65. Lucia Berlin — A Manual for Cleaning Women with Mimi Pond

KIM ASKEW: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew...

AMY FOWLER: ...and I'm Amy Helmes. The writer we'll be discussing today, Lucia Berlin, has been called one of America's "best kept secrets" and "the best writer you've never heard of." For much of her adult life, her genius was shrouded in the unglamorous pursuit of trying to get by. She toiled at a series of everyday jobs, raised four sons mostly on her own, and struggled through alcohol addiction and three failed marriages. Yet in the course of her itinerant life, she witnessed and experienced a lot. And she wrote about it all in the form of short stories that are completely engrossing; funny, dark, poignant, perceptive, and anguishing at times.

KIM: Yes, and 76 of those stories were published in her lifetime. Although she had a small following of devoted fans, she never received any widespread notoriety prior to her death, which was in 2004. It wasn't until fairly recently that the world suddenly took notice of Berlin. There was a 2015 compilation of her work, entitled A Manual for Cleaning Women, and it became an immediate New York Times bestseller, portions of which are now being adapted for a film by Pedro Almodovar. Literary critic Ruth Franklin described the power of Berlin's prose perfectly, writing in The New York Times: "Lucia Berlin spins you around, knocks you down and grinds your face into the dirt. Her stories growl."

AMY: That's pretty intense, right? But I kind of agree with it. I mean, at the very least, I think when I was reading this book, it felt like she was reaching through the pages and grabbing me by my collar and almost lifting me off the ground with the strength of her prose. And of course I had that familiar refrain wash over me, which is "How the hell did I not know about her?" And so I'm very grateful to our special guest today who mentioned her to me in passing. And I mean that quite literally -- she told me about Berlin while she was walking her dog, and I was unloading groceries from my car. 

KIM: I love it. That's an LA story. I'm so excited to talk to her, because not only did our guest turn us on to Lucia Berlin, she was actually friends with her.

AMY: Yes. Having a guest with a personal connection to the "lost lady" in question is an exciting first for this podcast, and we can't wait to get her insight. Besides that, I think Mimi is also probably one of the coolest people ever. So let's just read the stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

Our guest today is Mimi Pond, a cartoonist, illustrator, humorist, and writer. Her cartoons have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Ad Week, and The Paris Review, to name just a few. She is the author and illustrator of five humor books, including the critically acclaimed memoirs Over-Easy and The Customer is Always Wrong, which are inspired by her time waitressing at a diner in Oakland, California. 

KIM: And Mimi has also dabbled, I guess you could put it, in writing for television. In fact, she wrote the very first episode of The Simpsons to air on Fox. Some dabbling! I think that speaks highly of her. 

AMY: Yeah. I told you she was cool, Kim. But Mimi's latest project is also cool. It's a graphic novel about the Mitford sisters. And if you remember, we discussed this family at length last spring in our episode on Nancy Mitford. Mimi's book Do Admit: Making Sense of the Mitford Sisters, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly sometime in the next year or two. 

KIM: Okay, I'm so excited for that to get published, but I also have been following you on Instagram, and I'm completely enthralled by the images that you've been posting from this project. Listeners, please, I highly recommend you go over and follow her at #mimipondovereasy if you know anything about the Mitford sisters and if you follow us, you probably do you're going to want to follow Mimi on Instagram. 

AMY: Mimi also happens to be one of my neighbors. Her daughter, Lulu, used to babysit for my daughter back before she went off to art school in New York, and Mimi's entire family, including her husband, Wayne White, and her son, Woodrow, are talented artists also. To be honest though, I really only know Mimi sort of in passing. I always see you walking your chocolate lab, Mabel, around the block, and let's face it: Mabel is the real legend in our neighborhood. 

MIMI POND: Mabel is the mayor of Hollyknoll Drive.

AMY: Yes, exactly. But I'm so excited to finally get to know you better, Mimi. So thank you again for joining us for this discussion. 

MIMI: Well, I'm happy to be here!

KIM: Okay. So let's dive right in here because first things first, I think we all want to know the story of how you knew Lucia Berlin. Can you tell us a bit about that?

MIMI: Yeah. Well, I was working at that said restaurant in Oakland, Mama's Real Cafe. And there is a local weekly, one of those weekly alternative papers, and I read a story by Lucia in it, and I was just gobsmacked by it. I was like, "Oh my God, this person is fantastic. This is the way I want to write. This is the way I see things." And I looked her up in the phone book and I called her and I introduced myself and she invited me over for coffee. And it was just that simple. She is just, she is who she sounds like in her writing. She is that person, you know? She's funny, she's open, she sees humor in everything, which is astonishing considering the woman lived like 10 different lifetimes in her life, you know, and all this crazy drama. And not only does she see the humor in it, she has such empathy for everyone. Even if it's someone she claims she doesn't like, by the time she's finished thinking about it, she's, you know, considered their point of view. That compassion just comes through in her work so strongly. I was trying to describe her work to a friend this afternoon, and I said, "It's like, there's these horrible tragedies and these horribly cruel moments. And yet it feels like you're eating a souffle." 

AMY: I think almost every story... I almost can't think of one that isn't anguishing, 

KIM: But yet there's a love of life and of living and of appreciating every little thing, and it's so inspiring because we complain about the littlest things. Then you see all the stuff that she has gone through, and yet she's still just eating up life. It's beautiful. 

MIMI: Since we both lived in Oakland and Berkeley, I really loved how she described Oakland and Berkeley and the, you know, the whole Bay Area. There's such true descriptions of the way things were. And like I said, her empathy for complete strangers, you know, people in a laundromat or, you know, on a bus, are so compelling. Also there's a few stories she wrote about a number of elderly women who were neighbors and they would have coffees for each other. And she gets into the minute details of what it's like to be in one of those kinds of houses. Like, you know, my grandmother's house, where women were busy making a Jell-O salad, stuff like that. And she does it with such love. And also, she's covering material no man would ever think of covering, you know? The quiet, desperate lives of older women.

AMY: Okay. I love this story. First of all, that, "I'm just going to try to reach out to her!" And then I love that she was gracious enough to be like, "Yeah, sure!" Did you continue to have a relationship after that? 

MIMI: Yeah, absolutely. And eventually I moved from Oakland to New York and then we had a correspondence. Somewhere around here I have her letters, and I can't tell you where they are. 

AMY: Oh my gosh. 

MIMI: Um, but we corresponded and, you know, I was pursuing a career as a cartoonist in New York. And after a while I was making some money, and she'd written me to say, you know, she felt poor. All she could afford was the Jean Naté cologne from the drug store. And I had a little bit of money, and there was a Ralph Lauren perfume I knew she liked. And I went to Bloomingdale's and I bought her some perfume and I sent it. Just because I was like, "I want to do something for you," you know? 

AMY: Wow. And so at that point, after you had read the first piece, did you just go and devour everything else?

MIMI: Oh, I went and got everything I could! I got this, which I just found out on the internet is worth like $2,600, the original Manual for Cleaning Ladies from 1977. And that's a nice little small press thing. And then I have this, which is also very nice.

KIM: Angel's Laundromat. 

MIMI: And then I have this...

KIM: Phantom Pain...

MIMI: This is Timbuktu Press, 1984, and she signed it, "May, 1984. For Mimi, dear friend, love always, Lucia."

AMY: So you were one of her early fans. I mean, before this re-issue of A Manual for Cleaning Women, you already knew about it. 

MIMI: Oh yeah. I was absolutely thrilled. 

AMY: And I understand that draw when you read the first story she had written that you were just like, "I want to know her," because that's kind of the experience I had reading these stories were like, "Wow, can you imagine having a conversation with her and just hanging out and chilling?" She's so damn funny. 

KIM: Oh, a hundred percent. And you actually did do that! It's amazing. 

AMY: Okay. So the stories in Berlin's collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, which is the one we'll be discussing, they're typically told from the point of view of women and girls who are leading seemingly disparate lives. So we see one young girl growing up in mining camps in Alaska and Idaho. Another is living with her grandparents in Texas. A third young woman is living in South America with her socialite family. There's an ER nurse, a school teacher, a cleaning lady, a woman living in Mexico with her dying sister, a drug mule in New Mexico. And that's to name just a few of the characters. And the stories are set in laundromats, rehab clinics, tropical resorts, medical buildings, Catholic schools. And many of these characters and stories are kind of quasi-connected in that they recur in more than one story. And in that sense, reading A Manual for Cleaning Women felt a bit to me like reading a more long-form book.

MIMI: I have to just say that her five-paragraph story, "My Jockey," I mean, it's been touted and lauded and stuff, but for me, it's like, "Fuck Ernest Hemingway. This is the shit." 

KIM: Oh my gosh, absolutely! Oh yeah. You said it, you said it. And then the more you read, the more you start to realize almost all these protagonists in the stories are, to varying degrees, her herself, Lucia Berlin. She's drawing from her own very storied personal history. And so Mimi, could you give our listeners maybe the broad strokes of Berlin's life, which we see reflected in her? 

MIMI: Well, she was born in Alaska. Her father was a mining engineer. They lived in mining camps in, like, Montana and Arizona and Colorado. And then she lived with her grandparents during World War II. I think her father was in the war. Then their fortunes turned, and he took a job in Chile. He was paid quite well, and suddenly she's, you know, goes from being pretty poor to this fabulously top of Chilean society ... aristocrats ... wealthy people from all over. Prince Ali Khan, she famously said, lit her cigarette, 

KIM: Her first cigarette. Right. 

MIMI: Which is great when she's telling it to an Indian in a laundromat. It just blows my mind. 

KIM: Yeah. Completely.

MIMI: The fact that her father, basically, he pimped her out at 14. And she told me that was a true story. A wealthy Chilean landowner that they, you know, they wanted to get in good with. I mean, it's just like, ohhhh .... and the story that she tells about that, even, there's, there's compassion for the man who essentially raped her. It's astonishing. She really, um, manages just to see every point of view. So from there, she goes back to the states and I think she enrolled in college and met her first husband. And I'm not sure, I think he abandoned her after she'd had one child and was pregnant with another. And then she married the first nice guy that came along and then left him for this hot-shot jazz musician, Buddy Berlin, who was very handsome and very glamorous from a wealthy family. He'd been at Harvard. His family had money. They went to Mexico for like the honeymoon with the kids, and I don't know how many hours into the marriage she finds out he's a heroin addict! So eventually that marriage ended and she wound up in Oakland and Berkeley with her four boys. So then she's a single mother raising four boys on her own. They were teenagers when I met her. You know, she was always a writer's writer. She never made that leap. You know, she's published by Black Sparrow Press, and that's, you know, prestigious and everything, but there was never any real money in it for her. She won a few different literary awards, which helped some, but she was still just, you know, living in a basically studio apartment at the end of her life, probably paid for by one of her sons. It would have thrilled her to no end to see that she has finally achieved fame. I'm sure up there she's thrilled that her sons are making some money from her work. That's what she always worked for anyways. 

AMY: Yeah. She had all these kinds of workaday jobs, like school teacher, switchboard operator, working in a hospital.

KIM: Yeah. I just can't imagine raising four sons and going through everything she was going through that she managed to do. 

MIMI: Well, I guess that's why she drank. 

AMY: I know. Yeah. So that's another question. Was she battling alcoholism when you knew her? 

MIMI: You know what? She probably was, and I was too young and stupid to notice. You know, she was on and off the wagon a few times. If she was, I wasn't really aware of it, but you know, someone like her was like high-functioning and probably able to hide it pretty well from a young woman she just met, you know?

KIM: Yeah. I mean, if you're nursing and doing all the things she was doing while she was struggling with it, it's kind of, she must have been high-functioning.

MIMI: Teaching grade school. Teaching in prisons, working in hospitals, you know, whatever she could get. And she still had the energy to come home and write like that with four sons. So it's like...

KIM: incredible.

MIMI: Yeah. 

AMY: So as you kind of mentioned earlier, it really does feel like she lived many, many different lives in just one lifetime, more than the rest of us, for sure. In her stories, she likes to shock at times. There are some punch-to-the-proverbial-gut moments, which I kind of likened to almost having like that "Chuck Palahniuk" level of twisted sometimes.

MIMI: Yeah.

AMY: That makes me wonder how much of what she wrote should we understand to be true? Because so much of it reads like memoir, but what's your take on this? I mean, can we take some of this stuff literally? 

MIMI: I mean, you can take some of it literally. Maybe some of it not so literally. I don't know enough about her, intimately, to know. Like there's one story where she kills her husband's drug dealer in Mexico and takes him out in a boat and dumps him in the ocean. I'm not sure that's true, although you kind of want it to be! 

KIM: Yeah. She probably wished she could. 

AMY: Yeah. The one that I think of most is the pulling of the grandfather's teeth when she was like a 13 year old girl.

MIMI: I believe that happened.

KIM: I believe it happened, too. That one just rings so true for me.

MIMI: Yeah.

AMY: I mean, first of all, the description is so gory and shocking and so funny at the same time, like the teabag shoved in his mouth. This is from a short story that is called "Dr. H.A. Moynihan." And I guess her grandfather was a dentist, so ... I mean, the way I kind of look at it, it probably can't all possibly be true, but the feeling that the incidents evoke are true. Maybe she tells a story and, you know, adds something to it or makes it more dramatic, but the feeling that she's trying to convey I believe was true to her life. That feeling of horror, whether she actually pulled all the teeth or not. It feels like you're sitting in a dentist's chair reading that story. It feels like somebody is coming at you with pliers, basically. 

KIM: Yeah. And the activeness of all these emotions and mixed feelings she has about her grandfather coming out in this violent kind of horrific, but also really funny scene. It's all wrapped up together. 

AMY: Yeah. So let's get into the stories a little more actually. What do you think, Mimi? If you had to kind of sum up sort of the hallmarks of a Lucia Berlin story, we've kind of talked about it a little, but what do you think her strengths are? 

MIMI: As I said, the overwhelming sense of compassion for people. She's always putting herself in their place. She just has this sort of love of life and of people from all walks of life, you know, from the wealthiest to the poorest and real poverty, um, her confidence in the way she tells stories is astonishing, too. There's never a feeling like she doesn't know exactly what she's doing, the way she frames everything. She makes it look easy. 

KIM: Absolutely. She knows what she's doing and she has you in hand, but then she has this tenderness and empathy, which it feels like she has it for her own life, too, which is wonderful. And then she has it for the characters, especially the true down-and-out ones. Like I'm thinking of the Native American in the laundromat, for example. It's so moving, because considering her own life, it just feels incredibly genuine. She puts herself on the same level as all the characters she's writing. 

AMY: Yes, she has this impartiality when it comes to people from all walks of life. It doesn't matter what class they are in. She treats them all on kind of the same level. And I think that kind of goes to what we're talking about a little bit. Mimi, you talked about "My Jockey." That was one of her stories that's set in a hospital or set in the emergency room. And those were some of my favorites, honestly. Her commentary on the human condition, I guess, in the midst of a hospital situation was so profound. My favorite, I think, was the one it's called Temps Perdu, like "Lost Time," and she's basically in the emergency room dealing with all these sort of mundane ... kind of like changing bed pans, you know, all that kind of stuff, but then she's flashing back and forth with her past, her childhood in Idaho and sort of a childhood sweetheart of hers, Kent Shreve. I don't know if you guys remember that story, but it's the one where basically they got stuck in the rafters and they were hanging upside down from their knees for hours and the ladder had fallen. And it was such a romantic story. And I think so many of her stories are so dark, and she has all this deadpan humor, but she's not really cynical. And in fact, I think she's very much a hopeless romantic. 

MIMI: Yeah. 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: Hold on, let me find it. So she says, "I spent one night with him, the night my baby sister had her tonsils. Red sent me and my blankets up the ladder to the loft where the five older children slept on straw. There was no window, just an opening in the eaves covered with black oilcloth. Kentshereve poked a hole in it with an ice pick and there was a jet of air like on airplanes only icy cold. If you put your ear to it you could hear the icicles in the pines, chandeliers, the creaking of the mine shaft, ore cars. It smelled of cold and wood smoke. When I put my one eye to the tiny hole I saw stars as if for the first time, magnified, the sky, dazzling and vast. If I so much as blinked my eye it all disappeared. We stayed awake waiting to hear his parents doing it but they never did. I asked him what he thought it was like. He held his hand up to mine so our fingers were all touching, had me run my thumb and forefinger over our touching ones. You can't tell which is which. Must be something like that he said." 

KIM: Oh, the chills. So good. 

AMY: Um, yeah, Mimi, any others? I mean, we talked about "My Jockey" ... which ones instantly stick out to you?

MIMI: Oh, well [the one about] the music box. ["Silence."] It was about selling chances and she was a kid in El Paso, and seven-years-old, and eventually in the story, uh, she and her friend really hit it big selling these tickets for this non-existent music box. And they wind up in Juárez in a restaurant where everyone's lavishing pesos on them and giving them food and falling over them. Nothing bad ever happens to them, which is amazing, but it's also about, you know, her sort of realizing that as a child, that she has this power over people, to charm them and to get them to give her money. She and her friend are just like little hustlers running all over town, getting dimes and quarters from everyone. 

AMY: Yeah, I, this is a tangent, but it's making me think of just the fact that there's so many little surprising moments; things that just take you by surprise all of a sudden that you weren't expecting in a story. Like I'm thinking of the one, um, I can't remember what the name of the story is .. With Henrietta. She's throwing up bird seed to the birds and... 

MIMI: About wanting to make a good impression? 

AMY: Yes. Yeah. And she's just having such a lovely day outside her house and it seems so pleasant and all of a sudden the cat jumps up and eats all the birds! 

KIM: Oh yeah, totally.

AMY: It happens all the time in her story. 

KIM: I wanted to read one, um, if we have time. We talked about her loving life and everything, and she kind of talks about it in the one, "Strays," where she is basically in a rehab sort of alternative to prison out in the middle of nowhere. And she ends up being outside with the cook, basically, and then having this experience: "The world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. But then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot. He felt that way too. I heard the catch in his throat. Some people may have said a prayer, knelt down, at a moment like that. Sung a hymn. Maybe cavemen would have done a dance. What we did was make love." 

AMY: Yeah. It's the ability to find beauty and grace in sort of the most dark and kind of dirty environments, basically. I don't think it's overreaching at all to say she was a literary genius. 

KIM: No, it's not overreaching. 

AMY: I was reading an article in The Guardian, I think, um, that kind of talked about the fact that she kept going over and over the same stories; we kept going back to Mexico City and this sister who was dying, and each story is a little different, but The Guardian article says "Berlin seems to share the view that individual narratives aren't sufficient to capture certain episodes in life. As the narrator of "Silence," one of her stories says, 'I have a piece of family lore. I know it is true that grandpa shot him, but how it happened has about 10 different versions.'"

KIM: It's almost like a piece of music where you keep hearing, um, you know, the same part over, but a little bit different. Like you think of Handel's "Messiah." And then there's a crescendo and then it kind of comes down, but it's all woven throughout. And I feel like this book is kind of like that. 

AMY: Yeah. And I think your memory of things works that way, and so it makes a lot of sense. When I was reading her stories I kept thinking of sort of looking through a pane of glass in the rain so that there's raindrops all over the window. You're seeing the bigger picture, but then there's all these little, tiny prisms that are the stories, you know, and each one is telling a different episode of her life. It was fascinating. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, reading this, to sort of put together the mystery of her life. Which was AMAZING. I really am embarrassed that I hadn't heard of her even with the re-issue a few years ago. I mean, I guess I was just busy when all of that was happening, because it was a bestseller, you know, when it came out. But it's insane to me that she's not more well-known, and I've seen it written, and I would agree, that she even maybe deserved a Pulitzer Prize in her lifetime, yet she was never published by a major publishing house. Mimi, I don't know if you know this or not. I mean, I don't know if you could say, but do you think she had any bitterness or regrets about the fact that her work was not as widely read as it clearly deserves to be? 

MIMI: I don't know. Honestly, I couldn't tell you. It's just that she had such a sunny outlook. You can't quite imagine her spending that much time being bitter about something like that. One of the last times I saw her, we went out for lunch and, um, I think it was a fried chicken place and it wasn't very good, but we're sitting there in a booth and there was a woman by herself sitting in another booth who had set up camp and it was like we were living inside one of Lucia's stories. This older elderly woman who had been crocheting those pillow dolls, you know? There's a pillow and there's like the dresses crocheted around it? And she had like three or four of them arranged, like she was going to be selling them, and she was working on another. It just felt like such a "Lucia" moment. It was just kind of heartbreaking and funny and sad all at once. We both kind of looked at each other like...

KIM: Oh, yeah, yeah. 

AMY: Totally. Um, I almost have to think if she had this kind of crazy notoriety and she had taken off in her late twenties and thirties as a writer and became very popular, I just don't know if we would've gotten this kind of collection of short stories. Because she had to have kind of lived... I think she would have still been a brilliant writer and maybe it would have been different. I mean, you can't take away her talent, but would we have gotten these kinds of stories? 

MIMI: That's an interesting theory. Yeah. 

AMY: So what do you know? Do you know much about how she kind of got her start? 

MIMI: I don't know that much about it. I know Ed Dorn, the beat poet, became a big mentor of hers later, but I don't recall that much about her earliest work. 

AMY: But she did receive some recognition in her lifetime. I think there was a select circle in the literary community that maybe it was like, "Oh, she's pretty good." 

KIM: She's a writer's writer. I think I read that.

MIMI: Well, it says here that she won the Jack London Short Prize for 1985 and also an American Book Award in 1991 for Homesick, and also got a fellowship for the National Endowment for the Arts. And I think I remember seeing her right after that and she'd bought herself a new car. 

KIM: Oh, that's great. So, I mean, as someone who knew her, it must be so gratifying to see her finally getting...

MIMI: Oh, it's so... it's, I mean, it's thrilling for her and it's also just for me, it's like, "I KNEW!!!" 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: 100 percent. Um, did she ever give you any feedback on your writing? 

MIMI: She may have. Like I said, I have letters somewhere, but I don't remember that specifically. It's just, I mean, we talked about how when you have an experience and then you decide you're going to, you know, tell your friends about it, and you've started trying to figure out how to frame the story. She said that's how you write. You practice by telling people, and that stuck with me.

AMY: Actually one of her stories is all about her teaching creative writing at a prison, which gave a lot of good insight into her approach to writing. Just reading that story alone and what she shared with the prisoners was interesting.

MIMI: Yes. 

AMY: So even at the time of her death in 2004 she was still writing, which is impressive because it sounds like she was in a lot of pain. She suffered from scoliosis all her life.

MIMI: And then she had lung cancer, too, because she smoked. I took my children with me once to visit her. And she was living in a little unit behind her son's house, and my kids were maybe like five and eight, and they were running around and she was uncharacteristically cranky. And I knew that she probably had to be in pain. 

AMY: So all the more impressive that she was actually still writing around that time! She was working on a book of more autobiographical sketches. They were put together in a collection called Welcome Home that Farrar, Straus and Giroux published in 2018. It's an unfinished work, um, but it kind of is a bit more autobiographical where she actually goes through the chronology, recounting her origins in Juneau, going all the way up to the husband that you mentioned, the jazz musician, in Mexico in 1966. And so I'd love to read that to get even more insight and maybe a little bit more, um, kind of my answer that question a little bit more, like what really happened? What was she embellishing in her story? So did you read that one at all by chance? 

MIMI: I haven't read that yet. In fact, I have to say, boning up for this podcast I was like, "I've got to reread everything!" I hadn't really read anything in a long time, and it's so good, but it's almost excruciating because it's so good. Every sentence is just like a dagger. I mean, in a good way, but it's emotionally exhausting. 

KIM: I think that's absolutely true, 

AMY: But it's not depressing. 

KIM: No, no. It's just so engaging. 

MIMI: Yeah. Yeah. Engaging really is the word. I mean, it just forces you to feel these things.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah. I think it's great that A Manual for Cleaning Women is being adapted for film by Pedro Almodovar, and it would be his first English language film. I just recently watched Volver again, and it's just so gorgeous. I think that's an amazing director to take up this project, and Cate Blanchett is attached, which seems pretty perfect, too. And it's going to be set in Texas, Oakland and Mexico. That's all I know about it. 

AMY: Yeah. So Mimi, what are your thoughts about this movie coming down the pike?

MIMI: I mean, I love Almodovar. It'll be interesting to see if he can capture the dialogue, you know, in the way that she does, since English isn't his first language. I'll just be curious to see what that's like.

AMY: We talked about ... well, we showed Mimi, our #readlucia tote bags that we each have. And so I am so excited to take it everywhere and hopefully have it be a conversation starter. I want to now share your crusade, Mimi, because not enough people know her.

MIMI: So many women writers have been dismissed for telling women's stories, you know? Like, oh, that's just "women" stuff. Like it's not important.

KIM: Domestic life. Exactly. 

AMY: Yeah. Um, and speaking of women, let's talk a little bit about your Mitford book. What inspired you to tackle the Mitfords? 

MIMI: Well, I only knew about Jessica Mitford growing up because my parents bought this book, The American Way of Death, which was her expose on the American funeral industry. I think I was in my twenties before someone said to me, "You know, there were other sisters," and I was like, "What?" Then I proceeded to read everything I could get my hands on, you know, from Nancy Mitford's comic novels to books about all of them. There's a number of books about all of them. And then Jessica Mitford also wrote a wonderful memoir called about their childhood. Um, Nancy of course, self mythologized, the entire family. It's like Lucia, you know? She was loosely basing all these novels on her family. And then Diana wrote a memoir and Deborah, the youngest, wrote a couple of different books. But what fascinates me about them is that there were six aristocratic sisters. They're raised in the countryside in the middle of nowhere with no one else to talk to, and they're also not socialized the way girls are in schools, where they make it really clear to you from the get-go that "You're a girl; you're not as important. You're not going to use this information. You're just going to get married. So whatever." So they all just decided they were all going to do whatever they wanted to do. And they all went out and they did, you know, for better or for worse. They all stuck to their guns. They all did the most outrageous stuff. They met everyone from Maya Angelo to JFK, to Lead Belly, to Winston Churchill, who was their cousin. They knew everyone, they all went everywhere and they did stuff women weren't supposed to do. And it gets really crazy. Stories you just can't believe, and you know, they're made to be told and visualized. And there's been lots of books written about them, but no one's done a graphic novel.

AMY: Well, we can't wait for it.

KIM: Yeah, we want to tell everyone about it when it comes out. 

AMY: Yeah. We hope you will come back on, and actually, it would be fun to have you on with Leslie Brody, who wrote a Jessica... 

MIMI: Yes, a Jessica biography, which is excellent.

KIM: Yeah, she was one of our guests for the Harriet the Spy episode that we did on Louise Fitzhugh 

MIMI: Harriet the Spy, that book made me who I am. 

AMY: Awww!

KIM: So great. And then also we had Laura Thompson on, who's written several Mitford biographies. So yeah, a "Mitford Fest" on Lost Ladies of Lit. I love it. 

MIMI: I have other obscure women writers I need to tell you about.

AMY: Oh yeah. We're all ears. 

KIM: Oh yeah. We love hearing more. 

AMY: Shoot us an email with all your suggestions, for sure. We are trying to hit everybody up. And we're very jealous that you knew Lucia. Thank you, again, so much, for telling me about her. 

MIMI: Oh, you're welcome. It was all my pleasure. 

KIM: I hope to meet you in person. Thank you so much. 

MIMI: Oh, sure. You're welcome. 

KIM: So we'll see you next week. In the meantime, don't forget to leave a review where you listen to this podcast. It really makes a difference and drop us a line by email or an Instagram or our Facebook page if you're feeling so inclined. We love hearing from you.

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 Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.

64. Much Better than CATS — Esther Averill’s Jenny and the Cat Club

AMY: Hey everybody, welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner, Kim Askew, and Kim… today, we’re talking about cats.

KIM: The Andrew Lloyd Weber musical? Can we NOT? 

AMY: Let’s just go there for a second because I have a true love-hate relationship with that musical. I mean, it’s based on poems by T.S. Eliot, right? (That should be good).

KIM: That’s true.

AMY: And some of the music is good. I have seen it performed several times; I tend to enjoy it, but I do find myself, in the midst of watching CATS the musical, thinking, “This is so dumb! This is so random!” (It really is.)

KIM: Right. And the film version that came out a few years ago is said to be only worth watching if you’re high. 

AMY: That looks so bad that even though I will go see a stage production of CATS, I have not brought myself to watch that movie yet, because the trailer was just so awful. (I did enjoy reading the reviews of that. There were some really funny reviews of that movie.)

KIM: Yeah. I’ve read the reviews even though I haven’t seen the movie, or actually, I haven’t seen the musical either.

AMY: You haven’t?!!

KIM: No, which is why I don’t really have any room to laugh about it, because I actually haven’t seen it. However, you know, what I do know about it does make me sense that I might not love it, but the fact that you like it, and we like a lot of the same things…

AMY: I don’t think you’re as into musicals as I am.

KIM: No.

AMY: But I will say there’s something about the stage version I do find endearing. I like the costumes. I like the dancers writhing around on stage as if they’re cats. But the plot just sucks. I remember the last time it came to town I was trying to cajole my kids into going with me and Julia did not want to go. Jack grudgingly came with me because he just knew that I needed a date. And I almost apologized to him after it was over. Like “I'm so sorry, I made you sit through that.” Because it's not for everyone.

KIM: But what a sweet kid!

AMY: If I were Andrew Lloyd Weber, I think I would have stuck with the cat theme (I think that’s a good idea) but I might have turned to another author for my inspiration. And you might even call her a “lost lady,” in fact: Her name is Esther Averill.

KIM: Oh my gosh! Yes. I know where you’re going with this now, and you are absolutely right. That would have been way better. So Esther Averill is the author of a series of 13 children’s chapter books all about a black cat named Jenny Linsky. She’s an orphan who’s been rescued by a kindly sailor named Captain Tinker, and he encourages to go out into the neighborhood and make some friends. 

AMY: And there just so happens to be an official “Cat Club” amongst all these neighborhood cats, hence the title of the first book, Jenny and the Cat Club. They all have these fun names like Mr. President, and Macaroni and Concertina, and they invite Jenny to join the club. All these anthropomorphic cats have special talents. One of the cats can play a nose flute (which I thought was funny). But Jenny, poor Jenny, is feeling inadequate because she doesn’t have a special talent that would help her join the Cat Club. So in the course of the book, she does find her talent and she is admitted to the club, and the adventures continue from there in the rest of the series. And I’m sorry, but the cat club and all these cats with unique monikers — that is basically the stage show of CATS, but with a more cohesive story. I just think it could have worked better, I don’t know. Kim, anyway, I didn’t grow up with these books. I think you’re the one who mentioned them to me, but when did you discover them, and what do you like most about them?

KIM: I actually didn’t know about them until I bought my niece, Chloe, a New York Review of Books’ Children’s Book Club Subscription (which is great, by the way). And I think she was 9 or 10 at the time, and she immediately loved them and wanted more.

AMY: Okay, and I think we have a little clip of Chloe, who we invited to share her thoughts for us.

KIM: Yeah, she’s going to give us a little book review.

AMY: Yeah, let’s play that. 

[Plays clip of Chloe]

CHLOE: Well, what I really love about the Jenny and the Cat Club series was it was very cute, innocent …. very calm, chill vibes. It was just a sweet little story about a little black cat who has a red scarf knitted by her old owner who's a sailor. And she goes out one night and she meets this group of cats who dance and they have fun. And they jump around the gardens and go on picnics. And she has a bunch of adventures with them. And it's a really, just a really sweet book.

[end clip]

AMY: So I agree, I mean, just for this episode I did a quick catch-up on these books and I love how quirky they are. During the first meeting Jenny spies on, she sees the cats attending to financial matters. (The club is very official. They even have their own emblem.) It’s little details like that which just cracked me up. And I think these books would make a really good animated series for kids even today, don’t you think?

KIM: Absolutely. And my daughter is obsessed with cats, so I could see her loving that. So Esther Averill wrote the books and illustrated them. She was born in 1902 in Bridgeport, CT. She actually contributed some of her cartoons to a local newspaper when she was a teenager, then after attending Vassar, she went on to work in magazines. She eventually moved to Paris and started her own short-lived press, Domino Press, and it specialized in children’s picture books. (That is really cool.) After moving back to the states in 1941 (because of the war, I’d assume), she took a job at the New York Public Library. It’s during this time that she started writing The Cat Club books. She continued creating them until 1972. They were translated into six languages, and in 1954, one of the titles, Jenny’s Birthday Book, was named The New York Times’ Best Children Book of the Year.

AMY: The books were actually reissued back in 2003. And I think if you’re looking for a great gift to give a child, you should consider these books as an option. They’ve got a cool retro vibe and they’re just so charming… and I mean, I haven’t vetted them all, but I suspect they hold up in terms of appropriateness as well. And since we’re on the topic of cats, I thought this would be a good episode to bring up another children’s book that I first heard about late last year. It involves a few other lost ladies, and it might be kind of specific to Los Angeles where we live, but the anecdote behind this book is really endearing and so I wanted to share it. So A Cat Called Room 8 is an out-of-print book by Virginia Finley and Beverly Mason. There’s a copy of this book at the Los Angeles central library downtown, but it was not available for circulation (It’s reference only) and because of Covid restrictions, I wasn't able to get down there to check it out in person. However, I was able to find a digitized copy of the book (which means you’ll be able to check it out, too). The book is based on a true story. So in the 1950s, Beverly Mason (one of the authors) was the principal of Elysian Heights Elementary School here in L.A. (which is a school that isn’t too far from where I live). Virginia Finley (the other author) was a teacher there, and they wrote this book, A Cat Called Room 8, to memorialize a big gray cat who began visiting a sixth grade classroom day after day, and year after year. He would disappear back into the hills during summer vacations, but on the first day of school he’d pop up again, and for over a decade he was a fixture at the school. The first class that he visited named him “Room 8” because they were “Room 8.” And every year when the graduating sixth grade took their class picture, Room 8 was included in the photo. (You could see him on one of the kids’ laps.)

KIM: Awww!

AMY: And if you go on the Internet, you can find some of these class photos with Room 8. Over time, the cat became a legend at Elysian Heights Elementary, not just to the kids and the staff, but he became famous world-wide for his attendance at the school! So some local newspapers and TV stations began reporting on this cat that had taken up residence at the school, and then Look magazine did a three-page spread about the cat, which resulted in tons of fan mail coming to the school from all over the world! When he died in 1968, this cat got an obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

KIM: Oh, I love that story. And the students at the school actually raised money to buy him a gravestone. He’s buried at the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas, CA. Before he died, his pawprints were set in cement outside of the school, as if he were a Hollywood star. Oh, that’s so sweet! And we’ll try to find the Look magazine cover and put it on our social.

AMY: And also, if you Google it, you can also find messages that the children at the time wrote into the concrete alongside his little paws. So one message says, “We loved him, for he gave us much cheer.” Another says, “He came in our room and sat on my table. I loved him.”  And another one said: “Without a name, to room 8 he came, to give our school the greatest fame.”

KIM: The rhyming… that is adorable. There’s also a colorful mural devoted to Room 8 on the school’s outer wall and inside, there’s a sort of shrine to him with historic photographs. 

AMY: “Memories….. All alone in the school yard….!!!!”  I know you know that.

KIM: I know that song. I didn’t know it was from CATS.

AMY: YOU DID NOT KNOW THAT SONG WAS FROM CATS, KIM??!!

KIM: Nope.

AMY: Oh my god.

KIM: I know.

AMY: Maybe we … the next time CATS comes to town you’re coming to see it with me, because it’s got tons of ballet in it. There’s a white cat that’s a really beautiful ballerina — they always cast it with a ballerina. I think you might oddly like it, and it’s got the T.S. Eliot connection. It’s based on his poems.

KIM: Yes. No, that’s great. You know, we’ll go to tea afterwards…

AMY: To decompress. Or laugh. Or I have to buy you tea because you’re angry at me.

KIM: Yes. Yes.

AMY: Seriously, though, A Cat Called Room 8 is such a sweet story and I’m glad I was able to find a copy of it online. It’s really cute, with really good illustrations by a woman named Valerie Martin. And we’re going to post some pages from the book on Instagram so you can see how cute it is. (The book apparently is still read to incoming kindergarteners at Elysian Heights Elementary, which is fun.) And we’ll have a few more links about the real-life Room 8 cat in our show notes.

KIM: That’s all for today’s episode…. Let us know what you think of today’s episode. Are you a Jenny Linsky fan? We want to hear about it.

AMY: Or do you despise Andrew Lloyd Weber’s CATS like so many people do? Tell us! We want to hear from you!

KIM: And do us a favor and leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast to let us know you’re out there! It really helps us find new listeners.

AMY: Until next week, bye 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.

63. M.F.K. Fisher — How to Cook a Wolf with Anne Zimmerman

AMY: We want to share, on behalf of our guest, a dedication of this conversation to Maria Stuart. She was the person who introduced Anne to M.F.K. Fisher when Anne was in college. Anne says, "I reached for her books when I saw them. It's not an exaggeration to say that Maria Stuart and M.F.K. Fisher changed the course of my life."

KIM: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great women writers from history. I'm Kim Askew.

AMY: And I'm Amy Helmes, and maybe it's just me, but I am recuperating from Thanksgiving dinner over here several days after the fact. 

KIM: No, it's not just you. Thank God for elastic waistbands. I regret nothing though. Nothing. 

AMY: Right. Thanksgiving dinner is really one of those meals you look forward to all year. And then when it's finally here, you just want to go whole hog -- or whole turkey, as it were. 

KIM: Right. Or even whole wolf. Do you know how to cook a wolf, Amy? 

AMY: I do now, at least metaphorically speaking, thanks to this week's lost lady.

KIM: That's right. M.F.K. Fisher is a woman who believed in immersing oneself in the pleasures of a perfect meal, even in the midst of trying circumstances. She didn't just write about that. She lived it.

AMY: And lucky for us, we happen to have Fisher's biographer with us as today's special guest. We'll introduce her in a moment.

KIM: Yeah, and I'm already getting hungry. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music begins]

Our guest today is Anne Zimmerman, author of the 2011 biography An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher. She also edited several anthologies of work by Fisher, including Musings on Wine and Other Libations and Love in a Dish and Other Culinary Delights. Anne is also a writing instructor for Stanford University's Online Writers' Studio, and she is a former member of the San Francisco Writer's Grotto. Anne Zimmerman, welcome to the show! 

ANNE: Thank you so much for having me. 

AMY: Okay. Before we jump into talking about M.F.K. Fisher, I want to remind our listeners that last spring we featured another cookbook writer, Peg Bracken, who wrote the, I Hate to Cook Book, and that book was basically more about eating to live than living to eat. Right, Kim? 

KIM: Yeah. This is something very different. M.F.K. Fisher takes the opposite approach. She basically writes about how to find maximum pleasure in the meals you prepare, no matter how humble they may be. And she argues that sustenance is about more than just the food you put in your stomach.

AMY: That's right. How to Cook a Wolf is so much more than just a cookbook, which we're going to get into momentarily. But looking at the recipe she includes in this book, I would say that 95% of them are not only attainable, especially for a not-so-great-cook like me, but they also all really sound delicious. I was marking off many in the book. And I'm going to tell you guys flat out, there was one bit of really easy advice she gives up in this book that has been a total game-changer in my kitchen ever since I started using it. I'm going to share this cooking hack later in the show. I swear by it and everybody in my family agrees. 

KIM: Okay. I can't wait, because I really need all the cooking hacks I can get. I'm not the best cook either, but like Amy said, this book isn't your typical book of recipes. Fisher wrote it in the early 1940s when people were feeling extremely daunted by wartime shortages and were having to economize and get creative with what limited ingredients were available. But it's not a book about deprivation, right, Anne?

ANNE: No. Um, so How to Cook a Wolf and all of M.F.K. Fisher's writing really is about feeding yourself, both practically and spiritually. Wolf was written in 1942, shortly after the death of Fisher's second husband, as the United States entered the Second World War. She had lived in France after World War I and had observed, firsthand, the effects of things like food shortages and air raids. Wolf was an attempt to teach people how to eat well and be well amidst personal and collective chaos.

KIM: Yeah, my mom, who was born in the late 1940s, remembered Fisher very well, and I think she must have read the column that she did for House Beautiful, maybe. My grandfather, her dad, also subscribed to The New Yorker at some point, so maybe she read her there. And speaking of my mom, I actually really want to dedicate this episode to her memory. I had brought How to Cook a Wolf with me when my mom was hospitalized at the end of her life, and I ended up reading the book aloud to her in hospice. It makes this book extra meaningful for me, but it just goes to show how Fisher's writing really made an impression on people.

ANNE: Well, first of all, I'm so sorry about your mom. I really often say the M.F.K. Fisher's work finds people when they need it, which definitely sounds like it was true for you, and was also true for me. I discovered M.F.K. Fisher in my early twenties. I was actually in my first semester of graduate school. I was there to study women's memoir and autobiography, but I hadn't found my subject. And I was actually in the graduate school library intending to write a paper on Zelda Fitzgerald. And right next to Fitzgerald was this very compact section on M.F.K. Fisher. And I had heard her name before; I had worked in the Oregon wine industry for a bit of time, and so her name was one that was tossed around. And I literally picked up The Art of Eating Well more out of curiosity than anything. And I ended up checking out every single M.F.K. Fisher book that they had, which was about a dozen, and taking them back to my apartment. And what happened next was really interesting because there was a wildfire in San Diego County, and I got basically trapped in my apartment for a week due to the smoke, which is now a very common thing for Californians, but at the time was very weird and unnerving, especially since I had just moved to California. So I was living alone and I had all of these M.F.K. Fisher books and a couple of bags of groceries, and I just cooked and read and completely fell in love with her and her work. And by the end of it, I was like, she is the person. She's the person I want to write about. 

AMY: I love that because, in How to Cook a Wolf, there's also this sort of survival element kind of thing. Like "just in case you are starving..." You almost were in that situation where you're like, "I know how to make the crazy vegetable barley stew thing that she talks about." 

ANNE: Just in case.

AMY: So let's talk about the "Wolf" that Fisher references in her title, because it's a recurring theme throughout the book. Can you sort of explain that a little bit for our listeners? 

ANNE: Yeah. So the Wolf is metaphorical. M.F.K. Fisher believed that the thoughtful presentation of food and eating were, and this is a quote from her, "the true ways to ward off hunger, hurt and any other wolf at the door." And it's interesting because as I was preparing for our conversation and looking at How to Cook a Wolf again, I was reminded of the fact that the epigraph to the book is pulled from a poem from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, titled "The Wolf at the Door" and the epigraph reads: "There's a whining at the threshold/ There's a scratching at the floor./To work! To work! In Heaven's name!/ The wolf is at the door!” And the epigraph, it's attributed to C.P.S. Gilman. So I actually Googled it because I was like, "Who is C.P.S. Gilman?" And then it turns out to be Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And I was like, "Oh, that makes it so much more fascinating that that is the source, you know? Another woman with a super interesting biography."

KIM: Yeah, I know; we need to do an episode on her. 

AMY: Yeah, for sure.

KIM: So we want to give you, our listeners, an idea of what How to Cook a Wolf is like, if you haven't read it. Anne, maybe you could start us off.

ANNE: Sure. It was hard to pick, but I decided to choose a chapter, it looks like it's Chapter Six, and the title is How Not to Boil an Egg. And it begins: Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken. Until then, you would think its secrets are its own, hidden behind the impassive beautiful curvings of its shell, white or brown or speckled. It emerges full-formed, almost painlessly from the hen. It lies without thought in the straw, and unless there is a thunderstorm or a sharp rise in temperature, it stays fresh enough to please the human palette for several days. So to me, it's just sort of quintessential Fisher. She manages to see it in this poetic and beautiful way and articulate it, you know, like actually say some of the symbolic things that all of us sort of inherently feel as we look at an egg, she gives voice to all that 

AMY: OKay, so I'm going to piggyback on this one. First off, just to show her kind of dry wit throughout the book she wrote: I can make amazingly bad fried eggs, and in spite of what people tell me about this method and that, I continue to make amazingly bad fried eggs: tough with edges like some kind of dirty starched lace, and a taste part sulfur, and part singed newspaper. The best way to find a trustworthy method, I think, is to ask almost anyone but me. So she's humble in that, but one more little egg anecdote is when she is remembering being in Switzerland and a recipe that they would make, um, well, I'll just quote from her: One [recipe] I remember that we used to make, never earlier than two and never later than four in the morning, in a strange modernistic electric kitchen on the wine terraces between Lausanne and Montreux. We put cream and Worcestershire sauce into little casseroles and heated them into bubbling. Then we broke eggs into them, turned off the current, and waited until they looked done, while we stood around drinking champagne with circles under our eyes and Viennese music in our heads. Then we ate the eggs with spoons, and went to bed. And I just love that, because it gives you this vision of what her life was like when she lived in Europe. And we'll get into that later. 

KIM: I love that one because that is actually one of my favorite alone dinners. So when I get the chance to have a dinner by myself, I always make cream and eggs and bacon in the oven, and I feel so sophisticated, so I just love that you read that passage. And I actually want to piggyback on that one with the boiling water one. I don't know if you remember that part, but, um, I'll read from it: When the water boils, as it surely will, given enough heat under it, it is ready. Then, at that moment and no other, pour it into the teapot or over or around or into whatever it is meant for, whatever calls for it. If it cannot be used, then turn off the heat and start over again when you yourself are ready; it will harm you less to wait than it will the water to boil too long. And I'm guessing some of our listeners from the UK probably agree with the perfection of boiling water, maybe for tea or something like that. But here in the U S the idea of over-boiling water, I don't know. It's kind of foreign to us maybe, right? 

AMY: Yeah, I didn't know it was possible to over-boil water, but yeah, maybe we'll have to do a taste test. 

KIM: Yeah. 

ANNE: She's obviously a creative writer, but a lot of her prose is sort of based off of approaching the kitchen and what goes on in the kitchen in a creative way. And I would argue that thinking like that is what helps you learn to be a better cook, because you're approaching everything in your cupboard and everything in your fridge with sort of like a, "What could I do with that? How could I make this sort of like sagging celery... like, could I do something with that? And could it be beautiful and on my dinner plate tonight?" Much of the time, the answer is yes. 

AMY: Yeah. And even just the idea of, if you're putting something in the oven, use the whole oven; throw some other things in the oven for tomorrow, like use the space. 

KIM: Um, so I'm going to read the conclusion from her edited version: There are too many of us, otherwise in proper focus, who feel an impatience for the demands of our bodies, and who try throughout our whole lives, none too successfully, to deafen ourselves to the voices of our various hungers.... I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war's fears, and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy and ever-increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate even tangled as it is with cold wars, as well as hot, cannot harm us. 

ANNE: The term "self care" is totally overplayed these days, but for me, when I discovered M.F.K. Fisher, when I was, you know, living alone in a city I didn't know and at school. I didn't particularly like so much, at the time that idea that I had this power that I could make a meal for myself and nourish myself and care for myself in that way was so powerful, and still is, in a very different way... and it's something that I wish more people realized, that food could be so much more than just energy, you know, way better than a CLIF Bar.

AMY: I just want to jump in now with my little cooking hack that I took away in terms of kitchen skills from this book: she recommends soy sauce as basically your marinade for every single meat. I used to do that a little bit here and there with fish or when I was doing something that I wanted an Asian flavor or whatever, but I took her advice and I started marinating everything in soy sauce. It brines it, so everything is so moist when you cook it and it doesn't taste.... um, there's not like a taste of soy sauce in the meat necessarily. It's just so flavorful when you cook it. 

ANNE: The salt and umami, you know, that kind of unknown savory, they call it the "fifth sense" or whatever. Sometimes when I'm making a soup, like at the very end, I'll finish it with a splash of soy sauce or vinegar, just to kind of give it that extra acid that sometimes can really elevate the normal flavors, 

AMY: I'm trying that now, too! Okay. So going into this, I knew absolutely nothing about M.F.K. Fisher. The "M.F.K." Stands for Mary Frances Kennedy, which was her maiden name by the way. And so in reading How to Cook a Wolf, she weaves in all these interesting personal anecdotes, but it left me with even more questions about her than answers. So, Anne, that's where your book comes in, thankfully. I know Fisher wrote How to Cook a Wolf when she was fairly young. But as we learn from your book An Extravagant Hunger, she had already lived a really eventful life by the time it was published. 

KIM: Yes, Fisher was born in Michigan, but she was raised in Whittier, Southern California, not too far from Los Angeles where Amy and I live.

AMY: Yeah. And that fact alone surprised me, but I think I was even more surprised to discover that the food she grew up eating wasn't really the sort of fare that you'd associate with a budding food writer. So, Anne, can you talk a little bit about her early relationship with food?

ANNE: Sure for much of M.F.K. Fisher's early life, her maternal grandmother, Grandmother Holbrook, her mother's mother, has spent large chunks of time with the family. Grandmother Holbrook had been born in Ireland during the Potato Famine. And as Mary Frances said, uh, this is a quote, believed that "the plainer a dish was, the better it was for you." Mrs. Holbrook was also a fan of the water cure and traveled yearly to the health resort in battleground, Michigan, that was run by John Harvey Kellogg of the cereal dynasty, and he believed that a bland, vegetarian diet was best and that certain foods, especially foods that were very rich or spicy or fatty, would encourage impulsive or hypersexualized behavior. So when Grandmother Holbrook lived with the family, everything was very bland, very overcooked. She has, I think, you know, at least one passage talking about overcooked meat with over-boiled potatoes, with like a gray under-seasoned sauce. And that was just the norm. And then when Grandmother Holbrook would go away, everything was more of a party. The food was flavorful and richer, and her parents had a little bit of wine on the table, and they had dessert. And, you know, even as a very young child, she was able to spot the difference; that there was this pleasure that could be had in food and at the table, and that it was fun and that it was exciting. And it was something that she was drawn to. 

AMY: Then there's also one anecdote from your biography about one of the family's household cooks that they had briefly that I feel like is worth mentioning because it's sort of shocking and it kind of has a little bit of a true crime element.

ANNE: Yeah. So, I mean, we all know that as women, we learn a lot about food and the home from the women that are in our lives. M.F.K. Fisher had Grandmother Holbrook, but she also had her mother obviously, but Edith had a pretty ambivalent relationship to cooking and the entire domestic sphere. She had four children in fairly quick succession and sort of would go into hiding, you know. She would be pregnant and retreat into her room. She was not bustling around the kitchen. And so there was a series of cooks and other domestic helpers that lived with the family all of the time. And one of the women was named Ora, who M.F.K. Fisher said "loved to cook the way that some people love to pray or dance or fight." And Fisher describes Ora as grinding her own meat and using fresh spices and herbs. There's this simple line about her making a pie and taking the pie dough and cutting out little stars and making this beautiful pie crust with the decoration of stars across the. But no big surprise, Grandmother Holbrook was not a fan of Ora. And interestingly, neither was Mary Frances's father, despite the fact that she was such a good cook. And as the legend goes one night, Ora I went home after work and stabbed her mother with a cooking knife and then killed herself. Mary Frances was young -- only about nine -- but, you know, she was smart and observant and seemed to recognize the fact that there was this whole sort of mystery to food. That food could be pleasureful, but also maybe kind of dangerous. And she, again, was drawn to it and wanted to know more even at that young age. 

KIM: Wow. That's really interesting. 

AMY: Yeah, that would leave its mark. 

KIM: For sure. Um, as a young woman, Mary Frances attended Occidental College in L.A., but she ended up leaving school early in order to get married. She was young, and she thought she was in love, but it almost sounds like this marriage was, for her anyway, more of a ticket to a different life. Would you agree with that, Anne? 

ANNE: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, in writing my book and in sort of starting to study M.F.K. Fisher more academically, this is where the story really begins, because we have a young M.F.K. Fisher, she's very bright, but she didn't ever really love or excel at school. She wants to see the world. She doesn't want to just live at home in Whittier, waiting for someone to propose to her so that she can, you know, go off and get married and have children. And she meets Al in the library of UCLA and they have this immediate connection. But my theory is sort of that the connection is that each saw in the other a lot of aspirations. Um, he wanted to be a poet and she was into the idea of being a muse. But they also had similar, I guess you could say family values. They were both from religious homes and so they could take each other home to meet each other's families and the match was seen as appropriate and that this would be good for everybody. But then there was one thing that was really interesting, and that is that the only PhD program that Al had gotten into was in Dijon. So he was going to leave and move to France. And I think she was like, "This is intriguing. You know, I like this man. He's going somewhere. I want to go with him. This is my moment." There was just one tiny problem, and that is that their relationship mostly evolved over letters. He had gone away to college actually in Wyoming, and so they communicated back and forth and wrote these long, beautiful love letters, back and forth, full of longing. But by the time they got married, there was already, she reports, like in the pit of her stomach, a little bit of trepidation. And they marry and they set off for France, and my personal belief is that they just did not click and that it was almost immediate; that they probably hadn't really been physical with each other, and that there was this awkwardness around their union. But instead of being on like a bad date, they're living together in another country, married with huge emotional and financial pressures: you know, student budgets, no family around, no friends around, minimal language skills. So kind of, it was, you know, I think glorious, yet bleak. 

KIM: Yeah. There's nothing like traveling to bring out, you know, whether a relationship is working or not. 

AMY: Yeah. And she kind of danced around it, but you could tell the sex was not good.

ANNE: Well, and that was what sucked me in, that there was all this stuff going on under the surface. She's such a master of prose, and she tells you so much, but yet, if you really are reading every word of her work, which I did, there are so many questions. And I just knew that there was this huge story bubbling under the surface and that it hadn't really been told. And that was what was really intriguing to me. 

KIM: So, although her marriage wasn't going well, Mary Frances was in her element, living in Europe in the years leading up to World War II. This was when the "Lost Generation" of writers and artists were living it up in Paris. How did these years shape her into a foodie, as we'd say?

ANNE: Well, I think, you know, we've all had that experience right? Of going somewhere new, a really fancy restaurant or visiting a new city or a new country and trying something that is new or different and is literally astonishing. And that's what happened to her. She and Al went from the United States to France and once they got to France, they took a train into Paris. And according to her, on the dining train into Paris, she was served the most perfect baby lettuce salad with a tart vinaigrette and a beautiful, crusty French bread. And it was just like, it awakened her, you know? All of her senses, all of her inner longings, you know, she had finally gotten married and made it to this other country and she had her first taste and it just was like a rebirth. She became a whole new person right in that moment, as she said, actually: Suddenly I recognized my own possibilities as a person, and I was almost stunned by the knowledge that I would never eat and drink as I had done for my first 20 years. Sanely and well, but unthinkingly. 

AMY: It's hard to think of train food being that good in this day and age. Those old glamour days of travel. Um, where would you say that her ambitions to become a writer fit in with all of this?

ANNE: I mean, I do think, you know, it's pretty easy to bash Al Fisher, her first husband, and to talk about all the things that were wrong in that marriage. But I do think he wanted to be a writer. And I do think that the couple did connect over storytelling and poetry. And they had no money when they were living in Dijon and at night would kind of sit around in their two little chairs and they would work together on like pulpy, mystery, thrillers that they hoped to sell someday. Al definitely had bigger literary aspirations, and he believed that in order to be a true poet, he needed to be tortured and he needed to spend a lot of time alone in his little writerly hole, trying to do his work. And so that left, you know, clearly Mary Frances had enormous talent, but it was also just sort of this perfect environment. She was alone, but she didn't really go to school. She took a few art classes. She didn't have any friends, really, she didn't speak the language. And so she did what any of the rest of us would do if we were sort of on this weird kind of extended life vacation. And she started walking around and seeing the patisserie and going to the markets and occasionally eating in restaurants. And then she came home, and she wrote long, and by long, I mean, sometimes eight to 10 page letters home to her family to tell her siblings and her parents everything that she had seen and everything that she had done. And from a very practical point of view, I think that was where her writerly sensibilities began, is with just the recording and the telling of what she saw and learned about in France and tasted.

AMY: And so then she didn't have any formal culinary training then? It just all came to her through experiences like that? 

ANNE: No, she never attended culinary school. I mean, she did much later in life when she became more famous, start to hang out with other food luminaries like James Beard and Julia Child. But, um, not to burst the bubble, but is actually said she was not a wonderful cook. There are a lot of stories about people who showed up to eat with M.F.K. Fisher and all she would offer them was a glass of sherry and like a bowl of nuts or a bowl of olives. I think both Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters have written about being charged with packing a meal to take to M.F.K. Fisher in Napa, which is where she lived at the end of her life. My literary agent actually was M.F.K. Fisher's literary agent. He has since passed away, but at the time of the writing of my book and, uh, yeah, he said that she was not actually a particularly strong cook. Maybe she just didn't like it at that point in her life. I'm not sure. 

KIM: I don't judge her for that at all. It's like, that's fine. She knew how to express how it felt to enjoy eating.

ANNE: And she was a single mom for a long time. And I think, you know, like when you're cooking just for yourself and for your own palette, cooking can be very pleasureful and decadent and energizing. And when you were feeding a bunch of small mouths, that can become an entirely different task.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Absolutely. So, um, Mary Frances and her husband, Al, ended up leaving France and moving back to California. She was pretty much over her husband by then, but she did keep trying to make it work. She thought starting over in California, maybe, might help. While living there, she ended up meeting someone who would change everything. Do you want to fill our listeners in on this? 

ANNE: Sure. So it's 1932. The Great Depression is happening. Mary Frances and Al were unhappy, but divorce was not really on the table, both culturally and practically because there was a huge financial crisis at the time. Mary Frances was trying to write, but she wasn't really sure that she was an artist because she didn't think she was devoted enough to her work. That obviously wasn't true because during that time was actually when she was first published in a magazine called Westways, which was actually the precursor to the AAA magazine that you may get quarterly in your mailbox. In 1933, they became friends with another couple, Tim and Gigi Parrish, and they formed this immediate and intense friendship. Gigi was actually a fledgling starlet, so she was on the road a lot, kind of traveling around the United States. And Al and Mary Frances and Tim became this sort of threesome, and they would talk about art and they would talk about books and cook together and eat together. And pretty soon thereafter, Mary Frances and Tim developed feelings for each other, and she began showing pieces of her creative work to Kim. And within a few years, by 1936, they were fully having an affair, and she had also finished the manuscript of her first book, which is called Serve It Forth. 

KIM: Is it true that people thought she was actually a man because her name was so neutral? And do you think writing under her initials helped her popularity in that sense? 

ANNE: Yeah, this is an interesting question. So in the early thirties, when M.F.K. Fisher began publishing, if a woman was going to write about food, it was usually short, pithy pieces about cookery and home management and domesticity, not this sort of sensuous, historical philosophical pieces about the pleasures of food and the table. So I think yes, in that regard, having a gender-neutral nom de plume made her more palatable, so to speak, or at least helped her get her foot in the publishing house door. There's actually some myth about this. She always said that no one knew she was a woman until she had signed the contract and she walked through the door of the publishing house. And then there are other people that say, you know, that's impossible. They would have had to have known that she was a woman. So, you know, it makes for a good story. And I certainly think from a really practical point of view, I am not sure that I knew that she was a woman the first time I heard her name mentioned, and I'm sure that there are many, many people who have a similar experience.

AMY: So getting back to her personal life before she finally split from her first husband, things got super weird between the trio. So Mary Frances, her husband, and her lover, who, as you said, were all great friends, they ended up moving into a house together in Switzerland that they were building, which turned out to be a hundred percent awkward as you recounted in your book. And I guess Al kind of saw the writing on the wall, but I don't know what was going through his head at that point. 

ANNE: I mean, you know, it seems so clear that the arrangement was not going to work, but for some reason they thought it might! 

KIM: Yes, they were willing to try anything at that point. Anyway, Al, husband No. 1, eventually left and Frances and Tim were finally free to be together openly, but their happiness was soon marred by tragedy. Can you tell us what happened there? 

ANNE: Yes. So this is a very fascinating, I find, plot twist in the otherwise very decadent and privileged story of M.F.K. Fisher's life. She and Tim were in Bern, Switzerland in 1938, and Tim got terrible pain in his left leg. And when they took him to the hospital, the doctors found blood clots lining all up and down in the veins of his leg from his foot, all the way to his pelvis. They did surgery to remove the blood clots, and it ended up that they amputated his left leg just above the knee. So overnight he becomes an invalid and she becomes his caretaker. Um, they're still unmarried at this point, but you know, committed to each other. But even with great commitment, this was a tremendous, tremendous change. He was in a wheelchair and needed a ton of drugs to dull his pain, specifically opioids that the couple could only get in Europe. Unfortunately it soon became clear that he was not really going to get better and that there was the possibility that he would get worse. And he was a smoker. Smoking was something that he had done all of his life, but became one of his simple pleasures, so to speak after he was so ill. And if you have a predisposition to blood clots, smoking is like number one not what you were supposed to do. So he was looking at more amputations and just a really, really poor quality of life. Um, they did get married, but about a year or two after they were married, he did kill himself. 

AMY: Right. The whole ordeal of his illness and the suicide, it was so heartbreaking to read about this in your book, because it was clear that they were really in love and they had just finally found the freedom to be together, but their day-to-day existence just seemed so anguishing that I would imagine his death, as terrible as it was, must have also come at some relief to her. She was in her mid-thirties at this point, and she was at her lowest emotionally. Anne, you mentioned in the book that she even had her own suicidal thoughts. How did she kind of pull herself out of it and did food play a part in that in any way?

ANNE: Sure. So even when Tim was sick, Mary Frances did find some relief in sort of the ritual of food preparation and eating his illness. And the drug use caused his appetite to really diminish, but she of course, was this 24/7 caretaker and needed to keep her strength up to care for him. And in her journal, she writes dark, but lovely, journal entries about the kind of the solemn nature of preparing really simple foods and meals for the two of them; think, like, plain toast and plain tea that he could hardly eat, but that she had to. And after his death, she sort of continued with this routine, sort of eating to keep herself alive with not a lot of pleasure coming from it, in hopes that one day she might eventually feel like herself again. And the real turning point that she writes about at the end of Gastronomical Me was that she went with her siblings to Mexico. And the sun, the temperatures, the foods, it just sort of helped shift things for her and sort of bring her back to life and, you know, interestingly another travel...another trip to a different place and another kind of awakening to a new self. 

Right. And 

KIM: then that leads us to How to Cook a Wolf, which is the first book she wrote after Tim's death. What was the genesis of the book? And would you say this is the title that really solidified her career?

ANNE: Well, I think practically speaking, it was just a project that she could throw herself into. She came from a newspaper writing family. Her father had been the publisher of The Whittier News and she said something like "I wrote Wolf the way I would write a report for my father." You know, she just was able to kind of put her head down and do the work. The prose is so beautiful it's kind of hard to even like, make sense of that. The creative project is a form of comfort, and I think that's what it was for her. And because it did have this practical domestic angle and because it contained recipes and because it came at exactly the right time in the history of the United States, right as we were entering World War II, I think it did broaden her reach. During this time. She was also living alone. She had many love affairs and even worked and wrote for Hollywood. So it was kind of this weird period of grief, but also very sort of sophisticated and exciting. Um, but it was also a little bit of facade, right? So she's writing How to Cook a Wolf. She's writing kind of more about the domestic sphere and how to make your house strong to protect it against the wolf. And really she was living like a very different existence. 

AMY: So, many more food related books followed for her after this. Um, which other titles are your favorites, or which would you recommend to people who have sort of read How to Cook a Wolf and want to read more?

ANNE: Um, I really love Gastronomical Me. It's really the book that ignited my love affair with M.F.K. Fisher. It kind of is a more linear autobiographical story. She's writing a memoir, basically short memoir essays about her life. And I really have a fondness for that. 

KIM: She also wrote a novel, and I'd love to hear more about what that one's like. Is she as good at fiction writing as she is at writing about food? 

ANNE: Well, I, you know, I'm not a fiction writer, but I have to say that I think the general consensus is that it's an interesting portal into her thoughts, but that it is not compelling in the same way that her creative nonfiction is. Counterpoint Press actually published her novel a couple of years ago. And it's interesting to me, it's a little bit melodramatic and it maybe doesn't have the plot in the pacing that modern readers desire, but when read as a part of her larger collection of work, it's fascinating. I think that it helps fill in the blank sometimes when you wonder what she was scribbling in her notebooks and writing the fiction and writing the imaginative stuff. That's what it is. 

KIM: Oh, I love thinking of it as a piece like that, with everything that she wrote for us. Um, so you had said that many lovers followed in Fisher's life. She eventually remarried to a man whom she seems to have felt quite tepid. And she also had two children, somewhat sneakily in the case of her eldest daughter, who was conceived out of wedlock, it was a shocking predicament for her at the time.

AMY: Yeah. And she ended up dying in 1992 at the age of 83. But, Anne, I want to know more about your own experiences trying to discover the quote unquote "real M.F.K. Fisher." What were your biggest challenges in trying to find out about her life, and what were your biggest takeaways in what you discovered? 

ANNE: So I was relatively young, in my mid-twenties basically, when I discovered M.F.K. Fisher and started writing my book. So there were just, at the beginning, a lot of sort of practical things. It was a lot of work to gain access to her personal archive at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, and to convince the executor of her estate that I had the legs, the stamina, to write a book. A little bit later on, as I was writing the book, it took work to gain the trust of M.F.K. Fisher's younger daughter, whose name is Kennedy, who is now a dear friend. And then actually writing a biography is not easy. It takes a lot of work. But I also felt very lucky. I felt like, you know, I mean, not to get too "woo-woo," but I just always felt like I kind of discovered her work and her life at the right time. And my interest was deep and genuine enough that the right doors just sort of opened for me. I never met her. People ask all the time if I did. I'm glad that I didn't. I think that it's better for the biographer not to know the subject so intimately. But that said it would be interesting in some other portal to have that experience of meeting her and seeing how we would have gotten along. In terms of takeaways, not to get too philosophical, but I continue to go back to her work. And I think when I was writing my book, I was in a different stage of life. I wasn't married, I didn't have children. And there were parts of her life and the things that she wrote about that didn't always make sense to me. And now that I'm older, I find myself thinking about her and things that she wrote; not even necessarily things that made it into my book. Sometimes they're intimate thoughts that I read in the personal archive that I didn't know what to do with, and I didn't know how to put them into my book, but now make a lot more sense. So it feels like this ... I hope this doesn't sound too crazy, but it feels like this lifelong friendship, you know, that I am just going to continue to read her work and come back to it at various points in my life and learn new things. I mean, we've been through a real situation these past 22 months and she can give us all, still, a lot of nourishment with her work and with sort of teaching us how to return to the table and feed ourselves, metaphorically and actually, day after day.

KIM: Beautifully said. Anne, thank you so much for joining us to talk about M.F.K. Fisher and her extraordinary life. We loved having this discussion with you.

ANNE: This was so much fun. Thank you for having me!

AMY: We need to have some sort of M.F.K. Fisher dinner party where we dress up in the era and sample some of the recipes.

ANNE: I don't even feel like it has to be a dinner party. Can we just cook the eggs and stand around and drink champagne? 

KIM: Absolutely. 

ANNE: That's pretty good for me. 

AMY: Some Strauss playing lightly in the background. 

KIM: I love it.

ANNE: My expectations are pretty low these days. The champagne and the baked eggs and a little, you know, adult conversation would be great.

KIM: Hopefully, we won't be doing it on Zoom. Maybe we can actually do it.

ANNE: I mean, we could go to Switzerland!

KIM: I'm in; sign me up! Totally down with that. Yeah, we need a post-pandemic writer's retreat in Switzerland. Yeah. I love that idea. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you've got a shelf of cookbooks in your kitchen, How to Cook a Wolf really needs to be there in the mix. I think it's the sort of thing you'll reread while waiting for a pot to boil. And I'll even venture to guess you might get a little sauce splattered all over the pages of your favorite recipes, which is always the sign of a great cookbook, in my opinion.

KIM: True. And I usually slosh a little wine on it, typically. And likewise, we really hope you subscribe to this podcast so you can continue to find your favorite new forgotten women writers. And while you're at it, take a moment to leave us one of those five star reviews, which for us is the equivalent of a Michelin star. 

AMY: Oh yeah. And if you want to know what a James Beard Award might be like for us, that would be a shout-out on social media. So please consider that as well. Until next week, bye 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. 

62. Louisa May Alcott’s “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving”

AMY HELMES: Hey, everybody! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner, Kim Askew... 

KIM ASKEW: Hey, everybody. We hope you, our listeners, are getting the chance to spend time this week with someone near and dear to you. We have so much to be thankful for, including the vaccines that are making it actually possible for us to really celebrate Thanksgiving this year. And maybe, for some of you, even to travel. Amy, I don't have to ask what you're doing this week, because it's always the same. 

AMY: That's right. Thanksgiving week, every year, I go with my husband's side of the family. His parents have rented the very same house in Northern California for Thanksgiving (get this) going back almost 50 years!

KIM: That's a dream. I love that idea, especially with my growing up moving all over the world. The idea of going to the same Thanksgiving and every year... 

AMY: Yeah, it's such a great tradition. The house is right on the beach. You never know what kind of weather you're really going to have. And there have actually been a few Thanksgivings in recent years where we lost power for several days on end, which is always an adventure. But that said it's become a comfortably familiar place to me. And it's really interesting, I think, the way that being there sort of marks time, it kind of reminds me of that movie...there was that Alan Alda movie, I think it was called Same Time Next Year. 

KIM: Oh yeah. 

AMY: You know what I'm talking about? 

KIM: Yes, totally. Yep. Which I've never seen. I've always wanted to see it. 

AMY: I mean, that was about two lovers that would meet up at the same cottage every year. This is more family friendly, but, um, yeah. So a decade ago there were babies crawling everywhere, and now we're kind of moving into pre-teen territory with all the cousins. My in-laws always have fun surprises in store for the kids. They brought a magician in the year before COVID struck, and he actually had to wind up performing in the dark because that was also one of the years the power went out. Always a little unpredictable. They're always fun though. But what about you? What are your Thanksgiving plans? We're recording this a few weeks before Thanksgiving. 

KIM: Yeah. So, we are going back and forth, but I think we're going to try something different, which is having Thanksgiving with our friends, Kathy, Paul and their five-year-old, Sebi. We've been doing a lot of pandemic vacations with them and it's been really great. So we thought we would spend Thanksgiving with them this year. And then we're spending Christmas with family. 

AMY: Nice. 

KIM: Yeah. And Hanukkah at home. 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. It's fun to have kind of your "family" family, and then your family of your choosing. 

KIM: It's nice to have a little bit of both. Yeah. Christmas and Thanksgiving are so close together. Maybe a little too close. 

AMY: It feels like, honestly, right around the beginning of November (I tell you this, every year, Kim) it feels like you're at the top of a roller coaster and you're about to head down the hill and it just flies out of control until January rolls around. It's just crazy. It always stresses me out.

KIM: It does always stress you out. 

AMY: It does. This year I feel a little better because (I'm getting off on a tangent here) but I think because of the whole supply chain thing, I've had to start doing my Christmas shopping really early. [pause] Oh, no. Oh, am I making you panic now? 

KIM: Yes, because you always do it earlier than me. And there's a supply chain issue?

AMY: Kim, how do you not know this? 

KIM: No, I kind of know about the supply chain. I just, I'm very spontaneous. And I usually wait until the last week and then run around, because I always have to get the perfect present for everyone for Hanukkah and Christmas. I celebrate Hanukkah with my husband and my daughter and Christmas. So if Mike had been Jewish, you would also be celebrating Hanukkah, which would just put you over the edge. 

AMY: Oh, my God, that would be way too much. 

KIM: Cause we're talking about how many crazy nights? 

AMY: Way too much. Yes, but I will say my early Christmas shopping, there is a downside to that. I've had to be like, "No, no, no, no. Don't buy that yet," to my family. "Maybe don't buy that yet, because that might somehow be coming into your life." Or a thing that the kid wants in September they don't want in late November anymore. We're getting way off track here, but really we are here to talk about Thanksgiving. So we thought it would be fun for this week's mini to give a sort of literary nod to the Thanksgiving holiday.So right off the top of my head, I was trying to think about Thanksgiving books, right? 

KIM: Mm-hm.

AMY: And I'm not super familiar with too many novels that are set around Thanksgiving. Kim, I know you probably know more than I do, but I'm going to do a shout-out to listeners right now. This is where we need your help. Drop us a note if you can think of some interesting Thanksgiving tales for us to feature next year. The one that I think of primarily — the first thing that pops into my head is Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. 

KIM: Oh, yeah. 

AMY: Which is not exactly an idyllic tale. 

KIM: I mean, it's hilarious, but it's not warm and fuzzy for sure.

AMY: No. 

KIM: And then there's Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, which I love, I love the movie. I actually haven't read the book, but I absolutely love the movie. That, again, is also, you know, kind of dark. 

AMY: Yeah. If you haven't seen that (for some of our younger listeners, maybe) that's a film with Elijah Wood and Christina Ricci and some other big names.

KIM: It's great. 

AMY: Just basic dysfunction. So, you know, I didn't want to kind of go there with this episode. I was trying to think of something more uplifting. 

KIM: Yeah. And also, you know me and holidays. I'm all about, you know .... the warm and fuzzy. 

AMY: Yeah. Making it happy, right.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: I was like, "Where are you going, Kim?" I thought you were going to take a dark turn for a second.

KIM: No, no, no. Well, okay. So since we're going to keep things a bit lighter, we've decided to, how about a short story by Louisa May Alcott called "An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving?" I want some cider right now; just saying that makes me want some. 

AMY: Serve up the pumpkin pie y'all! So Kim and I could sit here and talk about this little story, but we wanted to do something a little bit different this week instead.

KIM: Yeah, rather than ask you to go hunt up the story, we thought we'd save you the trouble and read it to you. The best bits that is. I have actually wanted Amy to try out... she has such an expressive voice, as you've heard, if you've listened to any of our other episodes where, you know, she's done a sort of a longer piece. I always wanted to hear her read something out loud for us. 

AMY: I know, I always kind of had ... you know when Jo March goes to read to...

KIM: Aunt March. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. I was always jealous of her because I love reading out loud. So I thought it would be fun to read this story. (Thank God for literature in the public domain, also.) So consider this episode, your Lost Ladies of Lit story hour to get you in the Thanksgiving spirit, or maybe to aid you in digesting your Thanksgiving dinner, depending on when in the week you tune in.

KIM: Right. And though, of course, Louisa may Alcott isn't a "lost lady" of literature, granted, we're willing to guess a lot of you have never read this one. And even if you have, you'll probably want to hear it again. So Amy, since you're going to read some of it for us, maybe you can set the stage for everyone. 

AMY: So Alcott sets this story the day before Thanksgiving at the country home of Mr and Mrs. Bassett and their eight children. Eight! Oh my gosh.

KIM: Eight is enough.

AMY: "Eight is enough..." How does the song go? "Eight is enough, to...." I don't know. Anyway, Mrs. Bassett is in the kitchen starting to wrap her head around preparing the Thanksgiving feast for the next day when she gets word that her mother is at death's door. Oh no! She's being summoned to come say her final goodbye. So she and Mr. Bassett take the youngest child, an infant, with them and they hurry off in a sleigh to grandmother's house, which is 20 miles away, but they instruct their oldest boy Eph, short for Ephram, I guess, and their 14 year-old daughter, Tilly, to hold down the fort with the younger kids while they're away. Unfortunately, a snow storm is also coming, but the kids assure their parents that they can manage until Pa gets back to the house the following evening. So once the parents rush off, the kids soon forget all about grandmother's illness and relish in their newfound freedom and responsibility. 

KIM: Wait, is this Home Alone circa 1882?

AMY: Yes. I would say the kids are a little precocious. So you're left wondering what's going to happen now that they've been left all alone in the house. Yes. 

KIM: Yeah. I'm totally getting "Ruggles" vibes. For our listeners, those are the kids in The Birds' Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin. We featured that story at Christmas time last year.

AMY: Yes. I thought of the Ruggles, too. I would say these kids aren't quite as crazy as the Ruggles, but definitely cute. Definitely cute. So to save some time here, I'm just going to drop into the story around the halfway point, just as the Bassett children wake up on Thanksgiving morning and things start to get interesting.

So without further ado, here's the rest of Louisa May Alcott's "An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving." 

[reads story]

KIM: That was so sweet! I loved it. We hope that you all enjoyed this little installment of Lost Ladies of Lit story hour just as much as I obviously did. And we hope that you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. 

AMY: And if you're not completely in a food coma next week, we hope you'll join us again to discuss another lost lady.

KIM: Yes. As if you didn't need any more food, we'll be discussing food writer MFK Fisher and her wartime classic, How to Cook a Wolf. We've got a phenomenal guest joining us to discuss Fisher's life and work: her biographer Anne Zimmerman.

AMY: I can't wait. In the meantime, we're so grateful to have the support of you, our listeners. And if you want to share in that spirit, perhaps you could take a moment to give us a quick review over at apple podcasts. It's one of the simplest ways you can show your support for us. 

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

61. Simone de Beauvoir — The Inseparables with Lauren Elkin

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone! It's Kim Askew with my longtime friend, writing partner and co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: Hi, everybody. This week's episode focuses on someone whose name you're likely already familiar with. Does Simone de Beauvoir ring any bells? 

KIM: Right. We're talking about the French intellectual and feminist. But even if you've read her work, you probably haven't read her most recently published novel.

AMY: Because although she died in 1986, a long-lost novella she wrote called The Inseparables was published just this fall to great acclaim. We have the full story and the translator of the UK Penguin Random House edition here to talk with us about the book and its fascinating author. 

KIM: Yes, and it's especially interesting because this novella was very personal to Beauvoir. We'll explain more about how it finally came to light later in this episode. And let us assure you now, listeners, it's excellent. It's a quick, but unforgettable, read and it's very much worth your time. 

AMY: Yes, we wouldn't steer you wrong here, although it's possible Kim and I could steer you wrong with our French pronunciation, which is terrible.

KIM: Yes. Good to note that. Don't judge us by our French pronunciation, listeners. 

AMY: If you've listened to enough of these episodes, you already know that about us, but luckily our guest today is very proficient in French. So it's time to introduce her. Let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today is Lauren Elkin, and I've been a fan of her writing for quite some time. Her essays and criticism appear regularly in The Guardian, The New York Times, and many other publications. She's the author of several books, including Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2017 and a BBC Radio Four Book of the Week. And her wonderful new book, No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus, is composed of entries in her iPhone's Notes app as she commuted to and from a teaching job in Paris in 2014 and 2015 -- and I love this book. She's also an award-winning translator. Her co-translation with Charlotte Mandell of Claude Arnaud's biography of Jean Cocteau won the 2017 French-American Foundation's translation award. After 20 years in Paris, Lauren recently moved to London. Welcome Lauren. We're so glad to have you! 

LAUREN: Thank you. I'm so delighted to be here. Thank you for asking me to do this! 

KIM: So before we get started, I have a confession to make. It's maybe somewhere on the razor's edge between embarrassing and relatable, but here it goes: I don't think I've ever read anything more than quotes by Beauvoir until this. I knew who she was, of course, and that she wrote the important feminist text, The Second Sex. But as an undergrad, I had my head buried in Medieval and Renaissance lit. And then in grad school, I was focused on the Victorian Era. So be honest, Lauren. Does this make me a bad feminist? 

LAUREN: Oh my God, not at all! Not at all. The Second Sex is full of a lot of stuff about, like, biology... like, amateur ethnography, and you know, it can be a slog to get through. That's why they asked a zoologist to translate it, you know, way back when it came out in English, they had this guy H.M. Parshley do it. And you know, I think they didn't even read the book before they handed it off to him. They just saw there was a lot of stuff about reproduction amongst mammals. So yeah. No, you're not a bad person. I think you can probably read the highlights and feel like you've gotten to grips with The Second Sex.

KIM: Okay, okay. But now that I've read The Inseparables, I can begin to redeem myself. And honestly, after The Inseparables, I'm actually looking forward to it. Amy, what about you? 

AMY: I have to count myself in that same doghouse. You take philosophy courses in college, and you're sort of like, "That's homework; that's heavy and deep." And she sounds really intimidating to me. And also, I have to admit, I didn't even realize that she wrote any fiction. Had I known that, I think I might've been more interested to start with some of her fiction works or her, you know, more memoir kind of stuff. But this story we're going to be talking about is a good little gateway drug. I feel like now that I've read it, I'm really interested in who she is and, um, wanting to read more. 

KIM: Yeah, it's kind of perfect for that. And in fact, I think we should start off with a little refresher on Beauvoir since her origin story is actually really intertwined with the plot of the book we're discussing today. Amy, do you want to take it away for us? . 

AMY: Sure. Okay, here are the basics to launch us into things: Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into a middle-class Parisian family. Her father was a legal secretary and her mother was a wealthy banker's daughter and devout Catholic. The family lost a lot of their money after World War I, but despite that, Beauvoir and her sister, Helene, went to a prestigious Catholic school. The Inseparables is a fictionalized story based on Beauvoir's friendship with another girl she went to school with nicknamed Zaza in the book. The young Simone is Sylvie, and Zaza is fictionalized as Andrée. The girls are given the nickname, "The Inseparables" because they are so connected at the hip. So Lauren, what can you tell us about this real-life friendship and how it compares to the fictionalized version? 

LAUREN: The first thing to say about the fictionalized version is that it's very compacted and streamlined. If you read it in comparison to the way that Beauvoir recounts the story of this friendship in her memoirs, Memoirs of a Beautiful Daughter, the first volume, um, there's so much else happening. There's lots of other players involved and, you know, there's a social context, a historical context. And in this book, it's almost like an allegory. It's really been kind of stripped to its essentials, the story. So yeah, these two young women, the real-life women and the fictional women, met as young girls and they stayed fast friends all throughout childhood and into adolescence. And then, um, both went to study together at the Sorbonne as young women, and then tragically, Andrée, or Zaza, contracted some kind of mysterious fever and died, and Beauvoir would be haunted by this death, the death of her friend, for the rest of her life. And it never quite felt to her like an honest tragedy. It always felt to her as if it had been kind of provoked, somehow, by the circumstances in which Zaza lived. The fact that she had this very overbearing, very, you know, well-to-do, upper-middle-class bourgeois, Catholic French family. The fact that she wasn't permitted to marry this young man with whom she'd fallen in love, who is also devoutly Catholic -- his name is Pascal in the novel. (He's modeled on the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.) The fact that she was going to be sent off to Cambridge or London or something to take her mind off of this infatuation. You know, we have science. We know that you can just catch a fever, unfortunately, and without adequate healthcare, you know, die, sadly. And it happens maybe more in the early 1920s, hopefully, than today, but in Beauvoir's mind, it was murder. And this book is an attempt to kind of point the finger and analyze the circumstances around that murder. At the very least, it's manslaughter. 

AMY: So let's jump into the book right off. Would you care to read maybe a favorite passage from the early part of The Inseparables to give us a sense of it?

LAUREN: Yeah. With great pleasure. I haven't actually had a chance to read from this, so I'd really be happy to! So I'll read a little bit from the very beginning and then a little bit from when they meet. That can be, you know, a good kind of sampler. So this is from the very beginning chapter: When I was nine years old, I was a good little girl, though this hadn't always been the case. As a small child the adults' tyranny caused me to throw such tantrums that one of my aunts declared, quite seriously: "Sylvie is possessed by a demon." War and religion tamed me. Right away I demonstrated perfect patriotism by stomping all over my doll because she was made in Germany, though I didn't really care for her to begin with. I was taught that God would only protect France if I were obedient and pious: there was no escaping it. The other girls and I would walk through the basilica of Sacré-Cœur, waving banners and singing. I began to pray frequently, and I developed a real taste for it. Abbé Dominique, the chaplain at the Collége Adelaïde where we went to school, encouraged my ardour. Dressed all in tulle,with a bonnet made of Irish lace, I made my First Communion, and from that day forward, I set a perfect example for my little sisters. 

So now I'll read just a little bit from the moment when Andrée and Sylvie meet, which is just about a page or so later. So this is the first day of school: When the bell rang, I entered the classroom they called Sainte-Marguerite. All the rooms look the same; the students sat around an oval table covered in black moleskin, which would be presided over by our teacher; our mothers sat behind us and kept watch while knitting balaclavas. I went over to my stool and saw the one next to it was occupied by a hollow-cheeked little girl with brown hair, whom I didn't recognize. She looked very young; her serious, shining eyes focused on me with intensity. "So you're the best student in the class?" " I'm Sylvie Lepage," I said. "What's your name?" "Andrée Gallard. I'm nine. If I look younger it's because I got burned alive and didn't grow much after that. I had to stop studying for a year but Maman wants me to catch up on what I missed. Can you lend me your notebooks from last year?" "Yes," I said. Andrée's confidence and rapid, precise speech unnerved me. She looked me over warily. "That girl said you're the best student in the class," she said, tilting her head a little at Lisette. "Is that true?" "I often come in first," I said, modest. I stared at Andrée, with her dark hair falling straight down around her face, and an ink spot on her chin. It's not every day that you meet a little girl who's been burned alive. 

KIM: That's so good. Oh my gosh. That was beautiful, Lauren! Wow. 

AMY: I want to chime in, because that very first portion that you read where the aunt says "Sylvie is possessed." ... It just reminds me so much (and Lauren, this might not make sense to you) but for anybody that listened to our earlier episode on Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, that book starts off almost identically with an aunt saying, "This child is possessed." 

KIM: Cassandra.

AMY: Yeah. It just struck me that those two just start off exactly the same way. 

KIM: Lauren, I wanted to ask, because I'm really interested in the translation aspect of this and sort of the process. Do you remember with these passages that you read, do you remember any decisions you had to make while translating, or anything that stood out to you about it while you were working on it?

LAUREN: God, I remember translating those early passages, because I did them for the sample translation. Toril Moi, who's a big Beauvoir scholar, gave my name to the American editor who had acquired the rights to this book and was going to publish it. And so he asked me if I wanted to submit a sample, and I said, "Sure." And so I translated these early passages for the sample, so I remember so vividly sitting up in my house in Liverpool, our old house, just falling in love with this voice. I mean, you know, from the moment that it begins where her aunt is like "Sylvie is possessed by a demon," I was like, "Oh yeah, I totally feel this." And I remember, you know, (I wrote about this in an essay really recently), but there's a scene very soon after that beginning where Sylvie is talking about how her mother had just made them some coats made of, like, real officers' serge, and they look like little military great coats. And I guess this is a time when you wouldn't really see kids in the military style. And Beauvoir writes that they had a little martingale on the back and that that martingale made the mother's friends raise their eyebrows in astonishment. And I was like, "First of all, what's a martingale? Second of all, how am I going to translate it? And third of all, how am I going to translate it so that it conveys to the reader what would be so surprising about it?" So I went round and round with dictionaries from the time and, you know, French-English dictionaries. And I talked to Toril Moi and talked to the French editors. It turns out that it's like a little piece of fabric at the back of a jacket to kind of nip in the waist. And so I couldn't figure out why that would be so astonishing, but it was really talking to Toril that I realized that it was the degree to which this coat was mimicking an officer's coat in the military, in the middle of the Great War. Beauvoir had written this novel in 1954 and then put it away, and we can talk about why in a little bit; I'm sure you're curious to talk about that. And then a few years later, she published the first volume of her memoirs, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. And so there's a lot of language that she took from this manuscript and reappropriated for that manuscript, and this passage with the martingale is one of them. So I looked at the other book to see how that translator did it. He wrote "bayonet frog." And I was like, "What? Weirder and weirder!" I don't know, but at least that kind of solidified for me that it was really like a military reference and that was the thing that was going to need to come through. Then at the end of the day, the French editors were like, "You know what, just write ‘martingale.’ People will look it up if they don't know what that is." 

AMY: And I did! It's just coming back to me in a flash that I paused at that point. And I was like, what exactly would that look like? And I did get from your meaning that it was a military style, but I did stop to figure that out. 

KIM: Yeah, it does really stand out. That part stands out. 

LAUREN: The martingale, yeah. And the language is really simple before that. It's very straightforward because it's written in the voice of this nine-year-old. So to suddenly have a martingale, I'm still not quite sure about it. Like I'm not sure nine-year-olds would know about the martingale. It is a bit of an intrusion, you know, on the part of the grown woman recalling, which maybe is okay, but, you know, I don't know. It kind of maybe confuses things. Um, oh! But I didn't finish my story about how it ended up with two translators! 

KIM: Yes. 

LAUREN: Well, so I did this translation, um, and they didn't like it. Well, I think they liked it fine, but they preferred the other translator, who's like a career translator, who had done lots of, you know, stuff from the same period. So I totally understood, you know, that they're picking her. But the British publisher preferred my translation. So that is how we ended up with a UK version and a U.S. version. 

KIM: Have you read the other version? 

LAUREN: I have not. I have not. All respect to the other translator, but it's like too intimate, you know, to see somebody else messing around with these words..

KIM: No, no, that makes sense, absolutely. No, I completely understand. That's a fascinating story and also fascinating detail about the translation process. 

AMY: So getting back to the book, these two best friends, Sylvie and Andrée, have these long conversations about everything, including marriage. And there's a line where Andrée compares marriage to prostitution. We've seen that before in some of the other books we featured, but can you give us a little bit of historical context in terms of what Andrée's options for the future were versus what Sylvie had to kind of look forward to?

LAUREN: Yeah. I mean, so Andrée comes from this very conventional, like haute bourgeois, even "upper-middle-class" doesn't quite convey it. They're not, you know, the aristocracy, but they're not too far off. So they're massive snobs, and they're very old fashioned and they have very strong ideas about what members of their families should be. For young women, it was really no different than it would've been a hundred years or 200 years earlier, you know? Join a convent or get married. Or maybe be a spinster and take care of your aging parents, if you really have no prospects. Um, but yeah, for Andrée, I mean, there's a scene midway through the book where Sylvie and Andrée see Andrée's older sister dressed up for this garden party. It's like, she's being pimped out to these wealthy boys from the neighborhood who are the "right sort of people," which is a phrase that Beauvoir uses quite a few times. And they're all hideous and boring, and the older sister is beside herself because she doesn't want to be promised off to one of them. But yeah, I mean, Beauvoir really paints, with a lot of force, yet delicacy, a picture of what is down the road for Andrée. So already it's a departure from tradition that she's allowed as a young woman to attend the Sorbonne. And I can only think that, you know, they were just indulging their slightly eccentric, intelligent, intellectual daughter and letting her go to school. But I think the understanding was at the end of it, she was going to get married. It wasn't like, you know, she could go off and earn her living. But for Beauvoir, who, as you said in your introduction, did come from a very bourgeois family, not the same kind of old, French Catholic family that Andrée does, but still, like very, you know, bien bourgeois, as they say. Nevertheless, her father, as you said, had lost a lot of money in the Great War, and so her future was not assured. There wasn't a sense that their role in the social structure was firm no matter what, even if he did lose all of that money. There's just a real sense of precariousness to the family's fortunes. That was true in Beauvoir's life, and it's true in Sylvie's. So I think Sylvie knew, or Beauvoir knew, from quite a young age, that she was going to have to go out and make a living. So Beauvoir studied philosophy and did the agrégation, which is a competitive, national examination to become a high school teacher. (In France, to be a high school teacher is a very lofty endeavor. It's like, you can take this very, very, very difficult and competitive written and oral examination. They call them professors. Then you're a professor at a lycee.) So that was what Beauvoir did after her years at the Sorbonne. And then, eventually, was able to support herself writing and didn't have to teach anymore. But there were, of course, also some controversies during her time as a teacher that you may be aware of.

AMY: I'm not, but maybe we can get into that. That sounds interesting.

KIM: Yes. So despite the fact that Sylvie and Andrée ... their futures are already wildly diverging by the time they're teenagers, or maybe partially because they're diverging, the two of them have this really intimate relationship. But Sylvie's feelings for Andrée go even deeper. She's really in love. And there's this part where 13-year-old Sylvie, who hates to do needlework, makes Andrée this beautiful silk bag. And because of it, Andrée's mother realizes, she sees this depth of feeling that Sylvie has for Andrée. What is it about Andrée that Sylvie falls in love with, do you think? 

LAUREN: I think, I mean, she's so different to any other child with whom Sylvie has come in contact, you know? You got a little bit of it in that scene that I read just before where she's like, kind of straight to the point, you know? No social niceties, just kind of like, "Yeah, okay. I got burned alive. Can I borrow your notes?" You know? "So you're the smartest one in the class? Yes or no?" And I think that was just really refreshing and unnerving, and then as the book unfolds, we find that she just is kind of in love with being alive. Like, she can get goose pimples on her arms just if someone says the word "orchid." She's this very sensitive creature. And she's great at playing the piano. She's doing a recital at one point, and as she gets through the part that she always messes up without making a mistake, she turns and sticks her tongue out at her mother. And so everyone in the room is like [gasps], but Andrée gets away with it. She's this irrepressible child. She just doesn't care. But I just love that.

AMY: It reminded me a little bit as if it was like a young girl's version of Nick and Jay Gatsby almost, you know? Like Sylvie's the more conservative, shy, quiet...Zaza is just full of charisma and lives life to the fullest. I kept thinking of those two characters. 

LAUREN: I love that. In another place across the ocean, Andrée would have run away or reinvented herself and have been throwing these parties in, you know, Great Egg, or whatever it's called.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: That's true. Imagine the life that Zaza would have lived had she survived. 

LAUREN: Yeah, I know, it would have been amazing.

AMY: If she could have escaped all the repression, I guess. Right. 

LAUREN: Yeah. Yeah.

AMY: So Deborah Levy, in the introduction to this book, she writes: "In every decade of my life since my twenties, I have been awed, confused, intrigued, and inspired by Beauvoir's attempt to live with meaning, pleasure and purpose." And she then references a quote from Beauvoir's autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, which we've talked about, which says: "Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody." As life mottos go, that's a really good one. 

KIM: Yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned that quote, Amy, because I loved it too. 

AMY: It brought me back a little bit to Lorraine Hansberry, whom we also did an episode on, and Hansberry often talked about how Beauvoir was a major inspiration.

LAUREN: I didn't know that. 

KIM: Oh yeah, yeah.

AMY: Oh, big time. Yeah. 

KIM: And Hansberry's daily practice of living and working toward a vision of Black Radicalism -- you can definitely see the influence of Beauvoir there. 

LAUREN: I love that. And I love, I mean ... Deborah Levy's introduction for this book is just like, it's just a pleasure, you know, from beginning to end. It was so perfect for this novel. I think that you do get a sense, reading The Inseparables, of the degree to which Sylvie is really a sensualist from the very beginning. Just the kind of lush way that she communes with the trees and the flowers and, you know, the hedges. And there is a real change after she meets Andrée; it's very funny. First of all, she starts going for the forbidden books on the top shelf of grandpa's library, but she also writes something like "I wanted to taste the poisonous berries just to know what it tastes like.” And so I think, as I said, that sensuality and feeling for nature and being in the world is there before Andrée, but Andrée really accentuates it. It's being with this girl who's just no bullshit, get to the point, get what you need out of a situation, out of a conversation, out of a day, that has her just wanting experience for its own sake. And I think that also underlies her rage at Andrée being denied her future and her early death.

AMY: It feels like this friendship with Zaza was sort of the crucible that turned her into that woman. Like, you can see what a transformative experience this was for her to know this person. And we know she obviously becomes this incredibly famous person, but in The Inseparables the focus is really on this Zaza character. 

KIM: Yeah, and I'm going to read a little passage from Sylvie as the narrator that touches on:

But what I admired most about her were the little habits she had that I never understood. Like when she saw a peach or an orchid, or even if someone just said one of those words to her, she shivered, and gooseflesh stood out on her arms. It was in those moments that I was most troublingly aware of the gift she had received from heaven, which I found so enthralling: her personality. Secretly I thought to myself that Andrée was one of those prodigies about whom later on books would be written. 

LAUREN: I love that passage. I mean, this book is really spectacular. There are some really memorable sentences in it, and that is definitely one of them. "She was the kind of person about whom later books would be written." I get the chills just thinking about that line. And so I think, for Simone, it was just a question of, I think her home life was pretty boring. I think she felt very misunderstood by her parents. Beauvoir just had this ouverture d'esprit they call it, like, an openness of spirit, and she was deeply curious and wanted to just question things. She was just a born questioner and you see that in the way that Sylvie slowly loses her faith over the course of the novel, and then feels like she has to hide that from the people at school and all of the clergy people that she comes into contact with. And it's this amazing moment of revelation that she has with Andrée, this amazing scene in the kitchen beneath the fancy house where Andrée's family lives in the countryside where, you know, she confesses to having lost her faith and it's this dramatic moment of revelation. And she's really not sure how Andrée's going to take it, but it's like she needs to bare her soul and have Andrée see her as she really is. It might seem kind of tame or something like, "Okay, so you don't believe in God," but in that context and that time, for a young girl going to a Catholic school to say, "I don't believe in God" is so shocking, and Andrée says something like "If I thought that we lived and did this and then died and that was it. I couldn't bear to live," and Sylvia's like, "But I love living!" And that moment it's just, it illustrates all the differences in their philosophies. And it's such a sad moment. And yeah, it really, it encapsulates what I was saying before about Beauvoir the sensualist, like, she just, she loves living. It doesn't matter what happens after; living is the thing. 

KIM: So going back to what you said, about Sylvie's character gradually losing her faith, it really changed how she behaved. She went from obedient to more rebellious. And I'm curious about how that squares with Simone's own experience in losing her faith and what you can tell us about that.

LAUREN: I actually don't know a lot about Beauvoir herself, how she lost her faith. I had the great good fortune to read her early diaries when I was in grad school. They were published in French, the Cahiers de Jeunesse in like the middle of the two thousands, and I got them and I read them. I devoured them. And I mean, I'd looked at The Second Sex in college, but it didn't really get anywhere with it. But because I was coming at her from seeing her as this young person who is inventing herself, a bit like the Sontag diaries that, you know, everyone was reading a couple of years ago. You see this young person who's brilliant and like, nobody else she knows, except maybe for Zaza, who's making herself reading lists and, you know, trying to invent herself as a very serious scholar and philosopher, and you just get a completely different sense of them as a thinker. You see them as a person who thought great thoughts and, you know, worked really hard. It must be in the Cahiers de Jeunesse that she talks about it, but I must've been so uninterested in that aspect of her life and thinking as to just completely, you know, pass it by. 

KIM: So in a way, given just what you know, or what you've read and what you remember, it's almost like this could be a real clue into Beauvoir’s loss of faith. I mean, obviously we can't take it for sure, but it's interesting that that's how she portrays Silvie's lack of faith, so it could be very similar to hers. So, anyway, this is a part we're excited to talk about. The Inseparables was thought to be too intimate when it was written 75 years ago. Why do you think that is? And how was it rediscovered? 

AMY: It almost seemed like it was her choice to just put it away for herself. Like she had no interest in having it be published. 

LAUREN: Yeah. I wonder about that. So, I mean, the way that we know about this book was in Force of Circumstance, a later volume of her memoir series, she says that she wrote this novel and she showed it to Sartre and he held his nose and told her it had no interior or internal necessity. And so she put it away. So for decades, Beauvoir scholars had been like, "What is this book? What is this book? Where is it? When can we read it?"

AMY: For our listeners can you explain who that is?

LAUREN: Who who is?

AMY: John-Paul Sartre. 

LAUREN: Oh yeah. Oh! 

AMY: We haven't mentioned him yet. Yeah. 

LAUREN: Yeah. We don't even have to mention him. Everybody always mentions him. 

KIM: Yeah. How important is he, really? Well... 

LAUREN: She, okay. So she had this boyfriend on and off. 

KIM: Exactly. 

LAUREN: She could do better. 

KIM: She totally. 

LAUREN: She did do better.

KIM: Yeah. I love it!

LAUREN: But, he's a great philosopher as well, and she took his opinion very seriously. And he told her it stank. I mean the holding of the nose, that is....

AMY: Come on, that's a drama queen. 

LAUREN: Yeah. 

KIM: He was probably jealous of Zaza. 

LAUREN: Well, that's a really good theory. I mean, so I'll tell you the story about how it was found, and then I can tell you a bit more about my thoughts on the Sartre thing, but, um, so it sat in her drawer and then when she died, her adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir, inherited all of her manuscripts and was now in charge of their fate. And a few years ago, this publisher in France called La Pléiade, which is like ... you know when you think of fancy books on a wall, they're always leather-bound and embossed in gold? This is the publisher in France that takes the collected works of a given author and turns them into beautifully-bound, complete works of whomever. And it's a great honor; it's like being canonized to enter into the Pléiade. So a few years ago, Simone de Beauvoir was published in a Pléiade edition, and Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir wanted to include The Inseparables as a kind of appendix to that publication. There wasn't room for all the stuff that she put away in drawers to be included, so Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir decided that she was going to publish this in its own right a couple of years ago. And then obviously, all of the foreign publishers around the world were like, "What? There's a lost novel by Simone de Beauvoir?" And I think, you know, to come back to why Sartre might have held his nose, and to come back to the novel's recent reception as it's come out, there has been some (I mean, controversy is putting too strong a word to it) but some disagreement about the nature of the relationship between Sylvie and Andrée. Obviously, it's not a lesbian novel in the sense that the two are not involved physically or even consciously articulating their desire for one another in a same-sex way. There was at least one piece by Paul Preciado, the philosopher, who said, "This is a lesbian novel." And then Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir and some other people were like, "No! This is not a lesbian novel!" And they thought that that was "like hitting a needle with a hammer," that it's actually much more subtle than that, but I think, you know, Preciado is not wrong. There is an element of queer desire to this novel, and queer desire does not have to consist of two girls getting it on together, or even consciously being aware that that's what they want to do. And I don't think that it's hitting a needle with a hammer to suggest that there's something more going on than just platonic love in this story. And I mean, the fact that she gives her a purse as a present? A red satin purse? Come on, who are you kidding? And so, as I mentioned before, there were some controversies with Beauvoir basically getting asked to leave her teaching job at the lycée in the provinces. It's because she was fondling female students, and that was frowned upon.

AMY: Oh, so now we're getting to it. 

KIM: Yeah. 

LAUREN: Yeah. So, you know, Beauvoir is someone whose sexuality is fluid, to put it mildly, and you know, her relationship with her adopted daughter was also fluid, you know? If you read Dierdre Bair's Parisian Lives, which came out a couple of years ago, Dierdre Bair wrote a memoir about the process of writing a biography of Beauvoir, and then the other half of it is she wrote a biography of Samuel Beckett, as well. So it's like writing about Beauvoir and Beckett. It's a great book — I really recommend it. But she mentioned the nature of their relationship. She asked, "What's your relationship with this young woman? And Beauvoir was like, "We're not lesbians. We don't do anything beneath the belt." 

AMY: Wow. 

LAUREN: Well... 

KIM: Okay. 

LAUREN: So we're not going to use the word "lesbian," but I think it's fine to use the word (and actually really politically and feminist really important) to use the word "queer." 

AMY: This is so fascinating. And now, I mean, this is all making me even more want to go read and learn more about her.

KIM: Yeah. It also kind of answers the question "Why now?" in a way, because, you know, now is when we can talk about that in an open way and we can have these discussions. Yeah. So, but also why else now? Is there anything else you want to say about why now? 

LAUREN: I mean, apart from the fact that it's lost novel by Simone de Beauvoir, so, you know, it's good to know what's in it, but in terms of thinking about how class functions in France at that time, and perhaps functions today, you know, the finer points of the way that the bourgeoisie have all of this power, and people who are maybe more precariously located on the outskirts of that class have a different path to trace, and the way that that intersects with gender and the way that young women have certain choices or don't. It's obviously a lot more subtle now, you know? We're not looking at like, "Am I going to get married or go join a convent?" But I think, you know, the way that young women are asked to be in the world is still very much, um, kind of ... how to phrase it ... I'm trying to think intersectionally, there's a lot of different aspects coming into play in terms of, you know, why a young woman's life takes the shape that it does. The way that Beauvoir is asking us to think about the way the class shapes a young woman's destiny is certainly something that we can stop and consider in this day and age.

KIM: Yes, very much so. I just want to say I think you did a beautiful job on the translation. It's absolutely wonderful. I completely lost myself in it, which is, you know, what you want, I think, from a translation -- that you forget that you're reading a translation, and that absolutely happened for me with this. I highlighted passages and lines throughout, and I would have done that even if I hadn't been, you know, working on the project. So thank you for doing such an amazing job and bringing this book to us in English. 

LAUREN: Thank you. It was all Simone, I was just the channel. 

AMY: It's not homework to read this book. It's enjoyable. 

KIM: It's a pleasure to read it. 

LAUREN: Yeah, completely. 

AMY: And I can't imagine the pressure you must have felt. 

KIM: Oh, I know.

AMY: There had to have been like, an "Oh my God! I've got to get this right! I don't want to mess this up!" 

LAUREN: Yeah, completely. I mean, it was like that at the outset before I was actually working on it, but once I was into it, I felt very sure of myself in a way that I don't often feel sure. (I'm not someone who usually feels sure of herself.) So it felt like a very... I mean, it was a lot of work, but it felt like a very natural kind of work, like my body knew how to do this work. My brain knew how to do this work. And then, yeah, after I had finished a draft, then I definitely was on the horn to some of my translator friends or French-speaking friends, to make sure that I had gotten everything right. And so far, I haven't heard from anyone that there's anything glaringly wrong.

KIM: It seems like the response has been fantastic, though. I'm glad to see that. 

LAUREN: Yeah. It's been a relief. Yeah. 

KIM: Good. 

LAUREN: It's such an amazing book. I can't even believe my luck getting to translate this book. Getting to put this book in my voice is, like, just amazing.

AMY: If listeners want to read more of Beauvoir's fiction after reading this one, what would you suggest next? I mean, I know her book, The Mandarins, won the Prix Goncourt.

LAUREN: I love The Mandarins. I mean, it's very different to this book in the sense that it's very long, and this book, it's very much like Zaza's life: short, sweet and tragic, and you're just like, "No! I want more! It's over! No!" The Mandarins, I mean, I don't think at the end, I was like, "I want more," because it's like 900 pages long. I felt like I'd had enough. But it's so rich. It's about life in Paris just after the end of the Second World War, and these intellectuals, who are all based on, you know, Camus and Sartre and everybody in their circle, having love affairs and trying to do good work; work that would rise to the historical occasion that they found themselves faced with. Like, "How are we going to rebuild France? How are we going to be free?" You know, all of the questions that were facing people who cared about the way that society was put together at the time, you know? Was Communism the way to go? Was Gaullism the way to go? Like, what would happen to the Republic? What was the intellectual's role in the remaking of France at that time? And also questions about love and sexual freedom and female aging and sex after forty, which at the time, I guess, was quite old. It's an amazing, amazing novel, and one you can lose yourself in. 

KIM: I want to go read that right away. So listeners, we encourage you to read The Inseparables right away, if you haven't already. Not only is it a real page-turner, as we've shown, but it seems like an essential piece of the puzzle if you want to understand more about the person who launched the second wave of feminism. 

LAUREN: I should add, if you do want to read my translation of this novel, you probably have to order it from the UK if you're not based in the UK. And I believe Blackwell's has them for like $15, shipping included, to America.

AMY: Oh, perfect. I'm glad you mentioned that. 

LAUREN: Yeah. So no offense to the other translator, you can read that one too, but you know, my one was a good one.

KIM: Yeah, you want to read Lauren's since she was our guest.

LAUREN: I barely even get any royalties, too, so really, it's not like I get more money if you buy my version.

KIM: But it doesn't hurt, so go buy it.

LAUREN: It doesn't hurt, but I mean, that's something that I don't know that people know about, is that translators get like maybe 1%, if they're lucky, and most of the time they don't get anything at all. So that's like a penny.

AMY: Labor of love. Labor of love. 

LAUREN: Yeah, exactly. 

AMY: Speaking of, is there anything else that you're working on now? What's your next project? Anything you can share?

LAUREN: Well, I'm in the revising stages of a book called Art Monsters, which is ... it's trying to argue for an aesthetics of monstrosity as a major kind of feminist tool or way of seeing the world or a way of making art, pretty much from like the seventies to today, but it reaches back to Virginia Woolf and Claude Cahun and the Baroness Elsa. So there's stuff from the earlier 20th century, but it's mainly like Seventies, Eighties, Nineties. So art and literature ... a little bit of film. The way that I'm describing "monstrosity" is really about almost a tactility of viscerality, an attempt to tell the truth of our experience as bodies. (That's a Woolf quote, that's not me.) And so it's art that really is taking embodiment as its point of departure. I think that that's an important way of thinking about "What is feminist art, and what can feminist art do?" Rather than, you know, arguing about who is a woman and who isn't. It's to look at art that moves from the experience of being a body, whatever kind of body that is, and looking at how it's interested in, you know, women's lives.

KIM: That sounds fascinating, and we'd love to have you back on to discuss that one when it's ready. 

LAUREN: Cool, cool.

KIM: Thank you again for joining us, Lauren. This was such a fantastic conversation. What a delight to get to talk to you about this! 

LAUREN: Thank you. It was a pleasure to talk to you guys. This is a fantastic conversation, and yeah, really happy to talk about the book with people who really get it. It's been lovely. 

KIM: Thank you, Lauren. 

AMY: Thank you. Well, we'll keep in touch.

LAUREN: Yeah, definitely. Speak soon!

KIM: 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.

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

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

60. The Preserved Girl-Corpse of Ancient Rome

Episode 60: The Preserved Girl-Corpse of Ancient Rome

AMY: Hi everyone, and welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew… last week we did an episode on lost lady of lit Gertrude Trevelyan, and as we noted in that episode, while at Oxford she won a major award for a poem she wrote called “Julia, Daughter of Claudius.” 

AMY: “It’s a major award!!!”

KIM: [laughing] “Must be Italian.” Anyway, her winning poem was a 250-line, blank-verse poem about a young woman from ancient Rome. She was discovered during the Italian Renaissance, and we’ll be discussing her “life after death” today.

AMY: Yeah, I hadn’t heard this story until we were doing research on G.E. Trevelyan, and of course, we’re always inspired to dig a little deeper when we stumble upon something interesting, and this case was no exception.

KIM: That’s right, and it’s funny you should use the term “digging,” because that’s how “Julia,” the young woman from Trevelyan’s poem, was actually discovered, supposedly, back in the spring of 1485.

AMY: Okay, so according to the website Medievalists.net, one historical account of this event came from a letter written by a man named Bartolomeo Fonzi, who was a scholar and professor of literature at the University of Florence during Renaissance times. So in a letter to his friend, he details that in 1485, some workmen were digging up some marble along the Appian Way six miles outside of Rome when they made a startling discovery. They hit upon a marble box, and when they opened it, they found quote, “a corpse, lying on its face, covered by a layer of fragrant bark two inches thick; all of the casket was likewise smeared with the same fragrant mixture like some sort of plaster.”

KIM: I’m thinking Raiders of the Lost Art, Part 6, right here.

AMY: Yeah!

KIM: I’m thinking about these workers cracking open this casket and it’s giving me the heebie-jeebies already. I would not be the one lifting that lid!

AMY: No way. Me neither. But somebody was undaunted enough to not only open the casket, but to start peeling away all this plaster-and bark within the casket. And underneath it all, they found the body of a young girl, but get this… physically, she was perfectly preserved! So I’m going to go ahead and read on from Bartolomeo Fonzio’s letter to his friend:

When this sweet smelling bark was removed, the girl’s face (to begin at the top) was rather pale and as if she had been buried that very day. Her hair, long and dark and firmly fixed to the scalp, was gathered in a knot and divided into twin tresses in girlish manner, all covered by a hairnet of silk interwoven with gold. 

Then there appeared small ears, a short forehead, dark eyebrows, the eyes beneath shapely and bright. The nose was still intact, and so soft that if it was pressed by a finger it would flex and yield. The lips were a pale red, the teeth snow-white and small, the tongue from the roof of the mouth all scarlet. The cheeks, chin, and throat – you’d think they belonged to a living person. The arms hung down from the shoulders entire,  and would followed wherever you led them. The hands were stretched out, the fingers rounded and tapering with translucent nails, and so firmly fixed that they could not be torn from the joints. Her breast, stomach and belly were equally broad, and appeared white when the fragrant bark was taken away. The nape of her neck, her back and buttocks retained their position and shape and graceful appearance. The beauty of her hips, thighs, shins, and feet likewise gave the impression of a living person.

And reading that, I just want to start singing, “Head, shoulders, knees and toes!” He really goes all the way down! 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: So he also sketched out a drawing of the girl laying by the casket. (He included that in the letter, and we can include a link to it in our show notes. So this girl was said to be maybe around 15-years old by one account, though I had also seen an anecdote that she could have been more like early 20s.

KIM: So that description you read where she looks like she’s only sleeping… it’s almost as if she’s Snow White or a vampire or something… were there any other sources to corroborate that this was a real incident?

AMY: Yeah, so several other writers did reference it, including Daniele da San Sebastiano, who wrote that this plaster-like pickling material that was in the casket was made up of “myrrh, frankincense, aloe, and other priceless drugs”, and he added she looked “so lovely, so pleasing, so attractive, that, although the girl had certainly been dead fifteen hundred years, she appeared to have been laid to rest that very day.” That was one of his quotes. She was also referenced in a late 1800s book by John Addington Symonds, who was a well-respected cultural historian and Renaissance expert of his day. So this isn’t just, like, a one-off anecdote.

KIM: Wow. So she was unintentionally exhumed during the Renaissance, but she actually lived during the era of ancient Rome. So who was she?

AMY: That’s kind of a mystery. Trevelyan refers to her as “Julia, Daughter of Claudius” in her poem. And that comes from one report that there was an inscription found alongside her that named her as such, but that’s not entirely certain. There was another rumor that this was the daughter of Cicero, named Tulliola (and that turned out to be definitely false; it’s not her). But the fact that she was buried coated in such expensive ointments meant she was certainly from a wealthy or famous family. There are actually a lot of tombs and mausoleums for patrician families of ancient Rome all along the Appian Way. But regardless of how famous she was during her lifetime, it paled next to the fame she received in death, after her body was unearthed.

KIM: Yeah, according to legend, tens of thousands of people made pilgrimages to come see this perfectly-preserved corpse. Her body was transported back to Rome accompanied by throngs of people, and it was put on display, apparently, outside the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill.

AMY: Right, and it was like a Medieval version of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not exhibit kind of thing. But no sooner had she been discovered and put on display than she disappeared again. The body mysteriously vanished.

KIM: I mean, obviously, a prince came along and kissed her, and they lived happily ever after!

AMY: Right. Yes, you’re right, that’s got to be it. No, actually… so there were some reports that Pope Innocent VIII was becoming concerned about the sensation this corpse was causing in the city. He was worried that “Julia” (we’ll call her “Julia”) was attracting an almost cult-like following and so he decided they needed to just make the whole thing go away. He ordered city officials to take the girl away and re-bury her outside the city walls. And then in another version of that story, she was dumped in the Tiber river.

KIM: You know, obviously it’s not unheard of for corpses to be mummified or preserved somehow. I mean, we know a lot about that from ancient Egypt.

AMY: Yes, exactly. But it’s also reminding me of a story (Kim: I don’t know if you heard this). It was from a few years ago. They found a glass-fronted coffin that was unearthed in 2016 in San Francisco in somebody’s backyard when they were renovating their house… the casket contained the body of a similarly preserved little girl (it was a three-year-old toddler who had died almost 150 years ago.) Do you know that story?

KIM: No, I had never heard of that. Wow.

AMY: Okay, so in 2017 scientists were able to identify who this little girl was, with the help of DNA. Her name was Edith Howard Cook. (This sounds totally made up, but it’s all true.) There are some news stories you can find online about this story, including pictures and truly… if you look at the pictures… so the coffin has a little glass window, and the girl has blonde hair and rosy cheeks and little pink cupid-bow lips. She looks like she’s just sleeping. It’s really kind of a haunting image. And if you check it out, it’s not gruesome; it’s not going to freak you out. It’s just really arresting to see it. 

KIM: It’s just so interesting to think about how many preserved corpses there might be underground.

AMY: I know. You don’t think of that happening.

KIM: Yeah. I can also understand how the people who happened upon this preserved Roman corpse might have looked on this as some sort of miraculous or supernatural event. On the other hand, it also sounds a little bit like a headline from The National Enquirer or something like that.

AMY: Right, and Bartolomeo Fonzio, in his letter, kind of echos how incredulous the whole thing was in his letter. He wrote: “I only wish I could do justice in words to the beauty and attractiveness of the cadaver, which would seem amazing to posterity and quite incredible were it not that it was witnessed by the entire city.” 

KIM: Okay, so we have Gertrude Trevelyan to thank for making us aware of this story… she was the first woman to earn the Newdigate Prize for this poem (previous winners included Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin, by the way). The poem ended up being published by Blackwell’s (a British publisher) and it was read on BBC radio. Trevelyan told the press that she’d actually written the poem as a joke. 

AMY: Yeah, I love how cavalier that is. “I just scribbled that out. I’m surprised to have won” There’s an article about her winning the award in an issue of The Spectator from that year, but I couldn’t manage to find a copy of the poem anywhere on the Internet. So if anybody listening happens to find it, let us know, I’d be interested.

KIM: Yeah. And a little tidbit that we read about this, too, is that some people thought that she just won the award because she was a woman, whereas to other people, it was like “This is amazing that a woman actually won the award” — It must have meant that the poem was even better, you know? It had to be so much better to actually be able to win.

AMY: Right, I don’t think they were just like, “Oh, we should give it to a woman this year.” I don’t think they had that mindset back then.

KIM: No, definitely not. So this is one “lost lady” writing about another “lost lady” you could say, so it’s getting very meta up in here on our podcast.

AMY: Anyway, yeah, all this talk of Rome has got me thinking that you and I can maybe, sometime, when we have time to binge an entire series of TV together, I want to sit down and try to watch that old Masterpiece Theater program “I, Claudius.” Did you ever watch it?

KIM: No, I didn’t. I do remember my parents watched it when I was a kid, though.

AMY: Yeah, it was huge when it came out. Yeah, I watched a trailer for it on YouTube, and it looks a little okey and kind of campy, but in a good way. And it’s got kind of a big-name cast; you’ll recognize a lot of actors in it. And even if it’s campy, when has that ever stopped us, right?

KIM: I have one word — or is it two words? — for you: Thorn Birds. NO, campy never stopped us!

AMY: And Poldark — the original Poldark. That’s pretty campy.

KIM: Exactly. We love it

AMY: Then I’m also wondering, maybe we should try to figure out the exact formula of some of those unguents that “Julia” was coated in in her casket. Maybe we could make a fortune with some sort of age-defying skin care.

KIM: Yeah, we finally found a way to monetize things around here!

AMY: Totally! Coming soon: “Dead Romans.”

KIM: “Appian” by Bartolomeo Fonzi.

AMY: Yeah. I love it. I love it. Okay, so we’ll be selling that skincare line soon, everyone. 

KIM: Anyway, we have a pair of fresh-faced young women at the center of the book we’re going to be discussing next week. The Inseparables is a long-lost novella about two best friends written by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. The book has finally been published for the very first time 75 years after it was written. (Apparently it was deemed “too intimate” to be published in her lifetime.) Her daughter found the manuscript though, and got it on track to be released.

AMY: And we have an incredible guest next week to help us understand this book in more ways than one. Lauren Elkin who translated The Inseparables from French for the UK Penguin edition of this novel, she’s going to be joining us, and I’m sure she’ll have a lot to say about this book — you won’t want to miss it.

KIM: Yeah, so see you next week — and in the meantime, don’t forget to leave a review where you listen to this podcast, and drop us a line by email or on Instagram or our Facebook page if you’re feeling so inclined. We love hearing from you all!

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

59. G.E. Trevelyan — Appius and Virginia with Brad Bigelow

Episode 59: G.E. Trevelyan (Appius and Virginia) with Brad Bigelow

KIM: Hi everyone! Welcome back to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off history’s forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. The book we’ll be discussing today, Appius and Virginia by G.E. Trevelyan, takes place solely within the confines of one small house in an English village, and there are only two characters in the novel — a single, middle-aged woman and … (brace yourselves) an orangutan.

KIM: If your first reaction is “What?” you’re not alone. Come to think of it, this setup immediately makes me think of that old Clint Eastwood movie from the Seventies: Every Which Way But Loose.

AMY: I loved that movie as a kid, and I’m sure it’s completely inappropriate. Probably should never have been made.

KIM: Right.

AMY: But when I found out the premise of Appius and Virginia, I was expecting something along the lines of that movie, probably. You know … a madcap story with heart; maybe something like Bedtime for Bonzo. I could not possibly have been more wrong.

KIM: Yeah. I think it’s safe to say this book is a bit … darker. 

AMY: A bit? It’s like an episode of Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone, I think.. Unnerving, but also very thought-provoking.

KIM: And we have today’s guest to thank for introducing us to Gertrude Trevelyan and her unique debut novel of 1932.

AMY: I say “GER-trude.”

KIM: What did I say?

AMY: You keep saying, “Ger-TRUDE.”

KIM: I seriously think someone deprogrammed my pronunciation. “Ger-TRUDE.”

AMY: “GER-trude.”

KIM: “GER-trude!”

AMY: I’m just gonna leave it, but you keep saying, “Ger-TRUDE” every single time.

KIM: Every different way?

AMY: Yes.

KIM: That’s fine. Okay, okay. Let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

AMY: Today’s guest is Brad Bigelow, editor of NeglectedBooks.com, a website devoted to unearthing books that “have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.” Brad is basically an archaeologist of lost books, and he also endeavors to get great out-of-print books reissued by publishers. Now, if you want some really great book recommendations, you need to check out his site and subscribe because it offers a wide range of fascinating titles and is accompanied by really great deep-dive articles. I’m so excited every week when I get your newsletter, because it’s always fascinating. I need to devote a little bit of time to sitting and reading through it all, and it’s always very much a pleasure to get those emails. Brad’s obsession with obscure books was even celebrated in a New Yorker profile in 2016 (which, oh my gosh, can you imagine? That’s amazing.) It was titled “The Custodian of Forgotten Books.” Just last year, he completed a masters program in Biography and Creative nonfiction from England’s University of East Anglia and he’s now hard at work on a biography of forgotten American writer Virginia Faulkner for the University of Nebraska Press.

KIM: Okay, and we’re going to have to bring you back eventually to talk about her, too!

BRAD BIGELOW: Absolutely. She’s a great story.

AMY: So incidentally, Brad (we should mention) is also a retired U.S. Air Force officer and NATO civil servant. So we’ve got quite the Renaissance man with us today! (We’re going to get into his story a little bit more later.) But he definitely knows a lot about Gertrude Trevelyan, so we are so glad he reached out to us about her. Brad, welcome to the show!

BRAD BIGELOW: Well, thanks, Amy and Kim, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite neglected writers, Gertrude Trevelyan.

KIM: So you had initially contacted us and suggested we look into G.E. (which stands for Gertrude Eileen) Trevelyan. When did you first discover Trevelyan, and what do you remember about reading her novel Appius and Virginia for the first time?

BRAD: Well, I've always been on the lookout for books that are distinctive, but have, for whatever reason, become forgotten. And about three years ago, I read a passing reference to Appius and Virginia that said it was a story about a woman trying to raise an orangutan as a human. And that was enough to spur me to go find a copy because just how bizarre that story sounded.

AMY: Right. That was the pitch you gave me also, and I was like, “Are you kidding me? YES!”

KIM: Yeah.

BRAD: Right. So it was about three years ago (almost exactly three years ago). In fact, my wife and I were at an ayurvedic spa in Germany with no wifi. So I had three days. I had a couple of books, and that was one. So I just sat and read it straight through. I thought it was wonderful.

AMY: It’s definitely different!

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: With that said, would you mind giving our listeners a little bit of a spoiler-free summary of the plot? You kind of gave us the elevator pitch, but can you dig in there a little more?

BRAD: Sure. So the book opens in media res, as they say, in the middle of the action. Virginia Hutton, who's an English spinster, probably in her 40s, she’s sitting in this isolated country house observing a little creature sleeping under a blanket in a crib. And I say “little creature,” because we quickly learned that she's in the midst of this experiment that came to her one day when she was visiting the London Zoo. And when she decided watching the apes that if a young ape were taken at birth, and brought up completely in human surroundings, exactly as a child, it would grow up like a child (at least this is her theory), and in fact, become a child except, of course, for its appearance. And so Appius and Virginia is the story of this experiment. The spoiler, of course, would be telling how the experiment turns out.

AMY: And we’re not going to do that.

KIM: No. We should point out that you, Brad, actually wrote the introduction to the 2020 reissue of this book, and in it, you mention that Appius and Virginia was compared to another novel that was published around that time. Tell us about that.

BRAD: Sure. Not long before Appius and Virginia appeared, an English writer named John Collier published a novel with the striking title of His Monkey Wife. And in it, a rather slow-witted English schoolmaster returns from the Congo with a chimpanzee named Emily. And his intent is to give Emily as a pet to his fiancee, but Emily is actually quite smart (in fact, probably smarter than he is.) And she's also smitten with the schoolmaster. And so she concocts this elaborate scheme to win his love that centers on her dressing up and passing as a human. (So we have to buy that artifice.) What it really is, is a wonderful satire of Victorian manners. In fact, Emily, herself, is certainly the most likable character in the book. She's really a wonderful character, because she actually, you know, outwits all of these humans in carrying out her plans. So I had read that book years ago, because it's sort of what you might call a well-known forgotten book. But it's been reissued a number of times, and it's kind of a comic classic. And so when I saw that comparison, I thought, well, you know, it'd be great to find another book like that. And of course, it was nothing like that.

AMY: Yeah, as we mentioned in the introduction, I was going into Appius and Virginia expecting this comic romp. And then I was like, “Oh, boy.” It stopped me in my tracks.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

BRAD: Right.

AMY: So basically, the totality of the book takes place in a small cottage that Virginia has rented for the purpose of conducting her “experiment.” The story takes place in the nursery, the garden, around the hearth, so in that sense, it all feels very “quaint” and safe, but right off the bat, like I said, I felt a strange foreboding. So Brad, can you talk about the tone of this book a little more and the techniques that Trevelyan employs to make it (I think) a psychological thriller?

BRAD: Absolutely, because this is really how, in my opinion, Trevelyan distinguishes herself and the book. She was drawing, of course, on this stream-of-consciousness approach to narrative that had kind of been pioneered in the decade before her by people like Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclaire, etc, in which you follow the action through the eyes and thoughts, and also the blind spots of a character. And in this case, the whole story is related through Virginia, who is this willful idealist really committed to her experiment, and through Appius the orangutan. Now, of course, Virginia sees the world as we might, so channeled through her lens of the desire to see him become a human through her experiment. So as we follow the action, we see how she systematically interprets everything in terms of success of the experiment. She’s always reading into things of, “Oh, this is working or this isn't working.” Well, Appius, of course, is not a rational being and he understands nothing of this. So when Trevelyan is relating things through his eyes, what we see really is this world of sounds and shapes and sensations, which have no rational context. So when he sees the storm blowing outside his nursery windows, the way she describes it is, you know, it’s  “blackness, big moving things, big still things, big black things, stillness, whiteness, dazzle” she's just using impressions. And so they're not thoughts. And in fact, several times in the book, there's a phrase that recurs, which is “he had no thoughts,” but she relates that still so we're very convinced that we are seeing the world through In the eyes of this orangutan. And so we know that you can't bring these two very different beings together (who are seeing the world fundamentally differently) without expecting that eventually there's going to be some kind of collision taking place. And that's where you get the tension. It's how long is this gonna last?

KIM: Right? And as you said, Trevelyan alternates between the point of view of Virginia and Appius throughout the book. And despite being “motherly,” Virginia feels like a villain at times. It was really hard to witness her control over Appius, even when he’s an infant. It felt like child abuse. 

AMY: Yea, there’s actually a passage…. So we see Appius as a little tiny baby at the very beginning, in his crib, and then we start to see him growing up and becoming a toddler. There’s a passage when Appius is playing in the backyard, but he goes a little bonkers out there. He decides to climb a tree, which he had never done before, and Virginia really does not like this because she’s concerned he’s going to get away from her somehow. So she’s trying to get him to come down out of the tree. He ultimately falls and he messes up his clothes. (Which Virginia never likes when Appius gets his clothes out of sorts; and he’s always wearing, like, a cute little sailor suit.) 

BRAD: Right.

AMY: So when he lands, having fallen out of the tree, she grabs him; she shakes him violently and scolds him. And Trevelyan writes: “Appius stopped struggling and stared at her with wide-open, tearful eyes. He did not in the least understand what she was saying. It contained words — clothes, tree, socks — which he had been taught to repeat after her when she said them slowly, pointing at the objects But their connection and even their significance in this outburst altogether escaped him.” It really made me think of how many children and animals are mistreated because of a lack of understanding. That scene where she shakes him — it’s chilling. And that idea of language and the meaning of words ultimately plays a critical importance in the book, right, Brad?

BRAD: It certainly does. And Virginia we would describe as a helicopter mom, right? She's constantly hovering over him and trying to correct him. And she's focusing on the same things that any parent raising a child might, which is behavior and language. So she trains him to dress and eat like a child and tries to teach him language through this repetition of words. And these, you know, to put it bluntly, “monkey-see, monkey-do” kind of a repeating of action. And he does learn but he doesn't, of course, learn language; what he learns is patterns of activity. So it's sort of a Pavlovian programming going on. He starts to associate words with things and actions. And he associates “Mama,” he thinks of Virginia as “Mama,” but he doesn't think of her as “Mama” as a child would think of its mother. That's just the sound that he associates with her. To use a linguistic example, Noam Chomsky used to use two phrases to illustrate this concept of a phoneme, which is a sound that has a meaning. And he would have two phrases, which is “John is eager to please” and “John is easy to please.” Now we hear that and the difference between “eager” and “easy” — we know that they have different meanings. For Appius, it’s just sounds. They literally are just sounds. She really is ahead of her time in understanding you can't attribute conscious rationality, you can't associate those things with an animal. So her ability to switch back and forth between those kinds of sensibilities, I think, is one of the remarkable things in the book.

AMY: I kept thinking of my dog. That’s exactly how Appius responds to things is the way a dog would respond to the words.

BRAD: Exactly.

AMY: In getting back to Virginia’s strictness, you know, her anger stems from the fact that, like any “child,” (or wild animal) Appius really is a handful. He makes messes, he throws tantrums, he gets into trouble. (When he’s flinging oatmeal all over the dining room, I was thinking, “Okay, I’ve been there.” You know? I’ve cleaned up a lot of messes like that.) So during the time that I was reading this book I was dropping my son off at summer camp, and there was a nanny there who was dropping off a little boy and she was talking to another woman. And she said, “Yeah, the kid, you know… when they hired me, his parents said, ‘He’s always getting into trouble. You’re going to have your work cut out for you.’” And she said, “I told the parents, ‘If he wasn’t getting into trouble, he wouldn’t be a kid.’” I thought that was so insightful of her. And I was like, “Wow, what a wonderful nanny.” You know, she sort of lets him be who he is. And it really made me think about this book when I heard her say that, because she understood what Virginia doesn't. Virginia is just obsessed with molding Appius into this perfect human. (And I think a lot of even the most well-intentioned parents attempt to do that with their own children). And we know, of course, that Virginia is doomed to fail, especially with an orangutan, but also with a child. And then on the other hand, as readers, we feel tremendous empathy for Appius. And even though Brad, like you said, it’s very fragmented how she shows his consciousness, you do find yourself feeling for him. Do you have any favorite passages from the early part of the book that maybe showcases this a little bit?  

BRAD: Yeah, well, actually, let's go back to that scene that you were just talking about, which is where he gets loose and he tries to climb a tree. Virginia sees this as misbehavior, you know? She shakes him. She straightens his clothes. She doesn't like him getting messy, as you said. Well, he's seeing this in a completely different way. So to quote from the book, “he knew vaguely that he had been swinging, which was pleasant, and had almost freed himself of these extraneous skins…” [clothing to him is just, “why am I wearing two skins?”] “...which always clung to him, holding his limbs in uncomfortable positions and pulling at his growing fur. He knew that now he was being shaken, which was not at all pleasant, and that he was no more free. The skins were being fastened onto him again, very tightly all over and tucked into place, his face and hands were being rubbed clean with a handkerchief. So there was no more friendly Earth and nice smelling tree moss left on them. He was not free because of all these things. But still more he wasn't free because of the steely, scolding voice that went on and on, it would never stop until it was satisfied by his obedience. And because of the hard flat eyes that looked at him coldly and vividly following and holding his glance so that he could never get away.” I mean, we can all imagine that, that you know, when you're with this tyrannical disciplinarian. She really gives us that experience again, but through his eyes and his sensibility.

KIM: Yeah, so hearing his version of it (or reading his version of it) is actually chilling.

AMY: Yeah, it's like she's a monster. When we're seeing her version of it, she's very maternal. She only has the best intentions for him. When we flip it to Appius’s point of view, she's suddenly this monster,and you are left wondering, “What is broken within her to have made her so obsessed?” 

KIM: Yeah, seems like she has some serious mental health issues. So I’m curious, Brad, what’s your take on Virginia?

BRAD: Well, you know, earlier I described her as an idealist, and the idea that has taken hold of her — this idea of turning Appius into a human through just the same sort of training by which you might train a dog to heel if you're trying to get it to learn how to walk properly on a leash. But in her defense, we have to remember what Trevelyan tells us about what the alternative to this is, because she has this flashback early on in the book where she leads us through how she came to this idea. And the idea came to her when she is living as a middle-aged woman in this woman's boarding house in London. And she's really not doing much more than having tea from time to time and going to museums and the zoo and borrowing books from the lending library. And Trevelyan writes that Virginia “knew obscurely inarticulately, that if this experiment failed, her existence would no longer be justified in her own sight.” So if she fails, she has nothing to look forward to but growing older, and it's chilling to read how Trevelyan describes this kind of purposeless life: “..each year, a little less bright in the after dinner conversation, a little less able to remember the novels she has read, a little less able to find a listener, a little less able to live, yet no more ready for death.” I mean, it's hard to paint her as a villainess when you realize how sad the life was that she was coming away from. I mean, it was a soul-sucking life. It's hard not to see that and feel that it's as bad or worse as what's going on with this experiment with happiness.

AMY: It didn't seem like she had a lot of relationships with other people. And so when she is imagining Appius’s future, (which is, I mean, just delusional, really — she's wondering sometimes if you know, “Maybe he could grow up to be a minister of Parliament!” She has grand plans for this orangutan), but there's also a sense of like, “He's always going to be here for me.” when I get older.

BRAD: He’s going to be my companion when I get older. Yeah.

KIM: Yeah. The book becomes more and more intense as it goes along. Little-by-little, we see self-realization take hold of Appius as he pieces together the truth about who he actually is. Virginia is too in denial and too powerless to reverse course — she’s like the proverbial mad scientist who realizes too late what she has wrought. There are also many passages in the novel that show the complete misunderstandings between Virginia and Appius. They both want something from the other, but aren’t able to articulate it and they can’t understand at all where the other is coming from, no matter how hard they try (and they do try), which makes sense when you’re talking about two different species, but of course it can also be true between people. 

BRAD: That's right. And to me, this is the way that Appius and Virginia operates, I think, as a parable. Because even if we're not dealing with such a dramatic difference, as between a woman and an orangutan, there's a limit to which any two beings — men and women, for example — can understand each other. And if one fails to try to bridge that gap through empathy — and that's the one thing Virginia fails consistently to have, is to show any empathy to Appius’s way of being in the world — if you fail to bridge this gap with empathy, either because you have the lack of capacity (which Appius can't understand what Virginia is trying to do) or through this willful refusal on Virginia's part, well, then the relationship really seems destined to have a tragic end. Trevelyan understood that Virginia was setting herself up to fail by trying to get Appius to think of her as “Mama,” not “Mama” the sound but “Mother,” you know? Appius lost his real mother, remember, at some point before Virginia bought him from an animal dealer. Virginia wants to fit her interactions with Appius into this template of “mother and son,” and particularly as the story goes on into interpreting his actions as the responses of a loving son. But of course, Trevelyan knows this is delusional. Throughout her books (and I've read them all) she has this phenomenal capacity to get herself into the mind and sensibility of a very different individual, or in this case, a completely different species.

KIM: So what was the general reaction to Appius and Virginia when it was published?

BRAD: Well, as you might imagine, in that much more conservative age, many reviewers were not ready to read a book about a single, middle-aged woman and a (brace yourself) orangutan, as you put it, on its own merits. The oddity, the novelty of the story was enough to put them out. So the dean of British reviewers at the time was a guy named James Agate who wrote for The Daily Mail, and he just dismissed the book out of hand. In fact, I love this phrase, he called it “pretentious pewling twaddle,” which is about as harsh a criticism as you can imagine. 

AMY: Not great. 

BRAD: Not great, although I have to say, it's not the worst she got. One of her later books was called A War Without a Hero, and one of the reviewers said reading the book made him want to go out and shoot himself...

KIM: Ouch!

AMY: Oh my gosh. Poor Gertrude!

BRAD: ...because she was never anything but intense when she threw herself into this exercise of creating these different conceptions of the world in different books. They're very intense books.

AMY: Doesn’t the extremity of those reviews almost make you more intrigued?

BRAD: Absolutely, yeah. And in fact, I wrote something recently about that, which is, you know, one of the ways I find these books is by going through old book reviews. And very often it's not the ones that get the “Well, this is a masterpiece!” that intrigues me. It's the ones that are condemned for being odd or just not fitting into some preconceptions of the reviewer’s idea of what's proper literature. Those are the ones you go, “Huh, let me let me check into that.”

AMY: Those are going to be the ones that are kind of ahead of their time.

KIM: Yeah, Genius Method.

BRAD: Right. They're taking risks. And one of the things I really love about Trevelyan is she took a risk in every book. And I think from an artistic standpoint, she took the risk and saw the reward. But you know, there were a lot of people who said, “This is just too intense for me,” or “This is just too strange for me.”

AMY: People weren’t ready yet, but now we are.

KIM: Yeah. So when I was reading the book, it reminded me a lot of a 1958 science fiction novel called Flowers for Algernon, which was about an experiment on a developmentally disabled man. I saw a lot of connections. I was also thinking a lot about Emma Donohue’s Room as I read it, just because we see this point of view of someone who’s never known the outside world and therefore has a very limited scope on what he perceives. 

KIM: Yeah, I have to admit, I've never read Room because I didn't know if I can handle it.

AMY: Yeah. There are some similarities. 

KIM: I also kept wondering if the book was going another direction as Appius became a quote unquote “man.” (And I’m almost embarrassed to say this) but did you read the 1976 prize-winning novel Bear by Marian Engel in college? If you did, you might know where I’m going. But suffice to say this book doesn't’ go there, but it does feel really different from anything else I’ve read from this time period, particularly from women writers. 

AMY: Yeah. And Kim, I know what you're talking about. And I did have that sort of sense of like, Appius is a wild creature, he's going to have urges. What's going to happen here? I was wondering if she was actually going to go there.

KIM: I’m so glad I wasn’t the only one, but as it went on, I started to realize it probably wasn’t going to go there.

BRAD: Well, you know, it's funny, because, of course, Bear has been reissued recently. And I think there's been a lot of talk on “book Twitter” about Bear. And I'm not sure you would have necessarily had that anticipation if you weren't aware of the story of Bear, which is, as you said, quite different.

KIM: Yeah, this is a little bit of a tangent, so you can include or not, but you know, there was a time when people were adopting monkeys. And my uncle actually had … he was in the Navy and they had a monkey for a while. They put a diaper on him; he lived in the house with them. And, you know, it didn't work out well. But anyway, it was a thing.

AMY: Yeah, I have a story similar to that where the monkey lived… and he wound up going to the neighbor’s house and trashing the entire kitchen, and.. yeah, it’s crazy.

BRAD: Well, it's really just been within the last maybe 40 years that you've seen this, you know, major switch, not just in terms of our understanding of the divide between animals and humans, but also kind of the ethics of that. I mean, people weren't talking about the ethics of trying to bridge that boundary in the 70s or 80s. And now we're, of course, hyper-attuned to that. And I think, for good reasons, that we do understand that there is a limit to how far you can bridge that gap.

KIM: Yes, and how far you should try to bridge it.

BRAD: Yeah.

KIM: Anyway, back to Trevelyan, what do we know about her life or upbringing? Is there anything about her life story that would have shaped her into telling a more “out there” story like this one is?

BRAD: As far as I've been able to determine (and I think I've dug up as much material about her as anybody has ever tried to) there's no indicators. She came from a very kind of sheltered life. She was the only child; her father had a comfortable level of wealth. So he never worked. In the census of the time, you would see him listed as “independent means” and they had servants and he rode horses, and he grew flowers. And that's what his life consisted of. And she went to a girl school, boarding school, she went to Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall, which was one of the first women's colleges at Oxford, but there's no sign of where was this going to come from? She was a very quiet person, I think, as far as I can tell. She suffered from tuberculosis on and off throughout her adult life. So she went to Oxford, she got this worldwide fame because she was the first woman to win something called the Newdigate Prize, which is an award given each year for the best poem written by an Oxford undergraduate on a set topic. But in reality, she was a very, very private person. She later wrote that when she was at Oxford, she didn't play hockey, she didn’t act, row, take part in debates, literary or political parties. And she failed to conform to the social standards commonly required of women students. So she graduated, she got a degree, she had all this hoopla. She went to London, she found herself a flat in Kensington, and she went to work writing. And, you know, in many ways, she was the model of what Virginia Woolf wrote about in “A Room of One's Own,” you know — if you have talent, if you have a room of your own, and 500 pounds a year, then you can create the kind of work of art that you should aspire to create. And she had all of that. And she did create these wonderful works of art. But there's kind of a, there's a lesson to be learned from her life, which is that just turning out wonderful works of art, without having that network, doesn't guarantee that your work is going to be remembered.

KIM: Yes, and then sadly, only eight years after Appius and Virginia was published, her life was tragically cut short. Do you want to tell us what happened, Brad?

BRAD: Yeah, well, one night in October 1940 (which was early on in the London blitz … so this is right after the Battle of Britain) her flat was hit by a German bomb. She was severely injured. Probably, all of her papers were destroyed. And her parents took her home to Bath, which is where … (or Bahhhth as they would say in the UK) to be cared for, and she died a few months later. She had a couple of obituaries in some of the papers and that was the end of it. Her books fell out of print, and her name literally does not appear in any literary history of the time.

KIM: That’s so tragic. And how old was she again when she died?

BRAD: She was 37.

KIM: 37. Wow, that’s heartbreaking.

AMY: Yeah, and to think she still had so much that she could have done, you know? So much more she could have written.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: It does look like she wrote eight novels before she died. Correct me if I’m wrong there.

BRAD: That’s right.

AMY: Appius and Virginia, however, was the only one that was also published in the U.S. So I know, Brad, you’ve read her other books ... are there any others still in print somewhere that we could read or that are worth checking out? You mentioned that she kind of took a risk with all of her different books. Are they all as dark as this one?

BRAD: Well, yeah, she did write eight novels, of which there are two in print, one which is Appius and Virginia, which has been reissued. And also her second novel Hot-House, which is based on her time at Oxford. It follows this very impressionable undergraduate through three years at Oxford. Hot-House is available in print-on-demand. Somebody brought it out right after Appius came out. I have been in discussions with some publishers about some of the rest of her books. I have a feeling within the next two to three years, we'll see a number of them come out. And hopefully, as a result, people will start to really appreciate the importance of our work. As far as just to answer the other question about the dark element: No, they're not all necessarily that; they're all intense. They're absolutely all intense. In fact, one of the books that I'm hoping that we'll see in print within the next couple of years is one of the later ones called William's Wife, which is about this woman who she becomes the second wife of a very stingy man and his stinginess infects her mind and sensibility to the point that after he dies, she essentially goes through the series of downsizing so that at the end, she's living in this hovel in London surrounded by her furniture, and she spends her days combing the streets for food out of garbage cans because she doesn't want to spend any money on food. You know, as you're reading into this, you're saying this is somebody who's losing mental control of her life. And that's a very intense experience there to go through reading, you know, 300 pages of that.

AMY: Yeah, that sounds like a good one. I’m ready for a Trevelyan resurgence. We’ve got to make it happen, everybody!

KIM: Speaking of that, Appius and Virginia was actually reissued last year by Eye and Lightning Books, in association with Abandoned Bookshop. Yay for that. And Brad, we understand that you had an important role in making this happen?

BRAD: Well, it’s important, but almost purely accidental. During the first lockdown in the UK, I made contact with Scott Pack, who is the publisher of the Abandoned Bookshop and works with Eye and Lightning. I mentioned this book and he said, “Well, that sounds interesting.” So they borrowed one of the very few copies there are available worldwide in libraries and contacted me soon afterwards. And he said, “This is a great book, I want to republish it.” And so I offered to write the introduction. And so it all came to be, it was great.

AMY: So last year the Guardian ran a story on Trevelyan with the headline, “If She Was a Bloke, She’d Still Be In Print” Do you think that’s true, Brad?

BRAD: Well, yes, in part. I mean, it's clear that many women writers have been neglected over the years due to their gender. But by now I've come across enough writers who've been forgotten that I have to say the number one reason that she was forgotten is that she lacked the one thing that Virginia Woolf didn't mention in “A Room of One’s Own,” which is a network, you know?  So let's take Virginia Woolf as an example. If you were to draw a map of the literary influencer network of England in the 1920s, and 30s, all those connections would lead to Virginia Woolf. She was not only considered one of the best writers of her time, which she was, but she was a publisher with her husband through Hogarth Press. She was a reviewer, she socialized, she was involved in political movements. She was related to a whole network of people, and she had affairs with other writers and artists. So if you think about it, it's not surprising she got remembered because there were so many people connected to her. Her name pops up in everybody's memoirs, and she wrote letters to tons and tons of people. One of the exercises I did early on in studying Trevelyan was to literally go through all the memoirs and biographies of writers that we would consider her contemporaries, and her name appears in none of them. What she did was she lived in this little apartment; she had a tiny circle of unimportant friends. She put all of her energies into her fiction. It’s sort of a cautionary tale for other writers, which is: talent alone is not enough to ensure that your work is going to be remembered. And the corollary to that, which you guys know, and I know from looking after these neglected books is that being forgotten doesn't mean that the book is necessarily of lesser merit to the books that stay in print.

KIM: That’s right.

AMY: I think I always had that kind of snobbery. When I was younger, you would hear that like, “The 100 Classic Books of All Time,” and I wanted to make sure I read through all of them. And now, especially as we're doing this podcast, I'm like, “Wait a second.” I had always kind of assumed, like, “Never heard of it. Probably didn't need to hear of it,” you know? Probably not worth reading. And you're absolutely right. It's completely not true.

KIM: Thank god we were wrong, though. Now it’s like, “Okay, there’s plenty of stuff out there. We’ll never get through all of it. 

AMY: We’ll never run out, yeah.

KIM: It’s a relief, actually.

AMY: Yeah, I think you're right. It is really good advice for writers even today. I mean, there's the sort of fantasy of the writer alone and her garrett ... solitude, 

KIM: If you build it, they will come. 

AMY:  Yeah, it's not true. And anybody who's written a book these days knows also you need to be out there being your own marketer. I would draw the line at maybe having affairs with tons of men and women!

KIM: But anyway, so back to you, Brad, I’m sort of fascinated by your story, Brad. And I think Amy is, too. I should also mention, I’m an Army brat and my dad was in the military. So how did you go from being a U.S. Air Force officer (thank you for your service, by the way) to the keeper of forgotten books?

BRAD: Well, for most of my adult life, actually, the two have gone hand-in-hand. So the Air Force was very generous — they gave me a scholarship to put me through college, but the condition was I had to get a technical degree. So I took a degree in math. Now this was back in the late 70s, when college was affordable, and I loved English. And I took English electives, while I was taking my technical classes, and I loved that stuff so much that I essentially went to summer quarters and paid my way to get a second degree in parallel with that. And somewhere early on, I started finding these amazing books that had for some reason or another gone out of print, and I started amassing a collection of it. And you know, like, most English majors, I was a frustrated writer. So about 15 years ago, I decided ... I knew how to build websites by that point … and I decided that I would start writing little pieces about some of my favorite neglected books and put them up. Now, I thought that that would take a couple of years, and then, like you said, I'd run out of material. But the truth is, I now know that I'll never get through all of the good stuff that's out there that has, you know, for whatever reason, fallen out of print — has become forgotten, but you know, it's still absolutely worth reading today.

AMY: And now you’re also working on a biography of Virginia Faulkner, as we said at the top of the show. I know nothing about her. (I assume no relation to the other Faulkner, right?) 

BRAD: No relation. She grew up ... she was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her family was one of the wealthier families in Lincoln. She was this incredibly intelligent and witty woman. She published two novels by the time she was 22. She went on to write very successful magazine fiction. She worked for Hollywood, for MGM, for a while. She wrote some things for Broadway. She wrote radio shows like Fred Allen’s “Duffy's Tavern,” but then she kind of had what we would call a midlife crisis today. So when she was in her early 40s, she kind of hit a wall, compounded by alcoholism. And her brother said, “Why don’t you come home, you know? Let's see if you can kind of restart your life so to speak.” And she did, and so she actually put writing away completely and she became an editor with the University of Nebraska Press, and she built that into one of the best university publishers in America. She was very important in bringing lots of Nebraska writers (like Wright Morris), keeping their work in print or bringing it back into print. And most importantly, she was really instrumental in this kind of revival of Willa Cather studies that started in the late 60s and 70s. 

AMY: Do you know Melissa Homestead? 

BRAD: Yes, absolutely. No. I know her. And in fact, I can thank her for helping me get a Cather grant for my research.

AMY: Nice.

KIM: We love the connection.

AMY: We’ve got a little “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” going! Everybody, if you want to know who Melissa is, go back to our episode on Edith Lewis. Melissa is a professor at the University of Nebraska. So that's a great episode as well. And Brad, I loved hearing about your whole story, and I think you are truly a book lover after our own hearts. And we're so glad you're out there leading the charge to get all these forgotten authors the attention they deserve. And I would also say again, go subscribe to NeglectedBooks.com. It will really add to your to-be-read pile.

BRAD: Yeah, I mean, you know, literature's a landscape. And, you know, you're talking about the “100 great books” that you should read. Well, those are like the freeways, you know? Those are the ones that everybody's going to take if they're going to go through the land of literature. But as you know, I mean, California is a great example: some of the greatest places in California are the places that you can only get to on a two-lane road. And literature’s that whole landscape. And so if you only take the freeway, you can't really say that you've experienced the literature of a time. And what you're doing and what I'm trying to do is simply to say there are other routes to get from A to B. They might be a little slower. They might be a little windier, but they're still worth it, and in fact, in some cases, you'll see scenery that blows away anything you might see in the you know, the top 10 National Parks sort of places.

AMY: Go get lost on the dirt roads, everybody!

KIM: Yeah, seriously. Yep

BRAD: Absolutely. And thank you both for this opportunity. It's been a real delight. 

KIM: It was wonderful to have you.

BRAD: Keep up the good work, guys.

AMY: Yeah, that was fun. Thank you!

BRAD: Take care! Bye!

KIM: So that’s all for today’s episode. Listeners, we hope you check out Ger-TRUDE Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia and go subscribe… [laughs]. Okay, you say that part!

AMY: Okay. Let’s switch it. Okay.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode. And listeners, we really hope you go check out Gertrude Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia.

KIM: Got any of your own “lost lady” recommendations for us? Be like Brad and shoot us an email to tell us. We love hearing from you.

AMY: And don’t forget to leave us a five-star review where you listen to this podcast if you’re enjoying our program. Until next week, bye everyone!

58. Monster, She Wrote with Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone. Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew.

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes, and Kim, can you believe Halloween is right around the corner? 

KIM: No. 

AMY: I know, it's like, "Oh, I've got to get ready for this." Okay. So we always have a fun time with it in my neighborhood. It's always a big to-do as you know, Kim, but trick-or-treating was canceled last year, so we had to come up with a Plan B. A friend and I wound up creating this very elaborate scavenger hunt for our kids centered around the theme of a Victorian era undead wedding. 

KIM: Oh, my gosh. She is not exaggerating when she says elaborate. I was actually trying to convince Amy to start some sort of scavenger hunt business after she did this. 

AMY: We wrote it all in rhyming poem, all the clues. There were just three kids that participated in it, but, they all said it was their favorite Halloween ever, which given what an S-show last year was, that really made me feel good that they enjoyed it.

KIM: Absolutely. So what are you doing this year? Do you have costumes in mind?

AMY: I mean, at the time we recorded this, we still don't even know what's going to be on the docket for Halloween, but the kids will still dress up regardless. So, at the time of recording this, my daughter wanted to be Lucille Ball, because she got really obsessed with "I Love Lucy" this year so maybe I'll be her Ethel Mertz to go along with that, who knows? But in past years I have dressed as Lady Mary from "Downton Abbey" and also a zombie suffragette.

KIM: Oh, my gosh. You are so cool! That's why I love you. So we have to post those photos of you on our Instagram. So we'll do that. 

AMY: Yes. 

KIM: Cleo, my daughter, we didn't have Halloween last year and we didn't really do anything. because there wasn't a point in making a big deal out of it since she didn't really know what it was. Actually, I just brought it up to her this morning on our walk to school and she didn't seem that interested. I think maybe she wants to be Margaret from "Daniel Tiger," but you know, that can change so much in the next few weeks.

AMY: What’s Margaret? 

KIM: Margaret's the little sister on "Daniel Tiger."

AMY: Oh, I didn't know he had a sister!

 KIM: Yeah, there's a sister. Yeah. We've watched it a lot, the one episode with the sister anyway. Um, so yeah, so we'll see.

AMY: Well, depending on how much trick-or-treating actually happens, it might be the first year she kind of gets it.

KIM: I think so. Yeah. So we'll see what happens.

AMY: And you know, with a kid that young, you're not really getting into any of the scary stuff, right? 

KIM: No, no, no. Right. 

AMY: But we are going to be discussing some scary things in this episode, though. Some scary lost ladies of lit, right?

KIM: I am totally here for it.

AMY: So I was wondering about this, because I didn't know how you felt about scary stuff in general. Can you do horror movies and scary books and things like that? 

KIM: Yeah, it's so funny because you know, we have certain types of books that we both love together, but weirdly, on the side, I also read a lot of science fiction and I also am a huge fan of Stephen King. (Not necessarily the newer stuff, which might be good, I just haven't read it, but the stuff from the seventies and eighties I love.) So, you know, It, The Stand, all that kind of stuff. So I love that, and then I love like "Gothic" scary and "ghost story" scary and "detective" scary. So I like certain genres of horror. I'm not so into horror movies. In fact, when I was a kid, once my sister and I, my mom and dad were out to dinner and we started watching the beginning of one of the "Friday, the 13th" sequels, and when they came home, we hadn't made it past the opening music, but I was asleep with a huge carving knife on my chest.

AMY: Which is dangerous!

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. So we watched the movie the next day with my dad, and it wasn't even that scary. It was just the music that was scary, but yeah, not into the super scary horror. Anyway... 

AMY: Okay. So that's what Mike is like. He cannot watch anything that's scary, so that is completely off-limits in our house. But when it comes to spooky fiction, I like it, but I like it to be throwback kind of stuff. Like, another time period in another era.

KIM: Yeah, yeah. I like that stuff too. That's right up my alley, as well. Well, in that case, you're going to love some of the women authors we'll be referencing today, creators of terror tales, and mistresses of the macabre.

AMY: Somebody queue the oppressive organ music, right?

KIM: That's right. And we've got some special guests — another pair of women authors, in fact — who are going to walk us through some of their favorites. I'm so excited and scared!

AMY: Ooh! They are also podcasters, and I can't wait to dish with them on some blood- curdling books by forgotten women writers.

KIM: So today's guests are Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson. They're the authors of Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction. It came out in 2019 from Quirk books. It's a reader's guide that also offers biographical info on the women who were and are vanguards of frightening fiction. The book includes more than a hundred female authors in this vein, and it's a really informative read, but also really fun too. Lisa and Mel have a wicked sense of humor, pun intended, and that shines through in this book. It won a Bram Stoker Award in 2019 for best nonfiction and a Locus Award from the Locus Science Fiction Foundation in 2020.

AMY: So now my imagination is running wild trying to decide what a Bram Stoker Award might look like.

KIM: I know! 

AMY: We'll get into that later. Last year, Lisa and Melanie also launched the “Monster, She Wrote” podcast, where they focus even more on this particular genre, and incidentally, they're also two of the hosts of the “Know Fear” podcast. That's K-N-O-W Fear, which also delves into all things horror-related. And I have been eyeing them as guests for our show ever since we launched our podcast last fall. And I'm really glad they accepted our invitation because I had penciled them into this Halloween episode a long time ago, long before I actually reached out to them because I'm just aspirational like that.

KIM: It's true. 

AMY: So Melanie and Lisa, thank you for saying yes, first of all, and welcome to the show.

LISA KROGER: Thank you so much for having us! We're so excited! 

MELANIE R. ANDERSON: Thanks for having us!

KIM: I think we should mention, first off, that, in addition to being authors and podcasters, you are both PhDs. Melanie, you're a professor at Delta State University in Mississippi, where you teach research and write about American Gothic and supernatural literature. Lisa meanwhile is one of the founders of the Nix Horror Collective. Did I say that right? 

LISA: Yep. Nix.

KIM: Okay.... whose mission is to develop, celebrate and elevate women-led horror content in film, TV, and new media. So cool. Their "13 Minutes of Horror" film festival features 60-second horror films that showcase their talent. 

AMY: How scary can a minute be? I bet it can be pretty darn scary. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

AMY: So I'm curious: how did each of you guys first develop an interest in this particular genre, and also, how did the two of you meet?

LISA: Well, I'll start with how I got interested in horror. It has been something that I have been interested in since I was a little kid. I grew up in the South, so, you know, I had a mom who dressed me up like I was her porcelain doll with these big dresses that twirled around and shoes you couldn't get dirty. And like, my hair was always curled and... so very, very like proper Southern girl. And then I would go and stay with my grandmother when I was really young, and she would show me old Vincent Price movies. So my favorite movie as a child was House of Wax, which I think my mother was horrified because she tried so hard to raise this perfect little child and then all I wanted to do was horror stuff. I have a picture of me when I was really little where I took her red lipstick and colored my entire face red because I wanted to do bloody makeup. So it's always been with me. I don't know if that's the same for Mel, exactly, but I'll let her answer. 

MELANIE: So I did not really think of myself as a horror fan when I met Lisa, because I was under this misapprehension that horror meant slashers and really gory movies, which was something that I was never really into. So I just always felt like I wasn't, you know, a part of that, or I couldn't necessarily say I'm a horror fan, but looking back on my interests  — and Lisa helped me see this — I was actually interested in horror, I just didn't realize I was into horror, basically. So the first couple of books I can remember reading... my mom read to me There's a Monster at the End of This Book, like forever. I was always constantly asking her to read me this book. 

AMY: For anybody that doesn't know, that's a Sesame Street book. 

MELANIE: It is a Sesame Street book. It has Grover, and I see so much in my interest now that possibly come from that. And then I was a huge fan of the Bunnicula series when I was a kid, which is probably more of a mystery, but it has the idea of vampires in it. And my mom loved Vincent Price and she also loved creature features and things like Godzilla. And so I would watch these movies with her, especially The Creature From the Black Lagoon, which she loved. And I enjoyed those, but I just, I wasn't thinking of myself as the type of person who wanted to watch these more violent movies or more contemporary movies. And I also got into reading ghost stories. I liked haunted house stuff. I like creepy, weird, kind of uncanny things. And so when Lisa and I met in graduate school, we got to talking about our interests, and I realized that the stuff that I enjoyed were basically just sub-genres of horror and that slashers and these things that I was kind of not drawn to were just other sub-genres. I think I probably always was kind of a horror fan, but just didn't realize it.

AMY: Interesting. And I also feel like Lisa, your childhood, somehow there's a horror movie just there in that story alone. Like I'm picturing the big bow… 

LISA: Oh, 

KIM: And then the red lipstick. 

AMY: I have a visual, yes.

LISA: Absolutely. My other grandmother also had an entire room that was just porcelain dolls, and that's the room I would sleep in. 

KIM: Your origin story is right there. 

LISA: My horror villain origin story.

KIM: And you're dressed as the doll too. Ooh. Um, so speaking of inspiration, do you want to talk a little bit about the inspiration behind your book, Monster, She Wrote? Why did you want to write it?

MELANIE: Well, I think the inspiration for the book is kind of tied to when we met in graduate school, when we were working on our dissertations, I was writing about how ghosts and the supernatural were in Toni Morrison's novels. And Lisa was writing about the traditional Gothic women writers of the 18th century. And so we got to talking to each other about our topics and we realized that they had a lot in common. I started reading more Gothicy things and I was reading a lot of ghost stories and kind of branching out and got really interested in women writing ghost stories in the 19th century. And we were very interested in Shirley Jackson. I had just read a bunch of Shirley Jackson before I came to grad school and I told Lisa about her. And so we were reading a lot of Jackson, and we did a couple academic projects together: one on ghosts in literature and film, and one on Shirley Jackson, where we wrote the introduction to a collection of essays together. And, you know, not a lot of people read academic things. If you publish something in an academic journal, you're not going to get a huge readership. And we wanted to try to write for a broader audience, and we were just fascinated by all these women writers that we kind of seemed to know about or could find out about through our research that other people may not have been reading. Like, people who are really into horror may not know about some of these older figures in particular. And so we bounced around different ideas as to how we could get this out there. We started the "Know Fear" podcast at the time, and we really decided we wanted to write a book that would have some of these women in them. And we happened to kind of luck out, I guess. There was a Stoker Con happening. I believe it was in Providence Rhode Island at the time. And we went and we got 10 minutes with a Quirk editor, and we basically just kind of vomited out all these ideas we had about these women we wanted to write about. And he was like, “Let's work up a proposal on something and try to figure out how we could make this work." 

AMY: Yes, Monster, She Wrote is not at all like an academic text. It's really fun. I will say when I read the book, I couldn't believe how many writers in this genre were completely unknown to me, you know? You definitely know Mary Shelley. You know Daphne DuMaurier and Shirley Jackson. Those are kind of the big ones, but then Kim and I read a lot and there were a lot of women in this book that I hadn't heard of — I didn't know anything about. Were these writers who you were pretty familiar with on the whole, given your love of this genre? Or did it require some digging on your part to unearth any of these women?

LISA: Between the two of us, because Mel and I have very different focuses with our academic stuff. So I am more of like the earlier Gothics and she's more 20th century. So we already kind of had a pretty wide net of people we were familiar with. So like the Gothic sections, you know, those were people I was already reading and I wanted to talk about because you know... a lot of people know Mary Shelley but I mean, unless you've taken like a higher level university class, you probably haven't read Ann Radcliffe. Or unless you're a Jane Austen fan, because Jane Austen lists several of them in Northanger Abbey. But, um, yeah, a lot of people hadn't read those, but I'd read those. And then of course, you know, Mel had Toni Morrison and a lot of writers around that time period covered, but there were some that we really had to dig. One in particular was, um, the women writing in the pulp magazines. So we knew Margaret St. Clair, but when we were talking about Margaret St. Clair, we were talking about women writing in the weird tales. And that is always a time period that I have associated with HP Lovecraft. We started talking, and we were like, “There's got to be more women who were publishing around this time.” And that was really fun to dig into, because we uncovered a lot of names we had never heard of, a lot of stories we hadn't heard. So that did take quite a bit of research, and that was difficult to find because I don't know why, but people have not kept a great history of those pulp magazines, like those weird tales. Unless it has something to do with Lovecraft, people just don't care, apparently. So those haven't been kept. And then I think some of the ghost story writers too, because for instance, I knew Edith Wharton, of course, being an English person, but I hadn't read many of her ghost stories. So there were a lot of surprises that we found. 

KIM: It's interesting because as we said, there are many women horror writers, but that almost flies in the face of the idea of what women were supposed to be throughout history. And I know you kind of talk about this a little in the introduction to your book, but how shocking was it for these women to be writing the things they did at the time they did?

MELANIE: Oh, that's a good question. I don't know. Lisa might be able to speak to this more with the Gothics than I can. Lisa were readers shocked that women were writing horrifying things? I feel like readers would be more shocked sometimes at what horror at the time was doing, rather than that women were writing, because it was a popular genre, right? 

LISA: Yeah. I mean, it depends on the time period you're in too, because the Gothics… there were presses that were solely there to publish these Gothic stories written by women. So I don't think that was a big shock. And then even in, like, the ghost story, when you look at the Victorian/Edwardian period, I think women were almost publishing as much as men during that time period, if not more. That may be tied to Spiritualism, you know, because that was kind of a philosophy/religion/pseudoscience that women could participate in. So I don't think it was as surprising. But for some reason, the closer you get to, like, our current times, I feel like there was some pushback maybe around the Seventies or Eighties with this idea that women don't write horror. I don't know why that would be, honestly, but that's when I started to see people being more shocked because even in the Sixties, you had more women writing these kind of weird … like, I mean Daphne DuMaurier was still publishing by then. And her stories are terrifying. 

KIM: True. 

MELANIE: She also was kind of labeled as a 'Gothic romance' writer, too. And I think there is a kind of mix between like the supernatural and sentimental lit that sometimes, you know, causes it maybe to be more acceptable. I was just thinking about, wasn't it Hawthorne...? Yeah, it was Hawthorne, who was really mad about all the women's books who were selling as much or more than his. And he called them the "damned mob of scribbling women." Like, I feel like it was more just competition for being popular and selling books, and not necessarily like you shouldn't be writing about this horrifying thing, but I don't know. It is interesting that you're saying, Lisa, it's like the Seventies and the Eighties when kind of the gender aspect picks up. Or maybe it just becomes more visible or more audible at that time.

AMY: Lisa, you brought up Jane Austen and how she kind of rags on Gothic novels in Northanger Abbey. First of all, I'm wondering if maybe she just secretly loved these types of books and it was just like, "she doth protest too much" sort of thing. Um, but yeah were these books kind of considered the trashy paperbacks of their day and not seen as very literary at the time? So it was okay for women to be doing it kind of thing?

LISA: I think that's a hundred percent true. The way some people looked at them was like, "Oh, well they're just writing ghost stories," or "They're just writing Gothic novels. So we're not worried. It's not true literature.” I think that's also why we don't know their names, a lot of them, because nobody thought to keep them, you know? Nobody protected them. Like scholars... I mean, the reason we have classics is because scholars have worked over a decade to put together canonical texts, and these women were not on those lists. But that's also kind of a horror problem in general, because the genre, I think for a long time, has not gotten the scholarly attention and respect that it needs. So, I think we were "allowed" -- women writers were "allowed" to write, I'm using air quotes. When I say allowed, "allowed" to write these stories because they weren't considered high literature. But that was kind of a double-edged sword, too. 

AMY: Okay. 

MELANIE: That's what happened with Edith Wharton, too, because I mean, we know Edith Wharton way more because of things like Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, than we do her ghost stories. I had read a lot of her realism before I even knew she wrote ghost stories, and I love her ghost stories. And yes, they're published, you know, because she's Edith Wharton, but like the thing that we teach, right, and the thing that's the most important, is her realist writing. And that happened a little bit with Henry James, too. I mean, Henry James's realist writing was way more prized than his supernatural writing, and so I think if you have someone like Edith Wharton, who's kind of punching above her weight, I guess, in what's accepted in the Academy, then maybe her supernatural stuff would be published. So like you're saying, Lisa, if you're a woman who was publishing something that was seen at the time as super popular, the Academy's not into that. They're probably not going to keep it or teach it or it's not gonna stay and be anthologized like other writings are.

KIM: That's a great point. 

AMY: And I will confess: I haven't read any of the Edith Wharton ghost stories. I wasn't even really aware of it that much until you guys. So that's on my to-do list now. and I can't wait, because that sounds amazing!

KIM: I have some that I can loan you, Amy 

AMY: Okay, Perfect. 

KIM: So I'm really excited for this next part, where we're going to cede the mic to you guys, the resident experts on darker tales by women authors. For Halloween, we thought you could share some of your favorites with us. 

LISA: Sure. Well, I'll start with some of my favorite Gothic novels. So I'm probably going to get my Gothic card revoked for saying that Ann Radcliffe is not my favorite Gothic writer. I really enjoyed Clermont, by Regina Maria Roche. I think she has a little bit more fun with the Gothic trope. Sometimes Ann Radcliffe can be just a little stuffy, and she definitely had ideas on what you should and shouldn't do when you're telling one of these scary tales. But I also want to give a mention to Manfroné: the One-Handed Monk by Mary Anne Radcliffe, which I wrote part of my dissertation on Manfroné. So Manfroné's been in my world for a long time. It is just absolutely bonkers, the story. It's not what you would expect from an 18th-century book. It starts with a bang and doesn't let up. I mean, you know, you've got your heroine, you've got a crumbling castle. There's the one-handed monk. Uh, he loses his hand in the first chapter, so that tells you how the book starts. It's just a great, super fun read. And, Valancourt Books has done an edition on it. They recently reissued it as part of our Monster, She Wrote collection that they've put out, which is reissuing some of these texts. So I always suggest if anybody is at all interested in what 18th-century women were writing about and what the early horror story looked like, I think that's a great example because it predates Frankenstein, you know, probably by a good two decades, so... 

KIM: I'm so excited to read that. You totally have me, and I have never... I didn't even know that her sister wrote a book, so... 

LISA: Well, it's not her sister. We don't really know who it is. For all we know she stole her name to publish and, you know, she saw that Ann Radcliffe had a readership. So she just, you know, was like, "Oh, I'm Mary Radclifffe." 

KIM: Wow. Okay. 

LISA: But we don't know for sure. There's a bit of mystery. There's like three women we think might be writing behind that, but...

KIM: She sounds like a whole episode.

LISA: Yeah. She's fascinating. 

AMY: Also I want to point out, I loved at the beginning of your chapter on the Gothic novels that you have a little "Spotting the Gothic" checklist in your book. So the monk occurs a lot in Gothic novels. Then you have "a virtuous young woman who's prone to quoting poetry and, or singing music while deep in the woods." If you see that, you're likely in a Gothic novel. "A handsome man with a mysterious background who shares the heroine's love of poetry and/or music and/or the forest." "A sinister-looking villain, usually foreign and gasp Catholic." "Some sort of crumbling castle or abbey or convent." And "a supernatural being," of course. I love that little "helpful tools for spotting a Gothic novel."

KIM: That's very cute. 

AMY: So what else do you got for us?

MELANIE: All right. I'll jump in here. My contribution is Pauline E. Hopkins who lived from the 1800s up to, I think it was around 1930. One critic has said she was probably the single most productive black woman writer at the turn of the century. And she's probably best known for her book Contending Forces, which I think is usually taught in graduate classes. But she also had a book... well, she had a few different books. But the book that we talk about in Monster, She Wrote the most is her book Of One Blood. I think the subtitle was Or the Hidden Self. And this book, which is actually recently back in print, it's got all sorts of stuff in it. So she uses kind of sentimental romance of the time. I believe there's Spiritualism in it. Uh, there's like a haunted house investigation at one point, and there's mesmerism. There are people getting hypnotized. And then the main character, I can't remember why, but he wants to get out of the country. And so he joins this archeological dig, as you do, and they go to Africa and they're trying to find this particular African nation that people claim exists, but isn't on any maps or anything. And he stumbles upon it. And basically there's this nation in Africa that has been completely untouched by colonialism. They're pretty advanced. The implication is that they're also technologically advanced. And so, you know, when I've mentioned this to my students before, they're like, "Wow, that's like Wakanda before Wakanda." It's a really fun book, and the stuff that she was doing was really interesting, so I recommend her stuff. And she also is most likely the first black woman to write a detective story. Um, she had a locked room mystery, Talma Gordon, which is really good. 

AMY: Wow. Okay. So Pauline Hopkins. Yeah. Okay. Good. 

LISA: I'm going to recommend for my next one. And we've mentioned her already, Margaret St. Clair. Because, just kind of like a little personal note. So I have two little boys, and they are both very much into anything with fantasy. If there's a dragon or magic or anything even remotely like that, they just want to consume it. So they're Harry Potter-obsessed. My youngest is really into that movie Labyrinth from the Eighties. Anything, if it has a mention of like goblins or magic, they're into it. So a while back, I was like, "Oh, I need something that I can do with them." So I bought Dungeons and Dragons. We're probably not even playing it right, but we play that game and, you know, we go and fight goblins and do our magic and stuff. I always love it because this is one of the things we discovered in our book when we were doing research was that we knew who Margaret St Clair was but I didn't realize that when the first Dungeon Master's Guide was published in the Seventies, there's actually a mention of Margaret St. Clair, because a lot of the lore came from Margaret St. Clair stories. So she was a science fiction writer who published in a lot of the pulp magazines. She also has some really great stories. One of her books, The Sign of the Labyrinth -- Mel was the one. who told me about it actually. Um, it is a story that deals with, um, actually it deals with a pandemic, now that I think about it. It's a pandemic story where people have had to stay so far apart from each other for so long that society has fundamentally changed in how we can interact with each other. But that all changes through magic and it's based in St. Clair's research. She knew practicing Wiccans, and so she actually went to really research and kind of live that religion. And that was what informed her lore. So I think that's pretty fascinating. She also has another story, Horror House. And then my personal favorite of hers is The Man Who Sold Rope To the Gnoles. That is the one that really stands out to me because it is, it's so fun. It's about this salesman who all he wants to do is make a sale and make his boss proud. And he wants to get an award at a dinner. That's all he wants. And so he's trying to think out of the box, and so he decides to go into the forest to sell to these things, which are kind of like trolls. They're the gnoles. And they're these really disgusting creatures who live in the woods. And it's just such a wonderful story because it's just so bizarre that she would take this mundane world of the traveling salesperson and mix it with this really high fantasy. It's funny and it's dark and gross at times and I love it. So...

KIM: Great! 

AMY: I mean, so many women, their imaginations are just so elevated beyond sort of the other authors typically read. I love it. Okay. Who else do we have? 

MELANIE: I got one. I'm going to talk just a little bit about L.T. Meade. So her full name was Elizabeth Thomasina Mead Smith. I wrote that down, so I wouldn't forget. And she was prolific, and she was very much into writing, like what we call in the book "girls fiction." So this would have been books about, basically girls going to school, dealing with family issues. How do you make friends? And so she was very popular for that, but then she also liked to write mysteries. And I am a big fan of the sub-genre of occult detective fiction and horror, which is basically where you take something supernatural and you mix it with mystery. And so she would write these mysteries and sometimes have kind of weird things mixed into it. When she would write her mysteries, she would work with a doctor. So his pen name was Robert Eustace. He also at one point, I think for one book he wrote with Dorothy Sayers when she required some medical knowledge. And so L.T Meade and this doctor would write these mysteries, one of which was occult detective fiction. And that is A Master of Mysteries. And it was about this guy named John Bell, who is alternately called the Ghost Exposer or the Ghost Breaker. I'm not sure why it's Ghost Breaker, but that was his nickname, I guess. And he's basically this guy with a lot of money and a laboratory and people come to him and say, "This supernatural thing happened. You have to explain it or, you know, tell me how this is going on, or how do we get rid of these ghosts?" and it's very kind of "Scooby-Doo"-lite because every single story he debunks the supernatural thing and tells him how someone was actually taking advantage of them or there's a murderer or something. 

AMY: “You pesky kids,” like ripping the mask off.

MELANIE: Exactly. Yeah. And then she had two collections of stories, one of which was a series in The Strand that had female villains, these women who were basically Moriarities in her stories. And so you have Madame Sara (and she has a series of stories) and Madame Koluchy, which has a series of stories. I believe that Madame Koluchy's is The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings. So basically, she runs this Italian cult and when things get hot, she goes to England and starts, you know, committing crimes and ripping off people there. And so it's really interesting because, I mean, her first women villain would have appeared just a few years after Moriarity, but quite close to him. So it was kind of interesting to think about how you know, we really remember Sherlock Holmes, but we don't necessarily remember her stories, which were also being published in the Strand. And she also had a woman detective in one series of her stories, which is really cool. 

AMY: I hope some Netflix development people are paying attention to all this because this all sounds like great TV, right? 

MELANIE: I would tune in to something like that, yeah.

LISA: I'm waiting for "Ghost Breakers" personally. I mean, that sounds like a ready-made show.

KIM: Absolutely. 

AMY: So this is amazing. I definitely can't wait to check out some of these that you mentioned. Definitely the Edith Wharton ghost stories. And needless to say, what we heard here today is really only a drop in the bucket. And I'm kind of guessing even the ladies that you've listed in the book, even though you've got over a hundred, I think that's probably only a drop in the bucket in terms of what's out there, would you say?

MELANIE: Oh, yeah. Lisa and I say this a lot, that this is a collection of women to get people started. We have people tell us all the time “you missed so and so,” or “you need to add so and so to your list” or I find more stuff as I’m reading. Or, we even had a longer list at one point that we cut back just a little bit. So it’s definitely a starting point.

AMY: So everybody, I would encourage you: A, go get a copy of Monster, She Wrote. it's one of those things that you will be referencing back to all the time. Just keep it on your bookshelf, you will get a lot of great recommendations. And it's also just a lot of fun to read. You guys have a great sense of humor. Also, B: go check out their podcast. They're talking about a lot of these authors, but also a lot of other stuff like horror flicks, and even just stuff that's in culture today, like, you know, current events kind of stuff. 

KIM: So circling back to the Bram Stoker award. Tell us all about it. And what does it look like? 

LISA: So the actual award itself is shaped like a haunted house and it has a little door in the front. And when you open the door, it has your book and the name. I actually have mine on a bookshelf next to my St. Shirley Jackson candle.

AMY: Oh, 

KIM: I love it! 

AMY: Do you guys both have very high thresholds for being scared? I mean, you're reading all these books and watching all these horror movies. 

MELANIE: Yeah, I’m a complete scaredy cat. I’m very easily scared. I’m very easily jumpy. I think even when we did T. Kingfisher’s book, The Twisted Ones on the Monster, She Wrote Podcast, I think I talked pretty openly in the podcast about where it scared me and I couldn’t sleep anymore. My threshold is not as high as Lisa’s, I’m sure.

LISA: Okay, it’s funny. When you talk about the threshold of what we will watch or read, I will probably expose myself to a lot more. Like I like almost every subgenre of horror. I like everything from like the quiet, creepy kind of supernatural mystery, all the way up to , you know, really bloody, gory extreme… I really do like a lot of it. There are very few things I will not watch. But I am a scaredy cat. Totally. I am the type of person that, growing up, for as much as I like spooky things, I could not walk through Blockbuster video without shielding my eyes going past the VHS tapes of all the Eighties horror movies.

KIM: Those were the scariest, right?

LISA: It took me forever to actually watch Hellraiser because just the art on the cover of it terrified me as a child. So, yeah, I'm a big scaredy cat and I'm still the type of person that if I read a spooky story, like at night, I'm sitting in bed, I'm reading a scary story and then I have to get up for whatever reason, I have to do that thing where you jump off your bed and run, just in case there’s something underneath.So it's probably not very good for my mental health, but… 

AMY: I thought you guys were going to answer that nothing fazed you at this point, but I think that connection is why you like the genre, because I think if you read things without that emotion, you wouldn’t … you have to have that for the enjoyment factor. People like being scared. 

LISA: I mean, the day it stops being scary is the day I move onto something else. Because it’s kind of like, why would you watch a comedy if you didn’t want to laugh?

KIM: Oh, that's a great point. Yep. 

KIM: Do you, uh, do you have any other projects in the works either together or separately that you want to talk about? 

LISA: Mel and I decided to pitch another book just right smack in the middle of the pandemic. So we’ve been working on our second non-academic book together. We’re still kind of in the midst of writing and revising that right now, so hopefully it will be out by the fall of 2022. I don’t have the exact date on it right now. But it’s called Toil and Trouble and it’s about a women’s history of the occult in America. So we’re kind of looking at how women have engaged in occult activities as a form of rebellion. So there's a little bit of witchcraft and, um, astrology and Satanism and feminism. It’s just, it's just kind of a look at how women's relationship to the occult has changed over time. So that's what we're in the middle of working on right now. And then I'm still working on my Nix Horror Collective. We had our first film festival and the 13 films, we put them together called “13 Minutes of Horror Folklore” which is running on Shudder right now. And then we’re gearing up … we’re going to do the same thing in August of next year where women can submit one-minute horror films. This year’s theme is “Sci-Fi Horror.” I’m really excited about that.

KIM: That sounds great. 

AMY: Good luck with everything. Let us know when the next book comes out, we can't wait. 

KIM: It was so fun getting to talk to you, Melanie and Lisa. Thank you so much for dropping by and having this conversation. What a blast.

MELANIE: Well, thanks for having us!

LISA: Yeah, thanks so much. This was fun!

KIM: Bye.

AMY: So that's all for today's podcast. Hope we didn't scare you too much. And I hope you check out some of these books and authors we've talked about. If you are loving the podcast, please don't forget to give us a rating and review wherever you listen to it. And thanks for listening. 

KIM: Happy Halloween, everybody!

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

57. Ida Craddock with Amy Sohn

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers... 

AMY HELMES: ...including forgotten women writers of sex literature. I'm Amy Helmes, and, oh gosh, Kim you're blushing, aren't you? 

KIM: Yes, I am already. It's those puritanical ancestors! 

AMY: Okay, well, I know how you feel, but our "lost lady" for this week, Ida Craddock, would surely tell us both to just get over it. She was a self-taught Victorian sex expert, known for her complete candor when it came to discussing what happens between the sheets. 

KIM: That's right. And she believed so fervently in her message of healthy and happy sex lives for women that she made her erotic instruction public, even though it was downright dangerous to do so in the era, in which she lived. 

AMY: For those listeners among us who maybe consider themselves to be more demure, as it were, on topics such as this, I want you to just consider that Craddock was, from everything we can tell, a virgin — a lifelong virgin. 

KIM: Just don't tell her that. 

AMY: Right. We will clarify that in a bit. It's a crazy story. Needless to say, I found myself just saying, "Holy bananas!" when I was reading about Ida Craddock's personal life. 

KIM: Yeah, she was fascinating, and she's just one of the remarkable women highlighted in a wonderful new non-fiction title by author Amy Sohn. The book is called The Man Who Hated Women, and we've got Amy with us on the podcast today to talk about it and Ida Craddock, in particular. 

AMY: And we're going to try to keep it PG-rated, but no promises, people. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

KIM: So we're so thrilled to welcome author Amy Sohn to the show today. She is a New York Times' bestselling author of 12 books, including the novels Prospect Park West, Motherland, and The Actress. She's a former columnist about sex and relationships for The New York Press and New York Magazine. She's a real-life Carrie Bradshaw, you might even say. I'm sure you've heard that before.) Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Men's Journal, Playboy and other publications. And in July, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published her first nonfiction book, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age. Oh, that sounds great. Kirkus Reviews calls it an "important work of biographical history" and The Wall Street Journal described it as "compelling, well-researched exploration of these pioneers who faced jail time because they promoted contraception, gender equality, sexual education, and a woman's right to sexual pleasure."

AMY: And we are going to be getting into all of that in today's episode. Amy Sohn, welcome to the show! 

AMY SOHN: Thank you so much. I am so delighted to be contributing a "lost lady" to you!

AMY: This is a spicy one!

KIM: Yes. And let's get started with the title, The Man Who Hated Women. Your book highlights some of the most radical and important women of the late 19th century when it comes to female reproductive and sexual rights, but you frame their stories through the lens or the crosshairs, I guess you could call it, of one particular man who was determined to stop them all. Tell us about it.

AMY SOHN: So you want to learn about Anthony Comstock? 

KIM: Mmm-hmm.

AMY SOHN: All right. Anthony Comstock was born in 1844 in New Canaan, Connecticut. His mother was a direct descendant of the first Puritans in New England, and he was raised Congregationalist, but he was very much a product of his time. He served in the Civil War in the Union Army after his brother died at Gettysburg. And he didn't see much action, I've got to say. He was kind of disappointed. But he moved to New York in the late 1860s to try to make a living in dry goods. And when he moved to New York, New York was smutty, dangerous, bawdy, and there was sex everywhere in the form of literal streetwalkers -- "pretty waiter girls" they were called, which were waitresses who were really trying to sell you sex. And then also an incredible amount of obscene materials, both pictorial and, I guess you could say, literary. And the reason it was all exploding was well, there were a few reasons that kind of stuff was exploding in New York at that time: One, there were a ton of young men like Anthony Comstock moving to New York after the Civil War, and so this material catered to them. Two, printing changed, and you, for the first time, could have things that were small enough to be able to hide. That's very important when it comes to dirty, I call it smut, because there's just not, there's not one word for what this was. You needed to be able to hide things, because if you were a young guy like Anthony Comstock living in a boarding house on Pearl Street, which is modern-day Financial District in New York, you needed to be able to slip something into your pocket. And so he was just so basically assaulted by all of the sex out there that he became a part-time unpaid vice hunter, which meant that he went around to the smutty booksellers in lower Manhattan and ratted people out to the cops.

AMY: Which, speaking of, I hear sirens in the background right now. It's perfect, it's like we have a soundtrack.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY SOHN: You know what's crazy? I'm actually in lower Manhattan right now. And when I walk around here on these narrow streets, I imagine him all the time. So yeah, he basically realized that he was better at ratting out dirty booksellers to the cops than selling dry goods, and so he wound up getting the YMCA to pay him for these activities. And then in 1873, with the support, I should say, of extremely well-connected blue blood men, was able to go to Washington DC and pass what became known as the Comstock Law, which, in a sentence, is a law that criminalized the mailing of obscenity and this is very important and contraception, with very steep penalties and fines. We had had federal obscenity law before, but we had never had contraception linked to it. And so he was really the first one to create in the American mind this idea of birth control as dirty. 

AMY: So I'm curious about the genesis of your book then. So did you know that you wanted to tell the stories of these women in relation to him? Did you know that's the framework you wanted to use the whole time, or did you start off wanting to write something about Comstock first? 

AMY SOHN: I first learned about the woman who we're going to talk about today, Ida Craddock. I discovered her story while book hunting, looking for my next book project, wanting to do nonfiction after 20 some odd years of fiction, and became totally intoxicated by her and specifically intoxicated by this very ... what are the two characters in Les Mis? Javert and...? 

AMY: Valjean. Do you ...want me to sing? I can start singing.

AMY SOHN: This Javert and Valjean cat-and-mouse that spanned more than four states over nine years between her and Comstock. And then I decided that I really wanted my book to be more broad than that. I love Ida Craddock. Ida Craddock has had her own biography, which is quite good, by a guy named Leigh Eric Schmidt. I could write volumes about her. I could write novels about her, you know. In transitioning to the world of non-fiction you need kind of like a big idea. And I felt like Comstock was less interesting than the women, because the women that he pursued, although they made up ultimately a very small percentage of all the people he pursued because he went after so many dirty booksellers and most of those were men... The women just completely inspired me, because so many of them were writing about sex and contraception from a feminist perspective. And a lot of these women were denigrated for their sex writing when really what they were doing was using sex as a way of talking about other things, because sex is at the root of everything whether you have a lot of it, none of it, you know, like it, or don't like it, it's about power. It's about equality. It's about coercion. It's about pleasure. It's about social issues. And anyway, I just, I love these women so much. So my book is about eight women who went up against the Comstock Law. You would expect that just for pure public relations reasons, he would leave women alone and bother the men. When in fact, he had this very, very personal animosity to a specific type of woman, which was a smart, liberated, usually unmarried, complicated woman who was challenging perceived truths about religion and family and marriage. And this was at a time when, if you were a young married woman, you had very little information, depending on how you know, how good your doctor was. You might've had no idea what was about to happen when you went home after your wedding. And so, you know, Ida Craddock, who we're going to talk about, she was providing really, really valuable information. 

AMY: And I realized as soon as I started reading your book, that there is so much about this topic that I was woefully unfamiliar with. So, I basically only knew like the quick hits I knew Victoria Woodhall, who's one of the ladies in the book. I knew she was the first American presidential candidate who was a woman, right? I knew Margaret Sanger gave us birth control. I knew Emma Goldman was an anarchist. Those were like my, you know, "Jeopardy" facts, basically. I didn't know their full stories or the full historical context of what women of this era suffered at the hands of society's squeamishness about sex. Also, as you said, almost all of the women that you feature in the book were writers and they were getting published or they were self-publishing to get their points across. And it would be really fun to talk about them all, and that's why everybody should go read this book, but we're just going to focus on Ida Craddock. She is the woman that you start the book with, and she kicks the book off with a bang. I've got to get that pun in there.

AMY SOHN: Excellent.

AMY: I'm willing to guess not many of our listeners have heard of her.

AMY SOHN: Absolutely not. It's not a stretch to say nobody's heard of her. 

KIM: You begin your book with an anecdote about the Chicago World's Fair and why that was a pivotal moment in the turn Ida's professional career would take. Can you fill our listeners in on that? 

AMY SOHN: Yes. So Ida Craddock, in 1893, when she went to the Chicago World's Fair was a 36-year-old unmarried woman who lived in her mother's house. And she had tried unsuccessfully to become the first woman to receive an undergraduate liberal arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She had not been able to get in because she was a woman. She tried like four times. I always say she reminds me a little bit of myself. I was fortunate enough to get into an Ivy League institution by virtue of the year of my birth, but she was kind of bouncing around after she couldn't get into Penn living in her mother's house. Her mother was a widow. And she literally slept behind a partition in the living room and she called it "the cubicle." There's so many modern things about her story. So she basically, because of entrenched sexism preventing her from getting the education that she wanted, she was absolutely brilliant, she started reading about sex at the library, and she was able to find some pretty good, dirty stuff! And at the time she was in her twenties and thirties, there were also a lot of radical publications publishing stuff about sex -- safe or safer childbirth. Krafft-Ebing, his work was being translated into English. Even some of Freud was beginning to cross its way over. And so Ida became very interested in two thing:, sex and the devil. She became interested in the occult. And I've often wondered why she was so curious about different religions given that she went to a Quaker school in Philadelphia and her mother was a Unitarian, but she was living in these kinds of liberal free-thinker type worlds, and within those worlds was kind of a healthy skepticism about Christianity. Christianity was understood by radical thinkers to be connected to damaging systems of power, and she totally got that. So as she started exploring the occult, she went out and bought a Ouija board. The first Ouija board came out in the early 1890s, just a couple of years before the World's Fair in Chicago. And through this Ouija board, she encountered these spirits. One of them was an infant who had died before Ida was born, also named Ida. This was a very common thing, because people lost babies so early. Her father, she was very upset about her father's death. He had died when she was very young. This was one of the other spirits. And the most interesting one of all was called Soph. And Soph was the ghost of a handsome friend of her mother's who she had gotten to know when she was a teenager. He would come over to her mother's house and hang out with Ida and talk to Ida when Ida was a teen, and he had died very young of tuberculosis. She never revealed the man's true name. He was only Soph, which is Greek for "wise or shrewd." And first, they were just friends, but low and behold, in October 1892, maybe it was November, 1892,they were wed in the Borderlands, which was the space between the living and the dead. And he became her ghost husband. So when she went to the World's Fair... 

AMY: Okay, let's just hold on. You can't just casually throw that into the conversation. So listeners, Ida Craddock had a ghost husband.

KIM: A ghost lover.

AMY: A ghost lover. Soph! She was married to him. Okay.

AMY SOHN: What I'm trying to tee up is at the Chicago World's Fair the biggest attraction was the belly dances. And these actually happened at three or four theaters that were then called the Oriental Theaters. And these were 18 and 19 year old girls -- Egyptian, Tunisian, and they were bringing belly dancing to the United States. Which, you have to imagine how shocking this was. And so all of these Americans were going to the World's Fair and watching these belly dancers and completely losing their minds. One of these people was Anthony Comstock, because he was preaching at a religious revival near Madison and some guy came up to him and he's like, "I've been to the belly dances. It's horrifying. You have to do something about this." And so when Anthony Comstock went to see the belly dance, he became absolutely appalled, and he tried to get rid of them, but it didn't really work because the promoters were stronger than he was and in the end, the only modification he was able to get was a slight change in clothing. So there was like a thin, more gauzy material covering the navel, but basically he completely made a fool of himself and lost. But he got all this attention for saying that the belly dances were bad and immoral. And so Ida Craddock, at some point, I like to believe they were there at the same show, but, within weeks of Anthony's visiting the belly dances, Ida made the journey herself from Philadelphia. And when she saw these belly dancers, she was like, "This is everything I care about in one form." Sex. Symbolism. Phallic symbols. World religions. It was everything. And she realized that she was like an expert on belly dancing, because she had done some research into different religions. There was actually an area of scholarship called phallic worship. So she saw the belly dance and decided, number one, I want to write something about what I think about them. And number two, I want to shame Anthony Comstock. So she got a little essay published in Joseph Pulitzer's, New York World basically saying that belly dances should be used as a premarital educational tool, and that all women should learn to move their hips like the belly dancers. Which I think was an absolute stroke of genius, because under the guise of sort of positioning it within its symbolic and historic and cultural context, she was essentially telling women, "if you move your hips during sex, you might have an orgasm." And this was really, really important information. 

AMY: She's onto something, ladies. 

AMY SOHN: Okay. 

AMY: So let's go back to her childhood a little bit more. Did she have ambitions as a girl to be a writer? 

AMY SOHN: It's very interesting. You know, she learned to read at two or three, supposedly. She was a star student at Friends Central, which is still a highly regarded Quaker school in Philadelphia. And she was just very, very bright and an avid reader. She wrote a couple of short stories and was able to get some of them published. And one of them was about this old maid who had kind of a boring life, but was trying to find her independence. And, um, she wrote these stories under the pseudonym Celanire, her middle name: C-E-L-A-N-I-R-E. I think she was literary. I think Ida was literary, and she had a little bit of a fantasy of herself as a fiction writer. And her writing was a very, very powerful force in her life. In yet another way in which she inspires me, she moved from fiction into non-fiction. Her marriage guides, which, I'm sure you have questions, and we can get into that in a little bit, are just incredibly well-written and funny. At one point she said that, um, if a man's penis was too big for his young bride's vagina, he should "make like you do with a glove that is a trifle too small," and she suggested various lubricants., which, you know, for it's time, she's telling these guys that there's ways to make things easier, but also what she's doing at the same time is making the sex better for the woman. Is this the dirtiest one you've ever had? 

AMY: Oh, yeah! 

KIM: I think I might have to put "explicit" when I upload it. No, this is great.

AMY: So after she published her article about the belly dancing at the World's Fair, she realized that there was this huge audience for Frank writing about human sexuality. And that's when she started pitching herself as an expert on phallic worship from a sort of anthropological standpoint. And that's when these sort of sex manuals started coming together, I guess you could call them sex manuals. They were kind of tracks that were advancing new ideas about a woman's rights within a marriage and including the right to say no to sex when you were married, which was a new idea.

AMY SOHN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Ida Craddock would have called them marriage manuals or marriage guides. She was not the only person who wrote them. There were a lot of them in the 1830s and 1840s, which was 30 years before the Comstock law was passed. And then once it was passed, it got harder to circulate them. It got harder to get this information. She wrote a book called The Wedding Night, but there were other books also called by other people. So a lot of it was "What do you do when you come home?" Another radical thing she said was that she was very concerned about the hymen on the wedding night and that sex could be painful to the woman. And this could also be very upsetting to the man. And so she advocated that you get your hymen snipped before your wedding, and then she said, "And if your husband believes that entrance is easier because you've been with another man, then you may as well find another husband." 

KIM: I love it. Radical. Radical thinking there. And the interesting thing is she was also writing for men and women. A few of her titles included Helps to Happy Wedlock, No. 1 For Husbands, Advice to a Bridegroom and Letters to a Prospective Bride. Can you talk about how her books were received and the backlash, particularly Anthony Comstock's response?

AMY SOHN: One problem she had was she had men coming to her office and asking for sex lessons who would then flirt with her, you know, the least harmful of which was asking her out to dinner. The most harmful of which was attempting to assault her. And that just goes to show you, to call yourself a lecturer in phallic worship or a marriage instructor an this kind of thing when you're an attractive woman, alone, you are very vulnerable to men misinterpreting what your intent is. She has these amazing case files where she talks about just constantly being hit on by men. In terms of Anthony Comstock, he caught wind of her fairly early on. She received a warning to stop selling one of her books in Philadelphia in 1898. And it appears that the postal inspector in Philadelphia had some kind of communication with Anthony Comstock even though at that point, Ida only received a warning. But he had her on his radar and he called her "lecturer of filth" in his arrest log book. And Ida wound up moving around a lot. I mean, Ida Craddock was one of many women who was trying to help other women, but also directly writing about Comstock in some of her marriage guides and calling him unctuous and, in one piece of writing, she said that the urge to describe what she viewed as clean writing, because this was all about purity and truth in positive relations between the sexes, to describe those things as unclean, that kind of Comstockism, she likened it to masturbation. I mean, that is an incredibly bold thing to do, to basically say he's the pervert. She was always turning it on him.

AMY: So we've got to get back to the ghost. 

AMY SOHN: Let's do it. 

AMY: Okay. So Soph is what she called him. Now she's not the only person who was communing with ghosts in your book. It's kind of a thing at this time, period. Correct? 

AMY SOHN: Spiritualism was a very popular movement both before and after the Civil War. Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, communed with the dead. Spiritualism is very confusing, because some people feel that it's aligned with hucksterism. But what I know from my reading is that people at that time in the 19th century had a very different relationship to the dead than we do today. It was common to have ongoing relationships with dead relatives. Some historians Civil War, you wanted to continue to have a relationship with your dead husband or your dead son or your dead nephew. So, yes, I think what you're getting at that's very important is that she wasn't that unusual in having a relationship with a dead person, but perhaps a little bit unusual in having a nine-year orgasmic, sexual relationship with a man who she married in the Borderlands. 

KIM: That was a perfect explanation. I love that. And I'm so glad that we're getting to the heart of the matter here. I mean, whoa, literally, she is writing this incredible advice for people and allegedly it's coming from a fantasy relationship with a ghost lover.

AMY: And it was hot. 

KIM: It was hot, yeah.

AMY: She describes some of it, and it's like, she got into details. 

KIM: She learned a lot!

AMY SOHN: It's it's but it's interesting that you say fantasy relationship because one of the things I'm careful to do in my book is, I don't guess for the reader what I think her mental state was. I really believe in taking Ida at her word, and what I know from what I read is that she had a total ability to distinguish reality from not reality. So for example, she didn't talk to herself while she was walking down the street. He only visited her at night and in private, which is also significant, because it means that maybe these interactions were like you say, in some gray area between sleep and wakefulness. We just don't know. We don't know if she was masturbating during these sessions. We don't know what she was hearing and seeing, but I'm telling you, she wrote about this guy for seven and a half years, and it feels very real. They argued. She didn't always have an orgasm, which as I write in my book, you would think that ghostly sex would be by its naturen perfect, but it wasn't. It makes you wonder what was going on. She was concerned when she did have orgasms about whether they were what she called astral or physical, which today we might call G-spot or clitoral. This is mind blowing stuff. 

KIM: It is, on the other hand, I think in some ways, you know, when you're hitting puberty and like, I mean, I guess I'm speaking for myself here, but your brain kind of works like that. It's just, she's, you know, an adult woman having these, but she's not having these other experiences because you know, she doesn't have another relationship nor is she may, well, I guess she could, in her...

AMY SOHN: She swore that all of her knowledge came from Soph, and there was no other man 

KIM: On some level, given her circumstances, it does seem believable. It just goes on for a really long time. And there are a lot of details. 

AMY SOHN: Someone that interviewed me said she was living in such a repressive time that she basically had to conjure an egalitarian boyfriend. 

KIM: Yeah. And that makes sense. 

AMY: I mean, sometimes your fantasy lover can maybe be better than the real thing. 

Yeah. And to your 

KIM: point about earlier about the religious idea, you know, you think of the famous saints or women authors from historical, um, that were having ecstatic relationships and those were, you know, celebrated. 

AMY: Yeah. She already had sort of a complicated relationship with her own mother. 

AMY SOHN: Mommy dearest is how I describe it.

AMY: Yeah. So her mother and other people were already thinking that Ida was not all together there. And then, so a ghost lover was not necessarily helping her cause you know, with those, with those sorts of people.

KIM: Well, yeah. I mean, we didn't really talk about her mom trying to have her institutionalized. 

AMY SOHN: Her mother was not supportive of Ida wanting to have a literary salon, an intellectual salon in the home. So that was an initial point of tension, is that Ida, and she said, basically, if I'm going to be living in my mom's place, I want to be able to have radical, cool people over so we can talk about stuff. But at one point, um, in Philadelphia, her mother succeeded in having Ida institutionalized, sent to an asylum because she believed that otherwise Ida was going to be imprisoned for her writings. Um, I can't imagine anything more horrifying, first of all, than being institutionalized against my will. And then by probably the person closest to her, aside from Soph. And when she went to the asylum, she was asked whether she had sex with a dead man, and she was kind of cagey about it. She knew that they were trying to set her up. And she did eventually get out with the help of a woman lawyer, um, a woman named Carrie Burnham Kilgore, who basically said to Ida, "Get away from your mother as fast as possible." But yeah., talk about Mommy, Dearest. And then while Ida was in the asylum, she went with an assistant district attorney and took all of Ida's books and pamphlets from her office and handed them over to the assistant district attorney. So she was in constant conflict with her mother about this. And, you know, the most generous interpretation is that she believed because of Soph, that Ida wasn't well, and that an institution was a better place for her to be than prison. But I think her mother was also very troubled. Her mother was in the women's Christian Temperance Union and she was just way more conservative than Ida. She wanted Ida to have a very traditional life, get married to a proper gentleman. 

KIM: And you also explain in your book that she did try a work around, initially to legitimize her sex teachings, that she founded a church. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? 

AMY SOHN: After she had run into trouble with the postal authorities in Chicago and received what was called a suspended sentence she reinvented herself as pastor of the Church of Yoga. And she, in the same office where she'd been doing her sex teaching, she began giving lectures on yoga. And Ida Craddock's actually been written about in a couple of books that deal with the history of yoga, which is really fascinating. She's one of the first kind of high-profile examples we have of an American really wanting to bring the teachings of yoga. to The United States, more incredible still that she was a woman, um, and, and a single woman doing this. So, yeah, she was, in her mind, I guess I should make this clear. She felt that religious speech was constitutionally protected, as anyone who reads the Constitution would be right to assume. And yet it didn't really serve her when she was tried at various times for violating the Comstock laws. When she expressed her writings as part of religious belief, the prosecutions were just not fair and they weren't interested in the overall context of the teachings. They were only interested in the obscene passages. 

AMY: And so speaking of those obscene passages, let's get to this book she wrote called The Wedding Night, which is basically the one that, just bold-faced bright red flashing lights said to Comstock, "Come get me, come get me." Would you say that is the most explicit of her books? 

AMY SOHN: Yes, but also the most likely to offend him because it named him. I want to see if I could read some of these portions. 

AMY: Oh, yeah. I think this is the moment our listeners have been waiting for. 

AMY SOHN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. These explosive passages. Okay. So let's see if we can do this. Um, okay. One section of the wedding night was on how a groom should enter a virgin bride without causing pain. In case you're wondering, "kiss and caress at the throat and bosom." Um, another section suggested that when the woman got excited enough, "her genitals would become well lubricated with an emission from her glands of Bartholin." I mean, this is the 19th century! Then she had a passage in here where she said that the habit of using a wife as a convenience, when men used their wives as conveniences was "responsible for the widespread idea that the sex relation is unclean and for the growth of Comstockism with its baneful efforts at suppression of all enlightening literature upon the details of coition as being obscene, lewd, lascivious." So she was taking his attitudes about sex and linking that to men who use their wives as sexual conveniences. And then the third really insane passage was that women should perform pelvic movements during sex. So it was all going back to the belly dance and she said, this is so radical to me: "these movements will add very great to her own passion and her own pleasure." So in other instances she had written about pelvic movements as an aid to kind of like marital harmony or making it better for the man, but here she's saying women should do it for themselves. The first edition of the wedding night was printed in August 1900. So just put all that in the context of its time.

KIM: Wow. Yeah. And you mentioned Craddock turning the tables on Comstock and saying he was basically the one with the filthy mind, but a lot of Americans also didn't like this guy, right?

AMY SOHN: Oh yeah. I mean, even though he was living in a different time, there were people who basically felt like, you know, live and let live. Like, why is he so concerned about other people's stuff and other people's problems? He was inserting himself into other people's privacy. He was both a man of his time and he was just born a zealot.

KIM: Zealot's the perfect word. 

AMY: I don't want to give away the ending of this "Javert, Jean Valjean" competition here, because I think it's too good. I think people need to read about it in your book. It definitely surprised me. I did not see it coming. Um, but at the end of the day, we need to just remember Ida as somebody who was really a pioneer. Yeah, she was a maverick, but she was doing something that even today... I guess I'm thinking about what's going on right now in our country and just realizing how far we've come, but how far we still have to go.

AMY SOHN: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's most upsetting about the Comstock law, it wasn't just that it was cutting off the flow of physical contraception, which was bad enough because contraceptives were frequently ordered through the mail, but he was cutting off the flow of information. And you really have to look at these things as pieces of the same thing. In other words, when you prevent young people from knowing what it means that their bodies are changing, you know, teaching them what sex might feel like the very first time you have it, you are cutting off knowledge that ordinary, and when I say ordinary, I mean, Christian married people among them, you know, needed. And it was particularly dangerous for young women, because so often, they didn't have other sources of information. And also, remember, there was a ton of misinformation out there. So, in terms of what's going on today, that's so scary is that, you know, I call my book, the man who hated women. And it's a little bit of a trick title because ultimately it's about these eight women far more so than it is about Comstock. And also because I don't really believe that he thought that he hated women. He believed that women needed to conform to a certain mold, which was putting husband and family first. And that mold, which has been called the Victorian ideal, was the dominant American model for women for his time for many, many years. But when you read about what's going on in Texas right now, it just feels like we're going so far back. And one of the things that was enlightening to me in researching this book is that we actually had pretty good abortion rights in the United States until. Around the time of the Comstock law. In fact, some of the first state laws that placed restrictions on abortion did it to protect women from bad practitioners. They were aimed at protecting the woman's life, the woman's body. They were not around conceptions of when life began, no pun intended. And so when you look back at history, you realize that Greg Abbott in Texas is taking us back to a time before the 1840s. I mean, in other words, you're thinking to yourself, "I'd rather live in the 1840s right now. My rights would be more protected." Um, and some of the language, you know, around women's bodies and women's autonomy is very, very frightening because we're just going backwards. And I should also add that the Comstock law was passed in 1873. And the two cases that really overturned the birth control provisions of the Comstock Act, which were Griswold versus Connecticut and Eisenstadt versus Baird ... EIsenstadt Baird was passed in 1972, 99 years after the Comstock law was passed. Happens to be one year before I was born. And when you think about a 99-year law, that just had the impact that it had on women's access to information and birth control, which then as now, most people believe that families should make these decisions for themselves. And one of the reasons it's so frightening what's going on in Texas right now is that it's so out of step with what most Americans believe about abortion, which is that it should be protected and then it should be a woman's choice. And so, yeah, we're going backwards and there are many Comstocks out there, but that's why we need more. We need more Ida Craddocks! 

AMY: And also, I think it's important that as women, we do know this history. I mean, like I said, at the beginning, I didn't know so much of this and yeah, we can kind of poke fun at the fact that Craddock had this ghost lover and it's all silly sounding, but really she, and all these women in your book, they were the ones that were trying to pull society out of all these sexual hangups and, you know, doing something to help and giving women agency over their bodies and their relationships. 

KIM: Yeah. And sadly, as you pointed out, it's still up for debate somehow.

AMY SOHN: And I think,, also what I try to point out in the book that I think is very important is that, um, you know, what these women were doing, it was not just about women's bodily autonomy. It was about women's pleasure. And one of the things that I think is really a shame today is that we're still afraid to talk about pleasure, and we are very afraid to talk about the women's experience of it and in advocating for women's pleasure as a tool. towards autonomy. I think they were doing something really radical, the women that I write about in my book, which was, they were saying, if we're living in constant fear of pregnancy and childbirth, which has all kinds of health and economic effects that tend to punish women more severely than men, how are we ever going to be able to enjoy sex? So just the simple idea, you know, Ida Craddock said that babies should be spaced three years apart. She was a little cagey about how, but basically through withdrawal. But I'm saying Ida Craddock, you know, just the radical idea that women should have their babies spaced a couple of years apart for the benefit of their own health, that was a radical idea. It was saying that it's not good for a body to get pregnant right away. And we now know this is scientifically born out, that there's all kinds to me. 

AMY: And speaking of pleasure, albeit a different kind of pleasure. It's been a pleasure having you on the show and talking to us about all this. 

KIM: Yes. It's definitely not been anticlimactic. Let's put it that way.

AMY SOHN: You guys are great. Thank you. We loved talking to you

AMY: Thank you so much for joining us and telling us all about your book and congrats on it again. 

AMY SOHN: Thank you!

AMY: So that's it for today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. 

KIM: Thanks for listening, everyone. And until next week, visit us on our podcast, lostladiesoflit.com 

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.

56. Swiping Right (and Left) in the Regency Era

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

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. Kim, you and I discussed our opinions on the Regency-Era TV show “Bridgerton'' earlier this year in the episode about “real-life Lady Whistledowns.”

KIM: Right. We had mixed feelings about it. But it’s no surprise that Hollywood is clamoring to capitalize on the success of “Bridgerton” by churning out other series in that same vein, including, it would seem, a dating reality show.

AMY: Yeah, you knew that was coming, right?

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: So this past summer, NBC’s streaming platform Peacock announced that they had a reality series in the works called “Pride & Prejudice: An Experiment in Romance,” which is basically, I think, kind of “The Bachelorette” meets “Jane Austen.” I think that’s what they’re going for.

KIM: Yeah. Here’s what the press release had to say about the show. So in their own words: “A heroine looking for her duke will sign up for the ultimate social experiment in romance. Transported to a Regency-style England, a group of eligible hopeful suitors will have to win the heart of our heroine, and her court. Housed in a castle in the countryside, set on a beautiful backdrop of rolling hills, the heroine and suitors will experience that with which dreams are made of. From carriage rides and boat rides on the lake to archery and handwritten letters to communicate, they will be immersed in a time-traveling quest for love. In the end, our heroine and her suitors will discover if the ultimate romantic experience will find them true love.”

AMY: Okay, so I mean, we’re obviously going to watch, but I’m also sort of rolling my eyes a little bit. And I also want to point out that the true Jane Austen nerds among us know that this series has already been done — 20 years ago. It was called “Regency House Party” and it aired on BBC and PBS here in the states. Do you remember that, Kim?

KIM: Oh my god, yeah, it was the OG dating show for people who like this sort of thing. Oh my god, we loved it. 

AMY: Yeah, we did. Ergo, we’re going to watch this new one, too.

KIM: Totally. At least the first episode.

AMY: Yes. So in that earlier “Regency House Party” show, there were five women and five men (and a couple of “chaperones” and then, of course, servants) they were all thrown together on a country estate for several weeks to find out who might find love. 

KIM: I remember watching this show with you and writing about it for our blog, Romancing the Tome, way back in the day. It was so much fun! 

AMY: And I liked that it took an educational bent; it sort of explained the protocol and parameters of Regency-Era courtship (which I very much hope this new series on Peacock plans to do). 

KIM: Yeah, I hope so, too! Anyway, the old show also made the contestants adhere strictly to how people of this era would have lived in the year 1811. So not only were they dressing in full Regency get-ups, they were also living without any modern conveniences. They even used chamber pots, which is basically what living with my toddler is like right now and, for the record, I wouldn’t want to do it, you know, regularly or anything. 

AMY: No. It kind of takes the “romance” out of the Regency romance.

KIM: The bloom off the rose.

AMY: Yeah. Getting to walk in Jane Austen’s shoes, I guess, does have its trade-offs. But the reason we bring up this earlier show is because you can actually still watch it. It’s on YouTube; they have it in its entirety. So if you simply can’t wait for this new series to come out, now’s a good time to go back and watch “Regency House Party.” It was fun. (I think we both agreed.)  And I think Richard E. Grant was the narrator of that show. Who doesn’t love him?

KIM: He’s our favorite, right? Withnail and I and The Scarlet Pimpernel. 

AMY: Yeah. I don’t think he appears on the show, but yeah, his voice is the one narrating it. And the contestants do get up to some very mild antics, and there were some juicy elements, for sure, but it’s nothing like what you see these days on “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette.” But something tells me that the Peacock platform show might aim to be a bit more tawdry in that respect. Who knows? 

KIM: Yes, I’m maybe getting that feeling too. I have a confession to make, though: I don’t think I’ve ever watched “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette.”

AMY: That’s not a confession; that’s a point of pride!

KIM: Thank you. Thank you. I remember in watching “Regency House Party,” though, how sobering it was to realize how unfair that world was for women. The men on the show were living it up and having a great time, and the women were basically bored out of their skulls and pretty limited in what they could do. There was a LOT of needlepoint going on. And for someone who gets a headache doing anything remotely like that… I would have spent a lot of time hiding out in my lacy boudoir with a case of “the hysterics,” I know.

AMY: Fetch the smelling salts!

KIM: Exactly.   

AMY: But going back to needlepoint for a minute, I do want to point out that I used to do a lot of needlepoint. Did you know that? 

KIM: No!

AMY: My grandma taught me. Growing up when I was really little, my grandma taught me how to cross stitch and then so I did it a lot when I was a kid and even kind of in my 20s I did a few pieces, but my mom, for Christmas this year, gave me a Jane Austen cross stitch pattern. 

KIM: Love it. Oh, that’s sweet. Well, as long as it’s by choice. I should point out.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. So in addition to being bored out of their skulls, the women also the whole time had to be under the watchful eye of these stick-in-the-mud older chaperones. So that’s one of the first elements of Regency-Era dating that we’re probably going to see in the Peacock series. The dreaded chaperone! Because it would be unthinkable for an unmarried young lady to be alone in the company of any man who’s not immediate family. 

KIM: Exactly, which is why, in “Bridgerton,” it was so scandalous when Daphne is caught out in the garden, at night, with the duke, right? That sort of predicament could basically ruin a young woman — just the perception of something untoward would be catastrophic for her reputation, right?

AMY: Yeah, men could just sow every wild oat they wanted, but a female would be “damaged goods” if her virtue was ever cast into doubt.

KIM: That’s right, yeah, and you say “damaged goods,” as though women were a commodity, but basically, that’s what they were. There’s a reason they called it the “marriage market,” right? They had a “season” each year when the eligible bachelors would be in town (usually spring until late summer), and it could be a desperate gambit to get your daughter married off during that time frame. 

AMY: And getting back to those lurking chaperones, getting to know a potential suitor just must have been so awkward. You know, you’ve got this buzzkill lady hovering over your shoulder, probably eavesdropping, you know? You have to watch everything you say.

KIM: Yeah, which is why the dances back then were so important. As we’ve seen from many a Jane Austen flick, those moments on the dance floor were sometimes the only opportunities for meaningful, semi-private conversation, if you think about it. 

AMY: And even then, you know, they’re having to weave in and out with other dancers the whole time. So it’s like, “Oh, we’re talking… I would love to continue this gripping conversation, as soon as I sashay around this other dude over here, I’ll be right back.” Can you imagine that?!

KIM: I can, but it’s not pretty. I have two left feet (you know this) so trying to imagine concentrating on dance steps while also conversing intelligently…. It would be a huge challenge for me, personally. I don’t think it would work … yeah.

AMY: I really love the image of that. I can picture it so clearly in my head: you attempting little prancy, dainty steps. You’d have on the cute, you know, Empire-waist dress; you’d have that smile plastered on your face. I would pay money to see that.

KIM: And I would be blushing so hard, right?! Somebody please hire us to be extras in the background of a “Sanditon” ball so we can just put this theory to the test!

AMY: Make this happen, somebody!!!! (Okay, so we want to be officially extras now in “The Gilded Age” and also in “Sanditon.” 

KIM: Hopefully someone from Hollywood is listening right now. Or the BBC. 

AMY: Yes. We will travel.

KIM: We’ll travel, yep.

AMY: On our dime!

KIM: Yes.

AMY: I’m going to throw that out.

KIM: I’ll pay them!

AMY: Somebody should offer that, sort of like a Groupon thing, to go be an extra.

KIM: Maybe that should be our side business. Our side hustle.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Okay.

AMY: But anyway, getting back to dancing and courtship, it was actually tricky in more ways than one, because when you were at a ball, you were not supposed to overdo your time on the dance floor with any one particular young man, okay? If you danced more than two “sets” together (and a set was approximately about 15 minutes), you were basically engaged. So basically, ladies, keep an eye on that clock lest your name be suddenly showing up in marriage banns! And also, from what I understand, even writing letters was not sanctioned during the courtship period. Men did not write to women unless they were married or they were relatives. And I don’t think I was aware of that until I was researching for this because… I’m thinking back to Pride & Prejudice when Elizabeth received a letter from Mr. Darcy, right? (But if you remember, he hand-delivered that letter to her. He did not send it via post. So since he was technically flouting the rules of etiquette, he had to deliver it to her in person, because that was how they would avoid a scandal that way.)

KIM: And it was really sexy, too.

AMY: Yes, yes.

KIM: And I remember in Sense & Sensibility, Marianne causes confusion because she does correspond, via letter, with Willoughby. Eleanor, then, thinks, of course, they have an understanding with one another.

AMY: Yeah, and then also unmarried young people -- if they caught each other’s eye across a room, neither could just go up and be like, “Hey, how’s it going? Nice to meet you. Come here often?” (You know, that sort of thing.) It did not work like that. You needed to have a third party who would introduce the man to the woman (And it wouldn’t be the other way around, because a woman would never be introduced to a man, because she would be considered the person of “honor”). Also, unmarried young people could not call each other by their first names. (I think we did know that.) A gentleman caller could visit a young woman’s home for no longer than 30 minutes at a time. (I actually like this one, because if the dude’s a kind of dud, it’s not too prolonged, right?) 

KIM: Yeah, I feel like that about all these things. Like, for the wrong guy, it’s great to have all these things in place. For the right guy, it’s certainly a deterrent.

AMY: Yes, it’s hard. It’s a challenge. And actually, the first time a young couple would ever be allowed to be alone together in a room was for the actual proposal itself. Of course, then everyone makes themselves scarce, you know?

KIM: God, talk about the pressure! This reminds me of that proposal scene between Jane and Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice when the rest of the family is trying to keep it together but they’re basically screaming on the inside.

AMY: So great. And speaking of sisters, also, a suitor had to make sure he was taking interest in the “appropriate” daughter of any given family … so it was bad form to like a younger sister who wasn’t “out” in society yet, especially if the older ones are still on the market. So as a woman, you had to pray your big sister wasn’t homely! And also, once a woman was in her mid-to-late 20s, she was said to be “on the shelf” which is akin to maybe “put out to pasture.” She’s done. She was seen as less marriageable by that age.

KIM: I mean, literally, the only thing you can do is kind of laugh because it's very sad. It also goes without saying that you could not marry outside of your social sphere, in addition to all this. So men can have these lower-class mistresses, but they were shunned if they married a woman from a lower class. 

AMY: Yeah, and getting back to “Bridgerton,” it’s possible we’ll get to see some of that more in the next season, because they’re supposed to be focusing on this character of Anthony, Daphne’s older brother and we know from Season 1 that he is in love with an actress. So we’ll see how that plays out. Anway, obviously, these courtship rules applied to people living in the higher ranks of society. If you were a scullery maid, this sort of protocol didn’t really apply to you, which sounds good -- but if you were a servant, marriage usually wasn’t in the cards for you anyway. So … sorry! If you were a sad singleton in Regency England, though, and you were looking for love in the midst of all these difficult parameters, there were a few superstitions that could help you find love during this time period. So on the eve of the Feast of St. Agnes, for example, young women were advised to take pins, transfer them all from the pin-cushion into their sleeves while reciting “Our Fathers” with each pin. And if you did that, that night, you’d supposedly dream of the man you were going to marry.

KIM: Who came up with that one, I want to know?

AMY: I know… complicated!

KIM: Very. It’s about keeping them busy, or something. Okay, and that lore, though, is what John Keats based his poem, “The Eve of St. Agnes” on. That poem’s set in the Middle Ages, so that’s interesting if people were actually still buying into this in the early 1800s.

AMY: And then in one region of northern England, there was apparently also a ritual that men could do on the eve of St. Agnes: A guy could eat a whole red herring (bones and all) before retiring for the night, and he would then dream of his future wife. (Which, I don’t know; that sounds more like heartburn to me: “I was gassy and dreamed of you.”)

KIM: Yeah. Where’s the Tums? There’s another superstition that if a guy and a girl both threw seeds into a fire (and often this was done on All Hallow’s Eve), it would divine their future together. So if the seeds stayed close together and burned, they’d end up married, but if one seed jumped away from the other in the flame, that did not bode well. Awkward!

AMY: I like the idea of these things just being invented on the spot. Like a girl sitting there by the fire and she’s like, “Oh, see that? See, the seeds jumped apart. Yeah, we’re never going to be. SORRY.” There’s also something called a “dumb cake.” Have you heard of that?

KIM: I knew there was something about eating a piece of cake and dreaming of your future husband? I can’t remember where I know it from now. It’s a scene in a book, I think. But I didn’t know about it being called a dumb cake.

AMY: Yeah, it’s a dumb cake because you weren’t allowed to speak while you were baking this cake. That was part of the rule for making it. But you would prepare the cake silently as a young woman. And then after you ate it, again … dream of your future husband. 

KIM: I think a mom came up with that. She didn’t feel like talking. She wanted her daughter to be quiet and said, “No talking while you make this cake and you can meet your future husband!”

AMY: Yeah, all these silly pre-teen girls. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Actually, it wasn’t even really cake. It was more like bread. We can include a link in our show notes that has more specifics about that.

KIM: That makes me think of the idea that when Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake!” she was really talking about bread. There's an argument to be made. If you wanted to take a less hocus-pocus approach to finding a mate, there were a lot of “conduct guides” for women with practical advice on attracting men. One of the most popular we found was called Sermons to Young Women. It was written by a clergyman named James Fordyce. (It’s actually the book that Mr. Collins, in Pride & Prejudice, attempts to read to the Bennett sisters, who were not having it, by the way.) The book urges women not to be too witty, because husbands don’t want that. Women should be meek and modest, dutiful and submissive. And he says the highest reward for female virtue is male attention. (I believe he wrote a version of this book for young men, too. Would be interesting to just compare those two books — something tells me we would be seeing red, right?)

AMY: Yeah. Another guy,( “Dr. Gregory” was his name) he wrote a book called A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters. (It’s kind of the same idea; same kind of book.)  He writes “be even cautious in displaying your good sense. It will be thought you assume a superiority over the rest of the company. But if you have any learning, keep it a profound secret especially from men who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated understanding.” And he wrote this for his daughters, and I kind of sort of hope that his daughters hated him.

KIM: Can you imagine when he left the room? The scowls. So, Mary Wollstonecraft blasts these guys, specifically, and others of their ilk when she later wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women. We could do a whole episode on her incredible clap-back. In any case, hearing all this, it sounds like it was just exhausting and miserable to try to find true love in Jane Austen’s era… (I mean, no wonder she never married!) But we wish the contestants well, anyway, on the forthcoming Pride &  Prejudice: An Experiment in Romance, and we will thank our lucky stars we were born in the modern era while we’re watching it!

AMY: We keep saying we want to be cast in the balls or whatever... extras in the “Sanditon” ball. But if you were single, would you have wanted to do this show?

KIM: No, I would still want to be an extra. 

AMY: If it wasn't a dating show. I would love to do, you know, do that series that's like “1940 House...”

KIM: “Manor House.” 

AMY: I would love to do something like that, where they just taught you how it was all going to be.

KIM: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

AMY: I would even do the chamber pot!

KIM: Yeah, I would do all of it. I would live in a cold castle, you know, having my asthma attacks and everything, to have that experience. It's just the “Bachelor/Bachelorette” feel of the dating show idea that I don't know that I'm into. But I will reserve my opinion completely though, and watch it. But I agree, the more educational shows where you’re putting it all in practice, that sounds more up my alley, too.

AMY: Right. Like what’s her name, um, who I love… Lucy...um…

KIM: I don’t know…

AMY: Now I have to look it up.

KIM: Okay.

AMY: Oh, yeah. Lucy Worsley! Have you ever watched any of her documentaries?

KIM: No! What is it?

AMY: Oh my gosh, she is the most adorable British woman, and she has these series... (I think she writes books, too.) She does all these different series for the BBC or PBS, where she kind of takes you into like, what it was really like, like: “Sex in the Tudor Era.” Or “The Six Wives of Henry VIII.” I can't believe you don't know her!

KIM: No, I can’t believe I don’t, either!

AMY: It’s all on YouTube; you can find a ton of them. She has so many different episodes. And, oh, she’s just SO CUTE! She's always standing in the middle of a castle or Regency house and…

KIM: Yeah, I’ve got to watch this. It sounds like my perfect “chill and Netflix” show.

AMY: Or like, a sick day, being in bed and just watching it.

KIM: I feel a little cold coming on... Oh, wait; it’s Covid.

AMY: Oh! We have to figure out how to get her for a guest!

KIM: Oh my god, yeah! Let’s get her as a guest! Let’s work on that. Okay.

AMY: Okay, so sorry, we just got off on a tangent there, obsessing over Lucy. But you know, earlier we were talking about “Regency Era” dating guides from these annoying old men, but next week we have something a little bit similar. It’s Victorian SEX MANUALS. 

KIM: Okay, I’m excited about this. Maybe I’m ... [laughing] I’m very excited. I think this is going to be fun. Her name was Ida Craddock — she was fascinating, and we’ve got the author of a new book about her (and other pioneers of sex positivity — as well as the zealous “smut-hunter” who was basically on a mission to to stop them at any cost.)

AMY: Yes, join us for this titillating discussion with Amy Sohn, author of The Man Who Hated Women. Your collective jaws are going to drop when you hear about Ida Craddock. She was basically a Victorian kind of sex columnist, I guess you could say. You do NOT want to miss it. Just trust us.

KIM: Yeah, she was an incredible person. It’s an incredible story. I cannot wait! Until next week, if you could take one minute out of your day to give us one of those five-star reviews where you listen to your podcast, we’d be forever grateful. Let us know you’re out there! 

AMY: Yeah, we love hearing from you. So until next week, bye, everyone! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.

55. Ouida — Moths

AMY: Hi everybody, and welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great works of literature by forgotten women artists. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. In this week’s episode, we’re excited to talk about a little-known Victorian-era novel by yet another once wildly popular writer. The British novelist, under her pen name, Ouida, wrote more than 40 novels as well as essays, short stories, and children’s books, and she hobnobbed with literary notables such as Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, and Wilkie Collins. We’re going to be discussing her novel Moths today.

AMY: Some critics called Ouida’s “high society stories” depraved, and Willa Cather dubbed her work “mawkish” at best, but Oscar Wilde, who as we said, ran in the same circles, wrote that she had successfully captured “the tone and the temper” of the day. Meanwhile, critic and wit Max Beerbohm called her “one of the miracles of modern literature.” That’s pretty high praise.  Ouida, herself, was quite an eccentric…  even by our typical Lost Ladies of Lit standards, right Kim?

KIM: Yes, I would agree. Her story IS pretty fantastic, or fantastical, and so is Moths. Though some call it a Victorian-era Harlequin novel, I feel like Moths is maybe more of a cross between Harlequin and Proust. I’ll try and back up that bold assertion for you later in the episode. But anyway, among other interesting things, Moths tackles the topic of divorce in an unusual way for that time period. There’s obviously a lot to talk about here! I can’t wait, so let’s raid the stacks and get started! 

[intro] 

AMY: Okay, so let’s begin this episode by giving our listeners just some background on our author, whose pen name, as we said, was Ouida. (That’s O-U-I-D-A). She was born Maria Louise Ramé (although she preferred the more fabulous Marie Louise de la Ramée, which is fitting when you learn more about her.) and ‘Ouida’ actually comes from her infant mispronunciation of her name ‘Louisa,’ which is kind of cute, I think.

KIM: I think so, too. It’s adorable when you know what it actually means.

AMY: Yeah. Anyway, she was born in 1839 in Suffolk, England. Her mother, Susan, was a wine merchant’s daughter and her father was from France, but he wasn’t around much. 

KIM: No, he wasn’t. And I think maybe I saw the word “elusive” used to describe him, and that really works, because it’s thought he may have been a secret agent for Louis Napoleon… I’m thinking here about the elusive Pimpernel from The Scarlet Pimpernel, of course. Anyway, Ouida’s father Louis Rame mysteriously disappeared often, for whatever reason, but when he was around he taught her French, literature, history, math, and politics. 

AMY: What a cool dad!

KIM: yeah.

AMY: Cool “spy dad.”

KIM: Cool, mysterious, but also taught her a lot of stuff for that time.That’s pretty awesome.

AMY: Yeah. So around age 11, she created an imaginary fantasy world for herself, as children sometimes do. However, unlike most other people, she pretty much lived in that imaginary fantasy world for the rest of her life. Her father (cool spy dad) eventually disappeared for good (which is not so cool). But when she was 18, Ouida moved with her mother, her maternal grandmother, and her dog Beausire to London. And I guess the neighbors thought it was a bit unusual to live without a man in the house, and she also walked around alone a lot with the dog. (She was kind of a  “crazy dog lady” throughout her whole life. She was always thought to be overly devoted to her pets, always making sure they had the best food, and even the best furniture in the room, apparently.) 

KIM: Yeah, plenty of people do that now, so it doesn’t sound so weird. It’s kind of funny how much they talked about her craziness with the dogs. That really didn’t sound that bad. Anyway, Ouida began publishing her short stories filled with aristocratic characters in glamorous locations and then when she was 22, her first novel was serialized alongside Ellen Wood’s East Lynne. Readers gobbled it up and demanded more, and they also were intrigued by the eccentricity of Ouida. 

AMY: I mean, 22 is really young to have your first hit novel.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Speaking of eccentric, though, here’s another fun fact: she tended to think every man she met was in love with her and she would make up these wild fantasies in her head that never actually happened. (It kind of reminded me a little of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. She has this secret internal world.) She was described in Irish poet William Allingham’s diary as having a “sinister, clever face” and a “voice like a carving knife.” Not exactly flattering… 

KIM: No, you wouldn’t necessarily want to be described as such. 

AMY: No, but I mean, she was clearly confident if she thought every man she met was in love with her.

KIM: It makes me laugh a little bit, because it actually sounds like manifesting, but it didn’t work! So I guess it’s an argument against manifesting. 

AMY: Poor Ouida!

KIM: I know. I know, well, you know what? It seems like she was happy, anyway, and that’s all that matters, right? So in 1867 (I love this) she established residence at The Langham Hotel in London and made such an impression there that the hotel’s VIP reward program today is actually named after her … Because she LIVED IT UP, and she pretty much always spent more than she earned!  She allegedly lowered the curtains during the day and wrote by candlelight, surrounded by purple flowers. Her monthly florist bill was astronomical. (I think there’s a saying, “spend more on flowers than you do on food”... I think she spent a lot of flowers and a lot on food.) But anyway, the Langham’s website says that she received her guests in bed and wrote, also in repose, on violet-coloured notepaper. I think maybe I’m going to try that, Amy, when I’m writing. I don’t know.

AMY: I know what my birthday gift is going to be for you now: Violet notepaper.

KIM: I love that idea. You always give the best gifts. And though she wrote prolifically, she was also throwing these incredibly LAVISH soirees that were attended by the writers we mentioned at the beginning, like Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning, as well as artists, soldiers, and politicians. I can just imagine it, can’t you?

AMY: I can imagine it. She sounds like a complete party animal. I do think it’s a little ironic, though, that she wrote all these novels and no one’s heard of them, but the one thing she’s known for is like, the Langham hotel, being the “crazy party girl.” 

KIM: Yeah, and you can guess that probably the people who are in that VIP rewards program probably really don’t have any idea about her, which is kind of funny, too.

AMY: No clue. But it sounds like that hotel was kind of the literary world’s version of the “Riot Hyatt” in Hollywood that all the hair bands in the 80s used to party at.

KIM: Yeah, it’s like, “Riot Hyatt” mixed with Chateau Marmont, right?

AMY: Yes, totally.

KIM: I forgot to mention, too: I want to add that mostly men were at these parties. She had one female friend, I think that came, but otherwise, it was pretty much all men, which is interesting, too

AMY: Interesting. And it seems like that wouldn't necessarily be sanctioned in society to have a single woman hanging out with all these men, but she broke taboos for sure. Apparently, speaking of these salons, she also drew a lot of her story and character ideas from these gatherings she held. Two of her most successful were Under Two Flags and Idalia, both were penned not too long after she moved into The Langham hotel. Under Two Flags became her greatest success up until that point, and that’s when the first of the three major passions of her life also began. Kim, do you want to tell us what happened with this first passion? 

KIM: Yes, so basically this very handsome 61 year-old tenor (so quite a bit older than her) named Mario came to London to perform, and Ouida fell head over heels in love. At his farewell performance in Covent Gardens, she threw him a bouquet of flowers, an ivory cigar case, and a love note. Shocking, okay, but he never responded. He left London—they never even met—but she concocted this elaborate story in her head for why he had to leave her. He became her fantasy lover and she later wound up using him to inspire the hero of Moths, the book we’re talking about today. He was the singer Correze. 

AMY: Yeah, which actually nicely leads us into our discussion of Moths, which is not actually her most popular book. It was savaged by many critics at the time, but we feel it deserves reconsidering, especially as it deals in a unique way with some topics considered particularly “taboo” in the Victorian era, like divorce, adultery, and domestic violence. And also, it’s just a whole lot of fun to read! We liked this book.

KIM: Yeah, I actually liked it a lot. So, I’ll start, basically, with a broad sketch of the novel’s plot, and I won’t spoil anything for you: The heroine of Moths is Vere Herbert. She’s young, beautiful, very serious, and also very innocent. She goes to live with her widowed mother, Lady Dolly, who basically flits from one continental vacation spot to the next in a decadent society of shallow, rich women and playboys. Her mother is at best, negligent, and at worst -- well, she manipulates Vere into marrying the worst possible guy, Prince Zouroff. He has this well-deserved reputation for being pretty depraved and cruel. 

AMY: Even some of the men in this world are appalled by the thought of him marrying Vere, but the prince is creepily obsessed with her innocence (and he sees her as a conquest). Vere herself would rather die than marry him, but some mitigating circumstances make her feel she has no other choice. So she goes to the altar like a woman going to her grave. And we should point out that Vere is this naturally beautiful young woman (in contrast to all the artificially beautiful women surrounding her), but having to marry a man she despises turns her into this stoic ice queen. Ouida plays up this metaphor too — she always describes Vere in terms of snow and frost and she’s often wearing white. Ouida says she has “grave proud eyes that looked like arctic stars.” And the whole time I was reading this book, I kept picturing physically, Vere looking like Robin Wright from The Princess Bride at her wedding to Prince Humperdink. (I don’t know if you remember that scene?) But I just pictured Robin Wright in the role of Vere because she has this stoicism to her you know? Like, “I do not love this man, but I’m going to do it because I have to.”

KIM: Yes, and I'm just thinking, you know, basically she is this natural English rose type character. And when she marries Prince Zouroff, who's from Russia, she basically becomes this cold ice queen. So it's like the proximity to him and his cool depravity turns her into this stoic ice queen character. 

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Anyway, Prince Zouroff becomes irritated by his young bride’s chilly disdain for him, so he does everything he can to break her will, including flaunting his adultery in her face. He wants to get a rise out of her, but she just has this steely resolve not to crack. She stays with him because she’s too proud to be the subject of a scandal. And she obeys him out of a misplaced sense of wifely duty. They’re equally determined. 

AMY: Meanwhile, Vere’s beginning to develop feelings for the young and handsome opera singer Correze (which, as we said, is based on a man that Ouida was crushing on). And you’ve got to admit… Correze is a pretty dreamy guy, right? I kind of liked him.

KIM: Yeah, he’s super handsome and charming. I actually fell a little bit in love with him while I was reading it. Totally.

AMY: She is tempted to cheat on this horrible husband with this amazing guy she adores -- and you have this kind of “will-she-or-won’t-she?” question throughout the whole book, because it totally makes sense. She’s miserable in her marriage. Why not just give her heart to this kind, handsome opera singer? But Vere knows that to do so would almost be like handing her husband a “win” because it would reduce her to his level.

KIM: And, okay, this is where I have to make my argument for the Proustian qualities of this book. And it’s not just that this is a long book, okay? It’s a long book, right, Amy? But Nabakov said about In Search of Lost Time that “The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb and tide of memory, waves of emotions such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria—this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucent work.” 

AMY: Which, I’ve never read any Proust so I need you to put that more into layman’s terms for me.

KIM: I think just the sentiments that Nabokov is talking about here. The desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria — I think those things are also in Moths. Treated differently, but the ideas are there. So I think that is where the comparisons lie. There are also many differences between Ouidaa and Proust, but the treatment of the subject matter is similar. And okay, the plot of Moths sounds kind of basic and lurid, but you have to hear the prose to get a feel for what makes it so entertaining, decadent, and even, I think, wickedly hilarious! And the characters become more nuanced and complex (like Proust’s do) as the novel progresses. 

AMY: Given that, I think it would be a good spot to read a passage from Moths for our listeners right now. 

KIM: I love that idea.

AMY: Okay, so this is a very early passage from the book featuring the horrible “Mommy Dearest,” Lady Dolly. (She’s one of the villains of the book, but at the same time, she reminds me a lot of Lady Montdore from Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. She’s very funny). 

KIM: She gets the funniest lines and thoughts, I think.

AMY: Yeah, one hundred percent. So she and all her society friends are at a resort town in France enjoying the beach when a new arrival turns up wearing this ugly brown holland dress — the horror! But as the young woman approaches, Lady Dolly’s horror multiplies tenfold when she realizes it’s her daughter, her long-lost daughter, that has been living with another guardian for a while. (As we mentioned, Lady Dolly had basically pawned off her kid on an in-law to raise after Vere’s father died, so she hasn’t seen her in years.) And this is where the story continues:

   Lady Dolly gave a sharp little scream, then stood still. Her pretty face was very blank, her rosy small mouth was parted in amaze and disgust.

   “IN THAT DRESS!” she gasped, when the position became clear to her and her senses returned.

   But the brown holland was clinging in a wild and joyous kind of horrible, barbarous way all about her, as it seemed, and the old Scotch plaid was pressing itself against her baptiste skirts.

   “Oh, mother! How lovely you are! Not changed in the very least! Don’t you know me? Oh dear! Don’t you know me? I am Vere.”

   Lady Dolly was a sweet-tempered woman by nature and only made fretful by maids’ contretemps, debts, husbands, and other disagreeable accompaniments of life. But, at this moment, she had no other sense than that of rage. She could have struck her sunshade furiously at all creation; she could have fainted, only the situation would have been rendered more ridiculous still if she had, and that consciousness sustained her; the sands, and the planks, and the sea, and the sun, all went round her in a whirl of wrath. She could hear all her lovers, and friends, and rivals, and enemies tittering; and Princess Helene Olgarouski, who was at her shoulder, said in the pleasantist way —

   “Is that your little daughter, dear? Why she is quite a woman! A new beauty for Monseigneur.”

   Lady Dolly could have slain her hundreds in that moment, had her sunshade but been of steel. To be made ridiculous! There is no more disastrous destiny under the sun.

I mean, that’s our introduction to Lady Dolly, and what a FANTASTIC set-up! You just instantly want to know more about her and hear more of this woman talking. 

KIM: I can't believe you had to read that over me laughing over here. Hopefully you can edit that out. I'm sorry, but I'm dying. There's so much melodrama in Lady Dolly. And there’s a line a bit later: “Lady Dolly felt the mist over her eyes again, and this time she knew it was not the prawns.” You can see why Ouida was friends with Oscar Wilde, right?! I mean, she has such a sense of humor. And she is very well-read; she drops a lot of little notes to explain things and her scope of knowledge seems to be both broad and deep. And maybe a lot of that comes from her work with her dad in her early years — all that education. I’ll admit maybe it could be just a bit showy offy, but is it a stretch to say it’s like a moth, maybe? Flimsy but with substance?

AMY: I don’t know, but that’s also sort of describing a lot of the characters in this book who have everything, but are also vapid and shallow. And moths in this book are of course a metaphor for this well-to-do society, and particularly women like the ones in Lady Dolly’s crew. If Bravo TV did a “Real Housewives of Victorian High Society,” most of the women in this novel (excluding our heroine, Vere, she doesn’t count) but every other woman in this book would make up that cast, I think.

KIM: Absolutely. I love that comparison. That is a perfect comparison; that’s hilarious.

AMY: Yeah, if you like Victorian literature and you also have a guilty pleasure for “The Real Housewives,” this book is for you.

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: So yeah, these women really don’t do anything to contribute to society other than be fashionable and beautiful, basically, and obsess over that and hunt out their new lovers. Ouida writes that this “...is a world full of moths.  Half the moths are burning themselves in feverish frailty, the other half are corroding and consuming all they touch.” And I know she’s lobbing criticism at these superficial socialite women, but to me, honestly, the less virtuous characters are MUCH more interesting and MUCH more fun to read about than Vere. I kept thinking that Vere was SUCH a pill.

KIM: Totally. Oh my gosh, yes, thank you!

AMY: Yeah, I didn’t know if you were going to agree with me or not, because she’s painted as the heroine, like, the protagonist that you’re supposed to love. And I just kept thinking of her as this annoying, saintly martyr. She just gets on my nerves after a while — she's on this high pedestal of her own appointment, you know?

KIM: Yeah, it kind of makes you think that on some level, I think Ouida I mean ... clearly she enjoyed these parties, and this decadence and everything. So maybe even though there's an evil component, I guess you’d say, or a really bad component to Lady Dolly, she's interesting and fun. And I think there's something to be said for those characters and those people and the interesting life that they're living. I mean, I wanted to read more about them actually, in the book. When I got to the “Vere” parts. I was a little bit like ...

AMY: Yeah, you’re like, “Oh, here we go with Vere and her moralizing.” Yes. I wanted the other ladies in the book to just gather around her and sing that song from Grease, like, “Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee.” They kind of were doing that. They were all kind of talking about her behind her back and rolling their eyes, like, “Oh, what a drip to be around.” She just needed to just live and let live a little bit and stop judging everybody else. 

KIM: Absolutely. And I think maybe, given what we know about Ouida I wonder if she wanted us to have that feeling? I don't know. It's interesting to think about.

AMY: Yeah. Actually one of my favorite characters was this American heiress named Fuschia Leach. (Such a good name).

KIM: It’s a great name.

AMY: It was interesting to see Ouida write an American character because she definitely mocks her as this crass, title-grabbing yokel, you know? (“Leach” is her last name, which makes sense) But she also, perhaps, has more heart and I think was the least phony of any of the other women in the book, and I thought that there was something intriguing about that. 

KIM:  I agree. And I wonder why Ouida felt that she couldn't make Vere a more likeable character?

AMY: Or did she think that was likable? 

KIM: I feel like maybe I'm just throwing this out there. Maybe it could have been the only way she felt that she could have her do what she does at the end of the book, which I don't want to ruin. But I wonder if she had to make her so noble that she would be excused from the choices she makes at the end of the book. 

AMY: Maybe.

KIM: So, but what’s most interesting to me throughout the book was Ouida’s commentary on marriage. She repeatedly compares marriage to slavery and prostiution. (Only the prostitutes seem to have it better off than Vere….) 

AMY: Yeah, I wouldn’t have wanted Vere’s life. Because materially speaking, she has everything. I mean, castles (literal castles!), all the clothes in the world, jewels — she’s dripping in diamonds. But none of it matters because she’s subject to her husband’s iron rule. And Zouroff is basically that horrible husband in the Julia Roberts movie, Sleeping With the Enemy. 

KIM: Oh my god, that movie. I was a kid when I saw it, and it made a big impression.

AMY: And that's why you want her to run away with Correze, the opera singer. Why are you not doing this?

KIM: Yes.

AMY: At one point he tells Vere: “I am your master, and I can be a bad master.” Chilling. 

KIM: Yes.

AMY: And even though I had some issues with Vere’s sanctimoniousness, as we’ve talked about, you do have to give her credit at the way she responded to this asshole throughout the whole book. She calmly obeys him, but she had a knack for wording her responses in such a way that infuriates him. And it’s really kind of masterful, and that is one part of Vere that I loved. 

KIM: Yes. She does know how to push his every button. And even though Moths doesn’t paint the most positive portrait of marriage, some modern critics think she actually isn’t harsh enough. But I would argue that given the context of how stifling Victorian rules can be, it’s kind of no wonder Ouida made up these extravagant, emotionally dramatic stories (and by the way, they had overt sexuality, and the readers ate them up, I think, because of that.) Clearly she was tapping into something. And, I mean, it kind of seems like an appropriate response to me. What do you think?

AMY: There was a lot in this book that reminded me a lot of Mary Astell and Aphra Behn, from our previous episodes. This idea of, like, “Why do women have to be forced into a marriage that’s going to ruin their life?” But I do think readers at the time must have been absolutely floored (or outraged) by Ouida’s savage criticism of marriage. Married women would have been the ones reading this book, you know, so it’s like … I could almost see them taking umbrage because they made the decision to get married, you know, and you’re kind of trapped in that life, and she’s judging so harshly. 

KIM: Yes.

AMY: But in this case, I also wonder if maybe her criticism of marriage stemmed from her own disappointments in romance. Could there be a bit of resentment here? What else do we know about her personal life? You talked about the opera singer that she fell for, that was you know, that was not reciprocated. What else happened?

KIM: Right, so, well, she and her mother, after the time living in the Langham, relocated permanently to Italy where she lived a life of luxury, (while she could afford it, anyway — she was always overspending). At times she had as many as 30 dogs living with her. And then she had this long-term “friendship” with a man who was devoted to her, but sadly, she found out he was also having an ongoing affair with someone else. This reminded me of a lot of some of the satellite characters in Moths. So being a writer, this was fodder for a scandalous and very recognizable roman a clef that she wrote about this ongoing affair that he had. And it was during a period of depression after this that she wrote Moths. In spite of being trashed by many critics, booksellers couldn’t keep it in stock and a cheap version was published just four months afterward. It’s said that Moths influenced both Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, which is pretty cool. But despite the book’s success, apparently at one point, her landlord had some peasants remove her from her villa because she wasn’t paying her bills. She then fell in love with the son of the novelist Bulwer-Lytton, but he wasn’t into her. She turned it into one of her imaginary lovers and kept on writing. But she was soon evicted again and destitute. Despite that, she wrote a novel The Masserines in 1897, which Max Beerbohm praised in a collection of essays dedicated to the author. Meanwhile Vernon Lee (she’s a writer we mention in our episode on Amy Levy) insulted Ouida in one of her articles, and The Daily Mail printed a picture of a peasant that was said to be Ouida. She wasn’t thought conventionally beautiful at all, so it was this added insult here. Everyone was thinking of this, you know, horrible-looking destitute woman.

AMY: That’s really sad. I mean, I think I can’t really blame her for creating these fantasy relationships, both in her head and on the page. A fictional lover of your own creation is not going to let you down. But it seems like people either loved her or hated her and her writing, don’t you think? Willa Cather once described Ouida as having a “brilliant mind that never matured,” right?  And I think in some ways this just makes her a more entertaining writer. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

KIM: I agree. I mean, she had fun in a safe way that worked for her! And she lived in this fantasy world. I mean, you know, good for her. She actually coined the term “New Woman” in an essay in May 1894 and she lived it: she was an unmarried woman who worked for a living, initiated relationships with men outside of marriage, and made her own rules. Her heroine Vere has the physical strength, courage, and intelligence of a New Woman and finds a life outside of the bonds of her first marriage to Prince Zouroff. Many of the women in the book have also done the same, and as we noted at the beginning of the show, Ouida includes divorce in her plot, and it’s actually treated as a positive thing. So we won’t get too specific about how Vere’s story ends — I do think the payoff ends up being worth it, but as for Ouida, she died of pneumonia in 1908 at the age of sixty-nine. 

AMY: But what a life! I didn't know that she coined the term “New Woman.” I think that's cool, because we mention that a lot in our episodes. Yet I mean, she supported herself and her mom for more than 30 years and she just kept churning out books because she knew what she wanted out of life. She wanted the finest things and she wanted to have fun! There were two early films based on Moths in 1913 and 1917, and a 1977 British film based on it too. I’m curious about that one, because the scenic locales in this book, you know … they are in the South of France. They are in Swiss mountain villages. They are in the wilds of Russia — castles all over the place. Cinematically, this book would be SO GORGEOUS to see as a film. We both had a lot of fun reading it, and really encourage you to pick this one up. It is a long book, but it’s one of those fun ones to immerse yourself in. If you’re going to get it, get the Broadview Edition, which has a ton of additional info on Ouida’s life in there. So Kim, do you think you would want to read more Ouida now that you've read Moths?

KIM: Yeah, I absolutely think so, and here’s the thing: I loved Moths, and I loved being immersed in that world, and then to know that it's not even one of her potentially one of her best or a lot of people's favorite. So I definitely would like to read more.

AMY: I think the Harlequin romance comparison is wrong. I don't like that.

KIM: Yes. I don’t agree either.

AMY: Is it a sexy book? Yes. Is there some romance in it? Yes. But to me it was a lot more like a British Edith Wharton novel. 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: Or even like Dangerous Liaisons. That kept coming to mind.

KIM: Yes, I agree.

AMY: So if you like those kinds of books, Ouida is an author who would probably appeal to you. 

KIM: Yeah, the whole idea of it being a Harlequin novel... I mean, when I think of Harlequin, I think of your standard plot. Every book has the exact same A..B..C.. you know, and it's like, for me Moths is nothing like that. The only thing that it has in common with Harlequin is that there's some romance in it. Otherwise, no.

AMY: Yeah, I'm sure at the time, the word “trashy” might have been bandied about with regard to it for that society at that time.

KIM: Yes, that’s a good point.

AMY: But today, it's not you know ... today, it's just an interesting good book. 

KIM: Yes. But the complexity of the characters and everything. Definitely, definitely more three-dimensional. (Not that there's anything wrong with romance novels, either, by the way.)

AMY: Right. The book is just dripping with diamonds and glamor and wit — and definitely some shocking social commentary, too. So give our girl Ouida a go and maybe you can embark on your own inner fantasy (like she did) about living in fin de siecle Europe, right?

KIM: Yeah, totally. That’s a fantasy I’m always down for. Anyway, that’s all for today’s episode. Consider giving us a rating and review if you enjoyed it. Tell all your book-loving friends, and check out LostLadiesofLit.com for further reading material.

AMY: And it’s also time right now for a fan shout-out! We want to say a huge “thank you” to Rosemary Kelty, who reached out to us recently with an awesome list of recommended “lost ladies” including Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kathryn Forbes, Lillie Devereux Blake and Hisaye Yamamoto. These are all authors who were unknown to us and we have added them to our increasingly long list of future podcast subjects. Rosemary also wrote that she was excited to dive into Edna Furber’s So Big…. and that she’s also following my lead by attempting to tackle Clarissa, a.k.a. the book that never ends. I honestly think, Rosemary, you're going to enjoy them both, but I do suspect you'll probably finish Clarissa before I do. So…

KIM: Okay, you guys can do this and it's totally worth it. And then you'll be able to say that you read it. 

AMY: Yes, yes. Bye, everybody!

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

54. Dare Wright and The Lonely Doll Series

AMY: Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode everybody! I’m Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner and BFF, Kim Askew…

KIM: ...Hi, everybody!...

AMY: So Kim, I’m wondering what’s your official position on old dolls: do you find them comforting or creepy?

KIM: I'd say a little bit comforting depending on the doll. I just ordered a Raggedy Ann doll that looked like the one that I had when I was a kid for my daughter. But most of the time kind of creepy, maybe. 

AMY: Yeah, I think it can be a combo of both for sure. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Today, we’re going to be talking about a lonely doll today, and if you are a listener who already knows that reference, I’m sure you are stoked for this episode. If, however, the phrase “The Lonely Doll” does not register for you at all, then Kim and I are so excited to introduce you to a children’s book that I think is going to become your new obsession. Or maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. Kim, are you fascinated by Dare Wright and her “Lonely Doll” series?

KIM: Yes, absolutely. I think I was introduced to Dare Wright and her books through Lauren Cerand, who was one of our guests in the past. And also my sister had somehow I think, gotten them for her daughter, Chloe, and I read them to her when Chloe was young. Yeah, which, you know ... they were definitely interesting and unforgettable.

AMY: Everybody will have their own opinion about whether or not these books are appropriate to read to children today or not. And we’ll get into that.

KIM: Absolutely. So for those of you that don’t know, it’s a midcentury-era children’s book series (there are 10 books, total) and it’s about a pretty little doll named Edith who is sadly on her own in the world until she meets two teddy bears (Mr. Bear and Little Bear) and they agree to adopt her into their family. Edith and Little Bear usually get up to all sorts of mischief in the stories, which are told through these amazingly creative black-and-white photographs typically taken in and around New York City. Mr. Bear is their stern, yet-loving protector. We, as the readers, get an almost voyeuristic look into their lives together. 

AMY: Yeah, and I came across these books when my daughter, Julia, was very young. Her babysitter had taken her to the library and they came home with a few of these books. I’d never seen or heard of them before, but I was so charmed by the photographs in them. They have a very retro, kind of a noir-ish feel, and the way these inanimate objects are arranged in the shot, they very much come to life. So there’s a shot where the doll, Edith, is tumbling down off a ladder, for instance and somehow, it’s almost cinematic. You feel like she’s really falling, you know? They feel real and they feel alive. 

KIM: They absolutely do. And there's something also very dark about them. So I love that you said almost noir-ish. There's a feel of something maybe kind of sinister going on in them. And they're very striking for that reason.

AMY: Yeah, I think it could be the way that the tableaus are kind of lit (There’s this play of light and shadow) and then you combine that with the narrative of Edith’s fear of abandonment and rejection. (That’s kind of a throughline through all of the books.) And then there are the spanking scenes.

KIM: Oh, yes, the spanking scenes! And there are a few of those, right, across several different books?

AMY: Yeah. When Little Bear and/or Edith take their mischief too far, Mr. Bear disciplines them by taking them across his knee to administer spankings. This definitely shocked me when I first encountered it — totally inappropriate for a children’s book in this day and age — but obviously when the books were published (in the late 50s and 60s) it wouldn’t be seen as any big deal. So I know there are parents who probably wouldn’t want to expose their kids to it, and I understand that, but there’s also just too much to love about these books. (Frankly, even if you don’t have kids, you should totally check these books out. They’re that terrific.) Yet for as adorable and creative and brilliant as these books are, they are somehow unsettling, like you said, Kim. I mean, there’s one of the sequels called Edith and Big Bad Bill. Big Bad Bill is a bad bear. He winds up kidnapping her and gagging her and tying her to a tree. So yeah, you know… maybe not for kids.

KIM: Right. I see them as more art books, almost, now. Amy’s right about that scene. And it takes us back to the creepy/cute paradox of dolls. And I know a lot of people have said the darkness that seems to lurk in the periphery of these books springs from the author’s own tragic life.

AMY: I think you could rightly say that the author, Dare Wright, was a bit of a “lonely doll” in her own right. She had some issues, which we’ll get into, and there was a lot of sadness in her life, but there was also a lot about her life that was utterly fantastic. She literally lived a fairy tale existence in some respects. So let’s get to the bottom of it all. 

KIM: Nice pun, Amy. Let’s go for it. 

AMY: Okay, so let’s dive in here. There are a couple of great biographies out on Dare Wright, which I would definitely recommend you guys check out. One is called The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright, by Jean Nathan. That’s the one I read in preparation for this podcast. But then there’s also a biography written by Wright’s own goddaughter, who is now the heir to her estate. That’s a woman named Brook Ashley. And that book is called Dare Wright and the Lonely Doll. 

KIM: Yeah, and to really understand Dare Wright, you have to first know about her mother — because the two women really go hand-in-hand. It makes me think of Little Edie and Grey Gardens.

AMY: Oh, yeah, that’s a good comparison.

KIM: Yeah, her mother’s name was Edith Stevenson (she went by Edie) and she was a very well-known portrait painter. She was from Youngstown, Ohio and was later based out of Cleveland. For decades she was highly sought out by the region’s (and later the nation’s) wealthy and distinguished art patrons. She went to the White House to paint President Woodrow Wilson (that painting actually, though was was ruined in a fire, sadly); She also did a portrait of Winston Churchill (from a photograph) which apparently still hangs at the University of Bristol in England. Greta Garbo later commissioned her to paint her portrait. So she was kind of big-time.

AMY: Yeah, she was a big deal. Really talked about and written about. Actually, in terms of her popularity as an artist, Edith Wright (the mother) she reminds me of the fictional Dallas O’Mara from Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer-prize-winning novel So Big, which we talked about back in July. She was this well-respected painter; she had boundless confidence and chutzpah and she was always promoting herself and her achievements. She loved publicity. She was very mendacious, too, because she could fib a little to make herself sound more impressive, and she did that a lot. But she was able to earn a decent amount of money for herself painting.

KIM: She had to hustle for that money, actually though, because she was a single mom. Her marriage to Ivan Wright had fallen apart and by 1920, Edith and her five-year-old daughter, Dare, were out on their own.

AMY: And this is where the story gets pretty weird. So Dare had a brother who was two years older than she was. His name was Blaine. And in a series of strange events, when the parents split, Blaine ended up moving to New York with his father, and then Dare went with her mother, and it was sort of never spoken of. Edie used to tell people her husband had died, and she never mentioned having a son (let alone did she correspond with him). So it’s kind of like the set-up from the old Parent Trap movie, where you’re thinking, “How could the parents do this?” Like, how could they separate these siblings?

KIM: Absolutely. I was completely thinking of The Parent Trap movie. That’s exactly right. And not only was Dare ripped away from the older brother she had loved very much, but her mother was basically all-consumed with her career. She would leave Dare home alone to fend for herself, or she would give Dare strict instructions that she must not be disturbed. 

AMY: As a result, Dare found comfort and companionship in her dolls, including one she’d been gifted by her mother:  It was an Italian-made doll from the Lenci company. It had a felt face and curly hair, and Dare and her mother, Edie, decided to name her Edith: (which, given how truly self-absorbed her mother was, this is so par for the course that she was like “Why don’t you name her MY name?”) But this doll would eventually be the doll that takes center stage in the books, The Lonely Doll series, but not before Dare had given it a significant “glow-up.” We’ll get to that later. 

KIM: Wow, the psychology going on here. I mean, a psychiatrist would have a field day with all this. Anyway, eventually, Edie sent Dare, when she was around 12-years-old, to a boarding school that was right down the street (just to get her out of the way, basically). And everyone at school knew that Dare was the daughter of the famous painter, but Dare struggled to fit in there.

AMY: When Dare was in the presence of her mother (which was infrequent around that time, but) she was often a subject for her portraiture. So Edie wound up painting dozens of oil paintings of her daughter, from childhood through adulthood. It was almost as if Dare was a prop for her mom’s painting just as her own doll would later become her prop. And needless to say, Dare was growing up to be quite a beautiful woman. I would encourage you to Google photos of her. She was stunning and glamorous — she reminds me of a lot of, like, Lady Gaga or a Barbie doll, even. I mean, her waist was the size of a napkin ring. (I do think she did have some eating disorder issues on-and-off). But she was really tiny, and she had the most killer fashion sense.

KIM: So it’s no surprise that in her early adulthood, after a failed stint as an actress, Dare got into modeling. The camera loved her, as you can see by the many photographs of her. (And we’ll post them on our Instagram, too.) Today, she would have certainly been a phenomenon on Instagram.She was just visually arresting.

AMY: Yes, and the biography by Jean Nathan that I read, it’s just LOADED with photos of both her and her mom. It’s really gratifying. So like you said, Kim, the camera loved her, but she also loved the camera. She enjoyed experimenting with taking pictures and she eventually decided that photography was the career path she really wanted to pursue, especially since she wasn’t an attention-seeker by nature. (She was kind of shy.) Her connection to magazines as a model helped her ease her way into that world. She started doing photography assignments for Good Housekeeping magazine.

KIM: And then, meanwhile, around this time, her brother re-emerged in her life. An uncle decided he was going to reunite the siblings, and when they finally met again in their 20s, they were almost smitten with one another. 

AMY: Yeah, the biography I read says that they actually toyed with the idea of marrying and pretending they weren't siblings. I'm a little bit skeptical of this claim, and if it was true, it was just very brief — the first few weeks of knowing each other, but needless to say, they adored one another.

KIM: Though Blaine (for the rest of his life) had no real love for Edie, the mother who abandoned him. At one point, Blaine was annoyed to find out that Dare had never been given a teddy bear growing up. He rectified that situation by going out and buying her a Steiff bear that would later have a starring role as Mr. Bear in the books. (Dare bought Little Bear herself.)

AMY: And Blaine may have held a grudge toward his mom, but Dare did not. The older she got, the closer she and Edie became, but they developed a very codependent relationship with one another. In some ways their love for each other was so sweet, but in other ways it was unnerving. And their dynamic kind of reminded me a little bit of Mommy Dearest, you know? There wasn’t physical abuse, but this attention-seeking mom just being focused and obsessed with her daughter. And you know, she neglected Dare when she was young, later on, but as Dare grew up and became beautiful, Edie was really needy. (Edie Needy!), and she was just a permanent fixture in Dare’s life. It seems like she kind of smothered her, you know? They were best friends. They were travel partners. They were playmates (and I say that literally because they liked to play dress up.) Outsiders would say like, “Yeah I saw them together and I just found them off.” There was just something a little weird about them, you know, but they did make an impression wherever they went. And even for the decades they lived in two different cities (because Edie remained in Cleveland once Dare moved to New York City) they still saw each other constantly. They were always flying back and forth every few weeks. They often slept in the same bed when they were visiting each other. They were just connected at the hip.

KIM: Yeah, they also loved to sunbathe naked together on their summer vacations. Their favorite destination was a place called Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Edith would also help Dare stage nude photographs of herself. She was very comfortable posing nude for her own private photo collection, but at that same time, she had also pretty severe sexual hangups.

AMY: Yeah, given how gorgeous she was, it’s no surprise that Dare had many, many suitors or people, you know, that were trying to date her. She was even briefly engaged to a British pilot who was a friend of her brother’s. But true intimacy was something that terrified her. She was very diffident and emotionally stunted — she liked flirting with men, but would literally run away from anyone who tried to make a physical pass at her. There’s actually a really heartbreaking story about a divorce lawsuit that Dare had gotten dragged into. So there was a socialite woman who wanted to divorce her husband, but he was refusing. So she basically baited Dare. She saw this attractive younger woman… she arranged for her husband to start helping Dare with her dark room photography stuff, but then sent a private eye to watch the husband going in and out of Dare’s apartment. So of course, the private eye thought they were having an affair. Dare was dragged into court (and the newspapers) because of all this as “the other woman” which was really tragic and mortifying because she was apparently a virgin. There was nothing going on. He truly was just helping her in the dark room. It was just a total trumped-up accusation of adultery, and the defense lawyers for the husband, they had a last resort plan — that they were going to give medical evidence of Dare’s virginity in court to help their case. But the husband wound up settling, so it never came to that.

KIM: Oh my gosh. And can you imagine if that happened now, in today’s day and age? I mean..

AMY: Nobody should be put through that. Her name was all over the newspapers. It must have been horrible.

KIM: I know, and for somebody who already had a lot of issues about intimacy and shyness and stuff like that, it must have been agony for her.

AMY: Yeah, so sad. So everyone who knew her described her (despite her glamorous and fashionable persona) They said she was ethereal and childlike and “not of this world,” and she was also damaged. So think of, like, a fairy with broken wings. That’s the best way to think about her. She’s also described as the sort of person you either instantly loved or found exceedingly odd. 

KIM: So how did the Lonely Doll books actually come about?

AMY: Yeah, so she had started to play around at home with her old doll, Edith and the two stuffed bears. By this time, she’d given Edith a makeover, because she was extremely creative and crafty. She was a genius at sewing clothes, she was an amazing interior designer; she was into carpentry; she was a great sketch artist. So she could transform almost anything. So she had sewn the little doll, Edith, a bunch of new doll clothes and she sewed one of her own blonde hair pieces onto the doll’s head. And then suddenly the doll is here looking remarkably like Dare, herself, you know? So she started to set the toys up in and around her Manhattan apartment on W. 58th street  — and like the many photographs she took of herself — she never intended on showing the doll pictures to anyone. But through happenstance, a friend of a friend in publishing had seen one photo that Dare had taken of a little boy (a family friend) with a teddy bear that she had given to him, and the publisher was like, “You know, there’s something here. I like the idea with the photographs.” That was all Dare She showed up with an entire outline for a book featuring Edith and the two teddy bears. The idea got greenlit and the little doll, Edith, suddenly became her muse. 

KIM: Right, and the first book, simply called The Lonely Doll, came out in 1957 and it was an instant hit. The book was just flying out of bookstores and getting tons of national publicity, and so sequels were quickly lined up. The year it came out The Lonely Doll landed at number 14 on the New York Times Children’s Best Sellers list (The Cat in the Hat was number one). And thanks to her dazzling looks, of course, Dare was an instant star. She didn’t love all the attention because she was so shy, but she loved creating the books. Dare’s mom told a reporter that Edith and the bears were being insured by Lloyd’s of London. Dare began keeping them in a safe deposit vault. And so for almost two decades she worked on sequels, some of which also featured live animals, including The Doll and the Kitten, Edith and the Duckling and Edith and Midnight, which featured a pony. Some were shot in the countryside where Dare’s brother lived, but my favorites are the ones set in New York City, and I love that you get to see Dare’s own apartment as the backdrop for so many of the tableaus.

AMY: Yeah, and a lot of people think the books were Dare’s way of working through her own issues, that little Bear and Mr. Bear represent the brother and father Dare lost as a child. You could do a psychological deep dive, I think, but also, Dare was just so freakin creative. I think she was really just using her imagination to tell these stories that she thought would charm people. (And they do!)

KIM: Yeah, and Amy, why did the books sort of fall off peoples’ radar… and what ultimately became of Dare Wright?

AMY: I’m not completely sure why the books originally went out of print. I mean, maybe changing tastes I guess? She did switch publishers at one point; she felt she was being denied creative freedom at Doubleday. So maybe that had something to do with it, I don’t know. But the books have subsequently been reissued, but even still, it’s not easy to get your hands on all of them. And I think maybe the spanking stuff didn’t help…. It’s not exactly the sort of gift you’re going to give to a young child given those cringe-y elements. You know, it’s not a “new baby” gift or anything like that. (Parents would freak). But as for the rest of Dare’s story, it’s definitely really tragic. First off, she went on to create some different children’s books after The Lonely Doll series, including one called Lona, A Fairy Tale, which features Dare, herself, in the photos. She’s dressed up as a cursed fairy princess named “Lona” (which is a play on the word “Alone,” or “Lonely,” a lot of people think). She was nearing 60 when she did this book, and my god, if you look at pictures from it, she still looks unbelievable! She looked like she was in her 30s when she was pushing 60! It’s really hard to believe.) But after the death of her mother and then the death of her brother, Dare quickly started to spiral. She went downhill; she was more lonely than she had ever been. She became more erratic; she became an alcoholic and very self-destructive. She ended up befriending transients in Central Park and would give them access to her apartment to sleep in, and as a result, some very bad things happened to her, which I won’t get into, but you can probably imagine… you find out more about that in Jean Nathan’s biography. It’s truly, truly, heartbreaking to read about Dare’s final two decades of life. It really leaves you feeling empty.

KIM: It's so tragic. I mean, to think of that, and then also knowing that these books are actually really a beautiful work of art. So let's instead try to remember all the glorious photographs she took and appreciate them and her amazing Lonely Doll books.

AMY: I agree. I mean, some people say the story of Dare Wright’s life is a tragic one, but I do think she really lived a charmed life in many ways. She always found beauty and magic and sparkle in the world around her. She had so many amazing adventures, and in her own eccentric way, I think she lived a celebratory life. I think her story also would make an amazing movie or television show. I can picture someone like Anya Taylor Joy playing Dare (especially now that she has her platinum blonde — she looks…)

KIM: Oh, that would be perfect!

AMY: And actually, I recently read that a musical about Dare Wright is in the works. So the playwrights behind that are named Tasha Gordon-Solmon and Faye Chiao. (I don’t know how to say her last name).

KIM: That sounds really amazing. Especially in this Instagram-age where photographs are everything, it seems like she is more relevant than ever before. 

AMY: For sure.

KIM: So Dare Wright had her “dolly,” and the protagonist of next week’s novel has a “Dolly” of her own — a character by the name of Dolly, we should clarify. 

AMY: Yeah, and like Dare and Edie Wright’s relationship, this book involves a beautiful ingenue who is dependent on a manipulative “maternal figure.”

AMY: That’s exactly right, and her actions have consequences. We’ll be discussing Moths, a classic from 1880 by the prolific English author Ouida, which is the pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé. 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.

53. Emma Wolf — Other Things Being Equal with Sarah Seltzer

AMY HELMES: Hey, everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW: ...and I’m Kim Askew. Earlier this year we did an episode on Amy Levy, a British writer who is described as “the Jewish Jane Austen.” Almost 30 years later, an American named Emma Wolf was also writing about “the marriage plot” from the standpoint of a Jewish heroine. By depicting her characters within a more diverse and secular, upper-middle class society (rather than within the confines of tight-knit Jewish communities, or ghettos, as many other Jewish writers were doing) Wolf offered a different perspective on Jewish people in America at the turn of the 20th century.

AMY: She wrote five novels, all of which are set in the San Francisco Bay Area. And that alone really intrigues me, actually, because you just don’t often find books set in San Francisco in that time period.

KIM: Yes, having lived in San Francisco, I love that aspect of it, too. (It’s also actually reminding me of Sui Sin Far, the Chinese American author we did an episode on last year  -- many of her stories were also set in the Bay Area, and she was writing around the same time as Emma Wolf. I wonder if they knew each other?

AMY: Yeah, I don’t know, but they did, at one point, have the same publisher, A.C. McClurg and Co., so it’s possible? Wolf’s books were published by the most popular presses of her day, thereby earning her the nickname, “the mother of American Jewish fiction.” (Why does nobody know of her?

KIM: Right?

AMY: Crazy.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: An esteemed friend also called her “the best product of American Judaism since Emma Lazarus,” (and Lazarus, of course, wrote “The New Colossus” which is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty). So sadly, this Emma, Emma Wolf, is not at all well-known today, and after reading one of her most popular novels, Other Things Being Equal, it seems quite surprising and unfortunate that she’s been completely forgotten.

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. I really loved this book, so I’m glad that we’re going to be able to shine some light on it today. And I also love that we have a special guest to discuss it with us! It’s someone from our distant past, right, Amy?

AMY: Yeah, I can’t wait to reconnect with her and see what she thought about this book also — so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

KIM: We first connected with today’s guest, Sarah Seltzer, back in the Aughts when Amy and I were writing a blog together about book-to-film adaptations. It was called Romancing the Tome, and she was one of our guest bloggers (having her own very popular blog at that time). Since then, she’s been writing up a storm for MUCH bigger outlets. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, Jezebel, Rolling Stone and Salon among many others. She also has served as deputy editor at Flavorwire, and she was editor of the Jewish parenting online outlet Kvellar, and these days, she’s the executive editor at Lilith magazine, an online magazine that amplifies Jewish feminist voices. Sarah, welcome to the show!

SARAH: Thank you so much for having me on! And it's so wonderful to reconnect with you both after all these years and our time together on the early days of the book blogosphere.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: Okay, so when we initially discussed having you on the show, we were going back and forth, trying to figure out which author we might feature, and Emma Wolf’s name eventually came up because you had retweeted an article on her that was written for Lilith by Josh Lambert. And Kim and I had never heard of her before, so we thought, “Hey, she might be a good choice.” Had you known of Emma Wolf prior to Josh’s article? 

SARAH: I hadn't at all. And you know, Lilith does a lot of the same kind of excavating that you do on this podcast, where we're always looking for stories of political figures, feminist figures, artists and literary figures, who have kind of been forgotten by time who were may have been, you know, important during their time. (Women, of course, and for us, usually Jewish women), and who are going to be really interesting to our readers. So when Josh approached me (Josh was my teacher at a writing retreat years ago) about Emma Wolf, I was so so excited because not only am I always looking for Jewish heroines who have been lost to time, but I love (as you both know so well) I love novels of manners. I love Jane Austen. I love Edith Wharton. And the idea that there was this young Jewish woman who was kind of a prodigy writing in the style of these writers and whose books were really good and really popular was just so exciting to me.

KIM: During Wolf’s lifetime, the Chicago Daily Tribune had prophesied that she might “someday rank high among American writers of fiction.” Any idea as to why she’s not more known?

SARAH: I think there are a bunch of reasons. So one of the things that Josh really highlighted well in his piece was that she she kind of doesn't fit any of the expected categories. So during this ’70s when all these feminist writers were being rediscovered, she was kind of overlooked because she wasn't writing radical feminist work. She wasn't uppending notions of class and gender at all. And also her characters aren't Jewish (as he said) in a way that fits neat Jewish Studies narratives. They're not new immigrants ... they don't eat pickles ... they are more likely to use French Phrases than Yiddish ones. So that's one reason that she might be overlooked. Another is that, you know, I think that her books are really, really lovely and I really have enjoyed her prose style and her storytelling, but they are sort of small in scope. And so as we all know (and you know from this podcast and the work that you do) that sometimes when women write novels that are small in scope, they don't get seen as really important, and so they get lost to time. 

AMY: Exactly. Getting ready for this episode, it’s always hard to find information on the lost ladies that we feature on our show, but Emma Wolf, I thought, was even harder to sort of pin down. There wasn’t a wealth of information on her on the internet. Luckily, literary scholars Barbara Cantalupo and Lori Harrison-Kahan did a lot of legwork to uncover more details of her life. (And most of the things we’re going to be mentioning about her bio are, thankfully, you know… they did the research on this.) So what we do know about Emma is that she was born in 1865, the fourth of eleven children. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from the Alsace region of France and they were doing quite well for themselves by the time they were living in the Bay Area. Her father owned several cigar and general merchandise stores in San Francisco, and business was booming thanks to the gold rush. So they got to live in very fashionable neighborhoods (at various points they were living in Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights and Laurel Heights). They vacationed at summer resorts in the Santa Cruz mountains and they had servants running the home. But when Emma was around 13 years old her dad died unexpectedly while away on a business trip. So Emma’s mother (who had 10 surviving children at that point) she was able to fall back on the wealth from her late husband’s businesses, but even still, there was less financial stability for them after that.

KIM: Wolf attended the San Francisco Girls’ High School and one of her childhood friends was Rebecca Bettleheim who would go on to become an important Jewish feminist leader. The two girls often confided in one another about the difference they felt being Jewish in upper-class San Francisco society. Sarah, do we know anything else about what it would have been like for Wolf as a Jew in San Francisco in the late 19th century? 

SARAH: So in a lot of ways, and one of the things that Josh touches on in his piece, is that this pocket of society back then mirrors what a lot of other Jews would have experienced sort of later in the 20th century, including like my grandparents. It seems very familiar to me where they're, you know, in separate social circles, but their social lives imitate and are similar to non-Jews. So they have their clubs and their social events, and you know, they have the servants and they have the social world. Wolf was part of this women's club movement, which enabled her to meet with other women, and they could talk about ideas and books, and they went to synagogue and these German synagogues … this is something that if you live in New York, you can sort of recognize the difference between like, there are Sephardic synagogues and German synagogues. They were these beautiful early American synagogues that were started by Jews who came from German-speaking countries in Europe and they were more church-like, to put it bluntly, than you might expect. They had organs, they had stained glass. So again, another way that sort of the Jewish sphere is similar to the Christian sphere, and there's social mixing, but there's also social antisemitism. And I think that's probably what Emma Wolf and her friend Rebecca Bettelheim are talking about at school where, you know, there's a level of equality, but it only goes so far. And there's probably a lot of casual social antisemitism that they have to deal with. And that's where the stigma around intermarriage would come up.

AMY: Also, I never had really equated San Francisco with necessarily having this thriving Jewish community.

SARAH: Me neither, I had no idea.

AMY: In 1895 they had already elected their first Jewish mayor.

KIM: That does seem incredible.

SARAH: Yeah.

AMY: And Jews were making up nine percent of San Francisco’s population by 1855. So you know, you think about the Gold Rush, and I just didn’t factor Jews into that equation.

KIM: Nope.

Sarah: Nope.

AMY: So another factor worth noting about Wolf: she had a congenital physical impairment of some sort (and it was exacerbated by polio). It limited her mobility. So she was confined to the house more than other young women of her day, and so reading and writing was something she was more at liberty to focus on. One of her other seven sisters, Alice, wrote also and had a novel published, but once she got married, her writing career effectively ended. So Emma, who never married, was able to make her writing career a priority.

KIM: Oh, I’m curious about the sister’s novel too now!

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Emma’s first short story was published when she was only 12 and she recalled in an interview later, “There was no joy in the experience. I cried bitterly over the affair.” (So apparently it was not her decision to have it published… a very bold cousin stole the story and gave it to the neighborhood paper thinking she was doing Emma a favor.” Emma, though, actually found it humiliating and thought her neighbors were probably laughing at “her little love story.” 

AMY: It does seem like a bit of a violation, you know, as if somebody took your diary. I can see why that would be embarrassing.

KIM: It could go either way. I guess it depends on the person.

AMY: And the story.

KIM: And the story, that’s true.

AMY: But that said, by the age of 27 she was feeling a lot more confident about putting her “love stories” out into the world. Her first novel, Other Things Being Equal, (the book we’re discussing today) was originally published in 1892 and you could say the controversial plot may be one of the reasons it was quite popular at the time. So Sarah, we always give this hard part to our guests, but would you like to give a quick, spoiler-free summary of what the book’s about?

SARAH: Sure, so it's in some ways a classic love triangle with all these social elements thrown in. The heroine’s name is Ruth. She's a young, only child, a Jewish girl living in in San Francisco in the milieu that we've just discussed, and she discovers early on that her mother is a hysteric, and this very handsome kind Christian doctor, Dr. Kemp, comes in and takes on her mother's case, and they form a friendship and an attachment at the same time. Ruth also has a cousin named Louis, who is very urbane and intelligent, and the family had kind of always assumed that they would be a match eventually. And Ruth grows torn (over a series of social events and excursions) between her attachment to her family and making her parents — particularly her father, who really raised her — her loyalty to them and her interest in this new doctor figure in her life.

AMY: So getting back to the mom’s hysterical...I don’t know what you would call that. She reminds me a lot of the Jane Austen metaphor…

SARAH: Mrs. Bennett.

AMY: Mrs. Bennett, yeah! Maybe not quite so comical.

KIM: And not quite so irritating.

AMY: Yeah. But I do think it’s interesting that she starts off with the mom basically having a nervous breakdown or whatever, because that particular malady feels so insulting to women, traditionally, and yet, in this main heroine, Ruth, the daughter, we see somebody who’s much more in command of herself. 

KIM: It’s a good contrast, yeah.

AMY: So what do we think of Ruth in general?

SARAH: I think she's kind of this very classic, romantic heroine. She's a bit independent-minded, but she's not a real rebel. And she, you know, is very, very caring towards her family, and she takes her mom's hysteria very seriously. Also being kind of sweetly teasing to her and saying, like, “You're gonna be the baby now and I'll be the mom.” She's a very appealing character. She sometimes verges a little bit close to being what we would call now I guess, a “Mary Sue” — being a little too precious. She doesn't quite get there, which I like. Wolf was writing for the sensibilities of her time, but I think it's interesting that even in our time, she manages to keep her grounded enough that we really like her and sympathize with her.

AMY: I think that's key. She's like the dutiful daughter, which can be so annoying in some contexts, but she's got just the right amount of gumption, and she does disobey them periodically throughout the book. She will be sneaky and you know, do things that she knows that they kind of wouldn't want her to do. She has great little retorts. She can hold her own.

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: And she's funny at times, but I don't know if it's that she's funny or that Emma’s funny. I think some of the exposition .. there are some little snarky things in there that I did love. 

KIM: Mm-hmm.

SARAH: There are those little, you know, sunbeams of humor that, you’re right, kind of fall throughout the whole book.

AMY: One of my favorite Ruth scenes is actually towards the beginning when her cousin Louis (who's one part of the love triangle) he insists on walking her home, walking her to her door, and she just takes a stand against that. “I can get myself there.” Like, “No, thank you.” And especially back then when you did have a chaperone…

KIM: Yeah, she’s very independent.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, let’s not waste any more time before we get into Dr. Kemp.

KIM: Yeah!

AMY: He is the O.G. McDREAMY. (I would say Patrick Dempsey has some competition here). And I loved the whole romance and the setup for it. I think Emma Wolf was masterful at setting up this attraction. I was all-in; every time he and Ruth were in the same room my heart did start to pick up a little bit, you know? I could picture him as pretty hot.

KIM: The doctor archetype! The healer!

AMY: Yes, exactly. And it’s kind of critical for this book -- you have to feel invested in the romance to care later at the obstacle that’s going to be thrown in their path.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: So Sarah or Kim, were there any particular moments where you felt like Wolf truly nailed that chemistry between Ruth and the doctor? 

SARAH: I mean, when you first see the doctor, one of the first scenes, he literally hypnotizes the mom…

KIM: Yes!

AMY: I forgot about that!

SARAH: I mean, so immediately, you're like, “Who is this guy?” You know, he's, he's a very powerful character from the beginning. But I think what Wolf does such a good job in is that it really starts out as this friendship that you really buy right away where they, you know, they're both concerned about her mom. And then he draws her in in his concern for his other patients, and kind of gives her a moral education. And she realizes that there's this whole world out there of people she can help. And she, you know, kind of rises to the occasion, and helps him, and they become partners, really, in this endeavor of visiting his various patients around town. And from there, you see their attraction grow. And Wolf also does a really good job of ... there are a lot of long conversations between the two of them, and they're not romantic conversations, but you see, the interplay, the back and forth, that they really get each other and are also kind of unafraid to speak their minds when they disagree. In addition to the quickening heartbeats, there's a strong foundation to the relationship that really works nicely and is a very believable romance.

AMY: For me, it was just these little slight, subtle moments between them. And the one that comes to mind that was just like “shiver all over” for me was, when they go to the theater, she's getting a wrap on or a cloak, and he helps her fasten it at her neck, and he kind of stoops down and is, you know, studiously fastening the tie at her neck and you could just picture it as this moment. But then there's also these kind of rom-com moments, too. So at one point, his carriage drives by the house and she had been in the kitchen helping with something and she runs outside to say hi, and she's all flustered when she comes back in but then the housekeeper tells her that she had a speck of scrambled egg on her cheek the whole time that she had been talking with him. So, like, a little “Bridget Jones-y” there.

SARAH: Very Bridget Jones. And she’s wearing a flannel day dress and her hair is in braids, and she kind of realizes after they've had this conversation that this is how she's presented herself.

AMY: And also, we should note that Dr. Kemp is not a fan of mayonnaise.

KIM: No.

AMY: That was one of the funniest parts of the book for me. He goes off on this whole tirade about mayonnaise…

KIM: That was hilarious…

AMY: … the hazards of mayonnaise on people’s health, which made me laugh. So next time you’re making a turkey sandwich, think twice about...

SARAH: Go easy on the mayonnaise.

KIM: Yeah, I’m a mustard person.

SARAH: I am, too. But I think what was interesting, also, about that scene is that he kind of makes a casually antisemitic comment after he's complaining about mayonnaise. And she doesn't really get mad at him, but her presence kind of recalls him to himself. He's embarrassed. So in that way, she’s kind of giving him a moral education, too.

KIM: Exactly. I think she does help him, also, develop his morality and ethics as well. So they’re kind of growing together, which I think is a cool moment.

AMY: On the flip side of Dr. Kemp, we have Ruth's cousin Louis, who we've mentioned. He also wants to marry her. So if Dr. Kemp is “McDreamy” Louis is “McPatronising.” Whenever I think of these type of characters, I always go back to “Cecil” from A Room With a View. Ruth is way more civil to him than I wanted her to be. How did you respond to Louis as you were reading, Sarah?

SARAH: I think the “Cecil” comparison is so good. I have, over time, become more sympathetic to this kind of character than I was, you know. You feel bad for him. He is horribly patronizing. He kind of doesn't know how to be charming or light. He doesn't really have a sense of humor, which is unforgivable. But at the same time, you see that his dreams are kind of slipping away before his eyes. Louis is the first one to kind of figure out what's going on before even Ruth herself, I think, knows that she's in love with Dr. Kemp. Louis sees the writing on the wall, and he starts making these kind of snide comments that are so obnoxious, but also, you know, they come from a place of pain for him, and he ends up, you know, being there for the family no matter what. But yeah, he's a very difficult character. He's a very good foil.

KIM: Yes, he is. So as we mentioned (I think we mentioned) Dr. Kemp is a Unitarian. It means that nobody is even considering him as a potential suitor for Ruth (and so it feels “safe” in some ways for Ruth to be hanging out with him unchaperoned even though we’re kind of like, “Hmmm.”) Wolf doesn’t really focus on the family’s religious practices too much (we don’t see them in the synagogue, for example, as we did in Amy Levy’s Rueben Sachs), but she does draw a cultural distinction. For example, the Levices are going to a party hosted by a Christian family, and Ruth’s cousin, Jennie, is really annoyed by this. She wonders, “What does possess your parents to mix so much with Christians?” So Ruth responds to this: “Fellow-feeling, I suppose. We all dance and talk alike; and as we do not hold services at receptions, wherein lies the difference?”

AMY: Yeah, but cousin Jennie’s not buying that. She responds: “There is a difference; and the Christians know it as well as we Jewish people. Not only do they know it, but they show it in countless ways: and the difference, they think, is all to their credit. For my part, I always feel as if they looked down on us, and I should like to prove to them how we differ on that point. I have enough courage to let them know I consider myself as good as the best of them.” So Jennie’s also one of the first people to raise her eyebrows at seeing Ruth and Dr. Kemp together. She’s also quite the gossip. Wolf describes Jennie by saying, “almost everyone who knew her agreed that a grain of flour was a whole cake, baked and iced, to Mrs. Lewis’s imagination.” I loved that line. And so basically, once Jennie starts to eyeball these two, she’s like a dog with a bone. She’s just not going to let it go.

KIM: Yeah. And then the family’s Jewishness also comes up when Ruth, who is an avid theater-lover, goes to see a production of “The Merchant of Venice.” She’s been waiting to see how the character of Shylock is interpreted and she’s incredibly moved by the performance. For her the play hinges on this character, and at the same time I’d say she’s fairly disgusted by the character of Shylock’s daughter, Jessica. Sarah, how do you think this play ties in with the overall story Wolf’s trying to tell?

SARAH: Well, I think that the primary way the play is used is that it's about loyalty or disloyalty between, you know, a Jewish daughter and her father in this hostile world. So it sets up the conflict that comes later on when Ruth's father, who is a wonderful character, opposes the idea of her marrying Dr. Kemp. And Ruth really feels that it's important to be loyal to her father, whereas Jessica runs away from her father, steals his money and converts and marries a Christian. So I think that's sort of the obvious setup there. “The Merchant of Venice” is such a tricky play it; it's really hard to argue that it's not like a virulently antisemitic play that's been used for, you know, centuries and centuries to justify antisemitism. And then there's also ... there's one or two moments where the character becomes so sympathetic (the character of Shylock) and a lot depends on the portrayal of it. And I think it's interesting that Wolf kind of picked up on that, you know, even back then, that she opened the chapter about “Merchant of Venice” by saying, you know, Ruth had seen various portrayals of Shylock that turned him into this greedy, horrible character and sort of a pathetic character and that this one was the one where she just saw him as so sad and sympathetic and grieving his daughter throughout the whole play, and she just can't think of anything but how sorry she feels for him. I think that's done to really, you know, draw out both her sympathy with her own father, her sympathetic tendencies as a character in general, her compassion, and also her ultimate loyalty to being Jewish, which is kind of what gets tested by her love of Dr. Kemp.

AMY: There’s an anecdote from an interview Wolf did in an 1901 with The San Francisco Examiner where she credited a grammar school teacher (Yay, teachers!) for helping influence her writing. She said the teacher had critiqued her tendency to use “superfluous language” in her composition, and apparently, the teacher said, “Emma, your balconies are bigger than your houses.” Such a great way to explain what’s wrong there. She noted that “Ever since, I have tried to avoid verbiage.” Do you think we see that restraint on display in this book?

SARAH: I think so. I think her style reminds me a lot of Wharton's in that there is a restraint. Like the opening passage of the book, on the whole, has a bit of flowery description, but I think she has these sort of one-liners like the one you mentioned, about the gossipy cousin and, you know, “every grain of flour was a whole cake” that are just really like, really get to the point, in a very succinct way, that are really a pleasure to read. So I think her writing style is very accessible and not dated for the most part, which is so nice to discover when I read it. You know, she's not describing them going to synagogue or celebrating the holidays, but she does have these little lines where she kind of pinpoints her social worlds in a really nice way. One of the things that I learned, also, from the piece that Josh Lambert wrote for Lilith about Emma Wolf was that there was this trend of writing that was called at the time, quote, unquote, “ghetto realism,” which was about these immigrant families, you know, squashed together in tenements on the Lower East Side. And they were kind of potboiler-y and, you know, a little bit othering, and full of stereotypes, you know, although there's some good writing to be found, of course, in all these genres, and good stories, but that those early plays and books have influenced actually a lot of more serious Jewish writing that came from there, and that they're, you know, there's this idea (especially until Philip Roth, maybe any of those guys came along) that the quote-unquote, “real Jewish novel” describes these kind of hard luck difficult, more sordid, more dramatic, more tragic scenes, in a specific area of the country, a specific milieu of the newly arrived, immigrant kind of clashing. What makes Emma Wolf's work so interesting is that it's, like we've said so many times now, there's really no difference between Emma Wolf's Jews and what someone might write about, you know, any other group of well-heeled people living in the United States at the time, and that, you know, there are a few different things like, they have different holidays, and they go to their services and their own social clubs, but otherwise, they have no different characteristics. In fact, when Dr. Kemp, when he tries to throw a stereotype out, Ruth, (and Emma) will correct him and say, “Look, we're not really that different. And, you know, in the areas where Jews haven't achieved as much as Christians is because we haven't been given the chance.” And she kind of leaves him speechless with that story. So it is really different from other Jewish literature, and that's why it's kind of its own branch.

AMY: And if anybody's listened to our previous episode on Amy Levy, I think Emma Wolf's is much lighter.

KIM: Yes. I feel like Emma wolf is more “Jane Austen,” and Amy Levy is more “George Eliot.” 

AMY: Oh, yeah, that’s actually a really good way to put it.

KIM: It's a great read, but it's not dark, or maybe as existential as Amy Levy.

AMY: There is another ... when you were talking about some of the other American Jewish writers who are writing more about the “ghetto,” one that comes to mind that is also on our list for a future episode at some point is named Anzia Yezierska. I think I saw in Joshua's article, he might have mentioned that in America, you weren't going to have a ton of super wealthy Jewish people at this time period. They're going to probably identify more with Anzia Yezierska’s books…

SARAH: Yes, yes. 

AMY: … than with Emma Wolf's books. At the same time, though, I do think there would be some sort of enjoying that aspirational, you know, seeing a wealthy Jewish family. I don't know. So it's interesting.

SARAH: Yeah, it's really interesting. And what Josh points out is how a lot of these debates that Wolf brings up in her work are super relevant today, especially maybe like one generation ago, but still today. I mean, intermarriage is still a hot topic, particularly, you know, in terms of having children. And there are still some people out there who think that, you know, intermarrying is a slow betrayal of Jewish peoplehood. I've done all this writing and read all this writing about organizations like Birthright Israel and these other Jewish youth groups that are basically existing to foster marriage between Jews so that they'll have Jewish babies, and that is, you know, partly an effect of the Holocaust. So it's different in that sense, from what Wolf's writing about, which is just about, you know, early assimilation and prejudice and antisemitism. And this is more of a response to a genocide, but it's still there. And this whole concept of: we will go to parties with our Christian friends, we will socialize with them, we will be friends with them, we will visit them, but we're not going to ever go to church with them and we're not going to mix our families together by getting married -- is very, very relevant today still, in a way that it probably wasn't relevant when it was published. just fascinating.

KIM: Oh, wow! Yeah.

AMY: Like we said, that's the crux of the problem. Once Ruth and “Dr. Hottie” finally acknowledge their feelings for one another, the only thing that's left to complete their happiness is to get her father's permission to marry. And Dr. Kemp and Ruth's father have been great friends for a very long time. And even though Ruth's dad had encouraged her to spend a lot of time with the doctor when he thought it was like an innocent, platonic thing, he is dismayed to discover that they've fallen in love.

KIM: The naivete!

AMY: How could it have happened?!! [laughing] And he's such a kind man, so as the reader, you have nothing but respect for him. I mean, it breaks his heart, but he explains why he cannot in good conscience consent to the marriage. And he does talk some common sense, I think.

SARAH: You know what it kind of reminded me of? (And I know we're doing lots of fun literary references) but it almost reminded me of when Jane Eyre finds out that Rochester has another wife, and he proposes that they just go away and live together in a foreign country without getting married. And she says it would be great at first, but it would wither because we're living a lie, and we can't really ever come home or be welcomed in polite society. And you wouldn't, we would basically lose our love for each other, and our respect for each other. And I think that that's not exactly what Mr. Levice is saying, but he's saying that if you become social outcasts and you have nowhere that you belong and you face all these pressures, because of your marriage, on both sides, it's going to make things really difficult for you as a young couple. Every decision is going to be fraught. And you know, you may not find the social welcome that you expect. And how can a young marriage (even if there's a lot of love) kind of stand on its own that way without a social world to embrace it? He's warning them that they may not be able to withstand that. And it's it's very real, I think.

AMY: Yeah, heartbreaking. You’re rooting for them, but everything he’s saying rings true.

KIM: Yeah. It's not like “Romeo and Juliet,” where it's just mean. He is trying to do what he thinks is best for her. It's pure-hearted. So Ruth is forced to decide between the man she's in love with and respecting the father, whom she completely adores. She knows that if she were to break her father's heart, she could never be truly happy married to Dr. Kemp. It's really heartbreaking, but is a non-starter for Ruth. She just can't do that to her father.

AMY: Yes, and there are a few more twists to the story en route to the ending (and we’re not going to spoil it), but I don’t think Wolf sugarcoats this debate at all on interfaith marriage. The answers are not simple. And they’re (like you said), they’re still not simple even today.

SARAH: And that's, in some ways, why it reminds me so much of Wharton. Because Wharton did such a good job of (in all her books) of juxtaposing the love, or the feelings that our characters have with the reality of a very hostile society. And, I think, you know, if I were to critique Wolf’s writing at all, I would say that I wish that we could see more of that. You have Jennie, and you have some of the gossiping eyes on Ruth and Dr. Kemp, but I was craving more of like both of their social worlds. Like, it would have been great if Ruth had gone somewhere with Dr. Kemp and experienced some antisemitism, or, you know, if Dr. Kemp was uncomfortable at a Jewish function, and you got to really see what Ruth's father was saying, because you know, it's there. 

KIM: Yeah.

SARAH: You're kind of filling in the blanks as a reader, but yeah, I mean, I think there's this essential dilemma here where some happiness is going to get lost either way. I think the question is what happiness is it?

KIM: Yes. So with respect to Emma Wolf, not everyone in the Jewish community was complimentary of this book. Some people accused her of breaking with her ancestral religion and undermining her faith. But when the novel was reprinted (and that was in 1916), Emma Wolf wrote a foreword to the book in which she said “The humanest love knows no sect.” (Also, we should note that members of Emma’s own family married outside their faith, including her sister, Alice. So she was maybe writing from some personal experience). Was there anything else that really struck you about this novel that we maybe haven’t mentioned yet?

SARAH: You know, I think we've mentioned most of what really struck me, which was, again, how fresh the writing is, how palpable the romance is, and how real the dilemma is. It talks about, you know, there are elements of it that are a little bit dated. But I mean, I know everyone in my family is always like, “I wish Jane Austen had written another book,” or “I wish there were even more in print Edith Whartons.” I mean, we all buy out-of-print Edith Wharton novels to read when we're feeling a particular craving, and it's amazing to come across this writer who is writing in that vein, and and maybe it's not quite as masterful as those writers, but it has a lot of the elements that make them pleasurable to read, and thought provoking. It's just a great find.

AMY: Yeah, it's very satisfying. And like you said earlier, it feels like a modern novel, too. 

SARAH: Yep.

AMY: Wolf did not always write about Jewish themes in her books, but she does have another novel, Heirs of Yesteryear [ed: Yesterday], which is about a young Jewish man who attempts to pass as gentile in order to further his social and professional advancement in the world. That one was just reissued last fall with an introduction by those two scholars I mentioned at the top of the episode (Cantalupo and Harrison-Kahan). And I actually purchased that one after reading Other Things Being Equal, because I just really enjoyed the first book, so I want to read more. I will point out also that Heirs of Yesteryear [ed: Yesterday]  was turned down by the main Jewish publishing company in America, they didn't want to have anything to do with it. 

KIM: Why? 

AMY: Because it's too controversial. They wanted books that, you know, were just all positive. They didn't want to even go there. I think,

KIM: Sarah, are there other books that you recommend that we read? Is there, like, a second book that you think we should read next by her or...

SARAH: I think Heirs of Yesterday is the other one that…

AMY: Oh, is it Heirs of Yesterday? Did I say it wrong?

SARAH: Yeah. I haven’t read that one yet.

AMY: It seems like that’s her other major title that you want to turn to next, for sure.

KIM: Okay.

SARAH: And I think just to go back to what you were saying before, that the publishing house ... she did find was a small Chicago publisher that actually ended up publishing pioneering works of Black and Asian American literature. So it was sort of, I think, a publishing house that was open minded.

KIM: That’s so interesting, wow. Yeah, we should look into that more.

AMY: So Emma also had started up an epistolary friendship with a Jewish writer from England named Israel Zangwill. (He was nicknamed “the Dickens of the Ghetto” so he was kind of a big name in England and America.) They never met in person, however, Wolf initiated a correspondence by sending him one of her other novels and he responded, “I am so accustomed to getting bad books sent to me that it was an added pleasure to find a gift one could be sincerely grateful for.” I love his honesty there. I mean, that just goes to show … sounds like he’s a pretty blunt guy and he seems to have liked it.) And in that same letter he goes on to compare her work to that of Emma Lazarus, as we mentioned at the top of the show.

KIM: Right. And then for the last 15 years of her life, Emma Wolf was basically confined to her room in a wheelchair. She died at the age of 67. You know, we compare things to Jane Austen and say, you know, maybe it's not quite as good as Jane Austen, but we're talking about Jane Austen. I mean, this is a wonderful book that's very much worth reading and better than a lot of things out there. 

SARAH: Absolutely.

KIM: So highly recommended by all of us to read this.

AMY: All right, so Sarah, thank you so much for dropping by to talk about it with us…it was so good to reconnect with you!

KIM: Absolutely!

SARAH: I agree. I was thrilled that you guys reached out. So thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. 

KIM: Anytime. Sarah, you’re the best. 

SARAH: Take care!

AMY: That’s all for today’s episode. We’ll be back next week with an episode all about the children’s book author Dare Wright. I’m so excited for this one; her life story is absolutely fascinating so you don’t want to miss this one!

KIM: Yes, I’m so excited for this, too. And to keep on top of all our upcoming episodes, be sure to go to lostladiesoflit.com and subscribe to our monthly newsletters. And keep those five-star reviews coming! We love them. Thanks so much for listening, everybody!

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

52. It’s Our One-Year Anniversary Episode!

KIM: Hey, everybody! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host and writing partner Amy Helmes, and Amy, we really should be busting out the cake and champagne for this week’s episode, because we’ve officially made it to our 52nd episode! How did that happen?

AMY: I don’t know! Yeah, you guys, it’s our one-year anniversary, and cake and champagne does sound good — but I’m also thinking maybe we should be toasting with a Dubonnais Cassis, remember that? It was the cocktail we were drinking in our very first episode — and it was also the drink preference of Mary, the heroine of Monica Dickens’ novel, Mariana.

KIM: Oh my god… I’m thinking back to recording that first episode. We were kind of hot messes, weren’t we?

AMY: Yeah. I remember, I guess I had read somewhere that it was best to record in a closet, so I was cramped up in my daughter Julia’s closet, sitting on the floor balancing the cocktail and my laptop and feeling like a complete idiot trying to sound interesting, but yet informed and casually clever. I was maybe trying too hard.

KIM: I feel like there was definitely some imposter syndrome going on. I definitely was feeling that I was like, “do we know what we’re doing? WHAT THE HELL ARE WE DOING?” 

AMY: Yeah, which, that notion was only confirmed for the second episode, because we basically wound up scrapping the whole thing and starting over from scratch when we realized how awful it was.

KIM: Yes, but just taking that first leap of faith was a huge victory. It’s all a process, and I think (at least I hope… okay, I know) we’ve improved over time, right? 

AMY: Yeah, I think so. I think we found our groove, but it was not without its record-scratch, laugh-out-loud moments along the way, you guys.

KIM: Right? I mean, that’s actually part of the reason we do it! We’ve had a lot of laughs, and we thought it would be fun to share with you guys some of the more hilarious outtakes over the past year. I think we’ve got a little montage here that Amy managed to put together. She’s amazing. Let’s roll it.

[montage plays]

KIM: Oh my god. Well, you can’t say we haven’t had fun, right? And also, by the way, I just want to note: we started this during the pandemic.

AMY: So yeah, we needed those laughs, man! We needed all the laughter we could get! So yeah, there’s so much more audio of us cracking up, most of which never makes it into the episodes… and okay, Kim, I’ve been saving this one for this episode. If we’re talking about anecdotes that made us laugh, I really think we have to mention the one from early on where you didn’t reveal until the very end of our recording that you’d been besieged during the course of conversation. Let’s roll that audio:

[recording plays]

KIM: If you didn’t quite follow that, I was dealing with a termite issue at my house around that time and so during the recording termites were literally falling out of the ceiling and landing on me! But I tried to play it really cool until the end, when I just couldn’t take it anymore.

AMY: We didn’t even have a guest on for that episode, so you could have, like, interrupted, I think.

KIM: I was being a professional! I took this very seriously, Amy!

AMY: “It’s raining termites! Hallelujah!” Yeah, there's also another episode.. It was during the World Series last summer. My whole family was upstairs cheering it on. I couldn’t not allow them to watch a World Series game, but we needed to record an episode. And then, so in the middle of our recording when the Dodgers hit a home run, there were screams, so we had to pause. 

KIM: I remember that, too. I mean, nothing stops us from the pod! There was that time that my dear neighbor next door decided to start legit sawing lumber during the middle of a recording! That was interesting. And loud. 

AMY: Yeah, it was like, “How are we going to make this work?” 

KIM: Yeah, “Let’s just keep going and see what happens.”

AMY: And we did. Somehow, miraculously, the sawing happened in between our talking so we were able to edit it out, which was great. But we’ve also had to cross fingers that babies stayed sleeping during our recordings (both yours, Kim, and those of our guests.) 

KIM: Yeah, and sometimes our guests’ “babies” are more vocal than others. Do you have that outtake I’m thinking of? 

AMY: Yeah, let’s roll it:

[recording plays]

KIM: That was a cameo from our interview with Dr. Melissa Homestead about Edith Lewis. Her basset hounds wanted in on the action, and they would not give up. 

AMY: They had some strong feelings about lost ladies! They wanted to get a word in edgewise! So, basically, to help with sound-proofing (I’m no longer in my daughter’s little tiny closet) but I did build a pillow-and-blanket fort in my home office so that it sort of dampens the echoes, and that often has mixed results. So, listeners, thank you for sticking with us through our occasional sound issues this year…

KIM: Yeah, I just want to say, Amy, thank you for being an incredible editor. (Amy edits our episodes, and she’s amazing and so patient.) And thank you, our listeners for your kind words and your five-star reviews -- it really gives us the motivation to keep churning out new episodes each week. I feel like we’re really getting to know so many of you, and that’s been one of the best parts about this project. 

AMY: Yeah, every time we hear from you, it really makes our week; we get so excited. Although, there’s one review that took our average from five stars down to 4.9, but it’s kind of awesome, so I’ve got to share it. One listener wrote: “Maybe it’s an age thing (I’m 70), but if I want to listen to a couple of adolescents giggling over the cool books they have just read, I’ll ride the crosstown bus.” [sings: “Forever young! I want to be forever young….”!!!] Thank you, Mildred, wherever you are! That makes me feel really good to be compared to an adolescent because I’m nowhere near that.

KIM: I sort of want to wear that one like a badge of honor. And by the way, I do still feel like I’m 14, so maybe she’s not all wrong, and I’m okay with that. But all right, so we’re thanking people right now, and I think we have to put our husbands, Eric (my husband) and Mike (Amy’s husband) at the tippy-top of that list. 

AMY: 100 percent. You guys (I know they listen — my husband listens, which is amazing, because he’s not anything like any kind of English major that would be super into this, but he listens to every single episode. He’s so supportive. They both are.). And if they’re not on child-care duty while we’re recording, then they’re tip-toeing around the house like cat burglars trying not to make a sound. We totally adore you guys for it, thank you so much.

KIM: Yeah, I just want to say Eric, oftentimes, is out in the backyard. Literally, the backyard, until I remember that we’re doing and call him back in. Sometimes I forget! Anyway, since you mentioned kids, too, I’m remembering, Amy, how great it was to have Julia be our guest. She read Nathalia Crane’s poetry last December, and I love it..

AMY: Oh my gosh, she’s growing up so fast, but at the same time, she’s still got that squeaky little kid voice that just melts me. So let’s just roll a snippet of that cuteness.

[recording plays]

AMY: Isn’t she the cutest?

KIM: Yeah, completely.

AMY: And also, considering my son, Jack, is the world’s pickiest eater, he made a valiant effort for episode 33. He had to sample some of the recipes I cooked from Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book. Now we just have to figure out some way, Kim, to get your Cleo on the mic, right?

KIM: Yeah, totally. I would love that… I’m thinking we could do a Lost Lady picture book at some point. I mean, there’s got to be, you know, some “lost” version of things like Goodnight, Moon, or something. 

AMY: Yeah, so Cleo would be our youngest guest to date… we have to get her in here. But I mean, speaking of guests — I know we say this all the time to each other, but I am so completely in awe of all of the scholars and writers and critics who have swung by the podcast to help enlighten us this year.

KIM: Yeah, we need a whole hour to gush over them all, but yes, I’m kind of on a natural high when we get to speak with them, and it’s beyond anything I ever expected. But I do think we should give a special shout-out to our VERY FIRST guest (if you’re listening to this) Dr. Anne Boyd Rioux… She graciously accepted our invitation to come on the podcast without knowing much about us. This was BEFORE we launched, so she was coming in blind, not knowing whether we were even competent or (to quote Mildred) a couple of giggling adolescents. But she was amazing!

AMY: Yeah, she was so lovely, and she really put us at ease and that helped set the tone for every interview that followed, I think. Anne, thank you again! 

KIM: Yeah, I mean.. And also, I just want to add just the incredible thought that our guests have put into every conversation is what, I feel, makes this podcast really special. So again, thank you to ALL of our incredible guests. I pinch myself every day knowing how lucky we are to get to have a weekly gabfest with some of the most intelligent minds around. We’ve met some wonderful people and made some amazing connections, too. It’s basically been a dream. I really do have to pinch myself.

AMY: And let’s not forget we’ve also gotten to “meet,” in a sense, all of these incredible women authors that we’d never heard of and had never read before. It truly has been like discovering buried treasure. And we’ve really lucked out with all the books we’ve chosen, right? I mean, basically, there’s not been one book that we haven’t loved pretty much. I was expecting maybe there’d be a dud here and there, but so far, no! And ever since we started this project, we just keep finding more and more writers to add to our list, including ones suggested by you, our listeners, which is great.

KIM: Yeah, we literally have a list with hundreds of future authors to tackle, and that’s not hyperbole — we really do. It’s almost shocking (it is shocking, honestly) to realize just how many forgotten women writers are out there, and we’re excited (and it means a lot to both of us) to keep introducing them to you. 

AMY: And we’ve also got some exciting extras in the works for you all as we head into our second year. So not to be too mysterious, but we will be revealing a little bit more about that in the months to come. 

KIM: I know; I’m so excited for that. But first things first; we’ve got another guest coming our way next week. Writer Sara Seltzer (who is also executive editor at Lilith magazine and a longtime online friend of ours -- years and years) joins us for a discussion of Emma Wolf and her 1892 novel called Other Things Being Equal. It’s an interfaith love story set in San Francisco. It was incredibly popular and Emma Wolf was very well-thought-of in her day, so it’s very much worth your time to listen to this one.

AMY: And everybody… just, thanks for tuning in, again. We had a blast this year, and we hope that you guys continue to come along on the ride with us. We’ll see you next week!

KIM: Yes, we love you guys. 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.

51. Rosamond Lehmann — Dusty Answer with Lucy Scholes

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

KIM ASKEW: And I’m Kim Askew, and actually, dusty is the operative word today, because we’re going to be discussing Rosamond Lehmann’s debut novel Dusty Answer — it’s a book that caused quite a scandal in its day and had lovelorn ladies of the world feeling seen.

AMY: Dusty Answer was ridiculously popular, you guys, when it was published in 1927, but it also had its fair share of vocal detractors. The book was seen as having a corrupting influence on young people, and Lehmann, herself, said that it was discussed and reviewed as if it was the “outpourings of a sex maniac.”

KIM: Haha. Honestly, that’s like the best sales pitch ever. I mean, come on. 

AMY: Yes.

KIM: But there’s really so much more to this book than just the “naughty bits” (which, frankly, by today’s standards are, as you can imagine, pretty tame.) At the time, a reviewer for The New York Herald Tribune said Dusty Answer gave him “more pleasure than the work of any living English novelist save Virginia Woolf, George Moore and E.M. Forster.” 

AMY: And the distinguished poet and critic Alfred Noyes, in a review of the book for The Sunday Times, wrote: “It is the kind of novel that might have been written by Keats if Keats had been a young novelist of today.” 

KIM: Wow, that’s high praise, and I think, actually, in a lot of ways, accurate. And speaking of high praise, we’ve got a guest today whom Amy and I greatly admire, and we cannot wait to introduce her — so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

KIM: Okay, so if Amy and I are the incoming freshmen in the pursuit of forgotten women writers, our guest today, Lucy Scholes, is the totally cool senior that we hope will talk to us in the hallway. 

AMY: Yeah, that’s a perfect metaphor right now because we’re recording this, basically, right around “back to school” time. So we definitely had a “we’re not worthy!” moment when she agreed to join us for an episode. Lucy is a London-based critic who writes for The Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, The Financial Times, The New York Review of Books and Literary Hub, among others. But (this is the coolest part) she also exhumes out-of-print and forgotten books for her monthly “Re-Covered” column in The Paris Review.  

KIM: Yes, we are huge fans of her column. And in addition to all that, she hosts “Ourshelves” — it’s the official podcast of our favorite Virago Books. Every two weeks you can find Lucy interviewing big names in the literary world, talking to them about their own favorite books, music, TV shows and more. We highly recommend you go check out that podcast. But today, Lucy gets to be on the other side of the interview table, and we are excited to talk with her about Rosamond Lehmann. Lucy, welcome to the show!

LUCY SCHOLES: Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm having my own “I am not worthy” moment after such a generous introduction. So thank you. It's great to be here.

KIM: You suggested we tackle Dusty Answer today, which was perfect, Lucy, because Amy and I hadn’t ever read it. When and how did you first discover it, and what was your response to it?

LUCY: Well, I think Dusty Answer was the first of Rosamond Lehmann's novels that I read, which is apt considering it was her debut. And I came across it first as an undergraduate quite a long time ago now (I won't say exactly how many years), but I remember being assigned it for a particular class that I was taking. And it was honestly like no other novel I'd read in an academic context at that stage. I mean, I’d read novels which I enjoyed and admired, and, you know, spent hours analyzing, but I had what I can only describe as quite a visceral response to Dusty Answer, in that I just sort of fell in love with it the same way that maybe I'd fallen in love with certain books as a teenager or as a young adult, you know, reading them as a child. And I just can't really describe it any other way. I fell in love with this book, but at the same time, I think I was quite fascinated by the way that Lehmann plays with ideas of fantasy and desire in the text. So there was something else there going on beneath the surface. And I know that it's one of her books that is beloved by many of her readers, but also, there are some Lehmann fans who do you think of it as being her sort of “juvenile” work, you know, because it was the first novel; that it's overly romantic. And actually, I think there's something that's quite clever there beneath the surface that not everyone sees.

KIM: I love it, and I can't wait to get into it more with you. So Rosamond Lehmann was born at home in the village of Bourne End in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1901. And she was born in the midst of a thunderstorm, no less! Her mother, Alice, was an American who hailed from New England. She met and fell for Rosamond’s father, an Englishman named Rudolph, when he was visiting the States. Rudy, as he was known, was a world-class authority on rowing (that was his number-one passion in life), but he also worked as a newspaper editor and he wrote these whimsical poems like “An Ode to the Brussels Sprout” for Punch magazine. He also was a member of parliament for four years.

AMY: “An Ode to the Brussels Sprout”... he sounds like a fun guy. And based on some anecdotes I read, it sounds like he was a fun dad, like, really creative, kind of whimsical, but I think he could also be temperamental — so kind of ran hot and cold with his own family. That said, he was really instrumental in encouraging (and critiquing) Rosamond’s writing when she was a child. 

KIM: Yeah, and, actually, he had portraits of Wilkie Collins and Robert Browning in his library that were painted by his great-uncle. His own parents hobnobbed with a number of literary greats, including Charles Dickens. And as a little girl, Rosamond (or Rosie, as she was then called) was introduced to Georgina Hogarth — that was Dickens’s sister-in-law.

AMY: So we’re going to be explaining a bit more about Lehmann’s life as we go along in this episode, but I think her novel is a helpful tool in getting to know her, so let’s just pivot to that. Lucy — (of course we give this hard part to our guests) — would you mind giving our listeners a quick, spoiler-free rundown of what Dusty Answer is about?

LUCY: Yes. Well, it's a bildungsroman. It's a story of youthful disillusionment and doomed first love. Our heroine is Judith Earle. She's an only child who’s raised in relative luxury, but isolation, in a large house on the river in the English countryside, and her otherwise solitary childhood is punctuated by visits from the Fyfe cousins — four boys and a girl — or as Lehmann puts it, “mysterious and thrilling children who came and went, and were all cousins except two who were brothers, and all boys except one, who was a girl; and who dropped over the peach-tree wall into Judith’s garden with invitations to tea and hide-and-seek.” So the Fyfes’ grandmother lives at the house next door to Judith’s, and they're there most every holiday, come to stay with her. And Judith’s just completely enchanted by these other children (some might even describe her as obsessed with them) and they occupy both her fantasies and, as she grows up, increasingly her reality, too, as she becomes entangled with each of them in turn. And the book is broken down into five parts. The first deals with memories of her childhood. In the second part, she is now eighteen, and the cousins have returned to the house next door after a few years during which they didn't visit. So she's very excited about the return. The third part then concerns Judith’s three years as a student at Cambridge. And the fourth part then covers her relationships with the Fyfes now they're all grown young adults, I suppose, at this point. And then the fifth part of the novel provides us with a summing-up as Judith now embarks on life as an adult — older, and perhaps we might say a little wiser, too.

KIM: That was great! And Dusty Answer is actually autobiographical, to an extent. Lucy, can you shed light on that a little bit, especially as it relates to Part 1 of the book? Where do things line up when comparing Lehmann’s earlier life and that of her heroine, Judith?

LUCY: Well, I think Judith’s childhood clearly draws on Lehmann’s own. So the big house by the river is very much like Fieldhead, the house in Buckinghamshire where Lehmann enjoyed her childhood. And there were lots of outdoor activities; swimming and rowing on the river. And her biographer, Selina Hastings, describes this house as “a paradise for children.” And this is something that Lehmann later looked back on with nostalgia, as a sort of “lost Eden.” I think this explains the potency of this first section of the novel. And indeed, after reading the novel, one of Lehmann’s sisters, Helen, wrote to Rosamond declaring “all the dear dead things of our childhood carried in that first part had touched me beyond words.” So there's clearly a lot of truth there in terms of what their childhood was like. There was also a particular family who lived close by (the Desboroughs) in a large house called Taplow Court. And these looked to have loosely inspired the fictional Fyfes slightly. But most importantly, one of the big differences is that Lehman was not an only child like Judith, but she did idolize her father in a way that's quite reminiscent of Judith’s own relationship with her father in the book, who's also a writer. So I think it's probably worth mentioning that the parental figures in Dusty Answer (both Judith’s and those of the cousins next door), they are sort of wispy, barely-there figures. They drift in and out of the story, but they don't figure in a particularly important way. And in this, Dusty Answer always makes me think about sort of wonderful childhood books, books for children in which parents are often kind of relegated to the sidelines of the story. You know, they don't play a big role in the kids’ imagination, therefore, they don't play a big role in the novel itself. And there's certainly a feeling of that here.

AMY: Right, that fairytale element or the Disney movie where you never see the parents.

LUCY: Yeah. 

AMY: And that ties into the sort of tone of the book, also, because, you know, the words that kept springing to mind for me as I read it were “pastoral,” “enchanted,” “halcyon,” you know? There’s just sort of this vibe that it’s a magical place. It’s a magical otherworld — especially this childhood section. 

LUCY: Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. It has that feel, and I I think, for me, I love, in particular, how the beauty of the cousins and the way that Judith describes them somehow becomes just a sort of another element of the beauty of this idyllic, rural landscape. I have a little section to read here, if I may. This is from the first part. “It was the autumn, and soon the lawn had a chill smoke-blue mist on it. All the blurred heavy garden was still as glass, bowed down, folded up into itself, deaf, dumb and blind with secrets. Under the mist the silky river lay flat and flawless, wanly shining. All the colours of sky and earth were thin ghosts of themselves: and on the air were the troubling bitter-sweet odours of decay. 

   When the children came from hiding in the bushes they looked all damp and tender, with a delicate glow in their faces, and wet lashes, and drops of wet on their hair. Their breath made mist in front of them. They were beautiful and mysterious like the evening.”

KIM: That’s gorgeous.

LUCY: So beautiful, and it also makes me think of, you know, that very famous line of Keats's in “To Autumn,” you know? “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” And obviously, that seems particularly apt, I think, because you mentioned the Sunday Times review of the novel that you know, you quoted the beginning of the show, talking about how it could have been written by Keats.

AMY: Exactly.

KIM: Dreams factor into the book quite often, too. Judith will sort of drift off into these imaginary reveries, which I really loved, and I know Amy did, too. What did you make of that?

LUCY: I think for me, Judith’s imagination is absolutely central to the story. So our first sort of conception of the five cousins has very little to do with their real life identities; we see them as Judith sees them, these people who have taken on this sort of larger-than-life role in her imagination. And if I can quote briefly from the novels, I think that sums it up better. She says, “In the long spaces of being alone which they only, at rarer and rarer intervals, broke, she had turned them over, fingered them so lovingly, explored them so curiously that, melting into the darkly-shining enchanted shadow-stuff of remembered childhood, they'd become well-nigh fantastic creatures.” And she's created this whole world in which she adores them all, you know? She wants them to adore her and she's sort of fallen in love with Charlie, the oldest boy, this beautiful golden-haired child, who she dreams of lying in bed with at night and mopping his fevered brow when he's sick. And she has such a wild imagination; it really carries her through. And I think this is something that's, you know, I guess a lot of lonely single children do this, you know, if you're an only child with not many people around, and she doesn't really have any other friends, you know? And so she's had to rely on her imagination, and she's become a sort of hopeless romantic. It's all entangled.

AMY: And at the same time, she’s awkward and shy around them; she finds them to be completely spellbinding. She thinks they exist on this higher plane of perfection, basically, and it kind of reminded me a little bit of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, you know, the cool kids that are in the book, these beautiful, perfect young people. But despite Judith’s being an awkward fan-girl around this clique of cousins, Lehmann writes: “One day they would all like her better than anyone else: even Roddy would tell her everything. Their lives, instead of being always remote and mysterious, would revolve intimately round her. She would know all, all about them.” So you’re like, “Ooh, how’s this going to work?” Like, “What is this change that’s going to happen?” She has really unique bonds with each of the cousins — the cousins are all very distinct in their own ways, and so as you said, she kind of loves them collectively in a sort of way, she’s obsessed with them as a group. But you’re also, as a reader, starting to wonder which of these Fyfe cousins she has a … Fyfe or Flyte? I’m getting them confused with Sebastian Flyte!

KIM: Oh, yeah.

LUCY: Actually, they have a very similar feel — a “Bridesheady” sort of feel to it.

AMY: Yeah. But anyway, you're wondering which of these Fyfe cousins is she going to ultimately become romantically entangled with. Because you can see how it's going to play out and it could go any number of ways.

KIM: Absolutely, for sure. And soon enough, though, these idyllic childhood summers are over and the cousins stop coming. Then at the very beginning of Part 2, there’s this passage I absolutely loved. Judith finds out the Fyfes are returning; they could show up at any time, and she goes down to the river for a skinny dip. It’s night time, and like all of the descriptions of nature, I thought this was just brimming with beauty and joy and sensuality: “...she dared not venture beyond the garden for fear of encountering them unexpectedly. Only the dark was safe; and night after sleepless night she jumped out of the kitchen window into the garden, and crossed the lawn’s pattern of long-tree shadows, sharp-cut upon the blank moon-blanched level of the grass. All the colours were drained away; only the white spring flowers in the border shone up with a glimmer as of phosphorus, and the budding tree-tops were picked out, line by cold line, in a thin and silvery wash of light. 

   She went dancingly down the garden, feeling moon-changed, powerful and elated; and paused at the river's edge. The water shone mildly as it flowed. She scanned it up and down; it was deserted utterly, it was hers alone. She took off her few clothes and stepped in, dipping rapidly; and the water slipped over her breasts, round her shoulders, covering all her body. The chill water wounded her; her breath came shudderingly, in great gasps; but after a moment, she started to swim vigorously downstream. It was exquisite joy to be naked in the water’s sharp clasp. In comparison, the happiness of swimming in a bathing suit was vulgar and contemptible. To swim by moonlight alone was a sacred and passionate mystery. The water was in love with her body. She gave herself to it with reluctance, and it embraced her bitterly. She endured it, soon she desired it; she was in love with it. Gradually its harshness was appeased, and it held her and caressed her gently in her motion.” Intense, right?

AMY: I was going to say, I’m glad you chose that little passage, because I think it perfectly kind of summarizes what this book is about, in some ways. You know, we talked about how brilliant she is at writing this sort of evocative, you know, descriptions of nature. And you see how her writing is so sensual here, and it seems perfect because the book is basically about a young woman's sexual awakening, in a lot of ways, right? 

LUCY: It is; it's very sensual. It's very, it's actually quite erotic and in a not particularly explicit way, but there's a real eroticism to quite a lot of the moments. And interestingly, probably a lot of the ones that … a lot of the moments where Judith is alone; it’s not necessarily eroticism with other partners. It's about her discovering her own sort of sense of sensuality, her own beauty, her own eroticism. And I love that; I find that incredibly moving.

KIM: It made me want to go skinny dipping.

LUCY: Exactly!

KIM: In England!

AMY: That would be one of your reveries, Kim, because I can’t imagine you actually doing it. But maybe. I don’t know.

KIM: Dare me! I’m going to the lake in a couple of weeks.

AMY: Prove it on Instagram. So anyway, as Part 2 continues, Judith … she’s still seeing the newly-returned Fyfe cousins periodically. And although, as a child, she’d been in love with the cousin named Charlie, he has tragically died in the First War. So now, Judith realizes she has fallen hopelessly in love with Roddy, one of the other boys. I think Lehmann is really gifted at writing flirtatious scenes, and so I was into this romance. What did you think of Roddy and Judith’s interaction, Lucy?

LUCY: Yeah, she's completely and utterly head-over-heels in love with him. But I think what I like is, it’s so hard to work out what he feels for her. He blows hot and cold, you know; one minute, he's quite attentive to her. The next he seems completely disinterested. And I'm always impressed by the way that Lehmann writes this confusion so believably; it's done so well, in a sense, because we have nothing but Judith’s own impressions to go on. We're never inside Roddy’s head, so we never really kind of get a sense of what's going on with him. And Judith’s own interpretation of the interactions are sort of, you know, unreliable, to say the least. But I think it's worth pointing out that although she has got a very active imagination, she's not a fool. She knows the difference between dreams and reality. In fact, if anything, she's so acutely aware that she's got this kind of very wild fantasy life, she can't begin to comprehend that some of the Fyfe cousins, you know, might have their own fantasies about her. But that's also getting ahead of ourselves a little bit here, so...

KIM: Yeah, it's interesting. I think that if I had read this when I was younger, I probably would have bought into the “Roddy” romance maybe a little bit more. Reading it from my perspective, I think I was a little more like, “Red flag! Red flag!” 

AMY: She feels they're destined to be together, so when you feel that it's written in the stars, she will take any little sign. 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: … as a signal that this is on, right? 

KIM: Absolutely. So in Part 3 Judith goes off to Girton College (that’s an all-girls school at Cambridge University) and there, she meets another character who takes on an almost-mythical status in Judith’s heart: a young woman named Jennifer. We understand right off the bat that this person is going to be somebody very special in Judith’s life. Lucy, would you care to read from the first scene in which Jennifer appears?

LUCY: Yes, so this is Judith...this is from Judith’s point of view. She sat at the wrong table in the dining hall on her first night at college. And so she is looking across the dining hall to the table where the other freshers are, where she should be sat: “That was where she should be humbly sitting, among those quieter heads, right at the end. There was a light there, flashing about: the tail of her eye had already caught it several times. She looked more closely. It was somebody fair head, so fiercely alive that it seemed delicately to light the air around it: a vivacious emphatic head, turning and nodding, below it a white neck and shoulder, generously modelled, leaned across the table. Then the face came round suddenly, all curves, the wide mouth laughing, warm-colored … It made you think of warm fruit, — peaches and nectarines mellowed in the sun. It seemed to look at Judith was sudden eager attention and then to smile. The eyes were meeting her own, inquiring deeply.

   “Who’s that?” said Judith excitedly, forgetful of her position. 

   “Oh, one of the freshers. I don't know her name.”

    Her name, her very name would be sure to have the sun on it. 

AMY: It's like, “MARIIIIIAAAAAAA…..” from West Side Story. That’s what I’m thinking of. Really quickly, I want to refer our listeners back to the episode we did on Amy Levy with Ann Kennedy Smith, because we talked a lot in that episode about Newnham college, which is also at Cambridge. So Girton was the other all-female college and I think Lehmann's description of what life was like there in the 1930s was really interesting. I just loved getting into that whole “boarding school” element and seeing the girls all together and they're drinking hot cocoa, you know, in the evenings and things like that. But getting back to Jennifer, we know that this book was considered scandalous in its day. You hear teases about the book, like, “Oh, it's got lesbians in it!” And really, the prospect didn't quite shock me because it seems like male homosexual encounters at universities were kind of prevalent in this era. (I'm thinking back to Brideshead Revisited, for example.) So I was just like, “Oh, okay, here we go,” you know, “they're going to fall in love or whatever.” Lehmann leaves it slightly nebulous in the book. But I will say that the two women are quite, quite close, and it's at least an intense infatuation. Lucy, what do you think we should make of this relationship between Judith and Jennifer in the book?

LUCY: Well, there are definite moments that do seem to imply that they're more than just good friends, as it were. There's a particularly famous moment in the book, a line that's often quoted. They're both bathing, skinny-dipping, again, together on an early summer's day in the river Cam. And Judith looks longingly and lovingly at Jennifer's kind of beautiful, naked body as she stands on the bank. And she says, “Glorious, glorious pagan that I adore!” whispered the voice in Judith that could never speak out. So that seems a fairly clear indication of some sort of same-sex desire. I mean, this line alone has spawned myriad academic papers on the hidden lesbianism in Dusty Answer, many of which I remember reading back in the day. And there is a convincing argument to be made for it. But I don't know, for me, I think Jennifer's gender has never really been here or there. I mean, she's absolutely another love object in this novel. But Judith is just bouncing from love object to love object as she goes through, you know? She's falling in love left, right and center. Whether she's actually sexually attracted to Jennifer seems of little consequence. And I don't know, I think we also need to think about the context of the area you're talking about. I think these sort of pashes and crushes were very typical of the era. A lot of, you know, young women, whether they're at school or at university, had them. But I don't know, I think a more fruitful way of thinking about it might be just that there's romance in the air throughout this entire book. So I'm not saying there isn't a sexual element to the relationship. But ultimately, they don't have an explicit sexual encounter. And I think we maybe need to trust Lehmann herself on this point, because she was quite shocked when readers wrote to her and complained about the lesbian romance in the book, you know. She had no idea that it was going to be read like this. (Well, that's what she claimed.) This is a very long-winded way of saying I'm not going to come down on one side or the other. I think we also need to think about the fact that Judith hasn't really had many attachments at all. She hasn't had many friendships, let alone sexual encounters. Everything about this is new to her, like falling in love with people is ... it seems to be what she's doing now, right? 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, before knowing about Lehmann’s life, it felt to me definitely like the girls were having a love affair that was passionate, even if it was mostly platonic — I mean those hairbrushing scenes were pretty intense. But as you said, Lehmann later insisted the characters in the book were all completely invented, you know, but she did attend Girton College. Considering it was an all-female college, it seems surprising that she would be so out of touch with lesbianisn that her husband apparently had to explain it to her. I don’t know if that’s true. But anyway, Lucy, what, if anything, about her time at Girton might parallel Lehmann’s real-life experiences?

LUCY: Well, she certainly experienced a very close intoxicating friendship with a fellow student, Grizel Buchanan. I think Lehmann described their relationship as a “very emotional friendship” and Grizel herself as a “temptation to everyone, like a particularly heady wine,” which, you know, reading between the lines again, right? But this was also the period in Lehmann's life in which she experienced her first heterosexual heartbreak. So she had a short-lived romance with a young man called David Keswick. And at the very end of her time at Cambridge, they went to a ball together one evening and danced together all night, and they'd been flirting for quite a long time before this. And he kissed her rather passionately. And because she was such an innocent, she sort of took this as a proposal of marriage and said to him, you know, “Write to me! Write to me!” He disappears off into the night, and then she finds out that he's actually engaged to somebody else. And she's heartbroken by this, you know, and this experience obviously feeds directly into what happens between Judith and Roddy in the novel.

KIM: Yeah, was it really just a kiss? 

AMY: Yes, that’s true.

KIM: So, Rosamond Lehmann was considered a great beauty of her day. Apparently T.S. Eliot said she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. (So this is something she recalled him saying, so who knows if that’s true, but she does look Hollywood gorgeous in the photos we saw of her online, and she did have a lot of men throwing themselves at her.

AMY: If anybody out there is contemplating, especially in this Covid era, just forgoing hair dye and letting your hair go its natural shade … she began to have her hair turned silver when she was very, very young, like in her early twenties. And by her mid forties, her hair was completely white. That was one of her, you know, signature features of her beauty basically, was this shock of white hair. So if you need any inspiration for embracing your gray, Rosamond Lehmann is your girl! So back to the Girton years, while she was at college Lehmann felt hopeless about finding her soulmate in the aftermath of WWI. And she even says, “as all the young men have been killed, I shall never marry.” She remembered thinking that.

KIM: Right and then it turns out a shortage of men was never really her problem. Instead, it was maybe the opposite.

AMY: Like her novel’s heroine, Lehmann was an incurable romantic, often to her own detriment. And we’ll get to all that shortly, but first, let’s get back to the novel. We have Judith connected at the hip to Jennifer, but I think we should also point out this other student at Girton, a character named Mabel. She’s kind of annoying, she’s a not-very attractive, hanger-on whom Judith finds to be a complete bore. She does not want to be saddled with this girl. So she's torn between trying to be polite, but also being like, “I don't want you hanging out with me!” I think there actually was a “version” of this young woman in Lehmann’s experience at Girton. But what I like about her inclusion in the novel is that it helps us see Judith’s petty side shine through, you know? She can be a mean girl. What do you think, Lucy?

LUCY: I think Judith is in no way perfect. In fact, by the end of the novel, I think most of the characters that she has been close to at one time or other have had to learn this about her in quite a hard way. You know, she gets her heart broken, but she breaks hearts too. And she's also very careless with other peoples’ feelings in the way that I think you know, probably a lot of us can be when we're young and don't think things through. 

KIM: For sure. After a heady two-year romance (or very intense friendship, however you choose to see it) with Jennifer, their relationship falls apart. Judith is badly shaken up by this, but still, in the back of her head, she has Roddy on the brain. 

AMY: And this takes us to Part 4 of the book, when they eventually meet up again, and it is on — or at least it seems to be on from Judith's point of view, to the extent that she allows Roddy to make love to her one night under a tree by the river’s edge. And the next morning, she writes him this blissful letter talking about how they’re going to be together now forever, and his response is basically: “I’m afraid you misunderstood me.”

KIM: It's gut-wrenching, even though you can see it coming. It's absolutely gut-wrenching. Yeah.

AMY: This in-person confrontation that they eventually have later that day is particularly agonizing. Lucy, how about you read us a small part of that exchange to kind of help drive home the misery?

LUCY: Yeah, the whole episode is unbearably awkward. He behaves like quite a thoughtless cad. But I think it's her wide-eyed innocence that’s sort of so heartbreaking. I said earlier that she's not foolish, and she really isn't; but she is naive. And I think what's so kind of torturous about this. We watch in real time as it sort of dawns on her just how unworldly she is. So Roddy says, “I'm afraid You've misunderstood me.” 

   “Yes, I've misunderstood you. You see, this sort of thing has never happened to me before and I thought ... when a person said … Why did you say ... I didn't know people said that without meaning it ... I suppose we must mean different things by it. That's what it is. Well…” Her voice was terrible: a little panting wine. 

   “I don't know what you mean.”

   Probably that was true: he had forgotten he had ever said: ‘I love you.’ She could not remind him; for In any case he would not be affected. What were three little words? … And after all, she had probably more or less forced him to say them: she had wanted to hear them so much, she had driven him to say them. Yes, he had groaned, and quickly repeated them to keep her quiet, stop her mouth so that he could go on kissing her. She said:

   “But, why, Roddy, why did you take me out ... behave as you did ... kiss me so — so ... I don't understand why you bothered … why you seemed…”

   He was silent. Oh God! If only he would wound and wound with clean thrusts of truth, instead of standing there mute, deaf.”

AMY: So she is so filled with shame, and at the same time, she’s trying to keep her dignity. I think the roller-coaster of emotions she endures (really throughout the book) is quite relatable to any woman who has lived to a certain age. I just kept thinking how much I could have used this book when I was in my twenties and pining away over total jerks. It’s just a reminder that love makes idiots of us all.

KIM: Yeah, I could have definitely been called naive a few times. Yeah, that was absolutely painful. It’ll take me a minute to recover.

AMY: You can totally understand why the book resonated with women, right?

KIM: Absolutely.

LUCY: Yeah. And I think this is what the readers felt. I mean, Lehmann was inundated with letters from female fans telling her that “this is my story!” There were people who wrote to her to vent their revulsion, too: “Before consigning your book to the flames,” wrote one woman who signed herself the Mother of Six, “I would wish to inform you of my disgust that anyone should pen such filth, especially a Miss.” (You know, the two ends of the spectrum there.) And I think, like you two, I absolutely identified with these parts. Like you said earlier, we've all experienced heartbreak that at the time feels as traumatic as this does. And Lehman is so brilliant at pinpointing that on the page, but I think perhaps also, more so than that element of the book, the thing I find most relatable and sort of always have is Judith’s longing to be seen by the cousins in that first section, when she realizes they're returning to the house next door for the first time. And her immediate reaction is a strange mixture of excitement and absolute fear. She's distinctly afraid that they won't remember her. If I may, just quote briefly: “She knew that, anyway, they would not remember so meticulously, so achingly has herself: people never did remember her so hard as she remembered them.” And these lines, I mean, they've stayed with me ever since I first read the book. These cousins are so important to her. And she's so utterly preoccupied by the fear that they might just not think of her with the sort of same affection and magnitude that she does. And I think, you know, this is what elevates the novel, what makes it, to me, more than just an evocative tale of first love, which it is, and beautifully done. But by the end of the book, we see that the tables have turned and that’s Judith herself, and the reader comes to finally understand that she has played a really large role in the Fyfes’ fantasy worlds, you know, as large as they've played in hers. But she just doesn't see it for such a long time.

AMY: You had mentioned that you read this book when you were an undergrad. 

LUCY: Mm-hmm.

AMY: So you were like, early twenties, basically, kind of Judith’s age. And I wonder if I would have read it somehow differently in my twenties. As I'm now reading in my forties, (I would have enjoyed it equally both ways) but I think in a very different way. And I'm wondering if reading it again now as you're a bit older has changed your perspective on it?

LUCY: Yeah, I think I must admit, I was actually quite frightened to go back to it again, because it made such a visceral impression on me the first time around. I was a bit worried that I'd go back to it for this — I hadn't read it since I first read it, I just knew I loved it — and I was worried that it would be sort of spoiled as an older woman going back to it now. But I still found it remarkably poignant, I think, and maybe that is because I still have the recollection of reading it the first time round. But I think that when I first read it, it definitely captured so many feelings. You know, the first love; this sense of these friendships, these incredibly kind of important friendships and relationships that you have with people, whether they're sexual or platonic, and the way that they become this huge part of your life. And that fear that maybe they don't think the same way about you and I can't quite get over how well Lehmann does that in this novel.

KIM: Yeah, and the self awareness to have, even when she's talking to Roddy, she wants him to say that he loves her. But she doesn't want him to say it if it isn't true, and she gets what's going on. And I thought that was so powerful to give that that complexity and that added layer that just makes it that much more intense.

AMY: It's like an elegy to youth. It's taking you back to this dreamy place when you were younger. And I think no matter what age you are, when you're reading it, it transports you back to that time period.

KIM: Yes, absolutely. So we don’t want to give away too much of the rest of the book, but after being used and tossed away by Roddy, Judith becomes a shell of the person she once was, and her involvement with the rest of the cousins becomes complicated as a result. 

AMY: Yeah, and then Lehmann’s real love life, as we said, was as up-and-down as Judith’s — even more so, in fact. So in the midst of her disastrous first marriage to a guy who was a total jerk, she fell madly in love with the man who would become her second husband (and with whom she’d have two children). But the bloom fell off that rose, and then she wound up taking up with the very married Cecil Day-Lewis (who is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis). And he was probably the great love of her life. But she was his mistress. And for almost a decade they were together until he ditched her for a younger woman. And that was just devastating to her. She never quite recovered. (And oddly enough, she even tried to form an alliance with Cecil’s first wife, the woman she first stole him from. She kind of like, met up with her and was like, “Hey, he's now dating this third woman. Do you and I want to sort of team up and make sure that doesn't happen?” And weirdly, the wife was sort of on board with it. But it got a little complicated.) But suffice to say it was all a little bit pathetic. She had some brief affairs with other men, including James Bond author Ian Fleming, and she even took one of her son's friends for a lover. He was 30 years younger than her at the time. So it goes on and on reading about her romantic exploits, and you sort of start to lose count of the number of lovers she had throughout her life and reading about it all. I just kept thinking, “What are you doing? Like, oh my gosh, just stop!” 

KIM: She wanted to keep falling in love. She seems like she was in love with the idea of love. What do you think, Lucy?  

LUCY: Yeah, I think absolutely. Like you say, none of her marriages or affairs lasted. Nevertheless, they were grand romances at the time, and she gave everything to each of them in turn. I also think her beauty (which you mentioned earlier) played quite a huge role in this. She clearly inspired grand passion in many men, and she responded to this passionately. She wanted to be desired. She loved being desired by the men. And in the biography, Selena Hastings explains that even when Lehmann was quite an elderly woman — long after she'd lost her figure and had become quite stout and her youthful allure had left her — she still behaved as if she was the great beauty in the room, always. And she still expected men to fall at her feet. Although you could argue there’s something rather sort of sad and tragic about this sort of refusal to accept reality, another part of me thinks kind of, “You go girl!” You know?

KIM: Yeah, absolutely!

LUCY: I think it's kind of admirable. It suggests an impressive degree of self worth, you know, that you could still act like you are this incredible beauty when you're actually quite an old, stout woman.

KIM: Isn't that what we're all supposed to be trying to do? Yeah, yeah. So we know that Lehmann hung out with the Bloomsbury set in the 1930s, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf… She was acquainted with so many illustrious writers of her day, (including Elizabeth Bowen, Dylan Thomas, T.S, Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Christopher Isherwood, Carson McCullers, Graham Greene...and countless more). 

AMY: Catch your breath. Catch your breath.

KIM: Yeah, no seriously. It’s surprising, then, that she sort of fell off the radar for many people. As I mentioned at the beginning, Amy and I had never read her. Any ideas about why she’s maybe not as remembered or as read as she should be? Or is that just something here in the States?

LUCY: Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. I mean, I think, you know, obviously, there's plenty of books or bestsellers that were once huge, that kind of fall off the radar as times change. And just because she was a bestseller in the ’20s doesn't mean that she was going to be read as much in the ’60s. But I also always wonder if it's something to do with her reputation as a romance novelist. There's definitely some snobbery going on there, I think. I mean, she certainly wrote about love. She wrote about romance, there's no question about that. But if she was described to me as only a romance novelist, I might very well not be interested in picking her work up, you know? (I can be a snob as much as the next person.) So I think that definitely has something to do with it. But you know, she does write about these topics, but she also writes about them in such a sort of truthful and beautiful way and also in a very innovative way. You mentioned the Bloomsbury connection, but like Woolf, she uses stream-of-consciousness technique, you know? She moves between interiority and exterior explication (sometimes in the space of a single paragraph) in such a kind of elegant and effortless way. Yet today, I think I'd be willing to bet that she's still mostly read for her subject matter, not for style, which I think is a bit of a travesty. I'm gonna acknowledge as well that she is better known here in the UK. She was the success story of the Virago Modern Classics in the 1980s. So when they were first launched as a series, they did two of her books: Invitation to the Waltz and The Weather in the Streets in 1981. And both of these, they each sold 20,000 copies, which is a huge amount, and that was in the space of three years only. I mean, any author would be happy to sell 20,000 copies, let alone as a reprint later in life. And she became, then, a sort of literary celebrity all over again. So she is known, but I think she has a certain reputation. Let's put it that way.

AMY: So you mentioned her other novels (I think she wrote eight in total, as well as some short story collections and an autobiography). I know some of her other books are considered to be even better than Dusty Answer, critically. Have you read anything else by her? Or are there any other novels she's written that you would like to read to check out?

LUCY: Yeah, I must admit that when I first read Dusty Answer and I fell for her, I fell so hard I immediately went out and bought everything else she'd ever written and read it. 

AMY: I love it!

KIM: I was completely enamored. And I will say, I, I do love Dusty Answer; I think it's a beautiful book. I think my favorite of hers is The Weather in the Streets, a novel that she wrote a bit later. And that is a book that (unlike Dusty Answer), I actually have read on multiple occasions. It is one of those books that I sort of come back to when I need a comfort read. And I mean that in the broadest sense of the term; it's not a particularly comforting novel in terms of ... so it's, it's another story of a kind of doomed love. This time our heroine is Olivia Curtis. She's a woman in her late twenties. She's living sort of on the Bohemian fringes of London in the 1930s. She's separated from her husband, and she embarks on an affair with a married man named Rollo, who grew up in a house; a sort of wealthier family near hers in the countryside. So there are some sort of similar elements with Dusty Answer there. And Invitation to the Waltz is the sort of precursor to The Weather in the Streets. It tells the story of Olivia Curtis's childhood, and a ball at which she first met Rollo. And I think those two ... my favorite is The Weather in the Streets. But I think those two are often seen as a sort of pinnacle of Lehmann’s work. So if anyone was looking to read something else after this, I would say go and read those two. 

AMY: That would be me. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: And I love the idea of you just becoming full-on obsessed, because I do that too. I just get in his zone and I am devouring it all. 

LUCY: Yeah.

AMY: Okay, so apparently, Lehmann turned down an offer for the film rights to Dusty Answer — her second husband convinced her it was a bad idea (which I think that was a bad idea). But a movie was going to be made of another one of her novels, The Ballad and The Source, but then that didn’t come to pass, as so often happens in Hollywood. A few of her other books did get adapted. Her novel The Echoing Grove became a 2002 film called The Heart of Me starring Paul Bettany and Helena Bonham Carter. And then The Weather in the Streets, which you mentioned, was made into an ’80s TV movie starring Joanna Lumley and Michael York. So maybe those are worth checking out. I don’t know if you’ve seen those, Lucy, but listeners, give us a shout-out if anybody’s seen that and if they’re worth watching.)

KIM: I can't believe I haven't seen The Heart of Me, because Helena Bonham Carter and Paul Bettany sounds like…

AMY: I know it sounds up our alley.

KIM: Yeah.

LUCY: I've seen that. I did actually quite like it. I went to try and find it again recently to rewatch for this as research. And, unfortunately, it’s not available here in the UK at the moment, so I don't know what's happened to it. But I remember thinking it was quite well done. That's another beautiful novel. I'd recommend them all. But you know, yeah.

KIM: Great, no, no… that’s fantastic. I will watch that, too. Maybe we’ll have an online viewing for that, Amy.

AMY: If we can find it.

KIM: Yeah, if it’s available here. What do we think of a Dusty Answer film or mini series? Would you want to see it? I would. What do you think?

LUCY: I’m going to kind of burst the bubble slightly and say, I'm not sure if it would ever be quite as poignant as the book, only because I think the book is, for me ... so much of the novel lies in the sort of shifting perspectives. And in the way that I think, like I mentioned earlier, Judith is sort of an unreliable narrator. (Not that she's trying to hide things, but it's only at the very end of the novel that we're sort of able to see her in the way that others see her: as this beautiful, accomplished, desirable object.) And she sees herself as something so different to that throughout. And I think that revelation is so important to the story. I don't know how you would do that in the film. It will be very obvious that she is beautiful and accomplished throughout. You’d have to have a wonderful actress playing her.

KIM: A “makeover moment!” [laughs]

LUCY: That’s the thing: it is a sort of “makeover” novel, but the reveal is in the words on the page rather than the image.

AMY: More subtle.

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: I think you'd also need a director and cinematographer who could capture the glory of that natural description. You know, the laying on the lawn smoking cigarettes languidly along the Thames — that dreamscape kind of thing.

LUCY: And also, that first section is so fragmentary. You know, we take that for granted in writing today, literary fiction, but again, I think it was relatively innovative at the time it was written. These fragments of recollections and memories of our childhood — to put that on the screen would be, it might be hard to do. I'm sure somebody could do it, but it wouldn't necessarily be straightforward.

AMY: Right. Speaking of “fragmented,” Lehmann got really into mysticism and the paranormal later in life after the tragic death of her daughter, Sally, who died unexpectedly in her twenties. I think it was probably a coping mechanism, but with the help of psychics, she claimed to be able to speak with Sally and other people from the beyond, including her old pal, Virginia Woolf. Her friends and family were naturally skeptical and very concerned, you know, thinking she’d had a break from reality. 

KIM: Yeah, I don’t know, the fact that she would commune with spirits almost seems fitting, when you think of the haunting mystical some of Dusty Answer is. At any rate, it did bring her a lot of solace and comfort before her ultimate death in 1990. What do you think Dusty Answer offers today’s reader, Lucy? What makes it worth reading or relevant?

LUCY: Well, I think I'm going to be annoyingly argumentative and suggest that I'm always wary of things being worth reading, because they're “relevant.” I think Dusty Answer is worth reading because it's, you know, the kind of book that consumes you like a fever dream while you read it. It's worth it for that alone. However, I think, you know, we've all mentioned that our own experiences of young love resonate in Judith’s experiences. And so it seems that it doesn't matter about the passing of time. The era might be different, you know, the context might be very different, but we've all experienced heartbreak and young love. And also ultimately, it is a novel about a very painful process of growing up. And so anyone who's experienced that at any point, I think, can also relate.

KIM: I would add to that the natural beauty, when you're stuck inside in a city … it's palpable. That feeling of nature and being outside in … I just found myself letting myself go into that world as I was reading it, and it felt very visceral.

AMY: Escapism. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah, it's perfect for that.

AMY: And now I'm definitely interested in going to read some more works by Rosamond Lehmann. And as always, Lucy, I'll be following your “Re-Covered” column for other buried classics like this that we can all check out. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been such a pleasure.

KIM: We can't thank you enough. We were both jumping up and down thrilled when you said yes. So thank you. 

LUCY: It’s been my pleasure entirely. I've had a great time getting to chat about this. And also, I owe you a great debt of thanks, because I think, like I said, I don't think I would have gone back to this novel if I hadn't had an impetus like this to go and read it. And it has been a pure pleasure to kind of slip back into Judith’s life again. So thank you both so much. I love the podcast, so it's a real pleasure to be on it. Brilliant. 

KIM: Thank you.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s podcast. We hope you share today’s book recommendation with all friends…

KIM: Yes, and while you’re at it, point them in the direction of our podcast and Lucy’s podcast for Virago. It’s called “Ourshelves”... And speaking of podcasts, Amy, can you believe it’s been almost ONE YEAR since we launched “Lost Ladies of Lit?”

AMY: I know! That’s crazy! It’s hard to believe, but actually, time flies when you’re reading great books and having fun.

KIM: Yep, that’s true. It’s been a blast.

AMY: So anyway, next week we’re going to look back at all the bloopers and “best of” moments from the past 12 months. It’s going to be a lot of fun. And also, just thank you to everyone who has made this podcast part of their weekly routine. We’re so thrilled to have you along for the ride.

KIM: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Until next week … bye, everyone!

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

50. Literary Sisters, Twisted & Otherwise

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

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. In our last episode, we discussed the first English novelist, Aphra Behn, and I’ll say it again, people: A WOMAN wrote the first English-language novel.

AMY: Woo-hoo! Yeah, I had been taught that it was Daniel DeFoe, but that said, this is a question that continues to be debated, and where you end up probably depends on what you consider to be a “novel.” (Some would argue that earlier works like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or even Malory’s Morte d’Arthur qualify.)

KIM: Yeah, I’m sure some people would say that, but I’m going to go with Behn! In any case, she was a ground-breaker, and in our last episode, we talked about her novella The History of the Nun: Or The Fair Vow-Breaker, which features two characters who are “sisters in Christ.”

AMY: Yeah, and before that, we introduced you guys to the Scottish sisters Jane and Mary Findlater and their novel Crossriggs, which features two sisters who had almost nothing in common.

KIM: And let’s not forget at the beginning of the month we talked to the creators of the “Let Genius Burn” podcast about Louisa May Alcott, and she probably created the most famous sisters in all of bookdom.

AMY: So if you’re sensing a theme here, we’ll go ahead and confirm it for you: we are talking “sisters in literature” today. So, Kim, I have two brothers, as you know, so naturally I’ve always idealized the idea of growing up with a sister, like you did. And I do feel like in some ways I missed out on that special brand of sibling camaraderie. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just kind of thinking back to Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy books, which we talked about with Sadie Stein, because that had this beautiful, boy-magnet older sister who was so supportive and so nice and so cool! I just felt like it would have been awesome to have Julia as your sister. 

KIM: Yes, it definitely would have. I probably can’t say that I was a sister as nice as Julia. But on the flip side of that, we’ve read a lot of books this year where the sisterly relationships are a LOT more complicated. I mean, think about the novel Anne by Constance Fenimore Woolson. (That was one of our first episodes). Anne’s half-sister, “Tita” is almost malicious -- she’s depicted as this sinister little devil. You just want to scream at some of the crap she pulled.

AMY: And then there are the sisters in Princess Marthe Bibesco’s The Green Parrot, which we discussed back in Episode 23. The girls’ relationship feels haunted and tragic, you know?

KIM: Absolutely. And I think there’s also some unsettling weirdness that abounds in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons. The sisters, Cassandra and Verity, in that book have an intense love-hate relationship. They kind of want to claw each other’s eyes out, but you also get the sense they’d defend each other to the death if it came to that. And I kind of get that sort of sibling feeling, I guess.

AMY: Yeah, I guess these books are kind of making me think maybe I’m good with brothers. Less drama! 

KIM: Yeah, I always wanted a brother, myself, just so I would… I felt like I would understand men more if I’d grown up with a brother. But don’t forget; I mean, even the March sisters fought, and they’re pretty perfect, right? And I actually have a sister, as you know, and I love the way those authors we talked about were able to show the complexities of the sister relationship. 

AMY: In thinking about famous sisters in literature, when you start trying to catalogue them, the ones who come to mind right off the bat were all written by women. You know, we have Alcott and her March sisters, obviously. Then there’s Jane Austen’s Bennett and Dashwood sisters. I also think of George Eliot’s Celia and Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch and then, you know, like Laura and Mary Ingalls (who are based on real-life, of course).

KIM: Right. And if we’re going to go dark again, there’s also Constance and Merricat from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And I’ve never read this, Amy, but there’s an Edith Wharton novella with two spinster sisters. It’s called The Bunner Sisters, and it sounds really dark. I’m adding that one to my reading list. And there’s a poem, “The Goblin Market,” by Christina Rosetti all about two sisters, Laura and Lizzy, which you’re very familiar with.

AMY: Yeah, that’s a poem all about the sacrifices sisters make for each other, and I’ll just recite the famous line from this poem having to do with sisters: “For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands.”

KIM: Sisters have each other’s backs; end of story. Of course we could come up with sisters in books written by men, too.[Shakespeare had a number of sisters … there’s obviously the “weird sisters” from Macbeth -- maybe they’re not actually sisters -- and then there’s the sisters in Atonement by Ian McEwan, and all the sisters in The Virgin Suicides… But I think you’re right… the ones that you immediately think of, that spring to mind, were created by women.

AMY: I have to wonder if women are just better at writing about this sort of relationship? I feel like it’s just a dynamic women would know well just by virtue of the fact that that are the ones in the relationship, but maybe also because historically, they would be in the sphere of the home and that’s not necessarily an arena that male writers would be as well-versed in or comfortable with examining on a deeper level. I think only the most astute men would be paying much attention to drama centered around the hearth, between women.

KIM: I think when men tend to write about sisters, it has more of a mysterious note… like maybe they’re trying to understand them, study them in some way. Whereas you could argue that the women are portraying something more realistic. I think this idea of “a woman’s place being in the home” also speaks to why a lot of these women writers were forgotten over time. They wrote about “women’s worlds,”... “women’s issues…” “women’s relationships.” 

AMY: Yeah. And it was seen as somehow not important. There was so much  -- half the world was going on in the home, you know? Among women. It’s crazy. But going back to Shakespeare for a second, that’s actually reminding me of Virginia Woolf and her famous work A Room of One’s Own where she talks about “Shakespeare’s sister.”

KIM: Yes, she was writing to answer this question about why history seemed to produce very few “great women writers,” and so she created this hypothetical woman — Shakespeare’s sister, Judith — (Shakespeare really did have a sister but her name was Joan -- and she didn’t write that anyone knows of). But Woolf’s “Judith Shakespeare,” like her “brother,” has a passion for writing, yet at every turn, she is denied the opportunity to do so simply because of her sex. She ends up committing suicide because she sees no path for herself in the world. 

AMY: Woolf also wonders why so many of the great characters in literature (including Shakespeare’s plays) are women, and yet women historically weren’t given an opportunity to write, themselves. She writes: “She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.”

KIM: Yeah, so it’s easy to see why Virginia Woolf was singing the praises of Aphra Behn — she was one of the few women of her era who was able to do the seemingly impossible. Make a living through her writing.

AMY: Speaking of Virginia Woolf, actually, in doing research for this episode I came across a book that came out a few years ago that sounds like something of interest, and I was wondering if maybe you had heard of it or already read it even. It’s called A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Virgina Woolf. It’s by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. (These are two writers who are friends, themselves.) Have you read it? 

KIM: No, but I’m completely intrigued by the book. (And also, Emily is one of our followers. I think she might be one of our listeners. Hi, Emily, if you’re out there.)

AMY: Oh! I didn’t know that!

KIM: Yes. I absolutely want to read that book. It explores some of these great writers’ close female friendships through their letters. Maybe we could have her on for a future episode?

AMY: Yeah, that would be fun. Her and Emma. It sounds totally up our alley. And the title really reminds me that this idea of sisterhood doesn’t need to be limited to siblings. I mean, you’re probably the closest thing to an actual “sister” that I have, Kim… which, you know, come to think of it, maybe means I should come over to your house and raid your closet when you’re not looking, and then never return the clothes.

KIM: Hmm, okay. You’re one of the few people I’d actually let do that! I’ve seen how you keep your closet; it’s pretty neat. So I could go into all the ways you’re like my sister, but I’d probably start crying, so we’ll move on. And maybe now is a good time to share with our listeners the book we’re discussing next week — it centers not around sisters but around a group of cousins, following them from childhood through early adulthood.

AMY: That’s right. Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer is our book next week, and joining us is Lucy Scholes, a literary critic, who, among other things, writes about forgotten books in her “Re-Covered” column for The Paris Review. (How perfect that she agreed to be our guest?)

KIM: Yeah, and she’s also the host of Our Shelves, the official podcast for Virago Press.

AMY: Oh my gosh — we’re not worthy! I’m so excited she’s coming on! So be sure to meet us back here next week, and in the meantime, don’t forget that we would love to hear from you! So if you want to weigh in with your two cents on any of the books we’ve mentioned today or if you want to point us in the direction of one of YOUR favorite women writers (or one of your favorite “sister” books), we are all ears and would love to have you shoot us an email or connect with us on social media.

KIM: Which reminds me, also, don’t forget to call your sister! Bye, everyone!

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone etc. 

49. Aphra Behn — The History of a Nun with Dr. Sarah Raff

AMY: Hey, everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my colleague Kim Askew, and to entice our listeners today I think I might summarize the work of literature we’ll be discussing today as “The Sound of Music” meets “Quentin Tarantino.”

KIM: Whoa! That is wild, but also, you’re not wrong! Aphra Behn is considered the first woman in England to earn a living as a professional writer, penning plays, novels and poetry — and her works were also pretty eyebrow-raising. 

AMY: Yes, I was first introduced to her in a women’s lit course in college — she was a pivotal pioneer in the history of English literature. Her popularity in her day may have had something to do with the fact that she was not afraid to scandalize with her writing. (In fact, she wrote a comic poem about erectile dysfunction written from a point of view that’s sympathetic toward the woman, and you can be sure we’ll be discussing today, as well.)

KIM: I wish that we had thought to get Viagra to sponsor this episode, but we didn’t, sadly. 

AMY: Aww, darn!

KIM: Yeah. Though at some points in history she’s been disregarded for being “lewd” or “morally depraved,” the reality is, Behn was actually a proto-feminist with really frank and progressive views on motherhood, marriage, and sexual politics. And, remember, we’re talking about a woman from the mid 17th century, before the Age of Enlightenment even began. (And, oh by the way, she was also an international spy.)

AMY: The novelist Virginia Woolf wrote that “All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn… For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

KIM: That totally makes me want to celebrate an Aphra Behn day… I’m imagining flowers… a graveyard, maybe some dancing.  Anyway, our guest totally agrees with Woolf’s sentiment, and she definitely tipped her hat to Aphra Behn in a very special way, and we’ll get to that in a moment.

AMY: Right after our jaunty little theme song, in fact. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

AMY: Our guest today is Dr. Sarah Raff, an associate professor of English at Pomona College in California. A graduate of Yale University’s Ph.d. program, she is the author of Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. She’s currently writing a book about fictional guardian/ward interactions in 18th and 19th century novels. She also happens to be a friend of mine. She lives in my neighborhood, our kids went to elementary school together, and I’m thrilled that she agreed to join us for this episode. Sarah, welcome to the show!

SARAH RAFF: Thanks so much for having me on the show, Amy and Kim. I'm thrilled to be here!

AMY: Kim, I need to explain how I met Sarah, because it relates to the author we’re discussing today. So it was the beginning of my daughter’s first grade year in elementary school, and she came home one afternoon talking about all the new friends she’d made in her class. She mentioned a little girl named Aphra, and it stopped me in my tracks, because I’m like, “Could she possibly be named for Aphra Behn?” It got me thinking, like, “Okay, I’ve got to try to meet this girl’s parents. I think they might be my people!” And then a few months later, I did get the chance to meet Sarah and sure enough, I find out she’s an English professor and everything falls into place for me. So Sarah, can you tell us when and where you first discovered Aphra Behn and why you named your daughter for her?

SARAH: I first encountered Aphra Behn in the lovely Virginia Woolf passage that you quoted. And I first read her in a graduate class about the beginnings of the English novel, but we didn't discuss her novel-length work Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister in that class. Instead, we discussed the novella length work, Oroonoco, which is wonderful, but I think the reason we didn't discuss Love Letters is that it was out of print, and there was no cheap copy available. It's a little bit of a weird omission, because you could argue that Love Letters is the very first English novel and ought to be in print in an affordable edition. So I think it's true that on some level, she's no longer lost thanks to the efforts of people like you, but she's still a little bit more lost than she should be.

KIM: And can I just say you said that a woman likely wrote the first novel. Let’s just take a moment and appreciate that.

SARAH:  I agree. And it's still not part of the story of the history of the novel that's told in scholarship, even. My daughter's name came about, in part, through a philosophical difference between me and my partner. This was years before we were actually going to have a kid but we were sitting around, and it became clear that he wanted a baby name that he had never heard before, and I wanted one that was super familiar. And we had gone through dozens of names, and we couldn't agree on any of them. And his eye passed to a book that I was teaching at the time, by Aphra Behn. And he said, “Aphra. How about Aphra?” And I thought, “Hooray, I love that idea!” And it was perfect, in a way, because it was a familiar name to me, and it was an unfamiliar name to him. And the fact that it was unfamiliar to him again is troubling. He has heard of Daniel Defoe, another contender (but considerably later than Behn) for the prize of first English novelist. And then also when I met Amy ... I think you're the only person I've met in the neighborhood who identified “Aphra” as Aphra Behn. And so that was super fun for me; I was so delighted that Julia's mother knew about Aphra.

AMY: Yeah, we “English people” find each other. 

KIM: Yep. So Aphra Behn lived in Restoration-era England, from 1640-1689. Sarah, what, if anything, do we know about her life independent of her writing?

SARAH: Not very much, unfortunately. She was probably the daughter of a barber and a wet nurse in Kent. And probably, through some wealthy connections, she became acquainted with Thomas Killigrew, who was both a spy master and eventually the manager of one of the two theaters in London: The King's Company. And it's possible that she was already acting as a spy for the English government when probably (though not certainly), she travelled to the English colony in Suriname in South America, which is the setting for her novella, Oroonoco. Back in England, she, again, probably married a man named Behn, who might have been a London merchant, or might have been a ship's captain, and who died or disappeared quite quickly, a few years later. Using a code name, Astrea, which also became her literary pen name and the name by which she was celebrated by other writers in her day (and here, things are finally certain), she certainly acted as a secret agent in Antwerp, which was a job that proved desperately unremunerative. She has all these letters, writing back to the government, “Please, I can't pay my hotel bill — send money!” But she did eventually get some money advanced to her and she got back to England, probably worked as a copyist again for the King’s Company. But when she came out with her first play, it was for the more successful rival company, The Duke’s Company, which came to rely on her as a source of plays that would succeed on stage. There were other women with one play a piece when Aphra Behn got started. But Behn, after the first year, became the only woman writing plays for theatre during the years that she was active. And also she was by far the most prolific of even the few professional writers who were going at that period; so she has four more plays than either of her closest male competitors, John Dryden and Thomas Durfee. She was huge. 

KIM: Wow.

AMY: Very prolific! Churning them out like Danielle Steele!

SARAH: Maybe, her most important love relationship was with a man named John Hoyle, a lawyer who got in trouble with the law; first for stabbing a man (a watchmaker) in the street, and then eventually in trouble for sodomy. So he was bisexual, maybe violent, and possibly, it seems that she was his mistress for a while. He seems not to have been a nice person. She was chronically in need of money, and this may have been one secret to her success; she was writing for money. When the demand for new plays went down with the merging of the two theaters, she was able to pivot to other kinds of writing. She may have gone back to copying, but she also translated romances and scientific works from French. She eventually became very good at French. Possibly she spent some time in France. She also translated stuff from Latin, even though of course, she didn't know Latin, and Janet Todd, her biographer, suggests that Behn was so fluent at writing verses that it might often have been that a friend of hers classically educated would have been sitting there with the Latin book in his hand, and he would have been translating that into English out loud. And she would have been sitting there with a pen writing it down in verse as he went, so kind of on-the-spot versifying,

KIM: Even if she had been a man, her life would still be really remarkable when you talk about all these things that we know she may have done, but doing them as a woman during that time. It's kind of mind-blowing.

SARAH: It really, totally is. Yes. And she was really, I think, at the center of London literary life. She was published by Dryden in one of his collections of poetry. She translated some Ovid for him. She put Aesop's Fables into verse. She translated la Roche Foucault's Maxims. She produced a lot of original poetry and a ton of government propaganda, possibly directly paid for by the court. 

KIM: I know she wasn’t the only woman who was writing around this time, but to have so much professional success in such a male-dominated arena (she was very prolific; she penned 18 plays) How was it socially acceptable for her to be a writer and a spy?

SARAH: These are fascinating questions. For “socially acceptable,” it depends on which social circle you're talking about. And this is a society that's cut into many groups at the time. To most literate people, a woman writer (especially a woman writer as bawdy as Aphra Behn) would probably not have been socially acceptable. But at Charles II’s restoration in 1660, there were still a lot of Puritans around who had succeeded in getting the theaters shut down altogether. And there were plenty of people who were totally horrified by the licentiousness of the new court, with its French ways. Charles II had scads of illegitimate children, and his milieu was associated with sophistication and high art and wit, but also with extravagance and sexual license and full-on debauchery. And the theater was a kind of mirror of the court, and strangely enough, in this period, given the precariousness of the court’s power and the fact that there were spies all around, and given that there's a population full of people who had cooperated with the interregnum governments, performing acts of outrageous libertinism was actually a way of showing allegiance to the crown. And Aphra Behn was loyal!

AMY: She was way loyal!

KIM: As loyal as they come!

SARAH: But it is true that actresses who had just joined the stage before the Restoration (of course, [before that] the women's parts had been played by boys), they were always being accused of prostitution (sometimes justly), Behn, too, attracted that slur both in her period and later. One contemporary condemned her as a new, “Sapho, Famous for her Gout and Guilt for Punk and Poesie agree so pat/You cannot well be this and not be that. 

AMY: I love that. That’s like a rap song.

KIM: Totally. You know what? If she’s already getting called it, She might as well just go for it.

AMY: So I guess it boils down to: Yes, she was popular, but that doesn't mean she was acceptable. It doesn't mean that she was classy. 

SARAH: I love it. Yeah.

AMY: Okay, so then, speaking of the king, like you said, she was a favorite of the king, until at one point she used one of her plays to attack his illegitimate son, which was kind of a mistake on her part. Charles II ordered her arrested for slander in fact. 

KIM: Right. And she wasn’t held for long (if at all), but note to self, don’t piss off your theatrical patron--especially if he’s the king, right? On the other hand, that’s pretty bold of her.

AMY: She obviously had something on her mind. And here’s some other interesting gossip from a few years before that. Behn was apparently really good friends with an actress who was also the king’s mistress. Her name was Nell Gwynn. When another actress named Moll Davis looked to be positioning herself to supplant Nell in the king’s affections, it is, I guess, rumored that Aphra helped Nell slip laxatives into Moll Davis’s tea cakes before an evening she was supposed to be spending with the king. I don’t know if that’s true. Sarah, I don’t know if you’ve heard that anecdote. It does sound like the sort of thing she would have included in one of her plays; it does sound like a plot point for her.

SARAH: I hadn’t actually heard that, but I love it.

KIM: Yeah, it sounds, based on what you said, like something that wouldn’t be impossible for her to do. Let’s put it that way. But unlike Shakespeare, we don’t really see Behn’s plays staged too often by modern theatrical companies. Are they too antiquated for this day and age? Or too racy? It almost feels like the time is rife to resurrect her work for a wider audience?

SARAH: I agree. an awkward issue for staging Aphra Behn (and I suppose for reading her as well) and other writers of her time is that she does not draw the same bright line that we do between seduction and rape. And she doesn't condemn rape as strongly as we do. The seduction stories of that period challenge our current ideas about consent, and that can make them really hard to process, but also fascinating. I do agree it would be wonderful to see Behn's plays performed more often today (and certainly her poetry and her prose read) a lot more often.

AMY: So in the later years of her life, she sort of transitioned. She gave up writing for the theater and focused more on fiction-writing and poetry. As you said, she's kind of most known for her novella Oroonoko. It's also called The Royal Slave. It’s set on a British plantation in Suriname, and it's important in that Behn really humanizes the title character, a slave. And it also depicts the slave masters as the villains. So this was pretty progressive for Behn; we can see that she had forward-thinking ideas about society. And I actually am interested to read this one given that it's her most famous novel. At the same time, now that you talked about the one that's the quote unquote, first, that's drawing my interest as well. And that one is ... what did you say? Letters?

SARAH: Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, which is slightly less scandalous than it sounds because “sister,” in this case, means sister in law.

AMY: Oh, okay.

KIM: Okay. Anyway, at the same time, if you are brand new to Aphra Behn and want to just dip your toe in, we’re going to be discussing a short story called The History of a Nun or The Fair Vow-Breaker, and that really is a perfect place to start, we think. As Amy said at the beginning of the episode, the elevator pitch for this one is  “The Sound of Music” meets “Quentin Tarantino.” So that’s pretty enticing, right?

AMY: Yeah, she certainly knows how to tell a shocking tale, let’s just say that. This one was published the year Behn died, actually, at the age of 48. And in the story’s dedication (she wrote this for an Italian duchess living in London) she mentioned that it is based on a true event. And I’m a true crime buff, so I’m like, “What?!!” You know, this story is just so bonkers; so it left me thinking, could this possibly have been “ripped from the headlines?” Sarah, what do you got on that?

SARAH: As far as I know, alas, the claim that this story is based on real life has not been independently corroborated by scholarship. But Behn certainly did base some of her works on real life. So for example, her novella The Fair Jilt, (which is also very much worth reading) comes straight out of the newspaper; also a murder and a nun. And her novel Love Letters, which we've just been talking about, was a full-on roman à clef, which was meant to be understood as an account of some scandalous episodes in the lives of some rich and powerful rebels against the king. The names were changed; the setting was changed from England to France; but everyone knew to whom the story referred. And we tend to think of the novel as defined precisely by its fictiveness, by the fact that it's not about real people. So this very topicality has, I think, helped to deprive Behn of the central place in the history of what is today the dominant literary genre, and that’s the novel. And yet when Behn was writing, people were constantly looking for coded references to contemporary events. A huge proportion of Restoration plays should be understood as commenting on the politics of the moment, even when they were set in a distant past or faraway place.

AMY: You can imagine that readers or theater goers I mean, even today, we love juicy stories about things that really happened. You know?

KIM: We want to guess who it’s really about. Yeah, we’re intrigued by that. Absolutely.

AMY: It’s popular. Yeah.

SARAH: And Behn had a kind of following there. Another woman, Delarivier Manley, came after her also writing “scandal fiction” — sex lives of the rich and famous, but “I'm going to take out the names and you're going have to guess who exactly I'm talking about.” And she, like Behn, just got swept aside in literary history and has only been revived in, you know, the last half-century or so.

AMY: And I feel like Delarivier Manley ... we mentioned her in an episode where we were talking about possible “real-life Lady Whistledowns” of their day. And that makes sense that she would have been writing about the town gossip and things like that.

SARAH: Completely.

KIM: So back to The Story of A Nun, so Behn starts off this story with a little bit of sermonizing about young women. Sarah, would you care to read a passage from this section to give our listeners an idea of Behn’s tone?

SARAH: Yes, I love the complexity of Ben's opening here. We know from the subtitle that we'll be dealing with “a fair vow-breaker.” And after the dedication, Behn's narrator begins with a generalization, “of all the sins incidental to human nature, there is none of which Heaven has took so particular visible and frequent notice and revenge as on that of violated vows, which never go unpunished.” And she goes on to explain, you might think that all is fair in love and war, and that the false promises and misleading flirtations of lovers are outside the scope of moral judgment, and that they're rightly dismissed as mere gallantries. But in fact, heaven does punish them in the form of unhappy marriages. And this is a point that Austen was going to make more than 100 years later: that seducing and abandoning women represents a real betrayal and a real deception and does cause real harm and is (or should be) noticed by Heaven. That just because a vow is to a woman doesn't mean it isn't a vow and doesn't mean that a man of honor gets to break his word. You know, the libertine code is usually that, “Well, I said it to a woman so my honor isn't really at stake. It's okay to lie.” And then Behn goes on to observe that men break vows and they boast of the numbers of women that they've ruined, and that women are more constant than men by nature. But after men have betrayed them once, they, too, learn how to break vows. It's kind of curious that after this opening, we never actually do see a man breaking a vow — the men here are quite constant; we don't get a “used and abandoned” story at all. And Behn is really setting up a comparison between broken vows among lovers and the sacred vow that a nun makes to God, wherein the young beauty weds herself forever to the service of God. And if these vows to God are broken, says Behn, then you get the most notorious and severe revenge, which is from God. So girls should be really careful before they make such vows. And then Behn has this really tantalizing moment of first-person recollection, which biographers have really wondered about. She says, I once was designed a humble votary in the house of devotion. But she says, I decided against it and, quote, “I could wish for the prevention of an abundance of mischiefs and miseries that nunneries and marriages were not to be entered into till the maid so destined were of a mature age to make her own choice, and that parents would not make use of their justly assumed authority to compel their children, neither to the one or the other.” And Behn is developing an idea that was quite new at the time; that there should be an age of consent, that before a certain stage of development, you shouldn't be bound to the contracts that you make. And she's also, you know, against women getting compelled to marry, just as she's against women getting compelled to enter nunneries.

AMY: Kim, who is this reminding you of?

KIM: Mary Astell. Yeah.

AMY: We just did an episode on Mary Astell, the first feminist, and she kind of makes the same arguments. Like, girls need to wait — girls need to be educated first.

SARAH: I'm so excited that you're thinking of her, because I, too, thought of her. I mean, there she is just a few years later, saying, “Wouldn't this be a brilliant way to figure out what to do with women instead of making them get married? They could enter institutions for women.” And at one point she calls them monasteries and that we could have places for them to live.

AMY: Sarah, you complete me. [laughs]. I do love that Behn has that whole part that you mentioned, which is just like, “Hey, fellas, guess where we learned to break our vows? We learned it from watching you. Like that old drug commercial. 

AMY: So anyway, to set the stage for the story, we have a young woman named Isabella, who is sent by her father to live at a nunnery with the one provision that she will be able to decide for herself, at the age of 13, whether she wants to devote her life to god or not. But until that point in time, she was going to experience everything the material world has to offer: Fine clothes, society, and parties ... you name it. It kind of reminded me of the Rumspringa Amish tradition where teenagers get to experience the outside world a little bit before they commit fully to a life in the Amish community. 

KIM: Yeah, only this sounds even more fun. During her “debut” in society, Isabella is sought after by many an “eligible bachelor” — the finest of them all being a wealthy, highly regarded young man named Villenoys. Unfortunately for Villenoys,  he doesn’t manage to turn Isabella’s head — she’s convinced that the only husband for her is the LORD. (I mean, she’s 13-years-old, so what is she supposed to think?) So she heads back to  the convent. She commences being the perfect young nun. Behn writes: “she was most exemplary devout in the cloister, doing more penance and imposing a more rigid severity and task on herself than was required, giving such rare examples to all the nuns that were less devout…” 

AMY: Yeah, so unlike Fraulein Maria, she is neither a will-o-the-wisp or a flibbertigibbet. She is a good, model nun, which is really what makes the rest of the story so damn shocking. Everything begins to unravel when another young nun named Sister Katteriena starts getting daily visits from her brother, a total hottie named Monsieur Henault. Isabella’s attraction to him is instant and intense, and there is overwhelming (and I mean overwhelming) romantic angst on display. 

KIM: Yeah, it’s very Romeo and Juliet, right? Sarah, do you have a favorite moment from this section of the story, and is this sort of intense longing typical in Behn’s depictions of love?

SARAH: It is typical, and here's a very intense but also a very conventional passage: “But the more she concealed her flame, the more violently it raged, which she strove in vain by prayers and those recourses of solitude to lessen. All this did but augment the pain and was oil to the fire, so that she now could hope that nothing but death would put an end to her griefs.”

AMY: Cue the telenovela music. 

SARAH: Everybody's threatening to die of love! But you mentioned “Romeo and Juliet” and Shakespeare, and so I can't resist bringing up another Shakespeare play here. The fact that Isabella is, as you say, a model nun “imposing more rigid severity” reminds me of a “Measure for Measure” nun (also in Isabella). I'm sure that Behn was thinking of “Measure for Measure.” There's a similar setup. There are three possible partners for the heroine: there are two men and God. And then in “Measure for Measure,” there's a regent in charge of Vienna who wants to extort sex from Isabella in exchange for committing her brother's sentence of death. Isabella refuses to break her vows, even to save her brother's life. But at the end, when the extortionist villain is foiled and the brother’s saved and the restored ruler makes Isabella an offer of marriage that we have to assume that she can't refuse … she doesn't accept it. She famously says nothing when he says, “Marry me.” We've got a secular authority who is obliging the nun to break her vows. Behn's Isabella does not have that excuse, alas.

AMY: Behn’s Isabella has only her lust to blame! So yes, needless to say, owing to the intensity of her feelings for Henault, Isabella ends up busting out of the nunnery under cover of night, thus breaking her vow as a bride of Christ. The lovers run away together, but Henault eventually goes off to war and is killed.

KIM: Yes, and that’s when Villenoys, the thwarted suitor from the beginning of the story reappears. After several years, Isabella agrees to marry him.

AMY: And here is where we cue “Days of our Lives,” soap-opera craziness, because guess who didn’t really die after all? Henault! Poor Isabella. She kind of panics and goes full “Lifetime Movie psychopath.” Yes. Cray-cray. After Henault comes back and is like, “Ta-da! I’m alive!” After he goes to sleep in the castle (or wherever they are), Isabella smothers him with a pillow. She totally freaks out and smothers him to death. So then when her current husband, Villanoys, comes home, she gets her Oscar-worthy drama on, basically… shows him the corpse. So Villanoys, to protect his wife’s honor, puts the corpse into a sack so that he can carry it to a nearby bridge and drop it into the river. He’s just going to try to dispose of the body. However, when he goes to hoist it onto his shoulders, little Isabella secretly stitches the sack of Villanoys’s coat so that when he throws Henault, the corpse, in the river, he too falls in and drowns! I mean, you gotta hand it to her — it’s quick thinking! But it’s really twisted. Suffice to say, things do not end well for poor Isabella. And in the end, Aphra Behn states the moral of the story, which is that you shouldn’t break your vows, ladies! But Sarah, do you think she was offering up any other deeper commentary here?

SARAH: So much! One thing I think is really interesting is that Isabella kills her second husband through an act of needlework. This is an era when people still needed help dressing; they often had to be actually sewn into their clothes and sewn out of their clothes. So the idea that Villanoys drowns because something is sewn onto his coat is maybe not as implausible as it might sound to us. In the Renaissance, women were exhorted to spin and weave and sew at all times, to prevent the wickedness that comes from idleness. And so it's pretty neat that Isabella uses stitching precisely to accomplish this fabulous murder. It presents the murder maybe as an act of feminine self-assertion, but also as women's work or as a perversion of women's work. And one woman who was held up as a paragon of wifely industriousness in that period (and earlier) was Homer's Penelope, the wife of Odysseus in The Odyssey. [She’s] besieged by suitors while Odysseus is gone for years fighting in the Trojan War. And all day, she weaves a funeral shroud for Laertes, and she tells the suitors that she's going to choose a husband among them when she's finally finished weaving that shroud. But every night when she's alone, she unravels the thread so that the task will be never-ending. And it seems to me that on one level, Behn's Isabella is a reverse Penelope; instead of staying faithful to her husband and welcoming him home, Isabella remarries, and then when her first husband returns, she kills both husbands. The murder of the second husband might seem kind of puzzling from the point of view of the love story. She's fallen out of love with her first husband, but she is in love with her second, and you would think that she would just need to get rid of the first one. But I think the return of the first husband reminds Isabella of her very first husband, the one she's sworn to, namely, God who really does have the priority. There's some question of priority between the two human husbands, but she's got to get rid of both of those earthly husbands because of the rights of her spiritual husband who came first. The earthly bigamy that she's committed is a shadow of the bigamy that she knowingly committed when she married Henault after making vows to God. And I think you're absolutely right, that this story is very Tarantino-esque. There's a kind of gusto to this murder spree, and there's a kind of reveling in a female capacity for violence. And I think there's also a kind of absurdist comedy here (I’m thinking of Kill Bill, especially), and on some level, unlike Tarantino, the story may seem kind of doubtful about the possibilities for female empowerment. Isabella starts the novel with huge capacities and talents and ambition. Her community glorifies her. Is it spiritual ambition or is it social ambition? It’s not totally clear, maybe she just loves that everyone thinks of her as miraculously virtuous. But anyway, she's done in by love. And when you think about Mary Astell coming later, you think how she could have been in a community of women ruled by a woman, and in which she could have developed her intellectual capacities. And instead, she fell in love. And she's probably going to hell, (though, arguably Behn didn't really believe in hell.) But on one level, it just seems so unfair.

AMY: Yeah, it’s sort of a commentary that women just don’t have any good choices. They’re very limited in their options for what their life is going to be.

KIM: Yeah. So as we mentioned, The History of a Nun is a really quick read and a great jumping in point for reading Behn. But there’s another work of hers that a lot of people tend to reference. It’s a poem called “The Disappointment.”

AMY: All about male impotence. Let’s read part of it, shall we?

KIM: Yes!

AMY: Yes!

AMY: Okay, so to set things up… “The Disappointment” starts off as your typical pastoral love poem… we have the “Amarous Lisander” who is trying to make some time with “fair Cloris” — the shepherd and shepherdess are alone in a thicket and Lisander gets a little too worked up, I guess you could say. About halfway through the poem Behn writes: 

He saw how at her length she lay,

He saw her rising Bosom bare,

Her loose thin Robes, through which appear

A Shape design'd for Love and Play;

Abandon'd by her Pride and Shame,

She do's her softest Sweets dispence,

Offring her Virgin-Innocence

A Victim to Loves Sacred Flame ;

Whilst th' or'e ravish'd Shepherd lies,

Unable to perform the Sacrifice.

8

Ready to taste a Thousand Joys,

Thee too transported hapless Swain,

Found the vast Pleasure turn'd to Pain :

Pleasure, which too much Love destroys !

The willing Garments by he laid,

And Heav'n all open to his view ;

Mad to possess, himself he threw

On the defenceless lovely Maid.

But oh ! what envious Gods conspire

To snatch his Pow'r, yet leave him the Desire !

It goes on quite a bit from there. Cloris ends up running away, leaving Lisander mortified and furious. So Sarah, let’s talk about this one briefly.

KIM: Is this a revenge poem?

SARAH: I do think it's a revenge poem. [laughing] It's interesting, what makes this unique, in part, because it's, it's part of a large literary tradition concerning impotence. The one thing it could be playing with is the idea that it's not unique. In fact, it's actually based on a French poem, which it cuts and translates, but Ovid had an impotence poem in the Amores and Petronius, in The Satyricon, has this guy struck with impotence harshly reprimanding his own penis. And you've got the brilliant libertine poet and patron and troublemaker John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, whom Behn did know, who has a hilarious and obscene poem called “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” in which he's elaborately cursing his impotent member after boasting about all his accomplishments from earlier days. And we’ve got [Nathaniel] Lee and a poem from the same period on the same theme called “Love’s Opportunity Neglected.” And you've got William Wycherley’s play “The Country Wife,” in which a man spreads the false rumor that he's impotent in order to get access to other men's wives. And Janet Todd proposes that Behn may have written this poem, in company with the last writers that I mentioned, as a kind of parlor game among literary wits: “Let's all write an impotence thing!” And according to Todd, this is more explicit than anything that Behn or any other woman had thus far ever written in English (or we have knowledge of having written) and it differs from other impotence works in that it's presenting a woman's point of view, as much as a man's. But Behn has impotence running throughout her works, and it may have been a factor, says Todd, in her relationship with John Hoyle. In Love Letters, you've got the first tryst between the central lovers and the man suddenly cannot go through with it. He ends up fleeing dressed up as a woman. And I wonder whether there isn't a kind of involuntary expression of love and care and mercy on his part in that act; a kind of reprieve. Because here's this woman with her whole life before her, and she's about to completely ruin her life by sleeping with her sister's husband. This is supposed to be the highest expression of love, and yet it's going to cause one party irreparable harm, however willing she may be. And I think you get that same paradox very much emphasized in “The Disappointment.” The willing woman is compared to a town that's besieged and no longer protected by its army. “All her unguarded beauties lie the spoils and trophies of the enemy.” And in the lines that you read, the lady is “a victim to love’s sacred flame” and the man is about to sacrifice her. But the impotence of the male lover results in the tables being turned on him in a reversal of the scenario that usually plays out between two lovers when a man gets a woman to agree to sleep with him. At the beginning of the poem, she basically gives in. She lacks what Behn calls the power to keep resisting, even verbally, but then he lacks the power as well, physically. Suddenly the bad things that would ordinarily happen sooner or later to the woman who agrees to sex start happening quite immediately to him. So he found “the vast pleasure turned to pain,” and he gets abandoned. “From  Lysander’s arms she fled, leaving him fainting on the gloomy bed.” So he experiences some of the losses that literature of this period warns us that women who sleep with men outside of marriage will inevitably suffer. And I think we're laughing, as we always do with these impotence poems, but we're laughing, in part, in vindictive solidarity with Cloris. But it is an ambivalent ending, I think, because Aphra Behn is a very sex positive kind of a feminist, and the disappointment is real, I think, even for Cloris — for both of them, it's real. You've got these really menacing final lines with Lysander, vanquished, but not subdued, and seeming dangerous, at least to me. He's not cursing his own penis. Instead, he's blaming Cloris. “He cursed his birth, his fate has stars but more, the shepherdess’s charms, whose soft bewitching influence had dammed him to a hell of impotence.” It's funny, but it's also very creepy.

KIM: I remember reading Aphra Behn in college too, but when exactly did she start making a resurgence among academics, and what prompted that?

SARAH: Well, as you know, with the inexorable increase in prudery over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, she became a totally unsafe ancestor to claim for women writers. In 1915, Montague Summers came out with a collected edition. And speaking of Lost Ladies of Lit, in 1927, the novelist and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West wrote a biography of Behn, The Incomparable Astrea. And Sackville-West was in a relationship with Virginia Woolf at the time, and this was one year before A Room of One's Own. But for academics, what really, I think, brought attention to Behn was the rise of feminism in the 60s and 70s. And in an attempt to find those lost ladies of literature, even though Behn's work didn't completely necessarily fit the model of covert rebellion that a lot of people were looking for. And today, she's become even more fascinating to even more contingents of people. She's got of a lot of pictures of same-sex desire (especially among women), and of gender ambiguity. She's got these fascinating treatments of colonialism, and race. And then, of course, she's also offering this window on the rise of the novel — not as big a window yet as she deserves to have, I think, but that's coming.

AMY: Interesting. I didn't know Vita Sackville-West wrote a biography of her either — that's new to me. Um, so you've mentioned a couple of your favorite Behn works, but if our listeners wanted to check out something else by her, which would you suggest people check out next?

SARAH: Maybe next, Oroonoco and The Fair Jilt. They're just so entertaining. And also, certainly, this gender-bending poem called “To the Fair Clorinda: Who Made Love to Me, Imagin’d More Than Woman.” And her other poems are pretty fabulous as well. But one play that I particularly love is called “The City Heiress,” and like several other Behn works, it shows a very charming rake or libertine figure — a man of pleasure. He’s choosing between a virgin and a non-virgin woman, and we see the non-virgin woman, the virtuous widow, succumbing to the extreme wit and seductiveness of this libertine man's talk, even though she knows that he's going to abandon her after she sleeps with him. And Behn makes the path of that sexually experienced woman (and the seductiveness of the clever man) completely convincing. It's a really hard book to find, but I do recommend it, “The City Heiress,” as one of the most marvelous Behn plays.

AMY: I think what I love about reading Aphra Behn (what I’ve read so far) is that, while it’s true she does draw you in with the shocking and the titillating, once she’s nabbed you with the entertainment value, she also has a message (an often feminist message) to impart. 

KIM: Yes, and Sarah, it’s been wonderful to have your professorial guidance on today’s show to help us navigate the ins and outs of this amazing writer, who basically paved the way for every woman writer who came after her (and maybe every writer who came after her). Thank you so much for joining us — it’s been a blast having you here and I can’t wait … the book about guardianship sounds amazing. Oh my gosh. That’s right up my alley. 

SARAH: You guys are inspiring me to think that I need to look at Behn for that, too. But yeah, I'm so enjoying writing it. It is so interesting. And it's leading me to look at the early, early novel, and that is just so unexpected and mind-blowing. She was a hole in my book, Aphra Behn, that I kept thinking, “I need to go back to Aphra Behn,” and you've led me to do that.

KIM: That’s fantastic; I love it. 

SARAH: And thank you so much for having me! I've loved talking to you both!

KIM: Yeah, this was fantastic. You just brought so much to this conversation. I loved it.

AMY: So cool. That's all for this episode. Don't forget to rate and review us wherever you listen to this podcast, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at Lostladiesoflit.com to find out about all the upcoming authors we’ll be discussing on the show. Bye, everybody!

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

48. For Whom The Bell Rings -- Backpacks and Boarding Schools

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

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. It’s the middle of August, and around my house, at least, that can mean only one thing: Back to school!

KIM: Yay! How exciting! My daughter goes to preschool, so she basically has school year-round, but I can always tell when school’s back in session in L.A. because the traffic turns monstrous. How do your kids feel about going back to school?

AMY: Well, considering they spent the better part of last year not being able to set foot in a classroom, I don’t think they’ll ever complain again about getting to go to school. Jack, my youngest, will be entering fourth grade, and Miss Julia is now in middle school, so she’s going to be starting an all-girls’ Catholic middle school, which is going to be a new experience for her.

KIM: I am so jealous of Julia because (at least, my teenage or preteen self is jealous) because I always wanted to get sent to a boarding school (particularly a Catholic girls’ school) and have, like, this literary, idyllic experience that I had read about growing up and fantasized having...my life was very far from that.

AMY: I know, you’ve always talked about wishing you went to a Catholic girls’ school. Yeah. And I actually did attend an all girls’ high school. 

KIM: Okay, so please tell me it was like the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, Scotland. You know what I’m talking about, right?

AMY: Yeah … that would be the school that was featured in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: If you guys have not read that book, you definitely should… I would say it’s kind of a girl version of Dead Poets Society, but a lot darker. And it’s actually Muriel Spark’s best-known novel. So just a little summary of that: the title character, Miss Jean Brodie … she’s this mythical, cult-like figure, for better and for worse, and the character was actually based on a teacher that Spark, herself, once had for two years in boarding school, who was this glamorous, poetic and inspiring woman, but she also happened to hang posters of Mussolini on her classroom wall. 

KIM: Oh, yeah. And Miss Jean Brodie in the book (which is set in 1930s in Edinburgh) is also charismatic and also ideologically radical, you could say…. She has these student acolytes that she surrounds herself with… her “Brodie set” as she calls them. Miss Brodie wants to teach the girls to think for themselves, to appreciate the classics and to have a lust for life.

AMY: Yeah, but lust is kind of the operative word here, and it becomes part of the problem, I think you can say. Miss Brodie’s aims for her girls aren’t always on a professional level — especially when she tries to urge one of the girls in the group to have an affair with a male teacher at the school (one that Miss Brodie was previously involved with, by the by). So yeah, Jean Brodie, she’s a little more controversial than Robin Williams’ Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society, and we’ll leave it at that.

KIM: You know, a little aside: I wonder if a book like that would get published right now? Or if it would just be, you know, too scandalous, almost, you know?

AMY: Too inappropriate, yeah.

KIM: But anyway, back to this book, they made a movie of it in 1969 starring a young Maggie Smith in the title role, and of course, she’s amazing in this. She’s perfect for this role.

AMY: Oh yeah, I love this movie. And actually, I had an English teacher at my all girls’ high school who kind of physically reminded me a little of Maggie Smith in that role, because she had a sort of 1930s, curly wedge bob haircut, you know? Like a very retro haircut. She always dressed in pencil skirts and heels and she often wore these long chiffon scarves around her neck. It’s like she was using Miss Jean Brodie as her, like, style guide.

KIM: I would have been obsessed with her and started dressing like her. I mean, I can’t even imagine, if I had a teacher that glamorous.

AMY: Her hair would kind of hang in front of her face a little, and then she'd sweep it aside with her hand all the time. I mean, she was very glamorous. So, yeah, I guess in some ways my high school was like the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. But that teacher was not leading our minds into questionable territory. It was all on the up-and-up.

KIM: This is fun, so let’s discuss some other school-related novels that people can read since we’re on the subject, because I’m into this. Our first podcast episode was actually on Mariana by Monica Dickens. And part of that is actually set at a girls’ school, but the whole book is in a girls’ school book.

AMY: Right. And also, Monica Dickens flunked out of three different schools, so if you want to know that story, go back to episode No. 1, which is fun. So there are a lot, obviously, when you start to think about it you’re like, “Well, there are so many books set in schools!” And you know, people always think of the classics that are centered around boys’ boarding schools — so like, A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, even, you could say. Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. Old School by Tobias Wolff is another more recent one. But when it comes to “school-inspired” classic books that were written by women there are still quite a few, starting with one that is a series, in fact, that was written by an actual teacher. It’s the “Fairacre” series, by Miss Read.

KIM: Yes, I have not read any of these, but I definitely, I’m so intrigued. This is on my to-be-read list, for sure. Soon. And Miss Read is the pseudonym of British school mistress-turned-writer, Dora Jessie Saint. Her “Fairacre” series comprises 20 different books which she wrote from 1955-1996! The books center around the life of an unmarried village school teacher named Miss Read. They are extremely quaint and cozy, apparently, and have been compared to the works of Barbara Pym. Have you read them?

AMY: Yeah, actually, I started reading one recently, knowing that we were going to be doing this episode The one I'm reading is Mrs. Pringle of Fairacre. In some ways, it kind of has a little bit of the feel of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, because it's set in this little village, you know? There's not too much major drama. If you remember in our episode on Stella Gibbons, how she was making fun of the English rural novel, I feel like this kind of falls into that category. (Although these were written post Cold Comfort Farm). It sort of seems like this sort of thing Stella Gibbons would have rolled her eyes. I mean, everyone in the village knows everyone else’s business, but then the drama is all very low stakes. You keep waiting for something to happen. And then Miss Read, she'll write something like, “And then something appalling happened…” And you're like, “What is it? What is it?” It's like, “a boy from the school was accused of stealing two eggs from a robin's nest.” It's like, “Okay, what?” There's no real drama. Or maybe I just haven't gotten to that part yet, I don’t know.

KIM: Okay, you're gonna have to keep us posted. I mean, are they something you want to read with tea and cookies, or maybe they're just, you know...

AMY: Yeah, tea and cookies, and you’re sitting in an easy chair with a lace… what do you call that? Antimacassar? 

KIM: I love that you’re saying that aloud. I’ve only seen that in books; I’ve never actually heard it pronounced! So another boarding school that I know you and I both read, Amy, and that’s Villette by Charlotte Bronte.

AMY: What? It’s called [pronounces] VEE-YAY? It’s VEE-LET, right?

KIM: It is? I don’t know.

AMY: No, it’s VEE-LET.

KIM: Right.

AMY: VEE-LET

KIM: You’re right. No, of course. Don’t put that in. But yeah, of course. Don’t put that in!

AMY: It’s funny. We’re putting it in.

KIM: Oh, okay. Anyway, all right. [laughing]

AMY: Yeah, so Villette, I’ve actually read this one twice, I think. I really enjoyed it. It’s about a young Englishwoman, Lucy Snowe (who is very Jane Eyre-like, I would say). She travels to the Belgian town of Villette. (Now you’re making me doubt myself…. No, I believe it’s VEE-LET) who travels to this Belgian town to work at Madame Beck’s boarding school for girls. She’s young and she’s trying to make her way as best she can, and then there’s this weird, sort of caustic male professor who’s also teaching at the school there with Lucy, and they have a sort of intense relationship.

KIM: Yeah, and Villette is also considered a gothic novel given the fact that there is some spooky ghost stuff involving a nun. 

AMY: Yeah, I think you could call it a psychological thriller in some respects.

KIM: And there’s another “boarding school” book, which I’m sure we’ll end up doing a future episode on, and that’s Frost in May by Antonia White. And I’ve been wanting to read that one. 

AMY: Yeah, if you went to Catholic school, this one’s going to definitely hit close to home for you. It’s a 1933 novel that was reissued in the 70s by Virago Press. At the start of the book, we have 9-year-old Nanda Grey, who is on her way to a convent boarding school called the Convent of the Five Wounds…

KIM: Oh, god, what a name! Yikes! I’m scared just hearing the name of the convent!

AMY: Yeah, I know. It’s already intimidating. And yeah, Kim, I do feel like you would like this once since you’ve always sort of secretly been fascinated by Catholicism. 

KIM: I wanted to be a nun when I was young.

AMY: Oh, you did?

KIM: I was Baptist. That didn’t stop me. It didn’t stop 9-year-old me!

AMY: So the book blends kind of that romance of Roman Catholicism that you have with the harsh punitiveness we tend to equate with Catholic schools, historically, as well as, you know, all that power and patriarchy involved. I will say I’m glad I didn’t attend Catholic school in the first half of the 20th century, because there’s a lot of severity and knuckle-wrapping — stuff like that.

KIM: Yeah, I don’t think I can handle that side of being there, too. I’m too sensitive. So I have one more book to round out our list, and this is one that I don’t think either of us have read yet, Amy, but correct me if I’m wrong. It’s Bel Kaufman’s Up The Down Staircase.

AMY: I haven’t read it either. But you know, the title sounds really familiar for some reason, like I know I’ve heard of it. 

KIM: Yeah, I think because it was made into a movie in the late 60s… so maybe that’s why it’s ringing a bell for you. It’s written in the vein of that Michelle Pfeiffer movie, Dangerous Minds, or maybe a Stand and Deliver, I think. It’s about an idealistic English high school teacher named Sylvia Barrett, and her first year on the job leaves her frustrated and discouraged. She comes to a crossroads, eventually, when she has to decide whether to quit teaching and go work for the private sector or continue to tough it out and try to make a difference in the kids’ lives. 

AMY: Well, stick with it, Miss Barrett! The kids need you! I should check out the movie. Or maybe I’ll read it. That sounds interesting.

KIM: Yeah, let’s read it and then maybe watch the movie.

AMY: Movie night!

KIM: Yeah. So the author, Bel Kaufman, like Dora Jessie Saint, was also a school teacher (she was a high school teacher in New York City, so I would imagine it’s very realistically portrayed.)  It’s actually an epistolary novel, which is also an interesting twist.

AMY: Hmm. All right, I will add that one to the list. And I think we should also maybe dedicate this episode to all the teachers out there. It’s a tough job (we all know that). Add on the past several years, which have been exponentially difficult because of the pandemic. 

KIM: Yeah, so way to go, teachers! We appreciate you! And hopefully things will be getting back to some semblance of normalcy for kids and teachers alike going forward. Fingers crossed.

AMY: Yeah, absolutely. And now I kind of feel like I ought to dig out my old plaid green school uniform for this episode.

KIM: Oh my gosh, we have to share a picture of you in your uniform on our Instagram! We’ve got to show this. I don’t even know if I’ve seen a picture of you in your uniform. So let’s share it with everybody.

AMY: Mayyyybe. I’ll see what I can find. Anyway, that’s all for today’s episode everybody! We hope you’ll join us next week when we’ll be talking some more about nuns, Kim! Yayyy! But in this case, it’s a murdering nun!

KIM: Cue the gothic music. Yes, we’ll be talking all about the first female English novelist (and sometime spy), Aphra Behn, as well as her titillating story, “The History of a Nun” with Pomona College professor Sarah Raff joining us for this discussion.

AMY: Ooh, maybe she can tell us how to actually pronounce her last name, because I was saying APHRA BEN… you say AFRA BAYN? I don’t know.

KIM: I don’t know. I don’t know.

AMY: Yeah, we’re going to ask Sarah that.

KIM: She’ll know, yeah.

AMY: It’s going to be a fun discussion, though — I can’t wait! And in the meantime, sign up for our monthly newsletter if you want to know more information on the authors we’re featuring, including a schedule of upcoming novels we’ll be discussing so you can read along with us. See you next week!

47. Jane and Mary Findlater — Crossriggs with Julie and Shawna Benson

KIM ASKEW: Hey, everyone! Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY HELMES: And I’m Amy Helmes… When you think of literary sisters, Kim, who springs to mind for you?

KIM: That’s pretty easy. The Brontes: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Right?

AMY: Right. But that said, they never really collaborated on writing novels. The sisters we’ll be discussing today actually wrote books together in addition to each publishing novels on their own. They were literary celebrities in their day (counting the likes of Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Rudyard Kipling among their admirers). One of their joint efforts — Crossriggs — is considered to be their finest work. (It’s the book we’ll be focusing on today.)

KIM: Yes, and in the book, there’s a scene where there’s a sailing trip to an island off the coast of Scotland, and it’s been suggested that it likely influenced Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Though the sisters wrote several bestsellers in their day, Amy and I had never heard of Jane and Mary Findlater before we started this podcast. I’m guessing many of our listeners haven’t either. Amy, you and I know what it’s like to write novels as a partnership… it’s not all that common, actually. But I can imagine that writing with one’s sister comes with its own unique advantages and disadvantages.

AMY: Yeah, one would guess. But hey, let’s not guess… let’s get a real “sister act” to weigh in on this, shall we?

KIM: I love it. We’ve got screenwriter siblings Shawna and Julie Benson with us today to weigh in on the Findlater sisters.

AMY: There couldn’t be more perfect guests for chatting about today’s lost ladies, and I can’t wait to introduce them, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

AMY: Our guests today are screenwriting sisters Shawna and Julie Benson. You may know their work from the CW’s critically-acclaimed series, “The 100,” or Netflix’s Wu Assassins. They are co-producers and writers on the forthcoming Nickelodeon animated Star Trek: Prodigy series, which I can’t wait to watch and also get my kids hooked on. The Benson sisters have also written a couple of titles for DC Comics: “Green Arrow'' and “Bat Girl and the Birds of Prey.” 

KIM: (Oh my gosh, we’ve had some cool guests but you … you’re pretty cool.) Clearly they’re sci-fi and comic book nerds, but they are also classic lit lovers, as well. And having penned episodes of the Emmy-award winning series Emma Approved (it’s a follow-up to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries for all you Jane Austen fans among us), they’re kind of perfect for this. 

AMY: I basically picked up Julie in a bar almost 15 years ago. (She’s laughing when I’m saying this.) We were both waiting for our respective other friends and we were sitting at the bar watching Jeopardy!, which was on the TV above the bar, and we got to talking. And I soon discovered that she and Shawna are not just Midwest transplants after my own heart, but they are also two of the coolest, funniest chicks I’ve ever met. So ladies, thank you for joining us!

JULIE BENSON: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having us! We are big fans of the show. I think I've listened to every episode now. I love it; I'm obsessed. And it gives me this long list of books that I accrue each time that I need to read. So it's also giving me anxiety. Thanks for that.

SHAWNA BENSON:It's been a long time since I've been able to read something that wasn't just for work.

KIM: Right? 

AMY: Okay, so I can think of plenty of brothers in Hollywood when I think of sibling teams, but not as many sisters spring to mind. Are you guys kind of like the proverbial unicorns in Hollywood? Like a sister team? 

JULIE: Oh, I mean, yes, we’re a little bit of a rare breed. But we have met the other sister writing teams — we’ve made an effort to kind of go out and find them. So there are a few of us, and we try to get to know each other. You know, we've always joked, “What if all of the sister writing teams came together and made a show? Like, made a series?”

KIM: Oh, yeah, I love it.

SHAWNA: Most people probably don't know maybe all the TV writing sister acts, but they might know one of the more famous film writing sister acts, which is the Ephron sisters, right? Nora and Delia wrote You've Got Mail and Bewitched together and then of course there are other sisters who are also novelists. There's four of them. So Amy and Hallie were also writers which I didn't know until I was researching.

JULIE: Wait, those are there other sisters?

SHAWNA: Yeah. Nora, Delia, Amy and Hallie. 

JULIE: There you go!

KIM: So I'm guessing that like Amy and I, you two maybe hadn't heard of Jane and Mary Findlater before now.

JULIE: We had not. It was so cool to see a powerhouse writing sister team like this.

SHAWNA: Who wasn’t a Bronte.

AMY: Exactly. In researching them, I believe that you two share some similarities with them. Let me just throw out a couple of details, and you can weigh in here: So Mary Findlater was born in 1865, and her little sister, Jane, was born 18 months later in 1866… so they were close in age.

JULIE: Shawna and I are also close in age. We were born three years apart on the same day. So it doesn't get much closer than that. (Well, I guess technically it does: twins.)

KIM: Yeah, right, exactly. But the same day? That’s pretty cool!

JULIE: Yeah, the same day, and Shawna has never let me live it down for raining on her third birthday.

SHAWNA: Yeah, she's the gift that keeps on giving, I say, and, you know, when we were young, we got a lot of joint birthday gifts…

JULIE: That totally sucked.

SHAWNA: … But of course, now that we’re older, it’s fun, actually, to have the same birthday. We enjoy it.

AMY: Okay, next fact about the Findlaters: They lived together for the entirety of their lives — they were together for 80 years and were only apart from each other for very brief spells twice in their lives.

JULIE: We had been living together in a condo in Hollywood, pretty much since we moved to L.A., and it was because,you know, rent is so high, and we were writing together. It just kind of made sense. It was always supposed to be short-term, but like 17 years later…

SHAWNA: Ahem... it's 19.

JULIA: Okay, 19 years later (and you wonder why I'm still single). But don't worry, we didn't move too far apart. In January, I literally moved downstairs in the same building. So now we have distance, you know, but I can't imagine 80 years! 

KIM: So wait, are you also Scottish? Because that would be really perfect.

JULIE: I'm fairly certain when we did the Color genetics test, not only did I ruin any chance of being able to commit crimes in the future and getting away with them scot-free, but we were shocked to discover that our ancestors were almost entirely from this one tiny circle on the map that basically was like UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Scandinavia, and other parts of eastern Europe, potentially.

SHAWNA: I like to dye my hair red, but as far as we know, we don’t have any actual gingers in the family, alas.

AMY: We’re just going to say you’re Scottish. “If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” (Congrats to any listener that gets that reference.) Okay, so getting back to the Findlaters and their Scottish heritage, they were born in Lochearnhead, Scotland. Their father was a minister… their mother, incidentally, was a bit of a writer, too. She and her own sister actually worked together to translate a book of German hymns. So the sister-act thing ran in the family.

KIM: And the Findlaters’ parents were older when they got married, but (this is important with respect to the book that we’re talking about, Crossriggs) their marriage was actually a true love match. They were said to be very affectionate and happy together. We’ll circle back to that later.

AMY: From what I’ve read, both girls were very pretty. They inherited their father’s dark, Mediterranean features, which was unusual for a Scotsman. (So maybe not gingers!) Actually, there was a little scandal having to do with this, though. So Mary and Jane, when they were adults, they learned that their grandmother (their father's mother) had actually gotten pregnant thanks to a Spanish pirate who had come around during a storm. 

JULIE: That’s incredible.

AMY: Yeah, I’m picturing Johnny Depp. Like a swarthy, hot pirate, right?

JULIE: Yeah, I just have to get it in my, you know, the mental picture. Okay, I’m ready. Yeah, all right.

AMY: The fact that they were anecdotally descended from a Spanish pirate sort of explained why the girls had darker features than most of the locals. And needless to say, the sisters were pretty stunned by this revelation. Right? Who wouldn’t be?

KIM: I’m shocked right now, just hearing about it.

AMY: Yeah, even just meeting a pirate would be very shocking. Mary and Jane did a little digging, and they eventually uncovered some information that sort of cast doubt on the pirate story (surprise, surprise). But it did open up another can of worms about their father’s true paternity and they ultimately came to accept that he was likely “illegitimately” conceived as the saying goes… 

KIM: So basically, they blamed it on the pirate. 

AMY: It’s a better story.

KIM: “The pirate did it.” Yes. Okay, but anyway, if you want drama, there’s actually more. As Amy mentioned, both sisters were quite fetching, and Mary was even called “the prettiest girl in the world” by some locals. She got engaged when she was a young woman, but was warned by a family friend that it would, “be unwise to expect a relationship with the kindest husband to be as harmonious and perfect as that which existed between her and Jane.” So Mary began having serious misgivings about getting married, because she knew it would mean being separated from Jane. She ultimately called off the engagement. Her fiance was so furious that he threw the engagement ring into the fire!

JULIE: Mary did the right thing, because clearly her fiance wasn’t sufficient because who throws a ring in a fire besides Frodo?

KIM: Totally! There had to be a Lord of the Rings reference.

JULIE: Okay, so I can totally relate to, you know, “the prettiest girl in the world” thing. Like, I deal with that on a daily basis. It’s really hard to live with, you guys. But no, seriously, I get that feeling of like, you better find somebody who gets along with your sibling. That makes sense.

SHAWNA: Might I refer you to the classic song “Sisters” from the movie White Christmas, which sums up the philosophy? Are you ready? Can we do it?

JULIE: Are you going to sing it?

SHAWNA: Let’s do it! I said we should!

AMY: Oh, please!

KIM: But we need fans though. But go ahead.

JULIE: All right, pretend we have fans.

KIM: Yep. 

SHAWNA and JULIE: [singing] “Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister/And lord help the sister who comes between me and my man!!!”

JULIE: I have no idea how that song goes. I realized halfway through it.

KIM: That was great!

AMY: You guys harmonized! 

KIM: Oh my god, and you can harmonize! Anyway, ultimately the sisters realized they didn’t ever want to get married. It was a conscious choice for them.

AMY: And I’m going to refer to a biography of the sisters that was written by an acquaintance of theirs; her name was Eileen Mackenzie. She wrote, “Mary’s quick tongue and keen-edged sense of the ridiculous would have been somewhat daunting to potential lovers.” So Mary, the elder sister, was considered the more “tempestuous” of the two, while Jane, the younger, was considered the “sweet one.” Mary could not suffer fools, while Jane was more the patient one. Jane loved children, the biography says, while Mary loved some children. (I laughed out loud when I read that.) So Benson sisters, does any of this square up with your own personalities? How are you two alike or different?

JULIE: Okay, so I am the younger sister, but I think I'm totally the “Mary,” and I have real trouble suffering fools, and I'm very impatient. I do like kids, but in a way where you can play with them and they think you're the cool aunt and then you can go home.

SHAWNA: Right. Julie is sadly right on this score. I am the older sister, but I relate more to Jane, who is younger. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm sweet. 

JULIE: No, definitely not. 

SHAWNA: I certainly have the patience thing down!

AMY: I sense an insult, Julie.

SHAWNA: Never! Julie, though, is the quick wit of the two of us. I’m like the slow burn, dry wit. 

AMY: So speaking of wit, I will say this about the Findlater sisters (and it kind of maybe also reminded me of you guys, from what I know). They sounded kind of sarcastic and cynical. You wouldn’t imagine these lovely Victorian women being cynical, but here’s an anecdote: Together they sometimes made up imaginary tea parties consisting of all the most boring people they knew, apparently. I guess they found certain people to be extremely tedious, so they made that their entertainment, just having, like, fake tea parties with the losers.

KIM: I love them.

JULIE: I’m obsessed with them.

SHAWNA: I now have an image in my head of like, Mean Girls, but with them sitting around with, you know, like stuffed animals in place of their imaginary friends and going, “You can’t sit with us!” 

JULIE: Yeah, I can totally relate to the sarcasm and cynicism. But I'm not sure we've done the “tea party full of drips” thing.

AMY: You’re never going to admit that, because any of your friends might be listening.

JULIE: That’s true. But I mean, it does sound like a really good way to sort of suss out characters for our writing.

SHAWNA: I don’t know why we never thought of doing that, because it’s kind of genius! Okay, yeah. We’re going to do that now: tea parties, real or imagined.

JULIE: Yeah.

SHAWNA: Yeah.

KIM: Incidentally, they also had an older sister named Sarah. Her nickname was Mora, the Gaelic version of Sarah. But they had absolutely nothing in common with her, and she apparently was a bit of a drip, as my mom used to say.

AMY: She was probably at those tea parties.

KIM: Yes, I am sure she showed up. It doesn’t sound like they actually had a ton of affection for her. And sadly, in adulthood, she suffered from mental illness, on and off.

AMY: Oh, now I feel bad for saying that.

KIM: I know. I kind of feel bad too.

SHAWNA: All right.

AMY: As children, the harsh Scottish climate kept them indoors for weeks at a time. I basically kind of think this forced them to really use their imaginations because life was so dreary on the Scottish moors (or wherever they were). They had a series of governesses… one in particular, named Annie Lorrain, went on to be a famous botanist. She’s the one who introduced the girls to Shakespeare and also taught them critical thinking. But then they also had this cook, a “Mrs. King” who entertained them with horrifying “murder” stories.

JULIE: Yeah!!!

AMY: So you can start to get the sense of how their childhood might have shaped them into writers. And then, also, get this: Their mother believed that the girls needed to see “real life,” so she would take them to see dying people so they could know what someone’s last tortured hours were like. Not surprisingly, they were super creeped-out by this.

JULIE: Oh my god!

KIM: I mean, whoa. And then Mrs. King is telling them murder stories?

AMY: We’re going to have to read more of their books to see if Mrs. King makes a cameo somewhere.

SHAWNA: But that does kind of explain some (not to get ahead of ourselves), but it does explain some sections in the book about death that you know, make a whole lot more sense knowing about that.

AMY: Comfortable with the morbid.

KIM: Yes. Going there. So Julie, Shawna, was there anything about your own childhood that might have steered you two into writing? Did you have a “Mrs. King” of your own? Or were you writing things together as kids?

JULIE: Shawna says that we were writing from a young age, because we would play Barbies together, and I would constantly complain that she wasn't playing Barbies right. Because Ken (and yeah, she had to play Ken because of course, I was Barbie) he would decide he didn't want to hang out with Barbie after her shift at McDonald's, and they’d go ride around in the Corvette. He would get all snooty about it. So I would get mad at Shawna. So I guess you can see we've been writing for most of our lives.

SHAWNA: It’s a little scary how that mirrors our process now.

JULIE: It’s not true, but we also used to write and perform little plays in Shawna’s best friend Susan’s basement.

SHAWNA: So yeah, my best friend Susan and I were super into PBS shows like Mystery and Masterpiece Theater. So we mashed them together and wrote our own Mystery Theater shows. It had a theme song, it had an opening…

JULIE: We had commercials.

SHAWNA: The whole thing. It was a big production, let’s just put it that way.

AMY: I want Laura Linney to be doing the introduction to these videos. I hope that you did videotape them.

SHAWNA: Thankfully, those videotapes are locked away in a very secure vault, because it’s basically mutually-assured destruction if either one of us releases them.

KIM: I’m calling Geraldo Rivera after this.

JULIE: They’re fantastic. I do want to get them out and kind of re-look at them because it's just ridiculous. We thought we were so clever.

SHAWNA: Oh my god.

AMY: I assume you guys did not live in a manse?

JULIE: Yeah no.

SHAWNA: Uh-uh.

KIM: The Findlaters did. But money was always tight, and they were not well-off. They were living on a minister’s income. Actually, in our research, we discovered that their childhood home is now a B&B, so we could go there and stay.

JULIE: Yeah, we’re leaving, what? Tomorrow?

SHAWNA: Tomorrow. Yeah.

AMY: I want to go! Oh my gosh!

KIM: I’m going with you.

AMY: I checked it out. It’s a nice house. It’s not, like, a glorious mansion.

SHAWNA: Is it like a McMansion?

AMY: A McMansion, yeah, but like a Victorian McMansion. Yes.

KIM: It’s cozy. Yeah.

AMY: Their financial situation became even more dire when the girls were in their early 20s and their father passed away. The mom and three daughters all ended up moving to another town, and they were poor. Apparently at one point the girls had to buy “paper shoes.” I don’t know what paper shoes are, but I’m guessing maybe they were made out of cardboard? They were also very insecure about the clothes they wore, because they were never dressed in the latest fashions (and I think they got teased about that.) And Jane wrote her first novel on the back of scraps of butcher paper she managed to procure from a local grocer. Do you have any “starving artist” anecdotes? Shawna? Julie?

JULIE: We might be living one now, thanks to Covid unemployment! Yeah, seriously, most of my career in Hollywood was making, you know, little to nothing and being super overworked and overstressed. And we were lucky to have supportive parents. But yeah, there was a lot of bringing our lunches to work in, you know, plastic containers, and wearing out of date clothes and trying to convince everyone I was just super into vintage, but it was really all I could afford.

SHAWNA: So before Julie and I became established writers, I had a totally different career. I worked for Disney, but in the IT department for 13 years. 

JULIE: Nerd! 

SHAWNA: Yeah, I know. So I got laid off in 2009 when the recession hit, and of course now I say it's like the best thing that ever happened to me. But at the time, I went from having a very comfortable income to zero income. And I know I was luckier than most, you know, my budget was a lot tighter back then, just like Julie's was. 

JULIE: So yeah, so we can kind of relate.

AMY: So you were almost at the “cardboard shoes” phase.

KIM: So wait. I just want to ask a side question. Julie, did you convince Shawna to basically… I mean, were you very instrumental in her deciding to do this? Or was she already kind of working with you on things?

JULIE: Yeah, she wanted to be a writer, and I thought I was going to produce. And so when she moved out here, I was doing the development thing, and she was taking night classes at UCLA for writing. And at one point, I was doing these notes for some writers and I felt kind of like a jerk because I was giving notes to writers, and I had never tried to write a script. I had gone to film school. I’d done all the things But I was like, “You know, I should try to write a script before I tell people how to write a script.” So I recruited Shawna to write one with me, using all of her free knowledge that she was getting at UCLA. And then we wrote our first pilot together, which was called Moonrise, and it was basically Deadwood on the moon. And then that got us some traction, and we realized we should start doing this together. So it kind of just fell into it a little bit. 

SHAWNA: Yeah. 

KIM: I love it. So like your situation, the Findlaters’ financial situation quickly improved once younger sister, Jane, published that first book that Amy mentioned, The Green Graves of Balgowrie. It was an immediate hit, and instantly they  were befriended by people like famous stage actress Ellen Terry and Lady Dorothy Gray, the wife of a well-known British statesman. (The sisters would go stay with her at her estate, which was featured in the “Downton Abbey” Christmas Special.) 

AMY: Eventually, both sisters’ writing careers took off and they were suddenly skirting the periphery of celebrity. They never became outlandishly rich, but they were always able to make a comfortable living through their writing from that point forward. 

KIM: They eventually moved to Devon, England to be in milder climate for their mother’s health, and they befriended author Kate Douglas Wiggin (and we devoted an episode to her last Christmas. She’s the author of The Birds’ Christmas Carol, which we discussed then, as well as the more well-known Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.) On a girls’ trip with Kate, the weather was lousy, so Kate suggested they use the time to collaborate on a book together instead. The book was called The Affair at the Inn, and the sisters each went on to write several more novels with Kate Wiggin (whom they knew by her married name, Kate Riggs.) The Findlaters actually dedicated Crossriggs to Kate and her sister, Nora.

JULIE: By the way, I looked this book up, and they each took a character and wrote that character’s POV in the book. So I’m desperate to read it, because I think that would be interesting to see how in the world they cross those streams.

AMY: Yeah, triple seems really hard. And I guess it kind of was, because little Mary wrote wrote to her friend about the collaboration with Kate Wiggin and she said, “Dear Kate is an Angel, but an Angel with no taste in adjectives, and if I have ever by any luck achieved one that is descriptive she always deletes it and carefully substitutes the old, old, well worn one that has jogged along with its noun since the beginning.” 

JULIE: Ohhh!

KIM: Burn!

JULIE: Yeah, you know, writing teams, It’s really tough. It’s tough to work with other people.

AMY: And that’s a really funny quote, obviously, but it also goes to show that writing jointly with another person is not always easy. That said, the three novels the sisters wrote together are widely regarded as better than any of the books they wrote separately, which is interesting. So Shawna, and Julie, do you think, from your own experience, that they would have had an easier time writing together than they did, maybe, while working on projects with Kate? Does being in a sibling relationship help you just cut all the crap?

JULIE: Absolutely. You can be much more open and honest with each other than we would be with a “stranger,” right? If we had a “Kate” in the middle of this, I would feel really sorry for that other writer. And at the end of the day, the best idea wins. So although, you know, we do get along, we've had our creative dust-ups and it is harder to be with someone when you're trying to be on your best behavior, you know? It's harder to be creative that way.

SHAWNA: This is a point where I wish I could disagree with my sister just to prove a point. But she's right. As siblings, you know, you grow up together, and you have the advantage of the same lived experience. So we kind of over the years unknowingly developed a kind of twin speak. I can look at her and she looks at me and we know immediately what the other person is thinking. People get really weirded out by it.

JULIE: It’s happened in writers’ rooms where they’re like, “What are you guys doing?” We’re like, “I don’t know! What are you talking about?” So yeah, poor Kate, in this situation.

SHAWNA: Yeah.

KIM: So Kate Wiggin, who was American, actually encouraged the Findlater sisters to do a U.S. tour, which they did around 1905. They were not very impressed. They found New York to be full of showy people wearing over-the-top jewels and dresses, and they were amused/disgusted by it all. But they did befriend William James and his wife, Alice, which is how they were introduced to writer Henry James. 

AMY: Yes, and I have the best Henry James anecdote, and I think you guys are going to laugh so hard. I love this story so much. This happened after their tour of the states when he was living in London. So they had a correspondence where Henry James said, “Oh, yes, I would love to have lunch,” but he was really kind of persnickety about it. They agreed on a date and he was like, “but you must come at 1pm sharp, do not come late. I need it to be this time. It's really important. My time is precious.” So the sisters are kind of intimidated and nervous, you know? He's a great author. So on the day in question, they are absolutely certain that they show up at the right time. They knock on the door. Somebody opens the door, and they are not expected. Like, “What are you doing here? This is the wrong day.” 

JULIE: That’s my nightmare.

AMY: It gets better. So Henry James is like, “You got the date wrong. But now that you're here, come on in. I'll have my cook make you lunch.” So picture the two girls sitting there trying to have lunch feeling completely embarrassed. They don't even want to stay for lunch. I'm sure I can picture it all. They're just like, “No! We'll come back!”

KIM: Yeah, “It’s no trouble at all,” but it’s really a ton of trouble. Yeah.

AMY: Yeah. He’s making a big deal out of the fact that they came on the wrong day. They sit through this awkward lunch. They go home and look at the correspondence … they had the date right!!!

JULIE: Oh my god!

KIM: I think he might have been effing with them, honestly.

JULIE: Yeah! He was just on a power trip!

KIM: I could see him doing that. Yeah.

AMY: When I picture the two of them at this lunch, I picture you two having this, like, comically, awkward, like, “You got the date wrong!” “No, you got the date wrong!”

JULIE: Screaming at each other behind everyone’s back, like, “I’m going to kill you when we get home because you totally embarrassed me in front of my friend, Henry James.”

SHAWNA: There’s something interesting when you learn that people have famous friends. Like, they all kind of knew each other in some weird way, and they interacted with each other. And I don't know, it just seems like such a small world that on so many levels with these artists … but you kind of get it, because once you get to a certain level, then all the people you know are kind of at the same level. So it's always fascinating to me. 

KIM: As we mentioned at the top of the show, they were befriended by lots of well-known writers, including Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf. In 1920, Mary first reached out to Virgina with a letter saying she admired her work, and Virgina wrote back: “I am particularly glad to think that writers whose work I admire should find anything to please them in mine.”

JULIE: Oh, I would barf and die if Virginia Woolf said that to me.

KIM: Totally.

AMY: They were also longtime friends with the writer Mary Cholmondeley, who is on our list of future lost ladies to cover. And they were lifelong friends with Charlotte Stewart who went on to write historical books under the pen name Allan McAuley. The three of them became friends as teenagers before any of them even thought about publishing books. But speaking of books, I think it’s time we discussed the Findlaters’ most well-regarded title, Crossriggs!

KIM: Yes! Crossriggs was published in 1908, and incidentally, the original working title of this book was Pitmilly. (I think probably Crossriggs was the wiser choice in this case). Julie, do you want to give our listeners a quick, spoiler-free introduction to the plot?

JULIE: No!

KIM: You’re going to make Shawna do it?

JULIE: Yes.

SHAWNA: So this is a “slice of life” story about a small Scottish village called Crossriggs, where the protagonist, a young woman named Alexandra Hope (or Alex, as she's more commonly referred to) lives with her eccentric father, whom she's named after. And we're introduced to the Hope family’s neighbors and their own foibles. But the story really kicks into gear when Alex's sister Matilda, who has lived in Canada for many years, returns to the family home and Crossriggs recently widowed and with her five young children in tow. So the meager budget that used to suffice for Alex and her father now has to be stretched to feed a full house of eight, which, no surprise, is impossible. So Alex looks for ways to make money to support them all, which is a challenge for women in this time period. By that era’s standards. Alex is a spinster... 

JULIE: How dare you! 

SHAWNA: I know, it offended me too. I mean, she's like in her 20s in this book, I think, so it's not like she's ancient. I mean, she's not even as old as us! 

JULIE: Yeah, let's not say that. 

SHAWNA: In any case, Alex has already turned down one marriage proposal from a wealthy, but boring, man. And she shows no interest in marrying anybody. But Alex is clever and funny, and she talks her far more aristocratic (but nearly blind) neighbor, Admiral Casillis, into hiring her to read to him after he approves of her lovely voice.

JULIE: Which, she reads the newspapers or something, right? She’s just like his Alexa. Oh! Get it? Alexa! It’s like I’m a writer or something!

SHAWNA: So in her visits to his home, she meets the admiral’s nephew, Van. And despite the fact that Van is much younger than Alex, they become really good friends. Now, her sister, Matilda, is on the hunt for a new husband, but Alex (who isn’t interested in marriage) is the one who finds herself with suitors everywhere, kind of like dropping out of the sky, and one of them to her shock and dismay is Van. Now this younger man declares his affection for Alex, but she is certain that Van’s puppy love won't last being so young, and even if it was true love, Alex can't reciprocate because she's already in love with someone she's known most of her life: her neighbor, Robert Maitland! But he's a married man, and so Alex's love must remain unrequited! So throughout the novel, Alex struggles with the financial difficulties, her love life, and even her sister Matilda is a bit of a drip and kind of useless. And the ending is quite a surprise. And, you know, that's kind of the basics, I think, without getting too spoilery.

KIM: Way to go! [claps]

AMY: That was wonderful. Good job. So readers ate this book up right from the start as soon as it was published. Women readers, in particular, were incredibly smitten by this character of Robert Maitland. And Shawna, it’s said that the sisters based Mr. Maitland on a real-life family friend they knew well growing up, someone who has his own literary connection. Would you care to explain that a little bit?

SHAWNA: I'm so glad you asked me about this, and I even wore a shirt to commemorate this particular moment.

JULIE: Oh, you did!

SHAWNA: So Dr. Joseph Bell, who was 18 years their senior ... the sisters had a bit of hero worship for this guy, and they knew him when they were teenagers. So Dr. Bell is actually the real-life inspiration behind the character of Sherlock Holmes. 

JULIE: (Shauna is currently wearing a Sherlock Holmes t-shirt.)

SHAWNA: So he must have been a really captivating guy to have not only inspired Sherlock Holmes, but also Robert Maitland, who is this character that the sisters have written about and modeled on him. It's pretty cool.

AMY: Okay, so of the two sisters, Alex is definitely the one we can identify with, right? Matilda is sort of disappointingly blah and conventional, whereas Alex has these rich, truthful, sarcastic, unexpected inner thoughts. What did you like most about Alex, our heroine?

JULIE: I just thought it was so fascinating, because she's so contemporary. I mean, you could write this today. All of her commentary, it's like, she should just have a blog. She's just sort of griping about all the boring dudes all over the place. And she had bigger fish to fry than to worry about all these dudes’ feelings. You know, the umbrage I had was with her sister, like you said, Matilda, because there were times where I wanted to reach through the pages and just strangle her. She was made obsolete and kind of useless by this “grieving widow” thing where she couldn't even go out and do shit or else she’d be seen as an uncaring widow. So it was like this patriarchal society that forced her to be kind of codependent on her sister in a way, because she wasn't allowed to do anything or take a job. And it was like, “Girl, you have five kids.” It's like she didn't even do anything to raise them! I think it mentions one time she puts them to bed. I was like, “Oh, well done. Congratulations.”

AMY: Let’s not even blame society and patriarchy for this one, because she’s just a pill. She’s nice, but you just want to slap her.

KIM: Totally.

JULIE: But anyway, Alex was also super judgy at times, which is something I found to be a really nice character flaw, and her having a tendency to sort of speak freely. For myself, I have always been the type to kind of “step in it” too. So I don’t know, I just thought that was a great character flaw, and yet it bothered me that she was that way. I wanted her to be better.

AMY: I get her bitterness, though, because everyone in the village (including her own sister) is pressuring her to accept this marriage proposal. I mean, she had several, but one of the marriage proposals is this boring dud of a guy, James Reid. And couldn't we all just groan in sympathy with Alex over everybody pushing her on this? I know I've been there. Let me tell you a little anecdote which reading about Alex and James Reid reminded me of: There was a point in time where somebody was trying to fix me up when I was single. And this is what they told me to try to entice me. They said, “Amy, I think you'd be perfect together. He really likes pizza. And I know that you like pizza too.” And I'm like, “Honestly? That's why I'm supposed to like this guy?”

KIM: I can’t believe someone said that to you. [laughing]

AMY: Every person in America pretty much likes pizza. So you didn't do a lot of research here.

JULIE: I will say though, my L.A. bar is very low at this point, like, “Hey, man, if you like pizza, please call me. I’m also a fan of pizza.” If your friend wants to hook me up with somebody …

SHAWNA: It sounds like this guy is the guy for you!

JULIE: It’ll give us something to talk about.

KIM: It’s like, “This person eats, and you eat too!” Anyway, in the book, she actually talks a little bit more about romance right away. I want to read the first line of the book, which I think says a lot in a few words: “Romance, I think, is like the rainbow, always a little from the place where you stand.” That’s the narrator speaking, but as we know, the Findlaters did make a conscious choice not to marry. What kind of statement on the institution of marriage do you think they were trying to make with this book, Crossriggs?

JULIE: You know, you mentioned that the girls’ parents had this happy, romantic love relationship/marriage for many years. So it's interesting that they seem to be issuing a criticism of marriage, or at least the options available to women. You know, our parents just celebrated their 50th, and although they're a shining example of what a marriage could be, it hasn't forced me to run out and just marry the first warm-body, pizza-loving guy that I can find. 

SHAWNA: And it hasn't really done that for me either. So our parents raised us to be independent and choose what kind of life we want to have, whether that includes marriage or not. And I would say love has not been absent from our lives entirely, but I'd say finding a soul mate or a life partner who can keep up with us is kind of a challenge, you know, and that made me think that maybe the Findlaters realized this, too. Like, if they couldn't find someone to match them perfectly, like their parents were matched, then wouldn't they rather be single or just hanging out together?

JULIE: Yeah, so the statement was kind of like, probably just the fact that they gave women the option to be like, “Or what if you don't do that?”
It’s like it was the first time anyone was presenting that as an option.

SHAWNA: Here’s an idea, ladies…

JULIE: Talk more about this “not having to settle for somebody” thing... That sounds … I want to hear more about that. 

KIM: Yep, yep. So this discussion is really a throughline that runs throughout many of their books: their rejection of the idea that the life of a woman who doesn’t marry is basically a waste. That marriage isn’t always the answer, especially for certain women who have the kind of intellectual and emotional temperament that doesn’t allow them to just “settle” like we were talking about. And it makes sense, because the Findlaters were writing during a time of transition between the restrictive Victorian society they grew up in and the era of the “new woman.” In that sense, Alex has made up her own mind about marriage (she’d marry, but only with her equal), but her big struggle, really, is figuring out what the alternatives are for her. How can she ensure that her life isn’t a waste, no matter what society thinks of it? Essentially, what is her purpose? Matilda asks her, “What do you want, what do you expect from life?” and she answers, “All or nothing. All is what I want, and nothing is what I expect.” 

JULIE: I seriously want T-shirts of that. It gave me chills when I read it in the book.

KIM: Totally. And yet their last name is “Hope,” so take that as you will, I guess.

AMY: It’s not just marriage and her “options” that really frustrate her. It’s also the sphere of womanhood and poverty that she’s relegated to. She was basically working her ass off. Their housekeeper has to go away for a time and she and Miranda (sort of) are taking care of the house, their father, and the five children. So one afternoon, Robert Maitland (the married hottie) comes by after a walk in the hills (a refreshing, idyllic walk in the hills) and she blasts him. This is the quote, she accuses him of, “looking as if you had been on some mount of transfiguration, whilst we have had such a petty and disgusting woman’s day, though perhaps some of us would have liked quite as well you to lie by the side of of a burn, and look at beautiful things, and come home to write history...” 

JULIE: I’d like to report a murder…

KIM: Yeah, seriously.

AMY: But that said, Alex never shies from work and I think at one point, she’s doing three jobs at once to pay the butcher’s bill. I love that she’s not this perfect noble character, though, and she has a lot of bitterness about, you know, the circumscribed life that she has to live. Did you guys have any other favorite scenes or passages from the book that come to mind? 

SHAWNA: I have to say one of my favorite scenes is honestly this epic dinner party that takes place over two chapters — Chapter 31 and 32. And from a writer's perspective, these two chapters basically have everything. It has drama, it has plot turns, it has a crazy girl running around being really, super crazy. It has people talking about caskets and death. And Alex, you know, she's part of all of this like, she's not … what's interesting to me is as the protagonist, you would think that she'd be the person standing outside going, “Get a load of all this craziness that I'm listening to and witnessing it.” Oh, no. She's like a full-born participant of it. She talks about the night air and you know, the fact that “it's a strange kind of gaiety about a night like this isn't there?” said Alex, “like the pleasures of the Elysian Fields? Couldn't you fancy the shades of the dead meeting for bottomless enjoyment by the light of the moon on such a frosty night as this, all of us a troupe of ghosts just meeting in these well-known fields?” The best line goes to E.V., who's like, “The dead,” remarked Aunt E.V., “will be better employed, we hope, in the next life than wandering about regretting this one, Alex.” 

AMY: So good.

JULIE: So good.

AMY: Could you guys tell that the book was written by two different people?

SHAWNA: No. I think interestingly, when you talk about the fact that one of them wrote poetry, right...? 

AMY: Mary. Mary. 

SHAWNA: Yeah. And there was definitely ... there are some florid chapters that I'm like, I think Mary had to do — Oh, and also that critical eye. She definitely wrote a lot of the snark, I can tell. Like, Mary definitely wrote a lot of the snarky or kind of catty lines for Alex 

JULIE: For sure.

SHAWNA: But really beyond that, you can't tell. They really do have a singular voice. And that's what's interesting. Like, Julie writes something alone, I write something alone, we each have our authorial voice, but when we write together, it really is a different, unique perspective. Right?

AMY: People can’t tell, yeah. 

KIM: Crossriggs is sort of a Cranford-esque or Austen-esque novel in some ways. It’s the microcosm of sleepy village life and relations between neighbors of varying social status… all that. And Alex has a temper, like Emma, and she actually asks Robert Maitland (who’s a bit like Knightley in a lot of ways) to help her curb her temper in conversation… to basically help her hold her tongue. But then there are points where drama and tragedy occur. And we won’t spoil it by saying what that is, only that it might not be what you expect. 

AMY: As for the Findlater sisters, you know, people don’t know of them now. And basically, the onslaught of World War I changed tastes in literature, so that by 1920 their work began to be considered old-fashioned. But they took it in stride that their stars were waning. They simply said that, “The present age must make its own books.” So very gracious of them. They lived happily in retirement together until Jane’s death in 1946. Mary died in 1963. Sounds like they lived a pretty full life as artists, people, and sisters. Speaking of the present age, Shawna and Julie, is there anything you’re working on right now you want to talk about?

JULIE: I just realized when you said the dates that they died, by the way, like, that might have been the longest they’d ever been apart if Mary outlived her for another 20 years or so. And that had to be so sad for her. Anyway, on a lighter note!

KIM: [laughing] Yeah, yeah. What’s going on with you?!

JULIE: [to Shawna] Promise to die after me. I wouldn’t want to live 20 years and be bored and I don’t get to pick on you and all that fun stuff.

SHAWNA: All right, we’ll workshop it.

JULIE: We’re going to workshop our deaths, because we’re super into this now. We're actually developing a YA series with the Jim Henson Company. It's called The Witchlands by Susan Dennard. It's fantastic. You guys should read it, if you're all into, you know, cool world-building, two female leads kind of storytelling. And it's been really fun using our perspective as sisters to write it, because even though the two leads aren't sisters, they're kind of entwined in a way that they might as well be, right? And so fingers crossed, it gets set up. And there's so much story to tell. Like I said, there's, I think, six books already out. So lots of story there. Fingers crossed that we sell it. And if not, we’re just going to keep coming on the podcast and tell you about the books we read! 

KIM: Thank you so much, Julie and Shawna, for joining us. This was great, and we can’t wait to watch your next show! I’m a big fan of you guys.

JULIE: Oh, we're huge fans of you guys! And thank you so much for even thinking of us to do something like this. I mean, I couldn't even pronounce a word in the book, so we're not literary snobs. You guys, just get out there and read, and don't be afraid of these old, old-timey books because they're actually not old and musty. They're really contemporary. You just got to get into them.

KIM: Yeah. And listeners, we hope you’ll take their advice and read Crossriggs and let us know what you think of the ending, which we’re not going to spoil, but we want to know what you think. Tell us.

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!

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!

[start closing music]

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

46. Let Genius Burn — Louisa May Alcott

KIM: Hey everybody! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes...

AMY: Hey guys!

KIM: … and Louisa May Alcott is definitely not a lost lady of literature (she’s one of the grande dames!), but if you’ve listened to our past episodes, you know that we are both fans of hers. In fact, I recently raved about Rose in Bloom in one of our earlier episodes because my mom had a beautiful copy of it on her bookshelf when I was a kid. I still have that copy and I treasure it. And Amy, I know Little Women was one of the first “big girl” books you read — we talked about that back in a previous episode.

AMY: Right. And we’ve also both been to Alcott’s girlhood home, Orchard House. So let’s just cut to the chase here, it’s also why we’re also fans of “Let Genius Burn,” a new podcast that takes a deep-dive into Alcott’s life and writings. It premiered in July, and we’ve got the two creators and co-hosts with us today to tell us a little bit more about it. We figure if you guys are enjoying our podcast, this is one you might also appreciate. And we are all about supporting other female podcasters, especially when they love books as much as we do.

KIM: Right. So without further ado, it’s our pleasure to introduce Jamie Burgess and Jill Fuller to the show. Hi ladies, we’re so glad you could join us!

JILL FULLER: Thank you so much for having us.

JAMIE BURGESS: Thank you! So excited!

AMY: So why don’t you guys start by telling us a little bit about the podcast. How did the idea come about, and what can listeners expect when they tune in?

JILL: Yeah, so “Let Genius Burn” is a podcast, like you said, about Louisa May Alcott. It's really a focus on her life, her legacy. So we don't tell her story chronologically. It doesn't start with her birth and then go through till her death; we look at her life from a lot of different angles. So kind of like as if, you know, her life is a puzzle and we're filling in those pieces. So we look at her as a celebrity, as an activist, as a daughter — all of these different pieces that made up her life, and that influenced her writing.

JAMIE: The episodes are half-scripted, and then half more casual conversation. So listeners can expect about 20 minutes of hearing about Louisa's life from one perspective — we kind of tried to cover a lot of different anecdotes and little stories under one theme, and then we have a chance to talk about it. And we have a chance to bring those stories into the present moment, relate them to current events or relate them to things going on even within our lives.

KIM: So we’ve gotten to connect with you a bit over Instagram, which has been really fun, but we’d love to know more about you. Can you talk a bit about who you are, individually? And where does your own interest in Alcott spring from?

JAMIE: So my interest in Alcott started, really, when I was in college. We read “Hospital Sketches” in my American Lit class (I was an English major), and I got so into it that I went to Orchard House. And then I said, “I'm going to work here,” and I started as a volunteer in the garden and then became a guide and was a guide there on and off for the next, about, six years. So it really was kind of my “home place,” especially intellectually. There is an amazing community of women that are connected to Orchard House. Many of them are retired from their original careers. So I really studied this for such a long time, but I've never done a culminating project that brings together all of this knowledge. I've written a couple of essays. I wrote a piece for PBS, when the PBS “Masterpiece” version came out in 2018, about what we can learn from Louisa May Alcott. But other than that, I never felt like I did the project that kind of brought together all of my interest in Alcott and all this knowledge I have. So the podcast is kind of this big culminating project. I live in Massachusetts still, just down the road from Louisa's house.

AMY: Jill, what about you? What’s your story?

JILL: So I first got interested in Louisa, not through Little Women. I was really interested in the movie (I watched that a lot when I was a kid), but I didn't really read the book Little Women, and I first really got to know Louisa, the person, when I was reading the biography Eden's Outcasts by John Matteson, which is like this kind of seminal biography of Louisa and her father. And I read that one maybe about eight years ago or so, and I just connected to her as a person. I just loved her personality, I was drawn to her experiences or life experiences. And my background is not in literature. It was in history. And now I'm a librarian, and did, like, kind of archival work and genealogy and things like that. So I was really drawn to her as a historical figure, you know? Where she was in time and kind of her legacy as a writer and just how much more there was to her story than Little Women, which is really, like ... you were saying at the beginning, you know, she's not a “lost lady” — we know who she is. (Most people know who she is.) But most people actually don't really know anything about her at all. Because there was so much more to her than just this one book that she wrote, as incredible as it is. So that's just what really caught my attention. And then I just kind of went down that rabbit hole of just, like, every biography I could just, you know, connecting with other people who are interested in Louisa. There's a Facebook group, there's the Louisa May Alcott Society. So just kind of immersing myself in her. And that's how I first kind of got to know who Jamie was. And the thing that I've loved the most about this podcast is that up until now, I've just been reading and taking in everything I can about Louisa — everything, everything I can. And now I'm actually finally contributing something, and I'm creating something about her, which I just love. Like I'm participating even in a very small way to helping other people meet Louisa.

AMY: I love that. And Jamie, maybe this is a question for you: You guys almost kind of answered it, because we've been pronouncing it AL-COTT, which is how I have always pronounced her last name. But I did see a video last year, which I think was somebody from Orchard House. They did like a little news piece or something for a local news station. And they're like, “It's actually pronounced ALL-kut.” And I'm like, “What?!” So where do you weigh in on this?

JAMIE: So we talked about this a lot before we started recording, because at Orchard House, we do say that the pronunciation is ALL-kut. I think that that actually originally came from something like a poem where there was a rhyme, and that was how we realized like, “Oh, it would have rhymed with this.” But I also think that people take liberties with the rhyming, and I'm not really sure that that was a concrete example of the pronunciation. And because we know that people recognize AL-COTT, that was the way that we decided to say it in the podcast, and that's the way we're consistently using it.

JILL: The other interesting thing is that Bronson, her father, his original last name was Alcox — and that, you wouldn't really pronounce like ALL-cux. So we, you know, yeah, there isn't 100% sure of how to pronounce it. But it's like Jamie said, we just wanted to make sure it was recognizable.

AMY: Got it. Okay, let’s get back to the title of your show for a second: “Let Genius Burn” … where does that come from?

JILL: Oh, we had such a good time coming up with our title. And when we finally did, it was like Louisa handed it to us on a plate. We were like, “YES!!!!”

JAMIE: So “genius” is mentioned many times in Little Women. Specifically in Chapter 27, there's that kind of iconic line, when Jo is in the attic, and she's in her writing outfit and she goes into her vortex. (Her vortex is like a writing episode where she really can't stop writing and her meals go untouched, and, you know, she doesn't sleep. She's just writing and writing.) And the question is, “Does genius burn, Jo?” And this is something that I think Louisa did really well in Little Women, is to address this question of what makes a genius? Can it be taught? Can it be something that you achieve over time or is it innate? And I love in the 2019 Greta Gerwig version of Little Women where she actually addresses that head-on between Amy and Laurie, when she says you know, “Talent isn't genius, and no amount of work can make it so.” And Laurie says “Do you know of any women geniuses?” and she says maybe the Brontes. I think it was a big question for Louisa, in her time of like, “Can I achieve genius? Is it even possible for a woman?” And I think looking back, one of our thesis statements for the podcast is: Louisa really was a singular genius of her time. We think of her as this children's author. But she truly was so talented at this one specific type of storytelling that really connected to readers. And just because it is somewhat simple doesn't make it trite and doesn't make it less. And that is something that we are working really hard in our podcast to convey to our listeners — that Louisa was truly gifted in this one type of writing.

KIM: I love that title, I have to say, too, and even hearing you explain it makes me love it even more. So wonderful.

JILL: Yeah, I wanted to jump onto that, too, to add to that. The other thing with “genius” that, when we were really thinking about it, I came across another quote of hers. So genius doesn't just come up in Little Women; it also comes up in some of her journals and letters and some of her own writings, because like Jamie said, she was kind of working through this idea of “What does genius mean?” And, you know, she ran with transcendentalists. They were kind of a generation ahead of her, but, you know, Emerson, Thoreau, you know, that was in her town, like, she's surrounded by these thinkers. And, you know, genius was, for the longest time, really the domain of men. It was a public idea, you know? If you have genius, you have been gifted with something. And she came up with this line that I found in one of her letters, where she says, “Genius is infinite patience.” And I love that, because Louisa worked really hard. Really hard ... on her writing, on ... I mean, she was just — she was a hard worker, just to put her butt in the seat and she, you know, she cranked it out and she did it. And you know, to her, I think that that's what genius was; genius was putting in that work. But that was something that women were not supposed to do. Women were not supposed to work, and especially at something so public as writing, and so when I think of “Let Genius Burn,” it's like, you know, not just Louisa but, (we mentioned this in the podcast) but let women have the space, and let women have the time to create. Let women be able to claim that name of genius. Let that genius burn, not just for Louisa, but for all of us, you know? For all of us who really have that drive and that ambition. That is something that we are entitled to, as well, and that we can work towards.

AMY: Am I the only one that just wants to bust out into like, Elsa, “Let it Go?”

JILL: I know. We need a girl-power song.

KIM: So you talked a little bit about it, but can you tell us a little bit more about how you know each other and maybe a little bit about your friendship?

JAMIE: We don't know each other, because we've been in a pandemic and we've never met in real life.

AMY: What?? I can’t believe that!

JILL: So sad for us.

JAMIE: We did meet originally through an “invite only” Louisa May Alcott superfan Facebook group, and we became internet friends. And we've worked on this project together now for a long time and we have become very close friends and love learning about each other's lives. But we dream of the time when we will hole up in some cabin somewhere and just like finally get to tell each other all of our stories. 

JILL: I can't wait.

KIM: Slumber party time!

JILL: Oh, yeah. When I had the idea for the podcast, it came to me after I was ... I’d just gotten to see the 2019 Greta Gerwig Little Women. I'm driving home and I'm thinking, “Oh my gosh, all I want to do is just talk to someone about Louisa right now. Like there's so many things I just want to say and discuss.” I was like, “I should do a podcast!” And then I immediately thought of Jamie's name and again, like, I knew of her and we were on Instagram together and I'd read some of her pieces so I knew she was a good writer. Her name just, like, popped into my head. It was just like it was there, this, like, fully-formed thought, and it ended up being serendipitous. We are so similar and we get along so well. And we've ended up becoming, like, really close friends. It's just been such a joy. 

AMY: And you live in different parts of the country then?

JILL: Yeah, I'm in Wisconsin. She's in Massachusetts. So our idea, like our dream idea, was to record our episodes in real life. To get together for like a week. But that was before Covid happened. So we, yeah, that's all right. We will soon.

KIM: So obviously, listeners, if you listen to Let Genius Burn, you’re going to get an in depth introduction to Louisa May Alcott, and they came to our show, basically, to give some breadcrumbs to help tempt you, right, ladies? Some Alcott trivia?

AMY: Yeah, so lay it on us!

JAMIE: Sure. So we know in Little Women, that Jo March cuts and sells her hair for money so her mom can go to Washington to get Mr. March. And in real life. It wasn't the father who was sick and suffering in Washington DC, it was Louisa herself. And that haircutting is actually a reference to ... Louisa had typhoid fever, which she caught when she was working in Washington DC as a nurse during the Civil War. And they cut off all her hair to alleviate her fever. 

AMY: Let genius burn!

JILL:  Let her fever burn!

JAMIE: Yeah. And so it's one of the little twists in Little Women are many of these kind of, like, hidden little twists about Louisa's real life that come through in the story, but you have to kind of know her backstory to be able to fully understand them.

AMY: Okay, you guys, this is exactly why you need to listen to this podcast because there's going to be all sorts of stuff like this. I'm gonna love it! Okay, what's next? 

JILL: All right, so another one that is kind of similar from Little Women: In Little Women, Jo writes a lot of these sensational stories, and Louisa does well ()she called them her “Blood and Thunder” tales.) So most people think of Louisa as, you know, she was called, like, “The Children's Friend.” But for years, she made money selling these scandalous, really just shocking, (especially for the time) tales full of like murder, drug use, suicide, spousal abuse, like just, you know, just chock full. And the thing (I personally love these stories), you can actually get them; they're published, The thing that I love about them is that the protagonists are these really strong female characters who are fed up with the patriarchy and fed up with, you know, being rejected or whatever, and they're just gonna make their own way in the world. That's what Louisa churned out and made a lot of her early money before Little Women was published. And the really cool thing about these thrillers is that for the longest time, people knew she had written them or had an idea, but they weren't found; nobody knew what they were or where they had been published. And they weren't found until the 1950s by two Alcott researchers who figured out what her pen name was, because she had a pseudonym. (She had probably multiple pseudonyms). So we actually, there's more stories out there that have not been found, but yeah, a lot of them were found under this pseudonym and they were finally published in the ’70s. So that's how recent they are. And most people are not aware of them and really haven't read them, but they're really cool, Gothic thrillers in that kind of Gothic tradition. It's really fun.

KIM: Wow, I mean, I want to go read them now.

AMY: So pulp fiction, basically. That’s cool.

JILL: Yeah.

AMY: Okay, got anything else?

JAMIE: Yeah, so one thing that people don't really know about Louisa necessarily was that, in her time, she truly was a celebrity. She was like, the best known female author in her day, to the point where people were like, on her lawn, trying to, you know, meet her. And there's a funny remark in Jo's Boys about people trying to steal crickets off the lawn as, like, a souvenir. And we've always thought at Orchard House, that there's probably some truth to that. And also, in addition to this celebrity, she was incredibly wealthy because of her writing. She started out truly destitute in life, and then became astronomically wealthy. Like, the house she lived in at the end of her life on Beacon Hill, when it most recently sold, it was for $19 million. That was the most recent sale, but it's, you know, a five-story mansion. It's like one of the most coveted spots in Boston in Louisburg Square. And so she really was a huge celebrity and incredibly wealthy, which I think is just so cool.

JILL: Yeah, she deserved it. Another thing that people don't know is that her family was actually involved with the Underground Railroad. They had freedom seekers in their home. There's a reference to it in Bronson's journal, or her father's journal. And so yeah, they were really heavily involved in the abolition movement. Her parents were in like 1840s/1850s Boston, and Louisa was a child when they had freedom seeker staying in their home in Concord.

KIM: I love it. Oh, you’re making me so excited for your podcast!

AMY: Is there anything else we ought to know?

JILL: She loved owls. That was her favorite bird. And there's owls, an owl painted on her mantle in her bedroom.

AMY: And that's also reminding me of at Orchard House that you can see May, who was the character of ... Amy is based on her sister May ... that you can actually see some of her drawings on the wall in Orchard House. That was my favorite part of visiting. I just couldn't believe that.

JAMIE: Well, I always say this, but you know, people come to Orchard House to learn about Louisa, but when they leave, they are enamored of May, which I think was kind of true to the Alcotts’ real lives. Louisa could be a bit (especially as she got older), more of a curmudgeon, and she wanted her alone time. And May was always very gregarious. She was always very outgoing, social, certainly the most-loved around town. She's just as fascinating as Louisa. She's so cool. I love seeing May’s work all over Orchard House. It makes it so special.

AMY: So Jamie, I'm dying to know more about what it was like working at Orchard House. Tell us more about that.

JAMIE: I have so many fun anecdotes from working at Orchard House because we got to dress up like the Alcotts and pretend to be them, which is the most fun thing in the world. And we would do the May pole in springtime, and we would do the Christmas program, which was so fun. In between visitors ... so the Christmas program is a little bit different than like the regular tours because regular tours you had one guide with a group going through the house. The Christmas program we had people stationed in each room. So when we didn't have visitors we could all get together and have funny chats about Victorian times. So the living history was always really funny and interesting. But I also got to see some really behind-the-scenes things with the Alcotts; I got to see locks of their hair for example, and all their baby shoes and things like that that are in the house archives that don't make it into the permanent collection so you don't necessarily get to see them on display. And then some of the, you know, the preservation of the house could be really fun because you're getting to handle the Alcotts’ real belongings. About eighty percent of the house is furnished with the Alcotts’ real belongings, the things that were in the house when they were there. We even have pictures of the rooms and have tried to recreate them exactly as they were in the Alcotts’ time. So you can, you know, with gloves on, you could touch and handle some of the Alcotts’ real belongings.

KIM: So how often does the podcast come out? And is it going to be a limited series? And also where can our listeners go for more information?

JILL: New episodes drop every Monday and so they can go to you know wherever they listen to podcasts and look for “Let Genius Burn.” They'll find it there. We are also on Facebook and Instagram at “Let Genius Burn,” and we’ve got the website letgeniusburn.com, so any of those places they can find us. It is a limited series; it's eight episodes plus an intro episode (so nine), but we do plan on having some bonus episodes later this year with hopefully some interviews with some Alcott scholars and other people involved in the Alcott world. And then we will just kind of see where it goes from there; if we're going to move on to a Season Two next year or something else. We're just going to kind of see how this one plays out.

KIM: Jill, Jamie, congratulations on the release of “Let Genius Burn.” I know you worked your butts off putting the episodes together. And thank you for dropping by to tell us about it!

JAMIE: Thank you, thank you, thank you!

JILL: Thank you guys so much for having us. We really appreciate it. We love your podcast, so we're just so happy to be part of this.

AMY: It was more fun than a ball at the Moffatts.

JILL: I love it!

KIM: That’s all for today’s episode, check back next week when we’ll be discussing a “lost ladies” sister act!

AMY: Yes, the Scottish sisters Jane and Mary Findlater were once literary celebrities whose admirers included Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Rudyard Kipling.

KIM: And we’ve got another sister act joining us to talk about them — Hollywood screenwriting duo Shawna and Julie Benson.

AMY: I’m fascinated to find out the pluses and pitfalls of writing with one’s sister — I’m sure the Bensons (who are hilarious, by the way) will spill all the tea for us.

KIM: It’s going to be so much fun. In the meantime, don’t forget to rate and review us (five stars? please?) if you’re enjoying the podcast, and help spread the word! Give us a shout-out on social media or tell your book-loving friends!

AMY: See you next week!

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.