139. Nora Ephron’s Heartburn Turns 40

KIM: Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY: Hey, everyone!

KIM: Last week we discussed the author Ursula Parrott, whose 1929 bestselling debut novel helped make the word “ex-wife” a part of our vernacular.

AMY: Yes, her novel tackled the topic of divorce with frankness and humor. Many wry novels about divorce have followed Parrott’s ex-wife, including one which celebrates its 40th anniversary later this month: Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.

KIM: And yeah, Nora Ephron is certainly no lost lady. She’s known not just for her books, but for films like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail. I mean, iconic movies.

AMY: Yeah, obviously I’ve seen those movies, but prior to this episode I had never actually read Heartburn. OR seen the movie based on the book.

KIM: Oh my God. I can't believe that! It's such a good book and such a fun movie to watch when you've read the book. I mean, yeah. Well, I'm sure we'll be talking about it all, but yeah, I'm glad that you've now rectified that horrible omission in your, um, reading.

AMY:  You know, I saw a newspaper article saying it was the 40th anniversary, and I was like, “Oh God, I never read that.” And when I started reading it, I was like, “What on earth? This is so good. I love it. What the hell?” But I think I know maybe why I hadn't read it. And that is, you know, it came out in 1983, so I was in elementary school. I'm part of the Gen X generation. The last thing that would appeal to me in previous decades would be reading some quote unquote “old lady” book. And that's what it always sounded like to me, was just like this “old lady” book, like a, a book for women named Darlene who goes to Tupperware parties, drinks chablis and sells Mary Kay. I was wrong. I was wrong.  And honestly too, they say don't judge a book by its cover. But if you look up the covers of heartburn over the years, it's never… the covers are always a little cheesy.

KIM: Yeah. Maybe we should post some, to go along with this episode so that we can, we can show maybe  where Amy got this idea about Darlene and her Tupperware parties. You know what, this makes me think of one of the people on my team at work. He's in his twenties. He and his friend have a podcast about  costumes and they watched The Matrix for the first time and they thought it was going to be like Men in Black. They had no idea, like, the depth of the story. They saw some stills and they thought, “Oh, that's just a dumb action movie.” And then they watched it and their minds were absolutely blown. So anyway, how did I bring The Matrix into this?

I don't know. Anyway.

AMY: And I, because I just dismissed it,  I didn't know anything about it.  I kind of knew that it had been a movie. I thought it was just  a book  for menopausal women or something. Um, but then when I'm reading this article about the 40th anniversary of the book, it mentions that it was based on Ephron's own divorce from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. And that, like the character in the book, Ephron was seven months pregnant with their second child when this divorce took place. So that caught my attention.

KIM: Yeah. You're like, this is not what I thought!

AMY: Yeah. I was like, well, this is interesting. And I never realized that this book featured recipes throughout it.

KIM: What?!

AMY: I didn't know! I didn't know it was about food. Um, so, you know, basically I'm now of the age of the chablis-swilling Tupperware lady. So I guess finally the time had come for me to read it and I loved it!

KIM: It’s all coming together, right?

AMY: They say a book comes to you at the time you're supposed to have it come to you. But I mean, I would've loved this book in my twenties.

I just never gave it a try.

KIM: I mean, we've compared things to like,  Lena Dunham's Girls and Sex and the City and stuff like that.  I feel like this is like that too. 

AMY: It is, it's a New York City…. Hilarious. Super witty. it's been a while since I've read a book where almost every page has multiple laugh out loud moments. You know, this book has it. And I thought maybe the humor would be corny, but she's just savage. 

KIM: Yeah, there’s a line from the book that kind of sums it all up. Rachel (the main character’s) therapist asks Rachel why she turns everything into a funny story, and she answers: “Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I can tell the story, I can get on with it.” 

AMY: Yeah. And, and it's so great and so true that, you know, this book was Ephron's way to get her power back. It's what launched her into this successful career. Success is the best revenge, isn't that what they say?

KIM: Absolutely. And I’m sure a lot of our readers are familiar with the book, but would you want to read any other passages from the book?

AMY: Yeah, sure. I was looking through trying to find my favorite funny passage, but then I remembered this section, and it reminded me a lot of Ursula Parrott. So like Parrott, Ephron takes an opportunity in this section to make an observation about the situation for married women (and divorced women) in the 1970s. 

There have always been many things you can do short of actually ending a bad marriage — buying a house, having an affair and having a baby are the most common, I suppose — but in the early 1970s there were at least two more. You could go into consciousness raising and spend an evening a week talking over cheese to seven other women whose marriages were equally unhappy. And you could sit down with your husband and thrash everything out in a wildly irrelevant fashion by drawing up a list of household duties and dividing them up all over again. This happened in thousands of households, with identical results: thousands of husbands agreed to clear the table. They cleared the table. They cleared the table and then looked around as if they deserved a medal. They cleared the table and then hoped they would never again be asked to do another thing. They cleared the table and hoped the whole thing would go away. And it did. The women’s movement went away, and so, in many cases, did their wives. Their wives went out into the world, free at last, single again, and discovered the horrible truth: that they were sellers in a buyer’s market, and that the major concrete achievement of the women’s movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.

KIM: And that is why this book is like Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife for the 1970s, right there.

AMY: Ursula Parrott, Jr., you know, for the next [generation] or whatever.

KIM: Yeah. What is really happening? How is the, the so-called feminist movement  really impacting real women in their lives? And I'm giving you a hard time about not having read this,  novel, but obviously I'm playing it up for fun.

It happens to both of us all the time. Anyway. It is kind of funny how she also incorporates recipes throughout the novel.  It's almost like Julia and Julia or whatever.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Yeah, Um, and we've done a, a few other books with recipes on this show. I'm thinking Peg Bracken and MFK Fisher, and I feel like Peg Bracken is good one to mention in relation to what we're talking about.

AMY: Yeah, given the time frame this was written,  was kind of worried that these recipes would be very peg bracken, like, which means open up a can of cream of mushroom soup and dump it in with a packet of onion soup mix. Um, lots of sodium, 

KIM: Yeah, you’re like, “What’s it gonna be?” Amy and I were hoping to pull off a “Heartburn” themed potluck dinner party in time for this episode, but we didn’t end up having enough time.

AMY: Yeah, I, I really wanted it to run after Ursula La Parrot  but, um, we, we couldn't get our acting gear for having a full on dinner party. So I wound up, letting my family once again be taste testers for some of the recipes in this book.

KIM: I can’t wait to hear them.

[Amy plays snippets from dinner table.]

KIM: Cute. Very cute. I love it. Oh my God, you're family. They're just always so sweet. It's a good thing your marriage isn't relying on dressing though. I didn't think the enthusiasm was enough.

AMY: I will say  the dressing's pretty basic and she doesn't give the dressing recipe until the very end of the book,  it's just Dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, and olive oil.  And I thought  her proportions was way too mustardy. So in the future, I will make it again, but I would just do much less of the Grey Poupon.  and I also want to say that that dressing and the fact that she's like, “Oh, for sure my husband won't leave me because he doesn't know the salad dressing recipe.” It reminds me of a real-life gossip story about Olivia Wild and Jason Sudeikis.  

KIM: Oh yeah. Oh, and the salad. That was for, who was the salad for?  Harry Styles or something? She was taking him a salad. I don't know. I mean, I don't know any of these people. 

AMY: If you Google it, you'll find something about the salad dressing and, but, so anyway, the salad dressing in this book made me think of that.

KIM: It involves someone in like trying to stand behind a car so it couldn't pack out of a driveway. I mean it, I mean the salad 

thing really it is Heartburn!

AMY: So maybe there’s something to it!

KIM: Yeah. But also the lima bean and per casserole. Yuck.

AMY: Oh, yeah. I know. That's one of the recipes that I did not make.

KIM: I hate lima beans, first of all… 

AMY: Yeah, I don't think I would eat that. If we would've had the potluck dinner with friends, I would've had somebody bring it just for fun, because it's so crazy. Listener, somebody out there needs to have a Heartburn potluck! It's such a fun theme for a dinner party. 

KIM: We should still do the dinner party!

AMY: Right. All right. We'll…

KIM: Everything doesn’t have to be for the podcast.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Yeah. Okay. Wait, so let's talk about the movie adaptation. It's starred Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. So what did you think about the movie, Amy?

AMY: I didn’t fully watch it.

KIM: That’s saying something right there. 

AMY: YouTube has like, the famous clips,  I, I watched like, maybe six of the famous scenes from the movie, like snippets. Here's the thing. I love Meryl Streep as an entity. She, to me, was not my ideal Rachel. And I just find when she's in a movie, she is so distracting to me. Like her cheekbones are mesmerizing. So like I spend more time looking at her cheekbones…

KIM: It's an aesthetic movie. I mean, I didn't feel like the characters from the book to me, Jack Nicholson didn't either. I mean…

AMY: No, it didn’t feel like the right casting.

KIM: Yeah, we're not of the right, we're not the right audience for Jack Nicholson. Because I realize women probably thought he was like the best thing ever, but we don't…

AMY: Watching those snippets, I was like, “I think I’ve seen enough.”

KIM: I mean as, I mean, just to say Jack Nicholson, not as a sex symbol. Anyway, go ahead. For us, anyway…

AMY: I thought he was kind of sexy in his day.

KIM: Yeah. I guess he was in his day. I just don't know. Yeah. Anyway.

AMY: I feel like we’re getting off on a tangent.

KIM: Okay. Go ahead.

AMY: This movie though, received some pretty sexist backlash when it came out. Um, Nora Ephron took some heat  for the fact that this got turned into a movie, um, a guy Tristan Vox, wrote about it in Vanity Fair he basically said that, whatever Bernstein's affair, any harm that caused the family Ephron's tell-all about it was far more damaging. You know, just like she had a responsibility toward her children to sort of take the high road and to, you know, not air all this to the public..

KIM: Yeah, I'm sorry, but as if he had no part in creating the circus. I mean, his affair sparked the book. 

AMY: It was part of their actual divorce agreement. There was a stipulation that Bernstein would be allowed to meet with Mike Nichols, is that the 

director, um, and view an early cut of the film and that a share of the prophets from the film should be placed in a trust for their children.

Which I guess that's fine, but to be like, I need to be able to see, you know..

KIM: I don't know. That's her art. She made it after he split up with her. I mean,  how does he get to say how she spends the money she makes from it?

AMY: Yeah. After their divorce, he said of the movie that it “continues the tasteless exploitation and public circus Nora has made out of our lives.” Nora has made?! Nora has made?! How is she the bad guy? Because he cheated on her and all she did was chronicle it?

KIM: Yeah. I mean, she brought it out in her art. She used it in her art. Good for her.

AMY: Yeah. Anyway, listeners, if you're like me and you never gave heartburn a read, go read it.   Penguin Random House is putting out a new, um, addition of it with a forward or introduction by Stanley Tucci, which is interesting, I guess the food connection there. Anyway, That's all for today's episode.  If you like what we're doing, head over to wherever you're listening and give us a five star review of this podcast. It really, really helps.

KIM: Yeah. We got one the other day and we were texting each other with wild excitement.

AMY: Oh my gosh, you guys, you don't know how  we react to your amazing reviews, so, please do that and, head over to our Facebook forum where we're having all kinds of fun conversations with listeners and former guests. And, uh, we'll see you next week for another lost lady. 

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

AMY: So this movie received some pretty sexist backlash when it came out. (see below)

[paraphrase]

Tristan Vox in Vanity Fair, slammed the then-possibility of a Heartburn film as “child abuse,” going so far as to make the case that Bernstein’s betrayal was far less harmful than Ephron laying bare the details of her story. As Vox, Wieseltier equated the potential creation of a film adaptation to “the infidelity of a mother toward her children.” The film adaptation even played a pivotal role in the divorce agreement, which included stipulations that Bernstein be allowed to meet with Nichols and view an early cut, and that a share of the profits from the film be placed in a trust for their children. Following the finalization of their divorce, Bernstein disparaged Ephron and the Heartburn screenplay, claiming that it “continues the tasteless exploitation and public circus Nora has made out of our lives.”

KIM: responds… [as if he had no part in creating the circus! His affair sparked the book! He cheated on her! All she did was chronicle it! How does that make HER the bad guy?]

AMY: Any way, listeners, if you’re like me and  never gave Heartburn a read, go read it. Or re-read it, like Kim!

KIM: That’s all for today’s episode, blah blah blah…

138. Ursula Parrott — Ex-Wife with Marsha Gordon

AMY HELMES: 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. Today's lost lady, Ursula Parrott, shot to fame in 1929 after writing the most talked about book of its day, a highly autobiographical novel titled Ex-Wife. It sold out at bookstores, right along with Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Eric Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

AMY: Yeah. Interesting that we all know those titles, but none of us know Ursula Parrott and Ex-Wife. She went on to write over 100 works, including other novels, film adaptations, and numerous short stories and magazine articles. At the peak of her career, she was earning the equivalent in today's money of $2 million a year. Parrott made headlines not just for her writing's sometimes-scandalous content, but also for its cautionary message: that the freedoms modern women had newly claimed came at a staggering personal price.

KIM: Sadly, you can see that theme play out in Parrott's own discontented life. She may have managed to grab the brass ring as an independent woman, but it didn't prevent her from living an endless loop of doomed romances before descending into a life of infamy, homelessness, and eventual obscurity by the time she died in 1957. Almost all of her writing is out of print, but we have McNally Editions to thank for bringing back Ex-Wife. It's out this week and it is so, so good.

AMY: Yeah, I think it might be one of my favorite books that we've covered on this podcast so far. It's achingly poignant, but also wildly funny and such a perfect, perfect snapshot of an era. I cannot rave enough about it.

KIM: Yes, and we are so lucky that there's also a brand new biography of Ursula Parrott (this is the one and only biography, by the way) to put Ex-Wife into context with the author's own gripping and daringly lived life story. 

AMY: We've got the author of that book with us today for the discussion, and we can't wait. So let's read the stacks and get started. 

[intro music]

AMY: Today's guest, Marsha Gordon, is a professor of film studies at North Carolina State University. A former fellow at the National Humanities Center and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, her most recent book published just last month, is Becoming The Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life, and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott. Marsha, congratulations on this book and welcome to the show.

MARSHA: Thank you so much. I am so excited to talk about Ursula with you two today.

KIM: We're excited too. So let's get started by telling us how you originally discovered Ursula Parrott, and what was your experience reading Ex-Wife for the very first time?

MARSHA: Well, I think you and your listeners will really like this story because in some ways it gets to the heart of your podcast. So in 2015, I was acting on a tip from F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar Jim West from Penn State about some screenplays that the University of South Carolina archives had purchased at auction that people weren't really working with yet. And so I happened to go to Columbia (S.C.) to give a talk. And so I set aside a little bit of time, like 90 minutes, to go to the special collections and look at these Fitzgerald screenplays. And so since I had a limited amount of time, I had to just pick one to look at, and so of course I picked the one called Infidelity because it sounded the best, right? 

KIM: Yes.

MARSHA: And I will never forget the note that I wrote in my own notes as I was looking at this screenplay, which was, "Who is Ursula Parrott?" Because Ursula Parrott was the author of the story that had appeared in Hearst's Cosmopolitan that Fitzgerald was hired to adapt. And I thought, “Okay, that's pretty interesting.” So I started doing research into who Ursula Parrott was. And after about a year of thinking I was still maybe gonna do something with the Fitzgerald screenplays, I thought, “Okay, the real story here is this fascinating woman who was a prolific writer, lived a really interesting life that nobody is talking about.” So in order to read Ex-Wife, her first book, which was published in 1929, I had to buy a used copy on eBay. And what I ended up buying was the 1989 Plume reprint that Francine Prose did the introduction to. And basically, after I read the first sentence of that book, I was like, “Okay, I'm, I'm hooked.” And so from there, it was a digging game.

AMY: And I love that you did the digging. You could have just been like, "Oh, okay, interesting. It was some woman that wrote this story for a magazine." You know, it just takes that one little extra step, sometimes curiosity...

MARSHA: It actually was a big mental shift to go from, I'm thinking about this super famous, probably the most famous, you know, 20th century American writer to, “Okay, I'm actually gonna embark on a project about a woman no one's ever heard of who has no books in print.” And that that is a formidable challenge, I can tell you, from every angle, but I'm so glad that I took the leap.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: It's interesting you mentioned Fitzgerald, and we're gonna get into this a little later in our discussion, but that name kept ringing through my head as I was reading this book. (Not always in a positive sense, but we'll get into that in a second.) Before we dive into the discussion of the book, I think we need some historical context to help our understanding of it and why it was so explosive. So can you help us out with that?

MARSHA: Yeah, I think it helps to just think for a minute about Ursula Parrott's life trajectory. So first off, she was born Katherine Ursula Towle (so Ursula was her middle name, that became the first name of her authorial name) and she was born in 1899, so at the end of the Victorian era. And the years Parrott was growing up were a time of really kind of unprecedented and immense change in American culture, and I think especially for women, in terms of things like access to education, acknowledgements of female sexuality, and if you think about Sigmund Freud and the popularization of Freudian ideas. And also, I think, confrontations with the kind of fleeting, uh, fragile nature of life. So I'm thinking in particular of the influenza epidemics and World War I that were really a reminder, especially to young people, that you have one shot at life and it may not last very long, so live a big, exciting life while you can. She's coming of age in a period where the idea of being intentionally modern became really in vogue, and rejecting kind of prudishness and embracing openness and frankness and not worrying so much about what people think about you. This is the world Parrott is kind of coming of age in, and that certainly influences her first novel.

KIM: So one of Parrott's first published articles is titled “Leftover Ladies,” which reminds me of The Extra Woman and Marjorie Hillis who wrote Live Alone And Like It. That was about a half dozen years later. Listeners, we did a previous episode on that book, which you can go check out later. But Marsha, what did Parrott mean by the term "leftover ladies," and how does it tie into these changing times that you're talking about in the 1920s?

MARSHA: Yeah. I'm so glad, Kim, that you invoked Marjorie Hillis, and, uh, of course you're referring to your former podcast with Joanna Scutts, her Extra Woman book, which is so good. And Marjorie Hillis encouraged women to embrace being single, right? So Parrott writes this story "Leftover Ladies," and it's a non-fiction manifesto (that's how I think of it) that appeared in December, 1929 in a magazine called The Mentor. And it is the opposite of Hillis. So if you wanted to put two pieces of writing together, you could put Hillis and Parrott’s “Leftover Ladies” together and have a nice comparison and contrast. So a "leftover lady" for Parrott was a divorcee. And keep in mind that when she got divorced in the late 1920s, she thought at first like, "Oh, I'm the only woman in the world going through this,” right? “This is such a tragedy." And she starts working because she has to support a child, and she realizes that every other woman she's working with is a divorcee. So she's like, “Okay, there's all of these women who are like me.” And then she's also noticing that there are these intentionally single women who have chosen a career over a marriage; this is the group that she classes as the leftover ladies. And her central argument in this piece, which was a kind of companion piece to Ex-Wife, it came out just a couple months after Ex-Wife was published, um, is that women could be educated, they could have careers or work --she differentiated between the two. They could behave in the same ways as men, including drinking, sexual adventuring and so on. They could support themselves. There were some really good things about that, the kind of independence and autonomy and self-reliance. But she also thought, you know, there's some really bad things about this that I don't think the feminists who pushed forward a lot of this agenda thought through. And she felt like she and other women like her were experiencing these, and she wanted to air them as a problem; to start a conversation about some of these things. It's like, "Oh wow, our lives just got a lot more complicated." 

KIM: I love how you have that line in your book from her, I think, that was about, um, you know, “Women are supposed to act like they're the pride of the brothel.” They weren't raised that way, so it was like there was that huge juxtaposition between how they were supposed to act in this modern world, but how they really felt, or maybe, you know, what they were kind of up against.

MARSHA: Yeah, I mean, in some ways she really feels like the same kind of roles, of like the “angel wife” and the “whore” are still in place. It's just the terms have shifted. And so it's like instead of leaving money on the dresser, she has a line, you know, “People bring you a bottle of scotch and some violets.” Like, it's the same thing. It's just the kind of, uh, judgment around it and the terms have changed. But women, she felt very strongly, were in the same disadvantaged position, nonetheless.

AMY: She's kind of playing devil's advocate a little bit like, Wait a second. There are things that are wonderful, but let's be pragmatic about it. There are a lot of things that are not so great in our end of the bargain now.

MARSHA: Yeah, she was not afraid of provoking. As a matter of fact, I think she really liked that part of the role she ended up playing in the culture. Saying things out loud that people really weren't saying quite the way that she was doing it. And, um, it got her a lot of attention. I think she was on a bit of a mission to speak questions that she thought like all of these women wanted to know the answers to, but nobody was asking out loud because they were kind of scary questions to ask.

AMY: Mm-hmm. So can you give our listeners a little overview of the premise of this novel Ex-Wife and our narrator in the book, Patricia?

MARSHA: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, Ex-Wife is published in late summer 1929, and actually it was published anonymously at first. That's kind of an important gimmick with the book. And of course, Parrott's name was attached to it soon after. But it's about the failure of a very modern marriage between two young moderns. Patricia, her life is pretty much exactly like Ursula's in terms of upbringing and education and the like. And Peter, whose life in the book sounds pretty much just like Ursula's first husband, Lindesay Parrott. They marry young, they move to Greenwich Village, they have and lose a child. (And losing the child is actually an interesting invention of the novel that did not happen in the way that it's described there.) But this couple drinks too much. They basically have mutual and equally meaningless infidelities, followed by a really awful breakup and divorce that comes fairly late in the novel, actually. But Patricia does not want this divorce. I mean, she works really hard for it not to happen. She wants to move on from the infidelity and be mature about it because they're living by this modern ethos, and her husband just can't let it go. And so, kind of the end of the novel is, “Well, life goes on. It's never what it's supposed to be, but it goes on.”

AMY: And I think we should point out that the very first line of the novel is “My husband left me four years ago,” so it's not being told in chronological order per se. We know right at the beginning that she's a divorcee.

MARSHA: Absolutely. It goes back and forth, and I believe the next line is something like, “I don't know exactly why,” right? So it's trying to figure out not only why her marriage failed, but also try to understand this idea of the ex-wife as a category; an identity that people were having to embody in this age of kind of rampant divorce, especially in Parrott's social circle, right? Like rich, educated, white, urban. There was a lot of divorce going around in Manhattan, for example, which is where Parrott was at the time.

AMY: So, yeah, it's like that Shakespeare, "How camest thou in this pickle?" That's what you're starting with, you know? She's like, “Okay, how did this happen?” And, and then she takes you back in time to share the whole thing.

KIM: So we'd love to have you share a passage from the book, one of your favorites, if you can. I know that's a tough ask though. There's so many great moments. How do you narrow it down to one? But give it a try.

MARSHA: Yeah. Yeah, so I'm gonna read a passage actually from the new McNally Edition of Ex-Wife, which I'm so thrilled that they have republished. It's been a long time coming. And the context for this scene is that Patricia has this female mentor kind of who helps her navigate life as a divorcee, who is named Lucia. And Lucia takes her under her wing and into her apartment. And she gives this kind of extended lecture to Patricia, about women's fate in the modern age. Um, and I'll just read from it: “If you and your Peter had been young 50 years ago, you wouldn't have been unfaithful to him once because you wouldn't have had 20 opportunities for infidelity flung at you in a year. And if he were unfaithful to you, he'd manage it discreetly because he'd be socially ostracized if he didn't. And he wouldn't have told you to go your way blithely because there wouldn't have been any way for you to go. The principle thing that relieving women from the dullness of domesticity did was to relieve men from any necessity of offering stability in return for love, fidelity..” and so on.

And then I just want to read one more line from a paragraph after that. “The choices for women…” [This is actually apropos what we just were talking about] “The choices for women used to be marriage, the convent or the street. They're just the same now. Marriage has the same name, or you can have a career, letting it absorb all emotional energy, just like the convent. Or you can have an imitation masculine attitude towards sex and a succession of meaningless affairs. Promiscuity, the street that is taking your pay in orchids and dinner dates instead of money left on the dresser.” And so this is getting at that essential paradox of women's independence and self-sufficiency. And I just, I love the way she pulls no punches. This is so frank, and um, it's a little bit startling. And I suspect that readers at the time would've gasped a little bit about the truth behind these statements, right? I mean, she's speaking a very uncomfortable truth here.

AMY: It was not too long after her divorce, and to be able to have so much perspective, like to stand back and look at it and say “Where as a society did we go wrong?” or “How did we end up at this point?” It's pretty amazing.

MARSHA: Yeah. I mean I think it's fair to say in many ways she was a true philosopher of modernity that has never been taken seriously. One of the things I try to do in the book is to kind of pull these threads from her writing, from her letters, that really advance a pretty coherent imagination of modern gender relations in part.

AMY: For sure. So Ex-Wife is called a “confessional novel” in that a lot of the main character’s experiences parallel Parrott's own life, as we said. And I read Ex-Wife prior to reading your biography, Marsha, and I was just champing at the bit by the last page to get to your book and find out how it all lined up. What were the real circumstances? Who were the real people? Because it's so tantalizing. So could you tell us about some of the ways that Parrott's real life aligns with the novel?

MARSHA: Yeah. I read every single word that Parrott ever wrote or said that I could get my hands on. So that means I read every novel, every story, every interview, every letter. Fortunately, her agent George Bye, and the most significant lover she had, Hugh O'Connor (who's Noel in Ex-Wife, by the way) they saved her letters. So I think it's fair to say I'm the only person on this planet who has gone through this exercise, and that is to say I have a pretty good sense of how she used her life and her stories, and she drew from it very, very heavily. So in terms of Ex-Wife, outside of many of the characters and plot similarities, there are significant divergences like the death of her son, for example, but the most important alignment really has to do with Parrott's determination to live an examined life. I mean, apropos, Amy, of your comments a couple minutes ago about the amazing kind of maturity of being able to look at your life and examine it as a 20-something person, I mean, this was an intentional part of the way she lived her life; trying to learn from her mistakes, even if she kept making them. To be honest about the uglier aspects of modern living, like being stretched to the point of exhaustion by having such a busy life, of using sex and alcohol to kind of numb feeling, you know, of being brassy and funny instead of actually communicating how hurt you are about something. As a matter of fact, at one point in the novel, Pat tells Lucia that she doubts theirs will be a long-lived generation. And in that she was speaking to these kinds of hedonistic excesses that were kind of taking the place of more substantive aspects of what she perceived, at least, of earlier times. There's another idea that I think Parrott really kind of brings to bear from her life to this, and that's the idea of detachment. She really tried to look at even the worst things that happened to her with a sense of detachment. So in the novel on page 74, she's telling Lucia, “I'd like to be harder inside to try to take all this sort of thing as men are supposed to. Take it for the adventure, for the moment's gaiety, perhaps for warmth and friendliness and anesthesia against feeling so alone.” She's really trying to live like a modern, but it's just not working out, like, she can't just do the things that she saw the men around her doing and feel the same way about them. All of that tension between conventional romances and marriages and kind of modern, free, open sex relationships. Those were really at the fore.

AMY: That's one of the things that I made a note of, these swings between her being so cynical, the narrator, but then turning and being so emotional and kind of acknowledging that yes, women have soft hearts and that's not a bad thing, and it's not a bad thing to want to fall in love and to find the love of your life. And I think that is also conveyed in her own life story too, 

MARSHA: Yeah. And it's impossible, right? I mean, that's the tragedy as she saw it; that she tried so hard to bottle up her feelings. She says over and over again in stories and in her correspondence, “I'm just gonna put on a good face for this.” Whether it's an abortion or whether it's a breakup, I mean, whatever it is that she had to suffer through, she would try to not let people know how devastating it was. And she felt that that was part of what it meant to be modern, to not be bothered by things that would have been proper, tragic events in the life of women before this period of time. And I mean, you know what? It was not healthy, right? I mean, it was very destructive, personally to her, and I mean, she's not the only one of this generation who abused alcohol, right? You brought up Fitzgerald earlier. You know, so many people just drank themselves to death in this period of time where life was supposed to be so great and freeing. And so we should probably think about why that is. And I think Parrott explains a lot of that in her writing.

KIM: I was just thinking about, you know, even, um, the rape that happens, it's devastating to her, but she kind of just picks herself up and almost just numbs herself afterward to kind of get over it and it's like, wait a second. Oh my God! That's terrible! 

MARSHA: I think that rape scene in the novel is so powerful and so devastating. Um, the way that Parrott writes it, just in terms of the experience, I mean, it pulls no punches on the one hand. On the other hand, that part where the next day she starts to question if it even happened, and she has to notice wounds on her flesh in order to say, no, it actually happened. Because she's already, Patricia in the novel, she's already trying to move past it. Like, what's the point of dwelling in it? Well, she was just raped, right? This is another really awful traumatic experience that she doesn't give herself a second to process. There's no conversation. It's just moving on to the next thing. And so, yes, so many of these experiences that she pushes past and that she sees other women around her pushing past and the novel are so specific to women's experiences of like, kind of these hazardous conditions of modern life, outside of the conventions of a kind of, um, domestic arrangement where a man would've tried to protect you from these things.

KIM: Yeah, she got herself up, put on a beautiful outfit and went back out

MARSHA: That's right. Went to work! 

KIM: Went out the next night or went to work. Yep. 

AMY: Oh, and speaking of beautiful outfits, we get such a description of these flapper clothes throughout. She does not leave out any detail. The purse, the shoes, and that, that seems superficial in light of everything else we're talking about, but it's … this is a Jazz Age novel, and I think because she's drawing from real life, it's just such a genuine window into a woman's life from this era. And that is what gets me back to Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby and why I kept thinking about that while I was reading it, because I don't wanna throw shade at The Great Gatsby, but I never connected to any of the female characters in that book. And I think a lot of women would probably say the same thing. They're not compelling to me. And don't even get me started on Ernest Hemingway's novels, you know? So I'm not saying that this book should be compared to theirs, it's different, but I was just finding myself becoming irritated that this book was out there. I mean, until recently, hard to find, but it was out there too, and I didn't get to know about it until now. I went to an all- girls high school and we read The Great Gatsby sophomore year, and I thought, " What would it have been like as a young girl to read this and have this be the Jazz Age novel you're introduced to and to see these perspectives?" It's kind of infuriating that so many great books that focus on women's experiences just get dismissed.

MARSHA: Yeah, Amy. Uh, yeah, you are singing my song right now. It is absolutely true. May it change, right? I mean that's why we do this research and writing and, you know, efforts to recirculate women's stories that have been marginalized. It's because there's a value in them that has not been recognized. And I think there's no reason that we shouldn't put Parrott alongside Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Why would we not? The reasons her book fell out of print and the reasons it hasn't been taught all these years include the fact that we have an exclusionary, systemic, unabashedly kind of sexist canon formation history. You know, which authors are studied, what books are in print, what is taught in junior high school, high school, college. These are decisions that have been made based on criteria that really predated women having a real voice in canon formation and in the scholarly community. And this is precisely what makes everyone know Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and very few people knowing Parrott. And you know, I talk a bit in the book about how Parrott was completely unfairly pigeonholed as a romance writer and a magazine writer. And I have news for you: F. Scott Fitzgerald was a romance writer and a magazine writer. They are the same in so many ways. They just had been treated so differently. Does anybody say, “Oh, who's your favorite romance writer of the 1920s and 1930s? Oh, it's F. Scott Fitzgerald.” No, he hasn't been categorized that way. He's been categorized as one of the great American writers of the Jazz Age. And I think Ex-Wife is every bit as much a complex snapshot of the 1920s as is Gatsby. And it's a hundred percent more compelling engagement. 

AMY: Yeah, more entertaining. 

KIM: And more real! More real, like, you're feeling. You're actually getting a real window into what it was like instead of a fantasy, which is The Great Gatsby.

MARSHA: Yeah. And part of it is the textures. I mean, the textures of women's lives are there in the book. I mean, the fashion stuff, it's not inconsequential, right? It's part of the way women experience their lives. In the book, Patricia writes advertising copy for a department store, so she's immersed in this world. That's a great job for women in the 1920s, is writing advertising copy. That's how Ursula Parrott got started as a writer. So, um, you know, now that the book is back in print, what I would say to the listeners of your podcast are like, read the book, study it, publish about it, teach it. Let's get it back in circulation, and let's create a context where maybe somebody makes a decision one day to teach Ex-Wife instead of The Great Gatsby. I don't think there's any tragedy there. It's about making space for things that have been marginalized.

KIM: Absolutely. Hear, hear!

AMY: One other note that just occurred to me, too, is her male characters are fully fleshed out. Even the most peripheral character (because obviously Patricia is going on the series of dates, that's kind of how the book unfolds) as she's just going from date to date to date, all of these men have such interesting backstories and that she's really, um…

KIM: They're vivid — vivid personalities.

AMY: Yeah. So it's not like this is just a “woman's book.” 

MARSHA: Absolutely. And yeah, there's a section — you're probably referring to it, Amy — that um, that is, I don't know, eight or 10 pages I think, of describing the different men she's dating and their stories; their tragedies, their losses, their hopes and dreams that have been dashed. So yeah, thank you for bringing that up, because I don't wanna give the impression this is a completely female-centric novel. As a matter of fact, it's really all about the relationships between men and women. It's just told from a woman's perspective.

KIM: There is a pity and a tenderness for the men, too. It's not just like "men are terrible." It is also feeling sorry for the men and the position they're in as well and what they're struggling with and suffering from. So what was the reaction at the time to this book? I'm guessing it sort of ran the gamut.

MARSHA: Yeah. Well this was kind of the “water cooler” book of the season, and even the kind of reviewers who dismissed it as sordid or sensational, even those people had to acknowledge that everybody was reading and talking about this book. There were a lot of newspaper op-eds, a lot of interviews with Parrott. I mean, you could say that this was like the trending book of its moment. I was also really struck by how many reviewers misunderstood the novel as a celebration of hedonism and immorality. Because it seems so obvious to me that the book is about mistakes and regrets, that it's not like, “Oh, look how amazing my life is.” It's like, “Wow, my life would've been so much better had we both acted a little bit more maturely.” And, you know, the New York Times reviewer for the book, who did not have much love for it, um, but really credited Parrott with putting her finger on the pulse of the culture with this idea of the ex-wife as a new type of woman. And of course, he had to admit that, you know, he left the book out and his wife and all of her friends immediately picked it up and started reading it. And so he kind of says “Okay, there's like a line of women standing behind my wife to read this book right now.” So, yeah, and I think I'm very curious to see how reviews of the McNally reprint, um, what they're like. Because when Ex-Wife came out in 1989 in that former Plume edition, I was just looking at the Publisher's Weekly review from that, and it ends, um, that “Parrotts work's contemporary quality is eerie and disturbing. Although the scenery has changed, behavior patterns have not." And you know, if you think about binge drinking and hookup culture and burnout, I mean, Parrott kind of has like the hot takes of 1929 on these subjects, but they're still with us today. So I, I really hope that people respond to the novel still the way I did. And it, the way it sounds like you two did.

KIM: Yeah. It feels very relevant to now in a lot of ways too. Absolutely. Absolutely.

AMY: Yeah. And just introducing each of the men that she winds up going on dates with is very “Sex in the City.” You know, Carrie Bradshaw trying to make her way.

KIM: Yeah, and Ronna Jaffe's The Best of Everything. I was gonna mention that, too.

AMY: Yeah. This book to me though, reached like a whole nother level of greatness when she starts to weave in George Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue.” You could hear the song in your head as you're reading it. She literally puts the bars of music in between the passages where she wanted you to be thinking about this song as the action is playing out. It's just such a perfect moment in the book.

MARSHA: Yeah, you know, I wish I knew the why. I wish I knew the context for that, I mean, I would say, radical formal innovation in the novel. To include the notes on the page, um, to kind of infuse the entire chapter with the energy of that song. It really does speak to the moment in ways that words do not, but I also think it's really cool to think about the way it brings this kind of exciting new technology of the moment, the phonograph, into the novel, right? Because the whole point is that Patricia and Lucia can play the record over and over and over again. This is also very contemporary, right? Like thinking about, you know, hitting the Spotify song over and over again that you love, that just came out. And, um, I think it speaks to that kind of great ear that Parrott had for the moment. I mean, I think her language (and in this case, beyond language, right?) kind of captures the frenetic energy of a young person in New York at the time. And, you know, since you brought up this interesting innovation, I wanna bring up another stylistic observation about the novel, which may not be as obvious, for first time readers, which is Parrott's use of parentheses. Across the body of her writing, she uses parentheses to bracket off the sincere emotion and feeling that characters will not say out loud. So at the most wounded, difficult moments in Patricia's life, you will see parenthetical phrases that tell us how she (and I will also say with confidence) how Ursula Parrott felt about these particular moments in her life. And I think that's so interesting because it gives us a visual marker of that idea of flippancy, right? Like so it's the things you say out loud are on the outside of that, but the things you're thinking and the things you're feeling are contained in this marker on the page. And so again, I think it's another thing that we can point to when we talk about what a fascinating and innovative writer Parrott was.

AMY: I love the way we see Patricia in the novel make a transformation over time to the point where she can finally say “There are no villains in the piece.” I mean, we kind of discussed that a little bit before. She manages her own version of closure by the end. In real life though, Parrott continued over and over to make really poor decisions with respect to the men in her life.

MARSHA: Yeah. Um, you know, she did not wanna be a leftover lady. What she wanted more than anything was a life partner. But she also had her own terms, right? It wasn't just that she wanted any husband, obviously, because she was married and divorced four times. She had multiple engagements and multiple serious affairs. But you know, she wanted to keep her writing career. She loved travel. She wanted to raise her son the way she wanted to. She had no interest in a replacement father for her son. That was her project. That was her job. And so she was not looking for a conventional husband or a conventional family. And I think, you know, you can read her serial relationships and failures cynically, or you can read them as I do, which is she is the most relentless optimist I have ever encountered, right? Like, “this marriage is gonna work. I figured it out. This marriage is going to work. I'm gonna give this another try.” I mean, that is kind of extraordinary, right? To not give up at some point. I mean, she really kept thinking that she was going to crack the nut on this. And so, I like to think of her in the optimist, even if slightly delusively, the Optimist Club.

AMY: And speaking of delusional, she has Hugh O'Connor who is kind of like the great love (in her mind). He's not really treating her that great though. You know, he doesn't wanna commit. He's happy to just kind of get what he can get, but also have his freedom. Um, so at one point she makes what I would call an Indecent-Proposal-style proposition to him. Can you talk about that?

MARSHA: Yeah. So he's making less money than her, right? Everyone was at this point. And she offers him what she calls "a year of his life;" that she will pay basically more than his salary for him to do what he wants, write his great novel, whatever, but he has to marry her. 

AMY: For one year. 

MARSHA: For one year, right. So there's the hook of, like, you have to do this, but at the end of that year, if you don't wanna be married to me, I'll give you a divorce. But I want to be able to say, I had the respectability of being your wife and not just your mistress.

KIM: "Starring Kathrine Hepburn and..."

MARSHA: Yes, exactly. I mean, I have no doubt that that was the plot that Parrott wrote in her mind when she imagined this scenario. And, you know, he did not take her up on the offer, but part of her point was like, men do stuff like this all the time. They use money to buy their mates, why shouldn't I be able to do that? That blows my mind. I really think that that is such a radical act. And she saw it just like that. She saw it as tit-for-tat. This happens all the time, why shouldn't I be able to do this in this age where supposedly there's no difference between the way men and women act?

KIM: Didn't work, but good for her for trying. Is it true her first husband wrote a parody of her novel called Ex-Husband? There is a novel called Ex-Husband. Did you read that?

MARSHA: Um, yes, I have read all the parody novels. There's no way that Lindesay Parrott wrote that novel. He was a very serious gentleman. But it did become a bestseller. It was published anonymously, just like Ex-Wife. There were also books called Ex-Mistress, Ex-It, and my favorite Ex-Baby. The fact that there were so many parody responses, I think, gives you a sense of what a sensation this book was. That anything that is copied this much that can also become a bestseller, right? That tells you about cultural impact. And I think it's an important thing to remember when people are trying to understand the circulation of a novel like this and how it resonated in the culture at the time.

AMY: So we've already talked a little bit about how Parrott used flippancy and humor to mask the things that troubled her most, and it's also making me think of the abortion scene in the book, which is really gripping to read because she does put in those parentheticals. 

MARSHA: Yes. 

AMY: What was the response to that abortion in the book?

MARSHA: Yeah. Um, that's a great question. I haven't read a single review that singles out that scene. I don't think that would've been considered something that you would write about, although when people are offended by the book, as being “tawdry” or “sordid,” no doubt they are thinking about that abortion scene. Which by the way, I think is one of the most powerful scenes in a novel of the 20th century. I mean, I'll just say it. That chapter is phenomenal. Um, her narration of it, Pat's narration of it in the novel is very flippant, but Parrott reveals her flippancy to be a coping mechanism, right? So it's not that the novelist is flippant about it. The character is flippant about it because basically she doesn't wanna undergo this procedure in the first place. She wants to keep her marriage and have her baby. Um, and second, it's re-traumatizing because she's lost a child earlier in the novel. And, as you know, there's all of these parentheses used in a section where the real feelings are buried. So the doctor, for example, ends up asking her if she's nervous and, uh, Pat says, “Oh no, let's just go ahead and do the procedure.” But her parenthetical thought is “Hell, I just feel dead.” That almost brings tears to my eyes. That is how she felt. That is the pain and suffering of undergoing this procedure. And she's being told by her soon to be ex-husband, “Is that even mine? I don't want anything to do with it.” He won't pay for it. He is glib about it. He is a jerk about it, right? So I think again, in terms of what makes this novel remarkable and important, that scene to me is like one of the top three aspects of the novel. I just think it's powerful. It's moving, it's devastating to read that, the details of the waiting room and how she's looking around and observing the other women around her, and then how she feels after.

AMY: We almost see an echo of that scene when they are in the divorce court in a way because it takes on the same tone of like a death and, uh, you know, the finality of it and that she doesn't really want it. Um, and the same kind of humor yeah.

MARSHA: Absolutely. Not only that, there's an explicit reference to it in the court scene, because she says she remembers someone else telling her about a procedure that would only take 20 minutes, and that's the abortion. But again, as with everything else, that's awful that happens in her life, after the divorce, what does she do? She goes home, puts on her work outfit, and goes to her day job and just keeps on going. So there's no mourning, there's no crying, there's no experiencing the real sadness of the situation.

KIM: So Hollywood quickly came calling to her after the success of this book, and I think if I'm right in the film version of the book, they left out the abortion plot, right? So that gives you some indication of the response to that part. It was like not ready for Hollywood, but her writing was. Her fame obviously helped too. Do you wanna tell us about her time as a screenwriter?

MARSHA: There's a couple big sections of the book about this, but there were nine films that were adapted from Parrott's work during her lifetime. She's actually only credited for work on one screenplay, that's for “The Divorcee,” that first one from 1930. But that doesn't mean she didn't work on any of the other ones. It's just the only one she got screen credit for. Basically in 1930, she was hired by Paramount, who as with every other major studio, still had New York offices and New York studios. So they were still making films outside of the city, it was not just Hollywood. And Parrott was writing stories for Claudette Colbert and Ina Claire and Clara Bow. Fox hired her to write a scenario for her gangster novel. (Yes, she wrote a gangster novel called Gentleman's Fate.) And in the spring of 1939, she went to Hollywood for the first time and she hated it. She hated the sunshine. She hated the gossip. She really wanted to be back home. And part of the reason is she was kind of mourning this disintegrating relationship with Hugh O'Connor and she kind of just wanted to be back in his orbit. But part of it was she really had a New York sensibility. She recognized the kind of value of Hollywood. She knew that her ideas about modern relations could reach millions of people by participating in creating stories that she really felt could help people have better marriages and better relationships by being honest about modern life. And she was really committed to doing that when she went to Hollywood to try to write female characters that she felt were not impossible throwbacks to an earlier age. So yeah, she has some great experiences, um, uh, entertaining, I should say, experiences while she is in Hollywood. And she went back a couple of times, but she had no great love for being there.

KIM: So later in her life, she started to make headlines for all the wrong reasons. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened?

MARSHA: Yeah. So all of the things that she had been doing to kind of manage the difficulties of her life caught up with her, not surprisingly. As the line I referred to earlier that “we would not be a long-lived generation,” right? She had a lifelong struggle with alcoholism. Um, it seems pretty clear to me that she had bouts with depression in addition to writer's block. That she would just not be able to write a word, and have days where nothing would happen. She was a spender. Those clothes she describes in Ex-Wife and the price tags? Those came from the heart of Ursula Parrott. She loved good fashion and nice cars and vacations and furs and jewelry, and she loved that she could buy things for herself, and she did. So she would overspend herself and then have to get a story out and try to meet a deadline, and everything was kind of catching up with her over the course of the 1940s. And, you know, she ended up in a really dark place. This was especially, I think, hard for her when her agent, who was with her for so long, finally in the 1940s said, “I can't do it anymore. It's just too much histrionics, too much missed deadlines.” Like, “you're so talented, but you've squandered so much. And I think it's better for our friendship if we part ways.” And he was, I think, her closest friend, and he was the person who could tell her, “Look, you need to get your act together.” As maybe she saw from the beginning that this kind of life was not going to end well.

KIM: Yeah. She lived fully. 

MARSHA: This was a common way to live if you were part of the literati in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. You spent every ounce of your energy and every dollar you had on the pleasures of life. And you often ended up with very little or nothing.

AMY: And listeners, we'll let you read Marsha's book to get the full deets on this one particular story. But let's just say, Ursula Parrott has a sort of Bonnie and Clyde situation that she finds herself in where she is facing federal conviction because of some antics that she got into, which is almost like something out of a novel. Not even almost, it is like something out of a novel. So to hear that whole story, check out Marsha's book. I mean, Ursula was homeless towards the end of her life, right?

MARSHA: Yeah. Yeah. As Walter Winchell broadcast in his column, she was sleeping on the subways. She did try to pull herself out of that tailspin, and really fought. Really fought hard. And I, I think it was just, she was too far gone. Um, one of her ex-husbands really tried to help her in the end. It's very moving. You shouldn't cry at your own book, but there are some parts towards the end that you know … I have this great sympathy for this woman who I really admire in so many ways. And, you know, it's really hard to imagine that suffering and the loneliness and, just, you know, she fell apart in the end. 

AMY: Yeah, she was her own worst enemy in some ways, but I think she was also being this Cassandra for culture and saying, "I don't think anybody realizes the unintended consequences of this newfound freedom." And it's almost like the things she was warning against is ultimately what took her down. 

MARSHA: That's right. That's absolutely right. And she saw it. She saw it, right? Like so she was not unaware, kind of, of being entrapped in the things that she saw. She didn't say, “Oh, I have the answer. I know how to solve the problem.” She just said, “I see there's a problem. Let's talk about it”

KIM: Given how much we loved Ex-Wife, Amy, and I, are there any other books by her that are still in print or that we can easily track down that you recommend we read next? What are your favorites?

MARSHA: It's such a great question. So first off, the bad news is there is nothing else in print, but, um, I will say that I am doing my very best and if there's any listeners out here who wanna help me in this quest to have more of her work republished, there is to me the gem of her writing, it's a serialized novella, it's called Breadwinner, and it's about a young widowed mother with career ambitions who becomes a very successful screenwriter. It's set mostly in New York, so you've got all the great New York locations, but it's really about how working women were struggling to balance careers with romance and with family. And it's about how men were really struggling to accept competition from women in the working world, and I think it might be the first kind of female work-life balance novel. I just love it. And it's short, so it's, you know, like novella length under 50,000 words. So a very quick and affordable re-publication opportunity. And, um, I would love to also put together something with her short stories and interviews and non-fiction writing. Um, I've got a lot of ideas about that, but if you are feeling adventurous, like a eBay or Abe books kind of, Next Time We Live from 1935, which was also serialized in The Los Angeles Times, is really interesting. It's about a career- oriented couple, a journalist and an actress, who can't seem to find time for each other because they have these careers that suck all of their energy away. And this was adapted into a film with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret O'Sullivan. So I would say, grab your copy of Next Time We Live if you can. And maybe that one will be republished too.

KIM: Those all sound great. I definitely wanna read the Breadwinner one right away, so I'm gonna have to find it online somehow.

AMY: Some more titles have to come out just given how much we loved Ex-Wife and how good it is. It's just, it's unforgivable to keep these under wraps anymore. Some of these lost ladies… we've covered so many on this show, and some that we feature really stick in my heart more than others. And I think Ursula Parrott is one that I'm going to think about often, long after this episode. Something about her life just really spoke to me. Her story made me sad in many ways, but I think she always held onto hope, which is why I loved, loved, loved, loved the quote from Parrott that you included toward the end of your book. It felt like she was kind of speaking to us across the generation, would you be able to share that prediction that she made?

MARSHA: Absolutely. So she said "Women like me will be better off in a hundred years. We hunt about among the wreckage of old codes for pieces to build an adequate shelter to last our lifetime. And the building material's just not there. I do believe that out of all this will come a comradeship between men and women, fairer to men, fairer to women, but not in time for us." I mean, the prescience and self-awareness of that, it's so moving to me. She was such a fighter. That relentless optimism, that sense that she was really trying to figure out how to solve this problem that her generation had created for itself. That's really there. And you know, I say in the book, I have to agree with her. I think if she had been born a hundred years later, she wouldn't have seemed like such an outlier. She would've seemed very much in, you know, the cultural swim that we all exist in. And I think she would've had an easier time. Her ideas would've been recognizable within a culture that has really radically changed. It's thinking about gender roles and work-life balance, et cetera. But let me add, a lot of these problems and questions she raised are still with us. We are not living in some magical fixed paradise of gender equity. And you know, I think Parrott would have been an interesting voice in all of this. She would've been doing the #MeToo tweets about her experiences. Some of these things are not gone, right? 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. Well, we just think it's amazing that you did the hard work of bringing her story back into focus. And listeners, you won't regret picking up this biography. Ursula Parrott's life was quite a life. Um, thank you so much, Marsha. We loved having you. 

MARSHA: Well, thank you for having me, and let me just say, your podcast makes such a contribution to this project of correcting the historical record about women's contributions to literary culture. So thank you for all the work that you put into it.

KIM: That means a lot. So that's all for today's podcast. If you enjoyed it, consider giving us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It's a really good way to help us find new listeners. You can stay up to date on all things Lost Ladies of Lit via our Facebook forum where listeners and guests get a chance to connect.

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. 

136. Pauline E. Hopkins — Of One Blood with Eurie Dahn and Brian Sweeney

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off classics from forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: Hi everyone. I feel like I should be wearing a leather jacket and dusty fedora a lá Indiana Jones for today's episode because the book we're discussing today feels a little Raiders of the Lost Ark. It features an expedition through the desert, a cryptic treasure map, secret chambers, and a run-in with an ancient sacred crocodile.You can practically hear the John Williams score in the background.

KIM: Yes, but this work of speculative fiction also feels very Black Panther, too, because it features an advanced civilization hidden away on the African continent that's reminiscent of Wakanda. There are also a lot of very cinematic twists and turns.

AMY: Pauline E. Hopkins Of One Blood: or The Hidden Self is a book we mentioned briefly several years ago. It was recommended to us by Melanie Anderson of the “Monster She Wrote” podcast, and we'll be honest, the plot of this book is a little bit bonkers.

KIM: Yes, but in a good way, right?

AMY: Bonkers is always a good thing. 

KIM: Yes, it's good. In addition to the adventure feel we just mentioned, it also has mesmerism, baby switching, bigamy, incest, ancient prophecies, and a haunted house for good measure. 

AMY: Bring it!

KIM: Yeah, exactly. But the book also brings up a lot of questions about race and power in the midst of all this thrilling storytelling, and Hopkins reclaims Black history in her appeal for racial justice.

AMY: There's a lot to dive into, and we've got a couple of guests who are going to help us with it all, so let's rate the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays] 

AMY: Our guests today, Eurie Dahn and Brian Sweeney, are colleagues in the English department at the College of St. Rose in Albany, New York.

KIM: Together, they edited a brand new edition of Of One Blood for Broadview Press, which was published earlier this year. As scholars, they have a special interest in African American literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They're also the directors of a project to digitize full issues of the Colored American magazine, which was a general interest magazine for Black Americans in print from 1900 until 1909. Pauline E. Hopkins served as editor of that magazine and also wrote extensively for it. Eurie and Brian, welcome to the show. We're so glad to have you. 

EURIE: Thank you for having us.

BRIAN: Thank you so much. So happy to be here.

AMY: So before we get into any more detail about this book, we wanted to find out first how each of you happened upon it and what your initial reaction was.

BRIAN: I first read Of One Blood in graduate school when I was, working on my dissertation, and what attracted me to the text was, primarily, the character of Reuel, who, as you know, is a white-passing Black man studying medicine at Harvard at a time when many in the medical community were putting up all sorts of official and unofficial barriers to entry into that profession for Black Americans. So I was really interested in how the text's depiction of alternative medical practices and medical spaces connects to the role racial exclusion played in professionalizing American medicine.

EURIE: And I first encountered this novel as an undergraduate, probably in a women's writing course. And, um, my response to it was totally unintellectual, unlike Brian's. I was more like, "What is happening? Did that just happen?" And you know, just my feelings of astonishment just snowballed as I went on. I mean, let's just be clear, the novel never gets ordinary. Like, shocking thing after shocking thing. And of course I was captivated. I had to think more about it.

AMY: Okay. I'm relieved to hear that because Brian's reaction was so highbrow, and my reaction was just like, "This book is bananas!"

KIM: Exactly. Same. Me too. Like this, “this is bonkers, but it's a rollercoaster of a ride.” It's really fun. Can you tell us a little more about Pauline Hopkins and her background?

BRIAN: Sure. Hopkins was born in Maine in 1859, but grew up in Boston, and she was born into a family that was pretty noted for its work in religious ministry. It was a very musical family. In high school, she entered an essay contest sponsored by the Black abolitionist, the novelist, William Wells Brown. And she won. She won $10, and I think probably also won a dawning sense of confidence in herself as a writer. As a teenager and into her twenties, she writes and performs for musical theater. She becomes to be known as Boston's "favorite colored soprano," quote unquote, and also begins to attract attention as a lecturer speaking on Haiti and Black history.But it's 1900, the year she turns 41, that's a really big breakout year for her. Um, that's the year her novel Contending Forces is published. This is the only one of her novels that was published in book form during her lifetime. And she is also hired to join the staff of The Colored American magazine. It was one of the first general magazines aimed at a Black readership. And its stated goal was, quote, "Unflinching demand for all that is right and just during the present evil days." So she works there at the Colored American from 1900 to 1904, first as editor of the women's department and eventually as editor-in-chief, all while contributing a huge amount of original writing to every issue under various bylines, at least three different names: one her own, and two pseudonyms. And these writings included short stories, editorials, biographies, and three entire novels that were published in parts, including Of One Blood, the third of the three, which was serialized in 1902 to 1903. As a writer and editor, Hopkins was a woman who spoke truth to power, and this made her some powerful enemies, both within and outside the Black community. In 1904, she ends up pushed out as editor. She continues to write and to lecture, but eventually moves back into private life caring for her elderly mother and working as a stenographer and proofreader. When she died in 1930 at the age of 71 (tragically of injuries she sustained in a fire), she had lived long enough to witness the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance and to see magazines like The Crisis carrying on the pioneering work she had done during her four years at The Colored American magazine.

AMY: Wow. So a woman of many talents, too. She kind of had a whole second act, really, like starting off as a musician or a singer, and…

BRIAN: Absolutely.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: I love the picture of her at the beginning of the Broadview Press edition. Her personality shines through. It's not a boring author photo; it's really great. Um, So Of One Blood was published with this great subtitle, The Hidden Self. Do you wanna talk a little bit about her intended audience for this novel and what her aim was with it? 

EURIE: Yeah. So I think first it's essential to recognize Hopkins is writing during the Jim Crow era, which stretches from, roughly, the late 19th century to the mid 20th century. So this period was a time of legalized segregation, racial violence, lynchings and the like. So slavery's over, so you don't really need anti-slavery abolitionist art anymore. So how do Black authors and artists respond to these Jim Crow conditions? And so Hopkins is basically writing during this time of crisis, and her fiction is deeply political and activist. And as such, you know, she's aiming her work not just at Black Americans, but also white Americans, because her goal is to make a change to end racial injustices, and to work towards a better future.

KIM: Let's jump right into the book then. We're going to attempt to provide you listeners with a mostly spoiler-free setup of the book, which is not easy to do, and I wonder if we'll actually be able to get this in one take. Let's see. Amy, you, you start.

EURIE: Looking forward to it.

AMY: Yeah, there is so much going on and how do you say it without saying it, right? I definitely think that's part of the joy of reading the book, is stumbling onto these surprises for the first time, so we really wanna preserve those moments for anybody out there that's going to pick up a copy after listening to this episode.

And so to that end, at the novel's opening, we encounter Harvard Medical student Reuel Briggs, whom we find out early on is a light-skinned Black man who is passing as white. He is deeply interested in mesmerism and its potential benefits to society, but he's feeling bummed out because he knows the scientific community thinks it's basically a bunch of bs. So his best bud, Aubrey Livingston, shows up at his room one night and coaxes him out of his funk by inviting him to a concert featuring Black singers from Fisk University. And the star performer in this concert is a woman named Dianthe. Do you guys say Diantha or Dianthee?

EURIE: This is a complicated question.

KIM: We love those!

EURIE: We also have had debates about Reuel's name too. 

AMY: Okay. All right. So to each his own, you know. Okay. We'll just go with whatever. Okay. So the star performer in the show, Dianthe, her voice and beauty ensorcels both of these young men. And see. Kim, I'm still trying to make “ensorcel” a thing. 

KIM: I mean, it's the perfect word. Uh, it's, it's like I'm totally on board because it's so useful.

AMY: We just discovered that word ensorcelled a few together, so now we wanna use it all the time.

EURIE: It's a good word. 

KIM: Yeah. So back to the story, this first part of the novel has a decidedly gothic feel. So after being dared to go visit the grounds of a supposedly haunted house, Reuel meets what he believes to be the spirit of Dianthe begging him for help. The next day, Dianthe ends up in the hospital where Reuel works. She's unconscious, having been in a train accident. He revives her using his special mesmerism techniques, but she then suffers amnesia, and as a result, doesn't know that she, too, is Black. They fall in love, but Reuel feels as though he doesn't have a sufficient income to give her the life she deserves. So his friend Aubrey comes up with a solution. He knows of this expedition heading to Africa to unearth the supposed treasure of a lost ancient civilization. He suggests Reuel join the expedition, earn his fortune, and then return to the States financially ready for a future with Dianthe. Reuel agrees to do this, but he's reluctant about it. He doesn't wanna leave her for this years' long journey, but he marries her on the eve of his departure, and then he asks his friend Aubrey to look after his young bride while he's away.

AMY: And so the next part of the book is an adventure tale. As part of the African expedition, Reuel stumbles upon the site of the supposed buried treasure of Meroe in the Ethiopian desert, and somehow enters a magic portal of sorts. Here we are introduced to a gleaming paradise filled with perfectly chiseled African hotties living in this advanced utopian civilization. They're all calling Reuel their returning king, which the prophecies have spoken of. So go ahead and cue from the musical Annie: [sings] "I think I'm gonna like it here!!!" He's pretty stoked about this kingdom that he stumbled upon.

KIM: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But meanwhile, you know, back in Boston, Dianthe is in real trouble. She needs his help and he's continents away. We won't give away anything else other than to say that by the novel's conclusion, the reader comes to learn that Dianthe, Reuel, and Reuel's friend Aubrey all have more of a connection than anyone could have ever known.

AMY: Okay. Phew!

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Readers like, like that's really just the very basic setup. So we weren't really giving too much away there. All right. So Eurie, Brian, is there any other context that we need to know in order to understand the goings on in this book? Would readers have had any sort of familiarity with any of these elements that she's writing about that we kind of find completely bananas?

BRIAN: Uh, yeah, there's so much going on in this book and our addition does try to re-situate it in context that will render some of its more unusual attributes a little more familiar and accessible. First, is the genre of the Lost World Adventure novel, which was a relatively new genre in the 19th century. You can find some examples in the writings of Poe and of Jules Verne, but really it's the English novelist H. Rider Haggard in the second half of the 19th century who's generally credited with inventing this genre with, books like King Solomon's Mines. And this particular genre of writing has a very long afterlife, and we can still see it living on today in films like The Mummy or Disney's Jungle Cruise and the Indiana Jones films. Hopkins is definitely making use of this form, but interestingly, I think it subverts Eurocentric and imperialist logic in a number of ways. A second context is about medicine and unorthodox medicine, mesmerism, magnetic healing and so forth. Of One Blood was written during a time when American medicine was rapidly professionalizing by setting up barriers to keep what deemed quote “unqualified people” out of the trade. And Black Americans and white women were making significant inroads into the medical profession by 1900 for sure, but they encountered more barriers to entry than white men did. And so it stands to reason when we look back at this period, that women and Black Americans who felt a calling to such work might look outside of the professionalized institution of medicine and so unsurprisingly, you'll find a lot of overlap between unorthodox medicine and progressive politics, or even radical politics, particularly concerning gender and race. So the novel’s curiosity about magnetism and all of this stuff, I think, is linked to a suspicion of the institution of professional medicine. We talked about the novel's subtitle a moment ago, The Hidden Self. That's actually the title of an essay by the Harvard psychologist William James, brother of Henry James. And that essay argues that scientific medicine at this time was discovering that however outlandish some of the claims of magnetic physicians might be about invisible fluid and so forth, their methods often resulted in cures. And so Hopkins, I think, is asking us to think about the way in which the line between orthodox scientific and unorthodox popular healing practices, how that line is always being redrawn. The origins of mesmerism in this novel end up getting traced back to Africa, so it's being presented to us as a specifically African kind of tradition and practice.

AMY: And aside from all that, it lends itself really well to just telling an entertaining story!

KIM: Yeah, that's for sure. 

EURIE: Well, I think one of the most important things to know about Hopkins' novel is that it was serialized. in each issue of the magazine from November, 1902 to November, 1903, an installment of the novel was published and the readers had to basically wait until the next month to read the next installment. And this concept is so foreign to us in our days of, you know, watching White Lotus until 1:00 AM, binge watching it. (Not that I know anything about that.) Um, but so sensationalism is, in part, a marketing strategy for Hopkins. So she's weaving all these sensational events with substantive commentary about generational trauma and all these things related to gender, et cetera. So for me, the thing that I find really compelling about Hopkins is the way she uses the conventions of adventure tales, romances, supernatural stories, to further her political ends.I think that's such a tightrope to walk. And that she does it so well she's mixing in this entertainment along with this really deep, important social political message. And Hopkins' title Of One Blood comes from the Bible. It's, uh, Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament. And the phrase was frequently used by Christian abolitionists to argue for the end of slavery. So writers like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, they used it to condemn racial injustice; to basically say, “We're all of one blood, we're all human beings,” right? So it was deployed very strategically for political ends. And Hopkins uses this phrase in the Jim Crow setting to say that the sins of slavery, they have this long reach into the present day. They're not just in the past.

KIM: So yeah, the characters in the book do come to claim their Black heritage with pride, and Hopkins does in fact address the idea of colorism. There's the white character named Charlie on this African expedition when he meets up with the citizens of Telessar, a dignitary says to him, quote, “I've heard your people would count it as a disgrace to bear my color.” And Charlie answers basically, “Well, your complexion is light enough that you would just get labeled as Arab or Turk or Filipino.” You'd get by okay in America, in other words.

AMY: Right, but then the same dignitary points out a servant named Jim with obviously darker skin and says, okay, but what about him? And Hopkins writes this: “Charlie felt embarrassed in spite of his assurance. ‘Well, of course it has been the custom to count Africans as our servants, and they have fared as servants.’ And the dignitary answers: ‘And yet ye are all of one blood, descended from one common father. Is there ever a flock or herd without its black member? What's more beautiful than the satin gloss of the raven's wing? The soft glitter of eyes of blackest tint or the rich black fur of your own native animals. Fair-haired worshipers of Mammon, do you not know that you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting?’”

EURIE: This is such a great quotation, Amy. This is the tension with the novel's depiction of beauty standards, right? You have the satin gloss of the raven's wing, you know, it's being described as beautiful, but then the main characters in the novel basically look white. They can all pass as white. They all have light complexions, and often their beauty is described as specifically related to their fairness, um, particularly in the case of Dianthe. And so this debate also plays itself out in the pages of the Colored American magazine. So you have articles that are meant to evoke Black pride, but then, you also have side by side to these articles, advertisements that promote skin-lightening creams and hair straighteners, you know, so I don't really have an easy way to resolve this tension other to basically just point to the complicated politics of the era. And I think this novel really embodies those politics.

AMY: Yeah, you're right. I think it's complicated and, you know, in a certain sense the characters have to be light-skinned for the other messaging that she's trying to bring out. You know what I mean? So like, it's hard to make it all dovetail together. Um, but when Hopkins presents readers with this lost city of Telessar, it's an advanced civilization that predates ancient Egypt or anything in Europe, I found myself thinking, “Is this real?” Like what's real and what's not? Uh, admittedly my grasp on African history is limited. But I was trying to figure out what was real and what was not in what she was asserting. There is some basis in historical fact though, from what she's expounding upon, right? And why would that have been galvanizing for her readers to hear?

EURIE: So I think the whole “what's real and what's not” thing was one of the trickiest parts in editing the novel, um, and creating our footnotes where we provide contextual information. So in understanding Hopkins' relationship to history and historical fact, I think it's good to think of three things. So first it's important to understand that she's writing during a time when many scholars simply did not think that Africa had a history, right? It was just like this dark continent, a primitive land with no real accomplishments, unlike Europe, of course, right? And, uh, second, she is deeply, deeply invested in writing a history of Black Americans and Black people to counter all that. And she relies upon the work of Black historians like George Washington Williams, and builds upon their work. Like these are overlooked historians, obviously not accepted by the mainstream, but she uses their works and builds upon it for her novel and her magazine. The Colored American magazine also does similar things with history. And then third, her novel partakes in a school of thought called Ethiopianism, which is grounded in a passage in the Bible, which states “princes shall come out of Egypt. Ethiopia shall soon stretch her hands unto God.” And this passage was read as a kind of prophecy about the rise of the Black race. And Ethiopianism was very popular in the 19th century and beyond. Uh, Francis Harper, for example, has a well-known poem that's titled “Ethiopia.” This Ethiopianism is basically related to an account to the fad for all things ancient Egypt at the time, right? There's a big craze for Egypt at the time. And so it's a way of affirming the accomplishments of Black civilizations in Africa, and a way to argue for Ethiopia, not Egypt, as the cradle for learning. So Hopkins' history relies upon the work of Black historians and biblical histories even as she adapts white mainstream sources for her own ends. And so she basically remixes it all, and her focus on history in the past is always future oriented, you know, it's always about taking pride in Black accomplishments and about working to end racial injustices.

AMY: Well, she's very convincing. If a lot of that is fabricated, she really went into detail. I think that's part of why I was like, “Wait, is this true?” Like they invented trigonometry or whatever it is that she's asserting, you're just sort of like, huh? 

EURIE: And so the answer is “sort of.” It's sort of true.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Okay. okay. And so when she's describing this lost civilization, her descriptions of this place are like the best Trip Advisor reviews you've ever read. Um, it was like great world building, right? She makes it sound so deluxe. So I'll just read a little bit from when he sort of wakes up, I guess, and is starting to realize where he is. He's not so much being kept a prisoner anymore. They're starting to pamper him because he is their returning king that the prophecy has predicted.

Hopkins writes: Used as he was to the improvements in luxuries of life in the modern Athens, [which the modern Athens is like a nickname for Boston] he could, but acknowledge them as poor beside the combination of Oriental and ancient luxury that he now enjoyed. Was ever man more gorgeously housed than this? Overhead was the tinted glass through which the daylight fell in softened glow. In the air was the perfume and luster of precious incense, the flash of azure and gold, the mingling of deep and delicate hues. The gorgeousness of waving plants in blossom and tall trees, palms, dates, orange mingled with the gleaning statues that shone forth in brilliant contrast to the dark green foliage.The floor was paved with various mosaics and dotted here and there with the skins of wild. After the bath came a repast of fruit game and wine served him on curious golden dishes that resembled the specimens taken from ruined Pompeii. By the time he had eaten, night had fallen and he laid himself down on the silken cushions of his couch with a feeling of delicious languor and a desire for repose. His nerves were in a quiver of excitement and he doubted his ability to sleep. But in a few moments, even while he doubted, he fell into a deep sleep of utter exhaustion. When he arose in the morning, he found that his own clothing had been replaced by silken garments fashioned, as were Ai’s [this high priest guy] with the addition of golden clasps and belts. In place of his revolver was a jeweled dagger, literally encrusted with gems.

So just the level of description she provides of this place is wonderful.

KIM: Season 3 of White Lotus!

AMY: Oh, yeah. That’s perfect. 

EURIE: Oh, that would be great.

AMY: And I was also intrigued, later on she describes this room that has all of these preserved dead bodies of women that were encased in some sort of see through crystal chambers, and, I don't know, I thought we were gonna come back to that later in the book and there would be more of a purpose for it, and it just kind of was just there. 

KIM: Like Superman or something. There was something so intriguing about that. I was trying to picture what that would be like.

AMY: Was there a point to those bodies encased in glass coffins or was that just more of her trying to make the place sound cool? 

BRIAN: I share your wish that it had been developed at the level of plot for sure. It's not uncommon in Lost World narratives to have some kind of a scene where a main character enters a crypt, sometimes just full of skeletal remains, but sometimes well preserved bodies. There's a scene, similar to that in Haggard's She, for example. Perhaps these preserved bodies are supposed to make this a kind of liminal space that sort of connects past and present and future. But one thing I suppose I take from this in Hopkins' treatment would be to gesture back to what we were talking about a moment ago with the goal of really emphasizing Ethiopian greatness and priority. So, you know, when we think of the achievements of Egypt, one of the first things we think of is mummification. And you know, in the white historical imagination of this period, Egypt is sort of the one exception, the one great civilization, right? And all neighboring African peoples would have been seen merely as supplying slave labor to Egypt. But here, we have Ethiopia being depicted as greater than Egypt, more technologically sophisticated than Egypt, with these more advanced techniques for the preservation of bodies. That's something that I can find here in this scene.

KIM: Yeah. “We're gonna one up the Egyptian mummies with our glass crystal chambers.” 

BRIAN: Right.

KIM: So that's just another example of why academics probably love analyzing this work because there's so many scholarly rabbit holes you could just go down. Everything feels rife with multiple meetings. So can you talk about some other important themes that run through this work? I feel like there are too many to touch on them all, but what are some that you find the most important or intriguing that you'd like to mention?

EURIE: I think one big theme is Afrofuturism, you know, a term that was not a theme during Hopkins' day. It was coined later, in 1993, to refer basically in part to like speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, et cetera, that focuses on Black culture and concerns in the context of the future. So for example, like Black Panther with its depiction of Wakanda. It's a place of very old traditions, but also a place that has incredibly futuristic advanced technology that the Western world knows nothing about. And so Afrofuturist art basically works to connect the past with possible futures for Black people. And so Of One Blood is a work of speculative fiction, and it aims to make that connection between the past and the future, right? So both the glorious past of Ethiopia, but also the past of slavery, to a future that is full of Black accomplishment, to a future that is better than the one that they're living in right now, you know, to a future that's free of racial injustices. And a second thing I think that is important to Hopkins is Hopkins' connections to networks of feminist activism. On the surface, this novel may appear to be grounded in conventional depictions of gender, right, you know, especially with the figure of Dianthe, who throughout is a really passive sort of figure. However, as the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that Hopkins's critique in the novel is grounded in the assertion that issues related to race can't be discussed in isolation to issues related to gender. So Black women are at the heart of her focus on racial justice. And so I think those are some major themes within the novel that I think are quite important. Obviously there are many, many, many more, but um, I guess we could just end with those two.

AMY: That makes me think of, we've done a previous episode on Utopian literature and how feminists use that, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman with Herland, and we did Miriam Michaelson's The Superwoman where a guy ends up on an island full of women, basically. Is this something different or can we compare this book to some of that? I mean, I know she's dealing with race more than gender dynamics, but are those two separate things like the Lost Adventure tale as different from a Utopian kind of novel?

BRIAN: Um, that's definitely a parallel, for sure. One thing I think is maybe missing is, when I think of Herland or other sort of 19th century utopias, looking backward, we don't get as much detail in Of One Blood about sort of how this society functions. That kind of understanding, issues like government and social arrangements and things like that that I expect to find in Utopian fiction. Certainly would classify this as at least Utopian-fiction-adjacent, though I think as a feminist utopian text, it fails to satisfy a little bit, you know? But it's so interesting because in life Hopkins' struggle in terms of racial justice justice always is intersecting with gender. It's white men and Black men who are continually trying to tell her what she can and cannot say, uh, what kind of tone is acceptable and so forth. And so I do find an interesting disjunction between the way women are depicted in this text and what we know of Hopkins' politics.

KIM: Yeah, because, uh, Telessar, correct me if I'm wrong, but it almost comes across as a little bit like a harem. Am I… did I take that wrong? 

AMY: Yeah. yeah. 

KIM: They're like, these priesthood girls are women, but one of them is meant to become Reuel's queen.

AMY: Yeah, I think when I make the comparison, I don't make it in terms of the feminist point, but just like she's using this perfect world that has everything figured out on some sort of like spiritually elevated blame.

BRIAN: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Um, I don't know. It just kind of reminded me of this perfect society where it's like “We're looking at the way you do things and are baffled because we would never do things like that here. We're so much more enlightened." 

EURIE: Right.

AMY: It was just sort of that, um, yeah, that persuasive technique, I guess. 

EURIE: I would be interested in the sequel to Of One Blood, right, where they delve into like the governmental structure, and they talk about taxation, and then suddenly we see the utopia unraveling, right?

KIM: Yeah, totally. 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Um, but okay. So you say in the introduction to this book that Of One Blood is now probably the most taught Black American novel that dates prior to the Harlem Renaissance. How was Hopkins and this novel rediscovered in the 20th century?

BRIAN: Um, yeah, I would say certainly postbellum, pre-Harlem for sure. It might have some competition from some antebellum Black author texts like Our Nig, for example. But yes, its popularity now as a teaching text couldn't be more different from its reputation, um, such as it was 50, 60 years ago. Hopkins herself died in relative obscurity. In fact, in the Seventies, uh, an essay written by Ann Shockley about Hopkins when really nobody was writing about Hopkins was subtitled. "A Biographical Excursion Into Obscurity," which gives some sense of how she was perceived even by someone interested in writing about her and recovering her. It was really in the Eighties and Nineties that scholars began to really get to work in earnest in reconstructing a tradition of Black American writing and especially Black American women's writing that had been really ignored and neglected. Oxford University Press brought out the Schaumburg Library of 19th Century Black women writers in that time, which did so much to advance that project. And they included two Hopkins volumes. And a really big event in bringing Hopkins back as an important literary figure was in 2009 when the Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society was founded. Once you have an academic society dedicated to you, then you're truly a field and, um, that society has done so much to continue to encourage new work on Hopkins, especially junior scholars. I know as a younger scholar, I felt very incredibly well-supported by this society when I was starting out. And one thing I want to point out about the Pauline Hopkins Society, by the way, which I just love, is that they sponsor a high school essay contest, recalling the role that a high school essay contest played in Hopkins' own development as a writer.

KIM: I love that. Oh, that's wonderful. That's so cool. Um, we talked a little bit earlier about how you're digitizing issues of the Colored American magazine, which is helping make a lot more of Hopkins and others' writing available to interested readers. How's that going? What's the process of that like?

BRIAN: Sure. So both, uh, Eurie and I, we both teach in the same institution, and Hopkins and the Colored American magazine is really pertinent to both of our teaching. And we would constantly complain to one another and to our students about the lack of really good digitized Black print to use in our classes. And so eventually we tired of complaining about it and decided, like, let's see if we can do something about it. So, um, our search led to a lot of dead ends. But finally we found a very large collection of issues at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript library at Yale. And they generously agreed to photograph every issue for us, and since then we've discovered additional individual issues at Emory, at UNC Chapel Hill, and those two have been digitized, put on the site. One hundred and eight issues of the magazine were ever produced, and our site now hosts 41, with six in the works. And our hope is that eventually all of them will be found. But given the precarious conditions under which Black print was produced in the early 1900s, and 20th century practices of preservation that didn't always care a lot about preserving Black print really well, it's possible that there will be some unstripped issues that just are completely lost.

KIM: It’s wonderful that you're doing that. 

AMY: Yeah. It's so important to save that kind of stuff. Um, and can you talk a little bit about when and why Hopkins’ tenure at the magazine came to an end? Because it's kind of a frustrating story to learn about.

BRIAN: Yeah. So briefly, the magazine had always been financially insecure and it was experiencing a lot of pressure. As I mentioned before, Hopkins was someone who spoke truth to power and some did not like that Booker T. Washington and his allies felt that her focus as both an editor and writer on topics such as lynching, racial intermarriage, Jim Crow, and other topics that were, say, triggering to Southern readers were counterproductive and hurtful to the cause of Black uplift. They wanted to see the magazine focus more on positive depictions of Black business success and avoid racial justice agitation. Um, in 1904, a white ally of Washington, his name was John Christian Freund, he began giving money to the Colored American magazine to help keep it solvent. But in exchange he increasingly started to insert himself into the day-to-day operations of the magazine and tried to control the direction and politics of the publication. At first Hopkins doesn't recognize quite what's happening, um, but once she does, friction and conflict ensue between her and Freund. And basically, the upshot is that the magazine winds up being bought out and put under the control of another Washington ally, a man named Fred Moore, and moved to New York. Hopkins was originally promised that she'd be kept on, but with a demotion. But then she's forced to resign in September. And the magazine reports that her departure was due to "health reasons." Hopkins continued to write and lecture and even began her own short-lived magazine, The New Era, which only lasted two issues and contains the only chapters of her uncompleted final novel, Topsy Templeton. But Hopkins' firing from the Colored American magazine essentially was the beginning of the end of her career as an editor and novelist.

AMY: It seems like a familiar story, like, the investor comes in and decides they're gonna have input.

KIM: And ruins everything.

EURIE: Mm-hmm. 

AMY: So I feel like that still happens.

KIM: Yeah, for sure. Um, so do you have any other favorite pieces from Hopkins? Maybe there's something else she wrote for the magazine that you found, or something else that you think listeners should um, head to next.

EURIE: This is a terrible question to ask to Hopkins scholars… we'll basically be like "everything!" Um, but the go-to answer is, of course, Hopkins' short story "Talma Gordon," which is published in the October, 1900 issue of the Colored American magazine. It's available on our site. It's described as the first African-American mystery story, and it's a murder mystery that deals with racial passings, and it's very good. Um, and I'm also particularly fond of her first novel, Contending Forces. So Contending Forces has a romance plot that's interwoven with topics related to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and assaults on Black women. And it also features a main character who makes a living as a stenographer, just as Hopkins herself did at various points in her life. But I also think it would be great to read some of her nonfiction, like magazine pieces. But I don't think you can go wrong with anything you read by Hopkins.

KIM: I just wish I had a little more time. That all sounds amazing. I mean, already I'm liking the murder mystery. I can't wait to read that. 

AMY: So listeners, go to coloredamerican.org is the website at which you can find all the issues that Eurie and Brian have put together. You'll find that murder mystery tale. 

KIM: Yeah. Eurie and Brian, this has been a real pleasure having you on getting to learn more about Pauline Hopkins, talking about this incredible book. Thank you so much.

BRIAN: This was really, really great fun. Thank you.

EURIE: It was.

KIM: For more information on this episode, you can visit our website, lostladiesoflit.com for show notes and our newsletter.

AMY: And join us over on our Lost Ladies of Lit Facebook forum if you want to talk more about this episode or just interact with other listeners. It's a lot of fun. 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

135. The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald

AMY: Hi, everyone, I’m Amy Helmes, here with another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. Here with me is my co-host Kim Askew, and Kim, question: did you ever play with paper dolls as a kid?

KIM: You know, I did. I remember having like some retro paper dolls and maybe some Holly Hobby paper dolls when I was little,vague memories of that. Did you?

AMY: Yeah, I did. I thought they were fun. Like the cutting, 

KIM: Yeah. It's a craft

AMY: Yeah. Um, but interestingly, my Aunt Ruth, who, if you're listening… (Aunt Ruth sometimes listens to this podcast) but when I was very young, she sent me a paper doll book. It was called Chuck and Di have a Baby, and it was Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and it had all their most famous clothes, and it must have been right around the time when she was expecting William.

KIM: Oh my God.

AMY: And there was like a nondescript baby that you could stick in the bassinet. Um, but they had their like Balmoral, Scottish kilt outfits… 

KIM: Oh, I can picture this.

AMY: And then more recently when Julia was little, I had got her something called Master Puppet Theater: The World of Shakespeare at Your Fingertips. They weren't quite paper dolls; they looked like playing cards, but they had two holes cut out in the bottom and it would have a figure on it, and your fingers would go through the holes so you could walk the cards around and do a little play, because it had 60 different Shakespeare characters. It came with a theater, like a proscenium theater. I'm gonna look, because it would be great for Cleo now.  And it would have different background scenes that you could slide in, like the Forest of Arden or you know, a court scene, and then you would do your little finger puppets. But it was kind of like paper dolls, just because it was these cardboard cards.

KIM: But back to our topic for today, we want to give a shout-out to one of our favorite listeners (and they’re also going to be a future guest later this year.) She gave us the idea for this topic today. 

AMY: Rosemary Kelty, you know us so well. 

KIM: Yeah, she’s one of our biggest supporters. So we all know who Zelda Fitzgerald is, right? I sort of hate to reference her in relation to her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, because she was a talented and incredibly fascinating person in her own right.

AMY: That’s true. She’s remembered mostly as “the wife and muse of” Scott or she’s known for her schizophrenia and tragic death. I read the biography of Zelda by Nancy Milford a while back and once you read that you can’t help but be taken by Zelda’s effervescence. I always kind of picture her dancing around in pointe shoes and a tutu…

KIM: Drinking champagne…

AMY: Yes, exactly. She was one of the original flappers.

KIM: Mm-hmm. Yep.

AMY: And she was also an artist and novelist. But come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve read her most well-regarded novel, Save Me the Waltz. Have you, Kim?

KIM: No, and it's so weird, but it's like I know of her and I've known  of her for what feels like my whole life, and I did not read this and haven't even tried to. I feel like I should. 

AMY: Yeah. Maybe it's not great. Anyway, listeners, you gotta, yeah. Who, who's read this book, contact Us and let us know if it's worth reading. Um, So, although her name is well known to most people, maybe we do need to consider her for your future episode. Just the fact that we haven't read this book…

KIM: Let's take a poll in our new Facebook group.

AMY: That's a good idea. Yes. And really, there’s so much to her life story that we couldn’t possibly cover it all in today’s mini, so we’re going to focus on one very small but charming bit: the paper dolls she created for her daughter, Scottie. 

KIM: Aww. As we mentioned, Zelda was an accomplished artist, and she began painting these creations in 1926 but continued working on them throughout her life, even up to two years before her death, which was in 1948. Her granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, saved and collected these paper dolls which were recently compiled into a beautiful, 128-page book. It’s out from Scribner called The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald.

AMY: I’d like to read a review of this collection by Paula McLain for The New York Times. She wrote: “The dolls retain an intimacy that’s more piercing somehow for being whimsical: playthings too gorgeous to touch. There are stowaways from classic fairy tales captured rapturously in gouache, with sly revisions (the Big Bad Wolff-Wolff has been granted a party dress) and notably prescient androgyny. Every flounce and shoe buckle of the courtiers, knights and musketeers reveals a studiousness close to reverence for the details of period costumery, just as the exaggerated musculature of the figures shows the painter’s deep knowledge of — and rapt fascination with — the human form.”

KIM: Oh my god, I need it. That sounds amazing!

AMY: Yeah, this book is actually something Zelda had wanted, in her lifetime, to see. She thought it would make a good book. She had approached her husband’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, about releasing something like this. (She’d sent a letter about it, but there’s no record that he ever replied to her.) Zelda did get the paper dolls placed in an exhibit at the Montgomery museum of Fine Arts in her hometown of Montgomery, AL. But now, seventy years after her death, the book version has finally come to fruition. Apparently Lanahan, her granddaughter, had first encountered the paper dolls when she was a kid and was rifling through her mother’s attic. She notes in the book that some of the dolls are actually made using scraps of fabric, crepe paper and foil. (but most are painted with watercolors). There are even some representations of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda and little Scottie. She actually depicted them. But others are fairy tale characters or historical figures from French courts. The one thing I kept thinking is how amazing it is that something so fragile as paper dolls could even have survived all this time.

KIM: Yeah I mean that’s crazy. I mean, that’s so amazing they did. I mean, this sounds like such a great gift idea. I mean, i want to get one for myself, but what a conversation piece to have sitting out on your coffee table. I mean, how beautiful.

AMY: Yeah. And I read that Lanahan, when she decided she wanted to compile all these, you know, she had to actually hunt some of these dolls up in other places, because some had been put up at auction at various points or just ended up scattered to the wind, so to speak. So she did the legwork of trying to find everything that was out there, but she suspects there are still more she doesn’t know about. So up in somebody else's attic, there might be more Zelda Fitzgerald paper dolls.

KIM: That’s a cool thought.

AMY: Yeah. And what’s interesting is that Lanahan herself grew up to be an illustrator of children’s books. So  she was either inspired by the artwork of her grandmother that she saw, as a child or she inherited that artistic bent.

KIM: I love that. It’s also reminding me, isn’t there a TV show about Zelda that came out in the last few years?

AMY: Yeah, Amazon did a series called “Z: The Beginning of Everything” based on a novelized book about Zelda’s life by Therese Anne Fowler. 

KIM: No relation.

AMY: No relation.Christina Ricci played Zelda…

KIM: Oh, I love Christina Ricci!

AMY: Oh, you hadn’t heard of it? It was only out for one season… and maybe that’s why we never watched it, because it just didn’t have enough longevity. 

KIM: I'm gonna check it out. I mean, that's sounds…I think it's worth even watching, just even if there's only one season.

AMY: I know, because I do love that time period.

KIM: Yeah. And I feel like Christina Ricci wouldn't do something that wasn't 

at least in its intention or conception, really, really good.

AMY: All right, so listeners, we also need you to weigh in on this is if anybody has watched Z. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Head to our Facebook forum and tell us.

AMY: And yeah, so speaking of our Facebook forum, we sort of have a group that we started.

KIM: Thanks to another of our listeners, Julia Valentine. And what a great suggestion, because we already have so much conversation happening on there between ourselves and listeners, and it's been really fun. I'm enjoying it.

AMY: Yeah, we had been looking for a way to  interact with listeners more, and sort of keep the discussion alive after the episode ends, and it's been really fun so far. So go to facebook.com/groups/lostladiesoflitforum, or just search up Lost Ladies of Lit on Facebook and you'll find us and we will accept you right away and you'll be able to post and comment and do all the fun things. We'd love to hear more of your thoughts, opinions, questions, and maybe tips on future lost ladies.

KIM: And join us back next week for another full-length episode of Lost Ladies of Lit. Thanks for listening!

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. 

134. Jane and Anna Maria Porter with Devoney Looser

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: Hey everyone. A few years ago we introduced you all to a pair of Scottish sisters, Jane and Mary Findlater, who were born in the 1860s and became quite the literary sensations.

KIM: In today's episode, we're going to rewind to a century before the Findlaters to another set of sister novelists with ties to Scotland. Jane and Anna Maria Porter's books took Regency-era England by storm just a few years ahead of Jane Austen.

AMY: And like a Jane Austen novel, the Porter sisters' lives were chock full of fascinating and insufferable characters, intriguing romantic escapades, event- filled interludes at the homes of wealthy acquaintances, and desperate gambits to stay one step ahead of the poverty line.

KIM: The Porter sisters were known for their innovative historical novels, and one could argue that they paved the way for writers who followed, like Sir Walter Scott.

AMY: One could also argue that Sir Walter Scott basically ripped them off and never gave them any credit.

KIM: Them's fightin' words, Amy.

AMY: Well, like Jane Porter's hero, William Wallace (yes, the same guy Mel Gibson would portray in Braveheart almost 200 years later) I'm not afraid to go to battle for the reputation of these talented literary sisters.

KIM: Okay, well our guest today, biographer Devoney Looser, can probably help lead the charge then. She wrote the book on the Porter sisters. So let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

KIM: Today's guest, Devoney Looser, is Regents professor of English at Arizona State University. She's written and edited a number of books on literature by women, including The Making of Jane Austen, The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes, and The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in the Romantic Period . Her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Salon and The Times Literary Supplement. Maybe we should also mention that she was interviewed in The New Yorker on the um, English major article that everyone is talking about right now.

AMY: Oh yeah, for sure.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Her most recent book is Sister Novelists, the Trailblazing Porter Sisters who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontes. Kirkus reviews, calls it "a triumph of literary detective work." Smithsonian Magazine calls it "a triumphant and moving biography," and our very favorite British historian, Lucy Worsley, dubs it "clever, compassionate, and compelling." Also, the "Bonnets at Dawn" podcast, which we love, named this book in their Best Reads of 2022 episode, so everyone's vouching for it, you guys.

KIM: When her head's not buried in books, you can find Devoney skating roller derby under the badass moniker of Stone Cold Jane Austen. Oh my God, so cool. She's also faculty advisor to the ASU co-ed rollerblading team, the Derby Devils, and once starred as herself in a never -released low budget Jane Austen roller derby vampire movie Vampyra.

AMY: I don't have a clue why this movie is not available on every streaming service right now. Who do we have to contact in Hollywood to get some distribution lined up? I can picture the whole thing in my head, but Devoney Looser, welcome to the show.

DEVONEY LOOSER: So great to be here, Amy and Kim, and I love the work that you're doing on Lost Ladies of Lit. It is crucial, and I just feel so honored to be a part of this conversation.

AMY: Well we're honored to have you. So let's dive into the Porter sisters. Jane Porter was born in 1775 and Anna Maria, it's Maria, right? 

DEVONEY: Absolutely. She rhymed it with “fi-ah!” 

KIM: Yep. I love that you've had that in the book. Yeah, that was great.

AMY: And she was simply known as Maria to her family, she was born three years later. In total, there were five surviving children in the family, including a brother Robert, who was born in between the two sisters and with whom the sisters shared a special bond all their lives. Their story begins in Durham, England, which I loved reading about in this biography, Devoney, because I visited Durham, so I could picture it all very well. And you were so specific in it, in fact, that I was able to go on Google Maps and look at those cross streets, where the house was located, where the inn was located. So that was fun. But tell us all about their childhood and how it kind of shaped the writers they would become.

DEVONEY: So their father died almost immediately when Maria was still an infant, under difficult circumstances. He was an army surgeon and he had significant health decline, leaving his wife a widow with five children under the age of eight and no money. And so this shaped obviously all the things that were possible for them. Their mother ended up running boarding houses, which was not an odd choice for her because her father, the Porter sisters' grandfather, had run a tavern and an inn. So she kind of knew how this stuff worked. And, uh, she took the three youngest children with her from Durham to Edinburgh. So the three youngest grew up mostly in those two cities until they headed to London. And I know we'll talk about that in a minute, but they didn't have much of an education. They had only charity school education in Edinburgh with their brother, Robert. I just think it's so amazing that two of the women who would go on to become the most famous writers of their generation started with so little. They were really very self-made in terms of their intellect.

KIM: So the sisters started getting published very early on as teenagers, basically, which is really interesting. They didn't really have insta-success, did they?

DEVONEY: No, not really. Although it was the younger sister, Anna Maria, who first burst onto the literary scene in the 1790s. She published this first book called Artless Tales at age 14 in 1793. The family was already in London. It was their brother Robert, who was then a budding artist, soon to become a famous artist and studying at the Royal Academy, uh, you know, they got really well connected into the art and literary context and exciting people in 1790s London. And Anna Maria had this chance to publish this book by subscription, which means they took advantage of every wealthy and famous person they knew. So that means that this was basically like a crowdfunded book. They made money off of people expecting that they would get a copy and get their name inside the book later, and she put her name on the title page. So Anna Maria was the first to break out as a writer. At the same time, the critical establishment was not so sure that this was something a teenage girl should be doing. She got very high-level reviews. They noticed her book at the highest levels, but the reviews, as I described in the book, were often quite cruel in telling her things like, "Stop publishing. You've come too soon with the fruits of your imagination," you know, “You're not yet ripe" and, you know, all sorts of really gross imaginings of what it meant for her to pluck this fruit of her intellect. Uh, but yeah, she took a lot of really harsh criticism and kept writing, which I also just think is so resilient and so amazing. Also it was done, I think, out of financial necessity in a way. She didn't have a choice but to ignore the critics. 

KIM: Yeah, to be able to go up against that, even when you really need to, is, is very admirable. So let's talk a little bit more about their personalities. Um, I kept thinking of the Dashwood sisters when I was reading about Jane and Maria. Jane seems a little bit more like Elinor, you know, pragmatic, measured, and a little bit more reluctant to own her feelings. Whereas Maria was this passionate, impulsive person like Maryanne.

DEVONEY: I think you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, I do make the comparison there, too. But they also had friends who compared them to John Milton's poems, “L'allegra” and “Il Penserosa.” So again, the lively versus the more melancholy. And they seem to imagine each other in these terms too. Uh, but it is really moving to me to imagine them as Elinor and Maryanne Dashwood.

KIM: You really made me picture them just walking into a drawing room or something and like everyone going, “Oh, those are the authoresses.” People start to know who they are and they're in this fascinating milieu of artists and writers, so…

AMY: And they were gorgeous! 

KIM: Yeah. And they're gorgeous. Oh yeah, exactly.

DEVONEY: It certainly didn't hurt them that they were beautiful, especially because their brother was in the art world. They sat as models for a lot of his artist friends. So we do have some images of them and we know that, at least in a couple cases, very famous artists were absolutely struck by the beauty of these sisters. And then when they turned out to be smart, too. Oh my God, right? 

KIM: Yeah. Completely.

AMY: Yeah. So given the fact that they're so gorgeous and charming, it's interesting that both sisters never married. But they definitely had suitors for much of their life. And as teenagers, it sounds like that house was just always chock full of lively young men. You know, it sounded like a fun house to be in.

KIM: Yeah.

DEVONEY: I think so. And their mother, I mean, their mother to me is a kind of heroine of this story, too. The widowed Mrs. Porter, she didn't put a lot of constraints on her children, especially these three younger children. She let them get up to all sorts of things that we wouldn't normally think of as being okay. They had a lot of freedom, socially, and their house, which was very modest, turned into a kind of, revolving door salon for artists and poets and philosophers and just really interesting, brilliant young people.

KIM: So whether she wanted to fully admit it or not, it seemed like Jane was pretty smitten with this charismatic bad boy, Henry Caulfield. But there was another more reputable man, a war hero who really captured her fancy as well. Can you talk a little bit about how these two crushes worked their way into her writing?

DEVONEY: Yeah. So, and I should back up maybe a little bit and say who Henry Caulfield is since he's not a familiar name. Um, you know, he was a military man who then went on to become first an amateur actor, and then a professional actor of some success. But he's not by any means a name anyone would know today. He was also, however, at the time, one of the country's most renowned ice skaters. He was absolutely charismatic and gorgeous and athletic, um, and it's clear that Jane, in particular, was really, really taken with him for all of these reasons. We know that he wrote together with the sisters. The sisters and some of their male friends put together a periodical called The Quiz. So they were running their own magazine, and Henry participated in the writing of that magazine with them. So again, part of these literary circles. So they were just doing all of these exciting things, some under their own name and some not. Uh, but the other person Jane became smitten with was the war hero, Sir Sidney Smith. And he was probably the country's most famous war hero alongside Lord Nelson. I mean, she just thought he was perfection. The Napoleonic Wars were full on, and England and France were at war. So the idea that Sir Sidney Smith was someone who had been in their circle meant everything, I think to the Porters, that they had come up from nothing and now they were in London alongside the people who were saving the country. So, yeah, these were the two most significant crushes of Jane's life. As you mentioned, neither she nor Maria married, but it's clear that they were very, very much able to experience love and desire and, um, that they had very complicated romantic lives, and I wanted to make those central to the book because I think it just tells us so much. We know what the ideals are about women, what they were supposed to do, but I think we have less evidence about how polite women managed to kind of fly under the radar with a lot of the choices they were making when they ended up with strong feelings for men.

AMY: It's almost like Jane was reaching for the unattainable. Like, she chose two of the most unattainable men, but Maria, on the other hand, um, we compared her to Marianne Dashwood before, and it seemed to me, at least in your telling of it, that she had a very Colonel Brandon-esque man who fell in love with her. But Jane gave this guy the thumbs down and dashed her hopes of romance. She just thought, "Well, without my sister's seal of approval, I'm not gonna go forward with this." So next she turns and makes a very bold move while staying with friends on the Isle of Wight, something her big sister would never have approved of. Can you tell this story, Devoney, about the “sighing soldier?”

DEVONEY: This is, to me, one of the most remarkable parts of the book, and I should say we know all of this because the sisters' letters survive. And I know we're gonna come back to that, but this section, I think more than any other, really reads like a novel because you can't quite believe it, that this is real life that she's describing. So Maria has this opportunity to go with some wealthier friends to the Isle of Wight, uh, kind of, you know, a vacation to try to restore her health. And there are a lot of military men on the island at the time, and she notices this soldier outside the window and she makes eye contact with him. And he keeps returning to the window and kind of sighing. He's not doing anything impolite. He's not accosting her, but it's clear that he finds her attractive. And the two of them end up in an illicit years-long correspondence kept completely secret from their family because they'd never been properly introduced and ultimately ended up engaged to each other without ever having spoken. And I won't tell about what happened when they met. I really hope people will want to read the book to find out. 

KIM: Read the book. Yeah. 

DEVONEY: We see these things in novels and we think, "That sounds so fake," or "How could that really have happened?" 

KIM: Their lives are so exciting, and there's so many amazing stories about their romantic entanglements. These are just some highlights. And you actually write in your book, I'll read: "Their real-life adventures read like funhouse mirror versions of Austen's famous characters and plots," which is so true. So listeners, if you love Jane Austen, you'll get a real kick out of all the drama they managed to get caught up in and somehow get away with. 

AMY: Do we know at all, would Austen have known of them or read their work? What do you think?

DEVONEY: So in Austen's, letters, and, you know, only around 160 of her letters survive, but one of them references Anna Maria Porter's novel The Lake of Killarney from 1804 as a book that her nephew, Edward, is "curled up in a great chair reading." So, you know, she definitely knew of the Porter sisters' fiction. Because she was so widely read in fiction, I would be very surprised if Jane Austen hadn't read their books. But there's just that one reference in the letters to her having known of the Porter sisters.

AMY: Okay.

KIM: She must have. I know you can’t say it because you're a biographer, but yeah, I mean, come on. She must have been interested in reading them.

DEVONEY: I agree. Follow the scent. Absolutely. Seems like she must have.

AMY: Okay. So you mentioned how incredibly famous these sisters were in their lifetime. Do you think their fame hurt their chances, ultimately, of making a love match?

DEVONEY: Yes, definitely. And I think it wasn't just the fame, it was fame without fortune. And that's a more complicated answer, but I think you know, the sisters, separately and together, published 26 books. By 1803, they were household names, or at least on their way to becoming so, Jane, in particular. By 1810, certainly both of them were household names. So they were still, you know, in their thirties, and they recognized this: men tended to marry women who were not public women, who were not women with public reputations. Public women who had money, maybe you could overlook the public part for the fortune that they brought. But the Porter sisters, for various reasons, ended up being public women without a fortune. And there, what they found is that men didn't want to take the risk. Men wanted what was the more typically ideal wife, a kind of pliable, passive helpmate. These women had shown that they were neither of those. And so, yes, they knew very well, both sisters talk about this in their letters. "Public fame," Anna Maria puts it very specifically, she says, "makes it hard or almost impossible to have private happiness." And by that she meant love. So they knew. They knew by their thirties what their obstacles were.

KIM: But they had a lot of fun along the way and a lot of romance. 

DEVONEY: And I think they were each other's most important relationship. To me, that's the beautiful part of the story, is that these were sisters who were incredibly supportive of each other and who made each other's incredible careers possible. So the love story that I see in this book that's most important is the sisters. Um, the, the ones that are the most colorful or compelling or vivid to readers might be those, you know, sort of never-rans or almost-was-es with these beautiful men. Um, but the most moving relationship to me in this book is between the sisters.

KIM: Yeah, yeah. And speaking of that, was there any competitiveness at all when it came to their writing between the two of them? And then also can you talk a little bit about, um, who came out first as a breakout star? 

DEVONEY: Right. I think they watched each other, but they loved each other so much that any competition was more in the realm of joking. In a sense they were competitive in a good way, that is, they wanted to help each other compete successfully in the literary marketplace. Uh, I talked about how Anna Maria came onto the literary scene first in her teens, but 1803 was when Jane Porter published her book, Thaddeus of Warsaw. And people went bonkers for this book. It went through, I think, at least 10 editions by the time Jane Austen died. It was the kind of book people were talking about everywhere. So in that sense, with the first bestseller and P.S. — this one was also critically acclaimed. So I would say it was Jane, the older sister, who became the breakout star after about 10 years of watching her sister be the one who had the greater reputation, the greater name recognition. It was a big shift for them.

AMY: I mean, to me it was so incongruous reading your book; they were so successful, they sold so many copies of their novels, and yet they were practically indigent, you know? How poor were they? Why was it such an unrelenting problem for them for their entire lives?

DEVONEY: Yeah, I think there were periods when they were in genuine poverty and maybe not even eating. But by the time their brother, Robert, starts becoming a successful artist, I think then they move into a period where they're living more in what we probably call genteel poverty. That is, they have apartments, uh, that their mother describes as "a dog hole." I love Mrs. Porter, she's always so blunt. She's like, "This apartment is a dog hole." Um, 

KIM: Airbnb review!

DEVONEY: The idea that they became some of the most famous writers of their generation and never broke out of genteel poverty except for very limited moments is kind of what's incredible to me.

AMY: And they were having to throw so much of their royalty money to their brothers.

KIM: Yeah. 

DEVONEY: So in any other version of what should have happened at this time for a middle class family, three brothers and two unmarried sisters and a widowed mother, the brothers should have been supporting the three women who were dependent females, but it ended up being the reverse. As the brothers went, in various circumstances, more deeply into debt, the sisters were using their writing and any money they made from it to shore up not only their own household and supporting their widowed mother who only had an army widow's pension, a small amount to live on, but finally their brothers’ debts. And especially Robert, the brother they most loved, they ended up using some of their writings to support their brother, right? It's the exact opposite of what we would think. Robert should have saved the whole family. Uh, and I can't believe that it's this far into our conversation and I haven't mentioned yet, that Robert married a Russian princess. A legit Russian princess, right? So he went off to paint for the czar in Russia. This princess falls in love with him. And eventually they become engaged and they do marry. So this was supposed to be the making of the Porter family. But in fact, the princess turns out to be, uh, what Jane and Maria refer to as “The Horror.” You know, she's not only a horror in terms of her personality, but she cannot manage money, and so she ends up pulling the Porter family into debt. There were periods where Jane and Maria were actually paying off the princess's debts. It's just unthinkable.

AMY: And it was so sad because the whole family was thinking that this princess was gonna be their golden goose. So you could just picture them dancing around the living room. And then they were like, "Oh wait, no. This is not working out how we thought it was gonna be."

DEVONEY: Yeah. They hoped for the best. They hoped that their brother had chosen well. He hadn't.

AMY: So the sisters are having to be the ones to fund everything. And when they were writing these novels, it really depleted them. I mean, emotionally and physically. And their books are so gosh darn long that I kept thinking to myself, "Why didn't you just kind of write a little shorter books?" Also they kind of tag teamed it because it was such a depleting experience to finish a novel. Jane would do one and then she'd be like, "Okay, Maria, it's your turn." Which I thought was kind of interesting. 

DEVONEY: Yes. And often they're being paid per volume. So that might be a short answer to what you're asking there.

AMY: Okay. Okay. Because yeah, it was like, "Girl, you're going on and on and on with these books. No wonder you're dead exhausted."

DEVONEY: I mean, three volumes was common for a novel in this period, but it could go up to five. Uh, but you know, as you point out, they would take turns, and I should add, they not only took turns writing books, they often took turns traveling. And this is why so many of their letters exist. They lived in these "dog holes," you know, these not very nice London apartments. And then they moved to a dilapidated Surrey cottage. So as soon as the sisters had any opportunity to stay with a wealthier friend they would go off to a house which had heat and comforts and a bed that they might not even have had to share with someone else. And no drafts and no dampness and, you know, the, the, uh, the servant who might prepare food. And they would write a lot of their novels staying with wealthy friends who understood that the sisters needed the space to support their families. But as a result, they were apart. So when they lived at home, they lived together, but for months on end, they would take turns, one of them going to the house of a wealthy friend living there, writing there, the other staying back with their widowed mother. So they took turns, definitely, and they would write themselves, as you said, to exhaustion, which becomes more and more of an issue as they age.

KIM: So, before we get into the Walter Scott controversy, which we teased a little bit at the top of the show, let's just take a moment to discuss the sisters' best known books. So for this episode, we opted to focus on Jane's epic William Wallace story called The Scottish Chiefs and Maria's equally epic, The Hungarian Brothers.

AMY: I wasn't sure I was gonna like these books, going into them. They are definitely of an era. That said, I thought Scottish Chiefs was pretty exciting. I mean, it had a lot of moments where you're just like, 'Hell yeah." You get wrapped up in it a little bit. Um, it felt very Game Of Thrones meets Braveheart, meets that Robin Hood,, Kevin Costner movie, if you remember that.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Anybody that's a fan of that kind of thing, you know, you're gonna be able to immerse yourself in this, except for the fact that it is so damn long. She just keeps going and going and going . Um, but there are so many cinematic moments. Kim, why don't you give us a little rundown of what the book's about.

KIM: I'll give you a quick rundown without spoiling too much. Um, the action takes place in Scotland. It's the early 14th century and the English army is running ransack over Scotland, destroying everything in sight and terrorizing Scottish citizens. William Wallace is at his idyllic Scottish estate with his beloved pregnant wife, Marion, when a series of events, including the appearance of a mysterious box, the contents of which are unknown, leads Wallace to dedicate his life to leading Scotland to freedom. It's very dramatic. Um, and as you follow the Scottish hero's most legendary conquests, you come to fully understand why basically every woman in this novel swoons over this guy like a teenage girl glancing Harry styles, right, Amy?

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: And Porter takes some pretty giant liberties with her telling of William Wallace's story, but all in the name of entertainment, we could say, right, Devoney?

DEVONEY: Oh, absolutely. I love the Harry Styles reference, of course. Uh, but it's like Game of Thrones if there were more good people, right? 

KIM: Yes. yeah, yeah. 

AMY: And really, just as gruesome. 

KIM: Guts, blood, murder.

AMY: I mean, it's such a macho book. 

KIM: Totally. 

AMY: I'd never have thought a woman was writing this book if you didn't know

KIM: Yeah. We can't give away some of the stuff that happens, but you read certain things and you're like, "Wow, this woman, you know, in the 18th century wrote about this." It's pretty amazing.

DEVONEY: You're absolutely right, these are surprisingly gory. And so books of war that don't put a kind of sheen on it, but are willing to show you the gross stuff, I think it's pretty incredible still.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, will you read a passage to showcase to our listeners, sort of the brutality and gore of the story?

DEVONEY: Yeah, so I chose a passage that includes some female characters, although the book is about Wallace, a male character, I wanted listeners to hear what happens when there are women in the story, as there often are. And so this is from chapter 14. 

[reads excerpt]

AMY: Here's where I need to bust into the Bryan Adams [sings] "Everything I do, I do it for you!" And you, you can't help but think of Jane's crush on that military hero while you're reading this, right? We know what kind of inspired this. And she paints William Wallace like a saint. I mean, she lays it on so thick. This guy is so heroic. There are very sentimental moments. There are, like, almost religious moments, right? 

DEVONEY: For her, telling history was about models and virtue. It was didactic. So her version of historical fiction makes you a better person. And I do think that the parts that you're describing, the perfection, haven't aged well. I think one of the reasons I love Jane Austen's fiction is because she doesn't give us pictures of perfection, but for the Porter sisters, the point of all of this perfection was to ennoble, to make us better people. And even though that section of Helen is, uh, you know, damsel in distress, this isn't so much a damsel in distress book. The women are in the mix with the men in the war. Of course, the men are the ones leading the charge and wearing the armor. Uh, but I do love the idea that this is about trying to make readers understand history, but also, trying to inspire them to better behavior in wartime.

KIM: And people were eating it up. 

DEVONEY: They were. 

AMY: While I was reading it too, I kept thinking, you know, Scotland's situation with England was like Ukraine and Russia right now. They kept saying "All we want you to do is just leave. You invaded our little country. We were totally happy. We don't want to fight you, but we have to because it's a matter of our survival at this point."

DEVONEY: Yeah. And Jane's first book, Thaddeus of Warsaw, did that with Poland and Russia. So the sisters had so much invested in the idea of tyrants who were doing wrong to independent countries.

KIM: Yes, yes.

DEVONEY: Still topical. 

AMY: I definitely had moments where I gasped and moments where I didn't see something coming and moments where my blood was pumping a little.

KIM: Oh yeah, there's some surprises for sure. 

AMY: Yeah, I can see why everybody got into it and, and probably appreciated that it was so long and drawn out. 

KIM: Well, you could read it to your family and everyone's gonna be interested in wanting to hear, you know, what happens.

DEVONEY: Yes. And it was apparently the favorite book of Queen Victoria and President Andrew Jackson. I mean, there were lots of fans of this novel in the 19th century. Emily Dickinson's copy is really well worn . So, I mean, just to imagine how much this circulated, I add those examples of famous readers.

KIM: Yeah, that's great. Okay, so let's now turn our attention to Maria's best known book, The Hungarian Brothers. So that's about two military siblings fighting against the backdrop of post-Revolutionary France, and Devoney, I'll actually just read from your book to summarize this one. “Maria's story featured two brothers of opposite personalities, count Charles Leopolstat, and his younger brother Demetrius, the orphan sons of a Hungarian nobleman. The brother heroes face adversity and adventure in love and war. Charles, a military genius, guides his brother, whom he shielded from the realities of the family's debts and troubles, in his career and his relationships. The brothers fight for the French in different locations, Charles in Switzerland and Demetrius in Italy. Maria was using her novel to comment on the damage and devastation wrought by war.” So Devoney, this idea of two siblings, can we draw any parallels between the story and Maria and Jane's own relationship?

DEVONEY: Well, I certainly think so, and I hope that's clear In the passage you just read that they, they seem to be, uh, the, the one, rational, uh, serious, responsible sibling and the other one that's, you know, feeling and acting and much more outgoing and in the mix and living vividly. Both Maria and Jane occasionally wondered what would've happened if they were born male. And so I think there are moments in all of their novels where some of their own desires and personalities are being put in each even to these male characters.

KIM: I love them. Can I just say I love them?

DEVONEY: I'm so glad.

AMY: Now, I will say I was not as big of a fan of this book. I didn't even finish it, but the part I did read, the beginning section, the first chapters, I was getting a major Prince William and Prince Harry vibe from the two brothers. That's how she was setting them up. And I also think, again, you know, what is causing these sisters to be so interested in military campaigns and soldiers? Doesn't seem like a topic that a lady would write.

DEVONEY: Yeah, they were living through wars. And I think that's partly, and as I mentioned earlier, their father, all of their brothers were involved in various points in military careers. Everything they read was full of war and death. So I think the art from this period was depicting it. The things they were reading in the newspapers were depicting it. I think Jane really wanted to be a general. I think Jane thought if she were born a man, she would've been a general.

KIM: I love it. Okay, so let's finally dive into this Walter Scott controversy. The sisters were somewhat acquainted with him in their childhood, which is interesting in and of itself. But can you talk about the reaction when he started publishing his novels to great acclaim?

DEVONEY: Yes, and this is complicated, because the sisters were in that charity school in Edinburgh, and at the same time, Scott was in this sort of tony high school getting the very elite education. They were getting this not very good, but really interesting, education. And then they fell out of touch. The Porter family moved to London. Scott went on to become first a famous poet, and then he published, uh, anonymously in 1814, his first novel Waverly. And he didn't acknowledge authorship of this book for a very long time, but it came to be known that he wrote it. Up until Waverly, if anybody had asked readers in Britain who the most famous writers of historical fiction are, they probably would've called it historical romance, the Porter sisters would've been the name you mentioned. But Waverly became this amazing sensation, even more than the Porter sisters had. And then novel after novel started coming out by this Waverly novelist who started to be called The Great Unknown. And the Porters were just really upset that this Great Unknown, and they eventually realized it was Scott, their childhood friend, this Great Unknown was not anywhere in the pages of his books suggesting suggesting that he had been at all inspired in method or in content by these women he knew in his youth, the then most famous writers of historical fiction, Jane and Maria Porter. And I think the less that these novels mentioned them and the more they felt they were being ripped off, they used the word “theft,” they used the word “vampirism,” all they wanted was for somebody to say, "Waverly is great, but it owes some of what it does to the Porters." Increasingly, however, what people started to say was that Waverly was the first work of historical fiction. Waverly is the work of genius. And more and more, the Porters were seen as the feminine ones who weren't doing it right, or you know, who did it in this way that's not really historical, and that Scott was the one who did do it right. So as Scott became the originator, the supposed originator of this genre, the Porters started to become seen as less important. And sadly, they saw this happening during their own lives. Jane met up with Sir Walter in 1815 in London. They reconnected. It would've been an opportunity for him to say, "Hey, your books are great," or anything. Apparently he didn't. She was very angry and she threatened at some point, she said to Maria, "I will give the public the full genealogy of these matters." And it took her 14 years, uh, but she did eventually go public with her claims that she inspired Scott, and I will let people read the book to see what happened when she did that.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: That, that winds up being pretty interesting. Um, yeah, so check it out.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the Porter sisters, as we've discussed, they wrote so many letters to each other over the course of their lives, and it helps you tell their story. But you also mentioned that in their letters to each other, they often wrote in a code or in cryptic ways. Did that impede your research in any way? Did it make it harder for you to find out the facts, or find out what they were really talking about?

DEVONEY: So the hardest thing for me was just the sheer number of unpublished letters. It's 7,000, in the United States alone, of these unpublished letters and manuscripts that, uh, for various reasons made their way to the United States in the 20th century. And I also tell the story in the book of what happened to the letters. Also an interesting, strange story. Uh, but the fact that these letters have never been published and are now, moldering away, unpublished in the archives... i, that's not exactly true, but it is quite a commitment to want to go through this many letters and try to figure out who was who. And some of the people, uh, you know, for instance, Henry Caufield, who we mentioned earlier, it was hard to figure out who he was. The Sighing Soldier, it was hard to figure out who he was. But it's harder because the Porter sisters, they coded the names of some of these men in their letters. And I think it's because they worried that one of their brothers might open the letter or someone else might, um, in the course of delivering it, open it. And so they started to refer to people in their letters as Apollo or Agamemnon. And it took me you know, a few minutes at first to be like, did they really know somebody named Agamemnon? So, you know, I took some reading to figure out who these men they were referring to in code really were. Uh, there are even mentions of them thinking of writing notes to each other on paper in lemon juice or in milk and having one of the other of them hold it up to the fire or the window to read it as if it's invisible ink. And I don't know that they ever did that, but just to, to give you a sense of the ways that they knew they were telling stories that shouldn't be read and that they were worried would be read. Um, so piecing together who was who definitely impeded my research, but it also made it more exciting, you know, wanting to get to the bottom of who these figures were that they were speaking of in such colorful, vivid, loving terms.

AMY: Why was this a story that you wanted to write?

DEVONEY: So I was working on Jane Porter for a book that I was writing on women writers in old age. She lived to the age of 74. And I was working in the archives as I often have done in my books. And I just started reading around a little bit and these letters between these sisters, I learned that Jane had this younger sister, Anna Maria, and I thought, "Well, I'm here, you know, there are these 3000 letters," right? And the more I read, I just felt pulled into the lives that they created and the stories they were telling. And I guess at some point I would just say, if even this sounds, you know, a little bit out there, I kinda felt called to tell the story. For a while, I thought somebody else would tell it. It needed to be told. There hasn't previously been a biography to the sisters for various reasons, which I think is wrong and unfair, and in terms of literary history, just unforgivable. I wanted to write something that I think literary history got wrong. So that's why this was a story, a career, but also a life story that I wanted to tell. A story of the literary marketplace, a story of a marriage marketplace, and a story of resilient sisters who made so much of themselves and added so much to the world, against all odds.

KIM: Thank goodness for the humanities.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. 

DEVONEY: English majors unite! 

KIM: Going back to The New Yorker article. Yeah.

AMY: Um, and like we said, your book really does read like a novel. I mean, we only touched on a few of the most fascinating portions of their stories. 

DEVONEY: They just wrote everything down.

AMY: And they're funny and they're snarky. So much will make you laugh. They seem like modern day sisters.

KIM: They’re real!

DEVONEY: I'm not sure that the novels will survive. They are not as good as Jane Austen's. Their letters, however… I think their letters are as much of a masterpiece, more of a masterpiece than Jane Austen's novels. And I know that that is a great claim. But these letters are masterpieces for the genre.

KIM: Absolutely. And to just get this three-dimensional view of women living the lives that they lived at that time. It's just an amazing window into their world. 

DEVONEY: Oh, I'm so glad you think so. 

KIM: Thank goodness that you are bringing them to people's attention.

AMY: And I was so intrigued at how many other women writers of the time period existed. I mean, you've mentioned so many other writers that I felt like I needed to keep a separate little notebook for future episodes for us. I was like, “Who's this? No, who's this?” Including, we had just recently mentioned Sophia Lee's The Recess that I was intrigued by because you mentioned it in your book and I was like, "What? This sounds crazy." 

DEVONEY: Yeah. And the Lees were also a set of sisters. I think she probably said it's “So-FY-a” So Sophia and Harriet Lee, also a set of sisters known to the Porters, right? So I don't need to tell you, Kim and Amy, there are so many more lost ladies of lit. And from this period we think it's all Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Jane Austen. There were hundreds, and there's just so much more to learn and know about them.

KIM: Well, thank you so much for writing this book and bringing the Porter sisters back to the reading public's attention. And thank you for joining us today to discuss them. This was so much fun. 

DEVONEY: Thank you so much. Love this show and thank you so much to both of you. Such fantastic work you're doing.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. Visit us at lostladiesoflit.com for more information for show notes.

AMY: And don't forget, we've got a Facebook forum going, if you wanna talk more about the Porter sisters.

KIM: Oh, yeah, yeah, we're going in hot with that. There's lots of cool stuff happening on that forum. And if you love listening to Lost Ladies of Lit, we would love it if you would give us a five-star review wherever you listen. It really helps new listeners find us, and it also just makes us feel really great.

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.

133. “Dirty” Books

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: Hey, everyone. So Kim, I was scrolling dumb news stories on my phone earlier this month and I saw a headline that said something about "Here's why you should always put your used book in the freezer."

KIM: Is it because it's a scary book? Do you remember that episode of “Friends” with Joey? He hides Little Women in the freezer because it scares him because he used to have The Shining, which he lent to Rachel, and she was reading that. So she lent him Little Women and that scared him just as much of The Shining and he had to hide it in the freezer. 

AMY: I don't remember that at all. And that is hilarious. 

KIM: Little Women! 

AMY: Good throwback reference there. No, that is not the reason why they recommended always putting your used book in the freezer. The story advocated for doing so because it would kill any germs on them. And I thought to myself, "You know, if that's what's ultimately going to seal my fate, death by book cooties, so be it." I'm living on borrowed time at this point.

KIM: There are worse ways to go. And, uh, yeah, I mean, I like the idea that other people have held the library book.

AMY: Yeah. A super OCD person must have written that.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: But no, I'm still fine with my gross old dirty library books. I think we should talk about dirty books though. How many listeners clicked this episode because they thought it was gonna be like, dirty books? Like naughty books. 

KIM: Why did your mind go there?

AMY: Get your minds out of the gutters, listeners. This is literal dirty books. So let's do a quick rundown. Kim, you buy more new books than I do, so you might not have this phenomenon in your life, but I want to talk about the grossest things we've ever found in our library books 

KIM: Yeah. Or used books in general, because I buy a lot of used books. 

AMY: Two things definitely come to mind for me. They are not frequently… I don't say they pop up with frequency, but on a number of occasions I've gotten a library book where it's pretty recognizable that it's a smeared booger.

KIM: Oh yes. Oh my God, totally. That happens actually quite, quite a bit, I'd say. And 

AMY: it, is 

KIM: Come on, people get a Kleenex! 

AMY: No amount of putting it in the freezer is gonna solve that! 

KIM: No, totally. Yuck. 

AMY: It's there for the ages. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: So that's gross. And then also I occasionally find silverfish smashed. You know, those little bugs? 

KIM: Oh yeah. Yes. Yeah, have you ever seen what looks like tears? Like someone read it and tears 

AMY: gosh. Wow. I would love that. 

KIM: Maybe it's snot and I just romanticized it.

AMY: Yeah. Tears. That sound that does, that sounds very romantic. .Um, have you ever found evidence of an actual bookworm, like a hole through the pages? I feel like I have. I think I have. Yeah. That's kind of neat because it's a hole like in the same exact spot

KIM: Yeah. It makes you think of an ancient library, with, you know, really old books in it, getting bookworm. 

AMY: Yeah, yeah, if you ever want to kill some time on the Internet though, you should google "weird things people have found in books." There's a couple articles that come up, like listicle kind of things. Um, there's one where someone found a smushed dried lizard. I mean, I think silverfish are bad, but can you imagine turning the page and there's like a pressed lizard. 

KIM: That might actually put me off of library books forever.

AMY: Yeah. I mean that would elicit a scream for sure. But I do have a similar story in my own house. Um, when the kids were young, we had a fish tank and it was on top of the bookshelf . And we had gotten a few new fish, one yellow, I don't, I can't remember what type they were. Um…

KIM: don't even remember you having a fish tank. 

AMY: We did for years. Yeah. Um, I can't remember the species of fish that they were, but we got one that was yellow named Jellybean and one that was orange named Cheeto. And within like a couple days of getting them Jellybean, the yellow one, was gone. My first thought was it must have jumped out. I looked everywhere for this fish on the floor, shelf, wherever. Couldn't find it. Did it get chopped in the filter? Is it dead somewhere behind the plants? Did Cheeto eat it? Could not find it, it was a mystery for the ages. I want to say at least four months have gone by, Jack is sitting by the bookshelf. He's got all the books on the floor surrounding him, and he's like, "Mom, I found a sardine! We don't serve sardines in our house, so I don't know why he thought it was a sardine. And I was like, "What?" He was looking at one of those Little Golden Books. Jellybean had jumped out clearly and had landed on the spine of the Little Golden Book. The fish got camouflaged on that binding. 

KIM: Oh my God. That explains everything. It wanted to read! 

AMY: Um okay, so those are the grossest things found in books. What about any cool things you've ever found in a book?

KIM: Yeah. I love finding different bookmarks people have left in there, or sometimes there's pressed flowers, things like that, that people have left. Um, Yeah. What about you? 

AMY: I remember, um, one of our early episodes that we did on Emily Eden, who wrote The Semi-detached Couple and The Semi Attached House. I got that book from the library with both of those novels in one book. And I found one of those like corporate name tag stickers. It said "Weston Hotel" on the top, and instead of having somebody's name on it, it said, "Happy couple, thank you" with a smiley face and exclamation point. And I felt like the reader, I imagine that she was sitting at some boring conference and instead of listening to whatever the seminar was, she was reading Emily Eden and she was just excited and happy that the couple, it was like a happy ending sort of scenario in those books. And I love that she just wrote "Happy couple. Thank you," and like stuck it in 

KIM: Aw, that's so cute.

AMY: When you find things like that, it's like books are a time capsule, you know? Stuff that you find from years and years ago.

KIM: And people's dedications at the beginning. I mean, those are always interesting too. Like, you know, when someone really thinks about why they gave someone a particular book, it can be really moving. I can't think of one off the top of my head, but it's always really sweet to see that.

AMY: Um, I saw, I think it was like a library. They, um, have a bulletin board where they just tack up all the stuff that people have left in their books. Like photos, you know, old bookmarks, old notes. 

KIM: Yeah. Because you think about the things you use. I often use photos or postcards. I want to see it every time I open it, this picture, whatever.

AMY: Yeah. Um, what about changing tacks here, your thoughts on dog earring pages or cracking the spines? 

KIM: Um, I don't think with library books that you should do that, honestly. I think you gotta treat them with respect, knowing that other people are going to be reading them. Though I do love when people underline things in used books and I see their notations.

AMY: Okay. See, I'm the opposite almost. I, well, I've gotten better about dog earing. I used to be a horrible dog-earer. 

KIM: You?!

AMY: Yes. 

KIM: I'm surprised. 

AMY: I'm surprised you even lend me your books anymore because I probably did it to your books. I think I try not to do it with your books because I know it's like your book, but my thought process was, none of these are gonna wind up being like the rare, I mean, I'm for the most part reading popular, bestselling books, so I'm like, this is not gonna be that one book that survives the apocalypse and has to be kept in this like rare, pressure sealed chamber for all of history. Like, there's a million copies of Harry Potter.

KIM: Yeah. You like your books lived in. 

AMY: Yes, exactly. And if I see a previously folded page, it almost gives me a connection to the person before that read it. But I do think, especially now, a lot of the books that we read for this podcast we have to get from libraries. And they're old, you know, they're not in print anymore and I realize how this is now a rare book, you know? And, it is a more precious thing. Like Dorothy Richardson's Dawn's Hand, like all of those books we're reading through The Pilgrimage books right now, and I am so careful with those books now. And the pages are crispy, so I know if I dogeared that, that triangle is falling off immediately. So I'm very careful now. So I'm starting to change my tune a little bit about the dog earing, but when it comes to the annotations, I find that so distracting. And I'm sure I put the stupidest notes in that only makes sense to me, but when you see other people's notes, they just look like idiots. 

KIM: I think it's okay in a used book, and I usually have looked through and I've seen, is it gonna annoy me or is it somebody that I feel like I'm gonna learn from their 

AMY: I always feel like it was probably a college student and they were in a class and that. Yeah. So that's okay. The worst though, was a recent one. I don't remember what book it was. It was something for this podcast I want to say, though. And somebody was going through and playing editor, thinking that they knew better.

KIM: Oh,

AMY: And correcting things and putting commas and like changing, and it was wrong. And it was like, "You smug old lady!" 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: I picture a smug old lady doing that. Busy body. I think the publisher knew what they were doing that they wouldn't leave 75 typos for you to find and correct. But anyway, 

KIM: the author's intention.

AMY: So we talked at the top of the episode about the fact that I wouldn't mind dying from library book germs. It's not a, you know, great fear of mine. But did you know that you could also get arsenic poisoning from old books?

KIM: Ooh, no. Tell me more.

AMY: So apparently there, yes, there's an emerald green pigment that was once used to color cloth book covers, primarily in the mid 1800s, and researchers have discovered these particular green books to be toxic. And many of them are still sitting in library stacks and used bookstores and people are none the wiser. But there's a new effort that's been launched by conservators at the Winterthur Museum and Library in Delaware. The Winterthur is kind of like Delaware's Huntington Library. Our version. 

KIM: If I ever go to Delaware, I'm going.

AMY: Yeah, it's beautiful, beautiful grounds and everything. Um, but yes, this new effort to, you know, find these books and track them down is called The Poison Book Project.

KIM: I love it. Can you imagine having that on your LinkedIn profile? I worked on The Poison Book Project. 

AMY: Yeah. You are kind of like the Poirot of poison books, right? You have to find them and warn people about, 

KIM: Yeah. Or not. 

AMY: For example, at the oldest library in America, which is the Library Company of Philadelphia, The Poison Book Project team found more than two dozen of these emerald green cloth color books.

KIM: Okay. First of all, this is like Knives Out Number Three, and it'll probably be better than Glass Onion, which I didn't think was that great, but it'll be the Poison Book Project. 

AMY: I didn't like Knives Out.

KIM: Uh, I had fun with it, but it was a little blockbustery for me. It was a little too pat. Anyway, but what's the risk with the books, actually? Can these books actually kill you? Like how much would it poison you? Is it just light poisoning or like, are you good?

AMY: No, no, no, no, it's not like... Kim is clutching her neck and like falling to the floor. 

KIM: I've read too many Agatha Christie novels.

AMY: Yes. No, it wouldn't be anything like that. But people who do come into contact with these books frequently, like researchers or librarians or book conservators, they could inhale small particles and it might make them feel sick or it could cause a skin irritation. Um, so this dye that was used in the book covers, it was developed in 1814 and it was used to color a whole range of products, not just books. Apparently the Victorians really liked this green color . It was like their Pantone Pick of the Year for many years running. Um, yeah, I'm sure you know the shade of green I'm talking about.. 

KIM: I know exactly what you're talking about.

AMY: And it's not just the emerald green books that are toxic. There are also some yellow and orangish books from around that timeframe that are also known to contain the toxic substance chromium. And there's also a lot of lead in book covers from that time period of assorted colors. So the dyes were applied to the cloth, like a coating, and that makes it a problem because it's easy for that then to crack and peel off, and that's where the danger lies. So even though these colors eventually fell out of fashion and the dyes stopped being used so predominantly, you know, there are old books lurking.

KIM: I have a lot of old books that's giving me a little bit of shivers.

AMY: Well, you can go to The Poison Book Project and they can give you more details.

KIM: I can find out. 

AMY: It's for the most part, it's not gonna be books necessarily that you have in your house unless you are really a collector of very, very vintagey old 

KIM: Okay. I don't have a lot. I have a few books from the 1800s, but not a lot. Okay, so, but basically the moral of today's mini is maybe just wash your hands after you read that old book. Just to be on the safe side. If you're not gonna wear gloves.

AMY: Yes. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Uh, or just throw caution to the wind and say, "So be it. This is how I die." if the only yellowish green on your used book is an old booger, I guess you can be thankful it's not arsenic, at 

KIM: That's funny.

AMY: Um, but yeah, so speaking of discovering things in old books, we mentioned Pilgrimage earlier when I was talking about the dog ear. And I wanna update listeners a little bit on our Pilgrimage journey because we promised you guys that we were gonna be reading all 13 books. I have so far done, well, we've read book 10, uh, for the episode. Now, I've already read Book One, which is Pointed Roofs, and I read Book Two, which is Backwater. 

KIM: Oh my gosh. 

AMY: They are so freaking good.

KIM: I've got to read them. I ordered it and I didn't go to the library to pick it up. I've just been Yeah, 

AMY: You're behind. I'm lapping you. 

KIM: know this can't, I can't let this stand. 

AMY: I'm gonna get my mini pin. 

KIM: I can't let you get your pin first.

AMY: And here's what I want to say to viewers that might have listened to that Dorothy Richardson episode where you and I were talking about how difficult we found the writing. if you start from the beginning, the writing's not difficult at all.

KIM: Oh, great. 

AMY: It’s much easier to follow. I think part of our problem was we jumped in at Book 10. 

KIM: We didn't know what was happening. Yeah, 

AMY: Exactly. 

KIM: I didn't even know what genre I was reading when I first started reading it, because I didn't know anything about it. And I was like, "Is this sci-fi?"

AMY: Yeah. no. You're gonna feel this rush of, um, just revelation when you start Pointed Roofs, like, "Oh my gosh, I'm totally following everything now." And especially since we get further in her journey in Book 10, you're gonna love getting to see this character back when she's young and she's first starting her journey. And also, I wanted to say that in Backwater, um, there's a whole significant portion of the book is about her reading life. And she goes to a library and she kind of is a little bit embarrassed to ask the librarian where these books are, but she kind of wants to read books that wouldn't be looked on as suitable for a young woman like her. And, um, so the one author that fits that category is Ouida.

KIM: Oh yeah. 

AMY: she talks a lot about the experience of reading Ouida. Margaret Wolf Hungerford also comes up in her recollections. And then there's another lost lady, Rosa Nouchette Carey, um, who I don't know anything about, but Rosa Nouchette Carey almost sounds like one of the authors that would be more suitable for a young woman at that time. But she kind of wants to go read Ouida instead. 

KIM: We'll link to the Hungerford and Ouida episodes in our show notes.

AMY: Yeah. But Kim, chop, chop! 

KIM: I know! I better catch up. 

AMY: And once you read, you're not gonna be able to stop because each one I finished, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I need to get the next one right now." So, yeah, not only are you gonna want to get the next books right away, but also I was jumping over to readingpilgrimage.com. That's the kind of center if you wanna follow along and be part of a group that's reading Pilgrimage, this is what Brad Bigelow from neglectedbooks.com, he kind of spearheaded. It's got great resources, it's got great discussions that you can...

KIM: Playlists.

AMY: It's got musical playlists because in the first couple books, music is kind of central to her inner life and I wish I would've thought that these playlists were there before I started reading Pointed Roofs because it would be really cool to read. And I want you to do this, Kim. Read Pointed Roofs and have that playlist ready so that when she gets to each song, I want you to play the song.

KIM: Okay, I will do it. 

AMY: I think that would really add to it. 

KIM: Yeah. Immersive experience.

AMY: So I am in it to win it as they say. I can't wait to finish the whole thing.

KIM: Okay. So, uh, yeah. I, I will. So, so, just circling back quickly to the topic of this episode, we want to know, listeners: what's the weirdest thing you've ever found in a book? You can email us or, uh, give us a shout out on social and let us know.

AMY: Yeah, we're all ears, and we hope you'll be all ears next week when we return to discuss another fascinating Lost Lady of Lit.

KIM: All right. Good. I love how you connected that. 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. 

132. Minae Mizumura — A True Novel with Lavanya Krishnan

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

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes. Many of the authors we discuss on this podcast were hugely popular in their day, but long forgotten in this one. The author we're going to be discussing today, though, is alive and, we hope, well.

KIM: That's right. Minae Mizumura a Tokyo-based author who absolutely deserves more recognition here in the US--and everywhere else for that matter. Her novel that we'll be talking about today, the title is A True Novel, was originally published in Japanese in 2002 and translated into English in 2013. So it's definitely the most recent quote unquote "lost" novel we've discussed on this show.

AMY: Yes, and A True Novel is a loose retelling of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, but set in post-war Japan.

KIM: And If that doesn't pique your interest, though, let's be honest, we know it does, what if we told you it also had shades of The Great Gatsby and Middlemarch?

AMY: Uh, that sounds great, but really, come on, Kim, you had me at Emily Bronte. Seriously though, this book, A True Novel is epic, both in scope and execution, yet in Mizumura's own words, neither this nor her other novels have been commercially successful, although she has been called one of Japan's most important living writers. We are converts though, and it's thanks to our guest today who is on a mission to champion Mizumura.

KIM: I am so excited to talk about this novel with her, so let's read the stacks and get started.

AMY: Our guest today is Lavanya Krishnan, who co-founded a curated book box subscriptions company called Boxwalla that showcases literature from all over the world. Her recent book, subscription, curated with the writer Alexander Chee, focuses on American fiction, but a past collection included A True Novel and it's one of Lavanya's favorites, which is why she's here to talk about it. Welcome to the show, Lavanya!

LAVANYA KRISHNAN: Hi, Amy, hi Kim. Thank you so much for having me, um, and I'm thrilled that I was able to get you to read an 800-page novel. 

KIM: Yeah, you found the right audience. 

AMY: Yeah, and I have a funny story really quick before we dive into all this. I got a copy of A True Novel from the library, and if you'll see , I'm showing it on the screen, it's not very big. I started reading it and I'm texting Kim, like, Oh my God, Kim, I'm obsessed. I can't put it down. It's so good. You're gonna love it. And then I got to the end of this book and I texted Kim and I was like, I didn't like the ending. It's very abrupt and I don't know if this is a Japanese style of writing or what's going on. Well, about two weeks ago, thank God I caught this, I realized I read Part One only and it's the size of a full novel, right? So I thought this is the novel. It doesn't say Volume One very obviously anywhere on it. So it was like, Of course that's why I didn't like the ending, because it wasn't done yet. So listeners, please do not make the same mistake that I made. It's an 800-page novel, so,

KIM: Yeah.

LAVANYA: So the version I have, I have the two-volume novel, but when we showcased it in the box, it actually came as one big fat novel. So I'm not 

KIM: I have the big fat one right here. 

AMY: I can understand why they break it up, because sometimes it's hard to read such a heavy novel. It's physically hard.

KIM: Yeah. You don't wanna drop it on your nose in bed.

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: So, Lavanya, do you remember when and how you first discovered Mizumura?

LAVANYA: So, um, in 2015, , my husband and I, my husband is the co-founder of Boxwalla, we were actively looking for unconventional, compelling love stories for a February box that we were doing. And we came across A True Novel, and my husband read a sample and he was very excited and he was like, You know, you have to read this book, you're gonna love it. And I was sort of simultaneously intrigued and skeptical because it was a retelling of Wuthering Heights. And Wuthering Heights was one of my favorite novels as a child. I mean, at that time I was wary of reading retellings in general, but especially a favorite book. And also the kind of reader I am, I don't actually want to see the narrative arc that the writer is aiming at. But then, you know, by definition a retelling is actually, you know, handing you over the formula. And I don't like to see the formula. So I was very wary, but then I needn't have been because, uh, I mean, Mizumura is extraordinarily skilled. Once I started reading, I was just sucked in. I couldn't stop. I think I read it over two days, a weekend and, um, I don't know how she does it, but, the book was so evocative and stirring, but she's never sentimental or sort of emotionally manipulative, so she just sort of hits the spot, and and I'm a huge fan of stories within stories, and, um, also the whole foreshadowing of sort of this doomed love story that casts a cloud over the whole book. I mean, I couldn't put it down. And I completely fell in love with it, and I was like, you know, I have to showcase this. I know it's sort of blasphemous to say this, but you know, I ended up loving it even more than the original. 

AMY: Wow. 

LAVANYA: But a few years later, after we showcased the book, I was preparing a list of my favorites for a newsletter and I was sort of looking to link the book and I realized it was out of print.

KIM: Oh yeah. 

LAVANYA: And I was upset and I was like, you know, this is not a book that deserves to go out of print. I mean, it's back in print now, but I think probably that incident is the reason that I actually thought of this book for the Lost Ladies of Literature, because it's a great book and it doesn't deserve to be ever out of print. There's always this danger that it, you know, might become lost to the English speaking world. So, yeah.

AMY: Absolutely. And yeah, I think you're right. When you first hear the Wuthering Heights connection, I kind of felt the same way. I was intrigued, of course, like, wow, that's a unique premise, but at the same time you're like, is this just gonna be gimmicky? 

KIM: Yeah. It's like there's the pressure of, yeah.

LAVANYA: Will it be derivative? You know, is it going to stand on its own as a novel?

AMY: Yeah, exactly. But the way she frames it is so unique and we're gonna be talking about that. But Kim, do you wanna give our listeners a brief sketch of Mizumura's bio first? And then we'll really delve into the novel itself because there's so much to talk about.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah, I would love to. And Lavanya, if there's anything you wanna add to her bio that you might know that we didn't figure out, please feel free to jump in. So there wasn't actually all that much information about her online, but while researching her, I did discover this really interesting essay on The Wayback Internet Archives, the piece was entitled, Why I Write What I Write. And in it, she gives a sketch of her life, um, her biography essentially, and links it to a through line in her first three books, the third book being A True Novel. And we'll link to that essay in the show notes. It's really interesting.

But anyway, Mizumura was born in 1951 in Tokyo. She moved with her family to the United States when she was 12. Her father was stationed as a branch manager in New York, and as she put it, she quote, Didn't get along with either the States or its language, English. Instead, she turned her back on that. She spent her entire girlhood reading old Japanese novels that her parents had brought for her and her sister to read. She was just waiting to be able to go back to Japan and live her full life there. She called her life in the States "a shadow of life," but it was a long time before she was able to move back to Japan.

AMY: Right. So while she's still in the States, she decided to go to art school and then she married a Japanese man. After a time she gave up painting to study French literature, but all the while she still dreamt of moving back to Japan and writing her first novel in Japanese, and she eventually did just that.

KIM: In an interview in Writing Routines, she said that she first decided to become a writer after reading The Brothers Karamazov in Japanese translation when she was a freshman in art college in Boston. But she said that, typical to a Japanese girl of her generation, it was. quote, More essential that I marry someone nice and suitable than try to fulfill what seemed like a childish dream. So she didn't begin writing until she was in her thirties.

AMY: Her first novel was called Light and Darkness, Continued, and it was published in 1990 and it was actually her sequel to an unfinished Japanese classic by another famous author. Um, and Light and Darkness was said to be the first true novel in Japan. And we're gonna get into that in a second. But Mizumura's second novel, An I Novel From Left to Right, was published in 1995, and A True Novel came out in 2000. It was actually serialized in Japanese initially, and it was her first novel to be translated into English in 2013 by Juliet Winters Carpenter.

KIM: And I think this is the perfect segue to launch into our discussion of A True Novel because the novel opens in Long Island with a teenage Minae Mizumura as the narrator, which is super interesting, right? So Lavanya, do you want to set the scene for our listeners?

LAVANYA: Yes. So the novel is, as I had mentioned, essentially set up as a series of stories within stories, nested stories. And each story has a very different and very distinct narrator. And I love how you learn as much about the narrator as about the story that they're telling. And so the novel opens up with the first narrator, who is, essentially, a fictionalized version of the author. And in this section, the author, teenage Mizumura, meets Taro Azuma, who's a Japanese immigrant, the novel's Heathcliff. And when she meets him, he has a pretty low position in her father's company, but then she witnesses his meteoric rise, and he becomes this millionaire, and then, eventually, a billionaire. But there's also something very different about him, and many other people around her also notice that. He doesn't seem to be like other Japanese immigrants. But I almost think that's why she actually feels a sort of connection to him, because of that sort of supposed weirdness that everybody feels when they're around him. And then, eventually, Mizumura meets Yusuke Kato, who is a young man from Japan who worked at a literary journal in Japan. And he comes to her with this story of Taro in Japan. He was born into poverty and he had a very difficult childhood. And so what that creates is sort of this rich, multilayered tapestry where each story adds color and texture to what we already know about taro from sort of the first section, and so it just makes for such a glorious reading experience, I think.

AMY: Right. And when Minae meets this young man, Yusuke, who comes to her, like, I've got this story and it's crazy and I wanna tell it to you, it's literally a dark and stormy night, right? It's exactly like the beginning of Wuthering Heights. So you're feeling it, you're feeling the tension and the mystery, and it's all starting to build. And you're also like, I don't quite understand how this is gonna line up exactly with Wuthering Heights. 

LAVANYA: Exactly. 

AMY: And that's what's kind of so brilliant about it, right? She's choosing to retell Wuthering Heights, but to make it Japanese. And she explains within the novel what her technique is. There's a whole section that's almost like an aside to the reader and she's like, Here, I'm gonna spell it out. This is what I'm doing. And so there are so many layers.

KIM: Yeah, so the title of the novel, A True Novel, and then her previous novel that we mentioned, An I Novel, those are actually the names for two different types of Japanese novels. Lavanya, do you want to explain the difference between an “I novel” and a “true novel?” We're gonna put that on you.

AMY: Yeah, we gave you the hard part.

KIM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LAVANYA: So I actually love that Mizumura actually explains the difference between the two kinds of novels in the novel itself. Um, so an “I novel” is essentially a novel where the author or the fictionalized version of the author is at the center of the novel, the subject and sort of the "I" of the novel, so to speak. For example, Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human would be an “I novel,” whereas a “true novel” is more of a sort of panoramic, Western- style of novel where a fictional world is created that is very different from that of the author's world. So Mizumura's novel, very interestingly, is actually set up as a “true novel,” which is the Wuthering Heights retelling, wrapped up in an “I novel.” 

AMY: So like the way I saw it, like an “I novel” would, in our parlance, almost be kind of like a memoir-ish? 

LAVANYA: I think, yeah, it would sort of be like what's now called autofiction, I think. 

AMY: Okay. Okay. Got it.

KIM: So in addition to being a retelling of Wuthering Heights, as we mentioned, Taro makes himself over a la The Great Gatsby. So you've got Great Gatsby going on here too. And then that made me realize something I hadn't before, which is The Great Gatsby is also a retelling of Wuthering Heights, so my mind was kind of blown. I wouldn't have known this maybe for a lot longer if I hadn't read this novel.

LAVANYA: Yeah, that's so true. It's kind of mind blowing when you realize two seemingly sort of unrelated works that are sort of classics in their own right are actually related .

KIM: Yeah. It's so cool.

AMY: I will say I thought Taro, who is the Heathcliff in this book, um, he does almost feel like more Jay Gatsby to me than Heathcliff in a way, because he's more likable.

KIM: Well, he is more Heathcliff later in the book, I would say. 

AMY: He does, he does have some Heathcliff moments, but I didn't struggle with him as much as you sometimes struggle with Heathcliff. 

KIM: Yes. 

LAVANYA: Yes. He's, I think, nicer, but also more brooding. So he sort of is a bridge between the two, so to speak, almost. Yeah.

AMY: Yeah. That's a good way to see it. So when we get to the part of the novel where the Saegusa's housekeeper, Fumiko tells the whole story to Yusuke, that was where I really became completely enthralled in the story. The same as Yusuke is. So he's on vacation there with a friend, but he can't stop going to Fumiko’s house to hear the story of Taro and Yoko. There's a lot of storytelling going on within, as Lavanya said, it's like nested within the overall. Narration of the novel, but honestly, I felt like Fumiko was the most interesting character, almost, in a novel full of interesting characters, and she was really pivotal to the plot. Lavanya, what did you think about Fumiko, herself, and her role in the novel?

LAVANYA: Fumiko's such an interesting character. She's sort of the Nelly Dean of this novel, but much more fleshed out, and such a nuanced character. Through her eyes you can sort of witness how Japan is changing. I love how self-aware she is, too, like she has her own prejudices, but she also seems aware of them. She's aware of the shortcomings of these rich families she's working for, but she's also strangely drawn to them. It's all so well done. You see some of the sort of World War Japan, the trajectory from poverty to sort of a more stable middle class that’s kind of happening within her lifetime, to her, as well. So yeah, she's, I think, a really important character and very well fleshed-out.

AMY: Yeah. It's almost like she took Nelly and made her the main character of the story. You, you hear her whole backstory from childhood on, which was fascinating. 

KIM: I love what you mentioned about Japan and postwar Japan. We're gonna talk about that a little bit more, but she has so much going on in this novel, but it's not too much. Like, she just makes it all flow together so beautifully and weaves it all together. But she's talking about America, Japan, their interactions. I mean, it's just, it's, it's amazing. She does an incredible job.

AMY: So, yeah, let's talk a little bit about the setting of the novel, post-war Japan and this resort spot, Karuizawa. We have the two families. There's the Saegusas and the Shigemitsus, who both have summer homes there, very nearby one another. Lavanya, can you talk about how they represent sort of the different aspects of post-war Japan ?

LAVANYA: Yeah, so we have these two families, the Shigemitsus, who represent old money. The old families of high social standing, were sort of losing their wealth after World War II. And then you have the newly rich, represented by the Saegusas, who now have the money, but are desperately seeking to elevate their social standing by association with these older families. So it's a very interesting interplay of class and money and, yeah.

AMY: Kind of like the Buchanans and Jay Gatsby. Yeah. Or the, um, Lintons and the Earns haws.

KIM: Yeah. So the three Saegusa sisters call themselves the three witches, jokingly, and they really do actually though at times act like witches, especially the oldest sister Harue. She can be really charming, but also really awful at the same time.

AMY: They're always kind of fun in a scene together, right? They're kind of catty and... 

KIM: They're always performing.

AMY: Yeah, yeah. Um, but I'll read a little bit that kind of gives this element. This is a little section where they first meet Yusuke and they find out in conversation that Taro, this Heathcliff kind of character, is back in town:

[amy reads from novel]

KIM: That's perfect.

AMY: So, yeah, Yusuke, every time he's in conversation with them, he just feels super awkward, and there is something mystical about them almost.

KIM: What did you both think of the character of Taro? Amy kind of mentioned a little bit, what she thought earlier, but we get his origin story, which is super interesting and poignant. Um, you know, and then we see how he sort of evolves as he grows older.

AMY: Yeah, I liked him. He's so mysterious and he is not even there for much of the time, right. He's not even part of the story for much of it, but he is looming over in America. There's this sort of distant mystery of Taro and who is he? I kept waiting like, “When are we getting back to Taro? When are we getting back to Taro? I wanna know his story.”

LAVANYA: Yeah. And for me, I think even when he's not there, he's always present. So for me, he is the essence of the book as you say, just looming. I loved how he was drawn, how nuanced he was, yet he wasn't, you know, the perfect hero either, but not as unlikeable as you might have thought she would make him.

AMY: Yeah, he's more reserved. I,

KIM: I know and the way that she talks about his growing up and how they sort of befriend him and bring him into their world. I mean, he's just a little boy and she's so good at making you care about him as a character. 

AMY: I loved, um, the lightbulb scene. 

LAVANYA: Yes.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: So we have these stories within the story, within a story basically. And she manages to have these two moments that interconnect and so when you get to the second story and the light bulb, you have a light bulb moment — literally, a light bulb moment in the book.

LAVANYA: I love that you brought it back because I had made a mental note to bring this up exactly, because when I was reading it for the second time for the podcast, and you know, I was trying to say, “Okay, so in this first section, what does that correspond to in the actual retelling of the story?” And with the light bulb moment, you get exactly that because you have that moment happen and you're like, “Oh, that's why he reacted that way!” Because it was such a... 

AMY: It was such a formative part of his childhood. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

KIM: It comes full circle. I mean, I'm gonna be reading this novel again. I know for sure, that's how I felt about it. Like I want to read it again with that knowledge. I think it will be a whole other experience. So…

AMY: Yeah. So I didn't really have any idea that the Japanese novel was not traditionally a novel as we think of it. That's a whole new premise for me. I was like, wait, what? I just assumed all novels were set in a fictional universe and told a narrative like that. So then once I learned a little bit more about how that works, then just to be able to go back and read it again and be like, okay, I see everything she's doing here. It's 

KIM: I 

AMY: But it goes back to, like you said, not wanting to know ahead of time that you're just getting a Wuthering Heights retelling. She certainly does not do that. There are some twists in here. Yeah.

KIM: Yeah, for sure. You will be surprised, definitely, by the things that happen.

AMY: So Mizumura wrote in the essay that Kim mentioned earlier, that even though she has what she calls a quote unquote "unhappy knowledge" that permeates her life and her books, she wants all her novels to end with a glimmer of hope. I love the phrase "unhappy knowledge," and I think that really fits with the novel and also with Wuthering Heights, too.

KIM: Yeah. And at the end of the novel Taro compares the new Japan to "champagne bubbles; hollow, barely there at all," he says, which is very "Great Gatsby” to me as well, the champagne comparison. And yet there's Yusuke and the narrator, Minae, enchanted by Fumiko's story. I feel like that's the glimmer of hope, basically. They're so enchanted by this old story and the drama of it. 

LAVANYA: I agree that the characters of Minae, herself, as well as um, Yusuke, they sort of do point to there being some hope because, you know, you have these people who are sort of appreciative of the good things about old Japan. 

AMY: The whole book, really, it's just permeated with this, um… the fog of the moors, the, um…

KIM: Oh, there's actually a ghost. 

AMY: It's haunted… 

KIM: Old houses…

AMY: You're not on the moors, you're in a forest in Japan, but you still have that beauty mixed with gloom. Um, and I love that there are photographs. We haven't talked about that this, there's photographs running throughout the book that all sort of speak to that sensation, you know, the kind of crumbling…

KIM: Yeah. Is that something typical or not? Do you know, Lavanya? Like to incorporate imagery with a novel ? 

LAVANYA: I'm almost done with another one of the novels and she has no photographs. Um, I think she likes to play with form and language, so I think that was her way of doing it. Because the “I novel” part of it where she begins is sort of a fictionalized version of the real life, but then with the actual “true novel,” she sort of pretends that it's real. And it works really well to lend sort of a credibility that you actually begin believing this story. And I start googling the places.

KIM: Right? 

AMY: Same. I was like, did this really happen? 

KIM: Yeah. It's like 19th century novels at the beginning when they're like, Oh yeah, someone told me this story. And like she brings that back. 

AMY: They purport it to be true. Yes. 

KIM: Oh, we were gonna mention, um, there is talk of an upcoming Japanese language TV series adaptation of this novel. 

AMY: Yeah, it's gonna be adapted. I mean, I think it's great because it's such a sweeping epic. I hope that comes to fruition and that we get it here.

KIM: And we get to see it, yeah, absolutely. 

LAVANYA: So yeah, Mizumura is one of these writers, I mean, once you read her you want to keep being pulled back into her world. And so, um, there was a novel that came out after this, which was Inheritance From Mother. If you like Mizumura's style, you'll love this novel. I almost feel like she took part of the I novel from A True Novel and zoomed in on it. Because it's basically the relationship between the main character and her mother, and you see echoes of that in A True Novel as well because there seem to be a lot of dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships. And so that aspect is sort of zoomed in on, in Inheritance From Mother. And she has, again, it's a very engaging style where she goes back and forth to the past to sort of build the story in layers. And I was so intrigued that I started wondering, you know, is this a reflection of her relationship with her mother in real life? And I haven't read An I Novel, uh, her second novel; it's been on my list and I need to get to it, but I haven't read it yet. So I was very curious, so I started googling her about her mother, if there was anything there. And I, I sort of got something really interesting because apparently her mother wrote her own autobiography and Mizumura actually helped her edit it. So I was like, “Oh, okay, that, that sounds nice.”

KIM: Yeah,

AMY: Well that can make or break any relationship right there, working on a project like that. So that's interesting, though, what you said too about in A True Novel, the mother-daughter relationships are all kind of fraught. Yeah, that's a good point. 

KIM: Yeah I just wanna go back to your original story of how you found this and decided... I think it's so great that you really were looking for something different and you took a chance to put this in your subscription. I just think that's so cool.

LAVANYA: Yeah. Um, that was one of my favorite boxes. It was actually called “Love in Three Formats.” It had A True Novel, but it also had Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and, uh, Javier Marias's A Heart So White. So it was like three formats of love.

KIM: I love Javier Marias! That's so cool that that was in there. I love A Heart So White! 

AMY: So, yeah, this idea of Boxwalla is great for book lovers. Are you still doing any new ones coming out?

LAVANYA: Yeah, so we have, uh, the regular bimonthly subscription where we focus primarily on translated literature, but also English. But as English is one of the languages in the world rather than the only language, which is something that sort of ties into, Mizumura's own sentiment about how she finds it problematic that, you know, English is sort of taking over the world as sort of the primary language of, uh, intellectual, discourse. So one of the books that we are gonna be showcasing in the April box is called The Diary of an Invasion [by Andrey Kurkov.] It's basically this Ukrainian writer who is talking about sort of his thoughts about the war. And it's very interesting because in the beginning he starts with, Oh, we have Covid here, too. It's like they're dealing with all the small, and big problems that the rest of the world is dealing with in addition to this, you know, war. So he's a great writer. And then there's another writer, a Bulgarian writer Gospodinov, his Time Shelter, that we are showcasing whom we think, if the Nobel Prize is awarded to an Eastern European writer this year or next year, he's probably going to win it. Um, so we have that ongoing series, which happens every two months. And we also have this series with Alexander Chee, which focuses, um, specifically on American fiction and sort of the diversity within that space, also.

KIM: Great. That's exciting.

AMY: Yeah, so a lot of our listeners are people that have read everything, so this is perfect for somebody like our listeners who are always looking for something really outside the box. 

LAVANYA: Yeah, I should send you guys some of our book boxes. I think you'll enjoy them.

KIM: We would love that. 

AMY: Yeah, we would love 

KIM: That. sounds great. We want to thank you so much for introducing us to this novel; we're never going to forget it. And for coming on this show. We loved having you.

LAVANYA: Thank you so much, and again, thank you so much for taking that leap of faith and committing to reading an 800 page novel. 

AMY: We loved it. 

KIM: I enjoyed every minute. That's all for today's episode. Visit lostladiesoflit.com for more information and show notes, and be sure to give us a five-star review if you loved this episode. It's a great way for listeners to learn about the show.

AMY: And if you have other questions or want to discuss this episode further, hop onto our Lost Ladies of Lit Facebook Forum where we have interesting conversations going with other listeners and former guests. It's really a fun place to be; we'd love for you to join.

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.

131. Lost Ladies of Music with Leah Broad

Episode 131: Lost Ladies of Music with Leah Broad

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone, welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: Hi everyone. This week we're excited to chat about four extraordinary women from the musical world whom we hadn't heard of before. And Kim, I'll admit that prior to reading this book, I would've been hard pressed to name even a single female classical music composer, which is kind of embarrassing to admit. What about you?

KIM: Well, I can be right there with you, embarrassed, because the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Clara Schumann, and she was married to Robert Schumann, so maybe that's why her name is still known. But anyway, like many of the authors we've discussed on this podcast, three of the four women we're going to be discussing today were celebrities in their own day, yet their captivating life stories and their once acclaimed compositions have been all but forgotten.

AMY: Fortunately, our guest today is bringing them back into the conversation and concert halls with her new highly praised biography Quartet, how four women changed the musical. 

KIM: Dr. Leah Broad is an award-winning music writer and historian who specializes in 20th century music, especially women in music. A research member and fellow at Oxford University's Christ Church, her writing has appeared in outlets including The Guardian Observer, BBC Music Magazine, Huffington Post, and The Conversation. Out this month is her first book Quartet, and it's earning deservedly rave reviews from critics as well as renowned historical novelists. Kate Mosse and Antonio Frasier. Welcome, Leah. 

LEAH BROAD: Hi. Thank you so much for inviting me on.

KIM: We're so happy to have you.

AMY: Yes. Okay. So Quartet tells the story of four British composers: Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen, and you weave their stories together so beautifully. Leah, what made you choose these four particular women for the focus of your book?

LEAH: Thank you. So, yeah, the reason that I picked these four, I mean, you can't tell the story of British music, I think, without Ethel Smyth, even though a lot of people have tried to do it. I think that's a mistake. She was such a character. She's so important. Um, so for me, she was always gonna be included. Um, and she, Rebecca Clarke and Dorothy Howell in their lifetimes were considered the three most important women composers of the day. I wanted a cast of some very different personalities and different music, so for me they were a natural three. And for Doreen Carwithen, when I got into the 20th century, it was kind of more like, who did I not want to write about. There are so many women who I could have written about at this point, but I chose Doreen Carwithen because she was famous as a film composer, and that's still something that's seen as a bit exceptional for women to do. A very small proportion of big Hollywood films are scored by women. So that's why I chose Doreen Carwithen, because she has this unusual career, an unusual life story, which again, is very different to the other three. And because I adore her music. I only wanted to write about composers whose music I feel I can really, honestly advocate for. And all four of these speak to me very personally with their music. So that was why I chose these four.

AMY: It's interesting that you said there are so many actually that you could have chosen from, because it wasn't just these four. And that goes throughout the course of history right? I mean, there have always been women composers. It's not a modern phenomenon. 

LEAH: Yeah, and I mean like, you know, the first opera by a woman is back in the 17th century , right? Like this is a really long lineage and a long history. And that's why I guess I felt so frustrated, continually walking into bookshops and you get to the music section, it was like, Oh, music history is by men and written by men as well. That's just not true. These women should be in our history books. Um, and I think part of the reason why the women in Quartet felt so strongly that they had to be the first, and they were often held up as the first to do X, Y, and Z even when they weren't necessarily, is because history books excluded their predecessors. They had no way of knowing they weren't the first. And so I think it's just so important that we start to put these women back where they belong, because especially with some of these women, like, I'm not drawing people out from obscurity. They were really famous in their lifetimes, and it's kind of a choice that they are no longer in our history books. Because they're there in the 1920s, Thirties, when they're alive. They're in those history books. So they've been removed.

AMY: Alright, so let's begin with the story of Ethel Smyth. She was born first of the four women in 1858. And she's a fascinating person who was especially well-known for her operas, but also she was just such a character. I think, Leah, you describe her as a lovable eccentric. So can you kind of give our listeners a little basic sketch of who she was?

LEAH: Oh, this is the question I dread. How do you condense this woman down into a few sentences? Because, oh my goodness, I mean, she really was an extraordinary person. She's most famous for her six operas. She composed prolifically at a time when it was thought sort of biologically impossible for women to write in these really big genres. Um, she has an extraordinary personality. Everything she did, she did to extremes. She has love affairs throughout her life with both men and women. She kind of starts out with a throwaway engagement to Oscar Wilde's brother. She decides, eh, no, actually, she's not that into him. Um, she's much more attracted to women. And so she has love affairs with women, including Emmeline Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf, really anyone who's anyone in the early 20th century she knew and was possibly lovers with. She wrote the anthem for the suffragettes. Yeah. I can kind of go on and on and on with all the extraordinary things that this woman did.

AMY: There was one story where she decided she was gonna practice conducting tied to a tree because she thought it would help her muscles . The image of that is so good.

LEAH: And so I asked a conductor about this. I was like, is this something you might do? Is this completely bonkers? And he was like, well, I mean, I wouldn't go tie myself to a tree, but I might like practice on the floor like lying down to get my posture right. But I think Ethel Smyth just did naturally what other people might have done as a publicity stunt

, right? Like she, I think it didn't occur to her that anybody would think it was weird that she would tie herself to a tree to practice her conducting. She's like, "No, I'm improving my posture. Obviously this is a very good idea." And all the journalists are like, What? They are so perplexed by this woman who really is just larger than life.

AMY: Virginia Woolf, she compared her to a wildcat or something?

LEAH: Oh yeah. She often refers to her as an “uncastrated cat” because she would fly into these kind of indignant rages and she would just go on and on and on and on. And Virginia Woolf found it by turns really entertaining and desperately frustrating. And so there are days in her diary where she's like, " I have to pretend I'm not in. I can't deal with Ethel Smyth today. She's just too much."

KIM: She's too much. Yeah, exactly.

LEAH: Too much. One of her other acquaintances said, um, "One has to be really very well to enjoy you.' I think that sums her up really well.

KIM: Yeah. And at the same time, she had so many friends, so...

LEAH: So many. Those were essential for her, her friendships and, you know, her romances were her lifeblood. A lot of them were inspirations behind her music, and then a lot of them were her patrons as well. And they supported her, and without their support, because she was kind of locked out of the patriarchal music institutions that discriminated against her because of her gender, if she didn't have this circle of really quite powerful women, we wouldn't have heard about her today. I mean, we still haven't heard about her today, but she wouldn't have had the success that she did in her own lifetime.

AMY: I love this anecdote in your book of her performing for Queen Victoria for the first time. Can you retell that, just because it really illustrates her uniqueness? 

LEAH: Let me just go grab a copy of the book because I had it on my desk and then one of my friends came and took it away. One second. Okay. " While Ethel was reliably starstruck when she met her musical idols, royals were another matter. She was quite used to mixing among the upper echelons of society. And although she admitted that the queen was a little awe-inspiring, she was calmed by her smile, which she thought the sweetest, most entrancing that she had ever seen on human face. Undaunted, Ethel launched into a rendition of the Masses, Sanctu and Benedictus in her uniquely unselfconscious way, hollering out all the parts while accompanying herself at the piano and stomping her feet for additional percussion. Queen Victoria was so delighted with this novel experience that she invited Ethel to Balmoral to give a repeat performance. Ethel managed to breach all kinds of court etiquette, but nonetheless, she and Marco, who's her big dog, thrilled the stern Balmoral audience with a rendition of the Mass that was so loud and energetic that the presence of a real chorus and orchestra was scarcely missed."

KIM: I mean, forget Tár, Cate Blanchett needs to play Ethel Smyth. I mean, can you imagine?

LEAH: Why fictionalize when you've got people like this for real! 

KIM: We're gonna talk about Tár more later, but yes.

LEAH: Okay.

KIM: So, let's talk a little bit more about her passionate romances, because her music was deeply inspired by these intense love affairs she had. Do you want to talk about The Wreckers? That's the opera she wrote with HB. Can you talk about HB and their relationship and how it inspired The Wreckers?

LEAH: Yeah. So The Wreckers is her third opera, and she writes it with the only man who she had a sustained romantic and sexual relationship with, and this is a philosopher and writer called Henry Brewster. And their relationship is real messy . This is like the gossip and dramas in this book. Like the Coronation Street of music history that I've written. 

KIM: Yes. Perfect.

LEAH: Okay, so it starts out when Ethel Smyth falls head over heels in love with this woman called Julia Brewster. And she pays absolutely no attention at first to her husband called Henry Brewster. He's fallen for Ethel Smyth and Ethel Smyth eventually kind of falls in love with both of them. And there's this awkward love triangle where Ethel Smyth understood it, that the Brewsters had an open marriage. Julia says, No, I'm not having it. Ethel backs off, Henry chases her and eventually Ethel ends up with Henry Brewster. And this causes an awful lot of heartache. Um, obviously she loses a lot of friends over this. They both do. But Henry Brewster, I think one of the reasons she was so attracted to him is because he also had very unconventional ideas about love and sexuality. He encouraged her to see other women, and I think that she just found that really liberating. And she loved people who challenged her intellectually, and I think Henry Brewster did that. And so she keeps up this relationship with this man for very many years, and they write together this third opera called The Wreckers. With some composers it can be kind of hard to see the connection between their lives and works. It can be a bit opaque. Ethel Smyth is not like that. She's like, "Yes, this is my life! Here it is! Right in the music." Um, and so I think it's not a surprise that The Wreckers features two women fighting over a man basically. So this is an opera that's set in a Cornish town, sort of poverty stricken. And the community is populated by wreckers, so people who wreck ships deliberately to kind of loot the boats and murder any potential survivors. Ethel Smyth called it THE opera, you know, that she she lives or dies by. This was, for her, she felt, the kind of pinnacle of her career.

AMY: I notice, listeners, that you can watch a full rendition of The Wreckers on YouTube. So if this story is intriguing to you and you like opera, it's right there.

LEAH: Yeah, there's also a brilliant recording conducted by Alina de La Martinez that was a recording the first time that this opera got done at the Proms in the UK as well. So there is a CD you can buy as well. The story is quite morally ambiguous, and the critics were absolutely outraged. They said they couldn't believe that a woman had set a story of, and I quote, "Such exceptionally nasty character," and they were really upset about this, which for Ethel Smyth was great, right? Like causing a scandal for an opera. That's the way to make the music succeed. 

KIM: All publicity is good publicity, yeah. . Yeah.

LEAH: Exactly. Um, but really, yeah, it caused quite a bit of controversy when it was first performed.

KIM: So I think this is a good spot to mention that we did put together a playlist on Spotify. It includes the music from The Wreckers and some of the other pieces we're talking about today. We're gonna link to that in our show notes, so that everyone can hear it. Um, I wanna talk about something that I found really intriguing and wonderful about Quartet. Um, it's not just a book about music, it's also about women's rights. I really learned so much about the Suffragette movement in England, especially as it related to Ethel's story. Specifically, you had mentioned earlier she was in a relationship with Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst organized the UK's suffragette movement. Can you tell us a little bit more about the relationship and talk about Ethel's involvement in the movement?

LEAH: Yeah. So Ethel Smyth, effectively around 1910, was gonna take two years off composing to join the militant arm of the UK suffragette movement. This is the Women's Social and Political Union, which was set up by The Pankhursts. One of the ways that she contributes to the women's movement is through her music. She writes this anthem for them called the March of the Women, and this becomes super famous. All the suffragettes have to learn this song. Um, and she becomes Emily Pankhurst's, pretty much her closest confidant. I think they were probably lovers. They were certainly in a romantic engagement. Um, it's one of the difficult things when you're looking at sort of like same sex histories. Nobody commits anything to paper. They were probably lovers. One of the things I really love about their relationship is, again, how much music Ethel Smyth kind of wrote about it. So one of her songs called Possession is dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst. And I think it gives us a really beautiful insight into their relationship at the time. She was also the kind of main inspiration behind Ethel Smyth's fourth opera called The Boatswain's Mate. And she has this really feisty heroine, and that's definitely modeled on Emmeline Pankhurst. And all the letters we have between Ethel Smyth and Emmeline Pankhurst show how very exactly, she's like mapping the character onto this woman called Mrs. Waters. 

AMY: And I also love the anecdote when Ethel was in prison and at one point she was hanging out her prison window and there were women in the prison courtyard below and she was conducting them to sing a rendition of The Women's March. Again, where's Cate Blanchett? 

KIM: Yes. It's to cinematic. Her story's so cinematic. It's just crying out to be made into a film.

LEAH: It absolutely is. Hint, hint,

KIM: Yes. if you're listening,

LEAH: Yeah, please do. Like It is cinematic stuff. And this is the anecdote that was sort of most famous. She conducted The March of the Women from her cell window with a toothbrush conducting all her fellow inmates in the yard below. That was, uh, a certainly popular image.

AMY: Okay. So before we move on to the next lady, was there anything else you wanted to say in terms of how gender dynamics played into the response of her work? 

LEAH: Yeah. And this was one of the most frustrating things with Quartet is having to read all this very, very gendered reception. And also just a difficulty with repetition, right? I had to sort of keep going, well, I can't just say again, "And they were super sexist."

KIM: Yeah.

LEAH: That is a common thread, unfortunately, that threads throughout the book. And I think it's really important to understand that these women weren't composing in a vacuum, and that we had this kind of idea that, well, if the music was good, we would've heard of it. Read these reviews.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

LEAH: There are so many platitudes and commonalities that are just trotted out about women's music over and over and over again. So one that really demonstrates this well is her Mass, which is a big work. It's an ambitious work. She was a young woman when she wrote it, and it premiered in 1893 at a big venue. And some critics say "It's quite good," you know, they're like, "Oh, it's okay for a woman." um, and this 'for a woman, oh my God, Ethel Smyth hated this. She loathed being called a woman composer because she was like, either I'm a good composer. Like, what does this mean "for a woman?" This is so irritating. Then it gets a bit more negative. Then they go, oh, okay. "This is ambition, which overreaches itself." This woman has tried to be too like a man, therefore she fails because women should be feminine, they should be pretty, and they're very unattractive when they try to be like a man. So she's sort of in this impossible situation where she's either too ambitious for writing like a man or she's too manly and therefore unattractive. And this is the double bind that basically all these women find themselves in. They're seen as women first and as composers second. Second,

KIM: And it's interesting considering the actual response that people had to her music in the moment. I mean, standing ovations, you know? They like ate it up. So then when you compare that to what people were writing about it, the critics were writing, it's just, wow, what a disconnect.

LEAH: Yeah. And that's why I'm so glad you've made a playlist for this . Cause like if you hear this music and think, Ugh, I hate it. Fine. Right? But at least you've had the opportunity to make that choice for yourself. And I think that's so important. That's why we need recordings. It's why we need performances. We should be able to kind of find the pieces that we love and if they're not there, we can't make that choice.

AMY: Correct. All right, so let's talk about our next composer from your book, Rebecca Clarke. She was born in 1886 and home life was very difficult. She had a father who was emotionally abusive for sure, if not physically abusive. Um, he kicked her out of the house and this part of the book was very poignant, that whole ordeal, but then that incident kind of allowed her to become a working musician.

KIM: Yeah. It reminded me of Amy Levy's Romance of a Shop where the orphan sisters open a photography studio together and they have to make it on their own as working women. So it's very much like she's out there living the life she could never live at home. 

AMY: Mary Tyler Moore, a little bit

KIM: Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. 

AMY: Um, so let's talk about her music. What was she known for and what set her compositions apart?

LEAH: So this is one of the things I really love about Rebecca Clarke is that when she's in a sink or swim situation, oh my God, she's a swimmer . Like every single time she will fight. And I think this really comes through in her music. It was Rebecca Clarke, actually, whose music kind of first got me really into studying these women at all. I heard the opening of her Viola Sonata, which was the piece that really she was most famous for. So she wrote this piece for a competition in 1919 and all the entries had to be submitted anonymously. And so obviously for women this was great. So she submits this piece, it comes joint first and when the critics find out that it's a woman, they kind of can't believe it, cause it's so damn good. And then it's this woman we've never heard of, what the hell? And it's one of the most extraordinary pieces I know. And I heard this piece and I just stopped everything I was doing to listen to this Viola Sonata. And I was like, oh my God, I have to know who wrote this. This is great. And then I saw this name Rebecca Clarke, and I was like, I know a fair amount about classical music, and I'd never heard her name before. And I was like, why? Why has this happened? How have I grown up as a pianist and not come across work by Rebecca Clarke? Because her work is fiery. It is modern, it is kind of aggressive sometimes. It makes you sit up and listen. She was seen as a modern composer and was taken very seriously and she performed with people like Ravel. She, she just was right there in the heart of contemporary music making. Also, she was a viola player, which was super unusual at the time. Like, the viola was not thought of as a solo instrument. And she's one of these pioneers who kind of makes the viola a solo instrument, and because she's such a good performer, she kind of has this dual career of being pioneering both as a composer and as a performer. So in 1913, she becomes one of the first women in the UK to be hired into a professional orchestra, because professional orchestras weren't open to women up until this point.

KIM: I've been playing her for my daughter and husband and we all love her music, so thank you. I had never heard of her before reading this book, and I am a complete convert so yeah, you, you're, yeah, you're already making people sit up and take notice, so, um. Let's talk about our third composer, Dorothy Howell. She was born in 1898 and she actually comes from a very different background than the other two. She was comfortably middle class and Catholic. She went to Catholic boarding school before attending the Royal Academy of Music and her symphonic poem Lamia is based on the poem by Keats and it brought her a lot of fame. So can you talk about the response to her work, Lamia, and what made this work so special? 

LEAH: Yeah, so Lamia was her first really big orchestral work, and this is the piece that launches her as a composer. Um, in 1919. It's done at the Proms, which at the time and kind of still is the biggest music festival in London annually. And her piece is chosen to be one of the premieres, and it gets an absolutely extraordinary reception. The audience love it. They have to be repeats scheduled and the conductor of these concerts, a guy called Henry Wood, who at the time is probably the most famous conductor in the UK, was like, this was exceptional for a British composer's work; for a woman? Absolute triumph. So this just makes her famous, really famous overnight. She becomes like one of the most talked about musicians in London. Um, there are some delightful press interviews with her, some of which are very sexist, like, let's be honest. Um, but so this is the piece that launches her, and it's a fantastic piece. It tells the story of a snake transformed into a woman. But if anybody finds out that she's a snake, she's gonna disappear. And oh, it's all sort of fated love and very teenage angsty . It's great fun. And so it's really unsurprising, therefore that the audience absolutely loved it. 

KIM: I love all the politics about the Proms, too, and just what got played and what didn't, and everyone waiting to find out what was going to be on the, ticket, and it's just,

LEAH: Yeah, I mean, like these, these, it's hard to explain how unusual it was to get a really big performance like this. Composers fought over it. And this is one of the things where all these women, when their music is performed, the critics, they kind of have to navigate circumstances that are completely out of their control, right. Because these big performances are so unusual, the critics always have their favorite hobby horses for who's gonna get one of these slots. And if it's a woman instead of the person they were backing, you are already starting on the back foot. The piece has to be so extraordinary for people to say, yeah, I loved it. They're sort of always starting at a bit of a disadvantage. Having said that, Henry Wood is one of these standout guys who does schedule women and he does hire women. 

KIM: Yes. I like him. . 

LEAH: Yeah. And it just shows what a difference an individual can make, because throughout his tenure at the Proms, actually through the 1920s, there were quite a few pieces by women, and then there's this dip when Henry Wood dies, after the Second World War, and it just shows how much women's progress is not linear. There are years where zero works are performed by the Proms. It takes us until 2019 to get back to where we were in 1920. 

KIM: I mean, take a moment and think about that listener as, wow. Wow. That's quite a big chunk of time there. Yeah. Yeah.

AMY: And so speaking of fast forwarding a little bit in time, our. Woman that we're gonna discuss is Doreen Carwithen. She was born in 1922 and she's the one who wrote movie scores. This was during a time when England was trying to compete with Hollywood in the film industry. Um, so talk about Doreen's music and why it lent itself so well to film.

LEAH: Yeah, Doreen's music is so pictorial. Uh, if you wanna hear why Doreen Carwithen was a film composer, go listen to her overture Bishop Rock. It's inspired by a lighthouse and it's an evocation of the kind of the lighthouse, uh, with its beam shining out over the Atlantic. And you can hear that, right? You have all the strings swelling, and she has the kind of splash of the spray against the rocks in the percussion. You can see everything that she's painting for you. She's a born film composer. She has such a talent for musical imagery.

KIM: And wasn't she uncredited in a lot of her works or she got like second billing even when she actually was doing all this hard work and working overtime to get this, these compositions completed? 

 films. 

LEAH: Yeah. So she did start out ghostwriting. Having said that, that was not super unusual. What was a surprise for me was she gets called in as the composer for this really big film, which was the film of Elizabeth II's Coronation. This was a big deal. , like the, uh, the production company could have chosen anybody in the world. They picked Dorian Carwithen. And she's billed as the conductor's assistant.

KIM: Ouch. 

AMY: This was like the documentary film of the Coronation? 

LEAH: Yeah. exactly. And yeah, so that wasn't great. Having said that, like, on her other movies, she was credited. Um, it's often behind the scenes that the main kind of gender bias happens, particularly because she often wasn't paid as much as her male counterparts for exactly the same amount of work, sometimes by the same studio on the same film series. And also she found it really impossible to get an agent to represent her because she was a woman who would then have been able to negotiate proper pay for her and kind of help her navigate those issues. And, you know, the film, company would often say, "Oh, you know, we need you to go and approach this person. Wear a pretty dress and a pretty hat." You know, there's some very sexist stuff going on behind the scenes. 

KIM: Was she as well known as the other women in her time, or not as much?

LEAH: Not really. Like she has a few big concert successes, but because she works on film, she's less well known in general because film was a bit of a kind of second fiddle to big orchestral composition. They were like, ah, you can do film, but you can't write proper music kind of thing. That's a real problem that the establishment kind of still has, right? We are getting away from that now. 

KIM: Right? Yeah. 

LEAH: It's contemporary classical music, right? Like if you ask people to name a classical composer, probably the person they're gonna come back to you with is John Williams. And scoring these films is so hard. It takes such skill to write good film music. There's a reason why these composers for film are now as famous as they are. 

AMY: Right. You're not just writing the music, you also have to time it to what's happening on a screen.

KIM: Yeah. But what power to be able to do that if PE people have such an emotional response. Yeah, it would be amazing.

AMY: Um, I just wanna say, as somebody who is not musically minded at all, I wanna give you a lot of credit for explaining these women's music to the layperson. You're not able to give them evidence, right, in a book. And so to that end, I wanna read what is now my favorite simile of the past year. And it's describing Doreen's music. Let me just read it cause I laughed out loud. So you're, you're explaining sort of what she does as a composer, blah, blah, blah. And then you write, "She would fill her pieces with spicy harmonic and rhythmic surprises. It's like finding a chunk of chili at the middle of a Werther's Original. And as funny as that is, uh, that explains it to me. I'm like, oh, I get it! There's like something fiery inside the smoothness. I get it. You know, it was so brilliant and I laughed out loud when I read it.

KIM: Yeah. That was so great. 

LEAH: Hooray. Thank you. I'm so glad because I spent ages trying to think of like, music's such a difficult thing to write about. I try and flag where possible, like, please go listen to this because nothing stands in for the experience of these pieces. Um, but yeah, describing the music in a way that is accurate and also makes people wanna go listen. Oh, it's hard. ,

KIM: You did a great job.

LEAH: Thank you.

KIM: So aside from Doreen, the other women were pretty much music celebrities in their day, at least part of their lifetimes. Ethel, especially, was a household name in her lifetime. Um, and in Quartet, you talk about though, how not too long after her death her compositions, and eventually the other three women's as well, were mostly forgotten. It's really painful to read about that. Why is that and do you think a resurgence is happening now or are you single handedly...?

LEAH: Not single handedly. And like, I think, you know, part of the reason that I'm able to take this book to Faber and they've gone, "Yes, we want it," is because of the pioneering work that other women have done before me, right? Like performers have been bringing this music out. Feminist musicologists have been doing work that I can build on. And that's so important. And I think, yeah, a resurgence is happening finally. A couple of years ago, Ethel Smyth won a Grammy . That's a big deal. So her final work, The Prison, was recorded. And rightly, my goodness, it's an extraordinary recording. It's an amazing piece. And the job that they do with that recording is so good. The soloist, they have an incredible, ah, girl, listen to it. Um, but it is disappointing that we've kind of needed a resurgence and it was kind of heartbreaking for me having to write Ethel's death because she says in her diaries, The thing I really fear most about death is that my music, when I'm not there to fight for it, it's going to die with me. And the like process of writing her out of music history starts with her obituaries. They're like, "Oh, she was a great personality, rubbish composer."

KIM: Ugh, 

LEAH: Sure enough, everything this woman feared came true like days after she died. Um, and I got really angry. Honestly, I got a lot angrier writing this book than I was when I started it. Um, but I think there are so many factors that kind of pile up that meant that these women's music got sort of pushed to one side. If their music wasn't published, then it's really hard to get performances. How can you know whether you like a piece of music or not if it hasn't been performed or recorded? There are still major works by all of these composers that have not been published. Rebecca Clarke's kind of the exception. Nearly everything of hers now has been Published and Doreen Carwithen's stuff has also been published recently as well, which is fantastic. But so that certainly didn't help in the sort of period after their death. Also in the style that they write in. They were not composers, any of them, who really strongly embraced what would become Modernism in the sort of mid to late 20th century. And so Modernist music is sort of associated with what becomes called atonality, which is music that doesn't have a key. So when you hear sort of historical pieces of music from the 18th, 19th centuries, it sounds like they kind of stay in a familiar place, harmonically. They go somewhere and they come back. Atonal music does not do that. It doesn't have a center, it doesn't have a home key. Um, and then this sort of becomes more complex throughout the century, but none of my composers ever really embraced that. And in the mid to late 20th century, this is the music that's kind of being prioritized by the establishment. And a really key figure is a guy called Benjamin Britten, who is, in the UK, kind of embraced as a kind of bridge between Modernism and, and not Modernism. And he writes Ethel Smyth out of history , frankly, like he says, You know, I am the first opera composer since the 17th century in Britain of any interest at all. And the critics follow this line. They go, Yeah, he is. You know, we haven't had an opera opera composer of any merit. They completely just write her out. Um, and I think because this is the kind of music that's being embraced by the musical establishment in the Uk, there's no kind of momentum behind publishing music that doesn't fit this kind of model. Thankfully, I think part of the reason we're seeing this resurgence now is because we have a much broader idea of, you know, what music we can enjoy, what music can be fun to listen to. And so I think there's now a real audience for this kind of music that there maybe wasn't 40, 50 years ago. So I really, really hope that people will go listen to it and then as I say, you can make your mind up about it if you don't like it, cool. But at least you've heard it.

AMY: Thank you for your explanation of Modernist music, but I am a little disappointed there was not a hard candy that we could liken it to. 

KIM: Associate it with.

AMY: Um,

LEAH: Okay. Alright. It's like a Sherbet Fountain. Fizzy and has a weird aftertaste, you know?

KIM: I love it. I love it. 

AMY: Yes. 

KIM: So let's circle back to, um, Tár, which we mentioned briefly at the beginning. You wrote a really interesting piece for your email newsletter, which I also encourage listeners to sign up for. Um, you talk about how it's a story of an incredibly successful fictional female conductor, and I think you really hit the nail on the head with your assessment of it as I'll quote "a regressive film masquerading as a progressive one." And it had me wondering how you might assess today's classical music industry when it comes to this gender parity issue.

LEAH: Dreadful. 

KIM: She's making a face, listeners. 

LEAH: I am pulling a face. Okay, no, so I think classical music has a lot of catching up to do. And I think this is one of the reasons that I personally found Tár very interesting, partly because it felt like a real opportunity to put a, a sort of horrible abusive woman in this top job role and analyze okay, what kind of world would it take for this to be able to happen? But the gender dynamics just aren't engaged with beyond simply putting a woman in that lead role. And Cate Blanchett, I think said quite tellingly, Oh, I don't think this film could have been made with a man in the lead role because we know so obviously what abuse looks like with a man in the role. I'm like, but it doesn't make it any different just cause it's a woman.

KIM: Yeah, exactly.

LEAH: So, and it, it didn't engage with this rich9 history that results in the horrendous statistics that we see today with like 7.7% of music played worldwide, orchestral music, is written by women. In the year of our good Lord, 2023., 7.7%. Are you kidding me? The statistics are awful, and people like Marin Alsop have talked very eloquently about this. Um, and so I think for me personally, Tár felt like a missed opportunity. But I, you know, I appreciate lots of people came away with different responses. What it has done is opened up this conversation about gender in the industry. And for that I think, you know, great. Um, but some of the conversation I'm a little like, Oh, okay, we're a lot further behind than I thought we were.

KIM: Yeah. That and, and everyone's gonna know the name Lydia Tár but it's like, you don't know these other women's names!

LEAH: And I'm like, you know what? Let's pick up real, incredible women and write about them. Let's have our fictional characters as well, but let's not forget that we have really incredible historical people and contemporary people who we should know about. Let's bring those into the frame as well.

KIM: Hear, hear!. 

AMY: Yeah, there was a line from the end of your book that struck me, Leah, that said, "So long as women remain unusual and exceptional, they cannot be the familiar or the favorite." And I think that applies across many disciplines, right? That really stuck with me. 

KIM: So basically, we have barely scratched this surface of the story of these women. They lived incredibly interesting lives and we encourage you to pick up a copy of Quartet and you'll get the full story from that. But thank you so much for coming on the show, Leah. This was a blast. 

LEAH: Thank you, really, you're like ideal readers. I can't believe you went and listened to all the pieces. Thank you.

KIM: Oh yeah.

AMY: That's the only way to do it because you wind up being so curious when you read the description. You're compelled to go find it. 

LEAH: Well, thank you so much. That means the world. 

AMY: For more information on this episode and past episodes, visit lostladiesof lit.com.

KIM: If you love the show, we would be so thrilled if you could give us a five star review wherever you listen. It helps new listeners find us, and it also just makes us feel really good.

AMY: And if you want to keep the discussion going with us please join us on our new Lost Ladies of Lit Forum.

KIM: Yeah, it's a great opportunity for you to talk with us and we can talk with you and you can, uh, meet other listeners and former guests of our show too. It's a really fun space. People are sharing books, and it's a great conversation. So join in and talk with us.

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

130. Han Suyin — Winter Love

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

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. In this week’s episode, we’re excited to talk about another new-to-us novelist. Han Suyin, born in either 1916 or 1917 to a Chinese father and Belgian mother, qualified as a doctor in London before moving to Hong Kong to practice medicine. One of her novels you may have heard of, A Many-Splendored Thing, was adapted into a film in 1955 starring William Holden and Jennifer Jones. I know the song, Amy, but I’ve never seen the movie. (sings the words, “Love is a many-splendored thing”) 

AMY: Ooh! Yeah [sings]. Now I haven’t seen that movie either, but do you know why we both know that song so well? There’s a reason.

KIM: I think it won an award, right?

AMY: Noooo… There's a reason everybody knows it. [sings it again]

KIM: How do we know it?

AMY: It’s the very opening scene of Grease! When Sandy and Danny…

KIM: Oh my gosh! That’s exactly why we know it! Oh my god, you’re totally right! Of course! I can see it in my mind now. It’s so dramatic; the sand and the water…

AMY: Exactly.

KIM: It all goes back to Grease, the musical, for me.

AMY: Okay, but getting back to this other movie, A Many Splendored Thing, it was the successful film adaptation that enabled Suyin to quit medicine to focus on writing full time, and boy, did she! She went on to publish more than 30 books, including memoirs, biographies, volumes of cultural and political history, and novels, including the one we’re going to be discussing today, Winter Love. 

KIM: Called her most vivid and best book, Winter Love is a jewel of a novella and its unusual story of two female medical students who fall passionately in love during the freezing, austere London winter of 1944 ensorcelled both of us. We can’t wait to talk about it, so let’s raid the stacks and get started! 

[intro music] 

AMY:  Okay. Before we jump into this, uh, Kim, you used the word “ensorcelled” right before the theme song. I don't think I've ever heard that word before. Can I possibly be this old and have never encountered that?

KIM: Well, if this makes you feel better, that's the first time I've ever said it aloud. I  read that word somewhere on the internet in the last month or so, and I absolutely loved it. I was ensorcelled by the word ensorcelled, and I had to work it in because it's so perfect. Right?

AMY: At first I was like, “that's not a word.” It IS a word! I Googled it!

KIM: Me too! I know. And I'm like, wow, how did I not know it?

AMY: It sounds like exactly what the meaning would be, right? Like sorcery, ensorcelled. Yeah. 

KIM: And don’t we need more words like that?

AMY: Yes, we learn something new everyday! Okay. So McNally Editions had sent us Winter Love, along with three other books that they launched their imprint with last year. We read the three other books and ended up doing episodes on each of them: Troy Chimneys, They, and Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, and we’ll link to those episodes in the show notes, if you want to check them out. They were all so good! McNally Editions bats it out of the park every time, don’t they?

KIM: They really do. And I knew this one would be good too, and I think that’s why I almost put off reading it, I was saving it or something… It was on my nightstand, and finally I had a window where I could pick it up… and honestly, I don’t think I put it down until I’d finished it. It’s slim for one, so it’s not a long novel, but I was just completely engrossed. It’s that good. Anyway, when I finished it and then read the little bio of Han Suyin on the back book flap, I knew immediately we had to do an episode on this one too…

AMY: Yeah, because how many novels do you read about college-aged women in the 1940s studying science? 

KIM: None that I can think of. And how many novels have we read by women who were once-practicing physicians?

AMY: None, that I can think of. I’m sure there are some contemporary novelists who were, but it’s pretty unusual, I think. So, before we jump into discussing Winter Love (and I agree, Kim, I couldn’t put it down either once I started) let’s talk about Han Suyin’s life, because, no surprise given what we’ve already shared, it’s pretty interesting. 

KIM: Okay, so Suyin was born Chou Kuang Hu in Xinyang in the North-Central province of Henan. (She later said of her name, “It sticks in the throat like a fishbone.”) Her father was from a land-owning clan and he met his Belgian wife, Suyin’s mother, while studying abroad. They returned together to semi-feudal China. As a child, while traveling to school in a rickshaw, Suyin would see the bodies of people who had starved to death. Maybe that was why she decided, when she was 12, that she wanted to become a doctor when she grew up. But her road to becoming a doctor wasn’t completely straightforward and it took some time. For one thing, it was completely against her mother’s wishes -- she wanted her to marry a rich American. 

AMY: Right. So, she started out as a typist at a medical college in China and then in 1935, she moved to Brussels where she began studying medicine. In 1938, she returned to China and married a Chinese Nationalist military officer. She then worked as a midwife at Christian mission hospital and in 1940, she and her husband adopted a daughter. Her first novel, 1942’s Destination Chunking was based on her experiences during this time. In 1944, she went to London with her daughter and began to study medicine at the Royal Free Hospital there. While she was in London, her husband died in action in the Chinese Civil War. 

KIM: Uh, yeah, and I also just want to note, these are just the highlights of her story. There's so much more too. We didn't want to overdo it by telling you every little thing because it would just go on forever. 

AMY: Yeah. If it seems like we're giving you a lot of facts, it's because this is actually the condensed version.

KIM: That’s exactly right. Suyin graduated with Honors and a Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery degree in 1948, and in 1949, she went to Hong Kong to practice medicine at the Queen Mary Hospital. It was there she met and fell in love with Ian Morrison; he was a married Australian war correspondent. Morrison was killed in Korea in 1950. Suyin fictionalized their relationship in the bestselling novel A Many-Splendored Thing and their relationship is documented in her autobiography My House Has Two Doors. She wrote a lot of memoirs and autobiographical material, so there are many volumes of additional information on her as well. She chose the pen name Han Suyin, which she translated as “a common little voice.”

AMY: In 1952, she married a British officer who was sent to Malaysia. She joined him there and worked in a hospital before opening a clinic. And then the following year, she adopted another daughter in Singapore. In 1955, she contributed to the establishment of Nanyang University in Singapore. 

KIM: Okay, I love an anecdote from that time: She served as a physician at the university, declining a teaching position in the English department because she wanted "to make a new Asian literature, not teach Dickens.” So she wanted to be the one creating the literature. In 1955, Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing was filmed and the titular theme song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Interestingly, she distanced herself from the film, saying she never wanted to see it and that she’d sold the film rights to pay for an operation for one of her daughters who suffered from tuberculosis. 

AMY: Wow, okay. But according to the McNally Editions biography, the adaptation is what allowed her to become a full-time writer. Most of her writing features a colonized East Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries, but Winter Love is an exception to that. And, with that, let’s begin our discussion of that book. 

KIM: All right. Winter Love was originally published in 1962 as one of two novellas in a book called Two Loves. And Iet’s kick this off by giving a quick synopsis of Winter Love. It’s the winter of 1944, so that’s toward the latter end of World War II. London is still being bombed, there are air raids happening regularly, and people are surviving on food rations. If that’s not enough, it’s bitterly cold that year. It’s a pretty bleak time, but for Red, our narrator, who is looking back on this winter from some decades later, as a married woman with a child, it is indelibly etched into her memory as the one time when she was fully alive. She’s remembering her early 20s as a student at Horsham Science College where she falls in love with a married classmate named Mara. Their “meet cute” is Red asking Mara to partner with her on a cat dissection. Not typical, but I love it! 

AMY:  Yeah, Sounds like a pitch for the Hallmark Channel! “We met over a feline spleen!”  Anyway, they begin a passionate love affair that we know from the start is doomed (as we said Red is married with a child in the present), so we’re not giving anything away there when we say that. 

KIM: Yes, and in juxtaposition with the factual coldness of the time she’s remembering, the memory itself is almost like this  fur coat that she can put on and luxuriate in in the privacy of her own mind. Amy, after you read the novel you texted me right away. Do you want to share your initial impressions?

AMY: Yeah. I think when I texted you, I was just like, “Oh my gosh, this book is gorgeous. It's a little jewel of a book.” There's a very lyrical quality to the writing  that makes it kind of sublime. But then there's all this urban grittiness mixed in, um, the city and the smog  you know? It feels gray  throughout the book. And in a way, now that I'm thinking about it, that's kind of, um, a good  parallel to make between Red, our narrator and Mara. Because Red is kind of, how do I wanna say it? Um…

KIM: She can be cold on the outside. 

AMY: Yeah. Red can be abrasive. She comes from a poor background. Um, Mara is beautiful and elegant and kind of a pampered princess. You know, she lives a more luxurious lifestyle. So it's something about the juxtaposition of those two elements, the grittiness with the beauty, I guess. And  I'd love to read from the novel just to give  a little example, maybe of what I'm talking about. So, this is a kind of descriptive passage, but remember this is Red reflecting back on the time period

 [Amy reads]  

AMY:  So yeah, that's just a good example of what I was talking about,  the kind of urban decay with this, like glory of her relationship with Mara.

KIM: Yeah. The cold and the warmth existing together so perfectly.

AMY: So not only is she setting you up for the heartache we know is coming, but she also really painting this descriptive picture of London in winter. You feel the chill.

KIM: It’s like you’re there. There’s an elegant precision and spareness in the language, and you could even say that there’s a surgical precision to the way she cuts quickly and deeply into these  characters of Red and Mara. Mara’s beauty and carefree ways stands in stark contrast to this austere environment that we mentioned before.   

AMY: So Red lives in a grubby, depressing rooming house while Mara on the other hand, has a more upper class, privileged existence. She lives with her husband in a nice apartment with luxuries like a private bathroom with hot water. 

KIM: Oh yeah, she sets it up so well (the differences between their lives) in this scene when Red comes over to Mara’s apartment and Mara invites her to  take a hot bath. It’s steamy in more ways than one-- Anyway, then Mara’s husband Frank comes home and ruins the whole spell! 

AMY: Oh, he always does, anytime he enters the scene, right?

KIM: Yeah, cold water on it. 

AMY: So Mara doesn’t have to worry about money because of her marriage to Frank, and Red is almost too careful about money and Red comes across as outwardly confident to the point of bossiness. She’s kind of aggressive, can’t help but taunt her and punish her for what she sees as weakness and passivity. 

KIM: Yeah, i t’s these and other differences in their personalities that eventually contribute to the breakup of what is essentially a domestic partnership. Ultimately though, for Red, it’s the judgment of society—that’s what Red lives in fear of. It kind of reminded me of the female equivalent of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain story that was adapted into a film. 

AMY: Yeah, that’s funny, I hadn’t thought of that at all when I was reading the book, and I’m surprised, because there are similarities there, like, they can’t be open about their relationship, obviously, in this time period.  Funny enough, the one movie that was coming to mind for me while I was reading it was that 1960s Georgie Girl. I think just aesthetically that sort of like city, um,  I knew I was in the 1940s, but for some reason, maybe because we're dealing more bluntly with sex in this novel, I felt like it was more modern than that almost. 

KIM: Withnail and I, too. It's so cold and miserable in London in the winter. I mean, the two guys and their relationship and sort of, they're finding warmth together but  their relationship is kind of doomed too. And it's also gritty. London Winter,

AMY: Listeners, if you don’t know Withnail and I…

KIM: It’s one of our favorite movies, basically.

AMY: We love it. You have to stop immediately… well, first listen to the rest of this podcast and then go find Withnail and I.

KIM: Yeah, I’m sure some of our listeners from England have seen it many times.

AMY: Speaking of Withnail and I, there's also a point in the book where Red and Mara managed to go away on a little vacation. But they end up in this disastrous situation that sort of, “We've gone on holiday by mistake!” from Withnail and I. 

KIM: Best line ever!

AMY: Um, so that's getting to be a section of the book where we're starting to see the cracks in Red and Maura's relationship where you're like, “Oh, are they gonna be able to hold this together?” 

KIM: The rose-colored glasses are kind of off a little bit. 

AMY: Yeah. And they have all these external pressures on them. And then you're also seeing, like, internally, maybe it's just not meant to be sort of thing.

KIM: Though I kept wondering after I read it was that if Mara and Red had been able to live openly as a couple, would they have “made it” or would their personality traits have caused them to break up anyway? Maybe they would have been able to work out these kinks a little bit.  In the Kirkus Review for Winter Love, it reads: “A rumination on a life that could have been, this novel encapsulates queer history often left untold.” So I guess the answer is, at least they would have been able to try if they had been able to live together openly. 

AMY: Yeah. I mean  the experience of reading it and I think the fact that they're sneaking around and trying not to get caught. You internalize that as a reader, right? You're feeling the pressure and the tension and it was giving me anxiety as I was reading it, especially because I fell in love with them as a couple, right? You're “shipping” a couple? Um, They were cute together.

KIM: Yeah. I agree.

AMY:Um, we'll just leave it there right now and let you, the listener, read the book to find out what ultimately happens to their relationship.So let’s circle back to Suyin’s life. Besides the science college, are there any connections we can make between her life and the story in Winter Love?

KIM: Well, as I said earlier, she did write several volumes of autobiography, so there may be some more specific connections there if you read those, but she definitely knew what it was like to be an outsider or to have her feet in two worlds. As a reminder, she’s half Chinese and half European. Her granddaughter, the writer Karen Shepard, wrote a piece for The Millions that I’ll read from: 

“Certainly, she hadn’t had it easy. A younger sibling had died because no doctor, white or Asian, would touch the infant, and my grandmother’s own mother — who, to her credit, did touch her — nevertheless referred to her as “the yellowish object.” With that row to hoe, the yellowish object became a Eurasian force of nature, a woman who was fierce and charismatic, as well as chameleon-like and a master at control and getting what she wanted. “I do what I want,” she said in one interview. “That’s the leitmotiv of my life.” My father, even to her face, called her Dragon Lady.” 

So, you know, I think I can see some similarities between her and Red. I’ll link to Shepard’s full essay in our show notes too so you can read. 

AMY: Yeah, that’s making me think more about Red too, and why she is kind of so tough and abrasive. It’s known by the pen name Sui Sin Far, who was half-British and half-Chinese. We did a previous episode on her, and we’re going to be doing an episode on her sister, Winifred, later this year. But I remember our guest from that Sui Sin Far episode, Victoria Namkung, she too is Eurasian and she was talking about having your feet in both worlds and not feeling like you fully belong. ] Anyway, after 1956, Han visited China almost every year. In 1960 Han married an Indian colonel and lived in Bangalore, India. They later lived in Hong Kong and Switzerland, where she remained, living in Lausanne. She died in Switzerland in 2012 at age 95. You know what else I was thinking of that we didn't even discuss yet is just the fact that she was a straight woman and she wrote a gay love story.

KIM: Yeah,  you asked me if we could connect her life.  There's nothing that I read in researching her that in any way indicated that she was lesbian. Um, I only read about her many relationships with men. Uh, but I wonder if in her autobiographies, if she mentioned anything like that.

AMY: Yeah. Or what inspired her to choose that for a subject matter. When I was reading it, not knowing her biography at all, I kind of read into this narrator saying, you know, now I'm married and have a child, but I'm reflecting back. You know, my first instinct is to just go ahead and put the author in that situation. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. 

AMY: Um, but yeah, like you said, we couldn't find any information, any 

evidence pointing to that.

KIM: No, no. If any listeners know of her and anything about that, let us know.

AMY: Yeah. But also it just makes me think what a revolutionary thing to be writing about at the time that she did. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: I mean, it's so different from anything from that period  that I know of.

So It was written after A Many Splendored Thing, which was hugely successful. So then to really  change gears, knowing that you already have this audience that knows you for this sweeping love story…

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: … a heterosexual love story and be like, “I'm gonna try something else out here and see what everybody does with it.”

KIM: Yeah. And  most of her other work actually was focused on  post-colonial or colonial China and environs, like the fact that she even had a novel set in London during the war was a complete aberration from

all of her other work, which is also interesting too. 

AMY: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it's such a beautiful book. It's so quick to read, and I think we both have the same experience where I just, I'd be walking through a room and I'd see it sitting there, and I'd have to go over and pick it up and continue, I need to find out what happens next.

KIM: We were ensorcelled, what can we say!

AMY: We were ensorcelled. One hundred percent. we're gonna make ensorcelled a thing. I pledge. 

KIM: Ensorcelled T-shirts.

AMY: Yes. 

KIM: We’re going to try to make it happen. Listeners,

AMY: 2023, the year of “ensorcelled.” And with that, we urge you to go pick up a copy of Winter Love. McNally Editions has a beautiful copy. For more information on this episode and past episodes, visit LostLadiesofLit.com. 

KIM: If you love the show, we would be thrilled if you could give us a five star review wherever you listen. It really helps new listeners find us and we can’t tell you what it means to us.. 

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

129. Twins In Fiction

KIM: Hi everyone. Welcome to another Last Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY: Hey there. So first up today, before we get into our topic we just want to update you all on an amazing email we got at the start of the year. Kim saw it first, and all I saw was a text from you Kim saying, “Omg Omg,” which always means either something amazing or awful has happened. So I was like, “What?! What?!”

KIM: Yes, totally, it could be either, you never know. Um, I was hyperventilating basically, though, because we got an email from Firoza (I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly) Jhabvala. She's the daughter of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. So Firoza wrote us saying, "I want to tell you how much I loved the podcast you did on our mother. What a warm and moving tribute it was. Thank you for spreading the word on her wonderful writing." I was crying after I read that because I thought it was like the coolest, sweetest thing to get that.

AMY: I know. I love that she reached out to us. And she also let us know that, uh, she actually created a new website about her mom's life and writing. So listeners, you should check that out. It's ruthprawerjhabvala.com. You'll find a list there of all her novels, short story collections and screenplays, but it also has some great photos too. We loved getting to know all about Ruth for that episode, and we know you'll love her too, so if you haven't yet, go back and listen. Um, we did that episode last year, and especially if you're a fan of Merchant Ivory films, because she was their screenwriter.

KIM: Yeah, this is reminding me, it's almost time for my yearly Room With a View screening. I try to watch it and read the book at least once a year. The E.M. Forster novel, though I must say, it's going to be with a lot of sadness that I rewatch it this year, because at least right now as far as we know Julian Sands, who, um, plays George Emerson is missing, presumed dead, from a hike here around Los Angeles. It was really cold and everything where he was hiking, so it's terrible. 

AMY: I know. It's awful. 

KIM: I'm so sad. 

AMY: Yeah, I did not like seeing the news. 

KIM: Yeah. He was in Boxing Helena, too. I love him.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. All right. So,

KIM: Anyway.

AMY: Tribute to him. But moving on back to today's episode, um, so sometimes we brainstorm what topics to cover for these episodes, and then at other times the universe just tells us, and that's what happened for today's topic. I have had a weird, almost uncanny reading experience here lately, but first Kim, I wanna sing a little diddy in honor of today's topic, and I wanna see if you can identify what it's from. [sings] "Let's get together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The sooner the better."

KIM: Parent Trap! Haley Mills. Yeah, I mean, I love that movie. It's actually adapted from a German novel called Lottie and Lisa by Erich Kastner. Oh gosh, I watched that so many times as a kid. I loved that movie. It was so great. I wanted to have that sleepaway camp experience so bad. 

AMY: And I know there's a Lindsay Lohan version and maybe some of our listeners prefer that one, but it will always be...

KIM: Hailey Mills for us. Yeah, totally. Um, but how does that tie into your strange reading experience? I can't wait to find out.

AMY: Okay. So I ended up selecting four consecutive novels randomly that had nothing to do with this podcast, really, I just was reading them in between for my own pleasure. And each one, as I went along, happened to have twins at the center of the story. I would finish a novel about twins, and then I would pick another novel and it would be about twins. And it happened four books in a row. And at the fourth one, I was like, "What the hell is happening right now?" 

KIM: Right. Have you been doing a double take or something? Sorry. 

AMY: Yes. 

KIM: But what are the books? What are they?

AMY: Okay, so I'll go through these books and then we can talk more about twins and fiction. But the first book I had picked up was Hamnet, which you had given me a while ago, and I just never got around to it. Um, and so of course Shakespeare had, twins, Hamnet and Judith, and so they factor into the story. It's set during the plague. Judith winds up getting sick, and then, because Hamnett and Judith have such a close bond with one another, their physical bond ties into what happens with the plague.

KIM: Right. Yeah. 

AMY: So I think a lot of people know Hamnet. It came out a few years ago. Maggie O'Farrell. Um, so then I was like, all right, moving on to the next book. I'm trying to get through a bunch of the books that are sitting crowding around my nightstand, just to work my way through the pile. So the second one that I read, which is another book that you had lent me a long time ago, was Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker. 

KIM: Oh yeah. That's great. 

AMY: Yeah. I mean, you could consider her a lost lady of Lit. She also wrote, um, the Man with the…?

KIM: Young Man with a Horn, which is also amazing. Yeah. 

AMY: Yeah. So maybe we can do a future episode on that one.

KIM: I think we should.

AMY: But, um, so this book, Cassandra at the Wedding, was written in 1962. It's about two twins, Cassandra and Judith. Another, Judith. Uh, so right away I'm like, "Wait, what? Two more twins, and another one's named Judith?" Like, what's going on? Um, this one, Judith is going to be getting married. She is at her father's house. They live on a ranch in the Bay Area in a cool, kind of mid-century house, which is reminding me a lot while I was reading it of the cool mid-century ranch from The Parent Trap, which is one of my all-time favorite film houses. 

KIM: Yeah. Where the dad lives. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. So it's that kind of house. And Cassandra is driving back for the wedding and we find out right away that Judith is kind of the good twin and Cassandra is kind of the hot mess twin. She's feeling dismayed at the idea of her sister getting married, um, and what that means for her relationship with her sister.

KIM: And she's kind of at a loss right then in her life. 

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: It’s going to get made into a movie, apparently.

AMY: Yes! It's being adapted for film by Neon, which is the same film company that did Parasite.

KIM: Oh yeah. Mm-hmm.

AMY: A woman named Sarah DeLappe is going to be writing the screenplay, and she wrote a play called “The Wolves” that was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. So apparently…

KIM: So excited for this. 

AMY: I don't know when that's coming out. I guess not for another year or two, I would think, but I'm interested to see who they will cast, and I think it'll be a good one. Um, so then my third book that I picked up, I kind of knew it was gonna be about sisters because it was called Sisterland. It's by Curtis Sittenfeld, the author of Prep and...

KIM: mm-hmm.

AMY: Eligible, that Jane Austin, uh, was like a remake of Pride and Prejudice, if you remember that. This one, yet again, adult twins, Violet and Daisy. They both have psychic powers. One of them has sensed that an earthquake could be coming to the town that they live and she becomes like a media sensation trying to warn everybody. Yeah.Um, so I have to admit, I was starting to feel twinned-out and so I got three-fourths of the way through before I finally was like, I can't deal with twins anymore. I just can't. I decided to not finish that one. But I think people would like it. I just couldn't do any more twins. 

KIM: Okay. 

AMY: So the next book I get is Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson, who I believe, I'm not 100% positive that he's confirmed, but we've talked about him potentially being a guest on our show. 

KIM: Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. . Yeah, I think that's gonna happen. 

AMY: So anyway, I pick up his book, Nothing to See Here. It happens to be about a young woman who has offered the job of a nanny for two young twins, a girl and a boy. The only catch is she finds out that these two children spontaneously catch on fire when they get upset. So that was a fourth book I read about twins. And even though I was twinned-out at that point, I finished it and I really, really liked it. It's really funny and cute book.

KIM: Okay. 

AMY: Um, 

Like 

KIM: Like Firestarter.

AMY: "Firestarter meets Mary Poppins" would be like the elevator pitch for this one. Yeah. Um, so that one's good. But yeah, I don't know why I had four twin books land in my lap all at once. I don't know what the universe is trying to tell me there, um, but it got me thinking that there are a lot of books where twins factor in, and I think it's because there is so much you can do with it as a writer, it symbolizes so much, right.

KIM: Yes. And you could show two different types of personalities and how they interact. 

AMY: There's so many plot devices that you can do using twins. I mean, I who used to write about soap operas for a living, know that that is a trope that you can always do something, with the twins, which is why Shakespeare, like, okay, let's talk twins in literature. Shakespeare's one of the first things you think of right. .Um, we have Sebastian and Viola in “Twelfth Night.” 

KIM: And “Comedy of Errors.”. 

Yeah. So I think he definitely uses it for that plot device idea of like switching identities and "I'm mistaking you for this other person," which also then makes me think of A Tale of Two Cities.

KIM: Oh, yes.

AMY: I think I always thought Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay were somehow twins. They weren't, they just looked alike.

KIM: I don't remember now. I love that. 

AMY: I mean, they looked so much alike that they were able to be interchangeable. Um, . So, yeah, East of Eden. John Steinbeck, there's the whole Cane and Abel parallel, you know, with the, the brothers. That's a good one. We have the twins from The Secret History.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Donna Tartt.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: I think you read Her Fearful Symmetry.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: by Audrey Niffenegger. Remember that one? It was set in the famous cemetery in London. Um, and there are two twins that are the main characters of that book.

KIM: Yeah. I mean, the first twins you always think of are the ones from The Shining, which…

AMY: Oh yes. The Grady Twins, which, um, come to think of it, Julia and her best friend, who looks a lot like her, dressed as the Grady twins from The Shining for Halloween. We'll post photos from that on Instagram if we can. 

KIM: I love that. Julia has a dark side. 

AMY: Oh yeah. But the funniest part about it is like, we're all hanging out on the street and she and her friend are Grady Twinned out, and all of a sudden Julia's jaw drops as she looks down the street and sees a family approaching, like a couple and a young child. And I didn't know why Julia was having this reaction at first until the couple gets closer and they are having the same reaction towards her. Turns out they are dressed as Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall and the little kid. The dad had a hatchet. The mom was wearing like the brown corduroy jumper. So yeah, it was like a fated meeting between all The Shining characters on Halloween night, which was fun. Now also when you were saying like the first twins that come to mind for you as The Shining, but for me, I always think of Sweet Valley High.

KIM: Oh, right. Yes. 

AMY: Did you read those? 

KIM: I read a little bit. I wasn't as into them. Yeah. I don't, yeah.

AMY: I think it goes back to the The Parent Trap thing where like, just the idea of having a twin is, especially when you're younger, I mean, did you ever have dreams of having a twin?

KIM: Oh, I love the idea of having a twin.I love that idea. Absolutely. 

AMY: I think it would be neat, but also hard.

KIM: Yeah. I mean, we actually have a lot of twins in my family, um, on my dad's side. So, I've been around twins growing up. They were always very different because they weren't identical. They were fraternal. But it was interesting just seeing the difference in their personalities and everything.

AMY: So I found in these books that I was reading, there was like a common theme that kept coming up and that was always like kind of the good twin versus the bad twin. You always have one, especially in literature. One's always kind of like a hot mess. Even Tale of Two Cities, you know? Like they're not even twins, but you have the alcoholic and then you have the do-gooder. That's why I think it would be hard to be a twin in some respects, because I think there's a natural tendency to want to put twins in those roles. 

KIM: Yeah. And you want to be your own person and be taken for who you are, yourself instead of being compared or juxtaposed with your sibling. But what I love is all the research about twins, where twins are separated at birth and they end up marrying someone with the same name and they have the same jobs and all that kind of stuff. It's interesting.

AMY: Yeah, it is. They're on the same wavelength. 

KIM: Have secret languages when they're kids and everything, so, yeah.

AMY: For this episode, I looked it up on Goodreads, "twins in books," and 414 entries came up. So I feel like it's just an enticing, um, topic. Even a friend of mine, Janelle Brown, our daughters are friends, um, she writes a lot of books, but her most recent release is called I'll Be You. And it's about twins who grew up in Hollywood. Kind of like the Olsen twins, and they've now grown up and they're not in Hollywood anymore, but one of 'em, uh, joins a cult and then the other one has to try to save her from the cult. So I'll Be You. Um, a couple other "lost lady" books about twins. Elizabeth von Arnim, you remember her from, she wrote Enchanted April? So she wrote a book called Christopher and Columbus, which sounds like something we'd like. Yeah, set during World War I kind of era. 

KIM: I thought it was gonna be set in the 15th century.

AMY: No, no. no. no. In the early part of the 20th century in England. And two young girls, fraternal twins, their mother dies and so their relatives decide they would be better off getting sent to America to live with an aunt or something like that. So they get sent by themselves, on a ship, to sail for America. And while they're on the ship, they meet like a rich man who kind of takes them under his wing. And I guess it's kind of a comedy. I haven't read it, but I flagged it. 

KIM: Yeah, let's put that on our list to read. I'm definitely intrigued.

AMY: And then there's another really old one that I thought sounded enticing called The Recess. It's by an author named Sophia Lee. Um, let me just read the description that I found here. " The novel is set during the reign of Elizabeth I first and features as narrators twin daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots marriage. So it imagines" like, what if Mary, Queen of Scots had had these secret babies?

KIM: You would never think of that from the name.

AMY: Well, it's called The Recess because these twin babies are sent off to a cave basically to be raised so nobody can find them...  Because their lives would be in jeopardy sort of thing. 

KIM: Like King Arthur, Only two girls or something. 

AMY: I mean, 

KIM: yeah. 

AMY: It’s all fictional. Like Mary Queen of Scots did not have babies. 

KIM: What year was it?

AMY: 1783.

KIM: my God. We have to add this to our list.

AMY: Yeah. If we can find it. I don't know how readily available it is. 

KIM: I'm gonna see if I can find it.

AMY: The biography of the Porter Sisters mentioned it. 

KIM: My Spidey-sense is going off.

AMY: Yeah. So, um, lots of twin books and listeners, I'm sure you guys can think of even more . Um, this is just the ones that occurred to us off the top of our head.But let us know if you know of other twins in literature. Shout 'em out to us. 

KIM: That's all for today's Lost Ladies of Lit. Visit our website for more information and show notes and to sign up for our newsletter.

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.

128. Margaret Oliphant — Hester with Perri Klass

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: Hey everyone. Kim, you and I recently took a brief hiatus to celebrate the end-of-year holidays. But the author we are going to be discussing today, Margaret Oliphant, would probably have chided us for taking a break, because she never did. She's routinely compared to her contemporary George Eliot, but whereas Eliot wrote seven novels, Oliphant wrote close to a hundred. That's not counting the other non-fiction biographies, histories, essays, and literary criticisms she penned. We've talked about the curse of overproduction in a previous episode. In Oliphant’s case, churning out books was a matter of financial necessity. She had a slew of dependents counting on her as the sole breadwinner of her house.

KIM: That responsibility seems to have inspired her writing, as we'll see in her 1883 novel Hester. It's about a formidable woman wielding the purse strings for not only her family, but an entire town over which she holds dominion

AMY: Yeah. It's an anthem to girl power for sure, and I kept humming [sings] “Who Run The World? (Girls); Who Run The World? (Girls)” while I was reading it. I mean that mantra kept going through my head. We're so glad one of our listeners turned us onto this book, and she's joining us today for the discussion. So before I launch into any more Beyonce tunes, let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: So we have our first medical doctor joining us today. Dr. Perri Klass is a Harvard- educated pediatrician and medical journalist. In addition to writing a column on children's health and wellbeing for The New York Times, her writing has also appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New England Journal of Medicine, among other publications.

KIM: A professor at NYU, she has also authored half a dozen nonfiction books, including The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future and Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor. In addition, she is the National Medical Director of Reach Out and Read. That's a nonprofit program promoting early literacy and distributing children's books at routine well child visits. That program reaches 4.2 million children a year, many of whom are affected by poverty. Dr. Klass, welcome to the show.

PERRI: Oh, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

KIM: So today's lost lady, Margaret Oliphant, doesn't really have anything to do with the medical field, but you actually reached out to suggest her after you discovered our podcast. And just a side note to our listeners, Amy and I love getting emails like this. It's so exciting. So when did you first discover Margaret Oliphant and what made you fall in love with her?

PERRI: I was aware of her for a long time as someone who gets listed as a Victorian novelist. And in fact, what had originally struck me about her was that she didn't write under the name of Margaret Oliphant. She mostly published under the name of Mrs. Oliphant and that always used to, I don't know, raise my hackles a little bit. Why would you do that? But her name turned up a lot. She was one of Queen Victoria's favorite authors. And I hadn't actually read her and didn't know very much about her until a few years ago when I was thinking and writing about other 19th century British writers. She did write a story about a doctor that I read, one of her best known novels, Miss Marjoriebanks, which is about the daughter of the doctor in a small town, and it's very preoccupied with the question of the doctor's position. And then I read Hester, which I'd never heard of, and I read it because it was in print in the Oxford World Classics so I could buy it. And I had that moment that you get when you think “This is the great Victorian novel that nobody has ever read, and why isn't it up there on the shelf next to the others?”

AMY: Uh, we are very familiar with that feeling. You're a little bit outraged, you know, and then you want to tell everyone about it, which is what probably prompted you to reach out to us. 

PERRI: Yes. 

AMY: Okay, so before we dive into Hester, the book itself, let's get to know Oliphant a little better. What do we know about her early life and how she first got into writing?

PERRI: Um, she's Scottish and her father, I think, is a clerk. And she's writing from a very young age. She publishes her first novel when she's about 20 and attracts a lot of attention right away. People think she's very talented. Um, she gets other offers. One of the things that we always have to say about Margaret Oliphant is that she writes a great deal. She writes many, many novels and at the same time, she writes a lot of journalism. She writes travel stuff, she writes non-fiction. And this seems to be true from fairly early on. She marries her cousin. So Margaret Oliphant Wilson marries Frank Wilson Oliphant. Um, he's an artist. He works in stained glass and they have six children together. And then, he gets tuberculosis and she's left a widow with her children all by about the age of 30.

KIM: Okay, so Blackwood's Magazine seems to have played a pivotal role in her career. She worked for the publication starting from a fairly young age as what she called a “general utility woman.” Would you say it's a collaboration that helped put her on the map?

PERRI: Absolutely, and it's a very prominent magazine. I mean, if you look at not only the people they publish, but also the people who read Blackwood's, it's very important to all of the Brontes. It's very important to Dickens. It's what people are reading. And if you look at some of the people they publish, especially in the early days, oh, they published Coleridge and they published Shelly and they publish Wordsworth. They publish all of those names. And one of the things that writing for Blackwood's does for her is it gives her a platform as a critic, and she actually becomes, I think, a very well-known and perhaps feared critic. And one of the things that this may do is it contributes to the fact that there are some literary feuds. One of the things that I learned about her that I didn't know is that there are nasty portraits, fictional portraits, of women who are writers who are supposed to be Margaret Oliphant, both in a Henry James short story and in an Anthony Trollope novel. And some people think that that's revenge on the critic.

AMY: Mm.

KIM: Interesting. Ooh.

AMY: And people kind of had some revenge on her in terms of her reception as a writer, and her reputation. Um, but we'll get into that a little bit later. You mentioned her husband's death and that was only really a small fraction of the tragedy that encompasses her life. And, uh, it was kind of pivotal in prompting her to need to write, really. So tell us a little bit more about some of these other tragedies that befell her.

PERRI: Well, that was actually part of what drew me to her. I was writing this book, The Best Medicine, about changes in infant and child mortality, and I was looking through the Victorian writers who had children to see, say someone like Charles Dickens, who writes the death of Little Nell, which is this famous famous Victorian death scene. I was interested in his letters and his behavior when his own infant daughter died. And so when I started looking people up and I got to Margaret Oliphant, I realized this is actually a tremendously tragic narrative. She and her husband had six children. Three died in infancy. So when her husband died, she had three surviving children, two sons and a daughter. So that's already, you know, by our standards, a tremendous amount of loss and tragedy. She's only around 30. Um, and so first of all, she's got to support these three children, and writing becomes the way that she's going to do this. And I think she basically becomes someone who does not turn down an assignment. You want 10,000 words on landscape painting? Here I am. You want a travel letter? You want advice? You want a supernatural short story? I mean, she does it all. And of course, one of the things you were talking about, her reputation, if you look her up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, the opening line will be “Prolific novelist…” And that word ‘prolific’ kind of gets attached to her, um, and I think it's a way of dismissing her. Whereas, say, if you look up Charles Dickens, who also wrote a huge amount of journalism, essays, travel letters, some of it good, some of it less good, you'll get, you know, “Greatest Victorian Novelist” before you get “Wrote a lot of books.” And if you look at those nasty portraits by, um, by Henry James or by Anthony Trollope, who himself was frequently attacked for his productivity, that's part of what they're making fun of her, that she writes so much. And of course, if you write so much, some of it's good, some of it's less good. She has two sons and a daughter. When her husband dies, he dies in Italy, and she goes back to Italy, I think, writing travel articles. And her daughter, who is nine or 10, gets sick and dies, I think, in Rome. So this is not a baby at this point. This is a child she knows and loves. And I think also named Margaret. This is a tremendous blow and a tremendous tragedy. And she goes on thinking about and writing about the loss of her daughter for a long time, and sometimes when I'm reading her, I think I hear echoes of that loss. And again, this is one of the things people note about her, she keeps up that productivity, writing novels, writing journalism, doing whatever she can. And she's successful. She's able to come back to England, establish herself with her two sons on sort of a high social level all by writing.

AMY: I remember reading that when one of the infants died while the husband was still alive, obviously, she had him write to Blackwood's: “my wife would like to know, you know, we've had this tragedy, uh, would it be okay if she waited until March to turn in what was supposed to be turned in in February?” And it's like, are you kidding me? That's incredible. I tried starting to read Oliphant's autobiography and it is just so gut-wrenching. She writes about the death of her children, and I had to put it down right away. I just couldn't, because you just feel it so deeply. And I think I remember her talking about the daughter, “Oh, it's my girl. My girl died.” And, and the idea that her daughter was gonna be somebody in her family that she, as a woman, would be able to relate to, you know? “My daughter, the one that I would have a kinship with for the rest of my life, she's gone.” The whole thing is just heart- wrenching when you read about it.

PERRI: Well this is one of the things that I am interested in, that I was interested in, this question of, you know, how people lived and wrote and thought at a time when, say, losing an infant was such a predictable part of being a parent, when, you know, every advice book for mothers had to have a chapter on when a child dies because so many children died. It's clear, I think, that one of the things you see with Margaret Oliphant is that fantasy in writing was also an escape. She could go into a world, sometimes a supernatural world, sometimes the life of an imaginary family, and sometimes as you're reading it, you think you're hearing moments where maybe the novelist is speaking to you more directly about her own experiences in grief, but clearly her imagination is a wonderful place.

AMY: Mm-hmm, and it's a coping mechanism.

KIM: Yeah, that completely makes sense. So, let's start diving into Hester then. It's actually her 58th novel, um, to prove your point, and that just boggles the mind. But there's nothing that Amy and I love more than a big fat Victorian novel with small print. It's the sort of thing you want to read on a cold winter's night. You can settle in with tea, a roaring fire, and maybe, you know, some Scottish shortbread cookies in honor of her heritage. I loved getting to immerse myself in this world that she created, which, as we mentioned, does feel very reminiscent of a George Eliot novel, or Anthony Trollope. If you love those, I can pretty much guarantee, listeners, you're gonna love this book. I did. As I was reading it, I just kept thinking, “How have I not read this before?” And honestly, I can't wait to read it again. I know I'm going to be reading it multiple times, so it's great.

PERRI: I just reread it, and I kept saying the same thing. I kept saying, this is like other things. It's like Trollope, it's like Eliot, but it's also different and it's brilliant and it's unexpected.

AMY: And you guys, this is a 500-page novel, so for anybody to be like, “I read it twice,” or “I read it multiple times,” or, “I'm looking forward to reading it again,” that says something right? Um, okay, so it's set in the small town or village you might say, of Redborough. There are really only a handful of locations throughout the novel. Most are residences. Perri, would you like to sort of give our listeners a spoiler free summary of the plot? 

PERRI: Absolutely. First there's a very important backstory. So you're going to think that maybe this is a spoiler, but this is actually Chapter Two. This is before any of the action of the novel. There's a family, the Vernon family, which owns the bank, Vernon's, in Redborough. And John Vernon, who has been trusted with running the bank, has gotten into trouble. He's spent money in ways he shouldn't. There's gonna be a run on the bank. They're staring ruin in the face, and the bank, and therefore the savings of everyone in town, are saved by the young woman, Catherine Vernon, who is a cousin of the man who's behaved so badly. He's in trouble, he runs away faced with disgrace. Um, his silly, pretty flibbertigibbet wife never really understands what's going on, but she goes off with him, and Catherine Vernon, the young heiress of the Vernon family, steps into the breach. She takes control and she then runs the bank for the next 40 years. And that's all the backstory. The actual novel starts when that wife, the one who was married to the man who almost ran them into the ground and ran away, comes back to town with her 14-year-old daughter, Hester. And she and Hester (she's now widowed), they're coming to live on Catherine's charity in Redborough. And the novel is what's going to happen when you bring this 14-year-old girl, Hester, into this town where she is dependent on Catherine's charity and you watch her grow up. And really, it's going to be a novel about these two women, Catherine, who is now 65 years old, and Hester, who when much of the action takes place, is going to be almost 20.

KIM: Can I just say the setup, I mean, it's almost a novel on its own. It's so well thought out, and you are so interested in what happens and watching Catherine, you know, sort of come into her own. It's such a great way to start the novel and really pull you in. I loved that.

AMY: Yeah, and it sets Catherine up with an air of mystery, like, who is this savior?

KIM: Yeah, what are her motives? What is she gonna do now? Yeah, it's great.

AMY: Okay. So while Hester, this younger woman, is the title heroine, I think we can all agree that Catherine is the real star. She is a badass. People practically genuflect in her presence. So allow me to just read a little bit here. From the beginning of the novel:

 Her name was put on everything. Catherine Street, Catherine Square, Catherine places without number. The people who built little houses on the outskirts exhausted their invention in varying the uses of it. Catherine Villas, Catherine Cottage, Catherine Mansion, were on all sides; and when it occurred to the High Church rector to dedicate the new church to St. Catherine of Alexandria, the common people, with one accord, transferred the invocation to their living patroness.

 So we see right away, she's a legend, but there's so much going on under the surface with this character in the way that Oliphant manages to humanize her. So, Perri, let's talk about that. What do you love most about this character?

PERRI: So I have to start by saying, honestly, I love that she's 65. One of my little projects when I entered in on my sixties was looking for novels in which things happened to people my age in which they're not just kind of furniture. When you think about, say, some of the interesting, powerful, remarkable older women in 19th-century novels, actually, they're not my age. If you think about Jane Austen. If you think about Pride and Prejudice, and you've got, you know, another Catherine, Lady Catherine, she's the mother of a marriageable daughter, so she's the mother of an older teenage daughter. How old do you think she is? She's, you know… brilliant actresses in their seventies want to play Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice, but she's probably in her forties. And so one of the things that I really loved was, you know, here's somebody, she's not by any means a saint, although she's compared to one. She's actually complicated and difficult, but she's the most powerful engine in this plot from start to finish. And it was just kind of fun from that point of view. As we think about the level of energy and strength that Margaret Oliphant must have had. This was, you said, what, her 58th novel? Um, I think she was interested in creating a character who could do things that other people couldn't do and then looking at that character to say, but what does that do to you over years? 

KIM: It's just so interesting how Oliphant, you know, gives her this opportunity to rise to the occasion that a lot of women don't get and how she takes it and runs with it. And that's why it's so interesting when we get to talking about Hester, and the flip side is that she wants that opportunity to come to her, too. And in that way, she is Catherine's Mini Me, only neither woman can really see it. Maybe on some level they do, but they don't want to admit it. Hester wants to make her way in the world. She desperately wants to be allowed to do something, anything, with all this energy and intellect that she has that's just like Catherine. But instead she's languishing in this house with all these pensioners with nothing to do. And there's a great passage that I'll read 

"I thought you hated Catherine Vernon," Roland cried.

"I never said so," cried Hester; and then, after a pause, "but if I did, what does that matter? I should like to do what she did. Something of one's own free will—something that no one can tell you or require you to do—which is not even your duty bound down upon you. Something voluntary, even dangerous——" She paused again, with a smile and a blush at her own vehemence, and shook her head. "That is exactly what I shall never have it in my power to do."

   "I hope not, indeed, if it is dangerous," said Roland, with all that eyes could say to make the words eloquent. "Pardon me; but don't you think that is far less than what you have in your power? You can make others do: you can inspire . . .  and reward. That is a little highflown, perhaps. But there is nothing a man might not do, with you to encourage him. You make me wish to be a hero."

He laughed, but Hester did not laugh. She gave him a keen look, in which there was a touch of disdain. "Do you really think," she said, "that the charm of inspiring, as you call it, is what any reasonable creature would prefer to be doing? To make somebody else a hero rather than be a hero yourself? Women would need to be disinterested indeed if they like that best. I don't see it. Besides, we are not in the days of chivalry. What could you be inspired to do—make better bargains on your Stock Exchange?"

So Hester already knows what Dorothea Brooks in Middlemarch has to figure out that being a muse isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Middlemarch was published in installments between 1871 and 1872. Hester in 1883. So I thought that was super interesting.

AMY: That's a conversation that she's having with one kind of younger suitor in town. And then there's another little section with another potential suitor that I wanted to read because it kind of piggybacks on that. He has gotten himself into some financial straits, and she asks him, well, explain it to me. So she says:

 “But tell me. Only, tell me a little more.” He shook his head.

“Hester, he said, that is not what a man wants in a woman. Not to go and explain it all to her with pen and ink and tables and figures to make her understand as he would have to do with a man. What he wants dear is very different. Just to lean upon you, to know that you sympathize and think of me and feel for me and believe in me, and that you will share whatever comes.”

Hester said nothing but her countenance grew very grave. 

And we won't spoil it, but especially when it gets into what Hester has to get involved in to solve the problem. It's galling , you know, that he says that. 

KIM: Yeah, they want her to be this beautiful vessel that they can fill with whatever they want, basically. 

PERRI: They do, and very deliberately, everyone is keeping her ignorant, and that includes Catherine, her aunt, who… I mean in a way, Catherine, her justification for what she's done with her life with the bank is in part that she can now take care of these various pensioners, these various poor relations. And it's complicated because they all resent her, including Hester. But part of what makes Catherine Catherine is that she's also saying to Hester, “No, my goodness, you don't have to earn a living. That's what I'm for. I can take care of you.” And Hester chafes. She doesn't want to be dependent. She resents it. She hasn't been told the backstory, and she's got all of this energy and people expect her to put it into being in love. And that's not what it's about for her. Hester doesn't want to inspire people. She wants to do something brave and big and important, or she wants to take her mother out of this position of dependency. And her idea is that she'll teach languages. And everyone's horrified. Her mother's horrified. It's almost as bad as being a governess, they keep saying.

KIM: Right, and, so with the passages Amy and I both read, you can see that there is romantic intrigue in there throughout the book that Hester's caught up in, but all the while I couldn't help but think that it's the relationship between Catherine and Hester that's actually the real love story going on here.

AMY: Yeah, 100 percent. It's Pride and Prejudice between an older woman and a younger woman. You have this hostility between them. You keep thinking, “When are they gonna have their breakthrough?” You're just rooting for that the whole novel.

PERRI: And I think you also feel that Oliphant is more interested in them. I mean, to be perfectly honest, the first time I read this book, I had trouble keeping the young men straight. It's hard to feel that Oliphant is really interested in them, and she's passionately interested in Hester's inner development and even more passionately interested in Catherine's. And that's what's really driving the plot. Oliphant recognizes you've got to marry people off. But in this book and in other books that I've read, she's not that interested in it. Um, the marriages that actually happen are often, um, you know, you feel like she's laughing. “Alright, go ahead, get married.” Or she's also capable of not telling you who marries. “They're gonna get married. I'm not sure which one,” um, as if it doesn't really matter. And one of the things that's really funny in this book is she brings in a brilliant comic character at one point, a young woman named Emma, whose role in the book is to sort of speak truth about 19th century marriage politics. She's the world's most blunt. Um, you know, “I have to get my chance. Can you get me invited to the party? Perhaps a young man will dance with me and will he speak because, you know, I don't have any money. Somebody has to marry me!” And it's very funny. Hester is full of fire and ideals about life, about love. And then you've got Emma walking beside her, analyzing the dance in the most blunt and frankly, economic terms possible.

AMY: I loved Emma. That bluntness, it was like, hey, desperate times call for desperate measures, and I'm just gonna get myself invited to this party and I'm gonna say what I need to say.

KIM: She’s working in the system that's given to her. She's like, “Okay, this is what I have to do and I'm gonna do it,” and she does!

PERRI: It's like, you know, “Why are we pretending? I'm here because I'm the youngest child and I have to live with my brothers and sisters, and they don't want me there, and I don't wanna be there. So somebody has to propose to me so I can have a house of my own. He's gonna dance with me, maybe he'll propose to me.” And she just says it.

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: And the idea of spinsterhood, it's interesting that the way she examines it in different perspectives like that because Emma is saying point blank, like, “I gotta find a man. There's no other option for me.” But yet we see Catherine who's this shining example of spinsterhood and all that it can be in a positive way, where you're like, “Go girl!” Girl power. But that at the same time you see that Catherine is lonely. You see that Catherine's friendships are all predicated on her money. And she, I, I think, deep down knows that. I think she doesn't wanna admit it, but she sees it. So it's interesting. She really explores these characters in many, from many different angles.

PERRI: Well, the other thing that this novel is really interested in is the impact of financial dependency, right? The level of resentment that Hester feels about being financially dependent on Catherine, but also all the other poor relatives who Catherine's taking care of, but it's not just them. It's not that Catherine is so good and kind and people resent it. I think she's also interested in the ways that Catherine has been a little bit poisoned by this financial setting, the way she's come to be amused and cynical about the ways that people react. And I think, um, there's a little bit in there, it's not said explicitly, but there's a little bit in there about marriage and about the question of what happens to love and affection when somebody is completely dependent on somebody else.

AMY: Catherine and Hester both have their bitchy sides, right? I mean, they can be petty and petulant, and thank God, because if this was a novel about, look at Hester and she's just everything noble in a woman, I would be bored, but they're human. They can be catty, they can be insensitive, both of these heroines. Um, I loved that about this novel, that all of the characters that we see are flawed. Yes, the peripheral characters, it's more obvious that they're flawed and they're made comical. But I like that she doesn't put Hester and Catherine up on some pedestal

PERRI: No, nobody becomes a saint. People are capable of honest affection. People are capable of heroism, but she doesn't believe in the good and pure 19-year-old girl, and she doesn't believe in the good and pure, you know, 70-year-old, white-haired lady.

KIM: Yeah, and that also makes me think about these poor relations we've been talking about. There's a lot of humor associated with them. They can be so passive aggressive and judgmental, even though on some level you might think they don't have any right to be. They're kind of living at her mercy and her generosity after all.

AMY: Yeah, they're total sycophants to Catherine's face. I mean, the ass-kissing is hilarious, but then the minute Catherine's gone, they tear her down. It's kind of that timeworn idea that any woman asserting power has to be a bitch and, you know, viewed as such by everybody else. So the whole town feels like they can voice their little private digs at her. I don't know if they would've been doing that had the head of the bank been a man.

KIM: That's an interesting point.

PERRI: Yeah, I don't know either. The people who are most clearly admiring of Catherine are actually her business associates. The clerk, the cashier, the people who've sort of seen her in action. One of the things that's interesting about the poor relations is they feel incredibly entitled. It's, you know, family money. “We're the family,” and always sort of picking at it. “But why are they allowed to be here? They're not really family. How come they get the better house or the better window?” None of these people have enough to do, right? They're living on her. They might actually be happier if they had to do the thing, which they feel would demean them so terribly, because they're gentry, and actually had to earn their livings.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. They're so bored. They're just miserable in their boredom. Do you wanna make any connections between the poor relations in the book and Oliphant's own family situation? Is there any connection there to make?

PERRI: I think so, because she was the big success, and there were plenty of family members who needed help. Her brother had a financial disaster and she took care of him and his family. She had cousins who came, and she did take it as her job to take care of everybody. So I'm sure she had thought a lot about what that does to your character and what are your illusions? When do you think you are really receiving love, but really you're buying a false affection? Who resents whom? I'm sure she'd thought about it a lot. And what she did here is make it into brilliant social comedy. But it was part of her situation in life. Her biggest ambition, of course, is for her sons, that she's going to launch them, and neither of them... the sons are what I guess you would call disappointments. They live off her, they take her money. They have expensive tastes. They've, you know, been educated . She keeps trying to make them into writers, uh, have them work with her on a project, which we assume she then writes. Neither of them actually makes it as a writer. Neither of them can hold a job. And she loses them both. I think in the 1890s, they both die. So it's a pretty sad story. It's not a unique story in the 19th century. 

AMY: It was so frustrating when I was reading her biography to hear all that she did for the men in her family, because she was such a workhorse. She wrote to the point of exhaustion just to be able to handle all these expenses. And it sort of gets us back to the takeaway from this book, Hester, which is that in times of crisis, women are gonna be the ones who will grit their teeth, clean up the mess and save the day. And in the book, the male characters literally run away when the going gets tough. And I have to wonder, because so much of this book, you know, from a woman owning a bank and the control that she has over people to Hester and her bucking different social conventions, you know, things that were expected of her as a young lady, it kind of feels pretty subversive for that time that it was written. I don't know, maybe there's an argument to be made that this sort of overtly feminist messaging contributed to her being forgotten or people dismissing the book? I don't know. Perri, what do you think?

PERRI: I don't know. She herself did not think of herself as a feminist. And just as Catherine Vernon is telling Hester, “No, no, no, you should not be earning a living,” I don't think that Oliphant necessarily felt a good deal of sympathy with people who were active for women's rights. On the other hand, remember, I said earlier, she was Queen Victoria's favorite novelist. She identified with Queen Victoria as a, I think, uh, a very hardworking widow. She wrote a piece about her, that was her formulation, right? That Queen Victoria had suffered a bereavement, she had lost her husband, and what was she going to do? She was going to work really hard. And so clearly, uh, sort of in her worldview, you've got that. The other piece of this that I think is interesting is that because she writes so many things, it's, I think, hard for people to know how to categorize her. For example, she writes supernatural stories. But it's not like if you pick up Hester, you say to yourself, “Oh, this is the person who writes supernatural stories.” So, I don't know how those different pieces connect, in how we remember her.

AMY: So I don't think that this novel, this 500 pages, seems like it was hastily dashed off at all. But critics of Oliphant over the years have used her prolificness against her, including Virginia Woolf, who basically felt that Oliphant was a hack writer because she turned out so many books instead of spending more time on a fewer number of novels, Woolf wrote: “Mrs. Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children.” And that might sound like a really harsh quote, but I think, yeah, but I think at first I was really taken aback by that. But I think she was actually trying to defend Oliphant in a way and make a broader critique about what options she had. That's the only way she had to go about it.

KIM: Right, because unlike Woolf, Oliphant didn't really have the luxury of a room of one's own. She was a single mom, like we talked about. She had all these personal obligations. Think about all the great women writers, everyone talks about Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot. They didn't have children, and that freed them up to throw themselves fully into their art. Whereas Oliphant noted at one point, “I don't think I've ever had two hours uninterrupted except at night with everybody in bed during the whole of my literary life.”

AMY: Yeah. And although I didn't read this other novel of Oliphant's, there's a novel called The Three Brothers, which features a widow who is an artist, and she churns out paintings to support her children. And in that book, the character says:

 I don’t deceive myself. I get money for my pictures, and that is about what they are worth. But… don’t you think it sometimes makes my heart sick, to feel that, if I could but wait, if I could but take time, I might do work that would be worth doing — real work?... But I can’t take time: there are six children and daily bread…!”

And I, I have, uh, like kind of embarrassing confession right now in that I just figured out what the true meaning of the term pot boiler is. I thought when you would hear potboiler novels, it meant, you know, they were kind of like mass market popular novels that were kind of just exciting or whatever. I didn't realize this term pot boiler meant they were written to keep the pot boiling, to keep coal in the house, to keep logs on the fire. That's what a potboiler was. Anyway, Perri, do you think this criticism of her is fair that her novels seem churned out?

PERRI: I don't think this one seems churned out. I don't think Miss Marjoriebanks seems churned out. I've read a fair number of them, uh, long and short, that I think are great. I think she wrote a lot and it's not all good, but I don't completely understand why that's the only tag that's on her. Charles Dickens had 10 children. He kept his family in luxury not only by writing, but by giving public lectures and charging money to have him read his famous scenes. Is everything he wrote equally good? No. Did he write, you know, continued episodic stories in magazines where he, you know, drags things out sometimes? 

AMY: But wait, let's be fair. Charles Dickens was off taking long walks all day long and having affairs. We can't say that he had anything to do with raising those 10 children. He put the food on the table maybe, but Oliphant really had to be there. 

PERRI: But he was paying the bills is all that I mean, and so I'm not sure why the idea that one of the reasons a writer writes is to, you know, pay the bills I'm not sure why that's automatically a disgrace, is what I'm saying. She may have written more that's not good than other people, although that's a hard thing to measure, but I'm not sure why that devalues the good work. I'm not sure why needing to pay the bills makes you a bad writer. I mean, if Hester felt like a hack novel: “Oh, we see flashes of something interesting, but it's just a standard 19th century romance, you know, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, that's really all she could do.” But it's nothing like that. It's a unique, strange novel in a very distinct writer's voice with I think a great deal of genius in it. And so, okay, she paid the bills, but I mean, why do we think that's a bad thing?

AMY: It's like, so we said that she wrote almost a hundred novels, I think if even a dozen of them were really, really good, that still puts her on par with all these other great writers. It's like she gets dinged because she wrote more, because not all of 'em were great. And it's frustrating because she put out enough that were good.

PERRI: Yeah.

KIM: So we are Team Oliphant, obviously, the three of us. Uh, yeah. So what else would you recommend we check out by Oliphant, speaking of that. So when we're ready for more, what are a couple books that we should read next?

PERRI: Well, there's another long novel Miss Marjoribanks, which is, uh, comic and will also give you a whole town and the point of view of a very interesting and distinctive young woman. She had a great success with, I think it's, I can't remember whether it's six or seven linked books and novelas, she was looking at, um, Trollope and what he had done with The Chronicles of Barchester and she wrote something called The Chronicles of Carlingford, which one of them is Miss Marjoriebanks. But then there are five or six others that, uh, I don't always know what's in print and what's available, but those were great successes for her. I have not read her supernatural fiction. That doesn't interest me as much, but I'm now sufficiently interested that I would be curious to read some of it and see where that fits in with sort of some of the 19th century stuff.

KIM: The series is piquing my interest because Amy and I are always looking for another series like Barchester.

AMY: I, I wanna say that that series, during her lifetime, somebody said that George Eliot had written that. And George Eliot came out and was like, “No, you're thinking of Miss Oliphant. I did not write that.”

KIM: Interesting. 

AMY: I also wanna go back and say that, when I was reading her biography there were a few moments where she was quoted as saying, [paraphrasing] “Don't call me prolific. I don't take that as a point of pride. I'm prolific because I had to be and I'm not proud of everything I wrote.” She flat out said that, “Yeah, some of it's not good,” but I needed to do it. She was constantly having to hustle, but I don't think she took it as a point of pride that she wrote close to a hundred books, It was sort of like, “I had to.”

PERRI: And again, I would say you judge people by their best. And then you say, “These other books will be more of interest to serious enthusiasts or, you know, biographers.” But if you've got a set of really good ones, why wouldn't you want to read them?

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: So Perri, before we let you go, we wanted to mention a little bit more about this charity you're involved with, Reach Out and Read. Tell us about it, and how people can potentially help out.

PERRI: So Reach out and Read, we've been around now for more than 30 years, and what we do is bring the promotion of reading aloud, early literacy, reading with young children, into standard pediatric practice. It's a very simple program model. We look at children starting at birth up till kindergarten, five years. And it's a program model in which, when you see that child come in for a checkup, for a well baby visit, for a one-year-old, two-year-old, 18-month visit, you talk to the parents about the importance of reading together. You give some guidance. What does it mean to read to a six-month old? She's gonna put the book in her mouth. That's normal. You don't read a story. You point to the page and say, “Where's the baby's nose?” And with that advice and that conversation comes a beautiful new age-appropriate, culturally-appropriate book for the child. So the board book for the baby to chew on, or the rhyming book for the toddler. And if we do that, if we have those conversations at every checkup, starting at birth, then by kindergarten there will be more than 10 beautiful books in the home. And it's a way of trying to help parents build those routines. And the reason it works for pediatricians is, we talk about bedtime and sleep and behavior, everybody who's seeing children, you know, and so you can use the book to talk about that, to talk about routines. You can use the book to talk about language. You can use the book to talk about how to build structures into children's lives. So anyway, Reach Out and Read is a wonderful organization. We have programs in every state. We have local affiliates in many states. If people are interested, you can go to reachoutandread.org. You can find programs near you. They want books. Sometimes they want volunteers. They want community connections with libraries and other programs. It has my heart. It's a wonderful organization. I love it.

KIM: It sounds fantastic.

AMY: And imagine being a toddler. The last place you wanna go is a doctor's office. But if you know that every time you go, you come home with a book, that's kind of enticing too, right?

KIM: Mm-hmm.

PERRI: It's very enticing. And honestly, I love standing in the clinic and watching the kids go out and seeing the books go out into the city and into their homes and into their bedrooms with the children.

KIM: That's lovely.

PERRI: thing.

AMY: Well, Perri, we're so glad that you joined us today and introduced us to Oliphant and Hester. And listeners, I know I referenced the biography of Oliphant a few times in this episode, so I just wanna let you know that that was by Merryn Williams. If anybody's interested in learning more about her life, you can check that out. So thank you again, Perri, for a, being a fan of the podcast and b, for reaching out to us. 

PERRI: Thank you for reading Hester. Thank you for liking Hester and Catherine and caring about them.

KIM: Loving it. Um, uh, we were just honored to have you on. So thank you.

PERRI: Thank you so much.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. Be sure to visit lostladiesoflit.com for more information and show notes. Sign up for our newsletter so you don't miss an episode.

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 x and Kim Askew.

127. Katrina Trask and the Ghosts of Yaddo

AMY: Hi, everyone, welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my co-host Kim Askew…

KIM: Hey, everyone! Today’s episode will touch on the renowned Yaddo Artists’ Colony and the bittersweet story of the woman who envisioned this sylvan retreat on 400 acres in Saratoga Springs, New York.

AMY: Yes, since its inception in 1926 huge names in American literature have spent time as artists in residence at Yaddo, including important women writers like Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Patricia Highsmith, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker. The poet Lola Ridge, whom we discussed in a previous episode, was invited to stay and work at Yaddo on two separate occasions. 

KIM: It remains, today, a prestigious retreat for writers, visual and performance artists, composers and filmmakers. At any given time throughout the year you’ll find about 26-30 artists in residence staying at the gorgeous Gilded Age mansion. Well, actually you won’t find them because their privacy while at Yaddo is sacrosanct.

AMY: Yes, the only public access to Yaddo is via the estate’s beautifully manicured grounds. The property features fountains, rose gardens and marble statues. It’s all maintained by volunteers.

KIM: It looks so gorgeous. The house itself features stained glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany and an all-white room called “the tower room” that looks like the inside of a cathedral. That’s the room where Truman Capote wrote his first novel. Amy, we need to go check out these gardens — this is another addition to the literary vacation bucket list that we have going!

AMY: I know I really wanna go. It's funny. Mike's aunt lives in Saratoga Springs, so she goes to the Yaddo gardens all the time. And Kim, she extended an invitation. Anytime we wanted to, we could go stay at her house and, uh, hit up the Yaddo grounds. 

KIM: We have to take her up on that, for sure. 

AMY: Um, although I should warn you the grounds and the mansion at Yaddo are purported to be haunted. There are a lot of anecdotes about spectral sightings.

KIM: Ooh, that actually makes me wanna go more

AMY: I know, right. Legend has it that long before Yaddo existed, Edgar Allen Poe got the inspiration for “The Raven” while staying at a fishing camp located on the property. And when you hear the story of the woman who founded Yaddo, you might get some unexpected shivers up your spine. 

KIM: Okay, so let’s hear it: Who was this woman and why did she want to establish this community for artists?

AMY: Her name was Katrina Trask. She was the wife of financier and philanthropist Spencer Trask, and while he was making his fortune investing in railroads and electric companies, she dabbled in writing  — she was a poet and playwright and she liked to host literary salons. So this couple, Katrina and Spencer, moved to the 400-acre estate right after the death of their first son – he died of meningitis just before his fifth birthday. Originally, the property had a run-down Queen Anne-style mansion on the property. The Trasks’ surviving child, Christina, suggested her parents name the place Yaddo because “it sounds like shadow but it’s not going to be a shadow.” (Clearly the whole family was looking forward to an escape from their gloomy, grief-stricken days and hoping this would be a place for emotional healing.) For six years the family had idyllic days at Yaddo. A second son was born in 1884. But by 1888, tragedy struck again. The Trasks’ two children, including little Christina, ended up dying from diptheria. The couple had one more child, a daughter, the following year, but she died, too, a few days after her birth.

KIM: Oh my God. This is so tragic. Oh, this is awful.

AMY: Yeah, I can’t even imagine. But to make matters worse, about a year later in 1891, the mansion at Yaddo burned completely to the ground! This happened while Spencer, Katrina’s husband, was seriously ill with pneumonia at their Brooklyn home. He recovered from that illness and they were determined to rebuild, which they did. They built a 55-room mansion, featuring a Tiffany mosaic over the hearth with the image of a phoenix and an inscription in Latin which translates to “Unconquered by flame, I, Yaddo, am reborn for peace.”

KIM: Wow, they seem really amazing. So in their new home, the Trasks continued to host literary salons and artist friends, but with no heirs to speak of they continually wondered what would become of their estate when they were gone. To whom would they bequeath the property and their fortune? The idea to create an artists’ retreat was originally Katrina’s idea, right?

AMY: Yes, and you could say it may have been a spiritual (or even ghostly?) nudge that led to the idea. One day she and her husband were walking through the woods on the grounds when she said she “felt an unseen hand laid upon me, an unheard voice calling to me.” She could suddenly visualize men and women wandering the gardens, sitting under trees — creating. In that instant she knew: “This is what we’re doing with the house. We’ll make it an artists’ colony.” Both Katrina and Spencer were big supporters of the arts — they saw creative minds as vital contributors to society and as sort of the antidote to the troubles brought about by capitalism, and, who knows, maybe there was a little bit of guilt there, you know? They had so much money. Spread the wealth kind of thing. Katrina felt strongly that artists needed to be able to have a quiet place to focus on their art in a peaceful environment without needing to worry about money.

KIM: That’s for sure. But I love that she took something that, for her, must have been associated with a lot of heartbreak, and she ended up transforming it into such an inspirational place from which great art (new life, basically, in a sense) could spring. 

AMY: Yeah, totally. So more tragedy, though, in her future: Nine years after working toward their vision for Yaddo, the artists’ colony, Spencer Trask was killed in a train accident. About a decade after that, Katrina married his longtime business partner George Foster Peabody (they had been lifelong friends), but Katrina passed away from heart disease about a year after that marriage. Peabody wanted to make sure to continue carrying out her vision. And so he did, with the help of Yaddo’s first executive director, a woman named Elizabeth Ames, who for the next 45 years would have a huge impact on American letters because she’s the one who basically helped decide which artists to extend invitations to.

KIM: And that list is pretty incredible. In addition to the names we’ve already mentioned in this episode, there were people like Aaron Copeland, Dorothy Parker, Leonard Bernstein, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, David Foster Wallace, Laurie Anderson and Jonathan Franzen. They all spent time at Yaddo. According to the foundation’s website, “Collectively, Yaddo artists have won 81 Pulitzer Prizes, 31 MacArthur Fellowships, 69 National Book Awards and a Nobel Prize.” Wow.

AMY: It’s like a genius factory, right? I found so many great stories about Yaddo from a book edited by Micki McGee called Yaddo: Making American Culture. It’s almost like a coffee table book. It’s got tons of amazing pictures in it. I suggest you check out if you’re interested in taking a deeper dive. And those ghost stories we mentioned at the top of the show? I’m sure you want to know more about that, right?

KIM: Oh yeah, for sure.

AMY: Okay, so there are many anecdotes of people seeing ghostly figures in the main house and around the property. For starters, paintings of the Trasks on the wall still, and a lot of their possessions (knick-knacks, things like that) are still in the mansion, which sort of adds to the mystique. You used to be able to take ghost tours of the gardens, so I guess there’s enough lore there to make up a docent-led tour, at the very least. Apparently one area of the gardens where people seem to think they’ve sensed spirits are around four marble statues called The Four Seasons, which have been on the property for more than 100 years. (People feel as though they represent these four deceased children.)  There is a story of one woman who used to work in the gardens who would apparently feel a tug on her jacket when she was there. There are also anecdotes in which people have claimed to see apparitions in the house (including the author Allan Gurganus who was staying there in residency at one point. I’m just going to read what he wrote about the ghosts he thinks he saw: “I sensed a change of atmosphere. It felt as if two windows or one door had just blown open. The shift in air pressure registered along my hands, against my face. I glanced up from the bed alcove, scanning windows as the sun commenced its setting. Between my own dark corner and the late light a figure stood. Five feet tall, it looked smoothed and faceless…. I could see right into it, but only as far as into some frosted-pane translucence.” He later claimed to have a dream in which featuring an elderly woman he swore was Katrina Trask.

KIM: Ooh. Okay. So whether there’s really paranormal activity here or not, who knows, but I can imagine there would be a feeling, a sense about the place, given the wooded atmosphere, the silence afforded the working artists and all the history that’s transpired here. I actually get chills just thinking about it.

AMY: Yeah, because it’s like “quiet hours” for most of the day to allow people to write. So just picture, like not a lot of talking you can hear the wind rustling, you can hear the birds and the trees. Yeah. It's definitely setting the mood for something spooky. And for all you Gilded Age fans, you might be interested to read a fictionalized memoir of Katrina Trask. There’s one called The Lady of Yaddo: The Gilded Age Memoir of Katrina Trask by Lynn Esmay. I have not read this, but I did come across it in my research and it looks like it could be good.

KIM: You said earlier that Katrina was, herself, a writer. Do we know what she wrote?

AMY: Yes, so I looked this up. She had several collections of poetry published, and then she wrote a novel, a historical drama and an anti-war play which was performed by several women’s groups during the build-up to WWI. If you go to poetryhunter.com or allpoetry.com you can read some of the poetry that she wrote. So I’ll go ahead and read one poem she wrote called “Sorrow” because it sort of reminds me of these apparitions that people claim they’ve seen at Yaddo and also it’s sort of a reminder of the heartache Katrina had in her life. She wrote:

O thorn-crowned Sorrow, pitiless and stern,

I sit alone with broken heart, my head

Low bowed, keeping long vigil with my dead.

My soul, unutterably sad, doth yearn

Beyond relief in tears—they only burn

My aching eyelids to fall back unshed

Upon the throbbing brain like molten lead,

Making it frenzied. Shall I ever learn

To face you fearlessly, as by my door

You stand with haunting eyes and death-damp hair,

Through the night-watches, whispering solemnly,

“Behold, I am thy guest forevermore.”

It chills my soul to know that you are there.

Great God, have mercy on my misery!

KIM: [singing to the theme of “Hotel California”] “You can check out any time you like… but you can never leave!”

AMY:: Yeah, yeah. But Kim, you know, when you start singing, I think that’s our cue to sign off.

KIM: Definitely. That sounded really good in my head, but it never sounds the same when I hear it.

AMY: You will NOT be invited to Yaddo for any sort of musical genius.

KIM: No, no. You could see that I put my heart into it, though. Like, you know, my headphones on and I’m really, like, my eyes are closed Anyway.

That’s all for today’s episode. Be sure to join us again next week when we’ll be talking about another lost lady.

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

126. Elinor Glyn — Three Weeks with Hilary A. Hallett

KIM: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten female writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes. It feels great to be back following our month-long hiatus, and we're ready for another fantastic year.

AMY: Yes, we're invigorated and ready to go, having enjoyed the holidays, and well, now we've got another holiday approaching right? Love it, or hate it, Valentine's Day is coming up, which means we're about to be flooded with all that tried and true romantic imagery. I'm talking rose petals, red velvet, silk lingerie, strings of pearls and lovers clutched in a fierce, smoldering embrace. Now, Kim, did you ever think about who came up with all of those visuals that signify seduction?

KIM: No, and I guess it had never occurred to me that any one person was responsible for all that.

AMY: Yeah, same here. But as it turns out, we can probably give the lion's share of credit, or maybe we should say the tiger's share (more on that in a moment) to today's lost lady, Elinor Glyn. Not only did she introduce the steamy romance novel to the staid Victorian world, but as a pioneer of the Hollywood movie industry, she basically shaped how romance was and still is portrayed on the silver screen and beyond.

KIM: Additionally, she coined the term it to describe that certain intangible appeal, which makes a person irresistible. There'd be no “It” girl without Elinor Glyn.

KIM: Like the sexually liberated tiger Queen from her scandalous bestselling novel, Three Weeks, Elinor Glyn was bold, provocative, and glamorous with a magnetism that endeared her to international readers and Hollywood celebrities alike. She counted Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, and Charlie Chaplin among her personal friends.

AMY: I had no idea how hugely famous she was in the 20th century. "Would you like to sing with Elinor Glyn?" was a catchphrase of that time period. Yet despite her lasting cultural influence, her name is largely forgotten today.

KIM: Which is why we're excited to delve into her fascinating story and her racy sex novel with the woman who literally wrote the book on Glyn.

AMY: I can't wait to introduce her. So let's rate the stacks and get started!

 [intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today is Hilary Hallett, a professor of history and Director of American Studies at Columbia University, where she specializes in popular and mass culture in trans-Atlantic perspective, particularly theater, music, and Hollywood history. Her first book, Go West Young Women, details the pivotal role played by women in the early days of Hollywood. Her latest book is Inventing the It Girl, how Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. Kirkus calls it "a brilliant thought-provoking portrait of a forgotten 20th century influencer." Hilary, welcome to the show. 

HILARY: Thank you. I'm really delighted to be here on Lost Ladies of Lit because I think Elinor Glyn definitely qualifies.

AMY: For sure.

KIM: Great. So, Elinor Glyn or Nell as she was called by the people who knew her best, hobnobbed with members of the British aristocracy. Her upper-class dignity and the air of good breeding she exuded throughout her life lent a stamp of propriety to her naughty novels. 

AMY: With striking red hair, cat-like green eyes and exquisite fashion sense, it seems like she was born to be a celebrity, but in reality her childhood was not all that glamorous. So Hilary, tell us a little bit more about Nell's youth and how it might have informed her perspective on life.

HILARY: So Nell was born in 1864. Her mother has two daughters in rapid succession, so she has an older sister who's just barely a year older than her, Lucy. And then her father dies before her first birthday, and so the mom returns to Canada where she was raised, um, to her parents' farm in Ontario, and really hands the care of her two little daughters over to her mother. And so their early years really are on this farm in rural Canada. Their grandmother is a very austere woman who had actually been born in France. And so one of both sisters' memories is getting a barrel at the end of every winter from their wealthy relations in Paris, which would just spill like the pleasures of Paris onto this farmhouse floor. And so there is this sense that they come from something finer than where they find themselves, right, but where they find themselves is a rural farm, until her mother remarries a much older Scottish bachelor. And so they go to Scotland, briefly, but then they settle in Jersey, and they live in a nice house on Jersey Island, which is really more close to France than England, right. It's in the English channel. So that's then where she lives from the age of about, 10 to 15 or 16. And what she was very lucky to have was access to her stepfather's library, and rather unfettered access to it, right? Meaning that girls, if they were chaperoned, what they were allowed to read was heavily censored. So this quality say like Virginia Woolf is another woman, you know, that had that kind of childhood, right. Access to her father's library to read whatever she wanted. That's the piece of her childhood that I actually zoned in on with the first chapter in the library because she herself identified that as being the most important thing about her childhood, next to her sister, who totally gave her her sense of style. I know we won't really get into her because there's enough with Elinor but her sister became the most notable female couturier of the period. 

KIM: Yeah. It's amazing how successful both siblings were in that family with the two sisters. So Nell had this prim and proper upbringing of a young Victorian woman. When and where did this more sensual, sexually liberated persona, that side of her, when did it start to take shape?

HILARY: Well, so I think, again, it first started to take shape in the library and in the sort of books that she chose to read. 

AMY: It's like the age old story of sneaking the naughty books, is that what you're saying? 

HILARY: Yeah, exactly. And so it starts there, but then it's also, she travels to Paris for the first time as an adolescent. And she is brought there, you know, by her mother's friend, and they don't know that she's fully fluent in French. So she's taken to see plays that girls her age would not typically get to see, starring, you know, actresses like Sarah Bernhardt, who was the most famous actress of her time. And, you know, it was quite scandalous, quite, quite scandalous, and considered not suitable. I mean, like she openly kept a string of lovers, right? Had an illegitimate son that she paraded before everybody. Slept in a coffin. I mean this like outrageous personality who was nonetheless, obviously incredibly successful and rich, um, but not considered okay for girls, and Nell sees her perform in this famous role of hers, Theodora, as a Slavic Byzantine empress, you know, a real historical figure. Um, and the love story of that play, and watching Bernhardt be that woman, really prompted her sexual awakening. And then she ends up spending several seasons when she's younger in Paris with these rich French relations that had sent that barrel to her, you know, as a child back in Canada. And they actually allow her to circulate in French society. But it's also clear that she's not really marriageable in that society because she doesn't have a dowry. She's not really an aristocrat, right. She just knows a lot of 'em.

AMY: So you mentioned this sexual awakening, but I didn't get the sense from your book that she acted on that. It seems as though she expected to settle down to a more traditional role as the wife of a country squire. She married a man named Clayton Glyn.

HILARY: That's right. She was desperate to marry by 28, which is when she married. And I think this explains some of why she did, in a weird way, remain loyal to Clayton long after… There are, I think, several reasons for that, but I think one of them was her appreciation that yes, this man who was a member of the gentry class in Essex, married her. She had no money. She had nothing but a pretty face and a witty manner. So it does give her security. It does give her access to this British aristocratic set, because this woman who's her neighbor, Daisy, the Countess of Warwick, becomes her best friend, essentially. So it gives her a lot in the beginning, but it doesn't ever give her romantic sexual satisfaction, it seems. It doesn't ever give her any emotional closeness, even. Like, they were a total misalliance. He was like a typical country squire who liked to hunt, hang out in the moors and in the woods, and that was not her idea of a good time. So after years of this miserable marriage and that most of the people in that set are not faithful to their spouses after they produce a couple children usually, which she does, she has two daughters, which is a disappointment of course, because they're girls. But nonetheless, it's clear there aren't gonna be any more children. She writes actually, that she felt like it was an embarrassment to her husband that she continued to remain faithful. 

KIM: Yeah. What's wrong with her? Yeah.

HILARY: Right? But she starts to write as her escape. And it really becomes an antidote to what we would easily today just call depression and anxiety, caused by this very, very unhappy marriage. 

KIM: All right, so then along comes Three Weeks, which was published in 1907, and, yeah, that basically took the world by storm. I guess that's even an understatement. So Hilary, let's talk about the response this novel received, because it seems like there was all this pearl-clutching in polite society, but basically everyone and their sister was sneaking a peek in this book, right?

HILARY: Right. Right. And their brothers too!

KIM: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

HILARY: She got a lot of letters from servicemen during World War I, you know, telling them how much they loved that book. Yeah, I mean the critical response to it though? Excoriating. So in Britain where they specialize in the kind of art of sniffing, you know, disapproval, it was met with just like, you know, "She doesn't have enough talent to pull this off and, you know, blah, blah, blah." But what they also called it, they branded it, um, a "sex novel," which was this new term at the time. Books that weren't pornography, but they focused on the so-called "woman question" as Freud put it, right? Like, what is up with the modern woman? Why is she so unhappy? And these books specifically took up the place of sexuality in the modern woman's problems and challenges. And they were considered, in Britain especially, but also in America where the book was hated as well by the critics, to show the influence of France. Because French literature had very different obscenity standards than English literature, right? France allowed for a lot more frank talk about sex, unsurprisingly. And so it had really become the lingua franca of realistic fiction, right? Fiction that wanted to deal with the force of sexual desire and morality and problems in a more open and honest way. And her book, to be fair, the critics did have a point. Three Weeks is one long, mostly fervid seduction scene. You know, there was a reason that it was considered obscene in Boston by people like Anthony Comstock and banned in Canada, and, you know, they didn't allow it to be sold at the largest British bookstore chains. It was, it was scandalous.

AMY: Mm-hmm. Yeah, she does, she goes from one sex scene to the next. They're just strung together. And we'll talk about that in a minute, but I love how Nell, all right, she's getting all this flack, but she is completely unapologetic about it. So when she goes to America for, I guess a, a book tour, she gets called out by the society ladies in New York City. And then that caused a big brouhaha in the press. Can you retell that anecdote for our listeners?

HILARY: Yeah, yeah, sure. The Pilgrim Mothers. They were actually a New England society. They were there for this luncheon. They had invited her to talk about this book, and it became clear when she arrived that they had not read the book when they invited her. And partially because the press and the critics, as I said, are making it clear what a bad French naughty book this is, one would think they should have just canceled the lunch, right? But instead they go through the lunch, but they tell her she can't speak and they sit her in a little corner off to the side where the people at her table basically interrogate her about why she wrote this bad book. And so, right, they did treat her pretty badly . Even though the critics hate her, the press love her, particularly in America, and on this first book tour where she really displays and develops the sort of art of managing the press, which is one of her many talents. Um, and so she tells the press how badly she's been treated and they quote, you know, the quote that I know that you love is, "Never in all my young life have I've seen such aggregation of dowds, frumps and tabby cats, women who are breastless, slab-hipped, and pancake-footed frights.”

KIM: I love it. She basically was like, she didn't care and she couldn't have done a better thing to stand up for herself and kind of keep press on her side probably. I mean, they probably ate that up.

HILARY: Exactly. Well, you know what she actually did though, was that when she left, she corrected that quote and she said, "They caught my spirit, but not my words. I would never have compared them to cats."

KIM: It's like cats are too good for them.

HILARY: Exactly. They were "sparrows." That's what she said. They were sparrows. Right. But yes, she couldn't be shamed down.

KIM: Good for her. 

HILARY: That was the what the whole trip demonstrated, was that rather and be sort of slut-shamed as we would say today, she sort of invents this literary persona which kind of harnesses a lot of the appeal of that heroine from this novel, but adds her own sort of British lady spin to it. And you know, she just rides out the scandal and she's like, "You know what? I know I'm being criticized a lot, but I sold 50,000 books last week so I think I can handle a little criticism."

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And because she's so glamorous, she just comes across like a lady and so it seems appropriate. Yeah.

HILARY: Exactly, exactly. Everywhere she goes, the press reports on her outfits.

KIM: She's so cool.

HILARY: You know, she's like, by that point, she's what, 43 or four or something? And you would think she was like a supermodel…

KIM: Yeah.

HILARY: …the way that, you know, the attention paid to like every garment.

KIM: She's fascinating. So as you point out in your book, I thought this was great, for many years if you wanted to show that a character was loose or morally corrupt, all you had to do was depict them reading a copy of Three Weeks. So everyone knew exactly what it signified. So let's dive in a little more into why this book was so titillating. We've hinted a bit at it, but can you give us a brief rundown of the plot, Hilary?

HILARY: Sure. Yeah. It is essentially the story of the education, sensual, but moral and aesthetic as well, of a young British man. He is in his early twenties, you know, typical British aristocrat, has been sent away by his family because he's developed this unsuitable attachment back home. And so the novel opens, he's in Switzerland, his first stop, and he spies this lady, and that is what she's called for most of the book, just “the lady.” She's this mysterious older woman that he spies in the dining room. And she's not beautiful, he's quick to say, but she has this magnetism, and he cannot take his eyes away. She spies him as well, and decides that he's a handsome young thing and that she wants to seduce him, you know. And it starts off as she says, you know, very clearly, “I've just picked you for my pleasure and for our pleasure.” Three weeks is the amount of time they have together. As it goes on, it's clear then that part of why she's having the affair. She wants to have a love child with him. She really controls the entire thing. And then he wakes up one morning and she's gone and he is destroyed and distraught, and falls into a brain fever, as of course one did back in 1907. And basically like when he awakens, you know, he learns her true identity. 

 AMY: Yeah, the reader knows kind of her story, and so there's this ticking clock of something's gonna happen. This can't end well. 

HILARY: You're absolutely right. And that does add, you know, a kind of urgency to it all and contributes to its sort of heightened everything about the book is so fervid and heightened Yeah. And intense. Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: And to give our listeners, um, an idea of that, I think the best thing we could do is just read the infamous scene on the tiger skin rug. It's pretty early on in the book, so it's not gonna be a spoiler or anything like that. It speaks for itself, and I should probably preface it with some “Bowm-chicka-bow-wow” sound effects. 

KIM: Get ready, listeners!

AMY: Okay, so just to set this up, um, Paul, our young man, has sent the lady the gift of a tiger skin rug and has had it delivered to her room. She responds with a note that summons him to see her later that evening.

So this is what Paul finds when he arrives at her room: 

A bright fire burned in the grate, and some palest orchid-mauve silk curtains were drawn in the lady's room when Paul entered from the terrace. And loveliest sight of all, in front of the fire, stretched at full length, was his tiger — and on him — also at full length — reclined the lady, garbed in some strange clinging garment of heavy purple crepe, it's hem embroidered with gold, one white arm resting on the beast's head, her back supported by a pile of the velvet cushions, and a heap of rarely bound books at her side, while between her red lips was a rose not redder than they — an almost scarlet rose. Paul had never seen one as red before. 

So she welcomes Paul into the room. She tells him to have a seat she then proceeds to thank him for this rug. 

   “You bought me the tiger, Paul. Ah! that was good. My beautiful tiger!” And she gave a movement like a snake, of joy to feel its fur under her, while she stretched out her hands and caressed the creature where the hair turned white and black at the side, and was deep and soft.

   “Beautiful one, beautiful one,” she purred. “And I know all of your feelings and your passions, and now I have got your skin — for the joy of my skin!” And she quivered again with the movements of a snake. It is not difficult to imagine that Paul felt far from calm during this scene —

[everyone laughing]

HILARY: British understatement.

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: — indeed, he was obliged to hold onto his great chair to prevent himself from seizing her in his arms. 

   “I'm — I'm so glad you like him,” he said in a choked voice. “I thought probably you would. And your own was not worthy of you. I found this by chance. And oh! good God! If you knew how you are making me feel — lying there, wasting your caresses upon it!”

 She tossed the scarlet rose over to him. It hit his mouth. 

[everyone laughing]

AMY: A lot of the book is like this. That's why it's so entertaining to read. 

“I am not wasting them,” she said, the innocence of a kitten in her strange eyes — their color impossible to define today. “Indeed not, Paul! He was my lover in another life — perhaps —who knows?”

“But I,” said Paul, who was now quite mad, “want to be your lover in this!”

Then he gasped at his own boldness. With a lightning movement, she lay on her face, raised her elbows on the tiger's head, and supported her chin in her hands. Perfectly straight out her body was, the twisted purple drapery outlining her perfect shape and flowing in graceful lines beyond — like a serpent's tale.The velvet pillows fell scattered at one side. 

“Paul, what do you know of lovers or love?” she said. “My baby, Paul!”

“I know enough to know I know nothing yet which is worth knowing,” he said confusedly. “But — but — don't you understand, I want you to teach me —”

“You are so sweet, Paul. When you plead like that, I am taking in every bit of you. In your way as perfect as this tiger. But we must talk— oh! — such a great, great deal — first.”

A rage of passion was racing through Paul. His incoherent thoughts were that he did not want to talk — only to kiss her— to devour her — to strangle her with love if necessary. 

He bit the rose. 

[Everyone laughing.]

“You see, Paul, love is a purely physical emotion,” she continued. “We could speak an immense amount about souls and sympathy and understanding and devotion. All beautiful things in their way, and possible to be enjoyed at a distance from one another. All the things which make passion noble — but without love — which is passion — these things dwindle and become duties presently, when the hysterical exaltation cools. Love is tangible. It means to be close — close — to be clasped — to be touching — to be one.” And I'll just stop there. And that's just the, one of the first scenes, and it just gets more racy from there.

HILARY: You read that really well. 

KIM: Yeah, you did. 

AMY:I know.I felt like I had that inner spirit in me, to give that. 

HILARY: You definitely did. Yeah.

AMY: Um, so yeah, let's just talk about our thoughts. I'll say first off, I love the pacing of it. She gets into the sex scenes right away. She's not stringing you along. Uh, Hilary, I think you write, "With a speed of a set of skillful fingers un-fastening a row of tiny buttons along the spine of a woman's evening gown." That's how she lays it out for you. But at the same time, there's so much suspense, uh, you know, as getting to it. Um, and she, at the very beginning, I think, of the American version, she writes a little introduction where she calls it a bad book. And she cautions readers “don't skip ahead to the naughty bits.” Which, I love that she knows that that's gonna be the temptation.

KIM: They're probably still gonna do it even more.

HILARY: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, you don't know whether that's a real admonishment or it's like, "Yeah, there's lots of naughty bits here in my BAD BOOK." 

KIM: It's burlesque writing. Um, I just like the fact that she makes the woman the seducer, and this innocent young boy who is… or not boy, but very young guy, um, and he ends up the one with brain fever and everything. Like, she really turns the typical story when you're reading about seduction to make the woman the seducer like this. I mean, it's kind of amazing.

AMY: That scene where she insists that she pay for the meal very early on, and he gets angry at her and she's like, “no, this is non-negotiable. I'm paying for it.” The role reversal of masculine and feminine. You could see how this is a template for the romance novel genre. Just the literary techniques that she uses. So I noticed that she would often have Paul stop himself from completing a thought, which was very erotic in a weird way, You know mean? Like that building up of tension and in the way he spoke and then like, kind of would stop himself. Then also the words. I should have done like a highlight, you know, word count for quivering, throbbing... 

KIM: yes. Undulating. She undulates all the time. 

HILARY: yeah,yeah.

KIM: The whole thing where she's like a snake. It's like you're trying to picture how she's undulating so much.

HILARY: Right. 

KIM: She's driving him crazy. 

AMY: She's, I mean, She's basically masturbating. 

KIM: Exactly. On the tiger skin rug. Yeah, for sure.

HILARY: That's totally how I read it. And so she was exposed to erotica, pornography. There were a lot of decadent writers at the turn of the last century that she read, including a famous one about a famous dominatrix. So I do think there are little bits of that in here too, right? I mean, I think the major inspiration is both her own sexual frustration, she writes about the tiger skin . And, you know, her husband had refused to get it for her. She had bought it for herself with her first royalty check. So to have this reverse fantasy where the young man, she doesn't even have to ask. He just delivers, it is a total role reversal, although there were decadent writers in that period that were writing those kinds of heroines. An actress like Sarah Bernhardt in France was able to play some of them, right? In many ways, “Theodora,” that play that I was telling you about, features that kind of heroine. 

KIM: Okay. 

HILARY: it's really interesting, though, for me to hear you all, you know, just to hear your reactions because I came to this already knowing somewhat about the period, and I knew why it was a shocking book, but when I read it, I was still incredibly surprised at how much of it focused on the seduction. That was not typical of time.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

HILARY: At all.

AMY: I thought it would be much more veiled or you know, we'd see it, but it would be the Victorian version of that. No, it pretty much goes there. 

HILARY: Everything's about their sexcapades. Even like, and if you know the titles of the book, she's reading him, those are erotic texts from the ancient world where they were much more explicit about sex. So it was, um, I was just like, wow, lady, you were ahead of your time. 

AMY: Right. And I liked it! I know we were snorting through my reading rendition, and there are a lot of moments where you're gonna laugh out loud, listeners, at this book, but I didn't expect to actually enjoy it as much as I did. same. I read it basically in one sitting, and I thought I really liked the story. It kind of reminded me listeners will know this… of Kim and I, we love the movie Somewhere in Time. 

HILARY: Uh-huh.

AMY: And it has a lot of the same elements of like a travel situation where they're at a hotel. A mysterious woman. The fever dream, the, the time is running out.

KIM: It can't last. 

AMY: It's like Somewhere in Time meets Nine and a Half Weeks.

KIM: Yeah, 

HILARY: Yeah, there you go. 

KIM: I like that. Yeah. Yeah. 

HILARY: I do like that. But yet set in the Edwardian period.

KIM: And she doesn't drag it out, that's for sure. It's short and sweet. 

AMY: Yeah. Um, and I also think we have to read Mark Twain's reaction. 

HILARY: Oh yeah. It's so great, isn't it? 

AMY: Yeah. Oh my God. 

HILARY: I love that quote.

AMY: So he clearly had read it. He kind of was reluctant to endorse it because he has his own brand and his own readers that he has to be careful, but he kind of had a comic reaction to it. He wrote, "The lovers recognize that their passion is a sacred thing and that its commands must be obeyed. They get to obeying them at once, and they keep on obeying them and obeying them to the reader's intense delight and disapproval, and the process of obeying them is described several times, almost exhaustively, but not quite."

HILARY: It’s so great. But I was disappointed in him because he, in private, told her that he loved the book and thought it was amazing and thought it was so important, and did think that like Anglo-American obscenity standards about sex were ridiculous. But as you say, he has this image as this homespun, plain-spoken, middle-American guy. And, he was also a very smart author, you know, who, who himself had developed this persona his audience loved, and so he wouldn't endorse her in public, even though he told her how much he liked it in private. I just thought he was braver than that, you know, I thought he was a little braver. I mean like he would speak out against wars that America was involved in!

AMY: It was a cute… I thought what he wrote was pretty cute, though,

HILARY: It was cute. It was cute. But that was in his journal.

AMY: Oh! I thought he publicly said that. 

HILARY: No, no, 

KIM: Oh.

HILARY: no, no, no, no, no,

AMY: If he had come out and said that, I think it would have been a tacit endorsement.

KIM: A wink, wink kind of thing. Yeah. 

HILARY: No. That was his private writing.

KIM: Oh. 

HILARY: Yeah. 

KIM: Shame on you, Mark Twain. All right, So we know that Nell's husband was not providing her with this level of romantic passion we're seeing in Three Weeks. They did have two daughters together, as you said, but I think it's safe to say the embers of desire were pretty non-existent there. Was Three Weeks an exercise in wish-fulfillment for a sexually-frustrated Nell or was it inspired by any secret passion in her life?

HILARY: Well, there was one young admirer that, um, right before she composed this book, Clayton, unusually, uncharacteristically, um, you know, after this man had been traveling with them for months, uh, ordered her to send away. And so I do think that in his particularities, Paul is modeled on this Alistair person. Um, but he was younger and as you can see in the book, Nell appreciated handsome young men. But on the other hand, she did retain a more sort of middle-class Victorian core in many ways, despite her, you know, protestations, that I think really was instilled in her, of course, by her mother, so I think it's a little bit of both. I think there's a little bit of the model in there, but it was also definitely an indirect way to retaliate against Clayton. He had not bought her a tiger skin rug that she had seen and admired in a window when they were shopping in the Alps. And she luckily got a royalty check not long afterwards and went back and bought it herself, right? And that kind of says it all.

KIM: Yeah. And then she makes it the setup for the notorious scene that the whole world is reading basically. 

HILARY: Right. "Would you like to sin on a tiger skin with Elinor Glyn or would you prefer to err with her on some other fur?" That's supposed to be George Bernard Shaw.

KIM: Oh yeah. That, that actually makes sense.

HILARY: Yeah.

KIM: Okay, so it seems like it was pretty risky, socially, for her to have written this book and attached her real name to it. Why do you think she was willing to just go for it? And do you think she was purposefully trying to lob a metaphorical hand grenade at society? What was her aim with this?

HILARY: I mean, she was an outsider to the society. However much they had sort of taken her in, she wasn't born and bred in aristocratic society. I do think the level of outrage even though her friend Daisy tried to tell her, that did surprise her. I mean, the way that she writes about that till she dies, basically still, you can tell she's a little bitter over it, right? The hypocrisy of it. I think she was proud of that book. She wrote it in what she described as kind of a white hot fever. She did, right before she decided to publish it, find out the full extent of her family's money woes, and even though she had been basically supporting them by that point for several years, there was a mercenary element to it too. There was a like, "Wow, I'm kind of proud of this. And it is sort of sensational. And this really could be popular," right? Because as she was writing more explicit romantic fiction, audiences were liking it. It was a bit like throwing a hand grenade. I think you're right. I think she could pretend a little bit like it wasn't, but it was, and Daisy, her friend, told her that. She told her that she would get kicked out of society if she published it, so I think that she was kind of at a point where she was just willing to risk it, and I do think it went worse than she expected on the society front. 

AMY: I think it's funny that famed anarchist Emma Goldman loved it. 

HILARY: Totally. Yeah. It's not surprising though if famed anarchist Emma Goldman calls it a “declaration of independence” and a “masterpiece” that society people can't mostly admit to that in public because you know, it would tacitly at least admit that so many peers' parentage was uncertain. 

KIM: Yes. 

HILARY: Right? 

KIM: The elephant in the room there. 

HILARY: Yeah. She wasn't a revolutionary by heart though. She did really love these more conservative-minded aristocratic circles.

KIM: That's what amazes me about her just standing up for it anyway. Like, there's a strength of character there that's admirable.

HILARY: I agree. 

KIM: So although she went on to write many other successful books following Three Weeks, let's pivot now to her impressive career in the motion picture industry, which is fascinating. So Hilary, how did she end up in Hollywood in 1920?

HILARY: So she ends up there. She's become, just briefly, I'll say, even more famous during World War I for all of this press reporting that she's doing. She specifically is sort of enlisted by the French government because she is so popular in the United States, and of course France and Britain are desperate for the United States to join this fight. And so, in her depression after her husband has died and her lover has dumped her, she goes back to France and she spends the next two years there almost, writing for William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers, writing all these articles, continuing to publish books. So she's really at the height of her sort of brand name recognition when World War I ends. And at that moment in the States, this new business called Hollywood that seems to have literally taken the world by storm is everywhere. And it is like, people are almost shocked that it's succeeded and, and taken off so quickly, right? And so, Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldwin, um, Jesse Lasky is the vice president of charge of production of what will become Paramount Studios and Samuel Goldwin in his brother-in-law, have this contest that they call a Game of Authors, and they're competing to see who can bag the biggest literary name and get them to come to Los Angeles and write for the screen. And so that's the exact impetus, right? Paramount, of course, is gonna be known as the first real glamor studio. And so they are even more interested in sort of this high class glamorous allure. And in any case, they bring her, they bring Somerset Maugham, they bring Gilbert Parker, they bring a bunch of mostly British writers to Los Angeles as so-called eminent authors. And she's the only one that stays. She's the only one that flourishes. She just kind of never looks back and she's, you know, at this point, 54 years old. 

KIM: So can you talk about the influence that she had on the film industry and maybe some of her strengths or biggest contributions to it?

HILARY: Yeah. Yeah. Um, so it sounds really kind of almost too much, but you know, she really did bring knowledge about glamor to the industry. And I think that I was slow to fully accept that until Cecil Beaton said it . And when Cecil Beaton said it, I was like, Okay. I mean, if Cecil Beaton said it, 

KIM: Yeah.

HILARY: You know, he was just this huge admirer of hers from childhood when he read Three Weeks, you know, at some British boarding school. But, you imagine how young and mostly uneducated and from very modest backgrounds these Hollywood folks were, and they're trying to depict all these kinds of settings and act like these much more sophisticated, glamorous, worldly people. Part of what she did was she mentored this first generation of Hollywood stars and helped people like Gloria Swanson learn how to actually dress like someone who was glamorous. Not like a chorus girl, as she put it. And that's what she thought. Everybody just looked common. That was her word.

KIM: Cue the makeover scene.

HILARY: Yeah, exactly. And so she brought style, she brought elegance, she brought a staging to, you know, how to literally like perform heterosexual passion. Um, some of the elements of which, you know, we've already discussed in Three Weeks that became iconic for symbolizing sexual passion mm-hmm. , um, you know, she brought a kind of savvy over PR management that Hollywood didn't yet understand and desperately needed to learn, you know, as scandals continually started to erupt, right? And the Bohemian young party-going crowd, which included a lot of people, you know, um, you needed to learn some restraint in staging your publicity in ways that didn't let everything all hang out or you were gonna be in trouble a lot with censorship reformers and moral reformer types. So that's what she gave them too, 

AMY: She was like the grownup in the room.

HILARY: She was the grown-up! She was literally 20 years older than almost anyone else she worked with. So she was almost a full generation older than them, sometimes even more, right? She's there from 56 to 66. Gloria Swanson is like 21 when she meets her. She said she was old enough to be my grandmother. 

AMY: But that probably kept her young, the fact that she was able to make this transition and had she stayed in England, it would've been a different ballgame for her.

HILARY: A hundred percent. 

KIM: Right. 

HILARY: Yeah. I mean, that was essential, I think. Yeah.

KIM: Can you talk about the term "It" and Clara Bow being what we think of as the original "It" girl, but it actually originated with Elinor.

HILARY: That's right. So she had been talking about "it" literally since she came to, you know, work in Hollywood in 1920, and she described it then, as this kind of personal magnetism that attracts both sex. She likened it, of course, in her longer definition to the magnetism that cats have. You know, you have to be unbiddable, confident and unselfconscious. It wasn't exactly the same thing as sex appeal, but that was definitely what it allowed people to talk about. So it became a very handy way for people to talk about sex in an era, again, we have to remember where you couldn't do that still directly. And so she's talking about "It" and she writes a story called It, but it's not the story that you see in the movie that stars Clara Bow. But she's made this concept famous, and then it's actually a producer at Paramount that works with Bow that comes to her and says, "Listen, I've read all about you talking about "It," what do you think about us promoting Clara Bow as the "It" girl? And she's like, "Let me meet her." And I don't know if either of you've ever seen Clara Bow act, but she has "It," trust me. You know, she is that magnetic person that you just can't take your eyes off. And so Glyn saw that, like everyone did, immediately, um, and so, Clara talks about how important it was that Elinor Glyn promoted her this way because of course they do all this publicity together. And that it gave her confidence having someone like Glyn pick Bow to be her first "It" girl. You know, this gave her that thing she needed to become a superstar and really the first sex symbol of the twenties as a woman. But she didn't want Glyn to change her, like Swanson did, or Valentino did, or all these other actors that she had worked with before her. I think that that was interesting that by that point, I think the culture was starting to move on and the kind of settings and characters that she knew best, you know, we're, we're heading into the Depression now, right? These really kind of hard-boiled characters. It's not gonna be, you know, that that world is just gonna be a sort of interesting element, but it's not gonna have the same sort of purchase and, you know, interest that it did before.

AMY: And speaking of her kind of decline in Hollywood, as she got older it seems like her family, her two daughters and their husbands back in England, kind of tried to take the reins from her in terms of her business dealings. And it was infuriating to read about that in your book because she was still 100% with it. She knew what she wanted and like they were, they were somehow trying to better deal her, you know. I think they were trying to act in her best interest, but do you think their interference contributed to her reputation dwindling a bit?

HILARY: Yeah, I mean, I think for sure is the short answer. I mean, when Irving Thalberg offered to be a 50-50 producer with her and absorb all the financial risks and costs, he was not quite yet “Irving Thalberg of the Academy Award for best producer,” but it was quite clear that he was going to be. So that's like as once in a lifetime opportunity as you can get. And she had signed the paperwork, she was excited. This was what she'd been looking for. And you know, it was very painful actually, that part of the writing and the research, and I did worry a little bit about what her family would think reading it. I mean, they treated her almost like a slightly daffy, slightly addled old lady who didn't know what she was talking about, when in fact they had NO idea, I mean, especially her son-in-law, you know, he starts filing lawsuits and threatening lawsuits and, you know, just creating all this drama around, you know, a business that he literally knows nothing about, 

AMY: Right. So all the Hollywood types are like, "It's not worth it." 

HILARY: It's not worth it. I think it was the combination, she's getting older, which she undeniably was. It was amazing that she was as successful as she was still in her sixties. And she's too much trouble to work with. And I think it also, it made her mistrust the producers in a way that she really had it before because she was close to her family, and their opinion did matter to her even though she knew that they were wrong in a lot of particulars. I do think that their suspicions of the producers affected her.

AMY: So okay, listeners, there's so much from Elinor Glyn's story that we haven't even had time to dive into. There's so much more than what you've just heard. She was one of only two women in the Hall of Mirrors, for example, to witness the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. And there's also the story of her sister, Lucy Duff Gordon, who was a tremendously successful fashion designer and who famously, and controversially, survived the sinking of the Titanic. Like how much more can you put into this family's incredible life? So really what you need to do is you need to go get Hilary's biography to get the full picture, all the stories. Hilary, you had so much amazing material to work with, I can imagine it was almost hard to edit down what you were gonna include.

HILARY: It definitely was. It could have been a lot longer. I mean, it already is a little longer than I wanted it to be, but, you know, I didn't wanna write like a door stopper, biography. That was not what I was going for.

AMY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But I do love that you took the time in the biography to put it all in the context of the time period in both British society and the Hollywood enclave at the time. So in that way it really feels like more than just a biography of one woman's life. It's kind of like a snapshot of the entire era, which I enjoyed.

HILARY: Thank you. That was the idea. I wanted it to definitely be like life and times.

KIM: Thank you again for joining us today to share your knowledge. This has been fantastic. .

HILARY: Thank you. I really enjoyed this, ladies. I admire you for this podcast. I think it's amazing. So I'm really thrilled that you invited me to be on it. Um, and I'm glad that you liked Elinor, and I hope some of your readers do too.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. You guys all need to run out right now and get your copy of Hilary's Inventing the It Girl. And while you're at it, pick up one of those naughty copies of Three Weeks. I promise you it does not disappoint even if you are only in it for the laughs.

 KIM: And while you're at it, you can share the link for this episode with anyone you know who enjoys old books and Hollywood history. Those referrals and shout outs really mean a lot to us, and they help new listeners find us.

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

119. Stories for Christmas and the Festive Season

KIM ASKEW: Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host and writing partner, Amy Helmes. And wait, I think I hear something. Could it be... jingle bells?

[sound of jingle bells] 

AMY HELMES: Oh my gosh. Ha ha ha. Or is it ho, ho, ho? Honestly, I think you were an elf in a previous life. You're way too... she's sitting here, you guys, with a Santa hat on. There is a fully lit Christmas tree behind her, even though we celebrated Thanksgiving like literally a hot second ago.

KIM: I'm not embarrassed. I love the entire holiday season. We celebrate Hanukkah at my house too, so that and Christmas and New Year's. I mean, I love all of it, which is why I was so excited when we received a copy of the new edition of the British Library Women Writers Series: Stories for Christmas and the Festive Season. I actually read it at the beginning of November in order to prep for this episode, so maybe that's why I'm already in the mood. Um, listeners, you should know also that Amy is rolling her eyes right now. . 

AMY: Yeah. This totally epitomizes you and I, right? Like and our personality, but I, I think you told me that that's one of the great things about this story collection is that they're not too sugary sweet, right?

KIM: No. They actually run the gamut of what the holiday season encompasses from a woman's perspective, which is really cool. Our past guest, Simon Thomas, wrote the introduction, and in it, he explains that in order to put together this collection, he and his collaborators searched through published collections of stories and delved into Christmas editions of old magazines where they would find lesser known works by well known writers, and also stories by once popular writers whose work has kind of faded into obscurity. Amy, I hadn't read even one of these fantastic stories before I cracked open this book. You know, many times I'll read a collection of stories that'll be one or two or more that just aren't that good. They're kind of sandwiched in the middle of the collection, but that's not the case in this anthology. I found each of the stories unforgettable in their own way. 

AMY: Okay. That's really good to hear. But if you had to pick a favorite, could you? 

KIM: I did think a lot about which one was my favorite and honestly it was hard to choose. But there's this one story, it's by the Canadian writer Alice Munroe, and I will never forget it. Obviously she's not a lost author, but I'd never read this story by her. So it's the first story in the book, the opening story in the collection, and it really sets the tone and lets you know right away you're in for something different. It's called “Turkey Season,” and it was actually first published in the December 29th, 1980 issue of The New Yorker. Have you read “Turkey Season?” 

AMY: It doesn't sound familiar at all, no. 

KIM: Yeah, I would think that it would've been familiar to both of us after I read it, but it's not. So, um, often you see workplaces in a Christmas tale. So think of the office where Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchett work in A Christmas Carol. And the story we talked about in last year's Christmas episode, “A Wicked Editor's Christmas Dream.” And then there are those holiday Christmas party scenes in Love Actually and The Holiday, right? Mistletoe, there's too much champagne. Mm-hmm. , that whole vibe. Holiday party. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna read a bit of “Turkey Season” for our listeners to give them a feel for this holiday workplace story: All I could see when I closed my eyes the first few nights after working there was turkeys. I saw them hanging upside down, plucked and stiffened, pale and cold with the heads and necks limp. The eyes and nostrils clotted with dark blood. The remaining bits of feathers, those dark and bloody too, seem to form a crown. I saw them not with aversion, but with a sense of endless work to be done.

So fa la la la, la to you, too.

AMY: I was gonna say, can we get a Christmas carol? uh, Jimmy Mercer or whatever? 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, is it Stephen King or is it, uh, a holiday?

AMY: Right? Oh my gosh. 

KIM: I will tell you, nothing truly horrific happens, so don't worry.

AMY: It'll turn us all vegetarian is what it’ll do for starters. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. Right. Simon says in the introduction about this, story, it's an early reminder that Christmas isn't all twinkly lights and beautiful ribbons because it's told from the perspective of a 14-year old turkey gutter at the turkey barn, and it's actually set in the 1940s because it's an older woman remembering a time in her past. You know, the themes are small community poverty, workplace dynamics, and gender issues, and it's dark, but as I said, really unforgettable. 

AMY: Yeah, well, if it was a New Yorker story, I'm sure it's great. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. How do we not know it?

AMY: I know. Yeah. All right, so what else do we got? 

KIM: So lest you think this collection is all “Scrooge” and gloom, don't worry, it's not. The darker stories are really balanced out. For example, our beloved E.M. Delafield is included in the book. 

AMY: Oh, love her. So that's the author of The Diary of a Provincial Lady, which we did an early episode on when we first started this podcast.

KIM: Right. And her piece in the collection is called “General Impressions of a Christmas Shopping Center.” It's light, yet witty and insightful at the same time. It's from 1933, but it has this timeless feel to it. I'll read a quick few lines. You can get a feel for it 

 [she reads]

AMY: So relatable! It's like they went inside my brain. That's why I love E.M. Delafield. Yeah. I feel like she and I would've been great friends. That sums up 90% of what I hate about Christmas, right there. I love it. I love it. 

KIM: Oh, you gotta read this because the piece is just all little vignettes with different shoppers and it's, it's hilarious. Yeah. 

AMY: Because I agonize like that, and then I'll have an idea and I talk myself out of the idea because I'm too pragmatic and logical about everything and it's like, “No, that'll take up too much space in their closet,” or, you know, whatever it is.

KIM: I mean, I always wait till the last minute, unfortunately, yet I also want the perfect present. So there's like that tension between the perfect present and also, okay, this is the last store that I have time to go to. 

AMY: Yeah, because then you're like panicked of “What if I buy this and then I, the very next place I look, or tomorrow I find a way better present?” 

KIM: Yeah. So anyway, then there's a 1968 story by American writer Barbara Robinson, and it's called “The Christmas Pageant.” And there's a raggedy group of wild children that everyone kind of looks down on and they end up turning the Nativity play on its head. They make everyone stop and really think about what the Christmas story is all about.

AMY: Okay. That's the Herdmans! I know that story! That's taken from a children's novel called The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, I think, unless she wrote a short story that was separate. Um, maybe it's an excerpt from that book, but, uh, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever… I love, love, love that book. And I also own a DVD of the film adaptation. It's such a cute movie if you're looking for something a little different than the usual classic holiday flick that we've seen over and over and over, you have to watch The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

KIM: I wanna see this, it sounds appropriate for Cleo, so it sounds cute. 

AMY: Yeah, She might be too young for it. Yeah, it's probably elementary school age. Um, but we mentioned this book and Robinson in our episode a few years ago on “The Bird's Christmas Carol” by Kate Douglas Wiggin, because Wiggin has a very Herdman-like family in that story, you know, that kind of rough around the edges that you'll also fall in love with. 

KIM: Yes, totally. You go back and listen to that, we'll put a link to that one in the show notes. And speaking of familiar lost ladies, I want to read from the one by Stella Gibbons.

AMY: Ah, okay! There's a number of people coming up here. Yeah, she famously wrote Cold Comfort Farm, but then we did an episode on her lesser known novel Nightingale Wood, which was great.

KIM: Exactly. And this story, “The Little Christmas Tree,” is actually the opening story from her 1940 collection Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm and Other Stories. She did a couple of books that had the Cold Comfort Farm name on them.

AMY: Oh yeah. What was that family's name? I forget. 

KIM: I can’t remember, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna read an excerpt from this. Um… 

AMY: Starkadder. That's the name of the family. 

KIM:Oh, that's so good. Yeah. What a great name. So brilliant. Okay. All right, so here we go. Ms. Harding is our heroine in this story, and she decides to move to the countryside and then she decides to have her own Christmas by herself. Her very own Christmas. Um, so she goes into town to buy a few things and buy her own Christmas tree, and she's thinking back on how the shopkeeper responded to her having her own Christmas: Ms. Harding escaped, aware that the old lady, far from being embarrassed by her mistake, was taking her in from head to feet with lively, curious eyes and thought her a queer one. That Ms. Harding was sure that her wildest guesses at the reason why the toys had been bought would come nowhere near the truth in the circles in which the old lady's tubby person rotated, unmarried females did not buy Christmas trees, decorate them and gloat over them in solitude, however natural such a proceeding might seem in Chelsea. 

AMY: It's kind of like, you know, a little “Bridget Jonesy” there. But she's fine about it? Or is she like [singing} “Allll byyyy mysellllf”?

KIM: Well, here's the thing. She's fine about it until she's not, but it is a romantic story, so… 

AMY: Oh, okay. Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds good. 

KIM: Okay. Yeah. And there's also one from 1924 that's really sweet. It's called “Christmas Bread.” And it's really interesting because it's about a widowed surgeon, but get this she's a woman and she has a daughter. It's really unusual and really lovely and it's about family misunderstandings and reconciliation. And I should also mention, Amy, something I forgot to say: that the stories are in order of celebrations, not by the years they were published. So the collection actually concludes with another story from a working woman's perspective, but it's on New Year's and it's by a different Alice this time, Alice Childress. The story is called “On Leavin Notes,” and it's about a day worker standing up for herself. 

AMY: Hmm. Okay. Well, I mean if Simon Thomas helped write the intro for this and put it together, I know that I'm gonna love pretty much every story in it, so I can't wait. You're gonna have to let me borrow this, and actually, hearing about this book kind of inspires me with a really wild idea. I'm thinking if I buy a bunch of copies now, hang onto them, then I'll have 'em my next year shopping, like, some of it, out of the way. This sounds like a great thing to give people next year. 

KIM: That is a great idea. And maybe some of our listeners would want to do the same or purchase it this week as a last-minute gift. Okay, so we have one more mini episode for you next week and then we're going to be going on a month-long hiatus for January. (That's not too long.) And we're gonna be re-airing some of our early, full length episodes each week while we're on hiatus.

AMY: Yes, but never fear, we'll be back on February 7th, which will be our 126th episode, if you can believe that! And we have a full calendar of amazing women writers and guests already lined up for the coming year.

KIM: If you want to stay up to date, visit lostladiesoflit.com and you can subscribe there to our newsletter. You'll never miss an episode if you do that. And also, if you love this podcast, our Christmas wish is that you'll leave us a five star review wherever you listen. It truly helps us find new listeners, and it also makes us feel good.

AMY: Yes, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and see you next week. Our logo was designed by Harriet Grant, and our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew. 

116. Dorothy Richardson — Dawn’s Left Hand with Scott McCracken and Brad Bigelow

AMY: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my co-host and writing partner, Kim Askew

KIM: Hi, everyone. Amy, the author we're going to be discussing today is credited with writing the first stream-of-consciousness novel in the English language. That was book number one of what would become a semi-autobiographical series that comprised 13 volumes in total. The books cover the period of her life from 1891 until 1915, and that's from her early childhood to the moment she became a writer.

AMY: A 13-book series written in stream-of-consciousness style? Are you kidding? Sounds pretty daunting. But listeners, we know a lot of you out there are just the sort of book nerds to hear this and yell, "Challenge accepted!" 

KIM: Yeah. What's the bibliophile equivalent of "Hold My Beer?"

AMY: Yeah, right. And because it would take us weeks to fully explore Richardson's epic 13-volume work, Pilgrimage, for this episode we'll be focusing in on Book 10 from the series. In this installment, the author depicts her own year-long affair with the author H.G. Wells.

KIM: Now that sounds interesting, so let's read the sticks and get started!

AMY: Kim and I are thrilled to welcome back to the show a returning guest, Brad Bigelow, who joined us last year for an episode on Gertrude Trevelyan, as you may remember. Brad is editorial coordinator for Boiler House Press's Recovered Books series, which brings forgotten books of exceptional merit and resounding relevance to the attention of new readers.

KIM: On his website, neglectedbooks.com, Brad reflected on his experience reading Dorothy Richardson's 13-volume masterpiece Pilgrimage. He wrote, "It remains perhaps the most profoundly revealing experience in my reading life."

AMY: Wow. That's quite the testimonial! Joining us also is Scott McCracken, who is professor of 20th Century Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Scott edited the Oxford Critical Edition of the collected works of Dorothy Richardson. So Brad and Scott, welcome to the show. We're so thrilled to have you here. However, Brad... you know, Kim and I love you, but when I started reading this book, I was thinking to myself, "Damn you, Brad! What did you get me into? What is this?" I, I don't know if you could hear me cursing you out from 1100 miles away. Um, Scott, you could have probably heard me screaming all the way over in England. So yeah, my first response diving into the book, uh, these are some of the words: Flummoxed, frustrated, bewildered.

BRAD: And I fully sympathize. Dorothy Richardson takes no prisoners in terms of her demands on readers. She is immersive. She assumes that you are running with her. She writes sentences that go on for a page. She switches chronology without giving you any clue. She is absolutely a very demanding author.

AMY: Scott, and what was your reaction when you first read her?

SCOTT: So, I mean, yes, she's difficult, I'm not gonna deny that. But once you get drawn in, it's very seductive. And I think also, particularly if you love London, it's such a hymn to London as a city that,that really pulled me in.

AMY: Every sentence that she writes is so fraught with meaning and depth, and I felt when I was first reading it, that I needed to figure it out. And then I realized, "No, I kind of have to just go with this." And so it was a weird push and pull because when you feel like, Okay, I'm just gonna allow myself to float over these sentences a little bit, but I feel like I can't do that because that line is so momentous. I, I don't know. Kim, what was your feeling?

KIM: I mean, I, I had a little bit of warning because you read it first and you basically described that experience. So I was ready to kind of just go with the flow a little bit more. Um, and it also really reminded me, and I think we'll talk about this later too, but it really reminded me of Henry James and Ulysses as well in the way that you are trying to figure out what's going on. And there is a lot going on and there's so many references to things, but the writing is so beautiful and so evocative that without having all the knowledge that you might need to have to fully understand that you can still get such a great feeling from the words that she's saying and kind of dive into her experience. I mean, after just reading this one, I could see the obsession with Dorothy Richardson and with this series. Um, readers, if you are willing to stick with it, there's a real payoff. Amy and I both loved it by the end, even going into it, you know, you're a little bit confused. Um, so, yeah, if there's any group out there who's up for the challenge of reading Dorothy Richardson, I feel like it's our listeners, and I'm guessing some of you out there are going to want to run out and read all 13 books in the Pilgrimage series after listening to this episode, and Amy and I are right there with you. We want to join you.

AMY: Yeah, I felt like I was climbing a mountain, you know? And while you're doing the hike, you're like, "I hate this, I hate this," you know? It's a hard way uphill. But then you reach the summit, you take in the view, and it's downright exhilarating, and you want to do it all over again.

BRAD: Absolutely. 

SCOTT: Yeah. I was really struck by what you were saying about letting it flow over you because Richardson talks about not so much reading, but learning to listen. And I think it's that learning to listen to the musicality of the language, to the way that the sentences sound, it's at that point, when you tune in in that way, it really starts to come alive for you and you don't worry about the things you don't know anymore.

KIM: Okay, so without further ado, let's get to know more about Dorothy Richardson. Uh, Brad, do you want to give us a rundown on her life?

BRAD: Sure. Well, Dorothy Richardson was the third of four girls born into what started out to be a comfortable upper middle class English family in 1873. Uh, she and her sisters attended a school that was relatively progressive for its time, and to be honest, we might well never have heard of her had her father not gone bankrupt, which forced her to find a way to make a living when she was about 17 years old. And so she did go to work. She starts out, uh, as a teacher of English in a small girl school in England. That's what's covered in Pointed Roofs, which is the first volume of Pilgrimage. Then she became a teacher in a small English school on the north side of London, and then she was a governess. And then finally she ends up for a long period, over a decade, as the secretary in a dental office in London. And then finally she transitions to become a full time writer and translator. And this is pretty much the same trajectory that her fictional counterpart, Miriam Henderson, follows through Pilgrimage. But it's important to understand, while there are many, many, many parallels between Miriam Henderson's life and Dorothy's Richardson's life, Richardson takes many liberties, particularly in terms of chronology and some of the characters. And so, Richardsons scholars have been employed for decades deciphering and unraveling the interplay between fact and fiction in Pilgrimage.

KIM: So Richardson began writing Pointed Roofs, Book One in the Pilgrimage series in 1912, and it was published in 1915. This was the book that first had the term stream-of-consciousness applied to it by a reviewer. But Richardson actually hated this description, right?

SCOTT: Yes, she loathed it. And it's difficult, in a way, to get to the bottom of why she disliked it so much. But I think one of the key things is that she hated labels. She always wanted to be outside any box that people put her in. But I think one of the main reasons she didn't like the term "stream," because she's definitely writing about consciousness, she doesn't like "stream" because stream implies that you go from A to B. And one thing that Pilgrimage doesn't do is work in a linear fashion. It's much more lateral. She felt that the 19th-century novel just didn't represent women's experience, and she was trying to do something which did, and none of the literary forms available at the time fitted with quite what she wanted to do.

BRAD: It is much more based on the sequence of impressions that one gets. And to be honest, I think that's one of the things that when you get over the initial resistance of Richardson's particular style and you realize what she's doing, it is such an immersive experience compared to almost anything else you read that when you put it down, everything seems to be not as rich an experience.

KIM: Yeah, it takes you further into what reality can be on the page.

AMY: And also, because the whole point of these books is that she's looking inward, right? She's trying to figure out her own soul, and nobody thinks in complete sentences, right? The way she writes is the way we think, so it's like getting to crack open her skull, kind of, and just, and jump in.

BRAD: Absolutely. What goes on throughout Pilgrimage is this character, Miriam, being in the world, seeing things, taking them in, processing them. Do I approve? Does this work for me? Does this not work for me? And we all do that. I mean, that's our everyday living experience.

KIM: And there's not always a pat answer to how you feel about something, and that's in there too. It's like she's taking it in. She doesn't always know how she feels about it, almost.

AMY: Yeah.

SCOTT: And Richardson said she was desperate, for example, to describe Miriam's three sisters, but she refused to, because Miriam wouldn't think about how they looked because she's known them all her life. It wouldn't be at the forefront of her mind. consciousness. That's a really interesting way to approach the novel, and quite radically new for the time.

AMY: And when she wrote the first novel, Pointed Roofs, did she always know that it was gonna be this long series? What was her intention starting out?

BRAD: Well, I think it's clear that Richardson knew that Pilgrimage was going to be a work of multiple books or "chapter volumes" as she'd like to call them. But I think it's also clear that she didn't have a preconceived end in mind. And in reality, she kept on working on Pilgrimage up until almost the very end, and she never did actually finish the final volume, March Moonlight. It was published posthumously, and it was actually incomplete. It was kind of assembled by her husband's sister, who was the executor of her estate.

SCOTT: Yeah, I mean, I'd like to ask you, Brad, whether you think she could finish it? Because, um, the critic Stephen Heath describes it as "inevitably interminable," which is kind of a joke because it feels like it's never going to end, but it's almost like, she's writing her life. How could she finish it if her life wasn't finished? And that open-endedness of the text is a challenge for the reader, but it is also an extraordinary experience. So I think she couldn't finish it and in many ways she didn't want to finish it.

AMY: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I had a random thought to "The Sopranos" and the very ending of that, where it just stops in the middle because...

KIM: Yeah. How do you end it? 

AMY: Yeah, it's like, it's almost perfect that she didn't finish that last book.

KIM: Yeah. Um, how were the books received in their time when they were being published?

SCOTT: Well, she was quite a big thing, actually, particularly amongst literary circles. And in the 1920s people would talk about Proust, Joyce and Richardson, all in the same breath. These were the new novelists who were doing something radically different. And she herself read both Joyce and particularly Proust. She loved Proust. Later on in the thirties, she becomes more forgotten, but she's still remembered by other writers. So people like Graham Greene, for example. There's a clear strain amongst, um, women experimental writers in the 20th century that she's an important part of their experience. So somebody like Stevie Smith, who we normally think of as a poet, but wrote three novels, her novels are very influenced by Richardson. And then later, writers like Kay Dick, who you've done a podcast on before, Kay Dick was really interested in Richardson, wanted to write a book about her, tried to visit her in the nursing home, um, but her family blocked access when she was very, very old. Um, and then some of the 1960s experimental writers, writers like Eva Tucker, who until she died, was a really important part of the Richardson Society. So I think there's this strain going all the way through and even today, a modern contemporary writer like Jonathan Coe, the British writer, will talk about how he used to read Virago novels and how important writers like Richardson, in particular, are to him. So I would say she has an almost underground presence within British literature all the way through the 20th century. And now she's becoming better known.

AMY: When you said Proust, Joyce, and Richardson, it makes me want to cry what happened? And, we'll, we'll get into that later, but

KIM: I feel the same, Amy. Yep.

AMY: Okay, so this is probably as good a time as ever to dive into the book Dawn's Left Hand, and Brad, when you originally approached us about doing Richardson, we were gonna do Pointed Roofs, just start at the beginning, but I'm glad that you instead suggested we focus on this novel, the 10th. Why did you suggest this one? And can you kind of set up what we need to know in terms of where the character is at this point?

BRAD: Absolutely. Well Miriam Henderson, the lead character, is in an advanced stage of her emotional and intellectual development. Just before this book, we have the book called Oberland, which is entirely focused on about a week-plus trip that she makes to the Swiss Alps at wintertime. And I think that stepping away from London really provides an opportunity for both the character and Richardson to kind of do a stock- taking and to set her life in perspective. And so I think Oberland plays a really pivotal role in the whole structure of Pilgrimage. And also Dawn's Left Hand has the affair with Hypo Wilson, H.G. Wells's character, which is the piece where we can find lots of, you know, real-life interests for readers who are familiar, they won't necessarily know Dorothy Richardson, but they'll be familiar with H.G. Wells's name and the idea of an affair with a famous writer and all that sort of thing. And you also have the introduction of the character of Amabel, exotic, Anglo-French woman who has a very passionate approach to life, and that brings out something in Miriam that she hasn't kind of experienced before. So there's a lot going on in the book, and I think also we see the kind of more mature Richardsonian style. So, Pointed Roofs is written from the perspective of a girl of 17 encountering the world on her own for the first time. And if you read that book, you'll find that she's missing clues all over the place. Whereas now we have somebody who's become hyper attuned. I mean, she's read lots of Henry James, so she is, much of the book is, and, and much of Richardson's style, which can be frustrating, encountered for the first time is this kind of piecing together and deconstructing of experiences and encounters with other people. And so Dawn's Left Hand is full of that kind of rich, mature, Richardsonian experience.

KIM: I love that about it. Uh, okay, so at the beginning of this novel, as you said, Miriam's returning from her trip to Switzerland. She's on this emotional high. She has a golden glow as she calls it, and I think we can all identify with that feeling after you have an amazing, exhilarating vacation. She is determined to retain the spirit, but she's worried it might slip away. Richardson writes: The jingling hansom was carrying her back to her London, filled with people to whom the golden eternity had been just 14 “ordinary” days and who, knowing nothing of the change in her that at present seemed to be everlasting, would endanger and perhaps destroy it.

 So she's thinking everyone at home can't possibly understand this epiphany she's had. Scott, do you wanna talk about this emotional self-awareness and how it ties into Pilgrimage as a whole?

SCOTT: Yeah, I think this is an important moment in Miriam's life. I mean, she's been in Switzerland, and if you reread Oberland, you realize that she's being incredibly flirtatious with almost everybody she meets. I mean, this is somebody who is ready to start a relationship, but despite the self-awareness that both Brad and I have been talking about, she's also still capable of making mistakes. I mean, one example is when she's on the train at the beginning of Dawn's Left Hand, and she encounters this woman and she decides this woman is completely uninteresting. And then she discovers that the woman is about to get married and suddenly, her view of her completely turns upside down. And one of the things I love about Pilgrimage is that it's happening all the time to Miriam. She comes to an opinion and then she realizes she's wrong, and you go through that whole process with her. But I think there's something else going on as well, that Richardson wrote about other novels not really reaching the truth of life and the truth of experience. And I think this is an almost religious sense of the truth that's under the surface of things. And Miriam feels that she's experienced as, as you said, a kind of epiphany, um, in Switzerland. And she's still looking for that view of the world, which is very much her own, but is also a more transcendent sense of joy. I mean, the word joy is used a lot in the novel, and it's actually a very joyous text, despite its difficulty. And I think that's one of the things that buoys us along, as a reader, and that even though Richardson is often talking about the everyday, the customary, the habitual, she finds joy in those moments and she encourages us to stop and see that joy.

AMY: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that's different about these books is that she is an ordinary woman, and a lot of books you can't have that. That would be too boring. A publisher today would be like, "Put it on the scrap pile, nothing happens to her." I mean, obviously in this book she has the affair, but it's interesting that she doesn't feel the need to make some crazy adventures happen to this girl. She's just living a life. 

KIM: She works at a dental office. I mean, yeah,

BRAD: Absolutely, and actually, one of my favorite chapters in Pilgrimage simply follows Miriam through one very hectic day in the dental office where she's running up, she's doing errands, she's dealing with patients. I mean, I don't know of any other work of fiction that goes that immersively into the immediacy of the working experience. That's just one chapter in this whole massive book.

AMY: Yeah. Alright, so this, um, passage I wanted to mention, I almost didn't include this because it's kind of tangential, but I couldn't help but think of T.S. Eliot when I was reading this one passage when she's walking home alone one night, uh, after a night out at the opera with Hypo and his wife. Because it reminded me so much of his poem, "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." So I'll just read this little section: 

It was time to go, to drop away and face the walk home, alone, through the chilly midnight streets . . . that began to cast, as soon as a space of lamp lit stillness lay between her and the scene she had left, their old, unfailing spell. Unsharable. Although, to-night, the mellow, golden light, falling upon deserted roadway and silent grey stone building, was deepened by the glow of the hours from which she had come forth. 

So, a couple things that I thought was like, why in this day and age was she walking home by herself? It seems like a woman wouldn't be doing that in that era. Um, but also I think it's a really great example of how she pays so much attention to light throughout the novel. So in this case, it's lamplight, but there's also golden light. There's sunshine, um, there's rays of light that beam down. What's her fascination with light?

BRAD: Well, I think this is really one of the key things in the whole of Pilgrimage is the importance of light. Miriam is constantly responding to light. The sight of sunlight reflecting off the rooftops, but also the street lamps, the glow of the street lamps at night. It seems to connect deeply with Miriam's soul, and I think it has to do something with how passionately Miriam and Richardson felt about truth, which, you know, they're both kind of on this quest to find a way of living, I guess, that involves the least amount of deception. Not just on her part, but also on the part of the people that she feels closest to. I think that's one of the reasons why we know from the very beginning that this affair with Hypo Wilson is doomed to fail.

SCOTT: I totally agree with that and I love these lines. I mean, I think so much of Pilgrimage is about the experience of walking through the city streets, and I know these streets and I love them. And you say, Well, why is she a woman walking alone? Like, how else is she gonna get home? She's only on a pound a week. Um, she can't afford a cab. And our views of women at this time are actually a little bit wrong because women did walk through the streets, um, particularly working class women. Um, and it's not that Miriam doesn't encounter dangers. She does. She encounters violence. Um, she gets, uh, stopped by a policeman who thinks she's a prostitute soliciting. So her experience of the streets is not entirely safe, but it's the feeling of independence that she has, which she really values. And I think it's rare to find that in a novel of this period. It's not often represented. It's almost as if women have to be indoors in novels as well as in real life.

AMY: Yeah. And also even when she's with other people, there's a solitariness about her even in those scenes, right? You feel like she's always distant or separated.

KIM: Yeah. She's in her inner world a lot it feels like, yeah. So later, Miriam is at a meeting of socialists when she encounters an intriguing young French woman that Brad was talking about earlier. Her name's Amabel and later on Amabel sneaks into Miriam's room in a boarding house and writes, "I Love You" on her mirror with a piece of Miriam's soap, and it is a total "Whoa!" Moment in the book, right? It's like, "wow, who is this person? What's happening?" 

AMY: Yeah. She's intriguing, but you kind of feel like she's a little dangerous, or that's maybe the sensation that Miriam has. I couldn't quite put my finger on this character at all.

SCOTT: Yeah, I think that's really interesting because Hypo almost exists to show everything that is wrong with a masculine view of the world. And so Amabel is the alternative. And the historical character that Amabel is based on is a friend of Richardson's called Veronica Leslie Jones, who then went on to marry the character who is Michael Shatoff in Pilgrimage. I could go even further and tell you that for a while, they seem to all three live in a menage a trois um, certainly in the 1911 census they're all in the same house in London. So there's lots to say about that. In terms of Miriam's sexuality, I think what's interesting is she's not entirely comfortable in the heterosexual relationship. She's not entirely comfortable in a same -sex relationship. She seems to like to position herself between the two. And just as later with that menage a trois, I think it's really interesting that she goes to the opera with both Hypo and his wife, and it's that positioning yourself between the masculine and the feminine which is, I think, so much of what the ambiguity of the novel is about, what sexual identity actually is, and that's part of its radical nature, I think.

AMY: And for me, having only read this one sliver of the whole journey, I don't have enough, uh, information about all of this and her sexual identity and how she's really feeling about this woman. So to me, I kind of let that go and saw Amabel less literally as kind of a trigger for her to discover something bigger, you know? Um, it wasn't about the relationship so much as how she influenced her, I guess. 

KIM: It was like a spark lighting the next passage of her life or something like that.

AMY: And she sees, okay, so Amabel takes this piece of her soap, which is very intimate, writes on the mirror. And it's interesting, and Brad, I actually got this out of the discussion with your readers, but that she's looking in the mirror at herself when she sees that message, "I love you," which is amazing.

BRAD: Right.

AMY: Okay, so I want to read another passage from the book because I think it highlights her style , but it also sets the stage for the second half of the novel. And it was a passage that frustrated me because I had no idea what was going on for some of it. Uh, but let me just read it: 

The person who had stood for the first time alone upon the sunlit garden-path between the banks of flowers and watched them, through the pattern made by the bees sailing heavily across from bank to bank at the level of her face, and wondered at them all, flowers and bees and sunlight, at their all being there when nobody was about, and had looked for so long at the bright masses and now could re-see them with knowledge of their names and ways and of the dark earth underneath and still just as they were in that moment that had neither beginning nor end, this same person was now going, deceitfully, to local, social social Lycurgan meetings, frequenting them, since Oberland, only for small delights that were the prelude, the practice ground for more and more. This person, who was about to take a lover, presently, in time, at the right time, was the one who had gazed forever at the flower banks, unchanged.

And so first, after I catch my breath there, because that was only two Sentences, everything I read . Um, so she's talking about herself. And of course my mind did a double take when I read that line, "who was about to take a lover" because it's like, "oh, something's gonna 

be. Going on here, 

KIM: happened to me. It was like, ding. Okay, I saw that. Yeah.

AMY: So let's shift our focus onto this character Hypo AKA H.G. Wells, if you wanna read it that way, because in my mind, this book starts to get so good as their relationship comes into sharper focus. Brad, walk us through what happens between these two.

BRAD: Well first of all, Richardson started out, uh, and the Miriam character, having a relationship because she and H.G. Wells's wife or Hypo Wilson's wife were schoolmates together at this progressive school that I mentioned early on. But it's only as Miriam comes to spend time with the Wilsons that Hypo becomes attracted to her, kind of first intellectually and then, sexually, you might say. So the central drama in Dawn's Left Hand is really Hypo's campaign to entice Miriam into having an affair with him and Miriam's at best divided feelings throughout the whole experie.

AMY: Yes, I'm at best, divisive.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Downright hostile at times. Okay, so where they have their first tryst in this book, it's a private dining room that they have hired at a restaurant. I guess that was a thing. Uh, Richardson keeps having Miriam describe it as a shameful or a disgraceful room, so there's a degree of self-loathing about what she's doing with Hypo.

KIM: Yeah, they have such an odd dynamic in terms of conversation. They have this rapport and intimacy, but you can really sense that Miriam has disdain for him on some level. It's as if she sees through him completely and she has this very sharp insight into what really makes him tick. She writes of him: Having given her the chance of steering the conversation and waited, according to his own reckoning, for dark ages, in vain, he now resumed his usual role in any shared experience: conductor, perpetually defining. 

AMY: He always wants to be in charge. He always wants to lead the conversation. It's obnoxious and she sees it all, so it's completely scathing and I loved it. I think reading this book is worth it just for this relationship alone. All this Hypo stuff is so good, but I do have to laugh because one of the recurring things that always comes up in previous Lost Ladies of Lit episodes is this idea of women sometimes having to just listen to men wax on and on and on, and you just have to pretend you're fascinated.

KIM: And even more than that, to prop up the conversation for them and to make them look good.

AMY: And present company excepted, Brad and Scott, we're not talking about you. 

KIM: Definitely not. 

AMY: In your case, we are fascinated. Uh, but Richardson definitely has several classic moments in the book where she talks about Hypo as if he just is looking for a disciple. He's looking for a sounding board. She writes:

There was no place in his universe for women who did not either sincerely, blindly, follow, or play up and make him believe they were following. All the others were merely or unpleasant biological material. Wow. 

BRAD: There is no other work of literature which is so completely and unashamedly from a feminine perspective, giving no consolation to the male point of view. And in fact, she really often portrays men as sort of, uh, lesser beings from a sentient and emotional intelligence standpoint.

AMY: Yep. Yep. Girl preach. You know, um, she understands what he needs from her as a conversational partner, and so sometimes she gives it to him, but there's one point where she kind of messes with him and is like, No, I'm not finished yet. She sort of throws off the rules of their conversational game just to like get him to teeter a little bit. And I loved that moment.

KIM: Yeah.

BRAD: Absolutely

SCOTT: And you could almost say that Pilgrimage, all 13 volumes, is a, "This is what I wanted to say, but I didn't get the chance because I was talking to men like you."

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. I love that. Yeah. Even, the moment where they actually have their sexual encounter, that one in the restaurant, it ends very strangely and she spends the rest of the time trying to make him forget that that happened and making him feel better about it. 

BRAD: She is essentially trying to, uh, reassure Hypo that, you know, all is okay. 

AMY: It's 

KIM: Yeah, 

yeah. 

yeah. It's not your 

AMY: She's left having to be the one to try to make him feel better. 

Yeah, exactly. 

KIM: She does! It works!

AMY: Yeah.

SCOTT: I think it's one of the sort of comic moments in a way. I mean, you don't think this is a comic novel but when she looks at his naked body, thinks, 

AMY: Eh, 

Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah. There's nothing really that great about him undressed. 

SCOTT: Right, yeah. Yeah, and that's partly his body. It's partly the male body, per se, I think, is not that impressive. But while we're on the sex scenes and let's face it, blink and you miss them. 

KIM: Uh-huh. Yeah, you're reading between the lines , too. You're like, hmm. Yeah. 

SCOTT: Exactly. But I mean, there is a moment, I think, where they do have sex early in the morning when he comes to her room. And I was really struck when I was reading the manuscript of Dawn's Left Hand, that she crosses a bit out. And that experience is quite painful in the manuscript, in the bit that she cuts out. Um, and even in what we've got, she describes a sudden descent into her clenched and rigid form and that then afterwards there's a kind of moment of dissociation. I find that quite disturbing actually.

KIM: It is disturbing. Yeah. Yeah.

AMY: You get the sense that it's just something she feels like she has to get out of the way. I just have to follow through on this and do it, not for him, but for me to be able to sort of move on or whatever. 

BRAD: Well, I think you're hitting on a key point, which is, you know, Miriam throughout Pilgrimage  she's kind of going through a whole series of situations where she tests to say, Does this work for me? She's like, trying on different ways of living in the world. She's gotta kind of check that box to say, I did try that and did it lift my being to a new level or not? Well, clearly for Miriam, it did not.

AMY: Yeah, she kept referring to their sex as our journeying. If that's journeying, it was like a bad trip.

KIM: Yeah, definitely a bad trip. Yeah. So relating that to Richardson and H.G. Wells, what else do we know about this affair between them in real life?

SCOTT: So the other documentation that we have is H.D. Wells's unofficial autobiography, which he didn't want published until after everybody who was involved had died. And he suggests in that that their sexual relationship was quite active, that they had sex outside in the heather. That it did last for a year. But also we know from H.G. Wells's life that he was a serial adulterer. Now he represented that as free love. And in Dawn's Left Hand, it's clear that Miriam also sees herself as a free lover. So this decision to have sex with him is partly a kind of philosophical one. She actually believes not in marriage, but that everybody should be free to have sex with whoever they want. But at the same time, of course, we see that given the nature of society at the time it's a deeply unequal social relationship, that he has far more freedom than she actually does. He felt, though, really aggrieved that she got much more critical praise than he did. Although he got the money, people wanted to buy his books, he was never celebrated as an innovator or a stylist in the way she was. And I think that's quite interesting that, you know, in some ways he looked up to her as a writer.

KIM: Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about Richardson's writing style and her command of language. And I mean that literally because she was proficient in a number of languages, right, Scott? 

SCOTT: Yes, absolutely. I think she had an incredible ear. I mean, she talks in Dawn's Left Hand about English pronunciation, the pronunciation of the different classes. It's also people who heard her speak said she had a kind of golden mellow voice that you could listen to forever. definitely all comes through in the writing. And if we go back to the passage that Amy picked out, that moment is what Richardson critics have called the Bee Memory. So it's Miriam's very first memory, of being in a garden. And it's the first time she really becomes aware of herself. So when she's saying, even though I'm about to take a lover and I'm an adult, I am the same person. I am experiencing the same reality, the same truth, as that small child who first became aware of herself. And the writing is an attempt to link those experiences across time. That's why it's so powerful, I think.

KIM: Yeah. It's so moving and powerful. Yep.

AMY: Yeah, and so my aha moment came when Miriam is reading a bunch of letters that she's gotten from Amabel. Amabel has a very distinct penmanship, which Miriam's eyes aren't accustomed to. It's not your run-of-the-mill, straightforward handwriting. She describes it as disjointed curves and gaps and carelessly dashed down under pressure feeling. And then Richardson writes, She gazed once more at the word on the page and saw that as written by the girl. It was not a word at all, it was a picture, a hieroglyph, every letter. in itself. Beautiful. Yes. And suggesting all its associations more powerfully than did the site of the word written closely.

And I was like, Oh my gosh. That's her writing style. It's the gaps. It's the disjointedness. It's the carelessly dashed down, it feels like, at times. But then, you don't look at it up close, you look at it standing back a little bit, and then it's beautiful. And once I got to that passage, I just had a totally new relationship with this book. 

SCOTT: I think that's absolutely right. And you know, Richardson talks about what she wanted to do was not sort of have the reader as somebody who sat there as a passive recipient of the text, but she wanted a collaboration, that she thought the work of literature should be a collaboration between the writer and the reader. Now in order to do that, you have to leave gaps. You have to have inconsistencies, you have to have a sense of incompleteness. Otherwise the reader has nowhere that they can insert themselves. And I think when it works well, that's exactly what happens with her text. But she was also terribly self-critical, you know. She was always feeling that she hadn't quite achieved that style, that allowed that collaboration. So she used to write, IR in the margin of her manuscripts, meaning imperfectly realized. I haven't quite got that right. Um, and she was always trying to, to do it better and to do it differently, which creates a kind of inconsistency, which some editors of critics have seen as a fault. But I think it's just because she was always experimenting, she was always trying to do it differently, better, get exactly the right effect.

KIM: So her work is often compared to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. Also, it's been argued that it's like Henry James, which I can definitely see that. But I feel like there's more freedom to her work. What are your thoughts on, I guess, what her influences might be?

SCOTT: I think James, definitely. Charlotte Bronte. I mean, she's not impressed by that many women novelists, but Bronte is absolutely there. And the first volume of Pilgrimage is really a rewriting of Villette in lots of ways. She's very funny about Henry James. I mean, she does love Henry James. The point where she parts company with him is the way he represents women, which she just finds is completely artificial and unreal. But she talks in one letter about Henry James being in the ocean. So there's this idea of immersion, but he's in a tank and she says the tank is the middle class drawing room. He sees the ocean always from the perspective of the drawing room. And the implication is that what I want to do is get out of that tank and get into the water, totally immerse myself, and then we'll see what happens.

KIM: I think that completely makes sense. Um, he's like looking at it like as if it were a statue in front of him or a model almost. But she is like, it is the real human being right here and I'm gonna talk about that. There's something more real and fleshy about her work And more free. 

SCOTT: Maybe one of the things we forget about the late Victorian period is just how many women writers there were. There was a whole sort of genre of fiction called New Women Fiction. There were women writers writing about the possibility of living an unmarried life, but it always had to be represented as scandalous in some way. The extraordinary thing about Richardson is she makes being a single woman and independence completely ordinary, even boring at times, you know, because she's interested in exploring the boredom of being on your own. And thinking about boredom is actually quite an interesting thing to do.

AMY: So, Scott, Is that one of the reasons... i, I guess I'm trying to figure out why did she fall off the radar and then how and why did she start to reemerge from the shadows? Because it seems like there's more scholarship on her work happening today. Why is she now being recognized as important and what happened to make her disappear?

SCOTT: It's a really good question. Um, I mean, I think it's partly biographical. She didn't have a great deal of money. After the First World War, she got married and she started to divide her life between summers in London and winters in Cornwall because her husband had suspected tuberculosis, so she didn't have the financial means, nor was she particularly keen on putting herself out and about on the literacy scene. She was certainly out and about in the 1920s, but by the 1930s, after the financial crash, she was fairly withdrawn. The novels never really sold. And the gaps between each one coming out became longer and longer, so people didn't realize that this was a series. And partly it's to do with the way in which modernist literature got institutionalized in the universities after the Second World War. And it was a bunch of men, British and American, and they weren't that interested in Dorothy Richardson. One pretty important critic said to me, and he wrote his first book on Dorothy Richardson, he said, Well, I was just practicing really to write on Joyce. So . I was

like, 

That's, 

KIM: wow. 

SCOTT: I think that's how it's been viewed. But even now, Pilgrimage presents a problem. It's difficult to teach because students, you know, have difficulty getting hold of good student copies. There's a couple of good Broadview editions published by a Canadian publisher. And the big edition that I'm involved in, um, I'm afraid it's not finished yet. It's a scholarly edition so it's very expensive. But once we've got that out, we will then be able to produce paperbacks, which will be better available. 

AMY: I mean, Ulysses is a big book to dive into too, but it's one book at least, you know? You can accomplish it. Whereas when Brad pitched it to us, we were like 13 books?! No. We can't do that. But now I wanna go back and do 'em, so, um, yeah.

KIM: So speaking of that, you have this online course where it's a group reading of the Pilgrimage series in full over several months time, and I think that's still ongoing, right?

BRAD: Right. Yeah. We've been going essentially month by month, book by book, and it's been very rewarding for me personally to discover what others bring to that experience in terms of perceptions and interpretations. And I think this is definitely, number one, it is such a big book. You really do wanna pause repeatedly and bounce ideas and ask questions. And every one of those discussions, I see things that I completely missed and I hope other people have that same experience because, that's one of the ways you know you're dealing with a classic text. It doesn't offer itself up on a platter one time and you've essentially consumed the meal like a fast food.

AMY: And so it's actually too late for our listeners to, they've kind of missed the boat of joining this group, but you can go back and watch the recorded sessions, 

BRAD: right. So the site is set up so that you can start at any point and go through book by book and you'll find things to kind of help you through the book in terms of what the plot is and who are the characters. And then also the videos where we have the discussions, they'll be there all the time. 

AMY: I think having you guys here today to help talk us through it has really been helpful. It has definitely enticed me to wanna go back and read the earlier books in the series. Just have to find time now. But I think Brad, like you said, take it a chunk at a time. Maybe one every two months or something like that. They're not long books. What do you think, Kim?

KIM: Yeah, I'm in for it. Let's do it together. We can talk about it and then we can have a t-shirt or something that we could, you know, wear saying I read all 13 volumes of Dorothy 

AMY: Yeah, bragging rights. We did it. 

Yeah, If anybody wants to participate, maybe we could do a little button style pin that we can mail out to anybody that has actually accomplished it. 

BRAD: That's a great idea. I mean, it is something that it's worth encouraging folks to, to assault Mount Pilgrimage, essentially.

KIM: I love it. I love it.

AMY: The Everest of literature. Yeah.

KIM: This was a wonderful discussion. I feel like I got so much out of it, so thank you both. 

SCOTT: Thank you all for inviting me. I love what you're doing with the podcast. I think it's a fantastic idea and it really works. 

BRAD: Let's face it, Dorothy Richardson is a lost lady of lit. Uh, unfortunately, I wish that wasn't the case, but if you go out and look for her and open up and engage with her work, it just brings so much back.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. For show notes and more information, visit us at lostladiesoflit.com and be sure to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Those reviews really help new listeners find us.

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

115. Thanksgiving-ish Books and Films

KIM: Hey, everyone! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY: So, fun fact for y’all… the first project Kim and I ever collaborated on was back when we were in our 20s. We had a blog that we wrote called “Romancing the Tome,” which was all about book-to-film literary adaptations and costume dramas.

KIM: Oh my god, we had so much fun working on that together. We actually kept it going for about a decade (from 2004-2013) and it’s fun to go back and look at it, although honestly, when I do, I can’t remember writing ANY of it actually!

AMY: I know! You have sent a few things to me recently like, “Remember this?” and I’m like, “No, I have no memory of this. Did I write that? What?” In fact, I saw that I had written a limerick about Tess of the D’Urbervilles which was brand new to me when I saw it again. 

KIM: I don’t remember that at all.

AMY: There must have been a PBS Tess of the D’Urbervilles movie at the time.

KIM: There was. Yeah.

AMY: Okay. So I wrote for the blog: 

There was a poor girl named Tess

Her life was a tragic hot mess.

Her "cuz" did assault her (Will Angel now fault her?)

Stay tuned, and bring Kleenex, I guess.

I mean, I think that’s pretty damn good!

KIM: It’s excellent.

AMY: I can only pat myself on the back because I don't have any memory of writing it. It's like some other disembodied me.

KIM: The burgeoning of our writing career. We were testing things out. I think it’s great. But anyway, while recently going back to re-read that old blog we found many forgotten and I’ll say I think hidden treasures (you’ll have to be the judge of that) including a post we did that seemed apropos for Thanksgiving, which we’re celebrating this week in the States.

AMY: Yeah, so on the blog we were kind of talking about literature and, you know, movies and TV shows that would be set in Colonial America. We thought it would be fun to share them again with you in honor of the holiday this week. Maybe you’ll want to curl up on the couch this year after gorging on turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and indulge in some Pilgrim-adjacent entertainment. It’s not really a time period that gets too much attention in Hollywood, is it, Kim?

KIM: No, and I wonder if it’s because the Pilgrims had no fashion sense. I think anybody would think that’s true. They don’t have fashion sense. I mean, there’s nothing fun or flashy about Puritans. In fact, it’s pretty bad.

AMY: It’s hard to imbue glamor into that era.

KIM: That’s not a flattering look for men or women.

AMY: Yeah, Hollywood is like, “No, thank you.” The fashion, though, reminds me. Did you always used to make those paper pilgrim hats in elementary school? 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Boys would make the top hat-looking thing and the girls would make these white bonnet things out of tissue paper. I have so many memories of making those. My mom would always put me in a long, 70s dress and then I’d be wearing my paper Pilgrim bonnet.

KIM: If you can find (or your mom can find) a picture of that, we’ll have to post it on our Instagram account.

AMY: Yeah, I know we have one.  Okay. So anyway, getting back to our list for today, Kim, let's talk about our first suggestion.

KIM: Okay. So we've gotta start with Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Right? Of course you've read it right?

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. I can't remember when. I know it was for a class, so I think probably in high school, um, the story, to jog your memory, is set among the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was written in 1850 though. Uh, and it's kind of an amazingly feminist tale, even though it doesn't seem that way on the surface.

KIM: Yeah, that's true. It kind of is shockingly feminist in a way, and I actually, I have read that more than once. I really liked it. It might be time to read it again.

AMY: Have you seen any of the film adaptations?

KIM: Um, I don't know if I've seen it, but I'm remembering there was one with Demi Moore, right? And that one's popping into my head.

AMY: I think that's the most classic one, just because it is so bad that it's the one everyone remembers. And I have the funniest story about that. So in college, my roommate Meg (sometimes you hear me refer to Meg on the podcast) she and I were co-presidents of the English Club in college

KIM: I love it. 

AMY: And so we were responsible for planning events and stuff. And it was right when that Demi Moore, um, Gary Oldman was also in the movie. So she plays Hester Prynn, Gary Oldman plays Dimmesdale.

KIM: I can picture him in a pilgrim outfit.

AMY: Oh yeah, 

KIM: Anyway…

AMY: So it was 1995. I don't know what year I was in college, but we, as the English Club co-presidents were like, “Let's invite everybody in the club. We'll go to a screening of this, right?” So we put out the marketing for it. Whatever. “Come join us on this afternoon. We're all gonna caravan to the movie theater. We'll meet at this park bench on campus first.” So Meg and I meet at the park bench and the only person that turns up is one of our professors who is kind of awkward. He was like the Shakespeare professor. I think he was one of the faculty chairs of the English club. You had to have like the professor that sponsored it or whatever. No one else showed up. Like, literally no one else came to this event. And Meg and I were excited to go, but now it's suddenly me, you and this guy? What? And luckily he saw how awkward it probably was and he's like, "You guys just go ahead and go. I think I'll set this one out." Like, thank God. Because there was also, there was like the weird sex scene in the barn, but there was a ton of grain...

KIM: I feel like it's part of the exploitation of Demi Moore that was going on during that time. 

AMY: Yes. Yeah. And it had a really weird ending. I think they gave it a happy ending.

KIM: Oh God, how do you do that? You know what? I feel like that would make a really, I feel like it's time for that. I mean, you know, it kind of fits with like “The Handmaid's Tale” almost and stuff like that. Like I could see it really doing well right now.

AMY: Yeah. Well if you think about it, they did do a kind of nineties updated version, Easy A with Emma Stone?

KIM: Oh that's right. That's so great. So I have seen... in that way, I have seen an adaptation of it, because I love that movie. I haven't seen it in a while, but I did love that when it came out.

AMY: And there was a 1926 silent film version of this book starring Lillian Gish. The only reason I mention it, I highly, highly recommend that you go on YouTube and find a clip from this, because there's a scene where Hester Prynn is holding her baby while she's walking to the gallows and she nails the scene. I mean, silent films, they're hard to appreciate, you know what I mean? But in this, you see why she's a movie star, because she gives Dimmesdale the most perfectly cutting dagger eyes. And then on the flip side, the actor playing Dimmesdale, he looks like Will Ferrell and his acting is as buffoonish as Will Ferrell's. I mean, Will Ferrell would look like a serious contender for this role compared to the guy they actually cast. it's just such a weird mismatch. Cause she's nailing it and it's so intense and it's so poignant. And then you've got this like utter buffoon. But she is a full on badass in the scene. It's like, take three minutes outta your day and go find it. 

KIM: I'm gonna watch it. We'll link to it,

AMY: Yeah, exactly. So, all right, let's move on to our next Pilgrim-esque book. This one is actually kind of a stretch, but go ahead, Kim.

KIM: Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, I could see where this made our list. Uh, The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper.

AMY: Who by the way, is the grand uncle of writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, who was one of our previous lost ladies. I don't think we even had time in that episode to mention her connection to James Fenimore Cooper. But they were related.

KIM: Right. And the film version of that one has Daniel Day Lewis. And basically what they did to make that hot is I think they took his shirt off a lot. He wore like, an open shirt… 

AMY: Yes. And the long hair, like the long, romance-novel hair. 

KIM: I picture that more than the book. Like I just picture that movie and him, like running in his, you know, romantic shirt with the long hair. 

AMY: Tomahawk in his hand. Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: It's just like a famous cinematic... you know, it just, it comes to mind so easily. Yeah. He was the Mohican-reared Natty Bumpo. He's Nathaniel Poe in the movie, which is a nicer, I guess, sounding name.

AMY: I did see the movie. I don't know if I was in high school maybe. I don't think I've ever read any of those “Leatherstocking Tales” except for maybe an excerpt in English class at one point. And it didn't appeal to me at all.

KIM: Same. 

AMY: But Madeleine Stowe is also in that movie, and the reason I say it's a stretch is because this is set about a century after the first Thanksgiving. So in terms of our timeline, we're getting pretty loosey goosey here, but it still feels Thanksgiving-ish, right?

KIM: Oh, totally. I feel, yeah, it's definitely part of the theme, for sure. Yeah. 

AMY: And we're not done with Daniel Day Lewis just yet because he also starred in our third literary adaptation that we want to mention: The Crucible. Um, this is probably not the right time period, either.

KIM: It's of, generally. 

AMY: Yeah, it's like by give or take 500 years. Um, so that's the play of course by Arthur Miller. The film that I remember, uh, was from 1996. It stars Daniel Day Lewis as John Proctor, and then Winona Ryder as Williams. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Joan Allen's in it too.

AMY: Did you see that one?

KIM: Yeah, it's been a long time. I don't remember that as iconically as I remember The Last of Mohicans, and I love Daniel Day Lewis movies, but yeah, I did. I, I think I did see it. 

AMY: I remember Joan Allen in that movie, which makes me think she must have been really incredible in it. But really what I remember from the play and any version of that is just the hysterical teenage girls, you know? They always like really sell it. "I saw Goodie Proctor with the Devil!" How can you not love that? 

KIM: Yeah, if only the Beatles had come earlier, they could have focused all their hysteria on somebody else!

AMY: Oh my God. Somebody should do like a mash up of Beetle mania. Tie it all together somehow? Yeah, yeah. 

KIM: Um, the play was originally written during the Red Scare and McCarthyism, and it almost feels like it speaks to some of the hysteria we're seeing from people politically today, so.

AMY: Yeah, I could see, you know, you were talking about the Scarlet Letter remade. This one feels really ripe.

KIM: Yeah, I'd agree. I agree. Yeah, absolutely.

AMY: Okay. So all the films we mentioned so far are pretty angsty. This next one will be a bit lighter, I think. Um, it's from 2004, a TV series called "Colonial House." Now I am a huge fan of this whole series of shows. Yeah, so this is a reality show where the 25 contestants, which are a combination of adults and children, they attempt to live for five months as if it's the year 1628 in New England. You can still find it on Apple TV and Amazon Prime video. And I think if you have Paramount Plus it's there, too. Um, I always think I would want to go on one of these shows and to really live and you have like a historian talking you through it to like teach you how everything worked. And I think that would be so fun, but it really looked pretty hellish because this is not a fun era to live in. It's not comfortable at all. Grueling is how I would describe that lifestyle, but it's really fun to watch though. 

KIM: Yeah. Okay, so I want to suggest a novel that should make this list. It hasn't been adapted for film or TV yet, but maybe it should be. The Refugees: A Tale of Two Continents. And I actually have a beautiful old hard back of this. It's gorgeous. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it. It spans two continents and it tells the story of a French Huguenot family's flight to the New World from the court of Louis XIV. Once they arrive, they must travel through hundreds of miles of untamed wilderness evading Native Americans as they flee a malevolent Jesuit priest. It's really good.

AMY: That does sound good. And it's Arthur Conan Doyle? 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: I just think of him as Sherlock Holmes. 

KIM: I know! I found it at a used bookstore. I'd never even heard of it. That happens sometimes, and I just loved it. Um, and I feel like it could be a really great mini series. 

AMY: The Refugees. Okay. 

KIM: Yeah. They, we wanna change the name. Maybe just A Tale of Two Continents. 

AMY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So the last one I'm going to throw in is a more recent-ish movie. I mean, it's not too recent, but The Village, M. Night Shyamalan, however you say his last name. I know some people hated it, but I liked it. Bryce Dallas Howard is really good in it. Did you ever see it, Kim?

KIM: I did. Um, I, I don't remember. Isn't River... or not River, isn't what Joaquin Phoenix in it?

AMY: I think so, yeah, it's a bit scary. So if you're looking for those kind of vibes this Thanksgiving night, maybe that's an option.

KIM: Yeah. If you wanna have nightmares with your turkey.

AMY: Your tryptophan nightmares. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. 

KIM: You know what? All the talk that we did about, um, The Last of the Mohicans actually makes me think of a Colin Farrell movie that might work: The New World. Doesn't that also have the same Last of the Mohicans kind of feel?

AMY: Yeah. It's like the first explorers on the continent. That was one of those movies that was so hyped at the time and then it kind of fizzled a little bit when it came out. 

KIM: Colin Farrel was like...

AMY: BIg. Yeah, all right. So that's good. I mean, I think that's hard to come up with books in that vein. Listeners, if anybody else has other kind of colonial-era novels that you wanna suggest, give us a shout-out. Rosemary. I know you must know some. 

KIM: Yes, Rosemary, something. 

AMY: And Wendy-Marie.

KIM: Yeah, let us know.

AMY: Yeah. And other than that, we'll conclude this episode and see you back next week. So thank you everyone. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.

114. Elsie Robinson with Allison Gilbert

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

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. Today we’re discussing Elsie Robinson, a newspaper columnist from the first half of the 20th century whose daily copy reached 20 million per day (and millions more through syndication).  In her day, she was the highest-paid woman writer in the newspaper business  — although, no surprise, she was still woefully undercompensated for the staggering amount of advice columns, feature articles and breaking news stories she churned out.

AMY: “I am not a columnist. I am a factory,” she  wrote in a letter to her boss, William Randolph Hearst, in which she demanded more money after years of asking for (and being denied) a raise. Over her 40-year career, she wrote more than 9,000 columns and articles, and to top it all off, she even drew her own accompanying editorial cartoons!

KIM: Years earlier she’d walked away from a life of privilege in search of personal freedom, toiled in a gold mine as a single mother, and eventually hit rock-bottom before clawing her way to national success, becoming a household name revered by both adults and young people alike. On top of all this, she wrote poetry and short stories and penned a memoir. 

AMY: I mean, she was an Oprah-level superstar, and yet today, the name Elsie Robinson draws only blank stares. So we’re thrilled to welcome a guest today who knows more than anyone about Robinson’s inspiring life journey from misfit to miner to media maven. 

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

[intro music] 

AMY: Our guest today, Allison Gilbert, is an Emmy-Award-winning journalist and regular contributor to the New York Times. She has written several books on coping after the death of one’s parents in addition to being a co-editor on the book Covering Catastrophe: Broadcast Journalists Report September 11. Allison also hosted a 20-part documentary series called “Women Journalists of 9/11: Their Stories” in collaboration with the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, for which she also narrates the historical exhibition audio tour.

KIM: Her latest book is Listen, World! How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman, published in September by Seal Press and written in collaboration with Julia Scheeres. Allison, thank you for joining us! Welcome to the show!

ALLISON: I am so honored and pleased to be here. Thanks for having me.

AMY: Of course. So you explain in the book how you first discovered Elsie Robinson. You write about that in the afterward to Listen, World. But I would love for you to share it with our listeners right off the bat because I think it's such a touching anecdote.

ALLISON: Well, it's deeply personal, so I'm very happy to share it and honored that you would ask me. It happened rather fortuitously, and rather oddly for me to say fortuitously, because that kind of conjures that it was a very happy, uplifting moment. But it was after my mother died. I was going through her belongings, packing up my childhood home to get it ready for sale. And I was really having a tough time. I had just basically graduated college. I was 25, and I felt way too young to have lost my mom and grappling with all those emotions. I wasn't married, didn't have kids. I had this incredible long line of adulthood ahead of me without her, and I was making the chore of packing up her stuff take a really long time, and what that meant for me was going through all her books, opening each one, shaking them as vigorously as I could to see if any notes or pieces of paper or dollar bills or who knows what would have fallen out or to look at her annotations. What did she underline? Just wanting to see my mom's handwriting again. And low and behold, something did indeed fall out of one of the books. So my mom had retyped a poem on onion skin paper, and it was a poem called "Pain," and it was the most tough-love poem about grief I had ever read. It was like being slapped across the face, like that Moonstruck moment. "Snap out of it!" It was like that. And it was attributed to Elsie Robinson. And I had no idea who that was, and I had to find out.

AMY: So it's like your mom was kind of sending you a message right there. 

ALLISON: Yeah, in so many ways, writing this biography of Elsie Robinson, it began at that moment because I had to know why my mother was called to retype this poem by this writer. And the tone was so in keeping with my mom's POV of motherhood, which was also kind of do it yourself, you know, figure it out on your own. And not that she didn't love me, but she thought the best way to show love was to make sure I could be a survivor. And Elsie Robinson's voice, the way she writes, and we have uncovered, you know, 9,000 of her newspaper columns, poems, essays, and I'm sure we'll be talking about her writing, um, she is the most incredible, in my view, Lost Woman of Lit because she had this incredible voice and it helped me get through the loss of my mom. But her voice and her words also helped me raise my kids. It helped me think through even urgent issues that we still discuss today that have nothing to do with family. Her take on race and her take on antisemitism, or capital punishment. You name it, I read it, I felt it, and it made me feel incredibly lucky to have written this book with my co-partner, but, really, I don't wanna be too hokey, but with my mom.

KIM: That's beautiful. It gives me the chills. That's really wonderful. Yeah. So at what point following that discovery did you actually start researching this book? And then how hard was it to unearth Elsie's story once you began?

ALLISON: So there are three answers to the "how long did it take?" question. So my mother died nearly 30 years ago, and so it's been a slow burn of compiling information. Listen, World, our biography, is the first to be written about Elsie Robinson. So the bread crumbs were few. So we really had to do the exhumation of her life on our own, which of course is time consuming. And then about 11 years ago, I would say, the slow burn turned more serious when I said to my literary agent, "This is my next project. I really wanna write this biography. It's speaking to me in every conceivable way." Um, and I struggled. I struggled with how to tell the story. Um, it beat me. I just couldn't wrestle the story in a way that I felt was compelling enough to move forward. And then about, I would say, three years ago-ish, that's when Julia and I became incredible collaborators. And she really is the only reason why we were able to get this book over that finish line. I mean, what an incredible, you know, writer, partner in crime to have. Julia and I have actually only met in person three times. So yeah, the whole book was really done on Google Docs. It was done via email, via texting each other at all hours of the day and night. There were three times where we've actually met in person and we managed to pull off something that we are both incredibly proud of and really feel like it lifts up this forgotten woman into the realm of being reread and appreciated. And I hope once readers get their hands on it, they will feel, um, a little bit more knowledgeable about how hard it was to kind of go after your dreams. Even a hundred years ago in this country, it was tough.

AMY: Yeah. So let's dive into her story then. So like one of our previous lost ladies from this year, Miriam Michaelson, Elsie grew up in this sort of rough-and-tumble town out west. It was called Benicia, California, in the Bay Area. Allison, you write that living here gave Elsie "a radical empathy and open mindedness" that she'd use later in her writing career. So tell us how this girlhood shaped her.

ALLISON: She was born in 1883 and she grew up the way we, I think, envision the Victorian era. Constraining corsets and long dresses and high collars that she found not only literally suffocating, but of course figuratively suffocating. Yes, Benicia was by Western standards, somewhat open. It's a waterfront town. Gold miners would come in with their pockets of gold, you know. You would have people coming in by the shiploads, cargo and people of transient populations coming in from many foreign lands. This was an expansive landscape both in geography, but also in just how people of different cultures and races and religions came together. This was all in front of her. We also write there was a, you know, a red light district towards the water, and up on top of the hill there was a convent. And so there was this wonderful friction between the God-fearing souls of Benicia and those more renegade souls who were downtown. And this was all about her childhood, this push and pull of good and bad, evil and light. She wanted a bigger life that she saw. Where did those ships come from? Where do those trains go? These were the questions that she had and were occupying her mind when she was a teenager, and she wanted to see what was out there.

KIM: My ears actually perked up when I read in your book that she was a fan of the novels of Margaret Wolf Hungerford. We did an episode last year on her, and Elsie was also reading a ton and writing from an early age, right?

ALLISON: She was a voracious reader. You know, she also loved to write, and what she would say is that it was for nobody else but her. She was also an incredible illustrator and eventually, um, when she did have a child, she had a son, she would write stories and draw pictures to entertain him. And so this was something that was going on throughout her entire life.

KIM: And she wasn't just reading and writing. You kind of said a little bit earlier, um, about it, but she was out and about. She was noticing everything. She wanted to experience it all and soak it up, including, and you have a great story about this, the red light district. I mean, wouldn't you wanna know more about that?

ALLISON: It's interesting, you know, there were places and things that she wanted to see and claw her way into that were really off limits. And she found herself more comfortable playing with the boys, being with the boys, having more access when she was kind of running around with them, then being prim and proper back with the girls. She was much more comfortable in what we would call tomboy time, right? Getting dirty, as she would say, swiping watermelons from neighborhood gardens. Um, and this also informed her sensibility. We, I'm sure, will talk about her time working in the gold mines. And this is another reason why that is completely believable. At first, you're like, "Really? You worked for three years, the only woman in a gold mine amongst men?" And yes, she was always more comfortable with men, with boys. It made her feel that she could say what she wanted to say and be heard. And that was validating to her.

AMY: And so back to the red light district though, she's kinda wandering around down there with eyes wide open . It just points to like that nosy reporter instinct.

ALLISON: Yes! Oh yes. She, uh, was very happy to peer through ajar doors and if you're gonna be a reporter, you have to be very comfortable peering through ajar doors. And so I think you're right to bring up her experience with the red light district where she saw prostitutes doing their work, where she was literally seeing a transaction between adults that perhaps was unseemly to those up the hill by the convent, uh, to her was eye opening and it just showed her there were many ways of living a life.

AMY: So the memoir that Elsie goes on to write later in life is called I Wanted Out! So even though Benicia, like you said, is vibrant and exciting and there's a lot going on, it's kind of the first place from which she wants to escape. She realizes there's so much out in the world that she wants to explore. And there's a great anecdote from the book about her standing alone in a cemetery up the street from her girlhood home. Can you tell that story?

ALLISON: Yeah, it's such a great story. So one night she's in her childhood home and she is just getting antsy, antsy, antsier to leave. And she wants to kind of take her case, as she would say, to God. And so from her point of view, where would God be? Where would he hear her or she hear her, uh, the loudest? And so in her teenage estimation, that was getting out of bed in her nightgown, walking up the hill to the cemetery, taking her case directly to God, saying I wanted out, show me the way. And soon enough someone does come to show her a potential way out. There was a visitor who came to Benicia, and that was certainly a very exciting ticket, potentially, to see the rest of the country.

KIM: I can just see that scene being filmed of her in the graveyard. It's like, "Hollywood, are you listening?"

ALLISON: Oh, you know what? I'm so glad that you say that because when we were writing this book, there are so many parts of it where you're like, "Really? Did this actually happen?" The way she's talking about it really does seem so cinematic, and we, as biographers, took great pains to retrace every step. Could that have been possible? Could you have gone in your nightgown from her childhood home to this top of the hill? Like, how far really was that? Like, we wanted to make sure we were doing those types of really rigorous calculations and then some, right? So every single story that we share, um, is cited in the footnotes of how we know this is how it went down. So we feel very, um, comfortable as biographers with those citations. Because in some ways, as you just said, Kim, it's so Hollywood that sometimes you wonder did it really happen. And so Julia and I invested a great deal of time triangulating Elsie Robinson's version of events.

KIM: So listeners, you can just let go and enjoy it. You don't have to worry.

ALLISON: Yes, Yes, 

KIM: yes, 

AMY: Yeah, it's true because when you're dealing with somebody that's such a great storyteller, you do have to pause for a second and be like, "Wait, is she embellishing?" But okay, so that's good to know that we've got all this kind of fact checked for us.

KIM: So after this graveyard scene, she's excited because she thinks she's going to get to go to college. Her older sister goes to college. Um, she gets to watch that amazing experience. Her sister comes home on vacation and talks about all the stuff she's doing there. She even gets to attend her sister's graduation, but then she finds out she's not going to get to go to college.

ALLISON: Yeah, that was heartbreaking for a girl who grew up loving words. To not be able to proceed like her siblings was crushing. There was only one other option for her. It was to get married. The social strictures of the day were get married, have children.

AMY: Okay, so this brings us to this mysterious visitor to Benicia, which you alluded to earlier. A handsome stranger who comes to town, a young widower from a very wealthy East Coast family who happened to be visiting a friend in town, and he and Elsie lock eyes at church, and that's pretty much it. She feels like she's ready to marry this guy and be whisked away to a new life. However, there is one small catch. Allison, explain that for us.

ALLISON: Well, you're right. He comes from this incredibly wealthy family in Brattleboro, Vermont, and his entire family, his siblings all grew up going to Northfield Seminary and Mount Hermon School. This institution is still in existence today called Northfield Mount Hermon, and so if she was going to marry, his name is Christie, if she was gonna marry Christie, his parents made a deal. You can marry our son, you westerner you, if when you come east you attend Northfield and you get a little polish and you learn about God and you learn how to keep house and you learn all of those wifery skills that she would need in order to be a member of the Christie Crowell household. And was it a household! They lived in Lindenhurst, which was a 37-room mansion. Enormous. This incredible opulence. And in order to live there she needed to present in a certain way. And so for one year she had to apply and then matriculate, and then attend Northfield Seminary.

AMY: "You're just not quite good enough for us yet, little lady." It's kind of insulting. 

KIM: It's so insulting. Yeah. Yeah. So then she gets to the seminary and by the time her year there is over, she's already getting the sense that the marriage to Christie was not really what she wanted. She's begging her mother to let her break off the engagement, but she's ultimately pressured to go through with it. 

ALLISON: Yeah, I think that she saw the writing on the wall. She would leave Northfield with him on some weekends to go back to Lindenhurst, this mansion in Brattleboro, Vermont and to spend time with his family, like you would to get used to your boyfriend, you know, your fiance's family. And it was just somber. There was no levity, there was no gaiety. But even more so, it's a very Puritan New England home where God is first, happiness is second. It was very proper, and it just felt like the mistake was getting larger by the day.

KIM: can imagine the looks. You did kind of describe the differences in dinner tables from her home and the exuberance of it and everything to this staid environment where they're kind of looking askance at her and she's getting in trouble if she even, you know, cracks a smile or shows any sense of humor.

AMY: Paging Megan Markle.

KIM: I know.

AMY: What I kept thinking of, you know, like Megan Markle trying to fit in with these uptight Windsors when she's lived a more, you know, relaxed and carefree life. So she goes somewhere and is being stifled and told to shut up basically.

ALLISON: That is perfect. I have never heard that. That is the exact way to put it. I love it.

AMY: So once again, to reference Elsie's memoir, she wanted out. She called life in Brattleboro "hell on earth." Those are her words, and described herself as "frantic for freedom." And so she found another unlikely ticket. Uh, Alison, tell us about this.

ALLISON: So near Lindenhurst mansion where she lived, uh, there is still in existence today a hospital for the mentally insane and there was a patient there who had off campus privileges, like many people at the assignment did, where they were able to mingle with the regular towns folk.

His name is Robert. Robert Wallace. And he was also estranged from his family because of his own struggles. And he wanted to write a children's book, but every children's book needs an illustrator. And he was recommended to reach out to Elsie Robinson, who was always known as being this prolific, not only writer, but also a fantastic illustrator. And so they partnered on two children's books. He was the writer, she was the illustrator. And, um, a romance blossomed.

AMY: Again, you're reading it thinking, "No way."

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: You know, so I'm just gonna jump ahead to, they decide to skip town. They're not happy in Brattleboro anymore, so let's both just get outta here. 

ALLISON: Yeah, it wasn't immediate, but they ended up in this town called Hornitos, which is in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in the heart of the mother lode where people have gone for years to mine for gold. And Robert, being that he was, um, delusional in many ways because he was a patient again at this mental hospital, he thought he was gonna go strike it rich. And for a time he actually was successful. So Elsie ended up following him there, but then he left. But she stuck. And she wanted to make a go of it because she had no other options at this time. She was a single mom and she needed to make money. She needed to survive. And so what was she gonna do? She became a gold miner.

KIM: It's amazing.

AMY: Crazy. And yeah, so she's a single mom. We didn't really mention the birth of George, but she has one, one son.

ALLISON: And he's so cute. He's so 

KIM: He

AMY: He is cute, but he is, uh, sadly, you know, in ill health for pretty much all of his life, right?

ALLISON: He was born with a chronic bronchial issue. He had chronic asthma. This was in the days before there were any sort of easy cure for an asthma attack, right? And so an asthma attack could literally be deadly. There were many times when Elsie was caring for him where his skin would be turning blue, where she really thought that he was gasping for his last breath. I can't say, I mean, as a mom, I found some of her recollections of George's ill health to be absolutely searing, because I felt her concern for him. So she was there in Hornitos with George and part of the, um, upside of Hornitos, of course there was backbreaking labor, but part of the reason why she wanted to be there not only to make money, is that the air in Hornitos was easier for her son to breathe. Doctors at that time, at the turn of the century, were advocating geography as a cure for asthma, and Hornitos checked those boxes.

AMY: So she is in the mining business. She's swinging a pickaxe, she's doing the hard labor.

ALLISON: I know, it's crazy.

AMY: I know. And then, you know, also meanwhile taking care of her son, cooking, doing the laundry, all that. And, oh yeah, on the side, let me just start up a writing career here. So, um, Allison, let's talk about sort of how she gets her start writing, but then I also want you to talk about this "Indiana Jones" moment that you had in Hornitos.

ALLISON: Well, we had such a great time going to Hornitos. I don't wanna really call it a ghost town. I mean, there are a few people who live there, but it's basically a ghost town. So she was there and at night, after she walked, imagine, you walk four miles to your job. You are in a gold mine for what, 8, 9, 10 hours a day. You walk four miles back to your hut where you are living with your son. Cook him dinner. Make sure he's doing some sort of homework lessons, you know, making sure that he's kind of staying apace. And then once that's done, then you are turning on your kerosene can lamp. You're turning over a packing box on which to put your manual typewriter and you're typing at night. Clickety-click, clickety-click, where people could probably hear you through the cabin walls late at night. Imagine that side hustle. Imagine being so interested in pursuing your path that that's what sustained you. That's what fueled you to stay up late at night. It was incredible. And in terms of that moment that you were just describing, uh, when Julia and I went to Hornitos, we are 99.9% certain that we actually discovered the actual typewriter that Elsie Robinson learned to type on. Because she did not know how to type. She was gifted a typewriter from her one very close girlfriend that she made in Hornitos. And that woman changed the course of Elsie Robinson's life and really birthed her writing career.

KIM: Wow. 

AMY: I can just picture you guys, like, screaming at the discovery of the typewriter.

ALLISON: It was incredible. It was a Smith Premier, which is the name of the typewriter, and there was a cover that was over the top of it and it was covered in like what, an inch or two of dust.

AMY: Where exactly were you?

ALLISON: We were in the old post office of Hornitos that had actually been shuttered since the mid 1950s. And Elsie Robinson died in 1956, and that post office has not been in use since. And the reason why the post office was so important to our research, I mentioned that she was gifted this typewriter by this friend of hers, Luella Rogers. Luella ran the post office and there were lots of artifacts from Rogers in the post office, and one of them was this typewriter. So yes, when we found this, and we worked with all these typewriter experts, which there are many manual typewriter enthusiasts. Um, it was really fun to date the typewriter and we were so excited to include the images in the book.

AMY: So what was she writing on this typewriter?

ALLISON: Oh, it was amazing. We found the first fiction stories that she ever published. She wrote in magazines that we may not be familiar with today. She would write them on her typewriter, walk them to the post office, mail them off to New York or Boston to get viewed by an editor. She wrote for Black Cat Magazine. She wrote... 

AMY: Wait, didn't she send her first story to like Harper's or something like, super impressive? 

ALLISON: The Atlantic. She sent it to The Atlantic and I think her line was, her "tail feathers were immediately clipped." Like she knew that she had kind of small 

AMY: Let's start 

ALLISON: her. 

AMY: Yes, girl , you're just beginning. Yeah.

ALLISON: You know what I love that. She had moxy, right? She wasn't waiting for this invitation, this red carpet. She just thought she was bold and she had talent, and so why wouldn't you start there? That's part of Elsie Robinson's attitude that I found so intoxicating is that she was bold. She had courage, and I think that she had incredible, incredible confidence, and I find that to be many of the qualities I would love my own daughter to have. I want her to be bold and have courage and moxy and not wait for invitations and not be passive, but to be proactive. I mean, all these qualities that Elsie has, um, I feel are so timely that I just want my daughter to grow up. I want my daughter to read my biography of Elsie Robinson that Julie and I wrote, because I feel like there's life instructions for us even today.

KIM: I love it. I love it. Okay, so she is living a difficult life, but she's living it to the fullest it seems like. Um, do you think she has any regrets about leaving her cushy life on the East Coast at all or no?

ALLISON: No. In fact, I think that's part of her remarkable story. You would think that the worst part of her life was when she got to Hornitos where she had no money, where she was working as this gold miner, where her life was literally in peril, day in and day out, 600 feet below the surface of the earth, running away from dynamite blasts, getting dirty, getting bloody. And yet she says that was the best time of her life.

KIM: Bravo.

AMY: And doesn't she even kinda say , "I feel like there are a lot of nice East Coast women out there who would kill to trade lives with me"?

ALLISON: Yes. Yes. And of course, this is what's so remarkable. She could have chosen to stay in the mansion. She could have chosen to keep this cushy life. She had it. It was there. But yet what's so remarkable, it's like that is still not enough. That still wasn't fulfilling. That wasn't fueling her soul. It's like what Oprah always says, like no matter how much money you have, the money doesn't buy happiness. And it's the gratitude that is what's sustaining. And I feel that Elsie had this gratitude for being able to pursue a passion. And then once she started getting that initial success, once her fiction started to sell, once she got that first job in the newspaper business, then be got this incredible career where she became the highest paid woman writer in the entire William Randolph Hearst Media empire, that is what was fulfilling to her, to make it on her own terms. And I just find that to be incredibly inspiring.

AMY: And so she solidifies this choice, this personal choice, by divorcing Christy Crowell. A very nasty, very public divorce. So when the dust settles from that, again, I want out, I want out of Hornitos finally. So she takes her little boy and they move to San Francisco in 1918. But as soon as they do, George's asthma flares up. So now she is a single mother, new to San Francisco, no money, no prospects, a very sick child. It is really the most anguishing moment in your biography. She is contemplating taking drastic measures, right?

ALLISON: She saw there were only two choices. Either she was gonna turn to prostitution to make ends meet. She had already seen that in Benicia. She knew how that worked. She understood it. Or she was going to take her own life. She didn't see a way out.

AMY: Yeah, It's a harrowing description from her memoir that you include in the book . So obviously she didn't do either. What happened?

ALLISON: Well, she decides to, um, dig deeper. She did a mental calculation in her brain about which newspapers in the Bay Area had a children's section and which papers did. And the only one that did not have a children's section was The Oakland Tribune. And so she would cross the bay with examples of her drawings that she drew for George, examples of her drawings, and of course that she had worked on with Robert Wallace for those children's book projects. And she went to the editor and said, "Look at this work. I can do this job." And that's what gave her her first job at The Oakland Tribune. That editor gave her her first shot.

KIM: I feel like I'm gonna cry. I mean, I felt like it reading it and I feel like it hearing it. This woman is incredible. 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. All she needed was that one shot, and it turned her life around. Suddenly, she's going like gangbusters, right.

ALLISON: Originally the opportunity was to write a children's column, which she did. It became so successful that it expanded over time to a page, and then two pages, and then ultimately it became so popular they renamed a section of the newspaper Aunt Elsie's Magazine. It was eight pages. Kids joined "Aunt Elsie" Clubs all over the state of California. They would get membership cards, they would get membership pins. They were live shows that were put on in her honor. I mean, even parades were held in her honor, and children would dress up as their favorite characters in Aunt Elsie's magazine. We have actually been in touch with people who are in their seventies, in their eighties, one is even 101 years old. They remember how proud they were to have corresponded with "Aunt Elsie."

KIM: Wow, that's so cool. So in our introduction, we referenced the letter to Hearst where Elsie calls herself a factory. And this was no exaggeration. Um, can you talk a little bit about the amount of work she was actually doing in her heyday?

ALLISON: Well, in her heyday, her column... the reason why our biography is called Listen, World! Is because her column was called "Listen, World!" and we did a wild project, and I say wild because it was exhaustive and exhausting. We did a database compilation, and we have discovered that she wrote approximately 9,000 columns in her career, and that is from her "Listen, World!" Day. She also had other columns. One was called "Cry on Geraldine's Shoulder." She was Geraldine. She also had a "Cheer Up" column before she became Aunt Elsie. She also wrote poetry. She was also a breaking news reporter. William Randolph Hearst himself would send her to cover breaking news. And so she had a lot on her plate, and the quantity is what is remarkable.

AMY: And you incorporate so much of her writing throughout your book, which I love. She's just so funny and sassy, and like you said, there's like a wisdom that she brings, like a tough love. That's why I do, I compare her to Oprah a little bit, because she's this media sensation, but she's also like that maternal figure that you kind of just go to for advice. Well, literally people are going to her for advice, but there's just something comforting about her and also no nonsense. Listeners, if you want examples of what we're talking about, get a copy of Listen, World, you know, you're gonna be able to really get a feel for her writing style.

ALLISON: I love the fact that you appreciate that we brought Elsie's voice front and center in the biography. That was, um, very purposeful. We of course realized that nobody reading our book would likely go find all of Elsie's columns, all of Elsie's poems, you know. Her memoir is really hard to go and find. And so we thought the best way of telling Elsie Robinson's story was having Elsie Robinson tell her own story. And the best way to do that, because she was such a prolific writer, was to draw really nonstop from her columns, from her poems, through even some of her letters that we got access to, uh, to write this book. And so I think it really goes to the point, you know, we were aware that there's been a steady erasure of women's histories over time. And so why not let Elsie Robinson, who had something important to say, say it for herself? And so we allowed Elsie equal space, so to speak, on the page. Yes, we are the authors of the book. There's plenty of our voice in trying to create some context about what Elsie was going through. But Elsie, we really wanted her to speak for herself and she does.

AMY: And she doesn't sound old fashioned, or it's not like flowery Victoriana kind of style. It sounds like a friend right now today is talking to 

ALLISON: Yes. In fact, I'll say this, and it sounds so self-serving to say this, but The New York Times did a wonderful review of Listen, World, and one of my favorite lines from this New York Times book review is "One does not tire of spending time with Elsie Robinson." 

KIM: I would a hundred percent agree. Yeah, absolutely.

AMY: And thank God your mom loved her poem so much that she typed it out because we might still not know.

KIM: Yeah.

ALLISON: Well, isn't that the craziest thing, right? It's not lost on me that if my mother hadn't died, maybe we still wouldn't know who Else Robinson is today. And while I would want my mom back in a heartbeat, I miss her so much, I do have to recognize this unexpected gift from her death. And writing this book has made me feel one of those gifts is how close to her I felt during it. That's something I hold onto.

AMY: It feels like this whole project was meant to be, but at the same time, it's not just fate because the amount of work that you and Julia both put into this is so evident. We loved reading Listen, World. We really encourage all of our listeners to go out and get a copy, learn about Elsie, read some of her writing through the book. And just thank you so much for coming on today to give us a glimpse into her story, but also into your journey of telling her story. It's been fascinating.

ALLISON: Thank you so much. I am so grateful, Amy, Kim. This has been such a joy. I've loved getting to know you guys, and I am so honored to be here with you.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you enjoyed it, please show us your appreciation by leaving us a five-star review wherever you listen. It only takes a minute, but the joy it would give us is incalculable. 

KIM: We'll be back again next week with an episode that will appeal to all of you Sex in the City fans out there. Don't miss it.

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. 

113. America’s First Female Mayor

KIM: Hey, everybody! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes, and for those of us listening from outside the U.S., you should know that we’re holding our midterm elections the day this podcast is first dropping. 

AMY: Yeah, everyone’s watching closely — it’s been kind of hard to focus on anything else, for weeks, now, at least for me. It’s expected — and we certainly hope that the women of America are coming out in droves to make their feelings known and show their power.

KIM: Right. But we thought this week’s episode would be a great time to introduce you to Susanna M. Salter, the first female mayor in the United States.

AMY: Yes, her story is an awesome one, especially when you consider that it all started as a cruel prank orchestrated by a group of arrogant men. Well, she got the last laugh, so we wanted to tell her story.

KIM: Good for her. So Susanna was born in Ohio in 1860, but her family had moved to Kansas by the time she was 12. A studious young woman, she attended Kansas State Agricultural college, although an illness ended up preventing her from graduating. But while she was attending the school she met her future husband, Lewis, who was the son of a previous Kansas Lt. Governor. They married when Susanna was 20. The couple then moved to the small town of Argonia where Susanna’s father was actually voted in as the town’s first mayor. This was a town of less than 500 people. 

AMY: So yeah, she was clearly somewhat active in politics as a result of her family connections. Her husband, a lawyer, even became a city clerk. Having come from a Quaker family,  Susanna became the leader of the town’s Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, which needless to say, made her some enemies.

KIM: Uh-oh! Yes, men who frequented the taverns of Argonia did not approve of Susanna’s fight to ban alcohol, needless to say. And when the members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union backed their own pro-temperance male candidates in 1887, a group of men in town formed a secret caucus and thought it would be HILARIOUS if they wrote in Susanna’s name on the ballot for mayor. 

AMY: Their motive was to both humiliate her and to send a message that women were not welcome in political arenas, because that same year, in fact, women in Argonia were granted the right to vote. So these men assumed it would be a huge embarrassment for Salter and it would force her to shut up. But not so fast, you boozy bastards!

KIM: Nope! Suzanna — at the time a mother of four children — had no idea her name had been put on the ballot until the day of the actual election. Members of the Republican Party showed up at her house — while she was doing laundry, no less — and she was like, “Umm…. what?” But she decided to roll with it. She told the Women’s Christian Temperance Union — if you all vote for me and not the original candidates you’d planned on backing, I’ll do the job if elected.

AMY: Let’s see what happens! Roll the dice! But what the trickster guys didn’t anticipate was that with the backing of the WCTU and all the pro-temperance voters in town, Salter actually had more than a fighting chance. What ended up happening? The ladies in town flocked to the polls and Susanna ended up winning with ⅔ of the vote! Bam — just like that, she’s elected the first female mayor in American history, unwittingly, and one of the first American women to hold any political office! 

KIM: Amazing. And so she was 27 years old at the time… What kind of mayor did she end up being? Do we know anything about that?

AMY: Well, what I could find is that she reportedly “served with decorum” and what’s funny is that a few of the men who were in on this big prank were also on the ballot for other positions like town council sort of stuff. So they got elected to town council; she’s mayor. So she had to try to get along with these jerks who had sought to humiliate her. Apparently she did. Her term has been described as “uneventful” but considering what a sleepy little town it was, that’s no big surprise. What was surprising, however, was the reaction of the rest of the nation. So during her time in office, she became a sort of national (and even international) political celebrity… Journalists from all over the country came to little Argonia to report on what sort of job she was doing. She got all kinds of fan mail, but also, of course, she got hate mail, including this gem of a poem. This was a written on a note that included a pair of men’s pants drawn on it:

When a woman leaves her natural sphere,

And without her sex's modesty or fear

Assays the part of man,

She, in her weak attempts to rule,

But makes herself a mark for ridicule,

A laughing-stock and sham.

Article of greatest use is to her then

Something worn distinctively by men --

A pair of pants will do.

Thus she will plainly demonstrate

That Nature made a great mistake

In sexing such a shrew.

KIM: Okay, that is proof that there have always been trolls. Yuck! But on a side note to all this, Salter also gave birth to one of her children while she was mayor. So, you go, girl. 

AMY: When her year in office was over, she opted not to seek re-election, and I mean, come on, it was never her ambition in the first place remember. She just wanted to go back to raising her kids, understandably, (she ended up having nine children in total). But I think about the courage it took for her to say, “Okay you guys, just watch me — I’m going to do this,” and she did it professionally and competently. But here’s what’s really interesting: that year and the years that followed, other Kansas towns started also electing women officials.

KIM: She started the chain reaction…. I love it! She eventually moved with her family to Oklahoma, but in Argonia they placed a commemorative bronze plaque honoring her in the town square, and the home there where she lived is now on the national register of historic places. She died at the age of 101 in 1961 in Norman, Oklahoma, but she is buried in Argonia.

AMY: Keep her in mind when you’re going to vote, you know? If she could take on the job of mayor when it was sprung on her unexpectedly, the least we can do is make an effort to inform yourselves about the issues and candidates and vote and, yeah, go to the polls. There are no excuses!

KIM: That’s all for today’s show, but we’ll reconnect next week to tell you all about another lost lady of lit. Thanks for joining us, and don’t forget to leave us a review if you like the program, it really makes a difference for us and it gives us new listeners!

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.

112. Rona Jaffe — The Best of Everything with Josh Lambert

KIM: Hey, everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY: Hello, lovers. Today, we’ve got a novel sure to appeal to any “Sex and the City” fans out there. Rona Jaffe’s 1958 novel, The Best of Everything follows the adventures of four young, gorgeous, single women in New York City looking for love in all the wrong places. There’s a lot of drinking, dating, and drama, but beneath the surface of this dishy novel, there’s another story to be told. One that speaks, in hushed tones, of sexual predation endured by women in the workplace.

KIM: Yes, more than half a century prior to the #MeToo movement, Jaffe used her own experiences (and the experiences of other women) to call out the rampant chauvinism and sexual harassment in office culture (specifically, the publishing world), leaving many readers to wonder which real-life counterparts might have inspired Jaffe’s lechers and lotharios.

AMY: Our guest for today’s episode happens to have some useful insight into New York’s publishing world and how Jaffe’s smart and sexually frank bestseller (described as the “urban answer to Peyton Place”) fits into it. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro]

KIM: Our guest today, Josh Lambert, is an associate professor of English and the director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.

He teaches and writes about Jews and Jewishness with respect to the development of U.S. culture. Amy and I discovered the forgotten author Emma Wolf thanks to an article Josh wrote for Lilith magazine — we did an episode on Wolf with guest Sarah Seltzer as a result of seeing that article.

AMY: Josh wrote the award-winning book Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, which examines how Jews’ relationship with obscenity helped them gain cultural capital despite being a marginalized group. His latest work, The Literary Mafia, explores how and why Jews became ubiquitous literary gatekeepers in the publishing industry. Josh, welcome to the show!

JOSH: Thank you both so much. There is absolutely nothing I like better than talking about old neglected books, so I'm so glad to be here.

KIM: So the title of your recent book is a provocative one. Do you want to briefly describe the premise and why it's something you particularly wanted to tackle?

JOSH: Sure. Yeah. Thank you. It's called The Literary Mafia and I'll confess that I wanted a title that would draw people in, so that felt like a good one. But really it's a book where I tried to answer the question of why it matters that Jewish people had the opportunity to work in publishing and make decisions about what did and didn't get published. And when I started to unpack that question, some of the first voices that rose to the top were the voices of people like Truman Capote, who complained about a Jewish literary mafia and Jews having too much power and sneaking around and conspiring together. And obviously that's not what I found; there's no grand conspiracy, but I thought it's a useful way to reflect the fears people have about who gets to make decisions and who doesn't get to make decisions. And what I end up, you know, saying in the book is that we actually need more working together of people from minority backgrounds to give themselves opportunities to influence what happens in American publishing.

AMY: Got it. So Ronna Jaffe actually factors into the third chapter of your book, a chapter called “Shitty Media Men,” and you're actually alluding to something very specific with that heading, right? 

JOSH: Yeah, I was sort of working on that chapter around 2018 when there was a whole big discussion of this Shitty Medium Men list that a writer named Moira Donegan put together. There was a complicated situation of, you know, she did it anonymously. She was outed by people.It was a situation that really gave you an idea of the stakes of calling out, you know, men who've acted in criminal or sort of horrible ways. So I felt like that was useful in looking back at an earlier period.

KIM: Before we get into the ways Jaffe was exposing gender power dynamics, let's talk a little bit about how her book came about. Typically, you write a novel and then Hollywood comes calling for the film rights. But in Jaffe's case, it was actually the other way around. Do you want to tell us about that? Because it's pretty unusual.

JOSH: Yeah, it's an amazing sort of story and very strange, but basically, she was a recent college graduate. She was working at this paperback publishing company and she says she was visiting her friend who was working as the secretary to the editor in chief of Simon and Schuster when this Hollywood producer happened to be visiting, a guy named Jerry Wald. His plan, his project, was to create scenarios that he could use to make popular movies and then get novelists to write those books according to his scenarios. And he said he wanted a novel about working girls in New York and she basically more or less said, “Okay, I'll write you that novel.” And that's how the novel came to be, which is, you know, amazing, because she had the marketing muscle of a Hollywood studio behind her long before the novel was even published. 

AMY: So Jaffe was 27-years-old when this book was published, and I think getting launched to stardom in this way is like something we'd all dream about, right? But were there any downsides to this arrangement for her? 

JOSH: I mean, it is unusual, and almost a full year before her book is even published, there are newspaper articles about who's going to play which role in the movie based on her novel that hasn't even come out yet. So that's, I mean, an incredible amount of pressure and just like, incredibly weird. But the other stuff that I found is that she was treated a little bit like a Hollywood starlet you know? Her looks were fetishized, and there was, I think, you know, the sense of not giving her the same sort of serious consideration you'd give a typical debut literary novelist.

AMY: A huge amount of trust is put into this girl that she's going to be able to pull it off.

KIM: Yeah, like you said, it is a lot of pressure. So let's talk a little bit about the book's plot for our listeners. Josh, do you want to do the honors without giving too many spoilers or anything?

JOSH: Yeah, I think that fundamentally it's about a group of friends who meet at this office of a publishing company. One of them, Caroline, really aspires to rise in the publishing industry, but her friends, Gregg and April, um, maybe are a little more ambivalent. 

AMY: And Gregg is a girl, we should point out.

JOSH: That's true. Yeah. Um, uh, with two G's, I guess. But, um, I don't know how much more to say about the plot. There's not really a lot of focus on the nitty-gritty of publishing, you know. They mention it, but there's a bunch of office parties. There's a lot of their personal lives and their romantic relationships, and obviously a lot of pretty serious and intense things happen that maybe, you know, we should let the readers discover for themselves. It's a novel of disillusionment, right? The title is ironic. It's not the best of everything. And I think whatever experiences the women at the center of the novel have, it's about them discovering that the things that they wanted aren't really what they were cracked up to be, or there's a problem or something disappointing about it.

KIM: That's a great description. It's like you're going into it thinking you are going to have the best of everything, but then you find out the reality behind the curtain, kind of. 

AMY: One contemporary review of the book said “Every girl who reads this is going to feel a shock of recognition.” And I think the way Jaffe does that is by having these four very different women, kind of like Sex in the City. It's sort of like, which one are you most?

KIM: Mm-hmm. Are you a Charlotte? Are you a…?

AMY: Yeah, they have different personality traits. One's more of like a Midwestern kind of yokel… very naive.

KIM: You gotta have that. 

AMY: You gotta have that one. Another one is like, more sexually charged, uh, daring. You have a single mother, which was interesting, like a divorcee with a young child. There's something for everybody to relate to.

JOSH: Although you'd want to say they're not really very diverse. They're all white women.

AMY: Yes, that's true.

KIM: That's absolutely true, yeah. And as you point out in your book too, it wasn't really until the Eighties that that kind of changed in publishing. 

AMY: Yeah, which we'll get to later on in the episode, yeah.

KIM: So Amy usually reads because she has a beautiful reading voice, but I'm gonna read the opening because I love it. I think it really sets the scene. It kind of gets you in the zone. So here I go. 

[reads opening paragraphs]

Amy, aren't you gonna start singing “Let the River Run?”

AMY: What? 

JOSH: The opening theme from Working Girl, right? 

KIM: It totally makes me think of that! All the women going to work and their outfits. 

AMY: So what I thought of when I read that was the episode we did on Rose Macaulay, because she starts her book in almost exactly the same way on a subway talking about working girls and what they're wearing. It's so similar. So that's really what came to mind for me. 

KIM: I love that you remembered that. That's exactly right. 

AMY: Yeah. So anyway, it's a great way to start and also, it feels right away, instantly aspirational, right? Like, if you're a young woman anywhere in the country who dreams of moving to a big city, you're already hooked. In my case, I can remember being that girl. I moved to LA from the Midwest to work at a magazine when I was 21. I was living with other girls who worked for the same magazine. We had no money. So this instantly transported me back to that time in my life. Even though I was West Coast, there were a lot of similarities. 

KIM: Same.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. The one major difference is that I, at 21 years old, was not preoccupied with getting married at that point. The women in this book kind of are. So, Josh, can you talk about the contrast that Jaffe poses in this book? We have women with professional aspirations versus the women who are biding their time until they can find a husband.

JOSH: Yeah. And it is, I think, such an important part of the history of this moment. Like part of what I wanted to write about in the book was the Fifties and Sixties where this moment where women did get more opportunities in publishing, but this presumption that women would marry young and that that was their primary interest complicated their experiences so much. And you know, I think it was true in a social history sense that a lot of women got married very young to get out of their houses, to get opportunities to be able to live in apartments that weren't with their families. And I think that what the novel is really careful to show is how much that stands in the way of women's professional opportunities because it's so easy for a man to look at a woman and say, “You don't really care about this. This doesn't really matter to you. All you care about is getting married.” And, there's a speech in the book, uh, fairly late in the book where a man that one of the protagonists, Caroline, has been dating, sort of says it to her very explicitly, he says: “What the hell have you got to be so serious about? Where is it all going to lead you? It's one thing to enjoy your job. Every girl should have something to do until she's married, but you live with it every minute of the day. You take work home, you worry about office politics. You let Miss Farrow get you down. If you ask me, I think you'd like to have her job eventually.” And Caroline says, like, “Yeah, I would!” And he says, “You're much too ambitious. And the worst of it is you're fighting with windmills. If you had talents as an opera singer or something else, I'd say it was unavoidable. But you're knocking yourself out for a third rate little publishing company.” 

KIM: Ouch! 

JOSH: What's incredible about it, by the way, is like, that's the perception. And in her next speech, Caroline says back to him, [paraphrased] But it's no different for you. You're like a law student. Like, who cares? There's gonna be a million other lawyers who can take your job. Why is it any less meaningful that I want to do this work? The problem is she sees around her so many other women who really do see marriage as the path forward. 

AMY: And you mentioned this Ms. Farrow in that quote. We should talk about her for a second because she's kind of an older woman in the book who has had success at the publishing company who is single. She's not a central character, but you know, she winds up leaving the job because she is going to go get married.

KIM: And she's very judged by everyone. I mean, she's the one actually kind of making it, but she's judged pretty harshly by everyone.

JOSH: Right. For being someone who's committed to her professional goal. People use nasty words to describe her in a way that I think happened to many, many women who broke boundaries in that generation.

AMY: And we'll talk about the movie version of this book later, but Joan Crawford plays Ms. Farrow and does a good job of it, I think. Um, so to quote from a 2020 New Yorker Review written by Michelle Moses, “This book, The Best of Everything, is what you would get if you took ‘Sex in the City’ and set it inside ‘Mad Men's’ universe.” That's like a perfect way of describing it. The scenes that take place in the office or the coworker happy hours or the corporate picnic, all of that office stuff is just as intriguing as watching the girls' love affairs unfold. And you're right, Josh, she doesn't get too much into the nitty-gritty of the work itself, but you see the office politics and everything that's going on socially in the office, and it's a lot of fun.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And she doesn't sugarcoat things. The book is really honest in a way that reading it now actually feels really modern. Josh, your book posits that the predominantly Jewish powers-that-be in the literary world ended up shaping the literary tastes of America. Meanwhile, in Jaffe's book, Fabian Publishing produces cheap dime store paperbacks. But there's a scene where the editor in chief, Mr. Shalimar, echoes a similar idea.

AMY: Yeah, he tells newcomer Caroline, our protagonist, “We are responsible for the changing literary tastes of America. It's our books with our sexy covers and our low cost and our mass distribution that are teaching America how to read.” And so I thought that was interesting because it's a similar idea to what you're, you know, saying in your book.

JOSH: And I mean, I think it's part of why that moment in literary history is so interesting. Twenty years before that, if you wanted a book, you'd have to go to a bookstore. But in the Fifties and the Sixties, there were books at the checkout counter, at every drugstore, and everywhere you would go. And those books sometimes were very trashy, but sometimes they were the books that changed Americans' minds about race or the environment or something really important. So it is like a really fascinating moment for thinking about how literature affects the society at large.

AMY: Yeah. And what gets chosen. Yeah. So let's talk about this Fabian editor in chief, Mr. Shalimar, a little bit more. He's basically a lecherous old man. He can't keep his hands off the ladies of the secretary pool. Josh, we're gonna have you recount some of his predatory greatest hits, if you will.

JOSH: Okay. And I'm happy to do that. And I do think maybe like we should just mention to the listeners of the podcast that I'm gonna be reading moments that are, uh, basically sexual assault. So if you aren't into that, it might be a good idea to skip a minute or two. Um, but yeah, part of what impresses me about the novel is how sort of intense these moments feel. So, you know, the first moment we get introduced to him doing this kind of thing, it's with this woman, April, who's been assigned to be his secretary for the day. And he keeps her late at the office. And then there's a moment where he grabs her and the quote is, “His arms were like straps around her so that she could hardly breathe and his mouth covered her as hot and violent and authoritative. She was filled with terror.” So, you know, in terms of describing what workplace sexual harassment looks like, that actually gives you a sense of the real traumatic intensity of it. Um, there's another scene that's funnier and sort of like, also very disturbing, but I think hopefully a little less distressing, which is at an office Christmas party. Shalimar gets very drunk and he crawls under a table to look at the legs of one of the women, of Barbara. And at this point in the novel, he's already starting to lose his sense of authority. People are finding out about what he's like, and so everyone's laughing at him, but it's a pretty indelible image of this guy under a table with his legs sticking out, pawing at a woman's legs.

AMY: Do we know who this guy is supposed to represent in real life? Does he have a real-life counterpart that Jaffe was trying to signal?

JOSH: So, I mean, to me that's what's so striking that, you know, we know where Jaffe worked after college at a publisher called Fawcett and at their paperback line called Gold Medal Books, and the editor in chief was this guy William Lengel, who by all accounts seems to have been the model for Mr. Shalimar. Now, we don't know exactly that Lengel did these things, but it seems like Jaffe's account is based on that.

AMY: And you kind of bring up in your chapter in the book, and I think it's an interesting one, that in a way he's kind of made to look like an old dinosaur and it does almost become comic by the end. But you say in your book that that's kind of where the power lies for these women is being able in discussing it. So after the Christmas party, the women are able to all kind of gather around Barbara and be like, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry, that's just, that's how he is.” But in talking about it and making it public, he becomes a laughing stock, right? It takes his power away in some ways.

JOSH: The line in the novel is “Every girl who had been pinched or kissed by Mr. Shalimar had come forth to add her story to the office gossip,” and then quote, “No one in the office was afraid of Mr. Shalimar anymore.” They all thought of him as a rather pathetic, lecherous old man, right? So the power of sharing these stories gives some relief to the women who have to deal with this behavior because they have solidarity and they have some way of resisting it.

AMY: Yeah, and I think there was also like an understanding from all the women in the novel, and I think it would've been true of any career woman of the time that like their sex, their gender, and how men perceive them is inseparable from their job. Today we are able to keep that very distinct, but they sort of had to deal with those in tandem, so when you read those examples of the harassment, it did sound very true to life and very real. Um, and the reason for that might be because Jaffe really did her research in writing this book. She wound up interviewing a lot of different ladies, and I'll quote from that New Yorker review that I referenced earlier “In order to write it, Jaffe interviewed 50 women about the things nobody spoke about in polite company: losing their virginities, getting abortions, being sexually harassed. ‘I thought that if I could help one young woman sitting in her tiny apartment thinking she was all alone and a bad girl, then the book would be worthwhile,’ Jaffe wrote in the forward to the 2005 reissue of her novel. Put simply, she wanted it to say ``Me Too.”

KIM: Yeah, and I kind of felt like cheering for her and I feel like cheering for her right now. It seems like a really brave thing for a woman to do just starting out in her career like she was. And we should also point out that Jaffe herself was Jewish, but she doesn't really mention Jewishness in the novel. Josh, do you have any theories as to why.

JOSH: Yeah, I think I would explain it in two ways. One is that a lot of the Jews who went to work in publishing were happy to sort of not make that the center of their identity. They might not have just wanted to do that. And the other is that there's a phenomenon in the Fifties, particularly, of taking Jewishness out of let's say, a novel that was adapted to film, that the characters in the novel might be Jewish, but in the film version they would just be sort of unmarked, you know, white Americans. And I think that because Jaffe's novel was already predestined to become a film, there might have been a sense of like, let's not get into that minority representation stuff. Let's make it a sort of quote unquote “popular” novel for everybody.

KIM: Mm, Interesting. Okay.

AMY: When you're reading the book though, you do feel like, “Oh man, she must be drawing on real personal stories here that have happened to her,” like on, on bad dates or, you know, all the kind of stuff that happens with the men. Um, and so it is a roman a clef in a sense, but I don't think her backstory, her upbringing really applies to any women in the novel. So can you kind of fill us in on what that upbringing was?

JOSH: Yeah, I think you're right that none of them is an exact portrait of her. She was born in 1931. She was an only child. Um, what I think is one of the most interesting things about her is her grandfather was a really successful builder who built the Carlisle Hotel. So she grew up, from what I've heard, in sort of a very wealthy family and that makes sense with her going to Radcliffe, which was mostly a thing that people of real privilege did. Um, oh, another thing about her grandfather is I read somewhere that he was the first Jew to live in Greenwich, Connecticut, which is kind of an amazing thing, whether it's true or not. But I think, you know, there's a way in which Caroline, the character in the novel who has just graduated from Radcliffe, probably shares some of her background with the novelist. We get a sense, I think, that some of the characters grew up with a fair amount of privilege in their background, but we don't really get, like, exactly the picture that we might get of, you know, reading about, uh, Jaffe's biography.

AMY: Right. Nobody's coming from the Upper West Side or wherever she was living in New York. 

KIM: I feel like Jaffe has a wonderful anthropologist’s eye when it comes to dating. She has so much commentary on men and women where you're just like, “Yeah, yeah.” It felt really relevant to my own dating experience.

AMY: And it's comedy, most of it, you know? There are definitely tough moments in the book, but a lot of the dating stuff, um, the eye-roll kind of things are so funny. If you remember from a previous episode where I told my story about somebody wanted to set me up with a guy because he liked pizza and they knew I liked pizza too, and it was like so random and dumb… Jaffe has a version of that, uh, that I'll read. She's writing about Caroline here. “There were dozens of utterly mismatched blind dates she had been inflicted with in the past two years. A sentence at hard labor, starting with the words, usually uttered by some nice older woman who hardly knew her or the boy, ‘I know a nice young man for you to meet.’ These amateur matchmakers seem to think the mere fact that Caroline wore a skirt and the man wore pants was enough to make them want to hurl themselves into each other's arms.” So that's the kind of comedy we're dealing with. Also, the amount of drinking that they were all doing in this novel, like I almost felt like I had a hangover every time I put the book down for a second because they were really going at it

KIM: I love that you said that. That's perfect. . 

AMY: This book really is 100% the sort of thing you'd wanna curl up with alongside pint of Haagen Dazs, I think, or better yet, a martini, But, I don't think you could categorize it under the “trashy romance” heading, and unfortunately I think it has been to a certain degree. I think it has literary merit, but it's been overlooked a bit, especially today, because of it being a woman's novel, quote unquote. What do you guys think?

JOSH: I mean, I think definitely it's partly like that categorization of a “woman's novel” and also the popularity of it, right? Like a book that was so popular and turned into a movie, I think is a little bit harder at times for people to take seriously. I don't know if that makes sense as the way to understand it. I'm curious what you think.

KIM: Well, yeah, definitely. And then even, um, the way you sent us the videos of the “Playboy Penthouse” episodes that she was, I guess she was in the first episode of that, it was like from the very beginning, they were trying to make it trashy in a way. Maybe to sell it. 

AMY: Let's just tell listeners what that was. So Hugh Hefner started a television show called “The Playboy Penthouse,” and it was sort of like a talk show slash variety show. He'd have like a handful of maybe five or six people that would come on the show for the hour, and they'd all be sitting around this fake living room with a bunch of playmate women lounging around. Hugh’s smoking a pipe, looking ridiculous, and in the very first episode, Ronna Jaffe was one of the guests.

KIM: It's so ironic. They put her in a situation that's basically her book almost,and you're watching it play out. And these men and the way they're acting, and they won’t even look at…

AMY: Oh my God. What was his name? Lenny Bruce. He wouldn't even look at the clip [of her movie]. 

KIM: Oh, I know. He was so condescending. 

JOSH: It's just all weird. I've never taught the novel, but I want to teach it just to show that in class. 

AMY: Yeah, 

KIM: You have to. Yeah. 

AMY: It was like “hepcat” overload. 

JOSH: Yeah. 

KIM: And they tried to needle her about the book and the movie and the soapiness of it.

AMY: And she kept pushing back and I loved that.

KIM: Yeah, she was great.

JOSH: I mean, and it's really astonishing to me, like one of the things that struck me the most is she says at one moment she was writing it for girls out there who might feel alone. And she specifically mentions April at that moment and April (I don't know if the spoiler is too much) but April has an abortion, and on TV in 1959, she is all but explicitly saying if you have had an abortion, you do not have to feel alone. And that's like an incredible thing to do in 1959.

KIM: Yeah, and with those men there just kind of making light of all of it and being very, I thought they were very, um, patronizing and condescending. 

AMY: Yeah. 100%. And also the abortion aspect, they removed from the film. She miscarries, I think, in the movie. It's not an actual decision to have an abortion, which I thought was interesting. They didn't want to touch that, but Jaffe did. 

JOSH: No, because right, this is years before not just Roe v Wade, but Griswold, which makes birth control constitutionally protected. It is not a great time to be needing reproductive health services in America.

KIM: Yeah. And we'll link to the videos and the show notes for this episode. You should definitely go watch those, listeners. It's really incredible to see her. 

AMY: She could hold her own with those guys, but she's just also really cute. 

KIM: Way to make it about her looks!

AMY: Oh, I know, but she is! You know what though, I think it's interesting because a lot of the Lost Ladies that we cover, there's no video footage of, so I'm always fascinated when we can actually go see them and hear them talk instead of just seeing an old black and white photo from like 1880. It helps you get to know her a little bit. 

KIM: But it, it also makes me think of in your book, Josh, where you talk about how women were saying, and I think women that she maybe talked about in her interviews and stuff too, were pointing out that their looks were an important part of everything that they were projecting, and it was a part of their job too, like you pointed out, Amy, almost. It was inseparable, basically. 

JOSH: Yeah, I mean, and you feel it watching that TV clip, just because you get the sense of, as difficult as it is to feel like she has to somehow navigate in a world in which there are like playmates walking around and hold her own and try to get intellectual respect. It sort of makes palpable, like who among us could possibly keep it together in that environment. It's amazing. 

AMY: Yeah. And it also reminded me, Kim … remember the Lorraine Hansberry episode? Um, so Lorraine Hansberry did a famous episode with Mike Wallace where he was trying to needle her and he was trying to throw her off and, um, she held her own. And it's the same level of determination of both of those women in these clips.

KIM: Yep. So I'm thinking, um, with this discussion that maybe the time is right for a resurgence of this book, and Penguin Classics is actually releasing a new edition. It has an introduction by Rachel Syme, and that's coming out in March, 2023. I'm hoping that is going to really bring a lot of new readers to the best of everything. 

AMY: The film version did come out in 1959 starring Joan Crawford as the seasoned Ms. Farrow, and then a young Robert Evans played one of the bachelor cads. I felt like reading the book was a much richer experience, but I liked the film. They really did capture the essence of what she was going for. I thought the casting was great. 

JOSH: Yeah, the music is a little bit much, sort of old-fashiondy, but I don't hate it. It sort of feels like it speaks to that moment. But also, there's something about it that had to work because the whole idea of the novel was to make the film possible, like it was all one multi-platform marketing situation. 

AMY: Yeah, and “Mad Men” is one of my favorite TV series of all times, so the look is very “Mad Men,” like the office design and everything. I felt like Peggy from “Mad Men” was going to walk into the movie at any given point. Um, so yeah, worth seeing, but definitely read the novel first. You'll get so much more out of it.

KIM: So after being launched to insta-success as a result of this novel, where did Jaffe go from there in terms of her writing? Josh, have you read any other books by her? What can you tell us?

JOSH: So I haven't read that much of her other stuff, unfortunately, I'm, I'm embarrassed to say that. I would really like to, but I know she wrote a lot. She wrote about a dozen novels and a lot of them were on the same formula of taking a particular setting and then having a group of people, mostly women, show their different experiences to give a sense of what that was. She did one about college roommates and what they went on to do, or her follow up to this was about a group of couples who go to live for a period in Brazil. Um, the book that sometimes people have heard of, or her other book that like is, is most well-known, is a weird book she wrote in the Eighties, sort of a sensational novel about Dungeons and Dragons when there was a worry that kids were killing themselves by playing role-playing games. And the reason people know about that is that it was made into a movie called Mazes and Monsters that stars a young Tom Hanks. So it is just like a weird little pop culture strange thing. It's a little bit unfortunate because I don't think there's really any threat from Dungeons and Dragons.

AMY: Right, Right. It's like you kind of didn't need her to go there.

KIM: Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't expect that. Um, so, Rona Jaffe passed away in 2005 at the age of 74, but not before establishing the Rona Jaffe Foundation. It provided grants to emerging female writers from 1995 until 2020. And that seemed so in keeping with the spirit of her book. It’s really great that she did that.

AMY: Yeah, she recognized that it was gonna take women, you know, lending their assistance and their expertise to other women coming up the chain, so I love that. So Josh, we actually focused on Jaffe’s whisper novel for this episode, but in your book, there are a few other authors that you talk about who were also doing the same sort of thing. One is the 1973 novel Dickie’s List by Anne Burstein, Which I have not yet read, um, but the other one you mentioned is the 1984 book, Elbowing The Seducer by T. Gertler. The T stands for Trudy. So both of those books are out of print, but I was intrigued when you suggested them. So I found T. Gertler’s book at the library and I want to recommend it to everybody because, you know, we obviously didn't have time to cover two full authors on this show, but I thought the writing was so sharp on this one. Kim, I think I texted you like, “You have to read this too!” 

KIM: I can't wait to read it now. Yeah. 

AMY: Well, first of all, it’s extremely racy. Very sexy, but also very biting and funny satire. Um, it's also interesting because it's a roman a clef within a roman a clef. So the main character is a young woman who ends up writing a novel about her affairs with an editor of a high-brow literary magazine. Gertler herself swore that this book was total fiction, but readers in the literary know sort of had their ideas on this, right, Josh?

JOSH: Right. So this is the complicated thing I do in this chapter where as much as people might object to it, I really think it's important to listen to these women writers who are writing about harassment or like, just like mistreatment, um, and using fiction as a way to do it. I think that's an important way for us to know about what it was really like to be in the business in those years. Not to take anything away from Gertler as a fiction writer, because I agree with you, it's like an unbelievably sharp and just incredible novel, but I think that some of the characters who we know she based that on went on to like be pretty shitty, lecherous men in the industry for decades afterwards. And it's strange to me that it really took a long time and, and really even until now, it's very hard to find people who actually are willing to say, “Oh yeah, she had worked with these particular editors and they had probably treated her in these ways.”

KIM: Wow.

AMY: You can understand her just being like, “Yep, all made up.” 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

AMY: She wanted to say it, but she also didn't want to take all the heat.

KIM: Yeah. And the people who know, know. 

JOSH: What's incredible about it is the character inside the novel says the exact same thing, right? Like the character says, “Oh yeah, yeah, I made it all up in the book,” inside the book! 

AMY: So she is basically telling everyone. Isn't there even a little thing at the beginning? 

JOSH: The epigraph. It’s a quote from David Letterman. “If you accept the premise, you'll enjoy the bit.” It's so cool. It's her saying, right, like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is all made up, right?”

AMY: Yeah. Exactly.

KIM: Wink-wink. Yeah. Okay, so Josh, in the conclusion of your book, you say we need more literary mafias. Can you explain what you mean by that?

JOSH: Yeah, I think, you know, what I got out of studying the history of Jews in the publishing industry is that there was certainly no evil collusion or anything like that, but it really helped Jews out a lot to know that there might be other people from this minority group who would help them out or who would give their work a chance. And I think that when I see discussions of diversity in publishing, and I hope anyone listening to this knows the problems in the publishing industry, that it is way too white and has been for way too long, um, one of the things that troubles me is when I hear people say, “Oh, well what we should do is just not pay attention to race and ethnicity at all and just, like, pick the best work and just like care about merit.” Because I think what that does is it says that people from minority groups shouldn't be helping each other. What we really need is a system that allows people from groups that have been disenfranchised or minoritized or discriminated against, those people need to have the opportunity to help each other. What Ronna Jaffe knew is that women needed to help other women. They needed to talk to each other, they needed to support each other, and they needed to have each other's backs in order to overcome all the discrimination they were facing. That's exactly what needs to happen now. For all the groups who haven't had a chance to like have those influential rules in publishing.

KIM: I love that, and I agree completely.

AMY: Yeah. It's been so enlightening to get to talk to you about all of this. Ronna Jaffe’s The Best of Everything was such a fun read. I can't believe I'd never read it. It's one of those now that you know, you have a lot of friends that are like, “Oh, toss me a book recommendation.I need something.” And I sort of have my go-to ones that I say. This is one of my new go-to ones, because I think a lot of people don't know it. Despite the sobering truths that the book presents to us, there's so much fun also interwoven in the story. So Josh, thanks so much for joining us to put it all in perspective.

JOSH: Oh my God, it is such a pleasure for me. I like nothing better than being able to talk about an old book, so I hope I'll have a chance to do it again with you all. I love what you're doing.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. We'll be back next week. Thanks everyone for tuning in. 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. 

111. May Agnes Fleming — The Midnight Queen with Brian Busby

KIM: Okay, let's just do this. It's gonna be amazing.

AMY: Listeners, if you only knew the comedy of errors that we three have been through already today to even try to start this episode. It is the curse of The Midnight Queen. La Masque is somehow working her voodoo witch magic on us. We have had sound issues. We have had a Zoom app we've had to force quit. We have had the internet go down. We have had miscommunication on the timing. 

KIM: All we need is a natural disaster.

AMY: Yeah. Where's the earthquake? It's coming. We're in L.A. so... Okay. We're ready to get underway now.

KIM: Hey everyone. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes.

AMY: With Halloween right around the corner, we thought a scary read was in order for this week.

KIM: So the novel will be featuring today includes a haunted house, a fortune telling witch, a magic cauldron, an evil dwarf, a secret dungeon, midnight murders, a skeleton, and a pile of rotting dead bodies.

AMY: I'm laughing already. Uh, does not sound very ladylike, does it?

KIM: No, but interestingly enough, there are some incredibly compelling female characters in this novel, which also happens to be a really fun page-turner. There are all sorts of terrifying plot twists,

AMY: It's cray-cray, as they would say. First published in 1863, The Midnight Queen was written by May Agnes Fleming, a prolific Canadian author who specialized in churning out these binge-worthy books, making her one of the nation's first best selling authors. 

KIM: And we've got a Canadian literary historian with us today to learn all about her and this entertaining gothic thriller. So screw your courage to the sticking place as we raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

 Our guest today is Brian Busby, a literary scholar, writer, editor, and all around bibliophile whose previous books include Character Parts: Who's Really Who in Can Lit, and A Gentleman of Pleasure, which is a biography of the Canadian poet John Glasgow. You can find Brian writing about lots of forgotten authors on his blog, The Dusty Bookcase, and there's also a book compilation of the same name that expounds on many of his reviews of forgotten and neglected literary treasures. He admits to having a not-so-secret crush on today's lost lady. Brian, welcome to the show.

BRIAN: Well, thank you. It's a pleasure and an honor.

AMY: Now that we finally got here, right? Um, so you had reached out to us suggesting that we tackle a Canadian lost lady of lit for our show. I think that was a great idea because when thinking about classic books, there's one Canadian female author that always springs immediately to my mind, and that's Lucy Maud Montgomery, of Anne of Green Gables fame. After that, I'm embarrassed to admit I start to draw a little bit of a blank. Maybe that's the dumb American in me, I don't know. What do you think, Brian? Are Canadian women writers like May Agnes Fleming, who we're gonna be discussing today, are they somehow extra lost or are they just lost to the non-Canadians of the world?

BRIAN: First of all, Amy, there are no dumb Americans here. Uh, I think you're right that Fleming is extra lost. She's lost to Americans, with whom she enjoyed her greatest sales. She's lost to Canadians, to whom she has very much forgotten. Those who are aware of Fleming perhaps have not given her the acknowledgement she deserves because as you mentioned, she was one of the country's first best selling novelists. In fact, she was certainly the highest paid and the most widely read. 

AMY: We also failed to mention when introducing you, Brian, that you had a brief stint as a soap opera writer early on in your career. And I, myself, was an editor at a soap fan magazine for many years. And the reason I bring this up is because I think this book, The Midnight Queen, has a lot of classic soapy elements, which we will be getting into. What's your take? I mean, based on the other books you've read by Fleming, would you say that that flare for the dramatic is evident in all her novels?

BRIAN: Oh, very much so. And we see a lot of the elements we would see in soaps of, you know, the idea of twins. In this case it's triplets who are nearly identical, and the evil character versus the good character. And, um, an cintricacy of plot, which is almost unavoidable if you're going to be writing a soap opera where you have to keep every single strand interesting. She probably was influenced by Dickens and Wilkie Collins and popular writers of that era. In her own time there was something called the story papers, and we know for a fact that she gobbled those up. Um, these were American weeklys typically of no more than eight pages, and they published short stories and serial novels, and with hugely popular print runs of hundreds of thousand. So essentially, I often think of them as an equivalent of soaps. A 19th century equivalent.

KIM: I wish we could bring back the serial papers and have people reading these and discussing them in the same way. That would be so cool. Um, I guess we just now have the internet, sadly. Anyway.

BRIAN: I wish we could bring back the story papers if only because they paid so well.

KIM: Oh yeah, that's true too. Yeah. Good pay for writers. Um, so we know that Fleming was born May Agnes Early in 1840 in New Brunswick, Canada. New Brunswick borders Maine and is not far from Prince Edward Island, where we know L.M. Montgomery would grow up a few decades later. What else can you tell us, Brian, if anything, about her youth and her family?

BRIAN: Well, Fleming was born in a port city called St. John on the Bay of Fundy. It's roughly about 300 kilometers south of Prince Edward Island. What brought the Fleming family there, her parents immigrated from Ireland, was her father John's work. He was a ship's carpenter and together John and his wife Mary had six children, though May and her brother James, were the only ones to survive. And so James, being 14 years younger, it's almost as if she was raised as an only child for much of her youth. What I find interesting and very impressive about her parents is that they really invested in their daughter's education. We know, for example, May's mother Mary could not read or write. As a matter of fact, there are petitions in which her name is just marked as an X with the note that whatever she was signing had been explained to her. But May herself was highly educated, especially for the time. She attended a place called The Convent of the Sacred Heart, and it was a really remarkable and well respected institution where she studied English and French arithmetic, logic, philosophy, music, art, and of course needle work and embroidery.

AMY: Of course

KIM: You gotta have that. Yeah. 

BRIAN: And in an interview that she gave in 1878, she said that her earliest short stories took the form of fairy tales, which she would tell the other girls, adding that they didn't quite appreciate them as much as she would've liked. She suggested that it was this lack of appreciation that had her turn to the pen.

AMY: Maybe it's good to have a critical audience right off the bat. You know, you have to really hone your skills at that point. 

KIM: Work for it, yeah.

AMY: Okay, so what do we know about her early writing and how she got her start in terms of her career?

BRIAN: Well, she got her start when she was a student. She wrote a story called “The Last of the Mountjoys,” which, uh, she sent off to The New York Mercury, which was one of the biggest story papers of the day. It ended up being her first published story. She ended up, on top of that, being a frequent contributor to The Mercury. And not just The Mercury, but at least three other story papers were going at the same time. And, um, remarkably in the midst of all this activity, at 17, she accepted a teaching position at a school that she resigned two years later to devote herself full time to writing. It's amazing to think that her career took flight before she turned 20. Early works were published under, the nom de plume Cousin May Carlton. And she published at least five short stories in 1859 and six and 1860. And then in 1861, she turned to novels. That year, she published 3. In 1862 she published two novels. 1863, she published two novels, including The Midnight Queen, and then in 1864, for the first time, we have something published under her own name, which was then Miss M.A. Early.

KIM: I mean, wow. She wrote a lot and fast. It's impressive. 

AMY: Yeah. Churning them out. Yeah. Okay. So then we know that ., she married a machinist named John Fleming, but he was not the greatest catch right?

BRIAN: Yeah, you know, I should mention that the two novels she published the year before she married Fleming, one of them is called A Wife's Tragedy. And then that same year, again before the marriage, she published The Twin Sisters or The Wrong Wives Hate. Then we get further novels like The Unseen Bridegroom, or Wedded for a Week, A Leap in the Dark or…

KIM: Wedded for a Week! I love that.

BRIAN: Well, my, my favorite is A Leap in the Dark or Wedded Yet no Wife

KIM: These sound really tabloidy. I love it.

BRIAN: Oh, they're great titles. We get another one called A Mad Marriage. So it's kind of funny because before and after her marriage, the whole idea of matrimony is fraught with problems and tragedy and disaster. Anyway, she married her husband, John Fleming, at the age of 24. And he was a year younger than her. They'd known each other for only three weeks. He was a boilermaker, so he made nowhere near as much money as she did. They ended up living next door to May's parents. Uh, so at two years into the marriage, she gave birth to the first of the couple's four children.

AMY: Okay, so she's the breadwinner in the family, clearly. Uh, I read somewhere that she was earning about $50 a story, which would be the equivalent of about $850 in today's money. 

BRIAN: I mean, if anything, as Fleming scholarship goes along at a snail's pace, we're learning how much money she really did earn, and that income has certainly been downplayed. In, um, 1868, for example, she signed a contract with Philadelphia Saturday Night, which was another story paper, to provide three short stories per annum at $2,000, which amounts to nearly $42,000. And again, that's for three short stories.

KIM: Oh my God. I'll take that contract now. Give it to me. 

BRIAN: Hell, I'll do it for 2000!

KIM: I know.

BRIAN: So in 1870, her annual writing income is thought to have been well over a quarter of million dollars in today's money. And then she became an author for The New York Weekly, for which she was paid the equivalent of $350,000 for serialization rights alone to two novels. And , then in, um, 1875 to move closer to her publishers, she relocated the family to Brooklyn. She purchased a house, and then shortly after, a much larger house. Her husband lived in the first, but not the second. Uh, 10 years in their marriage was pretty much over.

KIM: Wow. She is a real financial success story for writers and women. I mean, especially in her time, but even today. 

AMY: I know, and again, it goes back to, this is crazy that this is a name nobody knows.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. So let's start diving into The Midnight Queen. When I started reading it, I texted Amy who had already read it. I was like, "This is an Alexander Dumas fever dream." Like, I was just completely into it. I felt like the swashbuckling element, all of that. But then it just gets crazier and crazier. Amy, do you wanna give our listeners a brief setup in terms of the plot without spoiling too much? 

AMY: Okay, sure. So the book takes place over the course of a single night. It's London 1665, which is the year of the plague. We've got two handsome young men, Sir Norman Kingsley and Malcolm Ormiston. They are roaming the streets, ribbing each other about their love lives, as you do when bodies are dropping like flies all over the place, I dunno. Um, but Sir Norman Kingsley is giving Ormiston a really hard time because he has fallen insensibly in love with La Masque. This sorceress woman who as her name implies, is never seen without her mask. So Ormiston's like, "She's incredible. You just, you have to meet her, Sir Norman. Maybe she can give you a prediction about your future." So, sure enough, the guy's head over to see La Masque. She stares into her cauldron to give Sir Norman Kingsley his reading, and she winds up making three alarming and kind of incomprehensible assessments about Sir Norman's immediate future. He's a bit unnerved by what she tells him. What follows throughout the course of the rest of the book is that we see these puzzling events sort of fall into place exactly as La Masque has predicted. So you kind of know, as the reader, what's going to happen, you just don't know how or why. And it's all this sort of mysterious puzzle that will fall into place little by little on this dark and scary night.

And I will say this beautiful blonde, Sir Norman, our protagonist, immediately, in the first chapter I had already cast him in my head with a particular Hollywood actor that I'm not gonna name because I don't like to impede my vision on other people's. But needless to say, he is a total charmer. He has so many great one liners and witty retorts, just like any Hollywood hero. And I felt like a moviegoer as I was reading it. So, you know, the sort of comments that you'd scream out , in a theater, you know, like, "Do not go in there! What are you doing?" I was kind of playing that out in my head, and I could also visualize everything so perfectly, especially the dungeon that he eventually goes to. It's like a set designer's dream. She would've been an amazing screenwriter.

BRIAN: Well, she was excellent with dialogue and atmosphere, I think, and her descriptions, as you said.. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. You can picture all of it.

BRIAN: It would really appeal to today's readers, I think, and today's moviegoers in that the females characters, the strong ones, are every bit as strong as the male.

KIM: Yep. Yeah. let's also talk a little bit about how these male characters have so much swagger. It's really interesting because they're love struck. So we're getting to see her depiction of a man who has a big crush, who's besotted. It's really fun to see that as well, right?

AMY: You can see her having fun with it and, poking fun...

KIM: Because it's ridiculous. They're ridiculous. 

AMY: Yeah. I mean, they fall in love with these women based solely on their looks. One literally seems to be suffering from the plague , and he's still in love with her. And like, she can't be looking all that great. And then the other one falls in love with this masked woman. It's like she's the female Phantom of the Opera or something like that. But he just believes in his heart that she must be so beautiful. I, I think she's making fun of it.

BRIAN: Oh, definitely. 

KIM: Yeah. I just love that the two guys are walking around. The plague's happening. It's this crazy night. Um, and they're just like, "Oh, well, we might as well just fall in love at first sight. We all might die anyway, so, let's just go for it." 

BRIAN: I mean, it's funny to think how love struck they are and how much they keep talking to each other about being in love. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

BRIAN: And, especially Sir Norman keeps tearing a strip off his friend Ormiston. There's this one scene where, um, uh, well, I'll just, if, if you don't mind, I'll, I'll read this little bit here. Um, he says to Ormiston: 

"When did you see her last?"

Then Ormiston replies "yesterday," with a deep sigh... "and if she were made of granite, she could not be harder to me than she is." 

"So she doesn't care about you then?"

"Not she. She has a little Blenheim dog she loves a thousand times more than she ever will me." 

"Then what an idiot you are to keep haunting her like a shadow. Why don't you be a man and tear out from your heart such a goddess?"

"Ah, that's easily said. But if you were in my place, you would act exactly as I do."

"I don't believe it. It's not me to be mad about anything with a masked face and a marble heart. If I loved any woman, which sadly at the present time, I do not, and she had the taste not to return it, I should take my hat, make her a bow and go directly and love someone else made of flesh and blood instead of cast iron. You know the old song Ormiston, if she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be?" 

And Ormiston replies, "Kingsley, you know nothing about it, so stop talking nonsense! If you are a cold-blooded. I am not and I love her!"

KIM: You know, it reminds me of Romeo and his buddies, and they're teasing him and everything about falling in love. 

AMY: Yeah, and as a woman reader, it's kind of fun to get to take a glimpse behind the curtain, sort of, of how men... I don't know, Brian, if men really actually do talk this way to each other about women. But it's fun to think that and think that you're a fly on the wall, you know? 

BRIAN: Yeah, it's, it's not locker room talk that we always hear about.

KIM: No, it’s not. 

BRIAN: It really isn't.

AMY: So, we've all been living in the Covid era long enough that we're thankfully no longer triggered to read about a plague. I don't know if a year and a half ago I could have done it. Um, any ideas what could have sparked a story like this one for her? Or was it just a wild imagination?

BRIAN: I think, being a work of historical fiction, The Midnight Queen is unusual and nearly unique in Flemming's bibliography. She does play around a bit with time in this story, um, and other stories, her early stories and novels are all set in England. Her first short story, the one that she sold at the age of 15, “The Last of the Mountjoys” is subtitled, “A Tale of the Days of Queen Elizabeth.” And she studied English history as a lot of people in New Brunswick would've done at the time. so she was inspired by that, Excuse me. [coughs]

KIM: Speaking of Covid

BRIAN: Yeah, 

KIM: Anyway.

BRIAN: Well, I was about to say 1665 was, as I said, the plague year and, um, the Lord Mayor's decision to smoke away the pest with bonfires did in fact take place, but not in June, which is time that this takes place in The Midnight Queen. They actually took place in September and they weren't doused immediately by rain as they are in the novel, although they were doused about three days later by rain.

AMY: It definitely helped set the mood I think. She said the sky turned "from black to blood crimson red," you know, because of all these fires that we're burning. So it's just...

KIM: it adds to the drama. Yeah. Yeah. And the life or death thing makes it even more exciting, obviously. Um, so speaking of exciting, um, we talked about serialization earlier. Was this also serialized? I can imagine people sitting around reading it aloud, waiting for the next installment. It's really that kind of cliffhanger type story, and there's constant cliff hangers.

BRIAN: Definitely. It was serialized both in the United States and England, and most of her money came from the story papers rather than book sales, although she'd made a very good living from book sales. But the story papers, you know, the much-missed story papers, paid so well.

AMY: Yeah, and those story papers are like our Netflix, right? I mean, that's what you would do for entertainment. As a quick aside here, while I was reading The Midnight Queen, I wanted to introduce my daughter Julia, to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which I had watched when it first came out. And so we started watching that and it struck me this novel is full on "Buffy." Brian, I don't know if you ever watched that series, but there is so much in terms of the tone. The comedy mixed with the glamorous vampires who are just snarky to each other. You're nervous and you sense the danger, but you're also laughing at these villainous characters. It's so good. Kim, did you ever watch it?

KIM: I did. And it does remind me of that same vibe of, um, ironic humor with darkness as well.

AMY: I just wanna check my notes really quick because there was a part that so made me laugh, too. I might have to paraphrase it because I don't know if I can find it. 

KIM: While you're looking I love the part where he falls into a building and lands on his feet. 

AMY: That's it! That's what I was going to say!

KIM: Oh, that's why you're gonna look. Oh my God. Our minds are so alike! I love it too! God. I can't believe you were looking for the same thing! 

AMY: He falls through the ceiling of their dungeon and it's like classic movie moment. 

KIM: It's like Errol Flynn or something. 

AMY: Yes. Here, I'm gonna read it. I found it. So he says, "Should you feel my presence here any restraint? I am quite ready and willing to take my departure at any moment. And as I before insinuated, will promise on the honor of a gentleman and a knight never again to take the liberty of tumbling through the ceiling down on your heads."

KIM: just takes a moment and he decides, "Okay, this is the way I'm gonna go with this." And it's so funny. 

BRIAN: I think you're right, Kim. It's very much an Errol Flynn moment, isn't it? 

KIM: Yeah. yeah. Definitely. I can picture it. So, the Midnight Queen of the title is actually a woman residing in this seedy underworld that we're talking about right now in the scene. Her name is Queen Miranda, and she is married to the ruler of this strange enclave. He's a monstrous dwarf aply named Caliban. Yet Miranda is not a shrinking violet. She's actually kind of a badass. Sir Norman isn't quite sure what to make of her when they cross paths because she is so forceful and outspoken. But we later learn the truth about her station in life, and it's kind of horrific. Uh, it's actually not kind of, it is horrific. You could say the same for this other witchy character La Masque that we've talked about. La Masque is incredibly intimidating and powerful, but there's also a real tragicness to her story too, which we won't reveal. So Fleming is portraying these female characters who are strong, yet tortured. What do you think, Brian? Um, is there any subtext that we could read into that in terms of Fleming's own life? Are we reaching or what do you think? Um,

BRIAN: Well, I, I'm not sure we can I say this only because The Midnight Queen was published two years before she married John Fleming, and apart from being a child who saw her siblings die, four of her siblings die, one after another, I don't really see much evidence that she had an unhappy life. Her school life was, by all accounts, very happy. She was almost blessed at very early age with this entre into the world of writing that I think we would all be jealous of at the age of 15. 

AMY: I thought she must have written it after she had married because the husband, Caliban, seemed so awful. But then you're saying it was written before she would've even met him. And that's making me think, "Girl, you should've known better! You, you of all people wrote the book on Don't get involved with a terrible guy!"

BRIAN: And to get married to somebody after knowing them for three weeks, that's probably not a good idea.

AMY: Exactly. Like these dumb male characters. Okay, so we've mentioned kind of the soapiness of the plot. There's the twin trope, or in this case triplets. It's very Shakespearean as well, wouldn't you say?

KIM: Yeah, there's obviously the names Miranda and Caliban that are from “The Tempest.” La Masque and her cauldron and everything is a little bit like the three witches. We talked about the following and love at first sight is like “Romeo and Juliet,” and a lot of other Shakespeare plays as well. So, yeah. 

AMY: She drops a lot of reference, like she drops in Dickens references in the book. She's definitely showing off her education, and how well-read she is. So, like I said, we're not gonna reveal the ending of the book, but I will say the very last lines, like how she wrapped it up, it made me laugh, in keeping with the rest of the novel. She didn't take any of this too seriously.

KIM: Yeah. If we haven't made it clearer, listeners, this novel is so much fun. have to read it, you really have to read it.

BRIAN: Yeah, I think you're right. She didn't take the ending seriously at all. And I'm spoiling nothing here, it brings into question the whole story as to whether what the narrator shares is true. Did it take place? Because we learn at the very end that this is a story she's been told. You were alluding before to my kind of crush on May Agnes Fleming. Much of that is because the omniscient narrator tends to have the very same voice from novel to novel. And to me it's her, uh, because it just sounds so similar to each novel. It's almost as if she's sitting you down to tell a story. In this case, she's sitting you down to tell a story someone has told her. As we find out at the end, and it's not my favorite ending of a May Agnes Fleming novel because it gets so absurd, but it's, funny.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Yeah, I did a "Wait, what?" You know, kind of moment, uh, and you're right, she has moments, you know, just between her and the reader throughout the story where she's like, "Oh, reader, and by the way, blah, blah, blah." you know, So there is an intimacy between author and reader because of that. 

KIM: Yeah. And speaking of Fleming, let's get back to her life a little bit. Um, she died in 1880. She was only 39. She had long suffered from Bright's disease. That's an affliction of the kidneys. And in keeping with her strong female protagonist, she actually managed to make one last power play upon her death. Do you want to explain it for our listeners, Brian?

BRIAN: Sure. Um, yeah, she'd been struggling with the disease for at least three years, um, but her death, which was in the March of 1880, was still very much unexpected. As a matter of fact, she'd actually made trip plans to travel the very next month to England for the very first time. So she never visited what had been the setting of so many of her novels. Also, as I think you've alluded to, she was a woman who knew her business and she clearly understood many matters. And, um, remarkably, you know, given the times she lived young, she managed to shut her husband, who was then estranged, out of her will. And more than this, she prevented him in having any control over the children or her writing and, uh, the copyright to her works remained with the children before they lapsed into the public domain.

AMY: I don't know if we really specified why this husband was such a deadbeat.

BRIAN: I've read a couple of times that he was an alcoholic, which seems possible, I guess. There was a lot of pressure he put on her, and I think some jealousy that resulted in making money. He recognized her as somebody who could make a lot more money than he did, and really pushed her to accept contracts. You know, she was writing three, four novels a year. She didn't have to do that. She could have written much less, uh, and been under a lot less pressure. And of course, she was raising children at the same time, which is a remarkable feat on its own. So we don't know exactly what happened there except for the fact that on the one hand, uh, he was pushing her to earn money. And on the other hand, and this is found in a couple of, um, uh, interviews, he began to resent the fact that she was making so much money, that he wasn't the breadwinner. And I think as would've been typical of the time, he would've thought, I control the family purse, right? Because I'm the man . And I don't think he ever controlled the family purse.

AMY: Well, good on her for taking that final stand.

KIM: Yeah.

BRIAN: Yep. 

AMY: Um, and, you know, I went online trying to figure out, because she was so prolific, I tried to really get a tally of the official number of novels that she put out. It was hard for me to come to a concrete number. I don't know if you have a definitive number in terms of the books she published.

BRIAN: I don't think there's a definitive number. Um, Lorraine McMullin has done a lot of research on this, and I think we can say it's something approaching four dozen novels. The challenge comes with the various titles. So we have La Massque and The Midnight Queen, who was originally La Masque or The Midnight Queen, but they've been published under different titles. Uh, after her death, a lot of books were presented as, two different books, one of which being sequel to the first part. So that makes things confusing as well. It's generally thought by people who've read them that her last novels were her best. And one wonders what she would've produced had she lived. She started to slow down her production. Bright's disease obviously would've had an effect on her energy. But, uh, I think also she didn't have that pressure from her husband anymore to produce, produce, produce. And, um, one of the things I find absolutely fascinating is that her very last novel is a book called A Changed Heart. It's the only one that's still in print, from Halifax Publishers. And it was published posthumously. Certainly it's most personal of her novels. It's the only one that takes place entirely in Canada. Uh, in this case, it's a disguised St. John, which was her hometown.

AMY: Mm. Okay. So I know Brian, that you're acquainted with one of our previous guests, Brad Bigelow, of Neglected Books. He recently featured a guest post by Sarah Lonsdale which I found interesting because she argues that sometimes prolific writers are more likely to be forgotten over time. I guess the thinking is, you know, if somebody can churn out that many books so quickly, they can't be all that good. Do you have any thoughts on that or how it might apply to her work and why it's been lost to time a little.

BRIAN: Oh, I think you're right. I think prolific authors tend to be viewed with some suspicion. But in this case, I think there are a few elements that come into play that are particularly Canadian. The first being genre. Um, genre writers tend not to be taken seriously by, let's say, scholars and academics. So we don't study them in school. I mean, in many ways we don't even study Canadian literature in school. Uh, I went all the way through elementary school, high school and college right into university before I was assigned to Canadian novel to read.

KIM: That's shocking. I would not have expected that. Wow. That's so interesting.

BRIAN: I think the other thing that happened with, um, uh, Fleming, and this is also related to the way some academics have cast Canadian literature is that she left. She went to New York. Most of her books are set in England or the United States. And I think that, uh, we see that there's some reluctance to embrace writers who've left. And I say this because I had personal experience several years ago, having, uh, a plaque dedicated to the great, great Montreal short story writer, Mavis Gallant, who I'm sure you're both familiar with. And on the committee that I was part of, there was one person who just didn't want to do it because she left to go to Paris as a young woman, and she stayed in Paris. And there's some sort of resentment from certain Canadian nationalists, I guess you'd say about that.

KIM: Interesting. 

BRIAN: I think she, Fleming, has suffered from that the same way.

AMY: Mmm. 

KIM: So speaking of Canadian authors, while we've got you, can you mention any other lost Canadian women authors? Maybe you'd like to give a shout out too for our listeners.

BRIAN: Okay, I'm gonna limit myself to three. The first is Winfred Eaton, who's sister…

AMY: Oh, yeah. 

BRIAN: .. is Edith Eaton. Yeah, Sui Sin Far.

AMY: Uh, yeah, we did an episode on her and we had questions about Winifred. I remember at the time.

KIM: Yeah. 

BRIAN: Episode 15. I just listened to it again, uh, the other day. 

KIM: Thank you!

BRIAN: Anyway, I, I've long been fascinated by the Eaton family, this huge family with tons of kids, but also we're talking about a 19th century family that was interracial in Montreal, which just would've been very unusual at the time. Edith of course wrote under the name, uh, Sui Sin Far. But her sister, Winifred, wrote under the kind of fake Japanese name Onoto Watanna, and she pretended to be Japanese or half-Japanese, which she kind of felt bad about later in life. If I can recommend one novel, it would be Marion, the Story of an Artist’s Model, which was published a few years ago, or republished by McGill Queens University Press and, uh, I guess the reason that I love it so much is because it's the most biographical of all her, um, all her novels and all her works. Um, I'm trying to remember. Which of you likes true crime?

AMY: That's me.

BRIAN: Yep. Okay. , Uh, in that case, well, Kim, you like this too, but in that case, uh, I recommend, Anne Héber, uh, French Canadian or Quebecois author, who, um, in 1970 published a novel called Kamouraska, which was inspired by the 1838 murder of a wealthy French Canadian by an American doctor who was in love with the French Canadian's wife. It was also made into a film that I think has probably one of the three great Canadian motion pictures. So, um, that one's great. And then I'm gonna plant a flag for my third one. And that is, um, Margaret Millar. I almost said Mller. I used to pronounce her name Miller. It's M I L L A R. She's often mistaken for an American. She, was born and raised in, a southern Ontario in a town called Kitchener. Her father was the mayor of Kitchener at one point. And, um, she's often tied and has been somewhat overshadowed by her husband, whose was Kenneth Miller. Uh, or see I've done it. Kenneth Millar. He's better known as Ross McDonald, who was a very big mystery writer from the forties all the way through until the eighties. So she is best known for a book called, uh, Beast in View, which won the 1956 poll award for best novel, but, well, I was thinking because of the recent Supreme Court decision in Dobbs V. Jackson, I would recommend her 1950 novel Do Evil in Return, which begins with a protagonist, a female doctor turning away a young woman who's seeking an abortion. It's not one of her best known books, but I think it's just as strong as the ones that are.

KIM: Wow. She sounds incredible. 

AMY: And listeners, will have all of this in our show notes. Um, if you didn't catch all of these titles, we'll make sure to have them. There was the other author too, that you kind of followed up with us, that was about, like, a single mother, who's...

BRIAN: Yes. Uh, The Untempered Wind by Joanna E. Wood, um, she's kind of a recent discovery for me. I'd never read her until this year, and you're right, it's about a single mother, and the way she's treated in small town Ontario, um, an area that's not too far from Niagara Falls. It's a 19th century novel. It's interesting because it really makes a small town seem less than idyllic, and there are a lot of people who are complete hypocrites when it comes to the way she's treated. And I will say, and I, I don't know if I'm getting soft in my old age, but, I will say that, uh, it's the first novel I've read where I actually wept reading the novel.

KIM: Wow. 

BRIAN: One scene that made me cry, which had never happened to me. 

KIM: Okay. I'll have to have a box of Kleenexes 

AMY: All right. Yeah, listeners, I feel like I want to challenge everybody, and I'm going to challenge myself, to reach for more of these Canadian authors. I mean, there's no excuse to not seek these out now that we know some of the names. Brian, thank you so much for joining us to talk about Canadian women and to talk about May Agnes Fleming. This one was a real blast.

KIM: Absolutely. And I'm so glad we made it through without any more glitches, I think 

AMY: I wanna say, but I don't wanna say knock, wood. Yeah, I think the curse is lifted, but we haven't checked the audio yet, so hopefully we don't have to redo this whole thing. Um, but yeah, it was great meeting you.

BRIAN: I loved doing this and, you know, , I'm a great fan. And as my late mother would've said, uh, you're doing God's work. 

AMY: Thank you. 

KIM: Thank you. We are honored to have you as a listener and have you on. That's all for today's episode. Thanks so much for joining us. If you loved listening to this episode, please leave us a review wherever you listen. It really means so much to both of us, and it helps new listeners find us as well.

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.