191. Barbara Comyns — Our Spoons Came From Woolworths and The Vet’s Daughter with Avril Horner

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to preserving the legacies of forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my cohost, Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: While preparing to discuss this week's lost lady, the British novelist, Barbara Comyns, I found myself feeling fascinated but also mildly unsettled at the same time. Does that register at all with you, Kim?

 KIM: Well, yes, um, I'm thinking about two of her novels, which we're focusing on for this episode: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and The Vet's Daughter. I think fascinating slash unnerving can apply to them both. Almost all of Barbara Comyns’s books feature vulnerable young women enduring traumatic ordeals, be it crushing poverty, abandonment, or abuse. Yet wit and woe sit side by side in her books, which were published between 1947 and 1989. They're dark, yes, but at the same time, there's also something almost effervescent about them.

AMY: Yeah, there's a remarkable quality about them where imaginative power and humor seem to effortlessly emerge, almost as if they're capable of levitating from within, sort of catching you by surprise.

KIM: Levitate. Now that's a term we'll be returning to later on in this episode. But let's start things off with our feet firmly on the ground, because there's a lot to discuss in the life of Barbara Comyns, who counted surrealists, spies, and a one-time romantic rival among her close friends.

AMY: Her life was not without its complications, messiness, and yes, stress, but with a sort of naïve pluck she powered through. As she once wrote in her novel, Mr. Fox, “In the back of my mind I was always sure that wonderful things were waiting for me, but I'd got to get through a lot of horrors first.”

KIM: And that line is actually an epigraph from a terrific new biography on Barbara Comyns by Avril Horner, who's joining us today for this discussion. So let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Avril Horner, is an emeritus professor of English at Kingston University in Southwest London. With a particular interest in women writers and Gothic fiction, Avril has coauthored and or edited numerous books, including Women and the Gothic, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, and Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire, and the Older Woman.

AMY: Avril's most recent book is Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence, published in March by Manchester University Press. British news outlet The Independent included this book in its list of the best nonfiction books to read in 2024 — amazing — and also declared that Avril's book is, quote, “an important intervention, ensuring Barbara Comyns’s name is not forgotten. But it's also a reminder that writers' legacies need careful stewarding and are never guaranteed.”

KIM: Hear, hear! Don't we know it? Avril, welcome to the show and congratulations on this book. It's so great.

AVRIL HORNER: Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here.

AMY: So, Barbara Comyns wrote 11 novels, which were published across five decades. And the reception toward most of her books was initially mixed at best. It seems like sales were often underwhelming, and that's a fact that left Comyns discouraged until much later in her life when her work was given new consideration and began earning high praise.So Avril, when did you first discover Barbara Comyns, and what made you want to write her biography?

AVRIL: About 20 years ago my good friend Sue Zlosnik who worked on the gothic a lot, we were asked to write an essay on female gothic for a special issue of a journal. So we hemmed and hawed and thought about the usual suspects like Mary Shelley and Daphne du Maurier and Angela Carter. And then Sue said, “Ah, why don't we look at Barbara Comyns?” And I had not heard of Barbara Comyns 20 years ago, so I read The Vet's Daughter, and I was completely hooked. Absolutely mesmerized by this book. So we wrote the article, which was published, and then I went on to read everything else and got hold of the stuff that was difficult to get hold of through the British Library. And then I begin to think, you know, what an interesting life she led, how extraordinary that no one's written a biography. But I was very, very busy leading a research team and doing all sorts of things at university, so it had to wait until I retired. And then I decided I really did want to write her biography because I've always thought she's been left out of all those reclamations of women in the 20th century, like Elizabeth Jane Howard and Barbara Pym. She's not been reclaimed in the same way. So I thought, it's time to reclaim her. She is an extraordinary writer. Her work is like nothing else being written at the time. And I just thought, “Right, I'm going to get in there and write the first biography.” So that's what I did!

KIM: I love that it stayed with you over that time period and you came back to it. I think that probably doesn't happen so much. It's meant to be, right?

AVRIL: Yes.

KIM: So I love the subtitle, A Savage Innocence. It's so great. Um, can you talk about that description a little bit with regard to her work?

AVRIL: Yes, okay. It took me a long time to find the right subtitle. I played around with several. And then of course I read this introduction by Ursula Holden to the novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which was republished by Virago in 1987. And Ursula Holden described her In this way: “Barbara Comyns deftly balances savagery with innocence.” and I thought, that's it! That's what it is, that peculiar mixture of savagery and innocence in her work. There's an extraordinary range of mood and emotions in Barbara Comyns’s novels, but they're often focused through a very innocent young woman, or even a girl in some cases. And the experiences are presented very, very well, directly by this innocent person.  And also these young women who are so innocent and naive do actually harbor sometimes quite savage instincts. In Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, Sophia, the main character, when she sees her lover's wife, she thinks to herself, “I'd like to smash that beastly woman's face to a pulp.” So, behind these innocent women, there are these savage feelings. That peculiar contrast between innocence, naivety, and savage emotion is there in the books. It's also there in the main female characters, I think.

AMY: Yeah, I think it's that paradoxical way that she presents her world. It almost knocks you off balance a little bit reading it. So let's dive into her life a little bit. Barbara Comyns was born Barbara Bailey in 1907 in Bidford-on-Avon. She was one of six children in an upper-middle-class family whose home was Bell Court, a large country house on the River Avon. This all sounds pretty idyllic, but Avril, tell us a little bit more about the realities of her youth and how that would go on to shape her.

AVRIL: Um, it does sound idyllic on the surface. I've been to Bidford-on-Avon a couple of times. It's a beautiful village, and the house itself is really lovely. And it's still there, although it's lost a lot of the out houses. And at the back of the garden, there was the River Avon, so it was an idyllic setting. The children were also always well-dressed and well-fed, and they had lots of freedom in the garden. They played with each other endlessly. There were lots of pets. There were loads of dogs. A peacock that followed her father around. And her mother even had a pet monkey. So, it was an extraordinary household, but — and there are buts — she was never properly educated. The only one sent away to school for any length of time was the boy. So the girls suffered a series of governesses who were not very well-educated themselves. And she didn't have a secure emotional upbringing either, although, you know, materially it seemed very comfortable. Her mother had six children quite quickly and resented being a mother. You get the feeling she would like to have lived a more bohemian life and become an artist, but she didn't. So she tended to sort of send them off to the governesses and never really played with them and didn't really listen to them and was often short-tempered with them. So when Barbara was unhappy as a child, she would be more likely to turn to her sisters or her grandmother for emotional comfort than her own mother. And you can see echoes of that in the fiction, that often the relationships between mothers and daughters are very strained. For example, in The Juniper Tree, her late novel. Also, her father had a terrible temper. He could be very generous and kind, and he took the children out more than the mother did and paid more attention to them, but he had a terrible temper and did occasionally beat his wife and beat the children. He would explode. And that marks her fiction too. In The Vet's Daughter, there's a father who quickly becomes very angry and is a bit of a tyrant. So, um, it wasn't quite as idyllic as it might have seemed on the surface, her childhood.

KIM: So she was 15 when her formal education ended, and then at that point, I guess her father's finances were more precarious and she basically was expected to go off and support herself. She knew she wanted to be an artist, and she worked briefly, I guess, as a kennel maid in Amsterdam, but then she moved to London, enrolled in art school, and she ended up living this classic bohemian lifestyle that her mom may have wished that she had, right, Avril?

AVRIL: Yeah, that's absolutely right. In 1929, she signed up at an art school called Heatherley’s in London, which is a private art school, which still exists. Barbara was very serious about wanting to be an artist. She had in her head she wanted to be a sculptor. Her father had left her a bond which matured, so she could pay for the first two terms, and she loved being there, but the money quickly ran out. She shared a bedsit when she was at Heatherley's with her sister, Chloe. A very, very small apartment, and they didn't have much money between them. Chloe moved out to become a lady's companion, which is what many young middle class women did, and Barbara was left in this flat she couldn't really afford. So she moved to a smaller flat. But in 1930, uh, John Pembrton, who both she and her sister knew vaguely from childhood, he came to London too, and he signed up as an art student. And perhaps because they were both a bit lonely, they became good companions, and then they became lovers. And they moved into a flat in Hampstead before they got married, although they kept their [respective] flats on to preserve respectability until the marriage day. They were very much in love and they enjoyed the bohemian life of London. John's uncle by marriage was a man called Rupert Lee, and he introduced them to all sorts of famous people in Fitzrovia, an area where artists and writers mixed. So they met people like Dylan Thomas, the poet, Paul Nash, who's famous for his woodwork, uh, Nina Hamnett and Victor Pasmore and Augustus John, who was lauded as a great painter. So she enjoyed that milieu for a while, even though they were poor, and in fact it became a badge of honor, you know? If you were a really serious artist, you didn't mind poverty. You embraced it as part of your outward struggle to become an artist. They were very young. John was 21 and Barbara was 23, and they intended to embark on this wonderful life of being artists, but it didn't quite work out that way.

AMY: Right. And so all of this, you know, romantic but sort of miserable poverty coincides with Barbara's highly autobiographical second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, which she wrote actually when she was in her 40s and looking back at this earlier time, and it was published in 1950. The novel begins with 21-year-old Sophia Fairclough marrying an artist. As in the novel, Barbara really did have a pet newt in the pocket of her tweed suit at her wedding, which is such an unforgettable detail of that book.

KIM: I love that. Yeah.

AMY: Also in the novel, Sophia and her husband began their married life very poor, but happy. And I thought, based on the book's title, that this was going to be some sort of cheery, you know, maybe slightly quirky story about domestic life. But it's really not that. Avril, why don't you sketch out some of the ways that Barbara's, and ergo, the fictional Sophia's, life soon falls into chaos.

AVRIL: Well, one of the first things that happens is that Sophia becomes pregnant, much to her husband's horror, just as Barbara became pregnant only a few months after marriage. And in the novel, Sophia thinks to herself, “I had a kind of idea that if you controlled your mind and said, I won't have any babies,’ very hard, they most likely wouldn't come. I thought that was what was meant by birth control. I mean, this always makes me laugh.

AMY: Oh my god.

KIM: That's the naive part right there!

AVRIL: I suspect that that was the case with Barbara, too. Um, in those days, you know, sex education was not a thing, and women often found out by bleak experience how things worked. So Barbara became pregnant a few months after they married. John was horrified because he wanted to be a great artist and didn't really want to be a father. He was only 21 or so. But their son, Julian, was born in March 1932. Now John was so insistent on his own career as an artist that he refused to go out and find work to support his wife and their little boy. He just insisted on painting all the time, hoping for more commissions. But this, if you remember, is the beginning of the Depression: 1932. So people weren't buying paintings, and they got poorer and poorer. So it fell to Barbara, really, to try to make some money. And she managed to get work as an artist model. She remained beautiful all her life, so it wasn't difficult. But she was rapidly becoming disillusioned with John, her husband, because he wasn't helping. And she was frustrated that she was unable to fulfill her own talent and she didn't have time to paint or sculpt because they didn't have money. He took all the money for his paints, and she was out trying to earn some money to feed the three of them. And she became pregnant again in 1934, and they had a discussion, and in fact, she and John borrowed some money and Barbara had an abortion because they felt they simply couldn't afford to feed another small mouth. And that abortion episode goes into a couple of novels, and it was clearly something I think that haunted Barbara. you know. 

AMY: We talk about her innocence, but then weigh that against the fact that she's being the adult in this relationship. She's the breadwinner. She's the one that's saying, I’ve got to abandon my own artistic pursuits and make sure we have food on the table. And that's kind of interesting because she is in some ways like a little girl, and yet she's the one that's holding it all together.

AVRIL: Yes. I think it was a process of rapidly growing up, you know, those first few years of our marriage.

KIM: Yeah. So she does such a great job of portraying that in the novel and giving you a feeling for what that was really like. So when we get to the maternity ward scenes in the novel, (because then Sophia has two children in the novel, a son and a daughter) and the maternity ward scenes are very intense. Avril, would you be willing to read a short passage from the book so listeners can hear some of it?

AVRIL: Yes, of course. Just to contextualize it, Sophia goes into labor and her husband takes her to a hospital, but in those days the husbands were shooed away, you know, once the woman arrived at the door. This is before the National Health Service kicked in in 1948. So she describes in the book how Sophia is whisked away by various people and then taken by a nurse to have a bath. But because she's actually in labor by now, she feels she really can't climb into that bath. So she splashes the water about to make herself wet, to pretend she's had a bath, and then a nurse comes back and works out that she hasn't actually got in the bath and calls her “a dirty, dirty woman.” This is the beginning of lots of horrible scenes. And she's carrying a suitcase all the time, so she's taken off to another room, and the pains keep coming, and it's very difficult to keep still while they're asking her all these questions, and then, of course, she's shaved, and she has disinfectant put on her pubic area which makes her jump with pain but she says in a way it was a relief because it was a different sort of pain from the labor pain. It distracts her for a while. And I'll read from there:

I lay in bed for about an hour and kept shivering. The pain did not seem quite so bad now I wasn't being disturbed all the time. Unfortunately, a maid came with some tea and bread and butter on a tray. I took one look and was sick all over the bed. The nurse in charge of the ward came and looked at me disgustedly and asked why I hadn't asked for a bowl to be sick in. I was taken out of the labour ward and put in another room, all by myself. I carried my horrid case, which appeared every time I was moved, although it disappeared every time I got into bed. Two nurses came and examined me. I heard one say it would be about two hours before the baby came. Two more hours seemed an awful long time. The pains got much worse again, and I tried saying “Lord Marmion” [the poem], but they told me to be quiet. I longed to cry out, but knew they would be angry, so I bit my hands. There are still the scars on them now. My hands seemed to smell of Grapenuts, and I remembered a white dog we used to have when we were children and she kept having puppies all the time — I felt very sorry for her now. They gave me a bowl to be sick in and I managed not to get any on the bed, but without any warning the wicked castor oil [they'd given me] acted and I was completely disgraced. The nurse was so angry. She said I should set a good example and that I had disgusting habits. I just felt a great longing to die and escape, but instead, I walked behind the disgusted nurse, all doubled up with shame and pain. 

Then she's taken to yet another ward. 

Suddenly it changed, and I was on a kind of trolley. The next place I found myself was a brilliantly lighted room, with two doctors and a nurse. As soon as I arrived in the room I could tell they were going to be kind. I was lifted off the trolley on to a very high kind of bed-table arrangement…. I explained to the nurse that I kept being sick all the time, but she didn't seem to mind. Every time I had a great pain she made me pull a twisted sheet that was fixed to the head of the bed in some way, and she would say, “Bear down, Mother.” I tried to explain that I wasn't a mother, but couldn't get it out. In between the pains they asked me questions, so they could fill in even more forms….

There was one dreadful thing — they made me put my legs in kind of slings that must have been attached to the ceiling; besides being very uncomfortable, it made me feel dreadfully shamed and exposed. People wouldn't dream of doing such a thing to an animal. I think the ideal way to have a baby would be in a dark, quiet room, all alone and not hurried. Perhaps your husband would be just outside the door in case you felt lonely… One of the doctors stood by my bed and said he would give me something to put me to sleep in a minute, and the nurse kept urging me to bear down and I could feel everyone trying to hurry me up. Then I was enveloped in a terrific sea of pain and I heard myself shouting out in an awful, snoring kind of voice. Then they gave me something to smell and the pain dimmed a little. The pain started to grow again, but I didn't seem to mind. I suddenly felt so interested in what was happening. The baby was really coming now and there it was between my legs. I could feel it moving, and there was a great tugging in my tummy where it was still attached to me.Then I heard it cry, so I knew it was alive and was able to relax. Perhaps I went to sleep. The next thing I knew was the doctor pressing my tummy, but although it hurt, it didn't seem to matter. 

I asked the nurse what kind of baby it was and if it was perfect. She said, of course it was, but I asked her to make sure it had all its fingers and toes. She laughed, and said it was a lovely little boy, rather small, but quite healthy. 

I couldn't help crying when I heard it was a boy, because I knew there wasn't much chance of Charles liking it, now it was a boy. He particularly disliked little boys. I longed to see the baby, but they said I couldn't yet. It has stopped crying, and I was worried in case it was dead. So I cried about that too.

KIM: Unforgettable.

AVRIL: Yeah. 

AMY: The first time I read it, I felt physically ill. Listening to it again, tears kind of welled up in my eyes again. And I realized things have not changed that much. Because I went through some of those same things, of knowing I was going to get sick and I was holding my baby and there was no one to get me a bowl and, um, I remember at one point, after I had my daughter, like an hour or so after the delivery, my doctor came back into the room and she was the first person that had been kind to me, I would say. And I just started crying and she said, “Why are you crying?” And I said, “Thank you for being nice to me.” Those descriptions of like the rough and hurried nurses, that was very familiar to me. It's a shame that the medical system hasn't changed that much.

AVRIL: Yes, yes. Yes, I remember my second son was taken away immediately. I had just had a C-section and I was out of it. Um, but he was taken away because he was jaundiced, but I didn't see him for about two days. Other people saw him. And I was in a, you know, a knot of anxiety and sadness, you know? The third time around it was much better, but, uh, I think we've all had those experiences and the scars remain. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: And the fact that she is so honest in her depiction, I mean, at the time that must have been unusual.

AVRIL: It was. It was extraordinary for 1950 to write in that way. Such frankness, I don't think I've come across it anywhere else, at that period. Having a child was often sentimentalized in magazines, you know, it was presented as the most fulfilling thing a woman would experience, having a child. The baby was a little treasure, you know, there was none of this stuff about postnatal depression or the difficulty of actually dealing with a little baby when you're deprived to sleep yourself. So, no, there wasn't much that was negative about childbirth or, you know, women becoming mothers at that time at all. And even today I think it's actually quite difficult for women to talk frankly about traumatic experiences in childbirth. They do occasionally, and women do publish things, but there is this, I think, conspiracy. I do it myself. You don't say to a young pregnant woman, “Oh my God, you're going to feel some pain.” You know, you wouldn't, because you wouldn't want anyone to be frightened. So there is a sort of benign conspiracy. But also I think there's a sort of social conspiracy of silence that some of the more difficult aspects of childbirth aren't explored fully.

KIM: I've been saying ever since I had my child that I wish there was a therapist right there, immediately after you gave birth, to talk you through what you've been through. But you're just expected to be thrilled at that moment and there's a lot going on. 

AVRIL: It's very common for me to have very conflicting emotions and be depressed or tearful after childbirth.  

AMY: So Comyns’s depiction of her own childbirth scene is… hard, but wonderfully written. There is some comedy too. I'm thinking about the moment where she thinks that cups of lemonade are being served in the clinic, not realizing it's a urine sample. Um, and then also when she winds up getting pregnant accidentally for the third time, Comyns writes that Sophia thinks, “Why should all these babies pick on me?” I laughed out loud at that moment in the book. So there is humor, but it derives from Sophia's misery, almost. And the writer Maggie O'Farrell describes it as, quote, “the disparity between tone and content,” which we sort of have talked a little bit about already. What do you think makes this formula so successful for her though, Avril? How does she pull this off? 

AVRIL: It’s interesting, isn't it? I think O'Farrell's phrase is absolutely right, that disparity between tone and content. You've got these naive young women, and so you laugh at them when they make these mistakes because it's comical. And we've all been caught out like that ourselves. But behind those young women is this author who's been through a lot herself. You know, she's been through abortions, suicide attempts and all sorts of things. So you have this knowing person behind the young woman. And she doesn't damn the characters who are cruel or insensitive. Or give lectures about them or preach to the reader about how one should behave. A lot of that taking people down a peg is done through humor.

KIM: Definitely. So, in Our Spoons came from Woolworths, Sophia takes a lover. He's a man named Peregrine. His real life equivalent in Barbara's life was an artist and critic named Rupert Lee. But the more fascinating relationship, which we learned about in your biography, is between Barbara and Rupert's other mistress, Diana Brinton. She and Barbara were what we'd say today as frenemies, right?

AVRIL: I think that's a very good term. It didn't occur to me to use that when I was writing the biography, but I think it sums up their very, very complicated relationship very well. Yes, her marriage was falling apart. This husband who wasn't providing anything for her was also having affairs himself. The marriage was falling apart and, uh, she was lonely. In 1934, she was seduced by Rupert Lee, John's uncle by marriage, who was 20 years older than her, and quite eminent in artistic circles in London. By November that year, Diana Brinton, who was Rupert Lee's partner, knew that he was having an affair with Barbara, of whom she was quite fond actually. They'd met socially many times, they had quite a lot in common, similar sense of humor, both liked art, discussing art. Now, Rupert had had several affairs, and Diana Brinton was used to sorting out his messy love life because he never really wanted to marry these women. But he had persuaded Barbara to believe that he would leave Diana for her. In 1935, Barbara became pregnant by Rupert Lee, and later that year in November, she had a little girl whom she called Caroline. For various reasons, she was absolutely sure it was Rupert's child. And Rupert had always said he'd wanted a child. He and Diana had no children. So she thought he would be delighted and that would put the seal on their relationship and he would leave Diana. But like many, many in that situation, Rupert suddenly became very evasive and Barbara fell into despair. She gradually realized that Rupert Lee would never leave Diana. And in 1936, Rupert confessed to Diana that he was the father of Caroline, Barbara's little girl. So by this time, Barbara was very frightened. Her marriage was falling apart. John was hardly around. Rupert wasn't going to support her. She now had two children. So she actually wrote to Diana saying how glad she was that she knew because she'd had to lie about things and it was better that things were in the open. Now, amazingly, Diana Brinton took this all very calmly. She, you know, she'd sorted out several affairs before. And she actually helped Barbara financially, quite a lot. But what she didn't want was Rupert to leave her, nor did she want a scandal to break onto the London art scene where they were very prominent. So in a sense, she bought Barbara off. She set her up as a landlady in a building, and she gave her money, gave her an allowance. So it was a peculiar relationship of helping Barbara, but keeping her within bounds. And she could be very calculating, Diana. She actually got her family doctor to sign a statement saying that Barbara was mentally unstable and would probably stay mentally unstable for the rest of her life. She also, through her lawyer, in exchange for money, got Barbara to give up the love letters Rupert Lee had sent to her, which proved that he was the father. And Diana burnt them, so that in the court of law, Barbara would have no evidence. Also the jury would be presented with this note that she was a mentally unstable woman. Diana was a very sophisticated woman, more sophisticated than Barbara in many ways. And it was a love hate relationship, because they were actually quite fond of each other. There were lots of rows, lots of very tearful scenes, but eventually their relationship settled down and they became friends again. And indeed it was Diana Brinton who introduced Barbara to her second husband, Richard Comyns Carr. If you look at the letters, there was, as well as emotional blackmail (and there's plenty of that between the two women) there was also a genuine affection and respect for each other. So I think frenemies is exactly the right word to conjure up that relationship. I've never come across anything quite like it before.

AMY: No, and so many of her relationships that you write about in the book are fascinating, but this was the one that fascinated me the most, and it is the stuff that truly soap operas are made of, right? And interestingly, Diana is not depicted anywhere in Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. But it was really eye opening for me to read that novel, as well as The Vet’s Daughter, to read those both alongside your biography, Avril. It's almost like having the reference book next to you, which is fun. Um, you know, Speaking of The Vet's Daughter, that one seems like it veers a little bit from her own experiences. It was her most critically acclaimed novel, and we were originally going to focus on Our Spoons Came From Woolworths for this episode and just leave it at that, but you suggested that we give The Vet's Daughter a look, and I'm so glad you did, because I actually liked this book even more than Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. 

KIM: I loved it too. It was great.

AVRIL: I wanted us to look at both novels, because she wrote 11 books and you can divide her fiction into what we would call realism (and I think I would put Our Spoons Came From Woolworths in that sort of realist category, as well as other books like, Sisters by a River and A Touch of Mistletoe.) But there are four of her books that make use of extraordinary effects we might describe as magical realist, or gothic, or uncanny. And those four books are Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, The Vet's Daughter, The Skin Chairs, and The Juniper Tree. So I wanted us to look at both sides of her writing style, because they are very different. The Vet's Daughter isn't autofiction, if you want to use that word, the same way that Our Spoons came from Woolworths, or some of the others are. Shall I just summarize The Vet’s Daughter?

KIM: Yeah, that would be perfect. Yep.

AVRIL: Um, the plot centers on a 17-year-old girl called Alice Rowlands, who lives at home with her mother, who is dying, it seems, of cancer and her bullying father. Her father is a vet, but he's a very unpleasant vet who doesn't actually like animals. He sends a lot of them off to be, um, taken to bits and he gets paid for it. He's not a nice man at all. He's very bullying. And one of the awful first things that happens in the novel is that the mother who is dying is put down, you know. In the UK, we talk about “putting down” animals when they're old and ill, you know, the vet kindly puts them down. Well, her father “puts down” his wife with an injection, just as he would have put down a sick animal. And quite soon after he takes a mistress, Rosa Fisher, who works in the local pub. And she's a very brash woman, very loud-mouthed. And Rosa takes Alice under her wings and decides that she ought to see a bit more of life, and takes her to meet a young waiter she knows. This young waiter tries to rape Alice. It was a rape attempt, but she's absolutely traumatized by what happened. There's a nice cleaning lady called Mrs. Churchill, and she goes to Mrs. Churchill’s small house to take refuge there. And it's when she's in that house that she first levitates, and we'll look at that scene in a moment. Um, the novel turns very dark then, because the father, once he realizes his daughter can levitate, decides to make money out of it. He decides to exploit her talent. And I won't go into the details of the ending because, um, it is a very disturbing ending. Again, it takes your breath away. It's a very odd ending, but a very powerful ending. So shall we talk about levitation? Because that's something really extraordinary, isn't it?

AMY: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I just kept thinking about the idea of an out of body experience and… 

KIM: Yes. Trauma. 

AMY: It seems like she was writing this before that notion was really talked about.

AVRIL: Yes, I think that's absolutely right. You get it in Our Spoons Come From Woolworths, when Sophia falls ill with scarlet fever and she's on a bed and she feels as if she's going up in the air. That's, however, more recognizable. I mean I'm sure you've read, too, about people who are near death or seriously ill, who feel that they're rising out of their body and looking down. It's quite a common experience, which is well-documented, But in The Vet's Daughter, it's not just an imagined sense of being out of your body. She really seems to levitate. And I've talked to Barbara's son about this, and he said she insisted that levitation could happen. For her, levitation was a real phenomenon; rare, but possible. So, the first time that we see Alice levitating, it's after this rape attempt, when she's gone to Mrs. Churchill's house. And I'll just read a bit, because it's described very well.

In the night I was awake and floating. As I went up, the blankets fell to the floor. I could feel nothing below me – and nothing above until I came near the ceiling and it was hard to breathe there. I thought, ‘I mustn't break the gas globe.’ I felt it carefully with my hands, and something very light fell in them, and it was the broken mantle. I kept very still up there because I was afraid of breaking other things in that small crowded room; but quite soon, it seemed, I was gently coming down again. I folded my hands over my chest and kept very straight, and floated down to the couch where I'd been lying. I was not afraid, but very calm and peaceful. In the morning I knew it wasn't a dream because the blankets were still on the floor, and I saw the gas mantle was broken and the chalky powder was still on my hands. 

It's an extraordinary scene, and I think you can read it in whichever way you want, really. You know, if you want to believe in levitation, you can believe it really happened. But if you don't, you can read it as a metaphor for PTSD, you know, that she's rising above the horror of what she's experienced emotionally, if you like, that it's a coping device. And psychiatrists talk about some psychological dissociation often seen in abuse victims or someone who's been through trauma. And in that sense, I think she was well ahead of her time, you know? She was sort of writing about this sense of dissociation, metaphorically, if you like. I think it’s quite strange, and about nine years later, Marquez published that very famous book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which a priest levitates and a young woman disappears into the sky. And this was, you know, lauded as magical realism, breaking new ground in writing. But she was doing this before this book was published, in 1959. In some ways it's too crude to describe the book as magical realism or gothic or uncanny. She simply uses those effects. She weaves them in and out of a context that is realist.

KIM: Right. And there's so much cruelty in the novel. There's cruelty to animals. There's cruelty to Alice and her mother as well. 

AMY: Yeah, and I think we should point out to listeners, though, because you hear that and then you maybe think, “Oh, this isn't a book I would be able to get through. This would be too triggering or whatever.” I'm not sure why, but the experience of reading the novel is not awful, despite all the awful things that happen in the story. And I don't know how she accomplishes this. It's pretty remarkable, but I couldn't put it down. It's almost like I was able to disassociate from the horrible things and enjoy the beauty of the writing. 

AVRIL: I think that's right. I think that's my experience when I first read it too. I mean, another writer would have made this very grim, you know, it would have been dark and tragic all the way through, but she always interweaves humor into her novels. Barbara Comyns was a great fan of Dickens. You get this in Dickens, too. Dickens’s novels can be heartbreaking, but there are always these comic characters, sometimes caricatures, peppering the margins of the novel, who amuse and divert the reader. And Barbara does this, too. There are these moments of kindness and moments of humor that leaven the darkness of the story itself.

KIM: Can you talk a little bit about the kind of response the book got when it was published? Um, how did it sell in comparison to her other novels? 

AVRIL: Who was Changed and Who Was Dead really divided readers, and John Betjeman, the poet, who was quite an influential literary figure, gave it a terrible review. So, she was very worried about how this one would be received, but it did actually get a great deal of praise, from famous writers. Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene both wrote wonderful reviews, and it was generally very well-received in the press as something new and extraordinary that works, you know, against all the odds; a novel about levitation works and was convincing, both on the story level and emotionally. She was absolutely relieved. She was living in Spain at the time, but she came back to London to see her agent and to do various things shortly after it was published, and she was so relieved to find out that it had been well reviewed. And it wasn't like a bestseller today, you know. It sold reasonably well, but she never made a fortune from her novels. I think they're an acquired taste. And I do find she's a bit like Marmite in that she divides readers. 

AMY: No! We're not going to allow that metaphor! I refuse.

AVRIL: I chose this book for a book group, and I paired it with another book, it was quite different. And, uh, about two thirds of the group loved it, and the other third said, “Oh, no, we can't be doing with that,” you know. And her novels still divide readers, but for me, once you've read a Barbara Comyns book, you just don't forget it, you know? They stay with you.

KIM: Absolutely. Can we talk about how important Virago Press was to her ultimate success and her legacy?

AVRIL: Yes, Virago Press was a feminist press set up by Carmen Callil in 1973, um, its agenda was to bring back women's writing into the public eye, particularly women who'd been forgotten. And in 1978, Carmen Callil created a series called Virago Classics to do just that, to bring back forgotten women writers. And, um, she reissued The Vet's Daughter in that series in 1981. And she quickly reprinted Sisters by a River, which was Barbara Comyns's first book, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, and The Skin Chairs, which is now out of print. Um, Graham Greene was slightly instrumental in this. Graham Greene pops up now and again in Barbara's writing career. After the war he became a part-time director at a publisher called Eyre and Spottiswoode, and he persuaded them to publish Sisters By A River. Later, Barbara's agent sent Graham Green the manuscript to The Vet's Daughter, and he thought it was terrific. It was then called The Long White Dress, but he persuaded Barbara to change the title to The Vet's Daughter, and he sent it to the chairman of Heinemann, who was his own publisher, and they published it. And in the early 1980s, he wrote to Carmen Callil and said, “I see you've got this new set of books coming out in this new series. Why don't you consider publishing Barbara Comyns?” And Carmen Callil had already been sent The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara's agent, but that persuaded her to look at the others too. So Barbara then became popular. People wrote to her saying, “Oh, I thought you were dead,” and “This is wonderful, you know, I can now get hold of this book in Virago Modern Classics.” And she had another wave of fame. She was interviewed on the radio, people wanted to see her and wrote to her, “When was her next book coming out?” You know, suddenly she was alive again. And also the royalties brought her money, and she was delighted about that, because she was never rich. I mean, Richard Comyns Carr came from a very illustrious family, but he was hopeless with money, and they were often (even though he had a career in MI6) they were often a bit hard-up. So she was very pleased that this money came in during the 1980s. So Carmen Callill did her a great favor. Um, The Skin Chairs, which was reissued by Carmen Callil in that series, is now out of print, and it's one of my missions to get it reprinted if I can. I'd really like to see it back in print because it's a very powerful novel, but with humor in it as well, like all the others. So, uh, that's one of the next things I want to do.

AMY: Yeah, I remember having my interest piqued reading your book, when I read about the premise of The Skin Chairs. And also House of Dolls. That's another one that seems like it would be up my alley.

AVRIL: Yes, Graham Greene didn't like that one, but I don't think he understood it. I mean, now it's much easier for women of our generation to understand that it's actually a novel about women and money. And it's very, very funny and irreverent, um, irreverent about men particularly. And it's worth reading. The others I would urge listeners to perhaps find if they haven't read them are (if you like the realist stuff she writes) you'll also like A Touch of Mistletoe. If you're a fan of The Vet's Daughter, then you would also enjoy The Juniper Tree, which was her last novel. After A Touch of Mistletoe, she said she'll never write again, but she did. She wrote The Juniper Tree, which was published in 1985, which is one of her best novels, I think.

KIM: I can't wait to read more of Comyns’s work. I mean, this has just been fantastic. 

AMY: I just want to say, also, we've barely scratched the surface of Barbara Comyns. I mean, you mentioned her husband was in MI6, they were hanging out with, like, infamous spies. There is so, so much, we would need another full hour to cover all the interesting facets of her life!

KIM: You’ve got to read this book.

AMY: Yeah, so run out, everyone, and get Avril's biography. It's amazing. 

KIM: Avril, we just want to thank you so much for joining us today, and congratulations on the release of your wonderful book.

AVRIL: Thank you for having me. It's been very interesting to talk to you.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. We'll be back next week with another bonus episode exclusively for our Patreon listeners. And I actually think that Barbara Comyns may have inspired me. I want to investigate some women writers who kept unusual pets. So feel free to join me for that discussion. And the rest of us can all meet back in two weeks to explore another lost lady of lit.

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

189. Enayat al-Zayyat — Love and Silence with Iman Mersal

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron” to find out more. 

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

AMY: Hi, everyone! Today we’re going to be discussing an Egyptian writer who wrote a single novel before, tragically, dying by suicide soon after it was rejected for publication. 

KIM: Enayat al-Zayyat’s novel, Love and Silence, was eventually published in 1967, four years after her death, but then her name seemed to virtually disappear from literary history. 

AMY: Fast forward 30 years to 1993 when poet and author Iman Mersal stumbled across the book in Cairo’s oldest book market and purchased it for one Egyptian pound.  

KIM: The novel haunted Mersal so much that in 2019 she wrote a biography on al-Zayyat in which she shares her decades-long journey to unravel the mystery of the novelist’s writing, her life and death. The English translation was published by Transit Books this April. 

AMY: It’s a fascinating story, and we’re fortunate to have Mersal on the show today to tell us all about it. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today, Iman Mersal, is a poet, writer, academic, and translator. Born in the northern Egyptian Delta, she emigrated to Canada in 1999. Her book, Traces of Enayat, which was first published in Arabic in 2019, won the prestigious 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, making her the first woman to win its Literature category. The author of five books of Arabic poetry, her most recent poetry collection, The Threshold, won the 2023 National Translation Award and was shortlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Award. 

AMY: Iman, whom the New York Times recently called “one of the most consequential Egyptian authors of her generation,” is also the author of 2018’s How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts, and her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books and The Nation, among other publications. She is an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. Welcome to the show, Iman! We’re so glad to have you here.

IMAN MERSAL: I'm so happy to be here as well.

KIM: Okay, Iman, can you take us back to the fall of 1993, that's 30 years after al-Zayyat’s death, and tell us more about how you came upon Love and Silence? Because you initially thought it was written by someone else, right?

IMAN: Yeah. I found a novel with a plain gray cover by a woman named Enayat al-Zayyat, and I never heard this name despite the fact that I studied Arabic literature. So the first thing that came to my mind was, “She must be a younger sister or a cousin of a famous Egyptian novelist named Latifa al-Zayyat.” She published her first novel in 1960, Open Door, and the novel became a film three years later. She was a very famous, iconic writer. So I actually started to read a novel thinking she is just a relative who tried her hand in writing. I was, of course, mistaken. 

AMY: Okay, so you start reading the novel, Love and Silence. What's your response?

IMAN: At the very beginning, I was taken by the whisper voice in the novel and the language. Because Latifa al-Zayyat set the formula of a good novel written by an Arab female writer in the 20th century by writing Open Door in 1960. So the formula was basically to have the "woman question" and the "nation question," and they have to be mingling together. There is no separation between “women” and “nation.” With the Enayat al-Zayyat novel, it started with the death of a brother of the narrator, so I thought, “Oh, she will take some time, you know, a meditation with grief, and then she will go on to find this formula.” But it wasn't actually. The novel was more complicated, with so many layers. The language was very strange, as if she is translating it from another language. This is what fascinated me the most. She was not trained in Arabic literature to begin with. She studied in a German school, and her father used to sit with her daily to improve her Arabic language in terms of writing. So you can see the struggle in her writing. And what I want readers to know about the novel when it's translated into English (now there is a project that it will be translated) is really the language of the novel. In this particular moment, a female writer is trying to put this internal journey in Arabic language. I don't really treat this novel as a memoir at all, but you can see that it was typical of her journey actually; anxiety, depression, feeling alienated inside her own class, inside her own body. The novel is not the best novel you would read, of course, and it's a debut novel, so it has all of the problems of a debut novel, when the young writer wants to capture and to say everything, you know. However, there is this kind of genuine voice that for me was a great gift. I really did not read in Arabic a female voice like this until I read Love and Silence in 1993. 

KIM: And I just want to go back to that moment. You're in the bookshop, you find this book, you pick it up. It's totally unknown, and yet it's this voice when you read it that is completely unlike anything you've read. It's amazing.

AMY: And unfortunately for all of us English speakers, we have to wait a little while to get a copy of this. It's good to hear that this is going to be translated at some point. But I'll go ahead and read an excerpt from Love and Silence:

Out of the still calm of sleep I pulled myself into motion, wandered across the room and, standing by the window, brushed my discontent into the street. I sat down—looked out—paged through the book of life. My heart was heavy and to my eyes everything seemed old. People were damp yellow leaves and I was unmoved by them, by their faces, by the soft covers of their clothes. I felt at once imprisoned by this life and pulled towards new horizons. I wanted to pull this self clear, gummy with the sap of its surroundings; to tear free into a wider world. The clear skies of my country bored me. I wanted others, dark and muddied and threatening, capable of stirring fear and astonishment. I wanted my feet to know a different land.

KIM: I mean, gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. 

IMAN: I really want to just comment here. So see this last sentence, to find “a land,” you know, not her homeland. This was in the time when the dominant discourse in culture was talking about the homeland, the nation, the “best land ever,” the “most brilliant nation ever,” and so on and so forth. I just want to say, when you read something like this in this age and this environment, you feel as if it's really speaking to you directly.

KIM: Yeah, I mean, it's how I felt, I still do feel sometimes, but definitely felt really strongly in my 20s and, you know, my late teens. It's a beautiful way of putting it that I never could have, but that feeling of just wanting another experience so deeply and also that ambivalent feeling of discontent, but also excited about the potential future at the same time. I thought that was lovely. And your translations throughout the book, because that's our opportunity to get to hear her voice, are just wonderful. So I'm so glad that you wove them throughout your book.

AMY: Okay, so you're realizing right away, “Wait a second, this is a whole different ball game here and probably, possibly, not what I thought, not a relative of this other very iconic writer.” What information, then, were you able to uncover on al-Zayyat in your first attempts at research? 

IMAN: Right away, actually, I started to ask old writers whom I know from the Sixties generation, and I was very close to. I started to ask them about a woman named Enayat al-Zayyat or about the novel. And I was so taken aback that people did not know her. And when someone knows her, they would tell me very interesting things, like “her mother is German” or “she had to learn the Arabic language in order to write in Arabic.” One time someone told me, “Oh, she is absolutely the younger sister of Latifa al-Zayyat,” going back to my assumption. And this actually made me ask my first question, and it wasn't “Who is Enayat al-Zayyat?” It was why this novel has been excluded from the canon of Arabic literature, from lists about Arab female writers, Sixties writing, whatever. So this was the first question actually. What makes the canon celebrate or exclude or forget something?

KIM: Right, right. So this all sparked what eventually turned out to be this decades-long quest to learn more about al-Zayyat. And I want to read from your book, Traces of Enayat. You write, “There’s a kind of intense curiosity which possesses us when we encounter an author who is truly unknown—a branch cut from the tree with no date of birth or death in evidence—or when their writing offers no clues to the wider life of their generation, to their close friends or literary influences.”  I really love the use of the word “clues” here. Because I felt like your book is just this beautifully written real life mystery. Like a detective, you're sifting through all this evidence. It's often contradictory, as you said earlier. It's incomplete. And there's also this physicality to the search. You're digging through archival material, you're reaching out to al-Zayyat's friends and family. You're meeting some of them in person multiple times throughout this search, and you're even traversing the streets of Cairo, particularly its cemeteries. And I found that part especially interesting. I was Googling to see pictures of the cemeteries and learning more about how they're part of life there. I wanted to know if you could share something about that with our listeners so they can get a feel for that as well.

IMAN: Sure. Let me tell you first about geography in the book, because I really felt when you search for someone, and this person is absent in the official public archive, and her family got rid of so many things, including the draft of her second novel, as we can talk about later… when you are searching for almost a ghost, it was, for me, geography that I can rely on. I wanted to know where did she live, die, work, and where is her cemetery? And here, a new relation emerged with Cairo, because I left Cairo in 1998. Of course, I go every year, but every year you go, places are disappearing, changing, and so on. But through the search for Enayat, I started to see the map of Cairo differently. So, for example, to find her old house in Cairo. I found out that I was living just two streets down from there, in the Dokki neighborhood. But the neighborhood was a bourgeoisie neighborhood, full of villas, trees, and very fancy during Enayat's life. But during my life, it became a middle class area, crowded, full of open markets in the streets and so on. The cemetery was very important for so many reasons.( I mean, I love what Saidiya Hartman said about visiting archives. She said to visit an archive is to go into a morgue. What do we see in the morgue? You see corpses. You see corpses that can't speak for themselves.) She was buried in what is known as the City of the Dead, right? It's more than four miles of different cemeteries and mausoleums, beautiful ones. However, with urbanization, poverty, migration from villages to big Cairo, people started to live there. So when you walk there, you are seeing people living there, children playing, you hear music, you smell food. So you can't see life and death coming that close to each other anywhere, I think, than like at this cemetery. However, I ended the book promising Enayat that I will visit her again and again. This is her place, the only place I am sure she is in. But guess what? In 2020 our government had a plan to build so many bridges and highways, and part of doing this was to demolish some of these beautiful cemeteries, which means even cemeteries are threatened to disappear.

KIM: There's just so much symbolism there. 

AMY: I was just going to say, it's so in keeping with Enayat's story. It just keeps happening time and again. And also these coincidences between her life and yours; you mentioned living in close proximity, but there's so many [coincidences] throughout the course of your book that kind of give you chills. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

AMY: It took you so long to work this all out that it was almost like time was giving you little morsels here and there, or Enayat was slowly dispensing the information to you. It's very interesting.

KIM: Yeah. I agree. So let's go back to Enayat’s life. What can you tell us about her early life, her childhood, her family?

IMAN: Her childhood can be seen through images, right? So, from her sister, Azim al-Zayyat, who died actually last year, it was a happy childhood. A devoted father, intellectual father, bourgeoisie family, the mother is a little bit tough, and, uh, controlling. From Nadia Lutfi, the iconic Egyptian actress who was a close friend to Enayat al-Zayyat, it wasn't that happy. Yes, the father was devoted, and Enayat was very close to her father, but she actually did not get along with her mother, because her mother was applying the bourgeoisie rules, and Enayat was struggling with depression, interested in writing and painting, not in salons and showing off. So whatever happiness and functionality of the family were there, she was struggling as a child, for sure.

KIM: So you mentioned Nadia Lutfi. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got in touch with Nadia and what she told you about their friendship? 

IMAN: So Nadia Lutfi is this kind of actress, she's an icon. I mean, think about Audrey Hepburn or something. We used to watch her movies on TV and in the cinema since I was a child. So the idea of reaching out to her was just terrifying. So I actually called the number I got from a friend who is a journalist, and I did not expect her to answer. But she answered. She has this hoarse voice because she was a heavy smoker, so I knew she was Nadia Lutfi right away. And we talked for one hour on this first phone call. And later on, I went to Egypt and I kept meeting her at least twice a year or so. And we continued talking and we would drink lots of whiskey, smoke lots of cigars together, stay up until almost the morning and she was sending me home with her driver, you know. So every time I was with her I just would feel, "I can't believe it. This is Nadia Lutfi!" 

AMY: Listeners, it's like Angelina Jolie or somebody like that and finding out that she has this childhood friend who was a lost lady of literature and she’s going to tell me all about it, and how intimidated you would be, but also how wild and crazy this must have been for you.

KIM: I mean, it's like Enayat led you to her.

AMY: Didn't Nadia say the same thing? 

IMAN: Yes, she said "She sent you to me."

AMY: Amazing. Okay, so let's move on in Enayat's story a little bit. She married an air force pilot at a very young age. She wanted to sort of get away from her childhood, and so she thought marriage was the answer. It was not, to say the least. What do you know, Iman, from your research about this marriage?

IMAN: It was a wrong decision. She was not happy. They were completely different. She felt suffocated, she wrote in her diary more than once. She asked for a divorce. And actually the whole thing was resolved after a few years, not by the court, but by her father speaking directly to the husband and convincing him to divorce her.

KIM: Okay, so she is separated from her husband, as you said. She's living in her father's house. There's an apartment on the floor above his. I believe it's an apartment. She's sharing custody of her young son with her husband. So this hasn't been resolved. What's going on there?

IMAN: In terms of custody, the father had the right to have full custody of the son when he reached the age of six. This was the law then, and the son was coming closer to this age, of course. So, Abassi al-Zayyat, al-Zayyat's father, built this beautiful villa in Dokki. And when she wanted to leave her husband and ask for a divorce, he built another apartment above the villa so she could have her independent life. And this is the space where she wrote Love and Silence. This is the space where she dreamed of obtaining an Optima [typewriter] machine so she can type. It was a very new trend, so she got one to type her novel. So what I'm trying to say is there are so many gaps to describe the three and a half years before her suicide. But we can fill these gaps by imagining her geography without really speaking for her. In the end, you are imagining. I don't want the question of why did Enayat commit suicide to be in the center of my book. Really, it wasn't. Maybe at the beginning I wanted to know, and I was fascinated with the idea that a young woman with a son, a beloved father, a friend like Nadia Lutfi, would commit suicide because her novel is rejected. I felt it's a tragedy, but it's a very interesting tragedy. It deserves to be known and researched. So I think really the rejection of the novel was the last straw. Her identity was as a writer and a mother, and both were going to be taken from her. She did not live, really, to her potential. 

AMY: The lack of archival information that was available on her did seem to impact how you thought about your own legacy as a writer and what you leave behind. You talked about that a little bit in your book.

IMAN: Yeah, I mean, you go through stages. In this case, one of them is “Oh, I want to keep my archives, my old papers and the diaries and you know drafts of books and blah blah blah.” And you go to your father's house, collect it and so on and so forth. But seriously, through my experience with Enayat, I feel now at least that the best way to protect our archive is to read other people's archives. It's to read the past. We read the past not to display it, not to talk about, for example, Enayat as a victim. No, she is not a victim. I was celebrating, all the time, the potential of Enayat as well. But it's actually to find this intersection and the connection between you and others. It could be a historical event. It could be a person. It could be a place, I don't know. But reading the past is our great way of actually reading the archive. Because if you go to the archive without a question, without a burning question, you will display it. You will talk about interesting things about Enayat, for example. It's not that way. I was actually reading my own archive while writing about Enayat. This is how I think about it.

KIM: I love the way you put that.

AMY: You also have a really interesting section towards the end of your book. It's almost an aside, where you address all these other women writers from the past. And you talk to them individually, and then you say “I want to tell a story right now. I want to light a candle for Enayat, and I want to talk about the day she decided that life was unbearable.” That was such a beautiful and poignant section of your book, and I think it kind of ties into what you just said about reading the past.

IMAN: Yeah, it's usually really the question of how to tell a story, either our story or someone else's. So, talking about this chapter, I was almost visualizing every day the last few days of Enayat's life. But how to write it is just so difficult. Am I going to write it as a prophet who saw what happened or someone who is imagining? I felt there was a heavy weight of reaching this moment of a young woman standing in front of the mirror, desperate, feeling “I don't want to be here anymore.” And then a moment happened that it's January 3rd. I'm in bed already. And then I realized it's Enayat's birthday. I went to my studio behind the house, and then something opened up. I saw all of these books, because I was searching them as well, of female writers older than Enayat, next to hers on my big desk. And this is the moment when you feel so connected to the past. It's not just Enayat. It's not just me. It's all of these women here. They existed. Lots of them are forgotten. And it's a moment to celebrate one of them, their life. So it's really finding the way to tell a story that is always the most fascinating thing in writing. 

AMY: Yeah. I love that moment of, like, it just all came together for you when you saw the books. I feel like we haven't done her writing enough justice yet on this episode. And so I want to read another passage from her journal. So there wasn't much available from her journals, right? But this passage that you included in your book just stopped me in my tracks. I'll preface it by  saying that Enayat, she would often refer to herself in the third person in her diaries. So this is her talking about her decision to get married when she was young:

She entered a marriage without love, without mutual under-

standing, without compatibility. The possibility of such things had

never occurred to her. Her only thought was to escape the discipline

and constraints of school.

So the paradise of infancy closed its gates and the doors of a

premature young adulthood swung open. Young adulthood? Just

adulthood. And she chose wrong. She went through the wrong door,

the one that opened onto a desert, onto wastelands devoid even of

mirages, and she looked back to find that the door had vanished, and

now there was no way home that she could see. Bewildered, she wept.

Wretched and lost, she wept. And then she took heart and resigned

herself. Resigned herself, and in doing so discovered an extraordinary

capacity to endure. She saw herself as a camel, ruminating on all

the happy moments of the past, chewing them over slowly, slowly in

the midst of that brutal desert. And then? Then the provisions ran

out, the past was finished, and the camel needed something new to

chew on. But there was nothing to be had except despair, yellow as

the sands, and her body wasted away and her soul thinned and she

began to call for deliverance, began to scream for help. Suddenly she

saw that her home was built on shifting sands and the harder she

worked to save it the deeper and deeper it sank, and she pleaded for

salvation, for help from God, from Fate, from everything. Caught

up in her wild inquiry, she had forgotten that no one was coming

to save her because she was the only one who could do it. The first

impulse must be hers. Then she saw the key, the key of deliverance

that hung at her neck and in her soul, in the spirit within her, and so

she rose to her feet and, opening the door, she stood on the threshold

and filled her lungs with life, with the rich fragrance of youth, the

scent of spring and freedom. There on the threshold she cast off her

old, cracked hide, gashed and knotted, saturated with fear, and took

her first steps in new skin, free and uninhibited. She was brave, she

was steadfast, she relied on herself.

I mean, I cannot wait to read this novel, Love and Silence, based on that passage alone from her diary! If this is how she was writing…I know you're saying it's not “the greatest novel ever,” but this writing right here is pretty damn good. 

IMAN: And this is really what makes literature great. I mean, you don't have to write the best novel on earth, but you can talk about it as a work that has real impact on you, that can speak to you. And this is what we should appreciate about literature, actually, more than anything else.

AMY: Absolutely. al-Zayyat died on January 3rd, 1963. And you imagine her final day in Traces of Enayat, but we'll never truly know exactly what happened. We do know that she left a note to her son and took an overdose of pills. It was four years after her death that Love and Silence was finally published. How did that happen and what was the response to the book?

IMAN: Enayat's father and Nadia tried to publish the novel more than once, and they kept waiting for this publishing house to bring his book out. When the book came out, it was March, 1967. Some of our best critics at the time wrote about the novel and how beautiful it is and how sad that the novelist is dead. And I got to know this later when I started the archival search. However, the 1967 war took place in June, like three months after the novel was published. And if you go through not just the Egyptian, but Arab newspapers, from the war and for at least a year, everything was about the defeat, was about the war, was about what's next. It was rare to even see book reviews in these newspapers and magazines. So I think there was kind of bad luck, but also the question for me was really why this novel did not impact other Arab female writers of the time? They kept using the formula of women/nation. Big issues and so on. I think it wasn't included in the literary scene. It wasn't talked about enough. It wasn't taught in schools like other novels and so on.

KIM: You discovered, as you briefly mentioned earlier, that there was a second novel in the works, and that adds really to the sense of loss there. What do you know about that novel?

IMAN: So in Enayat's diary, or to be specific, in the independent separate papers that survived from her diary, there were actually two or three pages that I didn't understand at the beginning at all. She wrote the name of “Ludwig Keimer” with another two German names. When I searched them, Ludwig Keimer was a very famous Egyptologist who was born in 1892 in Germany, and he escaped in 1928 to come and live in Egypt. And he lived in Egypt until he died in 1957. And just a year after he came to Egypt, he became involved in the culture and the Egyptology scene in Egypt with other scholars. So he was involved in cataloging the National Egyptian Museum. He got Egyptian national citizenship, and so on and so forth. So, the name was just a mystery for me, but there was also more than one address in her diaries that didn't make any sense. And in my search, I was successfully connecting the address to Keimer and to his other German friends. So when it came to my attention that she was writing a novel about Keimer, I became absolutely all over the place searching for any draft. I found, actually, some pieces of the draft of the novel. And I kept imagining that Enayat was trying to do with Ludwig Keimer exactly what I am doing with her now. So when she worked in the German Institute of Antiquities, she was bored, actually. She felt it's a useless job, but I have to take it. She used to make fun of herself as a woman who is working in bookshelves, but actually she became so fascinated with his life. Because this guy had a great collection of books, manuscripts, paintings, maps, and the Institute bought all of his materials, and his collection was just amazing. And she was working on classifying this material, since she knew German. So she became fascinated with his life. So I think this was a potential way to go out of your crisis, right? And through Keimer's life, I imagine that she was trying to reposition herself in her own life. She didn't finish the novel, of course.

AMY: Right. His story was an escape for her. Yeah. 

IMAN: Yes. The story of lonely Jewish intellectuals and scholars in Egypt is just fascinating. All of those who escaped the Nazis to come, and they became really a part of the society, an important part of the society. Every one of them needs a book. But I wish someone will write…

AMY: [interrupts] How much time do you have, Iman? How much time do you have? 

IMAN: I don't! It's not my project. But I feel like sometimes I have this feeling, especially in Cairo, because it's my city. I feel if I move a stone in the street, I will find a story. So it's not about the interesting stories, it's about which story is really part of you. Because it takes years, you are right, to tell one story. Every time you start the project, you are 60 pages into a draft and then you feel, “No, this is not what I want to do.” Like walking in a street and finding a wall in front of you and you have to reboot. And I'm actually engaged with Enayat because of poetry, because this is what touched me. In her whispering voice is this kind of poetic power. And I'm asking my questions about her, but I don't want to speak for her. So it's not a biography. It's not an academic work. It's not a history book, right? It's everything together. I wasn't able to write the book until it came to me in an enlightening second, that the story of my search for Enayat al-Zayyat is a book, not a particular genre. And I will have freedom to go with whatever genre that can express what I want to say. And this was a moment that the book really opened itself.

AMY: I think you chose perfectly in that. It's so much more interesting than just reading a cut-and-dry biography of what you could find about her life. And the missing pieces almost spurned you on to have to get creative in that way. And when you're talking about writing and hitting a wall, hitting a dead end, that literally was happening to you in Cairo! You were trying to look for her childhood home and being like, “Wait, the street's not here!” And having to talk to doormen and figure out where the street is now because it moved. So it's very fascinating to read your book. I absolutely loved it. 

KIM: Same. Definitely. It's a wonderful book. 

AMY: So we hope that there's a renewed interest in Enayat al-Zayyat, thanks to your book, Iman, and Kim and I are both so glad that through her, we've been introduced to your work. Listeners, there are so many intriguing twists and turns to Iman's journey in telling Enayat's story. It's quite a ride and well worth reading. Thank you so much for joining us on the show today. We truly appreciate your time. 

IMAN: Thank you for having me. This was fun.

KIM: Yeah, it was a real pleasure to get to talk to you and talk about this wonderful book. So that's all for today's show. Thanks for joining us and we invite you next week to listen to our Patreon episode on Ina Eloise Young. She was one of America's first female sports reporters and likely the first sports editor of a daily American newspaper.

AMY: I will also be fangirling a little over Caitlin Clark in that episode and recounting my own brief history as a sports reporter. If you want to get in on that and all of our twice-monthly bonus episodes, go to lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron.” And shout out to our newest Patreon members, Simon Sleighton and Julia Valentine. Thank you for your support. 

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 and made possible by listeners like you. 

187. Kay Boyle — Fifty Stories with Anne Boyd Rioux

This transcript was generated with the use of AI and may contain errors.

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to another episode of 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: Of today's lost lady, the writer Studs Terkel once said in an interview, "Why is Kay Boyle not better known? Things are out of joint when someone like Kay Boyle is not as celebrated as she should be."

KIM: Okay, so it sounds like we are much overdue in devoting an episode to her.

AMY: Yeah, and we've been kind of talking about doing this one for a while, but I kept kicking the can down the road a little bit. I mean, the scope of her life, the scope of her writing, the circle she ran in…it's not something that you can easily distill down to a 40-minute episode. This is a woman who was hanging out with Left Bank artists and literary giants in 1920s Paris, who wrote about the buildup to and ravages of World War II a few decades later, who was blacklisted in the 1950s, and then who in the 60s and 70s was at epicenter of Haight-Ashbury protests and picket lines. And that's not to mention her personal life, which is equally storied.

KIM: Right. So it's no surprise, then, that her writing really covers the gamut too. Whether she's writing about a young girl witnessing racism in Atlantic City or from the point of view of resistance fighters in the French Alps, at the heart of Kay Boyle's prose is a yearning for human connection in the midst of darkness. Boyle wrote more than 40 books, including 14 novels, eight volumes of poetry, and 11 collections of short fiction. As you said, Amy, it's a lot to try and cover, but we're going to do our best. Luckily, we have a returning guest today who knows a lot about Kay Boyle, and she's going to help us navigate all that.

AMY: Yeah, we've got a lot to cover and a short time to do it, so let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Anne Boyd Rioux, is very dear to us because she is the very first guest we ever featured on this podcast. That was for episode Number 11 on Constance Fenimore Woolson. Anne, your involvement back then did so much to legitimize our podcast when we were still very fledgling. But the strength of your reputation helped us recruit other academics and authors to participate because it was like, "Oh, Anne did it. Okay, great, you know? Sure, I'll come on too." 

KIM: Yeah, I feel like you really set the tone for us, Anne. 

ANNE: I'm so glad that I was able to help you guys get started. I'm so glad you're still doing this. So thanks for having me on again.

KIM: Anne is a three time National Endowment for the Humanities award recipient. She specializes in recovering women's voices. Her published work includes Meg, Joe, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why it Still Matters (Yay!) As well as editing The Collected Stories of Constance Fenimore Woolson.

AMY: After 23 years as an English professor, Anne left academia in 2022, sold virtually all of her belongings, and bought a one way ticket to Europe, where she's been traveling and working on her own writing ever since. You can follow her work and some of her many adventures by signing up for her Substack newsletter, which we'll include in our show notes. And Patreon members, next week we're going to be devoting a whole bonus episode talking with Anne about what her life is like now as an expat abroad.

KIM: I can't wait for that episode because that's going to be really fun. To kick things off here, can you first tell us about how your own interest in Kay Boyle was sparked?

ANNE: Yes, I was teaching in Austria for a study abroad program, and I wanted to do a unit on the literary expats who were over in Europe in the, you know, 1920s, Thirties. And I had Hemingway, I had Fitzgerald, but I wanted a woman writer. This was a short story class. So I started digging around to see if I could find one. And I found Kay Boyle. And I was amazed. Absolutely gobsmacked. She was part of that literary expat scene in Paris in the Twenties, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. There was so much there. Um, and some of the writing is actually set in Austria, so it was a wonderful addition to the class.

AMY: So Boyle was born in 1902 in St. Paul, Minnesota, but as a child she lived in multiple cities, including Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and my own hometown of Cincinnati.

KIM: Shout out to Cincinnati. 

AMY: Yes! Um, there seems to have been a stark difference between her mother's outlook on life and that of her father and grandfather. What do you know about that and how it may have impacted her?

ANNE: Well, there was a stark difference. Her father and her grandfather were very business oriented, very focused on wealth. Her grandfather in particular, was very focused on accumulating wealth, um, and had very conventional ideas about what was important in life compared to her mother. Her mother had an understated but strong personality, and she managed to hold her own against these two men, the grandfather in particular. And, I think what probably had the biggest impact on Kay was that she was just enamored with artists and writers and musicians, philosophers. She loved ideas. She loved art, and she exposed her children to all of that and encouraged them to create their own. I mean, she was reading Gertrude Stein at the dining room table, to guests. Tender Buttons, I think it was. Yeah. And then, you know, in the next breath, she's reading some of Kay's work, some of her juvenilia, as if it deserved as much attention as the published writers of the day. And so it's hard to, I think, overstate her significance in Kay's life. 

KIM: That's pretty amazing.

AMY: Yeah, and in terms of the writing and the artist she liked, it was very cutting edge. She likes people that were doing new and different experimental things, right?

ANNE: Oh, well, she took the girls to the 1913 Armory show, so she would have been 10, 11 years old when her mom took her to see that exhibit. And that was the one that blew everybody's minds. It was the first major exhibit of modern art in the US, and people were throwing tomatoes at the art, and people were horrified. And here her mom was elated. She loved the innovation, um, she loved the daring of it. And so those kinds of aesthetic principles imbued Kay's childhood.

KIM: Her mom sounds amazing. 

AMY: So yeah, so this is taking me back to, I mean, one of her short stories is called "Security" and it's sort of going back to her own childhood. And it's about her grandfather saying that he's going to help her fund this little amateur newspaper, and he's like, "Okay, I'll fund this, but certain political subject matters are off the table." 

KIM: Oh, I totally remember this. Yes. Yes. Yes. 

AMY: It might have even been like shares of a stock or something like that, that he was going to give her. And, um, and that ultimatum, she was like, "Nope, this is a newspaper and we're going to be writing about controversial topics and social justice," and she was basically like, "I can't be bought and you can keep your money." Um, it was a sweet little story, but…

ANNE: My understanding is that it's very autobiographical. She and her sister did have a little paper, and her grandfather did fund it. He had it printed in color, even, which you can imagine in the 1920s. Teens, I guess it would have been. Yeah, that's remarkable.

KIM: Yeah. That's pretty cool. So with her father and grandfather, when she moved to New York at the age of 20, she never, apparently, she never saw them again, which is interesting. When she was there, she was joined by her beau Richard Brault, a French exchange student she'd met in Cincinnati. I can see a French exchange student being interesting in Cincinnati. In Cincinnati. 

AMY: Yeah, yeah. He was an electrical engineer at the University of Cincinnati, I think. Of course, I wanted to find out all the Cincinnati connections. So yeah, they were dating in Cincinnati. She decides to move to New York. I think her sister was already in New York, working for a magazine. So she's like, "I'm going to go." The boyfriend tags along. So in New York, Kay right away gets a job assisting the poet Lola Ridge, who, listeners, you might remember Lola Ridge. We did a previous episode on her with Therese Svoboda. That's episode Number 108 if you want to go back and have a listen. So she joins Lola helping edit the literary magazine Broom. And I remember from our Lola Ridge episode that she was complicated. 

KIM: Yeah, to say the least. 

AMY: Yeah. But Kay Boyle really loved her. They remained close over the decades. I presume, Anne, that kind of like her mother, Lola Ridge also had a huge influence on her and the kind of writer she'd become. 

ANNE: Yes. So she was definitely a mentor to Kay, and she reminded her of her mother a lot in her frailty. Both of them were rather slight and, um, prone to illness. And so Kay had this kind of protective feeling from them both, but also admired their strengths so much. But Lola introduced her to so many writers. And at the gatherings that they would have, she's meeting William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, um, Jean Toomer, you know, lots of the writers of the day. And some of those associations, certainly with William Carlos Williams, would last for many, many years. But it was through Lola Ridge that she sort of had her entree into the world of literature, although she wasn't writing a lot yet. Um, she was, I think, a secretary for the magazine. Yeah.

KIM: So eventually Kay and Richard, the French exchange student, married, and they took a trip to France to meet his family. That was supposed to be a three month trip, but Boyle ended up remaining in France for 18 years, as one might do if they got the chance to get over to France.

AMY: Yeah, so she stuck around France, but we should note that she did not stick with her husband. Instead, she fell madly in love with magazine editor, Ernest Walsh, and she became pregnant. But by the time the child was born, Walsh sadly had died from tuberculosis. So Kay finds herself now a single mother living in France. Anne, tell us a little bit more about what you know of this time for Kate, both personally and professionally.

ANNE: Well, it's a very difficult time for Kay. I would hazard to say those were the darkest days of her life. She fell madly, helplessly in love with Walsh. She was enamored not just with him as a person, but with him as a poet and as an editor. He gave everything to literature.And there was a kind of religiosity to this, a sort of worship of the word. And this became her religion, I think, for the rest of her life. And I meant to say earlier that with Lola Ridge, she was introduced to writing as a form of politics, political conscience being such a big part of Lola Ridge's writing. I mean, her mom was very politically active as well. So both of those kind of influenced her, but with Ernest Walsh, she was introduced to the world of modernism and this kind of religion of the, the Revolution of the Word, and this desire to create something totally new. And so her passion, it wasn't just romantic, it wasn't just sexual, but it was literary too. And so she had this child, and she could not support herself. And she ended up in a commune, actually, that was run by Raymond Duncan, who was one of the brothers of Isadora Duncan. And this was a solution to this problem, this question of how to live as a woman writer, who's also a single mother. And so the commune was very avant garde and, you know, they walked around in togas all the time, and they're, they're making sandals , rugs and various things and selling them in the shop. And it's very back to nature. And they watched her child, and she worked in the shop and, you know, James Joyce is coming in.

She'd met Joyce and Stein and Samuel Beckett and lots of writers. Robert McAlmon was a huge influence on her. She met him through Ernest Walsh, and Robert McAlmon was a poet who was also a publisher, and he published the magazine Contacts with William Carlos Williams. He was Hemingway's first publisher. And so they became quite close and ended up, you know, there's this really interesting sort of double autobiography called Being Geniuses Together that she published after his death. It's quite fascinating, about Paris in the 20s. If you want another perspective on it, Kay Boyle's experience as an expat in the late 1920s Paris is completely different from anything you've ever read, you know, in the context of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and, you know, the grand times, the big parties that everyone was having. Um, Kay Boyle was, struggling, and what ended up happening, actually, is that they had to essentially kidnap her daughter away from the commune with the help of Lawrence Vail, who I'm sure we'll talk about it. Um, so it's a very dramatic episode of her life. 

AMY: Yeah, so it got a little bit culty there. Kim, it's reminding me a little bit of the episode we did on Hotbed and how at that time period, they were trying to figure out solutions for childcare and all these other Left Bank artists weren't having to deal with that, you know?

ANNE: Yeah. Well, they had wives to take care of the kids!

AMY: Exactly, 

KIM: Yeah, exactly. Yep. 

ANNE: Yeah.Yeah. 

AMY: Okay, so for this episode, Kim and I read Boyle's Fifty Stories, which is a 1980 collection of her short fiction starting from the late 20s through the mid 60s. So let's talk a little more about her writing style during the early time period, because she is very determined at this point to be on the cusp of something new and different. You know, she's hanging out with all these "Gertrude Stein" types. And of course, they think they're changing the face of the literary world. In fact, her name is listed first on a proclamation that was published in Transition literary magazine in 1929. It was a manifesto calling for the Revolution of the Word. So Boyle, along with 15 other expat writers, including Lawrence Vail and Hart Crane, they stated their intentions to, quote, "emancipate the creative elements from the present ideology." And here's the opening line of this proclamation that they all signed. "Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems, and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax,static psychology, descriptive naturalism, and desiring of crystallizing a viewpoint, we hereby declare that..." And then it goes on to state, I don't know, 13, 20, I can't remember how many declarations about what they intended to do as these new writers, and it ends with the declaration, "The plain reader be damned." So basically, they have no interest in boring writing. They have no interest in boring, pedestrian readers. They are wanting to break out of the box. 

KIM: I love that they had a manifesto published, like, what is bad about current writing and what they're going to do to fix it. 

 AMY: Okay, so I want to read a passage from her short story "Wedding Day." I think this story sort of, um, exemplifies her writing style in terms of trying to do this more experimental work. This story begins, it's a young girl's wedding day. She is home with her mom and brother, getting the house ready for the big event. And she and her brother are both mourning the end of their sibling relationship as they have known it.

Meanwhile, the mother is kind of oblivious to the bittersweetness of the day, and she's more worried about appearances and superficial things, you know, and she's unaware right in front of her eyes that her son and daughter are having this grieving process, basically. This is when the brother and sister just decide to go outside for the afternoon right before the wedding. [reads from “Wedding Day”]

Out they went to face the spring before the wedding, and their mother stood at the window praying that this occasion at least pass off with dignity, her heart not in her mouth, but beating away in peace in its own bosom. Here then was April holding them up, stabbing their hearts with hawthorn, scalping them with a flexible blade of wind.

Here went their yellow manes up in the air. Turning them shaggy as lions. The Sen had turned around in the wind, and in tufts and scallops was leaping directly away from St. Cloud. The clouds were cracking and splitting up like a glacier. Down the sky they were shifting and sliding, and the two, with their heads bare, were walking straight into the heart of the flow.

It isn't too late, he said. I mean, It isn't too late. The sun was an imposition, an imposition, for they were another race stamping an easy trail through the wilderness of Paris, possessed of the same people, but of themselves like another race. No one else could, by lifting of the head, only be starting life over again.

And it was a wonder the whole city of Paris did not hold its breath for them. For if anyone could have begun a new race, it was these two. Therefore, in their young days, they should have been saddled and strapped with necessity so that they could not have escaped. Paris was their responsibility. No one else had the same delight.

No one else put a foot to pavement in such a way. With their yellow heads back, they were stamping a new trail, but in such ignorance, for they had no idea of it.

KIM: Wow, I'm so glad you read that. 

AMY: She's describing this as almost like a tragic natural disaster, you know? The glacier is splitting in two. 

KIM: And it feels Greek. 

AMY: Yeah! 

KIM: Almost a little maybe incestuous, too, with the idea of them starting the new race and kind of escaping together. There's so many things going on that you can even just see in that passage.

AMY: Yeah, and I think the very opening sentence of this story, I have to paraphrase because I don't have it right in front of me, but they're throwing down the red carpet runner that the bride is going to walk down. And it said that the red carpet unfurled like a spurt of blood or something like that, you know? So… 

KIM: Yeah. It's very violent. 

AMY: Yeah. And I do think not so much anymore but back then, weddings were like a death in a certain way. It's an ending of childhood, and I think also the very ending of the passage I read, "They were stamping a new trail," you know, "Paris was their responsibility." That to me goes back to Kay Boyle trying to chart this new literary course, you know, putting her own stamp on a new type of writing.

KIM: I didn't even think about Amy. I love that.

ANNE: Yes, I think her early writing really shows her ambitions too, right? To create something new, with language. That is what she got from that circle, right? From Ernest Walsh, from Robert McAlmon. And of course she was already hearing that from her mother, that that's what a writer does. A writer reinvents language. And so you see this kind of really intense description and imagery in a lot of her early works that, like you said, that could be violent, right? Describing something as simple as a rug can take on these sort of intense emotional qualities. She's really digging deep in a lot of these early stories and you sense how passionate she was as a person, I think, through these stories too. That's a lot of her personality coming through as well.

AMY: And the poet. The poet within her. We haven't mentioned that she also wrote poetry. Yeah.

ANNE: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of poetry. 

KIM: Yeah. I feel like it's Fifty Stories… This is like, I think the second story, but it's unforgettable. Like, it doesn't get lost in the fact that you've read a whole book. 

ANNE: It is an incredible collection of stories and…

KIM: It is. 

ANNE: …if people ask me, What should I read by Kay Boyle? I say, get the collection, Fifty Stories, and just start dipping in because you'll be amazed. Certainly this collection shows the breadth and depth of her achievements, particularly as a short story writer. She also wrote novels. She also wrote poetry. I think that she particularly excelled as a short story writer and, you know, a number of these stories were published in The New Yorker and Harper's and other magazines. I really feel like she should be credited with helping create the modern short story in America. but she, you know, for various reasons, hasn't been. And one of them, I think, is because she lived overseas for so long. You said 18 years. And sometimes in her stories, there aren't even American expat characters as you will typically see in writers from that period. She's just writing about French people, you know, dealing with the war. She's writing about the Austrians and, and the rise of the Nazis of Germany. And it's like, wow, it's not what we expect from an American writer. But I think the stories speak for themselves. They're so high quality.

KIM: Yeah, definitely. So, uh, let's circle back to her personal life a little bit. Next, she's taking up with an artist and intellectual you had mentioned before Lawrence Vail. He was also called the King of Bohemia. He'd been married to Peggy Guggenheim. Boyle and Vail were together for 13 years and they had three children together. So she's writing so much, it seems like, but yet she has a lot going on in her personal life as well, which is interesting. 

AMY: So during this time of her life, Boyle won her first of two O. Henry Awards for a short story called “The White Horses of Vienna.” And side note, this summer, I'm going to be going to Vienna, so I hope to maybe get a glimpse of these white horses that are still there , at the Imperial Spanish Riding School. It's very symbolic of Vienna, those white horses. So in this story, Boyle talks about one of these horses being crippled. It's a symbol of Austria's grandeur being struck down by the Nazis. And it's such an interesting story because it includes a somewhat sympathetic portrait of Nazi sympathizers. It's almost as if somebody had written a story that is sympathetic to a MAGA person, you know what I mean? And then for that to win an O' Henry award seemed like, surprising to me. 

ANNE: Let me give this some context here, okay?

AMY: Okay.

ANNE: So that story, which is one of her best stories, but it's very difficult for modern readers to understand because of subsequent history, it was written in 1934-35. So before the Anschluss. Before, I mean, Hitler had only been in power since 1933. And so the sort of crippled horse that represents Austria is actually the crippling came from the First World War. Um, Hitler hadn't had anything to do with them yet. Okay. So, so that. She also wrote some really interesting stories about the effects of World War I on Austria. It was an incredibly impoverished country. They had left Vienna, in fact, the family, uh, She, Vail and the kids had been living in Vienna and the poverty was so bleak. And so they went to the Alps and lived in this little town called Kitzbuhel, and it's beautiful there. Oh my God, it's so gorgeous. But, they're noticing this political unrest happening and they're seeing swastikas burning and fire swastikas burning on the mountain sides at night. Nazis were outlawed in Germany at that time. And there were Nazi agitators coming in over the border and this area of Tirol, where she was living, which was close to Bavaria. And so there were, there were Nazis coming over and stirring up, you know, the locals who were going on these sort of terror campaigns and blowing up train tracks and different things. So this is the context in which she's writing the story. She's trying to understand why so many of the locals are sympathetic to the Nazis. The hotel they were staying in in this little town, it was the only anti Nazi or non Nazi hotel in town. They discovered that actually the governess, the girl who was taking care of their children, was a Nazi and was helping her boyfriend light those fires on the mountain sides.

And so this was like incredible material, right? She wants to understand what is it about Hitler that, that seems to magnetize them? So that's what she's writing about. She's trying to understand it, long before people knew how totally dangerous he was. She wrote a novel about that period as well, that expands on all of this, you know, why are the locals so enamored with Hitler? And in this story and in that novel, she hints at the devastation that's going to come. 

 She sensed how fanatical he was and how dangerous he was. And that comes through a bit, but it's not as overt. So we look back at it now and think, Oh my God, she was a Nazi sympathizer. But she wasn't. 

AMY: I knew in reading it that she wasn't a Nazi sympathizer, but it was just her ability to kind of showcase both, like, like you said, exactly what's going on here, and…

ANNE: Right, well I, I felt the need to say this because there are still people writing today who describe her as a Nazi sympathizer because of that story. 

AMY: What?! That is crazy.

ANNE: There is a book about American writers in Austria somebody showed to me not too long ago and I thought, “Oh my gosh, this person doesn't understand the context”. Because she's not overt enough. She's writing from the perspective of these characters. She's so immersed in the characters’ point of view.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: She's pointing out the anti-Semitism 

ANNE: Exactly, exactly. That character of the doctor who comes to stay. He's a very sympathetic character, the Jewish doctor from Vienna who comes to help out. And then the Nazi characters, who I think are less sympathetic. Um, but you know, at the same time, the doctor even understands why they're doing this. Because of what they endured in the First World War and with all of the economic deprivation that they've suffered since. I mean, people were basically starving. I'm sorry. That was a very long winded explanation of the story. 

KIM: No, I think it was good to bring that up. Yeah, we don't need anything to further inhibit her, um,

ANNE: Her recovery. Yeah. 

KIM: Exactly. 

AMY: But no, there's so many wartime stories in Fifty Stories. I mean, whether during the war, the prelude to the war, or post war, for like the decade or two post, and it was so enlightening, I think. As an American, we have an idea of what World War II was, and it just really gives you an entirely immersive, um, different view of what it was like to be there. What it was like to be French in Vichy France, what it was like trying to rebuild after. How messy it really, really was, even after we won. 

ANNE: Yes. Yes. She had this remarkable ability to get inside of the experiences of French people, of German people, of Austrian people, not just Americans always looking on from the outside. And that's something she worked really hard at. And she does have a lot of works that do include an American character, but two of her best stories from the war "Defeat" and "Men" are written totally about the men who experienced the war. On the one hand, in "Defeat," she's portraying two French soldiers who are coming back after the fall of France to Germany. And in the other story, "Men," she's describing refugees of the Nazis who were rounded up in France as soon as the war started. In September, 1939, France rounded up people who had passports from Austria, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, what was then considered greater Germany. Most of these people had fled the Nazis, but nonetheless, they were classified as enemy aliens and they were rounded up and put in concentration camps. And the story of "Men" depicts some of those men, and it's really beautiful. And it is actually based on someone she knew, which I think we're going to get to.

AMY: Yeah, for sure, and I can't wait to talk about him. But while we're talking about the wartime literature, it felt like she really felt an obligation to tell these stories and to write about the world that she was living in and speak for the people that didn't necessarily have the voice or the megaphone. So I got curious and read one of her more commercial novels, which sort of ties into this idea of... 

KIM: Extra credit! 

AMY: Yeah, some extra credit points for Amy. But, um, so this book is called Avalanche, and it's set in a village in the French Alps. It's much more, uh, you know, "plain readers be damned," when she said that earlier, this book is more for the plain reader, I think. It's a more commercial novel. It's a thriller. It's about a young girl who's on a mission to find her lover who's working in the French resistance. I loved it. I read it in like two days. It was a page turner. It kind of reminded me of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I'm sure she would hate that comparison because I don't think she loved Hemingway that much.

ANNE: So much more readable though. Her book is.

AMY: Oh, oh, 100%. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, 

ANNE: than his. Yes. Yes.

AMY: But my point being, this book was a critical flop, which surprised me. It's beautifully written. 

ANNE: But it's a romance, and it's political, you know, so that's why she was criticized. Not because it wasn't good. It was because she was writing a different kind of novel than what she'd written before. She was writing less as an artist. I mean, there's still art in it, but she knew, she knew, she was writing a different novel for a commercial, wider audience because she had something important to say about France. Because when she came back to the US in 1941, she was horrified at how Americans talked about the French. "Oh, they just laid down for the Germans," you know, "they deserve it. " And so she wanted to show that, no, look, there's a resistance happening. And a friend of hers, Mary Reynolds, who was Marcel Duchamp's partner, actually, when Marcel Duchamp left France, Mary Reynolds wouldn't leave. And she and Kay were friends. And she worked for the resistance, and she had to escape over the Pyrenees, ultimately, because she'd been found out. She had a really rough escape.  But anyway, Avalanche is dedicated to Marcel and Mary, because Mary's stories helped inform that book. So it isn't fantasy. It isn't made up. It's very real in a lot of ways. And it's a fascinating book. I think it might be the first fictional attempt at describing the French Resistance. It was written during the war still, um, when the French Resistance was still getting going. So it's a fascinating book.

AMY: Yeah, and it has that sort of ticking clock. It's set over just a couple of days, like, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and there's this urgency of, the Resistance has this, um, tactical, you know, thing that they need to carry out. So, that's where I saw the similarities. But she was like, Not only am I going to write this for everyone, I can't do the experimental stuff here, because I have a message and I want this message to get out. So I think that's interesting that she kind of backtracked a little bit from that manifesto. 

ANNE: It was wartime, you know? Manifestos didn't count. They didn't matter when people's lives were at stake. And she felt so guilty for having left France. Um, you know, she was able to get out, but a lot of people she knew didn't. And some of them didn't survive. So Avalanche features a strapping, Adonis-like mountain man who is the love interest. He is an incredible skier, he is noble in every way, like, 

KIM: [laughing] He's an incredible skier!

AMY: Um, he's like an action hero, you know, who you'd cast with some Hollywood hunk. We encounter a lot of these heroic mountain men in the short stories that are Tyrolean, right, including, um, the short story, "Maiden, Maiden" and "Diplomat's Wife."

KIM: Can I say I loved "Maiden Maiden," by the way? I just have to like give a shout out to that story. That one's one that really stayed with me. It's all so beautiful and tragic. 

ANNE: It was made into a movie starring Sean Connery, actually.

KIM: Wait, 

AMY: my gosh! 

KIM: It played like a movie in my head. I had no idea. Sean Connery. Oh Yes. We'll have to see if I can get my hands on it somehow. If it's streaming or 

AMY: So Anne, tell us about this fascination with the mountain man, that archetypal character. 

ANNE: Everybody assumed it was the man that she ended up marrying her third husband, uh, Joseph von Franckenstein was his name. 

KIM: What a literary name! 

ANNE: I know. Yes. It seems that Mary Shelley got her name actually from this family. She'd seen the castle that belonged to the family in Germany. So he has this interesting name, but Joseph was not the model for some of the early characters, the ski instructors, the guides. There was another Austrian man. So she was living with Lawrence and the children in Negev France, and there were these Austrian refugees living around there. And one of them was a ski instructor named Kurt Vick, and he was a ladies man. Flirted with all the women who came to visit, young or old, and taught them how to ski. And yeah, Kay kind of fell for him and they had a fling. So Kurt and Joseph knew each other. So Kurt went off to Africa, and in the meantime, Joseph comes back to Negev, and he meets Kay. And they truly fell in love. Okay, the thing with Kurt was a fling and she in a letter describes why this happened with Kurt and what had happened. She tells Joseph the whole story, and those letters between Kay and Joseph are the most amazing documents. There are hundreds of them, and they were embargoed until I believe 20 years after her death. So they've only been available to researchers for a decade or so. I've read a very large portion of them. And I know that in the letter where she tells him about Kurt, and this is something that does not show up in the biography of her, people didn't understand why she'd had this relationship. Uh, Lawrence Vail was violent and he was, um, an alcoholic and he beat her and he called her a whore in front of their friends. He was jealous all the time. He was suspicious and she was desperate, desperate to get out of it, out of this marriage in some way. And so what do you do when you're desperate to get out of a marriage? You flee into the arms of another man. Kurt wasn't the right one. Joseph turned out to be the right one. She helped save him. So the Nazis were closing in, and in the summer of 1941, she got him out of France, out of the only port that was still open in Marseilles. Her efforts were heroic. I mean, she probably saved his life. But he saved hers too, I'm quite certain of that. And he was a remarkable, remarkable person. A biography needs to be written about the two of them. I really hoped to do it, and I've done a ton of research on it. I hope still to do it someday. I'm not in a position to at the moment. But while their story is incredible, because he came back to the U S and they got married, um, he joined the Army, became a U S citizen and ended up getting recruited into the OSS, which became the CIA. And he was a spy for the U S, and he was parachuted into Europe and made his way to Innsbruck, Austria, his hometown, and helped liberate it from the Nazis.It's an incredible story. Yeah, 

KIM: Wow.

AMY: This is what I'm talking about when I was like, I'm just so overwhelmed by her story because there's so many components to it. It goes on and on and it's all so fascinating. 

KIM: Yeah. 

ANNE: This is why I knew I couldn't write a biography of her entire life. That just wasn't going to happen. But basically from when she wrote that. story about the Nazis and their influence in Austria, then in the mid 1930s, from that up through the war, and we can talk about after the war too, her life and the stories that she wrote during that period are just monumental, um, and so, so important. And I hope to still do that work someday, and I encourage other people to do it too.

KIM: Yeah. And speaking of like, there's so many things. She was pretty, it seems, unequivocal about good versus evil during the war years, but then she was later accused of being a Communist. And there was a McCarthy style loyalty panel. She and her husband were eventually cleared, but she lost her accreditation with The New Yorker, and she was, basically blacklisted by the literary community, 

ANNE: Yes So after the war Joseph worked for the State Department and was stationed in Occupied Germany. And she's going back and forth from France to Germany to see him. The New Yorker ended up getting her a foreign correspondence pass to be in Germany, and she had it for many years, from, I want to say 46 or 47 up through 50 or 51 when she had to come back after they were accused of being Communists and The New Yorker did not renew her accreditation. People haven't really questioned it very much, but when they have been questioned, they said that, Well, we didn't revoke it, our permission. We just didn't renew it. But she was writing. They sent her to write about Occupied Germany, but they wanted fiction from her. They had journalists over there, but they wanted fiction about what life was really like, telling the stories that journalists couldn't tell, they didn't have access to. And so she's writing all these incredible stories about what life is like in those very first years after the war. And some of these stories are still so powerful. "Adam's Death" is an incredible story about a Jewish man, a dentist, who comes to this small town, very prejudicial town in Germany, who had been in one of the camps. And came there after the war and is just trying to start over.  Think about what it was like for a Jewish person to come out of the camps and try to start their life over in Germany. That's a story we don't know. And there's another fascinating story called "The Lost" that is about the orphans who were picked up by the American GIs as they swept through Europe. There were all these young boys, and they would take them in and they were called mascots. She's writing the story about what it was like for them after the war. You know, they speak English now. They have Brooklyn accents, you know, or Southern accents, and they're trying to get to the U S, to be with these GIs that they've become very close to, and they're being told that they can't, they have to stay. And she sent this story to The New Yorker, and they turned it down because they said it wasn't believable. She fired off this livid response to them that said Every word of this is true. I have pictures of the boys who are in the story. I spoke to the woman at the detention camp who had to tell that boy that he couldn't go to America because the soldier that he had become very close to, who was like a surrogate father to him, was Black. And this little boy, I think he was from Czechoslovakia, so he was white. And she was trying to explain to this little boy, the woman who works at the detention center, that you can't live with this man who's become your father because he's Black and you're white. There's this thing in America called the race question. And so a week later, the boy comes back to her and says, Hey, have they solved that race question yet? And she's No, I'm sorry. They haven't. And The New Yorker said this didn't happen. It's not real. They didn't publish it. She said it was absolutely real, every single word of it. And she did end up publishing it later. So she's writing stories that are pointing out how hypocritical America was, you know, coming over there and saving Europe when they're still so hateful and racist and segregated at home, right? She was in Germany, where there was a lot of fear that there were Communists, um, infiltrating, like the Iron Curtain was very close. And so I think a lot of it had to do with her criticism of America. And she wanted to bring Richard Wright, of all people, to come and speak in Occupied Germany and they refused to allow him to come.

AMY: Yeah, this whole time period, like, post war Germany, rebuilding, I had never before read any, anything about this time period. 

ANNE: Yeah, me neither.

AMY: Like fiction or nonfiction. It was all new to me. So my favorite stories were the alpine stories, but these were a close second because I had no idea how it all worked, you know, with the Americans being stationed there. And there's just so much I learned about that, what the world was like. 

ANNE: Me too! Yes. 

AMY: Like the, uh, during the war, like the, the situation in France and, anyway, I, I don't want to get into it all, cause we're, we could just go on and on… 

ANNE: Sorry. I've already spoken way too long. Yes.

KIM: No, not at all. This has been really good.

AMY: So Kay Boyle died in California in 1992. Um, up until that point, she was busy both as a writer, a teacher, and an activist. She lived in the Haight Ashbury heart of San Francisco in the 1960s protesting the Vietnam War. She was twice arrested, briefly imprisoned for this activism. She worked in support of Amnesty International and the NAACP. Um, I love that literally from her childhood and from that little newspaper story through the later years of her life, she was always speaking out against injustice. It's just such a clear throughline for her entire life.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And as we've said we are only scratching the surface. Anne, thank you so much for joining us today to discuss Boyle's incredible life and writing. This has been really wonderful. Um, I'm excited that we got to have a reunion episode with you. 

ANNE: Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast. Thanks.

AMY: And as we mentioned, Anne has something in common with Kay Boyle in that she's currently living the expat life in Europe. Before we sign off here, I wanted to just switch gears a little bit and find out, Anne, what are you working on?

ANNE: Well, as you mentioned at the outset, I have left academia. And although I was writing this book about Kay Boyle, I've set that aside for the moment, because of this huge transition in my life. I'm writing full time now. Um, I'm working on a memoir about my year of travel after my daughter went off to college. So I sold my house and I left my career, ended my marriage and started traveling when my daughter went off to college. And it's been an incredible journey. It's been kind of a second coming of age for me. So I've been writing about that. I'm also planning, I'm not working on it yet, but I'm planning to write a novel in the future. So these are some of the things that I've been kinda dabbling in. But, a lot of my energies right now are going into my Substack. As you mentioned, it's called Audacious Women, Creative Lives. And I profile a lot of women writers who are quite bold and audacious and do inspiring things, and talk about why so many of them have been forgotten. So very much in line with the themes of your podcast, which I just love.

KIM: Yeah. your Substack is a must read for sure. 

AMY: I'm going to be talking to Anne a little bit more about her whole experience abroad next week in our bonus episode exclusively available for all our Patreon members. I know you've learned a lot about yourself over these past couple of years, so I can't wait to hear more about that.

KIM: For everyone else, we'll meet you back in two weeks to discuss another lost lady of lit. And in the meantime, consider giving us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast to help spread the word.

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. 

185. Speranza, a.k.a. Oscar Wilde’s Mother

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, Kim Askew.

KIM: We’re so happy to have you joining us today to discuss a lost lady of lit who also birthed a literary genius.

AMY: He had nothing to declare except his genius, in fact. I think we all know who Oscar Wilde is. Not only did he write “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” novels like The Picture of Dorian Gray, and popular plays (both comedies and dramas) but he was also a media sensation in more ways than one. The Irish writer was caught up in a public scandal, yes, but he was also heralded for his sharp wit and bon mots. Zingers like “I can resist anything except temptation…”

KIM: And my personal favorite: “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” He would be a social media darling if he were alive today.

AMY: True. But Kim, I’d like to point to another line he wrote, in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” which factors into our subject today: “Every woman becomes their mother. That’s their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That’s his tragedy.”

KIM: Oh, interesting. Because I’m thinking about how clever and talented Oscar Wilde was, and surely that did not materialize in him from out of nowhere. Does the woman who raised him deserve any credit in shaping one of the greatest literary talents in the English language?

AMY: Considering she was a successful writer herself, I’m thinking the answer is yes! In fact, despite that line I just read from “The Importance of Being Earnest,” I think Oscar was very much like his mother. I’d go so far as to say she made him the man he was. 

KIM: Okay! So I’m excited to talk about her and (given that she’s a lost lady of lit) her own writing career.

AMY: Me, too. So let’s raid the stacks and get started! 

[intro music]

AMY: Before we dive in on today’s lost lady, I’ll admit: I didn’t even know Oscar Wilde’s mother was a famous writer until I was listening to the Rest is History podcast’s episode on Oscar Wilde last year. They mentioned it in passing, and I was like, “Wait, what?”

AMY: Honestly, I didn’t even realize his mom was a writer until I was listening to The Rest is History podcast’s episode on Oscar Wilde last year. They mentioned it in passing, and I was like, “Wait, what?”

KIM: Yeah, I was totally clueless about this, too. So many lost ladies. So who was she, Amy?  

AMY: Well, her name was Lady Jane Wilde. But she wrote under the pen name Speranza.  

KIM: Ooooh.

AMY: I know I love saying that Speranza  in her lifetime. She earned the nicknames, the national poetess of Ireland, as well as Speranza of the nation.  So kind of a big deal. 

KIM: Yeah, sounds like it. 

AMY: Yeah, but that name was probably both because her writing spoke to her fellow country members and also because her work was very prevalent in an Irish newspaper that was called the nation.

Oh, okay. There you go. All right. So it was like a double entendre. Okay.  When you say Lady Jane Wilde, that sounds like she was some sort of  blue blood or nobility. Is that the case?

AMY: Not really. Her husband was knighted for his work in the medical field, which is how she gets the title. And she certainly leaned into being the lady, you know…

KIM:

As one would.

AMY: Yeah, if you give me that title, I'm going to live up to it. So,  um, the couple, they were definitely a celebrated couple in Dublin and upwardly mobile, but her Irish ancestors were pretty much working class, although her father was educated and an archdeacon and a solicitor, so fairly middle-class. He died when Jane was 3, and she was largely self-educated, impressively so. It is speculated that she probably knew around 10 languages, and she translated works from German and French in her 20s. But get this: Her uncle by marriage was Charles Robert Maturin who wrote Melmoth: The Wanderer. I know you would love that connection.

KIM: Totally. I absolutely love that. That's great. Oh my gosh.  Also in her 20s, she began to contribute prose and poetry to The Nation, as you mentioned, Amy. This was a weekly nationalist publication associated with the Young Ireland political movement for Irish Independence. It was basically THE go-to source for Irish radicals.

AMY: Right, and this is where we see that Jane (or Speranza as she was known by readers of this periodical) was a rebel at heart. She once said, “I should like to rage through life….ah, this wild rebellious ambitious nature of mine. I wish I could satiate it with Empires though a St. Helena were the end.” (a reference to Napoleon). She even briefly served as co-editor of The Nation alongside another female contributor after the male founders of the newspaper were jailed for treason.) 

KIM: So needless to say, she wasn’t writing “pretty ladies’ poetry” was she?

AMY: Not at all. Her writing was very political in nature — she wanted an armed revolution against the British. (It’s probably very good that she wrote under a pen name, let’s just say that.) Her words are quite stirring, if you’ll allow me to read a bit?

KIM: Yes, sure!

AMY: This is from a piece called “Jacta Alea Est” (or The Die is Cast)

Courage! Need I preach to Irishmen of courage?  Is it so hard a thing then to die Alas! do we not all die daily of broken hearts and shattered hopes …No! it cannot be death you fear; for you have braved the plague in the exile ship of the Atlantic, and the plague in the exile’s home beyond it; and famine and ruin, and a slave’s life and a dog’s death ; and hundreds, thousands, a MILLION of you have perished thus. Courage! you will not now belie those old traditions of humanity that tell of this divine God gift within us … Now is the moment to strike, and by striking save, and the day after the victory it will be time enough to count our dead …

KIM: Wow, that’s very “give me liberty or give me death!” Or St. Crispin’s Day speech.

AMY: Yes, very inflammatory, and this piece (written anonymously) resulted in The Nation getting suppressed by authorities. (The story goes that the editor of the Nation, Charles Gavan Duffy was arrested for writing the incendiary piece but that she stood up during his trial to admit that she’d written it. She was never prosecuted; maybe because she was a woman?)  But you can see why she’d have a massive following, too, right?  You can also see in the passage I read that she is also an advocate for the poor. She wrote a lot about famine and starvation, which would have been an unusual topic for verse. One of the poems she’s most well known for was printed in The Nation in 1847 as “The Stricken Land” (although it was later renamed “The Famine Year.” I’ll just read it here, and know that when she is speaking of “the stranger” she is referring to Britain.

WEARY men, what reap ye?–Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye?–Human corses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing …
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

KIM: So no love for the Brits.

AMY: You can say that again. Although interestingly, she would later go live in London, later in life.

KIM: Okay. So she's writing this political poetry for the nation and advocating for the poor. Where does family life and Oscar's birth fit into all of this?

AMY: Well, The Nation eventually met its demise after being repeatedly shut down by authorities. When she was 29 she married William Wilde, who was a well-respected eye and ear surgeon (he, too, wrote books… nonfiction works on subjects including travel and archaeology). They were both considered to be brilliant, if unconventional. Jane was almost six feet tall, so quite statuesque, and her husband was a bit shorter, so they earned the nicknames “The Giantess” and “The Dwarf.”

KIM: People are so nice, aren't they?

AMY: If you Google her, you will see clear resemblance to Oscar; he takes after her, physically, for sure. So the couple had a son named William, the firstborn (he also grew up to be a writer… he was a journalist and poet, but also an alcoholic who ended up penniless), then Oscar was born and then their last child was a daughter who died at the age of 9. (Oscar carried a lock of her hair with him until he died.)

KIM: Heartbreaking.

AMY: From what I could tell, Jane adored her children and doted on them, AND, most importantly, she included them in this extremely intellectual household. They were allowed to converse with adults at the dinner table. She hosted these fantastic salons with all sorts of famous writers and artists and politicians;  the children were present at those. In fact, Oscar carried on his mother’s tradition by creating a similar salon-like atmosphere when he was attending Oxford University. Another thing I think we should remember, because he started getting published while still at Oscar (he won Oxford’s Newdigate prize): when starting out, he was invariably going to be compared to his mother, the great Speranza. He had to prove himself in his own right. And she was SO PROUD of him when he started having literary success. She collected newspaper clippings of his eventual tour of America. So she was a proud mama.

KIM: Awww, that’s so sweet! And we know that Oscar was an aesthete and had quite a flamboyant personality, and so, too, was his mother. Her favorite color to dress in was scarlet which scandalized the other ladies in her social circles.

AMY: Yes, she loved drama and spectacle and was a sort of larger than life persona by all accounts, and it seems like she could make up pithy comments at the drop of her hat just like her son. Also at a certain point in her life she started saying that her ancestors were from Tuscany and she could trace her lineage back to Dante Aligheri. And it was all a bunch of b.s., basically.

KIM: Ooh, fun! Good for her! I'm gonna start doing that.

AMY: She was also described at one point as making a habit of wearing a bunch of miniature portraits of her ancestors pinned to her chest, making her look like a walking family mausoleum.

KIM: As if I couldn’t love her more already.

AMY: She’d just be fun to be around.

KIM: I feel like she would. Well, speaking of drama, we know that Oscar would go on to be embroiled in a world-famous libel trial springing from his homosexual relationship, which led to the writer’s two-year imprisonment. At the time of his arrest, JAne reportedly said to her son: “"If you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never speak to you again." 

AMY: Yeah, so this is in regards to he kind of had the option, he could have Just avoided all of this by fleeing to France or somewhere and just gotten the heck outta Dodge.  and they probably wouldn't have pursued the case.   But yeah, she wanted him to be defiant and perhaps she was recollecting back to her own  public scandal and libel court case from her own past. They have that in common too.

KIM: Oh, do tell! I want to hear. What happened?

AMY: Okay, so it’s a bit of a soap opera but I’ll try to sum things up in a nutshell. A young family friend of the Wilde’s, 19-year-old Mary Travers, was a frequent guest at their home and was a patient of William Wilde. Jane and William Wilde claim she developed an obsessive attraction to William. Mary herself claimed that during an examination by William sometime in 1862 she lost consciousness (possibly chloroformed) and when she came to she realized he had raped her. (Two years later is when he would be knighted, remember). This young woman continued to associate with the Wildes, but her behavior became increasingly erratic. She tried to kill herself by drinking poison, she extorted money from William and later wrote a damning pamphlet which gave a fictionalized account of her version of events, making it clear that it was the famous “Speranza” whose husband had victimized her. She printed up a thousand copies and had them printed all over Dublin. This is just a small account of her campaign against the Wildes. Jane did not believe Mary’s story and was exasperated by the ongoing harassment from what she believed to be a clearly troubled young woman. She wrote to Mary’s father saying Mary was crazy and needed to knock it off, and to make a very long story short, Mary used this letter to sue Jane for libel. The six-day court case was a complete spectacle. Everyone was following it. Mary won the case, but she was only awarded one farthing plus the cost of court expenses. One thing I discovered was that the case actually bolstered Jane’s public reputation as most people following the case sided with her. I think post #metoo we might think differently. [True crime fans: This is an interesting Internet rabbit hole to go down.]

KIM: Wow. Fascinating and disturbing.  Later in her life, Jane was living in poverty because after her husband's death, 1876, she and her sons discovered that he was basically bankrupt.  It's like a Jane Austen novel, right? And she moved to London where Oscar was living and tried to support herself writing for magazines. So when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in Reading Gaol, his mother tried to visit him there. She was suffering from bronchitis and near death. Her request was refused.

AMY: Everything about this is awful. Everything about This is awful. Oscar Wilde in jail is just horrible to read about. He actually claimed that he knew the moment his mother died because her apparition appeared in his jail cell. This was 1896. He was able to pay for her burial, but not for her headstone.So she was buried anonymously.   

KIM: It wasn’t until 1996 that she received a plaque honoring her on the gravestone of her husband, William Wilde. A few years later the Oscar Wilde Society honored her in the cemetery where she is buried with a Celtic Cross gravestone monument. 

AMY: And I think we should end this episode with another one of Jane Wilde’s poems because if you read this one while keeping in mind Oscar Wilde’s own tragic fate, this has real poignancy, I think. 

THE POET’S DESTINY.

THE Priest of Beauty, the Anointed One,

Through the wide world passes the Poet on.

All that is noble by his word is crown’d,

But on his brow th’ Acanthus wreath is bound.[Acanthus is a thorny plant)

Eternal temples rise beneath his hand,

While his own griefs are written in the sand;

He plants the blooming gardens, trails the vine—

But others wear the flowers, drink the wine;

He plunges in the depths of life to seek

Rich joys for other hearts—his own may break.

Like the poor diver beneath Indian skies,

He flings the pearl upon the shore—and dies;

KIM: It’s interesting that the “poet” in this verse is a “he,” because if you think about the griefs that Jane had in life, too, I think this could just as easily be about her, be about both of them.

AMY: Yeah, totally. Interesting life and interesting lady. So that’s all for today’s episode, everyone. If you’re a Patreon member, get ready to put on your dancing shoes! In next week’s bonus episode we’ll be exploring the revolutionary history of a scandalous new dance craze of 19th century Europe: The Viennese Waltz. 

Bye, everyone!

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

183. Emilie Loring — Uncharted Seas with Patti Bender

AMY: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our future bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click become a patron to find out more. 

KIM: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. Kim Askew…

AMY: …And I'm Amy Helmes. Fun fact about Kim and I: we've written a few Hallmark movies together.

KIM: Yeah, including Her Pen Pal, which aired in 2020. We've worked on a few more that will maybe see the light of day at some point. Anyway, our experience with Hallmark has really driven home for us what a huge and passionate fan base is out there for these kinds of movies. People who love them just can't get enough of them.

AMY: That brings us to today's lost lady who, from 1922 through 1950, wrote wholesome romance novels at the prolific pace of about a book a year. 

KIM: Emilie Loring didn't stop writing until she died, and even then, new titles continue to be published under her name almost every year for two more decades. Why? Because her devoted readers found her work addictive.

AMY: In the same way it's easy to get sucked into a Hallmark movie marathon. Our guest today can help explain this phenomenon. She's read every one of Emilie Loring's works at least 50 times! 

KIM: Woah. Do we need to stage an intervention here? I'm a little worried about her!

AMY: Don't be. An Emilie Loring addiction isn't going to hurt anyone. As today's guest writes in her 2023 biography of the author, "An Emilie Loring book is like a cardigan sweater; classic, comfortable, never too much or too little. Not a trendsetter, but somehow always just right." 

KIM: Listeners, are you ready to fall hopelessly in love with Emilie Loring? Then let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Patti Bender, is a former professor of kinesiology who has spent the last 30 years working in altogether different muscle, researching the life and works of Emilie Loring. This labor of love culminated last year in her published work, Happy Landings: Emilie Loring's Life, Writing and Wisdom, and I think it's safe to describe her as the world's foremost authority on Emilie Loring. Patti, welcome to the show!

PATTI: Thanks. I've been looking forward to this. Thanks for having me. 

KIM: So great to have you on. So the origin of this biography goes back 30 years, which is incredible, but your interest in Emilie Loring goes back even farther. Do you want to tell our listeners how you first came to know her? 

PATTI: Sure. My father and my sister and I were on a train going from Chicago to Arizona back home from my grandma's house, and I was reading Little Dot and Casper comic books and I ran out of them. And so my older sister had a book, it was an Emilie Loring book, and it didn't have any pictures, but I read it anyway. And I read that one, the first one, and then I just kept reading them. I had three older sisters. Every summer my grandma would make us rest after lunch and we would read books. So we'd get a handful of Emilie Loring's, and each of us would read all of them. But then I kept reading them, and I read them all every year and more were coming out. At this time I thought they were new; I didn't realize they were being re-released. So I just read them until I'd read them over, well, now well over 50 times each. And I had no intention of writing a biography, but I got curious about who Emilie was, and there was nothing written about her, really, except that she was born in 1866, which all of a sudden I thought, “Oh my gosh, she was an old lady!” And I couldn't believe that. So I still didn't think I was gonna write a biography until I met the Loring grandchildren. They started sharing more information, and pretty soon I had 5,000 pages on the woman, of original research. And, um, what do you do with that? You write a book.

KIM: That's amazing. Can I just add that I still remember the first book that I read as a child that wasn't for kids. I think you don't forget that. 

PATTI: That's right. 

KIM: Like, it makes such an impact on you, at least for me it did as well. So I completely understand how that would have grabbed your attention from the get go.

PATTI: Oh, sure, because I was reading little girl stuff and now I was reading like my sister's stuff. It was a big deal. 

AMY: I thought it was really interesting that she didn't even start publishing novels until she was 55 years old. And I know you remarked on that in your biography, that you hadn't imagined someone that old writing these books.

 PATTI: I know, and she was in her eighties when she wrote her last one, and yet everyone's so youthful. I think there's some wisdom in that for everyone. She kept that interest and vivacity throughout. 

AMY: She had a quote about that herself too. She said "Old age is merely life into which you put no enthusiasm."

PATTI: Right. "For enthusiasm is the fountain of youth."

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But despite getting a late start as a writer, she actually came from a family with a rich history in publishing, right?

PATTI: So her grandfather was an original founder of The Boston Herald. And then her father was really the biggest influence. He was a publisher with Lee and Shepard Publishing. They specialized in sets of classic works and also in children's books. And in his spare time, he wrote 78 plays. He's still the best selling amateur dramatist of all time. 

AMY: What?!

PATTI: Which I think is amazing. Yeah. His “Among the Breakers” still has sold more than “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” and nobody's ever heard of it. 

AMY: No. Or, or really of him. Yeah. 

PATTI: Yeah. And so, yeah, he deserves a book. But, um, Emilie used to go to work with him, and they'd bring children's books to her and she would say, "No, I don't like this one,” or “I like this one." And they would listen to her, because they wanted to appeal to children, right? So I think that's a really important thing. She always had books, books, books, and she was always listened to. This wasn't a girl who grew up in the Victorian times with being told to shush. She was put up on the desk and asked for her opinion. So she grew up in an environment that cared about what kids read, and that was great preparation for later.

AMY: Didn't her dad publish the first Alice in Wonderland edition? 

PATTI: He did, in the United States. He was responsible for the first, um, American edition of Alice in Wonderland. He did so many remarkable things. He was incredibly prolific. I don't know how anyone could do all the things that he did. 

AMY: For sure. And he was pretty chummy with Mark Twain. I mean, he was a big deal!

PATTI: He was.

AMY: But also he's such a good guy. He's such a good husband, he's such a good father. Around the house, the whole clan, they put on little plays because he's inspiring them creatively. It just seemed like such a fun family to be in.

PATTI: They'd take all the furniture out of the parlor and set up stages, and people would come in, and famous actors and famous authors were coming to their house and acting out plays. And every Christmas morning they acted out a play. And she said, you know, “I felt so sorry for children who didn't act in a play on Christmas.” He was the bright light in the middle of all of them and permanently influenced his children.

AMY: And not just Emilie, because her two siblings, their writing careers took off long before hers did, right? Her sister was a playwright. 

PATTI: Right. So her sister wrote suffragist plays and her brother wrote a few plays, but then he wrote for vaudeville and was tremendously successful there. And then he started writing musical comedies for the stage, and then he ended up writing for the silent film industry. And then his son became a famous script writer in the thirties and forties. So they were just a tremendously creative and prolific bunch. 

KIM: Okay, so normally we wouldn't have one of our early questions be about an author's marriage, but in this case, Emilie Loring was actually a traditional wife and mother a long time before she became a writer. She married attorney and aspiring politician Victor Loring when she was… how old was she when she got married? 

PATTI: Well, she was 25 when she got married, 24 when she met him, and he was 32. And in her books, the girls are 24, 25, and the guys are 32. Like, almost uniformly. There are about three exceptions, I think. I will push back just a little bit on the “traditional” part, because she did other creative things before coming to writing. So she was a photographer, an arts and crafts artist, a metal worker, she was a gardener, she designed a home, she did interior design. She was really busy, just not writing. 

KIM: Right. She was always creative on some level it sounds like. 

AMY: And like her father, her husband, Victor, also seems like a really great guy. It seems like she has great men in her life.

PATTI: She does. And the nice thing about that is in her book, she's not having to fight for dignity or fight for recognition. She assumes she's going to have it, and she has that, do you know what I mean? That's a nice thing about reading her books is that, um, internalizing that as a girl, I felt the same way. You know, it wasn't something she had to fight for. But Victor, I think of him as being steady and she was vivacious. So that was the kind chemistry that they had. 

KIM: I love his name. It sounds like a hero from a soap opera or something. “Victor Loring!”

AMY: It does!

PATTI: I know. 

KIM: Right. 

PATTI: Yeah. 

AMY: And he's the one that really prompted Emilie to go for it in terms of her writing career, right?

PATTI: Yeah, I mean she gave him credit for saying, you know, “You've wanted to write, go ahead and write. Give it a whirl.” And actually, he wrote a short story himself, which I have never been able to find. Help me find it. It's in Snappy Stories. I know which issue, I can't find anyone who has it, but Snappy Stories was a sort of a racy men's story magazine, and I would love to see what Victor had written. Um, but he wrote one story and then she took off and wrote. I would love to imagine that they had a conversation like, “Well, I did it. Come on.”

AMY: Yeah. He didn't just tolerate it, he's like, "I think you should do this. You're good." And I loved reading about Emilie's process for sending out pitches because it was almost like mechanical. Like, she was a machine, and it's a numbers game and you just keep sending pitches. She kept like a chart of her rejections…

PATTI: Yes. She kept them on cards and she would write the day that she began each story, you know, "Commenced this story," and then she'd say, "Finished, sent to this place," and then she'd start, "Commence this one." And then if the first one's rejection came back, that very day, if it was smudged at all, she retyped it, put it in a clean envelope and sent it out.

AMY: I would sit and be wallowing for at least a week or two and telling myself how bad it must be. 

PATTI: She just kept it moving. She was writing, she was sending, she was writing, she was sending. Her first book returned 44 times before she finally got an acceptance. You know, I think I would have given up. 

KIM: I have given up! 

PATTI: She was not gonna give up. Well, it's soul sucking, right? You know, it just takes all the strength from you when you work really hard and you try that you submit it it's like, "No, not interested." 

AMY: But she also took their notes into consideration as well, and she'd be like, “Okay, they gave me some feedback. Let me work on it. Let me switch it up a little bit and then send it out again.”

PATTI: That was an advantage she had growing up as she did, because she'd seen her father work. She'd seen him work with other authors. She'd watched her siblings work. And so she knew this was a craft that had to be honed. This was a skill to be created, not just an inspiration and a talent. And she took that very seriously. 

AMY: So, she had a lot of examples in her life of healthy and happy marital relationships. Her parents had a great marriage. She had a great marriage. Um, talk a little bit about some of the classic characteristics, I guess, of an Emilie Loring romance.

PATTI: Yeah. So, something happens right away. When you open the book, there's gonna be something right away. In Uncharted Seas, the very first thing is, " Step quick, lady, step quick.” So a dramatic start. There are two educated, independent characters who have separate goals. That's the guy and the gal. And there's a mystery that brings them together. The mystery often takes place in his life, but doesn't have to. There's humorous dialogue. There are charming surroundings, uh, there are cultured references. And then there's a theme that's usually expressed in the title. So Uncharted Seas, you know, it's about sending yourself into the unknown, into places where there's uncertainty, and finding romance in that. Finding new vistas, strengthening your character. So those are the things that are in all of them. The plots are quite different. You couldn't play “Emilie Loring Bingo.” There are some things that if you are paying attention, then you know that she's going to mention Alice in Wonderland in each one. And then this is the first book where she wrote “Happy Landings.” A horse is named Happy Landings, and from this book on, somewhere in the book she puts that. So those are some nods, just little things she slipped in for herself.

KIM: I think this is a good time to start talking about Uncharted Seas, our book for today. So Patti, do you want to set the stage for the story? And also tell us about some elements from this novel that are lifted from Emilie's real life. 

PATTI: Sure. So the character in this book, Sandra Duvall, is a girl on her own, and she goes to her father's friend and he gets her a job as a two secretary to a woman in the horse racing set. When she goes out there, there are two men, Nicholas Hoyt and Philippe Rousseau. They're both claimants to this same estate. Their horses are about to compete in a big race, and they're both interested in Sandra. But is Philippe who he really says he is? And who's on whose side at Seven Chimneys? So those are the conflicts, and Seven Chimneys is a real place. These are places that are in Blue Hill, Maine, where she had her summer cottage. Uh, Stone House was Emilie's actual house in Blue Hill. That still exists today, and it does have a ghost. There are lots of stories about the ghost at Stone House. 

AMY: Okay, so we've got Sandra Duvall. She has just landed a new job as a secretary at this very nice house, Seven Chimneys. But as you said, Patti, this first chapter just kind of ropes you in right away because we learned that her employer is temperamental, who's prone to maybe throwing some tantrums. We start in that chapter with an admonition to Sandra, not to, was it not to fall in love? 

PATTI: Not to fall in love with her employer's husband. 

KIM: Husband. Yeah. But she thinks at first that it's the son, because he's younger than her.

PATTI: Right. Right. 

AMY: I liken it to all the best bits of a soap opera, but with much better writing, you know? 

KIM: I totally can picture it as a movie the entire time. 

PATTI: I know. I often think about the different actresses that I would like to see play these parts. And it makes so much sense because with her dramatic background, you can imagine these things being spoken and played. First scene, after she's gotten the job, when she arrives in the town, she comes to the train station and she's waiting for her ride. And a fellow comes and loads up a saddle and she says, “I'm here!” She thinks it's her ride. He says, “Yes, Miss. I see you.” And she thinks, “Oh gosh, you must be a groom or a workman.” But she inveigles him to take her to Seven Chimneys. And unbeknownst to her, this is Nicholas Hoyt. This is the heir, one of the people who claims the estate. From the very beginning, she's attracted to him, but she thinks he's down on his luck, and she's sort of, you know, she's amused that he's playing a part, but she doesn't know what part. 

AMY: It's that classic where it's like…

KIM: Mistaken identity. Yeah, 

AMY: Exactly. But then she kind of knows that he's not who he says he is. So there's like, friction. 

PATTI: Mm-hmm. But she's wrong about who she thinks he is. 

AMY: And it's not only that sort of like Darcy/Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice vibe going back-and-forth between them, but also that is a very classic Hallmark start to a relationship with the mistaken identity and this sort of thing. 

PATTI: Sure. And and the thing that is interesting is that she doesn't think she's supposed to like him, you know. She can't help herself. She does like him.

AMY: Yeah. And there is this other romantic rival, I guess you would say, he is kind of like the Willoughby in Pride and Prejudice, where, you know, Sandra's taking his side and then eventually comes to realize like, "Oh wait, he's the cad," you know?

PATTI: She's never really attracted to Philippe, but they're not sure whether he's the true heir or not. And that's the big mystery is, you know, who's going to inherit this big estate? 

AMY: You mentioned also that Emilie Loring was really into interior design, and you see that so much in this book. I don't know if all of the novels have these lush settings, but the way she describes, well, first of all, Seven Chimneys is an amazing mansion on an amazing property. So you're already like, Yeah, I can settle into this world for sure. 

KIM: Oh yeah, Absolutely.

PATTI: And they're always accurate for the time periods. I have the Pantone color book that looks at all the colors for the different eras, and I'm always looking up and going, “Oh yes, there she is with the turquoise and the apricot.” Emilie went to fashion shows all the time. She loved fashion. And so the women's gowns are always just right, and the hems go up and down with the times and, they're Paris designs. Yeah, clothing and the places are always beautiful. People sometimes criticized her for having such fancy surroundings, and first of all, that's what she knew. And second of all, uh, she said, “I spend, you know, the better part of a year inside this book that I'm creating. I like charming surroundings!” 

KIM: It's like Philadelphia Story or something like that. I love the setting and getting to live in that world. I ate it up, like, I was completely into it and I could not put it down. 

AMY: Didn't she say at one point, “I write the things that I want?” 

PATTI: She gives a couple of examples. There had been a red hat that she had wanted and, um, so she wrote it into her next book. And when people couldn't travel for a while during the war years, then she would give herself a trip. She wrote a whole story about going to England because she couldn't go. So she gave herself that treat.

AMY: But so much of what she wrote was about things that she had experienced, right? Like going to Alaska, she turned that into a novel. I love the story from your biography about, uh, she wrote a whole book based on an advertisement about a lost shoe, like a lost and found? 

PATTI: That's right. Yeah. The actual, um, clipping is in her archives at Boston University. It's just this little clipping she'd cut out and then years later she wrote the book. I mean, it was honestly years later before that happened, but it just said, you know, "Found: black slipper with a buckle." She just wove that into the whole beginning of a story.

KIM: I love her.

PATTI: Well, I do too! And it, it reminds you of, you know, just give me a start to a story. Okay. Here's a black slipper, make something out of it. And all of a sudden she's in…

KIM: Yeah, a writing prompt.

PATTI: Right. And now, all of a sudden she's in Alaska. And, um, so yeah, it didn't take much to get those going. And the thing that was fun for her was that she didn't know what was coming, either. So she used to say that she'd sit down with her two dozen sharpened pencils, and then she would start to write, and she never knew what was going to happen. And that was some of the excitement of writing for her. She would set up the situation, set up the theme, set up the characters, then find out what they were gonna do.

AMY: Um, the world of thoroughbred horse racing is really well delineated in this novel too. I'm usually not a horse literature person. Like, I didn't like National Velvet, I didn't like Black Beauty, all that kind of stuff. 

KIM: You didn't like Black Beauty?!

AMY: Well, that's, yeah, a whole other episode. But I mean, when she sets the stage for that horse race, it really comes alive. The muscles rippling in the horse's legs. The spectators in the crowd. It's the most dramatic portion of the book really, the stakes are so high. But yeah, I thought she did a great job with that.

KIM: It brought a lot action and activeness or into the novel, having that setting and the passion and obsession everyone had with the horses, and which horse was gonna win and everything. That was a pretty good device.

AMY: Alright. So this book has all kinds of twists and turns. It has the mystery element, which we haven't even really gotten into, but maybe we should just leave that for people that want to read and find out how that all comes about. There's a little bit of tragedy in it. Again, no teasers, um, for the most part, there's something cozy about it, right? I don't know if it's the setting or the time period, the romance… it makes me think about the time period that Emilie was living through, which was kind of fraught. You know, you have a couple of world wars, the Great Depression. Were people craving books like this because it was an escape? Did people find her brand of storytelling too cheery? You know, obviously people liked them, but…

PATTI: She was very popular. And, like she says in this book, Sandra Duvall observes and says, “Reading always closed the door on problems for her.” And Emilie wrote to entertain, and I think that she saw these kinds of books as an absolute need. Think about when we're at war and the USO goes over to entertain the troops. What do they do? Do they show them [Saving] Private Ryan? No. You know, they go over with something that's cheerful. And Little Orphan Annie came out the same year as as, um, the movie, came out the same year as Uncharted Seas. It had a funny ghost in it, too. So the humor and the optimism… Look at the pandemic we've just come through you know? Ted Lasso, here's a story that's about the goodness of people. Things turn out well. People do bad things, but not very bad things. You know, people are basically good. Um, that same kind of antidote, I think is what she was writing. And her thought was that, you know, if you were someone who was just living placid life, not involved with things, maybe you'd need a book to stir you up, make you aware. But if your son, like hers, is carrying ammunition to the fronts in World War I, and at any moment you could find out that he had been blown up the night before, you know if you've already lost your money and you're living hand to mouth, you don't need to be told that there are problems in the world.You have the problems. And so her kind of book is the kind of book that gives you some strength. It has optimism. It takes you away for a while. Gives you that break, gives you the rest you need, and you come back feeling a little stronger, a little better, a little better prepared. I think she saw that these were essential kinds of writings for people. And, during the Depression when, uh, publishers were dropping authors left and right because, you know, people were buying fewer books, they kept Emilie Loring on. 

AMY: And she wasn't turning a blind eye to anything in the world, right? Her books actually mention the first world war. I think that comes up in this book; She sees the veterans being helped into the stands at the horse race. She does acknowledge what's going on culturally. 

PATTI: Of course, and the men have typically served in wars, almost all of them have. And each of her books is set in the year in which it was written. And so if you read them in order, you can read the history of the United States from 1922 to 1950. And the events in each one are real events. So if she mentions a concert in New York, that concert actually happened, and they play what she said they played. So if you were reading her books as she was writing them, those references meant a lot to you because you knew what they she was talking about. 

AMY: Okay, so Uncharted Seas was her ninth novel, but her various publishers were racing to get these books out, as you said. Just as fast as she could turn out manuscripts, they would publish them. So she would go on to write 21 more titles until her death in 1951, but then, Patti, explain: more titles kept coming out.

PATTI: Sure. They were a little silent about her death because her sales and the royalties were so good. And so they hired a ghostwriter to flesh out some of her serials and make some more books. Then they started cobbling together short stories of hers, and I know that I can pick out: “Here's some Emilie writing… oops, here goes the ghostwriter again. Nope. Here's Emilie again.” Because the writing's different. You know, it comes from someone's soul. You can't have a formula that makes you be another person. Um, and so they wrote 20 more, and they re-released her original 30. So in Sixties and Seventies, then, they were having new books come out as well as re-releasing the ones that I thought were brand new. And the strategy worked because in the Sixties and Seventies, Emilie's book sold over 37 million copies.

AMY: Wow!

PATTI: Thirty-seven million! They really wanted those royalties to continue. Emilie was earning the equivalent of $300,000 a year toward the end of her career, and the royalties were keeping her sons, who were not particularly wealthy, was keeping them in the places where they lived.So it was important to the families.

KIM: Okay. So that's a lot of books. Um, if you were going to steer us toward a particular one to read next, I know it's probably hard… is it hard to pick? What would you say? 

PATTI: Of course it is. Well, never hard in the moment because, you know, like you stand in front of a bakery case you go, oh, I want that one! But tomorrow it's gonna be a different one. Um, I would say, Here Comes the Sun or Hilltops Clear. Both of those take place…she wrote eight of them that took place in Blue Hill. Both of those do. Writers might enjoy reading. Give Me One Summer, which is about a fledgling writer, and then reading Beckoning Trails, which is about a famous writer. So Emilie wrote about herself, actual things from her life as a writer. So Give Me One Summer and Beckoning Trails, if you were a writer and wanted to kind of put yourself into a romance, those would be the two I’d suggest.

KIM: Oh, that sounds really fun. 

AMY: Didn't you say in your book also that, the title Fair Tomorrow would maybe be the one that most closely hews to her own love story with Victor?

PATTI: Yes. That's the one that I think because it takes place where she and Victor probably began their romance. I think it's the closest to her real romance with Victor. Some of my favorite scenes are in that book. Um, so sometimes if I don't want to read the whole book, I just go from scene to scene in my favorite places. And Fair Tomorrow has some of those.

KIM: What about Hollywood? Did anyone come calling? 

PATTI: She tried. She only tried a little bit, and I don't think she pushed at it very much. I just, they're so in the vein of It Happened One Night or Philadelphia Story. if you know those movies, that's what these books are like. 

KIM: Absolutely. 

AMY: Yeah, anybody that is like a fan of Turner Classic Movies and that sort of “Old Hollywood” vein are gonna love Emilie Loring.

KIM: I completely agree with that. Yep.

PATTI: Right. I think that's where she belongs. The nature of her books. 

AMY: I was a little surprised to read in your book that she got nominated for a Pulitzer Prize actually in 1937. And Margaret Mitchell wound up winning that year for Gone With the Wind, but, you know, we kind of think of Pulitzer Prize winners as you know, going back to the, like, saying very deep and important things about the state of the world, so I'm surprised that her books would have been considered. 

PATTI: Well, a nomination isn't an award…

AMY: …but what did they make of her books? Like, serious critics?

PATTI: That kind of comes in two different parts. One is, did she do what she did well? Yes. So the critics call her books, “well crafted, intelligent, entertaining.” Did they admire what she was doing? No, they did not. Quote, “It is simply an entertaining mystery romance.” Oh, well, I mean, that's all it is, you know.

KIM: Yeah. I mean, given what we talked about, about how, you know, popular she was and it was that comfort food that you can escape for a while. I wonder if that was the thinking for the nomination. It's like she was doing a service in a way, right? 

PATTI: Those awards go to books that move the needle politically or socially in some way. And she wasn't trying to move the needle. She was trying to entertain people. it's just such a different thing. And it's good company though. You think about romantic comedies in the movies, since we've been talking about it. In the history of the Oscars, only two romantic comedies have ever won Best Picture. One was It Happened One Night in 1934. The other one was, um, Shakespeare in Love in 1998. That's it. Dorothea Lawrence Mann said, um, “Should the vast hoard of readers go on admiring realism and loving romance.” The Pulitzer or the Oscars are looking for those ones that societally move the needle, and ones that merely entertain people, merely make them happy, you know, that's considered fluff. And I hope at some point a comedy could make it. I hope that romantic comedies would get more interest. Look at Barbie this year, right? 

KIM: Yeah, 

PATTI: It was passed over for Best Picture…

KIM: Because it's fun. It's fun, it's light, even though it's feminist. 

PATTI: Emilie's in good company, being overlooked. 

AMY: Yeah. 

PATTI: And Sarah Ware Bassett had said something, I'm paraphrasing, but she said, you know what? I don't know why a story about a good person should be seen as idealism and about a bad person being realism. 

AMY: Yeah. Who are you hanging out with, right? Because my friends are all nice people.

PATTI: Exactly. And Emilie had said, you know, “the beautiful things in life are just as real as the ugly things in life.” But if you go into the awful bowels of despair, you know, that's considered more worthwhile. 

KIM: Yeah. And she was writing about what she knew, like we said, because she had a long and mostly really happy life.

AMY: This is, um, kind of jumping back in time, but I realized, we didn't give you an opportunity. Did you wanna read any section from Uncharted Seas? 

PATTI: I marked one. Her father's friend, the one who gets her the job, is talking about dreams. And, Nicholas Hoyt says that “dreams are an extravagant indulgence.” And, um, Damon says, “Indulgence? How do you get that way, Nick? Dreams are the source of much of the new thinking, new convictions, new power in the world. They send the adventurous out on uncharted seas, dangerous seas, and its danger, not security, which develops strength in mind and spirit. No, I wouldn't say that dreaming was an extravagance. I'd list it under the head of a non-taxable necessity.” And then Sandra speaks up and says, “I've had that ‘uncharted seas’ idea myself, but why think of those seas entirely in terms of danger and treacherous reefs and sinister whirlpools? I'm perched on the lookout spying for goodwill ships and treasure islands and priceless friends and lovely summer seas with just enough squalls to make me appreciate fair weather.” 

AMY: That's a great encapsuling of her of spirit, right? What she thought about life. This morning I was just looking on Goodreads really quick seeing what people had to say about Emilie Loring, and there was one comment that was so short and simple and it just said, “These books bring me comfort.” She’s still, today, she's doing that for people. And just the idea, like you said, when you first discovered her you always knew that there would be another one, another one, another one. I can never really run out, you know? Once you do, you start your journey like Patti to read them 50 times each!

 PATTI: People think that's funny. But I often ask people, “How often have you sung your favorite song?” It's not that you don't know how the song ends or that you don't know how the story ends. It's that you really love the language and love the flow and love the pattern. 

KIM: The feeling it gives you.

PATTI: Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to share when you were mentioning that, um, online… I have a website and people come there to share about Emilie, and mostly they'll say,” I thought I was the only one who remembered her!” But, um, one said, “I love her language. Her descriptions draw you in.” Another said, “Emilie Loring got me through two graduate degrees in literature, the antidotes to the depressing classics.” And then, um, and then another one said, “I found Emilie Loring when I was 18. I'm now in my eighties and I still enjoy reading them again and again.”

AMY: She's dependable. 

PATTI: She is. She is. 

KIM: Thank you so much, Patti, for introducing us to Emilie Loring, and never give up on your quest to tell her story. We're happy to be part of spreading the word about Emilie Loring and her books and your wonderful biography.

PATTI: Well, thank you so much for having me. This has really been fun. Thanks. 

KIM: That's all for today's episode. Join us back in two weeks when we'll be discussing an Irish writer who earned the nickname, “the national poetess of Ireland.” And oh yeah, she also gave birth to this guy you might have heard of: Oscar Wilde. 

AMY: That's right. Oscar Wilde's mom is a lost lady of lit, you guys! And for those among you who are Patreon members, tune in next week when we'll be playing a fun game of “Whose Line is it Anyway? Elizabeth Taylor versus Elizabeth Taylor.” Yes, we're going to be pitting the actress against the “lost lady of lit” trying to figure out who said what or who wrote what.

KIM: I love our life. Anyway, 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, and supported by lovely listeners like you!

181. Angela Milne — One Year’s Time with Simon David Thomas

AMY: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our future bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click "Become a patron" to find out more. 

AMY: Hi, everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes here with my co-host, Kim Askew. 

KIM: The novel we're discussing today is a story of a romance that starts off as a one- night stand. Liza, our heroine, meets a dashing gent, Walter, at a party and ends up, as Liza says, "with me in bed with nothing on and him kneeling there with only socks." Bowm-Chick-a-Bow-Wow!

AMY: Yeah, racy. Oh my god. Although there's nothing really that sexy about a man standing there in his socks only. But no, he's charming. He's charming. So the novel takes place over the course of one year, beginning on New Year's Day. But the year in question might actually surprise you. The action, in more ways than one, is set sometime in the late 1930s, just before World War II. So not necessarily an era known for its frank portrayals of sex and the single girl.

KIM: Right. And published in 1942, it was actually the only novel written by Angela Milne, The niece of famed Winnie the Pooh author, A.A. Milne.

AMY: I love a lost lady with a famous literary connection. It takes me back to our very first episode of this podcast on Monica Dickens, the great granddaughter of Charles Dickens. This book though is such a pleasure to read, and I am excited to learn a lot more about Angela Milne. We've got a returning guest, in fact, Simon

Thomas, to tell us all about her. 

KIM: Yay, Simon. So let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

Simon Thomas is a consultant for the British Library Women Writer Series, which curates works by forgotten female writers. It's their 2023 edition of One Year's Time, for which Simon wrote the afterward, that we read in preparation for this episode. He started the blog Stuck in a Book in 2007, and co-hosts the popular podcast, Tea or Books? Simon has a PhD from Oxford University in interwar literature.

AMY: And Simon joined us on the show several years ago for... god, has it been several years?

KIM: I don't, yeah. 

AMY: That seems more recent than that. Um, yeah, that was for episode No. 83 when we discussed Dorothy Evelyn Smith's O the Brave Music, which we loved. And I got to hang out with Simon on my trip to England last summer, which was wonderful. Welcome back, Simon. So good to see you.

SIMON: Thanks so much. It's lovely to be here. Yeah, it was lovely to meet you in person. Um, it was lovely to be called charming in your podcast about it. I put that in my little, you know, praise book. You, of course, are charming too. And yeah, I'm delighted to be back here for Angela Milne.

AMY: And in my like hazy recollection as time passes, I know I've changed it a bit, but now you have gallantly saved me from a throng of killer bees. Remember all those bees?

SIMON: I mean, I didn't sort of fling myself in front of them. I was like, “Shall we just go back inside?” 

KIM: That's the Mr. Darcy, style, right? You're just gonna calmly… 

 AMY: Understated save. 

SIMON: That's true. True. 

KIM: So let's begin our discussion by learning a little bit more about Angela Milne. What do we know about her early life, if anything, Simon? What can you tell us?

SIMON: Yeah, we're not gonna learn huge amounts, I'm afraid, 'cause it has been hard to find very much. But, um, the bits I have found, as you have mentioned, she's the niece of A.A. Milne who is, um, now very famous for Winnie the Pooh. And during his life he was famous for that book, but famous for a world of other literature as well. Um, she grew up in Croydon, which is a part of London. And she was apparently best friends with Peggy Ashcroft at school, the noted actress, uh, she would later become. She went to quite a posh school, Godolphin school, in Salisbury. Um, and that's basically all we know about her quite elusive childhood.

KIM: It's crazy how little you can know about someone in the 20th century and then, you know, you can dig up more sometimes on someone from the much more distant past. 

SIMON: Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: Especially considering you know, her relations and everything.

AMY: And for American listeners who might not be as familiar with Peggy Ashcroft, she was like a famous stage actress with like the Royal Shakespeare Company?

SIMON: Yeah, that's right.Um, she, and I think she was later Dame Peggy Ashcroft, but um, yeah, she was of that generation of extremely well respected classical actors. 

AMY: Right. I did see she was in A Passage to India, so that was a one thing where I was like, “Oh, yes.” 

SIMON: Ah. 

KIM: Oh, yeah, yeah.

AMY: Okay. So Angela Milne began her working career as a secretary, which will play into our discussion of this book. But after deciding she was, quote, 'the world's worst at it," she quit. So what happened next, Simon? 

SIMON: So her uncle, A.A. Milne, gave her 50 pounds, a lot of money in those days, and said, “Go and try and be a writer if that's what you want to do.” Which actually is a lovely hearkening back to his own young days when he had wanted to become a writer and his father said, “You've got a year to go and try and do it. If you can break even in that year, then fine. I won't make you be a school teacher” or whatever you wanted him to be. Um, so yeah, it's just sort of continuing the generational shift of, it is hard to set out to be a writer with no money. So here's a little bit of money. See what you can do. If you're good enough, you'll make it. 

KIM: Yeah, which is not a lot of money really to start yourself off, even then. But I like the traditional aspect of it. 

SIMON: Yeah. I guess, yes, you're right. It would not have paid rent for a year.. 

KIM: Yeah, it was like, “okay, I believe in you enough to think that you can do this.”

SIMON: Yeah. 

KIM: So she was also a land girl during the war. Simon, could you tell our listeners a little bit about what that actually entailed?

SIMON: Sure. So, yeah, during the war, obviously, uh, we had conscription in the UK where most men went off to fight at the front if they were of that age, and that left lots of jobs that needed doing, that women stepped up. For farmers actually weren't conscripted, but there was still must have been a lot of shortage of labor, and so it was just a way to, you know, “Dig for Victory” was the slogan on the posters, to go and, uh, make sure that there were enough crops in the UK for people to survive on, all that sort of thing. Basically just like after, you know, generations and generations of women not really being allowed to have hands on work, particularly if they were middle class and above that they were suddenly called to do it. And, um, and she went to do that. I don't know how good she was, but she described it as “living in quiet desperation, eating turnips and freezing in bed,” which is quite a good description of rural English life now. I don't have central heating in my flat. It's freezing.

AMY: Oh my gosh. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. You canimagine it, yeah, it wouldn't necessarily be the most fun thing to be doing at that age. But still, an adventure. 

SIMON: Yeah, something to build character. 

KIM: Yes. Yeah, exactly. 

AMY: So, uh, her uncle A.A. Milne, he wrote humorous sketches for Punch Magazine. And Angela would go on to do so as well. She was also notably the first woman invited to the Punch table, and there's actually a great anecdote about that in the forward to the British Library Edition. We were hoping you could share that anecdote, Simon.

SIMON: Sure. Yeah. So for those who don't know, the Punch table was something that only certain members of the writing staff and editors were invited to. So it wasn't like every writer got to be there, it was sort of very much the inner circle. Uh, and she was there just once and apparently while she was there, there was a heated discussion about Walt Disney's adaptation of Winnie the Pooh, which from what I know of Punch at the time Iimagine was not very favorable, 

AMY: Oh yeah, for sure. I'm thinking of that animated movie right now and just cringing a little and thinking about what they would've been saying. That's hilarious. 

KIM: Yeah. I kind of imagine it like an early, uh, woman on SNL or something and being in behind the scenes, practicing for SNL sketch 

SIMON: Yeah. Um, and one of the interesting things about Punch is that everybody wrote under a pseudonym, which is usually just initials. so A.A. Milne was always just A.M. Women tended to write under a full name. Well not full name, but a name rather than initial. So she was there under, I think it must be pronounced Andy, but a A-N-D-E, and you know, Rachel Ferguson was there as Rachel. So I don't know if they had to, like, we we're not gonna tell you who they are, but we have to code that it's a woman for some reason, rather than just letting them write under initials.. 

KIM: Oh wow. Okay. So her first and only novel is One Year's Time, and it was published in 1942, and she's clearly in it, she's drawing on both this experience of being a secretary and also her sense of humor. Let's talk about the book. Simon, do you want to share the basic premise with listeners?

SIMON: Yeah. And it is one of those books that has a very basic premise because in some ways, there isn't really that much that happens. It's a year in the life of a woman called Liza. She has a job. She works as a secretary, which, you know, is quite unusual to see that day-to-Day working life in novels of this period. She also very early on meets this young man called Walter and gets to know him quite quickly as we'll talk about. It's basically just a year in the life of her career, of her romantic life, of her friendship life. Uh, we don't see that much of a wider family, but she's very much that sort of single woman who, who's distanced herself from what family she has a bit. And there's, you know, there's a few trips and a few fights, but broadly there isn't really a plot to speak of. It's more just,

um, 

the day-to-day

life. Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And it still totally works. Um, AMY, do you want to do the honors of reading a little bit from the book to give our listeners a feel for how it reads? 

AMY: Yeah, sure. So this is a passage towards the beginning of the book, right before Liza and Walter sleep together for the first time. She's just met him at, is it a New Year's Eve party?

SIMON: I 

think 

so, 

AMY: it new? Yeah, yeah, 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: She's brought him back to her apartment and is hanging out with him on the sofa. Milne writes, "she thought of the party she had met him at, at the house of some strangers and how she had nearly not gone there, and she decided that there was something in Fate after all. She said suddenly,

What do you like best in the world? Well said, Walter, I'm not absolutely sure what plane we're on. I mean, I should like to say sex. It's sprang to my mind. It's true, of course. I mean, who doesn't? But then it would be just as true to say Shakespeare or the Brandenburg Concertos or curried chicken or the moon on the sea.

Or Groucho Marx. You see what I mean? Oh, I do, said Liza. I suppose it depends on who asks you. And then she nearly blushed and turned round and moved the telephone an inch from where it was before. So then Walter asks Liza, well, tell me some of the things that you hate. And so she rattles off a list of things that she doesn't like.

And Walter says, You hate all my hates. I think you can summarize them as stupidity and vulgarity, don't you? I think so, said Liza. She was thinking he has a quick, alive face to match his voice and his hair isn't quite dark. It's dark brown and his eyes are gray. So then Walter goes on to ask her what would happen if I took my tie off?

And Milne has Liza answer. Everything. I mean, how good 

is that? 

 And then Milne writes, Now she did blush. She hadn't meant it to mean what it sounded like or to mean anything. It was just something to say.

She saw that Walter was rather embarrassed too and was a little surprised. He said, I don't think it need. And then modern life's awfully trammeling, isn't it? Yes. I should hate to wear a tie. I didn't mean that. O? What did you mean? She wondered why she had said it.

If you insist, said Walter undoing the top button of his shirt. I meant that there aren't any rules of conduct. Now, there probably weren't any ever, but people always say there were, so I suppose there were, Liza stood up and put her glass back on the tray. I think rules are rather silly.

No, I don't really, Walter stood up too. Nor do I, really. And so, uh, things progress from there as you can probably, uh, intimate with him starting to undress. There's a few things I love about 

this. First of all, she's so good at the banter, right?

But, um, I love at the end where she says, I think rules are rather silly. And then she says, No, I don't really, because that's something that kind of comes up throughout, is she's not able, with Walter, to state what she really feels all the time. And we'll get into that 

later.

Um, 

KIM: Yeah, she says things she doesn't mean, which we all do, and she actually expresses like, okay, Why did I say that? 

AMY: And that little bit about moving the telephone an inch, I mean, that's such a perfect description of when you're sort of blushing and you can't look at him. Just fiddling 

with something to do. 

SIMON: And I think that whole dialogue could be lifted

to a film made today, set today, and it would still feel absolutely right for like a man and

a woman meeting for 

the first time. And, you know, flirting. It feels timeless. 

KIM: Yeah. 

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like it could be made right now into a film so easily. So I wanted to talk a little bit about when Walter first calls her the first time, and she is in the middle of painting her floor this glossy black color. She's trying to make her bachelor flat look more chic. She's on a tight budget, obviously, and I thought that was really fun getting to see like, 

there's a certain sense of pride she has, but also it's, you know, not always great. 

AMY: And that DIY thing, if anyone could look back at my apartment when I was in my twenties and I have this brilliant idea that 

I'm gonna paint an armoire, you know, and then I have no idea what I'm doing.

And, and the fact that she's painting the floor black, but she can't figure out how to paint under the rug and 

she's spilling the paint everywhere. It's hilarious. it's so, 

it's so my life when I was in my twenties. Yeah. 

I was always so proud of like my stupid painted, dumb 

thing that I did. 

KIM: Yeah. I could choose what color I wanted for a room. This was in San Francisco, and I had it painted like this deep red, which I loved for about a month. And then it started to drive me crazy 'cause it was so dark red. 

AMY: Like bordello. 

KIM: Exactly. It was like, Okay.

I went a little too far. Anyway, part of the thing she is like working through is she doesn't wanna be seen as this certain kind of bachelor girl, right, Simon? Talk a little bit about the bachelor girl term and kind of why it was bothering her 

so much. Yeah, I think the term bachelor girl is so fascinating because in this period, I guess starting maybe in the 1920s, there was this real attempt to stop using the words old maid, to stop using the word spinster. There were a lot more women than men in the UK, there were 1.75 million more women than men because so many men had died in the First World War. So there were all these young women facing the fact that they may well not get married ever, and if they were going to, they might have this extended period of singleness, but they wanted to rebrand. So bachelor girl originally came in as a cool alternative to spinster. But you know, misogyny being what it is, it very quickly, um, doubled back on it and there's a little quote I'll read, one of the mentions of it, which is when Liza's talking about finances and in her relationship with water, she says, I can't help feeling like that about money,

SIMON: said Liza, as they walked up the lane to the car. You would, if you'd always had to earn your own living. I mean all of it till a year and a half ago. She thought That sounds like getting at Walter for not really earning his, and it makes me a bachelor girl. That's awful." So there, she's thinking a bachelor girl as an independent woman, but what comes with being an independent woman, in her mind at least, is having to think about finances and having to penny pinch or, you know, having to do these things that don't make her seem womanly and flirtatious and all these things she's trying to be in that moment. So, yeah, she obviously wants to be independent. She likes having her own place. She likes having a job, but she's terrified that she'll be judged for those things. And she's also judging other people. She sees those women in a hotel and she decides just 'cause they're wearing slightly boxy clothing, that they must be, you know, beyond the pale and have never had a moment's joy.

So there's this internalized misogyny she's experiencing and projecting onto others. We don't really know how much other people are genuinely judging her for being a bachelor girl, but probably they were. There's a reason that she's afraid of this.

AMY: Well, Walter does have some derogatory statements about being a bachelor girl. He says like, they have fat calves or 

something like that, right? 

KIM: Yeah, 

SIMON: He again, he sometimes just like immediately backtracks

from it, essentially saying, Oh, I didn't mean it. But does he mean it? I guess he's in a position where he's

not really had to think about whether he means it or not,

whereas to Liza 

it's very

important. 

KIM: Walter has this annoying habit of flicking her on the neck, which I found really weird and annoying 

about him.

What did you, what did you both think? 

AMY: Okay, my older brother did this to me all the time, even in adulthood. That flicking, like 

flicking behind my ear, flicking my neck. 

KIM: How did you feel about that? 

AMY: It's so annoying, but he's trying to annoy me, right?

Like that's what brothers do. But for like a love interest to do it, it was triggering for me, 'cause I kept thinking back to all the times I got flicked by my 

older brother.

KIM: Yeah. There's something so 

aggressive about it. 

SIMON: Yeah, I think it's another example in this relationship where he just is doing whatever comes to his mind. It might be flicking her, it might be cutting her off. He is not thinking, How would this affect the future of our relationship?

How does this affect how she sees me? 'cause he just does whatever he likes. Whereas she's constantly thinking, How will this make me seem to him? Will doing this small action

jeopardize a potential future 

with him? 

KIM: Been there. Been there personally, 

AMY: Oh my God. Yeah. 

KIM: that?

Yep. I know. It was almost a little disturbing to 

AMY: read 

this because it was so familiar. 

KIM: Totally. 

SIMON: We should say it's also a funny and 

fun

book. It's not 

just 

traumatic. 

KIM: Completely funny and fun, 

but very realistic. 

AMY: A lot of their, conversation is humorous and it revolves around inside jokes, and I think that is very hard to write about, because inside jokes are annoying 

to everybody that's not 

part of the inside joke, right? She does a really good job of making you feel like you're a third party in that joke, and so 

you get the humor of it. And, um, yeah. I love the banter.

SIMON: Yeah, it made me think of Noel Coward plays when I was reading 

it. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a slight staginess to it, but in a fun way and yeah, like something like

Private Lives or something where it is that, you

know, everyone's 

saying the perfect thing to

each other. 

KIM: Yes. 

She is trying to do that to a certain extent. She's trying to be entertaining and fun, you 

know, whatever he throws at her, she can handle it and she's not gonna be too attached or whatever. 

AMY: So, yeah, Walter makes it pretty clear that what he expects from this relationship is kind of just no strings attached. As much as he disses the bachelor girl, he also talks down upon the little woman, and so when he does that, Liza has no choice but to be like, Oh yeah, I would never wanna be the little woman. No, no, that's 

not me at all. But privately inside, she's like, 

When's he gonna propose? Um, and Liza pretends it's what she wants, but it's not an equal relationship,

right Simon?

SIMON: Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, in the ways we've talked about already about, you know, her constantly reevaluating how she's presenting herself, which he clearly isn't, there's other much more tangible things that make it less free. Like if she gets pregnant, that's going to affect her life a lot more than it's gonna affect his life. So there is this sense that they're flying in the face of custom, but also very aware of certain customs.

One way that comes out, somewhere in the middle of the book, they go away for a weekend together. And, Liza is the one who's putting on an inverted commas "fake" wedding ring and practicing how to write her adopted surname in the hotel 

guest book.

KIM: Yeah, let's talk about this ring. ' You wrote about it in the afterword to the book as a sign of her middle classness. Can you tell us a little bit more about that, 'cause I think it's pretty interesting. 

KIM: I. Yeah, I think what made it seem really middle class to me is that she refers to it as a fake ring. And it's a wedding ring from Woolworths, the High Street chain. It's only fake to her because she expects when she actually gets married, she'll wear gold, she'll wear something actually valuable. This ring's probably made of bakelite, which at the time was a relatively new invention that made these things accessible. I did mention in the afterword to it a popular song from the 1920s, so a little earlier, called A Woolworth Wedding by R.P Weston and Bert Lee. I'll just read the

chorus. Sadly, I don't know the tune otherwise, of course I would, um, 

sing it to you, but

KIM: Oh, come.

SIMON: You'll just have to imagine it. Um, We'll have a Woolworth wedding, Sweetheart, you and I, everything except the grand piano down at Woolworth where you can buy, we'll buy the wedding ring there. It won't be gold, it's true, but our love is 18 karats, so any kind of ring will do. Um, so, so for Liza, it's something that, you know, you see this in quite a lot of the novels of the period.

You go and buy it and you pretend. For a maid or a girl in a factory, or you know anyone in that class that is their wedding ring and that is what they're excited about. There's nothing fake about it.

AMY: Right. They're 

not gonna get anything nicer than that one. Awww.

KIM: Yeah,

AMY: Uh,

KIM: happy to just be nominated. 

AMY: Yeah. Um, I looked up that song online and I could find the tune, Simon, but I couldn't find an audio clip of the tune with the words. So between you and I, we could put on a little show.

SIMON: We could piece it together. Okay. 

AMY: Yes, 

exactly. 

AMY: So, as we mentioned, Liza thinks she could never be herself until she got married, and she thinks she's gonna have security once she's married. Not only financial security, but it's also security from rejection. She's just sick of dating, and she's sick of having to deal with the games.

Um, she's jealous of Walter's interaction with other women, and so she thinks, Well, if we were married, I wouldn't have to feel that way because I would have him at 

that point, right? 

KIM: A done deal kind of thing. 

SIMON: Yeah. And, um, in fact, I, I'll just read the quote that we've sort of been hinting at between us, if that's all right. It's a bit of a long quote, but it's a good one. She could never be herself till she was married. When they were married, she could be nasty to Walter when it was necessary because she wouldn't be afraid of losing him. She could tell him he was lazy. She could make him a proper barrister and bully him to write his book. And all she did now was stop him working, not by saying anything, by saying nothing. He was afraid because at the heart of their relationship, instead of the courage to take each other for life was a blank, a fear on her side. On his. She sat down again and thought, trying to put herself in Walter's place. Yes, he was being perfectly reasonable. He had always told her what he wanted. She had always said she wanted it, too, because she was afraid. Which I think is actually a really moving moment in what is quite a funny book because he isn't being deceitful.

He's probably just blissfully unaware that she's thinking all these things and he thinks that they're both being honest, but she's not really allowed to be. Um, and to an extent she would be safe if they got married, both from the jealousy, from all these other things. be very unlikely that they would get divorced once they were married.

The divorce rates were very low. Because it was set in a sort of uncertain period in the 1930s, I'm not sure whether it's before or after divorce legislation came in in the UK, I think it was 1936 or 37 around then, which expanded the um, grounds for divorce quite significantly. Before then there's quite a tricky list of things like incest or insanity or something. Whereas, yeah, there were more options, but depending on when this was actually set within the 1930s, that might not have been on the table. But again, even with those options, you were pretty safely 

married. Maybe not happily married, but, but, 

you were 

KIM: safe. 

Yeah, because you're safe to bully and like 

SIMON: yeah. 

KIM: Totally. It's like 

her turn to like, get him under her thumb and get him to do all the 

SIMON: Yeah. 

KIM: wants. I love that her fantasy is about that. 

AMY: It's about 

nasty to 

KIM: Exactly. 

SIMON: I think her fantasy is also just

like not having to think about

what she's saying. It's just like if 

I'm thinking something, I can say it. 

and that's 

it. 

KIM: Exactly. Yeah. 

AMY: But would she? Would she be able to do those things with Walter? Because she, like myself, does not like confrontation. 

KIM: Oh yeah, me too. 

AMY: So even to the extent, not even with Walter, but she sublets her apartment 

when she goes off for the summer with him and the people subletting are not paying the rent and she just cannot confront them and be like, No, I really need my money. She keeps going back and forth like, uh, I'm still 

SIMON: Yeah. 

Yeah. 

AMY: them.

And it's like, just tell them. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: cause she hates confrontation. 

KIM: Yeah, 

there. 

SIMON: That's me as

well. Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: The other thing, um, I felt, so she describes her mood swings a lot, so she can go from like euphoric to mildly depressed, depending on how things are going with her relationship with Walter, for example, she could be just in the depths of despair and then he does one little nice thing, and then she's euphoric again.

And I felt like that is very true to like someone in their twenties and sort of how you feel about things in the moment. Um, and I want to read from a scene where they go to the movies ' because it's filled with Liza's random thoughts and emotions as she's experiencing watching this movie. "Walter and Lizza sat in the middle of the middle row of their cinema. In front of them sat a loving couple, sloping a little to the left and behind them, someone who clicked her tongue. Whenever anything happened in the film, Lizza sat with her hand in Walters. They always held hands in a cinema. It was a film they hadn't seen before, but as Walter said, only just soon it would pass from her mind.

And all she would remember was that tonight Walter had said he was in love with her, and tonight they had some Turkish cigarettes and she wore a new elastic roll on belt, which squeezed her together and would leave a pattern. But the funny bits of the film were exquisitely funny. The sad bits made her cry worse than ever before.

And she always cried at films. Now. When the girl in the film told the man that she loved him, whatever happened, she would always love him because he was a part of her and she wouldn't be alive if she didn't love him. The tears drowned Liza's eyes and the man hadn't said he loved her.

Oh, you poor girl. But he will, when they jacked the car up off the man, and the girl took his head on her knee and he said he guessed he loved her. The tears ran right down Liza's face. Oh, he couldn't die. He couldn't. The man was in bed in a very shiny hospital. The woman behind them clicked her tongue and said, look at his temperature.

But the doctor told the girl he was going to be all right. Liza thought, it's only a film I'm just watching. It has nothing to do with me. I'm not even interested. So she wasn't crying when the girl put her head down on the pillow by the mans and the music grew suddenly louder and the screen said the end. She took her hand from Walters and they stood up while the gramophone played. God saved the king. Liza saw with great pleasure and great. Embarrassment that Walter's eyes were almost pink, but that might just be from looking at the screen or the smoke in the air. But she'd never seen his eyes pink before.

No, it would be the smoke. When other people looked as you felt, it didn't mean they felt the same. Other people. That was wrong. Liza and Walter held hands as they made their way through the crowd and in the King's Road.

He took her arm and linked her little finger with his, they walked slowly along. Well said. Walter, what did you think of that? Well, what did you, same again. Wouldn't it have been heavenly if the Jack had slipped and bust his neck? Heavenly said, Liza. Some films are films, aren't they? But darling, I cried dreadfully.

I hope you didn't see me. No ducky. I was too busy, not crying. Aren't we awful? He squeezed her hand. Liza thought we are in love. I did know before that I was more than he was. Now it will be different. 

AMY: I think that scene, that whole movie scene and, and their reaction afterward 

sums up the 

entirety of their relationship, right? 

KIM: Right. Yeah. 

AMY: She's bawling her eyes out because the man in the film says, I guess 

I 

love you. And 

KIM: enough. 

AMY: her to just 

break out in 

tears.

And he's, Walter is pretty much 

unmoved by the 

KIM: yeah. 

ahead. 

SIMON: when he says he is busy not

crying, that's him saying that he was 

crying though.

KIM: Yeah. And she loves 

that. Yeah, 

she 

totally loves

that. It's 

like he gives her just a little enough, she takes it and she's like, euphoric. And then he turns it 

and it's like, Oh,

actually I'm gonna move 

to the neighborhood, you know, but I'm not moving in with you 'cause we're 

SIMON: Yeah. 

KIM: be married, so, 

AMY: That's what's great about Walter though, is he is so charming. You know he's behaving badly with her, but he is really charming and so you understand. Like in my head, he was the spitting image of Carrie Grant. He's got that vibe to him, and you can forgive him anything because he's just adorable.

Everything he says 

is so funny and cute and 

charming, 

right? 

KIM: What do you think, Simon, of Walter? I'm curious. 

SIMON: Yeah, I think I'm with you. Like if people listen to this episode, haven't read the novel, they might think, Oh, he just seems awful and selfish and caddish, but I defy anyone not to fall in love with him. He is so fun and light and fresh and it's, maybe that's where the frustration also comes because he is not committing, he is not being clear, but he's that person you meet at a party and you're just like, I want to hear what he's saying next.'cause he just makes it more fun to be around him. 

KIM: Yeah, totally. I mean, even like going away for the summer, that's exciting for her. They're gonna go away. She quits her job, which she was kind of bored with anyway, to go have this kind of playing “pretend marriage” time, you know, it's like he's, he is very fun.

SIMON: Yeah, you mentioned the job there actually, we haven't talked that much about the office job, but there's a little quote I wanted to read just from the office, because I think it'll give you a picture of how she brings across the camaraderie and fun and silliness of an office. Um. The office was rather exciting today. First, Miss Derry had a new jumper last week. She had dyed the navy on turquoise, or rather, as she had said, she had dyed the blasted stripes turquoise. You couldn't do anything with the navy part. It had made no difference that anyone could see, and today, Miss Derry had been saying when Liza came in, so I gave it to mom for polishing brass. What do you think of this one? It was magenta open work with very short puff sleeves. Pretty hot. Miss Nedley had said gloomily. think it's that.

Like I love that. It's great. That's what 

you talk about when you go into work, isn't it? You talk about, you know, the new outfit, you or you know,

the unsuccessful haircut you've had. Something like that. I know. It's, it's, yeah. And I think that way gloomily at the end is so good. ', You immediately know what the atmosphere of that exchange is.

AMY: And also it sums up another thing I loved about Liza throughout the book is all of her inner 

kind of catty thoughts about people. She's kind of, she can be a mean girl about people. She doesn't like confrontation, but her inner world is judging people for 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It could have been a dot-com digital advertising agency (said from experience.)

AMY: Yeah.

Yeah. And even that scene at the beginning with, um, Walter and Liza, basically any scene they're in together, if they had been like, “Hold on, I wanna post this on Instagram,” it would've worked because it seems so modern. It seems like it's present day. I mean, there are elements that you're like, Yes, we're not in the modern world, but... 

SIMON: And that was actually a discussion we had republishing it. The editor who I recommended it to said, I'm just worried this doesn't feel like a 1940s novel set in 1930s, because it feels so modern. I was like, Yeah, it does, but I think that's, you know, it was published in the 1940s, so let's go for

it.

It's not the period 

piece that

people might expect when they're 

KIM: Right. Totally. You completely surprised me, Simon picking this and I don't read the forward or the afterward until after I read the books. I don't wanna know anything about it. I was just so excited at how relevant it was to my life and how modern it felt like it.

It was a complete surprise. 

SIMON: I'm so glad. Yeah.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Okay. So, we've been talking here about Liza's personal life a lot. Let's get into Angela's personal life. We know she was married in 1947 when she was 38, which would've been 

kind of a ripe old 

age. 

KIM: I guess that's something with not 

not enough men maybe. Yeah. Not enough men around, as you said. 

SIMON: Yeah. 

AMY: Yeah. 

Do we know anything else about her own dating life? Married life? 

SIMON: We do not, um, afraid. I mean, I'm sure the second World War would've had an effect on, you know, when she would've met, uh, her eventual husband. But yeah, I don't know if she, I dunno if she had any broken engagements or maybe she met a Walter who wouldn't commit, who knows?

AMY: I think we've all met a Walter. We've all met a Walter. 

What was the response to One Year's Time when it came out? Were people scandalized at all by this casual sex?

 SIMON: I haven't been able to find many reviews. I don't think it sold very well, particularly, or there were that many printed. The people who did review it, I was quite surprised, didn't sort of call out that too much. I mean, they acknowledged that it was a very sort of free and easy relationship, but not in a scandalized way,

more just sort of saying it's a bit different from other things you might read. Um, so yeah, maybe the reason the publishers didn't do a huge print run, or it didn't so well, maybe it's

connected to that, 

but, um,

I don't 

know. It's, 

KIM: our perceptions are just off about 

that time because 

we don't 

SIMON: I, 

KIM: Maybe it was more

SIMON: yeah, I mean, people were obviously doing things that people weren't writing about, so, um, yeah. 

Yeah. 

I mean, it was also, of course,

published during the Second World War, so there were paper shortages, all these sorts of things meant that, um, yeah, it would've, I mean it isn't that likely it could have had a huge print anyway. But yeah, we often think people in the

past were like the books about them, 

which, you know, 

KIM: Yes. 

SIMON: were, but to an extent they weren't.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Yeah. 

And we're so lucky that this book has been republished. But uh, I hear that it was a bit of a challenge to track down the rights to it.

SIMON: Yeah, my goodness. Um, it does feel like a miracle. So I read it for the first time, oh, I don't know, maybe 2008, 2009. I read it in the Bodleian library in Oxford, which has all the books published in the UK, because I just couldn't find a copy of it anywhere. I'd heard about it because of her connection to A.A. Milne, and whom I love. Um, but I thought that I'm never gonna be able own a copy. I. That's it. so when they were asking me at the British Library for suggestions, I wanted to read this one again. It'd been a long time. I wanted to see if it was as good as I remember. Uh, and they said, Yep, fine. We'll do it. I was like, Well, this'll be easy because A.A. Milne's super famous. His estate must be well known, and it was in a catalog to come out a few years back and we had to, in the end, just pull it because they could not find the family. Angela Milne was still in copyright,uh, so we had to get a family to it, and I was, I was so sad. They've got brilliant people at the British Library tracking down the states and things, and they couldn't find any connection. And Angela Milne's married name was Killey, K-I-L-L-E-Y, which is pretty unusual. I thought there were so many reasons why it should be easy to find and it wasn't possible. So we were like, Fine, we'll put it on the back burner. If we ever find out about the estate, great. Technically, as you probably know, publishers can just publish, if they've done their level best to find the estate. You can actually pay. I think that's something the government set up. Uh, you can sort of set up a fund in case the estate ever does turn up, but it's quite expensive. And the British Library, I think, you know, because they're such an esteemed publishing wing of a very esteemed institution, they don't want to, you know, do anything too risky. So they just put it on hold and I thought, absolute last ditch, can't hurt on my blog I thought I'll just put a note saying I've mentioned this is coming out. It's not coming out. If anyone's got any connection, please let me know. Then a blogger called Claire, who blogs at The Captive Reader, a wonderful blog, emailed me saying, I don't know if this helps, but years ago I was reviewing a book by A.A. Milne and his nephew commented on it. He was not Angela's brother, he was her cousin. A different sibling of A.A. Milne. So she emailed him saying they're trying to find the family. Do you have any connections?He emailed me saying, Yes, I know her children, Nigel and Julia, I can put you in touch. And we went from there. It was amazing. I got to email both Nigel and Julia. And yeah, they were thrilled. They said yes straight away and I just couldn't believe it because I, you know, I never thought it would happen. It's one of the few books in the series that I'd never been able to have a copy of, so I'm thrilled it's reprinted, just so I can have a copy on my shelves apart from anything else. Um, yeah, that was a very exciting day, and I just love that it was just a, a humble book, blog exchange that managed to do what all these, you know, people who do it professionally somehow couldn't manage. 

AMY: Totally. Yay. Internet. 

KIM: So back to Milne's writing life, she continued to write for Punch. And her writing for Punch, Jam and Genius, was published in 1947. She was a regular book reviewer for The Observer and also an ad copywriter. She died on Christmas Eve, 1990, and One Year's Time, it basically seems almost effortlessly good. So I'm wondering why she didn't write another novel. Do we know anything about that? I guess we don't know much, so maybe not.

SIMON: Yeah, it's another one of those answers where I'm just afraid I have to say I don't know. Uh, but you, you see it time and again for women of this period writing, don't you, particularly if the first book hasn't been this huge success. Maybe she just didn't have time. Maybe she didn't have the inclination. I don't know. I think it's really sad that she didn't, because, I mean, Jam and Genius also really fun. That's easier to find second hand copies of if people want to track that down. And she was just one of these really fun, light, enjoyable, relatable voices that just burned once and then died, which  does make me think maybe, uh, maybe is more autobiographical than we know. 

KIM: Oh, good point. Yeah. 

SIMON: People have that one story, 

KIM: Yeah, they gotta get it out. yeah. 

AMY: She's one of the few lost ladies that I wasn't able to immediately find a photograph of online either. Have you seen any photographs of her, Simon?

SIMON: I think I've seen photo of her as a child, I think is maybe in Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. MIlne. But nothing as an adult.

AMY: Okay. 

KIM: That’s gonna be interesting. Yeah. Usually wehave something we can use. Um, yeah. 

AMY: We'll just have to use the book cover. Yeah. So anyway, Simon, this has been a blast. 

SIMON: It's so fun to be back. Thank you. Yeah.

KIM: Thank you for introducing us to this marvelous book that everyone should immediately go out and read 'cause it's a blast.

SIMON: Oh, thank you for spreading the word, and thanks as always for your wonderful podcast and all the great names that you're bringing to a wider audience.

KIM: Thanks, Simon. That's all for today's episode. We'll be posting a bonus episode on our Patreon site next week. That will be about Lost Ladies of Lit at the Oscars, just a little quick follow-up to the Academy Awards. 

 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 and supported by listeners like you, including Jan, McKenna Roe, JJ Wilson, and Marianna Fowler. Thanks so much for your support. 

179. Carolyn Wells — Murder in the Bookshop with Rebecca Rego Barry

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit for access to all of our future bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community, visit lostladiesoflit.com and click Become a Patron to find out more. 

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, who is not a big fan of mystery novels, listeners.

AMY: No. I think, Kim, honestly, I've maybe only read one Agatha Christie novel in my life. I'm not keen on Sherlock Holmes. I know both of these facts are making you shudder a little bit right now. You love a good mystery, right Kim? 

KIM: Oh yeah, I'm all over the place. Cozy British mysteries are great; like hardcore noir detective novels; French, Italian translations. I love the mystery/detective novel a lot. 

Amy: So this is the episode for you then. 

KIM: Yeah, 

AMY: While I don't love a fictional mystery, I do really enjoy a real life mystery, and I think we've got one to explore today, namely, the quest to figure out why on earth a wildly successful and prolific writer who was pretty much a household name around the turn of the century, fell into complete obscurity. 

KIM: We're going to call it The Mystery of the Vanishing Legacy, Amy. Carolyn Wells was a celebrity who counted Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison and Mark Twain among her many famous friends and fans. She was, without a doubt, a pioneer of the detective mystery genre. She started writing locked-room mysteries a decade before Agatha Christie's work first debuted, and she even published a nonfiction how-to guide on the technique of writing mysteries. She was so famous that in 1936, Milton Bradley actually licensed her name for a game. It was a card game.

Amy: And while mysteries were Carolyn Wells's bread and butter, at a certain point in her career, she also wrote across genres, including books for children and young adults, humor pieces, short stories, poetry, puzzles, and anthologies. All told, she published, get this — 180 books in her lifetime, which is mind boggling, especially when you consider she started her writing career a bit later than many other writers we've featured on this podcast.

KIM: Wow. That's a lot by any standard. And speaking of mysteries, our special guest today had to do some sleuthing of her own to uncover the answer to the question Who was Carolyn Wells? What she found out along the way is pretty incredible. Are you ready to kick off this investigation, Amy?

AMY: Absolutely. So let's raid the stacks and get started! 

KIM: Our guest today, Rebecca Rego Barry, knows a thing or two about old books. In addition to having a master's degree in book history, she is also a former editor of Fine Books and Collections magazine, and she currently works as the director of communications at the Raab Collection, a firm that buys and sells historical autographs and documents. She's the author of 2015's Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places, and her writing can also be found in From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of American Authors. 

AMY: Rebecca's latest book, out just last week from Post Hill Press, is The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author. Our former guest Allison Gilbert from our episode on Elsie Robinson blurbed this book actually, calling it “an engrossing biography that reads like a detective novel.” This book will also make you laugh a lot with its frequent fourth-wall breaking. So it's kind of part biography and part glimpse also into how biographies are born.Rebecca, this book is such a delight. I'm so excited to talk about it today. Welcome to the show. 

REBECCA: Thank you so much for having me. I've been such a fan of this podcast for years. So it's amazing to be on. 

AMY: Thanks for listening.

KIM: Yeah, that's awesome, we love hearing that. Um, we mentioned moments ago that you were a lover and a collector of rare books, which is so cool, and that is what circuitously brought you first into contact with the ghost of Carolyn Wells. Can you fill our listeners in? It's such a great story.

REBECCA: Yeah. Um, well, for about 13 years, I was editor of this magazine called Fine Books and Collections. So, in sort of my daily work, I would end up going to these rare and antiquarian book fairs, and one year, 2011, actually, my husband came with me, tagged along. And while I was off doing something else, he went over and he bought a first edition of Walden, which has always been one of my favorite books. It was going to be a surprise birthday gift for me that year. 

AMY: Major husband brownie points.

KIM: Yeah. 

REBECCA: It’s one of the only gifts in my life that has really knocked my socks off. And so I opened it, you know, on my birthday. There's a couple of book plates in there because obviously it's an old book, it's been owned by generations of people. And one of the book plates in it is a really kind of neo-Renaissance woman, and she's holding this funny little character in her hands, a little gargoyle like character. And it says along the bottom the name Carolyn Wells. So I was like, “Well, that's really interesting.” Like, I have no idea who this person is. And, you know, women collectors are pretty rare in the early 20th century, just because women didn't have the money or the agency to really be book collectors. So I just thought it was a neat thing and didn't really think about it too much. But again, going to all these book fairs, I started to see the name Carolyn Wells pop up on these first editions of 20s and 30s-era mysteries. And then in 2018, a British imprint put out a copy of one of her mysteries called Murder in the Bookshop. And that of course got my attention because it's a mystery set in a bookshop. It's all about rare books and antiquarian books. And it was such an “A-ha” moment. I was like, “Oh my God, she is not only a book collector, but she's a mystery author, and she wrote a mystery about rare book collecting.” And it really all just came together. And, um… 

AMY: And I have one of her books with her book plate in it.

REBECCA: Exactly. 

AMY: So you have this a-ha moment, but then at what point did you decide, “Hey, I want to write the story of this woman's life.”?

REBECCA: What happened was, because I was a freelance journalist I thought to myself, “Okay, I'm going to write an article about her.” So I pitched it to Crime Reads, which is a website about mysteries that I love, and, you know, they accepted it, and I just wrote a little article about her. But in the process of writing that I found out about all these other facets of her life in which she excelled, you know, and I just thought, “Wow, this is a much bigger project than I think it is.” And that article actually came out in March 2020, like the week the pandemic started, so I had all this time on my hands to really say to myself, that's not just an article, it's a bigger project. 

KIM: And fittingly, this book reads like a mystery novel in its own right as you're attempting to track down information about Carolyn's life and career. So tell us how difficult was it, and can you also, um, tell our listeners some of the more surprising twists and turns that happened along the way?

REBECCA: Yeah. I mean, probably for a lot of figures, you plug them into Google and not much comes up or not much that's reliable. You could certainly find her in Wikipedia, and she pops up in a couple of reference books, but there was no biography of her and I couldn't find any library that had a substantial archive, like her manuscripts and letters and that kind of thing.

So I just started thinking, “Where is this woman? Why is she not well known? Why is there nothing really out there substantial about her?” And I talked to one scholar when I was writing the Crime Reads article who said to me, “I have been thinking about this for decades. I really hope you run with this because somebody has to.” So, like I said, it was the beginning of the pandemic, so I just kind of spent a lot of time doing some digital research. Carolyn Wells never had any children, so I knew that there wasn't going to be some kid out there who's got an attic full of her stuff or a grandkid. But I thought to myself, “Well, maybe I can just find somebody.” And so I started looking around in Ancestry.com and Find a Grave and all these other websites to see if I could find any family members, and I happened upon her brother and I was like, “Okay, she has a brother! Great!” And then from there, I found out that he had three children, one of which was still alive. And so I sleuthed around and I found an address, and I wasn't even sure it was the right woman. It's a woman named Phyllis.I wasn't sure if it was the right person, address. I knew she'd be in her late 80s. So I thought, you know, she might be compromised. She might be ill. Who knows? But I wrote a letter and I just sent it out into the world. Four days later I get an email back from this woman and she's like, “Yes I am who you think I am and I'm so excited about your project and would you like to come visit me and see what I have?” And I was just like, “Oh my God, this is going to happen.”

Amy: Oh my gosh. 

KIM: Amazing. I love that. 

Amy: Her name is Phyllis. 

REBECCA: Yeah. She is the grandniece of Carolyn Wells and really the last living link, because she was about seven when Carolyn died. So she doesn't remember meeting her necessarily, but I'm sure they probably did. I just think of her as like the last living link between Carolyn's world and our world.

AMY: I'm just imagining how gratifying it was to hear from you, like, somebody cares about this woman that was related to me I know is important. Every biographer sort of has these stories, the kind of behind-the-scenes maneuvering of how they find all the information. You choose to include a lot of these personal stories, like, your journey in your book, which I loved, and you have all these footnotes that you include that are just hilarious. And I feel like that aspect of the book really makes this biography shine. So listeners, even if you think to yourself, “Oh, I'm not a big non-fiction person, I don't want to read like a big, heavy scholarly biography,” that's not this book of Rebecca's. Did you know that you wanted to write the book in this sort of personal way?

REBECCA: Well, a couple of things, and thank you for saying that because I kind of thought to myself as I was writing, and even now when I look at the finished product, I think some people are going to love this part of it and some people are going to hate this part of it. You know, those like the footnotes and the little side stories and that kind of thing.I kind of knew that people aren't going to want to read four or 500 pages, you know, a scholarly tome about a woman that they've never heard of. And Carolyn being Carolyn, you know, known for being funny and witty, I wanted it to be a little irreverent. You know, she says in her memoir the reason for writing, to her, was to entertain and to amuse, and so I kind of took that and I thought, I have to do something like that. I can't just plod along from birth to, you know, all of her different books and what scholars thought of them and then death. I didn't want to do it that way. 

AMY: And also the mystery aspect is fun. You're the Fleming Stone sleuth of this biography, you know? 

KIM: Totally. So let’s go ahead and dive into the life of Carolyn Wells. She was born in 1862 in Rahway, New Jersey. Rebecca, is there anything about her youth that maybe would have offered up a clue, (ding ding!) about her mystery writing future?

REBECCA: She had a very, um, “privileged” is definitely the word, lifestyle growing up. Although I will say this: her father decided what she could read and what she couldn't read, so she didn't really come into her own as a reader, um, until she was in her teens and she figured out that there was a public library she could walk to and she could get any book she wanted and her father didn't have to know about it. So, you know, that's one facet of it. She didn't grow up in a house full of books and she wasn't destined to be a writer necessarily. But one of the things I talk about in this book, and this is just purely a hunch, and it's, you know, certainly not something that can be proven, but there is this really violent and unsolved murder that happens streets away from where she lives when she's 25. And the victim is actually about 25 as well, and it's a woman that no one apparently knows anything about. She's found, it's sort of like a Jack the Ripper-esque murder. They never find the killer, but it goes on for months, the search for the killer, and the search to find out who this woman is. They call her The Unknown Woman. And they had like hordes of media come to this tiny town and people thinking they could figure out who the woman was. And I can't help but think that that kind of planted a seed for her, not only to be a writer, but to write mysteries in which they always get solved. There's always a detective. He always finds out. The right thing always happens. You're never left wondering if the killer is still out there, you know? 

KIM: Right. 

REBECCA: It's just a funny thing that I happened to notice when I was at the cemetery where she is buried, The Unknown Woman is also buried.

AMY: Oh, wow. 

REBECCA: And they still don't know who she is. I mean, I guess they could, you know, excavate her and do some DNA testing, but they don't want to do that. So it is something that the town actually cherishes as a mystery.

KIM: Hmm. Interesting.

AMY: You mentioned, you know, she started cultivating her own literary tastes later in her youth. Did she read any mystery writers? 

REBECCA: Well, you know, she started as a librarian, for about 10 or 12 years. She basically said, and I kind of point out in the book, librarians would kill you if they heard this, but she said, I basically just ordered books, sat there and read them. That's what she did as a job, which she loved because she got to read all of the magazines that came in, all the new books. So she read pretty broadly. And during the 1890s, Sherlock Holmes was like the biggest and best thing, and she loved him. She loved Arthur Conan Doyle. But she does talk in her memoir about being home one day, it's a rainy day, and she and her mother are there, and someone comes over and they want to read aloud to them this novel, and it's one of Anna Katharine Green's novels, mystery novels. And she says something in her memoir along the lines of, I had never heard this before and I was blown over and from then on I couldn't get mysteries out of my blood. 

KIM: Ooh, I love it.

REBECCA: So I think between Anna Katharine Green and Arthur Conan Doyle, she was just hooked. 

AMY: And listeners, we're going to be talking about Anna Katharine Green in a bonus episode coming up. So, um, we'll get more into her, but okay, so she's working as a librarian, but really just sitting there reading, which is funny because in high school, I was like a library assistant. That was my job. And I would pretend to be off in the stacks straightening or whatever, but I'd really just be sitting there cross legged diving into a book. So I totally can understand that. So how does she go from librarian to professional writer?

REBECCA: Yeah, while she's a librarian, like I said. She's reading all of these magazines we don't necessarily remember today, but they were like small literary slash humor magazines. And she kind of gets it into her head that she's going to start pitching these editors with some poetry and little bits of prose and puzzles she's really into. I mean, she's a literary nobody and she just thinks, Well, I can do this. So she lands a piece in Vogue and she lands a piece in Puck, and then she parlays every small publication, every little success into the next thing. By the end of the decade, she's writing for Life, and she's writing for Judge, which is a British humor magazine. And it takes her a long time before she finally can say to herself, “I am a writer,” and leave the job as a librarian. It's 1902 when she does that. She's 40 years old when she makes the break. 

KIM: Wow. 

AMY: So getting kind of a late start as a writer. Yeah.

REBECCA: Mm-hmm. 

KIM: So even before she started to focus on mysteries, she wrote a lot of novels for children and young adults, right?

REBECCA: Yeah, the interesting thing about her is she's doing all of this concurrently. She's writing poetry. She's writing for children's magazines. She's writing humor pieces. Uh, then she starts writing a bunch of young adult books, particularly a series called the “Patty” books, of which she writes 17. And they are immensely popular. They're reprinted for decades. And then in 1909, she writes her first mystery. But again, all of this is happening at the same time. And in some years she's writing six, eight, I think nine or 10 is the max per year. 

 KIM: That's more than Stephen King, right? Wow. 

REBECCA: It's not a record. For a while, I thought, Oh my God, is she a record breaker? 

KIM: Totally. Yeah, you're like, “Guinness..!” Yeah.

AMY: I want to get back to her humor writing. Didn't she do a parody of, I want to say Upton Sinclair? Who was it that she parodied?

REBECCA: Uh, Main Street was the name of the novel. I think, is it Sinclair Lewis?

KIM: Sinclair Lewis. Yep. Main Street. 

REBECCA: Yeah. Which was like the number one bestseller of the year. I guess she just didn't like the plot of it, and she decided I'm going to parody this. And she writes a novel that's called Ptomaine Street. I think that's a, is it a type of poison? I'm not sure. 

AMY: It's some sort of illness, or yeah.

REBECCA: And uh, yeah. Writes an entire novel and really just for the fun of it, in the middle of everything else she's doing.

AMY: And it seems like the response to all that, I just wanted to point out, was, you know, people were delighted by her, but also surprised that a woman could write anything funny.

REBECCA: Very much. Yeah. I mean, this whole thing that, you know, we've heard in our lifetime, “Are women funny?” is something that they were literally writing the same phrase, the same question a hundred years ago and addressing it at her. “Are women funny?” And then they'd hold her up as a woman who, in fact, is funny. Like, can you believe it? She's funny. 

AMY: Shocker! Yeah. And smart, too, because she's also doing these puzzles and brain teasers for newspapers and magazines. So she was kind of actually a crossword puzzle pioneer, and I wanted to correlate this back to what I mentioned in the introduction about my not loving mysteries so much, because I don't really like any sort of brain teaser games or logic puzzles. It just hurts my head. 

KIM: Which is so funny because you are so smart. I mean you were on “Jeopardy!” 

Amy: Yeah, no, I have no time for it. I do like the occasional crossword puzzle, but I think the fact that I don't like these logic games so much, it makes sense that I don't, therefore, love to read mysteries. Because there's a lot of synergy between the two. 

REBECCA: I feel exactly the same way as you do. I'm just not big on puzzles. I'm not big on like Wordle. My family gets mad at me when we play Scrabble because they say that I ponder too long on the letters, and same thing with mysteries. I kind of feel like when I open a mystery or any novel and I'm starting to read it, I don't want to think about what's going to happen. I don't want to know before everybody else knows. I want it to just play out. But mystery readers don't. They want to solve that puzzle before the big reveal. So for me coming into this project, it was like, “Okay, I'm going to have to read a lot of mystery novels and try to get into that headspace,” which I'm not in. But yeah, she actually equated poetry with puzzles and puzzles with mysteries. She would equate them to math equations. 

AMY: Which I also hate.

REBECCA: Me too! Yeah, she always said the heart of a mystery is the clues and the puzzle at the heart of it. She actually didn't care much about the characters, the motivations, and this is a little bit where, you know, modern ears don't necessarily like her writing or, you know, some critics have said, “Oh, well, you know, it didn't have enough depth.” That's not what she was doing. And it's just not the way she came at writing mysteries. 

AMY: This is tracking. 

REBECCA: Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah, that's like, I guess you could see it as a weakness, but then, what do you think made her so uniquely good at writing mysteries?

REBECCA: Well, she was great at that puzzle aspect, but that puzzle aspect was something that was happening in the earlier years. When she published her first mystery in 1909, that was like the height of the fashion for mysteries. But by 10, 15 years later, when you're in the Golden Age of mysteries, that's all changing and they don't want that anymore. They want good characters and they want motivation. But also, I mean, I feel like she had a lot of ingenuity. She's writing three, four, five a year, saleable mystery novels that are reviewed well, that are selling 15, 20, 000 copies each, which is unheard of. I mean, aside from somebody like Mary Roberts Rinehart, who was her nearest competitor in the mystery market in America, there's no one else selling that many novels. So she's coming up with good ideas and good plots, but when we look back on her as critics did in the 60s, 70s, 80s, whichever critics actually paid any attention to her at all, it's to say, Well, that was old-fashioned.

KIM: Mmm, okay. So I think now is a great time to talk about one of Carolyn Wells’s mystery novels. As we said, she wrote 82 of them. The most famous were her Fleming Stone series. We decided to focus on Murder in the Bookshop, the one we mentioned earlier, because it dovetails so nicely with your own interest in rare books, as you said, right, Rebecca?

REBECCA: I mean, she did sprinkle rare books into some of her other mysteries, but this one is the one where she really focuses her attention on that entire market, you know, the rare book collector is a man who gets killed within the first few chapters and then also a rare book is stolen. The librarian is suspected and the wife is suspected and the book dealer is suspected. And for people who love rare books and antiquarian books, the scenes in the library, the bookseller's office, I mean, it's all really cool.

KIM: Yeah, yeah.

AMY: So we mentioned the Fleming Stone series. Fleming Stone comes up in this novel. Rebecca, how would you describe him?

REBECCA: I think she tries to make him seem like he's a scholar detective. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. He's literary. 

REBECCA: He's literary. And I think his name, Stone, is meant to convey a certain blandness, which he is. He's kind of a gray, bland character, but then he just shows up and he's like, “Okay, I know what happened here.” I think, you know, she got some criticism because in some of the Fleming Stone novels, he doesn't show up until like the last 15 pages. So, you know, you go through this entire mystery, there's no detective. There's police, and they're always bungling, and there's the actual characters themselves trying to figure stuff out, and then, you know, you'll get 75 percent of the way through the book, and then someone's like, “Maybe we should call Fleming Stone!” So that was one thing that when she got criticized for Fleming Stone novels. It was like, well, why does he not show up until nearly the end of the book? This book is not like that. 

AMY: Yeah, but I do have so much to say about Fleming Stone, um, and I think “bland” is a good word, because he is not your charismatic Sherlock Holmes. It almost seemed like his underlings that he would recruit to help him out were the actual heroes in terms of solving the crime. I read two of her books for this episode, but in each case, it was like, “Okay, his assistants are the ones doing all the work, and they're more interesting characters!”

KIM: They have so much personality!

AMY: Yeah, yeah. What did you think of the book, Kim?

KIM: I love that it was set in the 1930s. I love the literary aspects of it. So I was looking up some of the quotes and things from Fleming Stone that he was throwing in his conversation. Um, I felt like  some of the things that happened kind of contradicted itself. So even though she had the puzzle aspect, it did feel a little bit rushed, to be honest. What did you think?

AMY: I got a lot of chuckles out of it. So Fleming Stone, his relationship with the police is so hilarious. The police give him so much leeway. It's just like, Oh sure, this random guy, let's tell him everything we know! 

KIM: Yeah, it wasn't that typical animosity that you usually see between the detectives, at least today, anyway, in mystery novels. 

AMY: And they decide it would be a good idea for Fleming Stone to have a key to their home so that he can do some solving in their house whenever he wants to. 

KIM: Oh, totally! Oh, and also can I say they… I'm not going to give anything away because I'm not going to say who, but they let a prime suspect go do their job for them!

AMY: There is a lot of citizen sleuthing.

KIM: Yeah, 

AMY But I agree, like, getting a window into the time frame, this upper class world..

KIM: That's what I loved.

AMY: 1930s rich people and how they lived is really fun to follow along, right? 

REBECCA: Yeah. And that's what she did best. And actually Anna Katharine Green did that as well. Carolyn liked setting her novels either on Fifth Avenue and grand apartments or it's a country house in Connecticut or it's a country house in Long Island. Once in a while, it's a country house in Wisconsin, but they're almost always in the Metro New York area. And it's always your upper class, your upper middle class. And yeah, when the detective shows up and his assistant shows up, they're like, “Yeah, just stay here for the weekend. Until we all figure this out, you can just stay here with us.” And they're all like that! 

KIM: “We have innumerable rooms,”was the phrase. 

Amy: Was it also a theme across her mysteries that the murderer victim, you always kind of weren't too upset that that person died? Like, you find out that they're actually not the greatest, so you're not really feeling too much sympathy for them? 

REBECCA: Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is in a lot of the novels from this era, you know, they'll end up committing suicide or they'll end up doing something so that the police don't have to arrest them and put them on trial and she wants to skip all that. 

KIM: So it's like a convenient end. 

REBECCA: She wants it to just end quickly and be done.

KIM: yeah,

AMY: I will say also, she does a great job at having lots of potential suspects all with valid motives. So I was never at any point in the two books that I read feeling like really early on, “Oh, I know who did it.” Actually, no, Murder in the Bookshop, I definitely was like, “It's probably this guy.” But you are given a number of options as you go along. And of course, she withholds very important information from the crime that you find out, like, three fourths of the way in. And you're like, “Well, that would have been nice to know.” So I think that's also why I don't love mysteries. You're being manipulated with the information you're given, right?Um, But the end of this novel, we're not going to give anything away, but the way that Fleming Stone solves this mystery, I was rolling on the floor laughing. so funny, ridiculous, however you want to say it. All credit to Carolyn Wells, I'm just saying I think it's right that this is not necessarily going to appeal to all modern readers. But for a laugh, it's really good. And, there are parts that are great. There are parts of her writing that are wonderful. It was uneven, is how I would describe it.

REBECCA: Yeah. and, you know, the funny thing is that this is probably, Murder in the Bookshop, her biggest bestseller. And it was a New York Times bestseller in 1936.

AMY: I think that's an important thing to touch on, Rebecca. We don't necessarily need to judge her based on what we think of the books, right? We need to judge her based on the success, tremendous success, that she had during her lifetime.

KIM: Yeah, obviously people were just craving what she was writing. 

REBECCA: Mm hmm. A getaway really. 

KIM: Yep, exactly. 

REBECCA: Yeah, I agree. And I kind of make this point a few times in the book. Like, I didn't write this biography of Carolyn Wells because I loved her books and I thought she was a brilliant mystery author. It didn't really have anything to do with that. It really had to do with mostly the fact that she excelled in all these different facets of, you know, literary, film, humor, children's literature, like all these different facets. When you add them all up, it's like, “Oh my God, this one person did all of these things!” But yeah, I mean, in terms of whether or not I subjectively thought this novel was good or that novel was good, I don't really think that matters much. And I also think, like you were saying, it's very hard to be a hundred years removed from the publication and think of it the way contemporary readers thought of it.

KIM: Absolutely. 

AMY: And hey, Theodore Roosevelt loved it.

REBECCA: Exactly. She actually was acquainted with four different presidents, Thomas Edison and Mark Twain. Maybe not that that matters too much, but what I'm saying is she was a household name, so much so that, you know, they tried to make a radio show out of her name. They made a card game out of her name. I mean, these are things that don't happen to everybody, that's for sure.

KIM: Right. 

AMY: Rebecca, we had discussed ahead of this recording whether we should read Murder in the Bookshop or this other very popular novel of hers, Vicky Van. And we ultimately settled on Murder in the Bookshop because of the rare books collection, but, , um, I actually liked Vicky Van better than Murder in the Bookshop. So I would recommend to listeners, if you were gonna do a starter Carolyn Wells novel and wanted to try one out, I would point you in the direction of Vicky Van. I thought it was fun. Again, a good snapshot of an era. 

REBECCA: I would agree. I mean, even though I say personally Murder in the Bookshop I love because of the book element, but I think generally critics, you know, when they talk about her work, they will say her early work is better than her later work, um, which makes some sense. By the time she's, you know, writing in the third book late 20s and 30s and 40s, you know, she's definitely older and she's definitely got a formula that she's employing. But the earlier work maybe has a little bit more interest to it. You know, when I started this project, everyone was like, “Oh no, she's, you know, very bland and very formulaic and don't really bother.” I had a couple of mystery scholars tell me that kind of thing. And when I went back into the reviews of each and every novel, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, like all the local papers, Publisher’s Weekly, I found more good reviews than bad reviews, which tells me that the readers then enjoyed the work. Again, when you're looking at it from a hundred years later, or maybe not even a hundred years later, you just have different expectations for literary work than they did then.

AMY: I want to go back and read from Murder in the Bookshop because I feel like we've been tough on poor Fleming Stone. He does have a lot of moments of humor, as does Carolyn Wells, his creator. So I just wanted to read this little section that did make me really laugh.

Fleming Stone has a hunch about who his suspect might be, and he says, I am not absolutely sure of my man, but if he is the one I think, he must be put out of commission entirely, as soon as possible. “I don't want to kill him, but if it is a question of his life or mine, I shall certainly try to remain in the telephone book.” 

KIM: Totally. I love Yes. Totally. I love those lines. Listeners, there are a lot of lines like that.  So we talked about this being set amongst the rare book trade and this is a pursuit that Carolyn got really into later in life as well. It's actually a pretty important part of her legacy, right, Rebecca?

REBECCA: Yeah, um, she got married late in life, she got married when she was about 55, a man named Hadwin Houghton, and… 

AMY: Can we interrupt and talk about the possible way that they met each other? 

REBECCA: Yes, although it’s difficult to know because Carolyn was always cagey about giving away personal information. But in some interviews she did, she puts out there that the way that they knew each other is that he loved puzzles. I don't think we really touched upon this before. You asked and I never really answered about her puzzle making, but for 15 years, she made puzzles that were published in various magazines, one of which was related to The New York Times. She claims in one of these interviews at Hadwin would write in answers to the puzzles and that they kind of struck up a correspondence that way and that's how they got to know each other. Whether that's true or not, I love that story. So… 

AMY: I'm just gonna believe that that's true because it's such a cute story. 

KIM: I love that. 

REBECCA: So they got married late in life. They move into this beautiful apartment, but then he dies a year and a half later. And when he dies, some friends step forward and say to her, “You know, you really need a diversion in your life. Why don't you try collecting rare books?” And she's like, “Okay.” You know, I mean, I guess she's got, like, time and money and obviously an interest in books. And she starts collecting pretty broadly, but Walt Whitman in particular. And she treats it like a job. She just goes after every Walt Whitman, first edition, second edition, letters, manuscripts, whatever she can get her hands on. And within, like, a year or two, she's got like one of the biggest and best Walt Whitman collections in the world, which she holds on to, um, and when she dies, that collection goes to the Library of Congress. It's amazing. And the rest of her books,she collected Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, um, what she referred to as the Concord poets, meaning Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne and that group, um, there were four different auctions just to get rid of all the books that she amassed. 

AMY: And the Concord Poets bring us back to your Walden. 

REBECCA: Yeah. Yeah. And I actually have a letter that she wrote to her friend about how she had stopped at a bookshop and bought a first edition of Walden and what she paid for it. It's amazing because this is a letter she's writing to her best friend about the book that I currently own.So now I have the book and I have the letter. 

KIM: Oh, that's so cool.

Amy: And you have the biography of Carolyn Wells that you've written. Amazing. Rebecca I'm in awe of the legwork you did to bring her story to light and even though I'm still not a convert to mystery novels, I really loved reading your book and learning about this amazing woman and everything she did, and also getting your account of sniffing out her story. You are a literary Nancy Drew, if ever there was one. 

REBECCA: You know, I was listening to one of your podcasts, the one about Rona Jaffe, and I went and bought a copy of The Best of Everything, which I'd always known about, but never gotten to. And I bought a copy. It has an introduction by Rachel Syme, and, um, she's got this wonderful line in the introduction where she says that “Rona Jaffe's legacy was bigger than her literature.” The same goes for Carolyn. It’s so, so much bigger than, you know, whether or not you think she was a clever mystery author or, you know, if she's the best. It just kind of transcends all of that.

AMY: Absolutely. She was a superstar of her day. 

REBECCA: I think so. And I think she deserved a biography at the very least. So that's why I was like, “I’m going to do this.”

KIM: Definitely. Well, I'm so glad you did. And I know Amy is too.

Amy: Yeah. And we're so glad that you stopped in today to talk to us about her. Thank you so much for joining us. 

REBECCA: Thank you. It's been my pleasure.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you're a Patreon member, you can join us next week for a follow up on today's discussion when we'll be discussing Anna Katharine Green, aka the Mother of the American Detective Novel, and her novel, The Leavenworth Case. This is the author who kind of inspired Carolyn Wells to write mysteries. So visit lostladiesoflit.com patron to find out how to access all of our exclusive content.

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

177. Zelda Fitzgerald — Save Me the Waltz with Stephanie Peebles Tavera

Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our future bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click become a patron to find out more. 

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

AMY HELMES: We're back, everyone! Yay, finally! And we're excited to start exploring some more lost ladies of literature and talking all things bookish. Let's kick off our return with a lost lady who, it's fair to say, is a true original. 

KIM: Yeah, she's one of a kind for sure. We know her instantly by her first name, but it's her last name, and, well, that of her famous literary husband which framed everything she did.

AMY: Zelda Fitzgerald, the first flapper, was an icon of the Jazz Age, but there was real substance under her bubbly effervescence. And I need to wrap my own knuckles here, Kim. I never took her seriously as a writer because I'd never really had her presented to me that way, I guess? We talked about her in a bonus episode from last year, which put her more on my radar. 

 KIM: Same for me. That's episode number 135 on Zelda's paper dolls for the curious among you. We mentioned then that she'd written a single novel, Save Me the Waltz. It was published in 1932. 

AMY: Yeah. So after that episode, our guests today happened to chime in on our Facebook forum to say that Save Me the Waltz was quite good. And I only had to read a few pages of this book to realize that this woman had a serious mind and she could write! 

KIM: Amy, while I was reading this largely biographical novel, I think I texted you two words, “Just. Wow.” Despite being once told by her famous literary husband that she had essentially nothing to say, I think she actually had a lot to say in this work.

AMY: Me too, and I cannot wait to discuss it, so let's raid the stacks and get started. 

 [intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Stephanie Peebles Tavera, is an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University, Kingsville. She's also the author of the 2022 work Prescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship, out from Edinburgh University Press.

AMY: In 2021, Stephanie helped to recover an 1892 novel by Annie Nathan Meyer called Helen Brent, M.D. That work earned her an honorable mention by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Edition Award. Stephanie is currently working on recovering the plays of Angelina Weld Grimke, as well as a monograph on women writers and mental health with an emphasis on the role travel therapy and self exile play in improving one's mental health.

 AMY: Ooh, I love that. That's giving me a reason to go on a vacation. Um, Anyway, as we mentioned in our introduction, Stephanie also has a particular affinity for Zelda Fitzgerald. In fact, an essay she wrote about Zelda and Save Me the Waltz will be included in an upcoming collection called American Writers in Paris: Then and Now. Stephanie, welcome to the show.

STEPHANIE: Thank you guys so much for having me and for hosting me today. I've been a long time listener of your podcast and not least because a number of my friends and colleagues have been guests on your show. Laurie Harrison Kahan, Mary Chapman, Coritha Mitchell, and Etta Madden. You guys have excellent taste in guests. 

AMY: Oh, We love our guests! 

KIM: We love our guests, yeah, and we love hearing that. So as Amy just mentioned, you have a special affinity for Zelda Fitzgerald. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? What attracts you to her life and work, Stephanie?

STEPHANIE: Sure. My first memory of being captivated by Zelda Fitzgerald as a historical figure and as a celebrity is from watching Midnight in Paris, the 2011 film directed by Woody Allen and starring Owen Wilson. Alison Pill, who plays Zelda Fitzgerald in the movie, really brought the character of Zelda to life for me. Her rapid-fire speech, her grandiloquent vocabulary, her decadence and vivaciousness, and then, of course, her infamous disdain for Ernest Hemingway.  Like you, I initially knew Zelda as a historical figure, not as a writer. She was the quote, "the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald." And I'm putting air quotes around "wife of" because she hated that phrase "wife of." She wanted to be publicly recognized as an artist on her own terms. I didn't read Save Me the Waltz until COVID quarantine about four years ago, and then I went on a binge, reading everything she wrote: her girl stories, her play, her essays. And I believe one of the reasons I was initially pulled into Save Me the Waltz, specifically, is because I learned that it was a thinly-veiled account of Zelda's own attempt to become a professional ballerina with the Paris Opera Ballet at the ripe old age of 30. And I was a professional ballerina once upon a time. 

AMY: What?!!

KIM: Oh that’s so cool!!

STEPHANIE: In another life. In another life. 

AMY: Alright, so sorry I interrupted you. I got so excited. Tell us more.

STEPHANIE: Okay, so I was invited to join Metropolitan Classical Ballet when I was 17 years old. So even before I finished high school, yeah.

It's a young person's career. So the emotional tenor of Save Me the Waltz, the pain that Zelda describes of molding your body to fit someone else's ideal form of beauty, as well as the anorexia, the perfectionism, the physical torture to your feet, all of that resonated with my own life experience, just as I had hoped when I got into the novel.

AMY: That's amazing. I love that connection.

KIM: I know. Absolutely. That is so cool. 

AMY: Even though, as I mentioned, I had never previously read any Zelda Fitzgerald, I had read the Nancy Milford biography of her that came out in 2011. So I was familiar with the basics of her life. And so I feel like we can have a parallel discussion going forward about Zelda's life as we also discuss the heroine of this book. Her name is Alabama Beggs. 

STEPHANIE: I think you're right. It is really hard to separate Zelda from Alabama, and I think that's purposeful. I think Zelda wants us to read her into Alabama Beggs. Zelda Sayre was born on July 24th, 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama. So there we have our first parallel, Alabama. Zelda was the youngest child of six born to Anthony Dixon Sayre and Minerva “Minnie” Machen. Her father was a prominent, respected judge from an old Southern family who had owned slaves and were proud supporters of the Confederacy. This is the same context in which Alabama Beggs was born and raised. Zelda suggests in her letters and in her novel, Save Me the Waltz, that her father was concerned with reputation and legacy. In other words, keeping his good name. Zelda was a threat to that legacy because she was such a wild child, and later as a teenager, a flirt who snuck out at night…

AMY: Uh oh! Daddy don't like it!

STEPHANIE: Oh no. Yep. A flirt who snuck out of the house to attend parties and date half a dozen boys all at the same time. Alabama is described similarly by the townsfolk, similar to Zelda. The first section, or act of Save Me the Waltz follows Alabama Beggs as she meets and falls in love with David Knight, who, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald, is temporarily stationed in Alabama's hometown during World War I. David wants to be an artist, a famous painter. And while Alabama's parents are resistant to their marriage, Alabama watches as her older sister, Joan, marries the right kind of husband, who can provide for her. David is neither southern nor wealthy, just like Scott, yet Section One ends with Alabama's marriage to David in New York City as he receives an advance for a piece that he recently sold.

AMY: So yeah, I want to get back to what you said earlier about Zelda not liking to be known as the “wife of” Scott, because we definitely see that here between Alabama and David. Alabama doesn't like the idea of being eclipsed by him. He carves their name on the doorpost of the country club in order to commemorate where they first met, but these are the words he carves: David, David Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody. And then later in his letters to her from New York he writes, “You are my princess, and I'd like to keep you shut forever in an ivory tower for my private delectation.” And Zelda writes, “The third time he wrote about the princess, Alabama asked him not to mention the tower again.”

I found that really telling, because this idea of having to take on the supporting role to Scott's shining star, it really must have vexed her.

STEPHANIE: Yes. Alabama is struggling against the patriarchal expectations that were imposed on her by her father and then later her husband. Zelda tells us about this cultural struggle when she says things in the novel like, quote, "The girl had no interpretation of herself. She wants to be told what she is like." And the men in her life tell her that her identity is dependent upon the roles that she fills in correlation or subordination to them. I think it's telling that the book is bookended by Alabama's relationship to her father, because her father has basically taught his daughters that their value is in relationship to men. And in a kind of Freudian turn, the husband must replace the father in keeping that wife or daughter in line. 

AMY: That also leads to something else I wanted to mention, which was, especially in this first section of the book, I felt there was tension between the old world, the sort of turn of the century , and then this new world with the flapper and modernity. When Alabama is on her porch swing waiting for David, Zelda writes, "Alabama waited for her date outside, pendulously tilting the old swing from the past to the future, from dreams to surmises and back again." So we really get that sense of past versus future.

STEPHANIE: Yes. And I just had this conversation with my students yesterday, that just because a century ends and a new one begins doesn't mean the culture stops or the politics stop. They just continue. They pull from the previous century into the new one, right? So it's poignant that both Zelda and her doppelganger, Alabama, are born in 1900. There is this tension that's pulling her between the two centuries, and I also think it's worth pointing out that tension also exists in Scott's short stories and novels, which indicates that he felt that tension too, culturally. You have these young folk who are trying to push for new progressive values in the early modernist period and they're at odds with one another.

KIM: All right. Let's dig in a little bit into her depiction of the Deep South. It's very sensual. You can feel the humidity. You can smell the perfumed air. You can hear the crickets chirping on a sweltering summer night. 

STEPHANIE: It's a really good novel to read right now when it's cold.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Mix yourself up a mint julep, everyone! 

KIM: There's the tension, but there's also that deep, ingrained love of the environment of the South. 

STEPHANIE: She's romanticizing it. Which writers from the South often do. Nostalgia for a past perfect. 

AMY: All right. So let's move on to the next section of the novel then, which is quite a departure. It's set in New York and also the Connecticut country house where our newlyweds, Alabama and David, are living. But it soon becomes clear that the excesses of the Jazz Age have caught up to them, so they end up moving to France, where they hope their money will last longer, and where David can focus more on his art career. At this point, they have a young child, a little girl, Bonnie, and in real life, the Fitzgeralds’ only child, Frances, whose nickname was Scotty, was born in 1921. Stephanie, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on this section of the novel and how it would have correlated with what was happening in the Fitzgeralds' real life.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. It's patterned directly after their real-life experiences and their adventure moving from New York City to abroad. Zelda and Scott had become celebrities in New York City. She became known as a fashion icon as the first flapper. And Scott, of course, he's gaining celebrity for his first novel, This Side of Paradise and for his short stories that he's published in a number of various literary magazines, like The Atlantic. And so they find themselves financially struggling, living the high life, and they take themselves abroad to Paris, where a community of writers had already established themselves. A community of high modernist writers: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes. And then of course, prior to that journey, Zelda gives birth to Scotty, their only child. I think it was not an entirely planned pregnancy, so that kind of throws her for a loop. Interestingly enough, the part about section two that most attracted me was the comic relief. The ocean liner…

KIM: Oh my God. Yes. That description of that whole experience is fantastic.

AMY: But then there's also hijinks even back in Connecticut when they are having a dinner party and some drunken fools stumble in, and Alabama is trying to entertain her parents…

STEPHANIE: …who are horrified. This is how you live?

KIM: Totally.

AMY: The wild child continues, basically. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: And it continues even on into France, because then she gets involved with some other gentleman. There's that whole plane crash situation. We won't reveal what all that is, but yeah.

KIM: Okay. So then moving on to chapter three in the novel, this is where we're going to cue Abba's “Dancing Queen,” right? 

AMY: Oh yeah. But “Young and sweet, only 17," therein lies the problem, because Alabama is around 30 years old, and as Stephanie already told us, that is a wee bit too old to be starting your ballet career. And this is a part of Zelda's life that always felt a little bit pathetic. Oh, what's she doing? But reading about it here, I developed a whole new respect for her drive and what she was trying to do.

KIM: Totally. Oh my God, yeah. It's intense, Stephanie, right?

STEPHANIE: Yes. We get the sense in the novel that Alabama joins the ballet because she's bored in her lifestyle in Paris, right? She's bored as a wife and as a mother, and she's also bored living this decade-long party. And so I think she's joining the ballet in part because she needs structure to her life. She doesn't have that anymore. And she wants her own thing, something that she can dedicate herself to that is entirely hers. She wants to produce an art that is entirely her own, not something that would compete with her husband. And the same might be true of Zelda as a writer. She creates a different kind of writing than her husband does. They're not really modernists together. He's a modernist, she's more surrealist. We'll get into that later. So as sad as this part of the novel might seem, yes, 30 is considered old for the life of a dancer, and then of course it's even more difficult when you've had children, which Zelda had just given birth to Scotty a few years before she joins the ballet. I have two kids. After giving birth your center of balance shifts…

KIM: Among other things… 

STEPHANIE: Among other things, yeah, and your body doesn't feel the same again. You have to kind of get used to living in a different body. So the ballerina in me is kind of reacting to this section going, "What are you doing? You're 12 to 13 years behind everybody else. Why would you put your body through this at this point in your life?" Zelda's trying to find or build some kind of community, a safe place among other women where she can create her art without criticism in the same way that the patriarchal world creates that criticism. 

KIM: When you talk about the trauma and ballet and the community, it makes me think of A Little Bit Culty, that podcast. It's like a little bit culty. It's like you're doing something that, you know, you're completely invested in to try to get something out of it, but it's causing a lot of harm at the same time.

AMY: And also just the masochism of putting yourself through that much pain. She describes the pain of being a ballerina. It's almost like when people cut themselves or something to relieve their inner pain. 

KIM: Yeah. She was not a dilettante in any way about it. Like she was spending hours, doing this.

AMY: Yeah.

STEPHANIE: In fact, there's this line that I really love that kind of encapsulates or crystallizes this idea. Zelda writes, "It seemed to Alabama that reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her, that in proving herself, she would achieve the peace, which she imagined went only in the surety of oneself."

KIM: That's perfect.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I thought so too. 

AMY: And when we're talking about ballet and reading this book, the word “arabesque” kept coming up in my mind because we know an arabesque is a ballet move, but also I think arabesque is also a design description, right? A very intricate, curly design. That intricacy, ornateness, reminded me of the writing style of this book, I think. So why don't we get into that a little bit? While she was writing the novel, she was in the hospital and she wrote Scott saying that this was what she was working on and she said "I'm proud of my novel, but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written. You will like it. It is distinctly Ecole Fitzgerald, though more ecstatic than yours, perhaps too much so." And that line stood out to me "too much so," because at first when I was reading it, I almost thought she was trying too hard with her writing style, or she was trying to show off. She's got tons and tons of simile and personification, but then once I got into the rhythm, it worked for me. And so I kind of want to know your guys' thoughts and how you reacted to it.

KIM: Oh, exactly the same. At first I'm like, "Okay, I want to try to figure out every line. What is she trying to say here?" And then I stopped. I remembered our other experiences with some of our other books that we'd read that were like this. And I just let myself get swept into the story and the writing and then I absolutely loved it and I could not get enough.

STEPHANIE: Yes. Yeah, Zelda is definitely a surrealist writer, not a high modernist like her husband. I think that's interesting because, for all of the claims to experimentalism that high modernist writers and scholars of high modernism have made, I find high modernism actually quite predictable. Surrealism is not. It surprises you, very much the same way that Zelda's writing surprises you. You think it's gonna unfold in one direction, and then it takes a sharp left turn and jumps off a cliff. That excess and decadence that you were describing earlier of Zelda's writing, there's an excess in language, an excess in imagery, it's very over the top. It's almost too much. 

AMY: She was living that excess, right? I mean, her lifestyle was excessive. Also, they're in the Jazz Age. So that sort of improvisational rhythm, the offbeats, the unpredictable nature, that is so evident in her prose.

STEPHANIE: And not just in the descriptions of the environment in which they're living, right? It's literally her writing is practicing or performing this excess. The word choice that she makes, right? 

AMY: Yeah, yeah, Okay, so let's go ahead and read a little bit that will um, showcase this. We have each picked a few of our favorite passages from the book. I'll go ahead and start with one of my favorites, just a description of New York City. You'll very much get that comparison to jazz when I read this.

The New York river's dangled lights along the banks like lanterns on a wire. The Long Island marshes stretched the twilight to a blue campagna. Glimmering buildings hazed the sky in a luminous patchwork quilt. Bits of philosophy, odds and ends of acumen, the ragged ends of vision suicided in the sentimental dusk.

The marshes lay black and flat and red, and full of crime about their borders. Yes, Vincent Yeomans wrote the music. Through the labyrinthine sentimentalities of jazz, they shook their heads from side to side and nodded across town at each other, streamlined bodies riding the prowl of the country, like metal figures on a fast moving radiator cap.

 That sounds like something Scott would have written, almost.

STEPHANIE: A little bit more decadent though. Like "labyrinthine sentimentality." That's so Zelda. Or "the ragged ends of vision suicided and the sentimental dusk." Suicided. 

AMY: She uses human verbs to describe these non-human things. it's just saturated with that.

KIM: It's so luscious and so visceral. I hope the listeners are getting how gorgeous this novel is and why people need to be reading it. I wish we had read it a long time ago. It's stunning. 

AMY: Yeah. 

STEPHANIE: Yeah. My favorite passage has that same kind of absurd or strange metaphor. This is on the train to Connecticut from New York City. The Green Hills of Connecticut preached a sedative sermon after the rocking of the gritty train. The gaunt, undisciplined smells of New England lawn, the scent of invisible truck gardens bound the air in tight bouquets.

Apologetic trees swept the porch. Insects creaked in the baking meadows, widowed of the crops. There didn't seem room in the cultivated landscape for the unexpected.

AMY: And she was the unexpected, traveling on that train to Connecticut, right? 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: Here comes Alabama, Connecticut! Watch out! 

STEPHANIE: But it's so perfect. The next time I go to Connecticut, that's exactly how I'm going to think of it.

KIM: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

STEPHANIE: The conservative nature of the state right? Apologetic trees. I mean, I will never see trees the same way again. Yeah.

AMY: Connecticut, she's got your number.

KIM: So this is a description of David and Alabama, courting. The spring rain soaked the heavens till the clouds slid open and autumn flooded the south with sweat and heat waves. Alabama dressed in pink and pale linen, and she and David sat together under the paddles of ceiling fans, whipping the summer to consequence.

Outside the wide doors of the country club, they pressed their bodies against the cosmos, the gibberish of jazz, the black heat from the greens in the hollow, like people making an imprint, for the cast of humanity. They swam in the moonlight that vanished the land like a honey coating.

And David swore and cursed the colors of his uniforms and rode all night to the rifle range rather than give up his hours after supper with Alabama. the beat of the universe to measures of their own conception its precious thumping. Mm hmm. how visceral that is.

Isn't that amazing? Gorgeous.

So let's move into Chapter Four now, the final section of the novel. In it, we see Alabama hospitalized for a dance-career-ending foot injury. In real life, though, Zelda was also hospitalized, but not for a foot injury. Let's talk about the mental struggle she was having at this time.

STEPHANIE: Sure. Zelda wrote Save Me the Waltz while she was a patient at the Phipps Clinic of John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland in 1932. Get this, she wrote the whole novel in six weeks. 

AMY: That's mind blowing. 

KIM: In every way, she's like a bright shining comet that's like streaking across the sky, burning brightly, right? 

AMY: Yeah. The feverish pace of that. 

STEPHANIE: So interestingly, Phipps Clinic was the fourth clinic or asylum that Zelda visited during her life. It also wouldn't be the last. She actually tragically died in an asylum during a fire in 1948, when she was about 47 years old. Zelda had been institutionalized by her husband after her previous mental health episodes of breakdowns, including her post-ballet breakdown in the fall of 1929. Like Alabama Beggs, Zelda Fitzgerald was invited to dance a solo part in a professional production of Aida with the San Carlo Opera Ballet in Naples, Italy. Unlike Alabama, Zelda did not take the position. We don't really know why she declined the offer, but shortly after declining the invitation, Zelda experienced mental and physical exhaustion, during which she began hallucinating and seeing voices. She was hospitalized twice as a result of these symptoms. First at Malmaison in France in April, 1930, and then Valmont Clinic in Glion, Switzerland in June, 1930. Because she wasn't getting better, Scott invited a famous psychiatrist named Dr. Oscar Forel to come assess Zelda.

And of course, Dr. Forel diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia, which actually in those days was a term they used for bipolar disorder, not just schizophrenia as we know it today. And then Dr. Forel recommended treatment at his clinic, the Prangins Clinic in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Geneva. While she was there, she experienced traumatic forms of treatment. She was given tons of injections of chloral hydrate to tranquilize her, of morphine to induce sleep, of bromides for pain. And she also participated in talk therapy sessions with a psychiatrist and her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and these sessions are important because not only were they verbally abusive, but also Scott poached dialogue word for word from the transcripts of those recorded sessions for his novel, Tender is the Night, published in 1934.

AMY: That feels like such a betrayal. Am I wrong? 

KIM: Yeah.

STEPHANIE: Absolutely. Yeah.

AMY: And there's another little section I saw in the introduction to the edition that I read. When Zelda and Scott are fighting over who has the rights to their story, I guess you could say. And he basically said to Zelda that what she wrote were “nice little sketches, but you have essentially nothing to say. You are a third rate writer and a third rate ballet dancer. I am a professional writer with a huge following. I am the highest paid short story writer in the world.” You know what? If you're the highest paid and you're the best, maybe get your own stuff. Don't steal from what I was telling my doctor.

KIM: Yeah, under tragic, really difficult circumstances. Sorry, go ahead, Stephanie. 

STEPHANIE: No, no, I remember the response to that. That was part of the transcript from the therapy sessions, and Zelda interrupts him at one point and says, “It seems to me you are making a rather violent attack on a third rate talent then.”

KIM: Yeah. It's like, if she's so third rate, why are you so threatened by it?

STEPHANIE: It felt like a mic-drop moment. 

KIM: Yeah, totally. 

AMY: And for him to say that after you read this novel and you see how good it is, it's like, "Shut up, dude.”

KIM: Oh, totally. Yeah. So going back to the novel, by the end of it, Alabama and David, they make their way back to her parents’ home in the Deep South. And it's really a full-circle moment. It's actually very emotional, right?

AMY: Yeah. Personally, I don't cry often reading books, but I teared up a little at the end of this book, I will admit. The book affected me. I know that sounds corny… 

KIM: No, it doesn't. 

AMY: And that last line in particular… we all know the final line of the Great Gatsby: And so we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past. Let me read the final line of Save Me the Waltz: They sat in the pleasant gloom of late afternoon staring at each other through the remains of the party. The silver glasses, the silver tray, the traces of many perfumes. They sat together watching the twilight flow through the calm living room that they were leaving like the clear cold current of a trout stream. 

KIM: Team Zelda. I'm getting us Team Zelda t shirts, Amy. 

AMY: They're both good. I mean, I'm not denigrating Scott. 

KIM: They're both good, but I'm sorry, Team Zelda for me.

AMY: And you do, you see similarities.

STEPHANIE: Yeah!

AMY: So if you're a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald and you're reading his version of their life, why not go ahead and see. her take on it is?

KIM: Yes. I love that, Amy.

STEPHANIE: They both end with a sort of meditation on water. I'm not sure what to make of that yet, I just realized it for the first time. Mm 

AMY: It definitely echoes one another. 

KIM: Time, water. Yeah, totally. The tension of past, present, future that Amy was talking about earlier. Yeah. 

AMY: I was gonna ask how did Scott feel about Zelda writing her version of their life together, but I think we know the answer. He wasn't happy about it.

STEPHANIE: Of course. Yeah. No, he felt that he had the copyright to their lives basically, right? He owned it. He gets to tell the story. So it's interesting. I think that Zelda was rather amused at the prospect of being Scott's muse. She enjoyed the attention from him. But then she came to resent it over time as he becomes increasingly more controlling. And so, as we know, Zelda wasn't just Scott's muse. He stole passages from her letters and diaries, the transcripts of their therapy sessions. Zelda was livid about that, um, she felt that it was a breach of privacy, which of course it is. But it's ironic, too, because Scott complained that Save Me the Waltz was a breach of privacy. He felt that it aired their marital issues in a way that Tender is the Night didn't, according to him, um, and in a way that Gatsby didn't, in his view.

AMY: He kind of thwarted her a little in the publishing process of this book, right? I don't remember the story completely, but when the book was published it was riddled with errors and typos. Do you remember about this, Stephanie?

STEPHANIE: Oh, yeah, I can tell you the hot goss. 

AMY: Okay. 

STEPHANIE: So Scott infamously tried to prevent the publication of Save Me the Waltz. When Zelda sent the manuscript of Save Me the Waltz directly to Scott's editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, Scott had not read the draft at that point. The first draft of the novel was more transparently about the Fitzgeralds' marriage. In fact, David Knight was originally named Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise, and the autobiographical character of F. Scott Fitzgerald. So of course, his first response to this was "Veto! Veto!"

AMY: I can see that. I can kind of side with him on that. Yeah.

STEPHANIE: Perkins helped guide the revisions of Zelda's novel into the final published form that we're reading today. And this is the version that Scott read, actually, before the novel went to press. Even so, he was still angered about the novel for a couple of reasons. He felt that it was too similar to his own novel, Tender is the Night, which he was writing at the same time that she was writing Save Me the Waltz. And he accused Zelda of poaching from Tender is the Night. Again, ironic, because he's the one who's actually poaching. The second reason he was upset about it was he felt it breached their privacy, and that it presented him in particular in a bad light. In fact, in a letter to his editor, Scott complains, quote, "The mixture of fact and fiction is calculated to ruin us both, or what is left of us, and I can't let it stand." End quote. That's when he actively intervened in the publication process. He discouraged his editor, Perkins, from proofreading, and in fact insisted on doing the proofreading himself. And it was so poorly proofread that the reviews of the book in The New York Times and in the Bookman, among others, complained about the mechanical errors and the type print. So after the book had been on the market for a few years, Fitzgerald pleaded in a letter to his agent, Harold Ober, “Please don't have anybody read Zelda's book because it's a bad book!” In other words, he's trying to tell his agent, Don't market it. Don't sell it. Don't help her out. So it didn't sell well. But I don't think It's entirely the fault of the copy editing process. Zelda's book came out in the Great Depression. People just weren't buying books. Another reason could be that they just didn't know what to do with the language. Even if it was well-copyedited, Zelda has a unique voice, and I think people don't know what to do with that. They didn't know what to do with it then, and they still don't know what to do with it now. They don't quite understand the principles of surrealism, or they just find it too difficult to read. It requires too much work on their part to parse through the language and learn the rhythm, as you said.

KIM: Okay.

AMY: Yeah. So back to Zelda and F. Scott's life, they eventually separated. He suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 44. Zelda died four years later at the age of 48 under really tragic circumstances. Can you tell the listeners what happened, Stephanie?

STEPHANIE: Sure. In 1936, Scott once again checks Zelda into a mental hospital, against her will. This was the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. While she was there, Scott ran off to Hollywood to become a screenwriter, thinking that it would make him more money than writing novels and short stories. Zelda was in and out of the Highland Hospital for the next nine years, and when she wasn't in hospital, she was often at her parents' home in Montgomery, Alabama. But then Scott dies in 1940, and Zelda falls into this deep depression. She checked herself into Highland Hospital voluntarily in 1948, and even though the doctors told her that she was well enough to go home, she kept insisting on staying until she felt stable. And that was her fateful decision. A fire broke out at the hospital three weeks later, on March 10th, and Zelda died in the fire alongside eight other women. And the autopsy revealed that she had sedatives in her system at time of death, which I think is really interesting. She might have been sedated as part of the treatment plan at the clinic.

AMY: Also an interesting internet dive if anybody wants to look into it more, it's possible that fire was arson. One of the employees at the hospital is suspected of being the person that set that fire intentionally. She was never charged, but it's an interesting thing to dig around on the internet about. 

STEPHANIE: Oh my goodness. 

AMY: Even more awful of a story, right? 

KIM: Yeah. 

STEPHANIE: I didn't know that part about the arson. 

AMY: Yeah. It was a nurse working at the time. And yeah, I'll send you a couple links to it.

STEPHANIE: Okay. All right, so there's a mystery here. 

AMY: Yeah, for sure. But really just a tragic… so much about her life is tragic, right? 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: And yet so much about it is brilliant and beautiful. She's such a paradox. Let's talk a little bit about her literary legacy, because I know that's something that you focus on in your forthcoming essay. You sort of have some ideas about why she has been excluded.

STEPHANIE: I think that it's easier for us as humans to accept the simpler story of a person's life. It's easier to remember Zelda as the flapper, the “wife of,” the drunk, the party girl, and, potentially, the madwoman. We cannot reconcile this simplistic image of her with the literary and artistic genius that she was. And I don't think that it's just the case with Zelda. I think it's also the case with a number of women writers that I've been working with over my career who I've been recovering. So what I'm working on with this article in particular is establishing Zelda as part of a Surrealist community, the community of women writers in expat Paris, like Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney and Djuna Barnes. I think that that influence affected her writing style in positive ways, but also then made it really difficult for her to fit in any kind of box as a writer, and makes it difficult for us to make sense of her, to make sense of what she was doing in her writing style and the meaning of the text outside of these clear autobiographical parallels.

KIM: Stephanie, I love that you're doing this work to bring Zelda out of this box and sort of change this legacy into something she deserves. 

STEPHANIE: Thank you.

KIM: Your time with us today has been so invaluable, and the more we talk about this book, I feel like there's just even more to say. There's so many layers, really, we only scratched the surface, listeners. But Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us. I've loved this discussion.

STEPHANIE: Thank you so much for having me. This was delightful. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Join us back in two weeks when we'll be discussing a forgotten mystery writer. And speaking of mysteries, next week we'll be discussing the Winchester Mystery House of San Jose, California, and its connection to author Shirley Jackson. That episode is exclusively available to our Patreon members, so if you want in on that, head over to lost ladies of lit.com and click Become a Patron.

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 and supported by listeners like you. 

168. Mary McCarthy’s The Group Turns 60

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone. Before we dive into today's episode, we want to let you know, this will be our final new episode for 2023. We'll be taking a brief hiatus to enjoy the holidays with our families and we'll be back with more brand new episodes in late January.

AMY HELMES: Until then, we'll be airing encore presentations of some of our favorite past episodes starting next week. This little break will also be a terrific time for you to catch up on back episodes from the past three years. In fact, it's going to be your last opportunity to enjoy free and unlimited access to our mini episodes. And really, Kim, if you think about it, “mini” is kind of a misnomer, because most of these episodes run about 20 minutes long. They're not too mini.

KIM: No, no. I like to think of them more as bonus episodes. And so to that end, soon after we return from hiatus, these episodes will be available only with a Lost Ladies of Lit Patreon subscription for as little as six dollars per month. You always hear things like "the price of a latte!" For the price of a latte! For the low, low price of a latte, you can get…” [laughs] Yeah, we're diving into Patreon, people. Some of our listeners have been suggesting this for a while and we finally got around to doing it.

AMY: And don't worry, we are committed to keeping our full-length episodes on forgotten women writers free and available for all to enjoy. That's a priority for us. But if you believe there's value in what we do, we hope that you'll consider supporting our work in the new year, because believe it or not, it actually does cost money to produce this podcast. I know a lot of our listeners are writers and college professors. A subscription is probably going to be a tax write off for you, so think about it that way. So we're gonna have more info for y'all at the start of the new year on how you can sign up. We'll direct you to our Patreon link also in our show notes if you want to get a head start on that or be put on the waitlist for when that's all starting. 

KIM: Amy and I tend to let our hair down a bit more in our bonus episodes. We have a lot of fun with them, they're usually good for some laughs, so we hope you continue to tune in for those. Consider it a small but meaningful way that you can be part of our efforts to remind the world of all the great women writers people should be reading.

AMY: It's been amazing to spread the word about lost ladies of lit, and we look forward to introducing you to many more in the new year.

KIM: So without further ado, here's today's episode.

AMY: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my cohost, Kim Askew.

KIM: Hey, everyone. Listeners, if you've followed this podcast long enough, you know that Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City and the television show it spawned get mentioned a lot on this podcast. I would say almost to a nauseating degree. I didn't even really watch the show when it was on, as often as it comes up here, and not that there's anything wrong with it, but you know, I just didn't.

AMY: I know it's a little embarrassing. I feel like maybe we need to issue a moratorium on that reference. But it is often our go-to comparison when we're trying to highlight a book's frank discussions about sex or novels about women friendships or independent young working women in the city. I'm thinking particularly of New York City, so books like Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything, Miriam Karpolov's Diary of a Lonely Girl, and Ursula Parrott's Ex Wife. We've done previous episodes on those, and I think Sex and the City has come up in all of those.

KIM: Yeah, that's right. And when it comes to scintillating "girls about town" sort of books, it's an easy touchstone to reference. Everyone gets it, even if you haven't watched it. And in fact, The book we'll be talking about today directly inspired Candace Bushnell to write Sex and the City, so we kind of have to mention it this time.

AMY: Yeah, but I'm going to start referring to it by other names so maybe like Fornication in the Metropolis or Carnal Activity in an Urban Center. Let's try to put new spins on the title.

KIM: We're going to work on that, guys. I like that idea.

AMY: Um, But yeah, so apparently Sex and the City was born after Bushnell's editor suggested, "Hey, why don't you write a modern day version of Mary McCarthy's The Group?"

KIM: Ka-ching! And the money started pouring in.

AMY: Yeah, yeah, brilliant idea. So I suspect a lot of you out there, you're all remarkably well read people, have already... read The Group, but then there might be others listening who are thinking, "What's The Group?" Or maybe like Kim and I, you sort of knew of it, but you had never actually read it.

KIM: Yeah. Amy, you and I both independently had this book on our radar a few months ago as something we wanted to read, not necessarily for the podcast, but when we found out we were both reading it, we decided we had to discuss it, especially since this past August, it actually marked the 60th anniversary of the novel.

AMY: Yeah. So let's dive in, or as we like to say, let's raid the stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

KIM: Okay. So full disclosure listeners, Amy and I initially planned this as a mini episode. We don't have a guest on today helping us out.

AMY: It's not a mini episode anymore. It's a bonus episode. 

KIM: It's a bonus episode. That's right. Bonus.

AMY: Yeah, but today, like Kim said, it's just going to be the two of us giving you our non-expert opinions. That said, let's talk about the history of this novel. It's probably Mary McCarthy's best known work. When it was published in 1963, it was pretty much an instant hit. It remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for two years, and it got banned in Australia, Ireland, and Italy because of its frank discussion topics, which range from sex and contraception to lesbianism and mental illness. So the story of the book follows eight friends over the course of seven years following their graduation from Vassar College in 1933. McCarthy, herself, graduated from Vassar in 1933. So in some respects, the book is autobiographical based on herself and her friends that she knew from college. So Kim, I didn't know what the Vassar Daisy Chain was until I read this book. I had never heard of it.

KIM: Right. I had not heard of the Daisy Chain either. Do you want to tell our listeners what it is exactly?

AMY: Sure. So I found a little bit of info about it on the Vassar Encyclopedia online. That's a thing. So I'll try to sum it up. It's a longstanding tradition at the school. Every year a group of sophomores are chosen for their leadership skills, their class spirit, their volunteerism, you know, they're chosen by a committee of seniors to carry a 150-foot chain of daisies and laurel, aka "the daisy chain" at the commencement ceremony for that year. So to serve as a "daisy" as a sophomore is a great honor. And this is a tradition of Vassar that extends back to the late 1800s. In fact, they got all the daisies in the first place because the quad on campus used to be a large daisy field, so they would just get the flowers there and make them into the chain. And the chain itself has become very elaborate and actually kind of heavy, from my understanding, so you do need a lot of girls to hoist this thing at the commencement. So originally the daisies were chosen for both their contribution to college life as well as their attractiveness. This didn't sit well with everyone, naturally, so eventually they correctly phased out the beauty contest aspect of it.

KIM: It kind of sounds like a homecoming court. I mean, maybe that's changed these days too, but I remember it was sort of a popularity contest, but physical attractiveness was definitely though, maybe not stated.

AMY: Yeah, yeah.

KIM: So the characters in this book, much like the real life young women chosen for this daisy chain, Amy told us about, they are considered to be the cream of the Vassar crop. And that sets the stage to find out what becomes of these women in the group as their lives progress beyond graduation. 

AMY: And it seems like each girl in this novel almost, in some ways, seems to represent one facet of a prism of female experience as a young adult, right? I think some of the characters are better fleshed-out than others, but I'm just going to rattle off the names of the core eight girls and then talk a little bit about each. Um, first we have Kay, who I kind of think of as almost like the main character in some ways. All the girls are attending her wedding at the start of the book. She's the first to get married. She is interested in theater and directing, which is something that she had done at Vassar, but she ends up having to work at Macy's to support herself and her playwright young husband. So she feels kind of thwarted in her ambitions. The marriage is rocky from the start and as that relationship devolves her husband later has her committed to a psych ward for hysteria. So that's Kay. Then we have Dottie. She comes from an upright Boston family. She's the one who we get to sort of see her sexual awakening in the novel.

KIM: Yeah, we're going to talk about that.

AMY: The “naughty part,” I guess, part of the reason it got banned in those other countries. Um, we have another character, Priss. She's sweet and timid. I kind of think of her as like the Beth March of The Group. Would you say that?

KIM: Yeah, yeah, I'd say that's right. She's a bit of a pushover almost. 

AMY: Yeah, I think so. We get to see her introduction to motherhood in the book, which is really fascinating. Then there's Lakey. That is the nickname for Eleanor Eastlake. She is gorgeous, dripping with confidence, very worldly. She's sort of the envy of all the other girls, and we do come to discover she is a lesbian. Uh, she's played in the film adaptation of this book by Candace Bergen, who I think everybody knows. Then moving on, Polly. She is a Midwestern girl. Her family had been hard hit in the Depression, so she actually attended Vassar as a scholarship student, but she's very kind hearted, she sort of takes on strays in her life. She's friends with, like, her elderly neighbors. She, in the book, has an affair with a married man and, if I remember correctly, she's kind of one of the more politically-minded, is that right, Kim?

KIM: Yeah, I think so. Honestly, I get them confused.

AMY: Some of the political stuff I would just like glaze over because it's actually a very long book. So when I would get to like Trotskyism I would suddenly be like "doo doo doo doo doo." 

KIM: They have a lot of debates about politics. 

AMY: Yeah. Um, okay next is Helena, she is a preschool teacher after college. I'd say she's one of the more well adjusted in The Group. She keeps the class notes on everyone, so she's sort of updating everyone as the years pass about who got married, who had babies, you know, what happened to everybody. I see her in some ways as kind of the glue of The Group, because she's in touch with everyone. Okay, so then, next we have Pokey. That's such a funny name. 

KIM: Very much. 

AMY: She is actually an heiress. She literally grew up with a butler, but unlike Lakey she's not as glamorous. She's kind of the pudgy one of The Group.

KIM: She's studying to be a vet and she commutes by plane just because her dad gave her a plane. So she got her pilot's license so she could commute to her Cornell classes. She's going to Cornell for grad school. Yeah.

AMY: Yeah. Um, and then last but not least, we have Libby, who works in publishing after college. She has literary ambitions. In the film, she is played by Jessica Walter, who you might know if you watched Arrested Development. And her attitude, especially in the movie, it reminds me a little bit of Samantha from Sex and the City. Shoot! I said it. 

KIM: Oh, no. Drink, drink! Drinking game! 

AMY: Um, yeah. So, Libby is not quite, or actually she's not at all as sexually brazen as Samantha, but she does sort of say what's on her mind in the group. Maybe, you know, a little too brazen at times. Um, and then, so that's the eight girls, but then also McCarthy throws in random people that you're like, “Wait, who's this?” So there's Noreen who went to Vassar but she was never officially a member of The Group in college. And she is a hot mess. She's sleeping with one of the other girls' husbands. She's portrayed as a negligent mother, kind of dirty. 

KIM: Yeah, she's definitely an outsider to the group. They look down on her.

AMY: Yes. So Kim, of all those that I just mentioned, did you have a favorite?

KIM: So I think Polly was maybe my favorite, but also she kind of rounds out the book at the end. So maybe that's why I think of her as like a more strongly developed character maybe. But all the characters, I enjoyed aspects of each of them. I feel like they sort of all come together and their personalities play off each other. You almost can't have one standalone, at least the way they're developed in the book. Um, but Dottie's experience is really super poignant, and I found her character really interesting and her story unforgettable too. What about you? 

AMY: Yeah, I ironically liked Lakey the best. As soon as she came on the scene at the wedding at the beginning of the book, I was like, "Who's this? I like her." So cool. And then…

KIM: There's not enough of her. 

AMY: There's not enough Lakey! Lakey goes off to Europe for much of the book and then she returns at the end. But the whole time I was reading the book, I was like, " When are we going to return to Lakey?" 

KIM: Yeah. Speaking of Little Women, like you did earlier, she's like the Amy; the lesbian Amy. 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah. She's just so confident. So yeah, I was disappointed that there wasn't more Lakey. 

KIM: I could have read a whole book on Lakey. 

AMY: But we should talk about the fact that McCarthy based all these characters off real friends of hers from Vassar, because they took it as a betrayal of sorts. They did not like the fact that they inspired this book. 

KIM: I could totally see that. I mean, she's a writer, so I think we even had a whole episode on this, but we talked about how writers have kind of the right to sort of take their life, I guess, to a certain extent in their fiction, but I could see, based on how the characters are portrayed, there's definitely negative aspects to them. Um, it's almost like she's gossiping in a way if she's using her friends' personalities in her portrayal and it makes me think of Donna Tartt and what she used for The Secret History, you know? People's actual personalities from Bennington.

AMY: Yeah, you have to be willing to accept the consequences. People might be ticked at you, and these women were ticked. I was thinking this morning, like, “Would I have wanted Mary McCarthy to do a send up of me?” And I think no. She shines a light on maybe parts of a person that the person themselves would not even want to know about. It is satirical at times. 

KIM: But I'd say, you know, and maybe this is getting too far ahead, but I'd say it's all for the greater good, though, because stepping back and looking at the novel and looking at what this Vassar education... what that life was like. It's almost like it was idyllic while they were in school. They were given all these ideas. They were so well read. They had politics. They had an idea of how they wanted to help the world. It's all about self fulfillment and that's how you're going to help the world. And then they get out into the world and they're actually interacting at careers and marriages and everything, and it's almost a hindrance to them. And I think it's really interesting that she shows how society takes these women who were ready for everything, like The Best of Everything idea too, that's not how it ends up working out.

AMY: Yeah, yeah, and the more I looked into Mary McCarthy's life as we were getting ready for this. episode, I did realize there's a lot of Mary McCarthy in all of these different girls in the book. She had said, you know, these characters are composites. And I would say it's a composite of her also in a lot of the different characters. I can see her in all of these girls in some respects, including the fact that, uh, McCarthy said that her second husband had had her committed for hysteria, much like Kay in the book, you know? So, you can take bits and pieces.

KIM: Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, there's so many things in the book that you could see as gossip. And they, the characters do gossip about each other in the book. So you could see how it was probably like that in real life among these friends as they're staying in touch after college. That's crazy that McCarthy was also committed for hysteria by her husband, because that is an unforgettable part of the book,

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay, so there are other unforgettable parts of the book. We mentioned that this was considered so scandalous at the time, so let's talk about that. I was personally expecting it to be far juicier on the sex front than it was, given what I thought I knew about it going into it.

KIM: Yeah, I feel the same. I mean, Dottie losing her virginity, it was quite descriptive, but it's nothing compared to how, you know, from the 70s onward, the way sex has been talked about, it definitely feels dated in that way.

AMY: Yeah, and it was really like that "Dottie" moment, and then you didn't return to a ton of sex in the rest of the book, right? 

KIM: No, I don't think so. No.

AMY: It was just one portion. But yeah, for sure, this sex scene is kind of unforgettable. She walks the reader through it, step by step. But to me, that makes it almost seem more like an instructional manual, you know, more than something salacious. Uh, it felt like being in sex ed class or something like, okay, this is what will happen and this is what you should expect and it's going to feel like this.

KIM: And you have to wonder if she was kind of trying to give that information almost into the public service. I don't know.

AMY: Yeah, it felt like it to me, definitely. You'd think, Oh, girls are reading this book secretly undercover because it's so naughty. No, I think girls are reading this secretly undercover because they're getting a lot of important information from this book that they wouldn't get anywhere else. 

KIM: Yeah, including, uh, Dottie goes to the gynecologist to get birth control, and it's very nerve-wracking for her, you know, not wanting anyone to see or know who you are and like, all the emotion about this, um, visit to the gynecologist. So do you want to read an excerpt from that section just so people can hear what we're talking about?

AMY: Yes, I do. And I actually want to back up a little bit to the morning after she has been deflowered by this guy, an artist who's… 

KIM: Daisy chain... Deflowered. Sorry. 

AMY: We gotta get that, pun in there. Um, so this guy, his name is Dick. He's an artist. He's very…

KIM: Sorry, all the, all the puns. [laughing]

AMY: I know lots of puns going on, but yeah, he's very no-nonsense about what he wants out of this interaction. He does not want a relationship. He just is interested in casual sex. And so he says to her the next morning. Actually, he says it to her the night before they have sex. Like, "You got to know there's not going to be any attachments here." And she's like, “Fine, fine, fine.” So he reiterates that the next morning, that he would be happy to continue on as casual lovers. So here's what McCarthy writes: 

"Get yourself a pessary." Dick's muttered envoi as he propelled her firmly to the door the next morning fell on Dottie's ears with the effect of a stunning blow. Bewildered, she understood him to be saying, “Get yourself a peccary,” and a vision of a coarse piglike mammal they had studied in zoology passed across her dazed consciousness like a slide on a screen, followed by awful memories of Krafft-Ebing and the girl who had kept a goat at Vassar. Was this some variant she ought to know about, probably, of the old maid joke?

So this shows just how naive she is. 

KIM: Totally. There's just so much going on in this passage. 

AMY: He's just like shoving her out the door, basically saying like, “Go get a pessary.” 

KIM: Come back when you're, uh, yeah, pessard. I don't know, whatever that is.

AMY: Um, so she's confused thinking he's saying get yourself a peccary, and all these thoughts are running through her head. It gets funnier and funnier, that little scene. And then he sees that she's confused, and so he clarifies: “A female contraceptive, a plug,” Dick threw out impatiently. “You get it from a lady doctor. Ask your friend Kay.”

 Understanding dawned; her heart did a handspring. In a person like Dick, her feminine instinct caroled, this was surely the language of love.

KIM: Oh, Dottie. 

AMY: So, yeah. So she does, she goes and she gets herself to the gynecologist. And let me read another little passage:

…Dottie, all by herself, had visited a birth-control bureau and received a doctor's name and a sheaf of pamphlets that described a myriad of devices — tampons, sponges, collar-button, wishbone, and butterfly pessaries, thimbles, silk rings, and coils — and the virtues and drawbacks of each.

[First of all, I don't know what half of those are, just FYI.] 

KIM: Sounds like torture devices or something. I don't know. Or something a tailor would use. I don't know. Weird.

AMY: The new device recommended to Dottie by the bureau had the backing of the whole U.S. medical profession; it had been found by Margaret Sanger in Holland and was now for the first time being imported in quantity into the USA where our own manufacturers could copy it. It combined the maximum of protection with a minimum of inconvenience and could be used by any woman of average or better intelligence following the instructions of a qualified physician.

This article, a rubber cap mounted on a coiled spring, came in a range of sizes and would be tried out in Dottie's vagina, for fit, wearing comfort, and so on, in the same way that various lenses were tried out for the eyes. The woman doctor would insert it, and having made sure of the proper size, she would teach Dottie how to put it in…

 And so she goes on from there with very, very, detailed instructions on how to insert this device. So again, it's like a sex ed pamphlet.

KIM: Totally. It's like the government put out a pamphlet explaining how this all came about and what your options are.

AMY: Yeah. Like a PSA. Yeah. So this is just one aspect where McCarthy is doing that. There's other moments throughout the book where she's sort of giving women information.

KIM: You know, that makes me think about Priss and her battle with breastfeeding. She actually marries a pediatrician, and so he's basically telling her what the latest information is on how she should be a new mother. Um, she's talking about how much it's hurting at first, breastfeeding, and the dread you feel when the baby hasn't eaten enough. She's worried about his weight goals. Um, it's really harrowing for her, and yet she's being encouraged by her husband, actually not even encouraged, more like... really forced ordered to let her baby cry it out at the hospital and she's so unsure of what to do. She just wants to do the right thing and it was so hard to read honestly because she wanted to pick him up and they weren't letting her. It was hard to read.

AMY: Yeah. It was hard to read, but also satisfying to read because I remember like the early days of breastfeeding and how, much it did hurt, you know, and I remember a nurse saying, "Say the alphabet in your head and grit your teeth, and by the time you get to the letter Z, hopefully it'll stop hurting."

KIM: Yeah. Oh my god. 

AMY: Like in a way it was comforting to read too. But yeah, also just the 1930s maternity ward scene was hilarious. So a lot of the group members were coming to visit her. She's just had a baby, they're literally smoking cigarettes in the room. 

KIM: Right 

AMY: They’re pouring cocktails to celebrate the baby. 

KIM: It was a cocktail party!

AMY: It was. And then it was so funny too, because I don't remember which member of The Group, but they were always joking "Can you believe Priss is breastfeeding? Because she was the most flat chested of us all." And then McCarthy has one of the ladies make some joke about like, "It's the miracle of the loaves and fishes" because Priss had the smallest boobs and she's breastfeeding. Yeah. So, but yeah, so there's all these social issues tackled, you know, others are mental health because Polly's dad is manic depressive in the book. And then we have Kay, you know, being committed. Um, psychoanalysis is talked about a lot. It's not really a very plot-heavy book, but her description of the characters is to me what makes the book. Like, her ability to write about them in a way that you know exactly the sort of woman she's talking about, which does get back to the friends sort of being upset, because it's not always kind. Um, what do we think in general about the book? I know you had mixed feelings.

KIM: I had mixed feelings. Um, so I started reading it. I got a little tired of it, to be honest. I put it down. I picked it back up later. That is not the sign for me of something… If I really love it, I'm just going to like, drop everything and read it. I did not do that. And then sometimes I had trouble keeping track of all the characters, cause there were so many of them. But that said, having finished it now, I felt it was definitely worthwhile to read. So I recommend it, but I didn't love, love, love it. What did you think? 

AMY: I had the same issue. I was gripped by it enough to keep going solidly through and finish to the end. But my problem was I just felt she didn't need so many members of The Group. It was too many, and she couldn't or she didn't devote enough time to all of them equally to make it worth having some of the other characters. Pokey...

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: There was hardly anything to Pokey. 

KIM: She was an extra. 

AMY: She could have ditched Pokey. She could have ditched Lakey, even though she was one of my favorite characters. She wasn't there for most of the book. I think some of the characters could have been combined. You know, like, um, Helena could have been combined with Dottie or something like that. So yeah, it is very long. I unfortunately was comparing it a lot of the time to The Best of Everything, which we did an episode on previously because there are similarities. Now, The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe was published in 1958, and The Group was published in 1963. I'll put you on the spot, Kim. Which did you like better?

KIM: Oh, The Best of Everything. For me, personally. 

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: The Best of Everything was my favorite. 

AMY: I don't think The Best of Everything was trying to be everything that The Group was trying to be. Like, I think The Group is definitely aiming for a higher literary quality than The Best of Everything. But yeah, The Best of Everything follows four girls in a slightly later time period, but they're going through a lot of the same things, and it was just a more delightful read. 

KIM: That's exactly right. It's just more engaging because you're not having, “Okay, now we're to this character. What did that person do again?” You know, like, and trying to reconnect with that character again. I always felt connected with the characters in The Best of Everything.

AMY: Yeah, I think what you said earlier, Kim, is right. They had such a bonding moment at Vassar, and Vassar really prepared them to go out into the world set up for success and to have all these idealistic ways they could be in the world. 

KIM: Idealistic is the perfect word.

AMY: Yeah, like they graduate, the “daisy chain” is now ready to take on the world and make a difference, and then it's kind of dashed to pieces. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. If it had been an all female society…

AMY: It's true, it's like Vassar was a utopia and then they go back out and okay, now what?

KIM: They’ve got to try to work with what they learned and take that into the real world and it doesn't fit into the real world, sadly.

AMY: Yeah. And Lakey is the one who manages to escape and find happiness, but she's off the canvas for a lot of the time.

KIM: Right. So, let's talk about the book's reception. As we mentioned earlier, it was an instant bestseller, but it also had its critics, particularly among highbrow literary types. In the New York Review of Books, Norman Mailer famously wrote a scathing 4,000-word review of the book. He said, "Her book fails as a novel by being good, but not nearly good enough. She is simply not a good enough woman to write a major novel."

AMY: Ouch.

KIM: I mean, this is just... the reviews that we've read by men about women's work it's like “Fine if you don't like it,” but like the way... it gets worse, he called it "a trivial lady writers novel infused with a communal odor, a cross between Ma Griffe, that's a perfume, and contraceptive jelly." I mean, yikes. Also that the book could be said to "squat on the grand avenue of the novel like a shabby little boutique, a place which offers treasure in the trash."

AMY: A treasure in the trash is like, it's got a little something good going for it, but it's really treasure mixed in the trash. 

KIM: I just want to hit him over the head with it.

AMY: You know what though, when you think about Norman Mailer and how uncomfortable a novel this would be for him to read, it does tackle women's issues.

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: The putting in the “peccary” or whatever. 

KIM: He shouldn’t even be reviewing it.

AMY: There was a sense from him, I think, and so I wanted to try to give him a little bit of credit here because she was already a very well-respected literary figure when this came out. She had already written books that were critically, you know, um…

KIM: Lauded. 

AMY: Yeah, lauded. So I think there was a sense of disappointment from him that she had sacrificed her potential literary greatness by writing about women's issues after writing these other books that were more acclaimed.

KIM: Right. The same old story that women's issues are domestic issues and they're not like on the level or scale of

AMY: Right. Yes, especially because this was the 1930s and there were so many big world issues brewing, and so he was like, You had an opportunity to really tackle the vibe of this era, and this is what you gave us? It was sort of a feeling of like, I had high hopes for her, but now I'm not so sure she can hang with us greats, you know what I mean? That's the tone I took from his review. Um, and he basically, he writes the review like it's some sort of indictment. I think it's called the case, not the case against, but like the Case of Mary McCarthy [The Mary McCarthy Case]. And it's almost like a court judgment, the way he wrote it. We'll put that review in our show notes because I think it's worth reading just for some of the vitriol there alone. 

KIM: Wow.

AMY: But yeah, his review isn't all bad and I will say some of what he says. I do agree with. It wasn't our favorite novel ever. We didn't fully like it. Um, others have Hillary Mantel once called it a masterpiece.

KIM: And I love Hillary Mantel. Yeah, I mean, I guess my issue with what he's saying is the part of him claiming that what she's writing about isn't important in the scheme of things, if that's what he's trying to say, because I think that's actually the best part of it.

AMY: Yeah. And the "perfume" and the "contraceptive jelly"... he's using words relating to women and femininity to critique her, which is gross. Like “a shabby little boutique.” It's like he's talking down using women terminology, if that makes sense. Um, but he wasn't the only one that criticized it. Elizabeth Hardwick, the famous literary critic, um, McCarthy considered her to be a friend, but she called it an "awful, fatuous, superficial book." And she also wrote a mean spirited parody of The Group in the New York Review called “The Gang,” using a pseudonym, and Mary McCarthy was apparently very hurt by this. I think it would be interesting to see a parody of it, cause It was such a sensation. 

KIM: Hmm. Yeah, totally. Yeah. It's almost like if you get a skit from Saturday Night Live, it's like a good thing. Even if they're making fun of you, it's like, obviously whatever you did impacted culture. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. And I tried to look up online, and read this, “The Gang,” the story she wrote, and I couldn't find it. I need to do a little more sleuthing to actually read it because maybe it was very mean-spirited. I'm not sure.

KIM: This reminds me of the episode we did on literary feuds. 

AMY: Yeah, yeah, the Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield Fisher episode. Yeah, exactly. That was one of our early episodes. So Mary McCarthy wrote The Group when she was in her 50s and in an interview with The Observer 16 years later after it was published, she said that it had ruined her life. And I think it was because of the backlash with her friends, and yeah, I don't know. It's funny though because it's really the book that she's most well known for today. It did get optioned right away and turned into a film in 1966. I actually loved the movie.

KIM: Oh, yeah, I didn't love the movie, but I found it entertaining. It's so funny. I watched it with Eric, my husband, and it was good that I had read the book because I had to explain a lot of what was happening to him. He was like, “Who is that person?” There's so many characters that if you haven't read it, I think it's hard to keep track of who the characters are and why they matter. 

AMY: Okay, that's fair. The movie really does hone in on the high melodrama moments, almost in a campy way. 

KIM: Totally. Totally. High melodrama is exactly right.

AMY: I liked it, but I think you're right. You kind of had to have read the book. 

KIM: I'd say it was fun, but for me, probably I should have watched it without him. I warned him, but you know, he doesn't listen. Anyway.

AMY: Uh, getting back to Mary McCarthy, she died in 1989 when she was in her late 70s.

KIM: I'm wondering which of her other books are worth reading next. We mentioned her campus novel Groves of Academe in a previous episode, What do you think? 

AMY: Yeah, I'm intrigued by her debut novel. It's called The Company She Keeps, because it's kind of a send up of New York high society. 

KIM: Oh, that sounds fun. 

AMY: Yeah, and it was very much a critical success. There's also a famous short story she wrote called "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt," which is about a woman having casual sex with a businessman on a train. It was originally published in The Partisan Review, and I had heard of that, um, that title is very familiar.

KIM: Me too. Yeah, I know. I wish we had time to read more of her work. I'm just going to have to put it on the list for someday, but I'm definitely interested. And we haven't talked that much about her life in the episode because we were so caught up discussing the book, but I feel like there's probably a lot to say there as well.

AMY: Yeah, it seemed like she had a really interesting life and a tragic childhood, actually. She and her brothers were orphaned at an early age when their parents both died from the flu, the Epidemic of 1918. So the siblings all went to live with relatives, but it sounds like that was an abusive environment. And actually, I think we might be able to get more, uh, by reading her autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which gets into all of this a bit more.

KIM: Oh, interesting. And Amy, wasn't she also involved at one point in a public feud with the playwright Lillian Hellman? I don't really know the details of that, but maybe there's a future episode to be had in there.

AMY: Yeah. Speaking of literary feuds, maybe we do a follow up. I didn't know all the ins and outs of this, but apparently, um, this feud between Hellman and McCarthy inspired Nora Ephron to write a play about it called “Imaginary Friends”. So I think the fight stemmed from some sort of political disagreement, but what I do know is that Mary McCarthy then went on The Dick Cavett Show and said something to the effect of every word Lillian Hellman writes is a lie, including "and," and "the."

KIM: Oh my God. Wow. So they can just, you know, when you're that famous, you can just go on The Dick Cavett Show.

AMY: …and cast aspersions, yeah. So Hellman sued her for that, for libel, um, and that made the feud even more public. 

KIM: Naturally. Yeah. So obviously listeners, we barely scratched the surface of Mary McCarthy, but we're out of time for today. So maybe we'll circle back at some later date, but it was really fun getting to discuss The Group with you, Amy.

AMY: Yeah, I'm glad I read it. And finally, before we sign off here for a few weeks, listeners, we wanted to leave you guys with a little update, some of the responses that we got a few weeks back to our episode on mondegreens.

KIM: Oh yeah. That was a fun episode. And a mondegreen, if you remember, is the term to describe misinterpreting song lyrics.

AMY: Yeah, we asked you listeners to weigh in on some of your own mondegreens, which were hysterical. So we're just going to share a couple of them here with you. We will withhold their names to protect the innocent, but you guys know who you are.

KIM: Okay. Let's hear them.

AMY: Okay, um, first one somebody wrote to us on our Facebook forum and said that they always thought that the song, “If You Like Piña Coladas,

and Getting Caught in the Rain,” you know that one? She always interpreted it as, "If you like tea and enchiladas..." 

KIM: I feel like that particular song, the lyrics are so strange, there are probably so many people who have incorrect ideas about the lyrics.

AMY: Yeah, yeah, and like tea and enchiladas is such a weird dietary combo. Okay, next one, the song by Toni Braxton called “Breathe Again.” It's like, "If I never feel your tender kiss again. If I never hear I love you now and then. [hums]." I don't know the lyrics right here. So she says, basically, I promise that I shall never breathe again. And then it's like, “breathe again, breathe again.” Well, this person thought she was saying, "I shall never read again, read again."

KIM: That’s terrible. That's worse than not breathing again.

AMY: I know, I know, “I won't breathe again” is a pretty extreme reaction to have, but “I will never read again” is an even more extreme reaction. And the person was like, "What does she have against reading?" Um, and then my favorite, Is from a former guest of ours who wrote to me and said that the Alanis Morissette song, “You Oughta Know”, where she sings, “It's not fair to deny me of the cross I bear that you gave to me.”

KIM: You, you, you, oughta know!

AMY: They thought that she was singing, "It's not fair to deny me of the cross-eyed bear that you gave to me." So picture like a deranged-looking stuffed bear with cross eyes. Like the creepy Five Nights at Freddy's bear. She's like, “You gave it to me. I'm not giving you that cross eyed-bear back.” 

KIM: Okay. Yeah. Anyway, that's all for today's episode on that note. We're going to be back in late January with all new episodes, but in the meantime, we'll still be active on Instagram and our Facebook forum. So be sure to follow us there to stay in touch and to find out which Lost Ladies will be featuring in the new year. And also if you go to lostladiesoflit.com, you can sign up for our newsletter and we'll also be emailing you to remind you so you don't forget when the new episodes start.

AMY: And we'll be reminding you about how to sign up for our Patreon. And also as we sign off for 2023, we want to say thank you as always for your support. What a great year it's been discovering all these women writers with you.

KIM: Yeah. It's been amazing. Thank you to our wonderful guests too. 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.

167. Lydia Maria Child and the “Thanksgiving” Poem

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

KIM: Hey everyone! It's Thanksgiving week here again in the States. Amy, what's your favorite food from the Thanksgiving dinner table?

AMY: Uh, all of the carbs. Not as much the dessert. Like, the savory carbs. So, the mashed potatoes and stuffing, for sure.

KIM: Oh yeah, love that. 

AMY: Any bread. Although, I try not to actually not have the bread, because I'd rather just have more mashed potatoes and stuffing.

KIM: Yeah, but a good dinner roll…

AMY: Yeah, it's…

KIM: With butter. Yeah. So good.

AMY: A Parker House roll. Mm. What about you?

KIM: I like those. I like the stuffing. I like the savory stuff. I like the sweet potatoes, you know, and sometimes we do it with the marshmallows. Yeah, yeah.

AMY: Which seems like such a weird combo. I wonder if other listeners outside of the country are like “Sweet potatoes and marshmallows?” It's really good. Anyway, um, speaking of sweet stuff, my mom's side of the family, they always had a long-running tradition. I think they still do it, actually, that everyone gathers the day after Thanksgiving to bake the Christmas cookies, which then get frozen or eaten, you know, within a week. And unfortunately I haven't been able to participate in this for a long time because I haven't lived in my hometown since I was 21. But yeah, when I was little, from a very young age, my cousins and siblings and I, we would all gather at my grandma's house to do this.

KIM: “Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go!”

AMY: “The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh through the white and drifting snow!” I smell a topic as surely as I can smell the pumpkin pie baking in the oven! ) It's from a poem called “The Thanksgiving Poem.” And Kim, did you ever think about who may have written it?

KIM: No, but something's telling me it might be a lost lady of lit.

AMY: Indeed it was!

KIM: Ha!

AMY: The author's name is Lydia Maria Child, and we're going to end this episode by reading that poem in full, but first, let's find out a little bit more about her. There's actually a kind of new biography written about her by another Lydia: the author Lydia Moland. Moland. Not sure how you say that. That book came out this time last year. It's called Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life.

KIM: Radical. Um, I don't think of that poem as radical. It's so quaint. It seems almost more like Norman Rockwell, kind of.

AMY: Yeah, I agree. Um, and from what I can tell, it seems like Lydia Maria Child was sort of the Martha Stewart of her day, actually, because in addition to writing novels and children's books, she wrote a book called The Frugal Housewife, which was published in 1829, and it was a bestseller. It was full of practical advice in the kitchen and for around the house. But I guess probably comparisons to Martha Stewart in her Hamptons home, that's actually wrong because Lydia Maria Child was a staunch advocate of being economical. She thought of luxury as a vice.

KIM: Well, it's a bit more in the vein of MFK Fisher, I guess, we did that episode on her household guide and cooking, How to Cook a Wolf. I don't think she thought of luxury as a vice, but she definitely wanted to make sure that there were ways to have luxury in an economical way. 

AMY: Yeah, how to, like, make do with what you have. Yeah, that probably is a bit more what Lydia Maria Child would be advocating for. She was all about stretching one's resources, letting nothing go to waste. So this book, this household book, was so popular it went through 33 printings over the course of 25 years, which is...it's pretty amazing. She also wrote a manual for mothers called creatively The Mother's Book. 

KIM: Okay. That's reminding me a little bit of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management.

AMY: Yes, Isabella Beeton. Yeah, I had, I owned the Mrs. Beeton book for a while. I don't know what happened to it, but I was so intrigued by that for a while. Of course, there's nothing practical in it for the 21st century, but yeah, it's a fun book to flip through. We should do another episode maybe on all of these kind of household manual books. That would be fun.

KIM: I would be so into that.

AMY: Yeah, because I'm also, it's reminding me of the TV show “1900 House,” which we loved. Just, I'm always fascinated by how people did their chores and kind of went about their daily lives in history. But anyway, so getting back to Lydia Maria Child, she was also an outspoken abolitionist, and this was well before the Civil War. So in 1833, she wrote a book called An Appeal in Favor of the Class of Americans Called Africans. And that book really shone a light on the cruel treatment of enslaved people in this country. She considered slavery to be a moral disease, which undermined democracy because it really produced a bunch of lazy, rich white people who were unwilling to do their own work and therefore they were bringing nothing to society in terms of their usefulness to the country. So it might seem like the homemaker book that she wrote had nothing in common with this anti-slavery book, but there actually was a tie-in, because she saw that the people who craved luxuries in life were complicit in slavery because of all the luxuries that they had. Like sugar, for example, came from the toil of enslaved people.

KIM: Right. It kind of makes you think now of, you know, the discussions about cell phones and how they're made and a lot of things… the fast fashion and things that we buy now that we know that, you know, it's harming other people and the environment. But anyway.

AMY: Yeah, so she was kind of onto… 

KIM: She was already onto that… 

AMY: A long time ago, yeah.

KIM: So what do we know about this famous Thanksgiving poem she wrote? How did that happen?

AMY: Well, it was published in 1844 in a book of poetry called Flowers for Children, Volume 2. And we know it as “Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go.” But in the original poem, it was Grandfather's house. That got changed over the years. Um, it was originally also titled “The New England Boys’ Song About Thanksgiving Day.” Which is kind of a mouthful.

KIM: A really long title, but okay.

AMY: Yeah. Um, okay, so when you're hearing “Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house to go,” what do you picture Grandmother's house being like?

KIM: Oh, it's totally like Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods. Like a log cabin or something. Definitely something super rural on a farm.

AMY: Yeah, I thought that, too. But you can actually look up her grandfather's house online. It's a house called the Paul Curtis House. That's the “Grandfather's house” that she's writing about. And it looks like a mansion. Like, Google it right now. Paul Curtis House. It's a huge, white, three story, Greek Revival-looking mansion. 

KIM: More like, um, Little Women. Like the, like the grandfather who lived next door in Little Women. 

AMY: Yeah, Mr. Lawrence, 

KIM: I did not picture that at all. 

AMY: No, it's totally not what you think. 

KIM: Yeah, so was she rich?

AMY: Yeah, apparently. So it's interesting that she was all anti-luxury because it looks like her family was pretty well-to-do.

KIM: Interesting.

AMY: But it's funny because she ended up paying a pretty heavy price for the stance that she took against slavery in her life. People were outraged by this. They didn't want her lecturing to them about it, and they stopped buying all of her books. And as a result, she ended up living the later years of her life in poverty. Or so she claimed, actually, because, um, her friends, they were stunned to find out, when she died in 1880, that she really still had a tidy little nest egg that in today's money would be somewhere around three quarters of a million dollars, so she was claiming poverty because nobody was buying her books and she probably wasn't making any money, but because of her ability to live so frugally on the money that she had earned, she had a large savings still at the end of her life.

KIM: Making a mental note to pick up a copy of The Frugal Housewife to see if I can pick up any tips.It obviously worked out well for her. 

AMY: Yeah, So let's finish up this episode by reading the full version of “The Thanksgiving Poem.” Um, I think in subsequent decades some people swapped the Thanksgiving for Christmas, so if you think of this poem as more of like a Christmas poem, that's probably why.

KIM: I do. 

AMY: Oh, you do? Okay. I always think of it as Thanksgiving. Anyway, here we go. I'm going to read, uh, and I think I'm actually just going to read an abridged version, because I were to read all the stanzas, it would start to feel interminable. 

So:

Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather's house we go;
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow.

Over the river, and through the wood,
to Grandfather's house away!
We would not stop for doll or top,
for 'tis Thanksgiving Day.

Over the river, and through the wood—
oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes and bites the nose
as over the ground we go.

Over the river, and through the wood—
and straight through the barnyard gate,
We seem to go extremely slow,
it is so hard to wait!

Over the river, and through the wood—
When Grandmother saw us come,
She will say, "O, dear, the children are here,
bring a pie for everyone."

Over the river, and through the wood—
now Grandmother's cap I spy!
Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!

There's six more stanzas in the original poem, but I spared you.

KIM: I think the two stanzas we all know and love by heart is probably sufficient. 

AMY: Yeah, I think that's enough. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah, but Happy Thanksgiving to all of our listeners who celebrate. We're grateful for all of you.

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

166. Alba de Céspedes — Forbidden Notebook with Joy Castro

KIM: Welcome to another episode of 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: We've covered fictional diaries on this podcast before. I'm thinking back to our third episode on E. M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady, and more recently, The Diary of a Lonely Girl by Miriam Karpilov. That was episode number 142. Kim, did you ever keep one of those secret diaries when you were a kid?

KIM: Over the years I had different ones with a lock and key. I love the idea, but I could never really stick to it for any length of time. That probably doesn't surprise you.

AMY: I would always lose the key, so then I would just be like, Oh, I guess get rid of this. 

KIM: Yeah, that said, the narrator of today's fictional diary would definitely have loved a sturdy padlock, maybe even a steel reinforced concrete bank vault for her illicit journal. The prospect that her written depository of private thoughts could be discovered by her family makes her paranoid because the words she is committing to paper feel downright dangerous. And yet, she can't give up her obsession with it.

AMY: Yeah, I'm reminded of that famous quote by the writer Muriel Rukeyser. "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." This 1952 novel, Forbidden Notebook, by Cuban Italian writer Alba de Céspedes, expounds on that theory by showing us the secret hopes, fears, fantasies, and doubts of a seemingly ordinary woman living in Rome in the early 1950s.

KIM: In a New York Times review of a 1958 English edition of this novel, de Céspedes was called "one of the few distinguished women writers since Colette to grapple effectively with what it is to be a woman." Famed Italian writer Elena Ferrante is also said to be a huge fan of this book, and we're very excited that we get to welcome back a previous guest to the show to discuss it.

AMY: So as they'd say in Italy, andiamo tutti! Let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[introductory music plays]

KIM: Our returning guest, Joy Castro, is the award winning author of literary thrillers, including 2012's Hell or High Water and 2021's Flight Risk, as well as a 2005 memoir, The Truth Book and Island of Bones, an essay collection, which received the International Latino Book Award. Joy is currently the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, and you may remember that she joined us on the show almost two years ago to discuss the writer Margery Latimer and her fantastic novel, We Are Incredible. That's episode number 69 if you want to go back and have a listen.

AMY: Joy's most recent book, One Brilliant Flame, is a historical novel set in Key West and inspired by her ancestral history, and there is an oblique connection between that novel and today's lost lady, Alba de Céspedes. Welcome to the show, Joy. 

JOY: Thank you. Thank you both so much. It's wonderful to be back. 

AMY: Had you heard of her before you started writing One Brilliant Flame?

JOY: So yes and no. You mentioned Hell or High Water, and in that novel I named the protagonist Nola Céspedes because I'd been doing so much research about Cuba during the anti colonial period and I learned that Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in 1868 called for Cuba's independence from Spain. So he was an anti colonial revolutionary, but at the same time, he also freed all the enslaved Afro Cubans on his plantation. He knew that in good faith, he couldn't fight for his own freedom while enslaving other people. And so I was already aware of who he was, and I loved that kind of moral clarity, so I gave my protagonist that surname. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes comes up a few times in One Brilliant Flame, because he was so important to the Cubans in Key West. So the characters talk about him and so on. But Alba de Céspedes I had not heard of. I saw a tweet by the literary scholar Merve Emre, and she was reading an advanced copy of Forbidden Notebook. And I saw the surname of the author, Alba de Céspedes, and I was like, "That's an unusual name." So I did a little digging and was thrilled to find out that she is actually the granddaughter of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. His son had been a diplomat and had married an Italian woman. They had had a child, and that was Alba. 

KIM: So she was born in Rome in 1911, and I'm not sure how much you know about her early years, Joy, but it sounds like she definitely inherited some of her freedom fighter grandfather's political gumption?

JOY: Absolutely, yeah, and there is, to my knowledge, no full biography yet in English, but what I've been able to find is that she married quite young, at the age of 15. She had a son already by the age of some sources say 16, some say 17, and then was divorced when she was 20. That was in 1931, and that's when her writing career really began. But during the 20s, Mussolini had risen to power in Italy, so she was really coming of age under a fascist dictatorship, and she was quite outspoken against fascism. She was jailed twice for her anti fascist activities, and two of her books were banned. And so that's a really interesting and rich kind of tension, because as the daughter of a diplomat and quite cosmopolitan, Alba de Céspedes would have known about the opportunities that were opening for women around the world, you know, in some places getting the vote, uh, college, entering the professions, free love, contraception, bathtub gin, flappers, right? So in some places things were really opening up in wild and exciting ways for women, and yet under fascism, procreation was seen as a woman's duty, and women were being pushed, quite forcibly in Italy and Germany, back into really rigid traditional gender roles. So there would have been a tremendous tension and an urgency on her part. She seems to have really been born a feminist and an outspoken political thinker.

KIM: Yeah. She's so young to be doing all this. 

AMY: I was thinking, also, if your father is a diplomat, that takes a certain bravery to be like, "Sorry, dad, I'm gonna, gonna ruffle some feathers."

KIM: Gotta go get arrested.

JOY: I think so. And, you know, I would be really interested in learning more. I would love to read a full biography, you know, to see how she did experience that time and understand the interiority that she was experiencing during that very early marriage and what caused her to leave it at the age of 20.

KIM: Yeah. And then to go on to write, she wrote eight novels between 1935, and you can only imagine that the war and the climate in Italy leading up to the war must've had an impact on her work. 

JOY: Absolutely. I think she was very interested in the connections between the micro political and the macro political. She circumscribes the action of Forbidden Notebook to a small domestic sphere, but it's definitely a politically engaged novel in many ways, and I think she was thinking about how larger political forces play out on the home front. And I think a lot of terrific women writers have done so around the globe, you know, I'm thinking of Mariama Bâ in her book, So Long a Letter, or Merce Rodoreda in Spain, who also rode under fascism. I mean, we could go on and on with that list, but who are exploring what does that mean in the private, in the personal sphere? How do those same energies affect us in the most intimate realms of our lives?

KIM: Yeah. Even Lorraine Hansberry, “A Raisin in the Sun.” We did an episode on that. I'm thinking of just taking what's going on outside and taking it into the domestic space.

JOY: Exactly. Exactly. So, uh, very soon after Rome was liberated in 1944, Alba de Céspedes founded and began to edit a really important journal of politics, culture, literature, and during its short run, uh, they lost financial backing by 1948, they published pretty much all the major figures in Italian politics and culture, but also writers from around the world. And in fact, another one of those writers that should join that small canon that I was just building out loud, Katherine Mansfield, who is one of my personal favorites and who also, um, she's just an exquisite master of capturing large political issues in the tiny, compressed, intense domestic space of the nuclear family. And it's interesting to me that de Céspedes resonated with Mansfield's work enough to publish it in Mercurio. She also published a fantastic essay by Natalia Ginzburg in 1948, called “On Women”. And this was provoked by the fact that there was a cultural debate in Italy around whether women should serve as judges. And so women had just gotten the national vote in Italy in 1945, believe it or not. So it was a matter for discussion as to whether women were fit to serve as judges given that, the thinking went, their sense of logic was often so different from that of men. So how could they be trusted to rule on court cases? In Natalia Ginsberg's essay she explores what she calls a dark well that she says women fall into. And for her, it is something that renders women's judgment fallible, or at least not reliable. Women fall into a kind of anguish or despair. And then de Céspedes includes her own response to that in the journal, but she sees that dark well as a rich source of humanity, compassion, of being able to plumb the depths of agony and then come back to the surface with the riches that she finds there. And so she thinks that that equips women very well for judging, both from the bench and in everyday life, you know. Of course, as a critic, she would have been quite invested in women's ability to judge and judge publicly.

 KIM: Listeners, if you loved that rousing America Ferrera monologue from the Barbie movie, you need to read this essay and de Céspedes’s beautiful response in their entirety. They're fairly short and we'll post them for you in our show notes.

AMY: Yeah, I feel like Forbidden Notebook was de Céspedes’s opportunity to sort of explore all these ideas about the female experience in much greater detail. So let's pivot now to discussing the novel. It was published in 1952. I think we all read the most recent translation that just came out, uh, translated by Anne Goldstein. Joy, can you set the book up for us and tell us a little bit about this diarist?

JOY: Yes, delighted. I just want to thank Astra House, the imprint that published the book, and Alessandra Bastagli, um, who was so fantastic and involved with that process and who kindly sent the advanced reading copy to me back before it came out. They did a really beautiful job. But to the novel, and I will say it was originally published serially in 1950 and 1951 in a very popular Italian illustrated magazine that featured photographs of big film stars from the era on its covers like Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn. So the novel first came out in short bits and was consumed by readers of that magazine, and interestingly, it was published, as I said, in 50 and 51. And the first diary entry is November 26th, 1950. So it would have had this tremendous sense of immediacy, of right-now-ness. And the mostly women who would have been avidly reading it, although, you know, many men did too, would have been in some ways similar to the diarist Valeria Cossati, who is a 43 year old working mother of two adult children, young adults, and a wife, she's a devoted wife to her husband, Michele, and they all live together in a fairly cramped apartment in Rome. She has an office job, though she doesn't admit to herself that she actually likes working until about halfway through the novel. Um, but to set things up, one day, on a Sunday, she's going out and the weather's beautiful, and she's on her own. She's going out to buy cigarettes for her husband so that she can have them on his nightstand when he wakes up, because he sleeps in late on Sundays. And it's just sort of lush and sensual and she's aware of herself and the weather and she wants to buy flowers so that she can carry them around and feel beautiful. So it's kind of this Mrs. Dalloway moment there at the beginning of the text. And she goes into the tobacconist and she sees a black notebook, the kind that she used to write in as a schoolgirl. And she's possessed, suddenly, by an impulse to buy this notebook. And curiously, according to the laws at the time, tobacconists couldn't sell notebooks on Sundays because on those days the stationery shops were closed, and so to prevent unfair competition with the stationery shops, they were only allowed to sell tobacco products. But she convinces the tobacco guy to sell her the notebook and the way she codes this in her own first diary entry in this black notebook is fascinating. And can I just read a tiny bit?

KIM: Yes, definitely.

JOY: So listen for the sin in the language. So this is the very first line.

I was wrong to buy this notebook. Very wrong. But it's too late now for regrets. The damage is done. I don't even know what impelled me to buy it. Pure chance. I've never thought of keeping a diary. Partly because a diary has to be secret. And so it would have to be hidden from Michele and the children. I don't like hiding things. Besides, there's so little space in our house, it would be impossible to manage. Here's how it happened… 

And then she tells the story of going to the tobacconist, and then, at the end of that story: 

I was alone now in the shop. “I need it,” I said. “I absolutely need it.” I was speaking in a whisper, agitated, ready to insist, plead. So he looked around, then quickly grabbed a notebook and handed it to me across the counter, saying, “Hide it under your coat.” I kept the notebook under my coat all the way home, I was afraid it would slide out. fall on the ground while the porter was telling me something or other about the gas pipes. I felt flushed when I turned the key to open the door to the apartment. I started to sneak off to my room, but I remembered that Michele was still in bed. 

So, the language with which de Céspedes imbues this episode is the language of a secret affair, a secret romance, and it's also the language of political resistance. If you think about resistance to fascism, hiding something under your coat, it's a secret. You look around, say, "Here, quick, take it," right? So both of those discourses are brought to life within the first two pages of this novel. It's just brilliant. And it makes the notebook seem like this very forbidden object, a dangerous object right from the get go.

KIM: Yes, she does it so beautifully. It's like the simplest thing, but there's so much tension fraught within it.

AMY: Yeah, like, super desperate-housewife-vibe, where you're like, what could she possibly need to write? It's so clandestine, you know? Your curiosity is instantly piqued. And like you said, it's forbidden in more ways than one because she wasn't really supposed to have bought it that day.

KIM: Yeah, there's this level of escalating terror associated with the diary's existence. She's just so guilty. It burns wherever she has it hidden in the house. It's almost like The Tell Tale Heart or something like that, where it's just there all the time within her thoughts, whether it's hidden away in a drawer at the bottom of a bag of kitchen rags.

JOY: I think one key to understanding what it represents to her, because she doesn't have, you know, fornication to confess when she buys it, right? Nothing like that or criminal activity. But one key is that writing her own name on the first page, Valeria, is what excites her and what stimulates her. And we can talk more about naming later, but it's this selfhood that thrills her and that the diary stands in for so powerfully and effectively. That's why it's an excellent vehicle for telling the story, because it externalizes her growing sense of self awareness that's interior. She confides her interiority into this object that she then has to hide around the house, and the very fact of its physical substance makes her realize, I don't have any place in this entire apartment that is my own. I don't have a drawer that I can lock, you know, so she hides it in the laundry. She hides it in the kitchen cupboard. She's afraid that her husband or adult children will find it and read it or even just find it and ask her about it. And she realizes \ not only does she not have a space for it, so definitely no “Room of One's Own” in Woolf's terms, but not even like a drawer of one's own. But also she doesn't have time to write in the diary privately. She has no privacy, so if she's just sitting writing, it will cause all kinds of questions in her family that she doesn't want to contend with. So having the physical object of the notebook brings all these things to the surface for de Céspedes.

KIM: Yeah, I love that you mentioned her thinking about writing her name, because we learn early on that everyone in her family, including her husband, calls her Mamma, and it really irritates her on some level. And so much of her identity from their perspective is wrapped up in being a mother, so having the notebook just represents so much of her individuality separate from them, which she really almost isn't allowed to have.

JOY: Exactly. We learn in the novel that her parents have always called her Bebe. They don't call her Valeria, they call her “Baby,” right? And then, yes, her whole family calls her Mamma. And we get this moment when she reveals to the notebook that her husband used to call her Valeria when they were in love, when they were courting. I should say that their marriage is basically a friendly, companionate or roommate marriage. It's basically sexless, although that's not Valeria's desire, and that he started calling her Mamma when his own mother died, which is kind of ick.

KIM: Yeah, yeah.

JOY: And that a portrait, a photographic portrait of her mother in law hangs in their bedroom. 

KIM: Yeah, no wonder they're not having sex. 

AMY: Yeah.

JOY: She's been pushed into that domestic, familial, sexless, caretaking role, and it just doesn't sit well with her at all.

KIM: Yeah. And you had mentioned her age earlier. I think one of us mentioned her age, but everyone's telling her she's old, and she's feeling like this youthfulness inside that's blossoming, but everyone around her is telling her she's old and she's like her mother in law, basically.

AMY: And she's worried that if they do see that she's keeping a notebook, they're going to laugh at her and this idea that she doesn't have anything worthy of writing in their eyes, you know? And talking about this idea of time being a luxury that moms aren't allowed, so therefore the diary is this kind of sinful luxury for her to keep, she touches on so many problems that I think still plague mothers today. I'm just going to mention a few moments. She feels guilty about something as simple as just getting in a little cat nap when you're exhausted. I'm speaking as a mom, a lot of times you feel like you can't do that. She talks about the pressure to single handedly create a perfect Christmas for her family. Also the exhausting logistics and meal prep and the detailed household instructions that she would have to leave if she ever wanted to get away for a weekend, and having just taken a trip to England, I want to bring up a funny moment. A couple days before I was leaving, my husband said to the kids, Oh, maybe mom can make a lasagna and put it in the freezer before she goes. split the difference and I bought two frozen pizzas but I wasn't going to actually make a lasagna while I was packing to go overseas. 

KIM: Yeah, but there's also and I feel like she even admits it to herself, there's almost a martyrdom to it. It's like there's expectations that everyone has on her, but because her identity is only as this wife and mother, it's like if she slows down and has to think about who she is, which is what she ends up doing with the notebook, then chaos is gonna break out. So I feel like some of it is almost self imposed. Am I wrong there?

JOY: One Of my very favorite sections in the book speaks to exactly what you're describing. Sort of the pleasure of martyrdom, which is the only pleasure left to her. Um, and there's this really gorgeous passage that when I was first reading the book, I thought, Okay, this writer knows what she's doing so well. So let me just, um, share this: 

Something keeps me from confessing that I'm writing. [So again, the language of sin and confession.] It's the regret that I spend so much time doing it. I often complain that I have too many things to do, that I'm the family servant, the household slave, that I never have a moment to read a book, for example. That's all true. But in a certain sense, that servitude has also become my strength, the halo of my martyrdom. So on those rare occasions when I happen to take a nap for half an hour before Michele and the children return for dinner, or when I take a walk, gazing in the shop windows on the way home from the office, I never confess it. I'm afraid that if I admitted I had enjoyed even a short rest or some diversion, I would lose the reputation I have of dedicating every second of my time to the family. No one would remember the countless hours I spend in the office or in the kitchen or shopping or mending, but only the brief moments I confessed I had spent reading a book or taking a walk. Michele is always urging me to get some rest, and Ricardo says, [that's her son, her adult son,] that as soon as he's able to earn money, he'll take me on vacation to Capri or the Riviera. Recognizing my weariness, [so verbally recognizing her weariness] frees him of every responsibility. So they often repeat severely, you should rest, as if not resting were a whim of mine. But in practice, as soon as they see me sitting and reading a newspaper, they say, “Mamma, since you have nothing to do, could you mend the lining of my jacket? Could you iron my pants?” And so on. 

And so it goes on and on and then, she talks about how only having a high fever gets her out of constant work, right? The second shift that she pulls after she gets home from her office job at 7 p. m. And she writes: 

I'm always tired and no one believes me. And yet tranquility for me originates precisely in the tiredness I feel when I lie in bed at night. There, so in that tiredness, I find a sort of happiness in which I feel peaceful and fall asleep. I have to recognize that perhaps the determination with which I protect myself from any possibility of rest is the fear of losing this single source of happiness, which is tiredness.

The nuance and delicacy with which she examines her own contradictions is so... it's perfect. 

KIM: Yeah, it's absolutely perfect. And I, even in a very modern marriage, etc. I still totally get that feeling of where like, okay, you have to seriously be down for the count to take a break, you know, I mean, I take many more breaks than Valeria, but, 

AMY: Yeah. I mean, that's a good point. Still see artifacts of what she was going through a little bit, right?

KIM: Yeah, definitely. 

JOY: There's all this advice even today. Oh, if you want your husband to be helpful around the house, (helpful as if it's really your duty) never criticize his housekeeping.

KIM: Yeah, and overpraise, like, when they do things, make a really big deal out of it.

JOY: Exactly.

KIM: So, interestingly enough, in addition to having this life at home, she is also a career woman, and a lot of her friends, maybe all of them, really, aren't career women. So her workplace ends up factoring significantly into this novel. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Joy?

JOY: Yes, so most of her friends are wealthy women who are supported by their husbands, and we get scenes of that earlier in the book and how she feels a bit divided from them because of that. One of her friends, we should mention, is Clara Poletti, who has split from her husband and is a successful screenwriter. Poletti is more similar to de Céspedes herself, who was also a successful screenwriter in addition to being a novelist, editor, journalist, and so on. And so she's sort of a stand in for de Céspedes on the periphery of this novel. Valeria, our protagonist, does find such deep pleasure in her office work where she's competent, she's respected, and where she is called Valeria, right? So again, that identity is recognized by her boss, uh, who is a wealthy, good looking businessman. And they've worked together for some years, and, uh, the fact that he recognizes her, that he praises her work, that he calls her by her name, that he sees her for who she is and who she wants to be seen as, this gives rise to growing mutual attraction between them, which does become part of the focus of the novel. But again, I would argue that the real affair in this novel, the real danger to Valeria's settled domestic life, is an affair with herself. It's a romance with her own thoughts and feelings, her own desires, her own sensual perceptions of the world, you know. That's what's really blossoming. But she doesn't even really have the language for that, right? It sort of gets externalized onto this handsome, wealthy boss guy who could possibly, you know, change her life in all kinds of exciting ways.

KIM: Yeah, you get the feeling her husband would be more upset about the illicit diary, almost, than the affair. 

JOY: Potentially so. And an interesting sort of sidebar in the novel is that her husband, we learn, she learns, has also been secretly writing.

KIM: Mm hmm.

JOY: Writing a screenplay. And he gives it to Clara Poletti to read, and there's a very strong suggestion throughout quite a lot of the novel that he's actually involved in an affair with Poletti. And this is an interesting aspect as well, that he's drawn to a woman who's successful, independent, a writer, a creative, and his wife is right there in the same apartment with him, uh, and he sees her as Mamma, please mend, you know, whatever, please iron my stuff, please have dinner on the table. He's just incapable of seeing her, whereas her boss is capable of seeing her.

AMY: He reminds me a little bit of the husband in E.M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady in that he's just kind of a dope sometimes, but he's not a villain at all. And I like that she chose not to make him a villainous, jerky husband, because I think it makes her quiet desperation even more potent and you realize it's not about the husband, per se. It's a bigger issue.

JOY: I think that de Céspedes does a great job. Of humanizing all four of the main characters and showing their loneliness, their anguish, their desires that are thwarted by various forces. And so, yes, Michele does not come off as a cackling, controlling villain, uh, just as someone who expects his wife to fulfill certain roles and can't see anything beyond that, right?

KIM: The idea of an unreliable narrator, too, and how it kind of plays into this, because, you know, it's like what you said about him maybe having an affair. She's dropping hints, but she doesn't want to admit even to her own private diary. While she's very honest in a lot of ways, it still feels like, okay, this is a very real person who is unwilling to admit certain things to herself.

JOY: Exactly. There's a sense in which she's unwilling to let herself know what she actually does know. That that would be shattering in some way that she cannot emotionally tolerate. So she turns a blind eye to that. In terms of whether she's a reliable narrator or an unreliable narrator, she's a sincere narrator. There's a kind of ruthless honesty she has with herself about herself. I think she says something like The more I try to be the judge, which is interesting if you think back to that, um, Ginsburg exchange in Mercurio, um, the more I try to be the judge, the more I find myself the criminal, right? So she's interrogating her own motives, and that kind of careful precision of analysis of the small day to day mundane aspects of an ordinary life are what make the novel for me have the texture of psychological reality and the fluidity of the prose where one minute she's starting to think about politics a bit, and then the next minute she's worried about her family and then the next minute she's craving a new pretty hat, you know? That sort of fluctuation reminds me a great deal of the modernists who were trying to capture a stream of consciousness. 

KIM: Right. Right. 

JOY: Yeah.

AMY: So yeah, the relationship in the book that I was most intrigued by, to be perfectly honest, was the relationship between Valeria and her 20 year old daughter Mirella. The mother daughter dynamics are so intense, and I have a 13 year old, so I'm just on the cusp of this changing relationship that, you know, mothers and daughters naturally have, but it was kind of excruciating to read this as a mom to a daughter, and it was also very different. A lot of novels you read about maternal angst, it's mothers of young children, you know, postpartum things like that, but this is so different because Mirella is almost grown. But in that sense, they're able to actually engage with each other on an entirely different level that is almost hostile at times. 

KIM: Yeah, and it's hard because she recognizes that she should say something else, and she wants to, but she'll just say the worst thing to her daughter. You're just like, Oh why couldn't you say the thing you really wanted to say? You could connect, you're both struggling and lonely. You could connect over it, but...

JOY: Yeah, absolutely. To circle back, like, if you think about Kate Chopin and The Awakening and the way that her young children are the source of her anguish, right? But the issue of Mirella, I think that Mirella functions for Valeria as a kind of road not taken, right? Mirella is a vision of what could have been, what might have been, what could still be if Valeria were bold enough to seize the reins of her own life. And so it's insanely irritating to her that right here in her own apartment is her own daughter who's doing the things that she didn't have the courage to do, the wherewithal to do, the encouragement, right. And there's even a passage late in the book where Valeria contemplates her own role as a kind of bridge between her mother's generation and the expectations for womanhood that her mother still presses on her at every opportunity and then her daughter's generation, which has so much more sexual freedom, political freedom, professional freedom, right? 

AMY: There's a part of her that also is trying to champion what Mirella is doing, even though she disapproves of it. You see moments where she's like, Go on girl. Go, go for it. Don't do what I did, you know, sort of thing. So very interesting dynamics.

KIM: Yeah. And she does in some ways want Mirella to move forward, but then other ways she feels like it's very much a betrayal of everything she's put into marriage, that her daughter can go out and do this. It's like she did all the things she was supposed to, and it doesn't feel good to her. And she's almost punishing her daughter for that.

AMY: Yeah. Like I never got that opportunity. I didn't get to do that.

 JOY: Yes, you mentioned America Ferrara earlier, and a filmic text with which many of your listeners will be familiar is, um, her movie Real Women Have Curves. And that same dynamic plays out there, where the mother is envious and bitter. Why should the younger generation enjoy a life that I wanted, but could not have? Yeah.

KIM: Right.

AMY: But some of the moments between Mirella and her mom are so brutal. It's like she knows her mother's wounds, and she jabs it.

JOY: It's a brilliant analysis of mother daughter dynamics. It really is. And something that I want to mention in that regard, is that in the next novel by de Céspedes that is being published in English, now, again by Astra House, um, is called Her Side of the Story. And it also has a mother daughter relationship. So I haven't read it yet, I just got it last night in the mail and I'm so psyched, but there is a mother daughter relationship in which the mother has extra marital longings for someone. And her young daughter is watching this happen. So more Mirella became the protagonist and was watching Valeria and could tell what was happening with Valeria's desire and so on. So it flips the roles. I won't say more because I haven't read it yet, but this is just what I'm gleaning from the afterword by Elena Ferrante. Clearly the mother daughter relationship was one that compelled her tremendously. 

AMY: I also noticed, um, getting back to her boss at work, they're always trying to set up, like, how can we be together? How can we runoff on a rendezvous somewhere? And a phrase that keeps recurring over and over is Valeria saying, It's not possible. And I feel like she's saying something more than just this affair is not possible. Like she's speaking to a bigger issue again. 

JOY: I do think you're right. She's policing her own concept of what's possible for herself. We should talk about, just very quickly, the fact that the very act of keeping a diary changes how she perceives her world because now she's sort of scanning for things to write about. So what, in the course of an ordinary day, is worth memorializing in writing? Then what do you say about it? You're an editor and you're a critic of your own life, and that alchemy is part of what makes the notebook so incendiary, so explosive. She realizes that she's being changed by the very process. 

KIM: Yep.

JOY: That is just very important. And so her repeated utterances, it's not possible, both to her boss and to herself in the journal, are just sort of a way of surveilling herself and maintaining the borders of her life.

AMY: And the larger idea that really writing this notebook is not going to be possible for much longer, you know? I mean, she feels her world is closing in on her. 

KIM: Can you talk a little bit about the publication history of this book? How was it received when it was serialized also, and why do you think she was eventually forgotten?

JOY: Well, she was a best selling novelist in Italy. So it was received extremely well at that time in her country. When it was published in the United States in its first English translation the U. S. by Simon and Schuster in 1958 as The Secret, that was the title of it then, I don't know a lot about how it was received at the time but we know that it was reviewed in The New York Times by Francis Keene who was a translator of Italian literature and romance languages, and she loved it. She just thought it was incredibly brilliant. And so in terms of The New York Times and its influence, you know, it would have been well received here, but I don't know how widespread that was or what the sales figures were like. I don't know that yet. 

AMY: I love the idea that it came out first in the magazine, like you said, for Italian readers. 

KIM: Yeah, totally. It's perfect.

AMY: You feel like it's a real woman almost. Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah. 

JOY: Exactly. And that breathless urgency, what's going to happen next, right, as if this were happening in real time, perhaps not even that far from where you live, right? 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: And like we talked about, there is this building dread. Was almost like Lord of the Rings, the notebook was like some sort of dark entity in the house that has a power. So by the end of the book, Valeria writes that "all women hide a black notebook," and it's taking me back to this conversation from the essays earlier about this deep well that women fall into and de Céspedes's belief, kind of hopeful belief, actually, that women find important things in that well. 

JOY: Yeah. So the thing that I think is really brilliant about how de Céspedes structures this novel, in that sense, the sense of dread and ominousness and how things are either going to be horrific or they're going to close down; we don't know what's going to happen, and how things the opportunity to vicariously experience rebellion, critique, right? All the things that Valeria is experiencing desire, right? And then to close it up like a notebook and put it away or destroy it entirely. So we have the possibility and then the containment, right? So it's thrilling and revolutionary and incendiary, but then safe. 

AMY: It's making me think, randomly, of that kind of like end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Ark just gets buried on the shelves, but you know all the hidden danger and how powerful it really is, right? 

KIM: Yeah.

JOY: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All that hidden danger. Yeah.

AMY: So that brings me to your own writing, Joy. I want to mention a personal essay that you wrote last year entitled “Burning It Down.” It was recently named a notable essay in the New Best American Essays Collection edited by Vivian Gornick. We're going to share a link to that in our show notes, listeners, so you can read it in full. But it relates to de Céspedes, I think, because you talk about the decision you made to destroy all of your journals that you had kept since the age of 12. Tell us a little bit more about this.

JOY: Absolutely. Yeah. And in my case, I didn't really have scandalous, incendiary material in the journals, but I felt as if I wanted to let go of a calcified sense of identity. I really wanted something new and fresh. So it was really kind of an ontological move, like, I don't want to carry these yards of notebooks around with me anymore, like baggage of who I used to be, all these different iterations. There was something quite fierce and wonderful about letting them go, and as you know, the essay opens with having my hairdresser shear off my long hair, which was dark at the time, and letting it grow in silver. So like lots of letting go or shedding, uh, you know, because I had been coloring my hair. So there's a lot about performing a kind of femininity or youthfulness or whatever. I was just sort of like, nah, I don't want to, you know, I'm ready for change. But as long as I am dragging this boulder of past selves behind me, it's almost as if I feel beholden to the expectation that I'll keep performing who I was, you know? And even if other people haven't read those journals, I know what they say, you know, and I'm tired of them. I'm ready to turn those in and to see what kinds of freedom lie on the other side of that. The field of pure possibility, to go back to that phrase that you noticed, Amy, that Valeria keeps saying: It's not possible. It's not possible. What if one says to oneself, It is possible. And that is possible. And that's possible too. And anything is possible. Then what? Then what do you make of your life? That's a radical kind of freedom, and it's a kind of freedom that I think not only does the world not give women very often, but women don't give ourselves, and so that's what I wanted to do.

KIM: Right. So, we've talked about Valeria's need to keep her innermost thoughts secret. And then we talked about you destroying your own journals. But in your professional writing career, you've done really the opposite, in terms of publishing these incredibly candid essays, like Burning It Down, which I love and I'm so excited it's getting even more recognition because it's wonderful. Not to mention your memoir. 

AMY: Yeah, you took your past and you put it out there, boldly, for everyone to read, which is a hard thing to do. You're basically doing the opposite of what she was trying to do, which was to keep it under wraps.

JOY: But I think there's a tremendous difference. The public version, when one knows it will be public, is highly shaped, not fictionalized, but shaped, edited, chosen. In a different way from the process that Valeria learns about, where you're looking at your life and then choosing what to write for yourself privately to explore things. That's just so vulnerable. Of course I still keep notebooks and journals and so on, but, you know what I think it was? Um, we hired a historian, a Latina historian at my institution, and she came to my apartment. She's like, You know, uh, as a Latina writer, as a professor, there are very few Latinas who are full professors in this country, and she said, You know, people are going to want your notebooks, your archives, one day. And I was like, Whoa, wait a minute. What? You know, because I just thought, you know, uh, I'll get old. I'll destroy them all. So my son won't have to deal with them. And you know, that, that I forget what, um, Scandinavian practice of...

KIM: yeah.

AMY: Oh, right. Preparing for death. Yeah.

JOY: Yeah, but I never thought, Oh my goodness, that stuff could be public. I didn't write it to be public. So I guess it's a little bit about control and intentionality. So when we select things and we say, here's something that I would like to offer the world. Maybe it was harrowing. Maybe it was awful. Maybe I behaved badly. Maybe other people did, but I'm going to analyze it with a kind of precision and then revise it and polish it and give it to the world. That's a really different thing from, you know, I'm 19 and writing in my diary thinking no one will ever see it. So I think I just wanted to preserve a sense of privacy and freedom that kept those two selves very separate and distinct. 

AMY: Interesting. I love that.

KIM: So Joy, thank you so much for introducing us to Alba de Céspedes. Is there anything else you're working on that you'd like to tease for us? Another title in the works? No pressure.

JOY: Thank you. Um, yes, and I would say that. The next novel by de Céspedes will be available in November, like mid November, Her Side of the Story. 

KIM: I can't wait to read it. 

AMY: I know, I'm definitely going to read it. I love that there's something else available for us.

JOY: Yeah, I'm really excited. Myself, I'm working on two things: a collection of short stories about women at pivotal moments who choose the very unexpected. So it definitely ties into what we've just been talking about. And then I'm also editing, with translator Rhi Johnson, a collection for the University Press of Florida of my grandfather's writing. So this really fed into One Brilliant Flame. My grandfather, Feliciano Castro, after whom the character Feliciano in that book is named, he was a poet and a lector, and a printer, in Key West. He published a volume of poetry in 1918 that was included in my father's effects when my father died. And I just thought, you know, maybe all grandpas write books of poetry. And so I've known about this for many years. And, um, then I met Rhi, who's a translator and a scholar of Galician and Cuban literature, and they said, No, wait, these poems are actually pretty cool and important. So we've been working together for quite some time, and now they're going to be in print. So that's also exciting in terms of legacy, you know, and Alba de Céspedes and her relationship with her grandfather. Yeah, so…

AMY: It's really amazing, the connection that, you know, you've discovered with her. It's uncanny. 

JOY: It is uncanny. It's truly amazing and thrilling. So thank you for inviting me to talk about her.

AMY: Well, it's been so great to have you back. Thank you so much.

KIM: Yeah. You can come on anytime. You're great at this.

 So that's all for today's episode. Listeners, have you ever wondered how you can keep the legacies of these lost ladies alive?

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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. 

165. The Women Who Illuminated Manuscripts

AMY HELMES: Hi everyone. We're back with another Lost ladies of Lit bonus episode. Last week we discussed Christine de Pizan and her Book of the City of Ladies. Could a woman's hand have been behind any of the beautiful illustrations in this medieval work? Given what we know about women's involvement as artists in the medieval manuscript making process, it's certainly possible. Last week's guest, Kathleen Jones, author of the new novel Cities of Women, is back with us today to talk about it. So let's jump right into the conversation. 

Kathy, I found it really illuminating, pun intended, to discover that it wasn't just male monks who were illustrating these manuscripts in the medieval period. I don't know how it took me this long, or maybe it took us all this long to know, but this gets to the heart of your novel, Cities of Women. You feature a character, Anastasia, who's kind of the name at the center of the mystery that unfolds in your book, and she has a connection to Christine de Pizan, right?

KATHLEEN JONES: Yeah. We don't know whether she's real or another of Christine's metaphors, but she appears in the Book of the City of Ladies, and if I can read the passage, it's in the part where Christine is celebrating the various accomplishments of women artists. And she says, "I know a woman today named Anastasia who is so learned and skilled in painting manuscript borders and miniature backgrounds that one cannot find an artisan in all the city of Paris who can surpass her." 

KIM: That seems very real. 

KATHLEEN: I know. It does seem real. And then she adds, "I know this from experience, for she has executed several things for me, which stand out among the ornamental borders of the great masters." So whether it was literally Anastasia or she's using Anastasia to stand in for a number of women artists with whom she worked on these manuscripts, we don't know for sure. We do know, there's documentation from the archives in Paris that have survived, that there were women artists in all aspects of the book industry in medieval Paris, and while I was researching the book, I came across a reference to a dissertation about medieval artists by a woman named Kouky Fianu, who currently teaches in Canada. I forget what university she's at right now. [Ed: University of Ottowa] And I read her dissertation in French and we conversed about women artists at the time, and definitely there were women working as painters, as bookbinders, as scribes, uh, I'm not sure about parchment makers, you know, the people who created the material that the books were, written on, but definitely in all aspects of the trade. And we know because Christine tells us that she supervised her production, uh, her workshop. It's not like a workshop we think of today where everybody's in the same, you know, room or series of rooms, because the way the medieval book industry worked was, you know, there would be a parchment maker in one part of Paris. There would be a scribe in another part of Paris, the illuminators, the painters were in a different place. And the book would move in its development from spot to spot. But Christine was very precise. And there's been research on this by what are called paleographers, people who study, you know, the actual physical dimensions of the book, to demonstrate that she took absolute control of what her books looked like. And in some cases, she was actually the scribe herself.

KIM ASKEW: That is so cool. I'd love to see an exhibit of that, because I feel like Amy and I have seen illuminated manuscript exhibitions, but I've never seen it from the women who were participating in this work, from their perspective.

KATHLEEN: You know, there's an exhibit of women artists in the medieval and Renaissance period that's ongoing at, I think the Baltimore Museum right now. There's another exhibition, women artists from medieval times to the present, I think, I believe in Boston, but I know that the British Library is going to have a special exhibition on medieval women that they're going to launch in 2024.

KIM: Trip to England, trip to London! 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, there you go. It'll certainly feature de Pizan, uh, because, you know, they have that very famous Queen's Book in their collection. 

KIM: Right. Right. 

AMY: So getting back to the illustrators, who we're finding out women were doing this work, I got so excited when I found this out, that teeth actually help solve this mystery. Can you talk a little bit about what was found in skeletal remains that led scientists to realize this?

KATHLEEN: Right. A few years ago, uh, there's a woman, an archeologist by the name of Anita Radini. She is currently, I think, at the University of Dublin, and she and her team of researchers were digging in the graveyard near a German convent, and they exhumed the remains of a jaw. And they weren't looking for this, but they found these blue spots on the teeth and they couldn't figure out what it was. And they went through a whole bunch of explorations to finally identify it as the remains of lapis lazuli, which is this very, very, you know, expensive, but very important blue color that was used, particularly when you were you know, showing the gowns of, the, you know, Mary, the Blessed Virgin or whatever in these manuscripts. And it's interesting, because Christine, herself, uses that blue or requires that blue in the drapery of the gowns that portray her in her illuminated manuscripts. But they found the remains on skeletal teeth. And that was absolute, incontrovertible evidence that, you know, not only monks, but women were involved in the actual illuminating of these manuscripts. What they hypothesized is that the brushes that were used, you've seen these portraits in books, they're so small. In some cases, strokes are so fine that to get the point of the brush very, very sharp, they would lick it and probably deposited some of the remains of the paint in their teeth. And that's how they, you know, had that evidence to prove that women were involved. And the teeth were the source. 

KIM: I love, of course a woman figured that out. So amazing. I love it. 

Well, you 

KATHLEEN: know that women who were doing the, uh, remember when watches would glow in the dark? Uh, and it was a chemical that was put on them. Many women who performed that very delicate kind of painting in the watches got poisoned from the material that they were using to create the illumination, and this is the same thing. They stick the brush point in their mouth to sharpen it and dip it in the chemical and it was deposited and they in that case they got sick from it. So, but it was an archaeologist several years ago who, yeah, uncovered that information. 

AMY: And I found an article that discusses that a little bit more, and listeners will put a link to that in our show notes.

KATHLEEN: Okay.

AMY: I really loved the detail with which you described the whole medieval book making process in your novel. You really take the reader through that whole process, the binding, the illustrating. What level of research did you do for that? Did you go to a tutorial like the character Verity does in your book?

KATHLEEN: I did. As a matter of fact, I did. Um, well, first of all, I read, you know, voluminously about how the manuscripts were put together. I mean, I love books. I love to hold books. And I love, you know, the physicality of books. But these books are beyond what our books are now because they're so tactile, you know? They have a kind of three dimensionality to it. I wanted to convey that to the reader and I wanted to convey, you know, the amount of labor of many hands that went into the creation of what were, of course, in most cases, very rare books. If they were illuminated, they were meant for the nobility. Um, and so first years ago, I took a bookmaking class. I was interested in how books were put together. So I took an art course with a group of other people that was offered in San Diego at the time on making your own book. But then when I was writing this and doing the research on it, I felt I needed a kind of hands-on experience. And so I went to a workshop that was actually sponsored by the Morgan Library. And there I learned about ink making and the manufacture of vellum. There is still a place in upstate New York, I don't remember the name of the town now, where they mimic the medieval process of vellum making in order to produce the same material that medieval scribes would have. And there are art historians, there's a woman in the UK named, Sara Charles, who teaches the making of vellum, the making of ink, and the process of inscribing words on these pages, as well as illuminating the initials and drawing pictures. I didn't go to that one, that was in London, but in order to demonstrate, you know, the extent of labor involved in the making of a single book. The material was so precious. They couldn't afford to like we do today. Oh, well, you know, let me... 

KIM: Yeah, crumple it up and throw it behind... 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, it was so precious. So I saw a manuscript in the Morgan Library where there's a huge hole in the middle of one page. They weren't going to throw that out. They just wrote around it, you know, they inscribed around it. In other cases, there would be a tear because you stretched this material and there might be a tear made. Well, you know, you'd figure out a way to either write around it or add another layer or patch it up somehow. So yeah, it's definitely a laborious process. Yeah. 

KIM: So talking about these books with intricate illustrations, So the City of Ladies manuscripts, how did it enhance the experience of reading and understanding her work? What do we know about the illustrations that accompany her writing and the impact that they would've had on their reader?

KATHLEEN: Well, there's a kind of conversation going on between text and image and the image is meant to, you know, I guess call attention to aspects of the text to amplify it. And in Christine's case in particular, she was very keen on having her own portrait in these books, and so that serves like instead of signing it like we would now, you know, that portrait. And it wasn't just a portrait of her and her study, although that happens in some cases. She'd show herself at work in her study, but she would show herself giving this book to an important dignitary, like the queen in the case of The Queen's Book. And that was meant to sort of doubly authorize the queen in her power and Christine, you know, as an author. 

KIM: The author photo circa 15th century. 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, an author photo, but with, with much more, you know, power. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah, 

AMY: And make sure you use that expensive lapis lazuli on my dress, please.

KATHLEEN: Exactly. Exactly, if you go online to the British Library and you put in Harley 4431, which is the catalog number for the Queen's Book, will tell you where the images are and you scroll through those. They're amazing. They're also meant to be allegories in themselves. And the positioning of women in them is very important because rather than show, say, men doing all of the heroic acts, she'll show women doing, women bringing things into the world. So, you know, it has a lot of levels of meaning, but it's meant to kind of be in conversation with the text and amplify certain points that the text is actually making. 

AMY: And the colors are so vibrant and crisp. 

KIM: Oh yeah, gorgeous. 

AMY: It's amazing that it has lasted all this time. 

KIM: Mm hmm. 

AMY: It's as if it's almost fresh, on the page. 

KIM: It looks fresh, yeah. 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, yeah, and they're even more in person, they're even more stunning, I suppose, than you could ever reproduce in a... like an image on the screen can't quite get the depth or the almost three dimensionality of the image, you know. It almost literally leaps off the page at you. 

KIM: Speaking of leaping off the page, I really love how you made this relationship between Christine and potential people who were crafting her books, making Anastasia a real person, as a character in your book, and bringing her to life. So, 

AMY: Yeah, it's a great premise. 

KIM: Yeah, Yeah, I love it. 

KATHLEEN: Thanks. 

AMY: That's all for today's episode. Tune in next week, when we'll be discussing a secret diary, which both liberates and torments its owner. Author Joy Castro will be back with us to discuss Forbidden Notebook. A 1952 work by Cuban-Italian writer, Alba de Céspedes. 

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

164. Christine de Pizan — The Book of the City of Ladies with Kathleen B. Jones

AMY HELMES: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to unearthing forgotten classics by women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my co host Kim Askew. 

KIM ASKEW: Today, we're going to be discussing a single mom who was also Europe's first professional woman writer of the late middle ages.

AMY: A widow who turned to her pen to support herself, her mother, and her three children. Christine de Pizan was described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex as the first woman to take up her pen in defense of her sex. 

KIM: The book we're going to be discussing today, The Book of The City of Ladies, is Christine's history of Western civilization from the point of view and in praise of women, showcasing them as the intellectual and moral equals of men.

AMY: And that's really something, considering that this book was first published in 1405. That's almost four centuries before Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which we covered on this show a few weeks ago. 

KIM: Right, and we have an expert on Christine with us today to give us more insight into the writer and her remarkable book.

AMY: Let's raid the medieval manuscripts and get started. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: Joining us today is Kathleen B. Jones. During her over two decades as an academic teaching women's studies at San Diego State University, Kathleen authored six books, including three monographs and three edited anthologies of critical essays.Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt, received the prestigious 2015 Barbara “Penny” Kanner Book Award from the Western Association of Women Historians. 

KIM: After resigning from her teaching post to focus on her writing career, Kathleen earned an MFA in Fiction from Fairfield University. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Fiction International, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, the Briarcliff Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. And her debut novel, Cities of Women, was published by Keylight Books in September. Her inspiration for this novel came from The Book of the City of Ladies, a work she'd previously taught in her Women's Studies courses. Congratulations on your new book, Kathy, and welcome to the show.

KATHLEEN: Thank you. And thanks for inviting me. 

AMY: Okay, so you in your book have created a fictional portrayal of Christine based on extensive research you've done. And considering the vast time gap, she was born in 1364, as well as the limited historical records that are available, what is known about her life and what captivated you to base your novel on her life and her work?

KATHLEEN: Well, as you said, she was born in 65. We don't have accurate dates. And she was born in Venice, where her father was then working as an advisor to the city leadership. But the following year, he returned with his family to Bologna in Italy, for reasons that we don't quite know and In that year, 1365, he received several offers of a new job, and he accepted the one from Charles V in Paris, and he moved to Paris. Three years later, he moved his family to Paris, and that's when Christine first became acquainted with the city. She was four years old at the time, and, probably at that very young age, introduced to the court of Charles V. We don't know a lot. about her youth. And so I was able to invent things, which is great for a novelist. In fact, when you don't have a lot of information, it's the time when you can be the most creative. We do know, however, that her father encouraged her education and that he was well positioned with his place in the court, and especially because of the library of Charles V (he was a renowned collector of manuscripts) to enable his daughter to become educated at a fairly young age. Her mother really wanted her to pursue a much more traditional life and, you know, be married, have children, focus on domestic duties. The father was very much an advocate of her education and she recounts this in several places in the various books that she wrote. She was kind of a protégé at a very early age of the politics and humanistic climate inParis.

KIM: Um, I'm curious, based on what you said, and how you portrayed her father's role as an advisor, um, how much do we actually know about his work? 

KATHLEEN: We know he was an astrologer. And astrologers were very much advisors to kings at the time, among a bunch of other counselors that they would have. We don't know much about the actual activities that he undertook, but he served in a variety of diplomatic roles, consulting the stars for propitious times when, you know, the king could pursue the

various of his adventures, also in relation to the ongoing war with England and so forth. He was very, very proximate to the royal family,and lived very near them. 

KIM: Okay.

AMY: You and your novel, I think, did a great job at showing what a precarious role that is as astrologer to the king. You have a lot of power in the answers you're giving, and also... 

KIM: A lot can go wrong.

AMY: A lot can go wrong. You better make sure you're seeing the right things in those stars, yeah? 

KIM: Yeah, that's a lot of pressure. 

KATHLEEN: Exactly. That's actually relevant to Christine's own experience, I think. The fact that she has to figure out which side to stand for in the ongoing feuds that existed after the death of Charles V in 1380, when she saw her father's fortunes decline, partly because of the shifts in, you know, favor at the court and the conflicts over which of the king's brothers were actually going to be the most influential over the Dauphin, you know, the son of the king who was set to be heir and ultimately became Charles VI. He was very young, he was 11 when his father died, and so there's these, you know, feuds between the uncles over who should have the most influence at court.

And she had to figure out which side. to take, and that's been an area of a lot of controversy in the Christine scholarship, whether she favored Philip of Burgundy or Louis of the Orleanist family. So there's a lot about that in the scholarship about her.

AMY: And listeners, this time period is during the Hundred Years War. Kathy, it's really interesting because I also listen to The Rest is History podcast, and I just happened to choose... they had a four-episode series on the Hundred Years War, but once I was listening to it, I realized what a great connection it is to our topic today, because this is the time period she's in. 

KATHLEEN: Right, exactly, from the latter part of the 14th century all the way up to the influence of Joan of Arc over what was happening in France. So she lived in an amazing period of European history. 

KIM: So back to Amy's question about, what made you decide this is the story you want to tell? 

KATHLEEN: Well, I had actually taught excerpts from The Book of the City of Ladies when I was at San Diego State University in introductory Women's Studies courses. And I found that the students were fascinated that she wrote the kinds of things she did in, you know, the late 14th, early 15th centuries. A lot of the students at the time imagined feminism began in 1970. And so when they, when they hear that many, many centuries earlier, here was a woman who supported herself with her writings and took the side of women revising history to showcase their accomplishments, you know, they got really excited about that. I'm not saying she's a feminist in the modern sense of the term, but she certainly is unique in, uh, advocating for women at a time when many, many negative things were said and women had very little real authority. She insinuates herself into these literary and political circles and becomes, you know, quite influential. 

KIM: Yeah. It's pretty amazing for her time. All right, so she had this precocious upbringing. She's exposed to all the political things going  on. She's exposed to the royal library, which is pretty amazing. Um, and then in 1379, she actually gets married. She marries a notary and secretary at the royal court, Etienne de Castel. And it seems like it was a very happy marriage, what you'd call a love match, which as we know from this podcast was pretty unusual for that time period. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Kathy?

KATHLEEN: Her father, of course, is the one who selected the person she was to marry, and yet he did so, I think, with his daughter's interests at heart. He did not choose somebody who wouldn't respect her intelligence. So she's married at 15 and her husband is about 10 years older than she, uh, but respectful. And one of the things that differentiates Christine from, say, contemporary feminists, is that she underscores the idea that it's okay for a woman to be subordinate to her husband. Not in the sense that she has no life of her own, but she's very traditional in that sense. But it was a happy marriage, and when he dies about 10 years later, she's completely bereft. She's so mournful. She goes into a period of what I would say, uh, depression, and actually magnified by the debt that she was left with, because she couldn't inherit her father's estate. That estate that he had in Italy went to her two brothers. So she's left with the support of three children, a mother and a niece, and how is she going to do that? Well, luckily, I mean, she was privileged. She had access to influential people, but she spends almost 14 years in court trying to get herself out of debt. She was actually forced to pay rent on a property that her husband owned, which was taken back by the French court. And so she's like, in a really distraught place and begins to turn to writing, initially poetry, to sort of write herself out of her despair, except for the fact that the poetry she writes is never only what it appears on the surface. It's also got a lot of political messages embedded in it.

AMY: All right, so yeah, she was only 25 when her husband died, so fairly young. She has three kids, this mother that she needs to support, a niece, and that's very sad, but also this is when things get so interesting and she writes in her journal, actually, "I had to become a man" which is fascinating. And, and she does. She takes care of business. So talk about some of her works and what she was writing. 

KATHLEEN: Okay, she starts with writing what would be called lyric poetry, initially, when her husband dies in 1390. As I said, a lot of her time is taken up in these court battles. But the poetry that she starts writing has a lot to do with the mourning of a widow. But it has to be read in the context of the politics of the time. In other words, the widow isn't just the actual widow of Christine de Pizan or any other widowed woman. It's also, in a sense, the widowed France, because by now, Charles VI has become king, and he is often subject to bouts of insanity. And there's this feud between, as I mentioned, the dukes over who's going to control things. So her poetry is also about the sorrow of the political times. And soon she turns to writing essays, much more explicitly, you know, about politics. The book that you're referring to before, The Mutation of Fortune, is about her transformation into a man and as a way of saying, " If the men aren't going to come to the rescue of a beleaguered France, then I will, as a woman, and I will give advice about how to ease these tensions and solve these problems." And it's also an allusion to the fact that the Queen, Queen Isabeau, who was married to Charles VI, doesn't have the right to rule in her own name because women couldn't rule. But she appeals to the queen as somebody who might be able to, you know, solve some of these political problems. Uh, as times go on, uh, she soon enough she becomes involved in a literary debate about the subject of women. That is what sort of catapults her to public recognition, when she takes on this debate, and does it in a very overt way.

AMY: I believe you are talking about her sort of clap back, we could call it, to the popular courtly love poem, The Romance of the Rose. A lot of our listeners may be familiar or at least have heard of that. So what did she get mixed up in here? What did she do?

KATHLEEN: Well, she is involved in this debate about the added lines to this poem that had actually been written almost a century earlier. There were lines added to the poem, The Romance of the Rose, by a man named Jean de Meunes in the later part of the 13th hundreds. and these lines are what she specifically responds to because it was in way erotic poetry, and some people say, "Oh, she was a prude. She was objecting to this." No, what she was actually talking about was the way in which women were being criticized and misrepresented in these lines of poetry. And it's part of what becomes a major theme of her writing, which is the defense of women. She acknowledges that some of the poetry is fine. But she says, basically, people can hide really mean messages behind flowery words. And I want to set the record straight. But more than that, it's a way of positioning herself as a writer, as someone with authority who can engage in this debate, which had up until this time just been a debate between educated men. And equally important is the fact that she does it by a series of letters that she writes to major people attached to the court and to what's called the Chancery. The, the secretarial wing of the court. And by doing that, by taking this debate, which would have been in kind of private circles among, you know, literary men, and making it public through these letters, she really ratchets up the argument, and specifically, it becomes a turning point in her career around the year 1402, because now she's really a public intellectual you could say in modern terms. And the central thing for her is the defense of women. Don't say these awful things. Don't try to turn women away from virtue, which of course is what, you know, becomes the major enterprise of her later writing, how to ensure that virtuous women are recognized and are secured from the attacks that many are writing against them. Many men are writing against them.

AMY: I can just imagine how this would have been received, like how all eyes would have suddenly been upon her. Like, “Hey, I have something to say about this. Why don't you listen to me for a second?" I mean, that's really amazing. 

KIM: To take on this popular poem that everyone loves. Be like, "Hey, wait a second." 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, this is really pretty ballsy stuff. 

KIM: So let's go ahead and dive right into The Book of the City of Ladies. Kathy, can you give our listeners who might not have read it maybe an overview of what it is and what she's trying to accomplish with it? She pretty much lays it all out at the opening of the book, right?

KATHLEEN: Well, it's important to note that the book is an allegory. And by now, she's begun to write allegories. The Mutation of Fortune is a kind of allegory she's written about dreams or visions that she has. And so, as with The Mutation of Fortune, The Book of the City of Ladies starts out with a very kind of domestic scene. She's in her study, uh, she's reading. She puts one book aside and all of a sudden she sees another book on the shelf and she pulls it off and it's this, you know, really scurrilous attack on women and she starts reading it and then she says, "I got to put it away. This is just too much. "She puts it away, but she's so haunted by it. She takes it out again, and then she starts to say to herself, "Why is it that men have written these horrible things about women? How can they, even learned men, get away with this? How can that be?" And she becomes despondent and says at one point, " I fell into such a state of despair. I began to regret the fact that I was born a woman, and I began to hate the entire female sex." And in the deepest point of despair, she has another vision. 

AMY: I'm giving sound effects because that's what I'm picturing, 

KATHLEEN: Exactly. These three ladies appear to her. Uh, Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice. And essentially they say, Look, why aren't you trusting your own judgment? You've talked to a lot of other women. They don't think this way about themselves. You are a learned person. Why do you accept these awful things that have been said? Let us help you set the record straight. And in fact, we want you to build a City of Ladies, a place where virtuous women will be protected from these attacks, and, invite virtuous women of all classes, it's not just for noble people, and you will build this city with the trowel of your pen, and we're going to give you guidance about how to do it. And so she sets off for the next bunch of pages writing what we would now call revisionist history, saying, Here are the things that women have done. Here are the accomplishments that they've had in politics, in the arts, in science, in religious enterprises, as mystics, as visionaries. This is what it's really about and not the stuff that's been written about women. So in a nutshell, that's, that's what it's about. 

KIM: Yeah, I mean, and just hearing that, it just fires me up again. I love what she did. Um, so, um, like her contemporaries of the time, her work very much alluded to and responded to the work of her predecessors. Can you share some of the work she references in Book of the City of Ladies?

KATHLEEN: Well, the title itself is a kind of allusion to Augustine's City of God, you know. So she's clearly influenced by classics, the humanists. Boccaccio's About Famous Women, even Dante is an influence here. And this demonstrates the fact that she was erudite and learned in not only the vernacular French, but Latin. So she uses these things, but she doesn't just... I mean, some people would say, "Oh, it was just a compendium of things that other people had already written." No, it's very different, because she doesn't just repeat the stories that have been told by these other sources like Boccaccio. She rearranges them and sets it up as a kind of dialogue. Okay, are there really famous women rulers? Well, Lady Reason says, let me tell you about a whole host of them. Were there women who were educated in the arts? Of course. And then down the road they go. So she divides them up by, I guess, subject as opposed to chronologically, you know. It's not just a march through history, it's really innovative in the sense in which it's showing the accomplishments that women have made in this whole array of areas of interest from politics to religion.

AMY: Right, because she'll be like, Okay, let's talk about women who used their medical know-how, or let's talk about women who had super strength. 

KATHLEEN: Exactly. 

AMY: If she were around today, she would be our third co host on Lost Ladies of Lit. 

KIM: Oh, yeah. 

AMY: She's pulling all these women out of the hat that you're like, Who's that? Who? Who? I've never heard of this woman. I've never heard of this Amazonian warrior queen that she's referencing. But then she starts going into, like, Let's talk about Athena, Goddess of Wisdom. And then I'm like, Well that's not real. What's going on here? She's using both real women in history and fictional women in history? 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, exactly. In fact, she goes all the way up to her contemporary time to talk about the Queens of France and some of the wives of the dukes that she knew. She's weaving together, because after all, the mythologies would have been based in some way on conflict, right? And so they would have invented characters to represent the conflict. So she's taking those characters back and saying, this is part of our legacy too. Even Medea gets a makeover. She's inspiring people. I mean, because after all, they're stories.It's an allegory, so that even the real characters come to stand for something other than just themselves. Like I was saying before about her poetry, where she's talking about a widow mourning also stands for, you know, the mourning of the loss of the king. So also here, you know, these characters are meant to be inspirational, and they're more than real, just as the mythical are, you know, sort of more than mythical. 

AMY: Okay. Got it. 

KIM: Right, and a lot of those myths were used and are used to portray something about women, whether they're real or not. They're used by writers and thinkers to sort of say something about what a woman is. So I think it was free for her to take them, you know. 

KATHLEEN: And, and you think about what's been going on in contemporary literature just within the last, say, 10 years in historical fiction, for example. There've been so many rewriting of characters from Greek mythology, whether it's, uh, you know, it's Phaedra. A friend of mine wrote novel about Phaedra, or you read a rewriting of Lilith, 

KIM: Mm 

AMY: Circe, Yeah, 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, Circe. The purpose of it is, like with fiction, I guess, in general, it's to say, Hey, there's another way of looking at the story, and we can perhaps talk about it differently than the traditional one. So I think she's doing that. She's a kind of, you know, latter day precursor for all of these feminist retellings, like the ones you read, uh, the ones you mentioned, you know, Circe or Matrix by Lauren Groff or, you know, some of these other books. 

KIM: Right. 

KATHLEEN: Yeah. 

AMY: Um, alright, so she's writing The Book of the City of Ladies. Can we circle back a little bit more to her life at this time? What's going on? 

KATHLEEN: The period between 1390 and 1405 when she completes The Book of the City of Ladies is probably among her most productive, in terms of her writing career. And it's partly, like we were saying before, a response to the feuds over royal succession. The king's brothers fighting with one another over who was going to really control the court. And because Charles VI was subject to, uh, bouts of insanity from about 1392 on, this was a real, you know, hot potato. And she's watching all of these conflicts and is most concerned with seeing peace in France. And so, in a way, what culminates in The Book of The City of Ladies is an effort to say, perhaps Isabeau can intervene here and bring peace back to France because the guys are just going to tear us apart. And when the book, what's now known as The Queen's Book, a manuscript that's in the British Library, is ultimately presented to Queen Isabeau it's years after she writes the first version of The Book of the City of Ladies. But Christine presents, herself, this massive collection of her writings to the Queen in 1414, and at the very center of it is The Book of the City of Ladies. And it's there for a reason. It's an appeal to the Queen to, you know, deal with intervening in these battles and trying to introduce some kind of peace to the realm. So besides advocating for women per se, it's again situated in the context of the political strife of France and the ongoing, you know, war with England. 

KIM: Yeah, it's so interesting that, you know, you think about a lot of writers today as sort of being passive activists in a way, and she doesn't sound very passive at all, which is really interesting. Um, yeah. 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, yeah. 

KIM: I fell in love with this book when I read it as an undergrad. Shout out to Dr. Laurel Hendrix, who introduced it to me. I still have, um, the 1982 edition. Uh, That's the book that I used in this class. And Marina Warner in the foreword writes that Christine uses a benevolent tone rather than quote a shrill one. And she also talks about the courtly way she's very familiar with. But also, she says that it concealed an underlying rage. Because she was a mom, it made me think of that, um, phrase we hear now a lot, mom rage. So, um, Kathy, it seems like her rage is more, uh, politically motivated, but would you like to read maybe a favorite passage from The Book of The City of Ladies so listeners can get a feel for the tone and the style of this book ?

KATHLEEN: Okay, um, sort of going back to what I was paraphrasing before, but let me read the actual words. I talked about how she picked up this book by Matheolus:

 I put it down in order to turn my attention to more elevated and useful study, but just the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different men And learned men among them have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many devilish and wicked thoughts about women and their behavior. Thinking deeply about these matters, I began to examine my character and my conduct as a natural woman. And similarly, I discussed that with other women whose company I frequently kept, princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes, who graciously told me of their own experiences and intimate thoughts in order to know, in fact, whether the testimony of so many famous men could be true. And so I relied more on the judgment of others than on what I myself felt and knew. I was so transfixed in this line of thinking for such a long time, it seemed as if I were in a stupor. As I was thinking this, a great unhappiness and sadness welled up in my heart, for I detested myself and the entire feminine sex, as though we were monstrosities in nature. I mean, and then she goes on, a little bit longer, and the three ladies appear to... Pull her out of her despair. We use the term gaslighting, how women are gaslighted. That's what it is! And like, this is 1405. 

KIM: I know, it's, so, in some ways, it's so contemporary to how we're talking about what it is to be a woman today. 

KATHLEEN: Mm-hmm. 

KIM: You're supposed to be confident, but everything's telling you not to be. You're supposed to be body positive, but everything you see is telling you not to be. 

AMY: I have a favorite moment from sort of around the beginning where the three, um, you know, Reason, Justice, I forget what their, what their names were, the, the visions. 

KATHLEEN: Reason, Rectitude and Justice.

AMY: Yeah, okay. So they appear to her and they're trying to like, talk her, you know, down from all these feelings. She's like, you know, Why are the men saying all these things that were like, I forget what she was upset about, but it's something relating to sex. And, one of the visions was basically like, "Girl, these are written by old men whose male parts no longer work and they're just bitter." I mean, she basically says that! I laughed out loud. 

KIM: Yeah, Yeah, can you imagine them reading it at court and just being like, " She said that. She actually said that." 

KATHLEEN: Absolutely. There's so many of those outrageous things that if you put it into a kind of contemporaneous language, it would be like, That's because, you know, they just can't do it anymore. Or that's because they're really jealous of, you know, what you have. I used to have a pin I wore, or I still have it somewhere: War is menstruation envy. 

KIM: Oh, Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So in her writing on The Romance of the Rose, she makes the argument that if women had written these classics, they wouldn't have been falsely accused of all these things. but then she takes this argument to the next level in The Book of the City of Ladies. All of this that we're talking about makes me think of the episode we just recently did on Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Like Wollstonecraft, Christine was pre feminist, so there wasn't really the term feminism that we know now. But in Christine's case, she wasn't asking for equal rights or power, because that really wasn't a concept, right, in the 15th century. She was arguing that women's lives could be made better. And just like Wollstonecraft, Christine advocated for the education of women.

AMY: Yeah, and she also wanted men to sort of align with their own principles. In other words, you talk this talk, why aren't you walking the walk, sort of thing. Like Wollstonecraft, she's very skillful at dismantling all these flawed arguments regarding women. Kathy, is there any other examples from her writings that you find really powerful or thought provoking in this regard?

KATHLEEN: Yeah. Let me read you something from a little bit later on, where she's still wondering here about the arguments that men are making about why women are inferior. And Christine asks Lady Reason, My lady, according to what I understand from you, woman is a most noble creature. But even so, Cicero says that a man should never serve any woman, and that he who does so debases himself, for no man should ever serve anyone lower than him. Lady Reason replies, The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher. Neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body, according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues. You know, that's a pretty modern concept to, you know, that virtue, knowledge, even strength, doesn't reside in sex, but in what the person does. Um, there's been many, many glosses on that paragraph that have brought that idea into, you know, the 21st century. That's what she was saying. You're assuming that women are inferior, but they've been denied education, many of them. That's what makes them less aware of certain things. Educate them, like Wollstonecraft said, and you'll see that those differences disappear. 

KIM: Yeah, what a modern thing to write. 

AMY: I know, this is pre Enlightenment Era, you know? There are parts of The Book of the City of Ladies where she brings in the church and kind of ties it into religion. But she was really ahead of her game in terms of using reason.

KATHLEEN: Well, the humanist tradition from Italy is already making its way in France. And actually, that was part of what the debate about The Romance of the Rose was about, not just what she turns attention to, but it was about who was going to demonstrate in Latin and in French that they were sophisticated, like the Italian humanists. And so, you know, this humanistic thinking is making the rounds long before the idea of the Enlightenment. Like the Renaissance painter, Artemisia Gentileschi is another person, a painter, not a writer, who also tries to rewrite the way that women have been, uh, she doesn't rewrite, she repaints some of the stories. So, you know, this is a tradition that is sort of touching on the idea of equal dignity of all people. The dignity of the soul, et cetera, et cetera, you know.

AMY: I found it interesting that she did have a lot of patrons who were men, right? Mm

KATHLEEN: Mm hmm, Yeah. 

AMY: So yeah, how were people responding to her work?

KATHLEEN: Well, um, definitely, I mean, the invitation by Phillip of Burgundy to write the biography of Charles V is an indication that her writing was seen of a high stature and that she had that kind of influence. Many years after her death, a person wrote a book about the lost tapestries of Christine de Pizan. Now they're not her tapestries, but the writing that she did was sort of transformed into tapestries, and they became really important artifacts that nobles across Europe were interested in owning. So we know that her work had resonance outside of France. 

AMY: That's like the medieval, 'got adapted to film." 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. 

AMY: if you got a tapestry… 

KIM: I love it. Yeah, you got a tapestry. Yeah, yeah. Was she paid more for the tapestries? No, just kidding. 

KATHLEEN: I don't think she got any of those royalties, nor did her heirs. But one of the earliest translations into English was in fact, the first translation into English of was, I believe, around 1521. And then It wasn't translated again until sections of it appeared in the 1970s. And the edition that you read, Kim, was the most recent, until recently, updating of that translation into English. 

KIM: That amazes me. 

KATHLEEN: So, yeah, so she... Yeah, it's really, I mean, it was translated into other languages, but in English between 1521 and uh, to, I think, no extant English copies, you know, when you could find them if you knew what to look for. But that's why there was this sort of resurgence of interest in her in the 1970s was the, you know, availability of a new translation of The Book of the City of Ladies. But the resurgence of interest in her really coincided with the development of the modern women's movement, I would say, the 1970s. And it's just mushroomed since then. More and more and more and more is added to the literature. And there's in fact a Christine de Pizan Society; a North American branch and a European branch. So, you know, that's all developed within the last four decades or so.

KIM: All right, so let's circle back to Christine's life. In 1413, she crafted one of her final major works. It's called The Book of Peace. And in it, she offers guidance on governance for the future heir to King Charles VI. However, in 1415, as England's invasions cast this shadow over France, Christine sought sanctuary in a convent, possibly the same convent where her daughter had embraced the life of a nun years earlier. And during this turbulent period, her writing career seemed to be on a hiatus. 

AMY: Yeah, but not so fast. Because she had one last work up her sleeve. So after the triumphant siege of Orleans in 1429, that was a victory masterminded by none other than Joan of Arc, Christine was so inspired by that, that she took up her pen once more to write the Tale of Joan of Arc. In it, she hailed Joan as a beacon of hope for the French people. 

KIM: So then, Christine died at around the age of 65. That was about 1430. And it's worth noting that her poem actually remains the sole literary tribute to Joan of Arc written during Joan of Arc's actual lifetime. And how perfect is that? Because Joan, you know, purported to see visions. And we have The Book of the City of Ladies, which is about these visions that Christine is having that are, you know, the women who are telling her to write this incredible book and build this city. 

AMY: It's almost you know, an addendum, yeah, that would have fit into The Book of the City of Ladies had she known about her, you know? 

KIM: That's so perfect. 

AMY: Let me add her. 

KIM: Yeah, one last lady. 

AMY: So, Kathy, as we said in the beginning, you transitioned from academics to writing fiction. It's your first novel. What was that experience like for you?

KATHLEEN: Well, you know, telling stories is often the way you get people most interested in some point that you're trying to make. And I discovered that as a teacher for years, that, you know, I could assign what I thought were exciting articles for students to read, but if I could engage them with a story, that was something that would be more of a hook. So that's always been in the background of my thinking. And as I progressed as an academic, I began to really write more and more differently, let's put it that way. I didn't want to just write abstract theory or dry accounts of things. But at the same time, my training as a researcher clearly influenced my ability to write this particular story because I knew how to do that kind of research. And I had access. As a former professor, I'd have access to libraries. The fact that I was an academic, you know, enabled me to figure out how to use the materials to the greatest advantage of the story. But, um, it's almost as if, you know, I needed to set aside all of the footnotes that I'd been trained to rely upon to tell a story. Put that away and just let your imagination go visiting. I found that when I did that, the research was both a boon and a barrier because I could get caught up in doing all that research if I wanted to, and then I'd never write the story, you know, so you had to sort of let the research get out of the way of your imagination. 

KIM: Right, it's like you had all the tools, but, yeah, you had to step away from it. 

KATHLEEN: Yeah, you have to step away from it, too, because you could, like, you could research till the cows come home, and you never write the novel. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. Well, I loved all the research that you put into your novel. I think it just makes it that much more fascinating. And this has been such a fun discussion. It was so lovely to have you on the show to talk about Christine and The Book of the City of Ladies, and congratulations on your debut novel. 

KATHLEEN: Thank you very much for inviting me. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Be sure to tune in next week when we'll be talking more about the women who illuminated medieval manuscripts like Christine's City of Ladies. We wrongly believed it was only monks doing this work, but there's a lot more to the story, and Kathleen is going to be back for that discussion. It's a really fascinating subject. Until then, be sure to subscribe, rate, and leave us a review if you enjoyed the show, and visit our Facebook forum to chat with us and other listeners. Keep exploring the lost gems of women's literature. 

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

163. Cita Press & Sui Sin Far with Juliana Castro Varón and Victoria Namkung

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes, and today we’re circling back to our “lost lady” from almost three years ago (Episode No. 15) — Sui Sin Far (a.k.a. Edith Maude Eaton). 

AMY HELMES: Our guest from that episode, Victoria Namkung, is back today to tell us about a new volume of Sui Sin Far’s work, but before we get to that, we’re also excited to tell you about the feminist indie press publishing this work — they happen to share our passion for forgotten women writers. So I’d like to first welcome another guest, Juliana Castro Varón. In addition to being the founder and design director of Cita Press, she is also a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and she’s the author of the 2022 Spanish-language essay collection Papel sensible. 

KIM: Juliana, we invited you onto the show because we think what you're doing is going to be of interest to most, if not all, of our listeners. You founded Cita in 2018. Do you want to tell us how it originally came about?

JULIANA CASTRO VARON: Yes, it is built upon two demoralizing statistics that I found when I was in grad school. Um, I'm going to tell you those two and then you're going to think they're really unrelated, but what we ended up doing was kind of like the Venn diagram of those. The first one is that at the time, this is 2017, women comprised only 5 percent of people working in open source, that is, people building open-source software, uh, apps, and putting it mainly on the kind of major platform for that, which is GitHub. And also, of the kind of top public domain books lists, for example, Goodreads has one they put one every year, um, at the time there were only five women in that top 50 percent books, um, and there were 11 books, and most of half of them were by Jane Austen, who we love. But of course that, it was just like, overwhelmingly men. So I decided to kind of tackle both of these issues by creating a web-based platform that would allow us to publish things that are in the public domain, that is, they don't have copyright, but doing so by putting kind of design and code first, making them accessible, available, and free for people using the internet. And that's kind of how Cita came to be.

AMY: Okay. So explain open source, that first part that you were talking about. I don't even know what that is.

JULIANA: That's people who put their code visible and editable for anybody to use. So we've used an online reader. We don't use that anymore because now we're building our own online reader, and so we used things that other people had designed or written, such as the books themselves. And we put everything on open source. That means anybody can see it. And within some rules, we use Creative Commons licenses, people can share it, and they can share it without having to pay, without having to ask for permission. So everything we do, every book, with a couple of exceptions, is open access. Meaning anybody can see it, anybody can download it, anybody could reprint it if they want it. You go to Citapress.org and you find all the books we've published since 2019. Uh, right now you can see it online, we have a reader, meaning like a platform that allows you to have the size larger or have some highlights. We are about to launch a new update to the website that will allow you to download it in ebook, in a PDF. We also sometimes build educational guides for some of the books so people can also use that to teach in a classroom or for a book club or something like that. And sometimes, not for all of them, depending on the kind of like the size and the scope, we also do printable things that people can print at home, fold at home, um, in like either tiny versions of 'zine like versions and everything is free. We run a design studio and we have grants in order to keep every single book that we publish free. And when we sell them, we sell them at cost. So like these, um, we have some ‘zine versions of books that are like under a hundred pages. And those are five dollars, which is how much it costs us to print them.

AMY: Got it. And Juliana and I were talking before we started recording here about, you know, sometimes you go and you can find a public domain book for free on the internet, but once you start reading it, it's a mess.

KIM: Yeah. Or they'll have a picture that totally doesn't relate on the cover.

AMY: Oh, totally. Like really hilarious, bad cover art. Yes, which and, and Juliana, you're a designer yourself, so great design really seems to be a key part of your mission as well, right?

JULIANA: Yes. Thank you. We love talking about this because very often due to kind of scale and resources, open source places such as Project Gutenberg, um, they do a wonderful work of putting these books online at a scale. They put many, many books at a time. But they very often don't have the capacity to edit that book, that is read it, make sure that it doesn't have weird breaks, uh, make sure that the cover art relates, as you say. So what we do is we pick these books. We find a good book that we like, and then we find an artist and we commission a unique cover. And we also find a writer, which in the case of the book we're going to talk about today is Victoria, to write a foreword, an introduction to this book for contemporary readers as a way of landing the book in the present. Very often these books will deal with, like, extremely contemporary issues and very often even they would be written very freshly. So, yeah, design is very crucial. The cover art is so beautiful. We very often would have posters and other things made out of the cover because we like it. And we hope that this kind of lure the reader into finding these books charming and interesting.

KIM: So basically, other than doing Lost Ladies of Lit, this is like our other dream job. I mean, it sounds absolutely amazing. I love it. I mean, I hope at some point maybe we can collaborate on something because that is just so cool. So about how many titles are you releasing each year? 

JULIANA: We usually do between three and four. Three is kind of the sweet number per year. So we have, uh, around 16 books. Those books, not all of them, but many of them are both in English and Spanish, so that's two editions of each book that we produce. And what we cover really ranges in genre, we have from poetry, essays, memoir, so the, uh, the, the kind of the range is large.

AMY: I'm just going to name a few here, um, to entice people. So Cita has already published Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, which I think probably many of our listeners are already pretty familiar with those. But their catalog has in it also, a lot of titles that you'll maybe be less familiar with, but also very intrigued by. At least that was the case for me when I started browsing the list. So here are a few that jumped out at me. Louisa May Alcott's Behind a Mask. Haven't read that one yet. Elizabeth Gaskell's gothic ghost story, The Poor Clare, which, I mean, perfect for Halloween, come on. Um, and then there's an Edith Wharton short story, The Old Maid, and a poetry collection by Amy Lowell, um, a little book on aesthetics by Violet Paget. And we talked about Violet Paget, um, she was also known as Vernon Lee, we talked about her a little bit on our episode about Amy Levy a few years ago. So lots of good stuff. Kim, I know you'll love this one. They have the work of a visionary, and I mean that literally, she had visions, 16th century nun, Santa Teresa de Jesus. That seems like that's something you would instantly go for.

KIM: And that's totally up my alley. I love the nuns with vision. Great.

AMY: So lots of good stuff to go check out. I think everybody listening would be, you know, this is all in their wheelhouse.

KIM: Yeah, Juliana, you really cover a lot of different types of authors from different places and time periods. Does your team have any specific criteria in terms of which books you end up publishing? How does that process work?

JULIANA: Um, yes and no. Generally we have some logistic restrictions, for example, if a book is more than 200 pages, it's very hard for us to print it. The Awakening, for example, is a long book, and so we don't have printed versions of that one. So far we haven't repeated any author. So we try to kind of have one book per author. If the author is very famous, like Louisa May Alcott, we would do a non-known book of the author, and we'd not do, like Little Women, for example, which, editions of that book abound, but it's not the same case for others that are equally worthy. In general, the majority of the books that we publish are in the public domain. Because of that, the majority of our books are old. One exception is the collection of the Nobel lectures, which we published last year with the permission of the Nobel Foundation. But that one is not in the public domain. The Nobel Foundation continues to have the copyright, but they allowed us to do this free book for people to read. Um, we do books that are originally written in English and Spanish just because then we don't have to find an open access or public domain translation or translate it ourselves, which is expensive. Uh, but that's kind when I started Cita Press, it was only me, so it was just books that I was reading and wanted to publish. Right now, we have a little bit more time to do more exploration. And Jessi Haley, the editorial director, spends a lot of time thinking about what books should be put in the front of eyes of readers that have been overlooked or underpublished or that are just simply not available in an edition such as the one we're putting out. And this is the case for An Immortal Book, which I'm very, very excited about talking today.

AMY: Okay, so let's switch gears now and talk about this new title, An Immortal Book: Selected Writings of Sui Sin Far. Why did she seem like an obvious fit for Cita, Juliana?

JULIANA: Here I must credit my colleague Jessi Haley for finding this wonderful book, but well, there are a number of things. The first one is the historical context. Um, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which is the most known piece by her, was the first published book by a Chinese American author and the only one for, like, multiple decades. She wrote fiction that was realistic about Chinese characters that were not what most people had been publishing at the time. This was a time, as Victoria points out in the introduction, which you should all read, it had many historical racist parallels. I mean, the family separation policies of the present and with the racism that we saw with COVID. So I think that the historical context is important for this book. Solidarity between women, queerness and other topics around the characters in her fiction. The ambition of women, which is something that is portrayed throughout and not shyly. And her own career as a writer. She was very famous at the time, but she's not very famous now. She wrote so much, and she was also very funny. Like she's witty. 

KIM: All right, so let's loop our friend Victoria Namkung into the conversation now. In addition to being a terrific friend of mine, Victoria is a journalist and author. She's been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, Vice, and The Washington Post, among other publications. She's also the author of two wonderful novels, The Things We Tell Ourselves and These Violent Delights. And she has a degree in Asian American studies from UCLA. Victoria wrote the introduction, as we said, to Cita Press's Sui Sin Far title. Victoria, welcome back to the podcast.

VICTORIA: Thank you. I'm so happy to be a return guest. And congratulations on the hundred plus episodes you've done since I was last on.

KIM: You started us off.

AMY: Yeah, I think you came on the show maybe even before we were even airing. 

VICTORIA: Yeah, I had lots of faith, but I'm very impressed with how much you guys have grown since then.

KIM: You started us off right. So you set the tone.

VICTORIA: Yeah.

AMY: So how did this collaboration between you and Cita come about for you to write the introduction to this book, and how did it feel to get to revisit Edith Maude Eaton again?

VICTORIA: Yeah, well, um, you definitely play a role in this story. So Cita's editorial director, Jessi Haley, who Juliana mentioned earlier, she heard the episode we did back in 2020, and she was already researching Edith Maude Eaton for a potential new collection. And I think because I'm also a biracial Asian American journalist and author, and just such a big fan of Eaton, um, also known as Sui Sin Far, I just still remember how excited I felt when I first read her work in college, which was like 25 years ago. So getting to write this introduction is such a full circle moment, and it's thanks in part to Lost Ladies of Lit.

KIM and AMY: Yay!

VICTORIA: So in addition to the stories from Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Cita's new collection also features some personal essays about her life. She writes really candidly about her identity and racism she experienced. Also her career, which is so interesting. There's also an early sketch that bridges her fiction and her observational journalism entitled A Trip in a Horse Car. And that was definitely one of my favorites. It's published in 1888 and it starts to highlight her attention to subjects like class and gender, which we see later in a lot of her work. So I thought I could read a really short excerpt from this story, which has Eaton observing a man who has dropped a parcel that's full of sugar and it's starting to spill out in the horse car. 

AMY: Okay, let's do it.

 VICTORIA: A couple of fashionably dressed ladies are just behind him, and I think it would be kindness on their part to let him know he is losing his sugar, but they take their seats unconcernedly and allow the conductor to notify him of the fact. They choose a seat as far away as possible from the beggar girl, whom they regard with faces of disgust, and after they are comfortably settled, begin a conversation about some mission for which they are collecting contributions. They are rich ladies, good church members, charitable in many ways, but I am afraid they will not have the same position in the next world that they have in this. 

So that passage is a preview of the not always sympathetic mission ladies who appear in a lot of Eaton's later stories. We see that in Mrs. Spring Fragrance as well.

AMY: And just the sharp observation skills of her characters and her as a writer too, right?

VICTORIA: Yes. Juliana mentioned earlier how Eaton is really funny, and I think you see that there's these little jabs, you know, that can be really entertaining and humorous throughout her work.

AMY: And also I think we should make losing his sugar some sort of euphemism. 

KIM: Yeah. Totally. I was thinking the same thing. It's so perfect. Yeah. Did either of you walk away from working on this project having gained any new insights about Sui Sin Far?

VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I learned just how prolific she really was as a journalist and a fiction writer. Um, Professor Mary Chapman, who you had on the podcast to discuss Edith's sister, Winnifred Eaton, she had found more than 150 uncollected texts, so that brings Edith Maud Eaton's body of work to more than 260 texts, which is quite a bit. Um, you know, she's best known for her Chinatown fiction that we see in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, but the majority of Edith's fiction and reportage actually has nothing to do with Chinese people or the Chinese American experience. So she really covers such a range, going from fashion to fires, if you can believe it. So, um, yeah, I just was shocked with how much she actually produced at a time when you would think that would be quite unusual. 

AMY: Yeah. So all the more why we're excited that somebody's still publishing new versions of it, that we can get our hands on. Juliana, is there anything we haven't touched on yet that you just would want listeners to know about what it is you guys are doing?

JULIANA: I mean, I think your listeners would be interested in generally many of the things we do. So just read our books. Uh, we've started playing around with social media too, and just kind of adding content about and around women's writers. So just follow Cita Press and read our books and share them with people. They are free and they will be free forever.

KIM: Yeah, listeners, if you saw the viral video going around with Doris Lessing responding to winning the Nobel Prize, that was Cita Press's social media. So you're already doing great.

AMY: Well, thank you guys both for coming on to tell us about this new project and what it is that you're doing, and I'm sure we're gonna be back in touch with you, Juliana, and Cita, to get the word out about some of these other books you're doing.

JULIANA: Thank you for having me. I look forward to chatting again in the future about anything and everything.

AMY: And Victoria, as always, we love having you. Thanks for stopping in.

VICTORIA: Thank you so much. I look forward to listening each week,

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Don't forget to give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast if you enjoy it. 

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

162. Meridel Le Sueur — The Girl with Rosemary Hennessy

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co host Amy Helmes, and today we're going to be discussing a Prohibition era gangster novel. And frankly, Amy, what have we been waiting for?

AMY: No kidding. It's about time, right? But it was very worth the wait. In fact, author Meridel Le Sueur had to wait a really long time for this novel, The Girl, to even get published. It was originally written in 1939, but wasn't published until 1978, nearly 40 years after the fact.

KIM: And why? Because, listeners, in 1939, publishers didn't think a woman could write a gangster novel, and boy were they wrong. On the plus side, though, Le Sueur was able to use that extra time to revise The Girl, making it much more explicitly about the lives of marginalized women in urban America during the Depression, including frank portrayals of the female characters sex lives.

AMY: Yes, this isn't just a novel about stool pigeons, speakeasies, bootleggers, and Bonnie and Clyde style getaways. It's also a Proletarian novel, and it's filled with radical messages. But above all else, I consider this book to be a poignant tribute to women, more than a "gangster novel," quote unquote. The book is sparely written, but it is so raw and real, almost disconcertingly beautiful.

KIM: Yeah. This book is pure poetry, baby. And as the literary critic Blanche Gelfant wrote in The New York Times, Le Sueur's consummate achievement as an artist is her transformation of colloquial speech into musical prose.

AMY: And with us to discuss the novel is Dr. Rosemary Hennessey, whose most recent nonfiction book features Le Sueur.

KIM: Amy, are you ready to raid the stacks and get started?

AMY: You bet I am, and I can drive the getaway car. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Rosemary Hennessey, is a professor of English at Rice University, where she previously served as director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She has written extensively on materialist feminism, which highlights capitalism and patriarchy as a central aspect in understanding women's oppression. Her latest book, published in August of this year, is called In the Company of Radical Women Writers. In it, she rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven writers, including today's Lost Lady. Welcome to the show, Rosemary. We're so happy to have you here.

ROSEMARY HENESSY: Well, thank you, Amy and Kim. I'm really pleased to be here and so happy that you're talking about Meridel Le Sueur and her novel, The Girl.

KIM: So Rosemary, your book is about seven young women who turned to Communism during the Great Depression. Can you talk about what prompted you to write it?

ROSEMARY: Sure. As someone who has worked in feminist studies for decades, I really wanted to know who were the feminists of the 1930s. This was a decade of the Great Depression, as well as a period of major organizing by socialists and communists. I wanted to learn more about that time, because it seemed to me that it was a gap in the history of US feminism. And it turns out I did learn a lot. I also had in mind my mysterious grandmother. In 1926, when she was only 19 years old and my father was 18 months old, she ran away. She took her mother in law's suitcase and the Sunday school cash and left her baby with her parents. So it was about maybe nine months later that her then young husband received a postcard from a P. O. box in Chicago, and she was asking for him to take her back. He never answered the letter.

KIM: Wow.

AMY: So when did you find out that story? Did you always know that family lore?

ROSEMARY: I think so. You know, it wasn't a secret. It wasn't hidden. And we knew that my father had been raised by his grandmother. So, yeah, it was just part of the family story. And I have a lot of sisters, and we all have been, at various times, very intent on finding who was this woman. And I've often wondered, and especially writing this book, you know, I started to see in Meridel Le Sueur's novel the woman who could have been my grandmother. Who left, you know, a small town, it was Philadelphia, but it was still a small neighborhood, as a young person and went to the big city. Did she do some of the things that "the girl" had to do? Like... resorting to sex work, or having to figure out how to manage her own reproductive choices? Did she even, maybe, and I love this fantasy, I still harbor it, did she maybe join the Communist Party? Or did she end up in bread lines in the 1930s?

KIM: Yeah, I'm almost about to cry thinking about your grandmother. So, Meridel Le Sueur was born in 1900 in Iowa. She lived in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas before moving with her family to the Twin Cities. Both her parents were socialists, and her mother was an outspoken feminist. What else should we know, Rosemary, about her upbringing in terms of how it affected who she would become as a writer?

ROSEMARY: Well, one thing to know, and this really struck me as I was learning about her biography, is that her mother, whose name was Marion Wharton, was a really strong character, and I think she made a tremendous impact on her daughter's life. Their politics really diverged over their lifetimes, but, as a child, I think this woman who was so strong must have made a big impression on her daughter. As you said, she was a feminist and a socialist, and she lectured on what was called the Chautauqua Circuit then. And she lectured on birth control. She even chained herself to the fence around the White House as part of her very deliberate politics for women's right to vote. So her mother left the state of Texas where she was living with her husband and children and took the children, basically kidnapped them. And took them to Oklahoma where her mother was living, and they lived for some years there. Divorce was illegal in the state of Texas then. So she was basically like, saving not only her children, but her future. Several years later, she met a man named Arthur Le Sueur. He had been mayor of the city of Minot in North Dakota. And together, the two of them, along with Eugene Debs, who was a leading socialist then, founded in Kansas City a school that was basically a college for working class people. It was called The People's College in Fort Scott, Kansas. So Meridel's growing up years were spent in this lively network of free thinkers and socialists who were visiting that school. And that too, you know, had a profound impact on her. The other part of that experience in Oklahoma and Kansas is that she was very aware of the native people and communities that were living around them. And the other thing to know about her is that her great grandmother was Native American. So then the family moved from Fort Scott to the Twin Cities area because vigilantes basically attacked the school and burned it down. So the Le Sueurs moved and there in, St. Paul and Minneapolis, they became very active politically, especially in the Farmer Labor Party. So you get a sense of what the political atmosphere was and some of the family ties and culture. 

AMY: Yes, for sure. Very formative seeing what her mother and her husband were doing for the communities and traveling and seeing different parts of the country, really, too, and seeing that it was sort of, these situations were everywhere. So, Le Sueur joined the Communist Party in the 1920s, and she stayed a member until her death in 1996. And during the Great Depression, which is the time period in which The Girl, this novel, is set, she was in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area, as you said, living side by side with the types of women that she would go on to write about so vividly in this book. So tell us a little bit more about this time in her life in the Twin Cities, Rosemary.

ROSEMARY: Well, it's important to remember that in the 1920s she gave birth to her two daughters, Deborah and Rachel, Deborah was born in 1926 and Rachel in 1928. She had divorced their father earlier on. And so essentially during the 30s, she was a single mother raising her kids. Her writing career took off. Also in the late 1920s, she published her first story in 1927 in The Dial, which was a prestigious Modernist journal. She tried to live off of her writing and published mostly in those years in left leaning magazines like, The New Masses, The Progressive, Partisan Review. She also worked odd jobs: in a factory, on the line as a waitress, even as a washroom attendant. She was also, in those years, part of an organization called the Workers Alliance in the Twin Cities. This was an organization mostly supported by the Communist Party, and as the novel describes, it was really in the forefront of offering support for unemployed people, especially during the time before federal relief was available for them. I think that one of the ways that this novel speaks to people in post COVID times is because it really gives voice to people who are struggling, who are working class people, sometimes unemployed, struggling to support their families, as she was. And a lot of her writing, she's really tuned in to what women do and know. So here's an excerpt from her 1937 essay entitled, "Women Know a Lot of Things." They don't read about the news. They pick it up at its source, in the human body. In the making of the body. And the feeding and nurturing of it. Day in, day out. In that body, under your hands, every day. There resides the economy of that world. It tells you the price of oranges. and cod liver oil, of spring lamb, of butter, eggs, and milk. You don't have to read the stock reports in Mr. Hearst's newspaper. You have the news at its terrible source.

AMY: That reminds me of, um, a line from The Girl, actually, where she writes, What happens to women? What awful things do they know? I remember highlighting that while I was reading that, and it's kind of echoing what you just read there.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And I wanted to read a very quick passage that stuck with me from " Women on the Breadlines." Um, it's, quoted in the introduction to the West End Press edition from 2006 of The Girl. It's one of the great mysteries of the city where women go when they are out of work and hungry. There are not many women in the bread line. There are no flop houses for women as there are for men, where a bed can be had for a quarter or less. You don't see women lying around on the floor at the mission in the free flops. What happens to them? Where do they go?

AMY: So interesting, and I don't think I ever really thought about that. You can really see how all of this work that she's doing builds to result in this manuscript, The Girl. This book winds up answering a lot of these questions about where were the women, you know, where did they go? What happened to them? While the men were suffering, the women were actually suffering worse. And that's what this book is about. So let's go ahead and leap into our discussion of The Girl. Why don't you, Rosemary, give us a little basic spoiler free overview of the plot.

ROSEMARY: The central character is this unnamed narrator, "the girl". And we meet her soon after she's arrived In St. Paul, and she's working as a waitress in a place called the German Tavern. The bootlegged liquor in the tavern is run by an underworld network whose leader pays for police protection. So "the girl" has a crush on one of the gang members, a guy named Butch, and he draws her into... many things, uh, promises of a future together, but also, driving the getaway car for the bank robbery that the gang is planning. So the plot follows "the girl" through her disenchantment, basically, with the men's competitive fantasies, her eventual pregnancy, and her awakening to an alternative way of life. There's a woman named Amelia who represents that alternative. She's an organizer and a member of the Workers Alliance.

KIM: So a lot of the action takes place in this German Village Tavern. Incidentally, listeners, that was a real establishment back in the 1930s. Amy, it reminded me of a place Dirty Helen Cromwell might've owned. We did a previous episode on Cromwell. She was a real life, madam bootlegger and speakeasy owner from Milwaukee. She had quite a life. Um, and we'll link to that episode in our show notes, 

AMY: Absolutely. I was totally getting Dirty Helen vibes the whole time I was reading this. And I'm gonna go ahead and read the opening passage of The Girl, because I think it really pulls you into this world right away. Saturday was the big day at the German village where I was lucky to get a job in those bad times. And Clara and I were the only waitresses and had to be going up and down from the bar to the bootleg rooms upstairs. My mama had told me that the cities were Sodom and Gomorrah, and terrible things could be happening to you, which made me scared most of the time.

I was lucky to get the job after all the walking and hunting Clara and I had been doing. I was lucky to have Clara showing me how to wander on the street and not be picked up by plain clothesmen and police matrons. They will pick you up, Clara told me, and give you tests and sterilize you, or send you to the women's prison.

I liked to be with Clara and hear about it, and now with Belle, who, with Hoink, her husband, and Ack, his brother, ran the German village. It wasn't German, but lots of even stylish people came there after hours for the bootleg Belle and Hoink made. Clara told me all about what was going on up there, and it scared me.

The men who came in the back alley door and went past the bar and upstairs scared me. Clara told me about Gans, who brought in bootleg from Dakota and paid protection for the place. I shivered when he passed me. And Clara would take my place when Belle told me to take them beer, because she said she could field them better when they tried to make a home run or a strike with their two free paws.

Sometimes I didn't even know the words Clara spoke. I had a lot to learn, Clara said. 

So we see her naivete, her innocence.

KIM: Yeah. I mean, she just feels so real to me from the very opening passage that you just read. I mean, I was transported instantly reading this book. I didn't know anything about it when I started reading it, but I loved it. If the German Village is the hub of what's happening in the novel, I feel like women are the heart of it. There's a lot of suffering on their part. There's abuse. Um, but there almost seems to be a spiritual aspect to it in the way that Le Sueur is describing it. I'm thinking, for instance, of "the girl"'s mother, when she's talking about her love for her husband and children, it has a sacrificial feel to it. She says, it's a fierce feeling you have for your husband and children. Like you could feed them your body and chop yourself into little pieces. 

ROSEMARY: This is such a striking image, of women so intensely nurturing and caring for others that they feel they're feeding them their bodies, chopping yourself up into little pieces. For me, that image captures something very familiar, a very familiar embodied experience that's kind of at the heart of the contradiction of care work. The fierce love that drives it and the toll that self sacrifice exacts. Le Sueur is so good at conveying this tension in women's reproductive labor between that fierce love and its costs. So in the novel, I think we see lots of examples of this. And "the girl"'s mother is one. She's literally been eroded by a thankless and violent marriage and one pregnancy after another, and yet, as "the girl" acknowledges, chased like by a pack of wolves. She kept us alive. And at the same time, women do sustain one another. When "the girl" leaves home for the city, she develops this friendship with Clara, who becomes a mainstay and a support. She also gets support from Belle, who, now, I don't know about Dirty Helen, but when you describe her, Belle sounds a lot like her.

AMY: Oh yeah.

ROSEMARY: She runs the tavern. And then there are other women who come through, including Amelia, and surprisingly for me, Butch's mother.

AMY: Who, Butch's mother keeps being depicted as a woman who's not even in her right mind, like she's lost it. But yes, you still have an affinity for her, and, also she says some of the wisest lines sometimes in the whole novel, even though she's off in the corner, kind of being the crazy lady. Something will come out of her mouth. Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah. The oracle. 

ROSEMARY: And the effect, I think, is that you get a range of generations, from the ingenue girl to this perhaps demented, quite elderly woman.

KIM: Mm hmm.

AMY: The community of women, it kept reminding me of the novel and the movie Women Talking. I don't know if you guys have either read the book or seen that movie, but just, women of all generations kind of coming together to talk about their collective trauma, and supporting one another.

KIM: She doesn't leave the men out either. They're not necessarily flattering portrayals, but they aren't flat. She really develops the characters really well. Um, a few of the men seem capable of love on some level, but they're pretty much thwarted at every turn too. They're on the edge. And it almost feels like they're a pack of wolves looking for a reason to attack because they're on the defensive all the time. And I'm thinking of one particular scene that I found really chilling. The Christmas tree lighting scene where they're kind of all gathering. 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, it is a chilling scene, I mean, not only because it's cold, but because it's so dark and so menacing.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

ROSEMARY: It's important, I think, for us to remember this is the nadir of the Depression years. The men who are gathered there in the public square are there to get some food, maybe donuts and coffee, it seems, which never appear. And the word Christmas is repeated several times and it took me a little while to realize that it's printed as X mas. And in fact, a lot is canceled out here, besides the holiday cheer. It's a scene, I think, that's really preparing the bank robbery. The crowd of men are depicted as weak. The gangsters among them, as you said, are like hungry wolves. So the effect is a scene that's a spectacle of alienation, of, paralysis, really, and of something basic that's broken. So at one point "the girl" asks, why don't they do something? And then goes on to describe the crowd as crouched over our hollow stomachs, nursing our hungers like cancer. And never looking at one another or never seeing a way. So for me, what's so brilliant here is that Le Sueur is knitting together sexual politics into this scene when she has Butch basically give her, "the girl", to the lead gangster, and then he pushes her and she falls as if she's reduced to an object of exchange between two men. So on the one hand, we may think of this scene that's a kind of justification for the robbery, because people are desperately hungry and the state has completely failed to provide for them. But on the other hand, Le Sueur is helping the reader to see that the gangsters are really beaten down by a narrow idea of what's required of a man. They're part of a system, too, that is using people up and pitting them against one another. Never, as "the girl" remarks, never looking at the other or never seeing a way.

AMY: It's interesting. I'm thinking of "the girl"'s best friend, Clara, and she's described as always having an idealistic vision of her future. You know, she's always planning what her kitchen is going to look like someday, or, you know, what fabulous life she might have. And of course, you know, that that's never going to happen. But yeah, it's the first time I'm really thinking that Butch is like that, too, in a way. He always says, I'm a winner. I'm a winner. And when it's clear that he's so pathetic, he's such a loser, but he keeps trying to talk about like, I'm a winner and things are going to get better when we can have our gas station and we'll run a business and it's all going to work out. They're just clinging to a shred of hope. Yeah. Men and women. 

ROSEMARY: And, what's pathetic is not just Butch as a character, although he is, but that narrow script that men have to compete, to win, to get ahead. and then there's what's available to fill in even what that means.

KIM: Right. So let's talk a little bit more about gangsters, because apparently Le Sueur was actually somewhat familiar with the underworld of the Twin Cities. Is that right, Rosemary? What can you tell us about her knowledge of that?

ROSEMARY: Yeah, St. Paul in the 1920s and early 30s was really widely known as a place for gangsters and some famous ones actually passed through or stayed there: Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone. So bank robbers and bootleggers really from all over the Midwest came there to run their operations or to hide from the FBI. And the plot of the story is really drawing on very much real life events that were happening in that city.

AMY: So, yeah, I feel like we've been discussing all this social messaging and forgetting the fact that this is a gangster novel and it does build up to this big climax, the bank robbery, and as we said, "the girl" is tapped to drive the getaway car. Now, side note, my daughter listens to nonstop Taylor Swift all day long. There's a Taylor Swift song called “Getaway Car,” and every time I hear her sing it, I think about this book now. Um, but yeah, the bank robbery scene, it is so gripping. I love the way Le Sueur writes it. You can hear the ticking clock, you can see the moments, the waiting in the car on the sidewalk, the like, footsteps of, you know, the people on the sidewalk. It's just, I was gripped by it. 

KIM: Yeah. After I read this book, I watched the Robert Altman film for the first time, Kansas City, and it's a gangster film. I love Robert Altman, but this is not my favorite of his movies having seen it now, because I actually wish that he had used the plot from The Girl because she does such a great job. It is cinematic. 

AMY: It's totally cinematic. It's great. And the thing that struck me the most is that it's actually "the girl" who has the most composure while this crime is playing out.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: She's the one that keeps her wits together when it all goes south.

KIM: That's a great point. 

AMY: I kept thinking of the movie Badlands, with Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen, because after the bank robbery, they go on the run, and, um, you know, her innocence, combined with his kind of recklessness, reminded me of that story. I think Badlands is set more in the 1960s, but if you're a fan of that movie, I think you would really like this novel also,

ROSEMARY: Doesn't it make you wonder why this was never made into a movie?

AMY: I feel like Angelina Jolie needs to get on this one. This feels like her kind of directorial project.

KIM: Yeah.

ROSEMARY: Maybe you can reach out to her.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Maybe she's listening? 

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: We always hope.

AMY: I thought it was interesting in this book that there's no use of quotation marks or punctuation to set aside the dialogue, right? it works, it's not difficult to read. It's, you know, you would think that would make it more confusing, and it really doesn't. so seamless.

It 

KIM: almost makes you closer to "the girl" by reading it that way. I don't know, on some sort of

AMY: Like, inside her 

KIM: Yeah. Unconscious level. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

AMY: I think so, too. 

ROSEMARY: She really had an ear for ordinary people's talk. and she listened. She got them, you know, not from her imagination, but she got these ways of speaking from listening to people. 

AMY: So the novel has been labeled a Proletarian novel, and there's the socialist subplot with the labor organizer, Amelia, that we mentioned. I was thinking, I know that this, it ultimately wasn't published until the 70s. And I kept thinking, gosh, if this had come out in the late 30s, early 40s, what a recruitment tool this would have been for the Communist Party, right? By the time you're done reading it, you're like, where do I sign? Because we got to fix things, you know? That sounds crazy to say, but she really... lays her point out so well. 

ROSEMARY: And Amelia really carries the book's political message. I think in the manuscript she didn't have quite the sort of foregrounded carrier of the political message role that she does in this final version. But she is there now from the very beginning. Serving as a midwife as a cat is giving birth to kittens and the guys are betting on how many kittens are going to be born. But she's really more than a midwife to kittens or to a baby. I think of her as the Meridel figure, actually. 

KIM: Interesting. 

ROSEMARY: She is there as a teacher, as a supporter to "the girl", and also to the other women, and she's a counterweight, really, to Butch, and the gangsters, and mapping out another way that we can be a whole other set of values.

AMY: Yeah. Um, okay, so you mentioned the birth of the kittens. the first scenes in the bar. It's a fun moment. So we start with the birth and then we also end with the birth. Very symbolic, because women's reproductive power winds up being a through line of this novel. And you see childbearing as both a weight that holds women down, but it's also kind of their superpower. So Rosemary, you write in your book about the ways that Le Sueur likes to tie women's reproductive bodies to the land, right? 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, you know, I think there definitely was, I'll call it a generation of feminist critics who saw that connection between women and the land as not a very productive one because it kind of equates women with Nature as if that's all they can be. and in that way robs women of a certain kind of agency in the world. I don't read Le Sueur that way at all. In fact, I see her as putting what I think of as a radical ecology. She's really expanding how we can understand the reproduction of life as involving, yes, the need for humans to give birth, reproduce, but also for the natural world to reproduce. That humans and the land, they're quite interdependent and entangled. I'd like to refer to one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite stories of hers. It's a widely anthologized story called Annunciation. This was published in 1935, and I think it captures what she's referring to as remembering. I think of it as re, you know, like re-membering, putting back together. So in this story, a woman is reflecting on her experience of pregnancy through her relationship to the pear tree that's outside of her window. She remembers a time in the early weeks of her pregnancy when she had morning sickness and she, quote, “must give it up with the people all looking. And her boyfriend was angry, and he walked away so that these people wouldn't think that he was with her. So then she goes on to savor the memory of a night when the two of them rode on a riverboat to get out of the cold, and she hears the scurrying of tiny animals on the shore, and their little breathing seemed to be all around. I think of them, she says, wild, carrying their young now, crouched in the dark underbrush with the fruit scented land wind in their delicate nostrils, and they are looking out at the moon and the fast clouds. Silent, alive, they sit in the dark shadow of the greedy world. There's something wild about us, too. We too are at the mercy of many hunters.

KIM: Whoa, that is beautiful. 

ROSEMARY: So for me, this is the sensibility that so epitomizes Meridel Le Sueur and remains really at the heart of her politics.

AMY: I think it's also interesting in terms of women's reproductive bodies, which she brings up in the novel, the value to the economy for the work we are providing. Like talk about a labor movement! Literally, we're keeping this whole thing going with our bodies. That was fascinating, and I think just the cyclical nature of the seasons, then you're also thinking in this book about like the, the seasons of women, the generations of women. I kept going back to thinking about my grandmothers, my great grandmother, who I don't even know, their mothers, you know, like thinking about the generations of women that came before us. There's a very strong sense of the interconnectedness.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: The generations. 

KIM: So, Le Sueur, maybe not that surprisingly after some of the stuff we're saying, but she was blacklisted, unfortunately, in the 1950s. What happened and how did this impact her legacy, Rosemary? Mm hmm.

ROSEMARY: The 1950s were really tough for her. She was a member of the Communist Party, and she never denounced that fact. Her grandson, David Tilson, told me that she kept open for years, the Communist Party bookstore in St. Paul, so even through these difficult times. Her parents died in the mid 50s, and so did her partner, Bob Brown, the artist. So that was tough. She lived then in the boarding house that her parents had kept, and she taught creative writing courses through a correspondence program, and through all of that, she was hounded by the FBI to such an extent that her boarders, like, left. And her students quit. She was summoned by the House Un American Activities Committee, and they couldn't find her. She lost jobs, and it was then that she went to work at the Minnesota Asylum for the Insane. So, yes, she was also blacklisted and unable to get published except in Communist magazines and presses. So basically, the U. S. government wanted to relegate her to oblivion. They almost succeeded in doing that. 

AMY: So we mentioned in the introduction that The Girl didn't get published until 40 years after it was written. Why? What's the story there? And, when it was eventually published, what were some of the changes made in the intervening decades, or were there any?

ROSEMARY: Well, men in the Communist Party definitely voiced their criticism of her writing. It really speaks to what you had been mentioning before, the ways that women's lives, women's reproductive capacity, women's labor, matters to Le Sueur. All of that was just completely unrecognizable to male critics, because she just didn't conform to their priorities. Men in the party also saw her erotic sensibility as bourgeois, you know, as not working class. When she tried to publish her novel, it was rejected for being too lyrical. It was rejected for not being written in the style of Ernest Hemingway, and because publishers didn't think that a woman could write a crime novel.

AMY: Think about this. If we're to tell you right now, this is a crime novel that is written in the most beautiful lyrical style, isn't that a draw?

KIM: Yeah, exactly. 

AMY: What's wrong with that? That's amazing.

ROSEMARY: And so we would say, now, this is a woman who was clearly ahead of her time.

AMY: Yeah.

ROSEMARY: And because of that, what she was doing was unrecognizable. So then she put aside her manuscript and it stayed out of sight until the early 70s. What happened, basically, was that historical conditions had made it recognizable as groundbreaking. John Crawford, who founded the left wing publishing house West End Press in 1970, he learned about the manuscript and approached her and suggested that she dust it off and revise it. And she did. As I said, she modified Amelia's role, and she changed the ending. Uh, the baby originally was a boy, and this time around it became a girl. And she wrote to Crawford that she also had deepened the sexual perception of "the girl" and women. So by 1978, when the novel was published, we know that the women's liberation movement by then was in full flower. And, um, and she was able to represent "the girl"'s sexual experiences and women's discussions of sex more openly, more frankly, than she would have been able to do in 1939.

AMY: What a moment in the book that is. 

KIM: Mm

AMY: When "the girl" has her first sexual encounter and when it's over she goes immediately to the women. It's such a communal moment of all the women being there for her, sort of recounting their own experiences. I mean, it was very powerful.

ROSEMARY: Yeah, and she talks about, the phrase that stuck with me was, how awful wonderful it was.

KIM: Yes. 

ROSEMARY: And how it was really scary, and it hurt. And... The things that many of us may have wanted to say and maybe got to or maybe didn't. So I think it absolutely still resonates now, that scene. Also, this is a novel that talks about sex work. And that's part of "the girl"'s education too.

KIM: Right. Right.

ROSEMARY: Abortion is gonna feature in the novel, and we really get a picture that women's control over their reproductive capacity is also at the center of this book.

KIM: So with these changes that Le Sueur made to the manuscript, the story arc gets stronger. "the girl" goes from being this quiet pushover to becoming an empowered woman. And I felt like the ending was unexpectedly hopeful and I loved that about it.

AMY: Those last two chapters or so of this book left me speechless. I will never forget reading the end of this novel and how, how powerful it is. It's interesting, Rosemary, I didn't know that she changed the sex of the baby from a boy to a girl, because to me, that's 

the ending. It's the daughter, it's the, 

KIM: It's so perfect. 

AMY: The next generation of women. And this whole idea of she's called "the girl" the whole time. She doesn't have a name in the novel. She's just "the girl". Her mom calls her girl, you're not quite sure if it's a term of endearment or maybe kind of just dismissive in some ways, the way her mom says it. So, it comes up again at the end of the novel, and it's such a sisterhood moment. 

KIM: Right, right. Definitely taking it to the next generation.

ROSEMARY: Absolutely. I love the ending too. And in addition to all of what you've said, I really love that here, Le Sueur is weaving together those private spaces of women together, and the public space of what's happening outside the warehouse. Uh, and the two then kind of converge in the sense that collective action in the streets and in this warehouse home where the women are all huddled together to support each other in, like, the most dire circumstances, that that organizing that they do together then turns into a public demand for the resources that Clara didn't have and others of them don't have. So that's, for me, what really makes this powerful. That women are able to come together and do something that is so not scripted for us as women, which is demand, in public, what we need. 

AMY: So Le Sueur lived until age 96, which is incredible. Uh, she had such an interesting life. Rosemary, is there anything about her later years that you'd want to share? 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, sure, sure. During the 70s and the 80s, she was very much embraced by the feminist movement. It really enabled the recovery of a lot of her work, I mentioned that earlier. She also made a very beautiful film entitled My People Are My Home in 1976 and that's available actually on YouTube. One thing that is important to know about her later years is that she just kept writing into her 90s, even on her deathbed. And the writing that she did then was continually reinventing forms. When she was 91, she published a novel, it's called the Dread Road, and it's written in three columns. And one column is an excerpt from an Edgar Allen Poe short story, “A Message in a Bottle.” Another column is excerpts from Le Sueur's copious journals. And a third, which is the core narrative, is based on a trip that she had actually taken. It's narrated by an old woman, and this old woman gets on a bus in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and in the bus station, she meets a young Mexican woman who is carrying in her backpack a dead baby. So the journey passes through a nuclear test site, the town of Ludlow, Colorado, where there had been a massacre in 1914. And so there's this history of slow violence that hangs over the story. This is a book that really speaks to who we are in the 21st century, now trying to comprehend the ways that slow violence has materialized, especially in the climate disaster that we're living through, also in nuclear threats, and we're certainly reminded of them by this recent movie Oppenheimer. And we're trying to imagine what it means to restore a relationship to one another and to the land. So Meridel Le Sueur is writing about all of that. It's packed into the columns of this crazy novel.

AMY: So when you say columns, do you mean typeset columns? 

ROSEMARY: Yes. 

AMY: Wow.

ROSEMARY: So it's very unsettling. Like how the heck do I even read this? 

AMY: Yeah.

ROSEMARY: Right? I mean, she was pretty brilliant. And I think in many ways, a really great American writer.

KIM: I mean, she is an incredible woman, not just because of what she wrote, but that she was actually living it. She put herself out there in these situations, not just to be able to write about it but because she believed in it and she was really living out her beliefs. I mean, it just seems incredible. 

AMY: I was thinking a little bit reading this book about The Grapes of Wrath, too, and how this is such a good alternative in terms of getting a woman's perspective on that era.

KIM: Yeah. I always said my grandmother on my dad's side of the family was, we always say it was very Grapes of Wrath, in their life and experiences during the Depression. But now I'm thinking of my grandmother in a whole other way. No, she was more The Girl, and I wish she was still alive so she could read this and we could talk about it together.

ROSEMARY: You should definitely read some of her journalism, Kim, yeah, because you will maybe see your grandmother there, too.

KIM: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Rosemary, we can't thank you enough for coming on the show to talk about Le Sueur, and we love this discussion so much.

ROSEMARY: Well, I'm so happy you're doing this. Yeah, so, so grateful to you, because your listeners will now know something about Meridel Le Sueur. This has been a real honor and a real, fun conversation.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and leave us a review if you enjoyed the show, and visit our Facebook Forum to chat with us and other listeners. Until next time, keep exploring the lost gems of women's literature. 

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.

161. An England Travelogue

KIM: Hi everyone. Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes, and we're squeezing today's episode in during our lunch hour. But I'm actually really excited for this one because Amy is going to tell us all about her recent trip to England. 

AMY: Um, I think maybe listeners might start to groan a little bit because personally, that's the last thing that I enjoy doing is listening to people talk about their vacations. I promise, well, actually, I cannot promise 100%, but I hope that this episode will not be as tedious as all that. I've already been to England a couple times, so I didn't do any of the standard landmarks, you know, well known that everybody kind of has to hit up. I had an opportunity to really explore some lesser known sites. And yes, I may have even encountered a few lost ladies!

KIM: Oh, I can't wait to hear more about that. I'm so excited.

AMY: Okay. So highlights: day one, Hampstead Heath. You've been there, right? 

KIM: Yeah. I used to live near Hampstead Heath, so I went there all the time. 

AMY: It's so pretty. We went to this really cool modern home that's in Hampstead: Number 2 Willow Road. It was the home of an architect named Erno Goldfinger. It's in this modern style that sets it apart from all the other architecture in Hampstead, right? And remember our friend Ian Fleming, who likes to throw squid at his girlfriends? 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: Well he, when this home was being built, did not like the look of it. (I guess a lot of neighbors protested and took it up with the neighborhood council or whatever.) And Ian Fleming was so annoyed about the whole thing that he wound up naming his one villain in the James Bond “Goldfinger.” 

KIM: I was gonna make a joke about that! About Goldfinger and James Bond. Oh, wow. And there is a connection. That's so funny. Okay.

AMY: Anyway, we're on a group tour there. We were told explicitly when we walked in, “Do not touch anything.” This one guy could not stop touching everything. He kept getting yelled at.

KIM: Citizens arrest time!

AMY: It was shocking. I am such a rule follower. 

KIM: Oh, totally. Me, too. I was with my old college roommate, Meg, I should say. So she and I were silently horrified. The guide kept telling him, “Sir, please stop.” Anyway, this house, 2 Willow Road, is my first connection to a Lost Lady of Lit because prior to leaving on the trip, I was reading an article. There's a new biography out on Leona Carrington, who wrote, um, The Hearing Trumpet, was a kind of surrealist writer. Anyway, I was reading the review for this book and it mentioned that she met her husband, the painter Max Ernst, at the home of her friends, Erno and Ursula Goldfinger. And I was like, “That's where I'm going! That's 2 Willow Road!” So Leonora Carrington met her husband at a party at this house. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. .Yeah, the Lost Lady serendipity continues. 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. after that we walked into Hampstead Heath, we looked at Kenwood House. I did not go in Kenwood House because there's only so many houses that my travel companion Meg can do, and we had already done one that day, so I was like, alright. But I would've loved to go in. Keats' home is in Hampstead Heath also. 

KIM: Oh, yes, yes. 

AMY: I didn't have time for it. And also I was spending way too much time, keeping my eyes peeled for Harry Styles, because apparently it's his neck of the woods. Did not see him. Alright, moving on to Day Two. The John Soane’s Museum. He was one of England's greatest Neoclassical architects. This was his house. It's beautiful. It's got all these cool skylights, but what's really interesting about it is he was a collector of all these classical antiquities, from coins to full-size sculptures. 

KIM: The kind of hoarder we like.

AMY: Yes, but I wouldn't even say hoarder because he has it all meticulously placed. I am just marveling at everything I'm seeing. Also he's got this art gallery in the house. It's like all these hidden panels, so a wall that you can actually open up then there's another layer of paintings inside. So this guy owned William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress. 

KIM: Oh my God! 

AMY: Hidden in one of these hidden compartments. So I think they could tell that I was super geeking out about everything in this house, so they opened the cabinets and they took you through each painting and explained the whole story. 

KIM: I have to go there.

AMY: I know. I can't stop raving about it. It's so beautiful. Alright, after the John Soane’s Museum, I got to meet up with one of our guests for lunch: Lucy Scholes. 

KIM: I am so jealous about this. We love her. 

AMY: She did our episodes on Rosamond Lehmann and Kay Dick, and how great is this? So she picked a restaurant called Toklas, as in Alice Toklas. And I was like, oh, what a great coincidence. And she's like, “Of course I picked that for Lost Ladies of Lit!” So anyway, great seeing her. She says, hi, Kim. Then I went to this really cool place. It's like a tiny storefront, but it's called Novelty Automation, and I saw it on Instagram… 

KIM: Oh my God. That is so you.

AMY: What? 

KIM: I just already… Novelty Automation.

AMY: I know totally. You go in and you buy tokens, and then there's a bunch of, like, arcade games, I would call them, but they're mechanical, and then, um, you just play all the games and they're like… I'll give you an example of one. It's this cage and it has a ferocious dog's head that's probably made out of paper mache or something. And you have to stick your hand in the cage, and then a meter comes on that shows how courageous you are and you start hearing the dog panting and growling and stuff. And you're seeing how long you can keep your hand held in this cage. Then at the last second, the dog snaps and then of course you pull your

KIM: Or do you?

Right. Exactly. Maybe a better person than I could have lasted. 

AMY: But yeah, like it's all super creative. I was obsessed with this. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: I would've gone back if I had had more time. 

KIM: Have you been, there's one in San Francisco and it's definitely got a creepy side to it, but it's basically old carnival-type games like that. 

AMY: Okay. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah.

AMY: It's kind of like that, like the Zoltar machine kind of thing. They all have that kind of vibe. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: And I don't even wanna talk about any of the other ones 'cause so much of it is about the surprise.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: So then that night, we went to this place called the Viktor Wynd Museum. It's in an absent bar, and it's this very tiny museum that's packed, I mean, thousands.

That sounds crazy, but it's really a lot of weird curiosities. it's like

real weird 

stuff.

And I'm talking, 

it's not for children 

and it is not for the faint of heart. Like some of 

it is hard to look at. Taxidermied animals out the 

wazoo. There's like a whole, remember how we talked in the, um, Jurassic Technology episode about the, um, 

house flies that were dressed up like ballerinas. So there's a housefly picnic at the Viktor Wynd Museum.

It's a bunch of flies that are having a picnic have little 

wine glasses 

KIM: Oh my God. You found all the perfect places. 

AMY: I found 

the perfect places for me. 

Amy: if you're into all those curiosities and stuff. Sometimes my tastes run

a little to the strange

for sure.

KIM:: yeah, hidden because it's like meeting you at first you would not realize that, but you have depth. That's 

AMY: Viktor Wynd is a real guy who just has collected all this stuff for a long time and has it all set up here. Um, he has a whole section on Stephen Tennant, the famous English

dandy, I guess what, however you wanna describe him. He would, 

So while I was looking at the Stephen Tennant displays, . Another little framed photograph caught my eye and lo and behold, who do we find again? But 

Leonora 

Carrington. 

KIM: wow. 

AMY: Apparently she was friends with Viktor Wynd. I was like, what are the odds? Like two days in a row, Leonora Carrington is popping up. It just made me think we're supposed to do an episode on her clearly. cause it's like she was shouting to me. Yes. Okay, so I went to this immersive theater experience by a theater company called Punchdrunk. The name of the performance was The Burnt City, which is basically ancient Greece, like like Troy, Agammemnon, like a combination of two ancient tragedies that they take and my friend, Meg, has already been to one of these in New York City. She's like, “it's really cool. Just trust me.” She started being kind of hesitant to tell me, and I was like, “is this gonna be something super weird?” And so you get in, it's this dark warehouse. They give you a mask because the mask is the only way to differentiate the audience from the performers, because the are like walking around 

you. There's all these rooms. 

It's like a haunted house, like you walk in, you're not even supposed to stay with your friends or anything. You're supposed to go totally on your own. You can open any door, you can open the books on the shelves. You can open the drawers on the nightstand. 

KIM: That’s amazing. It is like our kind of Disneyland. 

AMY: It was a little bit unnerving. And then there's lots of like, performative dance done by very sinewy, half naked people. Sometimes fully naked people. 

KIM: Okay. 

AMY: Um, I was kind of done by the end of the two hours. 

KIM: Oh, I'm intrigued. 

AMY: But I'm glad I did it. Um, Uh, I will jump ahead to day four. We did some other fun stuff on day three, but I'm just gonna jump ahead to Blenheim Palace 'cause this takes me back to our episode Number 24 on The Gilded Age and Consuelo Vanderbilt. That's where she lived. So there were tons of pictures of Consuelo everywhere, like beautiful giant paintings of her. I think we talked about the fact that she didn't really love living at Blenheim Palace. And I kind of get why, because she was an American coming to marry the Duke of Marlborough. This house, I mean, it's a palace. It's bigger than Buckingham Palace. It dwarfs her giant mansion from Newport, Rhode Island, right? Like, it makes her Newport home look like a tiny house. Um, so it was interesting to see, but I got why she found it very kind of cold and oppressive to live there. It's also the home where Winston Churchill was born. So if you remember Jenny Churchill, Winston's mother. She was staying there for a while, like before their house in London was ready, and Winston was born “prematurely,” I say in quotation marks, um, 

KIM: Mm-hmm. One of those.

AMY: Yeah. One of those, probably. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: So, yeah, after Blenheim Palace, I had cream tea with another of our former guests Simon Thomas of the Tea or Books? podcast.

KIM: We love him. 

AMY: Yeah. He was on to discuss O the Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith 

KIM: Yeah. I hope we'll have him on again. 

AMY: Yeah, I think he's gonna come back on, you know why? Because while I was visiting him, he gave me a new book from the British Library Series that he consults on, and this one is by Angela Milne called One Year's Time. 

KIM: Mm. 

AMY: It's really good. She is actually the niece of A.A. Milne of Winnie the Pooh fame. 

KIM: Okay, 

AMY: I think it would be cool to have him back on and discuss that. And he's, uh, just as charming in person as he was on our podcast recording.

KIM: Aww.

AMY: We almost got attacked by bees while we were eating, but we were fine. We had to retreat indoors. but yeah, fun visiting with him. And that launched the start of my visit to The Cotswolds, 'cause he's kind of on the edge of that area. The Cotswolds are called An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty 

KIM: Hmm. 

AMY: It's not a misnomer it's like the, like the quintessential idea of an English village. So like the stone houses, the thatched roof cottages, the little rolling streams, the um, kissing gates. All that kind of stuff that you think of in England, or like a Thomas Hardy novel or something like that. Unrelenting beauty. At one point we were, um, parking to go to our next place that I'm gonna talk about. But there was a field of sheep and we got out of the car and we were totally in the way of everyone pulling into the parking lot. And so the person like waving people into the lot was like, “ladies, you have to get outta the way.” My friend was like, “Sorry, we just, we don't have sheep in Brooklyn!” Like, we were just like, everything was stopping us dead in our tracks. We were so excited. So in the Cotswolds, we went to this place called Snowshill Manor. Another architect. His name was Charles Wade, and he was also an artist, very eccentric. I would kind of describe him as like an architect version of Willy Wonka. I mean, he even kind of looks like that in some of pictures… he likes to dress up and wear weird hats and things like that. So he had this, um, manor house that he. I think he redesigned it. I'm not sure that he built it from scratch, but he used it to house 22,000 items that he collected in his lifetime, which I use the term “hoarder” with one of the docents, and they got a little bit outraged with me, so we're not supposed to call him a hoarder. He collected things and he had 'em all curated, sort of like John Soane, again, like curated very nicely. But you would just walk into a room and it would be filled with spinning wheels. You’d walk into another room and it was all baby prams or Regency costumes or suits of armor. Everywhere your eye rested, it was on something fabulous that you were just like, “Oh my God, what?” His motto was “Let nothing perish.” So he just didn't like throwing anything out. He actually didn't even live in the house. The house was for the objects and he lived in a little cottage in the backyard, like a shed that didn't have any electricity or anything. And apparently, Queen Mary visited Snowshill Manor in 1937, and she said that of all the collection, Mr. Wade was the most remarkable piece in the collection. So he was quite a character. Virginia Woolf visited too at one point, and she got annoyed because she didn't know when to leave to catch her train because he would not tell her the time. And there was like more than a hundred clocks in the house, but they were all set to different times. So that's where the Willy Wonka thing is coming in and she was getting really frustrated. So yeah, very much a character. I love him. But while I was visiting this museum, there was yet another instance of a guy touching stuff. There was a weird children's toy, and he didn't understand quite how it worked, and he just reached out and grabbed it and started spinning it, despite the sign. It had a sign that said, “Extremely fragile. Do not touch.” There's no way you should have been touching any of this. But once again, I was appalled. Okay. That night, we wound our way to Stratford on Avon and we caught a production of Macbeth

KIM: Oh my God. 

AMY: At the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

KIM: One of our favorite plays. 

AMY: I'm making you sick with envy.

KIM: Oh, this is, yeah, this is, I'm, I'm like, happy for you, but also like, oh, when am I gonna get to do this?

AMY: Okay, next day, I decided we had to take a pilgrimage to go see the grave of Nancy Mitford. If you guys remember we did an early episode on her with her biographer, Laura Thompson. It wasn't too hard to find. She's buried in a church yard. It's Nancy, then next to her are her sisters, Unity and Diana. So all three of their headstones in a row. I was hoping I was gonna have this quiet moment of reflection.

KIM: Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

AMY: There was a gardener mowing the grass like five feet from us. And so I was super annoyed, but then I thought about it after the fact and I was like, “No, Nancy does not want a quiet contemplative moment at her grave. Like, that's the last thing she would want.” She would, like, play some sort of joke or whatever. So like the lawnmower actually wound up being perfect.

KIM: Right.

AMY: Um, went and drove by the two Mitford homes. Um, the one we kind of saw driving up on like kind of a, a higher road and we just looked down and there was all these rolling hills, and then you could see Asthall, the whole big sprawling mansion in the distance. And that was amazing. And then I wanted to also see Swinbrook, which was another house that they lived in, so the GPS took me right to it. Take a right here. So I take a right and all of a sudden I realize I drove up their driveway! 

KIM: Oh, they're probably used to it. 

AMY: A cooler person would've totally gotten out and knocked on the door and became best friends with whoever lives there now, but I was like, “Throw it in reverse! We're trespassing!”

KIM: Rule follower. Yep. 

AMY: But that, basically, those were the highlights of my trip, I guess I would say. 

KIM: Wow. 

Amy: So thanks for coming along on my journey. I’ve already shared a few. photos from the trip on our Lost Ladies of Lit Facebook forum page. But I'll add a few more and we'll include a link for all the sites that I mentioned. And, we'll be back next week with another full-length episode. Our lunch break has ended.

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

160. Mary Wollstonecraft — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Susan J. Wolfson

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

AMY HELMES: The lost lady we're discussing today. Mary Wollstonecraft, is known to some as the mother who tragically died giving birth to future Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. Today some consider Wollstonecraft the mother of feminism, though we should note the concept didn't really exist in her day.

KIM: Right. She used a framework of philosophical arguments to champion women's rights and was privately referred to by the writer Horace Walpole, as a quote, “a hyena in petticoats.”

AMY: Is that like some 18th century equivalent of “nasty woman?” 

KIM: I think so, yeah. Wollstonecraft's 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a feminist declaration of independence. She argued that women, despite being rational beings with minds equal to men, were kept powerless by a system that denied them an education and treated them as sexual commodities.

AMY: Wollstonecraft's words were revolutionary. Sadly, her husband's sincere endeavor to preserve her legacy following her death ended up having the opposite effect on how she was remembered. Her work molded an obscurity for almost a century before modern feminists took a renewed interest in her. 

KIM: If, like Amy and I, you've heard of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but have never actually taken the time to sit down and read it, you're in for a treat. Today we've got a special guest with a new book out on Wollstonecraft's seminal work, and she's gonna take us through the author's fascinating life as well as some of her key arguments in her vindication.

AMY: And since we're still fighting this fight, it only makes sense that we should take a closer look at Wollstonecraft's ideas. So let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today, Dr. Susan J Wolfson, is a professor of English at Princeton University. Her scholarship focuses on British writers of the Romantic period. She has written and edited numerous books, including a 2022 compilation of Keats’s poetry called A Greeting of the Spirit, and 2018's Romantic Shades and Shadows, as well as annotated editions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. So cool.

AMY: A Guggenheim and NEH recipient, her most recent title is called On Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in April by Columbia University Press. Susan, congratulations on the book and welcome to the show.

SUSAN WOLFSON: Well, I'm delighted to be here.

KIM: Wollstonecraft was born in 1759, and Susan, the first words in the first chapter of your book are, “She was destined for this.” Do you wanna elaborate on how her upbringing and her background set the stage for what would come?

SUSAN: Well, it wasn't just Wollstonecraft's family horror show, but this is rather typical. Women had no power in the family. She had an uneducated mother. The budget went entirely to the first son. The rest of the children were not educated. The father was a spendthrift. He was a drinker. He beat her mother. He beat the children when he could. She slept outside her mother's bedroom in order to protect her. And as soon as she could, she devised ways to get out of that family horror show altogether. She made friends with neighbors, with a clergyman, and became kind of self-educated with those resources. She knew early on from the example of her parents and a lot of what she saw that marriage wasn't for her. It wasn't just marriage to a husband who could do what he liked with her body; beat it, rape it, whatever else, but it was also the serial pregnancies that came with marriage and were eventually a death sentence. Not in your first or second pregnancy, which is what took her mother out, but in your 14th or 15th pregnancy. And yet the opportunities for women who did not want to marry were really quite scant. So what's a brainy woman like Wollstonecraft gonna do? Well, she tells herself and she tells her sister, my nature is pulling me in a different direction, off the beaten track, and I've gotta figure out how to make this work. she was, you know, fairly young when she made that decision. So she was already sensing that the social structure that governed women's lives was not something that she could embrace, and she wanted alternatives. So that's her being born for this. Meanwhile , the French Revolution happened and a form of government that people thought, you know, was baked into human history, monarchy, suddenly got overturned and a new Republican form of government based on participation, the famous motto was “Liberty Fraternity and Equality,” um, that was the French Revolution. The American Revolution had already happened. It seemed that revolution in social structures was not only possible, but inevitable. I mean, this was the coming political order, and Wollstonecraft was excited about that. She was a strong supporter of the principles of the French Revolution. However, women were excluded from the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft felt that the unfinished work of the French Revolution was The Rights of Woman.

AMY: So yeah, so it's clear that she's looking around as a young woman and saying, I don't like what I'm seeing. We gotta fix this. 

SUSAN: I mean, that's the poignancy. There wasn't a community, a community of women who [unclear].

AMY: And so I think it's kind of fascinating that in 1783 she actually sets up an all girls school. 

SUSAN: Yes, she did. I mean, she wanted girls to have an education that stressed their brains and not their bodies. She wanted to introduce science, history, botany, physical exercise, subjects, uh, you know, of wider concern than preparing for the marriage market. It didn't work out. It turned out there wasn't that much of a market for that kind of education for women, and she was not an experienced businesswoman. So when she had to leave the school to go help out her dear friend, Fanny Blood, who died from her pregnancy in Portugal, and when she came back, the school was pretty much in a shambles. And to, you know, raise her spirits and raise some money to pay off the debts that the school owed, she wrote her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. So she's teaching by another means. She's discovered that you can teach through publication, through writing.

KIM: Okay, so when the school floundered financially, she ended up taking a governess position with a wealthy Irish family, and it was a twist of fate she equated with being sent to prison. Was there any upside for her in taking this job?

SUSAN: Yes. And of course Wollstonecraft has a real knack for turning dead ends into new pathways. And this is one of the first of those adventures. Through friends in London who were impressed with her, she got employment at 40 pounds a year with the wealthy Kingsboroughs. Now 40 pounds a year, I mean, this serious change. Um, but it took her far away. Her, this was gonna take her to Cork. I mean, 140 miles southwest of Dublin. uh, She said when she entered the household she felt like she was going into a Bastille, the French prison. But it turned out that this Bastille had a pretty decent library. So at night, Wollstonecraft read a lot. She also liked the daughters that she was hired to educate, particularly the oldest daughter, Margaret, who became very attached to her and Margaret herself, had a very interesting life. Afterwards, she became a doctor But Wollstonecrafter took the daughters outside, educated them by showing, challenging them intellectually. Meanwhile, um, Lady K as she called her, was a kind of bimbo out of the world of Jane Austen's novels, very wealthy, very vain, spent a lot of time dressing for dinner, um, doting on her dogs, taking baths of milk and rosewater. Wollstonecraft's letters of her are quite sarcastic and I mean, entire paragraphs could be, you know, exported to Jane Austen's novels, Lady Bertram, and those sort of wealthy aristocrats. And then Lady K fired Wollstonecraft. So she had, you know, just her salary. Her salary, um, no prospects, no letter of recommendation, no plans. And she goes back to London. And meets with Joseph Johnson, who had published a book that she had written while she was, in Ireland, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. He knew her and he thought she was really smart, that she wrote clearly, she wrote logically, she was lively. Um, and he was a mensch. I mean, he just said, I'll help you out. He set her up in rooms above his bookshop and then helped get her established in her own apartment. Um, he gave her employment, gave, he decided to publish her next novel called Mary. Then he soon hired her at this new sort of progressive journal, something like The New Yorker or something like that of the day called The Analytical Review. Wollstonecraft worked there as a translator and as a reviewer. That became a kind of second education for her. She got to read a lot of stuff and a lot of stuff that women usually don't get to read. But since the reviews were anonymous, she could write about boxing, politics, history and science as well as a shelf load of novels that really just disgusted her as being kind of junk literature. She's really funny in writing about them because you can tell she's just exhausted with the sort of recycled plots and character types over and over again. But she wrote a ton for him. Johnson had a kind of virtual college. He had these weekly dinners in his rooms above the bookshop. And the bookshop itself was a kind of de facto library. Um, you know, anybody could come in there and read the books. But at this table there was William Godwin and William Blake and Joseph Priestly, and Joel Barlow, Anna Barbauld, um, and Mary Wollstonecraft. 

AMY: Dream job.

KIM: Yeah. 

SUSAN: You know, this was a genuinely intellectual circle. I mean, Virginia Woolf writes a wonderful essay about this, where Virginia Woolf, excluded from Oxford, you know, had great sympathy for Mary Wollstonecraft's enthusiasm for this. She said, you know, she was an honorary young man. Basically she was just called “Wollstonecraft.” There wasn't any sort of polite, um, differential, you know, of manners or things they couldn't talk about. So this just completely jazzed her that she had an intellectual life at last in London.

AMY: Yeah. This Joseph Johnson guy who would wind up publishing so much of her stuff for her, I mean, he comes across as a really great guy.

SUSAN: He is. And he published a lot of 'out there' writers. I mean, he was somebody who took risks with writers that he believed in, and, you know, was a real force in the London publishing world.

AMY: I wanted to touch, uh, really quick again on Thoughts on the Education of Daughters because in a previous episode, Kim and I had discovered, I think his name's John Fordyce?

SUSAN: James Fordyce.

AMY: James Fordyce. Yes. He wrote that very condescending book about how to educate your daughters, right? Yes. And so this book that she wrote is kind of almost like an answer back to that, right? 

SUSAN: Yeah, I mean, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters is very cautious. She's not yet "Mary Wollstonecraft."

AMY: Okay.

SUSAN: The real reply to Fordyce comes in the chapters in A Vindication where she takes his conduct manual, Dr. John Gregory's conduct manual and Jean Jacques Rousseau's conduct manual for women, uh, called Sophie the chapter of Emile [or a Treatise on Education], and she basically opens the book and says, “here's what they say; here's what's wrong with what they say.” In other words, she's teaching us how to read against the grain of the three most prestigious books that have been given to parents on how to educate their daughters. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters is just her kind of putting her toe in the water. Once she becomes Mary Wollstonecraft, she's a famous person by the time she's writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Then she lets it all rip open.

AMY: Okay. Love it. 

SUSAN: Now you might remember that Reverend Fordyce, um, James Fordyce, is set up for parody even by Jane Austen.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. In Pride and Prejudice. 

SUSAN: Mr. Collins takes it off the shelf and reads it and all the girls in the household just titter.

AMY: It's such a hilarious scene. And you know, the women at the time were doing that, you know, like, Oh, this guy. Yeah.

SUSAN: Well, yeah, Austen is writing this in the late nineties. Pride and Prejudice gets published in 1813, but yet it was already a kind of ironized discourse. But they still had to do it. I mean that middle class women who wanted to marry well pretty much had to shape themselves into marriageable young women. You know, “Don't be smart, Be deferential. Um, if you have any learning, hide it. If you have any physical vigor, don't show it because it's considered indelicate.” These were still the codes. And for most women, securing a good marriage with what you had was the life goal. And you had to make all those decisions in your twenties. By 28, you were a spinster and your shelf life was toast.

KIM: All right, well that's a perfect segue talking about marriage. So Wollstonecraft turned down a marriage proposal. She had a very memorable reply though. Can you tell us about that? And also her views on marriage, um, why did she see it as such an unappealing prospect? We can kind of guess, but.

SUSAN: The idea that you marry for love is a very late, you know, romantic notion that happens mostly in novels, which is why Wollstonecraft is so cautious about novels. Because it gives false expectations. It was an economic arrangement. You find the kindest and most prominent man, and then prostitute your body to that person. That's what she saw. And some women, you know, wound up lucky and happily married, but most really just made that kind of settlement. Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, for instance, the spinster who takes the odious, Mr. Collins on the rebound, makes a rational judgment. He's a bit of a clod, but 

KIM: Yeah. She knows exactly what she's getting into.

SUSAN: She knows exactly what she's getting into and she figures out how to make the best accommodation with it. So marriage is a very, very severe compromise, especially for an intellectually lively woman like Wollstonecraft.. Her husband could prohibit her from writing if he wanted to as a dereliction of her domestic duties. He certainly had an entire claim on any income she made from her writing, even claim on her manuscript. So she gets this proposal from an intermediary, someone who had noticed her and thought she was pretty hot. And she was, she was a really good looking woman. She was physically vigorous, she was smart, she was lively, and she refused it by proxy. And then the guy tried again and she was insulted. She said, I won't submit myself to prostitution just because I've fallen on financial hard times. It was the first time that she used the word prostitution for marriage, legal prostitution. Now, she did fall deeply in love with a really bad husband prospect, Gilbert Imlay, in France, had a daughter with him, but he just wasn't husband material. And he broke her heart, um, almost broke her body. She tried to commit suicide twice out of despair of his, you know, ever loving her and wanting to set up a home with her. She finally met William Godwin again; a mutual friend reintroduced them. And they began an affair within months. They would not get married. That was something they didn't wanna do because of the legal constraints on marriage for a woman. But when she got pregnant again with little Mary, um, they put aside principle and got married. It cost Wollstonecraft a lot because people hadn't realized that she wasn't married to Gilbert Imlay. She had been calling herself Mrs. Imlay; she had a daughter, little Fanny Imlay. And when she signed herself, “Mary Wollstonecraft, spinster,” in the church register, it was obvious that she had not been married and that Fanny was illegitimate and that she had had an affair out of wedlock. And a lot of their friends cut her, basically refused to see her. She was heartbroken by that. But her other friends stayed true.

AMY: So it really, in some ways, there's no winning. You know, you talk about all the bonds of marriage and how it, would chain her, but not marrying also cost her, you know, so,

SUSAN: Yeah, it did. But she was really happy with Godwin. I mean, that was a really good marriage, finally. It was her last great adventure. Um, it was somebody who loved her mind, who loved her courage, who admired her vindications, and uh, expected to have a life with her. Um, they had separate sort of apartments for working, then they got together in the evening for dinner and sex. So they, you know, they kind of figured out, you know, how to have a marriage that would work for both of them, where they would have intellectual independence and they would both be professional writers. And they would have a marriage. And he, you know, he adored her first daughter, little Fanny. Everybody expected that this was gonna work out.

AMY: It sounds like a very modern marriage by today's standards, right? You know, like they would fit in well today. Alright, so let's talk about her vindications now. Let's switch gears. You mentioned the French Revolution earlier. This really galvanized Wollstonecraft so tell us about this first work A Vindication of the Rights of Men and, uh, the importance of that.

SUSAN: So Edmund Burke turns out to be the father of both her vindications in some ways. Um, Edmund Burke was a liberal Whig parliamentarian. He sided with the American Revolution, um, basically on the issue of taxation without representation. He was against corruption of the colonial administration in India. He was for the abolition of slavery. In other words, she wasn't dealing with a right wing troglodyte. So Edmund Burke, however, saw the French Revolution, said, this is not good. Monarchy is a divinely sanctioned institution. Even though there are inequalities, it is the pattern of Nature. Nature is not uniform. Some trees grow big, some don't. And those who are talking about equality are really destroying the world. He writes about the French monarchy as if it were divinity on Earth. And Burke really knew how to rock a sentence. I mean, it was just, it became an instantaneous bestseller. Wollstonecraft was reviewing for The Analytical Review at the time, and so thinks that she wants to review Burke for The Analytical Review. And it was quite clear, even though The Analytical Review could sponsor a dozen pages for a review, she said, I can't do it. And she decided she had to just sit down and write this out. She wrote it in a blaze in about a month. It was the first response to Burke. There were several responses to Burke. This was the first one that came out. was called A Vindication of the Rights of Man. The Rights of Man being the French Revolutionary document. And this wasn't just “thoughts on,” or “reflections on,” or “letters on” the Rights of Man. She goes out for an aggressive genre, a vindication. That means literally “to speak with force.” It means that you're gonna make a really powerful argument. So this comes out and it's noticed. It sells out. The first edition sells out. Her name is not on the title page. The second edition comes out about three or four weeks later, and it's got "by Mary Wollstonecraft." Now that's really unusual for a woman to sign her name. It's considered extremely unfeminine to go public that way. It's a very short pamphlet, very powerful, very funny, and very sarcastic.

AMY: I love that it wasn't even like a preconceived thing for her. She was just so fired up, you know? It's just like she had no plans to write something like this until she was galled by it, basically.

SUSAN: You know, so Burke became the sort of accidental muse. And then in arguing with Burke, she also kind of started writing paragraphs that she realized had the argument of a vindication of the rights of women. When she started talking about equality, she realized that women were involved in that. That there was a social system that created inequality in which ideally citizens would be fellow citizens and be equals. And I think as she was writing that the, um, idea of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was beginning to take shape, because as soon as she finished that, I mean, this was out in, you know, the second edition in, December 1790, by January of 1791, she was already kind of, you know, planning out A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and she was speaking to the political left. If you are for the rights of man, you have to be for the rights of woman. You can't have it both ways. 

AMY: I'm sure there were other women that were maybe writing or at least discussing fairness and inequality for women. What is it about this work that made it so persuasive and made it such a sensation right off the bat? 

SUSAN: Well, there were women who were writing, but they were accommodating themselves to the world in order to make a living. So you don't find, except obliquely, what we would recognize as a kind of feminist argument in the works of Frances Burney or Maria Edgeworth or even Anna Barbaugh, who distressed Wollstonecraft with some of her poems about female delicacy. So she got very interested in the linguistic politics in the Rights of Woman. Um, and she takes that on right away at the beginning. She has a real attack on comparing women to flowers. She said, that's just admiring them for their beauty and delicacy and short lived value. You're toast at the end of the day, and it can only be a barren blooming. She takes on the stigma of being called a “masculine woman.” That would be the version of a nasty woman, and she has this really funny satire. She says, Well, by that you mean that a masculine woman is somebody who's into hunting and gaming and swearing and cursing and drinking, I'm with you. Who wants to be a masculine woman? And then she says, if you mean by masculine power of intellect, moral self-accountability, the practice of civic virtue, may they every day grow more and more masculine. One of the most stunning passages in the Rights of Woman is when she says about Catherine Macaulay, who had just died. She said, “I will not call hers a masculine understanding because I do not want to give men that arrogation of, you know, the adjective. She is forceful and strong and there is no sex to that.”

KIM: Wow. Preach.

SUSAN: So she's amazingly detached the descriptors masculine and feminine from biological destiny and read them and what we would, you know, kind of call, um, you know, critical gender theory, seeing it as part of a political system of value and not inherent in any one particular accident of birth.

AMY: And she does it all in such an entertaining way. It's like, you know, her style of writing, she's laying out rhetorical gems that are almost irrefutable, really, but then at the same time, she has this kind of tone that I love where she's just like, “oh, I don't know, riddle me this.” You just kinda like her personality as she's laying it all out. 

SUSAN: It is funny. I mean, I'm glad you like that. 'cause some, some people find her boring to read, but I don't think, you know, you don't wanna read this all in one night. But the takedown on Burke is hilarious. My students are always quite surprised by that but she also has really interesting little insets and kind of narratives or character sketches that carry her argument forward too.

KIM: Yeah. I felt like, um, her humor was unexpected. 

AMY: Listeners, you know, we mentioned that it might feel overwhelming to sit down and read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that's what's so great about Susan's book is you incorporate a lot of the best bits into your book and explain it.

SUSAN: Well, give it a try. Um, I think pretty much you could read the first two chapters, the introduction and the first two chapters because she packs everything into there. I mean, readers sometimes complain that this is repetitive. But she's figuring it out for the first time. So of course it's repetitive and she's describing a worldwide web. Everything is connected to everything else. And you know, as soon as you start talking about one thing, you you find Mm-hmm bringing in something else

KIM: Mm-hmm. Good point. 

AMY: I mean, that's the power of the repetitiveness is like society needs to kind of have it hammered in over and over. 'cause if you just see the rationale, once you're like, oh, okay, that's a good point. But as the book builds, by the time you get to the end, you're like, this I can't argue with what this woman is saying. 

SUSAN: It has that cumulative force. I mean, I'm glad you felt it. I'm not even sure it's a hammering, but it's a kind of, um, relentless education. You know, she's teaching us how to read, even the vocabulary of praise. Well, what's wrong with a woman being called "innocent," "delicate," flower-like? Isn't that the language of love? And she teaches us how to read that not as a language of love, but as an insult wrapped in a language that feels like love. like innocent? She said, this is just a pretty name for ignorance, infancy. And within a chapter, she's calling it imbecility. 

AMY: That idea of infantilizing, even today, like "baby doll," you know, the terms of endearment that women are given sometimes. 

SUSAN: Or just, “don't worry your pretty little head about it.”

AMY: Yeah, yeah. 

KIM: So, some of her chapters seem to be juicier than others, and they may have shocked her readers at the time. We know she wasn't a puritanical person, but it seems like there's a cautionary view of sex in her work. Could you maybe explain her perspective?

SUSAN: Well, you know, 1980s feminists made a great deal about, you know, her being puritanically hysterical about sex. And she's writing this in 1792 before she's ever had sex, and she's only seen bad consequences. Moreover,

AMY: Oh, I didn't realize this was before Imlay and everything!

SUSAN: Yeah, before she fell, she meets Imlay in '93. And then Godwin, with whom she has really good sex, too, she meets in 95 96. So, I mean, this is, you know, while she's still a virgin, and a very intellectual virgin, and she's seeing only bad consequences of women indulging, or being manipulated as sexual beings. Moreover, as Wollstonecraft herself experienced, if you get pregnant out of wedlock as a young woman, you have no social viability. You will never be marriageable. The only option for you is to become a prostitute or to kill yourself. And that was the frequent outcome. So there's a way in which sexual self discipline is not just prudery. It's a rational assessment of what the severe penalties are for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. So there is that caution. What very comfortable birth control era 1980 feminists, you know, condescend to Wollstonecraft for, is something they've never had to contend with themselves. So I think that there's a historical situation for what gets called prudishness, but I would say just rational restraint. The woman who was writing in 1792 really sees female sexuality and men's exploitation of it as part of the tremendous problem of being a woman in the world, she'll call it the wrongs of woman. So I don't want to sort of downplay that she's extraordinarily cautious about this, but there are very good reasons for her caution.

KIM: Yeah, it's like a life-saving issue

AMY: Yeah. 

SUSAN: Literally life saving. Literally.

KIM: Yeah, yeah, 

AMY: Even, I didn't even get the sense that she was placing a moral judgment other than the practical outcome.

SUSAN: Well, she does have the distaste of having boys pigging together, you know, in those boys schools, and girls learning nasty tricks from servants and each other. I mean, there's a kind of lurid, softcore porn that is in her head. 

AMY: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I could see people skip ahead to chapter eight or whatever chapter she's talking about this.

SUSAN: She is worried about that, though, because she doesn't want girls to become too interested in sex at the expense of rational self control. 

KIM: Right, right. 

SUSAN: What looks to us like, you know, kind of excessive prudishness. It is a real concern for her about becoming a sexual body, what that can mean for a woman. 

AMY: All right. So in this work, she so skillfully lays out all of the problems that she sees with society's treatment of women. Does she have any concrete ideas for how to fix things? Does she offer up any solutions? 

SUSAN: Well, the solution is the last chapter, if you lasted that long, on national education. She is for free national public co education. Uh, the first side of education is the Republic of Home, where boys and girls, sons and daughters, are treated equally and where parents regard their children as future citizens and not as, um, subjects, merely there to be grateful to their parents and to obey their parents. This was her plan, educating everybody and developing a rational citizenship from this factory of education. But she ends by saying, it's not up to me. The men have the power. They have to start changing the system or put in a fresh order for Russian whips. 

AMY: Oh, I know, that goes back to one of my favorite lines, that she wrote, which is, Let women share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man. For she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty. It's basically like, call my bluff on this. Give us a chance, and if we cannot rise to the occasion, then we are justified at being held down. And we'll shut up. You can't even argue with that really. It's just, give us a chance. And if we don't do it, then you win, you know? 

SUSAN: And she's, she knows that that's the key point. The first chapters have a whole bunch of words that begin with pre. Preconceived, prejudice, prevailing, prescribed, prescription. That's the world into which we're born. So she wants to remove all those pre constraints and say, yes, exactly right, you can't say that we are weak, irrational, stupid, and incapable, essentially, when this, in fact, is an effect of the system we live in, and not the cause for that system's reinforcement. So you're exactly right. I mean, she's proposing a grand national experiment. Um, redo education, educate us, and see if we can share rational responsibility.

KIM: Yeah, so gauntlet thrown, and then what was the response to this work when it was published? 

SUSAN: Two things. Uh, pretty good reviews in the 1790s. There was one sort of, um, right wing journal, which just wasn't buying it at all, you know, and said that this is, this is just, you know, disrupting the ways of God to man. Next thing we're going to talk about is the rights of children and the rights of animals, and this is a ridiculous, slippery slope. But most other reactions were very positive. It's about time. Yes, this is exactly right. John Adams loved it. Abigail Adams loved it. Aaron Burr loved it, and gave it to his daughter. Um, a really interesting American feminist, Judith Sargent Murray loved it. It went international, and women around the world said At last someone has put this together. I've seen this in my classrooms too, I mean, where women, not U. S. women, but women who attend Princeton from very patriarchal cultures completely recognized the situation Wollstonecraft was describing. Obviously they were exceptions, being sent by their parents to Princeton, but this was completely readable to them as, you know, education is the first step. So that was the plan. Everyone thought it was a good idea. What killed it, you mentioned earlier, was Godwin's grieving memoir, in which he reproduced Wollstonecraft as a fallen, corrupt, deviant woman. He didn't mean to, but the enemies jumped on it.

AMY: Why do you think he, I know he wasn't trying to vilify her. He was just trying to tell her story, but her sexual past and everything. Why would he have included some of that? 

SUSAN: That's the big question, you know, what was he thinking? His philosophical commitment was to candor. But, you know, his best friend said, You stripped your wife naked. How could you do such a thing? And you know, immediately, Wollstonecraft was described as a prostitute, as a whore. The Rights of Woman was the philosophy of a whore. Her reputation was incinerated immediately, and was not recovered for about a hundred years. 

KIM: Wow. 

AMY: It's like she was canceled. 

SUSAN: Her name could not be mentioned in polite society. And it was only when women suffragists were reading her, she was being read sort of underground. She was being read in countries other than England. And they started, um, producing centennial editions of her work. And then Virginia Woolf writes this amazing essay about her. And then Wollstonecraft gets taken up by second wave American and British feminism in the 1970s. But as you can see in my book, there's still a reaction. I mean, there's David Levine's atrocious cartoon of her. The archetypal nasty woman, right? With that hatchet face. Um, really sarcastic reviews of new editions and new lives of Wollstonecraft. Then you have, you know, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham writing in 1947 that, um, pretty much, you know, they could have been writing this in, in 1801, that, um, you know, that feminism is only the philosophy of bitterness and resentment and female deviance and penis envy, um. That passed as science. You know, history is always uneven progress, but the back and forth about, um, you know, about feminist principles is still very much with us.

KIM: I mean, there's more of a conversation at least today that we're starting to have, but Amy and I talk about this all the time, but it still feels like in some ways we're at the infancy of a feminist movement, even, uh, you know, even after this amount of time. Yeah. Yeah. 

SUSAN: I mean, I still, um, you know, I'm 75. Will I ever see a female president? I don't know.

KIM: I hope so. Someday hopefully people will be looking back on this time and it'll be closer than we think 

SUSAN: You know, they'll look at our conversations and say, “What were they talking about? We're so past that!” 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah. 

AMY: But getting back to, Mary Wolf, Mary Wollstonecraft (I still can't say her name, even at the end of the episode), Susan, I knew so shamefully little about her before reading your book. Um, I'm so glad that I now have a better understanding of her life and her work and her impact. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about it all with us. It's been great. 

SUSAN: Well, no, this has really been fun talking to you. I didn't know anything about her when I was an undergraduate because she just simply wasn't on our syllabuses or in our books. Um, you know, that was a kind of act of recovery on my own part. is to learn about her and then just to be amazed.  I think Wollstonecraft is, you know, is a teacher. And that you, you know, you felt that too, you felt that you were not just studying something that you should know, but you were actually being taught about how to think. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Love her. Love her. So that's all for today's episode. Don't forget to give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast, if you enjoy it. 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. 

158. Sylvia Townsend Warner — Lolly Willowes with Sarah Watling

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my cohost, Amy Helmes. The book we're discussing today is about a woman who breaks the mold in a most bewitching fashion. The author who wrote it. You could say she did, too.

AMY HELMES: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, (or The Loving Huntsman is the subtitle), features a heroine who, as an unmarried woman, has been written off and relegated to the role of spinster. She's everyone's favorite auntie, but she feels like an invisible woman.

KIM: Not everyone is discounting the spinster though.

AMY: That's right. The loving huntsman of the book's subtitle sees our heroine for who she really is. The spell he casts on her allows her to approach life in a bold new way. Who might this savior, this dark knight, possibly be? Oh, I don't know. Could it be Satan? 

KIM: That's a Church Lady reference for you “SNL” fans out there.

AMY: Yeah. The Prince of Darkness turns out to be her Prince Charming of sorts. This early feminist classic, it was Townsend Warner's debut novel, actually, it's so fun. It is quaint, and yet it's also incendiary in terms of its social commentary, and Kim, the visual I get is one of Sylvia Townsend Warner crouching behind a chintz sofa and then occasionally popping up to lob a hand grenade.

KIM: I love it. Yep.

AMY: In 2014, The Guardian listed this book among its 100 best novels in English, and director Greta Gerwig is a fan of the book, too, which certainly speaks for it. Our friend and two time guest on this podcast, Lucy Scholes, described it in a 2012 review as “an elegantly enchanting tale that transcends its era.”

KIM: We've got another guest joining us for today's episode, Sarah Watling. She knows quite a bit about Sylvia Townsend Warner.

In fact, she's got a new book out in which Warner features.

AMY: By the pricking of my thumbs. I think we'd better raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Sarah Watling, is the author of 2019's biography, Noble Savages: The Olivier Sisters; Four Lives in Seven Fragments. It's the story of four brilliant, beautiful, and precocious English sisters who led fascinating lives in the first half of the 20th century. D. H. Lawrence thought these sisters were quote-unquote “wrong,” and if that's not reason enough to learn more, I don't know what is.

AMY: Yeah, I actually have this one all lined up on my Kindle ready to go because I have a long flight coming up. Um, I was like, ooh, I'm going to read this one on the plane. 

SARAH WATLING: It's nice and long. It'll keep you going for a long time.

AMY: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Uh, Sarah's latest work is Tomorrow Perhaps the Future, a group biography of a handful of creative minded women, including several lost ladies of lit, from America and Britain, who took a strong political stance during the Spanish Civil War while attempting to rally others to the cause. Sylvia Townsend Warner is just one of the impassioned writers featured in this scholarly work, which The Daily Mail calls “exhilarating.”

KIM: Yes. And Sarah admits to having a weakness for people with an instinct for rebellion, which pretty much makes her the perfect guest to talk about Sylvia Townsend Warner. Sarah, welcome to the show.

SARAH: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

AMY: So Sarah, my interest in the Spanish Civil War was piqued a few years ago when we did an episode on the war reporter Virginia Cowles, who pops up a few times in your book, I think. What actually prompted you to write this book?

SARAH: Well, I mean, I've been interested in the Spanish Civil War for a really long time, partly because it's so often been regarded as this kind of tragic missed opportunity to defeat fascism before the Second World War. But I really didn't think that I had something new to say about it. until I came across this pamphlet that was published in 1937 called Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. And this was essentially a collection of responses from authors from Britain and Ireland, to a question that had been posed to them by a woman called Nancy Cunard. And she had asked them very simply to just state publicly whether they supported the Democratic Republic of Spain, the government that had been elected the year before in Spain, or the military generals who were attempting to overthrow that democratic government. When she wrote to these writers, she said to them they should make their position plain because it is impossible any longer to take no side. And I was really struck by that idea that, you know, history could present a moment when it was almost a kind of moral imperative to work out where you stood, which to me sort of felt like it spoke to our contemporary moment in various ways. I was interested, Nancy Cunard had chosen to direct this question to writers, you know. I wondered why she felt that writers in particular should take a position on politics. And also I was like, who is this woman? You know, like it was, it was such a kind of bold and impassioned. political intervention to make and, and what I knew about the Spanish Civil War really came from people like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, you know, and the more I delved into Nancy Cunard's story, the more I realized that actually there were so many other writers who were mobilized by this cause, but who just really hadn't received the same kind of airtime and lots of them were women.

KIM: So in the book, you write about Sylvia Townsend Warner's political and literary activity during this fight against fascism. One might initially think it doesn't really have much to do with the plot of her debut novel Lolly Willowes, which came out in 1926. This book is more of a light comedy of manners, but there is actually a synergy between this novel and the outspoken political role she would go on to have later in life, right?

SARAH: I mean, in person, Sylvia Townsend Warner could be extremely outspoken. You know, one of the things that happens when she's first drawn into anti fascist activism is that she discovers she has this incredible flair for heckling, which she's really proud of, you know. but in her fiction, I think she was a lot more kind of wily about getting her point across. And there is so much that's going on under the surface in Lolly Willowes, which to me makes it quite clear that, you know, she was already dissatisfied with the way that conventional society operated, even before she got involved in what we might consider sort of organized politics.

AMY: So, Sylvia Townsend Warner lived from 1893 till 1973, and she once famously said, When I die, I hope to think I have annoyed a great many people, uh, speaking to your point of heckling. Um, so we usually start an episode talking about the author's life first, but I think in this case it makes more sense to switch things up and talk about the novel first.

KIM: Yeah. And listeners, it's pretty much impossible to discuss this novel, really, without revealing a bit of a spoiler about what happens to Lolly in the book.

AMY: Yeah, but it's not that big of a secret, it's pretty much... always talked about on every blurb you'll find about the book online. The edition I read, kind of, the cover art says it. So I think we'll be fine in saying it.

KIM: Yeah. And we'll get to that twist in a moment. But first, Sarah, let's talk about who Laura, AKA Lolly Willowes is at the start of this novel. Do you want to describe her a little bit for us?

SARAH: Of course. So, well, the way that Warner describes her in the novel is as a gentle creature. Um, so someone who's adored by the children in her family, for example, which is important because when we first meet her, she's moving into her brother's house where she's going to sort of help take care of his children. She's 28, she's not married, and she's been living, you know, in the ancestral family home with her father, who's just passed away. And from this very first line of the novel, Laura Willowes is kind of situated for us by reference to her family, and specifically the men in her family. So the first line reads, When her father died, Laura Willowes went to live in London with her elder brother and his family. So this is kind of her passing from the care, or depending on how you look at it, the property of her father to that of her brother. And we immediately sort of have this sense of someone whose life is dictated by other people's expectations rather than somebody who's exercising, you know, a great deal of autonomy. And that's also hinted at in the next sentence, which is spoken by her sister in law, Caroline, who says, “Of course, you will come to us.” You know, and that “of course” is holding so much kind of inevitability. You know, no one is really expecting Laura to have any plans or ideas of her own. Um, and everybody thinks it will be good for her to move to London because there's more people there. And so there's a better chance that she'll find a husband before it's, you know, too late because late twenties is getting a little bit late to get married. Um. And I think another important thing that we come to learn about Laura is her connection to sort of the natural world and to the earth and to cultivation. And that's something that will become more and more important, I think, as the novel goes on. Um, you know, at the beginning of the novel, she's in mourning for her father, but she's also already mourning for this life in the countryside that she's going to have to leave behind. In the novel, it's.

It says London was very full and exciting, but it undercuts that immediately by listing all the things that London doesn't have, you know, like her greenhouse and her apple room and her potting shed and all of the spaces where she can sort of create the natural remedies that she's taught herself to make.

AMY: Yeah, this, uh, beginning part of the book really reminded me a lot of Joanna Scutts’s nonfiction book The Extra Woman, just in terms of, you know, what happens to these unattached women. In Lolly's case, she is kind of just passed around. Townsend Warner writes, Feeling rather as if she were a piece of property forgotten in the will, Laura was ready to be disposed of as they should think best. So she's like a piece of furniture or something. Um, she also later says that Laura was put away. So it's kind of that idea of a woman on the shelf.

KIM: Yeah. And the way she just sort of is like accepting of it too. everybody's complicit in this “extra woman” thing.

AMY: Yeah, and The family members are all patting themselves on the back, like, We're so charitable to this single, you know, sister, and oh, we're going to give her the second best bedroom because we have to save the best bedroom for real guests, but she can have this sort of smaller bedroom.

KIM: Where she's working for free, basically, like, she's going to be the nanny. She's going to be the companion. She's going to run the extra errands. You know, she's busy from morning till night.

SARAH: There's that line that I think is so brilliant when Townsend Warner is describing Caroline's planning for Laura's arrival and she says, They could not give up the large spare room to Lolly. You know, like it's not even explained. It's just this kind of assumption that really exposes the way that they regard Lolly as this kind of, you know, extra wheel that they're doing this big favor to.

AMY: I think she refers to herself as an inmate. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. And it's all in this kind of gentle way that it's explained but yet this undercurrent of like, Wow, this is pretty mean and harsh. So, the novel is actually fairly short. It's divided into three sections. The first section is pretty conventional. We see her attempts to settle into this new life as a guest, basically in her brother's home. She has no agency. She's stuck at home with her sister in law doing needle point and cleaning the canary cage, right? She feels trapped.

AMY: Yeah, and also in this section we learn a little bit about Lolly's childhood. She was sort of a tomboy who had taken an interest in brewing and botany as Sarah was talking about. So this is a bit of foreshadowing for what's to come. There's also a great line where Townsend Warner writes that “coming out,” like for young women debutantes, we have this idea of “coming out,” but it really ought to be called “going in,” which I thought was great. I had never heard that before because it's sort of like, when she got to that age, life stopped for her. The life that she wanted stopped. 

KIM: So, Sarah, is any of this lining up with Sylvia's own childhood at all? Did she have a similar childhood to Laura Willowes in any sense?

SARAH: I mean, I think there's definitely an interesting parallel in the father daughter relationships. Um, so in the novel, Laura's father is really delighted when she's born to have a daughter. Laura's brothers are much older. They're sent away to boarding school. So most of her childhood, it's almost as if she's an only child, which Sylvia Townsend Warner was as well. Um, and Laura's father really dotes on her and her mother is, you know, it's not really gone into much detail, but her mother is some kind of invalid. So. Laura Is pretty much kind of left to her own devices, which means that she and her father can live this kind of perfectly happy, quite quiet life together, which continues even after her mother dies and then of course, it kind of ends completely when her father dies. As I said, Sylvia Townsend Warner was actually an only child. Um, and though her mother was around for her whole childhood, she was especially close to her father, George. And he was kind of an ideal father for a future writer. He was a schoolmaster at Harrow, which is a kind of, it was a fairly prestigious public school, as in fee paying school in England. And he had this reputation for being a really brilliant teacher. Um, his subject was history, but he was very strong on the importance of good style in writing. And he wrote his own books. He also wrote poetry. So while Sylvia Townsend Warner didn't have a formal education, she did have the benefit of these kind of private lessons with the most brilliant teacher at a really good and expensive school. And she became extremely erudite very young, which also made her quite off putting to potential suitors, which is another connection.

AMY: Yeah, that's exactly what is going on with Laura in the book, which is hilarious. Um, her relatives are all like, Alright, we'll keep her here in London with us for however long we need to, but hopefully we can get her married off. She is not exactly cooperative, right, Sarah?

SARAH: Right. And, and what I especially love is how Townsend Warner manages to refer to the men they line up for her as undertakers. It means it as in men who might undertake to marry Laura, but it's a wonderful kind of double meaning about, you know, the role they would play in her life if she actually married any of them. But yeah, I mean, Laura in the novel, she seems to have almost a kind of passive resistance to these potential suitors that her brother brings home, and she makes no real effort to please them or to appear attractive or interesting to them. Uh, Warner says that She did not feel herself bound to feign a degree of entertainment which she had not experienced. And the same deficiency made her insensible to the duty of every marriageable young woman to be charming. And as Sylvia herself liked to, you know, Laura would kind of turn the conversation to obscure topics or say things that these kind of conventional men will find really off putting. And I think part of the problem is that, you know, she just talks about whatever's on her mind and because she's surrounded by all these people who are so different from her, what's on her mind is almost never like what they're actually discussing at the dinner table. One brilliant example is that she manages to scare off the most serious suitor that she has by talking about werewolves.

KIM: Yes.

SARAH: She sort of ends up by implying that maybe he could be a werewolf, which obviously, you know, would not be a very respectable thing to be.

AMY: It's just a total record scratch moment. Yeah. Okay, so this first section of the book that's all kind of quaint and charming, it ends with the specter of World War I hanging over it. Can you talk a little bit about that, Sarah, and the significance?

SARAH: Sure. So, I mean, I think one thing that's interesting is that of course, World War I arrives in the novel and it's obviously this kind of cataclysmic event, but on the other hand, what's almost scary, especially to Laura when she's thinking about it, is how in some ways, or maybe for some people, it actually hardly changes anything. And it seems at first like the main kind of changes and opportunities for women in wartime are going to be for women a generation younger than her. So actually that would be women of Sylvia Townsend Warner's generation. And those women are kind of embodied by Laura's niece, Fancy, who marries at the start of the war to a soldier, then gets a job in a factory, then is widowed and ultimately leaves her young daughter in London to go and drive lorries in France, all of which is kind of totally incomprehensible to her mother, but sort of represents these new opportunities for women. Meanwhile, Laura is, you know, doing up parcels at some charity and basically kind of carrying on as normal. But she obviously has kind of noticed the changes for the younger generation and there has been some kind of subterranean change in her too that will become apparent not that long after the end of the war. And there's this moment when she's sort of watching Fancy's children on the beach, you know. Her niece now has two daughters of her own, and she sort of realizes that she's going to be called on to help raise that generation as well, you know. So this is a bit of a kind of escape or stay forever moment. And in terms of, you know, for Sylvia Townsend Warner, she was much younger than Laura when the war broke out. She was only 20. So in a way, it represents more opportunities for her. Um, and at first, you know, at her home, they only really feel the war in the way that all of her father's former students start, you know, disappearing and going to the front. And just really sad things like the school newspaper filling up with obituaries. But early on, Sylvia gets involved in kind of charitable efforts to help Belgian refugees, and then she moves away from home and works in munitions factory. So it kind of gives her this taste of freedom, but it's actually also, interestingly, the period where she comes closest to the kind of life that Laura Willowes lived, because it's during the war that her father dies unexpectedly. And that kind of leaves her in the position of being the kind of dutiful companion to her quite demanding widowed mother, but it is also the period when she decides that she's not going to tolerate that kind of life, and when Sylvia herself leaves for a job in London. More generally, it's maybe worth mentioning that the British suffrage movement, which, you know, had really been gaining ground before the outbreak of the war, uh, and the suffragettes famously kind of gave up their campaigning to work for the war effort. So on the one hand, it represents this kind of fallow period for women's cause, but it's also, there is this kind of real sense that it's their big chance to prove themselves. All of which is to say, you know, the First World War lasted from 1914 to 1918, hundreds of thousands of British men were killed, millions of people worldwide. So however people are affected personally, this is a huge trauma for British society that changed things in ways that perhaps weren't entirely clear at the time. And so from then on, you know, life is always going to be divided into before the war and after it. So, you know, it really makes sense as this kind of big dividing moment in the novel.

AMY: So, if Laura is trapped in Part 1 of the novel, Part 2 is all about her making her escape. She feels like she's being pulled towards something, she doesn't quite know what. And Townsend Warner writes, Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience. A something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet, in some way, congenial.

KIM: Yeah, she has this lightbulb moment. She's out on a secret expedition to buy flowers. (Her brother and sister in law judge her for buying fresh flowers; they think it's wildly extravagant.) Anyway, she's standing in the shop buying herself some chrysanthemums, and she has an almost out of body moment. She instantly knows she needs to move to the place where these flowers were grown, a village called Great Mop in the Chilterns.

AMY: So she goes home and announces this decision to the family, and they all think she's absolutely nuts. Her brother predicts that she is gonna go there and end up becoming the village witch, and she sighs and says, “How lovely.”

KIM: Right. More foreshadowing. Um, and then she also learns around this time that her brother who was acting as steward of her finances has mishandled her money and there's actually less to live on than she imagined, which is really infuriating, actually. Um, and she gives him a real piece of her mind. It's really an amazing scene.

SARAH: I think Sylvia Townsend Warner is so good at kind of using humor to depict the kind of ordinary, sort of non-ogre-like tyranny of people like Henry. 

KIM: Yes. 

SARAH: You know, she kind of exposes them for what they really are by not taking them as seriously as they take themselves, you And there's a great line where she says, Henry was kindly disposed to those who did not thwart him by word or deed.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: And I love that scene too because Laura is just so calm throughout it. She's just sort of patiently sitting there like, Yes, tell me more. Tell me what you did with my money. And then he has to grudgingly admit he misspent it and she just sort of sighs and is like Well, okay but still got my plan and I'm going to do this anyway. It's a very empowered moment for her. I love it.

KIM: Yeah. Me too.

AMY: So I feel like once she finally moves, she gets to this new village, Great Mop, we start to see a shift in the tone of the book a little bit. It almost felt to me like a couple of types of books put together. It still has that quaintness, but there's a more allegorical feel to it, maybe. So she spends her early days there just sort of walking the hills, but she doesn't really quite know what to do. It's sort of like “wherever you go, there you are” kind of feeling. Um, she stumbles across an inn called The Reason Why.

KIM: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. And the villagers all seem a bit odd. It's almost like, is it going to be Wicker Man or something? Like this stuff going on? 

AMY: Just going to turn into a Stephen King novel, yeah. 

KIM: Exactly. she can't quite put her finger on what it is, but there's something a little mysterious, a little spooky about it all, um, that she finds herself absolutely in love with country living. The thing she's much more worried about is that her grown nephew, Titus, is going to pay her a visit. And then once he gets there, he decides he wants to stay with her and work on writing a book. It's a huge problem for her, right, Sarah?

SARAH: Yeah, it's a big problem. Um, partly because Titus is going to need taking care of basically, but also partly because Great Mop is her place, you know. It's somewhere that she's had all to herself, it's somewhere that she's finally found her independence. Part three opens with her in despair and rebellion, the novel says, because Titus turning up kind of threatens to put her right back into the kind of bondage that she's just escaped. And I think it's worth noting that Titus is actually her favorite member of the family. So it's not that she has a problem with Titus in particular, but it is really this thing that he intrudes on her peace. And, you know, there's a sense that this time her entrapment is going to be much worse because she's now had a taste of freedom, you know? She knows what it's like to not be beholden to anyone, to not have to kind of account for herself or anyone. And I think, you know, the obvious connection you can make with this novel is to Virginia Woolf's “A Room of One's Own,” which actually isn't published until a couple of years later, in which Woolf kind of recognizes that a woman writer needs financial independence, yes, but also privacy.

KIM: Yeah. And the entitlement that Titus has to just immediately begin asking for whatever he wants. And she's basically it's, it's her space, but also the servitude aspect of it.

AMY: Yeah, and feeling like she can't even escape him. She's like, “I'm gonna go for a walk,” and he's like, “I'll meet up with you!” It's like, no! This is the point in the podcast where I wish we didn't have to worry about music copyright infringement, because I would so want to...

play the opening bars of "Sympathy for the Devil" right now.

KIM: You can sing it. It's never stopped you before.

AMY: Um, but to quote Townsend Warner, She, Laura Willowes, in England in the year 1922 had entered into a compact with the devil. The compact was made and affirmed and sealed with the round red seal of her blood.

KIM: And this is where you want to cheer.

AMY: Yeah, 

KIM: Go for it.

AMY: So, the pact is sealed with her blood because she gets scratched by a kitten and this animal becomes her familiar. Long story short, we're not going to give anything else away here, but she embraces witchcraft and she ends up being able to solve the Titus problem by the end of the novel. So we're just going to leave it at that. But anyway, this whole Satan coming into the picture, it's quite the plot twist.

KIM: Ha! 

AMY: I thought it was funny, Sarah, reading your book, because you mention an anecdote about Townsend Warner having her own strategy for getting rid of unwanted guests.

SARAH: Yeah, I love this so much. Um, when she was living alone in London as a young woman, if she hadn't an unexpected visitor, she would put her hat on before she opened the front door so that she could seem as if she was about to go out, you know, if she didn't want to actually let them in and have to deal with them. And, you know, she did this to protect herself, really, from, you know, from the amount of time that visitors can take up when she wanted to be writing or working on something else, but also, I think, to protect herself from the kind of emotional and practical demands of other people, know, because she's particularly vulnerable to that as a young woman living on her own, and this is something that both Woolf and Townsend Warner are aware of, and that they're both protesting, I think, is that, you know, they're living in a society that relies on the idea of women as self sacrificing. You know, it's a society that teaches women that their purpose in life is basically catering to the needs of others, you know, ideally as wives and mothers, but, you know, as maiden aunts, if they can't manage that, and as you say, you know, as you mentioned in Lolly Willowes, Titus doesn't even warn Laura that he's coming, you know, it's actually his mother who kind of bothers to give her the warning and he, presumably, he doesn't think it's necessary because of this assumption that single women are always available, you know, and this is what Sylvia Townsend Warner was kind of battling against a little bit, um, because they don't have any men or children to attend to. And if you think of, you know, her brother Henry getting his hour to himself in his study every evening after dinner, which, you know, it gets described in the first part of the novel, you really see the injustice of that. And this, again, I think is one of the things that's so interesting about Lolly Willowes. And I talk about it a little bit in the book is that, you know, Laura doesn't turn to witchcraft to get her money back from Henry or to get revenge on him for losing it, or to become beautiful or make someone fall in love with her or anything like that. She does it when her space is invaded, you know. That's the crucial moment, the big threat to her way of life.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. So Lolly gives a dramatic speech while speaking to the devil and she compares all women to sticks of dynamite. Warner writes, Even if other people find them quite safe and usual and keep on poking with them, they know in their hearts, how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are. Even if they never do anything with their witchcraft, they know it's there ready.

AMY: Oh, it's such a great speech. It takes up a few pages, right? But she goes on to say, That's why we become witches, to show our scorn of pretending life's a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. One doesn't become a witch to go run around being harmful or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It's to escape all that, to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others. So, Sarah, that goes back to what you were just saying. And we talked before about Lolly being disinterested in male suitors in this book. Do you think there's any queer subtext here? I mean, didn't realize until after I read the book that Sylvia Townsend Warner had a long term relationship with a woman.

SARAH: Yeah. I mean. I keep talking about Virginia Woolf, but there is this story about Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner meeting at a lunch after the book was published and Woolf supposedly asked Sylvia how she knew so much about witches and Sylvia told her it was because she was one. Um, you know, and if anyone is going to pick up on queer subtext, I think Virginia Woolf would be the person to do it. But as you say, the love of Sylvia Townsend Warner's life was a poet called Valentine Ackland and her given name was Molly,, who she fell in love with, actually, a few years after Lolly Willowes was published in 1930. And they remained together until Valentine's death in 1969, and there was really never any doubt for either of them, I think, about the significance of that relationship. And they kind of explicitly referred to it or regarded it from early on as a marriage, even though obviously under British law, they weren't, you know, afforded the same recognition as a heterosexual couple would have been.

KIM: So when Lolly talks in her speech about not wanting to take the safe route, Sarah, does that tie into the decisions Townsend Warner makes later in life politically? What were some of the other ways Sylvia was defying convention and living dangerously, so to speak?

SARAH: Oh, there are so many ways. Um, I mean, I think Sylvia Townsend Warner was someone who was very comfortable living on the margins. And I don't mean that she didn't want to have influence or power, because I think she did. And I think she wanted to get attention for her ideas and her causes. I mean that she had, you know, she really had no interest in conventional respectability, you know. As we've talked about from early on, she was much more intellectual than the usual kind of young lady of her class and of most men, to be honest. After her father died, she refused to be the kind of dutiful maiden daughter and she went to London. She had a job, you know. For most of her adult life, she was supporting herself through her writing, although she did have a small inheritance. Um, but, you know, as you say, the key thing is her politics, which is actually something that is also very much part of her relationship with Valentine, who is the person who encourages her in the 1930s to take a more kind of organized approach to her convictions. Because, you know, Sylvia Townsend Warner, she wasn't just outraged by the inequalities of gender, but also of class and of race and of those caused by imperialism, for example. And all this kind of stuff really comes to a head for her in the 30s. That was a time in Britain, and obviously in the US as well, of real kind of social and economic turbulence. And it was also the period when fascism was kind of on the rise in Europe, and Valentine and Sylvia were paying really close attention to what was going on then. And their kind of big decision in the mid 1930s was that they joined the Communist party. And this actually, you know, it wasn't that uncommon among intellectuals of that era to be sort of enthusiastic about Communism. You know, they had this kind of, in some ways, very inspiring example of the Soviet Union. This is before Stalin's purges, or at least before, you know, the Great Terror is really known about outside of Russia. Um, but obviously it was still an extremely radical and very kind of suspect decision for most people in mainstream society. It's not a kind of secret decision. They're not kind of silent members of the Communist party. You know, they're very active. They do things like make posters. They attend meetings. They sort of arranged to ferry their neighbors to polling stations when there are elections to make sure that they can vote. They kind of use their personal book collection as a kind of lending library to help sort of convert the people who lived around them in their village. And because the party is so small, and actually because, you know, a lot of the famous male writers who get enticed to join the party prefer to play a more kind of symbolic role, they actually kind of managed to establish a fair amount of influence within the party. On the one hand, Sylvia and Valentine are these sort of two middle aged ladies living in sort of rural isolation in Dorset, you know, like what could be more harmless than them? But on the other hand, you know, it's a queer communist household that by this time is under police surveillance.

AMY: And actually, didn't the Nazis have a list of British citizens that they were going to go after the moment they invaded? And she was on the list.

SARAH: I mean, they're very public, kind of anti fascist. intellectuals. So yeah, I mean, absolutely. They would have been at terrible risk if the Germans had invaded.

KIM: So, thinking of the description of Lolly's brother and sister in law in the book, it seems like Townsend Warner had a real disdain for people who lived in a bubble and were oblivious to those real pressing issues of the day that she obviously cared deeply about.

SARAH: Yeah. And I think that's a really large part of what her campaigning during the 1930s is about, you know. It's about getting people to sort of wake up from their complacency and to see that what's happening in Germany or in Italy, you know, or in Spain can have a real relevance. You know, she sees her fiction as something that can be deployed to help persuade people, you know, to help them kind of imagine their way into these other lives. And you know, I think both of them, she and Valentine, were really aware that the kind of life that they were leading, you know, which requires freedom to write what you want, to love who you love, you know, to not be reduced to your gender. That that kind of life wouldn't be possible for them in a fascist country, you know. So I think that is , partly what galvanizes them when the Spanish Civil War comes along. And there's this tragic, but brilliant letter that Valentine writes in 1936 where she says, you know, she's expecting a war to come and she's not optimistic that either of them would survive if it came, you know, but they use that fear to sort of power their activism. You know that they're not kind of overcome by it.

AMY: And I thought there was a really interesting line from your book, Sarah, that seems suited to Lolly Willowes. You write that "Sylvia played up a nothing to see here persona in much of her writing, letting what was radical infiltrate beneath A comforting sense of eccentricity." That really caught my eye. I think it's a perfect description of the tone of Lolly Willowes, with the sort of radicalness hiding underneath. All that, you know, pastoral imagery and it's like she pulls a bait and switch on the reader, almost.

SARAH: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I read Lolly Willowes in a way, as a reminder not to underestimate women like Laura Willowes, you know. It's a reminder that behind every maiden aunt there's an individual with a mind and desires and opinions. Of course, this is what gives Satan his edge in the novel isn't it? You know, that he not only notices these women who are so used to being overlooked, but he actually goes to the trouble of pursuing them.

KIM: Right. Right.

SARAH: You know, as you say, Sylvia Townsend Warner is so kind of skilled at enticing her reader rather than confronting them, It's not a kind of Disneyfied version of witchcraft,, you know. Laura's not kind of like a cuddly old lady with a broomstick who's, you know, taking the local children flying or whatever. She's, I mean, not to give too much away, but she very explicitly sells her soul to the devil, which, you know, is pretty shocking, right? But Warner has kind of readied the ground for this with her humor and by making Laura seem so kind of gentle and eccentric. A lot of her point in the novel comes across quite gradually. She sort of builds up slowly to this cri de coeur at the end of the novel, because, it's only as Laura gets happier at Great Mop that she realizes how unhappy she was before in her previous life. And there's this brilliant passage where, you know, she says Laura doesn't blame the family for her unhappiness, because she sees that they're the product as well of their time in society. And she writes, If she were to start forgiving, she must needs forgive Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament, great-great-aunt Salome and her prayer book, the Bank of England, prostitution, the architect of Apsley Terrace, and half a dozen other useful props of civilization, you know, i. e. there is this enormous edifice that is supporting conventionality and that's kind of holding women back. And I think, you know, the fact that Laura makes this extreme decision of selling her soul to the devil highlights how few options that women have in that world. The point is that Laura kind of sees everything that the kind of respectable bourgeois life offers a woman like her, and she sees that there's not enough in it for her.

AMY: It's almost like the end of the book becomes a manifesto, you know?

KIM: Definitely. Um, what was the reception to the book, when it was published? Were people shocked by this?

SARAH: Well, it was very well received. Um, there were lots of reviews that were very positive. It sold very well. It was probably her best selling novel during her lifetime. And it, you know, really helped with her not very big income at the time. But it doesn't really seem to have been the kind of reception that she was hoping for. Um, so she wrote to one friend quite early on saying that people were calling the novel “charming” and “distinguished,” and that was making her heart sink lower and lower.

KIM: Yeah, it's like, did they finish it?

SARAH: Exactly. But it's all, you know, it's, it's kind of the, you know, she has this skill at lulling her readers into a full sense of security and she almost does that too well, you know, and they kind of overlook some of the more provocative points that she's making. And I think it's quite notable that, you know, her subsequent novels are a lot more kind of explicit in their messaging.

AMY: That's funny. She's like, “Yeah, we're going to have to bring the hammer down now on the future books.” That's funny. Are there any other themes of this novel that you think we ought to discuss? Anything else relating to the book that we didn't touch upon?

SARAH: Um, I mean, I think time is a really important aspect of this novel, and I love the way that the novel kind of uses it. And I think that sort of also connects to another theme, which is, you know, the sort of difference between urban and rural life. Townsend Warner dedicates several pages to the sort of unchanging daily routine of Henry's house. And yet 15 years pass in a sentence, you know. And I think that's sort of maybe a comment or, you know, even a demonstration of how time can really lag for women in the short term when they're bound to this kind of domestic life. But it also passes so fast when they've got nothing to show for all these years, you know. And Laura in London always seems to be kind of busy with things that she doesn't think are important, like, you know, cleaning out the canary cage, as you said. And that's something to do with being in London as well, you know. She really loses control of her time and therefore she kind of loses the pleasures of idleness. And Warner writes, Even Laura, introduced as a sort of extra wheel, soon found herself part of the mechanism, and into working with the other wheels went round as busily as they. And that I think is also, you know, it's sort of about rural life and the values and the pace of rural life kind of coming up against the city and the demands of, you know, of capitalism, basically, for efficiency and quantifiable productiveness. And how that's sort of an anathema to the way that Laura would naturally kind of move through the world.

AMY: Yeah, she has that whole segue about the train coming to London with the cabbages on it, you know, and, and, and her brother and sister in law having no clue where the cabbages come from sort of thing. Definitely. Something she's interested in. Um, given how popular this book was at the time, I don't think it's ever been made into a film. Correct me if I'm wrong there. But hearing that Greta Gerwig is a fan of this novel gives me a lot more hope. I mean, can you imagine? And honestly, I was, I was thinking about it and I'm like, maybe the Barbie movie is sort of doing a similar thing, you know? 

KIM: Oh, yeah, I can see that. 

AMY: Some radical ideas hidden under all the pink. That's kind of what Sylvia was doing.

KIM: I like that idea. That's great.

AMY: Uh, so yeah, Greta, if you're out there, or maybe somebody British, this is such a quintessentially British book that maybe it has to be a British director.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

SARAH: I think Olivia Colman would make an excellent Lolly Willowes.

KIM: Oh my god. Absolutely. She's so great. 

AMY: Yes, perfect casting, yes.

KIM: She would be fantastic. So Sylvia Townsend Warner would go on to write six other novels, a handful of short stories, collections of poetry, a biography of T. S. White. Is there any book you would recommend that we read next in our discovery of her works? Are there titles you particularly love that you want to recommend?

SARAH: I'm obviously quite biased, but I would wave the flag for the novel that was inspired by her time in Spain, which is After the Death of Don Juan, which is really actually one of her most overlooked titles, but it's a great example of how freely she switched between comedy and tragedy, and how often she deployed comedy in quite kind of sly ways to express her outrage. And it also sort of features the devil as well, so another Lolly Willowes connection.

KIM: Great. 

AMY: Yeah, and I just saw Oppenheimer this weekend, so I feel like your book is actually very good in helping explain... I get so confused about the Spanish Civil War, you know, when it, when time goes by, I kind of forget it all because it's like, Which side's the good side, which side's the bad side. So your book does a really good job of explaining all that, but also kind of explaining, you know, people involved in communism at the time, all of the political underpinnings that now we're a little confused by. I felt like your book really did a great job of helping me understand it all. So thanks for writing it. And also I wanted to say your book really interested me and some other writers that I didn't know about, including Josephine Herbst. So we're going to add her to the list for a future episode, I think.

SARAH: Yay, that's great.

AMY: Thanks so much for joining us to talk about Sylvia Townsend Warner. This was so much fun.

SARAH: Thank you for having me. It was great.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. Join us on our Facebook forum to learn more about this episode and see behind the scenes clips.

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

157. Back to School Prof Edition

AMY: Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my co-host, Kim Askew. Fun fact about Kim: she works on a college campus by day. Are you guys gearing up to welcome a new class of students, Kim?

KIM: Yeah, we sure are. It's always exciting to see. I work at a fashion college. So good to see everyone's outfits on the first day. They take it to a whole other level.

AMY: Oh, I bet. Do you feel like you have to up your style game?

KIM: No, I don't anymore. Maybe when I first started, but no. Um, so

we know that a lot of our listeners out there ALSO work on college campuses. Many of you out there are academics — so this week’s mini is dedicated to you.

AMY: That’s right. A few years ago around this time we did an episode called “Backpacks and Boarding Schools” which was all about novels that take place in a school setting. That was a fun one. But today, we’re going to be discussing some books which center around the lives of university professors.

KIM: There’s a lot to love about college professors, not the least of which is because they literally have inspired an entire Tiktok subculture.

AMY: Yeah, I assume you're talking about Dark Academia, uh, which I actually read a New York Times article that said that the pandemic is what kicked off the Dark Academia. trend. There were so many young people who  couldn't be on campus, so they wanted that college-y vibe. Because they couldn't have it!

KIM: Right. That's one trend we were way ahead of. Our blog, if you'll remember from the early Aughts, Romancing the Tome, it had a skull, a stack of books and a quill pen for our branding. 

AMY: The skull! [laughs]

KIM: I mean, I don't even know where we got that. 

AMY: The only thing missing was like a candle with dripping wax. 

KIM: Yeah, exactly. But I’m thinking if there’s one book that epitomizes this concept of Dark Academia, it’s The Secret History by Donna Tartt, the origin book of Dark Academia.

AMY: Yeah, yeah, I think everyone listening knows this book, and the best place to learn more about it is the “Once Upon a Time at Bennington” podcast, which we both loved listening to. 

KIM: We were OBSESSED with it when we were listening to it. It was so great.

AMY: It tells the real story behind the character of Julian Morrow, the classics professor in that novel. Donna Tartt based him off one of her real instructors when she was at Bennington. Did I ever tell you, Kim, The Secret History anecdote about Mike, my husband, at the library?

KIM: It's not coming to mind, but maybe there's a vague memory there somewhere. Remind me what happened?

AMY: Okay, so he’s always looking for book recommendations from me, so I had told him to read The Secret History. He did, and he loved it. So he, on his own, like a lunch break at work sort of thing, went to the library  and a librarian comes up and is like, “Can I help you find anything?” And he's like, “Yeah, actually.  I just finished a book that I really, really liked and I'm hoping to find something similar.” And so she's like, “What was the book you just read?” And he said, “The Secret History.” Her knees buckled. Like, she did like a gasp!

KIM: I do remember this. She was like, “This is the best day.” 

KIM: She had an ecstatic moment, and she put her hands on her knees,  she was so excited.

KIM: Yeah. Oh, that's adorable.

KIM: So that said, let's dive into some other books  in which there's a university setting, and specifically professors. 

AMY: Yes, there are actually a LOT of books out there featuring characters who are professors. but since this is a mini episode, we're just going to stick with  a few that spring to mind and,  the first one I'll mention just because. Okay. It's Fresh in My Brain is Lucky Jim by Kingsley It had been on my reading list for a really long time, I kept putting it off for some reason, and I,  wonder if maybe I was confusing it with Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, 

KIM: Totally different, but absolutely. I could see where you… that’s so easy to confuse.

AMY: Yeah. And I think I have read Lord Jim, so I knew it wasn’t that book…but I still had those vibes from it, so I didn’t want to read it. But anyway, I think the death of Amis’s son, Martin Amis got me to dive in, and I found it so wildly entertaining! I was laughing out loud. You’ve read this one, right Kim?

KIM: Yeah, it’s so fun. It’s about a junior-level medieval history professor, James Dixon, at some unnamed university in England. He has zero job security and he’s trying to get his scholarly writing published, and everything he does to try to advance himself kind of blows up in his face. But we get to follow his romantic travails as well. I haven't read that in a long time, but I just remember laughing hysterically too. It's so great. I need to reread it.

AMY: I feel like it should be subtitled “Curb Your Enthusiasm at College,” because he is a dead ringer for Larry David! His behavior is so cringey and inappropriate. Like, not cringey in a sexual way, but he does the wrong thing. He’s hilarious. His job requires him to suck up to people, but he’s so jaded, privately. He’s always ducking behind pillars and things to try to avoid having to interact with people he doesn’t like. He hates his students, even. He’s constantly drinking too much. The anecdote that comes to mind the most is the story of him accidentally burning a hole in the sheet when he is staying over as a guest at his boss's house, and like, the lengths that he goes to to try to cover up the cigarette burn in the sheet. That will forever live in my memory.

KIM: Yeah, it's unlucky because all these things happen to him, but he keeps getting away with everything terrible that he does.

AMY: Right! That’s what makes him “Lucky” Jim.

KIM: Yep, yep.

AMY: Um, Christopher Hitchens called this the funniest book of the second half of the 20th century. I mean, I don't know if I'd go that far, but I was surprised that I was laughing as much as I was because I didn't expect it to be that funny. There's actually a few film adaptations of this book too,  including one from 2003 that I might like to see because it stars Helen McRory, the late Helen McRory, Keely Hawes, whom we love, and Penelope Wilton, who is from Downton Abbey. They play all of the key female characters from the book.

KIM: We got to bring back a movie night for that one. That sounds so fun.

AMY: Okay, so can you think of any prof-related books?

KIM: Okay, so one of my favorite authors is Michael Chabon. I love him. In one of his early books, Wonder Boys from 1995 (I think maybe it was his second book out….) It’s kind of a fictional Kitchen Confidential, almost, about college writing programs. The professor is like this pot-smoking guy, Grady Tripp. I think he’s in his forties. He was a literary wunderkind but is stalled on his fourth novel, and he just keeps writing and writing and writing. It’s like this massive tome that’s never ending. But he’s kind of lovable, in a weird way, too, even though he’s a jerk trying to stay forever young. Have you read it?

AMY: No, When I think Wonder Boys… Michael Chabon,  What's the one about the… maybe I'm getting the title wrong…

KIM: Kavalier and Clay.

AMY: Yes, that’s what I was thinking of. 

KIM: Yeah, this is totally different. And there’s a movie adaptation, too. It’s from 2000. It’s got Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey, and Frances McDormand. I’m sure you heard of the movie. I mean, it has such a big cast.

AMY: When you say he’s a “loveable jerk,” that reminds me of Jim from Lucky Jim.

KIM: It’s definitely similar vibes.

AMY: Yeah, A little bit different vibe, but also a male professor that I'm going to talk about next is the  hero of the novel, Stoner. 

KIM: That is one of my favorites.  It's the one that was rediscovered, basically, and brought back into print by New York Review Books.

AMY: Okay. Yeah, and I think I borrowed this from you.

KIM: I’ve loaned it out so many times, I've had to buy it, like, four or five times.

AMY: Oh my god. 

KIM: It’s, like, one of the books that I pass out. Now, I think everyone's read it, but initially, like, people were kind of rediscovering it, I was, like, handing it out, like, candy.

AMY: Yeah, that's funny. I hope I wasn't the one that hung onto it. I know I wasn't because I don't keep books.

KIM: Yeah. You always give the good books back.

AMY: I first heard about it, though, in an interview with Natasha Lyonne, the actress. She mentioned it, and then I thought it sounded interesting and I said something to you about it and you were like, oh, I own it. It was published in 1965. The author's name is John Edward Williams. 

KIM: He wrote several, I think three other novels that are all totally different and they're amazing. Butcher's Crossing, there's one I believe, I think it's about Caesar, and then I can't remember what, there's like a sci-fi one that he wrote,   

AMY: It reminds me a little bit of, like a Thomas Wolfe novel, like You Can't Go Home Again or Look Homeward, Angel or one of those.  The vibe is similar,  but basically it's a sad story.

KIM: Everything goes wrong with him and unlike Lucky Jim, the bad things that happen just keep getting worse. I mean, he starts out with such hope and promise as an English major and then professor, but It just doesn't go well, but it's so beautifully written about the frustrations of life. They just eat away at him. I mean, the subtitle of this book should be why you should never become a humanities professor because it's just, it's, it's too hard. Yeah. It's so hard

AMY: And it's funny, because his parents want him to study something practical. I think they're the ones that want him to study agriculture, but he wants to be an English major and that's reminding me of how many English majors start college with their parents being like, “Nooooo!!!!” 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. My parents were always like, “Well, she can go to law school afterward.”

AMY: The English major’s defense!

KIM: Exactly. Yeah. “Oh yeah, sure, Mom and Dad. Yeah. We'll look at it again in four years.”

AMY: I think my dad kept out of it, but I remember my mom kind of trying to nudge me toward engineering, which is  a lot of the people in my family are engineers. Everybody's super smart. If that had happened, there'd be many a bridge on the verge of collapse out there had I taken her up on it. 

KIM: I think you could have done it, but you would have been the most, like, creative, poetical engineer, but I feel like you do have that strong analytical ability.

AMY: Hmm. Maybe. 

KIM: You don’t see it?

AMY: No. Anyway, alright,  let's find a different book to talk about.

KIM: Okay, so I wanted to throw in TWO Charlotte Bronte novels based on her real life experiences teaching at boarding schools in Brussels. While teaching in Belgium, Charlotte fell in love with a married man who ran the first school where she was both enrolled and taught English for her keep, Constantin Heger. (I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right), but the first book she wrote actually came out posthumously. It was called The Professor, but in the second book, Villette, Lucy Snow is the main character and she falls in love with the professor, Monsieur Paul Emmanuel, and it's a widely held belief that the character of Emmanuel in Villette is closely based on the real life man, Heger.

AMY: Oh, yeah. It kind of lines up closely. I have not read The Professor, though.

KIM: Yeah. That’s about a male professor’s adventures in work and love while teaching in Brussels. So it definitely goes with our theme today.

AMY: Okay,  so another one  I wanted to mention just because I read it probably in the last five years or so was Philip Roth's The Human Stain, which is set at an eastern (I don't know if it's a fictional) college. I can't remember. Um, that novel came out in 2000, but it's still very timely because it's about a professor whose job is on the line after he makes a remark in the classroom that is interpreted as racially insensitive.

Philip Roth wrote in The New Yorker that the book was inspired by a very similar incident that happened to a friend of his who was a professor at Princeton.

KIM: I think I read the article, but not the book. Um, and I believe there might be a movie.

AMY: There is. Anthony Hopkins. Nicole Kidman. It's kind of weird… Anthony Hopkins is weird casting for it, once you read the book and know the whole story. I don't think he would… I don't think you would want to cast him…

KIM: Yeah, well now they wouldn't cast it like that. 

AMY: Right. Okay. So then in terms of “lost ladies” of lit, I think there's another one that neither of us have read, Kim. It's by Dorothy Sayers. It's called Gaudy Night. And it's part of her Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels. 

KIM: Oh, yeah, I started Gaudy Night during lunch yesterday at Bottega Louie!

AMY: Wow!

KIM: I took it with me and started reading it, and I love it. I'm totally into it.

AMY: You know me, I'm not into mysteries at all…

KIM: Oh, then… it's a very traditional mystery. but it's got the fun vibe.

It’s set at Oxford. I mean…

AMY: Yeah, so this installment, Gaudy Night, it's basically about  a series of crimes that are taking place.  It's kind of an all girls, an all women's college…?

KIM: Shrewsbury college at Oxford.

AMY: Okay, okay. And there's some incidents of obscene graffiti and vandalism and a series of “poison pen” messages that are turning up, and so Harriet Vane is this character who is the love interest of Lord Peter Wimsey… she's a mystery writer, and so the college knows that she maybe could help figure out whodunit. And then she recruits Lord Peter Wimsey to come help her.

AMY: Right. I mean, this is just a basic mystery novel and I'm reading it on my phone and my Kindle app, and I've already  underlined or highlighted so many passages, because there's so many interesting, like, philosophical thoughts, observations about people, observations about being in a rarefied environment that are so good. I feel like you would love it.

AMY: Okay, so yeah, if there's a little bit more to it beyond just the playing out the plot…

KIM: Yeah, I think that's what you'd love about it. It's almost like the mystery so far is incidental, but I mean, it's also set at the old girl's school, which we love those things too. And that's also a hotbed for bad behavior, right?

AMY: Apparently! This idea of all the obscene vandalism that's taking place on the campus, it's making me think of, did you ever watch that Netflix show “American Vandal?”

KIM: No.

AMY: Oh my god, Kim. I hesitate to even recommend it on this podcast because it is filthy, filthy, but it is so funny. It's like a spoof of a true crime podcast  like “Serial” or something like that. And it's these high school kids that are trying to solve a mystery that's going on at their high school in like true crime documentary fashion. And it's really, really funny. It got canceled after two seasons, 

KIM: Okay. 

AMY: It’s worth watching

KIM: You know what? This reminds me of (totally not related) but, um, when we watched the British “Office” together and we were so obsessed with watching it..

AMY: Speaking of British television, the BBC did a miniseries  of Gaudy Nights, this Dorothy Sayers mystery. 

KIM: Oh, after I read it I want to watch it.

AMY: It’s all on YouTube, and we can link to it in our show notes. A young Harriet Walter plays Harriet Vane.

KIM: Who's Harriet Walter? Remind me of…

AMY: Harriet Walter is the mom from “Succession,” and she's

the mom from “Ted Lasso,” Rebecca's mom.  We love her. She was in Sense and Sensibility. She played the bitchy…

KIM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

AMY: Um, one more campus novel I wanted to point out is Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe. We all know Mary McCarthy from The Group. That's her 1963 novel. Um, this one came out in 1952, and it's considered one of the first novels in this campus genre. This kind of idea of a campus novel. She was one of the first. It's a satire of her time teaching at Bard and Sarah Lawrence. The school in this book is called Jocelyn College. So she fictionalizes it. Um, but yeah, and then I guess, you know, The Group isn't really set on a college campus. It kind of begins on a college campus.

KIM: Right. It's like the afterlives after they graduate. 

AMY: And we are going to be. Doing an episode on The Group.

KIM: Yeah, I'm so excited we're doing a Mary McCarthy episode.

AMY: If you want to be all caught up to speed with that, you can start reading the group  you haven't already. In terms of other comic novels about college, we should probably check out A Campus Trilogy by David Lodge. The titles in this trilogy are Changing Places, Small World, and Work, and they were published in the mid 1970s and mid 1980s, and they all sound very “Lucky Jim”-like. Based on what I've read about them, I think we would really like them. 

Okay. All right. I'm interested. Adding it to the long, long list of books.

AMY: Yeah.  I'm sure you listeners know many more, so reach out and let us know what YOUR favorite novels that feature college faculty as characters. Email us, give us a shout-out on social media, or head over to our Facebook forum to post ones we ought to have included in this episode. 

KIM: And we’ll be back next week! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost ladies of lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.

156. Susan Taubes — Divorcing with Rosemary Kelty

AMY FOWLER: Hey everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner Kim Askew.

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone. When the book we're going to be discussing today, Divorcing, was first published in 1969, the critic Hugh Kenner, in his review of the book in the New York Times, dismissed the author Susan Taubes "as a quick change artist with the clothes of other writers." Tragically, Taubes took her own life mere days later.

AMY: In recent years, Susan Taubes's work is being reassessed. New York Review Books published a new edition of Divorcing in 2020, and just this June they reissued her coming of age novella, Lament for Julia.

KIM: Our guest today, Rosemary Kelty, is one of our longtime listeners and a passionate advocate for literature written by women. We can't wait to discuss Taubes and Divorcing with her.

AMY: So let's raid the stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

AMY: Rosemary Kelty is a prospect research coordinator at Weill Cornell Medicine. She has also worked at New York Cares, Penn America, New York Public Radio, and Columbia University Press. She has her master's in English from Queens College in New York City, and she is a proud fifth generation New Yorker. I was expecting her to have this very thick New York accent, and you can see that she doesn't. 

ROSEMARY: I've been trained out of it.

KIM: Oh, yeah. Okay. You started 

out with one. Yeah. Rosemary is also one of our most devoted listeners from the earliest days of this podcast. If doing this podcast, Kim, is like running a marathon, Rosemary is the person on the street corner handing us water at every mile marker.

Yeah, she's got the sign 

AMY: Yeah, it's a reminder to all you other listeners out there that we love [00:02:00] to hear from you guys. And you know what? You might get asked on the show like Rosemary.

KIM: Yeah. She has made so many great suggestions for books we should cover. We just had to have her on to discuss one of them. Welcome, Rosemary. We're so happy to have you.

ROSEMARY KELTY: Thank you so much Kim and Amy, I'm thrilled to be here.

KIM: All right. So let's get down to it. How did you come across Susan Taubes and her novel, Divorcing?

ROSEMARY: It was last summer. I was browsing through the uh, Strand Bookstores. That's an independent bookstore in New York. They have a Central Park kiosk. Um, It's really beautiful. They sell books right outside Central Park. And I came across their New York Review Books Classic section. And I always look at that series. You never know what gems you're going to come across. And that's how I came across Susan Taubes's Divorcing. And I was struck by the description in the back.It says "the question that haunts Divorcing, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life." So I just thought that sounds really interesting. What is this novel about? I expected it to be completely about the dissolution of a couple's marriage, and while it is most certainly the premise of the book, it's about divorcing from so much more in your wider life. And I also saw that the author was described as having a tragic death, and I wanted to read the book and learn more about Susan Taubes and her life and works.

AMY: When we had agreed to do this book, I didn't know anything about it other than the title, and we had recently done an episode on Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife and I thought, do we want to do Ex-Wife and then do Divorcing? Is that going to be too similar of books? No, not at all.

KIM: Couldn't be more different, really. 

AMY: Alright Susan Taubes. What can you tell us about her early life?

ROSEMARY: She was originally born Judit Zsuzanna Feldmann in Hungary. In 1928, Dr. Sándor Feldman, who was a Freudian psychoanalyst, and her mother's name was Marion Batory. Pardon me if I mispronounce the name. Susan Taubes was also the granddaughter of Mózes Feldmann, who had been the Grand Rabbi of Budapest. Her mother left the family in 1939 to marry another man. Susan and her father thus emigrated. to the U. S. in 1939, and they settled in Rochester, New York. I also wanted to mention that Susan Taubes changed her name from Judit to Susan when she arrived in the U. S. And thankfully, Susan's mother also survived World War II in Hungary. I believe that she also emigrated to the U. S. eventually or at least visited her daughter and her ex husband. Susan also received a BA from Bryn Mawr College and received a PhD in history and philosophy of religion from Radcliffe And she also did various work at the Sorbonne and Hebrew University. She met and married her husband, Jacob Taubes, while she was an undergraduate student.

AMY: I've seen it pronounced “Yakob” a lot, so I don't know.

ROSEMARY: Yeah that sounds right. He was born in Europe. 

AMY: Yeah, Jacob, Yakub, take it for what you will. They had a son in 1953 and a daughter in 1957. And by 1960, she began teaching at Columbia University where she was curator for the Bush Collection of Religion and Culture. She and her husband divorced in 1963, but their relationship continued to play a significant role in her life and work. Rosemary, can you talk about the dynamics of their marriage and maybe, if you know, what influence they might have had on each other's intellectual pursuits?

ROSEMARY: This is very tricky uh, in terms of anything definite. I've read that Jacob and Susan Taubes's marriage was pretty fraught. They supposedly had an “open marriage.” Again, I can't substantiate that; I've just read that in an article. He supposedly had many affairs, and that is similar to Ezra Blind in the book Divorcing. And I haven't come across anything about Susan Taubes having any affairs. I'm not sure if she had any romantic relationships after her divorce. Did either of you come across that? 

AMY: I don't remember seeing that anywhere either. 

KIM: We know that the book is somewhat autofiction, but we don't have actual facts to know which things are specifically true. We just know the gist of it 

AMY: Even if you take away the extramarital affairs and all that, it just seems like, um, two very cerebral people getting together, it might be explosive. 

KIM: Yeah. 

ROSEMARY: And what's interesting, too, is Jacob Taubes was also an ordained rabbi as well, which I found very interesting. One thing I will say, I can't speak to marriage dynamics necessarily between Jacob and Susan in any detail other than what we know of their divorce, but at least in the novel, Sophie mentions that Ezra wins the arguments every time. 

AMY: Because he has to win the argument and she has to let him. 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, and I wonder if she's actually even convinced.

AMY: Yeah. And also the idea of him so focused on his work. In the book, the Ezra character, he's the genius at work and he must be left to be able to do his great magnum opus. At the same time, she says, “I would like to write a book someday. Will I get to? Because I have to be the woman behind this great genius.” So just the idea of she had to sideline her own ambitions a little bit. (At least Sophie Blind in the book does.) 

ROSEMARY: Yeah it's interesting, though, in terms of her career, because she taught at Columbia. She went to all these prestigious institutions, was clearly highly respected by her peers. The author had (I know it's not good to use these types of phrases) but a more successful career than Sophie Blind in the book. So the basic premise of the novel is that the main character, a woman called Sophie Blind with three children, she's in the process of getting a divorce from her husband, Ezra Blind. But from the very beginning of the novel, so this is giving away the first page, but she is killed in an accident, and she is, beheaded. And throughout the rest of the novel, this decapitated head, who still appears to have the consciousness and the awareness of the main character, is basically rolling around through the character's life. So we just go through her entire life, basically, and not necessarily in traditional chronological order. We learn of her very intimate life with her husband Ezra. How they meet, how they get engaged and married, their actual wedding. We also, as readers, get an experience of the backstories of the characters' parents and grandparents lives and families. She also takes us through her entire past as she arrives in the U.S., her brief childhood in Hungary, and her return to Hungary post-war. So it's a real whole compilation of the character’s existence on this planet. It's so wacky, too! I don't know how else to describe it. Like, how do I describe this novel?

KIM: Yeah there's this severed head, her severed head wandering through her past. There's multiple funerals um, this nightmarish fantasy trial that's going on. And this is all woven throughout this idea of marriage using (as far as we know) her own personal experience with divorce and gender dynamics with her husband and possibly other partners and sublimating it into this novel. 

ROSEMARY: I think that Sophie Blind, as well as clearly Susan Taubes was also affected by her own parents’ rather unusual marriage, their divorce. Also, it's so hard to distinguish between the character and the author sometimes. I’m trying to be very careful here. In the novel too, the discussion of Sophie's paternal grandparents’ marriage.

KIM: Yeah. She's the product of all these relationships and she's bringing that potentially into her relationship with Ezra. 

AMY: And it ties into the whole Jewish tradition too, like going back to these previous generations and the rabbi grandfather and how they lived in Hungary and things like that. 

ROSEMARY: That's another issue, too, for me, I'm not part of that religion or culture. I wondered what other issues she was addressing in the novel that I didn't understand in terms of culture. I actually love how she describes different celebrations in the novel. It's very brief, but they're very descriptive about certain foods for holidays, or certain particular religious practices at home, anyway, I just wanted to bring that up, but that's something I can't speak to in terms of religion or culture.

AMY: Same. I felt that. I feel like if you were coming to this book with more of a knowledge of that, you would probably be able to extrapolate so much more. (Not just the religious background, but also the philosophy.) I realize how ignorant I am on every level when it comes to all this philosophy she's trying to weave in.

ROSEMARY: Yeah, same here. 

KIM: Freudian psychology, the biblical, the Old Testament, everything. I know. You almost have to be a scholar of all these things, which she and her husband together did, and their um, milieu.

ROSEMARY: Yeah, that's amazing too, isn't it? Her interweaving of all of these figures from the 20th century, the 19th century, but people further back, I'm sure, as well. There's just so much going on philosophically. 

AMY: And it’s like a fever dream.

KIM: It is a fever dream. Yeah.

ROSEMARY: Yeah, in terms of the philosophical stuff at the end, I don't know if that's supposed to be before she passed, before she was so brutally decapitated, or are we supposed to assume that this was actually a dream?

KIM: It’s an episode of “Dallas!”

ROSEMARY: I've never seen that show. 

KIM: This is a Gen-X thing. 

AMY: You're too young. 

KIM: Yeah, it was a huge controversy, 'cause everyone was like, what? 

ROSEMARY: Oh. 

KIM: … or if it was true..

ROSEMARY: Oh, wow.

AMY: I'm just thinking of all of the really highbrow analysis of this book, and we are the  only one that have or will ever make a comparison between this book and “Dallas.”

ROSEMARY: That's interesting, though. 

AMY: But yes, I think there's some merit to that. 

KIM: It was all a dream. Exactly. That's what I wondered too. There's no answer. Yeah. 

AMY: There's no knowing what's real and what's not in this. 

ROSEMARY: My initial reaction is that, “Oh, wait a minute, maybe she's okay.” But there's nothing definite. Then you know that she died so young and it's so tragic, and so when you read the book and you know that, then the ending, that feeling of could it all have been, is she okay? 

AMY: It brings a whole other layer to the experience of reading thebook, knowing what her fate was. 

KIM: Considering it's about death and dying and, yeah/

AMY: And we're going to talk about the reviews this book got in a few minutes here. And some people say oh, the bad reviews prompted her to walk into the ocean. And I texted you, Kim, and I said “I can see from reading this book that maybe that was gonna happen.”

KIM: I know; it's almost like she presages her own death. Yeah.

AMY: Yes. reading the book, at least from Sophie's perspective, you're like, “Wow, she's grappling with an awful lot of big, heavy stuff.”

ROSEMARY: Yeah. I completely agree with you, Amy.

AMY: I was just gonna say, too, that… so it starts off and it's, like I said, a fever dream. You're on an acid trip, almost. It's all over the place, you have no idea at times what's going on, it's first person, it's third person, it's really jumbled. And then I felt as the book progressed and we got closer to her European origins and her reconnecting with her roots and all that, that the prose actually got so much more clear. 

ROSEMARY: Well, I agree. 

AMY: It started to read like a typical novel almost by the end, and I thought that was interesting too.

KIM: It's like she has more clarity and it feels clearer. 

ROSEMARY: I'd have to agree with that too. I found the first 80 pages a little bit difficult to get through the first time. The second time, I'm a big fan of it and I saw it as definitely, it seems like it was related to the severed head as well. I remember a few times she mentions that you go through all your life, all your memories before you die. It's very macabre, I know. But I was wondering: is that the structure she was trying to evoke?

KIM: I thought that, too. 

AMY: I also saw it, especially with the Freudian psychoanalysis stuff… I read the word “shattered” used to describe this book and I thought that was the perfect word for it. And it made me think of a broken mirror on the sidewalk or something. And she's looking at the reflection of all these different shards and seeing different sides of her life reflected back at her sort of thing. There's a mention in a New Yorker article about this book that says “it does not even attempt stability.” 

ROSEMARY: Yeah. 

KIM: That's so perfectly said, I think! You just don't know what is going on at first. And it takes a little bit to understand even a little bit what's happening. And then once you do, everything starts to make sense. So I guess then reading it again, you're going into it, knowing what to expect, and it probably makes it easier. But I was just like, wondering “What is happening??”

AMY: Yeah, Kim, you likened it to reading Joyce's Ulysses.

KIM: Yeah, definitely. And I think that also speaks to what you were saying earlier, Rosemary, about there's being so much in there. Where you almost need an annotated book that explains, just like you would read Ulysses where you understood what all these references were because you're missing out on so much without that context.

AMY: I read it halfway through the first time and I had to just put it aside. I was like, “I can't.” It's funny because I said to you, Kim, we switch off who writes the questions for each episode, like for the guest. And I was like, “Kim, I need to hand the baton to you on this one. Cause I don't even know what to say about this book. I don't even know where to begin.” Of course I went back and read it a second time and I think because it wasn't so jarring anymore, I knew there was a severed head, I knew what to expect. Then I was able to immerse myself in it, and I had no problem the second time reading it. And what's funny is I feel like now, having thought I would have nothing to say about this book. I feel like I have so muchto say about it!

KIM: Yep. I couldn't agree more. 

ROSEMARY: The topics of the book, they're difficult to get through as well, right? There's a lot of tragedy. For the Sophie Blind character and Susan Taubes herself, they both lost family members In Auschwitz and the concentration camps. She, thankfully, did not have to experience Nazi persecution of Jews firsthand, but her former neighbors, her family members did, you know? And that, when I was reading that particular section, that made me cry too. The desperation of war. It's just so vivid. 

KIM: Vivid is the perfect word for that. I've never read anything quite like that about post World II in that way.

ROSEMARY: It's so personal. You get it from the first hand accounts, and you can see the psychological trauma.

KIM: Mm hmm. Absolutely.

AMY: I was getting Sophie's Choice vibes in that section. It was almost like the inverse a little bit, where she was gonna have to leave with her father and leave her mother behind, and it wasn't like she had the option, really, of making the choice, but there was that same gut-wrenching feeling

KIM: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm.

AMY: And it just had that whole setup in that you see them in the modern era and then you go back in time to the war and it illuminates why that person is the way they are in later years.

ROSEMARY: I really wonder if … were the horrors of World War II a significant shadow for the author, as they appear to be, for the character Sophie Blind? How do you even make sense of that? I was watching, listening to this interesting panel from this other independent bookstore here in New York and Brooklyn, the Community Bookstore. They interviewed David Rieff, who wrote the introduction to this book. And he's the son of Susan Sontag… and Susan Taubes’s son, Ethan Taubes, was on that panel. And another scholar, Jess Bergman, was on that panel. They were discussing the launch of the book. And David Rieff had mentioned an author, an intellectual figure, who said “How do you write poetry after seeing Auschwitz?” After hearing that, I wondered, was this particular book something like that for Susan Taubes, I wonder? 

KIM: Mm hmm. 

AMY: so speaking of Susan Sontag, let's turn our attention to Taubes’s friendship with her. Rosemary, do you know much about that? 

ROSEMARY: Well, I know that they were very close friends. During the Taubes’s marriage and afterwards. I know that Susan was apparently a student of Jacob Taubes. Sontag was very intertwined with the Taubes couple, and I've read that Susan Sontag also identified Susan Taubes’s body when her body was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean. So clearly, they were very close. And I know that, from David Reiff's introduction, and David Reiff is Susan Sontag's son, he mentions in the introduction to the book that his mother once said she couldn't forgive Susan Taubes for taking her own life.

AMY: Also I had seen that in one of the articles I read this week that Samuel Beckett was a fan of Taubes. And that made a lot of sense to me because when I think in the book Divorcing about that trial, it's like her trial at the end of her life, but it's also the divorce proceedings, and it's very Theater of the Absurd, right?

ROSEMARY: Yeah. It's just, I can't, how do I just, how do I describe it?

AMY: Yeah, It's bonkers. To me it was like, Beetlejuice when he's in the waiting room. Same vibes. 

KIM: But also terrifying, at the same time.

AMY: Yeah. Disturbing. The other movie that kind of came to mind. So everything's, like we said, it just jumps from one thing to the next. But when it was talking about the marriage itself, I kept thinking of that Adam Driver/Scarlett Johansson A Marriage Story, just because there's a lot of discussion. Very much analyzing what went wrong, and he wants to save it. 

KIM: In a very Rabbinical scholar and Freudian way 

AMY: Who, who doesn't want to ever lose an argument. 

KIM: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 

KIM: Oh, so speaking of Rosemary, do you want to read a passage from Divorcing? Because I feel like we need to give our listeners little bit of an idea of all this that we're talking about.

ROSEMARY: Yeah, I have two sections. They're pretty short. I just thought they connected so well. [Reads a passage.]

AMY: I love that passage, because it's reassuring you, the reader, as you're reading this book, which is “baffling and blundering.” 

KIM: Absolutely. “It's just a book.” Yeah.

ROSEMARY: And then I'll just read real quick when I read this, I just thought, Oh, wow, this is exactly like the book passage. [reads passage]. It's so true! It's so true! You're gonna go on to the adult world and it's gonna be…

KIM: Yeah, at least you know that you can depend on that you're going to be in school every day, you're going to have those clocks, you're going to have the uniforms telling you what to do. And that is a sanctuary from what is reality when you hit the adult world. Beautifully, beautifully put. 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, there's a comfort in there and so you're given that structure as a kid, and then you're fooled, you're an adult, it's no, it's gonna be a wild roller coaster.

KIM: The same with marriage, as far as society she got the structure from being married and then when she was cut off from being married, it set her adrift in society. And then you know that corresponds with the severed head I think. 

AMY: Yeah, she even says in the book that “marriage is a cloak,” a disguise that you can wear, that it keeps you protected from the truth, and once you get divorced, you have to take the cloak of marriage off, and then you're forced to confront the real truth of your existence. The other thing I wanted to connect back to the passages you read, I was just thinking of this today. I mean, “divorcing.” I think you mentioned Rosemary. It's not just a book about marital divorcing. She's divorcing from her. father. She's leaving America. So it's “divorcing” on many levels. But when you think about like a “marriage plot” book, you know exactly what to expect. They conform to a certain thing that you're used to, right? They're tidy, they're simple. That's a marriage plot book. So, this is the opposite, this is a “divorcing book,” and therefore, stylistically, it has to be the opposite too. It has to be messy, not tidy, all over the place; like an explosion, almost, of what the “marriage plot” book is.

ROSEMARY: No, that's interesting, Amy. You mentioned that about the explosion. Because there's one passage or line in the book where she does actually describe the dissolution of a marriage as like a building falling apart. I'm trying to find that. Oh yeah, on page 153, she says just that “it is at a calamitous moment that the past opens into view. A block of high apartment buildings, raised in 15 years of marriage, has been bombed away, revealing a long forgotten landscape which lay hidden behind the walls.The clearing of the wreckage must wait. As for the price or damage to body, soul, and mind of fifteen years of her life blanked out. Or is it more?” And she says “the sensation of forgetting comes back first. How one walked through years sealed in oblivion.” Wow. I can't understand how anybody who reviewed this, whether you like the style of the novel or not, you have to admit how beautiful the language in this book is! I don't know how to describe it, it's just like, when I've read certain lines like that or passages, I'm like, “Oh, I get that I can identify.

AMY I highlighted in this book more than I have highlighted in any book that we've done for this podcast. There were so many lines that I, even though there was so much I was confused about, there was so much that resonated. And at the same time (and I feel like we've been going on and on marveling at this book), I haven't decided that I love this book.

KIM: No, I agree. 

ROSEMARY: You don't have to. 

KIM: Yep. 

ROSEMARY: I'm not saying that this is my favorite book, although in terms of analyzing the darker sides of the human condition, I'd have to say it's probably one of the best I've read.

KIM: I agree with you.

ROSEMARY: In analyzing, she's so open, to what she wants to say about her life, her intimacy with her husband I mean, it's, it's, wow I agree though, you don't have to love it or like it, but I mean, that's something I've come to terms with in more recent years about giving books a chance.

KIM: Yeah. 

ROSEMARY: Because even if it's not your thing doesn't mean you can't appreciate it. 

KIM: Yeah. So we had mentioned that Harsh New York Times review of Divorcing. Can you talk though about how her book was received when it was first published? 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, sure that was the first review I came across, by Hugh Kenner. When I read it (it's very short, too) I initially thought “Okay, this is very dismissive to say the least.” That's being kind about the review. But that video, which I would highly recommend to everyone to check out, it's on Community Booksters YouTube channel. In that interview or discussion, David Reiff called it “unspeakable.” He found it so offensive. And later on in that discussion, Ethan Taubes said yes, it was “extremely vile.” Those are his words. And I was like, yes, it is completely vile, because Hugh Kenner's not analyzing the book at all. I get it. The first part is…you have to get through it. You gotta keep going through it to really appreciate and understand what she was trying to do. But I was looking for other reviews. I did come across one from The Chicago Tribune by Sarah Blackburn, and she was much kinder. She loved the language, the craft. She just wasn't a big fan of the characterization. To me, reading that article, she wanted something more traditional, but it was a much more glowing review. I wonder if Susan Taubes read that review. But yeah, it does seem that Hugh Kenner's review really affected the life of the novel. David Reiff also said in panel discussion or it might have been in the intro, I'm sorry, to the book, that apparently at the time, if your book was reviewed in The New York Times, if it got thumbs up, It was popular.If it got thumbs down, you never saw it again. That was interesting to me when David Reiff said that one review basically consigned the book to oblivion until 2020. I couldn't find too many other reviews. I don't know, did you? It was frustrating. I don't know why. It was published by Random House and everything. I guess it could be very controversial at the time. It's pretty raw, like, oh, I was blushing when I was reading certain things. 

KIM: Yeah. She was pushing boundaries.

ROSEMARY: Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: Within a few days of this review, she took her own life. And I guess we don't really know why. We can make guesses. Obviously, the review did come out a few days earlier, but she was struggling with a lot probably.So it's all just surmising what may have happened. 

ROSEMARY: We'll never know. But one thing I took away from that panel discussion, you know, it was really touching, too, of her son, Ethan Taubes mentioning that she was engaged in life. He also said that he views this novel, the writing of this novel, as her way to continue to be engaged in life, and I thought that was interesting. He clearly has a positive remembrance of his mother 

KIM: And let's fast forward to 2020 and she's gaining recognition. As you mentioned, Dr. Merve Emre and Leslie Camhi, they both wrote about her novella, Lament for Julia, too in a recent issue of the New Yorker and the New York Times.

ROSEMARY: Yeah. 

KIM: And the novella sounds fascinating. Have you read it? 

ROSEMARY: Yeah. No, I haven't gotten to that, but I was super excited to see that, “Oh my goodness! There's a review of Susan Taubes’s other work, which in 2020, you know, her son and Susan Sontag's son were talking about, “We're trying to get that published,” and here we are. So clearly, people want to read more. 

KIM: Yeah. And clearly you are on the pulse, because you are the one who mentioned doing this book before those articles came out!

AMY: I know you had suggested this for the episode before that stuff started coming out. I think it's clear that everyone out there is gonna have to make up their own mind about this novel. There's a lot to it. We did our best at trying to break it down a little bit. I'm not sure if we succeeded or not, but it's that kind of book. We would encourage you to take a look, though. And Rosemary, we cannot thank you enough for coming on the show. We're so happy we finally got to meet you over Zoom. You've given so much insight today. It was really fun to have this discussion with you. 

ROSEMARY: Thank you both. I was so thrilled when you asked if I wanted to discuss something. I was like, absolutely! And this book has literally just opened up a whole new world for me in terms of literature and what’s read, what's not read, what's not published, and again I really appreciate you ladies inviting me. It's no words, it's been awesome. 

 ROSEMARY: And I would encourage readers, other listeners, just try to appreciate a book on its own merits. 

AMY: Yes. And also, just as in life, be willing to step out of your comfort zone. That's how you grow. 

ROSEMARY: Yeah, this podcast has encouraged me to do that. So thank you. I just adore this podcast. Thank you so much.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Don't forget to join our Lost Ladies of Lit forum on Facebook if you want to connect more with Kim, myself, or Rosemary. You will find her over there chatting away. It's kind of a central hub for all of our listeners to be in conversation about the Lost Ladies we've covered and books in general.

KIM: Yeah, see you over there. 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.