and in another way they were completely circumscribed. You know, they had a London house, but they couldn’t cross the road without a chaperone. They never met anyone who wasn't part of their very, very tight circle, or, a game keeper or groom or whatever. So a life completely free and completely confined. There's a slight air in the book of the fairytale, you know? The Rapunzels in their tower waiting to be liberated, as Linda longs to be. But I think the boredom of that upbringing, which to a girl of Nancy's intelligence was phenomenal. Of course, it was incredibly productive, as I think boredom can be when you’re a child. Her frustration took the form at an early stage of humor, what you might call a spiteful humor, and the butt of it was usually Pam. Pam was a bit mild and meek, and Nancy would play these terrible tricks on her. (She dressed up as a tramp and pretended to rape her!) And so humor became her way of deflecting boredom, deflecting jealousy, deflecting frustration, and then it became a kind of Mitford... It kind of defines the Mitfords, and in a way is their “get out of jail” card for the many very terrible political choices that they made in the 1930s, of which we're all aware: Communism, Fascism, Naziism. For some reason, we still sort of are fascinated by them, and almost, in a way, love them. And it's partly English charm, which is, you know, a bit devilish — it seduces, but it's really that they're so funny. They have this lightness, they have this humor with which they, you know … Diana was sent to jail in the war. She managed to make these incredibly funny jokes about it. And Nancy, when Nancy was dying of cancer, she made incredibly funny jokes about it. You can say they all were, you know, in our sort of therapised culture, they're probably, you know, terribly repressed and terribly strained. It worked for them. It worked for them, and it's part of what makes them so seductive.

AMY: Yeah, it's very much “gallows humor,” and it's reminding me of in the book when the Radlett children are hoping that their parents’ ship would go down so that they could be orphans. That goes back to your idea of “they're just bored.” Fanny has a mother who they call the Bolter who just goes from one relationship to the next — one marriage to the next — and the Radlett children say to Fanny “what we wouldn't give to have a wicked mother like yours!” basically.

LAURA: Yeah. The Bolter is hilarious. I love the way they just call her the Bolter. Like “Mary.” Oh, hello, Bolter! Yes, absolutely brilliant. But yes, I mean, Nancy, when she was living in Paris, a friend of hers said, “Lord, you always say we're roaring with laughter. You’d say we were roaring laughter if we were on the way to the guillotine.” She said, “Well, you probably would be!”

AMY: You describe the Mitford family in your book as an “impregnable unit of rampant individualism,” which I loved. That’s totally accurate. They antagonized one another all through their lives, but they also really loved each other deep down. And looking back, it’s easy to use shorthand descriptions for each member of the family. We have Nancy — she’s the oldest one who was the “joker” and the Francophilic novelist. There was Pam, the “rural one,” that kind of meek good girl. Then there’s Diana, the “beautiful Fascist,” Unity, the “Nazi headcase,” Decca, the “spitfire and rebel,” and Deborah the sensible youngest. So on top of that, they were all drop-dead gorgeous. I could (and admittedly have) spent hours Googling old photos of them. And I want to say, if I could age the way Diana aged, that’s my only ask in life. She was gorgeous, up to the very end.

LAURA: It's true. It's true. When I met her, she was about 90. She turned, and I thought, “Oh, my God!” This pure cheekbone, and very tall. She had ballerina grace. Oh, my goodness, extraordinary!

KIM: What was that like, spending the afternoon with her? Tell us about it.

LAURA: Amazing. I mean, it's something I've never ... I think about her so much. I was terrified. I was really frightened of meeting her — I really was. She lived in this beautiful flat in Paris, in the Seventh Arrondissement. Absolutely lovely: beautiful, white, airy. And I was terrified. I thought, “This is the woman who knew Hitler, who got married in Goebbels’s house!” And the charm of her... the warmth of her. I just sat there the whole time thinking, “You are the most delightful person I've ever met in my life! You are so funny, and so charming and so intelligent. And you were a Fascist.” And you're just sitting there the whole time trying to, you know ... this conundrum. And the unrepentant nature of her is almost what I admired the most. You know, she wrote to Deborah later in life. She said, “Look, I cannot pretend it was anything other than interesting to know Hitler. I refuse to pretend that it wasn't interesting.” Of course, she didn't endorse the Final Solution, or any of that; Anybody who says she did, that's not true. But nevertheless, you know, it's a hell of a thing. You know, I can imagine people thinking, why am I even saying that I enjoyed her company? But I did. She's the most enigmatic woman of the 20th century, I really think that, but I'm very glad I met her. Very, very glad I met her. What an experience, my goodness, amazing.

KIM: We really recommend that you read Laura's book, The Six, to get everyone's stories. It is so good. I'm actually in the middle of reading that one right now, and I love it. Laura, given that the family members were already quite well known in society, how did the sisters feel about being so obviously depicted in Nancy's book? And how did the rest of the family feel?

LAURA: Yeah, that's a very interesting question, I think, because I think in a way, The Pursuit of Love saved them. Because in December 1945, when the book came out, and as you said, was an instant success. (She made so much money from it.) And up till that point, she'd been quite poor, and her mother, with whom she had quite a fraught relationship (Sydney Redesdale is a slightly different kind of woman from Aunt Sadie, in The Pursuit of Love. There's a coldness in Sydney Redesdale). And she wrote to Jessica, she said, “Oh, this family again,” meaning Nancy's book, and you sort of think, “Hang on, hang on, Love. ‘This family, again,’ is what's going to save your reputation.” Because in December 1945, you've got Unity, who was close to Hitler and shot herself on the day that war was declared (but didn't die, the bullet lodged in her brain.) You've got Diana, who was imprisoned as a Fascist sympathizer. You've got Jessica, who eloped with her Communist cousin and was a member of the Communist Party... With The Pursuit of Love she expunges the darkness in the Mitfords which is very, very powerful in the midst of all this scintillating champagne, bubbly stuff, and she, you know... nobody likes Hitler in the book. It's a gift! It’s a gift to them. Lord Redesdale, who in real life had met Hitler at Nuremberg and then had been forced to write a sort of mea culpa letter to The Times newspaper saying, “I'm so sorry I ever endorsed this man. I loathe Hitler. I loathe Nazis,” and all this kind of thing, but nevertheless, for the rest of his life he was regarded as a German sympathizer. In the book, Uncle Matthew, he hates Nazis! He is the ultimate anti-Nazi. He is this wonderful man of, you know, vigor. And well, Lord Redesdale was no longer those things. And his marriage to Sydney Redesdale was over. And so this book, which recreates something that, in a major sense, was disappearing, but it makes Nancy the gatekeeper to this Mitford mythology. And then you find out the reality, and that's even more interesting. So but you always have that duality. And if they resented it, the family, I think they were very ungrateful because, I think it did, yeah — it sort of saved them, really.

AMY: The tabloids were following this family. The press couldn't get enough of them. So to be able to sort of reposition their story a little bit through these books, at a time when they were starting to be vilified was probably important, and she was turning it into a fairy tale of sorts. And as we mentioned, Alconleigh is the home of the Radlett family in Mitford’s fiction, but in real life, the family lived in a number of different homes throughout the years. You kind of mentioned this a little already, but which of their homes would have been the inspiration for “Alconleigh?” And then also, we think of them as swimming in money, but were they, actually?

LAURA: Yeah, exactly. That's another big difference between the book, and this image of the English country house is powerful. There's something immutable about it. And that's what she makes Alconleigh, really. There is a kind of fable-like aspect about the English countryside. The house the family... there is a fable-like aspect to it in real life. They were quite peripatetic. When Nancy was born… so, her father only inherited the title by default because his older brother was killed in the first World War. So in 1916, he became Lord Redesdale and inherited this huge castle in Gloucestershire (Batsford), which is just extraordinary. But he was just the world's worst with money. He just could not hold on to anything. All this sense, again, of the immutability of Uncle Matthew’s land, that too had kind of gone by the time the book was written. So they went from Batsford to Asthall, which is a lovely house, and that's where they were happiest, I think. And I think it's the atmosphere of that house that she's describing in The Pursuit of Love. But physically, it's a house called Swinbrook. It's quite an ugly house, and it did have the Hons’ Cupboard because it was the only place you could get warm. But no, when Nancy said, “I wrote my first book because I wanted to earn 100 pounds,” that's kind of true. She didn't have any money. He had no money to give them as members of the upper classes usually did, you know, like a dowry or anything. It's extraordinary the way the reality diverges from The Pursuit of Love.

KIM: So like Linda Radlett in The Pursuit of Love, as a young adult Nancy Mitford has her own series of disappointing love affairs in her search for the one true love of her life. Her first serious romantic contender, Hamish St.-Clair, was gay, but he managed to string out an engagement to Nancy for years before he finally ended things. It’s crazy to me that she had no idea! (or did she?)

LAURA: Well, he’d had an affair with her brother, so I mean … that’s a big clue. But, you know, when I said about it to Deborah, she got a bit cross. She said, “No, no, no, you can't imagine. Girls were so innocent. She wouldn't have known he was gay. No.” But that can't be, I don't think, because Tom Mitford’s friends, many of them were gay, or bisexual; these wonderful, witty amusing men who absolutely adored Nancy. But I always feel with Nancy that she did have this almost gift (or anti-gift) for picking the wrong men, to such an extent that I felt a bit that she didn't really want that conventional.... I mean, she was extremely attractive. She had a couple of sort of “proper types” after her and everything. And instead of going off to dinner with one of them, she'd sit in a nightclub with  Hamish and wait for Tom to come and bail them out with a fiver or something. I mean, why did she do that? Because she didn't want the other thing? I don't know. That's my instinct, anyway.

AMY: She was clearly humiliated about being dumped by Hamish, which led her to save-face in a most unfortunate way, I think. So shortly after things went belly-up with Hamish, she married a man named Peter Rodd. (Unlike Linda, her counterpart in The Pursuit of Love, Nancy was practically an old maid at the ripe old age of 29 when this happened. So Peter proposed to her one night as a joke at a party and she sort of desperately jumped at it.) It wasn’t just a rebound, it was a total disaster, and reading about their marriage in your book, Laura, I just wanted to yell, “What are you doing? Don’t do this! It’s obviously not going to work!”

LAURA: Yeah, I'm glad you had that reaction, because ... he was very-good looking. He was very intelligent. You know, he was a Balliol scholar. He was a friend of Evelyn Waugh. He was good on paper, as they say. But he was a mystery really, Peter Rodd, because he had everything. And he also had a good wife! (She tried to be a good wife.) I think it meant, I know the convention was to be married. And I think the trouble was, unless she was married, she couldn't really get away from home properly. She couldn't really live a life. I think she did go into it with genuine hopes, which were quashed pretty quickly when he started having an affair. I mean, it was no time at all — a year, two years, something like that. (He also had an affair with one of her cousins.) You know, she made a bit of money out of her writing — she also did journalism —and he would steal it out of her purse. But in a way I always thought she did quite like him, actually. I think she felt guilty. She had quite a lot of old-fashioned morality, Nancy. For all her sort of anarchic humor, in some ways she was the most conventional Mitford. I think she really minded the marriage breaking down. Diana said “he was a terrible bore.” And that, of course, comes out in Tony Kroesig in The Pursuit of Love, who is Linda’s first husband, who is the most boring man in London. And Peter was like that; he sort of knew everything about a subject, and then told you. All of it. I think she tried. I think she really wanted it to work, but he was impossible. He was a bit of a wild man really.

KIM: As her younger sisters started marrying and having children, Nancy was trapped in a loveless marriage to this philandering, deadbeat husband. She suffered several miscarriages and she later had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy which would leave her childless. Laura, this is really sad, but could you say this ended up being a turning point for her in terms of the direction her life took from here on out?

LAURA: Yes, I think that's right. The final miscarriage — it was an ectopic pregnancy that led to the operation — that was from an affair of her own. You know, he'd had God knows how many, and he was really angry that she had this one affair with, when the Free French were based in London, she had an affair with one of the Free French officers. And that was what led to this, in one sense, calamity. It's so hard to know what she really felt about it, because the facade with Nancy is so bright and so strong. And yet one does get these glimpses of vulnerability, particularly in her letters to Evelyn Waugh. She’ll suddenly say something like, “Oh, don't tease me about not having children.” And then in another letter, she'll say, “Oh, my god, they're the worst. How do you stand them blah-blah-blah?” So there is this ambivalence, which is completely understandable. But it did mean that, having tried the conventional life, and having been a writer of four novels (the first one, when she was 25, which is remarkable. A couple of comic, Bright Young Thing-type novels, then they start to get better. Wigs on the Green, a satire on Oswald Mosley and the Fascists. And then Pigeon Pie, which I love. I'm going to shout out for Pigeon Pie.) After the hysterectomy, after the war, effectively ended the marriage to Peter (“Prod,” as she called him), yes, she was liberated, to be ... (cliche, sorry) the person she really should be. You know, free. An artist. Independent. Fantastic. And she began the famous affair with Gaston Palewski, who was DeGaulle’s right-hand man. She met him in 1942, again, in London, Free French, you know. She was going to the club there and she spoke very good French, and she was extremely smart and charming and attractive. She just fell for him. Bowled over, like Linda is in The Pursuit of Love when she meets her Frenchman Fabrice de Sauveterre. Gaston Palewski was not a French duke, but he was a ladies man in a good sense… in a bad sense, in that he was incapable of fidelity, but in a good sense in that he could talk to her as a woman. He could appreciate her as a woman, as none of her Englishmen had ever done. She, through him, in some obscure way, was liberated to write The Pursuit of Love, because she told him stories about her family. And he would say, “Oh, this is wonderful. This is so fascinating. This is rapturous,” and that sort of liberated her to think, “Yes, that's what I should write.” The simplicity of it. The need for plot just kind of fell away and she just wrote in her own voice, her own story. It just flowed out of her. In a sense, Palewski is the muse for that book. And then of course, she had enough money to move to Paris. And to write this ... god I mean, Love in a Cold Climate. You've mentioned it, I mean, it's just fantastic. And even funnier than The Pursuit of Love I think.

AMY: She settled in Paris, as you said. She absolutely loved it there. But how much of that do you think had to do with being in love with Gaston Palewski, and how much of it was a love affair with the city itself? Why did Paris appeal to this woman we consider so thoroughly British?

LAURA: Yeah, yeah. It's such a good question, because I think he and Paris are so bound up together, you know? There is this view, which I find a bit irksome, that, “Oh, she went hot-footing to Paris to be with Gaston. Oh, little woman, you know, and he didn't really want her. But she went to Paris to be near him so that he could ring her up and ask her to dinner if he hadn’t got anyone else to see.” And it's all a bit pathetic. God, that makes me angry. As if a woman like that ... yes, she was in love with him, but she had the most fantastic life! And she had a lot of friends out there. You know, there's something about the ambience of Paris that is romantic in a profound sense, and the formal, sexy sort of life there. And it's just, I don't think she'd ever been really happy in England. I think in a way she was (sorry, it's a bit of another cliché) I think she was always too intelligent for most of the men she knew. I think they couldn't cope with her. She was too bright and sharp, and, you know, a bit too much for them. And her family was disintegrating, and it was all a bit sad. And I think she just wanted to escape. From the age of 40, really, she was reborn. She was reborn. It is very intoxicating, Paris. And of course, he was there. And of course, that was fantastic. And of course, her sisters were so crazy about Germany, it was another way of saying, you know, there are other choices.

KIM: Let’s talk a little bit about the war itself for a moment. You had mentioned about the family members being Fascist, several of them. Unity and Nancy’s own mother were pal-ing around with Hitler — sister Jessica ran away and married a Communist. How did Nancy’s political leanings compare to the rest?

LAURA: Well, Nancy and Jessica were the only two who didn't meet Hitler, in fact. Even lovely, sane Deborah had tea with him. And when I wrote The Six, what I really tried to do was try to describe it as it was at the time. For example, when Diana fell in love with Oswald Mosley, he wasn't the monster. It was 1932 and he was regarded as the kind of future of British politics. Not because he was a fascist, but because he was, you know, a new man with new ideas. And, you know, it's the progression of things through the ’30s and how Diana's influence made Unity kind of fascinated by Fascism. And then she wanted to go one better. “She’s got Mosley, I've got Hitler.”  They’re really young girls, and there is an element of …  Unity writes about Hitler as if he were Harry Styles! I know that sounds really sort of inappropriate, but there’s something in it. And then Jessica goes the other way, goes to the left, the Communist thing. Nancy, meanwhile, her politics were pretty, what we would call today pretty centrist, really. I mean, she says in an interview, “Well, I've always been sort of a vague socialist.” You know, she voted Labour in 1945, so she sort of voted for the end of her own kind, really. She was always sort of center-left really but pretty centrist, as was Deborah. (Although center-right.) They had an overview on what the others were getting up to, really, and wanted to stay well out of it. That's what one feels really.

KIM: The only son in the family, Tom, was killed in the war — he was fighting in the Pacific Theater — so a lot of tragedy was befalling the family just as Nancy’s star was really starting to rise. We won’t give away any spoilers, but there’s a wretchedness to both The Pursuit of Love as well as Love in a Cold Climate even in the midst of so much humor. 

AMY: Yes, and the visual you get from her first few lines in The Pursuit of Love really highlights that contrast, I think. She writes in her opening: “There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece, plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children.” So the entrenching tool is obviously meant to be laughed at in this book, but there’s a lot of “death” running throughout the whole story. And she manages to co-mingle the glittering and the grim throughout the book. Her heroines do awful things at times and you still can’t help but love them. So Laura, you note in your book that Nancy Mitford is not really a satirist, even though she’s often described as one. Can you explain what you mean by that? And what do you think she was ultimately trying to do with these novels? 

LAURA: I mean, yes, some people do call her a satirist. Perhaps I don't know entirely what that means, but I don't see her that way, no. Her adult voice is one of smiling benevolence, you know, and remarkably free of judgment. And in Love in a Cold Climate, it's having your cake and eating it. Some of the people in it are quite reprehensible the way they behave. But there's no judgment. That's just what people are like. She said to Evelyn Waugh, “The god I love likes people to be happy.” That's really how she sort of presents her characters. Even though The Pursuit of Love has a tremendous amount of sadness, it's a more poetic book, I think. It's a kind of, almost like a poetic outpouring. I think that beginning you described, which instantly gives you a sense of perspective on the whole thing about the family photographs. There's a sense of the immutable in the book, but there's also a sense of change rushing away and bringing with it potential tragedy. There's always that pull in The Pursuit of Love that gives it a sense of tremendous vital joy, but also a sense of almost dread, I think. But I don't know how much awareness she had of that. You feel it's instinctive, this mastery she's got of what she's doing, what she was trying to do. I mean, Evelyn Waugh, when somebody asked him, what are you trying to do with your novels? He said, “Well, I'm just trying to write good novels.” And I think that might be her answer. She wants to entertain. She wants to amuse. She wants to earn money. The artistry, which I think is very present in her, I think was not something that she, herself, gave a huge amount of consideration to. I'm saying that. I don't know. I don't know.

AMY: If I was wanting to highlight in my book all the lines that made me laugh, my book would be completely yellow, right? It's that rife with humor. And then it's also just so dark. It's just, it's really special and unique in that way, I think, as is Love in a Cold Climate. I guess it’s sort of like a companion novel. We have a lot of the same characters. We have narrator, Fanny, again — but this time she’s recounting the romantic travails of another friend Polly Montdore, who is a young debutante who could have any of the finest young men in England but she has  no interest in any of them. She’s the coldest in the “cold climate” you could say.

KIM: Absolutely, and that’s much to the dismay of her obnoxious and overbearing mother, Lady Montdore, who is every bit as comical as the Radlett family’s Uncle Matthew. (And the Radletts do factor into this novel, too, by the way, which is great). But Polly ends up making an unexpected and utterly scandalous love match which throws everyone into a tizzy.

AMY: And it seems as though the fractured Montdore family will never get over the shock of Polly’s marriage until a distant relative named Cedric buzzes onto the scene (And I mean that literally -- Mitford describes him as a “human dragonfly”) He shakes up the family more than Polly’s marriage ever could.

KIM: He's almost like the “jump the shark” adopted child in a sitcom, only it's much better. He's so great, though. And he’s sort of this lovable “gay life coach” and Lady Montdore becomes his willing project. They all get caught up in that and sort of stop worrying about the Polly situation. Laura, do you have any favorite “Cedric” moments?

LAURA: What always kills me, and I always  think about it, because as you say, Lady Montdore who's so funny. She absolutely is so funny. And the fact that Polly, who is the most beautiful girl in London and she can't marry her off ... her frustration and rage about the whole thing. And then when Cedric comes along, who is this beautiful, highly groomed young man, he sort of takes her in her hand and makes her obsessed with her own appearance. So she loses tons of weight. She has a facelift. She has her hair done and all this kind of thing. And he says to her, I want to make her smile in a photograph, so how you learn to smile is you say the word “brush.” I think it’s hilarious, that “brush!” He is so fey and gorgeous. And it is just a delight.

AMY: He is just the fabulous gay friend that everybody wants. The “brush…” I do want to try that. It reminds me, I feel like I had a gay friend that told me whenever you're going to have your picture taken, to open your mouth when you're smiling, like, [Aaah]. You look better that way, when you have your mouth open for your smile — so it totally reminded me of that. And it’s so sweet the way he’s ultimately accepted by everyone. Yes, people are shocked by his fashion and the things he says. But it just made me think… the fact that Nancy had written this character (a gay character) in her book, was it daring at all, for her to have done that in that time period? 

LAURA: Yes. I mean, Harold Acton (who was gay) said in his biography of Nancy, he said quite seriously, that her completely nonjudgmental, not even mentioning in any way of, you know, that it's anything out of the ordinary, this description of Cedric helped make homosexuality more acceptable in this country, certainly. It wasn't legalized here until 1967, which is sort of incredible, especially when you think that in Nancy's circle, everybody was gay, everybody was bisexual. And that's the way Nancy, again in that wonderfully as I say, childlike sophistication of hers, just puts down things as they are. And because he's just there, Cedric. And he does misbehave in it. You know, he really does, actually. But they're all sophisticates. They're all people of the world. And I think Harold Acton, if he said that, then he should know what he was talking about. Putting Cedric in a book like that did have an effect, a sort of societal effect. It's hard to know whether it did shock some people in 1948 or 1949. It may have done, but my goodness, the book was another raging success.

AMY: And speaking of shocking people, let's talk about the Lecherous Lecturer, which is the nickname that the Radlett girls have for Boy Dougdale because of his unwanted advances toward them when they were younger. It seems like nothing is sacred when it comes to the targets of Nancy's humor. I mean, we see how in The Pursuit of Love, Linda treats her own daughter, Moira. You are a little taken aback. Do you think, Laura, that she is an acquired taste for some people because of that? And do you think her novels can stand the test of time, given how sardonic they are in a lot of ways?

LAURA: I mean, yes. Some of the things she writes, you think, “How has she not gotten canceled?” You know, when Fanny goes to see Linda's baby, and she says, “Oh, well, she's over there. It's kinder not to look” —  she really just has no feelings at all for her baby. And in one way, it's funny in the kind of [gasp] you know. Some of the lines, if you read them in cold blood, as it were, I mean, Boy Dougdale, who is the Lecherous Lecturer [laughing] …. You see, to me, it's funny. I don't know, I can imagine some people… she's not going to pass the “Ten Commandments of Woke-ery.” I don't know. It's like the Mitfords themselves. It's like what we were talking about before. She kind of gets away with things, with this same tone of smiling politeness that, in a way, characterizes the Mitfords. That tension within the Mitfords of formality and anarchy. So she gets away with stuff. But yeah, I can imagine that there will be people who will think “What the hell?”

AMY: Yeah, I think it goes back to what Kim had said earlier, which is when you run across another person that loves Nancy Mitford, you're almost in a club. You either get it and you think it's hilarious, or if you're going to be offended, then you're not in our circle, you know?

LAURA: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If you’re offended by them, you know, read something else. It’s not a big deal. 

KIM: In the 1950s, Mitford pivoted to writing historical biographies, which were highly regarded, I think? Can you tell us a little about them, and are they worth reading?

LAURA: Oh, yes, I think so. Particularly the first one, which is a biography of Madame de Pompadour. She writes in the same style as she writes a novel. So again, we've got the wonderful directness, we've got the wonderful cleaving to the heart of motive. She's got this wonderful ability to get to the heart of the matter and tell you what you need to know. Nonfiction can be quite unreadable, sometimes, but not with her. She never wrote anything that was anything other than entertaining.

KIM: In the end, Nancy’s own “pursuit of love” proved unfruitful. She finally divorced Peter Rodd in 1957 after living apart for years. Gaston Palewski moved to Rome and fathered a child with a different mistress. She moved from Paris to a house in Versailles in 1967 just to escape all of her reminders of him in Paris. She grew sick and close to death soon after finding out from him that he was going to marry another woman. Physically, she went progressively downhill from there. There’s an inclination to feel sad about her overall life trajectory, but do you think that’s misguided?

LAURA: You know, it's so interesting the way you've put that, Kim, because it's right what you've just said. But in another way, I think one can interpret it differently. I think from 1957, when he was made the French ambassador in Rome, I think her life did start to dim from that point. So she was in her 50s (which then would have been older than now, of course), and she'd had a very lovely life in Paris, you know, friends, social success, beautiful clothes, lovely apartment, blah, blah, blah. And then I think the realities made themselves apparent. I know her sisters, I mean, both of them said to me, (Diana and Deborah), that she had a very sad life. And it was very sad that she didn't have children. That's their interpretation. That's not my personal opinion. And I'm not sure it was Nancy's really. I think she did love him very much, Palewski. You know, when he got married to somebody else, I think it was terrible for her. But I think she knew by that time that he's not Fabrice in the book. He's not going to return to her and say, “I've come to tell you, I love you.” But in a weird way, what she wrote is as real to her as what she lived. I think she did have a terrible time when she got ill because they couldn't diagnose this cancer. And the pain was, it’s heartbreaking. I'm sort of welling up just thinking about it now, actually. It's not a conventionally happy life, but I think there was a lot of happiness in it for her. I feel the joy coming off her that makes me feel, “God she got pleasure out of life.”

KIM: You wrote in your biography of Nancy a really beautiful summary, I think, of The Pursuit of Love. You remark that the book is, “suffused to its considerable depths with feeling: bright with hope, shadowed with sadness, sometimes cold and stony with realism…. Steeped in a homespun, benevolent understanding of human nature, which shows as clear and clean beneath the sparkle as dolphins moving steadily under a sunlit sea.” That’s so perfect, Laura, and I think it really also beautifully sums up Nancy’s own pursuit of happiness in life. 

LAURA: Thank you, Kim. Gosh, that's so nice to hear. You know, I really loved writing that book. I really got very, you know, engaged with Nancy. And I think I found her pursuit of happiness, which as we've said, can be interpreted in different ways. She can be interpreted as being in denial, or suppressed or any of that, but I find in it courage, and also a kind of inspiration.

AMY: Well, I’ve got to say, I have so enjoyed your books. And I think your own writing style is a bit “Mitfordian…” as well. There are descriptions in your books that made me laugh out loud. There’s some humor in there. And it makes you not only a wonderful authority on Nancy Mitford, but also a true Hon. I would encourage our listeners to read Laura’s work, The Six and Life in a Cold Climate. Thank you for the books and thank you for sharing your insight with us today. And I’m also curious, what’s your next passion project? Do you have anything in the works, or somebody that you want to pursue next?

LAURA: Well, first of all, I have enjoyed this so much. You two are just amazing. And you're kind words ... to be called a Hon, I mean, come on, you know, I can die happy. It's just the best. You're so lovely. I do have a book coming out early next year, which is about “the heiress” or the concept of the woman who, from Barbara Hutton all the way back to the girl, Mary Davies, who owned the fields that became London's Belgravia and was put in an asylum because everyone wanted her money. So it’s that whole thing of women and money through history.

KIM: I can’t wait to read that. That sounds so good!

AMY: Yeah, looking forward to that!

KIM: This was a wonderful conversation. We thank you so much for doing this with us. What a pleasure to get to talk about Nancy Mitford and this amazing eccentric and wonderful family.

LAURA: I’ve so enjoyed it, seriously. 

KIM: Thank you so much.

END INTERVIEW

AMY: So that’s all for today’s podcast, and wow, Kim, how fun was that? 

KIM: That was like being in the Hons’ linen cupboard!

AMY: Oh my gosh, you’re right!

KIM: For a full transcript of today’s show, visit LostLadiesoflit.com, and if you loved this episode, please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps us find new listeners.

AMY: And go read some Nancy Mitford! Bye everyone! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.

38. The American Guide Series

KIM: Hey, everybody, welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. It’s almost officially summer and we’re so lucky here in the States that people are getting vaccinated and ready to explore the world again. (Maybe not the world, but at least maybe the country.) Kim, do you have any interesting travel plans for the summer?

KIM: Not yet for summer, though I’m dreaming about some local trips. In September, we are probably going to Hawaii, and I’m very excited about going to the beach.

AMY: That sounds so amazing. I’ve been thinking of Hawaii a lot through the whole pandemic — just to be able to sit with a drink in your hand … Yeah, the sunset and a Mai Tai. You earned it this year.

KIM: Thank you. I feel like I have… we all have, we all have. What about you, Amy?

AMY: Yeah, I've got some getaways planned — mostly places within the state of California, though we are going to fly to Ohio to see my family for the first time in two years. So that will be fun. Um, speaking of travel, though, do you enjoy reading travel guides?

KIM: Yeah, actually, I do. Well, I don’t know so much about reading them. I usually order those BK eyewitness guides before I travel anywhere new. I really liked the pictures. It gives me a feel for if I want to go to a particular place. But I love literary travel guides. I have this beautiful little book called Florence A Delicate Case. It's basically essays by an American who lived in Florence for many years, and he had all these really great experiences there. And also, I usually try to read a fictional book set there on the flight or while I'm there I once read Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety while I traveled around the south of France. It's actually set in Paris during the French Revolution, of course, so it's a bit tangential to the south of France, but it's still really great and also a lot to lug around, both emotionally, mentally, and physically, on that trip.

AMY: That’s so like you, carrying this big tome. Yeah, I'm kind of similar.  Before I go somewhere new, I like to not necessarily read travel guides, but you know, I want to know the cool history. I want to know the interesting anecdotes, the weird ghost stories, things like that. I remember the first time I went to London, I got Edward Rutherford's … I don't know if it's called London or Londinium, I think it's just called London. It's a novel, but it covers a sprawling history of London. And I remember my travel companion, Meg, I think she was so annoyed with me when we were actually there because I kept spouting off all this, like, stuff that I learned from the book. And you can be kind of obnoxious that way. I think I was coming across...

KIM: You’ve watched The Trip movies, right?

AMY: Yes! I love those!

KIM: Oh my gosh, they’re so great!

AMY: Steve Coogan!

KIM: Oh, he’s the best! Oh my gosh, I love him. I love those movies. They’re hilarious. But he’s a bit of that.

AMY: Yes! That’s exactly what I was like, but probably not as funny.

KIM: Yes, and that whole idea of your perception of a place reconciling with actually being there is really interesting to me. The contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton talks about that in his book The Art of Travel. It’s really interesting, and that’s another great travel book. Anyway, I’m guessing people are wondering how any of this actually ties into our discussion today. We’re talking about travel guides, right?

AMY: Yes, but not just any travel guides. So, I want to set the stage here for a second, because it sort of parallels what’s happening right now in the country with the Biden administration unveiling their ambitious infrastructure plan to help create jobs and kick the economy into gear… well, that’s exactly what FDR was doing with his New Deal.

KIM: Yeah, I was hoping Biden would do this because I’ve always admired and been inspired by what FDR did. It was this massive series of programs and public works projects between 1933 and 1939. They were designed to help pull the country out of the Great Depression. 

AMY: Right, and we tend to associate the New Deal with projects like building bridges and roads (If you remember The Tennessee Valley Authority, that was part of it) but people tend to forget that there were also  projects focused on creating jobs in all arenas of life — including, interestingly enough, offering employment for writers, and that’s something I didn’t know about. 

KIM: Yeah, and that is something I’d be happy to have now too! It’s amazing really, because in this day and age there’s so much stinginess about federal funding for the arts. But the Works Progress 

Administration, which was part of the New Deal, included something called the Federal Writers Project, which ended up employing more than 6,500 writers (many of whom were relative unknowns) and the most famous project within this program was a series of travel guides to the United States called the American Guide Series.

AMY: And what you have to remember is that there actually weren’t really any travel guide books for America that were written by Americans around this time period. The go-to guide books would have been Baedeker guides, which were published by a German firm. So basically you had the U.S. government saying, “Okay, we need to get people to work; we need to get writers some employment. Let’s get a bunch of American writers to write about our country, to describe our towns and historic sites and different regions and people.” So that’s what they ended up doing. There were books that were published on all the continental U.S. states as well as Alaska and Puerto Rico, and then they also branched out some books that focused on the major cities like New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Washington D.C. 

KIM: And let me just do a sidebar, because you say Baedeker Guides, and that totally makes me immediately think of A Room With a View and Edith Wharton. I mean, they’re mentioned throughout. That's the books that every tourist that was doing their European tour would take with them, almost to the point of where it became used for irony, because it was so typical that the tourist would be traveling around with this book and basically having it tell them exactly where to go. So that’s interesting and I just had to mention that.

AMY: Yeah, that was the joke. Lucy's chaperone — she wouldn't do anything if it wasn't in the Baedeker Guide, right? And it was a running gag.

KIM: Yeah. Totally. But anyway, back to the books that we’re talking about, 

writers like Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel all participated in the program, but of course there were a lot of women writers involved in the program, too, most notably Zora Neale Hurston.

AMY: Uh-huh, and Hurston was already a pretty successful writer of the Harlem Renaissance when she joined the Federal Writers Project, but the fact that she was trained as a folklorist made her a perfect fit for this gig, because a large part of the work involved going out into the field and interviewing locals — because the guide books really were bringing in the personal accounts of people living in the various regions. So she was travelling around her native Florida to contribute to the projects that related to that part of the country, and the firsthand accounts she collected from people (including many former slaves) helped form the basis for her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

KIM: Okay, the fact that they were going around talking to real people to hear their stories sort of makes it sound like NPR’s StoryCorps.

AMY: Yeah, it’s exactly like StoryCorps, and in fact, this Federal Writers Project program is what inspired NPR to start doing StoryCorps. They wanted to bring back this idea of documenting the stories of everyday Americans. So they’re trying to replicate it.

KIM: Oh, that’s so cool! I love that idea! Oh, you know what, this also actually makes me think of Martha Gelhorn. Was it her that we talked about went to … she was talking to people about what it was like during the um..

AMY: The Depression.

KIM: The Depression. Yeah, sorry! I couldn’t think of the word Depression!

AMY: You're absolutely right. However she was... the program she was involved in was something separate. She was not part of the Federal Writers Program. But it was a similar idea, but she was working with a different agency, I think. 

KIM: Okay.

AMY: But yeah. So another interesting thing: the writers who were involved in this federal program ended up being able to get a lot of firsthand accounts from former slaves (and that’s what was happening with Zora Neale Hurston). So many of these slave accounts were collected, in fact, that they ended up spinning this off into a new project called the Slave Narrative Collection. They basically had too much material to include in the guide books, so they were like, “Let’s just do a whole separate thing on these slave narratives.) So they wound up getting 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery that they documented along with 500 black and white photographs that were compiled. And thank god that they were able to do this while these people were still alive to share their stories! I mean, they captured this before time ran out.

KIM: That’s really incredible, and Colson Whitehead used this collection when writing his Pulitzer-prize-winning 2016 novel The Underground Railroad. (Which, by the way, I thought was absolutely incredible. I loved it.)

AMY: They’re making a movie of it. Or a TV series or something.

KIM: It’s a phenomenal book. I’m sure I’ll be re-reading it more than once. You know how I do that. So you can still find all of these first-person slave narratives on the Library of Congress website and I intend to go read some of them because that’s amazing that we have that as a resource to experience those personal stories by people who lived in that time. 

AMY: Apparently Michael Chabon used the New York City travel guide from the Writers Project when he was writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay because it gave him a lot of insight into what the city was like during the Great Depression.

KIM: Oh my gosh, another one of my favorite books that I love that the writers were using these resources to create this. That’s incredible. And it’s so great to know that’s there. Maybe we’ll end up using it one day for a project. So who were some of the other women writers who were involved in the program?

AMY: So in the Chicago region, we had Margaret Walker getting her start through this program. She was a recent Northwestern graduate and she apparently lied about her age so that she could get onto the project. She later went on to become a very famous Harlem Renaissance poet. And then there was also Dorothy West — she ended up being the first black writer to have her short stories published in The New York Daily News. While she was part of the program she wrote an essay about Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem among some other pieces. (I actually did find that one on the Library of Congress website). And she went on to write a novel in 1948 called The Living is Easy. Then there was also poet May Swenson from Utah. She was a poet and playwright of Swedish descent and Harold Bloom actually said that he considered her one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century. So lots of names here that we can be filing away for maybe future episodes. There was also Jewish novelist Anzia Yezierska (if I’m saying that right). She worked for the federal writers program (although she’d already had some success as a writer and Hollywood screenwriter prior to joining up with the program). There’s another author, Meridel Le Seuer, who profiled women in Minnesota whose stories had never been told, and she wrote a very controversial novel based on those interviews that she collected for the writers project and that novel is called The Girl.

KIM: Oh, wow. I think we have The Living is Easy on our list but all these other people need to be on it, and the fact that the poet that Harold Bloom thought was one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century… I’ve never heard of her name. There are  so many lost ladies that we could explore in more depth in future episodes and I have a feeling we’re going to. 

AMY: And I think it's interesting, because the controversy is still happening today, when they're talking about these infrastructure programs, where there's a faction of our government that just wants it to strictly be about building highways and building bridges and things like that. And I think now they're doing a push for, like, universal preschool. They're trying to expand the idea of infrastructure so that women who are traditionally not out on a highway as a construction worker, can also find jobs. And if you look at this program from the New Deal, it's kind of cool that they were able to put women to work, you know, and that wasn't even a priority back then really.

KIM: Absolutely, because when you think about everything we're hearing about how many women have lost their jobs during the pandemic, and how much it's affected women, that completely makes sense that you would want to create jobs where they could participate in a jobs program. That's fantastic.

AMY: And I should add that these travel guides, as they were published, they weren’t really like the travel guides that we have where it’s just like “Here’s where you can eat, here’s where to stay,”... they do have a bit of that, but these books featured so much more. It was really like a mini encyclopedia for the state. There was information on the plants and animals, for example. There were all kinds of essays about the cities. They were much deeper than just a “travel guide.” And they were really lengthy -- the guide to Washington D.C was apparently 1,000 pages. And the California Guide, I should add, was even selected to be part of the “Book of the Month Club” when it was published, so people really enjoyed reading these books. They were considered good. In one review of the guides, The New Republic called the books, “a vast catalogue of secret rooms,” and “a democratic anthology.” 

KIM: In John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley, he raved about the guides, too, saying, “"If there had been room in Rocinante [that was the name of the mobile trailer he was traveling in) I would have packed the W.P.A. Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them...The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has approached it."[

AMY: So, much of what was collected for these guides is easy to search up on the Library of Congress, as I mentioned, or Google books … you can find by just doing a Google search and a lot of the books have also been republished and you can still purchase them. For example, I just downloaded the Ohio one since I mentioned I was going to Ohio and my husband and I are planning to take a little road trip while we’re there, so I was like, “You know what? I’m going to see what these books have to say about it.” So if you’re curious and want to look into them, I’m sure all the libraries probably have these. They’re titled “the WPA guide to such-and-such.” New Orleans or New York … whatever you’re looking for. Even though they’re 80 years old, I think they still offer a real flavor and there’s still something to be gleaned from them. And also I should give a shout-out to author David Taylor. He wrote a book all about the Federal Writers Program called A Soul of the People and I got a lot of information just by watching some talks that he gave. I love that this whole project, though, just sprang from an endeavor to help writers earn their daily bread. 

KIM: Yeah, I wish they’d do it again! It’s so important that oral stories are preserved like this. So the writing that materialized from this project offered a pure glimpse into the lives of everyday American folks, whereas the author we’ll be discussing next week gives readers a glimpse into the British upper crust. (A comic glimpse, we should say).

AMY: Oh my gosh, I’ve been wanting to feature her ever since we started this podcast and it’s happening! Next week is our “Nancy Mitford” episode, you guys, featuring special guest, New York Times bestselling author Laura Thompson, who wrote biographies on the Mitford family and Nancy Mitford, herself.

KIM: I’m excited too! You won’t want to miss it! In the meantime, don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for information on our upcoming episodes, and leave us a review when you listen to this podcast — those five-star reviews really help us out!

AMY: Bye, everybody!

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

37. Elizabeth Stoddard — The Morgesons with Rachel Vorona Cote

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, everyone, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew. 

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes. Some of the authors we discuss on this podcast were literary rock stars of their day. But the writer we're remembering today wasn't so lucky. It reminds me of something a friend of mine in the publishing industry once told me — that writing a book is a largely heartbreaking experience. I think she was referring to the discouragement of putting your heart and soul and years of your life into creating something and putting it out in the universe, only to discover that the universe doesn't want to buy any copies. 

KIM: It's a harsh reality, for sure, and it's definitely the sort of pain today's Lost Lady of Lit, Elizabeth Stoddard, felt acutely. Like her contemporary Herman Melville, this New England author was a critical success. (Nathaniel Hawthorne himself was a fan, and she was compared to Tolstoy, George Eliot, Balzac and the Bronte sisters.) But her books failed to find an audience when they were published. 

AMY: Of her first novel, The Morgesons, Stoddard later wrote, “I think one copy passed from hand to hand, but the interest in it soon blew over and I have not been noticed there since.” It's not only tragic to hear this, but it's surprising, too, because The Morgesons is brilliant. And like it's blustery heroine, it is also aggressively bold. You’d think, honestly, it would have gotten people's attention, especially because some scholars today consider her one of the most strikingly original novelists of her time next to Melville and Hawthorne. 

KIM: Right, and we just so happen to agree, but it's as if Stoddard was left screaming into the wind. Maybe the book was just too much for readers of the day. 

AMY: Lucky for us, we are joined today by a guest who happens to have written the book on “too muchness,” especially as it relates to Victorian literature, and we can't wait to introduce her. 

KIM: I'm so excited. And speaking of too much, this is too much buildup. So let's raid the stacks and get started.

[introductory music]

AMY: Our guest today, Rachel Vorona Cote, is a frequent contributor to The New Republic, Longreads, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The Poetry Foundation and Literary Hub, among many others, and she was also a contributor at Jezebel. She has an MA in literature from George Washington University, and she's All But Dissertation for a doctoral program at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied Victorian literature. 

KIM: I read her 2020 book Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today when it came out last spring, and it had me nodding my head in rigorous empathy from the first few pages. Rachel, welcome to the show. We are so glad to have you here. For the next hour or so, feel free to be as unruly, tempestuous and hysterical as you want to be. 

RACHEL VORONA COTE: Well, thank you! That is such a lovely invitation. And I'm so thrilled to be here and to be reading a lost lady of literature with you two. 

AMY: Before we get into our “lost lady,” Elizabeth Stoddard, we need to discuss your book, Rachel, I think, because it really offers us the perfect lens through which to read her book, The Morgesons. 

KIM: Absolutely, there is a real synergy here, and listeners, we definitely encourage you to read these two books in tandem. Rachel, can you describe the premise of your book, Too Much, for our listeners? 

RACHEL: Sure. It's a work of nonfiction. It's basically making the argument that there's a sort of fundamental excessiveness that is both attributed to women-identifying persons and also kind of simultaneously becomes a form of stigma. So because my background is in Victorian literature and 19th century British literature, I sort of track the way that excess of all kinds (or what I call ‘too muchness,’) the way that we see this really intensify in the Victorian period. It certainly does not begin in the Victorian period, but it takes a really interesting and pernicious form there. And so I think about that through Victorian literature and culture, but also weave in contemporary popular culture, contemporary lit and then some of my own story — my own identification as someone who has often felt too much in all sorts of ways. And it's not to say that excess is good, actually, but you know, that it just is, and the sort of stigma that gets attached to it is really ideologically and patriarchally-grounded. 

AMY: And yeah, the title, Too Much. It's so succinct. It's like a perfect, easy way of describing what this phenomenon is like. I was predicting this sort of academic read, but when I dove into it, I instantly realized like, okay, no, this is a different kind of book. It's very personal. It is poignant. It's so fun though, too, it's really funny. And it was by page 10, when you were talking about the phrase “too much” — you reference, the Heat Miser and the Snow Miser from The Year Without a Santa Claus. That's a very obscure reference, and I knew it was just going to be such a more entertaining read than I was expecting. And I was not wrong about that. 

KIM: Yes, she was texting me as she was reading it, because I had already read it and passed it on to her. And immediately when she started reading, I started getting the texts like, “Oh, my God, this is great. This is great.” And then when I went back to look at it again, after we had approached you, and we had decided we were going to do The Morgesons and I thought, “Oh, I'm just gonna go back. I know, there's a lot in there that will relate to Elizabeth Stoddard and the book.” And even more than I ever thought! I mean, just your chapter titles alone... I'll just say some of them not in any particular order, but: Nerve, Crazy, Horny, Loud, Cheat, Chatterbox. I mean, it's our heroine, which we're going to talk about more; it's Elizabeth Stoddard; it's so many women. And the way that you distill what those things are, and relate them to the Victorian period and contemporary times is just both wonderful and wickedly funny. And I noticed very early on, you call yourself almost being possessed by a demon. And we're going to find out later in our discussion that that plays a key role in our book today, which couldn't be more perfect as well. So it all comes together. 

RACHEL: It really, it seemed pretty fortuitous. It kind of sucks that I didn't know that this existed when I was writing my book. 

KIM: Yeah, I know. It's like that with all of these books as we're reading them. We're like, how do people not know about this book? So that's what makes it so fun. 

AMY: Exactly. So listeners, we’ll give you a brief outline of Stoddard’s own personal background, but suffice to say The Morgesons, her book, is really autobiographical. So it's going to paint that picture better than we can probably. Elizabeth Stoddard was born Elizabeth Barstow in 1823 and she grew up in the New England coastal town of Mattapoisett, which in The Morgesons is represented by the town of Surrey. Like the heroine in that book, Elizabeth was the granddaughter of a tailor and the daughter of a shipbuilder, but her father was often plagued by financial woes. They never knew if it was going to be feast or famine, so her family was never really accepted by the affluent families in the area. 

KIM: But Elizabeth did, however, receive a good formal education, and she attended Wheaton Female Seminary. She was also a voracious reader, and she counted the Bronte sisters among her literary idols. What's most important to know about her, however, is that she had a notoriously temperamental personality. 

AMY: Yes, she was intelligent, witty and charismatic, but she was also known for being abrasive and shockingly blunt, and this is important to know for our understanding of her novel. She was prone to these venomous outbursts, and not surprisingly, as a result of her argumentative, passionate nature, she had a lot of difficulty maintaining friendships, particularly with other women. 

KIM: And when she was 29, she married a fellow aspiring writer named Richard Stoddard. Apparently, there was some initial hesitation about this pairing, and they ended up keeping their marriage a secret from everyone for several months. 

AMY: Richard was said to be as ornery as she was. (So a match made in heaven, I guess.) This sort of pitted them against the world in some respects, though. Yet it made her fiercely loyal to him. He was actually considered the more prominent writer in the circles they ran with in New York, yet Elizabeth would undoubtedly be considered more talented than he was by academics today. That said he absolutely supported her career and he was a champion of her writing. 

KIM: That's right. And she actually wrote a lot of newspaper and magazine articles early on. Then in 1860, she wrote a short story for The Atlantic Monthly called “My Own Story.” It was apparently deemed “too much” by editor James Russell Lowe. He made her tone down the story’s sexual explicitness. I'm guessing that anecdote kind of gets your dander up, Rachel?

RACHEL: It's not a surprise, especially knowing what we do about Elizabeth Stoddard, even based on this book, which is, like, really shockingly sexy. It's interesting to get a sense of her biography and to see what an iconoclast she was. My understanding of her comes from, you know, reading this novel and reading the introduction the editor of my Penguin Classic Edition wrote. It does seem to be the case that people really just didn't know what to do with her. She had no patience for dogma for, you know, the sort of New England puritanical religion that was pervasive. I kind of got the impression that she understood all of this about herself, but also was kind of fine with it and really had no interest in adjusting her behavior. Like she knew that she probably pissed off her friends by you know, sounds like being kind of a punk. But also, she appreciated that in herself that she was so outspoken and so brazen, and so you know, go on, girl!

KIM: It's interesting, because I don't think we … we don't get enough of a sense (and that's what's great about your book, too) about how many women there were, actually, who were probably happily almost too much. And that sort of idea of somebody being like that wasn't as much of an outlier as today we think it was. We think, oh, there's Emily Dickinson, and now we know Elizabeth Stoddard and a few other people like that. But maybe there was more of that than we realized, which I think is interesting. Anyway, so two years after she had written that short story, her first novel, The Morgesons was published by a minor publishing house. It's a bildungsroman that portrays a quest for autonomy and sexual fulfillment in an incredibly restrained environment. It straddles the line between the Gothic romanticism of Hawthorne, Melville and Edgar Allan Poe, and the modern ironic realism of Henry James and George Eliot, which is why some scholars believe it may have landed in the literary dustbin, if you will. 

AMY: Yeah, so not only too much, but maybe too original also. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

AMY: What a bummer. And sadly, as if she didn't already have a lot working against her in terms of finding a foothold with this book, it happened to come out just 10 days after the Union Army’s disastrous defeat at Bull Run during the Civil War. The country became fully distracted by that, which Elizabeth believed doomed the book to obscurity. She later wrote “The Morgesons was my Bull Run.” Rachel, I'm guessing you might be able to sympathize a little bit with that unfortunate timing?

RACHEL: Yeah, my book came out on February 25, 2020, so on, you know, basically the lip of the pandemic. I sympathize with having an event that is just so much bigger and more pressing and more critical. Ultimately, I am so fortunate to be here and alive and getting vaccinated. And, you know, you have to sort of keep that perspective and understand your privilege. I'm so lucky that I got to do part of my tour and stuff, but it was a bummer. And it would be you know, it'd be disingenuous to say it wasn't. And so, I spent the beginning of lockdown just sort of sitting with that and trying to stay focused. And now, it’s like, well, you know, that's what happened. And you know, on to the next thing.

AMY: I think our hearts can definitely go out for poor Elizabeth. 

RACHEL: Absolutely. She didn't have Zoom. 

KIM: No, she didn't have Zoom. And then, although she went on to write two more novels (the novels were Two Men and Temple House) her sales were sluggish, and sadly, it proved hugely demoralizing to her to the point where she felt discouraged and bitter.

AMY: Yes, she didn't believe she could ever make it as a major writer, so she just wound up concentrating on writing kind of more shallow work for the mass market. Three years before her death, a renewed interest was sparked in her earlier work though. Novelist and legendary literary critic William Dean Howells heaped public praise on her, which in part led to her three novels being republished. 

KIM: Yeah, I'm so glad she was able to see that transpire. That's a little bit of a happy ending there. But alas, the interest in her writing didn't stand the test of time. And today, very few people know her outside of academia, which is a real shame because this book deserves to be widely read. 

AMY: Yeah, and I think that's probably a great segue into our discussion of the novel. The first line of The Morgesons basically says it all, like a bullet shot out of a gun, and I will read it here: “The child,” said my Aunt Mercy, looking at me with indigo-colored eyes, “is possessed.” So this child is our narrator, and the heroine of the novel. Her name's Cassandra. Rachel, can you tell our listeners more about Cassie and talk about the ways in which we can see immediately in these first few chapters that she is, quote unquote, “too much?” 

RACHEL: Oh, I mean, it's so striking. I mean, even if you begin with her name… an elderly man has been told her name. He's like, “That's not from Scripture.” And no, it's from Greek mythology. And I thought, you know, that is sort of interesting to bear the name of the priestess who bore the gift of prophecy, but also the curse of never being believed, and that feels appropriate. The idea of being possessed is interesting on a number of registers. It suggests off the bat that she doesn't have any self control — that something has sort of taken hold of her. And then that also, of course, connects to the idea of possession more broadly and the extent to which women were treated as possessions. At one particular point in the novel when a man is really trying to possess her and her own relationship to this idea of possession, being possessed, and being able to, you know, agentially possess is I think, right off the bat, something that is introduced to us, but in this moment, immediately, what we're getting the sense of is that she's a wild child. She kind of reminded me a little bit of a 19th century, Ramona Quimby. 

KIM: I love that. That's perfect. 

AMY: She is described as having a zigzag part in her hair, you know? It's not straight down the line. Some of her behavior at school ... there's a point where she finds a loose floorboard and she just begins creaking it with her foot over and over and over, and she's making a commotion. She's that kid in the class. She decides to trample on the flower bed because she heard that the flowers grow better that way.

RACHEL: Such a Ramona Quimby thing to do. 

KIM: Totally. Yeah. 

AMY: That should be probably the last time we mention Ramona Quimby in this conversation, because folks, this book is not a children's book. This book is super racy. And, wow. It's shocking. But that's just a little taste of what Cassandra is like as a child. Early on in the book, Cassandra has an understanding where she says, “it was in my power to escape a moral penalty by willful ignorance, that I could continue the privilege of sinning with impunity.” So basically, as a kid, she was choosing to play dumb when it comes to the Commandments so that she wouldn't be expected to abide by them. And the local clergymen, her family … none of them know what to do with this girl. 

KIM: That just has to make you laugh. I mean, she's already so clever. I'd love to talk about Stoddard’s writing style, too, for a minute. It's ironic, elliptical … it comes to a sudden halt at surprising times. And the dialogue often goes uncredited. You don't know who's saying what. It was ahead of its time, and it may be more familiar to readers of Henry James, for example, then Nathaniel Hawthorne, her contemporary. As with a Jamesian character, you don't always understand the characters’ motivation. 

AMY: And like you said, Kim, it slams on the brakes in the midst of the most turbulent scenes. There are these transitions between explosive and passive, and it feels like minor whiplash, as you're reading it sometimes. 

KIM: Exactly. And it sounds a lot like what we know of Stoddard’s own personality, right? It's like her personality is almost haunting the prose. Rachel, what did you think of Stoddard’s writing style? 

RACHEL: You know, I thought it was really interesting: pointy and angular in a way. She's playing in the way that she's let this hang together. And I did think that there was something really fascinating about Cassie as being a really cagey narrator. Like, if we're narratively speaking, I guess there'd be a gap between Cassie the character and Cassie, the narrator, but the resistance to attributing quotes and to being really oblique — there's a resistance to a very 19th century realist convention of taking the reader by the hand and leading them through the plot, which, you know, felt like you were getting when you're reading a Dickens bildungsroman, like David Copperfield. You don't get that here; you don't get the same sort of exposition. And you also get the feeling that it's difficult to understand the characters’ motivations, which often they don't seem to understand them. But there is a way that this sort of unevenness and explosiveness does, I think, interestingly, express the characterization of the sisters Cassie and Very.

AMY: You're right. The idea that it's Cassie telling the story, and somebody that's as volatile as she is would tell the story that way, and that sort of herky-jerky …. it would take a more polite woman to be the one that would always say “he said, she said” to make it so clear for the reader. And that's not who she is. You know, she's like, “Follow along people!” 

KIM: Yeah, “Keep up, keep up!” I love the mysterious aspect of that. And even though a lot of things never get solved in a certain way, and I love that feeling all the way through, but you don't exactly know what's going on or why, I'm there for it. I'm completely there for it, and all that said, I think this would be a great place for our listeners to hear a passage from the book so they can get a feel for the prose. Rachel, would you like to read a favorite passage for us?

RACHEL: Sure! This is in the first half of the book. And so Cassie has gone to Rosville to stay with her cousin, Charles, and his wife, Alice. This is a passage where — she does this here and there, and it's a really interesting move, I think, especially in bildungsromans — it's as if she's sort of taking her own pulse of sort of where she is in terms of the way that she's experiencing the world and in an emotional even, like, almost physiological way. So, here's her self assessment: I found that I was more elastic than before, and more susceptible to sudden impressions. I was conscious of the ebb and flow of blood through my heart, felt it when it eddied up to my face and touched my brain with its flame colored wave. I loved life again. The stuff of which each day was woven was covered with an arabesque which suited my fancy, I missed nothing that the present unrolled for me, but looked neither to the past nor to the future. In truth, there was little that was elevated in me, could I have perceived if there had been whichever way the circumstances of my life vacillated, I was not yet reached to the quick, whether spiritual or material influences made sinuous, the current of being, it's still flowed toward an undiscovered ocean. And so of course, we get one of the central motifs of the novel: the ocean. 

AMY: So much of this book is about her trying to find her identity, and her sexuality, but it's about her identity. And I think there's a lot of scenes where she's looking in the mirror in this book. She's self-analyzing, and trying to figure it all out, as we said, 

RACHEL: She's contemplating her own sort of limitations, the limitations to her capacity for insight, to be able to make sense of the ways that she reacts to things, the ways that she feels about things. You know, we're getting a little bit of foreshadowing of the sexual stuff with “flame-colored wave.” There's a little hint of arousal, but she's confused you know? She's confused by herself. She recognizes that she's kind of living in the present and almost kind of in a feral way, just sort of experiencing things without really fully sussing them out. 

KIM: Okay, so Cassandra goes away to school. Then when Cassandra is 18, she goes to live with a distant relative. It definitely is the beginning of a more exciting existence for her, and it reminds me a little bit of Jane Eyre. 

AMY: So Charles is this dark, brooding type. He's passionate, he's aggressive. He's also very married. He was definitely giving off some Rochester vibes, and he had a weird fascination with her from the get go, which is why he's the one that asked her parents if she could come live with him. And yeah, he just wanted to try to tame her, basically. But there was a fiery passion between them for sure. 

RACHEL: Yeah, I super hated him. 

KIM: He was creepy. 

AMY: But she was not creeped out by him. 

KIM: No.

RACHEL: No. You don't know what constitutes creepy when you're 18 and you're super hot. 

KIM: She's finally feeling something for someone. 

AMY: Yeah, he and Cassandra have this immediate sexual attraction to each other that appears to go unconsummated, physically, due to some melodramatic circumstances that happen. But Cassandra is very cool and blunt about her fascination with him, even with his wife, Alice, which is kind of amazing. She has these conversations with the wife in the house where you're like, “Girl, you did not just say that to his WIFE, did you?!!” Crazy, and it goes back to: she just can't be reined in. 

KIM: No. 

AMY: She's too much, for sure. Yet she and Alice, the wife, have a very peculiar bond, also. Alice knows she's a threat, and yet somehow they have a sympathy or an understanding with each other. 

KIM: Yeah, it actually prompts Alice to ask her if she's mad, as in crazy. And Cassandra is called “crazy,” “mad” and “possessed” throughout the entire novel. And Rachel, as I said earlier, you have a chapter called “Crazy” in Too Much. Can you talk about this and how it’s manifested in Cassandra, and how the men and women, actually, in the book react to her?

RACHEL: First I will say, I really hope that Alice has her own lover because Cassandra does not care. She does not care if people think that she's weird. I mean, we get the clearest sense with her back and forth with her bestie,Ben, and I thought they had a really adorable friendship. And you don't often see a sort of platonic friendship like that, actually, in a 19th century literature. He adores her, but kind of finds her to be a little off the rails. We know that Cassie’s mother doesn't exactly know what to do with her, even though we get the sense that maybe there's some affinity there. Her father, at one point, straight-up says that she and Veronica scare him, which is awesome. And then there are people who just don't like her, you know, like Ben and Desmond's mother. Of course, she doesn't like her because she sees her as a threat. But Cassandra also doesn't do a whole lot to recommend herself, you know? Somebody like maybe Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch — if… I mean, no one would ever dislike Dorothea, but if somebody seemed not to be keen on her, Dorothea would probably do what she could to smooth things over. Not so with Cassandra. She does not care. And in fact, she's probably just going to, you know, be a jerk to you. Because, you know, why does she care? You get the sense that everybody thinks that she's gorgeous, but unpredictable. And Cassandra is really not fazed by it. 

KIM: So eventually, Cassandra goes to stay with the family of her friend, Ben Somers, and she meets his brother Desmond. He has a violent temper like Charles did, and he's even compared to the devil as well. And Desmond and Cassandra have a mutual fascination for one another, like the one she shared with her cousin Charles. 

AMY: So Rachel in Too Much, your book, you also talk about how the Victorians, contrary to popular belief, were really obsessed with sex and sexually deviant women. Most of the time though, those portrayals in literature are written by men. So how do you think Stoddard’s novel squares up with how other contemporary novelists were writing this type of uncontrollable woman? 

RACHEL: This was pretty wild. You know, I thought what was wildest about it to me, was just how unrepentantly pissy and aggressive Cassie is. It's interesting, because I mean, you have somebody like Christina Rosetti, who wrote a poem like “The Goblin Market,” that I don't know that she was writing it to be explicitly sexual, but it absolutely, at the end, involves sisters licking juice off of each other. It's very fleshy. 

AMY: I think it was pretty pointedly sexual. 

KIM: Yeah, I agree.

RACHEL: There was a lot of wild stuff out there. Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights is just I mean, she's a complete wild woman — just nasty to the core. So we see a lot of that, but this still felt sort of singular to me. Because Cassie, I mean, she's funny, but she's not charming, really. And she's really just pugnacious in a way that I'm not used to in a book like this. I mean, even Jane Eyre, who acts out in school and talks back, doesn't just straight-up smack one of her classmates and then tell her teacher “You're a bad woman.” Like, the level of audacity, I thought was really delightfully at, like 11. 

KIM: Yeah. Cassandra and Veronica are modeled on Elizabeth and her sister. Their relationship is a really interesting aspect of the book. It reminded me, Amy, of the sisters in The Green Parrot by Marthe Bibesco from a few episodes ago. 

AMY: Yeah, I was getting major Green Parrot vibes. And in fact, when I was looking over my notes for this episode, one of my notes was just: “This is exactly like The Green Parrot.” Even the way that it was written, the sort of poetic style in some places, reminded me of Marthe Bibesco. And you would love that book, too, if you haven't read it, Rachel. Highly recommend that one. But yeah, getting back to the sisters, Cassie and Very (short for Veronica), they are almost like a “too much” version of sisterhood. Typically, we think of the sisterly relationship as potentially being volatile, but they have a love-hate dynamic that is very intense and confusing. It reminded me a lot of your chapter Rachel, on female companionship and this notion of “We are the same person.” The sisters have a hard time understanding each other, but they love each other deeply. And you remark at the start of your chapter, Rachel, “I am the composite of the women I have loved.” So what are your thoughts on this relationship in the book? 

RACHEL: I thought it was fascinating. I mean, they're both so weird! To have these two, just strikingly weird, idiosyncratic, neurotic characters at the center is just really fabulous. And I think they're both really ... at least, Cassandra is really stubborn. So if she doesn't understand Veronica, she's maybe not inclined to try. I think it takes some time for empathy to really work its way in there. And Veronica is really ... I mean, she's kind of spacey and, you know, at a certain point when when Cassandra has to take over a lot of household responsibilities, is just more or less like, “Yeah, you know, I'll stay out of your way. I'm also not going to help you at all.” She is really quite aggravating in certain ways, but it's a really tempestuous relationship. Veronica seems like she's probably kind of jealous of Cassandra. But she's also very passive, you know — she's not trying to get a job, she's not trying to go to college or anything like that. She more or less can just sort of be an eccentric at home. Whereas I think it's a little bit more complicated for Cassie, who does want all of these different experiences. But they're also you know, they're also really protective of each other. They have that one also completely wild housekeeper who at one point accuses them of not loving each other, at which point, Veronica is like, “What the hell did you say?” Like, just completely loses it at her. So, much like any relationship that we're not a part of, we can't fully understand their dynamic because the only two people who ever really understand the dynamic are the people who share it. And also, they probably don't even understand it fully. 

AMY: Lots of button-pushing. 

KIM: Yes.

AMY: She's kind of a contrast of Cassie in that she's kind of painted as pure and virginal, and she's got actually a picture of St. Cecilia that hangs on her bedroom wall. And St. Cecilia was somebody that had made a pact with an angel that would allow her to preserve her virginity. So yeah, they're kind of opposites. It’s a definite push-pull that is really fascinating. The book sort of hints that Cassandra and Very’s mom had maybe once been a “too much” girl in her past. There's some town gossip about something, but it's never explicitly stated what happened. Seems though, that she ended up stuffing it all down to become the conventional wife and mother. And Rachel, I know you write about your own mom in your book. And I'm wondering if you were able to draw any parallels while reading The Morgesons just in terms of how that mother-daughter relationship goes? 

RACHEL: Oh, you know, my mother and I shared a lot in common, but at the same time, she often didn't know what to do with me. And would say so, and actually, in ways that were not unlike the way that Cassie’s mother says that she doesn't really know what to do with Cassie. But it's always in a very loving way. Yeah, you know, she's an interesting character. She felt to me, in some ways, really checked out, as if she had come to this sort of deeply circumscribed life, but then in so doing, just kind of disassociated, almost, in order to deal with it. And so there's a sort of quiet tragedy, I think, to her that, you know? She loves her family and we get the sense she’s very capable of running the house — does it well, but this is not her passion, by a longshot. 

KIM: Yeah. And speaking of passion, as everyone who's listening can tell, there's a lot of passion in the novel, and I guess you could also say physical manifestations of it. Cassandra has a voracious appetite that's referred to, for example, and a school friend of Cassie’s has a secret tattoo on her arm of her lover’s initials, which I found really unexpected. And Ben Somers is sent down from Harvard for being in a knife fight. Also, Cassandra, herself, is left with physical scars from an accident that happens with cousin Charles. 

AMY: There's also an instance of cutting in the novel. It's not self inflicted — Desmond is the one who cuts Veronica's skin. But do you think we could draw any parallels, Rachel, with the practice of cutting in young women, which is something that you write about in your book? 

RACHEL: I think that particular instance is, I think it's expressing something different. But I absolutely think it is apt to bring up Veronica together with this idea of self-punishment, because she seems to have a sort of interesting and maybe ambivalent relationship with that. With pain. She gets sick a lot. And she says, at times, at least once she says that she needs to be sick. She seems to forego eating. She does seem to sort of pick and choose a sort of asceticism. She also loves to dress well, so I mean, she's not really an ascetic. It's almost like she sort of plays at martyrdom or plays at self denial here and there. 

KIM: Another motif, we would be remiss not to mention, probably, is the sea. It's not surprising, given that it's New England, but it's an ongoing motif throughout the novel. And it's really tempestuous and terrifying and, I think, joyful. It's basically a metaphor for what it's like to come into your power as a woman. Did you want to add anything to that, Rachel? 

RACHEL: It was Cassie’s relationship to it, I thought, was interesting and Cassie really can't fathom herself, so the ocean is a useful symbol for her to embrace. And you know, it's also the question of whether or not she'll ever cross an ocean; whether she'll ever get to make her world larger, you know? That's something that sort of looms over the course of the novel. Is she always going to just sort of stand on the shore, and, look out at all of this sort of great unknown and, you know, only ever be a passive spectator? I think the ocean is often you know, it tends to be a very feminine metaphor. And I like what Stoddard does with it here to that extent. 

AMY: Okay, so we're not going to spoil the ending for anyone, so you'll have to read The Morgesons to find out if Cassandra is successful or not in achieving empowerment and sexual fulfillment. Personally, I found this book’s twists and turns completely unexpected. Sometimes you can kind of predict how a story is going to go, especially a Victorian novel, but this one really kept me guessing. I did not know what was going to happen. It really is a unique book for its time. 

KIM: Absolutely. Amy, I felt the same way. It's truly buried treasure. And if you haven't read it, you'll want to as soon as possible. And while you're at it, please pick up a copy of Too Much. It's an essential companion if you're reading books from this era. And we know a lot of you out there are. 

AMY: Yeah, if you like the types of novels we've been featuring on this podcast, we can guarantee that you're going to find Rachel's book not only enlightening, but really entertaining also, Rachel, is there anything else? You're working on anything new? 

RACHEL: Oh, um, I just finished an essay that's out in VQR about what I'm calling “feminist anachronistic costume dramas.” So shows like “Dickinson,” “The Great”… movies like The Favorite. That was a project that I've been working on for several months. And so it's really fun to have that out. That's in Virginia Quarterly Review if people are interested. And otherwise just kind of trying to, you know, get my act together. Write a second book proposal.

KIM: I'll be waiting to read your next book, so write it for me! Thank you so much for joining us on Lost Ladies of Lit, Rachel. You were a wonderful guest. 

RACHEL: Thank you. Well, you two were wonderful co-hosts. This was such a wonderful conversation. 

KIM: Take care. 

AMY: Thanks. Bye, Rachel. 

KIM: So that's all for today's podcast. Check out our show notes for more information on Elizabeth Stoddard and The Morgesons, as well as Rachel Vorona Cote. And if you like this podcast, be sure to leave us a review where you listen. The five star reviews really help people 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.

36. Celia Thaxter — A Picturesque Poet Turns to Crime Writing

AMY HELMES

Hey everybody! We're back with another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim…

KIM ASKEW

[Laughing]

AMY

No, I'm not Kim Askew! I'm Amy Helmes.

KIM  

And I'm Kim Askew — we're just checking to see if you are listening out there!

AMY  

I have not been drinking. No, actually, the truth is I have been editing one of our other podcasts for the last couple days, and so I think I have it in my head that intro: "I'm Kim Askew" because you're the one saying it on the other episode, so that's why I did that.

KIM  

That's so funny. Okay.

AMY  

Anyway...

KIM  

On last week's episode, we had a delightful conversation with Sadie Stein about the Betsy and Tacy series and author Maud Hart Lovelace. In one of her books, Lovelace wrote, "It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside." It's almost June, and I'm really feeling all the summer vibes.

AMY  

I know. And in fact, today was kind of cold and gloomy, and I actually got rained on, so I am ready for summer as well. Actually, there is an American poet and prose writer named Celia Thaxter who wrote about how to keep those summer vibes going basically forever. One of her most frequently quoted lines reads, "There shall be an eternal summer in the grateful heart."

KIM  

Yeah, it's funny because that quote was actually at the top of an email I received from this local day spa recently. So it's safe to say it's a pretty ubiquitous quote about summer. But of course, Amy and I, being who we are, we were really curious about who this Celia Thaxter actually was. So we started doing a little digging, and what we found out was, of course, super interesting. For starters, she spent part of her childhood on New England's White Island in the Isles of Shoals, where her father Thomas Laighton, was the lighthouse keeper from 1839 to 1847. And Celia's two younger brothers were her only playmates, and she wrote about her childhood there: "One of the first things a settler on the Isles of Shoals has to learn is to live as independently as possible."

AMY  

I can't decide if this all sounds really idyllic, or really spooky. Are you with me? 

KIM  

Yeah. 

AMY  

Because yes, I mean, in the summer months, you're like, yeah, standing on the shore ... a breeze caressing your face ... the seagulls overhead. But then I've also read so many stories about creepy things happening in lighthouses. So I'm kind of of two minds on this. 

KIM  

Yeah. Is it a children's book, or is it a Stephen King novel? It could go either way.

AMY  

Yes. Anyway, Celia described evenings on White Island like this: "High above, the lighthouse rays streamed out into the humid dark, and the cottage windows were ruddy from the glow within. I felt so much a part of the Lord's universe. I was no more afraid of the dark than the wave or the winds." So I guess she's okay with it. She's more brave than I would be. But if you grew up there you would be you know? That's all she knew. Anyway, her father, Thomas, and his brother ended up buying three islands in the Isles of Shoals and eventually, her dad built a summer hotel on one of them which he renamed Appledore Island and side note: the nearest island to Appledore is called Smuttynose Island.

KIM  

That's the worst name.

AMY  

I know, I'd like to think that's the best worst name ever, but it's definitely dampening those idyllic New England seashore reveries when I hear that.

KIM  

Back to Celia, at the age of 16, she married a 27-year-old Harvard graduate, Levi Thaxter. He had been Thomas's partner in building the hotel and also a tutor to Celia and her brothers. Levi moved the couple to a city house on the mainland in Massachusetts, and this move was huge because it severed Celia from the island life that she loved so much. It caused marital problems too, so she was really unhappy all around. And then she had her first child, a son, before she was 17 and eventually had two more boys. They summered on Appledore Island, but these long winters in the city were excruciating for her. She actually described it as being a domestic prison, and she wrote her first published poem called "Land-locked" in secret, as a way to sublimate her depression and the urge she felt to return to the Isles of Shoals. When Levi found Celia's poem, he sent it to a friend who worked as a publisher at The Atlantic Monthly. It was printed in the next issue,

AMY  

I have to wonder what kind of marriage that was if she was 16 and he was 27. Like, did she want to marry him?

KIM  

It sounds like it wasn't a great marriage. It never really was. But the fact that he saw that poem and saw something in it, even though it obviously was a metaphor for all the things she was unhappy about ... the fact that he took it and sent it in — that's a pretty cool thing to do. And then that it got published so quickly, it's kind of amazing and speaks to how great the poem was.

AMY  

So this poem, "Land-locked," was published in 1861 and it was an immediate success actually. Her poems began appearing in Harper's, Scribner’s and The Atlantic after that, and I'm going to read it aloud. (And if you're thinking to yourself, "Poetry, no, I am out of here," just hang on because we're going to have a gruesome murder that factors into this lost lady's story and we're going to get to that in a second. But first, your moment of poetry. This is "Land-locked." 

Black lie the hills; swiftly doth daylight flee;

And, catching gleams of sunset’s dying smile,

Through the dusk land for many a changing mile

The river runneth softly to the sea.

O happy river, could I follow thee!

O yearning heart, that never can be still!

O wistful eyes, that watch the steadfast hill,

Longing for level line of solemn sea!

Have patience; here are flowers and songs of birds,

Beauty and fragrance, wealth of sound and sight,

All summer’s glory thine from morn till night,

And life too full of joy for uttered words.

Neither am I ungrateful; but I dream

Deliciously how twilight falls to-night

Over the glimmering water, how the light

Dies blissfully away, until I seem

To feel the wind, sea-scented, on my cheek,

To catch the sound of dusky flapping sail

And dip of oars, and voices on the gale

Afar off, calling low, — my name they speak!

O Earth! thy summer song of joy may soar

Ringing to heaven in triumph. I but crave

The sad, caressing murmur of the wave

That breaks in tender music on the shore.

KIM  

That was beautiful, Amy.

AMY  

And it really does kind of evoke both of those feelings that I mentioned before, like, just this beauty of the island but then also, like, a bittersweet sadness as well. 

KIM  

Definitely. There's a mournful tone to it. You read it beautifully, though. So when the poems started getting published it made it possible for her, financially, then to actually spend more time at her family's hotel on Appledore Island, and she finally moved back there officially after 10 years on the mainland. Her books became very popular and also helped make her the darling of literary Boston. Some of New England's most well-known artists and writers visited her on Appledore Island, and she's actually credited with launching this area as a hotspot for vacationing artists and notables.

AMY  

The hotel is not there anymore.

KIM  

Right. 

AMY  

But there were a few pictures of hotels on the nearby islands and they said that it would have sort of looked like that. And it's a ... it was kind of a big old historic resort hotel looking thing, you know, almost like a New England, The Shining hotel. I'm going back to the spooky, I know.

KIM  

I absolutely have been getting that vibe. I totally feel that, too. I think there's an undercurrent of that. Maybe that's what makes her work compelling, because I think if it were just kind of sweet and nice and you know, beautiful ... but there's something there. There's an edge there.

AMY  

Yeah. And anyway, so with all these notables checking in at the hotel (we're talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Longfellow, Childe Hassam and Sarah Orne Jewett. They are just a few of the well known guests who came to visit her there). She became close friends with Sarah Orne Jewett, actually, who wrote the preface for and edited her 1896 collection “The Poems of Celia Thaxter.” But then, okay, we're getting back to the spooky — William Morris Hunt, a painter and close family friend drowned there in 1879. So that is tragic. Celia discovered his body. He was thought to have committed suicide.

KIM  

Yes, and Celia was also living in the Isle of Shoals when an infamous murder (actually a double murder) occurred. She knew everyone involved and wrote a compassionate essay about it called "A Memorable Murder" for The Atlantic Monthly. We'll link to it in our show notes. The essay was published a month before convicted murderer Louis Wagner was hanged in Maine. In 2008, the Library of America chose "A Memorable Murder" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American true crime.

AMY  

And you know me, Kim, I'm the true crime junkie. 

KIM  

Yes, I knew you would love this part.

AMY  

So yeah, apparently Louis Wagner was the most infamous axe murderer in this part of the country until he was supplanted by Lizzie Borden. So the country was kind of in a tizzy over these murders. And Anita Shreve also wrote a 1997 novel based on these murders, called The Weight of Water, which was later adapted to a film starring Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley. It's supposed to be not a very good movie.

KIM  

Okay.

AMY  

Basically, three Norwegian women were living in a little house on the island. Their husbands were fishermen. They had gone off that night in a little schooner to do their work (the husbands) leaving the women at home. Basically, only one of the women made it through alive after Louis happened upon them and went on a rampage. And actually, Celia Thaxter was one of the first people on the scene to comfort her the next morning after the tragedy. That woman's name was Maren, and I'm going to read a passage from a memorable murder. This is from when Maren is finally able to escape the murder scene because she had run off and tried to hide when the other two women were being attacked: At last she steals out. The little dog frisks before her. It is so cold her feet cling to the rocks and snow at every step till the skin is fairly torn off. Still and frosty is the bright morning. The water lies smiling and sparkling. The hammers have the workmen building the new hotel on Star Island sound through the quiet air. Being on the side of Smuttynose opposite Star, she waves her skirt and screams to attract their attention. They hear her, turn, and look to see a woman waving a signal of distress and, surprising to relate, turn tranquilly to their work again. She realizes at last there's no hope in that direction. She must go round toward Appledore in sight of the dreadful house. Passing it afar off, she gives one swift glance toward it terrified lest in the broad sunshine, she may see some horrid token of last night's work, but all is still and peaceful. She noticed the curtains the three had left up when they went to bed. They are now drawn down. She knows whose hand had done this and what it hides from the light of day.

KIM  

Whoa, I mean, everything we've been talking about, with the darkness and sort of like the undercurrent to this life, really comes through. And you would not expect it at all. When we first looked into Celia Thaxter, I did not see this coming. But it's funny how these things happen when we start looking into people. There's so much more, there always is. This is fascinating. She was there, she ended up writing the story about this. I mean, the yin and yang with the beauty of nature, but also the darkness, really comes through in this too as well.

AMY  

I found it really hard to pick a portion of that essay to read because it's very disturbing. She goes into a lot of detail. She writes it as if she was there when the murder is happening. And it reminded me of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It's a long short story. You feel the drama and the tension building as she's describing the husbands leaving for work that night, and the women getting ready for bed and the actual crime itself and the screaming. It's, it's upsetting. Actually, if you're into things like this, I would recommend reading it.

KIM  

It will be in the show notes for those people.

AMY  

Yeah, if you're squeamish, you might want to shy away from it actually, but just for that time period, to think of a woman, you know, writing this sort of thing. I was intrigued by it.

KIM  

Yeah, this is fascinating. She continued to draw inspiration from the natural world after this, and she actually died suddenly on Appledore Island in 1894. She's best known today for her prose works An Island Garden, illustrated by Childe Hassam, and Among the Isles of Shoals. It was her firsthand account of shipwrecks, storms and the day-to-day lives of people living in the Isles, but "Land-locked," with its sublime depictions of nature and personification of the ocean is thought to be the epitome of Thaxter's poetic style.

AMY  

And that is actually a perfect segue to next week's author who is Elizabeth Stoddard. Her incredible book is called The Morgesons, and the ocean is a major motif in this 1862 novel. It's a bildungsroman set in a small New England seaport town. Nathaniel Hawthorne, himself, was a fan and Stoddard has been compared to Tolstoy, George Eliot, Balzac and the Bronte sisters.

KIM  

Yes. And we have a guest with us for this episode — Rachel Vorona Cote, She's the author of Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today is going to be talking with us about The Morgesons. It's a bold, dramatic novel with an unforgettable heroine. And we're pretty sure you're going to love it as much as we did, so be sure to check back for next week's episode

AMY  

And maybe plan a summer island vacation. I need to take a break from any place that has a lighthouse. But if you love Lost Ladies of Lit, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. In addition to making us feel so great, it really helps new listeners find us.

KIM  

Our theme song was written and performed by the wonderful Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by the also wonderful Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes. See you next week!

35. Maud Hart Lovelace — The Betsy-Tacy High School Books with Sadie Stein

AMY: Hey, everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner Kim Askew, whom I did NOT have the pleasure of knowing as a teenager. Kim, what were you like back then?

KIM: I guess pretty much what you’d expect. My nose was always in a book. I was shy, gawky, annoyingly-well read, I’m sure. And I always felt as though I was waiting to be discovered, or something... I’m not sure by who. But how about you, Amy? 

AMY: I was gawky as well. I really felt intellectually superior to everyone else my age (of course I wasn’t). But physically, I was really skinny and mousy and still very baby-faced. I was completely terrified of boys. But luckily I had my two “ride or dies” — these were best friends whom I’d known since third grade. I’m still friends with them, so shout out to Michelle and Tricia, or “Woman” and “Tric,” as I still call them.

KIM: Right, I think I met them at your wedding!

AMY: Mm-hmm… they were my maids of honors. Matrons of honor, yes.

KIM: And you guys actually sound a lot like Betsy, Tacy and Tib from the books we’re going to be discussing today! Collectively, they’re known as the “Betsy-Tacy” books, and they were written by Maud Hart Lovelace. They trace the lives of three best friends growing up in Minnesota at the turn of the 20th century. And while they may not be quite as well known as the [Little House on the Prairie] or Anne of Green Gables coming-of-age books, Lovelace still has a very fervent fan base dedicated to preserving her legacy and keeping these wonderful books in print.

AMY: Yeah, I totally loved these books as a kid (I think they’re even better than the “Little House” books, frankly). Lovelace’s 10-book series follows title heroine Betsy and her friends from their kindergarten years through high school and beyond. And today we’re going to focus specifically on the four books set during the high school years. 

KIM: Right. And although they are classified under “children’s literature,” I definitely think you could argue that these were some of the earliest YA novels. Of course, the term “teenager” actually hadn’t been coined yet, but these books offer a window into what adolescence was like more than one hundred years ago. The times may have changed, but it’s safe to say the inner workings of the teenage mind really haven’t — not when it comes to the challenges of growing up. 

AMY: It made me so happy to go back and get better acquainted with these characters. It was like literary comfort food. And I think it’s safe to say that our special guest today is even more of a super fan.

KIM: I cannot wait to introduce her and dive into this. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Sadie Stein, a New York-based culture writer and editor. Her essays have been published in Elle Magazine, T Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among many others. Her style, aesthetic, and interests are comfortably placed at the intersection of vintage-cozy and incredibly chic. She’s written a defense of Maximalism and an ode to the butter roll, as well as a sheepish recommendation for the sub-genre of “Live Like a French Woman” books. I absolutely love everything she writes. We also want to refer you to her archives for an evergreen Besty-Tacy tribute essay, which was published in 2009 on Jezebel. We’ll share a link in our shownotes. Sadie, will you be our best friend for the day? 

SADIE: I would love to! Especially since I have not seen much of my own “Crowd” for the past year.

AMY: If we’re going to be Betsy, Tacy and Tib, I want to be Betsy.

SADIE: Everyone wants to be Betsy. It’s like everyone back in the day wanting to be Carrie Bradshaw or Jo March. No one wants to be the “Meg,” who’s kind of the Tacy, I guess.

KIM: You know what, I’ll be Tacy. [laughing]

AMY: Poor Tacy. Anyway, Sadie, I was so excited when you suggested that we do Maud Hart Lovelace for this episode. When did you first discover the Betsy-Tacy books, and what did you love about them?

SADIE: Well, I can tell you exactly when, because I was in second grade and the mother of a classmate of mine (if she’s listening, her name is Jackie Lynch) she gave me Betsy-Tacy, I think — the first one. She, herself, had loved them growing up, and she had three little boys, and I think wanted to share these books with a girl who’d be more into them. I was very bookish — that was kind of my thing. So she made me a present of this and it was the best gift, probably, anyone has ever given me because after that, I read all the others, and of course, as I got older, I read the high school and then post-high school books. I have probably re-read this body of work more than I have any other writers in the course of my life so far.

KIM: That is great. I love that. What a sweet gift, too, and what a thoughtful gift. My mom had a Besty-Tacy book on her bookshelf, and that was how I first began reading them. And it’s kind of funny, because when I was little, I actually imagined that was what her childhood was probably like. For one thing, she was born half a century later, and two, her childhood wasn’t anything like that, as I later learned. But it was a nice little story I told myself. Anyway, today, as we mentioned, we’ll be touching on the books that span Betsy’s high school years: Heaven To Betsy; Betsy in Spite of Herself; Betsy Was a Junior; and Betsy and Joe. Do you want to give our readers a quick overview, Sadie, about our girl, “Betsy” just to get us started? Who is she, and what’s she like?

SADIE: Well, Elizabeth Warrington Ray (Betsy to her friends and family) is a young teenager growing up in Minnesota. And these books span the years 1906 to 1910, because as we know, she’s Class of 1910. While the earlier books have dealt with her childhood, these books age with the reader into what we’d now call more YA prose. They’re at an older level. Betsy is herself, like the author, an aspiring writer. She’s friendly, likeable, but has a certain number of teenage problems and her biography is very much like that of the author Maud Hart Lovelace, who actually started out telling these stories to her young daughter about her life. Finally she thought, “Maybe I’ll try writing them up.” And she did, and in doing so, she actually drew pretty heavily on her journals of the time. So a lot of details are very similar. Not just the fact that Betsy, like Maud herself, is the second of three daughters and her father runs a shoe store, but details like the furs she gets for Christmas Junior year, the songs they play at the different dances. So the details are not just very evocative but really accurate, too, an exact moment of an era.

AMY: Right, so let’s go back and talk a little bit about the author. Maud Hart was born in the town of Mankato, Minnesota in 1892 and she spent the entirety of her youth there. (The family did eventually move to Minneapolis after she graduated from high school). But Betsy, in the book is a faithful depiction of Maud herself (as you said, Sadie) right down to the pronounced gap between her two front teeth. I’ve Googled pictures of Maud, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but she bears a striking resemblance, I think, to Jennifer Ehle from the BBC Pride & Prejudice. She’s got the high cheekbones and the porcelain skin, and she kind of wears her hair in that similar hairstyle that Elizabeth Bennett has in the movie. So every time I see a picture of her, I’m just like, “Oh! Jennifer Ehle!”

SADIE: She’d love that comparison, and as we know, she has the prettiest complexion in the Crowd. That’s one of her few (in her own mind) attainments, because she doesn’t consider herself conventionally pretty like some of the other girls. I think nowadays we’d say she’s kind of scrawny, which is one of the many things I identified with, I think. She likes being slender enough to wear some of the new styles, but she also has to supplement her figure sometimes with starched ruffles under her shirtwaist to get the required “Gibson Girl” silhouette.

AMY: With a few exceptions, really, the places and events from the book really do line up almost exactly with Maud’s real life. Can you give us a few more examples, Sadie, of where things really line up.

SADIE: Sure, well, just like Betsy and Tacy, the real-life “Tacy,” Frances “Bick” Kenney, lived across the street from Maud. They became friends at the age of five. And then the real-life “Tib” also joined their Triumvirate a couple of years later, and they all stayed friends their entire lives. And the boys she went out with… of course, everyone in “The Crowd” has a real-life counterpart. A couple of them are composites, but by-and-large they have pretty exact counterparts, and also, they look just like the characters. If you look them up, it’s very satisfying. They really look just the way you imagine them, and that’s also a tribute to Vera Neville’s illustrations, because I imagine she studied the pictures, too. But it’s so evocative, and it’s that’ rare case where your imaginings exactly map onto the reality.

KIM: And also, just as Betsy was basically writing from the second she could hold a pencil, so was Maud. She had her first booklet of poetry printed up at the age of 10, and she competed in her high school’s yearly essay contests (just as Betsy does). She went on to attend the University of Minnesota, too. During that time she took a brief sabbatical to visit her grandmother in California where she ended up selling her first short story to The Los Angeles Times. 

AMY: It had something to do with a murder on a streetcar, which is pretty unexpected if you only know the Betsy-Tacy books! It just is so different.

SADIE: She tries to write these very lurid stories and kind of Little Women-style. People keep being like, “Why don’t you just write what you know?” And she’s like, “No, no, no… I want it to be about people in a Fifth Avenue mansion… I want murder and mayhem.” And then of course, not ironically, in the end it would be these stories which she didn’t think were glamorous or exciting enough that would make her name as a writer and that people loved so much. And the others, of course, just seem kind of goofy and dated.

AMY: Right. Okay, so Maud, when she was 25-years-old, she fell in love with a fellow writer by the name of Delos Lovelace. I think it’s pronounced “Dee-lohs”...? Any thoughts?

SADIE: She called him “DeLossie.” And this is where I actually hope someone from the Betsy-Tacy Society will weigh in and tell us the right way to say it, because in his time he was a pretty well-known magazine writer. So presumably there’s some trail of lore that can tell us exactly how this would be pronounced.

AMY: Okay, so let’s call him “DeLoss.” I’m convinced maybe, given that nickname. He is the basis for Joe Willard, who is Betsy’s most important love interest in the books. And although Delos did not grow up or go to high school with Maud, she managed to work him into the book by creating this character, which I thought was really great. 

KIM: After they married, they moved to New York (where Delos was working as a newspaper reporter). Maud wrote a handful of short stories for magazines, and she collaborated with her husband in the 1920s on them. And then about five years before her daughter, Merian, was born, she published a book called The Black Angels; it was one of several adult historical novels that she wrote. Betsy-Tacy -- which School Library Journal ranked at number 52 on their list of 100 best children’s novels ever — came out in 1940. Lovelace never intended for it to become a series, but readers just kept begging her for more, no surprise, and she happily obliged, publishing just about one book a year in this series for the next decade. (There were also several spinoff books.) The final book that you mentioned, Sadie, Betsy’s Wedding, came out in 1955. She wrote 18 children’s books when all was said and done. 

AMY: Lovelace said, “I lived the happiest childhood a child could possibly know” and honestly, based on these books, she’s not lying at all. Everyone in these novels is so happy and earnest and kind. There’s no real intense drama, and what drama there is ends up being quickly and lovingly resolved for the most part. It does make me think that maybe a series like this could not get published today. It also makes me wonder why these books about the typical goings-on in the life of a typical American girl are so captivating. Sadie, what’s your take on this? What’s the special sauce here? 

SADIE: I mean, they’re so idyllic as you say, but they don’t have the creepy idealized quality of, like, the Emily of New Moon books, I was thinking of, or even the later Anne of Green Gables books where there’s no humor at all and she’s too perfect to be relatable. I think there’s a combination of taking a young person’s small problems seriously without taking herself too seriously as a character. So she’s very relatable and very likeable. And, of course, there’s the fact that it’s this great snapshot of another era, which is very nostalgic, even when she wrote it in the Forties. The food, the interiors, the outfits are all really satisfyingly described. I don’t know a better way to put it except that there’s sort of the cozy pleasure that you can get from reading a good cookbook, almost. And then, too, there’ s just the pleasure that comes with any saga where you get to stay and live with characters for, in this case, 10 books. You really get to know them, they become friends and you miss them when they’re gone. She had wanted to write one called Betsy’s Bettina about having a child, and it couldn’t gel. One could speculate about why: It took a very long time for them to have a child. They were older parents (especially by the standards of the day) and they lost at least one pregnancy, so it was probably fraught. It would have been hard to idealize some of that in the same way, although they adored their daughter. But I think these early years, in particular, she did not need to do that. It was (if pretty rosy) in other ways a very faithful recollection. And the fact that she could use the diaries means they have a very vivid quality. The parameters of the world are very safe, so you know nothing really bad will happen. She’s got this loving, very stable family and this very emotionally-safe space and physically-safe place, and you know all that. You’re anchored in it. And that allows you, in some ways, to get invested in the smallness of the problems the way you have the luxury of doing when you’re a child. 

KIM: Yeah, and it’s just that comfort level. I think what you said is exactly right — that feeling that it is safe and you can enjoy it without worrying that something terrible is going to happen. But it also feels real enough with the details that you can immerse yourself in it. So Heaven to Betsy kicks things off at the start of Betsy’s freshman year. In the first chapter it’s the end of summer and Betsy drops in at a shop a few towns over where she meets a new boy her age working there. His name is Joe Willard. He is an orphan. He’s incredibly smart; but standoffish and a bit mysterious … and he’s also enrolled at Deep Valley High. Betsy is really intrigued by him, but she has a lot of other things on her mind once school gets underway. She’s very excited about this new experience of high school. 

AMY: She’s also very moody at times in that first, freshman-year book. She’s anxious about fitting in with “The Crowd,” which is the group of popular kids who hang out together pretty much daily. And we can also see Betsy gamely faking her way through things at times to try to fit in which is so relatable. Up to this point she has always prided herself on being a standout student, but she starts to let things slip in Heaven to Betsy — she gets caught up in the thrill of her popularity and she’s carried away by her fixation on the handsome “bad boy” of the group, Tony Markham. (She and her friends call him the T.D.S. for Tall Dark Stranger.)

KIM: I love that. That’s very realistic. So, Sadie, did you have any particular favorite moments from Heaven to Betsy that you want to share? 

SADIE: I mean, I don’t know… I don’t want to spoil too much of the plot is the thing, but there are moments about her agony over her crush on Tony which are truly painful and which she evokes so well. There’s the moment when they’re skating at the pond and she’s a bad skater and she just feels miserable and she finds herself talking too loudly and trying to be too jolly and to cover. And there’s also the added humiliation that her best friend and her sister can clearly tell what’s going on. And that memory of when the person you like likes someone else and there’s just nothing you can do about it. The heartsickness of it, I think, is so well evoked. And also, although they’re all so young, the crush feels plausible. Like, you can see how he’d be really appealing. And if you look at the picture of the boy on whom he was based (Mike Parker) he was a very handsome young man. And you know, she, like some of us, was young looking. I think she was physically probably a late bloomer, which they don’t get into explicitly, but I think in some ways she’s a little young for her age and that’s part of it. Feeling emotionally grown-up and mature and having these really romantic feelings, but not really being viewed that way yet by the larger world is a big part of this series, I think.

AMY: Lest we all think by this description she’s some sort of shrinking wallflower, no, she can flirt with the best of them, and she kind of knows that a lot of boys do like her.

SADIE: It’s true! She’s very comfortable with all these boys. They’re all pals. People really like her. She’s fun and friendly. The contrast is always drawn between her and her open friendliness, and she’s got this older sister, Julia, whom we haven’t mentioned, who is very poised and is very conventionally pretty; a wonderful big sister, but a hard act to follow. And she’s never pals with boys; everyone’s just slavishly in love with her. She’s an aspiring singer, as indeed Maud’s real-life, beautiful older sister was. So that’s also important to draw the distinction, that Maud is kind of… she gets along great with all these boys (and she can flirt) but she isn’t a mysterious siren in the way she necessarily would like to be.

AMY: Which is why in Heaven To Betsy she is practicing her “Ethel Barrymore droop.” So she’s walking around with a slink after her favorite movie star, which I thought was hilarious. So I had read the earlier books, but I don’t think I had ever made it all the way to these later books, and I loved getting to finally read them! I was struck right away by the fact that their teenage experience was pretty similar to my own in a lot of ways, despite the 100-year time difference basically. 

KIM: For sure. I mean, they were passing notes in class constantly, they were obsessed with their “pop music” of the day, they were speaking in slang, flirting with boys (as Amy talked about) and constantly calling each other on the phone. They were even taking “selfies” with their new-fangled Kodak cameras as well. So yeah, very similar.

AMY: Really behaving like stereotypical teenagers which, for some reason, surprised me. Because when I think of teenagers from the past, I usually go to the 1950s. I go to American Graffiti and Rebel Without A Cause, but I don’t necessarily think “Edwardian Era.” So Sadie, can you help put this into some historical context for us?

SADIE: I mean, this really is sort of the beginning of our idea of the modern American teenager, right, because people have leisure time. They were starting to have a little more money. Kids didn’t have to work. Kids were certainly (by Betsy’s era and in her class) expected to go on to higher education. Their parents wanted them to have fun and enjoy it, and the market was not slow to respond to this, and they already knew that this was a captive buying public. And there was a shared pop culture building at the same time that kids were being kind of liberated and encouraged to go on to more schooling, to stay in through high school. We really see that here. As you say, we think of it as kind of this Fifties thing, where people had rock-n-roll and it was post-war, but it pre-dated that.

AMY: Right. Kids were gabbing on the telephone… you had automobiles.

KIM: Yep.

SADIE: They’re all getting around, they’re starting to have real autonomy and a lot of freedom. And they aren’t getting up to anything too wild that we see in this group at least…

KIM: Absolutely. All you’re going to do is have fudge later. I mean…

AMY: I think I really would have loved being a teenager in this era as opposed to the one that I was in. I feel like I missed my decade!

KIM: I am so right there with you, Amy! A hundred percent. Totally. But I think all this actually really leads into what I wanted to bring up, which is Maud’s family (and hence the Rays in the novels) are actually very decidedly middle class, if not (I think in today’s world) upward middle class. We’re looking in on a world that’s very white and for the most part, financially secure. Not everyone during this time frame would have had the same idyllic experience that Betsy and her friends are having.

SADIE: Absolutely. I mean, you have such a picture of what it meant to be upwardly mobile at exactly this moment. Because on the one hand they’ve got a live-in maid/cook basically. They have the dressmaker coming to the house twice a year to make them new wardrobes. They are able to travel internationally. On the other hand, if you actually look at the house, which of course, is now a historic home in Mankato, the houses are very, very small by our standards. The amount of room they have is actually really modest. As you say, the town is very white… we’re not talking about Emily of Deep Valley, or the earlier books, but they allude to a community which was known as Little Syria which was full of Syrian immigrants. So on the margins you have that in their world. You also have the immigrant populations who are sometimes kind of peripherally showing up. Their English isn’t very good: Scandinavian or German. And they make this explicit again in Emily of Deep Valley (which is a spin-off book) which she did a lot of, I won’t call it “socially conscious” work, but she did a lot of work in it. And i think it’s not a coincidence that it’s not based on real things and that it’s not quite as good in certain ways. It doesn’t ring as true. It doesn’t feel as real as the others, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence, because Betsy’s world is not that. Betsy may have abutted it, but her world is a lot of parties. It is The Crowd, and even within the town, I think it’s a population that was largely transported from New England. They weren’t even of the Scandinavian population. Tib, certainly, is German, but that’s brought up a lot. They’re very consciously immigrants.

AMY: When I was reading, especially the sophomore book, because she goes to Milwaukee, right? She gets introduced to this whole German community and German culture, and she was actually writing these books in the Forties. There was probably some anti-German sentiment in the country at that time. It almost made me wonder if she was trying to do something there with Tib and trying to make people see, no, it’s actually a really nice community of people.

SADIE: A hundred percent. I think that’s very deliberate. And in fact, it’s explicit in Betsy’s Wedding, in which WWI breaks out, actually. She’s trying to be sensitive to Tib’s feelings. She’s like, “I know this must be a really hard time for you,” and Tib’s like, “Not really… we’re American and we’re really patriotic.” So she deals with that quite explicitly. They all join the military. They talk a lot about how warm the Germans are, how much family feeling they have. They’re kind of talking about a lot of the German propaganda and she has tremendous sympathy for the Belgians. But at the same time, she goes out of her way, as you say, to paint them as sympathetic, patriotic, friendly. I think you’re absolutely right that that bears mentioning.

KIM: I’m so glad you mentioned that, Amy, because I was wondering the same thing.

AMY: Yeah. Okay, so as we mentioned before, I would not have been part of “The Crowd,” sadly. I’d like to think I would be, but that was interesting too, because Betsy is basically hanging with the cool kids — the glitterati of Deep Valley High. And in modern YA literature, we’re kind of  used to seeing that script be flipped and having those cool kids be the antagonists of the stories. But Betsy’s crew is wholesome and kind-hearted, yet Lovelace does sort of paint Betsy’s position within “The Crowd” as a double-edged sword. Can you talk about that a little bit, Sadie?

SADIE: Yeah, Betsy is never unkind, and she always knows better, but there are moments when, in particular… well, in all of them, really… that’s kind of the ongoing tension such as it is. In Betsy in Spite of Herself, aptly titled, she starts going with a boy who’s quite sophisticated. He’s new in town. He’s a rich kid. He’s got a car — a red auto. And he kind of likes this more mysterious version of her, which isn’t really authentic to who she is. She’s a goofball, and she pretends to be remote and smooth and starts wearing this very heavy perfume all the time and wearing green even though it’s not really a great color for her, but she thinks it’s very mysterious. Sure enough, she can’t sustain it and then realizes she was unhappy. But then in the next book, her sister, Julia, goes off to the University of Minnesota and gets quite caught up in rushing for a sorority. And Betsy and her friends are very thrilled by this idea and they start their own sorority, and it’s great fun at first, but sure enough, they realize other people are being excluded. There’s one poignant scene where they’re at a football game — a Deep Valley football game. They’re all in kind of their matching outfits to show that they’re a sorority and the girl Hazel Smith, who’s a very academic girl and class officer and nice, comes over to start to talk to Betsy and then she sees this kind of phalanx of girls in their matching outfits and she backs off. And Betsy sort of has a pang. And at the end, a few of them have this realization, like, “You know what? Can we do something more inclusive and get to know maybe some other people?” It really takes till the end of the series for Betsy to completely learn this lesson, and I think a lot of that is illustrated by the plotlines of her relationship with Joe Willard and her relationship to her writing as embodied by the essay contest in which, as you mentioned, she competes almost every year. 

AMY: She comes to these realizations and that’s part of seeing her grow up and mature, but there’s a lot of angst surrounding this growing up that she’s doing. We see all the girls in the book seesaw between trying to act mature and then also just digging in their heels to hang on to what’s left of their childhood. You feel the clock ticking away in these four books, I think, and it makes it really bittersweet. What kinds of emotions do these books stir up for you, Sadie?

SADIE: They’re so comforting, but at the same time, it can almost be painful to read them. You have the character of Tacy, who’s Betsy’s best friend, who’s always juxtaposed against her as someone who’s not interested in boys; who’s clinging more stubbornly to their childhood; who won’t put her hair up in a pompadour or try to be artificially grown up. And yet, at the end, she’s the first one to become romantically serious about someone,and it is like a dagger to Betsy’s heart. It’s an older person; he’s not a boy, he’s a grown-up. He kind of comes into their world and tears her away. He’s clearly a good guy; he likes her for good reasons, but to have the real world intrude that way is awful. And the stakes rise (I won’t say imperceptibly) but a little bit with each book. It goes from her crush in the freshman year book to her having to really break someone’s heart senior year. The stakes are adult, and she feels the difference. She’s in some ways still playing a child’s game and other people are growing up and have real emotions that she’s toying with, for good and bad. She wants to keep things on a friend level and people are developing adult feelings. I think that is something that’s very relatable and very painful and moving, in a way. 

AMY: Lovelace writes: “They would never be quite so silly again. The foolish, crazy things they had done this year they would do less and less frequently until they didn’t do them at all. ‘We’re growing up,’ Betsy said aloud. She wasn’t even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it was irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except try to see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be.” So very poignant.

SADIE: Yeah, and then of course, kind of “Anna Karenina”-style, you have the specter of WWI hanging over all this and the fact that all these boys would presumably have to go off to war.

KIM: I was thinking about that and then also just how early people married and started families and everything then, too. So those years where they were able to sort of live this idyllic, almost free, but yet safe, life — it was going to be short-lived for a lot of reasons, especially in that time. So it makes it even more emotional to hear those lines. 

AMY: Yeah, and like we said, the detail is so key to what Lovelace is doing. You would think it would get mundane (and there’s a lot of other novels where I don’t particularly enjoy when they get off into the weeds with describing things) but I never got tired of her describing even the smallest details in her life: getting dressed, having breakfast, how she did her hair.

She talks about her “Merry Widow hat,” for example, and I wound up Googling it for pictures to see exactly what that would have looked like. I loved all the specificity that she offered…. And then especially the constant running commentary on what they ate for special occasions and on picnics… I don’t know why it appealed to me so much, but it really did.

SADIE: And also, you get the sense the food at their house is particularly good because everyone’s always showing up. And of course they have their famous Sunday open houses known as “Sunday night lunch” at which her father makes his famous onion sandwiches. I think we’ve all tried them after reading it. He puts them on rye bread, butter, with mild Bermuda onions. And then a big pot of coffee and often a coconut cake. The ritual is very, very appealing. You assume they’re eating dinner really early every night. I think they probably keep kind of farm hours because then they always have appetites for fudge and stuff later in the evening. (The kids make a lot of fudge.) And in terms of the fashion, you really see how they shift every season, right? I mean the hemlines going up and down, the new style of hats, and how it would have been kind of awful to not be up to date. 

KIM: So in Betsy’s sophomore year, she gets involved with the new wealthy boy in town, Phil, and he ends up being a bit possessive, and he kind of separates her from her friends until she comes to realize it isn’t making her happy, and we alluded to it before, but she has a very close, platonic-but-borderline flirty relationships with so many of her guy friends, but this guy, Joe, he’s very mysterious and always in the back of her mind. He’s not part of “The Crowd.” He doesn’t flirt, and yet Betsy is really drawn to him.

AMY: Okay, Joe made me swoon so many times, I can’t even. She did a really good job.

KIM: Yeah, she did.

AMY: And that chemistry between a heroine and her love interest is kind of make-or-break, especially in young adult novels. It’s not easy to do — Kim and I have written YA. We always used to agonize over any of those sort of scenes, because if you don’t get them right it’s a real failure and it’s not going to make the book work. But yeah, Joe gave me major butterflies and the ending — oh my god — the senior year ending is just perfection! 

SADIE: Oh, absolutely. It’s such a slow burn, their relationship, and it’s a real meeting of intellectual equals and they really respect each other. Even when he’s at his most elusive, he’s clearly drawn to her. They always describe him as very proud because he doesn’t have much money. He has to work while they’re all partying and doing their sororities and stuff. He has multiple jobs. So there’s a real contrast drawn. And he’s one of the best writers and best students in the class, which, I mean, we all love that in a high school love interest. He also happens to be very handsome as well as the fact that he doesn’t date because he can’t really afford to makes him a real prize.

AMY: He’s unattainable.

KIM: Yes.

SADIE: Totally unattainable, and then, junior year when he does start dating a girl and it isn’t her, it is such a punch to the gut. I think she even says she’d always assumed that when Joe Willard got around to dating it would be her. She assumed they were fated, and I think as someone who’s had things come pretty easy to her, she just figured that would happen when he’d saved up enough money. But that is not how it works out. It’s the same year she’s in the sorority and at sort of her most off-puttingly flighty, and he goes for a very different kind of girl. Yes, ultimately, “Betsy and Joe” does happen (literally, it’s the fourth book) but it takes a long time, and the course of their true love does not run smoothly at all.

KIM: No, but the idea, as you said, of them bonding over their love of writing and literature was so great. And yet there’s another love story in this book. It doesn’t have anything to do with boys. Would you agree?

SADIE: Yeah, that fact… although she and Joe are rivals in the essay contest as you say, the romance of writing is a very separate one...although I think inextricably bound. I don’t think she could end up with someone who didn’t really respect her vocation and her talent, and that’s established from the beginning. So one thing she’s always serious about is her writing, and she’s disciplined about it. We see her always keeping the journals… she keeps sending her stories out, even when they’re not very good. She has a great work ethic about it, and she’s right, that’s what makes a writer. It’s the commitment, it’s not just the spark of genius. And in the essay contests, too, she sells herself short when she doesn’t prepare, and that’s one of the great plot points. The competition of the essay contests — that she and Joe are rivals in this and that sort of caps every year — is so wonderful. Another thing that I think is really nice about the books is how supportive her parents are of her ambition. Particularly the dad really takes seriously not just her ambition, but her sister’s ambition to be a performer. There’s never a moment when they question it or fail to support it financially or emotionally. As a reader, you have the luxury of taking that for granted, but when you think about it, in any era, it’s fantastic, let alone back then! It’s not even about believing in your dream — that’s not even questioned. They have such faith in her talent. They have such faith that she’ll do whatever she wants to do — that all of them will — and I think that’s lovely to read. 

KIM: Yeah, there’s something so egalitarian, actually, about them that I didn’t expect or remember. The way that the boys and girls in high school don’t feel… it doesn't feel as, I guess, sexist as you would think that time would feel. And her sister, Julia, is studying to be an opera singer and she’s going to be a writer. I think that does make it appealing to today’s readers, more than you would think.

AMY: The parents reminded me of 80s-sitcom parents. Like Elyse and Steven Keaton kept coming to mind from “Family Ties.” They were just so nice, but there were definitely comic elements where they were having to rush the dad out of the room when he was monopolizing the boys or just being an idiot.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: They were definitely the cool house to congregate at.

SADIE: Exactly. Yeah.

AMY: I have a … she’s now an 11-year-old daughter, and a few years ago I downloaded the first few Betsy-Tacy books for her. Why do you think, Sadie, that these books still offer something for young women today?

SADIE: I think part of it is, as we said, how nice it is that they have gifts and talents which are encouraged. I think the female friendships are terrific in them, and the fact that she and her main friends, they never really fight or fall out. She and Tacy, in particular, are just completely supportive of each other in a way that is rare to find in life or literature, and which is part of what provides the stability and comfort of the series, I think. It’s not just her family; it’s Tacy, and it’s part of what makes it hard when they begin to move into the romantic world and get married. And then, just on a historical basis, it’s just such a perfect snapshot. It’s more, in that way, educational than anything I can think of. You come away with an exact portrait of a certain kind of girlhood, but that girlhood in that place and that moment … I don’t think there’s anything you don’t kind of have an idea about after reading these books. 

AMY: She mentions The Great Train Robbery is the movie that’s playing in the movie theater, you know? It’s really like picking up a newspaper almost, from those years and seeing how they lived. And actually, you talked about the real-life counterparts for a lot of these characters. So at the back of each of the Harper Perennial editions (which is the one that I read), they have a supplement which is photos of all of these real-life people and….

SADIE: Isn’t it so great?

AMY: It is! I mean, to be able to put a face… and you’re right, you’re like, “Yes, that is Tony…” It was fascinating. And I wound up finding out about a reunion that happened between the real-life Betsy, Tacy, Tib. So it was Maud and her two best friends…. What did you say, Bick? What were their names? I forget.

SADIE: Yeah, Bick and Midge. 

AMY: Bick and Midge, yes, so they returned to Mankato in 1961 with a lot of fanfare and press coverage to see Maud back in her hometown, and it was so sweet to see them together as really old ladies in all of these locations. We’ll link to that article in our show notes so that you can read it and also see all the photos. It’s really cool. 

SADIE: And I do highly recommend the Betsy-Tacy Society’s newsletter and website because they’ve really done the legwork, and it’s really satisfying to see what the real people looked like. And also you’re like, “Oh! Julia was really beautiful as a real person!” Or “The real-life Joe Willard is very attractive!” It’s really what she says. She’s not exaggerating. It’s not fondness and projecting. People are very accurately described, and not just the ones who are very good-looking, but everyone conforms to her descriptions. She’s an accurate, faithful correspondent. 

KIM: So Sadie, before we wrap up, we wanted to ask you about your bespoke book curation.

SADIE: Sure!

KIM: We wanted to hear about it; it sounds so cool!

SADIE: Basically, if someone has a library, a shelf, a gift, and they write to S.O.S. Library (for so it’s called) and say, “I want four shelves on ‘fly-fishing’ for a 25th anniversary gift,” we will put this together. Anything you want, whether it’s mid-century obscure female novelists, whether it is something on a very particular era of art history… we can find academic books. What I love to do best is give a wide range of books. Some of the most fun commissions can be, “Just go crazy. I just want fun reads for the beach, a little bit weird and ideally they should involve travel on the Riviera. So give me 15 books.”

KIM: That sounds like a dream come true.

SADIE: It’s a lot of fun.

KIM: Thank you so much, Sadie! That was one of the most fun, wonderful conversations. That was lovely. Absolutely lovely.

SADIE: I could talk about these books forever and will and do, and thank you guys so much! I learned a lot too, and I’m so glad you asked that question about… I had never really thought about how she wrote about the German population, for instance. It’s so fun to have to think about this a little more critically and thoughtfully and assess why you love something. So thank you for that opportunity.

AMY: This was like the next-best thing to a Sunday night lunch!

SADIE: I know! And I’m hungry now. I’m sure you are too.

KIM: Yes, yes, go eat some fudge!

AMY: Thank you for joining us.

SADIE: Bye-bye, guys!

AMY: So we’ll sign off now, but don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter, where we’ll occasionally be giving out sneak-peek info on which books we’ll be featuring in future episodes. (You can get a jump on your reading if you’re inclined to read along with us.)

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

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

34. Anna Komnene — Europe's First Female Historian

AMY: Hey, everyone! Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes, here with Kim Askew, and Kim, are you ready to hop into the wayback machine today?

KIM: Um yeah, sure, why not? How far back are we going, though? And does it require costumes or anything

AMY: I don’t know about costumes, but it’s pretty far back. It’s the year 1148?

KIM: Oh, wow. So I can just wear a sheet or something, I don’t know. 

AMY: Yeah. Toga! Toga! We are going to be talking about a female Byzantine historian.

KIM: Oh, okay, well, wake me when it’s over, then.

AMY: No! I mean, granted, it does sound coma-inducingly boring when I say that, but I promise you, this lost lady is worth discussing. (And because it’s a mini, we don’t have to get too deep into it, right? We’ll just do the fun stuff. Because she’s got some hints of Cersei Lanister from GAME OF THRONES if you want to know the truth.) 

KIM: Oooh, well, I love Cersei, so...

AMY: Her name was Anna Komnene. She was a political player who was extremely ambitious (almost to a ruthless degree). She was an intellectual juggernaut who had soap-opera-worthy family drama, and all of that prompted her to put pen to paper to tell HER version of the family history in her 15-volume epic work, The Alexiad.

KIM: Are you serious? Fifteen volumes!? Stop it! I hate to break it to you, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to sit down and read this one. I can’t, no...God bless you, Anna, but no. No.

AMY: I know. Truth be told, I’m certain I will not read it, and I’m guessing our listeners won’t either. That’s fine. Let’s just own it. (Actually, I tried listening to a recording of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire last summer and it almost killed me. Did I tell you that?)

KIM: No, but I’m not surprised, and I’m proud of you for attempting it, anyway. Way to go.

AMY: So no, I’m not going to be eagerly diving into the 15-volume Alexiad either, but I definitely think this lost lady is worth getting the 411 on… and by 411, I mean all the juicy stuff.

KIM: Okay, well, you know I was kind of joking about not being interested. I mean, hello… she wrote something called The Alexiad? Am I saying that right? And good for her! I mean, we have enough epic stories written by men, I… you know, I am curious, actually. So let’s do it.

AMY: And she actually modeled The Alexiad after a lot of the classic Greek epics — she was a fan of those.

KIM: I figured, from the name.

AMY: Yes. I will say, it does sound like it might be a more engaging bit of reading than you might at first suppose. In The Paris Review Edmund White said: “Anna exhibits her learning and talent like a peacock splaying his feathers, and the work is all the better for it, turning what could otherwise have been dry hagiography into an engaging document of a crucial era.” Apparently she was pretty funny and snarky at times in the books...

KIM: That sounds promising, but maybe the Cliffs Notes version would be better for us.

AMY: Okay. So how about we just first explain why she wrote it, and also where she wrote it, because she took this project on while she was holed up in a female convent where she had been exiled. She had been banished by her younger brother when she was in her mid-to-late 30s, basically.

KIM: Why did he do that to her? Oh, man, and it just makes you think of all the women who probably got exiled to a convent back then. That is so unfair!

AMY: Well, he kind of had an excuse, because she tried to kill him. 

KIM: I’m sure he deserved it.

AMY: Well, maybe. Here’s where the Cersei Lannister stuff comes into play. 

KIM: Okay, tell me more. I’m really getting curious now.

AMY: Let’s back up a little bit. So Princess Anna Komnene was the eldest child of Emperor Alexio and Empress Irene. Their home was the Great Palace of Constantinople. 

KIM: Oooh, so, basically modern-day Turkey is where we’re talking about right now?

AMY: Yeah, but back then it was kind of an eastern extension of the Roman Empire. It had some Greek influence in there too, but they would have seen themselves as “Roman.” (I don’t believe the term “Byzantine” was even a thing until later in history.) But I don’t know, I’m not a historian so don’t quote me on that. But anyway, Anna is the oldest child, and her dad had really only just claimed the throne a few years prior to her birth. He had wrested it away from another ruler who was basically running the empire into the ground. So Alexio, her dad, swoops in and sort of saves the day and begins “making Byzantium great again,” to steal the tag line line we’d all love to forget. As a little girl, Anna was betrothed to another “junior emperor,” so he was going to wind up being emperor and they were going to kind of be “emperor and empress” together. The tradition back then was that the young girls would go off and live in the boy’s household, so her future mother-in-law is basically responsible for raising her when she is, like, a pre-teen. And that mother (unbeknownst to Anna’s parents) obtained a tutor for her to teach her mathematics, literature, history, medicine, astronomy, military affairs and philosophy. Okay, so this is a time when little girls were really only being taught things like “courtly etiquette,” so this was major that this woman took this up.

KIM: Oh my gosh! It was her mother-in-law… I thought you were going to say she did something terrible to her or something. (Nothing against mother-in-laws, but you know, historically, you hear things.) So I wasn’t expecting that. But good for her mother-in-law! That’s incredible! Tell me more.

AMY: So Anna taught herself to read Greek on her own, and she read “The Odyssey” in secret, actually, because her parents were really opposed to her reading anything about polytheism. So she snuck that under the covers at night, sort of thing.

KIM: I’m loving her. I’m loving her! She sounds great!

AMY: I know. But a little snafu happens in that her betrothed, the man that she’s supposed to marry … he was supposed to be next in line for the throne; he ended up dying before they could get married.

KIM: Not that surprising, given the time.

AMY: Right, exactly. So, as luck would have it, they have another eligible bachelor lined up for Anna. When she was 14-years-old she married another guy named Nikephoros. (And we’ll just call him “Nick,” because it’s easier.) So she’s now got another husband. The fiance that had died was supposed to go on to become the emperor, and she was going to rule alongside him, and now these plans are kind of thwarted. And yet, in Anna’s mind, the plans have not changed. She’s still, in her head, thinking, “Oh, yes — the throne is going to be mine.” But, when her father winds up being on his deathbed, her little brother John — he was already kind of seen by the world as the rightful heir at that point, although Anna, when she was born, had been presented with this royal diadem at birth, which basically signified “Yes, you are going to take over” — so you can see where the conflict is getting set up here. The dying emperor, Alexio, he did want his son, John (Anna’s younger brother) to succeed him, but Anna’s mom, Empress Irene, she thought it was Anna’s for the taking. She believed Anna was the presumptive next in line, and of course, cue the palace intrigue now, right? So Anna and her mom start plotting. The only problem is that Anna’s husband, Nick, (Nikephoros) he’s like, “Uh-uh, ladies. Count me out. I am not helping you guys with this.” And Anna is furious. She thinks he’s a total wimp. She even says, “Nature had mistaken their sexes, for he ought to have been the woman.”

KIM: Oh my god, Lady Macbeth is happening! 

AMY: Mm-hmm. So, while their dad is on his deathbed, Anna’s brother kind of pulls a shady move as well, because he goes in to give his dad a hug on his deathbed and surreptitiously swipes the emperor’s ring from his finger, which must have infuriated Anna.

KIM: Wait. This is a real story?

AMY: Yes! So you can see why she’s pissed and is like, “I’m getting him out of the way.” She really felt like she had been cheated out of her birth right, and she tried for a year to wrest control from her brother, but her plots ended up being exposed. John found out she was plotting against him and he exiled her to the convent (which I guess there are worse things he could have done in that situation. I guess she’s lucky she just got away with the convent.) But I mean, we thought things were bad with the British royal family, right? This is way more drama.

KIM: Yeah. Seriously, wow. So it’s hard to think that as a woman in that era she would have even been considered as a potential ruler. Do you know if women were given that kind of power at that time?

AMY: Probably not because like we said, she was really not supposed to be getting any formal education. But her dad, in his lifetime, had deemed her qualified to take on that sort of leadership role. Like I said, she was kind of helping counsel him in some ways. And at one point, he had put her in charge of a huge orphanage and hospital which had the capacity to hold 10,000 patients. So she was basically a hospital administrator and she taught medicine there and at other hospitals. (She apparently was an expert on the treatment of gout in addition to all the other things she could do.) 

KIM: Oooh, Henry VIII could have used her in his court!

AMY: Totally. Totally.

KIM: Okay, so after this coup that you told us about goes bad, goes horribly wrong, she’s cooped up at the convent. So you mentioned Cersei Lannister before, but I’m thinking Circe, the witch, who was banished to an island, sounds a lot like this character, also, who was banished to a convent. But how does this lead to her writing this epic history?

AMY: Well, she’s got time on her hands right? But she doesn’t even start this book project for two more decades; she waited until she was 55 years old to start writing it. Some say that this was a book that her husband Nikephoros (I call him Nick) — some say he first started it and she took it over after he died. But generally-speaking, the work is really attributed to her. She basically tells the history of her father’s reign, with all kinds of anecdotes about the crusades…different battles that he was involved in. She has a lot of great detail. She writes all about the political landscape at the time. Basically it’s considered a really prime historical document for his reign. Historians today are like, “Thank god she wrote this.” Her agenda, though, was to depict her dad as one of the great men of history and to denigrate her brother (and anyone else that she considered her enemies). So it was not an impartial bit of scholarship, but it is really a remarkable bit of scholarship nonetheless

KIM: Revenge is a dish best served in a 15-volume…[laughing]... I would think revenge would best be served in a pamphlet, but...

AMY: She definitely had an axe to grind. But it’s considered a landmark work of history from the Middle Ages. She wrote it in Greek. It took her a decade to write. 

KIM: She was in a convent, too. What else was she going to do? I mean…

AMY: Mm-hmm. There was one line in The Paris Review article I mentioned earlier that sort of gave a little hint of what the books are like, and I have to read this one little passage from The Paris Review article: “Bohemond of Taranto, for example, wins Anna’s horrified admiration for successfully escaping his enemies by playing dead in a coffin all the way from Antioch to Rome with a deceased chicken hidden on his person. The putrid stench convinced anyone brave enough to take a peek that Bohemond really was a rotting corpse.” So she’s giving us that kind of color, those kinds of stories.

KIM: I wasn’t expecting it to be like that. I thought it was going to be, “So-and-so begat so-and-so…” like the Old Testament, almost.

AMY: You really probably do want somebody to just distill the best bits for you. Some historians over time have theorized that Anna could not have written it all on her own, which, honestly, how many times have we heard that?

KIM: Oh, yeah, exactly. And even Shakespeare, so whatever. C’mon, everyone. 

AMY: And actually, since we mentioned The [Rise and] Fall of the Roman Empire earlier, the author of that, Edward Gibbons, he had some things to say in The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire about Anna Komnene. He likens her to Lady Macbeth, as you did, for trying to do away her brother. He really does not paint her in a very favorable light. She’s heralded today, however, for being the first female historian.

KIM: She’s literally playing with the hand she’s dealt. I mean, if a man did that, no one would think twice of it. I have nothing but respect for her.

AMY: And yeah, she wrote this incredible tome. She had this incredibly interesting life story, on top of it, and so I just think that makes her special and worth discussing today, even if we never do lug the 15 volumes out of some library, which we’re never going to do.

KIM: Noooo. It won’t be my next beach read, but yeah, I’m very interested about her story and I think other people would want to hear it.

AMY: And listeners, if you, like Kim, are looking for something a little more light, breezy and fun, we’ve got just the books for you. It’s a collection, actually, by author Maud Hart Lovelace, whom we’ll be discussing next week — it would be no exaggeration to call her book series “literary comfort food.” 

KIM: Absolutely. Known as the “Betsy-Tacy” books, this coming-of-age series is centered around Lovelace’s own upbringing in Minnesota. They are so charming, and we’ve got an equally charming guest joining us to discuss them! New York-based culture writer and editor Sadie Stein is joining us for the conversation. (I’m so excited!) And we had just so much fun geeking out with her over Maud Hart Lovelace. We can’t wait for you to check out this episode.

AMY: Until then, don’t forget to rate and review us or spread the love on social media! Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her” into your new favorite author!

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

33. Peg Bracken — The I Hate to Cook Book with Helene Siegel

KIM: Do you enjoy reading cookbooks, Amy?

AMY: Well, I don’t actually really enjoy cooking, ergo I generally do not enjoy reading cookbooks, no. 

KIM: Okay, so I do enjoy cooking, but only recipes that have fewer than maybe five ingredients and even fewer steps. And I have a gazillion cookbooks that, to be honest, I actually enjoy reading more from than actually cooking … I have a couple of cookbooks by Mimi Thorsson, they have these pictures of her chateau in France… and I own just about everything by Nigella Lawson, to my husband’s consternation. But the truth is they are mostly aspirational and remain so. And I’m totally okay with that. But, Amy, what if there were a cookbook that could make you laugh? A cookbook that, in fact, was once described as a “mashup of Martha Stewart and Amy Sedaris.”

AMY: That’s a weird combo, first off, but I would say you’re definitely starting to get my attention. 

KIM: Good because the book we’re discussing today is called The I Hate to Cook Book. It was written by Peg Bracken in 1960. As we know, that was a time when women were starting to rebel against these traditional gender stereotypes. The book was revolutionary in some ways in that it gave women permission to say: “Cooking just isn’t my jam.” (And literally, in this case — Bracken wouldn’t be caught dead making her own homemade preserves.) Anyway, Bracken’s book offered shortcuts and cheats so that women could still manage to provide arguably tasty sustenance for their families without being in the kitchen all day. As Bracken’s daughter, Jo, wrote in the introduction to the 2010 reissued version of her mother’s classic, “The I Hate to Cook Book was born from a group of professional women who would have been much happier sipping martinis with their husbands than spending the cocktail hour in the kitchen slaving away over a hot stove.”

AMY: Now that definitely sounds more my speed. So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit everyone, the podcast dedicated to dusting off books (even cookbooks) by forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. Three years before Betty Friedan wrote the seminal feminist work The Feminine Mystique, quirky cookbook writer Peg Bracken gave desperate housewives permission to throw in the towel rather than attempt to emulate Julia Child. She was recommended to us by today’s guest, a woman who definitely knows her way around a kitchen far better than you or I, Amy. We can’t wait to introduce her — and talk about Peg Bracken — so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

INTERVIEW PORTION

KIM: Los Angeles food writer Helene Siegel is the author of the bestselling series Totally Cookbooks for 10 Speed Press. She co-authored four cookbooks with celebrity chefs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, the Too Hot Tamales of early Food Network fame, and a lavish coffee table book, Pure Chocolate, with Seattle chocolatier Fran Bigelow. As a solo author she wrote the Ethnic Kitchen series for HarperCollins and the Barbie Party Cookbook for Mattel. 

Helene has written for the LA Times’ food, book, and travel sections, as well as Bon Appetit and Gourmet. Helene is a dear friend, and over the years, she has shared many a hilarious story about working in the cookbook publishing and food industres as a woman and as a feminist. So really, there’s no one more perfect to be our guest on this episode. And don’t worry, we plan to get her to share some of those amazing tales on today’s show! 

Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, Helene! We’re so happy to have you!

HELENE: Thanks, Amy and Kim! I’m excited to be here!

AMY: All right, so I think, Helene, the best way to introduce the I Hate to Cook Book is to just read the first few lines of it. So I will do the honors there:

   Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them. This book is for those of us who have to, who have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking. This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of a long day. 

   When you have to cook, life is full of jolts: for instance, those ubiquitous full-color double-page spreads picturing what to serve on those little evenings when you want to take it easy. You’re flabbergasted. You wouldn’t cook that much food for a combination Thanksgiving and Irish wake. …. And you’re flattened by articles that begin: “Of course you know that basil and tomatoes are soulmates, but did you know…”. They can stop right there, because the fact is, you didn’t know any such thing.

KIM: Okay, so we can establish right away she’s hilarious. And though Bracken tells women right off the bat, “If you love to cook this book isn’t for you,” that’s clearly not true, because Helene, you love to cook. When did you discover this book, and what did you enjoy about it?

HELENE: Well, I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties in the Bronx in New York, so I had very little personal experience with the book. It wasn’t on my working mother’s bookshelf (way too suburban for her), but it was a cultural phenomenon that was just in the air at the time, sort of like The [Official] Preppy Handbook in the Seventies. It made a big impression on me as a little girl. It did go on to sell 3 million copies, by the way, and, like James Beard, she became a professional spokesperson for Birdseye frozen food, which made perfect sense. Peg was a regular TV guest. She wrote articles in women’s service magazines like Family Circle and McCall’s. Just the book’s title was so daring in those days when women were supposed to be happy being “indentured servants” as she said. I love that she was thumbing her nose at being a good housewife. I think this one line captures her snark: 

   What should you do, ladies when the onions are frying? Smoke some cigarettes and stare at the sink. 

KIM: I love it.

AMY: I love her ennui.

HELENE: Yeah.

AMY: Okay, so there’s actually a really interesting anecdote about the collaborative origins of Bracken’s cookbook. Helene, can you fill our listeners in on where the idea for the book (and also some of those recipes) sprang from?

HELENE: Well, Bracken wrote in the introduction that a group of friends who were gathered over lunch just started talking about how bored they were with cooking. That sounds familiar, right? They decided to save time by pooling their recipes and gathering about 200, which, by the way, is a lot. In a sly dig at The Home Economist, she wrote in the book’s intro, These recipes have not been tested by experts … Experts in their sunny spotless test kitchens can make anything taste good. As for where the recipes originated, she assumed, she said, that they were created long ago by a good cook who liked to cook. And she says to those bizarre women who like to cook: Invite me over often, please. And stay away from my husband.  So remember, those were the “Mad Men” days. 

AMY: Oh yeah.

KIM: I can picture it completely. And it’s interesting when you read a little bit of those excerpts, because she actually started out as an advertising copywriter along with Homer Groening, father of Matt Groening of “The Simpsons.” And she and Groening also made a comic strip, Phoebe, Get Your Man, together, which sounds pretty fun considering how entertaining Bracken is in this book. I tried to find pictures of that comic and I couldn’t, but it sounds really interesting. And she truly was busy at this time, raising a daughter and doing all of this other stuff, so the book wasn’t just a gimmick.  

AMY: No. And with all due respect to my mom, this book really reminded me a lot of her approach to cooking when I was growing up, and I think it was either maybe a Midwestern thing, or a 1960s, 1970s thing, but I personally grew up in the era where cooking meant just opening up various cans and jars and tossing them all together. So in my childhood, many a casserole was built around a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup. And all the women in my family were way into Jello salads (and they were tasty, I don’t care what you say… in fact there was one Jello salad we often ate that had pretzels mixed in and that sounds super gross, but I’m sorry, it’s TO DIE FOR. Don’t knock it till you try it!) And I even remember a certain recipe for crockpot meatballs that involved dumping in a jar of grape jelly. So this book actually really spoke to me.

KIM: Oh my gosh, Amy, I’m right there with you. In fact, I don’t think it’s just a Midwest thing because I grew up in Texas, Germany, California… all over, and I can hardly remember a meal that didn’t involve canned vegetables or canned soup. I don’t think I knew what a regular vegetable was. And both our moms worked, so I’m not going to blame them at all. Who could blame them?  But Helene, I know you recently cooked a meal that actually took four hours to prepare, and it sounds like you liked it; but you were a working mom, too, when your kids were growing up. How is this ringing bells as far as your own mom?

HELENE: Well, my 1950s mom did not embrace all these shortcuts and conveniences. While she worked (and she was always short on time), she still used fresh ingredients. She was kind of old-school. Except, of course, for canned veggies and fruit cocktail in syrup, we ate fresh foods. Maybe that’s why when I left home and went to college in the West, I could never get used to food in cafeterias or anything smothered in condensed, canned soups. I didn’t even know what a tuna casserole was. But on a few very special occasions, like the Academy Awards night, my mom did treat us to individual TV dinners. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, I love picturing you with the TV dinners watching the awards. How wonderful.

AMY: The irony.

KIM: Yes.

HELENE: Years later when I was a working mom, I had a deep desire to cook for my family. So a cookbook editor once told me when I was starting out, “You’ll get tired of that one day, and you’ll just stop cooking.” And she was right in that I took a nice long break after the kids were gone. But back in the day, it was like I was running a marathon. I would make this mad dash at the end of every work day. After driving at least an hour in L.A. traffic, I would blitz through the door, get out of my work clothes, throw on an apron and get ready to make dinner every night. And when I look back, I think I was crazy. 

KIM: So some of the recipes titles in this book are just priceless: There’s “Stayabed Stew” and “Skid Row Stroganoff”... “Hurry Curry,” “Idiot Onions” and “Hootenholler Whiskey Cake.”

AMY: She’s also got the classic cheese ball in there… you know, the kind you roll in crushed nuts. That’s always been a staple at family functions where I’m from. And her dessert titles are pretty funny, too. Actually, her whole Chapter 9 is called “Desserts: Or People are Too Fat Anyway.” And then her chapter on vegetables and side dishes is subtitled “This Side of Beriberi.”

KIM: Doesn’t that make you think a lot of Marjorie Hillis, who we dedicated  an episode to back in February?

AMY: Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean that was about 30 years prior to when this book was written, but you can still see some vestiges. Lots of tinned things. At least she had moved away from aspics, but some of it’s definitely questionable. I think we can agree that tastes have come a long way since this book was written. And yet, Bracken, early on in the book, she sort of issues a caveat about some of the bizarre ingredient combos you’ll find in her book. So she kind of owns it a little bit. In her recipe for Beef a la King, she says, “Don’t recoil from the odd-sounding combination of ingredients here, because it’s actually very good. Just shut your eyes and go on opening those cans.” In other words, she’s basically like, “I know it sounds gross, but it tastes like the bomb, so just trust me.” And some of the ingredients for that dish were: the condensed chicken noodle soup condensed cream of mushroom soup, of course — you have to have that; then there were two sliced hard-boiled eggs, ¼ lb chipped beef… (there is so much chipped beef in this book); green pepper, pimento, cheese and a small can of mushrooms. So toss that all together and… wow. I mean that sounds a little bit like prison food, but what do you think, Helene?

HELENE: Well, first of all I want to ask the question, “Where’s the beef?”

AMY: Totally true!

HELENE: It’s a tiny amount in this cream-heavy swamp of condensed things. So one of my favorite footnotes on one of her recipe lists was: If you don’t like this, leave it out. It reminds me of the time a cookbook editor of mine on a Mexican cookbook I was writing, told me, “I hate cilantro, take it all out.”

KIM: [laughing]

AMY: That’s a challenge! Oh my gosh. 

KIM: Oh, that is so funny.

AMY: So, well, getting back to chipped beef, though, I remember that was an ingredient we always had in our house. I remember that was a thing. I don’t think that’s a thing at the store anymore, though, is it? Can you even find that anymore?

HELENE: Do you know what it is, Amy?

AMY: We used to call it “dried beef.” It was like really thinly sliced… kind of like prosciutto, but beef. 

KIM: So dried and sliced?

AMY: Dried and sliced. Sometimes it would come in a jar, even. But it was slices, and my mom would make this thing… the chipped beef, or dried beef (I don’t know, I think it’s the same thing). She would make it in a cream sauce and then put it over toast. My grandpa would always say that you’re making “shit on a shingle.” That was a World War II recipe.

KIM: Yes! My dad used to say that, too.

HELENE: We had that also, in my house.

KIM: Yeah, I think they must have said it in Vietnam, also.

AMY: I liked it. I actually liked it!

KIM: Did you guys have Spam? The cans of Spam? We would have Spam on toast. 

HELENE: Maybe because you were in the military.

KIM: Yeah, maybe. I mean, you could get it at the store, but maybe that’s why they got the idea for it, it was something that they served in the military. But, like, UGGH. But anyway.

AMY: Maybe we should be careful about being too critical of these recipes, because when Peg Bracken, herself, showed her second husband the manuscript for this cookbook, he apparently answered, “It stinks,” according to their daughter, Johanna, and that couple got divorced not long after. So don’t tell Peg that these are bad recipes. 

KIM: Yeah, I like to think she made the decision to end that based on his response to the manuscript. [laughing]. So, suffice to say, this book is more readable today for her witty chapter introductions and sardonic asides. But to honor the spirit of Peg Bracken, Amy actually tried out a recipe for her family and I will let her take it from there.

AMY: I selected, actually, a couple of recipes from this book. One was the very first recipe in the book. It’s called “Sweep Steak,” and that one appealed to me because it really only required two ingredients: pot roast and a packet of French onion dip mix. I mean, how can you mess that up?

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: The second recipe was a rice casserole dish called “Hellzapoppin Cheesy Rice.” That was basically just rice baked with cheese and eggs and butter and Worcester sauce. So, I thought maybe that could be okay? Well, the pot roast literally took me less than three minutes to prepare. I guess it’s called “Sweep Steak” — there’s no steak in it, but.... I was pretty pleased about how quickly I managed to get this in the oven, but then I proceeded to overcook it to a criminal degree. And later when I sampled the cheesy rice after taking it out of the oven, it tasted a little bland, so I decided to add more salt, which was a huge mistake. So…

KIM: Were you drinking a martini while you were cooking? I hope so. I hope so.

AMY: I probably had a glass of wine.

KIM: It was her anniversary dinner. [laughing]. It was her anniversary dinner! 

HELENE: Oh my god, that was risky! But I do want to say, that recipe, I have had in people’s homes. People still make it, they love it.

AMY: The rice dish or the pot roast?

HELENE: No, the pot roast. And whenever this friend of mine brings it to the table, she’s like, “Oh la la, I made zee special pot roast!” And I’m always like, “Oh my god, don’t make me eat it.”

KIM: Here’s the other thing: I was going to cook something, but um...it was really hard to find anything vegetarian.

HELENE: Yeah, she was not vegetarian. Not a healthy person.

AMY: Anyway, my whole meal was a total fail. I don’t know that it was Peg’s fault, fully. My family were good sports about it, and let’s roll a little audio clip of that.

[Clip begins]

JACK: So far I had the pot roast, and I’d say it’s pretty good. 

AMY: Pretty good?

JACK: Yeah.

AMY: The pot roast?

JACK: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Okay. You like the flavor?

JACK: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Okay. You can be honest, too.

JACK: It’s a little chewy though.

JULIA: The cheesy rice wasn’t my favorite.

MIKE: So I would say this takes me back to my childhood. It feels like a meal my mom would have made. I would say that the meat’s definitely on the well-done side and the cheesy rice is on the super salty side…

JACK: I think the rice is VERY salty.

MIKE: But I can get where I would appreciate the rice. I do like the rice a little.

AMY: How do you feel about this being the meal for our wedding anniversary?

MIKE: It’s always nice to keep things fresh and new. This meal certainly does that.

JACK: I don’t really like it that much. 

AMY: No? Not for you? Even with the cheesy, “Hellsapoppin” title? Maybe a miss.

[end clip]

KIM: That was hilarious, and honestly, it was sweet how supportive they tried to be in the face of all that salt and overcooked meat. Props to you, Amy, for giving it a try! Okay, with all respect to Peg Bracken, I think I'll stick with some of your recipes, Helene, like your latke recipe, that, unlike Bracken’s recipes, basically made me a hero with my husband at Hanukkah.

AMY: I think I’ve had those latkes, Kim… at your house. I think I’ve been over there for those.

KIM: Latke party, yeah. Pre-pandemic latke party. We’ll be having them again.

AMY: Yeah. Helene, do you think there was any sort of stigma in the 1960s for women who didn’t cook?

HELENE: Well, it’s interesting. I think at that moment, women were beginning to publicly question their subservient role in society — especially in marriage. The idea of a married woman not cooking, not doing the laundry or, in general, not making her husband’s life easier, was subversive. My mother-in-law once told me that she ironed her husband’s underwear.

KIM: Hell, no!

AMY: Jeesh! Too much!

HELENE: Yes, well, at the same time as Peg Bracken’s book came out, you had Julia child’s breakthrough French cookbook and her TV show, with six-page recipes for Beef Wellington and menus for elaborate, multi-course dinner parties. As Julia would say, “for the servantless American woman.”

AMY: Thanks for clarifying, Julia.

HELENE: Her audience was affluent, educated, and no doubt, competitive. They were professionalizing, in a way, the home dinner party. One other interesting thing that’s happening at pretty much exactly the same time is the arrival of smart-alec women standup comics like Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers on TV. They were breaking barriers, poking fun at men in general, especially their hubbies, “Fang,” and Edgar. And if cooking ever came up in their jet-fuelled tirades, it was self-deprecating, for sure.

AMY: That's a really interesting insight, because it does make a lot of sense that they were giving women permission to A) laugh at the situation. (Like how ridiculous is this that we’re ironing our husband’s underwear? This is stupid!) and at the same time, sort of saying, “I don’t want to do this crap.”

HELENE: I think they were really subversive, and as a little girl I adored them both, so I probably had a bunch of rage myself. 

AMY: So, Helene, as somebody who enjoys cooking, you’re almost stuck in the middle, because you’re a feminist, but you enjoy being in the kitchen.

HELENE: First of all, I go through a lot of phases with the cooking. I did not start cooking until I was pretty much until I had my first child, although I dabbled a little bit in college. I was a college student, and I recognized that I liked to cook and what I cooked tasted better than what was in the cafeteria. So I just cooked. And even when I had the smallest apartment, you know, my starting-out apartment in New York City, I did always invite people over for dinner parties. But the great thing was that I wasn’t obligated to cook. I was cooking out of choice.

AMY: That’s the key.

KIM: Mmm-hmm, exactly.

HELENE: And I do love food, in general, so that helps.

AMY: We made a crack about Julia Child earlier in this segment, but Helene, is it true you actually met her? 

HELENE: Yes, I did! And I’ll never forget it. I have a picture, actually, of it. So I was writing cookbooks (I guess this was during the Eighties) and I used to be a member of professional culinary associations. And we had annual conferences where Julia always showed up. But anyway, we gathered all to eat and drink A LOT, but she was always the grande dame at these conferences. I mean, there were crowds around her everywhere she went. Everybody just adored her. What everyone would always say about her is, when you meet her, she’s Julia, exactly as you see her on TV. Totally authentic… doesn’t put on any airs… she just is who she is. So she was a big, cheery, mountain of a woman. She did not cut corners (as she famously said) when it came to butter and cream. But she was so kind to everyone along the way, and I think that’s why she was so well-loved.

AMY: She sounds like a real character.

HELENE: She knew how to have a good time.

KIM: Speaking of people who know how to have a good time, Helene, you recently started an amazing project that I want to tell our listeners about. It’s a blog called the Pastry Sessions. It is so great and so timely. Let’s tell everyone more about it and maybe give a little bit of information about how you came about starting it. What prompted you to start it?

HELENE: Well, a few months into the pandemic, I started baking on Zoom with my 8-year-old granddaughter in Texas. (Her name is Piper). I just missed her so much, and of course, I couldn’t visit her. So baking was a natural thing to do, since it’s an activity that we’ve been doing together since she was about four, in person. Anyway, I started The Pastry Sessions to keep a record of what we were doing and to share my stories so she can know more about me later.

AMY: That’s so sweet! It has been really hard on grandparents this whole past year, and I love that you have turned it into a… is it a weekly thing? How often do you do it?

HELENE: It’ bi-weekly. She would do weekly, but I need a little break in between, you know, because it’s work.

AMY: I get that.

KIM: I love it because you really get to tell all these stories, so every blog post has some information about what you cooked with Piper, and sort of what the experience was like for her, but usually you bring up some story or anecdote from your past, or some sort of insight on cultural history or something, to really bring it to life, and I love that, so I’m enjoying it. I can’t wait to see your new updates every week.

AMY: Tell me about these magic brownies that you are known for. The ones that you got an interesting reaction with when you took it to a dinner party once.

HELENE: Oh, yes! The notorious brownie story! These brownies were my go-to for holiday buffets and parties. Once, when I brought them to a swanky Hollywood gathering, the host whisked me and my brownies into the kitchen and closed the door.

AMY: Oooh! Wait a second! Helene, is this going to be appropriate for our podcast?

HELENE: PG-13? [laughing] He said to me, “These are going here.” He stashed them high up in a pantry. He said, “These are for later.” In other words, he was hiding them from his friends so he could nibble them in solitude at his leisure after the guests were gone. As Bracken said of women who like to cook, “Stay away from my husband, ladies!” That’s the power of good baked goods.

KIM: Oh, yes it is! Yes it is!

AMY: All I know is, being somebody that doesn’t necessarily enjoy baking or cooking, I really can appreciate someone that does enjoy it. And I’m so thankful, because I like eating it all.

KIM: Mmm-hmm. Yeah.

AMY: Whether you’re totally gung-ho about cooking or if it’s not your thing at all, it’s all okay. Do what you love.

KIM: Yeah, it’s your choice and your life. Yep. I can just keep reading all my beautiful cookbooks and never cooking anything in them, and Eric will just have to live with all the cookbooks!

AMY: So, Helene, it’s been a blast getting to talk with you today about food  and all your stories, and I think with this Sunday being Mother’s Day, Peg Bracken is probably the perfect person to remind us of how hard mothers everywhere (in every generation) work for their families, whether they’re dishing out homemade delicacies or their own best rendition of Hamburger Helper. 

KIM: Bottom line, they were all serving it up with love, as are we. Thank you, Helene. This has been a real delight getting to share your funny stories. Thank you so much for joining us! 

HELENE: Well thank you! And I do want to tell the listeners that I hope you’ll visit my blog. It’s called ThePastrySessions.com. And I do want to tell you that all of the recipes are tested.

KIM: Yes. And we will be sharing all of it in our show notes and on our social media. Thank you, Helene.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode. If you like what you’ve heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast to help us grow our audience and help other book-minded people find us. 

KIM: Visit LostLadiesofLit.com for a link to Helene’s Pastry Sessions blog and subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss a single episode. 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.

32. All For the Love of Libraries

AMY: Hey everyone — welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my friend and writing partner, Kim Askew. And Kim, okay, it occurred to me the other day that this podcast (and actually, more specifically I guess, our reading habit in general), might just be hazardous to my health.

KIM: Uh-oh. How so? 

AMY: Well, I was in bed one night this week, about to turn off my bedside lamp to go to sleep… the stack of books that was hovering over my head on the nightstand could potentially collapse on me in the event of an earthquake (and we are prone to those here in L.A.). It would probably take a search and rescue dog to unearth me if this pile of books collapsed on me. So I ended up relocating two or three of the topmost books from the stack onto the floor, but let’s just say the book pile is getting totally out of control. 

KIM: Okay, I am right there with you, and I love this conversation, because Eric has been begging me to clean up my nightstand because it was turning into a Tower-of-Pisa sort of situation. And I did, but honestly, if left to myself, I would pile books up all over the house and love it. But he’s a bit of a neat freak as you know, and it’s not the worst thing, though, of course, in the general sense. But anyway. 

AMY: We both, I guess, are fortunate to have neatnik husbands so they kind of offset our own tendencies.

KIM: Yeah, they’d probably love to live together! Just stick us in the other house…

AMY: And we would live in our squalor happily. Mike’s not super thrilled about the state of my bedside, and I will totally post a photo on Instagram to show you the marked difference between his side of the bed and mine. Yeah, it’s funny. I wish I could say that my books resemble the wonderful, perfectly stacked and organized titles that you see on social media, but I just don’t think that I would ever qualify for being a Bookstagrammer.

KIM: Me neither. But I do love looking at people’s pretty Instagram photos of their bookshelves. My bookshelves aren’t color coordinated or in alphabetical order. I’d say it’s maybe glorious chaos, personally. But I often wish I had it in alphabetical order when I’m trying to find a certain book and searching and searching. Usually it’s just right where I looked over and over and finally, I see it. There’s just too many books.

AMY: Yeah, your eyes kind of glaze over. But this point in the podcast is when I sheepishly have to make a controversial confession. It’s going to come as no surprise to you, Kim, but maybe it might surprise some of our listeners. Yes, I have several dozen books piled up by the side of my bed, but I don’t have books anywhere else in the house really. I don’t have bookshelves. Or books.

KIM: You heard that right, everyone. She doesn’t. Have. Bookshelves.

AMY: That sounds so scandalous!

KIM: Ominous.

AMY: Dah-dum!!!! I know that it makes me a really odd bird among book lovers… and I do love books. I just don’t keep books, with the exception of one cabinet where we keep our kids’ books… and I DO have one shelf in my office cabinet where I keep books that were written by friends… or, you know, I have the collected works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Some of the biggies. But those are hidden away in a cabinet. Other than that, I don’t hang onto books. If I buy a book, I read it and I give it away, and I’m happy to give it away. 

KIM: Okay, so I read many of mine over and over again. I loan them out, I refer to them, and the ones I don’t reread, it really just makes me happy to have them. To see their covers and their spines there. But Amy, I know what a voracious reader you are. Why do you not hang onto your favorites?

AMY: I guess to begin with, I very rarely re-read a book and when I do, it’s years later. For example, I just re-read The Great Gatsby, but it’s probably been 20 years since the last time I’d read it, so I don’t understand why I would hang onto the book for two decades just because I might want to re-read it. It just doesn’t make sense. And also, I really love the library. I go to the library at least once a week (that’s even now, during a pandemic.) Growing up, my mom and dad both took me to the library probably once a week as well. I just love the idea that these books are constantly circulating and being read by other people who lead different lives. I feel like books are meant to be read. They’re not meant to just sit on a shelf and collect dust, they’re meant to be out there getting used.

KIM: Just talking about libraries makes me feel really good. I’m actually smiling just talking about them. And my parents used to take me and my sister to the library every weekend too, and I would always leave with the maximum number of books allowed, so I’d carry this huge stack out. When I got home, I would just read and read, and I hated to be interrupted for anything. (Actually, not much has changed, really.) And then when I was in fourth grade, I was asked to assist the librarian with shelving books in the school library because I spent so much time during recesses and lunch there. Even now, yes, I have a ton of books, but I do read so many that I probably went to the library maybe once a month before the pandemic. I don’t have any great libraries in my neighborhood, and definitely nothing I can walk to, so I would actually drive over to this pretty little library in South Pasadena, which is not close, as Amy knows.

AMY: Across town from you. Yeah.

KIM: Exactly. And I used to walk from my office downtown to L.A.’s main branch at lunch before the pandemic. It’s a stunning library. It’s art deco circa the 20s and 30s, and it actually was mysteriously set fire to about 30 years ago. Over a million books were burned or damaged in the fire. Susan Orlean wrote a book about it in her book, which is called The Library Book. 

AMY: I actually took a tour of the downtown library and they told us this anecdote about that fire and that rush to rescue all of these books. I mean these books wound up being completely water-logged. They have a process with which they can dry the books out, so they wound up recruiting freezer space in restaurants across L.A. and they stacked tons of soggy books in the freezers, because once they’re frozen, nothing can happen to them. So all these books were piled into freezer spaces across the city so that then they were able to slowly take the books out little by little and do the process of thawing them out and drying them meticulously, and that saved so much of their collection doing that. It was pretty amazing.

KIM: It just feels very much like an L.A. story. I love that. Um, it also makes me think of Han Solo, but anyway, that’s just me…

AMY: Coming out of the carbonite? Is that what you’re talking about?

KIM: Yeah, exactly. Everything’s “Shakespeare” or “Star Wars.” Anyway, I miss going to the Downtown Library’s ALOUD series too. It’s so great! I saw Rachel Cusk, Hanya Yanagihara (she wrote A Little Life), Ta-Nehisi Coates, and so many more, and I’m a proud member of the Library Foundation. Every year they have an annual Stay Home and Read a Book Ball and it’s extra perfect this year, since that’s really all we can do anyway! So support your local library!

AMY: Yeah. Happy to have it still operating during this pandemic, that’s for sure. One of my criteria any time I moved to a new place, a new apartment, was that it had to be in walking distance of a library. So with one exception (I’ve moved around a few times) but every apartment I’ve lived in (or now, my current house) has had a library just a couple of blocks away. And the fun fact about my current local library, which is about an 8-minute walk from my house, is that it sits on the location of Leonardo DiCaprio’s boyhood home. He actually donated $35,000 to the construction of the library, and so in his honor, they have a special “Leonardo DiCaprio Reading Room,” and there are all sorts of signed posters from him on the walls — posters of him as [Titanic’s] Jack Dawson or from Romeo + Juliet. It makes me smile every time I see them all.

KIM: That is such a great L.A. story, too! I love it! I love that story. My friend, illustrator and author Ann Shen (Amy, you’ve met her), she wrote Bad Girls Throughout History. She turned me on to this great 19th century library video on YouTube. I play it on my TV while I’m reading and it goes on for hours and hours. It’s got a crackling fireplace and a rainstorm and piles of books. And every so often a door creaks open mysteriously. Talk about a mood! 

AMY: So it’s just the ambience of a library basically?

KIM: It’s a room, and it feels like it’s in an old castle or a big old mansion. You can see the fireplace. It’s like a view from one part of the room to the other, so you can see furniture, stacks of books, the rain on the windows. It’s computer generated, but it looks really cool.

AMY: We have to link to that.

KIM: It’s really good. Basically for the last four months, I’ve had the YouTube fireplace thing going non-stop, and when Ann told me about this, I switched to this one and I’m even more addicted. But speaking more about libraries, Amy, I feel like you used to work at a library at one point, right?

AMY: It was my first job, actually, when I was a teenager. It was not quite as thrilling as you might expect for a high school kid because it’s a very quiet environment, obviously, and there were four high school workers on staff, and our shifts never overlapped, so I never had anybody my age to interact with, which is what you want. You want to work at the mall, you know, or somewhere where there are a bunch of teenagers that you’re goofing off with. But it was still a really good job for a book lover. My main responsibility was reshelving books, so I’d basically walk around the stacks with the big rolling cart of books and I put everything back in its proper place. And I really got to know a lot of different authors and genres that way. I shelved a ton of mysteries and trashy romance novels and Tom Clancy kind of books... those were always popular ones that most of the patrons were checking out. There were lots of children’s picture books, too though… that was always a big job. When you would come in and see all those kids’ books on the cart and go “Oh, boy, here we go.” I discovered Edward Gorey’s children’s books on that job, and I remember taking The Gashleycrumb Tinies, which is a book all about children who die gruesome deaths… it was the first time I had seen the book and I took it up to the librarian on duty and I was like, “Are you sure this is supposed to go in the children’s section? It doesn’t really seem appropriate!” And it probably actually didn’t belong there. I think she might have set it aside.

KIM: Your true crime fascination began with Gashleycrumb Tinies. Speaking of children’s books, that makes me think of Anne Carroll Moore. She was the influential New York City librarian who lobbied for children to be allowed to patronize libraries. Prior to that, people didn’t believe children under the age of 14 should even be allowed inside libraries, which is crazy to think about now. They were considered a nuisance. And Anne Carroll Moore (or ACM as she’s known in the literary world) headed up children’s library services for the New York Public library from 1906 through 1941.

AMY: Yeah, there’s actually a really super cute children’s book by Jan Pinborough called Miss Moore Thought Otherwise. It’s all about Anne Carroll Moore’s crusade to start children’s departments in libraries. Moore also wrote children’s books herself, one of which was a runner-up for the Newbury medal in 1925.

KIM: Right, but she was also a really controversial figure, too, in that she was a very powerful gatekeeper in the world of children’s literature. She was friends with Beatrix Potter, for example, but she could be super critical of some children’s book authors. She hated Goodnight, Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, for example! (One that I’ve been reading a lot lately.) She refused to carry it in the New York public library.

AMY: Yeah, wow. I read that book to both my kids every night before bed for YEARS, so I have my own love-hate relationship with that book (trust me), but I really cannot imagine disliking it to the point that you would have refused to allow it on shelves, right?

KIM: Right.

AMY: She also decided that L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and E.B. White’s Stuart Little were not worthy of her library shelves because she just really didn’t like them. She also hated Charlotte’s Web, too, and she didn’t love any of the Little House on the Prairie books! So I don’t know what to think about Anne’s taste in books, but she had some strong opinions there.

KIM: I mean how can you hate Charlotte’s Web? I can see maybe having opinions on the other ones, but, I mean, I don’t know how you can hate Charlotte’s Web.  Anyway, it’s wonderful that she was a champion for children’s literature, but as a woman who could make-or-break books, she also sounds like a bit of a tyrant! Maybe she let all that power go to her head a bit? She’s like the Robert Moses of children’s lit or something! 

AMY: I think you could say that Anne Carroll Moore was equal parts “hero” and “villain.” And I think we could probably devote an entire future episode just to her, and I’m sure we probably will because there is a LOT to say about her, and we are really only scratching the surface today.

KIM: Did you ever watch Party Girl with Parker Posey, Amy? Remember?

AMY: Yeah!

KIM: Right. She aspires to become a librarian and then she gets fired from her job at the library by sneaking in one night to sleep with her boyfriend. But I kind of imagine any infractions you committed in high school were more like… sneaking off to read or something like that. 

AMY: Yeah, I didn’t have any boyfriend to sneak into my library, so I don’t think I was having as much fun as Parker Posey’s character. But yeah, I would kind of sneak off behind the stacks when we weren’t busy, hide myself out of view from the adult librarians working the desk and then flip through books that were of interest to me. You were NOT supposed to do that, though, because even on a slow day at the library, you had to straighten the stacks. “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean…” that kind of McDonald’s motto? So you’d start at one end of the library straightening the shelves. You would make sure all the books were lined up with the front of the shelves and pat them all into place nice and neat, and it’s kind of funny because given the current state of my nightstand, which we talked about, keeping books tidy and orderly is not necessarily a priority for me. But it was a really good first job…

KIM: It almost feels cruel that they would give you a job at the library and then not let you read as much as you possibly could while you were there. I mean, that’s the worst!

AMY: I think it’s kind of a misconception about having a library job. I don’t think librarians are sitting around reading all day. They’re kept busy with their regular job. Another interesting thing I learned while I worked that job, because this was pre-Internet… people would call in to ask questions about anything under the sun. I never realized that you could even do that. I didn’t know that was an option, that you could bother a librarian to look up information, but people would call in all the time with just a question, like, “Can you figure out how tall Abraham Lincoln was?” The librarian would be like, “Sure!” And they’d walk over and look up some books and they’d try to get the answer and they’d go back to the phone and give the answer, so it was kind of like an early Google. I didn’t even know you could do that before I worked at the library.

KIM: It’s so quaint, and it reminds me of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set, where she’s working at the desk where everyone calls to get their questions answered.

AMY: Oh, right! Yeah...

KIM: But yeah, that is so funny to think about. Instead of Google, people were calling an actual person at a library and asking them questions. But another cool thing was you got to see all the books people checked out… it’s like a window into their soul or something.

AMY: Right. You know what else people really loved to check out, though… gobs and gobs of cookbooks. And I didn’t like putting those away because they were really heavy and unwieldy most of the time. They were sort of oversized books. Never liked having to put those back.

KIM: Funny you should mention cookbooks, because in next week’s episode we’ll be featuring a cookbook author. She was really well-known in the 1960s for her witty, sarcastic writing-style and for her time-saving recipes.

AMY: That’s right. Peg Bracken started a bit of a revolution by making it acceptable to not spend your days in the kitchen. We’ll be discussing her I Hate To Cookbook next week with the help of Kim’s good friend and prolific cookbook author, Helene Siegel. 

KIM: Until next time, let us know your stance on collecting books. Is your house filled from floor to ceiling with books like mine, or are you more like Amy and consider the library your home away from home? 

AMY: And what state of chaos is YOUR book collection in? Is your nightstand stack higher than mine? We want to know, so email us or let us know on our Facebook page or Instagram. 

KIM: I would be really happy if we had a whole nightstand stack competition and everyone was posting their stacks of books. So feel free to get in on that.

AMY: I want to see the messiest and the neatest.

KIM: Oh absolutely. Yeah, just share them. All shelves are welcome. We can’t wait for your responses…and for everyone who’s already reached out to us to let us know you’re listening, thank you! It means the world to us! 

AMY: We also wouldn’t mind your reviews of this podcast wherever you listen to us also, hint hint!

KIM: Bye, everyone!

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

31. Amy Levy — Reuben Sachs with Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith

KIM: Amy, I think we’ve both read all of George Eliot and Jane Austen’s novels multiple times, but all this time we’ve been missing out on a novel that was written in response to Eliot’s Daniel Deronda by an author who has been described as the Jewish Jane Austen. How could that be? 

AMY: I know, right? How had we not heard of her? The novel we’re discussing today, Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy, was published in 1888, twelve years after Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. 

KIM: And here’s what Oscar Wilde had to say about the novel: “Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic.” 

AMY: I mean, high praise from a man known for his brutal honesty, wouldn’t you say?

KIM: Mm-hmm. When I first picked up the Persephone edition of Reuben Sachs, I was immediately enveloped in the beauty of the language and the evocative descriptions of the characters and their surroundings. I’d even go so far as to say it was hauntingly beautiful. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s very poignant, and when we tell you more about the compelling and tragic story of its author, you’ll understand why that’s an all-too-apt description. We have a special guest on this week’s episode to give us more insight into Levy and her novel. We’ll introduce her in just a moment. As for myself, I’m Amy Helmes. 

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit. We’ve got a really interesting show for you today, so let’s raid the stacks and get started.

[Introductory music]

AMY: Our guest today is Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith, an author, critic, and researcher based in Cambridge, England. Her articles and reviews have been published in, among other outlets, the Guardian, the Dublin Review Of Books, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and the TLS (she was featured on their cover in January 2020 for her essay on female intellectuals of the 20th century). Ann specializes in writing about and lecturing on 19th and 20th century Cambridge women, including the author we’re discussing today, Amy Levy. You can find more of Ann’s writing at her blog, Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. Welcome, Ann. We’re glad to have you on the show today. 

ANN: I’m delighted to be here, thank you.

KIM: So let’s begin our discussion by telling our listeners a little more about Amy Levy. Would you like to start us off, Amy?

AMY: Sure! So Amy Levy was born the second of eventually seven children in 1861 in Clapham, which is an affluent area of London. Her family was Jewish, although they apparently had a “casual attitude toward religious observance.” Amy showed talent and an interest in literature at an early age. She won a junior prize for a critique of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh when she was just thirteen. And then at fourteen, her own poem “Ida Grey: A Story of Woman’s Sacrifice” was published in a feminist journal.

KIM: Wow, precocious. She reminds me of the episode we did on Nathalia Crane, the child poet.  

AMY: Yeah. I mean, in that case, Nathalia… there’s a question of whether or not she was really writing those poems, but in this case it’s pretty clear that Levy was obviously a very intelligent young woman.  

KIM: That’s right. Anyway, Levy’s family was supportive of her education. She went to Brighton and Hove High School, a day school for girls in East Sussex. And then at 17 she began her studies at Newnham College, an all female college at Cambridge University. She was the first Jewish student at Newnham when she arrived in 1879, but she left before completing her final exams. (And a side note, at that time women could study and attend lectures with a chaperone, but they weren’t given degrees at Cambridge until 1948.) She then published three novels and lots of poetry and essays before taking her own life at age 28. So young — and we’ll talk more about that later. But I did want to note that Oscar Wilde actually wrote her obituary, which really says something about her. But let’s go back a little. Ann, can you tell us more about what is known about Levy’s time at Cambridge and why she may have left?

ANN: Sure. Well, as you said, she went to a progressive girls’ school in Brighton, and that was at a time when well-off families would usually have governesses. And with governesses, the standard could be very variable depending on how good an education they, themselves, had had. So this was a period in the 1870s when new girls’ schools started, and they very much put an emphasis on academic achievement and excellence. Some of those teachers had attended the very first women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, which were just starting, and one of them was very influential on Amy. She was a Classics teacher — she was actually the head mistress — and her name was Edith Creek. She had been at Newnham herself. She was one of, literally, the first five students at Newnham College. She was a hero to Amy, and she wanted to follow in her footsteps. In a way, she was perfect Cambridge material, because she was so bright, she was so hard-working. She was, as you say, a very early achiever in that she had already published her poetry in adult journals, which is extraordinary, I think. But then probably Newnham didn’t quite live up to her own expectations, and perhaps that did have to do with being Jewish. I think at that time, even though the family was very assimilated, a Jewish woman stood out. And she was the first Jewish woman at Cambridge, so I think she did feel a bit isolated in that regard. I got interested in her because of what I write about: the research on the first Cambridge students and the first teachers at the colleges. And she became very friendly with Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, who taught her English literature. I think they developed a close friendship and that’s what Amy enjoyed most about Cambridge, probably.

AMY: You can actually find a lot of Amy’s poems on the Internet, and there was one that she wrote about Cambridge called “Cambridge in the Long,” and it seemed to convey her conflicted feelings about being at Cambridge, whether it was homesickness or feeling like she didn’t fit in. There was a sadness to that poem in that at the very end she writes that “the pain of living is too keen.” That’s already… when she’s at Cambridge we’re already starting to see that. So she decides to leave Cambridge. She moves back into her parents’ house — they were living in Bloomsbury by this time. I think I had seen somewhere, also, that it was possible she left Cambridge just because she was ready to start her work as a writer. So maybe it had more to do with just being like, “I’m ready. I don’t see the need for this as much anymore; I’m starting to publish.”

ANN: Yeah. And I think the year that she left, 1881, is a big year in Cambridge women’s history, because that was the year they were allowed to sit the final exams, and for most of Newnham students and Girton (the other women’s college) that was a great achievement because suddenly it looked as if women were becoming equal to men. They could sit the exams; they had a right to sit the finals. But I think Amy Levy had, you know, she knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a writer. And to sit the final exams, you had to study mathematics, and she had no interest in having to jump through hoops and study mathematics; she wanted to do her writing, as you say.

AMY: She is a girl after my own heart if she was trying to get away from the math exams.

KIM: I know, I was thinking the same thing! If you can’t get your degree anyway, why take the exam in math? Yeah.

ANN: Yeah.

AMY: Her circle of friends, as we said, included Ellen Wordsworth Darwin. She was the daughter-in-law of Charles Darwin). Then there was Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx), and Violet Paget — she was a gay writer who wrote essays on art and supernatural fiction under the name of Vernon Lee. I guess we need to add her to our episode list, because I had never read anything by her. It’s thought that Amy Levy was actually in love with her. 

KIM: Yeah, and Amy Levy first met Vernon Lee on a trip to Florence in 1886. She visited the Jewish ghetto there and it had a huge impact on her. As a result, she wrote a series of essays on Jewish culture and literature for The Jewish Chronicle, including “The Ghetto at Florence,” “The Jew in Fiction,” “Jewish Humour,” and “Jewish Children.” In her essay “The Jew in Fiction,” she criticises the treatment of Jewish characters by different novelists, including Disraeli, Dickens, and Eliot. Ann, do we know anything about how these essays were received by the Jewish community and the writing community, respectively? 

ANN: Yes, I think it’s very interesting, actually. The reason that she went to Florence was she was commissioned by The Jewish Chronicle to go there and report back and say how the Jewish ghetto (which, it was a tourist place; it was a beautiful area to visit, really), so they asked her to go. So that shows you how much trust they already had in her as a writer and that she would report back. And that was the first time, I think, that she’d written about Jewish issues, so that made her start examining how she fitted into the community as a woman. And the political situation at the time in Florence opened her eyes to women who perhaps lived life in a more unconventional way, such as Vernon Lee. Vernon Lee encouraged her to reach out a bit more with her poetry, with the themes that she tackled, to be more ambitious as a writer. And also at that time in London she was living in her parents’ house, but she was very much acting as an independent woman — going to the British Museum, meeting (as you say) Eleanor Marx, Beatrix Webb and socialists and feminists, so that was the circle she was mixing in, and she started to branch out and become more ambitious in her writing. And so, as far as I know in terms of the reception of her work at the time, the fact that The Jewish Chronicle kept commissioning her work shows that they liked it, that it went down well with their readers. So she was taking an intelligent look at their community. She wasn’t seen as somebody who was undermining any things that they felt were important at the time. 

AMY: And then it does seem that with Reuben Sachs, which we’ll be discussing, her perspective on the Jewish culture in London does get a little more complicated, I think. But let’s go back and talk about her first novel, The Romance of a Shop — that was published in 1888, and she wound up being one of twenty leading female authors who were invited to take part in the first Women’s Literary Dinner at Piccadilly, which became an annual event until 1914. And so Ann, you write a lot about the Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. Are those connected in any way?

ANN: Yeah, I like to think they are. I mean, I don’t know for sure. The Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society was a gathering of friends. They were twelve women who all knew each other mostly as the wives of male Cambridge academics. (All our academics were male). But also some of the women lecturers like Ellen Darwin, she had been a lecturer at Newnham; when she got married, she had to give up her work. But women like that, who were very intellectual but also good friends. So there were Newnham women and former students and wives who all had something in common. My feeling is that they knew what was going on in London. So I think it was a Cambridge version of the London women’s dinners. They decided that they’d have these dinners once a term. They’d discuss a set topic. I don’t know what topics they discussed, but I’m guessing they were often to do with literature and the “new woman” and issues of the day (women’s suffrage and things like that). The fact that they had these connections… (and obviously, Ellen Darwin knew Amy Levy and some of the women who were at the Piccadilly dinner.) This was very unusual; women didn’t just have dinners on their own. They always went with their husbands. You could have tea with other ladies in the afternoon, but you didn’t have an evening meal, and you certainly didn’t have an intellectual discussion, but that’s exactly what they did. So I think there was a sort of an echo between London and Cambridge at that time. Intellectual women were saying, “Look, we don’t need men to have intellectual conversations. We actually have better intellectual conversations among ourselves when we don’t have to play the part of the devoted wife and the mistress of the home,” sort of thing. So that, I think, was a nice connection. So that’s how I discovered Amy Levy, really, was that they had similar experiences with women’s clubs.

AMY: It never occurred to me that that was a novel or a sort of revolutionary sort of thing for them to be doing. And in fact, in my head, I was picturing it more as teas. I was picturing it as more of a daytime, “pretty lady,” …

KIM: Ladies who lunch.

AMY: Yeah. That’s the thought I had in my head. 

ANN: But the other funny thing is, in London, they said there were reports at the time that they were speaking to each other through a cloud of cigarette smoke. Of course, in those days, no nice lady would smoke in front of a man. They did smoke, but they would only smoke with other women. So that was a nice thing, that they could be free, they could express themselves and have a half a cigarette. That was how daring it got.

AMY: And also just to think about maybe what kind of conversations they were having about men.

ANN: Indeed.

AMY: To be a fly on the wall!

ANN: Yes, yes.

AMY: So I think this is probably a great time to begin our discussion of Reuben Sachs, which is Levy’s second novel, published in 1888 (the same year that The Romance of a Shop came out). What do you remember about first reading Reuben Sachs, and what was your initial response to it?

ANN: My initial response was how beautifully written it is. It takes you straight into the story of Reuben Sachs and his family life, and you feel the connections between all these people. It’s a little bit shocking, because she very much strikes you with a satirical component of it. She does mention Jewishness, race, the tribal community. And she’s quite funny (but in an ironic way) about the foibles of these families, that they care about money and they care about social advancement. Even Reuben Sachs, who is our hero, he’s an aspiring lawyer. At the beginning of the book, he’s had a nervous breakdown and he’s come back from six months in the Antipodes, but there is this question mark over what’s gone on. Why has he had a breakdown? And the sense is that perhaps it’s because of the social expectations that he is under. He is the “golden child” of the family. He’s expected to become an MP (a member of Parliament). He’s expected to make money. He’s expected to marry well. And all those things probably weigh on him, but in a sense, he doesn’t mind it. So it’s a funny sort of conjunction of humor, but almost with this slight bitterness to it. It’s funny. I mean, it’s funny, but it’s quite striking, with a political edge to it. It’s not something you would expect from a Victorian novel, I think. 

KIM: No, that’s absolutely right. That’s similar to what I felt when I read it for the first time, too. And I think this might be a great place to give our listeners a little overview of the plot. We’ve given them a little taste of it with a little bit about Reuben, but Amy, why don’t you give a stab at (without any spoilers) a little overview.

AMY: Okay. It’s about these two young people of marriageable age who live in London. We have the title character, Reuben, who is the scion of a wealthy Jewish family. And then there is Judith, a poor relation of his by marriage, who has been brought up by The Leunigers. They are Reuben’s rich aunt and uncle. Judith’s own family lives in a less-than-desirable neighborhood and it’s seen as a great advantage for her to be brought up alongside the rest of her cousins. So Judith and Reuben have this sort of unique opportunity to be around each other often in a casual, family setting and they are very close as you would tend to be with somebody that you’ve known your whole life. So, as Ann mentions, at the beginning of the novel, Reuben has returned from abroad — he was sent away by the family doctor to recover from nervous exhaustion caused by overwork — he has ambitions to become a member of parliament). His family, as a result, expects him to marry someone wealthy of their choosing, and they are deeply opposed to a union between Reuben and Judith even though it’s clear there is an unspoken spark between them. I’m going to read a passage from the novel… this is from Reuben’s perspective… he is thinking about Judith and trying to justify the fact that he’s sort of playing her both ways. He is enjoying their flirtation even as he also knows it can lead nowhere: 

She liked him immensely, of course, but she was unsentimental, like most women of her race, and would settle down happily-enough when the time came. He told himself these things with a secret, pleasant consciousness of a subtler element in their relationship; of unsounded depths in the nature of this girl who trusted him so completely, and whom he had so completely in hand. Nor did he hide from himself that she charmed him and pleased his taste as no other woman had ever done. A man does not so easily deceive himself in these matters, and during the last year or two he had been fully aware of a quickening in his sentiments towards her. Yes, Reuben knew by now that he was in love with Judith Quixano. The situation was full of delights, of dangers, of pains and pleasantnesses. A disturbing element in the serene course of his existence, it added a charm to existence of which he was in no haste to be rid.

KIM: In some ways it’s a typical “star-crossed lovers” plot, but one of the things that makes Reuben Sachs stand out from your standard late-Victorian novel is its feminist polemic. You can kind of see that in the passage Amy just read. I mean, it’s clear that Reuben knows that he could eventually hurt Judith, but he’s just going to do it anyway. And, even though the novel is called Reuben Sachs, I felt like, in a lot of ways, Judith was really the heroine of the book. 

AMY: Yeah, this book felt like Judith’s story, and I kept wondering why Levy didn’t use her name as the title of the book. Going into it, I thought, “Okay, this is going to be a whole novel about this man, Reuben,” when really Judith, to me, was the focus. Do you think Amy was making any sort of statement with regard to the title? Maybe this idea that women don’t get to win in the end? (They don’t get the boy of their dreams and they don’t get to be the title of the book, either!)

ANN: That’s a very good point, and I think there’s a contrast with her previous novel, which was published the same year. (I mean, she was just in a frenzy of creativity.) But what’s unusual about Romance of a Shop is that the sisters all run this photographic studio themselves. They’re independent and they don’t need to attract a man. They’re getting on with their lives. But Reuben Sachs takes a more oblique view of the marriage market. It’s a more cynical view and I think it emphasizes the fact that, more realistically for women, particularly Jewish women, was that to have any sense of identity they would have to get married and have children. And they’d have to marry well. Reuben Sachs would be an advantageous marriage for Judith Quixano, because she has no money and she needs the support. She is generously supported by the Leuniger family. Bear in mind that even though Amy Levy is very savagely ironic in this book, she makes it clear that the families are very kind. They have looked after Judith. They have treated her as one of their own. They don’t see her as a threat, even though she might possibly marry the golden son whom they want to do well and climb the social ladder. They don’t dislike her for that or shun her or treat her as a poor relative. They actually treat her very well. And so part of the novel is about the closeness of families. But within families, there is a bit of jockeying for power, for what way of life they aspire to. Reuben has to be the successful son. We have the contrast with Leo, who plays the violin beautifully, but he’s never going to do anything important. He’s never going to make a lot of money, whereas Reuben is their chance. So I think their relationship with Judith, he’s not toying with her. We’d probably see it today as that he’s being very selfish, but in a way, that represents a part of him that’s probably his truer part, but he knows he has this responsibility to the family to climb the ladder to do well. And so the novel is a critique, that it’s as hard on him as it is for Judith. But Judith, as you say, is the heroine. We understand what she’s thinking; we see things very much from her point of view and how she accepts that the love she has for Reuben isn’t going to be possible in the community that they live in.

KIM: That’s actually a perfect segue into getting Judith’s perspective. So in counterpoint to what Amy read with Reuben’s feelings for Judith, I’m going to read a little more about Judith’s feelings for Reuben (and it’s also from the beginning of the novel):

Meanwhile Judith, acquiescent, receptive, appreciative, took the good things this friendship offered her, and shut her eyes to the future. Not, as she believed, that she ever for a moment deceived herself. That would scarcely have been possible in the atmosphere in which she breathed. She had known from the beginning, how could she fail to know? that Reuben must do great things for himself in every relation of life; must ultimately climb to inaccessible heights where she could not hope to follow.  Her pride and her humility went hand in hand, and she prided herself on her own good sense which made any mistake in the matter impossible. And that he was so sensible, was what she particularly admired in Reuben.

Judith sees herself the way society does: that he’s “inaccessible” to her. And, to underline our point regarding Levy’s focus on Judith and women in general, Julia Neuberger writes in the preface of the Persephone edition, “This is a novel about women, and Jewish women, about families, and Jewish families, about snobbishness, and Jewish snobbishness.” 

AMY: Levy is very critical of the day-to-day life of women in the book. It’s very different from Levy’s own life among these intellectual women writers that she was palling around with. The women in this novel are basically kind of shallow — they’re gossiping, playing cards, and shopping. I’d say that Levy’s tone is mocking and cynical, at times. 

KIM: It’s not exactly flattering, but she also shows how the women are fairly trapped in that lifestyle. It’s what’s expected of them. She’s writing about Jewish high society, and as a Jewish author, you would think that Levy might have been lauded for what she saw as a more realistic portrayal of Jewish characters in this milieu, but it actually resulted in a lot of controversy at the time the book was published — people were shocked. And it’s also potentially problematic for modern readers as well. Ann, can you help us by delving into Levy’s portrayal of contemporary Jews in the novel and maybe what she was trying to do with that?

ANN: I think at the time she was criticized, very much, when the book came out, and I think it probably took her by surprise because probably the milieu that she was in at a daily level were intelligent women, writers, people who could understand approaching things in a slightly different way. I think that Levy didn’t see it as an attack on the Jewish community. You have to remember that she herself (as far as we know) she seemed to be attracted to other women, and she wanted to have a relationship with another woman. I think she craved acceptance in a community and to find an attachment to another woman and live that life. But she knew, particularly with Jewish women, that wouldn’t be possible because as far as they were concerned, they had to get married; they had to have children. They couldn’t have a romantic female friendship. And probably Gentile women, Amy felt she wasn’t very attractive to them. She felt, as a Jewish woman, they would look down on her and they would not see her as the same social level that they were. So she felt a bit trapped and she was satirizing the society that made her feel so ostracized. But she didn’t dislike her community. She was very close to her family, to her cousins, to her friends. So the fact that people read the book in a very literal sense to say that she was criticizing the community, I think they just didn’t get it. She was criticizing and satirizing the sort of English society as a whole that commodified women. That made getting money the only important thing. That made climbing the ladder of success the only important thing and sacrificed women in the pursuit of money and power. I think she felt she was making a funny riposte to novels like, as we’ve said, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, which has been called a philo-Semitic novel — she’s trying to create very positive Jewish characters. But Amy Levy thought, “No, that’s just creating another set of cliches. This is what I want to show it’s like, and I’m making a sort of funny, almost documentary-like study of a community and this is how it works, from the very garish furniture to the not-very-well-designed clothes that the women wear, and so on.” I think it’s actually meant to be affectionate, in a funny way, and I think it hurt her when people turned against her for that.

AMY: Yeah, it seems like as a member of the community you do have a little more license to be satirical about your own people, right?

ANN: Yeah. It’s like Woody Allen or Philip Roth or somebody like that. It’s an “in joke” for the community. That’s how I see it.

AMY: You can definitely see that as you’re reading the novel, but at the same time, as a modern reader, you do feel a little uneasy. Like, “Am I supposed to be laughing? I know she meant that to be funny, but I don’t necessarily feel like I should laugh.” And then there are also… the fact that she kind of paints all the different members of the family differently with regard to how they practice their faith. So you have the devout patriarchs of the family. Then you have one cousin who’s basically a nonbeliever; she doesn’t even bother going to synagogue at all. The cousin, Leo, that you mentioned, he’s an artist who’s grappling with what he doesn’t like about the Jewish culture, whereas Reuben eloquently defends the faith at every opportunity. So it feels a lot like she was making the family be a microcosm for the whole Jewish community and how they interact with one another and how they treat one another. They will have their little spats within the community. I think I’d even read that at the time there was a large influx of Eastern European Jews immigrating to England at this time and you could almost sense that there’s a kind of hierarchy. Who’s the “correct Jew?” Who’s the “right Jew?”

ANN: Yeah. Her own family, they did assimilate a lot in English society and they were English people, but they were Anglo-Jews. It was almost like the deal was that you could fit into English society if you didn’t appear too Jewish. You could be Jewish, but you weren’t really allowed to mention your religion or expect to have it respected. They were in an uneasy sort of relationship with the other middle class people that they knew, and as you say, this influx of immigrants caused (as it has done in modern times) a sort of increased racism in general in English society). So the people who were Jewish almost had to play it down in wider society, whereas in the privacy of their own homes and the connections to their own families, they could be themselves. They were on a tightrope, really, between the two different lifestyles that they had and what they aspired to, which often involved them denying their important Jewish rituals and family values. 

KIM: I think that’s really great context to help us understand sort of what Levy’s trying to do here and what her community would have been like, and maybe also, why she was surprised that they were shocked. And I think we’ve probably intrigued our listeners enough that it might be a great time to share another passage from the book so they can get a feel of the beauty of the writing in the book that we describe. Ann, would you like to read a passage?

ANN: Sure. So this passage is from near the start of the book after Rueuben has returned from his travels and is being welcomed with a small family reception, and his cousin, Leo is there. Leo is a talented violin player. It’s funny, because he’s studying classics at Cambridge, but none of the family think that’s very important. But when he starts to play his violin, then the mood changes a little:

Then, all at once, the music broke forth. The great, vulgar, over-decorated room with its garish lights, its stifling fumes of gas, was filled with the sound of dreams; and over the keen faces stole, like a softening mist, a far-away air of dreamy sensuousness. The long, delicate hands of the violinist, the dusky, sensitive face, as he bent lovingly over the instrument, seemed to vibrate with the strings over which he had such mastery.

The voice of a troubled soul cried out to-night in Leo's music, whose accents even the hard brilliance of his accompanist failed to drown. As the bow was drawn across the strings for the last time, Ernest’s solitaire board fell to the ground with a crash, the little balls of Venetian glass rolling audibly in every direction.

The spell was broken; every one rose, and the card-players, who by this time were hungry, came strolling in from the other room.

AMY: It’s almost foreshadowing the fact that Judith’s spell is going to be broken, too, you know, the spell that Reuben has cast over her, the beauty of their relationship... it’s all about to come crashing down, sadly, for her. 

ANN: Yes, because the music is very much tied in with Reuben’s feelings about Judith; that if they could just escape from all the stuff that surrounds them, from the life, from the expectations, that they could soar to a higher level of love and communication. And it’s that feeling of bitterness, in a bittersweet way, that they have such love for each other (it’s very clear) but somehow the spell has to be broken. The solitaire game breaks it up and the card players come in and the family chat commences. It’s a lovely moment, I think, because it shows you the promise that true love could find, and I think it shows something of Amy’s own yearning for a moment like that and how the spell keeps getting broken; the sadness comes back into the happy unity they found.

AMY: Judith had very limited options for her future, and maybe Amy felt that way, as somebody that was attracted to women. She felt like, “Okay, there’s not a route for me,” you know, so in the same way that Judith just has to accept what she’s been dealt, Amy just has to realize that maybe she’s not going to get to have a relationship like that. 

ANN: Yeah. That poignancy of soul mates, that you can feel very close to somebody, and they can be a soul mate, and yet, something intervenes. Society intervenes. You can’t build your life around that person because there are too many expectations of you to do something otherwise, I think. Yes.

AMY: She wrote that Judith would have had to just “open her mouth and shut her eyes and swallow what the fates had sent her.” So basically, this idea that life is a bitter pill for women and their only option is to accept it.

ANN: Yes, and I think it’s also important to say there is a great sadness in the book, but there is also a hopefulness, and I think, without any plot spoilers, the book ends on a hopeful note. Despite everything that’s happened there is promise for the future, and I think part of that promise is that women will be more fulfilled in the future. That they will be truer to themselves. There’s a certain hope that that will take place. That things won’t always be like this.

AMY: Which is true. It did change for us.

ANN: Indeed. Yes. 

KIM: I think we can say it’s not an entirely happy ending, but maybe there is a little hope. 

ANN: Definitely. 

AMY: Of course, Levy’s own ending is not happy, either. It’s quite sad. As we said, she took her life just a few days before her 28th birthday and she left instructions to be cremated, which was very unusual for a Jewish person. 

KIM: Yeah, I think I read she was the first Jewish woman in London to ever request to be cremated, in fact. Ann, do we know much about the final months or weeks of her life and do we know what prompted her to take her own life? I know there are a couple of different theories. What are your thoughts? 

ANN: Well, I think, as you said, she suffered lifelong bouts of clinical depression, and depression was not well understood at that time. I mean, it’s still not well understood, in a way, but people thought, “Oh, she’s a poet; she’s melancholy; that all fits with her.” Nobody, perhaps, took it very seriously, how debilitating it was for her. Her brother had died (had probably taken his life) the year before, it’s thought because he suffered from syphilis. So that’s bound to have affected her. And even though she seemed not to be affected by the criticisms of Reuben Sachs, she put it to one side, she carried on writing and socializing, there was obviously a sadness underneath it all. During this period, the book had come out, she was doing well — it was selling well — and she met the poet W.B. Yeats. He said later about her she was a very striking-looking woman but you could tell the sadness beneath it all. So that’s very telling. He wasn’t the only person who commented that she had a slightly, perhaps manic, side to her. She was working incredibly hard, but there was a sadness underneath it, that perhaps she was holding it at bay. And then the month of August, she’d heard The Jewish Chronicle made a negative comment about Reuben Sachs, and perhaps that just sent her into a spiral of despair. She’d had spirals before and come out of them, but this one, she didn’t get better, and she took her life in September, 1889, so it’s desperately sad, and it’s such a shame because she was actually making a name for herself. At this time, she was going out, she was socializing; she was making plans and arrangements and writing essays and planning to be published. She knew her career was taking off at this point, but she just fell into despair and she didn’t come out of it. So it’s very sad.

KIM: I’m wondering if the issues with the satirical portrayal of Jews is maybe one of the reasons this book isn’t as well-known as maybe it should be? What are your thoughts on sort of why it’s maybe not as well-known?

ANN: Yes, I think it is partly to do with that. It was felt people read it very literally; that Amy Levy would still, some people would describe her as a self-hating Jew. But I think that’s very unfair and I think it oversimplifies what she was trying to do. I think she was trying to show something of the life of her Jewish community. The good things, the bad things. But do it in a witty, literary way, and she was very much placing herself along with Trollope, along with George Eliot and Dickens and people like that, to show people that she could use a literary novel to subvert some of the expectations of Jewish life at the time. She told herself she wanted to be like Zola or Alfonse Daudet, French naturalists. She wanted to do something similar for her own community. So I think if she’d been male, people would have seen the book, perhaps, on a different level, but almost like some women writers, we’ll say today, “Well, women publish more memoirs; women write about their experiences.” But it’s almost like, well, that’s what they’re expected to do and that’s what they’re allowed to do, rather than say, she’s being very clever; she’s subverting expectations of what a woman writer can write about. And she’s been forgotten about and neglected because of that. 

KIM: I agree with you completely, and I think it is a real shame. I hope that at least a few of our listeners will read this book, because honestly, it is so worth your time. It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in the last few years, and as you can imagine, I’ve read a lot of books in the last few years. So yeah, please, please read this book. 

ANN: It’s also worth mentioning Oscar Wilde’s obituary for her. As you said, he saw her work as having “a touch of genius,” and she wrote several things for his magazine. He said, even if you just read her poetry (because you can read her poetry; it’s online, it’s available) he said, “that would be enough to mark the writer as a poet of no mean excellence.” and that “no intelligent critic could fail to see the promise of greater things in her poetry.” And I think the same thing would go, even more so, for her fiction, because she would have developed into much deeper novels. I think she was very much at a beginning period. But the fact that she could write with such extraordinary sophistication and beauty at such a young age shows the promise of greater things that were sadly not to be. She was a Jewish writer who wasn’t afraid to take on some of the precious beliefs of what a woman should be, and that marriage and children were the highest object of a woman’s life. I think that she was prepared to challenge that in her own life, the way she lived her life and how she earned her living and how she had ambitions as a writer and wanted to take on the established writers of the time. And I think that’s very moving when you think how early on that was — 1889 — it was just the beginning of women finding their voice, finding their unique individualism in society and being able to be themselves. The fact that she didn’t fit in so much but that she dared to write what she believed and what made sense to her and what was beautiful to her is very moving, and I think it’s very valuable for that reason. As long as you don’t take it too seriously and feel that she was being entirely serious. She’s being very ironic. She’s being satirical. And it’s just taking it with a pinch of salt. It’s very moving that her family, even long after she died, her sisters were approaching publishers and saying “Won’t you reissue this book? It’s really good.” Nobody who was close to her… didn’t feel she was somehow criticizing them; they felt this was just her and that’s how she wrote and that she should be better known.

KIM: Mm-hmm. There’s always the people that take things too literally, unfortunately.

ANN: Yes.

AMY: Do you have any other favorite lost ladies of literature that you would recommend taking a look at, especially any other Cambridge ladies?

ANN: Yes, well one of the nonfiction things I would suggest is called A Suppressed Cry by Victoria Glendinning, and it’s a biography of a woman at Newnham at the same time (or just after) Amy Levy. It’s a very short little biography, but it brings to life what it was like to be a student at that time. She actually enjoyed her studies there, but she couldn’t make it work. She didn’t stay very long at Newnham, and it’s good to read the story to find out why that was. As far as fiction is concerned, there’s a novelist called F.M. Mayor. She wrote The Third Miss Symons in 1913. Flora Mayor had been a student at Newnham in the 1890s. She then became an actress, but wasn’t very successful. Ended up going back home and living with her parents in the vicarage and becoming a writer. And actually, she was quite happy with her single life as a writer, but she writes about the third Miss Symons as a very lonely woman who never married, who was a bit like Amy Levy — always wanting to find love — and she never found it. So the book is very poignant about what it was to be a single woman, a rather superfluous woman, at the time. And the other one that she wrote is The Rector’s Daughter. It’s almost looking at it from the other point of view, about a woman called Mary whose father is a rector. She’s quite happy living at home looking after her father, and then she falls in love. It’s just how that disrupts her peace and quiet. It’s just an absolutely lovely book, and it very much sums up that era in a really nice way, I think.

AMY: Newnham College is all new to me. I was unaware of it, really, as being a part of Cambridge until we started working on this episode, and now I’m really kind of fascinated by this women’s college and what it would have been like… (what it’s like still) but also what it would have been like in the early days.

ANN: It’s a good year to notice Newnham because it’s exactly 150 years that Newnham was first established, so there’s going to be a lot of celebrations this year. But I should also mention Girton College, because that was the other women’s college. It was outside of Cambridge and it took a different approach to Newnham, but they both sort of grew up together and eventually became incorporated into the university. Newnham is the last all-women college of Oxford and Cambridge, and it’s very much stayed only women. 

AMY: This discussion has been fascinating. It was so fun getting to dive into this author and this book a little bit more with you! Thank you so much for lending your expertise to us!

KIM: Thanks again, we really appreciate you.

ANN: Well thanks so much for inviting me. It’s been lovely.

KIM: Until next week, don’t forget to sign up for our Lost Ladies of Lit newsletter to keep up to date on all our future authors. And if you have a moment, if you could give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast, it would be really helpful. 

AMY: Thanks for joining us everybody! Bye!

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

30. Martha Gellhorn

AMY: Hey everyone! Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And so, we are actually recording today’s episode a week before the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick Ernest Hemingway documentary starts airing on PBS, but by the time this episode airs, it will be readily available for everyone. I live for these documentaries. I’m so excited. I’ve been looking forward to this one for probably the last 10 months … the minute they announced it.

KIM: As soon as you mention Hemingway, I think of the podcast episode we did a few months ago on Stella Gibbons. She actually said her idea of hell was having to go shopping with Hemingway for fishing rods at Harrods (or something like that).

AMY: Yeah, exactly, I know Hemingway is a literary legend, but he’s also kind of divisive. You either probably love him or you can’t stand him, and it definitely goes without saying that his relationships with (and portrayal of) women are both complicated and, at times, pretty problematic. 

KIM: Right, he had some serious “Mommy” issues, didn’t he, as I recall. And he actually had four different wives, is that right? 

AMY: Yep. He was notorious for lining up the next lady in his life before he walked out on the current one, but there is one exception to that: Martha Gellhorn, his third wife — she dumped him after five years of marriage. She was sick of his drinking, bullying and jealousy. (Granted, he did kind of have the next wife pretty much waiting in the wings by that point, but it was Martha who officially ended things.) She was a journalist and author with a career of her own, and she had no interest in dialing back her own professional pursuits to suit him, which is what he wanted from her. 

KIM: The fact that she had this writing career of her own very much reminds me of Charmian Kittredge London, Jack London’s wife, whom we devoted an entire episode to back in March. In Charmian’s case, she did end up putting her husband ahead of her own career, but I’m intrigued by the fact that Martha Gellhorn was kind of like, “No, I’m outta here.”

AMY: For sure, yet in some ways it’s kind of sad that she’s always been best known for her association with Hemingway. Because there’s so much more to her than that. She famously noted, “I was a writer before I met him, and I have been a writer for 45 years since. Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life?”

KIM: Uh, yeah, exactly! And I mean, we did learn the repercussions of that with Charmian, because that’s sort of what ended up happening to her. Had you ever read anything by Martha Gellhorn?

AMY: Honestly, no, I hadn’t (which I kind of feel bad about) but I did get a book of her novellas in preparation for this episode, so I’ve been reading those. She published 14 novellas, 5 novels and two collections of short stories. And we can touch on some of the novellas in a moment… her extensive travels and her experience as a journalist definitely shaped the fiction-writing that she did.

KIM: Ooh, I want to borrow those soon when you’re finished — the novellas. Looking into Gellhorn’s life, completely independent of Hemingway, she’s pretty fascinating on her own. Her mother was a famous suffragette, from whom she clearly inherited that fearless, “take-no-crap” attitude. Martha got her start as a foreign correspondent in 1930 when she dropped out of Bryn Mawr college and moved to Paris. But she got fired from one of her first gigs working for the United Press after she reported being sexually harassed. 

AMY: Yeah, and I was surprised by that fact. (I mean not surprised that she was sexually harassed on the job because we all know that’s not a new phenomenon), but to think of a woman in the 1930s blowing the whistle and not standing for it is interesting and cool. And then, of course, for her to be fired for it is just so maddening, but not surprising. She obviously did not let this slow her down, though. Her journalism career continued for several years abroad, and then in 1934 she returned to America. She was really interested in the plight of the common man, and so when she was 25, she ended up taking a job working for the Roosevelt administration’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration. As part of this gig she traveled all over the American South observing the grim poverty that so many people were living in during the Great Depression. She later used these experiences and observations as a basis for a book of four novellas called The Trouble I’ve Seen, and these are among the stories that I’ve recently read. They reminded me a lot of Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath kind of thing. They’re very grim, and very journalistic in the portrait that they paint. 

KIM: Right, and she may have been a champion of ordinary people, but for a time there, she was actually living in the White House before she even met Hemingway, right? How on earth did that happen?

AMY: I know! Who just gets to go live in the White House? But yes, Eleanor Roosevelt had gone to school with Martha’s mother, the famous suffragist that we mentioned earlier — Edna Gelhorn. Eleanor was very interested in the reports that Martha was making as part of her job with the Emergency Relief Administration, so she invited her to the White House so she could relay what she was seeing to FDR himself. (Sort of “Tell Franklin what you’re seeing,” that kind of thing.) And though Martha actually later got fired from that organization for inciting a riot among unemployed workers in Idaho…

KIM: Whoa!

AMY: Yeah, wow, she sounds like a firebrand! The Roosevelts were fans of hers, though, and they ended up extending an invitation for her to come stay with them for a spell at the White House. So she lived there for two months and she even helped Eleanor with her “My Day” newspaper columns that she wrote. (Sidenote: she was also friends with H.G. Wells. So Martha was hanging in some high circles.]

KIM: Wow. Okay, but it seems really crazy that she’s so associated with Hemingway when she has all this other stuff going on for herself. I mean, wow, how did she have time for him and all of his stuff? And let’s not forget that, like Hemingway, she was a war correspondent, as well, covering every major war for six decades, starting with the Spanish Civil War and ending with the Vietnam War. Wow. She was totally fearless. During World War II she convinced British bombers to let her come along on flights for night bombing raids for example.

AMY: Right, and then her coverage of the D-Day invasion is basically the stuff of legend, and I can’t believe I’d never heard this story before now. Just to set the stage for this, her marriage to Ernest Hemingway was very much on the brink of collapse by this point. It was the summer of 1944. He had even sent her a cable saying, “Are you a war correspondent or a wife in my bed?”). 

KIM: First of all, whoa, and second of all, cables are great. I love getting these glimpses into the things that people would put in a cable! Can you imagine?

AMY: Yeah, that’s true. It’s a funny thing to telegraph. But you can imagine her reaction to receiving it, right? Not happy. And it gets worse for their relationship, because with the approach of D-Day, Hemingway managed to secure credentials to go cover the invasion for Collier's magazine. Gellhorn, though (she typically wrote for Collier’s) she was unable to get official press clearance to cover it because each magazine could only send one reporter. (So he basically swiped her spot for Collier’s). She did not let that stop her, though. She snuck onto a hospital ship by flashing an expired press badge, and she lied that she was there to interview nurses. They let her get on to the Red Cross ship. She couldn’t believe it even worked. But once she was on board, she locked herself in the bathroom of the ship in order to just be able to sneak along for the ride, basically! She stayed there for the course of the night and the next morning, she looks out a ship window and there are the beaches of Normandy! So she manages to get off the boat later by posing as a stretcher bearer. So she’s blending in, but she’s actually helping evacuate patients and all that. She’s doing her part to actually help with what’s going on. But in effect, she wound up getting to the invasion site before Hemingway did… so she beat him to the punch, because all of the other actual credentialed journalists had been kept farther offshore waiting on boats. So her report of the incident wound up being published in Collier’s first. Not only was she the only woman on the beaches of Normandy in the days following the Allied invasion. (It was her and 160,000 men!), she was also the first American correspondent to land on French soil after the troops did. 

KIM: Okay, I feel like giving a standing ovation after that. I mean, that’s incredible! Where is the Steven Spielberg movie about this story? Oh my gosh, this is incredible! It’s movie-making stuff! Wow, wow, wow. 

AMY: So much cooler than just the fact that she was married to Ernest Hemingway. This is the story, right?

KIM: Totally. This is the story, yeah. She also reported from Dachau when it was being liberated, which naturally was an extremely sobering experience, and her accounts of what she witnessed there are almost excruciating to read. She also ended up adopting an Italian orphan boy while she was in Europe. It required assistance from Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt for her to be able to bring him back to the U.S. with her after the war.

KIM: So then following her divorce from Hemingway, she had a string of relationships, including another marriage, but really, her work remained her predominant passion in life. She even wrote, “Be advised, love passes. Work alone remains.” And she continued to report on wars until she physically could not anymore. That was in the 1980s — her eyesight was starting to fail her. I think being in the middle of war zones is where she actually felt most alive. She liked to live on that knife’s edge of danger and adventure. And a conventional life that most women of her era were living would never have suited her. She just needed that adrenaline rush all the time. In the later decades of her life, she called London home, and at the age of 89, like Hemingway, she took her own life — swallowing cyanide. She had been suffering from ovarian cancer and that just became too much for her to bear. That was in 1998.

KIM: Wow. What a life. And having learned all this about her makes me so much more interested in learning more about her. I know there was a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen called Hemingway and Gellhorn, which could be worth checking out. And I’ll do that now. 

AMY: Yeah, I think you can rent it on Amazon Prime. And of course, don’t forget to check out the PBS Hemingway documentary (which I’m sure she factors into) if you haven’t already. I know it’s not going to disappoint!

KIM: So if I wanted to start reading some of Gellhorn’s work, where do you think I should start?

AMY: Well, like I said, she’s wrote five novels including one called A Stricken Field, which is set among refugees in Czecholslovokia just prior to the Nazi invasion… There’s another book, Liana, which is set in the French Caribbean. But I would actually recommend starting with her novellas. Many critics deem her novellas better than the novels even. There’s a collection that came out from Knopf in 1992… and that includes The Trouble I’ve Seen, the one I’ve mentioned from her time working for the Roosevelt administration. That collection also includes The Weather in Africa, which is actually three novellas set in Africa. I expected those to be very “Hemingway-esque,” but they’re not at all. They reminded me more of maybe Isak Dinesen or something like that. I think my favorites, though, are the stories about marriage and relationships. Some are set in England, some in the States. There was one passage I loved from a story called For Richer or For Poorer that I’m going to read, because it will give you a sense of how (unlike Hemingway) she is really able to draw her female characters so well. So this is just about a character who is sort of luring a man in, and I think it’s just very telling:

She watched Tippy with a practiced, almost a scientific eye. She had seen this happen so often: the male blooming, expanding, flowering, and not because one took any real trouble, simply because one listened. Years of successful experiment had taught her that she need, in fact, hardly listen at all. It was done with a gleaming, approving look, while thinking of whatever one chose to think about; with an encouraging or admiring smile — you could always sense, either by their expressions or the note of their voices, when the moment had come to enlarge the smile into a delighted laugh; with an occasional frown of sympathetic agreement. It was unbelievable that women actually went to bed with men to get what they wanted, when all you had to do to ensnare the gentleman was listen or seem to listen. Heavens, Rose thought, while Tippy’s voice droned senselessly around her, how I listened to darling Alan. It was a completely safe and infallible method, and the first thing mothers should tell their daughters.

KIM: It even reminds me of all the dates I had through online dating where I would listen because the guy would just be talking and talking and talking and there wasn’t really much to say, and I wasn’t really interested in saying more because I knew it wasn’t the guy for me, or whatever. But they always wanted another date and they would desperately think that I was interested in them too!

AMY: I agree! I’ve had those conversations. They’re so wrapped up in their own ego that they don’t even get that you’re just like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh!” Just with a smile on your face.

KIM: It’s all it takes, it’s true. She’s absolutely right. For some men.

AMY: Maybe that’s how she landed Ernest.

KIM: It makes me wonder. So this mention of male/female dynamics reminds me also of the “lost lady” we’re going to be discussing next week. Amy Levy wrote a critique of the Victorian “marriage market” in her novel Reuben Sachs, which is set in an affluent Jewish community of London. We’ve got Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith joining us to discuss this one. Until next week, don’t forget to sign up for our Lost Ladies of Lit newsletter to keep up to date on all the future authors we’ll be covering. And if you have a moment, please give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast.

AMY: Those five-star reviews really help! So long everybody! 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. 

29. Jocelyn Playfair — A House in the Country

AMY: Hi everybody, and welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great works of literature by forgotten women authors. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. The book we’re discussing today was published more than 75 years ago, but in some ways, it couldn’t possibly be more suited for a reader living through the turmoil of the world today.

AMY: I totally agree with you, Kim. You originally lent me this little book by Jocelyn Playfair and I looked at the title (which is A House in the Country) and I thought, “Oh, lovely! This sounds like the perfect idyllic escape from all of the world’s cray-cray right now, you know? Let’s have a charming romp through the country!” And though the book is set in a very pastoral location, at least partly, the circumstances of the story are anything but idyllic. So I was a bit misled by that title -- (actually the introduction of the Persephone version of this book calls the title “misleadingly cozy,” which I think is accurate) -- but I’m definitely glad that I read it. 

KIM: Yes, it’s very thought-provoking.

AMY: I felt like this was one of those books that kind of fell in my lap right when I most needed it, you know? It sheds light on how to make some sense of chaos and uncertainty, which is something that we’ve been living through a lot lately. It’s really a lovely elegy on the human experience and how to find meaning in strange, dark times, and in that sense, I found it comforting.

KIM: You said it perfectly, and I can’t wait to talk about that — and A House in the Country, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music begins]

AMY: So I have this habit when the world gets scary (which it has sort of felt that way for the past four years for me, anyway) … I reach for certain types of books to try to make myself feel better. Usually it’s nonfiction, but I have turned to history and I read about times that were worse than anything that I’m experiencing. So, for instance, I might read about the Salem Witch Trials, or World War I, things like that, and it helps me be able to put things in perspective and be able to say, “Alright, you know what? Those were bad times, but we got through them and so we’ll get through these bad times.” Or at the very least I can think, “Boy, I don’t have it as bad as THAT.”

KIM: I know exactly what you mean. I teeter-totter between stuff like that and lighter fare like Bridgerton-- and maybe that’s weird or maybe that’s completely normal… anyway,  when it comes to this week’s lost lady, Jocelyn Playfair, I almost have to wonder if writing is the thing she turned to for that sort of reassurance. She started writing books in England on the cusp of WWII, and then by 1952, she’d written the last of her 10 books, never to publish again. And with A House in the Country, which came out smack in the middle of that time period, it really felt like she was using the book to sort out all of the doubts and fears and worries she was likely experiencing along with every other British citizen at the time.

AMY: And I think it’s easy for us to forget (especially we Americans) that an Allied victory was far from a certainty. Before the U.S. entered the war, in particular, England was the world’s only hope, and it felt like a David vs. Goliath match-up. It’s scary enough looking back in hindsight, but to imagine living through that time period, you know, the constant stress and terror people must have been under really must have overwhelmed them.

KIM: Yeah, and then you couple that with a sort of eerie normalcy in the midst of all that panic. And that’s what Jocelyn Playfair depicts so well in this novel. This sort of calm dread that was experienced by everyone in England, even people far removed from London. Even the residents of a lovely house in the country. The Times Literary Supplement called the mood of the novel “battered but sincere optimism.” And that famous motto “Keep Calm and Carry On” is what the protagonist of this novel, Cressida Chance, is trying to do.

AMY: She is the Lady of the House at Brede Manor, a fine Georgian house shut up behind these decorative iron gates. But she has opened the gates to allow lodgers into the grand home… Everyone has to help with the war effort, so this is one way that Cressida can really pitch in. The house is filled with a random mix of guests who have been displaced due to the war. The combination of the war and changing times means there is a shortage of servants, and so the beautiful Cressida (who’s in her late 30s — I was picturing Cate Blanchett)...

KIM: Oh, I can totally see that!

AMY: She basically rolls up her sleeves and gets to work, running what’s essentially become a hostel. So there’s breakfast to get on the table and linen to be washed and there are these rows of cabbages that she can see through her kitchen window. They’re in a village that, by day, is peaceful and quiet. And one of the lodgers remarks to Cressida:

“Sometimes I feel the war’s just something one’s read about and — had nightmares over.”

And Cressida’s response is: “And yet you look out of the windows and there are the cabbages.”

So the story is unfolding right after one of the worst disasters of the war at that point in time (The Fall of Tobruk in the Middle Eastern Theater, in which 30,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner). This was seen by everybody as a just devastating turn of events. And there’s this juxtaposition between news from the front (and even the blitz that’s happening in London) and then the more ordinary days that are being spent back at Brede. 

KIM: Right, and that’s what we see playing out with Cressida. She’s trying to keep that intrinsically British “stiff upper lip,” but she can’t manage to shake thoughts of a man she loves who is part of the war effort (note that we say “a” man she loves, not “the” man she loves). Playfair actually bounces back and forth between the life at Brede Manor and the experiences of this man, Charles, who is floating alone and wounded in a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic after the ship he was on is torpedoed and sunk.

AMY: And sidenote: I was really struck by the similarities between the set up of this book and that of Monica Dickens’ Mariana from our very first episode of this podcast, because both books are centered around this news of a sunken ship in WWII, and we, as the reader, are wondering what’s going to become of a certain man who was on that ship.

KIM: Yeah, and it’s really interesting that she actually takes us into the experience of that man in the torpedoed ship in a way that Mariana didn’t, which, it actually goes to a pretty dark place, and it’s very interesting. And it makes me think about how it was unfortunately an all too common event, probably, to be hearing news of this sort. Also, I just wanted to mention what a fantastic heroine Cressida makes. She’s truly the center of the novel and what holds it together, just like she holds together Brede Manor. She’s kind and sympathetic but also really strong and sensible at the same time. 

AMY: Yeah, she’s just very lovely, even-keeled… a lot of the men who are lodging at her house have small crushes (small or not so small crushes) on her. So as I mentioned before, this book felt really applicable to the times we’re living in now. This idea that a colossal horror is unfolding all around us, while we, meanwhile, are somehow removed and holed up in our homes, but still collectively part of it. I couldn’t help but think about the pandemic we’re living through. (And I think we could toss in the political shitstorm we’ve basically been living through in America as well, because I was reading this book the same week that Trump rallied his supporters to go storm the U.S. Capitol and we were all glued to the television.) It’s all so crazy. And yet that quote that I read earlier, about the cabbages, sums it up so perfectly. Here I am reading about this ongoing nightmare and watching it all unfolding in our country and then, I’m still playing in the backyard with my kids, you know? I’m still making dinner. I’m still doing the laundry. Life goes on. And it’s a really weird dichotomy, don’t you think?

KIM: I couldn’t agree with you more, and I always actually wondered how people who lived through the world wars were able to go on somewhat as though things were normal. And now, after living through the last 11 months, I have a better idea. The book also touches on the sacrifices ordinary citizens were forced to make during this time period. Yeah, things seem normal by day, but at night, there’s the blackout, and Cressida has to stay awake on certain nights to watch for fires in the villages should an Air Raid occur (and one does happen in the course of the book, and it’s a very vivid account of this.) And then there’s a character, Miss Ambleside, Cressida’s pampered aunt, who pays a visit. She clearly represents the privileged class who don’t feel as if THEY are to be included among those making sacrifices for the war. 

AMY: Miss Ambleside is this older woman who feels indignant when she’s at the railway station when she finds herself confronted by a poster that reads, “IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY?” (and her journey in the book was so not necessary by the way). Playfair writes about the people who are still taking hot baths up to their necks and hoarding biscuits and using their central heating… the ones who refuse to let troops quarter in their country houses for fear their boots will ruin the carpet. You’re reminded of the people who refuse to wear masks in this day and age … the people who think the rules don’t apply to them. And of the rich Miss Ambleside, Playfair writes: “She suffered from emotional disturbance of the very rich who suddenly find themselves in a dilemma from which money has no power to deliver them.” And that reminded me of today, too, you know, when there was a run on toilet paper last year, it didn’t matter how rich you were… we were all reduced to that same feeling of panic at the empty grocery store shelves, right?

KIM: Yeah, exactly. And there’s this real sense in the book that their world has changed so drastically… that they are living in this strange new normal, which is what we’re undergoing right now. And all things considered, WWII was far worse, far more terrifying than anything we’re experiencing right now, but Playfair’s insights are really prescient. Cressida is musing about the war at one point and thinks to herself: “Funny how often lately it had occurred to her that there was something to be said for the war. It was frightening to consider how enormous personal worries and tragedies would look without the infinitely more immense background of the war to dwarf them into insignificance.”

AMY: Yeah, so that idea of just putting everything into perspective in your life is so true.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Kim, do you remember last spring, we had that amazing good news professionally, something we’d been working on for a long time that had been finally greenlit last spring and it looked like it was going to happen, and then the pandemic brought the whole thing crashing down, which is something that, yes, it was a bummer, but we would have been so much more upset normally, however with everything going on it just felt so trivial to dwell on something like that. 

KIM: Yes, absolutely. It gives you complete perspective on what’s happening in your life versus what’s happening out in the world. She also, in the book, contemplates the hostility between the two sides fighting the war, and it’s pretty easy to transfer those passages to the current political divide right now in our own country. This idea of “what are we even fighting over?” One of the lodgers staying at Brede is a man named Tori, a former concentration camp prisoner, who ends up having a lot of very deep conversations with Cressida about what it all means. At one point he says, “Cressida, there is war now in all the world, not only internationally and with guns and bombs, but in men’s hearts and minds with weapons more dangerous still. In each human being is their own war taking place, a war of thought, of feeling. ….Perhaps for so long the kindness in human hearts has been defeated by greed, selfishness, personal desires, for comfort, power, money, what you like, that can make a man forget so simple a thing as love towards his neighbors.” 

Could that possibly be any more on the mark with regard to the division happening right now in our country?

AMY No, it honestly sounds like something that could have been written today in an op/ed or something like that. The conversations among the characters in this book, meanwhile, with each other and with themselves, really runs the gamut… whether they’re discussing war or romantic love, it all gets quite philosophical, don’t you think?

KIM: Yes, and that’s what ends up making it so much more than just “a house in the country,” which is perfect. Even when Tori says, “It is not enough to be not unkind” — oh my gosh, I think we could liken that to the conversations we’re having today about systemic racism. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly, and Cressida says at one point that she wonders if everything that’s happening, all these tragedies, are the prices they’re “made to pay for being allowed to — to see, instead of merely looking.” And, you know, I feel that way a lot too about the times we’re living in. It’s a strange wake up call. It’s forcing us to appreciate and really see what’s important. To find happiness in simpler things, you know? When you can’t go out, you can’t be with your friends… you have to find things that bring you joy in a different way, right?

KIM: Yeah, this idea of being grateful for every moment. Several of the characters in the book say that explicitly. So we won’t give too much away about the book’s conclusion, other than to say that, like the rest of the book, it definitely also makes you think.

AMY: Yeah, I’m not sure I was in full agreement with decisions made by certain characters, but I think that’s kind of the point of a great crisis. It changes people permanently… and life can never be what it was before. So, anyway, what do we know about Jocelyn Playfair in terms of the war years? What was her experience there?

KIM: Well, we know that her husband, who was an engineer, was abroad for most of the war years. He was serving in Southeast Asia. And her two sons were away at boarding school, so she, like Cressida, was sort of fending for herself a bit during this time period. She was kind of a loner with just a few close friends, so she didn’t have any real social life to keep her busy… she basically just dove into her writing. Her first two books were crime novels. Apparently the second book she wrote in 1940 (it was called Eastern Weekend) had the exact same plot as Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, coincidentally. Like Cressida, she did take in paying guests during the war, too, and she did away with having servants as well.

AMY: And then politically, it seems as though she was very left-wing, bordering on socialist almost, which was probably a bit out of step with the country set she was living amongst, you know? She ended up moving to London after the war, and left off with her writing. She was just done with it — took up other hobbies, basically — and interestingly though, she became much more right-wing in her old age. She apparently said once, “What the world needs is another war.” (And I found that so shocking given the tone of this book.) 

KIM: That’s so interesting. On the right-wing side, part of me wondered if maybe there was some dementia or something making her go right-wing, but the idea of “what the world needs is another war…” On some weird level you can almost see thinking, wow, that was a time that made a huge difference in my life and it made me grateful for things, and maybe people need an experience like that (even though obviously we don’t wish that on people). Maybe somehow she felt that people needed the experience that they had had. So on some level, I guess I can maybe understand where she was coming from with that quote, though I don’t agree we need another war.

AMY: But no, I get that. It’s like a wake-up call. We’ve said that about the pandemic in a weird way. You find the silver linings… you have to find the silver lining, right? I mean, how do you get through it otherwise?

KIM: Yeah, there’s no way that you could go through a year of being at home pretty much all the time without looking inward on some level, I would think.

AMY: And yeah, this idea of privilege. We’re really seeing that play out with the pandemic in terms of there is a serious divide in how this virus is impacting people.

KIM: Yep, on so many levels, from the virus itself to, like you said, jobs and everything. It really is a wake-up call in a lot of ways to many, many ills in our society that are sort of hidden when, or you can choose to not see them when you’re just going about your regular, day-to-day life, which we haven’t done in quite a long time!

AMY: We should mention that Cressida does have a child, a young boy, and he doesn’t factor into the story very much, but it did make me think of my own kids and the fact that you know, you’re going through these hard times and you really have to put on a show in some ways and not let them see how it’s affecting you; not let them see that you’re nervous or worried about anything. They have to just know that they’re safe. It definitely does not give you time to wallow, and everybody’s got their own journey through it all, just like the characters in this book. 

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: So I actually have an interesting anecdote to share about those “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters made famous during WWII in England. People still sell things with that motto on it, like all kinds of novelty items. But despite what we think about that poster now, it actually wasn’t even a thing really in England at the time, because they had made two and a half million of the posters, but that particular poster was a set of three different mottos. And they were saving, “Keep Calm and Carry On” because they knew they wanted that to be the one that they started putting up when things were starting to get really bad. So when the bombing was starting to get bad, they were holding off and were like, “We’re going to use this one when it’s push comes to shove and we really have to motivate everyone.” So they put out the other two mottos first. I don’t, off the top of my head, remember what they were, but they were not anywhere near as memorable as “Keep Calm and Carry On.” They got a lot of negative feedback about these posters because people’s response was sort of what we talked about earlier, just this idea of the common man has to make the sacrifice when the privileged don’t really have to. That was sort of how people were reading it: DO YOUR PART! And people were like, “Well, I have been doing my part. What about the rich folk?” So they got a bit of blowback on the first two motto posters that they had put out and they wound up eventually just being like, “We’re not doing the third one.” They destroyed most of them.

KIM: Are you kidding me?!

AMY: It’s like an urban legend that that was this, like, rallying cry. Most people did not ever see those posters.

KIM: That’s fascinating. So when… Do you know when “Keep Calm and Carry On” became sort of the pop culture phenomenon that it became?

AMY: We can link in our show notes to a few of the articles I found about the origin of that poster, but what I do know is that they really thought there were none left. I think there was some sort of Antiques Roadshow kind of show where somebody came and they had a batch of, like, 15 of them, and that was a big find, because they were like, “We haven’t seen these…” There’s just so few that survive today because they actually destroyed the allotment of them.

KIM: I feel like we could do a whole episode on this, because I feel like it really distills the idea that people have of the British — the “stiff upper lip” and all that. But I wonder what British people (English people) think about that phrase, and whether they feel like it pigeon-holes them… whether they feel good about it?

AMY: I feel like it’s something to be proud of. To be able to maintain that decorum in the face of calamity is…

KIM: I agree. 

AMY: While it might not have been this sort of unifying rally cry for the English during WWII, I think it’s still pretty sage wisdom. I like it.

KIM: So as we said, if you’re looking for something to read that will sort of help you take stock of your emotions in the midst of our current “crazy,” we highly recommend checking out A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair. 

KIM: That’s all for today’s episode. Consider giving us a rating and review if you enjoyed it, and check out LostLadiesofLit.com for further reading material.

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

28. A Short History of Riding Side Saddle

KIM: Hey, everybody! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew, here with my writing partner Amy Helmes…

AMY: Code name: “Valkyrie.” That’s what I’m going to start calling myself.

KIM: I love it... It’s in homage to our “lost lady” from last week’s episode, Charmian Kittredge London.

AMY: Yes. And if you haven’t checked out that episode yet and our interview with biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle, we’d encourage you to give it a listen. Charmian Kittredge was quite the trailblazer, and one of the things we didn’t have time to include in the episode last week was the fact that she was among the first of a wave of women who rejected the idea of riding side-saddle on horses.

KIM: Dunkle actually filled us in on how this completely unnatural practice of women riding side-saddle came out. Let’s play that soundbyte:

[plays clip]

IRIS: Yeah, it was the norm for women to ride side saddle, and Charmian (who really wanted to gallop past young children shouting she was a Valkyrie) she didn’t think it was safe to ride side saddle. So first she solved the problem, and of course, women couldn’t buy pants at the time, so she bought a skirt and she cut it in half and kind of sewed her own culottes so she could ride astride. And then she looked up the history of riding side saddle to find out that it was really just a trend that had started in an English court because the king’s wife, the queen, was disabled and had to ride sitting on the side. All the ladies of the court were like, “Oh, I want to be like the queen!” They started doing what she did and then it just stuck.

[end clip]

AMY: Okay, so just think about the extra level of balance and core strength that you’d have to have to ride side-saddle. I mean, I didn’t know that that was the actual reason it came into practice. 

KIM: Yeah, I just thought it was a modesty thing, or maybe it was because women wore voluminous skirts and dresses, so it was the only way they could sit atop a horse.

AMY: So Charmian Kittredge wrote an article for Out West magazine called “Cross Saddle Riding for Women” in which she tried to make the case for doing away with side-saddle riding. And in that piece, she writes that the queen in question (that was mentioned in that clip), Anne of Bohemia, she suffered from a hip disease which was why she needed to ride this way. So I tried to find out more about this and I couldn’t find any other corroborating information about that. The only thing that I could find on the topic was that Anne of Bohemia rode side-saddle on her way to her wedding in order to “keep her virginity intact,” --  you know, protecting the royal hymen, as it were, which seems pretty crazy, but, you know, at that time in the 14th century, I can  kind of buy that as an explanation as well. That people would somehow think that riding a horse could be a problem.

KIM: Actually, for aristocrats and royalty and things like that, they often did some sort of physical examination of them, so they actually were encouraged not to ride for that reason, if it would look like they had, in any way looked like they had lost their virginity some other way.

AMY: Right, just keep it all “protected” down there, I guess, just in case!

KIM: Horrible!

AMY: But in any case, once Anne started riding that way, it was “monkey-see, monkey-do” for everyone else who wanted to follow the queen, of course, and it’s crazy to think that it wasn’t until the early part of the 20th century that the practice finally ended. I mean, if you stop and think about it, it’s just kind of preposterous and counterintuitive to sit that way.

KIM: Yeah, and dangerous! I mean, “Hey -- why don’t you just perch sideways on a 1500-lb horse!”

AMY: Yeah! Give that a whirl! But it was dangerous in more ways than one. Obviously, you were more likely to get seriously injured if things went awry in any way, but then there’s also just the physical toll that it would have taken on a woman’s body. So Kittredge London wrote in this article, “A side-saddle makes riding a more difficult feat. It increases the danger a hundred fold. It makes perfect poise and harmony of body an impossibility. It taxes the muscles unequally and makes long distance riding harmful.” In other words… get thee to a chiropractor!

KIM: And I can’t imagine the horse loves it either, so if you’re an animal lover, I mean come on. The poor horse is being ridden by someone not centered on its back….that can’t be comfortable.

AMY: As time went on, riding side saddle was seen as the only dignified way for a true lady to ride (especially in European culture)… there were some exceptions. Catherine the Great, famously … There is an amazing painting of her in uniform, sitting astride a horse which is a portrait meant to depict her badass military coup when she dethroned her incompetent husband.

KIM: She’s like, “Yeah, screw this… I’m going to run this country, AND I’m going to be comfortable while I do it.”

AMY: Yeah, totally, and she’s running the show, so why shouldn’t she, right? And, you know, as for that OTHER Catherine the Great “horse story…” (you probably know the one I’m talking about, and if you don’t, you can Google it because it’s too disturbing to mention here….)

KIM: Maybe don’t Google it.

AMY: Yeah, maybe don’t Google it. But just know that that anecdote is completely and utterly false. It’s just misogynistic b.s. that was spread by her political enemies and it ended up getting perpetuated over time, sadly, because whoever’s in power is the one writing the history. But that’s another story, and we’re not going there. So my experience with saddlery and anything else equine-related basically begins and ends with those coin-operated ponies outside the grocery story that I would beg my mom for a quarter to ride growing up. So I’m going to do my best to kind of describe how riding side saddle worked and what the tack was like. I just know that word “tack.”

KIM: Yes.

AMY: That’s what you call horse equipment right?

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Okay, so the earliest side saddles back in the Middle Ages were basically just a pillow and a piece of wood. And the woman always sits facing the left, by the way… not sure why, but I think maybe because\ you mount a horse from the left, so that’s the side you’d be getting on -- or maybe because most people are right-handed. I don’t know. But the ladies were not really “riding” the horse at that stage. They were really just sitting there clinging on for dear life and hoping they didn’t fall off. And there was no way of controlling the horse with that kind of equipment. But there was something, also, called a pillion, which was a sort of cushion that a lady could sit on facing sideways perched behind a male rider.

KIM: Yes, I’ve seen that in movies. And I also remember in the Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath was remarked upon as riding astride, which would have been something out of the ordinary.

AMY: Yeah, which is really kind of perfect for the “Wife of Bath” given her personality, right? Confident, strong-willed, defiant… gotta love her. So getting back to the mechanics of the sidesaddle, the ever-fashionable Catherine de Medici came up with a version that was a bit of an improvement. It involved a pommel that you sort of hook your right leg around, and then your left leg fitted into a stirrup on that side of the horse. Then in the 1830s, a saddle with two pommels was invented. So it kind of hooked both of your inner thighs…(And the only way I can think to describe that -- I looked up pictures -- is kind of like Suzanne Somers’ “Thigh Master,” if you remember that.

KIM: I had one. I shouldn’t have admitted that, should I?

AMY: There you have it! Anyway, so it’s on the inside of your thighs, but it’s a little more curved, so it cradles both of your legs. That way, as a rider, you had a lot more stability and control sitting up there. The problem with this, of course, is if you run into trouble, there’s no easy way of jumping free… especially with all the voluminous skirts. There was a serious risk that you could be dragged by the horse if things went wrong. And also it was much harder to mount and dismount without some assistance. It wasn’t until 1875 that the invention of the “safety apron” came along that was meant to open up if it got caught on these pommels. It’s basically like a hybrid apron-slash-wrap skirt, and it unsnaps if the skirt were to get caught on the saddle. You wear jodhpurs underneath the apron as well… (I did read that the snaps on this apron skirt is where the trend of pearl-button snaps on Western shirts originally comes from. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

KIM: Huh. I just have to say, come on! How many women probably died or were seriously injured riding this way? It’s ridiculous! Uggh, it makes me actually kind of mad. That really fits with the fact that naturally, women began to rebel against this idea of riding this way. I mean it was so dangerous. Especially in the American West, where horseback riding was kind of a way of life. But even in 1905, a male writer in the Los Angeles Times wrote: “The woman does not live who can throw her leg over the back of a horse without profaning the grace of femininity; or grasp with her separated knees the shoulders of her mount without violating the laws of good taste; or appear in the cross-saddle with any semblance of dignity, elegance or poise.”

AMY: Okay, he’s a jerk, and also he’s probably the guy spitting tobacco juice all over the floor, among other things, you know?

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Don’t lecture us about dignity and elegance please.

KIM: Exactly. So women in the Eastern United States were a little more married to the tradition of riding side saddle. It was seen as a more artistic way to ride. And I do get that on some level. I mean, it looks “pretty,” I suppose. I mean, remember the early seasons of Downton Abbey where Lady Mary is riding in her fabulous Edwardian riding habit sitting side saddle? 

AMY: Yeah, I do agree, it does look quite elegant in some respects, at least when I see it in film. And it did require some serious athleticism. But I think the women who lived in more rural areas just didn’t see the point, and why would they, you know? In the late 1800s Annie Oakley (who actually lived for a time in my hometown of Cincinnati and I was obsessed with her as a kid -- but that’s another episode). Annie was having none of it, obviously. So there were definitely women who did their own thing as time went on.

KIM: Yeah, there’s also another woman who was eventually part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, her name was “Two-Gun Nan Aspinwall,” (a great name) who accepted the challenge of riding a horse from San Francisco to New York. She rode astride in a split skirt just like Charmian Kittredge did. 

AMY: The Suffragettes were the ones who ultimately took this issue by the reins, pun intended. They wanted the right to vote, and they also wanted the right to ride a horse however they damn well pleased. They saw the practice of riding side saddle as oppressive. So, for sort of the same reasons that they embraced bloomers, they took up the cause of ending the side-saddle tradition. 

KIM: Yeah, they brought a lot of attention to the issue just as a sort of aside to their fight for the right to vote. By the 1930s it became culturally acceptable for women to ride astride. But there are still people today who enjoy the challenge of riding sidesaddle, and it remains a category of equestrian sports. There’s a famous annual sidesaddle steeplechase race called “Dianas of the Chase” in England.

AMY: I saw some pictures of that event in The Tatler and everyone just looks so posh. I have to admit I could see myself attending (on the sidelines) and wearing tweed of some sort. That sounds fun. And you know, even though the notion of riding sidesaddle is preposterous to me on one level, when I see it being pulled off, I am kind of in awe.

KIM: Yeah, first of all, I think that an idea of a costume party where we do the “Dianas of the Chase'' for our outfits after Covid would be amazing, and I think we need to put that on our list of things to do after Covid. And also, there’s a difference in knowing someone chooses to ride that way as opposed to it being the only allowable option. But Amy, you can dust off those tweeds next week, if you want — because we’re heading back to 1940s’ England and checking out yet another lost lady. This one is Jocelyn Playfair, and her novel A House In The Country.

AMY: And it’s not at all what you might expect from the title, is it?

KIM: No, it’s absolutely not, and we can’t wait to tell you guys all about it. It’s a quick little novel, so perfect for checking out in advance between now and next week if you have time and want to do so.

AMY: Until then, don’t forget to rate and review us, and consider sharing our podcast with anyone you know who might like the conversations we’re having. 

KIM: Or hey, a shout-on social media is always helpful for us to get the word out! And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more fun stuff to read about! Bye, everybody!

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

27. Charmian Kittredge London with Iris Jamahl Dunkle

INTRODUCTION

AMY: “Behind every great man is a great woman.” It’s a well-known platitude, but Kim, what do we think of it?

KIM: It’s kind of annoying, actually. Wouldn’t the more accurate wording maybe be, “behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes”?

AMY: Yeah, for sure. I think so. In any case, the woman we’re discussing today, Charmian Kittredge London, has always been relegated to the status of “the woman behind the man,” but when it comes to her famous husband, Jack London, she was every bit by his side (and was sometimes leading the charge). Smart, fearless, and ahead of her time, she was adventuring and writing right along with him — not to mention helping him shape his own published works. Her first book, The Log of the Snark, is a vivid and insightful account of the two-year sailing voyage (a sometimes harrowing voyage) that she and Jack charted through the South Pacific. She has always been eclipsed by her husband’s star power, however, so let’s drag her out of his shadow today, shall we?

KIM: Absolutely. So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, everyone, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes, and we’ve got a fantastic guest with us today to discuss Charmian Kittredge London’s fascinating life story. 

KIM: I can’t wait. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Iris Jamahl Dunkle, the author of Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer, which was published last year and is the first full-length biography to be written on Charmian London. Based in Northern California, Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She was also Poet Laureate of Sonoma County from 2107-2018 and has published multiple collections of poetry, including West: Fire: Archive which challenges preconceived, androcentric ideas about biography, autobiography and history. (And Charmian Kittredge London factors into this work as well.) Her work has been featured in Tin House, The San Francisco Examiner, Fence, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Split Rock Review and the Chicago Quarterly Review to name just a few. Iris, welcome to our show!

IRIS: Thank you so much! It’s great to be here!

AMY: So, it was such a pleasure to read this biography of yours, I have to say. I discovered after you wrote an article about Charmian for Electric Literature, and I’m so glad that I pursued that a little further and checked the book out, because I absolutely loved it. I tore through it in, like, two or three days. I thought it was really compelling.

KIM: I completely agree. You really brought her remarkable story to life in a way that I was gripped with every page, so thank you for that!

IRIS: Thank you so much!

KIM: So can you tell us a little bit about how you came to know of Charmian Kittredge and what inspired you to want to tell her story?

IRIS: Definitely. There’s really two little stories that lead to this. The first is, I grew up in Sonoma County, which is where Jack London State Park is located, and I went there on a field trip in sixth grade and kind of got to know Jack London as the first writer I ever met. Little did I know, though, by visiting that museum, that there was another writer that I was meeting that day, and that was Charmian. Because they didn’t depict her as a writer in the museum. So fast-forward years later, I’m at that park and looking at these photographs that are on the garbage cans. They’re of Jack London on a hillside — it’s an iconic photo. And I was like, “That’s really strange. I wonder who’d taken that photo?” And I was doing some research for a poem that I wrote and found out that Nelle Griffith Wilson (the poet I was researching) was friends with Charmian, and I was looking through her poetry book and found the same photo attributed to Charmian. And I was like, “Oh my gosh! Charmian took this picture!” So I reached out to a Jack London scholar and I asked them, “Did you know that Charmian took this picture?” And they were like, “We never really thought to ask that question.” And that’s when I was like, “Oh my gosh. What else did they not think to ask??!!”

AMY: Did I see somewhere that you actually worked at that museum? For some reason I had it in my head that you were a docent there or something, too, for a while.

IRIS: I did. I worked as a volunteer leading their book club, and so I brought Charmian’s books to the museum and we read them together. And I spend a lot of time at the park, because I’m kind of a book nerd. I’ve been volunteering there for years, because I’ve been a Jack London scholar for most of my adult life.

AMY: That all makes sense now. And I love that story about you visiting when you were a kid, too, and little did you know that you would be devoting so much of your life to writing about that place. One of the things about your book that you do so well is you cultivate this instant connection with Charmian right away. I knew basically nothing about her going into this, and by the time I finished reading your prologue, I was so emotionally invested because you set things up in such a way that you show us how in her later life she was kind of betrayed by people and in one instance cruelly scammed by various writers of her husband Jack’s biography, his life story — including the famous writer Irving Stone.

KIM: Yeah, that’s a heartbreaking anecdote, actually, and I wondered if the prospect of finding the truth and doing her justice, did you find it intimidating at all in light of the fact that she’d previously been so misrepresented and misused by previous biographers?

IRIS: Honestly, yes, it was really daunting. I mean, trying to write anyone’s life is daunting because you want to get it right, but writing the life of someone who has been forgotten, really, from history or misremembered, puts even more pressure. But honestly, I got really mad at Irving Stone, and that chapter, that first chapter, I had to rewrite like 10, 15 times, because I was really mad at first. And if you read, actually, all of the archival material around it, his actual letters to her, it just makes you furious.

KIM: He’s like a villain in a movie. I mean, yeah, absolutely. That is such a betrayal and so premeditated. Ugh, yeah.

AMY: He basically rifled through her secret belongings in the home when she was out. And it was disappointing, too because you’d like to think … He was the biographer of Lust For Life, the Vincent Van Goh biography that made him famous, basically, and you’d like to think that he was a great writer who does these people justice and then it really made you take a second look. And also, Rose Wilder Lane, I felt a little disappointed about her treatment of Charmian with regard to her biography of Jack. So I can imagine how you must have felt.

IRIS: Yeah, well, and if you think about those two characters, Charmian was not the only one who was wronged by them. So going back to Vincent Van Goh, the family of Vincent Van Goh actually were very, very upset by the work of Irving Stone because of the false, the untruths he was circulating about Vincent Van Goh. And if you’ve ever read Prairie Fires, the amazing biography about Laura Ingalls Wilder, the truth about her daughter, Rose, comes out as well. She doesn’t get a very good name in that book, for sure. 

AMY: But anyway, moving back onto Charmian, she was born in 1871 and she was essentially a California girl through and through. It seems like the West Coast really shaped her. There were several other women in her family who were gifted writers, right?

IRIS: Yes. Both her mother and her Aunt Ninetta. Her mother and her family came over from Wisconsin and they came over the Overland Trail to Utah and then Charmian was born in Wilmington in Southern California. But her mother, from the time she was very young, published poetry and short fiction, and Charmian kept all of her stories with her. There’s a beautiful poem called “Charmian” that she wrote for her daughter when she was, like, six months old, it’s really… anyone who has a child can really relate to it. But her Aunt Ninetta published in national magazines as well, including East Coast magazine. She wrote a novel about their life in Utah but ended up not getting it published. And she was really, really, a big part of The Overland Monthly crowd in the Bay Area.

AMY: And that was like a literary scene?

IRIS: Yeah, it was the main literary scene in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially relating to Berkeley around the turn of the century.

AMY: So before her love affair with Jack began, Charmian was an independent, financially self-sufficient young woman with a paying job. (She worked as a stenographer and was just starting to venture into writing.) But she’d also traveled by herself cross-country via railroad and she’d toured the great cities of Europe. She loved sailing and horseback riding. And there’s a quote from your book that really brings her personality into sharp focus. This is a recollection from a young neighbor of Charmian’s who reported seeing her when he was 8-years-old. And he recalled: “The first glimpse of Charmian Kittridge sparked a bright windy morning in Berkeley when, with tresses flying, she galloped past our cottage on Dana Street astride a white horse, shouted, “I’m a Valkyrie!’ to a startled child, and vanished down the highway in a cloud of dust.” What a badass she is!

KIM: She sounds SO COOL! 

IRIS: Yeah, don’t you just want to hang out with her?

KIM: So you write that her aunt Netta Eames had very liberated ideas about sex, and that’s something that she definitely passed on to her niece. They weren’t prudes when it came to sexuaity at all, we learn in the book. And on the flip side of that, history often makes Charmian out to be this loose woman who stole Jack London away from his first wife. What’s the real story of how they got together?

IRIS: Well, just to start off, Charmian was someone who was very comfortable with her sexuality, and as you said, her aunt and her uncle had an open marriage and Nanetta really believed in Victoria Woodhull's idea that a woman should be able to own her own sexuality and her own desires. So that was something that shocked me when I read it. I was like, “Oh, who knew ladies were like that back in the day?” And when I started to read about Jack and Charmian getting together, I mean… when Charmian first met Jack he was fresh off the boat, literally, from sailing to Japan, and he was a sailor, you know, like kind of bow-legged and not so refined. And so when she met him, she was like, “That’s Jack London?” But they had a luncheon together at Young’s restaurant down by the Ferry building, and they instantly hit it off as far as conversation. Jack London loved reading banned books and at the time, Tess of the D’Urbervilles [by Thomas Hardy] was a banned book, and he found out that she had a copy and he was like, “Can I come over and borrow it?” and she was like, “I guess! Sure!” He ended up coming by what she called her “den,” which was her room, and they just talked books for hours at a time. They found immediately that they had this, like, intellectual attraction to one another and this connection. I mean, his mind was like a jar full of bees and hers was exactly the same, and they would just ZING, ZING, ZING off each other in conversation. And so once they had that they felt a really, really strong attraction.

AMY: And he was single at the time?

IRIS: Yes, he was single when they first met. And they had this date set up in the future, like, a few weeks out, and all of a sudden she gets this note from Jack: “Uh, sorry, can’t make the date… I got married.” It was out of the blue. He had married Bess Maddern as a way to settle down and have some children. He thought that she had good bone structure so they could have great children together.

AMY: But clearly, he couldn’t get Charmian out of his mind…

IRIS: Like you previously said, Charmian went back East, travelled all over Europe and then came back. When she came back, she got invited to Jack London’s party. He had these parties up in the Berkeley hills. It was just, like, him, and a bunch of artists and a pot of spaghetti that Bessie made, with the small children. And so Charmian came and she immediately asked Jack to a fencing duel. He didn’t know that she had studied fencing at Mills College. She was quite good. So she challenged him, and he was like, “I got this…” and lo and behold, they had a match and she kicked his butt! He was so shocked that he ran over and kissed her, and so that was the beginning of it. Now, Jack London at the time was probably kissing a lot of ladies, but there was something about their connection from the den that carried over, and this affair started. They were in the same circle. It wasn’t like they were never seeing each other. The Overland Monthly, that literary crowd, they all intermingled at all of the events around the Bay Area, and so they were constantly seeing each other, and eventually it just started to become this really fiery, beautiful relationship where they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. And they wrote the most intense love letters that I have ever read, and funniest that I’ve ever read in my life. 

KIM: And she’s literally the opposite of what it seemed like everybody was being told you’re supposed to be at that time as a woman. She was doing everything that you weren’t supposed to do, and of course that’s incredibly enticing! I mean, how could he not fall in love with her?

IRIS: Yeah! It’s so true. And what’s really interesting is that they called each other “Mate.” They reason why is because of that connection. So he saw in her someone who was like a man, right? Somebody in his time period who didn’t follow female gender norms, and so she was what he called “game.” If they were going to go on an adventure, she would go first, you know. She’d be like, “Let’s do this.” She had no fear and always sought adventure and just was really, really intellectually engaged all the time as well. So it was a really interesting pairing, for sure. 

AMY: So, after some time he manages to extricate himself from his marriage, but Charmian does have to wait a while for that and kind of keep it on the down-low that they are together, but they do eventually get married, and for her, it was basically like being romantically involved with a national celebrity … a global celebrity…  which kind of complicated things for their courtship. He was a living legend and so they literally had the early 20th century version of paparazzi chasing after them on their wedding night at the hotel. Following that, she was doomed to be relegated to the public role of “Jack London’s wife,” but it seems like Jack was the one person who viewed her very much as his intellectual equal. 

KIM: Right, I mean, she basically took over as Jack’s personal assistant, she was his editor, his literary sounding board, and in some cases, it seemed like he even “sub-contracted” out some of his writing to her. Would you tell us a little bit about their working partnership? It was really important, and do you think her relationship with Jack ultimately encouraged or impeded her own writing pursuits?

IRIS: That’s a really good question and it’s kind of at the heart of where my study was, because what I realized when I started doing research into Charmian, the amount of help she had given Jack London in his writing… that was something that no one had ever talked about before. So I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’d better really check my facts on this one.” So I started really documenting whenever there was some sort of collaboration. So beginning with The Sea Wolf, which was the first book Jack London worked on while they were together, he’s writing to her… this was within a year of their relationship, he is writing to her asking her to help him switch the magazine version of The Sea Wolf into the novel version because it’s repurposed and it has to be changed around. In his letter he’s like, “Go ahead and make whatever changes you’d like. I trust your instinct.” So that kind of quote in the beginning, I’m like, “Oh, wow. That’s Year One.” So this idea that she was his secretary, which has stuck in Jack London scholarship for so long, was infuriating to me as I started to go deeper and deeper into this, because she had a better education than Jack London first, and second, she actually was the editor. That’s what she was trained to do. One of the ways that Jack London composed was...he composed in his head a great deal and so people were like, “Oh, he’s a genius, he just sat down and wrote the book in one draft!” Which is a bunch of bull honkey becuase he actually would go through several drafts with Charmian. They would talk through stories all the time. They were constantly talking about his work. And then much later, he started relying on her more and more. When they were writing on the Dirigo, which was a ship they sailed on from Baltimore around Cape Horn to Seattle, they worked on The Valley of the Moon, and they had done all the research for that book together and Charmian’s full pages of description were placed directly into that novel and she notes that in her diaries so there’s clear evidence of that. But you can see her input in so much more of that book because of the experiences and the way that it depicts a woman. It’s really the only book from that time period that depicts a woman that’s actually, like, a real woman and the reason why is because it was written by a real woman!

AMY: Yeah, Jack basically was like, “You’re really good at writing descriptive narrative, why don’t you just take on this part.” Who would have thought that he would do that? Everybody just attributes it all to him!

KIM: That picture of the two of them working together in the book and they’re looking into each other’s eyes and you can just see the intellectual stimulation. It very much seemed like meeting with each other on an intellectual plane and working together.

IRIS: Absolutely.

AMY: If our listeners know anything about Jack London, then they probably know about The Cruise of the Snark, which is his telling of the couple’s famous sailing trip around the world. I thought it was really interesting to discover that, of the two of them, it was Charmian who sort of willed this trip into being, is that right?

IRIS: That’s absolutely right. She’d come across Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum when it first came out in the early 1900s and she saw his exhibit when she was in Buffalo at the Pan-American Exhibit, and so when she got home, she had this dream of sailing around the world. And then when she met Jack, they both were very nautical. They both loved to sail on the bay, and so that was one of their dreams they had together was, “Oh, let’s sail around the world together.” Their relationship began with that dream and it kind of became the center of their lives.

AMY: But as you write, Jack was basically like, “Yeah, wouldn’t that be cool? At some point we can do that.” It was like a “bucket list” sort of thing, and she’s like, “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go do it!” And he was like, “Oh, okay. Yeah!” So she kind of lit the match on it a bit, which I think is cool.

IRIS: Definitely, yeah. She was ready to go. As I said, she was “game,” and she loved to travel. It was the time when she felt most like a writer, when she was traveling. 

KIM: Yeah, so on top of being able to hold her own on board the Snark, she was also kind of kicking Jack’s ass in other ways, too. There’s this surfing anecdote about Hawaii. Can you tell the story for our listeners? It’s great.

IRIS: Definitely. So they were in Waikiki when they first got to Hawaii and they had had a difficult voyage there. So one of the surfers wanted to teach Jack and Charmian how to surf. So they spent all day trying to learn how to surf on 75-lb wooden surfboards, which just sound awful, and it turns out that Charmian was able to stand up even before Jack. Jack also surfed, but the way that it was recorded in Jack’s account, and this is all in Charmian’s diary. Of course, she always recorded when she beat Jack in cards or when she did something adventurous that he couldn’t really pull off… she made note of it, but she didn’t publicly do so. So he did it finally as well, but ended up getting the worst sunburn of his life and was in bed for three days. But the way he depicts it in his Cruise of the Snark, his account of their Snark journey, it’s only him surfing; not Charmian. He totally omits her.

AMY: Of course. All right. Badass Exhibit A: “I am a Valkyrie.” Badass Exhibit 2: beating him at a fencing duel. And then Badass Exhibit 3: Getting up on the surfboard before he did.

IRIS: Again, we all just want to hang out with Charmian now.

AMY: Yeah, for sure.

KIM: Absolutely. 

AMY: And as you say in your book that omission about the surfing incident “...would re-occur throughout Jack’s account of the trip. … his feat of surfing on a ten-foot wooden surfboard would not have looked so adventurous if his small, fit wife had also accomplished the same thing.” We should also mention that Charmian basically taught Jack how to ride a horse, or at least, be way more comfortable on horseback than he initially was… It felt like she wasn’t just matching him step-for-step, but not only that, really besting him in a lot of areas. 

IRIS: Absolutely.

AMY: So we know they had a great intellectual and professional partnership, this couple, but did they manage to hold onto that love and passion that you described throughout the years? After all, Jack was seen as something of a philanderer.

IRIS: Yes, they did, actually. It was something that Charmian recorded everytime they had sex in their journal.

AMY: I was wondering about that! In this biography you have a very specific detailing of when and sometimes where…

IRIS: Yeah, it’s even more specific in the diary, so they… they called them “Lollies.” That’s their code word. It was very important to Charmian for them to maintain that intimacy. She actually would make her own lingerie, and they loved to dine naked when they went to hotels. It was a big part of their lives, their intimacy. They even on the Snark, which this was a very small ship and there were six other people on that ship — on that yacht — and they had sex almost every day. So I don’t know how they pulled it off. It probably was pretty awkward! 

AMY: There was a restaurant booth in there, too, as I recall.

IRIS: Oh, yeah. In Sacramento at the fair, they were at a restaurant and they were upstairs and people were dancing down below and they found a little intimacy there. 

KIM: Wow, intellectual… professional… sexual… it’s all there. So Iris, we were wondering if you might read us a short passage from Charmian’s book, The Log of the Snark, just to give our listeners an idea of her writing style.

IRIS: You bet, I would love to. This is a short passage from about a year into their journey, so this is 1908 and they’ve just arrived in Bora Bora. I thought I’d read this because it really gives a sense of her description. And Tehai and Bihaura, the people she’s going to mention, are two of the people they’re traveling with.

After Tehai and Bihaura had been set ashore at their request, Jack said to me: “What do you say we go over for half an hour or so?” Ernest took us to the long jetty, and we wandered in the soft cool air, attracted by music, which was accompanied by a concerted, regular chug as of some dull and toneless instrument. The grass grew to the water’s edge, and on this village green, by the forgotten graves of the decaying Mission church, we beheld an idyllic pastorale of youths and maidens dancing under a spreading flamboyante to the strange, rhythmic chant. The maids were all in white, garlanded with sumptuous, perfumed wreaths of allemanda and blumeria and tiare, mixed with drooping grass-fringes, the men likewise garlanded, and girdled in white and scarlet paréus. They moved in twos and threes, arm-in-arm, closely around the mouth-organ musicians in the centere, like bees in a swarm. The curious chug-chug was made by a measured grunt-grunt! grunt-grunt! of the dancers. There was witchery in it all — the wheel of graceful revolving forms, twining brown arms, bright eyes and white teeth glistening in a soft and scented gloom that the moon had not yet touched; and the last least veil of enchantment was added by flitting soft-glowing lights amongst the dancers’ heads. These spots of soft radiance were curly fragments of phosphorescent fungus, culled from dead and dying cocoanut trees, and set in red and silken hibiscus blossoms, worn over the ears of these flower-like women — curled flowers of captured moonshine, sometimes tender, luminous blue; sometimes evasive green, and again, mere phosphorescent white. 

KIM: That is so sensuous and evocative! Aah!

IRIS: Can I give you a contrast? Now this is Jack’s depiction of the same exact scene in his book The Cruise of the Snark:

Under the rising moon we came in through the perilous passage of the reef of Bora Bora and dropped anchor off Vaitape village. Bihaura, with housewifely anxiety, could not get ashore too quickly to her house to prepare more abundance for us. While the launch was taking her and Tehai to the little jetty, the sound of music and of singing drifted across the quiet lagoon. Throughout the Society Islands we had been continually informed that we would find the Bora Borans very jolly. Charmian and I went ashore to see, and on the village green by forgotten graves on the beach, found the youth and maidens dancing, flower-garlanded and flower-bedecked with strange phosphorescent flowers in their hair that pulsed and dimmed and glowed in the moonlight. Farther along the beach we came upon a huge grass house, oval shaped, seventy feet in length, where the elders of the village were singing himines. They, too, were flower-garlanded and jolly, and they welcomed us into the fold of little lost sheep straying along from outer darkness.

AMY: Hers is so much more poetic.

IRIS: Right?

AMY: And maybe it’s the way that you read it, too, being a poet, that it was lyrical!

KIM: Can you talk to us a little bit more about the differences between the two and actually how it sort of plays out in the complete pieces that each of them did about that voyage?

IRIS: Definitely. I think it’s important to realize that when Charmian’s entering these places she’s already an other, because women were not found in these areas at this time; white women traveling were not often the ones who were the travel writers. There was a woman that came before her named Isabella Bird, who was an amazing woman. If you haven’t read Isabella Bird you should check her out. She wrote about what were then the Sandwich Islands — Hawaii. And she traveled all over the world, including Korea and the Far East, but she wrote about Hawaii from the perspective of a woman, so she saw it differently than somebody who was in the dominant part of society, right? And so when Charmian was in these places, she saw it differently. She also had an eye for beauty, right? She had an eye for seeing things. Like, she paid attention to what kind of flowers they were; she didn’t just say that they were wearing flowers, they were hibiscus flowers with these glowing phosphorescence in the middle. Her attention to detail is very poetic. And although she did write some poetry and it was terrible (she was a terrible poet), she was very good at travel writing because not only did she seek adventure, but she knew how to capture that adventure on the page. 

AMY: As a biographer, Iris, you were fortunate that Charmian recorded so much in her personal diaries. She suffered a lot of heartbreak in her life, not the least of which was related to her desire to be a mother. 

IRIS: Definitely. One of the most important stories I wanted to tell in this book was the story of the child that Jack and Charmian lost: Joy Baby, as they called her. It was an important story that I couldn’t imagine why it was erased, and so when I started researching Charmian… She got pregnant right at the end of their Snark journey. When they came home, she was like, “I don’t feel very good,” and she found out she wasn’t sick with malaria; she was pregnant. And so she was so excited for this baby and was told all along that nothing was wrong. But when she went into labor… first off, Charmian was a very small woman, and the baby was over nine pounds, so a very large baby. So they had difficulty delivering the baby. They used forceps, and meanwhile, during this time period when a woman’s giving birth, she’s completely out, right? You’re not awake at all. And so they used forceps and messed up on baby Joy’s spine — the top of her spine — when they’re delivering her, and then, Charmian doesn’t deliver the placenta so she starts to bleed out on the table. So she’s rushed into emergency surgery. So unfortunately, baby Joy died 38 hours after she was born, and Charmian never got to see her. And then, on top of that, the doctor who did her surgery to deal with the placenta scarred her uterus so that she could no longer carry a child to term. But she didn’t know that, and so she kept trying and losing children for years to come. But she so desperately wanted to become a mother, and the diaries she wrote about that period of being in the ward and hearing all the babies crying and her milk coming in… just the pain she suffered, the depression she suffered from losing her child… it was so touching to read, and I had never seen anything like that about the Londons, so for me, it was a very personal thing that needed to be a part of this book.  

KIM: Absolutely. It was a heartbreaking and unforgettable part of it, and I feel the same, too. That’s part of her story that really needed to be told, and I’m glad that you were able to share that, as hard as it was to read it, too. So, getting back to another aspect of their relationship was her spending all this time helping him with his writing, and it really ended up coming at the sacrifice of her own writing. Amy and I wondered if that caused any tension between them? And when she did finally start really being able to put herself first, professionally speaking, when did that happen? When was she able to do that?

IRIS: You know, it was really a tough thing. When she was on the Snark was when she started to realize “Yeah, I really want to get back to being a writer.” She was a writer before she met Jack. It was really hard to do! She was in charge of Jack’s correspondence; she was in charge of Jack’s books; it was a lot of work. They did have a servant who worked for them. He did help Charmian with some of her typing, which eased up some of the work, but then she wasn’t there to help edit, right? That was her role as well. So there was a lot of tension. When she would back off at all, Jack would get upset because he needed her. She was part of his writing process. Towards the end of his life he started to get sicker and sicker, and that’s when she started to take a stand. He started to have renal failure, so he was very irritable, and she was like, “You know what? I’m just going to write my books.” She started to really commit to her life as a writer about the time of the Dirigo. Around 1912, about four years before Jack London died, she started to really focus on the fact that, “You know, I’m going to be a writer as well. And that’s what I wanted to do.” But she really was of two minds. It took a while for her to be able to let go of that role, even after Jack died. It was really difficult for her to just… she couldn’t let go of the stewardship of his career and his works, you know. She still didn’t have all the time to devote to her writing. 

AMY: After The Log of the Snark came out (which was well-received by critics), she also had two more books published. One was called Our Hawaii, which was another travelogue type book, and then she also wrote a biography of her husband following his death. But those books didn’t really do as well. So even after Jack’s death it seemed like, as you mentioned, a lot of her time was still consumed with being the protector of his work and his legacy, but she was able to carve out a new life for herself after he died, would you say?

IRIS: Yeah, she did, and in fact, she wrote four books. Our Hawaii was two different editions, and the second one was quite different. So when she was going to write the biography on Jack London called The Book of Jack London, which was a two-volume biography that she wrote about him on the urging of Jack London’s editor. So he had asked her to come take the train to New York and work with him about that. She was also in charge of dealing with all of the rights and copyright and everything, and writing the end of some of his books. So when she’s in New York…. A few years before Jack died, they had gone to a show at the Orpheum Theater in Oakland and it was Harry Houdini’s magic show. Jack was enamored; he was like, “That guy is so cool!” And went backstage and of course was like, “I’m Jack London!” So they all end up having dinner with the Houdinis. Harry Houdini was also married to a woman named Bess. They became friends, and when Jack died, Harry Houdini sent a letter of condolence to Charmian. So when she was going to New York, she mentioned to him that she was going to be there and he was like, “You have to come to my show.” So she went and sat in the front row with these tickets, went backstage afterwards, and Harry Houdini fell instantly in love with her. They started seeing each other all the time. Meanwhile, Harry Houdini is married. He invited Charmian on the first date to go to dinner with him and his wife, and she was like, “I don’t know, this is kind of weird.” But they ended up having a several-week-long affair, very, very well-documented, again, in her diaries. She called him her “Magic Lover.” But what she realized is Harry Houdini, much like Jack London, was really a charismatic and kind of self-absorbed man, and needed a lot of attention and needed a lot of her energy. She left New York for a little bit, went back up to Mt. Desert Island where her father was from and her relatives lived, and really came to terms with the idea of, like, “You know, I don’t want to get on this train again. I actually want to focus on me.” So when she went back, she was like, “Sorry, Harry, it’s over,” and went back to Glen Ellen and basically broke Harry Houdini’s heart.

AMY: That’s amazing. I love that whole anecdote. It’s crazy that she had these two amazing men in her life, even if that one was only brief and it ended on a kind of very weird note, as I recall.

IRIS: Yes.

AMY: But she also wanted to realize this dream of building her dream house, the dream house that she and Jack had always intended on building that, sort of, they didn’t quite complete during his lifetime. Can you talk about that?

IRIS: Yeah, so in their life together, from the time they got together they wanted to build this mansion called The Wolf House. And they did. They built this amazing mansion that no one had ever seen before. They spent all of their money on it. And then several weeks before they were going to move in, it burned to the ground. And during their lifetimes, both Jack and Charmian thought it was arson, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that these forensic scientists realized that, in Glen Ellen, it gets to be over a 100 degrees in August and the linseed oil that they had been putting on the floors, they left the rags next to the house and they combusted. And the house went up in flames because it was covered in linseed oil at the time. So that was a huge loss for both of them. Luckily, none of their stuff was inside because it was weeks before they were going to move in, and so Charmian dreamed of making a home where she could house all of their artifacts and really make a museum that would not only honor Jack’s life, but also honor their life together, to tell their story. Because in her first version of her biography [of Jack] it was called The Story of Us. It was the idea of both of them, because she understood that it was both of them that made the adventure. So she started working on The House of Happy Walls, which was a house she built so that it would never burn. I don’t know if you keep up with the news in Sonoma County, but we have a lot of fires here. She built this house over a decade long, slowly, with profits that she slowly earned, and the house became this amazing reflection of her. She loved to live in a place of beauty, and so the House of Happy Walls was really her final act of creating a place of beauty; a museum for Jack London, but also a home that was exactly what she wanted. She had dishes from the South Seas that had once been Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and used the coloring from those to make an aqua-colored kitchen and the tile in the dining room is all this turquoise color. There’s a fountain in that room. Upstairs, it looks like the belly of a ship, because that was the place that she loved to be. There were huge fireplaces and there were nautilus shells over the light bulbs. Everything’s just specific and totally an act of art. It’s amazing. And just a side note about that place: that is now a museum, The House of Happy Walls at Jack London State Park, the very museum I went to when I was in sixth grade. But several years ago I was asked to be part of the committee for them to refurbish it, and I was so excited. I gave them my manuscript before it was with a publisher to use as a reference, and that’s why now, you walk through and you see baby Joy’s bootie (so she’s in the story), all of Charmian’s feats and accomplishments… the whole top floor is called Trailblazer Exhibit and it’s so that little girls that go there like myself later on, will now see this kind of role model that I didn’t get to see. I started crying the first time I walked through, I was so excited. It was just like, “Oh my gosh.”

KIM: You should feel very proud.

IRIS: Thank you very much. I do.

AMY: Kim, I’m seeing a road trip at some point in our future, because I’ve never ever been there and I would love to visit. 

IRIS: Oh, we’d love to have you! We’ll go wine-tasting, too!

AMY: Absolutely. Sounds fun!

KIM: So we mentioned her passion for protecting Jack’s legacy, and you talked a little about that. Is there anything else besides the House of Happy Walls that is also Charmian’s legacy that you think people should know about as well?

IRIS: I think one thing (and this is also something I learned from writing the book), is that I considered myself to be a feminist my entire life, but it wasn’t really until I started researching Charmian that i realized that I kind of had stereotypes for what women were like at the turn of the century. And when I met Charmian in the “real,” as I call it, I realized that all of these preconceived conceptions I had of what women were like then were absolutely wrong, that of course women were just like they are now and of course, they weren’t recorded because they weren’t following “the rules.” It was really the first time I felt like I had truly done something to correct history in some way, and it felt like I got more out of the book than even anyone else who’s ever going to read it, you know? I learned a lot about what it means to be a woman in this world today. 

AMY: I feel like, reading your book, you brought her to life so well that as I mentioned, it took me about two or three days to get through this, and by the third day she felt like my friend...she felt like my gal pal. She was so cool. And I can only imagine if I felt that way, how you must have felt about her spending years getting to know her, poring through her diaries and really understanding her. I mean, you must have a really special connection with her in your heart. 

IRIS: Definitely.

KIM: So, Iris, we know that you’re a poet as well. Was switching gears to writing a biography a challenge? 

IRIS: Well, you know, it’s interesting. It became kind of part of my process. So I originally did not approach this as a biography. I was working in the archives, just curiously, because I do archival work for my poetry. The first thing I found was the Dirigo diaries, which are super lyrical. They were never published as a book. So I was reading them, and I couldn’t … I had to respond by writing poetry. So what happened was, I actually wrote poetry about all the artifacts as I was working through it, and about the process of trying to find a life that’s been buried by another. And so it became a whole book project, so I kind of wrote two books at the same time, because as a poet, I had to write a poem first, and then write prose.

KIM: That’s really cool. 

AMY: Is that the collection that you recently had published?

IRIS: Yes, it’s called West: Fire: Archive, and it talks about not only Charmian’s life, but also it talks about the fires that we had in Sonoma County and the disasters that have ravaged the West through generations. And kind of the myth of the West that we have; this whole phallocentric idea of what the West was like, the single narrative.

KIM: Do you have any other projects on the horizon?

IRIS: Yeah, so I’m working on my next book proposal and it is on another lost woman of literature named Sanora Babb. So Sanora Babb wrote this amazing book called Whose Names Are Unknown that she wrote in the Thirties while she was working at Arvin Sanitary Camp outside Bakersfield dealing with all of the refugees coming from the Oklahoma Panhandle where she had grown up. She was a writer and she worked in the camps, really connected with everyone and wrote this amazing novel. But she had shared her notes with her boss, which was Tom Collins, and one day they had a writer visit named John Steinbeck and he borrowed a lot of her notes. In fact, he quotes that he used these writer’s notes in his book. Sanora had a contract with Harper Collins and she was flown to New York that summer to finish the novel. (I mean, how awesome is that?) But a few weeks in, her editor took her into his office and said, “I’m so sorry, we’re going to have to cancel your contract because there’s another book about the Dust Bowl called The Grapes of Wrath and we can’t have two books about the Dust Bowl.”

AMY: Girl...now you’re making me angry!

IRIS: Yeah! And then it gets worse! She didn’t publish it after that. She actually was friends with Ralph Ellison. They worked on it together, but then after that, she put it in a drawer and it didn’t get published until 2004, the year before she died. It’s such a good story about the Dust Bowl. Because my family’s from the Dust Bowl and when I was growing up, my grandmother was like… I read The Grapes of Wrath and I’m like, “Grandma! It’s so exciting! I read a book about our people!” She was like, “Steinbeck didn’t get it right.” I was like, “You’re just grumpy, Grandma,” and she was like, “No, he didn’t.” And she was totally right! He set it in the wrong counties … it wasn’t the Dust Bowl that actually happened. All of the different types of people that were working in the fields … the women had these strong roles. None of that’s in The Grapes of Wrath. 

KIM: I am dying to do an episode on that! Wow, that’s incredible!

AMY: Yeah, that sounds amazing, and once again, literally a woman getting left behind in the dust.

IRIS: Yeah.

AMY: Jeesh.

KIM: Iris, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about Charmian Kittredge London. Everyone, go read Iris Dunkle’s biography of Kittredge London, then follow it up by checking out Kittredge London’s Log of The Snark!

AMY: Yeah, Iris, thank you so much! It was so fun chatting with you, and I’m so glad we got to finally know Charmian and that she’s now part of my vernacular.

IRIS: It’s been such a pleasure talking with you both, and I’m subscribing to your podcast because I love what you’re doing. Thank you!

AMY: That’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

[start closing music]

KIM: For more information, 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.

26. Dear Film Industry, Please Consider Adapting These Books by Women

AMY: Hey everyone, welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. So Amy, a few episodes back we talked a bit about “Bridgerton,” and it got me feeling all nostalgic for when you and I used to binge costume dramas together.

AMY: I think we should back up and first explain how our love of BBC miniseries is what sparked our friendship in the first place. As I recall it, I got dragged along by a colleague of mine to a media “networking” event (which, I never used to go to things like that), but he begged me to come along with him.

KIM: Our friend Matthew.

AMY: Yes. And Matthew and I were sitting at the bar just sort of like, “Why are we here?” I looked four feet away and I saw you in the middle of the crowd, standing there with your glass of wine with a smile on your face, but just like, “Oh my god, I don’t know anybody.”

KIM: I actually didn’t want to go at all. My boyfriend at the time was like, “Go! You need to meet new people and get out there.” I was trying to look for a job in L.A. I had moved without one. And I did not want to go all the way across town, because in L.A., that’s a huge deal, but I went to this MediaBistro event. I got my glass of wine and then I stood there, looking around, wishing I had not come. Until….

AMY: Until I said hello, because I was like, “This girl needs rescuing. I cannot sit here and watch her flounder.”

KIM: You felt sorry for me, and I needed someone to help me in that moment. I was actually desperate and alone! [laughing] And you! You made friends with me, and we hit it off!

AMY: It was during our conversation that we realized we had this mutual love.

KIM: Yeah. Of “Masterpiece Theater.” 

AMY: [laughing] Yes.

KIM: And also, just to add a little context, there are people that love “Masterpiece Theater” in Los Angeles, but it’s hard to find them. I mean, it’s a big city. It’s hard to find your tribe, so it was kind of amazing to me that I actually met someone who totally was into “Masterpiece Theater.”

AMY: “Masterpiece Theater” is kind of like code for “This person is going to understand everything that I like.” 

KIM: Yes. Exactly. They love to read, they’re an English major like I am, they see the world in a similar way. Basically, we became “Masterpiece Theater” buddies.

AMY: Yes. That actually leads us to our discussion topic for today’s episode which is “Which books by women authors would you love to see adapted for film?”

KIM: Right. Great question, and so Amy and I decided to each choose some books that we’d love to see turned into a movie or miniseries, and we’re going to share them with each other. So, Amy, do you want to go first?

AMY: Sure! So the first book I picked was Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. It’s the story of hellbent social climber Undine Sprague. She’s an American beauty from a new-monied family and she has this never-ending quest for social success. She leaves a series of husbands in her wake in the process of trying to conquer society. And like all Edith Wharton novels, this one would be so visually stunning with all the filthy rich characters living in both New York and Paris. 

KIM: Oh, yeah. That would make an amazing miniseries or movie, for that matter.

AMY: And actually, we might not have to wait that long, because apparently, Sofia Coppola will be turning this one into a film. I guess she’s working on it.

KIM: Please let that be true. I mean, that would be incredible. 

AMY: Yeah, it would be good. Okay, so what did you come up with?

KIM: Besides adaptations of every book we’ve done an episode on so far, let’s see… I would really love to see an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Rose In Bloom. It’s a sequel to her novel Eight Cousins. The heroine in the book is Rose Campbell. She’s an orphan and heiress who goes to live with her wealthy relatives who all live near each other. She has various love interests, and she has to decide between one cousin who’s everyone’s favorite; he’s really handsome but troubled — and another, who’s sort of the underdog bookworm type. There are all these aunts and uncles and cousins with various personalities. It would be such a fun miniseries. I would love to see it adapted.

AMY: Okay, I’m going to make a confession though: I’ve never read it.

KIM: Oh my god, I have it! I think this is my mom’s copy from when she was younger that I actually have. I can loan it to you and you can read it!

AMY: Okay. Yeah. I’ve only ever read Little Women.

KIM: Yeah. I think most people have only ever read Little Women. Anyway… So what’s another one that you picked?

AMY: Okay, so, with the success of “The Queen’s Gambit,” it got me thinking about another story set in the1960s, that kind of era. This one is set in Paris, and I think it could be a fun film. It’s The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. 

KIM: Oh my god, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? That’s brilliant! I love it, that would make a great miniseries! Absolutely, yeah.

AMY: So like my first pick, Custom of the Country, this one is also about a young American who ends up going to Paris looking for love. It’s really funny, it has a sort of “Bridget-Jonesy/Sex in the City” vibe. It was a bestseller when it came out and I know at some point we’ll probably devote some time to it in a future episode. I can totally picture this movie with that swinging, 1960s French yé-yé pop music in the background, and just the fashion and the colors. I think it would be really cute.

KIM: Yeah. So my next one is The Little Duke. It’s by Charlotte Mary Yonge, and it’s on our list of possible lost ladies episodes because it’s wonderful. It was published in 1854, and I loved it as a child. I think it was another of my mom’s books from her bookshelves. I have this gorgeous hardback copy from back then, and I should loan it to you, Amy, because I think Jack and Julia might like it. It’s set in the 10th century, and the title character, the Little Duke, is Richard, Duke of Normandy. (He’s the great-grandfather of William the Conqueror.) In the book, his father was murdered (as he was in history) and then he’s essentially kidnapped by his overlord, King Louie, and becomes a playmate of the king’s spoiled children. The character of the little duke is just so well done; you feel really committed to his journey, and it’s really a moral and historical tale. And actually, this is really cool, Mark Twain said it inspired his book, The Prince & The Pauper. So I think it would make a great adaptation.

AMY: It’s so long ago; that would be interesting to see something that far back.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah, it’s not as common. I guess some people might think it’s a little saccharine. I don’t. I think it’s beautiful.

AMY: I know this next book gets put on every list of books that need to be made into movies. I really don’t know why it hasn’t been adapted yet. It’s The Secret History by Donna Tartt. 

KIM: It was supposed to be made? A long time ago, right?

AMY: I had read that Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne were originally planning to write the screenplay for this one.

KIM: Wow!

AMY: The director who optioned it was Alan Pakula. (I don’t know how you say his last name) But he optioned the film rights, but then he died, and so it all just went nowhere. 

KIM: Okay.

AMY: And then in 2002, Gwyneth Paltrow and her brother wanted to make it with Miramax, but that didn’t go anywhere either.

KIM: Right.

AMY: And then more recently, Bret Easton Ellis and one of Tartt’s old classmates at Bennington College, Melissa Rosenburg (who I believe is some sort of producer/director), they wanted to turn it into a television series. I don’t know, though. Apparently the adaptation of Tartt’s other bestseller, The Goldfinch, kind of got less-than-stellar reviews. I didn’t even bother seeing it because it got such terrible reviews.

KIM: They’re so different though. I mean this one needs to be made. I’m up for that. I mean, I think this is a moneymaker for whoever decides to do it.

AMY: It’s set at a small liberal arts college, and it revolves around a murder that happens among this group of kind of young Bohemian “cool kids.” You would cast this movie with beautiful young actors and actresses, and it would have a very Dark Academia aesthetic, because the characters in the book are all Classics majors, like Greek and Latin classics. So I could see what this movie would look like, and it would be really cool.

KIM: It would be brilliant. I think now is the perfect time.

AMY: Yeah. Your turn.

KIM: This one is for “Masterpiece Mystery.” Sarah Caudwell’s “Hilary Tamar” mystery series. I read them a while ago, and they’re wonderful. They’re very British, very clever and really funny. And the books are: Thus Was Adonis Murdered, The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder and The Sybil in Her Grave. And the narrator is a professor of medieval law at Oxford. Hilary Tamar is the narrator, and we never find out his or her gender, so that’s a mystery all the way through (his, her or their gender). And the mysteries revolve around his four former students who are now practicing barristers and the characters are just so charming and the mysteries are so fun. There’s all this wordplay and inside jokes about British society. And the covers are illustrated by Edward Gorey, so I mean, how perfect? It would be great for Masterpiece!

AMY: I love that idea. They could go either way with the casting.

KIM: Absolutely. Oh, it would be so fun! Maybe we should adapt this for ourselves?

AMY: Yeah. Would be good. Okay, my next book… this one is really kind of kooky. It was published back in 1915 and it’s called Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, about a lost society of women living in a remote part of the world that are able to reproduce asexually and they’ve never had men in their midst for 2,000 years because the men were all killed in a volcanic eruption. So it’s kind of that land where Wonder Woman originates from… it’s kind of like that combined with maybe Planet of the Apes, which is a weird comparison, but it’s kind of like that because these two male explorers happen upon this community. The men are taken prisoner, but they come to find out that the women have created this utopian, perfect society. It’s very sci-fi. The men wind up forming romantic attachments on the island, and that does not go very well. But it’s a very feminist story, so I think it’s very of-the-moment, even though it’s a bit wacky.

KIM: I want to read that, and I think we should also probably do an episode on that.

AMY: Yeah. For sure. So listeners, we’d love to hear your recommendations for miniseries you think we ought to watch, so if you have any favorites that are already out there (any past BBC productions or “Masterpiece Theaters”) let us know what your favorites are.

KIM: Yeah. You can share them in our Facebook group, or on Instagram. And books by female authors you’d love to see adapted for film? Tell us what you think. We want to hear that!

AMY: I’m pretty sure next week’s Lost Lady of Lit would not have wanted to sit on the couch for hours at a time watching television, unlike us.

KIM: No, she was far too great an adventurer for that, and thank goodness. She was busy literally sailing around the world with her literary superstar husband (but sadly, she tends to get lost in his shadows even though she, herself, was a published author and had an incredibly intriguing life.)

AMY: We’re talking about Charmian Kittredge London was a bona fide BADASS. So we’ll be discussing her and her most famous work, The Log of the Snark, next week, and we’ll be joined by the pre-eminent authority on Charmian London, poet and biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle.

KIM: I can’t wait for that!

AMY: So don’t forget to rate and review us where you listen to this podcast, and we will see you next week everyone! 

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