238. Lucy Irvine — Castaway with Francesca Segal

This transcript is auto-generated; please pardon typographical errors.

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 lost ladiesof lit.com and click “Become a Patron” to find out more. 

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes. Today's featured book, Castaway by Lucy Irvine, could be described as a female Robinson Crusoe. 

AMY: In this case, however, it's a true tale. I am so excited about this 1983 memoir. Kim, I think you know this about me (this is a rare case where our reading interests diverge) but I actually love nonfiction survival memoirs, you know, books about people's time alone in the wilderness. Whether it's the Donner Party or some arctic explorer, somebody trudging through a deadly jungle. I will read all of these books whenever I come across them. 

KIM: That is hilarious because you are not very outdoorsy. Neither of us are. Um, so you would never actually do any of those things.

AMY: No, not at all. I think that's why I love them. I can sit from the comfort of my couch with a bag of chips and just read about someone else’s hardships (and the more harrowing the better, by the way.) So I don't know what that says about me. Pretty sadistic I guess. But for as many of these types of books as I've read, I can't necessarily think of too many that were written by women. There is Cheryl Strayed's Wild, but I don't quite count that because I need my adventures to be so far from civilization. Far from help that really ups the stakes in the same vein, I love that TV series on the history channel “Alone,” but those participants also have kind of the ability to tap out with a satellite phone when things get too dire, 

KIM: Right. But in contrast, today's last lady opted to maroon herself on a tropical island for one year — do-or-die, there's no tapping out — with only one other human (in fact a complete stranger) just to test her mettle. 

AMY: And no, the stranger is not a volleyball named Wilson. 

KIM: Wilson might have been more useful, honestly.

AMY: Yeah, it's true. 

KIM: Anyway, it's a wild story in every sense of the word. And Amy, I'll admit, I kind of expected that Irvine's written account of this adventure would be big on drama, but possibly short on literary merit. I was completely wrong about that second part. The writing in this memoir is beautiful.

AMY: Absolutely. And it sparked in me that old, familiar feeling we get on this podcast. How had I never heard of this book? Castaway was a bestseller in its day, and it was also made into a film in 1987. Now Lucy Irvine who wrote it, she's British, so I'm wondering if maybe more people in the UK are familiar with her? Because she wrote two follow ups to Castaway.

KIM: Well, we have a British guest on hand who has, herself, written about island life, so maybe we should introduce her and dive in. 

AMY: Okay. I can already feel the sand between my bare toes. Let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Francesca Segal, is an author and journalist whose debut 2012 novel The Innocents won the UK's Costa Book Award for first novel. In Francesca's most recent novel. Welcome to Glorious Tuga, a British veterinarian trades her comfortable London life for a remote south Atlantic island where she finds both delight and drama amidst a quirky cast of characters. The book was actually optioned for TV by Seesaw, the same production company behind “Heartbreaker” and “Slow Horses.” Um, wow. That sounds like a pinch-me-please development if there ever was one. Francesca, we'd love to welcome you to the show!

FRANCESCA SEGAL: Thank you so much for having me. It is such a total pleasure to be here.

AMY: I love when we get to find “lost ladies of lit” in roundabout ways, and that's the case with this book, Lucy Irvine's Castaway. Francesca, we knew we wanted you to join us, and so I was hunting around online, hoping to find some other sort of island themed novel to pair up with Welcome to Glorious Tuga. I did not anticipate finding a memoir, but once I started looking into this book, I was so intrigued by the premise. And turns out there are a lot more parallels between Lucy Irvine and your fictional heroine than I initially realized. Had you heard of Castaway before? 

FRANCESCA: You know, it's funny when you were talking earlier about whether this was bigger in the UK, I was thinking, you know, I remember something about this book. I hadn't read it. Um, you know, I was young in the Eighties, but when you suggested it, I was like, “Oh, that book.” And then when I mentioned it to a friend who's also a novelist, she described curling up with this book as a teenager, just absolutely rapt with it. And then I had the same conversation over and over with a couple of girlfriends. So I think this landed with a lot of like 14-year-old girls in the UK, which you can really… reading it, you can really imagine, for better or worse, but we'll get to some of that. 

KIM: Oh yeah, completely. So what makes Castaway such a fascinating read is that the fickle whims of Mother Nature aren't the only obstacles she has to contend with. Francesca, can you tell our listeners about this unusual arrangement that leads her to the deserted island in the first place? It's kind of fascinating. 

FRANCESCA: Yes, so it's amazing that we have this book from Lucy Irvine because the genesis of this whole island adventure was that another writer, a man, Gerald Kingsland, advertised for a “wife” to come and live with him for a year on a remote desert island in this kind of like “Robinson Crusoe”-style, survival mode. And an unbelievable number of women answered this advert, from whom he selected Lucy, who was more than 20 years his junior, I think. And for kind of various bureaucratic reasons they legally married and then launched into this madcap scheme. 

AMY: Yeah, it was completely whirlwind. And I think on Lucy's part, really impulsive, right? You almost get the sense she needed to run away or she needed to escape. I don't know. Um, but this idea of getting to go to this island, it's a place called Tuin, which is in the Torres Strait between New Zealand and Australia (and actually I read that Captain James Cook called the islands in the Torres Strait “the unhappiest place” on earth). So it's not very conducive to life, necessarily. But yeah, I did see the similarities between her decision to answer this classified ad, run off with this stranger who she basically knew for a matter of weeks it almost seems like… and then the character in your book, Charlotte, the narrator, who also feels like “I've gotta do something to shake up my life.” Right? 

FRANCESCA: Right. Well, I mean in comparison to Castaway and Tuin my tiny island is, you know, is Manhattan. But yeah, Charlotte is an academic vet from London studying newts in the kind of safe comfort of the zoo in Regents Park. And she goes for a year, she takes up a fellowship to move to this tiny remote tropical island with a very, very small, very close-knit community. Um, some of it is because she's a conservationist and there's a small population of very rare tortoises in the interior who are deserving of her study. But some of it is also for, as you said, personal reasons of her own that she is running to to solve a mystery. 

AMY: In your book, Francesca, your main character, you know, she has a similar “annoyed at first sight” interaction with a man that she meets when she lands on Tuga. In Lucy's case though, you don't get the sense that this guy is gonna suddenly turn into Mr. Darcy by the end. He's pretty abrasive. 

FRANCESCA: I found him unbelievably unsympathetic in this book. I mean, he is expecting her to be a wife in every sense, regardless of the kind of bureaucratic reasons behind their decision to marry. He is very much expecting her duties to extend to the bedroom, and it's very uncomfortable reading. I mean, obviously this book was written in 1983 when expectations perhaps were slightly different, but it's uncomfortable reading not only because he is so vile — relentlessly vile, but actually also I found Lucy's interpretation of her own reactions to him quite upsetting as well, because she quite often says, particularly at the beginning, well, you know, “Maybe I was being frigid? Maybe I was holding out on him?” and she's quite sympathetic to him in a way that I, as a reader, certainly was not. 

AMY: So a little bit of backstory that I think helps because it is very complicated. But when she first answered the ad, they did have sex. 

FRANCESCA: Yes. 

AMY: They were intimate. And so they had to get married for legal reasons to be able to go onto this island together. And she was mad about having to get married. She thought this is going a step too far, but we're already in it. So I guess I'll go ahead. And at that point she said. “I'm not gonna have sex with you anymore.” She basically said that right when they landed on the island, pretty much. And so it took him by surprise because he thought, I've got this hot girl (and she was hot, if you've seen pictures).

FRANCESCA: Oh, yes.

AMY: Yeah. So he's got this hot girl that had already agreed to sleep with him, and then suddenly they land on the island and she's like, yep, change my mind about that. So I think she does have a sense of, did I, you know. bait and switch?

FRANCESCA: But the way he speaks to her, oh, and the names he calls her and the, I don't know. I mean, I'm perhaps bringing an anachronistic reaction to it, but you know, if she says, “No,” my friend, it's, no. I really found him repellent.

KIM: I had a quote that I highlighted, she said “Later I was to discover how profound an effect being called the “C” word for a year had on my feelings of worth as a woman, because it was all I could really be to G. In the end, I felt it was all I really was.” 

AMY: Mm. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: And it's complicated because she also knows I'm stuck on the island with this guy for a year. I have to find a way to make this work. So she is very much about keeping the peace, keeping him happy in a weird like kind of “Little Missus” way. You know, even though she's not having sex, she definitely takes on the role of like, I will do the wifely thing. 

KIM: While also doing all the other stuff too! 

AMY: She was doing everything. That's a good point. 

FRANCESCA:: She's doing everything! I mean, 'cause that's the thing is that they get there and he's this big survivalist and he's done it a million times before and then within about five minutes he's lying on a green towel doing nothing. 

AMY: He just wants his siestas. 

FRANCESCA: Yes. It's so irritating. He's meant to be building this shelter for when the rains come and he's doing nothing!

AMY: And she's got like military level organization like, “this is what we need to be doing today.” You know, “the rains are gonna come. We need to get the shelter.” And she starts ordering him around and he does not like getting ordered around by her either. 

KIM: He resents it. Completely. 

AMY: Yeah. That's why I love this book, because if you're not into wilderness survival, it doesn't matter because this is a story about interpersonal dynamics. That's what makes this book so fascinating. 

KIM: Completely. In a crucible. Yeah. 

AMY: Yeah. And so they have to sleep in a tent together. They're wandering around naked pretty much because it doesn't make any sense to wear clothes. So it's an unusual situation, but it seems like throughout the book, what she's more interested in is her relationship to this island. That's why she's here. She's here to be an adventure, and it almost seems like the book is a love story between her and the land, wouldn't you say? 

KIM: Oh yeah. Yeah. She definitely is happiest when she's able to wander on her own around the island. She craves that time by herself to think and write in her diary, and it's very sensual, too.

AMY: She writes in her memoir. The island had me like a lover. I was totally captivated by the very indifference of its charm, aware always that my soft body was the alien, but as it toughened and moved more naturally to the rhythm of Tuin-time, I felt that I was beginning to blend. What she writes in these like private moments on the island just wind up being so beautiful. 

FRANCESCA: And that's the irony of his interactions with her, also, because he was the writer and he was the one who was having this big adventure to feed this book, the advance for which paid for his flights to get there and everything else. But actually nobody is still reading his book and a great many people are (or should be) reading hers. And she is the one who is responding with this poetry in her soul. It comes alive on the island and with the island. 

AMY: Absolutely. And she knew the whole time that he's gonna be working on this memoir, and it's almost like she had to keep reminding him: “Maybe you should work on your memoir?” Like he was so lazy.

KIM: Yes, totally. Her other wifely duty was nicely nagging him about his book. 

FRANCESCA: Yeah. Yeah. And making endless cups of tea. Like, the British commitment to the cup of tea when there's like almost nothing else on this island, and they have about 27 cups of hot tea a day. Yeah. 

AMY: And getting back to the island itself, Francesca, I'm curious about your thoughts on what makes an island setting so impactful in terms of storytelling, whether it's real life or fiction, in the case of your novel. 

FRANCESCA: I think for me there was some powerful wish fulfillment in writing this novel because the island of my novel I've created and I wanted to come to my desk with joy every day and be in a place of community and warmth and hope. And where can I go? Well, I can go to this other place that's so remote. It has this timeless feel to it. And you can only get there by cargo ship. Nobody has a cell phone. And this island just came to life, this tropical island that is a British overseas territory, (not a colony, to be very clear) with values I respected and a collectivist culture and a place of hope really for me and for readers. Um, and the isolation, I think. 

AMY: Yeah, I mean, you have a scene in your novel where the boat leaves Charlotte. I think Lucy has that same moment in her memoir where it's like, “Okay, there's no more, no more saving me. It's me here now.” You know? 

FRANCESCA: That's the novelist's gift, right? And it's the like human being's nightmare. I mean, unless you're a very particular type of human being, like Lucy Irvine. And actually I'm left reading this book with more questions than answers in some ways. Like she has got a degree of survivalist competence that is completely unexplained. The fishing and building and schlepping and hauling and climbing is unreal. I mean, if you put me on her island, I would die. I'd be dead in 72 hours. 

KIM: Yeah, you could see thinking, “Oh, that's a good idea.” And then you land there and you're like, “Wow, this was the biggest mistake of my life.” But instead it perfect for her. 

FRANCESCA: Yes! 

KIM: The percentage of people could do that…

FRANCESCA: Yes. It's like this was what she was born to do and there's not really any understanding that I've come away with of how she came to be the person who was so better suited to this than he was.

AMY: Well, but I think she did have that kind of crazy childhood where she's, you know, I think she ran away from home a time or two. She was always doing crazy odd jobs. She just had a very interesting and unusual childhood that I think kind of set her up for something like this where she was almost left to her own devices in some ways.

FRANCESCA: Yeah. I think her parents ran a hotel, didn't they? Quite a remote hotel, and she was at boarding school and she ran away a couple of times, like just to see, and then basically left school at 13 and never had any formal education after the age of 13. And she'd been a cleaner and she'd been a monkey keeper. But none of that accounts for me as to her instinctive response to this island. Um, but yes, she's definitely a very independent person from very early on. 

AMY: So these early days on the island, Gerald, who she calls “G.” in the book, he's just loafing around not getting anything done. So it's, it's all kind of on her. I mean, to be fair, he does come down with a very painful skin infection that affects his legs, but she is kind of just figuring her shit out. You know, they came with a few provisions, but not very much. They didn't want the comforts of home. 

FRANCESCA: Well, 'cause he'd come with all these seeds and he was gonna plant them a garden that was gonna keep them fed for the year. And obviously none of that happened. I mean, some of that's not his fault. Some of that was to do with the fact that water was very scarce at the beginning. But I mean, his garden project is woeful. But it's interesting because her commitment to this project is extraordinary and very literal. Like they get there and someone who has used the island in some way as a base or has lived there temporarily before them, has put this like corrugated iron shed up. Just literally a shed. Quite very small. And that's where they dump their possessions when they first arrive, because that's the obvious place to put it. And she feels like they're cheating. She has this almost visceral reaction to the shed, and they could not be more isolated and they could not be more independent. But no, she wants the letter of the law. She doesn't want someone else's tiny piece of tin. 

KIM: That's completely amazing. Yeah. Um, you talked about his skin infection, Amy. So this whole idea of scarcity and precariousness of healthcare on the island, it factors into the plot of your book, too. So I can imagine Lucy and G's medical maladies throughout the book might have struck a chord with you in that sense?

FRANCESCA: Yeah, it's very interesting, as a writer, the things that one discovers over the years that one is obsessed with. And for me through novels and nonfiction, somehow it's always women's healthcare. As soon as I start thinking about a very remote isolated, impoverished island, the next thought I have is, well, “Who's taking care of the women?” Because the medical system wouldn't have noticed them, or somehow they wouldn't have had the facilities or the wherewithal or the insight, um, to take care of women's needs. And so that for me was a really interesting plot. So it's where my mind goes instantly. Um, and so that's a strong thread in my book is the medical care. Yes. My main character is a vet, but also on the boat, coming back with her, is the new doctor who is an islander but has been living in England for 15 years and is coming back finally to assume his new role as head of island healthcare. And that was always gonna be for me, a really important part of the plot.

AMY: The problem when you're on an island is your resources are limited. They're finite, right? You know, you can't have every drug available. Lucy and G have a couple of Band-aids. That's what they have to work with. 

FRANCESCA: And she uses them to patch the roof!

AMY: Yes, you're right. You're right. Yeah. And so she's constantly improvising and trying to adapt and jimmyr-rig things with what they have. Gradually over time, she learns that they need to work with nature instead of trying to fight it. She writes in her memoir: Gradually, within and beyond the banalities of routine, the rhythm of Tuin established itself. Sun, moon and tide wielded an implacable baton conducting our every move, dictating to us when it was time to fish, time to labor, and time to rest. And yet, within the metronomic strictures of heat and night and day, we were free to flounder or flourish. To survive, one must conform. When the pattern of conformity is set, then you can see where your freedom lies. 

Her introspection is amazing. Just that idea of surrendering to everything she was dealing with on the island; G and all his tantrums, you know, the struggle to survive. And she also just had this joy and cheerfulness the whole time. Sometimes I would think of her as like a Disney princess because G. would be over here throwing a tantrum and she would still somehow have this like chipper attitude about everything. 

FRANCESCA: I think I responded to something similar. So this is from her diary.

What is it that makes the texture of the grass so different from one patch to another near camp? It's like flattened straw these days over near the scrub though beyond Long Beach it's thick where it bleaches and it's not blonde, but blue. Here it's dry, but so fine that there's softness. I like to lie stretched out on my side and let the heat melt all inner and outer tension so that I don't even flinch when an ant crawls in my ear. He'll crawl out again. 

AMY: Hmm. 

FRANCESCA: I mean, it's like very zen. She's just 

AMY: She’s like a wild nature girl.

FRANCESCA: Yeah. “He'll crawl out again!” I mean, it makes perfect sense, but also, uggh!

KIM: She's very at peace with herself. Like you feel like she could be alone if G. wasn't there and she would be fine. And maybe better. 

FRANCESCA: Yeah, better. Exactly. I was gonna say there are moments where you feel like maybe better. 

KIM: There's a section where she details the different meals she cooked based on the food she could source, which I thought was pretty interesting. And she gets really inventive. Obviously food is gonna be at the forefront of her mind, right, Francesca?

FRANCESCA: Yeah, I mean, the food is amazing. It goes back to what you were saying earlier about her going as in this traditional wifely figure because as far as I can tell, G. prepares no meals for a year. That is her domain and responsibility, and she takes tremendous pride in making these extraordinary, you know, mashing things into other things. And if she gets half of a something, it gets segmented between them and, you know, going on an unbelievable hike to where the giant pythons are because there might be a mango tree, possibly, in that direction. And you really do feel how important the food is to them and how great it tastes when they do find things.

KIM: Yeah, there's a great excerpt from her diary where she talks about this passion fruit: The tiny pale orange fruit looked so delicate against the armadillo-rough bark of pandayas, like thin eggshells against dark wood. I would love a boiled egg right now. Two with toast. Perhaps I can find a scrub fowl's egg. Some flowering vines to the right looked promising, but the fruit was yet too green to be good. I stepped over them, careful not to cause any damage, and made my way to a clearing where the sun could more easily penetrate the parasol of foliage. Here, one or two fruits were ready to eat, and I sucked out the sweet seeds as I moved among the vines. How I adore these tiny orange explosions of sweetness. First, I select the most deeply colored perfect specimens off the vine. Pushing apart the soft cup of fronds surrounding each individual fruit and then poisoning it carefully before my lips between thumb and forefinger definitely pop the skin so that only the honey-scented seeds flow into my mouth.

I mean, it's pretty striking imagery there, right? 

AMY: You can sense how alive this whole experience makes her feel. She just is appreciating everything as if it's the first time she's experiencing it. 

KIM: And again, the sensuality there, too. Yeah. 

AMY: So a kind of turning point comes in the book, I guess it's probably around three-fourths of the way through their stay on the island when a visitor from the nearby island of Badu visits. And Badu is a little more populated. I would say almost a little bit more like Tuga from your novel. It's got a whole community of people over there. And when this visitor discovers that Gerald (G.) is a master at fixing boat engines and generators, it kind of augers the end of the couple's isolation on the island because the people of Badu start coming to them for G. to fix stuff. It also marks the end of their having to survive because these islanders start giving them provisions like flour and you know, honey, things like that, that are making their lives more comfortable. And back to what you were saying, Francesca, a little earlier about Lucy taking this quest so seriously, she almost doesn't like that this is happening. She's like, no, I don't want the comforts of home. She's thankful that they're bringing these gifts to her, and in truth, they really saved them because they were so malnourished at the point when they were discovered, but she feels like, no, this is cheating again. Right? 

FRANCESCA: It's interesting that she is resentful, but two things happen. One, they bring them water so they can actually stay alive and stay on the island. But the other thing is that because they're bringing Gerald these engines, he suddenly gets off his arse and starts doing something and he becomes nicer. He's still not my fave, I must say, but he is more tolerable because he feels like he has a purpose and his enormous male ego is somewhat managed by being given a task. I mean, there were many, many tasks he could have applied himself to prior to this, but he feels useful in the wider sense to these people who are bringing him things that they can't fix. And so things get better because they're no longer starving to death or dying of thirst. But also he becomes a modicum less intolerable.

AMY: Slightly more sufferable. Yes. 

FRANCESCA: Yes.The bar, as we said, is low. 

KIM: Totally low. Like would you want to spend a year on an island with Hemingway or something? 

AMY: He seems worse than Hemingway. But I wanna defend G. for a second. I know I'm a little more sympathetic to him.  

FRANCESCA: You are! You are very “Camp G.” I'm finding this very interesting.

AMY: But here's why. Let me show you on the screen. I got a copy of his book.

FRANCESCA: So did I!

AMY: Oh, okay! Alright. So, yeah, so I gave it a read because I wanted to see … there's two sides to every story, right? So his account of their time on two is called The Islander. It was published one year after Castaway came out. And if you're a subscriber to this podcast, I'm going to be reporting back in more detail on The Islander in next week's bonus episode and comparing it to Lucy's book. Um, I suspect that “recollections may vary” as Queen Elizabeth would say. But it was Gerald who actually encouraged Lucy to write her memoir. In his memoir he says, “you're a more brilliant writer than I am,” because she would be sharing some of her diary entries with him as they were together. And I still don't like him, and I think he has a giant ego, but I did find a new respect for him reading his book, which is nowhere near as well written. I wouldn't even recommend it. He just kind of writes what happens. She writes hers in this sublime, beautifully literate way. So I feel like I have a little more insight into Gerald having read his book. He doesn't refute what she says about him. You know, I, I also want to point out that before all of these events of Castaway took place, Gerald was married to another lost lady of lit. Her name was Rosemary Kingsland, and she had a very interesting life as well. So in addition to writing novels and screenplays, she was very famous (in Britain, especially) for writing a tell-all memoir about the affair she had with Richard Burton when she was 14 years old. So I'm sure a lot of people in the UK know about Rosemary Kingsland. She is the one that helped Gerald (they had been separated for a while, but they remained friends) and she helped him narrow down the candidates for the wife on Tuin. So just an interesting side note that there's another lost lady of lit. 

KIM: How old was Richard Burton at the time? Do you know? 

AMY: Uh, too old. Too old. Probably in his forties.

KIM: Oh my God. Yeah. Whoa. Lucy Irvine's adventures continued after the success of Castaway and she published two more memoirs, uh, Runaway, which is actually a prequel to Castaway. It talks about her remarkable childhood, her Bohemian life prior to this Tuin adventure and then Faraway, which recounts her later decision to relocate for a year to a remote island in the Solomons. And that was with her three sons that she eventually had. 

AMY: I don't know if we even mentioned, but before Lucy answered the classified ad to be the Tuin wife, she worked for the Internal Revenue Service. I mean, America's version is the IRS is where she was working. So she was doing the boring office job in London, basically, which I think is hilarious that she went from that to, like, naked on the island. She also wrote a novel later in life called One is One about a woman in a dysfunctional relationship. (I wonder where she got that idea?) Reviews online when I was checking that out seemed kind of mixed. I definitely think Castaway is the book you want to reach for first, and then, um, if you're in love with her writing, go on from there.

KIM: Okay. And so now at 69 years old, Lucy Irvine is living in Bulgaria currently, where she has dedicated her life to animal rescue through the Lucy Irvine Foundation. Her organization helps dogs, cats, and horses in poor areas of Bulgaria, providing the animals with food and veterinary treatments and safeguarding their futures by finding them loving homes. We will link to that organization in our show notes with more information on how you can donate. So yeah, there are pictures of her and her son was interviewed in The Guardian. So yeah, she's living and has an interesting life still. 

AMY: For sure. She has a very Jane Goodall vibe to her that I love. Like she still doesn't care about material possessions at all. In fact, her home burned down in Bulgaria a few years ago, I think, and she's just carried on. You know, I think she moved into a mobile home or whatever, but her priority is taking care of these animals and she has been battling health issues in recent years, but her advocacy for animals has not wavered. Her foundation is doing great work. 

KIM: I wanna hear about the film version 'cause I have not seen it. The 1986 film of Castaway, which stars? Amanda Donahoe and Oliver Reed as Gerald, what's the verdict? And Francesca, have you, have you seen it? 

FRANCESCA: I haven't. I wasn't sure how I felt about it. And again, I looked at some reviews and they were sort of mixed. Um, but now I dunno whether my curiosity might not get the better of me and I might not have to just check it out. What's your feedback? 

AMY: Save yourself. Save yourself. It is pretty unbearable. I do not recommend it as much as we love the cheesy cover. It definitely is cheesy, but it's just really hard to watch. It's not good. Um, Amanda Donahoe, I will say was terrifically cast because she looks almost exactly like Lucy Irvine, but there is so much 1980s saxophone music. I can't even deal with it! It makes no sense. Because you're on an island and there's sexy saxophone music! It was pure Eighties.

KIM: I'm thinking of Against All Odds!

AMY: Yeah. The whole memoir of Castaway definitely has a “will they or won't they?” tension about the whole sexual situation with G. They try to play that up a little bit. 

KIM: Because it's not romantic in the book. It's “will they or won't they? I hope she doesn't!” as opposed to like The Blue Lagoon or something. 

AMY: That's the problem. They were trying to make it like Blue Lagoon, but like… it's Gerald. I don't think it did the book justice, but I can see why it did get turned into a film because people were loving this memoir so much. Maybe somebody needs to make a new adaptation.

KIM: Yeah, that's better. Um, but speaking of adaptations, we do look forward to hopefully seeing a TV adaptation of Welcome to Glorious Tuga. Is there any further information you can spill on that or can you share what you're working on next or both? 

FRANCESCA: I can both a bit. Um, so Seesaw have got a screenwriter on it and she started, so that's very exciting. Um, and I've been having all sorts of funny conversations with them where I get these sort of random communications. I said I didn't want to be involved. 

KIM: That's probably better. 

FRANCESCA: Yeah, it's better. Um, but obviously I've done a huge amount of research and so very occasionally I'll get a, just a WhatsApp message saying, um “Who's the police officer?” or you know, something like that. Sort of really practical questions or like, “Can we be in touch with one of your vet contacts?” Because obviously I've done lots of very joyful research interviewing vets and herpetologists. Um, so that is moving along, which is very exciting. Um, and what I'm working on next is the sequel.

AMY: Oh, nice! It's gonna be part of a trilogy, right? 

FRANCESCA: It is. Yeah, and the sequel (Number Two) is out this year, so I'm now, what I'm working on is Number Three. But Number Two is imminent, which is exciting. 

AMY: And listeners, Francesca's book was kind of originally described to us as sort of the Durrells from My Family and Other Animals — kind of quirky characters who are living in a small community. It has very much the same vibe as that TV show, “The Durrells.” So it makes sense that there's gonna be more books coming out. Um, this is all so exciting. If you do have any notes for the producers of the TV series, maybe just say “no Eighties saxophone.” Just draw the line there. 

FRANCESCA: Yes, I will pass that on. No Eighties saxophone.

AMY: Proven not to work. Yeah. And I also wanna say there's another novel that kind of fits along the seam that I'm reading. Um, it's by Allegra Goodman, and I mentioned this in a bonus episode. It's called Isola. 

FRANCESCA: That’s on my bedside table now!

AMY: Are you kidding? Okay. Yes. So it's a true life. Story, but it's been fictionalized by Allegra Goodman about Marguerite de la Roque de Roberval, who was a French woman who was purposefully kicked off a boat on the way to Canada. She was being punished, her and her lover were stranded on an island off of Newfoundland and left to fend for themselves. And so it very much has the same vibe of like, “How are they gonna live? How are they gonna find food?” But it's almost like a combination of Castaway and The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell, because it's set in that time period. So, um, yeah, just wanted to mention that also, because it's another book in this vein. 

FRANCESCA: That's my next read, that book. 

AMY: All right. It's good. It's good. 

FRANCESCA: Good to know. 

AMY: So, Francesca, thank you so much for joining us today. This book was so wild and interesting, and so it's really made for a fantastic discussion.

FRANCESCA: Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I mean, it's fair to say it's unlike anything else I've read. 

AMY: Yeah, no listener will be disappointed if they pick up this book. So that's all for today's episode. Don't forget to join me next week if you're a subscriber. I will be diving a little bit more into the memoir of Gerald Kingsland. That's his account of his time on Tuin with Lucy. Does everything that she mentions in her memoir line up to his account? We're gonna find out. 

KIM: That sounds really fun. I'm intrigued to hear his perspective and how it differs from Lucy's. 

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.

236. Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich with Victoria MacKenzie

This transcript is auto-generated; please pardon typographical errors.

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

AMY HELMES: Hey there! Kim, I think you know this, but earlier this year I did a special podcast for our subscribers on my recent adventures in Highgate Cemetery in London. I met a few lost ladies of lit there.

KIM: Yeah, I am so jealous. I wish I had been there for that whole trip and especially the Highgate Cemetery piece. 

AMY: I know. And it was a perfect day. The weather was beautiful. And then to top it all off, after I went to the cemetery, I made my way over to the British Library to see this special exhibit called Medieval Women: In Their Own Words. It was incredible. I saw Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies. I saw Anna Komnene's The Alexiad. The Book of St. Albans by Julian Berners. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, yeah, these are all books we've mentioned in previous episodes. That's so amazing that you got to see them. 

AMY: I was pinching myself the whole time. And it was also a really fun exhibit. too, because it was interactive. So they had different smelling stations along the way where you could experience these different scents in medieval women's lives, like what their shampoo would have smelled like, you could even smell the scents, both good and bad, that were described by Julian of Norwich in her Revelations of Divine Love.

KIM: Okay, I can totally imagine smelling the earthy tang of medieval shampoo or getting a whiff of the pungent brimstone in Julian of Norwich's divine visions. Wow. 

AMY: Yeah, and I should also add that The Book of Margery Kempe was among those on display too. So, I mean, it was just over the top incredible. 

KIM: So I first encountered Julian and Margery, you know, we're on a first name basis, um, in an undergrad course on female mysticism. And let me tell you, I was captivated from the get go. These women were both deeply radical and surprisingly relatable. 

AMY: Completely. And I was so thankful to be able to see, you know, all this stuff on display at the museum. Unfortunately, I think it just wrapped up earlier this month, but it did inspire me so much and it led me directly to today's special guest. I cannot wait to talk to her. 

KIM: Okay, so let's raid the medieval stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

AMY: I first encountered today's guest, Victoria MacKenzie, at this British Library exhibit that I just mentioned. I was browsing the gift shop and I came across her book there. It's called For Thy Great Pain, Have Mercy on My Little Pain. And it jumped out at me. And when I read the back cover description, I was so tempted to buy it. It's a fictional account of the real life encounter between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, of which very little is actually known. And unfortunately I was traveling for two weeks with only a small carry-on suitcase. So I knew I couldn't buy it at that moment, but I snapped a picture so that I would remember and I bought it as soon as I returned to LA. Then I dashed off an email to Victoria, we're going to call her Vicky in this podcast, and I asked her, hey, please join us for a conversation. We need to talk about these women. So Vicky, welcome. We are so glad to have you on the show. 

VICKY: Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here.

KIM: So Vicky, you're originally from Sussex, but you've lived in Scotland for the past 18 years. We're wondering, did you by any chance make it down to see this exhibit Amy is raving about at the British Library? 

VICKY: Yeah, I did. I went down at the start of February and I was also absolutely blown away by it. There's something about actually seeing those physical objects that is so special. It really sort of brings the women closer to you. And it was actually the first time I'd ever seen either Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich's manuscripts. So that was really special. I was actually quite moved. 

AMY: Yeah, it's so wonderful that they've been preserved and that they're there to see.

KIM: Yeah. So, Vicky, let's talk about the genesis of this latest novel of yours. What made you want to write about this encounter between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe? 

VICKY: So, initially, I thought I wanted to write a novel about Julian of Norwich. I just knew that she had been an anchoress, that she'd lived in this room for 30 years by herself, and I was curious about why she wanted to do that with her life. So I started reading about her, and I very quickly came across the figure of Margery Kempe because they are contemporaries and they lived in a similar part of the world. So you can't really research Julian without coming across Margery. And as soon as I read Margery, I just couldn't let her go. There's something about her voice in her book, which I'm sure we will talk about that plenty, that really touched me. And I just thought as a novelist, wouldn't it be really interesting and fun to juxtapose these two incredibly different voices, these two fascinating women in a novel and just kind of put them together and explore them. And then as I was doing a bit more research, I just couldn't believe it. I realized that they had actually met, which just seemed like a kind of novelist's dream. 

AMY: Isn't that a great feeling when the universe is telling you, like, “Yes, you are right on track. That's what you should write about!” Yeah. 

VICKY: Yes, it felt meant to be.

AMY: So like Kim, I also read excerpts of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe when I was in college, but it does take a bit of effort, I think, to read their work, given the difference in the language. What they wrote is all there in your book. You're able to incorporate it in different ways and it makes it so much more accessible to a modern reader. I think really it's a perfect introduction to these women, especially for people who aren't necessarily wanting to pick up a 15th century text and try to pick through, you know, the difference in language. 

VICKY: Yeah, totally. So, I mean, I was thinking to myself, okay, you're writing a novel about 15th century medieval women. This isn't necessarily kind of the most obvious hot topic for a novel that you've ever thought of, Vicky. Um, so I was sort of thinking, how can I balance the fact that maybe the subject matter is a bit niche? So it was important to me that I made the voices quite accessible, I suppose, to kind of balance out the weirdness, if you like. So it's an experimental novel in some ways, in terms of the structure and in terms of the subject matter, but I wanted it to feel like they were talking directly to you, like they were kind of confiding their life story to you over a cup of tea or something. So I wanted that immediacy. 

KIM: It completely feels like that. It feels very immediate and present. So before we go any further, I think we need to explain who these two women were. They both had extremely different lives and very different countenances, but they also actually had a lot in common too. So let's start with Julian of Norwich. Who was she, Vicky? Can you talk about her a little bit?

VICKY: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, Julian of Norwich lived in Norfolk in the east of England in the late-14th, early-15th centuries. She had a series of visions of Christ and God when she was really ill when she was about 30. And then we know that at some point in her life, maybe when she was around 40, she became an anchoress, which is like being a nun, but you're confined to a single room. And that she spent the rest of her life in there. And we know that she wrote a book, Revelations of Divine Love, which is the first known book in English by a woman. But apart from that, we know very, very little about her. She put almost no autobiographical detail in her book. As a novelist, that was quite interesting for me. I had a kind of blank canvas to invent a life. Margery, although she has a lot in common with Julian, couldn't be more different in some way. So she lived at roughly the same time as Julian. She's about 30 years younger. She also lived in Norfolk, what's now Kings Lynn, about 40 miles away from Norwich where Julian was. But she most certainly was not an anchoress. She was very much a woman in the world, of the world. So she was married to a merchant. Her father had been an MP and the mayor, and she had 14 children that we know of, that she mentions in her book. And she was someone who was very much part of her community. She wrote a book, The Book of Margery Kempe. And so we know a lot about her life from that, really kind of day to day details and, you know, things about her family, things about her community. She also claimed to have a series of visions. Unlike Julian's, which all seem to come within just a few days, Margery's visions started after the birth of her first child, John, when she was in her early twenties. And then they go on for many, many years, these sort of conversations, almost, that she has with Christ. So it's quite a different kind of mystical experience from Julian. Um, the other thing that's astonishing about Margery is she inherited money from her father and this gave her rockable freedom. She persuaded her husband to give her permission to go off on a whole load of pilgrimages around the world. So here she is, just an ordinary woman from Norfolk in the medieval period, going off to Rome, to Santiago de Compostela, to Jerusalem. So she had an absolutely extraordinary life. Very, very different from a woman like Julian who lived in one room. 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, wow. It couldn't be more different, and especially given that time for, like you said, a woman to be traveling like that. That's amazing. The Book of Margery Kempe is considered the first autobiography in the English language by a man or a woman, which is pretty incredible, but she didn't technically write this book. Do you want to explain that a little bit more, Vicky? 

VICKY: Yeah, so she was probably fairly illiterate, which was not untypical of a woman at her time and her class. And we know that she dictated her life story to a series of scribes. Um, it's not completely clear who they were. It's probable that the first scribe was her son, John. Um, he had actually lived in Danzig, which is now Gdansk in Poland, for many years as a merchant. And it's possible that his English actually wasn't all that great by the time he came to write this book. And Margery complained that his, you know, letters are ill formed and she decides to give it to a priest and ask a priest to be her scribe instead. And the priest can't actually read what the first scribe has written. So the book's quite a botched job, if you like. It doesn't have a kind of like a solid chronology. It starts and stops and then it starts again. You can imagine what it's like as a writer, just dictating a book, this kind of one-off. There's no possibility for Margery to redraft, to edit. She doesn't know what, you know, what she's already said. So she kind of goes around in circles. It's quite a chaotic book, but it's also got this amazing energy to it. And even though there's this kind of layer of. You know, who were these scribes and did they really write what Margery told them to write? I think you still get this amazing sense of the woman behind these words. It really feels like this bold, boastful, lonely, strange, oversharing woman talking about her life. Um, so just the kind of vividness really struck me when I read it. 

AMY: Yeah, and that's why I think we can say, yes, she wrote it, because her personality is there. I mean, she dictated it, yes, but her voice is so saturated throughout this book, and it reminds me of … I kept getting “Wife of Bath” personality. You know, she's got that very bold, say-whatever-is-on-her-mind feeling about her. So both Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe suffered traumas in their lives. Help us explain how that ties into their mystical episodes. 

VICKY: Yeah, so, um, Julian does tell us that she has her sixteen visions that come over a few days. She calls them “showings,” which is a word I just really liked. They come at a time when she is really sick with a fever. She's so sick that her priest has come to her bed and given her the last rites. So we know that she was expected to die at this point. She then starts to have these visions. She sees Christ dying on the cross. All these different things happen to her, and they're so visceral and sensory. You know, she sees the devil and she smells him. She sees Jesus, and he actually invites her to take a look in his wound. I mean, it's just so gory. Um. I just found it astonishing. So she looks in the wound and there she sees the kingdom of heaven. So it really, it gets quite trippy. And I think for a modern reader, there's that temptation to say, well, she had these mystical visions because she was ill and kind of explain them with that medical background. And I think that's fine. But for me, because I was wanting to tell my story in first person, and I was really, you know, doing my best within limits to inhabit that kind of medieval worldview. I didn't want to just dismiss those visions as if they were hallucinations just brought on by the fever. I really wanted to allow Julian, you know, because she thought she'd had these visions. So I really wanted to allow the possibility that they were real, basically. And then with Margery, we know from her book that she has her first vision fairly soon after the birth of her first child. And she tells us in quite visceral detail that she had a difficult pregnancy. She had a difficult birth. She basically she loses her mind. Her keys are taken away from her by her husband, which seems at that time to be quite a symbolic thing of taking away her power, her responsibility, and saying like, “No, you are a sick woman.” And then there's this astonishing scene where she describes where Jesus actually comes and sits on her bed by her and talks to her, and then he kind of disappears up to heaven and she sees him floating up. And at that point she says that all her senses are returned to her and she's well again, and her husband gives her back her keys. And of course, as modern readers, again, we're thinking, okay, you know, postpartum psychosis, all of these things. That may well be the case. But as with Julian, I just wanted to put those things out there for the reader and then let the reader make up their own mind about Margery's visions. And Margery's visions, you know, as I say, they keep coming back to her throughout her life, very different from Julian's. They're almost conversational. She's having chats with Christ, basically. They're really quite domestic. You know, she walks with him. She confides in him. He's almost like her best friend. It was really astonishing and just so bold of Margery to have these visions and then to share them with the world, basically. It's incredibly brave. 

KIM: Yeah, I agree. So you write so eloquently about their personal tragedies in your novel, and I think it would be great to have you read a few excerpts so our listeners can hear.

VICKY: Yeah, I'd be really happy to. So I'll begin with a little section from Margery Kempe. So this is from quite near the start of the novel and I hope you'll get a sense of the voice of Margery from this because she's quite direct, she's quite bold and it's quite different from Julian's more contemplative, calm voice.

Margery — Christ first visited me some months after the birth of my eldest child, when I labored for more hours than a single day can hold. I suffered much when I was with child, with vomiting and aches, and I was afraid it was punishment for my sins. I also desire to eat strange things. Clods of mud and leather soles from boots. My husband wasn't pleased and told me not to eat these things. He said that if I didn't stop, he would have me imprisoned in my chamber and he would put shackles on my arms. At that, I quite lost my reason. I ranted and screamed and tore at my clothes and hair, and I was indeed restrained as my husband had threatened, and he took away my keys. Then my labour pains began, and they were shackles themselves, pinning me down and causing me to roar. My neighbour Agnes was at my side, to aid me through the berth, but she tutted at my cries. I spent more time gossiping outside my room than rubbing my belly with rose oil. When the child emerged, I thought he was the devil come to split me in two and toss my entrails to the dogs. I prayed to Saint Margaret to relieve me of the terror and let me die quickly. But she did not hear my pleas. When Agnes pulled the devil from between my damp thighs, he brought other demons, who pawed at me and hauled me about the bed all night and day. 

AMY: Such a haunting description of childbirth. And it also reminds me of the exhibit that we saw, there was a whole section on what childbirth was like in the medieval era for women. And I love that your language is accessible as we talked about, but you really do feel like you're transported in time, right Kim? 

KIM: Yes, absolutely. I mean, it perfectly feels like you are there in that moment in that room with her. Yeah. 

VICKY: I think in her book, a genuine sense of suffering really comes across. It's so moving. When I was writing the voices, accessibility was important, but I did also want to give that kind of oddness. To let the reader know or to remind them this is 600 years ago. So sort of slightly odd grammar at times and obviously like vocabulary as well. So that was, yeah, that was important to me to get that kind of blend of the here and now and the long ago.

KIM: It almost has a poetic feel to it, the way the words flow, which makes it really beautiful. Yeah, I love it.

VICKY: So Julian's voice is so different, you know, in her book. She's profound and wise and calm and contemplative. And I just really enjoy playing with that and the juxtaposition with Margery. As I said about Julian, we don't know much about her life, so I've kind of invented a whole tragic backstory for her, if you like, to think about why she became an anchoress. And the other thing I should say is that Julian and Margery lived at a time of successive waves of the plague of Black Death. And so I really wanted to incorporate that and to make that part of my novel as well. You'll hear that in this section I'm going to read.

Julian — Soon after the wedding, I was with child, and when she was born, we called her Elizabeth after my dead sister. She was a fine black curled creature with her father's blue eyes and my own long limbs. Like all new parents, we thought our child the most splendid ever to be born. The pestilence that came then was swifter than the first. A person hardly knew they were ill before they were dead. Simon left me first. One morning he could not get out of bed. I rushed out to buy a pinch of saffron, which had been much discussed lately as a cure. I brewed the yellow orange threads with warm water, letting them steep for half an hour, and made him drink it down. But then he developed a headache and his throat was sore. Soon the fever took over and he was too weak to sit up. He sweated and complained of chills. I made another saffron brew and cradled his head in my lap, dripping the bright liquid onto his tongue. But I knew by then, and sent for Master Walter. He did not come in time. Simon died in my arms, clawing at the air, without the priest's oil or the chance to confess. His last words were, “Love God,” or were they, “For the love of God?” My heart grew as icy as his brow. I thought that nothing worse could ever befall me. 

KIM: Beautiful, and two completely different voices, but yet it works together. 

AMY: It's a good explanation, whether it's the right one or not, because she was older when she decided to become an anchoress, which is such an extreme decision, right?

VICKY: Yeah, totally. There are little hints in the images that she uses in her book, Revelations, that she was familiar with a domestic life. So I think it felt to me plausible that she had been a wife and mother, even though we don't know. Some people wonder if she had been a nun before she became an anchoress, but nuns were amazing at paperwork. And there's no record that Julian, “the nun” subsequently became the famous anchoress Julian of Norwich. So we don't know, but it's much debated, but obviously as a fiction writer, you come down one way or the other and to invent, which is very fun. 

AMY: One of my favorite parts of your book, too, is the ceremony that she goes through to enter into the cell. Is that based on research? Or did you just imagine? 

VICKY: Yeah, yeah. So the idea of becoming an anchoress was really that, as I said, it was that initial impulse to write the book. So I did lots of research on the anchoress life. And that ceremony, it was just so full of theater and I really enjoyed writing it. So I love the contrast. If you're a nun, you become this bride of Christ. You wear white. It's almost like a wedding ceremony, but with an anchoress, you die to life and you lie on the stone floor of the church with a black cloth over you and monks sing an actual Requiem mass for you as if you're dead. I just seemed so kind of goth and extreme. It was such fun to write. And then the bishop leads you around to your little room that's adjoined to the church where you're going to spend the rest of your life. And there's more ceremony where he sort of says, you know, let her enter if she wants to enter type thing and you step in and then you're bricked up and that's it.

AMY: The bricking up is, I mean, that is like permanent! It's not like there's a door there. 

KIM: No. I know. I was holding my breath through that whole part. I just, uh, yeah, it's kind of thrilling. 

VICKY: Yeah. I should say that with anchoresses, there are kind of different levels of extremity, if you like. So some anchoresses were just locked in bad enough. Some could actually walk in the grounds of the churchyard, so they sort of had a bit of outdoor space, but I opted for kind of “max anchoress” with my novel, so I went for the extreme, and also I just was fascinated by the fact that when you died as an anchoress, you might be buried in your cell, so your kind of predecessors, the bones were under you, and you're basically walking on your own grave.

AMY: She did have a servant. 

VICKY: It’s not all bad. 

AMY: There was a little window where meals could be passed through and a servant girl came and went in your book, at least in the telling. So I was starting to think, okay, if I had internet and TV, could I do this? Maybe. 

VICKY: Yeah, I was starting to think, is this just a really extreme writing residency?

KIM: Oh, I love that as a writing residency theme! But she does go through this period where you kind of describe what it would be like to sort of come to terms with the decision she made to be an anchoress, she's locked away in what that really does with her mind and that was fascinating. 

VICKY: Yeah, I didn't want to give her an easy ride. I wanted to humanize these women. I wanted to inhabit them. And I guess, you know, as a writer, you're sort of channeling a bit of yourself. So I was thinking, how would I respond to being locked in this room? And just using Julian's voice from her book as well, you know, she seemed like someone who would be quite observant. So I had things like her observations of the natural world out the window or the little creatures that come into her cell, she'd be someone who would pay attention to that kind of thing. Whereas with Margery, no, Margery never observes the natural world. She is not interested. So that was really fun. But you're, you're right as well, what you say about she had a maid. One of the things that I found so interesting researching the anchoress is that you couldn't just be anyone. You actually had to be quite well off because you had to pay your way to be an anchoress. So you had to be able to pay for a maid and what an extraordinary life story of those maids. They're kind of, you know, pseudo-anchoresses themselves, but without any of the kudos, if you like, of the anchoress life. Because Julian was actually quite famous as an anchoress and, you know, pilgrims would come to her window and to pray with her and to ask her wise counsel and so on. Actually for a medieval woman, career options aren't great. Being an anchoress is something that brings you some status and some safety. 

AMY: Yeah. 

VICKY: So I found that really, really interesting and started to think of it in actually quite a more positive light by the end of my book. 

AMY: We talked a little bit about the visions, so I didn't know if you had more to say on that front…?

VICKY: I think one of the things to say is that people are skeptical of Margery's visions in a way that they are less so of Julian. And I think that comes across in her own book, too, with people accusing her of making them up, of saying things for attention. I found that really sad. You know, she really seemed like someone who was quite lonely and vulnerable in her own community. With Julian, what really struck me is the visceralness of them. I wasn't prepared for that, you know, the really physical, up close descriptions of Jesus's face as he's dying, like his nose turning blue, this cold wind drying his skin. She doesn't hold back at all. It was just, you know, you think of mystics … for me, I just think of something a bit ethereal, a little bit misty, you know, kind of golden light. Whereas actually these visions were kind of earthy and graphic, um, not what I expected at all. So I really, when writing those visions, I really kind of enjoyed being a bit gross, basically, with them!

AMY: It lends credence to what she's saying, that it's not just like a glowy light, that she can be that descriptive. You're like, “Well, wait a second.” I will say I'm a skeptic, but I've been thinking about this a lot because, especially with Margery, she kind of frames it as Christ is her lover, you know, so it's a little bit shocking there, um, but God really gives her a position of power. If she can say, “God told me to do this,” you know, I had 14 children. I feel like I'm done. So I'm going to go to my husband and say, “God told me I should no longer be your lover. I should be his lover.” Maybe she was employing this in a way, you know, 

VICKY: It does feel like it. 

AMY: “God told me I should travel the world and see all these amazing sites. God told me to do it!” She's working it.

VICKY: She is, totally. And it's amazing how convenient some of the things are that God or Christ tells her at certain points in her life. And the other thing is that Margery would have been aware of other lives of mystical women and saints at that time through preachers and so on. And there was one woman in particular, Bridget of Sweden, and it really feels like she's mapping her life onto Bridget's life and Bridget was canonized. Margery really, really wanted to be made a saint and sadly wasn't. But yeah, Bridget asked her husband for a chaste marriage. Bridget dressed in white. You know, Margery starts dressing in white and her neighbors just laugh at her. They say, you know, “You've got 14 kids, Margery! We know you're not a virgin! What are you playing at?” Um, but she'll just say, “God told me to,” and that's the end of it as far as she's concerned. 

AMY: Yeah, and it kind of has to at least, if not stop the clergy in their tracks, at least give them pause. Because their instinct is to sort of come down hard on her, punish her. But what if she's right? They kind of have to walk a fine line. And I think even more radical or shocking than saying that Christ is her lover, which is shocking, but I think even more so than that was sort of how she interacted with clergy members, right? Can you talk about that? 

VICKY: Yeah, it's so satisfying and it's absolutely wild. So she's claiming visions and for a woman in the Catholic Church in the medieval period, that's a big no-no. You cannot have direct contact with God. It has to be through your priest. The other thing she's doing that really annoys the church is she's telling people about it. For a woman to preach is also against all rules in the Catholic Church. She's risking being burnt at the stake for heresy, essentially. So she is hauled in front of these really important men of the clergy, you know, bishops and so on, and they grill her about her visions, about her faith, they kind of want to burn Margery. They want to shut her up, she's threatened and arrested all the time. And yet she always wriggles out of it. She answers back to these men in a way that is so satisfying. At one point, the Bishop of York says to her, “I've heard you've been a very wicked woman.” And she just says to him, “And I've heard you've been a very wicked man!” And it's just astonishing. 

KIM: I love her. 

VICKY: You can't believe she says it. And what's so touching is that at times she says how much her hands are shaking with fear because the stakes are so high for Margery at this point. You know, she is risking being burnt at the stake. And so she hides her hands in her cloak. And she tells us this, even while she's answering back to these men and, you know, absolutely able to answer all their questions about faith perfectly. They can never get her, you know, they can never say that she's a heretic as much as they want to. So she's frightened, but she still does it. She answers them back and she gets away with it all. And the Bishop of York is so annoyed with her at one point, he gives a man five shillings just to get her out of his sight.

KIM: It's so amazing because they're both doing things to navigate in the world. in a way. We've talked about her maybe using it to be able to travel and to do all these things. It's really brave. She's standing up, taking the risk, like you said. And then Julian is ostensibly making a choice to have some sort of control over her life in a way, in this cell, it feels like to me.

VICKY: Well, there's just so little control, I think, for a woman over her own life. So, that was one of the things that struck me about being an anchoress, is that it meant you were protected from the dangers of childbirth, for example. She was probably protected from disease as well, because as far as we know, Julian lived on into her seventies, which is a pretty decent age at that time. And Julian wrote a book and that was pretty radical and brave. As far as we know, Julian only told a very small number of people about her visions at the time because it was so dangerous. You know, she wasn't like Margery talking about it on the street, but she wrote this book and her theology is quite radical in some ways. She has these visions and she feels that God's given them to her for a reason and she doesn't understand them. She wants to spend time thinking about them, unpacking them. And some of the conclusions she comes up with are pretty risky. She talks about God's love being quite maternal as well as paternal, which is really interesting. Um, she also has this interesting idea about sin. She talks about sort of going to the kingdom of heaven and worrying about sin, because as you can imagine, being a medieval person, sin was a big deal. You know, you got hectored about it every Sunday, et cetera. And it was such an important means of controlling people to say, if you do this, you're going to burn in hell. But she says, she goes to the kingdom of heaven and sin isn't there. It's nothing. It doesn't matter. And she says, all that matters is that you live as if you love God. And I think that's something that feels now quite shocking. It's got this kind of incredibly inclusive, loving theology, essentially. It's not about punishment. It's just about love. And I think for that time, that feels pretty out there. 

KIM: So One of these women lived in a walled cell, one traveled the world. One recorded quiet revelations, and the other is proclaiming her visions loudly to the world. And yet, they may have met. So what do we actually know, if anything, about that meeting, and can you talk about how you imagined this moment?

VICKY: Yes, so we know that they met because in Margery Kempe's book, she says that she travels to Norwich to meet Julian, the anchoress, and ask her about her visions, essentially, because she's being plagued by fears that these visions are not holy, that they're from the devil, or people are saying that they're, you know, they're made up. So she goes specifically to Julian to ask her advice. What's interesting is she probably didn't know that Julian had also had visions herself, because that just wasn't that well known at the time. What's so frustrating is that then she doesn't say anything else about the meeting. She doesn't say what they talked about. She just says she spends a few days with the anchoress and gets her wise counsel. And so it was brilliant as a novelist to think, okay, I'm going to make up this entire conversation myself and think about what they might have said to each other. And one thing that was really important to me is Julian's perception of Margery when she comes to visit her. So she can't look at people who come to visit her. She has a special window where people come, but she draws a black curtain. So it's just this voice. And I decided to write this section almost like a script, like a play. It's just voice dialogue. nothing else, no narrative, no descriptions, because I felt that's all these two women had. They just had each other's voices through the curtain. So that's what I wanted to give the reader. And Margery is sometimes portrayed as a figure of ridicule, a figure of fun. You know, she's almost Jesus's girlfriend or mistress. She has this kind of sexual, physical relationship with him. I think there's even some toe-sucking. Her neighbors laugh at her. They don't take them seriously. They throw mud at her in the streets. You know, she's not someone who's got people's respect. She's not a, you know, a wise preacher or a theologian. But when she goes to Julian, I didn't want Julian to see her as a figure of ridicule. I wanted Julian to pick up on things that I felt were in Margery's book, but between the lines.

And as I said, I think that Margery was fragile, was lonely, was worried. Um, and yeah, I think she was kind of playing these visions to bolster her sense of self, her place in society. And so I have Julian hear her voice and say that Margery Kempe was the loneliest woman she had ever heard. And it was really important to me to do that because I wanted the reader to feel empathy for Margery, not just to be laughing at her. And so yes, so then they have this conversation and Margery talks about her visions. I decided to have Julian hold back because we do have a sense that Julian probably didn't tell many people about her visions. She was in a cell in the center of the city of Norwich. And heretics were burnt there at the time that Julian was in her cell, just in fact, a street away. And so in my novel, I mentioned that Julian could probably smell the smoke on the burning days because that was entirely plausible. And I thought, how, how do you live with that kind of fear? Of course, you'd keep it to yourself that you had these visions. So they have this conversation and we don't know how Julian's book, which she probably was working on as an anchoress, we don't know how it got out into the wider world. So I fictionalized a way in which she passes it through her window to Margery, because I thought it would just be such a profound symbol of one woman passing on her written word to another woman. And the thing about Margery, so she dictates her life story towards the end of her life. What on earth possessed her? What gave her the idea to do that? You know, if this is the first autobiography in English by a man or a woman… Why? Why would an ordinary woman like Margery decide that her life is worth recording? And I thought if Julian had given her this book, perhaps that would give her the idea that books were powerful. Books were a way of, you know, saying something about who you were, something that mattered to you, a way of recording things for posterity and leaving a mark. So I thought that would be quite a fun way of both suggesting how Julian's book gets out into the world, which I completely made up, and suggesting what might have inspired Margery to think, actually, perhaps the written word matters, perhaps I could do something similar.

KIM: I love that. 

AMY: I know, that kind of gives me chills when you said that, that's amazing. And like you said, people laughed at Margery then, and I think people laugh at Margery now a little bit, like, wow, this is crazy. I mean, when you read some of what's in her book, you're like, this is nuts. But, um, I had seen an earlier interview you did where you kind of talked about, like, is she unwell? You know, what's really going on? What are your thoughts on that? 

VICKY: I think it's so hard to know, and we're coming at it from 600 years later with a completely different set of understandings of the human mind, of selfhood, so it's really difficult to know. I mean, yes, perhaps Margery was unwell, and, you know, I'm not someone who actually has any religious faith myself, so in terms of thinking, were these visions true? It's very difficult for me to say yes, I think they were because, you know, that doesn't fit with my own worldview. Um, but I think that Margery just has such a remarkable strength of personality, that why would you make this up if what you were risking was your own life? I don't know, I suppose it's a way of her shaping her own narrative of, um, asserting who she is and pushing back a bit against the patriarchy. You know, I mean, she stands on the street in her town and talks about her visions and people gather around to listen. And clergy say to her, you know, you're not allowed to preach Margery, you're a woman. And she says, I'm not preaching. I'm just standing here talking. And if people gather around me, well, that's not my fault. She's just smart, she's really smart, she's always got an answer for everything and she's constantly crossing these figures of authority and standing up to them and asserting herself, which is just completely fantastic. And I wanted to get that across through her relationship with her husband as well. I mean, I don't feel that he's like a terrible, evil man, but he says things to her, you know, about, you talk too much. She says about writing her book to him, he says, don't be ridiculous, women can't read, their brains are too soft. And that was a genuine medieval belief. I didn't just make that up. Um, that was the kind of thing women were putting up with at that time. And I didn't want it to be a book that kind of, you know, was shouting its lessons of feminism at you. But just by putting those things in, just letting them sit there, I hoped that the reader will be, um, you know, suitably annoyed on Margery's behalf. 

AMY: So for as interesting as these women's lives were, um, so too are the fates of their actual books after their death. They kind of take on their own journeys. It's pretty remarkable. Can you tell us about how both of their books were lost and found over time? 

VICKY: Yeah, so Julian's is shrouded in a lot of mystery. We don't know how her book came out of her cell, came to be in the world. We do know that some English nuns who lived in France had it and made copies of it. This was during the French Revolution. So somehow it had got out and reached women and women had thought that it was sufficiently valuable to protect it and to make copies of it. These nuns were persecuted during the French Revolution. They were arrested and put in prison and they managed to escape the day before they were due to be executed and they escaped back to England and they had on them a copy of Julian of Norwich's manuscript. So it's so fluke-y that we have it at all, but it's down to women, to women valuing these words. We have them to thank. And then it made its way into a British Library collection, and at the start of the 20th century, it was translated into modern English from Middle English. And since then, it's been very highly regarded as a literary and theological work, and much more so than Margery's book. So Margery, again, some kind of mystery about exactly where it was immediately after Margery died and so on. But excerpts of it were collected in anthologies. A wonderful scribe called Wynkyn de Worde (which is just such a perfect name for a scribe) he had a few pages of Margery's words. It was very, um, bowlderized. There's so little of it that he actually thought Margery might have been an anchoress, which just goes to show how much “Margery” was taken out. So it's just a few sort of bits of vision and so on. Then it just goes dead. We don't know what happened at all to Margery's book until the 1930s. So we're talking centuries later. Picture, if you will, a country house in Derbyshire in England. Some people are playing a game of ping pong and a guest inadvertently steps on the ping pong ball, putting it out of action, and they open a cupboard to try to find a replacement ping pong ball. The cupboard is crammed with stuff, all of these old papers come flying out, and the owner is very annoyed with all this rubbish he's got, he says, Oh, I'm going to make a bonfire of it tomorrow. And luckily, luckily, luckily, one of the guests has a friend who's a manuscript expert at the British Library and says, Oh, well, why don't I take some of them and, you know, in case there's anything important here. And it turns out that the lost manuscript of Margery Kempe's book is among those papers. So again, very nearly burnt on a bonfire, and we don't know what it had been doing for 500 years, but the fact that a ping pong ball got squashed meant that we now have the book of Margery Kempe. It's a very “Margery” story, I feel, that kind of ridiculous detail of the ping pong ball. 

AMY: Maybe God does have something to do with this, because that's crazy, you know what I mean? That is divine intervention, if ever there was some. 

VICKY: Absolutely. Also, what it makes me think, though, is just how much has been lost.

KIM: Yes, I thought the same thing. Yeah.

VICKY: Yeah, I mean, in the Reformation, so many religious texts were burnt. And then I don't know, if you look at the history of manuscripts, there's always a fire somewhere. So much just gets lost. So I feel that it's amazing that we have these two women's books, but I'm sure that there are other books, maybe one day we'll find them even, that we don't have now. There must just have been more out there, I'm sure, that we don't have at the moment. 

KIM: Yeah, going to be discovered in some room in a cupboard somewhere. Yeah. 

VICKY: Yeah. I hope so.

KIM: Yeah. Me too. Me too. So there's such a chasm in time, culture, and belief between these two women and our present day, more secular as we talked about realities. What do you think Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe have to offer modern readers? We're in an era where women's voices are still being silenced. So what can they teach us? 

VICKY: It was ever thus. Yeah, it's true. I mean, when I was writing, I was conscious that there's 600 years between me and these women. And yet at the same time reading their books, they felt like real people. They felt like people I could empathize with and understand women that were experiencing many of the same oppressions and pressures that women are still experiencing today. These were just two people trying to find their place in society, trying to shape their own stories, trying to find a voice for themselves, um, a society, you know, for many of us has changed to some extent, but I feel like nonetheless, as you say, you know, women are still being silenced or their voices like Margery's are not being taken seriously even when they do get to speak. I mean, Margery's writing is, you know, been dismissed as in the style of a hysterical woman. And I feel that that is something that women still are kind of coping with today. So, yeah, it's, it's very frustrating. But I think having that sense of historical perspective can be really helpful. And it's just unusual, I suppose, to be able to listen to the words of two middle class women from 600 years ago in the historical record, we don't have much in the way of that kind of record, the everyday lives of ordinary women, especially with Margery. So they're really very remarkable historical tech. 

AMY: Listeners, we should also mention that Vicky has won numerous prizes for this novel. It's her first novel. She's gotten the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Saltire First Book Award, which is another national prize. I know that we've already had listeners in advance of this episode reach out and let us know that they purchased this book. So, um, I think there's a lot of excitement surrounding it and it's so good. We highly recommend it. Wondering what's next for you now? What are you working on? 

VICKY: So my second novel is going to be out in 2026 with Bloomsbury. It's about the Victorian art critic, John Ruskin. Um, very different kind of voice, but like Julian and Margery, in some ways he was a kind of visionary. So my interest in Ruskin is in his kind of proto-environmentalism. He was one of the first people to really think about and document environmental pollution. And he really valued paying attention, observation of the natural world, um, kind of slowing down and really looking at what's around us. And I think that a lot of the things that Ruskin wrote about and thought about actually have enormous resonance for us today in those ways. So I'm hoping to kind of bring a new angle on John Ruskin. 

AMY: Yeah, that's another person who I kind of like just dipped my baby toe in in college, you know, you just have to read one little smattering and then you move on. So I am interested in finding out more. Looking forward to that. So Vicky, thanks so much for dropping by today to talk about these two remarkable women. It's been fun. 

VICKY: Thank you for having me. I absolutely love talking about Julian and Margery, so it's been brilliant. 

KIM: That's it for today's deep dive into two trailblazing medieval women. So whether you're an anchoress at heart or more of a wandering mystic like Margery, we hope this conversation leaves you inspired to uncover more lost voices from history.

AMY: I'll be back next week for our subscribers to talk about the woman who penned a beloved patriotic tune in this country, “America the Beautiful.” I had no idea a woman actually wrote the lyrics, Kim. Were you aware? 

KIM: I think you can tell from my facial expressions, no! 

AMY: Yeah, I mean, I feel like we're having a hard time feeling patriotic these days, so maybe this'll help. But 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 Amy Helms and Kim Askew.

234. Frances Wright — A Few Days in Athens with Tristra Yeager and Eleanor Rust

This transcript is auto-generated; please pardon typographical errors.

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. 

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 ASKEW: Hi, everyone. Amy, the lost lady we'll be discussing today, Frances Wright, counted some big names among her ardent fans. The Marquis de Lafayette was her close personal friend, Mary Shelley was a chum, and even Walt Whitman sang her praises, noting that hers was, quote, “the sweetest and strongest mind that ever lodged in the female body.”

AMY: On the flip side of that though, Frances Wright, or “Fanny” as her friends called her, had a lot of haters too. Why? Because her radical ideas and ambitions sparked controversy. Ooh, Kim, this is gonna get exciting, I think. [sings] “Let's get radical, radical!” 

KIM: Sorry, listeners. You want to know who else admired Frances Wright? President Thomas Jefferson. In fact, seven pages of Jefferson's commonplace book feature excerpts he wrote down from Wright's philosophical didactic novel, A Few Days in Athens, a book she wrote when she was 19 years old. 

AMY: I know, imagine the guy that's responsible for the Declaration of Independence reading the work of a young Fanny Wright and thinking, “Ooh, that's good.” And by the way, it is good. I was doing the same thing as Thomas Jefferson. I was highlighting, like, half the pages in this book. It's great. So Frances Wright, she was kind of next generation Mary Wollstonecraft, you could say.And her life story takes a lot of really  interesting and noteworthy twists and turns. You could even say it turns a little “Xanadu.” I kid you not.

KIM: You're tempting me, but I won't sing it. Anyway, there's actually a podcast entirely devoted to the life and work of Fanny Wright, and we've got the host of that show with us today to give us the rundown on this remarkable writer and lecturer.

AMY: [sings] “Have to believe she is magic… nothing can stand in her way!” Sorry, guys, for some reason when I was, uh, writing this intro, Olivia Newton John was clearly on my brain. 

KIM: Okay, so before Amy launches into “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” I think maybe it's time to raid the stacks and get started! 

 [intro music plays]

 KIM: Our guests today, Tristra Yeager and Eleanor Rust, both have PhDs and are self proclaimed “history freaks,” which set them on the path a few years ago of discovering as much as they could about free thinking social reformer Frances Wright. The result of that quest is a podcast that debuted last year called “Frances Wright: America's Forgotten Radical.” 

AMY: Over the course of eight episodes, Eleanor and Tristra interview a number of scholars to track Fanny's story and put it into historical context. This podcast is a really great snapshot of America during the time Fanny was making waves. And it also relates her story to cultural conversations that we're still having today. So we highly recommend it. And when Tristra and Eleanor reached out to us about having this conversation, a few things really piqued my interest right off the bat. Number one, the fact that Fanny Wright is actually buried in my hometown of Cincinnati, and yet I had never heard of her. Two, the fact that she started an experimental Utopian community, which I think those kinds of communities are always interesting to hear about. And three, the fact that the teachings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, and Tristra, I think when you had emailed me, I just happened to be reading a book mentioned the Epicureans, so it was like a weird synthesis there in my brain. 

KIM: Yeah, and we're going to be zooming in today on that last bit because it ties into this remarkable book, the one Jefferson loved, A Few Days in Athens. Tristra, Eleanor, welcome to the show. We're so glad to have you.

 TRISTRA: We're so glad to be here. Thanks so much. 

AMY: So, Tristra, why don't you explain how the two of you first set your sights on Fanny Wright? And we're gonna call her Fanny, by the way. 

KIM: Yeah, we have to.

ELEANOR: Like her friends did!

 TRISTRA: Totally. I'm happy to share my “Fan-stan” journey. Um, I got obsessed with the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. I live about two hours away in Bloomington. And, uh, for about ten years, I read everything I could about it and was known to sort of go down there and wander around and all that good stuff. And one time I noticed an interesting sort of placard by the Working Men's Institute, and it said this was the home of Frances Wright. I'm like, “Who the hell is Frances Wright?” So Google, thank you, and I pull up her Wikipedia article. I'm like, “What? How come I've never heard of this woman? What? She, she did what?” And we'll get into more about why she's such an extraordinary person in, you know, early 19th century America. But my mind was blown. And I was a little bit obsessed, and I started reading everything I could about Frances Wright. Um, eventually, I dragged Eleanor into my rabbit hole-slash-obsession. And fortunately, she shares a lot of my interest in early 19th century writing and culture.  And the more we learned, the more, we became fascinated,

 AMY: Okay. So as I mentioned earlier, Fanny is buried in Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery, but she was born nowhere near that. So Eleanor, what do we know about her origins and what brought her to America?

ELEANOR: Well, she was born in 1795 in Scotland to a wealthy kind of middle class family, but she was orphaned at an early age and raised by other relatives in England. And I always picture her childhood as taking place in a Jane Austen novel, but maybe like with the annoying characters, not with the heroes and heroines, cause she found that society, you know, preparation for the marriage mart, you know, being focused on being demure and on manners, she found that really constraining and kind of empty, vapid. But she spent her teenage years instead in Glasgow, Scotland with family that was closer to her roots, and that brought her into an intellectual circle that really let her bloom. She was influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, kind of the tail end of this rationalist, scientific age, and that's where she started writing poetry and plays, including the first version of A Few Days in Athens that we're going to talk about later. At some point, she read a history of the American Revolution, which was still fresh. It was, you know, 20 years old by the time she was born, and she loved reading about this new country that was based on ideals of liberty and equality, very counter to the aristocratic, class stratified England that she was really chafing against. So, that was kind of on her mind as she came of age. And , that sort of America fandom brought her and her sister on a really extraordinary trip in their early 20s, by themselves, without a male relative, uh, Jane Austen would never, um, to America where they entered New York society. She put on one of her plays in a theater and rubbed shoulders with the great and the good in New York and around northern U.S. And that led to her knockout success, her first published book, Views of Society and Manners in America.

 KIM: Wow, she's so cool. 

AMY: I know, I can picture the movie version of this, like the two girls in their carriage on the cobblestones.

ELEANOR: Yeah. 

AMY: …making waves…

ELEANOR: Oh, yeah. Apparently her uncle really loved her mind, but when he heard they were going to America, apparently he hopped on a carriage to get to Liverpool to try to stop them. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, it's even more dramatic!

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: So, she ends up in the orbit of all these important people like the Marquis de Lafayette and several U. S. presidents. How does that come about?

TRISTRA: Well, if she was interested in someone's thoughts, she basically would go and introduce herself. As you can tell, she is a pretty precocious, outgoing gal in her youth. And when she came to America, it's hard for us to think of this now, especially in this day and age, but the U. S. was small. It was a fledgling nation, right? So, it was kind of easy to go and like speak before Congress. I mean, Robert Owen, the industrialist, who was very connected with Fanny Wright's views on things, also went and just like presented this big, crazy idea with this giant mock up of his utopian community. So, those kinds of things were happening on the regular. 

KIM: It's like the early days of Twitter.

TRISTRA: That's right. That's right. It was a cozy country back then, at least for, for white people.  You could definitely go in and just make the acquaintance of the fancy people pretty easily if you were from a privileged British background. And so that's exactly what happened. It was pretty interesting, though. I think, also to credit Fanny, she was very, very interested in making connections with people and in particular, men, in places of prominence. I mean, we could go into the psychology of that, but I also think she really wanted to find intellectual peers and to be taken seriously. And she wasn't afraid to sort of go up to somebody and ask for that. It's pretty extraordinary.

AMY: Okay, let's talk about this book she wrote, A Few Days in Athens. When I first picked it up, I was a little worried. I thought it was gonna be dry. More, maybe, like homework than pleasure reading. I mean, right? 

KIM: Amy, I totally thought the same thing. I texted you when I got the book and it came and I was like, “Uhhhh….” 

AMY: Yeah, I was like, “Trust me, you're gonna have fun with it.” Um, moral of the story, it is not dry at all. It has good pacing. It's actually quite funny at times, which we'll talk about. But it's also really astute and perceptive in its philosophy. And it reminded me of being back in college reading Plato. You know, it has that kind of framework of the Socratic dialogue. But Socrates is not the great thinker at the heart of the story. Tristra, why don't you explain the very basic plot of the book?

 TRISTRA: So the main, the sort of focal figure of this is Epicurus, and Eleanor being the classicist here will give you a much better explanation than I ever could. But the book itself is really interesting and I think for modern readers, kind of fun because it's framed as this sort of mysterious manuscript that's been found and translated, from Greek, which I kind of love that, uh, sort of historical fantasy, almost framework. But, the manuscript itself contains a very 19th century novel, which focuses on a young man, Theon, who is wandering around outside of extremely upset by these disturbing rumors. He hears about this guy Epicurus and his wayward school of quote unquote “philosophy,” which sounds a lot more like vice. And of course, as one does in a novel, he ends up bumping into Epicurus himself. It’s a very fun, kind of goofy, interaction. And he decides to go back with Epicurus and see what all the fuss is about and join him in his garden where men and women, free people and enslaved people all mix. So there he meets the beautiful and wise Leontium and has a long discussion with her and several other followers of Epicurus. And it's almost like one of those art films where you're at a dinner party and it's super fun. It's a lively read. You kind of get caught up in the conversation and it would almost kind of make a fun radio play. You'd have to update it a little bit for our modern sensibilities. 

KIM: Okay. So I'm probably not alone in only having thought about Epicurus in relation to food and wine. Can one of you give us the quick hits about who he was and what he taught, and how is this in contrast to the Stoics, who also factor into this book?

ELEANOR: So Epicurus was a Greek philosopher of the Hellenistic era at a time when Athens is just full of philosophy schools. And I love that in this book there are cameos from a bunch of other schools. So what sets Epicurus apart is something that you could call hedonism, although that also has a bad name. Basically, his fundamental rule is that you should pursue pleasure. The thinking is, that desire and needs are painful. So you really ought to satisfy them and attain pleasure. And so in his thinking, distress and hurt are really signs that you should avoid things that cause you distress and hurt. And then pleasure is a sign of something that you should pursue. This is not the same as just following every impulse or kind of, you know, lust. It's not about indulgence necessarily. The Epicurus of Fanny Wright's novel makes that very clear. The real Epicurus, you know, points out that if you do bad things, you will feel guilt. And guilt is also painful. Consequences still exist in this model of pleasure. And this contrasts with pretty much all the other philosophical schools, but the Stoics especially held that all the strong emotions are damaging passions. So the Stoic model is that you just squelch them with strict self control. You use reason and self control to attain a Stoic state of happiness that is basically like a kind of serenity. It's not affected by externals, which includes sickness and pain, like you face all of that in the same way. That's the Stoic goal. But there are other quirks to Epicurean philosophy. One is that all things in the universe are void or atoms. It's all matter or not matter, that includes the human mind and spirit. And the corollary of that is that there is no afterlife. For Epicurus, you don't go to heaven or hell. There's no divine punishment after you die. Every moral decision is a decision you base on the here and now, how you feel, how it affects other people, not on what are the gods going to do when you die. In his model, gods exist but have no effect on our world. and he focuses on knowledge that you gain from observation. You need to be doing reality checks. It's not all abstract reasoning. Throughout the ancient world, Greece, Rome, it's a popular philosophical school, but it goes against the religious structure of Greek and Roman society. And honestly, it really pisses off the Christians. So when the early Christian church takes over, they are all in for, you know, kind of Stoic style austerity and all in for the afterlife. And so they hate Epicurus. And most of what we know about the historical Epicurus is actually from the later writers who hated him.

KIM: That's so fascinating. 

ELEANOR: Yeah. And so that's how we get the bad rap. That's how we get, um, it's all focused on pleasure. I feel like it's kind of a slippery slope argument, right? (Well, if you are going to sate your needs and follow pleasure, obviously you're gonna end up with orgies.)

AMY: Right, and that's kind of the point of view that this young guy, Theon, at the start of the book. He has all these misinterpretations of it, as we all kind of do. To, like, kind of simplify what you're saying, it's like, I can see another person eating an ice cream cone and say, Oh, that ice cream cone would give me pleasure. So if I'm Epicurean, I will just take it. And then I will have the pleasure of eating the ice cream cone. But the whole philosophy is Well, if you take it, you're gonna A, feel guilt, which is not gonna give you pleasure. You're going to have public condemnation from other people. That's not going to give you pleasure. So pursuing pleasure doesn't mean in the immediate, but that's kind of what Theon is thinking. 

ELEANOR: Right. It's what Theon thinks, and it's also what Theon's Stoic friends think. Zeno is a character who's the founder of the Stoic school. He makes the same argument that, “Well, maybe Epicurus is a good leader who's going to make sure people stick to, like, the moderate thing, but what about when Epicurus is gone? Everybody's going to look at that and say, ‘Hey, I can do whatever I want!’” Whereas the Stoic school doesn't give you leeway. 

KIM: I think now is the time for us to read a little bit from A Few Days in Athens, because as Amy said earlier, the banter is actually quite witty. And there's some laugh-out-loud moments. 

AMY: Yeah, my favorite, and this happens a couple times throughout the book, Epicurus would kind of approach Theon… they’ve become friendly, so he'll be like, “Hey, you know, all my friends back at the beautiful garden where we hang, we're all just gonna be, like, sitting around and having a good time, like, would love for you to join us, but, I know you're scared of orgies, so… I don't want to intimidate you but we would love for you to hang out with us.” 

KIM: Totally, totally. It's hilarious. Epicurus is always, like you said, basically popping up out of nowhere at the start of chapters…

AMY: “Why HELLO…” 

KIM: “Didn’t mean to startle you.” And then the more Theon's engaging with Epicurus, the more admiration and understanding Theon has for him. I mean, there's a crush. 

ELEANOR: Oh yeah. It's kind of love at first  sight. Yes. 

AMY: I thought of him as kind of like “Sexy Jesus.”

KIM: Totally!  Rockstar Sexy Jesus.

AMY: The way he was so calm and cool and collected. And it's funny too, cause I've been watching a lot of “The Office” lately… 

KIM: The British one? 

AMY: No, the American one. And I kept thinking, Okay, Epicurus is kind of the Jim. He's funny, he's cool, he, like, has his wits about him. And then the Stoics are Angela. 

ELEANOR: Oh yeah. 

TRISTRA: I mean a little bit of Dwight even. 

KIM: Totally,

 AMY: I love, also, that Epicurus, he's just sort of like, “Hey, I don't need you to agree with me.” Like, here are the facts. Decide for yourself. And in fact, that is very important for him. You need to make your own decisions based on knowledge. 

KIM: Yeah, I mean it feels like this book is a good manual almost on how to engage with someone who doesn't share your beliefs or who doesn't see the world in the same way that you see it. And we kind of need that right now, right? 

 TRISTRA: Epicurus is always chiming in with like, “Yeah, Zeno, that guy's really smart!”

KIM: Yeah. completely. 

AMY: He's not denigrating the other side at all. 

KIM: He's not threatened. 

AMY: No. But then I also, there was a little voice inside my head, like, “Yeah, easier said than done,” right? I mean, he never encountered internet trolls. I would love to know how he would deal with, like, the internet, because would he finally lose his cool? I think he might. But Tristra, I did email you while I was reading this book, which was right around the time of the inauguration, and I said, God, this feels like therapy for enduring a second Trump presidency. 

TRISTRA: Yeah. Absolutely. Just calm, rational people having an interesting discussion based on deep knowledge and feelings. It feels like that discourse is absent from the public conversation right now.

KIM: Completely. 

AMY: And literally Frances Wright is spelling out, here's how you have these discussions, you know, not as arguments, but as rational discourse. 

 ELEANOR: As I was reading this, I was thinking about how Zeno the Stoic is, I mean, like you said, there's no insults. Nobody's like, “Oh man, that Zeno, he has it all wrong.” But he is an authoritarian. He's the kind of leader who is right. And is better than you. What he offers his students is a feeling of superiority over other people. And that's not something Epicurus… Epicurus invites you to participate, whereas Zeno kind of lays down the law. And Zeno is stern and judgmental, and Epicurus is welcoming and open and not acting as an authority. Um, and so I thought it was really great to see how an Epicurus could respond to a Zeno, right? And I also, there were a few things that came up in, I think it's mostly Epicurus' description of the difference about how Zeno is all about what men ought to be, but Epicurus is about what everybody can be. He says, “None but philosophers can be Stoics. Epicureans all may be.”

AMY: There's no exclusivity about it. 

ELEANOR: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, in the same passage, Epicurus says that “the doctrine of Zeno is sublime, and many great men shall come from his school…” (Fanny Wright's able to look ahead in history a little here), “...but an amiable world will come from my school.” Which do you want? A bunch of great men or an amiable world for everyone. And that's a key political difference still today.

TRISTRA: Another thing though, and I think this is a good, um, perhaps check on some of … I consider myself, uh, you know, someone on the Left. Um, I know it's a big surprise, um, but I think, though, I'm also seeing some very poor strategy and tactics coming from people with whom I share a lot of values, and also a lot of emotions that may be interfering with our ability to act. And I think Frances, like, through Epicurus, offers us some advice about how to pursue that. This is a quote that comes up a lot in discussing her philosophy of social and political change. This is, I think, Epicurus is saying this: “Our knowledge of human life must be acquired by our passage through it. The lessons of the sage are not sufficient to impart it.” (So don't just assume that because you have these beliefs and values in the abstract that you know what to do. You have to kind of do things in order to figure out how to make change.) “...Our knowledge of men must be acquired by our own study of them…” (Note, not judgment, but study.) “The report. of others will never convince us.” So we need to think for ourselves, but we need to test our hypotheses and proceed rationally and deliberately in a practical way. And not just like, you know, put yard signs up that have big, bold statements of our quote unquote values, right? Um, and I think that's a really important thing to keep us grounded right now when we can feel very torn about in the tempest of emotion and ideas that are supposed to distract us and supposed to make us fight with one another.

KIM: I love that. 

AMY: I have a follow up. on that, which was a quote that I highlighted, which is something that I struggle with personally, and so I know it's what I have to work on. But Frances Wright, as Epicurus here, um, said “The mode of delivering a truth makes, for the most part, as much impression on the mind of the listener as the truth itself. It is as hard to receive the wisdom from the ungentle as it is to love or even recognize virtue in the austere.” That's hard for me because, your snap instinct is to be like, “You're an idiot. You don't understand. You're uninformed.” But to attack that way, as much as it might make you feel good in the minute, and I know this to be true, it doesn't accomplish what you want it to accomplish when you approach someone with that attitude.

 ELEANOR: That's especially hard when it feels like the other side is starting from fundamentals that are so different, right? If the person you're arguing with just doesn't even want to address the questions, it could be hard to be that gentle teacher.

AMY: And it's hard, too, because this text and this philosophy promotes truth. You find the way through science and through what is true. It made sense then and it should make sense now but what is truth is now up in the ether. Like, you can't grasp at it anymore on both sides.

TRISTRA: I mean, postmodernism made some very rightful critiques of Enlightenment thought, but you can take things a little bit too far. And now we're starting to see, I think, the sort of ouroboros of we've basically undermined reason and highlighted subjectivity to such an extent that there's no way to pursue a rational argument together. Um, but maybe we need to be like, Okay, that was helpful, but we're going to pretend that reason exists for a little bit.

KIM: Let's have a new Age of Reason.

ELEANOR: I'm ready. 

TRISTRA: I'm all for it.

KIM: Yeah, completely. Yeah. So I picked up the book and started reading it and immediately was like, “Oh, yeah,” and even in Chapter One there's this part where Epicurus is praising Theon and Theon says “Do you want to make me vain?” And Epicurus says, “No, but I would make you confident. Without confidence, Homer had never written his Iliad. No, nor would Zeno now be worshipped in his portico.” Theon responds, “Do you then think confidence would make all men Homers and Zenos?” Epicurious: “Not all, but a good many, I believe thousands to have the seeds of excellence in them who never discover the possession. But we were not speaking of poetry and philosophy, only a virtue. All men certainly cannot be poets or philosophers, but all men may be virtuous.” There's a lot of things going on in there, but I thought that there was a feminist bent in that, too, because it's implying that people need the right conditions and encouragement to be able to flourish and obviously, historically women didn't have that in most cases.

ELEANOR: I love that quote too. I like that there's a little bit of stealth feminism in there, in that we haven't yet met any of the women who are students, in the garden. But we do! We meet, I think three, um, and Leontium is probably the most prominent. And along the way we learn that Leontium's status is that of a courtesan, and I use courtesan rather than prostitute because it's connected to a Greek social structure, that is probably most often compared to like the geisha in Japan, that a hetaira, a courtesan, is a practitioner of the arts who interacts with men in a different way than like a married middle class woman or aristocratic woman would. But she's an equal member of the group of scholars, maybe even one of the leading scholars, in the garden after Epicurus. And then there's a couple of other women who come along, too, including Epicurus's adopted daughter, and everybody can be a part of this. Everybody can be virtuous. Everybody can reason if you have that environment in which you're encouraged to reason, basically. I feel like that is a thread that comes through Fanny's writing about feminism, about women's education, about working people as well. Don't you think, Tristra? 

TRISTRA: Totally. yeah. I mean, she devoted a lot of her time in the late 1820s, early 1830s to education of craftspeople, working people in New York, by providing scientific lectures at next to no cost and inexpensive printed literature, et cetera. So just so people could learn about, like, chemistry, 

KIM: She is so punk rock. I can completely tell why you all got fascinated with her. She's incredible. I just can't get over the fact that she's writing about religion, philosophy, orgies, even though, you know, explaining that the orgies are necessarily happening… courtesans…. I mean, like, it's pretty cool for a 19 year old woman to be writing about this.

AMY: Yeah, and speaking of religion, let's get into that actually, because kind of the last third of the book is pretty disdainful of religion, I would say. So what she does is she employs the Epicurean paradox that there cannot be an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God. That those three elements cannot coexist, if you think about it. This felt to me like the most dangerous part of the book. It does seem like this would have outraged people. 

ELEANOR: I think this fact that this is framed as a translation of an early work, it kind of gives her a little distance. Um, but the sort of interest in Epicureanism definitely aligns with a certain strain of kind of atheistic or agnostic thought among thinkers and revolutionaries, mostly in the 18th century, you know, kind of the peak of the Enlightenment. But it's still a pretty “out there” position to take at this time. And over Fanny's lifetime, it actually becomes less and less acceptable to mainstream society to entertain this notion. During the course of her life, America enters what's called the Great Awakening. Is it the Second Great Awakening? I can't keep my Great Awakenings straight all the time. 

TRISTRA: Second Great Awakening, absolutely.

 ELEANOR: So over her lifetime, she's really seeing a shift from 18th century interest in the rational and interest in dissent from accepted religious institutions, to a much more conservative or, you know, restricted bet. And now, keeping in mind that in all of this, criticism of, like, the forms of a religious institution is kind of all over the place. there's lots of dissenting sects and schisms and things we would even think of as cults. Like, that's rife, especially in America. Um, America in the early Federal period seems to be where you go to have a cult or a commune. Um, So, you know, Methodists really arise out of 18th century dissent from the Church of England, But then also Mormons come out of 19th century, you know, religious ferment. So there's just a lot of different strands going along. But, Atheism — actually denying religion's power, and denying, like, an active god — is really unthinkable for British and American people. “Atheist” is actually one of the worst things you could call somebody. It's really considered the depth of moral depravity and madness by most people. Um, and so it really is, when Fanny herself takes on religion in her own voice, that's when things get ugly.

TRISTRA: And yeah, she called herself a free thinker, like many people did, who were extremely critical of religion up to what we would now consider atheism. Um, 

KIM: There's so much about Frances Wright outside of her writing that really bears mentioning, and we've alluded to a few things in this episode so far, but she was also an abolitionist, she was a newspaper editor, and not to mention a superstar public lecturer. There's no way we can touch on all of that today, but that's what your podcast is for, uh, right? So, I do think that we should touch on the fact that she did found a short lived utopian community, which is always interesting. So, Tristra, could you tell us a little bit about that?

TRISTRA: Oh, I'd love to, and I'll try to keep it short because I could go on and on about this. Um, in fact, I did in my own novel, um, trying to understand what it was like to live in this community that she founded. Um, she called it Nashoba, which is from…

AMY: Wait. You can plug your book.

KIM: Yeah, plug your novel!

TRISTRA: I am a very lost lady of lit, too… a future lost lady of lit. 

KIM: So are we. 

AMY: We all are. 

TRISTRA: I wrote a novel called Starfall, um, that takes on the history of New Harmony and the history of Nashoba, which was Frances Wright's, but I also have a future section. So there's like crosstalk between past and future. And the future section is also narrated by a woman, who returns to New Harmony, which has gotten a very strange reboot. It involves all sorts of fun things like AI and climate change and all that good stuff.

AMY: This is reminding me, I had forgotten, but at one point I had an idea for, like, a thriller that was gonna take place at the Shaker Village in, wherever that is in Kentucky, 

TRISTRA: Oh, Pleasant Hill!

AMY: Kind of, like, Witness or something, but …

TRISTRA: Oh, there are some Shaker hotties. Frances Wright's sister

hooked up with a Shaker. 

AMY: I feel like we could have a whole ‘nother discussion …yeah, exactly. But take us back to Nashoba.

TRISTRA: So, Nashoba was basically modeled on Robert Owen's communities in New Harmony and back in Scotland, in the idea that the focus was on education. And so what she wanted to accomplish was to prove through this model that you could unwind slavery without any injury to the enslaved or to the enslavers. So I think she really was taking her cues from seeing what had happened in Britain, when enslavers were basically paid off to free their enslaved people in the Caribbean. But she's like, Hey, there's gotta be a better way. And to our modern eyes, it seems a little bit problematic, but in the legal framework of the time, and where people were in America at the time, it was a very radical idea. So basically she and some of her friends bought land in western Tennessee, near modern day Germantown, Tennessee, outside of Memphis, and they decided to settle it with a mix of white and African American people. The enslaved people were still enslaved legally. They were quote unquote “purchased,” right? It's very problematic. However, the goal was to live side by side, to all work on this farm and to raise cotton, to have a store, to have school where people would be taught side by side. So there really was an attempt at this sort of interracial community, even if there were still some notes of white supremacy that we would find difficult to stomach nowadays. Um, and not surprisingly, things did not go very well. We go into a lot of depth in that in our podcast. It was a very complicated situation, and basically got her kicked out of high society. Yeah, it was pretty wild. Um, so you know, you can kind of see however, going back to A Few Days in Athens, it lays out the philosophical foundation for Nashoba. She wanted to create a version of this garden, I think. She didn't want to just write about this stuff, she wanted to prove, in action, that you could do these things, even if it didn't go the way she planned. So you’ve got to admire her for that. 

KIM: Yeah, really courageous. 

AMY: Yeah, and I feel like these kinds of communities never pan out, you know, like, nice try. She had the best intentions. Um, she did wind up… The enslaved people that were part of the community, she did wind up trying to do right by them.

TRISTRA: Yeah. So she took them to Haiti, which was at the time the only African diasporic republic where people of color could live in freedom. So she did her best, uh, was kind of the best option at the time.

AMY: Yeah. Okay, so we talked about her having a lot of haters by this point. Um, The Cincinnati Chronicle back in the day actually described Fanny as having, quote, “A brain from heaven and a heart from hell.” God, oh I can't believe that. 

ELEANOR: That's such a t shirt slogan. 

AMY: She also earned the nickname the “Red Harlot of Infidelity.” So let's talk about that last epithet. What's that about and why did so many people hate her this much?

TRISTRA: Well, the “harlot” part, again, came from just the fact that she would speak in front of mixed audiences and hang around with guys. Um, you know, she co edited a paper with Robert Dale Owen and there was always a little bit like, are they friends or are they not? And Robert Dale Owen was like, We're friends. Oh, we're friends. We're brother and sister. Um, and. Yeah, I think that's actually historically accurate. We don't have any evidence to the contrary. Um, but just that whole kind of behavior at the time was seen as sketchy, and wanting to speak in front of men was seen as overly bold. Um, so that's where the harlot part comes in. The “infidelity” part is because of her stance on religion. So it has nothing to do with adultery or being a bad spouse. Um, it has to do with, basically being an infidel, right? Being a non Christian. Um, And so, yeah, people really, really disliked her stance and really disliked that she was speaking publicly. And that was, yeah, extremely scandalous at the time, as odd as it may seem to us today.

KIM: So Frances Wright died in 1852 after slipping on a patch of ice outside her home in Cincinnati. The fact that she was so loved and also hated by so many influential people of her day, it's really hard to understand why she was completely unknown to us before you approached us about coming on the show. It's kind of mind boggling. What do you think contributed to her being so forgotten?

ELEANOR: Well, she did lose relevance later in her life. Her greatest period of fame was really in the 1830s, and there are a lot of ways in which she ended up being kind of forced to compromise on the values that she stated at that time. She got pregnant and got married, um, you know, against her firmly stated beliefs. But the consequences for having a child out of wedlock were just too dire for the child for her to [not] take that path. And she made some political compromises, um, there was really a turn against some of the things she was advocating. I think she… didn't she end up supporting Andrew Jackson, which seems like a really weird bedfellow in an election. It's a super complicated time with lots of turmoil. She was just out of fashion.

TRISTRA: And there was something with banking, like it had something to do with like the bank of the, you know, I don't know, I, I, I'm not into banking. 

AMY: Oh, like the William Jennings Bryan... 

ELEANOR: Yeah, exactly. “Cross of gold.” Yeah. And then there's that marriage of convenience. Their divorce got super, super ugly. Custody battles, fighting over inheritances. It drained her energy, her health, and her coffers. And that also led to a difficult relationship with her daughter, Sylva, who was in the best position to carry her legacy forward. And it seems like Sylva rebelled against her rebel mother by being pretty conservative. And so she attained a bunch of Fanny Wright's papers that were in friends' hands that were supposed to be published. And she sat on them. Instead of publishing, you know, a history that Fanny had been hoping to publish, she sat on them.

TRISTRA: And to make matters worse, the family had this big trunk filled with papers that included all these documents about Nashoba. Letters, and all sorts of personal things. And that trunk got lost. So researchers in the 1930s had access to it. and we're lucky that they took extensive notes, but we don't know what else was there.

KIM: Listeners, there's a trunk out there. There's a trunk!

TRISTRA: If you find a trunk filled with very interesting papers, please let me know. 

AMY: You guys in your podcasts, you kind of explore, in general, women getting forgotten. Listeners, I really want to point you in the direction of that podcast because you have a whole conversation that made me think more deeply than just like “patriarchy!” you know? There's a lot at play there. I'm actually interested now that I've read A Few Days in Athens to check out this other book that Fanny wrote when she was young, Views on Society and Manners in America, because I loved Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I thought that was a super interesting book, and this sounds like it's kind of in that same vein of an outsider looking in on America and giving their bird's eye perspective.

TRISTRA: It's really fascinating how positive Fanny was about America. Her writing is a real mix of these sorts of personal takes on things. There's this sort of high Romanticism in a lot of ways, but she also really appreciates (and I think this is something we need to appreciate as Americans) how much we love to argue with each other about politics and that everybody had an opinion. Even the simplest farmer. It's a great tradition for us to be somewhat polarized and yelling at each other. Um, if we take, you know, Fanny's point of view seriously, and I think that's really refreshing that like, Hey, we've always loved to argue. So yeah, I really recommend it. There's some beautiful, beautiful descriptions in there.

KIM: I can only imagine what Fanny would be thinking of “society and manners in America” these days. 

AMY: Yeah. Maybe she'd help us feel a little better. 

KIM: Yeah. 

TRISTRA: Oh, I bet she would. She'd have some interesting advice. Probably a little bit unconventional, and probably kind of like “Hey guys, get it together.”

AMY: And do something, like you said.

TRISTRA: Yeah.

KIM: Act. Don't just write or talk about it or complain about it. 

ELEANOR: Yeah.

AMY: That also makes me want to add, I recently saw that somebody posted (..we're talking about everybody just like performatively posting, but…) someone did post that studying the humanities can be an act of resistance in itself. And I do believe that. I think knowledge and understanding history is a form of power. So Tristra and Eleanor, the work that you've done to make Fanny accessible in podcast form is really important. And we do need to remember her as we figure out where we go from here. So thank you so much for telling us about her today.

ELEANOR: Thank you. And, uh, it's important to remember that radical thought and rationalism, all that is part of American history, too.

TRISTRA: Yeah. We're a nation of weirdos. And if anyone tells you anything different they probably have an agenda that you may not want to take seriously, 

KIM: Hear, hear! 

TRISTRA: We’re a bunch of freaky eccentrics, and any good reading of early 19th century American letters or memoirs will show you how weird we've always been. And that's why I love Americans.

KIM: I love that. I love that as a note to end on. This has been fantastic. I really love talking with you both about Fanny Wright.

ELEANOR: Thank you. 

TRISTRA: Thank you. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to give us a rating and review wherever you listen. Those five-star reviews really help people find us. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode for all of our subscribers. If you're interested in becoming one of those, go to lostladiesoflit.com and click Become a Patron. You can also subscribe to those episodes wherever you listen to our podcast. 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.

232. New Yorker Editor Katharine S. White with Amy Reading

KIM: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers — and in today’s case, a forgotten magazine editor who discovered and cultivated some of the most important writers in 20th century American literature. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes, and Amy, maybe we should kick things off by pointing out that this week’s episode coincides with a momentous anniversary.

AMY: That’s right. One hundred years ago this week, The New Yorker published its first issue. A few months later, in the summer of 1925, a young woman named Katharine Sergeant [SUR-GENT] Angell walked into the office and asked for a job, becoming the first woman on the editorial staff. She proceeded to spend the better part of the next 50 years wielding her pen and her editorial influence there, shaping the magazine’s signature pithy voice and carefully tending to an ever-growing stable of talented (sometimes high-maintenance) writers — including one she married and spent the rest of her life with: E.B. White!

KIM: Yes, everyone knows E.B. White of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little fame (he was called “Andy White” by everyone who knew him). In fact, I just started reading Charlotte’s Web to my daughter. But I’d never heard of Katharine White — I certainly didn’t know how important she is in the history of American letters. 

AMY: Same, Kim. Though she was frequently described as “formidable” (an adjective I’m certain we’ll be unpacking today), her lifetime of editorial work falls under the “invisible” nature of editing that we talked about last year in a previous episode. 

KIM: Yes, rarely do editors get the credit they deserve, but you can’t celebrate the history of The New Yorker without telling the story of Katharine White — they go hand-in-hand. Lucky for all of us, there’s a new biography on White, published last fall by Harper Collins’ Mariner Books. It’s called The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, and the author of that book, Amy Reading, is with us today to talk about it.

AMY: Okay, can’t wait — let’s raid the magazine archives and get started!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Today’s guest, Dr. Amy Reading, is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library. She wrote a 2012 book on American con-artistry called The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge and a Small History of the Big Con. (Hmmm…Why am I thinking right now might be a really good time to read this book?) But anyway, Booklist calls Amy’s latest book The World She Edited “a literary landmark,” and The Boston Globe named it one of the best books of 2024. Amy is also a fierce champion of the independent bookstore, and her Substack “Open Book” chronicles the state of that industry as well as her own personal adventures as an executive board member of a cooperative bookstore in upstate New York. We’ll link to that in our show notes. Amy, welcome to the show!

AMY R.: [responds]

KIM: So, Amy, what prompted you to want to write this biography, and would you agree that Katharine White is a “lost lady of lit”?

AMY R: [responds]

AMY: Born in 1892 just outside of Boston, Katharine had a privileged middle-class upbringing (though it was not without tragedy). Yet her father and an influential aunt made sure she was surrounded by literature. (you tell a cute story in the book about how her father used to send her to the library each week to pick out two books for him to read — a high-pressure task, but also there’s such a throughline here in what she’d go on to do for her career!) We also see sparks of Katharine’s literary talent in a famous children’s magazine of the time. Tell us about that.

AMY R: [can briefly mention her uncanny winning submission and the fact that both her future husbands would also win badges after she did]

KIM: Katharine received a fine education, attending Bryn Mawr college as an English major in the footsteps of her big sister, the future writer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant [PRONOUNCED SIR-GENT]. She graduated in 1914, and as you wrote in your book, she expected to have it all -- marriage, family, career -- she was one of the “New Woman” we’ve talked about in past episodes. She married her teenage sweetheart, Ernest Angell. Motherhood became her immediate focus. (She and Ernest had two children). Yet this marriage wasn’t a happy one. Amy, how and why did she end up applying for a job at a fledgling new magazine in New York City?

AMY R: [responds… the job proves a a lifeline, financially and personally]

AMY: The New Yorker was flailing and seemed like a lost cause when Katharine accepted an editing position there. But you write that women proved key to the magazine’s success. How did Katharine recognize and tap into that?

AMY R: [responds… and can also tie this into Katharine’s insistence on featuring women writers]

KIM: So let’s talk more about some of the big-name writers — men and women — whose talent Katharine discovered in the years that followed. Amy, serve us up a list of some of the names most listeners would probably recognize.

AMY R: [responds]

AMY: As I was reading your book, I kept flagging all the women writers you mention throughout, many of whom I was unfamiliar with. Who are some of the women writers popping up in Katharine’s story that are lesser known but who piqued your interest? We’d love to hear about some “lost ladies of lit” that Katharine worked with.

AMY R: [responds]

AMY: As an editor, Katharine really had a nurturing, deeply personal relationship with her writers. This wasn’t just a matter of her being a thoughtful person — this was a deliberate editorial strategy for her, wasn’t it?

AMY R: [responds… you can also talk about her delicacy in writing rejections here and the fact that she had to walk the line of friend and maintain a certain level of objectivity to evaluate writers’ work.]

AMY: You remark several times in the book about an adjective that’s frequently used to describe Katharine: “formidable.” It’s a word that bugs you.

AMY R: [responds]

KIM: Do you have any favorite anecdotes or moments from Katharine’s correspondence or editing notes? Anything that perhaps made you chuckle when you came across it?

AMY R: [responds]

AMY: I thought it was interesting that Katharine didn’t have much involvement in editing Dorothy Parker, who’s such a name we associate so strongly with the magazine. 

AMY R: [responds… can also mention here some of the famous names that Katharine actually rejected, ie Gertrude Stein, Harlem Renaissance writers]

KIM: Were there any challenges for Katharine in terms of sexism or being the only woman in a position of power in those first decades at the magazine?

AMY R: [responds… can also maybe mention all the drinking going on “she learned what to ignore, play along with and when to draw the line.”]

KIM: Maybe more than any other American magazine The New Yorker has its own signature style and tone. What elements of the magazine that we still see today can be traced back to Katharine’s influence?

AMY R: [responds]

AMY: We mentioned earlier that her first marriage hit the skids, so let’s talk about her ensuing romance with E.B. White whom she met on the job. On the one hand their relationship seems really adorable, yet on the other hand it seems like Andy was incredibly high-maintenance. Did Katharine sacrifice a lot to his success?

AMY R: [responds… explain how they met, his anxiety issues and also the ways that she supported his career]

KIM: While Katharine was at the magazine she was co-parenting her two children from her first marriage as well as raising a third child she had with Andy. On top of that, it seems like she and Andy both suffered a neverending barrage of medical maladies. Being her sounds absolutely exhausting!

AMY R: [responds… Can also mention here all of the other projects she was tackling on top of the regular New Yorker gig: Children’s Book reviews, Subtreasury of American Humor, etc.]

AMY: Katharine and Andy eventually bought a farm in Blue Hill, Maine, (an area that was also home to a “lost lady” we featured last year on this podcast, Emilie Loring). Here in Maine, Katharine really perfected the OG version of telecommuting. To think of her being on a weekly deadline operating through mail correspondence is fairly impressive! (Especially because she also added “farm duties” to her long to-do list!)

AMY R: [responds]

AMY: It seems like she really attempted to “retire” from the magazine several times over the years (or at least transition to a lesser role), but that was easier said than done. You could argue that she never really fully stepped away; it was too much a part of her life. But I love that as she was easing her way out of the job in her old age, another member of the family stepped in at the magazine.

AMY R: [responds… her influence on Roger and how he was sort of tailor-made to step into an editing role there.]

KIM: At the time of her death in 1977, Katharine Wight was attempting to finally do some writing of her own. She was penning a gardening book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux (gardening was a lifelong passion of hers) but as Andy later described it, “The editor in her fought the writer every inch of the way… she would write eight or ten words, then draw her gun and shoot them down.” That makes me wonder about your own process of writing this biography, Amy. Did you feel like she was looking over your shoulder from beyond the grave, and perhaps judging every word?

AMY R: [responds….]

AMY: It seems like Katharine had a very clear and definite idea about the sort of fiction and poetry that was right for the magazine. It could be great literature and not necessarily right for the magazine’s readership. She was not necessarily looking for literature that was cutting edge or avant garde. How would you assess her impact on 20th century literature? 

AMY R: [responds]

AMY: I’ve made a mental note to add the other women writers mentioned in your book to our big spreadsheet of “lost ladies” we hope to someday cover. Congratulations on all the positive press for this book and thank you so much for telling Katharine’s story so beautifully. Again, listeners, the book is called The World She Edited — we highly recommend it. 

KIM: Yes, and thank you, Amy, for joining us today to talk about her. It’s been such a great conversation!

[goodbyes, etc]

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode. I’ll be back next week with another bonus episode. You can get that by subscribing wherever you listen, or visit our Patreon page. Patreon also now sells all of our bonus episodes individually if you can’t commit to a monthly subscription. So feel free to pick and choose if that’s your preference!

KIM: And in two weeks, we’ll be back with another free full-length episode. 

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

230. Literary Jewelry with Leigh Batnick Plessner

Literary Jewelry with Leigh Batnick Plessner

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 a brand new year of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off works of literature from forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes, and we're rolling back in from our holiday hiatus, and woo boy, January has been a real doozy, hasn't it Amy?

AMY: Yeah, not fun. But I think maybe we need to distract ourselves right now, perhaps with some sparkly objects. Do you think that would help at all?

KIM: I mean, we can certainly try, right? So with that in mind, today we're going to be discussing three different jewelry-themed stories written by women authors, and we've got a returning guest who knows a little something about this subject. Yes, a jewelry designer who also happens to love books. And she has graciously humored our idea for today's episode. So we're thrilled to welcome her back. So let's raid the stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

KIM: Today's returning guest is Leigh Batnick Plessner, Chief Creative Officer at Catbird Jewelry. Leigh joined us back in 2022 to discuss author and heiress Daisy Fellowes, and she was a woman who was known to always be dripping in diamonds.

AMY: Yes, last spring Leigh mentioned to us that she had stumbled upon another Lost Lady of Lit who was a contemporary of Fellows, Louise de Vilmorin. Little did Leigh know that in telling us about her, she was also volunteering herself for another guest appearance. Leigh, welcome back. We hope you don't mind that we recruited you for another episode here.

LEIGH: Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be back with you guys.

KIM: After reading de Vilmorin's novella, Madame de —., the plot of which centers around a pair of earrings, the three of us weren't sure if it was hefty enough to merit a full-length episode. So we're adding two more works to the mix: Maria Edgeworth's morality tale for children, “The Bracelets,” and also Dorothy Parker's famous New Yorker piece, “The Standard of Living,” which is about an expensive necklace.

AMY: Yeah, we're covering all the bases here. So let's kick things off with the earrings portion of the podcast and this book by Louise de Vilmorin, Madame de —. Now let me just start with the title because it's Madame de “blank,” so we don't get her last name and that's why it's kind of a funny sounding title. Madame de “fill in the blank.” Turtle Point Press reprinted this book in 1998, so you can easily get a copy, listeners. It's a thin little volume, one that Vita Sackville West once described as a soufflé. So Leigh, how did you first hear about this book? 

LEIGH: So I was reading a biography of Nancy Mitford that I think I bought on the dollar cart somewhere at a used bookstore. And, it mentioned the name Louise de Vilmorin and I was not familiar with her. And then there was just a little footnote and it said, that she was a poet, a minor novelist, and a wit. and so then I went searching and I found Madame de — and I bought my copy on eBay and that is when I messaged you guys because I thought that she might be really wonderful to talk about. When I found the book, I remembered that I had seen Max Ophuls film, The Earrings of Madame de — quite a long time ago, and I really loved the movie, and at the time I didn't know (or I had forgotten) that it was based on a book.

KIM: Yeah, we're going to be talking a little bit more about the movie later on in the episode, and we'll also share a photo of the cover of the edition that you have, because it's very cool. So would you like to do the honors, Leigh, of summarizing the plot of the book for us?

LEIGH: Sure, I would love to. The book is set in the 19th century. And there's this really beautiful woman, Madame de, who's very, like, preoccupied with elegance and glamour, and she, has racked up the debts with her dressmakers, et cetera, and so she very quietly sells this pair of heart-shaped diamond earrings that had been a wedding gift from her husband, to pay those debts off. And she concocts this whole story about how the earrings had been lost, and then the earrings come back into her husband's possession. He then gives them as a gift to his Spanish lover who is heading to South America. The lover then sells them to pay off her own debts. They're then acquired by a gentleman in South America who finds them to be very beautiful and this Italian diplomat comes from South America to the world of Madame de, and they end up back in her possession.

AMY: And it almost is like an O. Henry story that has gone tragically sideways, right? I mean, these earrings just keep turning up like a damn penny! And it's interesting too because with each new person that acquires the earrings, I feel like the earrings take on a different meaning. So by the end of this novella, the earrings ultimately lead to despair and devastation. The whole thing kind of just bites Madame de in the butt by the end, right? I mean, that's the most blunt way to put it.

KIM: Yeah. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” Leigh, why don't you read a passage from the story so our listeners can get a feel for it.

LEIGH: Sure. So this is the part of the book, which I have thought about ever since I read it and, um, it's, I think, partially for me because of my very specific relationship to jewelry that it really lodged in my head. But my relationship to jewelry is, I think like so many of us, a very emotional one of what it makes us feel, what it makes us hope for and long for. So I'm trying to, like, get this little part of it that won't give away too much. This is from the very end. 

He went straight to the jewelers. “Fasten this diamond heart onto a thin gold chain and fasten the chain around my neck so that it can never be undone. Do it quickly, for I have no time to lose.” When that had been done, he went straight home, gave certain instructions, and while his luggage was being packed, sent off a number of telegrams. Then he left the country. Monsieur de laid the other heart on the heart of his wife and then sent off for the old nurse. 

So that passage and the image of that diamond heart becoming something other than what we've seen it to be and fastened forever so that it could never be undone really sat with me. We actually had a parcel of stones at work the other day, and one of them was a heart-shaped salt and pepper diamond, and I immediately thought of this passage and was like, “Oh, I want that so much!” But I let it go.

KIM: Yeah, it's interesting, too, because when you read that passage, it made me think about women also being like jewelry at some point or treated like jewelry. 

AMY: Yeah, Madame de is described almost in comparison to a diamond, right? Throughout the book, she's sparkling, she's… 

LEIGH: Glittering. 

AMY: Brilliance and glittering, yeah, and it's almost like he sees her as his trinket or his little trophy wife, or whatever, and then when he finds out that she has pawned these earrings that he gave her for their wedding, he's not even that upset. He's like, well, let me go buy them back, And then he gives them to his mistress!

LEIGH: I think that Louise de Vilmorin, like, very intentionally set this book 100 years prior-ish to when she was writing. I think it was an aesthetic choice, but I also think that it really sort of highlighted the lack of economic autonomy. This book made me also think of Madame Bovary, and, you know, just so many women who were backed into a corner by not having any currency of their own.

AMY: Right, because the earrings, towards the end of the book, end up in the hands of Madame de’s niece, who is also going through financial straits because her husband is in debt. And it's almost like you see the cycle continuing. 

LEIGH: Yes. 

KIM: Okay, so what do we know about Louise de Vilmorin's life? Um, who was she, Leigh, and how does it relate to the story, perhaps?

LEIGH: So, Louise was born, I think it was in 1902, and she came from a really aristocratic French family. And they were deeply interested in the natural world and sciences, and my understanding is that, like, she herself didn't really have too much of an interest in writing, and then as a young woman she became friends with a circle of artists and writers. Jean Cocteau… She was um, engaged to Antoine Saint-Exupery… um, and just being in their presence inspired her to try her own hand at it. She also had a sister who, was a culinary writer, um, wrote cooking or restaurant columns in France, and she had four brothers, and one of those brothers actually was the son of the king of Spain, which is just an interesting side note.

AMY: Yeah, she definitely sounds like one of those “bright young things” of her day. And I can't help but imagine that she knew Daisy Fellowes. Don't you think? 

KIM: I was thinking the same thing.

LEIGH: They actually, yes, they had somebody very intimately in common. They were both lovers of Duff Cooper, the British ambassador. And he actually translated Madame de — from French into English. And I also think the fact that I read about her in the biography of Nancy Mitford, she was really a “bright young thing” is a perfect way to put it. She was amongst the literati and, um, I think, you know, all kinds of fascinating people.

AMY: And I think, like Daisy Fellowes, I do remember in that episode we talked about how she was kind of vilified. And I think you could almost say that of Louise as well. Um, I found an article from 2009 in The New York Times by Christopher Petkanis called “Chi-Chi Devil,” that talks a lot about her and what her peers kind of thought about her. Um, I'm just going to read a little section from this and then I'm going to link to this in the show notes because it's A really fascinating into her life, it also made me realize, like, we didn't know who she was, but apparently she was a huge, well-known deal, and across the pond, more people probably know this name than we do here in the States, maybe, So, this article starts off, “If Louise de Vilmorin knew how adoringly she would be remembered, and what an industry would be made of her life and oeuvre, she might not have been so heartsick. How desolate was this French femme de lettres, and saloniste, legendary clotheshorse and tastemaker, brilliant hostess and home wrecking manslayer. Casting about for a title of her new life of Vilmorin, Françoise Wagener, settled nicely on, I Was Born Inconsolable.”

So, there is this biography of Vilmorin. It's in French, though, so it's kind of unattainable to us unless you speak French. But, um, it goes on to talk about how she's a manslayer, you know, this article says that Evelyn Waugh and Cecil Beaton found her unbearably egocentric. Waugh described her as quote, “a maniac with the eyes of a witch.” So, yeah. So that's taking me back to Daisy Fellowes. 

KIM: Totally. Oh my gosh, how perfect. 

AMY: Their high-glam confidence about themselves gets taken down a notch by those around them.

LEIGH: Yeah. I mean, she also makes me think of Peggy Guggenheim as well. You know, any woman who lived free,

AMY: Here's another section that I'll just read. This beginning part is gonna really get your gall. “With her long face, her long, thin, ungainly body, and an overbite that the gap in her teeth did nothing to improve, Vilmorin was alluring, but not pretty.” And then he goes on to say, “It didn't seem to matter, though. Men were enslaved by her teasing sorcery, her surrealist word games, the ribald stories she told, the scribbling of poems on dinner napkins, not to mention the briskly minted bon mots.”

Then, um, there's a quote here from Vilmorin, which I thought was, uh, Kim, as you mentioned, like, how does this relate to Madame de —? Vilmorin said, “I have no faith in my fidelity.” And then she told one of her lovers, Orson Welles, She was taking him off to bed, and she said, “Darling, tonight I'll love you forever.”

KIM: She sounds amazing. 

AMY: She really does. And one more way that, um, she kind of ties into this story is that it's mentioned that she despised women who refused artifice. She didn't trust women that were dressing plainly, although I did see also that when she met Duff Cooper, she was wearing a dirndl. Which makes me really laugh, I know. So like, not at all what you'd expect. 

KIM: So de Vilmorin’s book was adapted to film in 1953 by director Max Ophuls. I hope I said that right. It stars Charles Boyer as the husband, Danielle Darrieux as Made de and Vittorio De Sica as the dashing ambassador. A very incredible movie, and you had seen it before, Leigh. Um, this was my first time, so.

LEIGH: I watched it ages ago, and it has always stuck with me. It's a jewel box. Those images are really incandescent.

KIM: It's actually a Criterion Collection movie.

AMY: Yeah, and worthy of that. The scene where, um, so basically Madame de is kind of toying with her lover for about a year at a series of balls before she finally gets together with him, and in the movie, it's conveyed in one single scene where they are dancing, but the costumes change as they go around the room. It was so brilliantly done.

KIM: Oh, the costumes, the furs, I mean, it was incredible. And I read in this article by Molly Haskell, it's on the Criterion Collection website, but basically she said that this film is like the level of The Godfather and Citizen Kane, but because it's about women's lives and women's love, she thinks that's why it is not, spoken in the same, you know, breath as those movies.

AMY: I also saw that Wes Anderson loves this movie. 

LEIGH: Oh, as in one of his little Criterion closets, yeah. I mean, the closeups of the earrings is very much of a Wes Anderson move like the opening of Royal Tenenbaums with the table, the placards.

AMY: Yes.

KIM: She hated it though. 

LEIGH: She hated it?!

KIM: She said it was like receiving a pretty box marked silk stockings. You open it and discover a pair of nail clippers. And she was mad because it was set in Paris, but she claims it was set in Vienna, but that's only in her head because the book setting is ambiguous. 

LEIGH: I hadn't really thought about it. It just feels European, you know, as an American. But Vienna makes sense. Also, Vienna has, for what it's worth, incredible antique jewelry. 

KIM: Ooh, Okay, yeah, so there's the connection there. 

LEIGH: And I understand so much how she was disappointed. I mean you've built this world, this world lives in your head, what a strange thing for somebody else to then kind of make a photocopy of it, but I think that they both work, really beautifully, as kind of, you know, a mismatched pair of earrings themselves.

AMY: Okay, so Madame de was Vilmorin's most famous work, especially because of the screen adaptation. Uh, but she did write a number of other books. I think there were 15 novels total. A few other titles are The Lovers and Julieta, which were both also adapted to film. She was awarded the Prix René Vivienne, which is an annual French literary prize in 1949. I actually ordered one of these Julieta, I think, from the library, and it came, it was on hold, and then I forgot to go pick it up, so I have to go back and get it again, because I do actually want to read something else that she did and compare it to this little one.

LEIGH: So do I. It really feels like a world that you step inside of. Like a little snow globe. And I would like to enter into another one of those worlds that she has built.

KIM: Okay, so we've got literary earrings crossed off our lists thanks to this now move on to bracelets and turn our attention to Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth.

AMY: She was one of the most celebrated women novelists of her day. I think I read, Kim, her 1812 novel, The Absentee, because you lent it to me. That's the one thing I've read of hers.

KIM: Yeah, I love that one and also, I have Castle Rackrent and Belinda, which I can loan you as well. I love those. I think we should really do a full episode on her at some later date because she kind of lurks in Jane Austen's shadows, even though at the time she was actually more famous than Austen and more commercially successful.

LEIGH: Wow, she is an entirely new name to me. 

KIM: Oh,my gosh, you've got to read her.

LEIGH: I had never, I feel like what an enormous blind spot, which is exciting because then there's other blind spots that I don't know that I have about wonderful writers But um, Yeah. totally new to me. 

AMY: I would say this little short story we're going to be discussing, “The Bracelets,” is not necessarily a good indication of her other writing, and that's just due to the fact that it's a children's story. It was originally published in 1804 in like a kind of parent's handbook manual kind of thing. The full title is “The Bracelets; or Amiability and Industry Rewarded.” So it's basically a morality tale that we're getting here in true Maria Edgeworth fashion.

KIM: Yeah, when I read it, it reminded me a lot of Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses, which we did an episode on, and that, you know, it's a morality tale in the same way, and maybe not as evocative of their other work.

AMY: Right, a little cloying. 

KIM: yeah, yeah, exactly. So please read her other works. Anyway, in relation to the book we just discussed before this, deceit also factors into this story too. Amy, do you want to give us the plot in a nutshell for this one? 

AMY: Sure. As with Madame de, it's kind of a crazy maze of stuff happening, but I'll do my best here. So the story takes place at a school for girls, where the headmistress has offered up a small prize to her class, a bracelet, for the brightest student. Now there are two top candidates in the class. Their names are Cecilia and Leonora. Cecilia wins the prize right off the bat, but here's where things get dicey. In her excitement over winning the bracelet, she ends up shoving another girl named Louisa, causing a cherished china doll that Louisa is holding to break. Cecilia just laughs. This instantly earns her the condemnation of Leonora and all the other girls in the class. They start to see her bratty true colors and they tell her so. Cecilia doesn't like this because she likes to be the best. She's already won the kind of academic bracelet, but she's realizing like, “Wow, I'm the smartest, but not the kindest.” So the always competitive Cecilia goes to the headmistress and proposes that they have another contest and another bracelet. This one could be made out of a braided lock of hair and it can be given to whichever student is the most amiable.

So I'm just going to read a passage from the bracelets that kicks off at this point. Animated with this hope of a double triumph, Cecilia canvassed with the most zealous activity. By constant attention and exertion, she had considerably abated the violence of her temper and changed the course of her habits.

Her powers of pleasing were now excited instead of her abilities to excel. And if her talents appeared less Brilliant. Her character was acknowledged to be more amiable, so great an influence upon our manners and conduct, have the objects of our ambition. Cecilia was now, if possible, more than ever desirous of doing what was right, but she had not yet acquired sufficient fear of doing wrong.

KIM: She's giving Regina George from Mean Girls vibes here, for sure.

AMY: Totally. She is a woman on a mission. “I will be the nicest girl. If it kills me.” Um, yeah, so at a certain point in the story, a peddler comes along, selling trinkets. And Cecilia, as part of her niceness campaign, decides she wants to make things up to Louisa, whose doll she broke. So, the only way she can afford to buy something for Louisa is to sell a very cherished little box that was given to her by Leonora and which she had promised to treasure always. So she sells the box that Leonora had given her in the past, and Leonora finds out. Now, Leonora is the good girl. She's the sweetheart that never does anything wrong. And instead of calling Cecilia out on what she's done, she buys the box back from the peddler, which is very similar to what had happened in Madame de, the earlier story we talked about.

KIM: Totally Madame de —. Yep, exactly.

AMY: In Madame de —, this action led to rack and ruin, but in this little short story, it winds up ending on a more uplifting note, because Leonora quietly lobbies behind the scenes to make sure that all's well, that ends well. What do we think? I mean, I always have problems where the interesting girl is kind of tempered, you know… 

KIM: It’s like how you need to learn to be a good woman by being a good girl. And being a good girl means following the rules and being an angel.

AMY: yeah. So Leonora, she practices restraint. But It also makes her sort of insipid. Like, kind of like boring, 

KIM: Yeah, totally.

LEIGH: I wrote down this line from it and I can't remember who said it and in what context but it was, “How can she know my heart?” I think it was just this tension between the veneer and what we show on the exterior versus like, what's happening underneath the surface, you know? Like swans, they glide very beautifully, but they're paddling very hard underneath. And so, I don't know, I thought that that was a really interesting tension to consider the, like, what we show and what we hold. So long as you keep it tamped down below the surface, that's fine.

AMY: I was so confused by, if this is a morality tale, what is the message?

LEIGH: What's the moral?

AMY: What are we supposed to get from this? 

LEIGH: Right.

KIM: Exactly. What are we supposed to take away from this? 

AMY: So I wound up finding a scholarly article on this, um, and shoot, I can't remember the author's name [Fiona Robinson], but I’ll include it in our show notes, but got me to thinking what was most important was that everyone was happy and that nobody was being mean to one another and things like that. Recently I lost a bracelet, because the clasp had broken. It's a chain, right? And if a part of that breaks, you can't have it anymore.So it was about the whole class coming together. 

KIM: [sings] “You can never break the chain, break the chain!”

AMY: LAUGHS 

KIM: That's usually Amy's job, but I couldn’t resist.

AMY: Look at you busting out a song!

AMY: But speaking of songs, it also reminded me of Taylor Swift bracelets. You know, like, the idea of what these bracelets symbolize for these girls and how the one that's made out of hair, which has no value, is really the one they're all competing for.

LEIGH: Well, it's also the one that is, woven together, from all of them. So it's sort of more than the sum of its parts.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Also, the same journal article this author claimed what she thought was that Maria Edgeworth was writing this book in recollection of, like, the two parts of herself that were probably grappling when she was a little kid. You know, like this, this ambitious side, the Regina George, I want things in the world, and… the nice girl… 

KIM: Oh, my gosh. This is Christina Rossetti, too! The tension was there for her, too. 

AMY: yeah, exactly, that's right. And like having to sort of remind yourself of like, no women are supposed to be nice. So like something she was working out for herself sort of thing. 

LEIGH: That makes it maybe a little bit more bearable to think that it was an internal conversation rather than being a tale meant to tell others what to do. It, yeah, perhaps feels a little bit less, um, finger-waggy.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: I love that take. 

AMY: Maybe in the future Catbird needs a whole human hair collection of friendship bracelets. 

KIM: It's so Victorian mourning!

LEIGH: That was the thing in that era… memento mori jewelry for sure, and the use of hair, um… I'll take it up with my colleagues. 

AMY: Okay. So we've talked about earrings, we've talked about bracelets, but this episode wouldn't be complete without a necklace. So now we're gonna pivot to a very pricey strand of pearls in a shop window, courtesy of Dorothy Parker.

KIM: Oh my gosh, this is a nice, exciting difference from the last one too. I love this story, “The Standard of Living.” It appeared in The New Yorker in 1941. Um, once again, the story centers around two besties. In this case though, they're two stenographers in Manhattan. They like to pal around the city. together. Uh, they each live at home with their family and they hand over half their weekly paycheck to them. But they still like to think of themselves as living high on the hog, eating decadent lunches out, turning young men's heads on the street, you know, being young women about town. Amy, would you care to read from Parker's description of Annabelle and Midge?

AMY: Sure thing, here we go. [reads] 

LEIGH: She was so good at her job.

KIM: I know. 

LEIGH: Oh my gosh.

KIM: Yeah. 

LEIGH: It's such a New York story. It feels like the place I know and love. It's just perfect.

AMY: So why don't you explain to our listeners now, Leigh, this sort of game that Annabelle and Midge always enjoy playing on their walkabouts in the city.

LEIGH: Sure. So Midge and Annabelle have this game, the essence of it is, what if you were bequeathed $1 million but the condition was you could only spend it on yourself. And so the way they play this game is they take it very seriously. They play it with an office mate and she suggests that immediately she would hire somebody to shoot the wife of Gary Cooper. Presumably she had a big crush on Gary Cooper, and, you know, she was gonna, get rid of the wife so she could swoop in. And Annabelle and Midge are horrified because there is no room for such, like, fantastical, thinking. This game is very stringent. They take it seriously. 

KIM: And it’s supposed to be guilt free too, right? Like they try to make it guilt free. Like the person that was supposed to leave them money should be someone they don't know and who dies of old age in their sleep.

LEIGH: Right, there's no unnecessary pain to get them to this windfall. So it's the September day in New York. And they're walking around as if they were young heiresses. And they're talking about these fur coats that they're going to buy and having this disagreement about what the best expenditure is around fur. And they walk past this shop and they see these pearls. And so they go into the shop. It's a double row of perfectly matched pearls. My guess is they are natural pearls. And they're closed with an emerald clasp. And they inquire about the price. And, these pearls cost $250,000, and they are alarmed by this price, realizing that it's a quarter of the budget of their imaginary windfall of $1 million. They leave the store. You can feel like the September heat starting to wilt them a little bit like flowers, Um, but then they brilliantly discover, or I don't know, they're struck by this incredible idea that actually, they ought to be bequeathed $10 million. and so they can have their pearls and anything else they desire and that their appetites call for. And it actually, it made me think of, I don't know if you guys know this, but the Cartier mansion on the corner of 5th and 52nd was acquired by the Cartier brothers. They traded a strand or a double row of pearls that were worth, I think, like $925,000 at the time in exchange for the mansion. 

KIM: Oh, I did not know that. 

AMY: Okay, so this story about the mansion is important in what I want to say next because when I was reading this story, I found myself wondering did the clerk tell them the real price or was it a kind of pretty woman moment where it was like “You can't afford anything here. Get lost.” I did find an article that said today, if there was a pearl necklace in the window it would cost $five million, that's the equivalent of what it was. That's a very expensive pearl necklace. During the Great Depression, the price of pearls actually crashed. So did he throw out a number that was super high? It could have been that the clerk took one look at them and was condescending to them and they could feel it. Sometimes I'm intimidated to go into a high end store like that, because I feel like I don't belong there. I'll take one look at a price tag and just be like, “Nope, I gotta get out of here,” you know what I mean? And they were kind of, the girls felt kind of bitter towards the clerk as they were leaving, right? 

LEIGH: It never occurred to me that they were being played with by the clerk, though I think that you're probably right that they might have been. But I just like their dream just got bigger. They're undeterred. So “okay, fine, the pearls cost $250,000, we'll have $10 million!”

AMY: Okay, that's so interesting because I took it as like a sad mockery of a certain type of New York girl that Dorothy Parker is kind of taking down, and that it's sad that the only money they really have to spend is in their imagination.

KIM: I felt more sympathy for it, I guess. 

LEIGH: She was pretty famous, you know, Dorothy Parker and that wit was pretty famous and like, not very gentle. So I don't think it's as gentle as my read on it was. I think it was probably pricklier than that. But there's also the flip side of maybe like admiration for a certain kind of New York girl who is undeterred, who will keep marching down the sidewalk in their tilted slippers.

AMY: Okay. I’m on board with that. 

LEIGH: It also goes to what Vilmorin was saying about how she didn't care for women who weren't invested in some level of artifice. This is a real jewelry conversation and it's like, you know, happening with lab diamonds right now, but lab diamonds always make me think about cultured pearls and, you know, we've been talking about what is inside of these works of fiction. What are they pulling from and mining from their real lives? So how something really tangible and an object that you can hold in your hand, um, can also be really mutable and can change over time, given social mores and our understanding of the world.

KIM: Yeah, that's absolutely true.

AMY: And I love that this story we're all coming to it from very different perspectives. That's awesome. 

LEIGH: It's also evidence of how good she was at her job, that we all walked away not feeling exactly the same thing at all.

KIM: I love that. Yeah, I absolutely love that. So speaking of different meanings, jewelry consistently is holding up a mirror to human behavior. It reveals the best and sometimes the worst in people. So whether it's a glittering heirloom or a strand of pearls in a window like in this story, these objects carry emotional weight and it ends up transcending time.

AMY: And so Leigh, as somebody who works with jewelry every day, I'm wondering if you have any deeper insight into the symbolism of jewelry in these stories, or just in general, and why does jewelry over and over again make such a good literary device?

LEIGH: Well, I think that, uh, jewelry is a reflection, like you guys were saying, of so many of our emotions. It can stand for love and connection and Hope and desire and envy and lust and it's also something that's worn on the body. It's so intimate. Pearls hold the warmth of our body in them and they benefit from being worn, they like to be worn. and so I think that that's really potent for literature as well. Um, it's ceremonial, and also jewelry is mutable. You can recut stones. You can unseat stones. You can melt the gold and turn it into something else. So over time, it can shapeshift kind of like, I don't know, I've been thinking about Orlando a lot recently, and, you know, Orlando moving through time and becoming different versions of themselves throughout time, and jewelry can do the same thing. 

AMY: I know you must take your inspiration from so many things, like art and, you know, music, whatever, but do you find that books inspire you in your work?

LEIGH: Oh my god, books inspire me and my work so so so so much. The things that I'm most inspired by are reading, um, watching generally old movies, and just walking around New York. I have some files I try and always really, pull out quotes that I read that have something really evocative about, um, jewelry. Some of my favorite ones are, James Salter has some really beautiful passages about jewelry. Virginia Woolf has so much about jewelry, um, and, uh, Naomi by a Japanese writer whose name I'm blanking on right now. But yeah, I always think about when we're making our jewelry, like, how it makes you feel and sort of, um, maybe because I'm like, kind of a little bit nearsighted and I don't wear my glasses enough what does it look like as you're sort of in a deep conversation and you're moving your hands around and how are they flashing? And, um, I think literature always captures that so well. So, we have a necklace named for the Neapolitan novels, uh, yeah, we're always pulling from literature.

AMY: Okay.

KIM: So cool. Leigh, we loved hearing your insights and we love that you've tipped us off to some utterly fabulous and glamorous forgotten women writers who, as we've talked about, just happened to have a lot of connections as well. Um, so keep them coming as you find them and we hope you'll join us again in the future. This has just been a wonderful discussion. I think we could keep talking for another hour or more.

LEIGH: Thank you guys so much. I love chatting with you. Have a really, restorative, peaceful weekend.

KIM: You too. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you enjoyed our discussion of the New Yorker story, in fact, we'll be talking a lot more about The New Yorker in two weeks when we're covering the first woman editor on staff there, Katharine White. And if you just can't wait until then, next week we'll have a bonus episode for our subscribers. You can find out how to subscribe at our Patreon page or wherever you listen to this podcast. 

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. 

222. Zitkála-Šá with Jessi Haley and Erin Marie Lynch

AMY HELMES: 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 ASKEW: Hi, everyone! Listeners, you can read the work of today’s “lost lady,” as soon as you finish listening to this episode. That’s thanks to our friends over at Cita Press who publish — (for free!) — the public-domain works of forgotten women writers. 

AMY: We repeat: They’re free. Just open up your laptop and start reading. It can actually be a little bit of a problem, Kim, because as I was working on this episode, I got totally side-tracked reading the Cita Press edition of Tender Buttons. (No, today’s “lost lady” isn’t Gertrude Stein.)

KIM: (It’s so easy to get distracted when there are so many “lost ladies,” Amy.) That said, today we are discussing another Gertrude who lived and wrote in the same era as Gertrude Stein. But the writings of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin couldn’t be more different.

AMY: Better known by her pen name Zitkála-Šá (which in the Lakota language means Red Bird) she was born on Yankton Dakota Indian Reservation in 1876. Her autobiographical writing helped English-speaking readers understand how Native Americans struggled to maintain their lands, culture and dignity even as she herself felt culturally unmoored straddling two disparate worlds.

KIM: Her story is fascinating and we can’t wait to share it with two special guests, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: So we mentioned Cita Press in our introduction, and our first guest today, Jessi Haley, is editorial director there. She previously managed the creative writing program at the University of Chicago and has served on the editorial staff of Chicago Review and Colloquium Magazine. Jessi helped curate Cita Press’s new collection, Planted in a Strange Earth: Selected Writings of Zitkála-Šá. Hi, Jessi, it’s great to officially meet!

JESSI HALEY: [responds]

AMY: Also joining us today is artist Erin Marie Lynch, whose work includes the 2023 poetry collection Removal Acts, which reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. The title takes its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands. Like Zitkála-Šá, Erin is a member of the Ihanktonwan (or Yankton) Dakota and is a direct descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell and Indigenous Nations Poets. She’s also a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California where she serves as associate editor at Air/Light Magazine. She wrote the forward to Cita Press’s new collection of Zitkála-Šá’s writings. Erin, welcome, and thank you for joining us!

ERIN MARIE LYNCH: Yeah, thank you both so much. I'm really excited for the conversation. 

KIM: We are, too. Erin, as we mentioned, you are from the same tribe as Zitkála-Šá…. Tell us about how you first learned about her?

ERIN: Yeah, absolutely.  I first found her writings when I was trying to sort of piece together some literary genealogy, or sort of cohort of literary ancestors, for myself from my tribe. Obviously, much of our storytelling and cultural memory is not preserved in literary works, right, or in writing, but because I'm a writer, I wanted to sort of see the other figures from my tribe who had come before me. And so she was one of those. (Also, th author Ella Cara Deloria, who's a really well-known, writer from my tribe.) And that's where I first encountered her work. 

AMY: In late October, President Joe Biden delivered a formal apology for the federal government’s role (starting in the mid-19th century) in separating Indigenous children from their families and placing them in boarding schools — harsh and often abusive institutions whose aim was forced assimilation at any cost. I mention it because this awful facet of American history is central to Zitkála-Šá’s story. Can you give us a little more background?

ERIN:  Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just say first off, you know, kind of about that apology…   not to speak for a monolith of Native people, but a lot of Native people were pretty, you know, hurt or sort of like, “Whatever,” about this apology that doesn't really come with any material action, reparation, or, land back, or even, you know, specific efforts to deal with, the trauma that boarding schools still have within Native families. So, you know, “whatever” about the apologies from the U. S. government. 

KIM: It’s easy to just say something, but yeah, to do something is different. 

ERIN: Mm hmm. You know, it's great that there is at least some acknowledgement on a national scale. Part of that sort of, I think is coming from pressure to follow in the lead of the Canadian government, you know, which has its own sorts of issues with Indigenous people. But that's the first thing I'll say. But yeah, in terms of this assimilation project,   what the United States wanted was to have our land, right? So first it was like, “Okay,  if we kill every native person, then we can take their land.” And then that sort of shifted in the late 19th century to this more assimilationist project of just, “Okay, if Indians become white people, then, you know, don't have to worry about what it is that we're taking from them.”  And so there were a number of different assimilationist projects, but yeah, the boarding schools still have the greatest trace or afterlife today, with Carlisle Indian  Industrial School kind of being  the model of that’s within the kind of the cultural consciousness today. Richard Pratt,  who sort of helmed this school, you know, had worked with Native people, ended up having a very complicated relationship with Zitkala-Sa  over time as well, where they're working to train Native youth within Western educational traditions, but also to be laborers, right? So, for example, in my family, those who went to the boarding school were all trained to be mechanics. So ultimately, a form of cultural loss, separation from culture, separation from family and, you know, intergenerational community is so important  to our cultures. Um, and then using that, you know, to ultimately [fulfill] that motto of “kill the Indian, save the man.” So for Zitkala-Sa, even for her to write about what was going on in the boarding schools on sort of like a national scale (not just talking about it within Native communities, but laying bare what was going on there for this broader audience as well) was actually a very important and kind of radical act.

AMY: Yeah, because the rest of the country would have seen this as maybe like, “Oh, this is so altruistic. Look at us helping these Native Americans.” And so she's exposing what's really going on there. And they have to see it.

ERIN: And it's so tied, you know, I didn't say, but it's also like so tied to religion, of course,  this Christianization, which is not only a loss of our,  spirituality, but, uh, spirituality that's connected also to like cultural retention and to cultural knowledge, um, and to preserving those things. 

KIM: Okay, let’s back up to talk about Zitkála-Šá’s early years. Jessi, what do we know?  

JESSI: [responds with some general biographical information and a sense of what her girlhood was like. Feel free to read a passage from “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” showing this more carefree time.]

• Getrude Simmons was born in 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Ihaƞktoƞwaƞ Dakota Oyate (Yankton Sioux Tribe). 

• Her father was a French fur trader, but we don’t know much about him (he was apparently known as a “worthless fellow”) and they never had a relationship. 

• Her mother was Ellen Simmons. She lived through a period of massive change for Yankton people and experienced a lot of hardship and loss. Gertrude was her youngest child.

• Gertrude’s older and only surviving brother left home for boarding school when he was a child. Gertrude was raised mainly around women, living a mostly traditional lifestyle that she remembers fondly in “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.” Loss and injustice are ever-present, but so is a strong sense of custom, kinship, and identity. 

From “The Coffee Pot,” a vignette where she describes clumsily copying the things she’d seen her mother do to try and make coffee for an elder who dropped by. He’s politely humoring her: 

Before the old warrior had finished eating, my mother entered. Immediately she wondered where I had found coffee, for she knew I had never made any, and that she had left the coffeepot empty. Answering the question in my mother's eyes, the warrior remarked, "My granddaughter made coffee on a heap of dead ashes, and served me the moment I came."

They both laughed, and mother said, "Wait a little longer, and I shall build a fire." She meant to make some real coffee. But neither she nor the warrior, whom the law of our custom had compelled to partake of my insipid hospitality, said anything to embarrass me. They treated my best judgment, poor as it was, with the utmost respect. It was not till long years afterward that I learned how ridiculous a thing I had done.

AMY: Erin, this first part of the triptych also shows us her origins as a writer too, wouldn’t you say?

ERIN: [responds in terms of storytelling tradition and learning to be a keen observer]

From the foreword: Above all, I want to situate Zitkála-Šá's writing within Dakota Ohúŋkaŋkaŋ, the storytelling practice we have used for thousands of years to preserve memory, to share the Dakota way, and to combat loneliness and loss. In “Impressions…,” she provides a vivid scene of listening to “the old people" as they told stories of Iktómi, the trickster. As the storytellers worked their magic, she says, "the bright flames leaped up into the faces of the old folks as they sat around in a great circle"; "the increasing interest of the tale aroused me, and I sat up eagerly listening to every word." While not a traditional storyteller herself, Zitkála-Šá learned from those evenings, gathered around that fire. Like a Dakota storyteller, she knew how to create suspense, how to pace a scene, and how to use a story to reveal truth. And she learned from the Iktómi stories, too, to be wary of the forms he might take. In her own writing, Zitkála-Šá's awareness of tone and context can shift, adapting her rhetoric as needed to suit an audience of White suffragists or Catholic bishops. I take these choices as strategy, enactment of her own trickery, using her abilities to outsmart Iktómi in his many guises.

KIM: “Impression of an Indian Childhood” ends with a section called “Big Red Apples.” This is a turning point moment for Zitkála-Šá, and it’s quite a poignant moment. Jessi, can you explain for our listeners?

JESSI: [responds, explaining how and why she wants to leave, at 8-years-old, with the missionaries. Why does her mother allow it?]

• What Zitkála-Šá calls the “first turning away from the easy, natural flow of my life” comes at the end of “Impressions,” when Gertrude is 8.

• Missionaries visit her house. She’s heard all kinds of exciting things from her brother and friends about what is in store for children who go with them - unlimited red apples, the “iron horse.”

• Her mother really struggles with the decision. She thinks that her daughter will need an education, calling the opportunity to be educated “tardy justice” for stealing so much from Native people. But she knows that her daughter will suffer greatly, too. 

• Ultimately she decides to let her go. 

[anyone can say anything else about this first section]

AMY: Zitkála-Šá’s second installment for The Atlantic Monthly was called “The School Days of an Indian Girl.” Here we see her imagined fantasies about life in the East come crashing down in a harsh and scary reality. Everything is bewildering, from being stared at on the train by pale-faced strangers to arriving at the school and seeing a staircase for the first time, which she describes as “an incline of wooden boxes.” She doesn’t speak English. She cries herself to sleep on the first night in this starkly institutional setting. Erin, why don’t you read for us what happens to her the next day?

ERIN: [can read from “The Cutting of My Long Hair” from “Late in the morning, my friend Judéwin until the end of section]

[Erin, you can talk about the significance and intention of cutting their hair… we can all discuss more from these first few sections at the school… not understanding the language, forced to become Christian and the devil in the picture book, the sharp, dark contrast to the serene vibes we got on the prairie in the first article. The ways in which she was “actively testing the chains that bound [her] individuality like a mummy for burial.”]

KIM: She paints a really bleak picture of her time at the school, which we now understand to be harmful and abusive. The lingering trauma is also readily apparent here, too, right Jessi?

JESSI: [Responds and can read: The melancholy of those black days has left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years that have since gone by. These sad memories rise above those of smoothly grinding school days. Perhaps my Indian nature is the moaning wind which stirs them now for their present record. But, however tempestuous this is within me, it comes out as the low voice of a curiously colored seashell, which is only for those ears that are bent with compassion to hear it.]

AMY: [responds] Around seven years after she first arrived at White’s Manual Labor institute, Zitkála-Šá returned home to the reservation for a visit, which you would think would be a joyful reunion, but this part of the book is almost equally anguishing. Erin, what are your thoughts?

ERIN: [responds… explain the conflict she faces when she returns and the anguish of her mother’s wailing.]

AMY: Getting back to Zitkála-Šá’s biography, we learn in this second article that she ends up at college (Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana) and wins a big state oratorical contest despite overt racism against her… (someone strung up a racist banner directed at her.] Nevertheless, Zitkala-Za manages to get the better of the haters. She writes: 

There were two prizes given that night, and one of them was mine!

The evil spirit laughed within me when the white flag dropped out of sight, and the hands which hurled it hung limp in defeat.

Leaving the crowd as quickly as possible, I was soon in my room. The rest of the night I sat in an armchair and gazed into the crackling fire. I laughed no more in triumph when thus alone. The little taste of victory did not satisfy a hunger in my heart. In my mind I saw my mother far away on the Western plains, and she was holding a charge against me.

Erin, her mother is a looming important figure throughout this autobiographical writing, right?

ERIN: [responds]

KIM: So her third installment for The Atlantic, “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” recounts her experience after college working at another Indian Boarding School, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. During her time there she was actually sent by the superintendent to go back West to recruit more pupils, just as she had once been recruited. She finally reaches another point of no return. Tell us about that, Jessi.

JESSI: [responds… talk about her disillusionment and read from “Retrospection” beginning with “At this stage of my evolution” until “zigzag lightning across the heavens.” You can also mention here why you decided on Planted in a Strange Earth for the Cita Press title. Can also mention how she came to part ways with Carlisle.]

• Some accounts of Zitkála-Šá’s life claim that she was fired from Carlisle for the Atlantic stories. But she actually decided to leave before that, as she describes in “An Indian Teacher…”. 

• She had spent the summer staying with photographer Gertrude Kasebier, who introduced her to a lot of people and took some now-iconic photographs of her meant to showcase her sort of dual identity. 

• She returned to Carlisle at the end of the summer but soon left, with Kasebier’s encouragement, to study violin with a professor from the New England Conservatory of Music. 

• While she was there, she started to write about her experiences.

• Carlisle’s leaders and teachers and related publications were instantly critical of and bitter about the Atlantic stories, but they still tried to maintain a relationship with her publicly.

• She still went on tour with the Carlisle Indian Band as planned, but she refused to denounce what she had written. She responded to criticism in the Red and Man and Helper: “No one can dispute my own impressions and bitterness!”

• After the tour and the publication of “The Soft-Hearted Sioux,” the Carlisle machine really went after her in a nasty way.

KIM: Cita’s new collection also features five more pieces by Zitkála-Šá that are really wonderful short reads.

AMY: Oh yeah, shout-out for “Why I am a Pagan.” I thought that was such an amazing meditation on the moments of awe you can discover just being attuned to Nature. 

[anyone can respond to this or mention other favorites]

A note on “Why I am a Pagan:” this was later published in American Indian Stories as “The Great Spirit.” The edits reflected Zitkála-Šá’s conversion to Catholicism and a general softening of its critique of Christianity. We decided to include the original version in our collection.

KIM: Writing wasn’t Zitkála-Šá’s only remarkable talent. She was also gifted musically. Tell us about that, Jessi.

JESSI: [responds and can mention performing for William McKinley and The Sun Dance Opera]

• She was a talented violinist and a standout of the 53-piece Carlisle band. Newspapers gushed about her presence. 

• SHe performed at the White House for President McKinley and his wife presented her with a bouquet.

• Later, when she was in Utah with her husband working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she met Willam Hansen, a Mormon music teacher who was fascinated by Indigenous cultures. 

• At Zitkála-Šá’s suggestion, they worked together to write “The Sun Dance Opera,” the first American Indian Opera. 

• Later Hanson basically claimed authorship and majorly minimized Bonnin’s role. But writing the opera gave her a chance to dig into the struggles to maintain Native identity and culture through music. The story of the opera is the story of a life and culture under threat but preservering.

• P. Jane Hafen is definitely one to read on this topic. 

• BYU’s opera program is including some selections from the The Sun Dance Opera in their recital this year, and a student named Sanae Fujii performed an aria Zitkála-Šá authored at the “Historic Change” event this October. 

AMY: So in addition to all of this, Zitkála-Šá was also a strong political activist. Erin, what are some of the ways she fought for the rights of Native Americans?

ERIN: [responds… can also mention her husband here]

•  Zitkála-Šá  and her husband Raymond Bonnin were lifelong activists. Whatever she was fighting for – anti-peyote campaigns, citizenship, legislation, land rights – her ultimate aim was to improve the lives of all Native people. 

• She joined the Society of American Indians in 1914. It was the first organization focused on Native rights that was run by American Indians. She became its Secretary in 1916 and editor of American Indian Magazine.

• She was constantly writing pamphlets, letters, editorials, appeals. P. Jane Hafen’s 2022 collection Help Indians Help Themselves brings together her later writings and pamphlets.

• Her husband served in WWI, and she argued for Indian citizenship based on his other veterans’ service.

• She was involved in women’s suffrage groups, and her main goal was to get white feminists to advocate for Native rights and citizenship. 

• At a speech after the passage of the 19th Amendment, she said ““The Indian woman rejoices with you,” but reminded the crowd that Native women still could not vote. 

• Her efforts influenced the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924; from there she fought continued obstruction of Native voting rights. 

• Also in 1924, while an agent for the ⁣General Federation of Women’s Clubs, she wrote Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes—Legalized Robbery, an exposé that helped trigger the federal investigations chronicled in Killers of the Flower Moon. 

•  In 1926, she and her husband Raymond co-founded the National Council of American Indians, for which she served as president until her death in 1938. 

KIM: Zitkála-Šá died in 1938 at the age of 61. She is buried under the name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin next to her husband at Arlington Cemetery in Washington. Erin, what do we make of her legacy today? Is she more forgotten than she ought to be or is there a growing awareness about her?

ERIN: [Responds and can circle back to Cita and the importance of keeping her work in print and preserving her memory]

AMY: Erin, tell us about your poetry collection Removal Acts. 

ERIN: [responds and if you’d like you can set-up and read a short poem that lends itself…. (we can prompt by asking if you’ll read) Doesn’t necessarily have to be Zitkála-Šá-related.]

KIM: [responds] Erin, thank you for sharing your work with us and thank you for joining us today for this discussion. We’ve loved getting to talk with you and Jessi both! 

[goodbyes from everyone, etc]

AMY: AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode. Listeners, this marks our last full episode for the calendar year. We’ll be back with new free episodes beginning in early February.

KIM: Until then, Amy will be serving up bonus episodes to our subscribers, so if you can’t bear to take a break from us, consider becoming a patron to help support our production costs.

AMY: You can also purchase our bonus episodes individually without a subscription at our Lost Ladies of Lit Patreon page. We do appreciate 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 Amy Helmes and KIm Askew.

220. Christina Rossetti — Speaking Likenesses with Ayana Christie

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

AMY HELMES: Hey, everyone! Today, we’re talking about Christina Rossetti — who admittedly isn’t a “lost” writer.

KIM: Yes, most people know her for her poetry, especially the poem “Goblin Market.” 

AMY: “For there is no friend like a sister/in calm or stormy weather/To cheer one on the tedious way/To fetch one if one goes astray…” It’s one of my favorite poems!

KIM: Me too. But today we’ll be talking about one of Rossetti’s lesser-known works — a children’s book called Speaking Likenesses. It’s often compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was published nine years prior. This work of Rossetti’s has its own unique spin, but before we dive in, I have to share this cute story—my daughter, who just started kindergarten, recently went on her very first field trip to see a theatrical production of Alice. She was gobsmacked! She’s been running around the house quoting Alice and the Queen of Hearts, “Off with her head!”—you can imagine what that’s been like!

AMY: Ha-ha, echoing throughout your house constantly. That’s adorable! I remember saying that line to Julia when she was about three and her responding: “No! I want my head on me!” (We would also sing “We’re painting the roses red” any time we would pass by a rose bush. So I think it's one of those stories that really never goes out of style. And in particular, it really appeals to little girls. Every generation gets to discover its charm. 

KIM: Absolutely! And I have to say, it’s kind of fun hearing those lines, even if they’re repeated a hundred times a day. But like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the three heroines of Rossetti’s book embark on their own wild journeys — ones that are a bit more moralistic — and maybe a bit more clear-eyed about the realities women and girls face in the world.

AMY: That’s right. But before we get too far down that rabbit hole, let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Joining us today is Ayana Christie, Chief Product Officer at Bond & Grace, a women-owned publishing company that reimagines classic literature for the modern reader. Their signature is The Art Novel, which is made up of a classic story, annotations from a team of scholars, and bespoke fine art inspired by the narrative. This immersive reading experience is one of a kind. Previous titles include Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and they’ve recently published a new edition of Alice in Wonderland, which we’ll discuss later. Welcome to the podcast, Ayana!

AYANA CHRISTIE:  Thank you so much. I am thrilled to be here. I love what you all have going on, bringing fascinating figures to light in a way that gives them agency. It's all my type of party. 

AMY: And the Bond and Grace Instagram account, that's my kind of place to be also,  I just want to live in it. it's So pretty! Anyway, we all know Alice in Wonderland, but few people know Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses, which one could almost read as an homage-slash-answer to Alice in Wonderland. It was published in 1874. Ayana, why don’t you kick things off by describing the framework of this book? 

AYANA: Yes, I'd be happy to. So Speaking Likenesses is structured as a collection of three short stories about three young girls. They're all told by an aunt to her nieces. It's similar to the way that Charles Dodgson (a. k. a. Lewis Carroll) created his Alice stories for the three Liddell sisters. And in Rossetti's case, the aunt keeps her nieces occupied with the task that they have at hand while she's telling the story, which definitely brings out that Victorian sense of woman's work and responsibility that's woven through her tales. Very different to how Carroll purports the idea of play and this story concept with the Liddell sisters. So each story has its own fairy-tale setting and real lessons, as well, behind them. 

AMY: Yeah, it's interesting because these little girls are not just allowed to sit and relax and listen to the story, right? They have to stay busy. They have to be hemming pocket handkerchiefs or darning stockings while they're listening, and at one point, the aunt says, “All eyes on your occupations, not on me, lest I should feel shy. Now I start my knitting and my story together.” So even the aunt, while she's telling the story, she has to be working, right? It's this focus on women's work that I think is very intentional by Rossetti, and I think it's key in understanding these three tales that she's going to tell. 

KIM: Yeah, that’s right, Amy, because unlike in Alice where the rules are constantly shifting (or non-existent) at times, Speaking Likenesses shows a world where the characters have to learn how to navigate within those rules. It’s about growth through understanding responsibility. There’s also a lot of interruption by the little girls as the aunt tells her stories. (It’s a bit like The Princess Bride in that sense, where the girls are like, “Wait, wait, wait.” The aunt then gently corrects or shushes them to continue her story.) Ayana, do you want to give a quick rundown of the three different moral fables, which are wrapped in fairy-tale settings?

AYANA: Yes, “moral fables” is a great way to put it. Um, I'm going to try. So each story follows a young girl that's embarked on some kind of journey or something that's causing a challenge for them, which then results in this moral lesson. So first we have Flora, who expects her birthday to be perfect, but she encounters all these disappointments that test her behavior and test her ability to show up as her “best self,” if you will, with her friends and family. And then the second story features Edith, who is attempting to light a fire for a kettle that she just like whisked away into the forest. But she encounters these spirited animals who contribute their ideas about how she can light the kettle, and they're trying to be helpful, but it doesn't seem like it really pans out. And her lesson is patience and resourcefulness, I think. And then lastly, we have Maggie, who’s sent on a mission to deliver some Christmas gifts that were left in her grandmother's shop to a doctor's home. And she sets out eagerly, but soon slips and falls and kind of falls into this very dreamlike state, which reminded me a lot of Alice. She bumps her head and then, um, similar to the other stories, she's met with strange children and talking animals and is tempted to stop and play and get redirected from her mission, but she stays on the mission because she made a promise. 

AMY: Okay, thank you. It's hard to sum up these very, very weird stories succinctly. 

KIM: Yes. Yes, you did a great job.

AMY: Before we go deeper into these stories, let’s talk a little bit about Christina Rossetti’s life and where Speaking Likenesses fits into her body of work. She was born in London in 1830, the youngest of four children in a remarkably talented family. Her father was an Italian exile, a poet, and a Dante scholar, and her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became a famous painter and poet; he was a central figure in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

KIM: Christina is often overshadowed by her brother in terms of fame, but she was an incredibly important poet in her own right. Her poetry is filled with themes of spirituality, personal sacrifice, and moral instruction — largely influenced by her deep religious faith. She grew up in an intellectually vibrant household, surrounded by the influence of her Italian father, who was frequently visited by other Italian intellectuals. Both of her parents were deeply involved in her education, fostering a love for literature early on. From a young age, she was captivated by writers like Dante, Tennyson, and Keats and their works no doubt influenced her poetic voice. However, her teenage years were marked by bouts of illness and depression, which were emotionally and socially isolating. This period deepened her religious convictions and heightened her sensitivity to themes of mortality and inner struggle—experiences that profoundly shaped her writing and added emotional intensity to her work.

AMY: Now Christina Rossetti  never married, despite having at least two serious proposals, apparently because they didn’t share her strict Anglican beliefs. Jan Marsh’s 1994 biography on Rossetti also speculates that Rossetti might have been a victim of sexual assault as a teenager, possibly perpetrated by her father. There’s no direct evidence supporting this, and we don’t have time to explore that fully in this episode, but it’s an interesting theory to consider while reading her most famous poem, “Goblin Market,” published in 1862. “Goblin Market” was actually written for children, which is interesting because it doesn’t seem very appropriate for children in some respects, but it has these dark layers of complexity that make it equally engaging for adults. 

KIM: Amy, that’s actually a great lead-in to Speaking Likenesses, which was published in 1874, after Goblin Market but before her later collection A Pageant and Other Poems. Unlike the “anything goes” rule-breaking of Alice in Wonderland, Rossetti’s book is grounded in Victorian ideals of morality, personal growth, and responsibility. And speaking of Alice, Rossetti and Lewis Carroll actually knew each other, didn’t they, Ayana?

AYANA:  Yes they did. They met in 1867 [correction: 1862], I believe, at her family home, and Carroll greatly admired her work, apparently, and people assume they exchange their writings and their poetry. He even photographed her and her family, and some of those images are still displayed at the National Gallery of London now. And Carroll referenced Rossetti's poem, “Goblin Market,” in his journals, and it said that they maintained a cordial friendship over the years. Do you guys know anything about them possibly having a dating relationship at some point?  

AMY: Mmm, I don't know. I don't think so because I feel like Lewis Carroll's maybe seen as gay… I have that idea in my head; I'm not sure. But then he's also taking pictures of the little girls. So…

AYANA; Yeah, there definitely is a lot more to explore about his kind of  fascinations with girlhood and womanhood. And we know that he never had an official relationship, but it's one of the things that we ended up exploring in Alice in Wonderland in our version of the book. And so I was just curious, because there were some things online that I saw that there was speculation about whether or not they had a courtship. 

KIM: Oh, that's so interesting. I didn't know. 

AMY: Yeah, I read that Jan Marsh biography, and I feel like if they had had a little something going on, I feel like that would have stood out to me from reading her book. Now, it was years ago, so perhaps I just forgot, but I don't remember that being a thing in reading her biography. 

KIM: Yeah, so she did write a glowing review of Alice in Wonderland in 1866, praising its wit and creativity! But she also subtly noted its lack of a strong moral message.

AMY: I wonder if Speaking Likenesses could be seen as her response to Alice. I mean, it really seems so, right, Ayana?

AYANA: I think so. She acknowledges that the Alice books were an inspiration in her letter to her brother Dante Gabriel. And she also wrote a positive review of Alice in Wonderland in 1866, and she even goes as far as  referring to her own work as merely a Christmas trifle in comparison to Alice in Wonderland. So it's possible that she saw it as a sequel, if you will. Um, however, we know that Rossetti aimed to infuse her stories with clear moral lessons, perhaps addressing what she saw as gaps in the market around stories that actually teach girls how to be, and Speaking Likenesses offers that very structured character-building type of narrative. That is just less obvious in the Alice story. It's like, it's really easy to get wrapped up in the details, if you will, of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and miss whether or not there is more to learn there, both as a child, as an adult. So I think she wanted something that was maybe a little bit more obvious. 

KIM: So there’s an excerpt from Speaking Likenesses that I think shows some of the connection to Alice that we’re talking about. Amy, you're so great at reading. Maybe you can read it. It's from that first story. It's the one that seems the most Alice-like of the three. And just a reminder to everyone, that's the one with the eight-year-old Flora that Ayana had told us about. She's being a bit of a brat on her eighth birthday. 

AMY: [reads passage]

I just want  to say [sings] “Be our guest! Be our guest!” You know, it just reminds me of that scene from Beauty and the Beast.

KIM: Oh, yes, but also, I mean, hello with the Alice references or elements. I mean, this is like a grocery list full of things that make you think of Alice in Wonderland, right? 

AMY: Right. The tunnel of yew trees is like the rabbit hole, right? We've got the door, with the signage  saying, “Ring please,” or whatever. 

KIM: Multiple looking glasses.

AMY: There's even a queen, like a tyrannical queen, ruling over this feast, right?  The comparisons are pretty endless. it's not subtle and I think readers would instantly know the reference. 

KIM: Absolutely. Yeah, it's not subtle at all. Um, and then also I should say I have a cheap printed version, a copy of the original 1874 edition. And the Flora from the book looks very similar to Alice. The illustrations are actually by Arthur Hughes. He was a painter and illustrator, and he was also friends with Lewis Carroll, too. So I think that's another interesting connection. 

AMY: And also, I don't think it’s necessarily in that passage I just read, but as the story continues it gets very unsettling and in the same way that Alice in Wonderland gets unsettling, like, disturbing, right? I mean, there's a scary game with children called “Hunt the Pincushion,” where Flora is the pincushion, and it  reads like an assault — like a violent assault on her. 

KIM: Yep.

AMY: And there's also a lot, especially in this story, just a lot of imagery of fruit, which reminded me of “Goblin Market.” 

KIM: Yeah. And the symbolism of fruit and what it means. Yeah, completely.  . 

AMY: So we talked about the similarities, but let's talk about the differences, because  what Rossetti is doing is much different than what Lewis Carroll's doing with his story. There's a much stronger moralistic tone. So basically, by the end of the tale, which is really wild and crazy,  Flora learns her lesson. You know, she learns that you can't be bratty, especially on your birthday. You have to be a sweet, mild-mannered girl. And here's what the narrator aunt says:  And I think if she lives to be nine years old and given another birthday party, she is likely on that occasion to be even less like the birthday Queen of her troubled dream than was the Flora of eight years old: who, with dear friends and playmates and pretty presents, yet scarcely knew how to bear a few trifling disappointments, or learn to be obliging and good-humoured under slight annoyances.”

You can really feel the weight of the lesson, which is “be a good girl,” you know? And it's kind of hard  in 2024 to read that and think, “No! I don't want that to be the lesson!” I don't want Flora to have to be a good girl. It doesn't feel very feminist in this day and age, I guess. What are your thoughts, Ayana?

AYANA: Yeah, I agree with that.. certainly, our understanding of the relation of time, what has happened since this period taints the way we're able to read Rossetti's writings here. And another thing here that she gives us in her finger-waving to Flora is Flora is having this outburst at her eighth birthday. And Alice is seven-and-a-half in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. So she's also giving us another clue that this is like another way that Alice could evolve to be a different type of girl who doesn't talk back to the queen, who doesn't, you know, uh, offer her own autonomy to the animals, et cetera. Um, and I also think that there's a very clear highlight of the didactic language that Rossetti likes to use in her work. A major contrast to the more nonsense literature that makes up Lewis Carroll's whole canonical contribution to our understanding of children's literature. And in Alice, the messages are more implicit. They're like wrapped in humor. They're more surreal situations. The story kind of invites readers to interpret and maybe even defy this concept of, whereas Rossetti seems to be using logic as a holy grail. Like it's her failsafe. It's the thing that anchors her. And it's the same kind of Victorian lessons that we see anchoring Alice from time to time, but she chooses to defy them. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. And it actually reminds me of Rossetti’s own struggles with her temperament. She was known for having a fiery temper as a child—there’s even a story about her cutting her arm with scissors after being scolded by her mother! But later in life, she became much more restrained, maybe even too restrained. 

AMY: Yeah, her brother William said she had stifled her natural high spirits.  There's always this theme of learning to subdue your own temperamental nature and desires. And I'm, you know, thinking back, of course, to her mental health battles as a teen. Um, but it does seem like maybe Christina Rossetti started off as a child, more like Lewis Carroll's Alice, and then as she's writing this as a woman, um… it's, it's hard for me because I keep wanting to put  in her mindset, like, feminist ideas that I don't think she actually had, you know? Because I want to say that her point of view is like,  “As girls, we're not afforded the luxury of being able to be like this.” This, on the other hand, this more structured, rule-abiding way of being is what we have to be. You know, we're forced by society to be that way. But I think I'm putting that on Rossetti, and I don't think that's actually what she intended. I think she really did believe that this was the path for girls. This was the righteous and moral path for girls. I don't know. What are your guys's thoughts on that? 

AYANA: Yeah, I think it was a coping mechanism. I think she's really clearly telling us like there's a way to deal with these trifling disappointments of life and your best path forward is to be polite and to be graceful because you can't do anything about the fact that life is going to disappoint you and maybe that's some of her own personal strife coming through with her writing career and things that she wanted for herself. Think about her being a woman writer in the shadow of a Lewis Carroll, trying to break through what some of those emotions might be that are coming through in her writing. And we see that even now in modern writers, when they create a children's novel, They want to pass down a lesson that they are really  holding close to heart. 

KIM: It reminded me, too, of the conversation between Marmee and Jo in Little Women. We talked about that in a previous episode. But, um, you know, Marmee talking about how she had a temper, and she's angry every day, but she has to learn how to control it. And she wants to teach Jo how to control her temper, as well, so that she can survive in this world, basically, that they live in. 

AMY: Yeah, and that's basically the same time period as this would have been written. Um, and it's taking me back to, okay, so this idea of domestic labor that we've said runs throughout all three stories with the outer framework, but this second story in particular, where little Edith is tasked with lighting a fire to heat a tea kettle. That's all about domestic labor, right?   She needs to get this tea kettle going before the rest of the family comes out for a little picnic in the woods. um, so while she's, you know, frustrated trying to get this fire to light, she sees a cluster of grapes, hanging from a high branch overhead. I think this little section says a lot, so I wanted to see if you would read that passage, Ayana. 

AYANA: Yes. Happy to:  How she longed for a cluster of those purple grapes which, hanging high above her head, swung to and fro with every breath of wind; now straining a tendril, now displacing a leaf, now dipping towards her but never within reach. Still, as Edith was a very wise girl, we must not suppose she would stand long agape after unattainable grapes: nor did she. Her business just then was to boil a kettle, and to this she bent her mind.

AMY: So yeah, the fact that she doesn't have the luxury of dreaming for something unattainable or something beyond domestic work, you know. This is what her mind has to focus on And we see that in the first story too, of not being able to partake of any of the sweets at the table. The strawberries and cream, they're snatched away from her just as she's about to take a bite. So there's this idea that girls just aren't allowed to have it.  

AYANA: I’m also thinking of  fear, right? The fear behind what if I go off the path and indulge my imagination or indulge this other part of me that I don't actually know how to manage that wants to try new things. Her inability to even think What's the worst that will happen? is also something that struck me about this particular passage and all the stories. Like, what if you kind of stop and play and don't deliver the package directly? Who is going to tell? 

KIM: Exactly. It's a perfect lead into the third story because it's like a classic take on the little Red Riding Hood fairytale. But it also has that sense of like, you have to do the right thing and you don't have any other option. I mean, in this case, yeah, we'll talk about it more, but things can go very wrong if you don't follow the rules. 

AMY: Right, in this one the heroine, Maggie, travels through a forest to return some items to a rich family. She’s then visited by otherworldly spirit children who tempt her and try to divert her from her task. She’s given a rude welcome when she finally arrives at her destination, but as a result of keeping her promise, she is rewarded on her return journey home.

KIM: Let’s face it, she actually lives. I mean, she gets a concussion and the spirit world is coming to her. She could die of freezing cold if she doesn't do what she's supposed to do. I mean, what I took the symbolism to be saying. So scary. 

AMY: My example of how I keep putting my own modern framework into these tales… again, I don't think Rossetti intended this at all, but when I read this story, so it's set around Christmas time, right? She's doing all this work. I mean, it's hard work. And then she's passing along the way in the forest all this really fun stuff. And she's like, nope, I can’t stop and play the game with these fairy children or whatever. I gotta keep going. No, I can't enjoy this. I gotta keep going. And it made me think about  all the work that women do at Christmastime and all that, you actually really cannot enjoy at Christmastime and I, like, I, clearly have, like, a problem that I'm placing all of my anxieties about Christmas onto this one story, but that was my takeaway from it. Like, “Oh, yep, that sounds about right at Christmastime: Sending a girl on an errand and then she misses out on all the fun.” 

KIM: But she does get rewarded with some puppies. 

AMY: That's true. That's true.  

KIM: Yeah, And she doesn't die!  

AMY: Well, the one thing that really stands out in this story, too, is the appearance of this little boy who is described as “all mouth and  teeth.” It's like a distorted face with a giant mouth And these, like, you know, ferocious teeth. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: He's probably the thing that stands out to me the most in that story, just because he's so creepy. 

KIM: Oh, yeah. He's so creepy, that imagery, yeah.

AMY: Listeners, I will say that in next week's bonus episode, I'm going to be reading this third tale in full for everyone. It is very Christmas-y. So stay tuned for that.  But getting back to the, um, comparisons between this book and Alice in Wonderland, there's a point in Flora's tale where glass bricks are being built around her to make up like a house that's being built around her. She's being confined, right? And, by contrast, in Alice in Wonderland, it's Alice who's busting out of the house, right? 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: Getting bigger and she's breaking the walls and coming out of it. And it's sort of like the opposite is happening in this tale where she's getting trapped in. Um, so yeah, in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, there are no clear rules to follow. There's no being a “good girl” necessarily. There's a playful defiance of logic and of Alice's behavior, frankly, that reflects how disorienting it can be to grow up. It's a metaphor for adolescence and puberty, but in Rossetti's work, it's the complete opposite. 

KIM: Yeah, as we said, it's basically learning how to navigate these norms and it's kind of embracing personal growth. It's funny, one of the games is called “Self Help;” it made me laugh. Um, but Alice, on the other hand, she's getting to break free from those strictures entirely.

AMY: Yeah, Ayana, what do you think modern readers can take away from this contrast between the sort of playful rebellion that we see in Alice and then all the lessons that are so overt in Speaking Likenesses? 

AYANA: Yeah, I think Rossetti offers us a lesson about navigating the confines of acceptable behavior. And we as adults, like in this new 2024 world (maybe not so new sometimes, right?) can think about how we ourselves are  subjected to this concept of “acceptable behavior” and maybe how we're projecting that onto young people around us, the children around us, the girls around us. We have a centerfold essay in our version of Alice in Wonderland that talks about this, like how there's an intertangling with identity and what's acceptable, what's beautiful, what is within the confines of our understanding of the ideal girl, and some of the ways that you know, it's time for us to break what that actually is and give children freedom to explore these different parts of them as human. And so I think when we look at Alice, it's a really interesting way to think about how children could be cultivated differently and or you could cultivate yourself differently and thinking about what are the confines, what's the glass house that you found yourself in that you want to break out of and be a little bit more like Alice?

KIM: I love that.

AMY: Yeah, it feels like there's a reason maybe that Alice endured  and Speaking Likenesses did not endure. And I think part of it is that Alice as a character, she does defy the norms of what a little girl is supposed to be and that's, I think, going back to our daughters and how they were captivated by Alice in Wonderland… as a little girl you read that and you're like, “Yeah, she's kind of a smart mouth and talking back to all these crazy characters.” I'd rather read that story than Christina  Rossetti's admonishing me to walk the straight and narrow path, you know? 

AYANA: Yeah, and there's something to be said about, you know, Rossetti is also confined to her time, right? And so I can imagine that her novel or her work didn't reach the same acclaim because it was kind of restating the obvious. It's restating things that people were already experiencing. And then, you know, we can also talk about Lewis Carroll as a male writer talking about girlhood and the weirdness around that. And like, why does he get famous and her and not her? Like I like to say, the ideology is all in the water and it's hard to escape it, especially when you're a creator, um, with this type of talent. You know, I can see how she found herself in a bit of a box and and it. felt comfortable there. 

AMY: Yeah. I mean, there were so many morality tales for children that were similar to the ones she wrote here. Um, but I do like to think even though, like I said, I'm putting my own modern sensibility on it, I do like to think maybe there was a part of her as she was writing it that kind of  was writing it a little tongue-in-cheek, with a little bit of shade, like: this is girls’ lot, you know, this is our lot.

KIM: I want to think that too. Yeah. I love that. I want to hear more about your… you said a little bit about the Alice in Wonderland.  Let's tell the listeners more about your Alice in Wonderland edition.

AYANA: Yes, of course. I'd love to. Um, so our latest release   includes the full original texts of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as well as Through the Looking Glass. And the reason why I bring that up first is I love that we actually give you the full story of Alice, her evolution, if you will. In the first story, she's more timid. She's kind of going crazy in a topsy-turvy world and growing in size, shrinking in size. And we see her come into more of her womanhood and to this, like, more of an adolescent stage by the time she gets through looking glass. And throughout that journey, we have paired the text with new contemporary, fine art. As well as commentary from a global team of scholars. So they give you more information about Lewis Carroll, his influences, things that were happening at the time that would influence why a particular passage is important. These stories are layered with references to the British empire, references to their growing stake at that particular time and people's changes and eating habits. That's why there’s so much sugar references in the book. Like just so many interesting references that we learned from our stores are all baked in here.

KIM: That's fascinating. How cool. Oh, I'm so excited to read it.

AMY: I love that, because even still, when I read Alice in Wonderland, I think of it as just a lot of, like, fun nonsense, right? I think I miss a lot. There actually is a lot of, like, targeted meaning in there and symbolism.  I would love the idea of having expert annotations along with the reading. And I don't know if you have this yet for Alice, but I just realized you had it for some of your other titles. Like the “expansion pack,” where it's like, um, cards. Am I right?

AYANA: Oh, yes. Oh my gosh thank your for bringing that up! Those are one of my favorite products that I created this year for the company. And so what they are, are “Companion Cards.” So you don't need our version of Alice in Wonderland or Frankenstein or The Secret Garden to use these cards. What we've done is packaged most of the annotations, and most of the art from our books into this compact companion card experience. And you can use the card to read any version of those books and just read them in a different way. Um, and we learned that from our book club community, the community of folks who just love the idea of having access to the research that we've done  from our team of scholars and access to the visuals of the art. 

AMY: It's such a good idea, and I don't think I've ever seen it done in quite that way, you know? Like, people usually reach for a book to read another book, so this is different.

AYANA: I love it. It's something that came together… we were trying to think of, actually, we started off with thinking about doing like playing cards to go with Alice in Wonderland just as a, you know, nice lifestyle home concept. And I was like, well, actually, I think we have something here.  Everything we do, we try to make sure that the book lover is at the center and giving them something different. There’s not in the market, there's not enough things out there like book accessories and experiences that are for people who actually read. 

KIM: Love it.

AMY: The first time I read Alice in Wonderland, I was in second grade, and I grabbed it off the shelf at the school library because the cover was so beautiful. It had, like, the gilt edges of the pages and the cover itself was just like, so colorful and gorgeous, and that's my reason for choosing the book and then of course, I got drawn in and I loved the story. And you don't forget books that are beautiful and special, and the Bond & Grace books are just that. The books you guys are producing are exquisitely beautiful and so special and they would make such a terrific Christmas or holiday gift for the book lover in your life. I mean, they're keepsakes; they're heirlooms, really.  

AYANA: Thank you so much. We have an incredible team that has worked so hard on the design, the curation, the writing. I mean, I couldn’t be happier with how our books have turned out and we do design them so that there's something that draws you from across the room. 

AMY: Thank you so much for joining us today to discuss Christina Rossetti.  This has been such a super interesting discussion, and we're glad we got that opportunity to dive into a different work by Rossetti that we wouldn't have thought to read. 

AYANA: Yes. Thank you so much, Amy and Kim for having me. I really appreciate being here. Always excited to talk about books anytime you've got another one up your sleeve. 

AMY: Do you happen to know what the next book will be after Alice? 

AYANA: Okay, I will drop a hint. We do like to keep people waiting and baited to know what book we're doing. So I'll drop a hint. We are coming back to the USA. We're going to do an American author.

KIM: Ooh, I can't wait!

AYANA: It’s a good one. For the anniversary of the book.

AMY: Okay. I'll get to thinking on that. But, like I said, if you start following Bond & Grace on Instagram, their beautiful Instagram site, you'll eventually get the answer, right? 

AYANA: Yes, exactly. 

AMY: So that’s all for today. In next week’s bonus episode, it’s story time! I’ll actually be reading the entire third story from Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses. It’s very Christmas-y, so it feels appropriate to kick off the month of December. Get that episode by subscribing wherever you listen, or visit our Patreon page. Patreon also now sells all of our bonus episodes individually if you can’t commit to a monthly subscription. So feel free to pick and choose if that’s your preference!

KIM: And in two weeks, we’ll be back with another full-length episode, this time discussing the late nineteenth and early 20th century writer Zitkála-Šá, a member of the Yankton Dakota Sioux tribe whose writing explores the mistreatment of Native Americans and her own feelings of conflicted identity.

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!

218. Margaret Drabble — The Millstone with Carrie Mullins

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

AMY: Hey, everyone! A few months ago, a listener let us know that the book we’re featuring today (The Millstone by Margaret Drabble) was (at the time) on-sale for $2, so of course I downloaded it — and then promptly proceeded to forget about it. 

KIM: Been there! 

AMY: Yes, an all-too-common occurrence. Luckily, I was reminded of the book as I was reading a nonfiction title published earlier this year: The Book of Mothers: How Literature Can Help Us Reinvent Modern Motherhood by Carrie Mullins. 

KIM: Right. In fact, the first sentence of Mullins’s book mentions The Millstone, which was first published in 1965.

AMY: Exactly. Seeing it mentioned in Carrie’s book jogged my memory that I had it on my Kindle, so I ended up reading these two books in tandem, which turned out to be such a perfect pairing. Mullins’s unique insights are so helpful in my understanding of The Millstone.

KIM: Yeah, there are some great connections to be made, which is why we decided we had to have Mullins come join us for an episode.

AMY: Yes, so let’s take this pregnant pause (pun intended) to raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Carrie Mullins, is a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in outlets like Parents, Food & Wine, Epicurious, Tin House and Publishers Weekly. A former national editor at the Serious Eats website, Carrie is also a longtime contributor to Electric Literature, where she covers the intersection of literature and culture.

AMY: In May, Carrie published The Book of Mothers which examines today’s cultural notions of motherhood through the lens of 15 classic literary moms. The book makes thought-provoking arguments through timely comparisons: likening Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennett to one of Bravo TV’s “real housewives,” for example, citing Emma Bovary as a harbinger to the cult of Instagram materialism and examining the politics of childcare through Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple. This book urges you to reassess what you think you know about some of the most classic mothers in the literary canon while pondering what lessons they can teach us today. 

KIM: Yes, such a great book. Carrie shades her literary analysis with deeply personal reflections about her own maternal foibles and fears, including a particularly harrowing experience that parallels an incident in The Millstone. Carrie, we’re thrilled to have you join us, welcome to the show!

CARRIE: Thank you. Thank you for having me on!

AMY: You used a funny anecdote about the publication of The Millstone to kick off the introduction of your book. Can you explain why you wanted to start there? How does it speak to the bigger picture of what your book is about?

CARRIE: Yeah, so that story always makes me laugh. It's about how Margaret Drabble, she'd  had two children. She was pregnant with her third when she sent the manuscript to be reviewed. And The Millstone is about a somewhat prudish graduate student named Rosamond who gets pregnant on her first and only time having sex, and she not only decides to keep her baby, but she falls in love with that baby and doesn't give up her job and manages to push back against all of these, uh, boundaries and preconceived notions that existed, especially in the 60s, um, in the UK. So you have to imagine that if Drabble is sending this manuscript out, she's anticipating getting some notes back from her reader, who's, by the way, a middle-aged man, about the more progressive parts of her book. And instead, he writes back saying, you know, I have a big problem with the plot because women can't get pregnant on their first try.

AMY: Oh, boy.  

CARRIE: And it's just so hilarious because Drabble is pregnant with her third child, so you imagine she knows how the female body works. And that of all of the things that she says in this book about motherhood, this is the part that the man grabs onto. So, I mean, it's just so funny, but also so indicative of where we, continue to be when it comes to motherhood in literature, which is that it's not necessarily that there's a problem with how mothers are portrayed in literature, but it's how we talk about them, the notions that we bring to those portrayals. So it's not enough to say, well, you know, some of those moms are really old fashioned; they no longer speak to us. The question is, well, why? And how are we talking about them? Are we talking about that in a way that's useful or not?

KIM: Right, right. So there’s a moment in The Millstone when a character describes motherhood as “one of the most boring commonplaces of the female experiences.” You admit in the introduction to your book that you had no interest in reading about mothers prior to becoming one. 

CARRIE: Oh yeah, none.  I wanted to read books about the universal human experience (as if everyone doesn't have a mother.) But I think it's pretty common. We really package motherhood that way as something that is relevant only to women who have children. So I understood that the books that I should be reading to get that bigger experience were books about men, you know, and sometimes books about women, but certainly not about motherhood, which just immediately put up the walls of that silo. 

AMY: Okay, so we’re going to be incorporating some of the ideas from your book into our discussion of Drabble’s book, but first I want to get into some of the basics about her life. (I feel like I am constantly showing my ignorance on this show, and here’s another good example: I had no idea Drabble is actually younger sister to the late novelist A.S. Byatt!!)

KIM: I didn’t know either! But we love literary sisters, so it’s great. I love A.S. Byatt’s work, so it’s a cool connection. Anyway, today Margaret Drabble is 85 years old. She was born in 1939 and originally hails from Northern England. Her father, John Frederick Drabble, was a county judge who also authored two novels in the 1970s (after his daughters started getting published). Drabble attended a Quaker boarding school in York where her mother was a teacher, then went on to Newnham College in Cambridge. (We learned a lot about Newnham College in our previous episode on Amy Levy, and our guest from that show, Ann Kennedy Smith, has a wonderful Substack about the literary women of Newnham called Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society.) 

AMY: At college, Drabble’s life centered around the Amateur Dramatic Club where she met the future Sir Ian McKellan (and how’s this for nifty: a decade later McKellan starred in the film adaptation of The Millstone!)  In 1960, Drabble married her first husband, fellow thespian Clive Swift and they joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon. She mainly had walk-on roles, but was an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Rigg! 

KIM: Shortly thereafter, Drabble abandoned acting to forge a professional writing career. Between 1963 and 2016 she wrote 19 novels, in addition to some short stories and nonfiction titles — including a history of the jigsaw puzzle!

AMY: She’s got a lot going on, this lady! Okay, so as Carrie mentioned, Drabble had two children (and was expecting her third child) at the time she wrote The Millstone — her third novel. She has said she chose an unmarried protagonist so she didn’t have to write about marriage or dwell too much on the baby’s father. Carrie, what do you think that distillation achieves in this book?

CARRIE: Well, so the thing about Margaret Drabble if you read enough of her interviews, is that she can be a little bit glib. So I believe her when she says that she, you know, just didn't want to have to deal with the dad character. But on the other hand, the book wouldn't be itself if Rosamond was in a relationship. So much centers around this situation that this young woman finds herself in. So, I mean, if we go back to London in the mid Sixties, at that point, unmarried women having babies weren't just seen as promiscuous, they were seen as unfit for motherhood, you know, borderline mentally unstable. So you had a situation where, you know, between 1949 and 1976, an estimated 185,000 unmarried women were forced to give their children up for adoption. So it's not only that Rosamond doesn't have a boyfriend or husband, it's that she decides to keep the baby. Abortion was illegal in the UK at the time, but as in many societies now, if you are a woman of a certain means, you had access to it. So what we see in the book is that Rosamond's friends are all sort of encouraging her to do this. And then the specter of this forced adoption is also always there. So these are the things that make her decision to keep the baby so powerful. And if she had a husband, you know, none of that would really play out in the same way.

AMY: Yeah, even if you are with a partner,  there's something about having a child that  it's your personal journey. That's what this book is. It's her own personal journey with this pregnancy and with this child. There’s a line in your book where you note that women have “None of the control, but all of the responsibility.” Can you speak on that further, and what are the ways we see that in Rosamund’s experience?

CARRIE: I mean, it's so much the case today, but especially then. So she wrote the book in 1965, which means that contraception was two years from becoming legal in the UK. So that means that, you know, Rosamond decides to have… it is a consensual sexual encounter, but obviously the results of that are all on her. Ultimately, the pregnancy is on her and the raising of that child is on her. The buck will stop with her, which is, you know, the same for a lot of women. 

KIM: So though her pregnancy makes for a tricky situation on a number of fronts, there are some distinct advantages that Rosamund has that other unwed mothers probably wouldn’t have had. She is living in her parents’ flat while they are serving as missionaries overseas, so housing isn’t an issue for her. 

AMY: Right, she’s got a really nice flat. And she is also determined to continue working. She is getting her PhD in Elizabethan poetry. (even today I think about trying to do that while a new mother and I get panicky.) Her decision to keep her career a priority seems striking for the time period, I think. She doesn’t even think twice about it. Drabble writes in first-person, as Rosamund: “I suppose I must have a rock-like confidence in my own talent, for I simply did not believe that the handicap of one small illegitimate baby would make a scrap of difference to my career.”

CARRIE: This is so funny. This is Drabble's voice. You know, in her interviews I said she could be a little glib. I think it is absolutely that same voice in the book, which is  so often hilarious. She is really confident at the same time, you know, kind of wondering like, “Am I so confident? I guess I am!” And she just sort of, you know, goes about it with this kind of funny  indifference that allows her to power through what, for most people, would have been a completely insurmountable situation. In the Sixties not a lot of women worked, period. So to say “I'm gonna devote myself to this really niche academic subject and also raise my child…” I mean, her treatment of it, as though it's obviously gonna be okay,  is, I think, meant to heighten, actually, how difficult that would be. And how unusual. Also, you know, she brings it back to this question of, of resources. And in the UK, that's often a question of class. So, Rosamund's parents have this beautiful flat in, I think it's Kensington. So when the ambulance comes  to take her to deliver the baby, the way that the ambulance drivers treat her is pointed out, you know? They treat her with respect. Whereas if she had been picked up from a neighborhood south of the river, she would have been treated in a much different way. So I love that about the book, the way that she takes this kind of like funny, sarcastic angle, but never fails to recognize what the situation is and the challenges that Rosamund, even though she's acting confident, we know that they're there and for anyone else would have been the end of the story. 

AMY: Exactly.  This is all not to say that she has an easy time of it. She's got one portion covered, which is the apartment. 

KIM:Yeah, and the other reason this situation works out for her partially is because she manages to have a workable childcare arrangement. This subject of childcare makes up a chapter of your book, Carrie, right?

CARRIE: Yeah, that was one of the most fascinating chapters to research. I was looking at the book The Color Purple by Alice Walker, which is, you know, about  a young woman in the South at the turn of the 20th century who's black and incredibly poor, and she's married off to this widower and expected to raise his children. So, over the course of the book, she does that, but really with the help of her community, and at various times, um, the women are all sort of looking out for each other and their children. So it's this shared communal child care, and so it got me thinking, “Why is that the situation?” You know, this isn't the nuclear family, which is what in America, we have a really long standing relationship with that. It's our ideal, you could even say. So why does theirs look so different? And that was obviously a question of racism and misogyny and again, resources. So they couldn't afford all of these things. It's something that women had to fill in by necessity. And that got me thinking just about child care in general. So then I went down the rabbit hole and let me tell you, it's obviously a whole story that I had never really considered. You know, I live in New York City where we have universal pre-K, which is wonderful, but the other options are really expensive. It's hard to get into those programs. And so why is that the case? I had never really thought about it on a really granular level. And then I started researching  in the Eighties, Reagan pulled funding from one of the biggest national daycare programs, and, you know, that was just going off of what Nixon had done in the Sixties, which was to frame daycare as like a Communist  project, you know? As if by sending our kids out to daycare, we were all going to become socialists. Fast forward to today and in 2021 in Idaho, the state government turned down a grant for $6 million because they thought that subsidized daycare would hurt the family unit. So I was suddenly like, Whoa, there is actually so much going on behind the scenes that I hadn't considered and you know, we talk about all other kinds of social context and not the ones that pertain to motherhood, right? 

AMY: And just the idea that you're just left to figure it out.  You made that choice and now… good luck! Figure it out. You probably won't earn enough to actually pay for the childcare and sorry, no solutions here. 

KIM: That’s your problem, yeah.

AMY: And I'm also thinking in terms of  the scene in the book where Rosamund has to figure out what to do when she needs to leave in an emergency,  so let's talk about the anxiety of that scene and just a mother's anxiety in general because Carrie, this is a whole chapter of your book and it's kind of intrinsic to what being a mother is. 

CARRIE:That chapter is so interesting to read as a person mothering today because I was immediately like, “You can't leave your child!”  

AMY: Yeah, so basically, baby Octavia is running a high fever.  Rosamund's  panicked.

KIM: Didn't they warn her that it could be serious if her daughter got sick too? So there's an added pressure… 

AMY: Okay. Yeah. So Rosamund has to go out to a late-night pharmacy and try to find medicine for the baby, but  it's raining. It's like the middle of the night. She does not want to have to risk taking the baby out. And the baby's sleeping peacefully right now. So she's like, “I think I can get out to the corner drugstore and get back, right?”  But then she has all these thoughts about, like, what if there's a fire in the building? Like you're saying, Carrie, “No, I can't leave the baby!” So then she's like, well, how am I going to do this? She has no one to help her.  She winds up having to  knock on some neighbor's door…

KIM: They're having a party. 

AMY: They're having a party. They haven't really ever had any interaction before, and she has to do one of those, you know, “My baby's sleeping upstairs and you're probably not going to have to do anything, but like, can you just keep an ear out?” It is so stressful.

KIM: So  stressful. 

AMY: I'm going to make a really funny story from my own life to compare this to. But I remember my daughter was just a few weeks old. I was a first time mom. And I was trying to just get out of the house and go do something. So I went to a fast-casual Mexican restaurant and it was really crowded, right? So I order at the counter and there's no tables, but I find a table  far in the corner. So I cart the stroller all the way over to the corner, get the diaper bag and everything un-situated. I have my table, I'm going to be able to eat.  Then they call my number and I'm like, “How am I going to do this?”  It's packed. I can't leave her and walk the 40 feet through this crowd to go get my food, and I can't even hold it all. I'm not going to ask a total stranger to  watch the stroller…  

KIM: I totally remember that happening. I had it happen at the cafeteria at the Huntington and I was completely like, I've got this tray, I've got her, like, I need to leave her, like, how do I do this?  it would have been fine, probably, just to leave her there. Like, but all that fear is so built into 

AMY: yeah. yeah.  

KIM: Especially, I don't know, it might be a very, um, American thing too, I don't know. Like the fear that you can't step away from your baby for one second. Yeah.

CARRIE: Yeah, I mean, in that moment, to put yourself in Rosamond's head, you can, if you've been a mom, like you guys have been saying, you have that spiral, you know, like what are all the various possibilities of disaster that could happen in this moment, you know, between me going out and getting the medicine or going to pick up my burrito or whatever, you know, it's these small moments that can feel so overwhelming. Researchers have realized that, Oh, actually your pregnant brain changes and there's a decrease in gray matter and an increase in certain hormones. And so you're literally more in tune with your baby, which also makes you more anxious. So at least for me personally,  that was really nice to hear like, okay, there's a scientific explanation for what's going on. But also, like, once we have that realization, then can we go back and look at all of these moments and maybe have more compassion? Can we also build a society where that happens? Where mothers are supported a little more. So like in the book, when she goes to her neighbors, you know, what's so nice in that moment is that the neighbors are like, “Of course!” And actually I've been on that end. Um, I've been the mom who's like, what do I do with my baby in this moment? And then I've also been the person where like another mom in the park has been like, “Oh my God, I have to pee. Can you just watch my kid for a couple of seconds?” And it actually felt so nice in that moment to, like, be there for that mom.  Knowing what she's going through, like the anxiety of just trying to make this decision, like, can I go pee in the park, you know? It's just, I think, so important to see that moment in the book and understand how real it is for Rosamund and how deep that anxiety goes. Because I think, especially the way that Margaret Drabble writes,  you know that she's going to get through it because she is such kind of like a strong scrappy character, but just knowing that actually what she's showing us is, this anxiety, which especially when you multiply that one moment over the course of a baby's life or your children's life can become so overwhelming so fast.

KIM: Completely. And in Rosamund’s case, her anxiety is warranted, because she’s already been through a harrowing medical ordeal: emergency heart surgery for baby Octavia. At the end of the day, this book is a love story between mother and child, and we really see Rosamund owning the fierceness of motherhood when this happens. Carrie, I’m sure this section of the book must have special resonance for you, I’m guessing?

CARRIE: Yeah, absolutely. So my second son was born in 2020, which was the height of COVID   and he was born, With, sagittal craniosynostosis, which is basically when the plates in a baby's head are not, there's no separation, there's no soft spot, which is sort of the way we talk about it, um, and so what happens is that the head becomes deformed and then over time, if you don't separate the plates, uh, it would like limit the brain growth and that kind of thing. So it resulted in, uh, him having surgery at 10 weeks old, like neurosurgery, splitting open his head. And that was, um,  you know, something that  I never anticipated, you know, with my first child. And I write this in the book, you know, when I'm talking about my anxiety, it's so, easy to understand, in a way, why I would be so anxious in that situation, but I thought I had experienced anxiety with my first child because just having a baby just opens you up to so much and you're worried about so much. And then when this happened it was on a whole new plane of worries. So I definitely, you know, reading the book could be difficult, you know, cause it brings back the intensity of like those feelings and especially the moments where you don't know what's going to happen are the worst. And also even just thinking about her interactions with the doctors, you know, who you want to be on your side, but you're also worried, you know? Are they doing the right thing? You're trying to evaluate it. So even though you have doctors who are theoretically professionals, you feel like you need to be somehow making the right choices too. And you feel that in her scenes. And so, yeah, it was tough, but also nice just to see that experience get recognized, you know, on the page.

KIM: Yeah, for sure.

AMY: And now I'm feeling really dumb about my “baby burrito” paranoia because that so pales in comparison with what you had to go through. Is he okay now? 

CARRIE: Yeah. He's fine now. Yeah.  Yeah, yeah. Happy ending.

AMY: This book does remind me a little bit of, um, Barbara Comyns’ Our Spoons Came From Woolworths in terms of the hospital experiences and the maternity ward and things like that. Rosamund is a much stronger character in this book. The scene that comes to mind is when she is trying to get the attention of the medical personnel after her baby has had the surgery and nobody will let her see the baby. Nobody's giving her any information. They want her to go away. Um, and this is heart surgery that has been performed on an infant. And finally, Rosamund just snaps and she starts screaming in the middle of the hospital. And you know what? It works.

KIM: I was cheering for her!

CARRIE:  I also love how she kind of like co-ops that craziness, you know? Like, something that's used to dismiss women is like, “Ugh, they're just crazy.” But she's like, I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna use it to get what I want.”

AMY: Yeah. “You want crazy? I'm gonna give it to you.” And then of course they want the screaming to stop so they're like, “Shut her up, give her whatever she wants.” So let's talk about this more in the context of your book, Carrie, because you have a whole chapter about mom rage. 

CARRIE: Yeah, you know, that was also nice to write.  Now that we're talking, it just dislodged a memory, which is… when I first brought my son, you know, we saw various doctors to try and get a diagnosis, and I walk into one office, you know, and I'm with my husband and I'm carrying my son. And the doctor just turns to me and goes, “You know I just want to let you know right off the bat, Mom: This is not your fault.” And I was like…???? 

AMY: What?!

CARRIE: Yeah, I was like, “Uh, okay, am I supposed to be thinking it's my fault?” And also my husband's standing right here. No one's, you know, asking him if he's taking responsibility for this. So just the trickiness of being a woman and mother in the medical space… I love that Drabble was able to put that into her book as well. It's just about so many things in what's actually a relatively short book. She covers so many bases. I think one of the things that I wish I had done in that situation was have stronger emotions, but that can be really difficult. You know, the expectations are that women don't, and especially when it comes to anger, so that to me is one of the stickiest maternal taboos —namely that good mothers don't get mad. And I wrote about Little Women, which is a book in which Marmee is often held up as, you know, the perfect mom. It's just how we understand her. So Greta Gerwig came out with the film version a couple years ago, and she includes the scene where Marmee says, “I've been angry nearly every day of my life.” And the media response to that was so effusive and also  congratulatory towards Gerwig, you know, saying like, “Wow, what an amazing idea to put this in your movie.” And to her credit, she said, “I didn't make it up. It's been in the book this entire time.” You know, Little Women was written in 1868, so why haven't we noticed? And when I was thinking about it, I felt like it was because we can't reconcile those two things in our minds. Like good moms, the perfect mom, the sweet, knitting Marmee does not get mad. But she clearly does! It's right there in the book. So I think we're really uncomfortable, still, with the idea of women getting angry. And I think that part of the reason is that we correlate it with being a bad mother, and why are you a bad mother? Because you must obviously be dissatisfied with your kids and with the whole experience if you're also getting angry — as if you can't love your kids and also be angry, which then also I think shuts a lot of moms down because what an awful thing to have someone think, “Oh, she doesn't like being a mom. She hates her kids because she's angry about something.” But if you sublimate that, then what happens? You're not going to say that there's a problem. You're not going to start agitating for change. So by telling moms that they can't get angry, you're also really like keeping the status quo. So it's been a relief to see us start to pick away at that in the last couple of years. But, um, I think in a lot of ways, people still look at angry moms like they looked at Rosamund, like “you are crazy.”

KIM: Yeah, and I could see in the situation you were into, it's like you need help from this doctor. And so you want to do everything right so that you can get what you need to get for your child. So it puts you in a difficult position there. Anyway, throughout The Millstone, Rosamund maintains a sense of intellectual superiority and independence, yet motherhood significantly alters her sense of self. How do you think Rosamund navigates this identity shift?

CARRIE: She Was a young 20-something, with all of the freedoms that that entails. That shift to thinking about someone not just once during the day, but constantly, is really life-changing. I mean, it just changes your whole perspective on everything.  But equally what I love about Rosamund is  how much of herself stays the same. In the canon of literature she reminds me a little bit more of Rachel Samstat from Nora Ephron's book Heartburn, who is pregnant with her second child, but you really you feel like you've known Rachel forever; like she's a mom, but there is really no difference between how she was then and how she was now. There's been no huge transformation. And I get a similar sense from Rosamund.  Even though she's suddenly dealing with taking care of another person 24/7, her interior self has a consistency which I really like, you know? Her belief that the Elizabethan poets are worth devoting her life to, you know? That doesn't waver even though she has a child. She just still has the same sense of  independence that she had at the beginning. So I really love that too.

AMY: Something earlier in the book speaks to this, because there's a scene with a kind of previous boyfriend or suitor, where they're planning to have a tryst in a hotel room. The sex doesn't actually materialize, but they do go to this hotel, and she is planning on writing her name in the registry book as his name, you know, like his last name, so that it looks official and that they look like a married couple. But when she goes to sign the book, she accidentally  signs  her real last name. She is reluctant to give up her identity, right? 

CARRIE: Yeah, I mean, what an amazing way to tell us so much about Rosamund in a small little interaction at the beginning of the book. It's just a great setup.

KIM: There’s another really powerful moment in the book, I think, when at a doctor’s appointment early in her pregnancy Rosamund sees a pregnant mother with two very young children. The mother asks Rosamund to hold the younger child for a moment, which she does, but it’s a very foreign feeling to her. After the appointment she sees the mother and children again on the street. Carrie, would you mind reading that passage?

CARRIE:

“She was going painfully slowly along the other side of the road: the elder child was stopping to look in every litter bin and to run up the steps of every building, and she did not hurry him along but paused to wait for him, hardly looking at what he was doing but standing still, eyes fixed, the smaller child slung, legs astride, over the swelling of the next. There was a solemnity about her imperceptible progress that impressed me deeply: she stood there, patiently waiting, like a warning, like a portent, like a figure from another world. Five months earlier I would have passed her without another glance, but now the weight of her child was heavy in my arms and my coat still damp from his dampness. I do not know how she could get along that road. Nor could I feel that weight till my own arms had tested it.

AMY: It kind of sums up what the whole point of the book is, right? 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: She knew nothing and then suddenly by the end of it she has such an awareness about everything related to motherhood. And I think it ties into your book too and what you were saying about, you know, you had no interest before. I don't think you have to experience motherhood to suddenly take an interest, that's not what I'm saying, but just sort of the recognition from this passage is beautifully put, I guess.

CARRIE: Absolutely, and it is exactly  what I'm hoping to do with The Book of Mothers. I think that for me, this passage is really working on two levels, which is one, is to sort of recognize and in sort of a funny way celebrate  that experience of becoming a mother and really being able to understand for the first time this like the long line of women. Like you're saying, that you are suddenly a part of it's just such a specific experience to be pregnant and to have a child (or to raise a child; to adopt a child and raise a child) just raising that child is you know, you can't  in some ways understand until you do it. But that being said, you can absolutely get closer in the way that you can get closer to any experience that's not your own experience. And that's what this passage is doing for us. And that's what I'm hoping we, as readers, are going to do towards motherhood in general. You know,  being somebody who owns up to the fact that I didn't read about motherhood, I was not putting myself in those shoes, and I believe that you can read this passage from The Millstone and get that much closer to understanding. I mean, I tell everybody to read this book. I told my husband to read this book, and he did and loved it. And that was just because  it can be really difficult to explain these things to somebody who hasn't gone through them. I found pregnancy in particular sort of difficult to articulate and The Millstone was a great way of having my husband share in those things. A big part of the book is her pregnancy. Like actually, the baby maybe even is delivered after the halfway mark. So a lot of it is about her experience becoming pregnant and “Oh my God, now I'm trapped inside this body that's not mine,” which is its own incredibly unique, bizarre experience. In the book I wrote about it as being like  people are suddenly commenting on your body as if you put on a sequined tuxedo that you had forgotten you put on, you know? You're like “This isn't even me, but everyone's commenting. I'm now this other person!” And reading The Millstone, I think actually my husband got a little bit closer to understanding what that's like. 

AMY: I'm going to go back quickly to the passage we read and this figure of the other mother, you know, a mother of two with one more on the way. And, when she had seen her in the waiting room and like we said, the mother needed help and was like, “Please, can you hold this baby for a second?” Um, it's kind of a shit show. Rosamund's looking at it, like, “Oh my God, these kids are snot nosed. They've got filthy faces.”

KIM: The diaper's wet and it gets on her. 

AMY: Yeah. So it's all so gross and it looks so  grueling for the mom. And then, so she sees her again on the street and the line is “She sees her like a warning.” And so it's like, yeah, that's a beautiful moment, but you can also look at it the other way.  It's  ominous, like there's something ominous about it. And it also takes me back to the title of the novel, which is The Millstone. And when I hear the word millstone, I think of tying it around your neck and jumping into a river. Right? Like, so it seems really dark, but then there's also another way that you can look at that title. The title actually comes from a Bible verse: “If anyone causes one of these little ones, those who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

In that context, it's actually fiercely, “mama bear” protective. I love that the title works in both ways, because it's hard and also you're gonna fight like hell for this kid. 

CARRIE: Yeah, I mean, when Rosamund goes into that waiting room, she describes it as something like a sea of misery, you know? It's the worst thing that she's ever seen. So, Drabble doesn't shy away from those two aspects of motherhood, you know, like the beautiful but also the painful. 

KIM: Exactly. Exactly.

AMY: And that you're allowed to honestly be real about both, and you don't have to pretend that one side doesn't exist. Yeah. 

CARRIE: I think different books offer us different portrayals of motherhood and some of them are more one-sided and it's important to talk about what that one side is and how we should deal with it. But these books that manage to come at it from both angles and can feel in that way (despite being written now, you know 50 years ago) so fresh. I mean, I read The Millstone and it feels like this could be someone I know. It feels so contemporary in her thinking, which, you know, I don't know if that says that we just haven't made enough progress or if it's just a really, really well-written book. I think it's both. And I just think it's such a good book for people who maybe were like me and think “Oh, I'm not that interested in books about motherhood.” This is a book to start with because it's so funny and it moves along really fast and the writing is so strong that  you know, there's lots there that's also gonna then of course make you think about motherhood, too.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: Carrie, getting to read The Millstone while also reading your book, as I mentioned in the introduction,  I felt like you gave me the little CliffsNotes to have alongside. And it's one of the reasons that we really do want to recommend The Book of Mothers because I think it might change the way you think about maternal characters when you come across them in your future reading.

KIM: Yeah, for sure, I loved this book. So, Carrie, thank you so much for being with us today to lend your perspective. This has been the best conversation.

CARRIE: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.

AMY: So that's all for today. I'll be back next week with a bonus episode discussing Virginia Woolf's influence on this year's fall fashion. If you own argyle socks, you are off to a good start, I'll just say that. You can get that episode by subscribing where you listen or at our Patreon page. Patreon also now sells all of our bonus episodes individually, so if you can't commit to a monthly subscription, feel free to pick and choose among our bonus episodes, if that's your preference.

KIM: And in two weeks, we'll be back with another regular episode discussing a lesser known children's book by Christina Rossetti. You could potentially read it as a clapback of sorts to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

AMY: Ooh, that's gonna be good. I can't wait. 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.  

216. Elizabeth Garver Jordan — The Case of Lizzie Borden & Other Writings with Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan

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, and AMY, I can see by the look on your face that you are excited for this episode.

AMY HELMES: You’re right! I’m going to be geeking out a little more than usual in this episode, because today’s “lost lady” was involved in the murder trial of the century (the 19th century, that is). You know I like my true crime, Kim.

KIM: More than like, but yeah! And although the name Elizabeth Garver Jordan didn’t initially ring any bells for us, when our guests today explained that she famously reported on the trial of Lizzie Borden, we knew — beyond all reasonable doubt — that we needed to know more.

AMY: Jordan was a regular Lois Lane in petticoats while working for Joseph Pulitzer’s The New York World, but she also wrote popular fiction inspired by her job at the city desk, including stories that would set a precedent for the #MeToo movement that erupted a century later. 

KIM: Two of Jordan’s novels were adapted for film, and she later transitioned to a career in editing where she helping shape and steward the works of literary greats like Sinclair Lewis, my thesis buddy Henry James and several “lost ladies” we’ve discussed previously on this podcast: Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Zona Gale.

AMY: That’s cool and all, but I want to talk about Lizzie Borden.

KIM: Okay, it’s time to raid the “cold case” file and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our first guest today, Lori Harrison Kahan, joined us back in 2022, for our episode on Miriam Michelson. (That’s Episode #104 if you want to go back and have a listen). A professor at Boston College, Lori edited a book of Michelson’s work called The Superwoman and Other Writings. She’s also edited a 2020 edition of Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf (another “lost lady” we’ve covered on this show!)  Lori is also the author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black Jewish Imaginary. Lori, good to see you again!

LORI HARRISON KAHAN: It’s so great to be back!

AMY: Our second guest, Jane Greenway Carr, is a former senior opinion editor at CNN digital where she oversaw social and cultural commentary. An adjunct faculty member at Manhattanville University, her writing has also appeared in outlets including Slate, The Atlantic, and American Quarterly. She is also a former Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and lecturer at New York University and was the co-founding editor of The Brooklyn Quarterly. Jane, welcome to the show, we’re excited to have you!

JANE GREENWAY CARR: Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

AMY: Together, Jane and Lori edited a collection of Elizabeth Garver Jordan’s work called The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings. It was published by Penguin Classics earlier this year, and while the Lizzie Borden material in and of itself is incredible, this selection of her work shows the interconnectedness between Jordan’s life and writing, between her factual reporting and her fiction. 

KIM: That’s right. So, to kick things off, Elizabeth Garver Jordan was born in Milwaukee in 1865. As a young woman she actually had another vocation in mind before launching into journalism. Lori, can you tell us about that and maybe a little more about her early life?

LORI: Sure. So one thing that's important to know about Jordan is that she was raised Catholic, and she attended a convent school called St. Mary's High School in Milwaukee. And that experience was really influential on her entire career. You see it as a thread all the way through all of her writings. She was so influenced by her teachers who were nuns that she decided she, herself, wanted to become a nun. Her parents weren't so thrilled about that, and they ultimately struck a deal with her. She was very talented in so many areas: She was valedictorian of her class (so academically successful), she was a talented writer from a young age, and she was also a talented pianist. and her parents encouraged her to take some time to pursue her secular interests first. And after a year of doing that, if she decided she still wanted to become a nun, they were okay with it. But she ends up beginning to work in journalism after she graduates from high school and really gets the writing and reporting bug, um, and sticks with writing and editing throughout her career.

AMY: It’s like that Amish Ring-sprungah.. Ringsprung…what’s that word?

JANE: Rumspringa.

AMY: Rumspringa, thank you! Like, take a year, check out some other things before you fully commit to a life with God. Okay. So Jane, do we know anything about how she landed at The New York World? Because that's a pretty big deal.

JANE: Absolutely. So Jordan's entry into The New York World, interestingly, does come just a couple of years after Nellie Bly talked her way in and made the world take note. So while Jordan's approach was a little less stunt and spectacle based then Bly’s, you know, the higher-ups of The World were at least acquainted with what women could do in journalism and in the newsroom. So Jordan, as Lori indicated, had experience. She'd been working for papers in the Midwest. She had some clips from The Chicago Tribune. But, uh, she wants (and this gives me an opportunity to describe her memoir, which is not in our book, but is a great read.

It's called Three Rousing Cheers, and it was published in 1938. I highly recommend it.) So she describes both the foresight and the chutzpah that it took to really get in at The New York World. She takes the train to New York, and as her memoir describes it, she goes right to The World office. She asks for the editor, and the way she recalls it later is she says he was impressed by her combination of ambition and ignorance, but she does also say that she talked about the lessons that she learned coming up through her convent school and all of the various challenges, and negotiations that were involved in her education. And she said that looking back, she was probably amusing to him, but he did offer her a tryout. And she really made the most of it. That's something that's really a theme in her career is capitalizing on opportunities. Initially, she gets this tryout. She's kind of shunted off to the Brooklyn office of the paper. She doesn't really like it. She is kind of confined to writing style pieces and things about travel and resorts, but one of those resorts is a place in Cape May where the president's wife and child, who everyone is super curious about, happened to be vacationing. And she talks her way into the first interview where we see access both to the first lady, but also to “Baby McKee,” with whom everyone was obsessed at the time. And the result is a front-page feature that really gets her noticed. And shortly thereafter, she gets a lot of really interesting assignments that she really makes the most of.

AMY: So it’s like getting Meghan Markle or somebody to talk.

JANE: Pretty much, yeah.

AMY: Um, and also, I mean, The New York World, they were one of the few newspapers that really were like, “Hey, there's something to this female journalist. This is going to help us,” right?

JANE: It's gonna help them connect specifically with all of the women readers that they were really trying to get in their orbit.

LORI: And women's subjects, right? Because a man probably couldn't get access to the first lady on the beach in this way that Jordan did.

AMY: Okay, so I can't wait anymore. We have to jump into the Lizzie Borden trial now. It’s time… I’ve read a lot about this case over the years, and I’ve actually visited the Fall River, Mass. home where the crime took place in 1893. The trial was held almost a year later… so relatively early in Jordan’s time at the newspaper. Let me channel my best Keith Morrison voice from “Dateline” to set up the story, but I’m going to use the actual reporting from Elizabeth Garver Jordan’s reporting on the case:

Lizzie D. Borden is a young woman thirty-one years of age who has heretofore led a respected life, who has identified with numerous religious movements, who, according to the testimony of her friends, was kind of heart and thoughtful for the comfort and feelings of others. Did this young woman split open her aged father’s head with a hatchet as he lay sleeping on the sofa, and afterwards go back and batter his face and head with the same weapon that even the doctors who looked upon the hideous sight could hardly command their nerves? Did this same young woman, just before or just after this deed, strike down her stepmother and chop and hack her head and face until it was beaten almost out of human resemblance? Did she do at least one of these horrible deeds within twenty minutes’ time, and was she at the end of that interval able to appear before neighbors she summoned without a spot of blood on her clothing, without a sign of derangement or hasty adjustment of her dress, with the weapon concealed beyond discovery, and not even a scrap of direct evidence to connect her with the deed left undisposed of?

KIM: Good job, Amy. 

AMY: Not quite Keith Morrison, but … 

KIM: It was pretty good. I'm, yeah, I've got the chills.

AMY: I mean, the gore! I mean, that shocking to read!

KIM: It's not demure by any means. 

JANE: No, it is chock full of those details and we see that throughout her reportage on the subject.

KIM: Wow, that is incredible.

LORI: That use of questions is so interesting, too, right? She's formulating it as questions rather than reporting it as fact. And I think that's part of and the imagery there of how she's immersing her audience and getting them to be engaged in the story.

AMY: And I joked about Keith Morrison, but that question-asking is how they still do these kind of crime shows today, right?

LORI: Absolutely.

AMY: So, Jane, every reporter on staff must have been wanting to get to cover this trial. So why did they choose Jordan?

JANE: Well, it was definitely a deliberate choice. One of the things that really stood out to me after reading Cara Robertson's book on the Lizzie Borden trial is how initially it was really only Massachusetts papers who were even granted access to cover it. And The New York World and other New York outlets had to go to court to get special permission.

And so, not only did they assign this to her, but they had to jump through some fairly extensive hoops to get the opportunity. And so what Jordan really, I think, offers to them is a unique perspective as a woman on not only Borden herself, but some of the female witnesses and certainly some of the women who were so interested in seeing the proceedings firsthand that they queue up around the courthouse every day. She offers up her skill as a crafter of narrative. We hear it in all of that robust detail, and we see it in some of her other writings that are included in the collection. And also as a reporter who did already have experience covering high profile murder cases and telling stories in a unique way. The year before the Borden case, she covers the trial of medical student Carlisle Harris in New York, who was tried and convicted and later executed for the murder of his wife. So both her skill, but then also the reader interest of placing a woman in this kind of titillating true crime context… Those in charge of The World really understood and really thought that her insights as a true crime reporter with some experience would be incredibly valuable in this context. And you can really see it when you read some of her coverage.

KIM: So Amy set the stage a little by reading Jordan’s first dispatch from the trial. Can you guys tell us a little bit about her coverage that followed. What’s most remarkable about it in your opinion?

JANE: I think what's most remarkable about it is it's future fiction writer's eye for detail. She notes everything from the curl of the defendant's bangs, she talks about the audible gasp that goes through the courtroom at particularly traumatic moments, notably, when they see the jaw of Andrew Borden's skull, you know. You feel like you're in an episode of “Criminal Minds.” And so she's really only one of the few women assigned to that trial, but she really brings a literary mind to her understanding of the public's obsession. These are also the years where she starts to develop her own voice as a fiction writer, which she then goes on to use in any number of contexts later in her career. So this is kind of, you know, a crucible for a lot of what we see from her later. 

AMY: I know everybody's heard of the Lizzie Borden case, but it really was the OJ Simpson trial of the 19th century, right? Everyone in the country was following it. And her voice is like having a camera in that room, and a microphone, and you hear it all and you can see it, like you said, the curl of her bangs…

LORI: And it's important to keep in mind that this is before photography was included in the daily newspaper, right? So maybe there were some sketches. So she is literally doing the work of the camera and capturing those details. An aspect of the details that stands out to me is her attention to dress. I learned so much about late 19th century fashion from working on this book because I was researching for all the footnotes and there are constant references to calico and cambric, um, Bedford cord, different styles of dress, the cut of the skirt. And you could see (she goes on later to edit a woman's magazine, which involves a lot of fashion writing) and you could see that trajectory from covering the Lizzie Borden trial until that later moment in her career.

KIM: Fascinating. You wouldn't think necessarily that fashion would play a huge part in it. And then you're reading it and you're like, “Whoa.”

AMY: And I think it even plays a little bit in Jordan's opinion about Lizzie Borden's guilt or innocence, because there is a key witness, Miss Alice Russell, that takes the stand, and Jordan describes what she's wearing, and the quote is, “Over her blouse she wears a short jacket, which it would be an excellent idea for to discard. It adds to her height and thinness.” So, we'll talk about what Jordan thought of Lizzie's guilt or innocence in a little bit, but she's casting a little bit of shade on this extremely damning witness against Lizzie Borden. I thought that was fascinating.

LORI: Yes. And there's actually a moment where she's talking about Alice Russell. I'll just read this one sentence because she says as she, Russell, “took the witness stand today, it seemed as though one of the strange women characters with which Wilkie Collins delights and which flit like ominous specters through deep shadows through his mysteries, had walked out of the pages of one of the dead novelist's books and into real life and real participation in a tragedy more awful and more wrapped in obscurity than any he ever evolved.” So she's referencing Wilkie Collins — his most famous novel is The Woman in White. And here, she's kind of saying, like, “this Borden is even stranger and more sensational than that fiction.”

JANE: Yeah. And the drama that she projects there is so, at least to my reading, is so directly correlated to making women readers feel spoken to and seen in relation to the coverage of, you know, this case and particularly considering how gender was such a central factor to how other coverage of Lizzie Borden, you know, how it was constructed. And she speaks to this directly later when she says there are two Lizzie Bordens and one of them was created by the press and the other one is the one I'm looking at. 

KIM: Yeah, I can't even imagine how it must have compared to some of the other reportage because hers is so dramatic and engaging and just fascinating. In fact, I think we should read some more excerpts!

JANE: Okay. This actually is about the women who are watching the proceedings: 

Interest in the trial here in New Bedford has reached such a pitch that elaborate measures are necessary to keep it within bounds in the vicinity of the courtroom. Day by day, the crowds seeking admission have steadily grown until the deputies and policemen who line the stonewalk down from the courthouse through the courthouse yard to the sidewalk have had to be increased in numbers. But even this was found insufficient to restrain the mad fury of the rush for the door when it is announced that so many as can be accommodated will be omitted. There is no fence around the courthouse yard. It is divided from the sidewalk by a low stone wall, the top of which is on a level with the lawn of the yard. The gateway is a mere break in this wall. This is the only access to the front entrance of the building, for along the top of the wall a rope had been strung to keep people from trampling over the lawn.The pressure of the crowd around the gateway at critical hours is something fearful. The worst of it is the crowd is almost entirely composed of women and young girls. Rough handling or shoving or even harsh language is out of the question with such as these.

So here, you know, you really get that sense of who it is who's wanting to see Lizzie. And I just wanted to read just a bit of the introduction to the piece that I was alluding to before about how she says there are two Lizzie Bordens:

There are two Lizzie Bordens. One of them is the very real and very wretched woman who is now on trial for her life in the little courthouse at New Bedford, Mass. The other is a journalistic creation skillfully built up by correspondence and persistently dangled before the eyes of the American people until it has come to be regarded as a genuine personality. This last creature is a human sphinx, a thing without heart or soul. It is large and coarse and heavy. It committed a ghastly double murder in Fall River last August, and it is now stolidly awaiting the result of a trial for that crime. It deserves no sympathy, and receives none. This is the Lizzie Borden of the press. As the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has already spent two weeks in an earnest, but abortive, effort to convict the accused woman of this crime, and as at this time her acquittal seems to be a foregone conclusion, it may be interesting to take a look at the real Lizzie Borden. She will be shown here exactly as she appeared to this writer, who spent two days of the past week in a close study of her face, manner, and character, sitting within touch of her while her trial was going on.

AMY: Yeah, she really does humanize Lizzie a lot. 

KIM: Yeah, whether you think she is guilty or innocent, her descriptions of Lizzie at the trial do give you pause. She describes her face, her hair, her mouth, (even her feet!) — all in such eloquent detail. It’s riveting.

AMY: Yeah, I think that was one of my favorite passages actually from the trial, even though of course you're all into evidence and the witnesses and everything, but it was something as simple as her shoes that was captivating. I'm just going to read this little passage. Garver Jordan sets it up by describing how as soon as Lizzy takes her seat in the courtroom she hooks the heel of one foot over the other. Then she writes:

When the proceedings grow interesting, she changes the position of her feet for several others, each of which indicates exactly her mental attitude at the time it is made. When the prosecution is demonstrating with skulls and hatchets just how the murders were committed, the prisoner sits forward in her chair, and rests on the extreme tips of her toes. When Mr. Adams or ex-Gov. Robinson [those are her lawyers] ties a witness up into a hard knot, she crosses her feet in a comfortable position and rests. Later on she returns to the first position. All this friction is rather hard on the buttons of the boots, but it will be noticed that the button which hangs on its head in a dejected manner during the morning session is proudly and firmly in its place in the afternoon. These movements of Miss Borden’s eloquent feet have scraped almost all the paint from the rungs of the chair which she occupies.

I mean, the detail of that, the micro within the macro of this legal circus and juxtaposing something as banal as the button on her shoes with the gore and the shock value of the murders. It's brilliant to me. And I also can picture her hearing from her editor, like, “Write as much copy as you can,” so maybe that's a day when it's kind of boring and she's like, “What am I going to write?” And she's like, “Okay, let me do this description of her starting from her hair to her mouth to her dress all the way down to her shoes.”

LORI: That detail of the button… I mean, part of it is that she's using the button as kind of a symbol for Borden's psychological state, or what you would imagine her psychological state to be, and how it's shifting. But the other thing that's interesting about that is that because the button's falling off in the morning and sewn on in the afternoon, so she's kind of filling in what might be happening when Borden's not in the courtroom, right? She doesn't have access as a journalist to her outside the courtroom, but this is a way to kind of suggest what might be going on.

KIM: And that she takes care of her things, too. 

AMY: She’s an upper class, fastidious woman, know, how can you possibly believe that she's capable of committing these crimes?

JANE: And it almost gives her a layer of femininity that other representations of Borden were trying to strip away. You know, she's written about as being devoid of emotion or somehow strange or “other” or not even a real woman, and we see how that plays out in some of the interpretations of Borden as a character that transpire after this and well into the 20th century. But even just at the micro level of the way she treats her shoes, you get that sense of Borden's femininity in a very real, direct and detailed way.

AMY: One of the notes I put while reading all of this trial stuff was: I wish she was still around to cover trials today. I mean, I would love to read her coverage of the E. Jean Carroll case, or something like that. 

JANE: Yeah! 

KIM: Yeah. For sure.

KIM: So in this writing, Jordan seemed to come down on the side of Lizzie’s innocence, don’t you think?

JANE: I mean, she writes so assertively about her humanity, and she's most critical not of how she's framed in terms of being guilty or innocent but just, I think she has her harshest criticisms for how other coverage portrays Borden. And her main focus is in humanizing her rather than giving some kind of definitive statement on her innocence or guilt, but she does write in pretty open terms about the lack of evidence and some of the main problems in how the prosecution presents its case. 

LORI: She does, in her autobiography… I'm pretty sure that there, she maintains that she thought Borden was innocent.

JANE: Another reason to read Three Rousing Cheers. 

KIM: For sure. For sure.

AMY: Like I said at the beginning, I have done a lot of deep diving into this case, and I was not expecting to learn anything new. I really did! I got new stuff out of this that I had not heard of before even. And I'm sure you guys also kind of went down the internet rabbit hole a little bit. I read her whole interrogation interview. I sat down and read that whole thing because I was just like, “I need to know. I need to solve this crime!” So what are your guys thoughts? Should I go first on whether we think she really did it or not?

KIM: Do it, Amy.

JANE: Go for it.

AMY: I think the evidence is non-existent, right? There's nothing they can pin on her. I absolutely think she did it. I absolutely think she did it. And I think Bridget, the housemaid, cannot be believed. If you believe Bridget, then you have to believe the timeline of the murder. I didn't believe Bridget, therefore I didn't believe the timeline, therefore I think that she could have cleaned up everything and gotten away with it. And it's a crime of passion to stab somebody like that. I think there was some serious rage that came out. She burned that dress! Why'd you burn the dress two days later or whenever that was? Okay.

KIM: Yeah, those are some compelling reasons.

AMY: Anybody else can disagree with me…I'm curious to hear what you think. 

LORI: I agree with you. That's the experience I have from reading the details of the reporting, but also the kind of absence of there being any other possible suspect in the case. I think it's so interesting, right, that you read her reporting and you come away thinking she's probably guilty, and yet Jordan herself, who did the reporting, is saying she's innocent.

AMY: Yeah, that's interesting. That's a good point.

KIM: Yeah, but it feels like almost what you were saying earlier, Jane. It's maybe not so much guilt or innocence, but that she didn't think she should have been convicted of it. 

JANE: It's so impossible for me to separate what I think about the case from what I know and what I've studied about the various ways that she's been interpreted in every format, from experimental film and theater to there was a ballet adaptation that was performed in the mid-20th century by some very well known and dancers. And so that sense of obsession with “did she or didn't she,” coupled with the difficulty with the case and with, you know, how it was covered. I almost can't even get there to “did she or didn't she,” because it's just, you know, the view of her and what she means culturally is so fraught and so crowded with other concerns that my mind can’t get there.

KIM: Yeah. 

JANE: I mean, I absolutely recognize the logic… as it happens, my partner is a lawyer, so I recognize the logic and the legal reasoning behind, Amy and Lori, what you're saying. But for me, it's hard even to get there. I mean, not only did she not really, in some ways, have a fair trial in the court of public opinion, she hasn't had a fair trial in the court of public culture or discourse for, you know, the last century and more. So it's really hard for me to get there.

AMY: Whether you think she did it or not, There was no evidence to convict her on. I think the decision was the right one, based on what was available. So Elizabeth Garver Jordan's published fiction later led readers to wonder if this reporter had more scoop than she was actually telling at times with regard to the Lizzie Borden case. So let's talk about her story, “Ruth Herrick's Assignment.” It's fascinating.

JANE: So this is a story that she publishes in Cosmopolitan, and she says later that it's a story she began before her coverage of the Lizzie Borden trial. But essentially the story, and it's a wonderful read (it's quite short) essentially is about a reporter who has a conversation with a woman accused of murder. She's a sympathetic figure to the reporter. She confesses her guilt, and the reporter keeps her secret. And so this comes out both in a moment after the Lizzie Borden trial with which Jordan's name was associated and it also comes out at a moment when Jordan’s star is really on the rise as a fiction writer. So the double contributions of those things really kind of set a fire underneath this story, and the reader interest, of course, was immense. 

LORI: It's a work of fiction, right? And people were reading this and saying, “Borden confessed to Elizabeth Jordan and Jordan suppressed it?” The other, I think, important piece of this is that the reason the reporter in the story doesn't print the confession is because she finds out that the woman killed her husband, after years of abuse, of abusing her and her mother. It's also a story about female solidarity, which is a thread through much of. Jordan's work.

JANE: And also the knowledge that other women know that women who tell stories of that nature often aren't believed, particularly by institutions of power, be they the criminal justice system or, you know, other institutions of power in society.

 KIM: So let's talk about the story “The Cry of the Pack.” It was written in 1914, preceding, obviously, the #MeToo movement by almost a century, but it's pretty incredible that she was writing in this way about sexual predation. So do you want to talk a little bit about that? 

LORI: This was actually the story that made me want to work on this collection. I was teaching a course on American women writers in 2017 Right as the #MeToo movement was beginning, and I was teaching actually another work by Jordan. It's called The Sturdy Oak, which is a composite novel that she created and edited. So each chapter is written by a different person. But Jordan writes the preface to that book. And in that book, there's kind of #MeToo throughline where a character is being sexually harassed throughout the narrative. And my students and I were just fascinated by this book published in 1917. And then I started to investigate more of Jordan's writings and discovered that she has these, what we would call now #MeToo moments throughout all her writings, including “The Cry of the Pack.” I know you had pulled a passage. Does someone want to read from it?

AMY: Yeah, I think we have to read a little bit from this, and I think our listeners are going to realize that this does not seem like an early 20th century piece of writing at all. This is Mae Iverson talking about the type of men that she encounters at work, and she admits to the reader: 

I was becoming afraid — not of work, but of men…The worst of my fear now was that I didn’t know exactly why I felt it, and there was no one I could go and ask about it. All the men I met seemed to be divided into two classes. In the first class were those who were not kind at all — men like Mr. Hurd, who treated me as if I were a machine, and ignored me altogether or looked over my head or past the side of my face when they spoke to me. They seemed rude at first, and I did not like them; but I liked them better and better as time went on. In the second class were the men who were too kind — who sprawled over my desk and wasted my time and grinned at me and said things I didn’t understand and wanted to take me to Coney Island. Most of them were merely silly, but two or three of them were horrible. When they came near me they made me feel queer and sick. After they had left I wanted to throw open all the doors and windows and air the room.

KIM: She gets the “ick factor” just right in this! So as this story proceeds Miss Iverson gets put on an assignment that will test her ability to deal with a man like this second type she described. It’s pretty gross and chilling… and unexpected.

JANE: It does not sound like 1914. I think for anyone who has read these stories, lived these stories, known people who have lived these stories, it feels incredibly immediate. 

LORI: This is really how Jane and I connected on this collection. So when the Miriam Michaelson book came out, Miriam Michaelson's work… (I think I spoke about it with you guys on the episode)... also has these #MeToo moments in it. And she also was a journalist who used fiction as a means of exploring what happened to women in the newsroom, something she couldn't address in her journalism. And I pitched to Jane — we knew each other a little bit before —I pitched her at CNN, an op-ed piece about Michelson, Jordan and some other writers who I was reading as the precedents or the seeds of #MeToo. Jane ended up editing my piece, and we discovered through that that Jane had written a dissertation chapter on Jordan. And so we really connected over our love of Jordan, and that became the seeds of this project. 

AMY: I love that. 

KIM: Let’s touch on the next phase of her career, because she transitioned from writing into editing, both magazine and literary publishing. What should we know?

JANE Well, two things that I think are really important. These are the parts of her career where we see her most visibly engaged in activism, particularly suffrage activism, and we also see her most involved in some brightest and boldest literary names of the time. So she goes from working at The World to editing Harper's Bazaar for the first decade of the 20th century at just such a key moment when expectations around gender are changing the New Woman. And as Lori had alluded in some of her Borden coverage, an opportunity to really think in different ways about the form and function of fashion for sure. But we also see her involved in a kind of literary innovation. She's involved with William Dean Howells in creating another composite novel that precedes The Sturdy Oak called The Whole Family, and we see Elizabeth Stewart Phelps, we see Mary Wilkins Freeman, we see Henry James, and we also see in her correspondence from the time, a real understanding of what it meant to develop relationships with those writers as a collaborator, but also as an editor. It's not always fun. There's a lot of cat-herding that goes into it, but we also see her awareness of editorial work as something with a great deal of power, but also a great deal less visibility than what she was accustomed to as a fiction writer and a journalist. And that's something that Lori and I also confronted in our own scholarly understanding of what it is to make editorial labor visible. The critic Sarah Blackwood has a fantastic essay, which I highly recommend from, I believe, Avidly, on editing as “care work.” And that can mean behind the scenes unacknowledged labor, but also the curating labor of really investing both a nurturing sense in, you know, more of a traditionally gendered way, but also, you know, there's a real power in determining how something is presented and the conversation that it intervenes in. And so we see that happening in a literary way, with The Whole Family in 1908, but we certainly see it happening in a political sense, with The Sturdy Oak, during the late suffrage movement a decade later. She also is very involved, when Harper's Bazaar sold to Hearst in 1913. She stays on with Harper and Brothers as a literary editor.

She helps launch the careers of writers, including Sinclair Lewis. She signs his first novel in the 19-teens, which is pretty amazing. And she's also involved as both an editor and ghostwriter for suffrage legend, the Reverend. Anna Howard Shaw's book about her life, The Story of a Pioneer. And that of course is happening at a moment in 1915 when there are a lot of conversations going on about how the suffrage movement understands itself and how it helped shape women's political identities in the 19-teens. And Jordan really has kind of a front-row seat to that. You can see her really negotiating both the politics of women's lives and how that relates to her, but you can also really see her negotiating the politics of visibility, both as an editor and as an activist.

LORI: And this was one of the challenges for us as editors of this volume — to make editorial work visible, right? Because it is invisible labor, right? The name of the author goes on, but not the name of the editor necessarily. And so the final section of the book contains excerpts from Anna Howard Shaw's autobiography. It's called The Story of a Pioneer. It may seem like an odd move, right? Because it's written by Shaw. But even the title page says this is written in collaboration with Elizabeth Garver Jordan, because Jordan was the one who went to her and commissioned it and said, you need to write this and ended up basically, kind of ghost writing it in many ways, right? She had Shaw dictate it to her. But you see Jordan's fingerprints all over it, and so that was why we've included it. And also because we think it's one way that in a volume like this, you can make editorial labor visible.

JANE: Absolutely, and I'll just add to that as a fun tidbit. If you look on the cover of our book, there is little “OK EJ” in blue, and that is taken from one of the final pass pages of the title page of The Sturdy Oak. Jordan has initialed it as, you know, “I've looked this over and this is okay.” So for us, it was just a very small way to celebrate that element of her career. Leaving it to invisibility is not, you know, something that we're comfortable with.

AMY: Yeah, and actually, this part of your book made me think about another “lost lady” of lit that we'll be featuring on the show in early 2025. Katharine White who was one of the…

JANE: Yes!

AMY: … first editors at The New Yorker and that whole idea … she was married to E. B. White, but of course nobody knows her name even though she was a huge deal and she was the steward of all these amazing writers like Dorothy Parker, um, she helped usher them through The New Yorker and into being amazing artists in their own right. But that idea of being a caretaker really resonated with the biography by Amy Reading that I'm reading about her because she's very much like a mother figure in a lot of ways in helping to guide authors. That was part of the skill that made her so good, you know?

JANE: Yeah. We've been in conversation with Amy and are doing an event with her at the Grolier Club.

AMY: Oh, perfect, because yes, there is such a good nexus there. I instantly thought of Katharine when I was reading your book, so that's perfect.

JANE: And I'm reading Amy's book right now, too. We can compare notes.

AMY: Yeah. It’s good! 

 KIM: So with Garver Jordan's novels, do you have recommendations for other ones? Have you read all of them? Or some of them?

LORI: So I will just say The Sturdy Oak, I really think it's a must read, in addition to our volumes. The Sturdy Oak is in print. It's pretty easy to get. Technically, she edited it, but she only really wrote one page, which is the preface. But in that one page, her voice and her humor and her passion for suffrage just all comes across. It makes all my students who read it want to go on and read more Jordan. so I recommend that. And then she became a golden age mystery novelist, so drawing on her background in true crime. And she's incredibly prolific. So there are a lot of novels. There's a scholar right now working on her biography named Sharon Harris. Sharon has read all these mystery novels, and she recommended one to me, which is called The Lady of Pentlands. So that's the one that I've read. It's not easy to get a hold of. It took, like, multiple months of inter-library loan back and forth, but what's fascinating about it is that the heroine is a single woman. That's something that we haven't emphasized about Jordan's own biography; that she was single throughout her life. She didn't have children. She made a family with other working women, and I think that's a really important part, not just of her career, but also of her fiction. That we get all these possibilities for women of how they can lead their lives outside of traditional heterosexuality and domesticity.

KIM: That’s a great point in her story. I'm glad you brought that up.

JANE: Definitely. So am I. And I just have to quickly add in that Sharon Harris co edited with Ellen Gruber Garvey, a book called Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands about the invisible work of women editors, which was one of the inspiring texts that made me want to write my entire dissertation about women editors. So I just want to give a shout out both to Sharon for her work on Jordan, but also that book given, um, given why we’re all here. 

KIM: Oh, great. We'll link to that in our show notes. 

AMY: That’s a perfect segue to us giving you two some accolades for this book. And listeners, just to remind you, the book is called The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings. I came to your book for the Lizzie Borden content, and I thought to myself, “Let me just be polite and read the other works.” No, it is all really good! I enjoyed all of Elizabeth Garver Jordan's stories, and I didn't expect to. I thought I would just enjoy the Lizzie Borden dirt but not have as much interest in the other stuff, but I'm just as interested in all of the other things she wrote. It really does not disappoint. So thank you for coming today and helping to put it all into context. 

JANE: Thank you for having us. This was a blast.

LORI: It was so great to be back with you.

AMY: If you are a paid subscriber to this podcast, which you can do through Apple Podcasts or Patreon to receive two extra episodes a month, then join me back next week for our bonus episode. I've got a fun little movie recommendation and review for you all, and I'm going to also talk about the true story that inspired it. 

KIM: And Amy and I will both be back in two weeks to discuss Margaret Drabble's The Millstone with guest Carrie Mullins. Goodbye for now and keep those five-star reviews coming our way. We love to see them.

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.

214. Sanora Babb — Whose Names Are Unknown with Iris Jamahl Dunkle

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

AMY HELMES: The word "wrath" may pop up at times throughout this episode. We'll be talking a little bit about John Steinbeck's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, but we'll also be talking about the wrath we felt upon learning how Steinbeck's novel edged out today's “lost lady,” Sanora Babb.

KIM: No American writer was more uniquely qualified than Babb to tell the story of the Dust Bowl and the plight of the migrant farmers who journeyed to California. Whose Names Are Unknown, the novel on this subject she spent years working on, was slated for publication in 1939. But Steinbeck's novel, written hastily in less than six months, beat hers to publication and became an instant bestseller.

AMY: Did we mention he used Babb's notes and research to write The Grapes of Wrath? In a devastating about-face, Babb's publisher shelved her manuscript. "Rotten luck," he told her, acknowledging that Steinbeck had already written the definitive “Dust Bowl” novel, so hers wasn't needed.

KIM: But did Steinbeck really get the story right? Our guest today, the author of a brand new biography on Sanora Babb, wants to set the record straight and introduce you to Babb’s masterpiece, which was finally and rightfully published in 2004 (that's 70 years after she started writing it) mere months before her death at age 98.

AMY: Better late than never, I'll say, because this book packs quite an emotional punch. I feel like I already knew all of the Dust Bowl history, especially having read The Grapes of Wrath, but no. You don't really know everything until you've read this book.

KIM: Exactly, and I can't wait to talk about it all, so let's rate the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Today's guest, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, is a three-time returning guest to this program, having first joined us to discuss the subject of her fantastic 2020 biography, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer.

AMY: Iris joined us again last year to discuss “lost lady” Janet Lewis's novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre. We had a fun time pretending we were in an episode of “Law & Order” in that one, which is episode No. 152, if you want to go back and have a listen. A former poet laureate of Sonoma County, Iris also published a 2021 poetry collection called West: Fire: Archive, and we're delighted to be helping her celebrate the release of her latest biography out today from University of California Press. It's called Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb.

KIM: And listeners, we actually have an in-person event scheduled for tonight, October 15th. Amy and I will be joining Iris at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena at 7 p. m. for a conversation on Sanora Babb and her connection to Los Angeles. So if you live in the area, come hang out with the three of us and pick up a signed copy of Iris's book. We would absolutely love to meet some listeners out there. So don't be shy, swing by. And Iris, congratulations on the book. We're so happy it's finally here. Yay!

IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE: Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be back with you guys!

AMY: Okay, so the facts that we just spelled out in our introduction are enough to make me want to close my eyes and count to 10 to just calm myself. I don't want to paint John Steinbeck as a villain in this episode; he's not. And I loved The Grapes of Wrath when I originally read it. I think his intentions in writing that novel were really noble. But, the fact remains, the world knows The Grapes of Wrath, and almost no one knows Sanora Babb's Whose Names Are Unknown. So Iris, tell us, when did you first learn that there was an alternative story out there?

IRIS: Well, I first learned about, Sanora Babb's book through Ken Burns's documentary, The Dust Bowl. So he does a really good job of incorporating the story of Sanora Babb and her version of the Dust Bowl in that documentary. But I also read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, and my family came over from the Dust Bowl. My grandmother came from Oklahoma. And I was really excited when I read it, and I ran home to call my grandmother and tell her and I was like, "Grandma, they wrote a book about us.!" And she was like, "That is not what it was like. Don't ever talk to me about Steinbeck again." And I couldn't understand why she was so mad. It had a lot to do with the way that Steinbeck had depicted the people of the Dust Bowl, you know, as victims. And she didn't like someone else telling her story, especially in that way, which gave her no agency.

KIM: Listeners, we're going to give you a fuller picture of how Babb's novel was almost resigned to oblivion as a result of Steinbeck's success. And we're going to talk about some similarities and differences between the two novels. But first, Iris, why don't you go ahead and describe Babb's book and the significance of the title, Whose Names Are Unknown.

IRIS: So the name, Whose Names Are Unknown, was based on an eviction notice that Babb saw on a decrepit workers' shack when she was working with the migrant workers. And it was on a corporate farm, she noticed that it said: "To John Doe and Mary Doe, whose true names are unknown." And she thought that really kind of embodied the way that the Okies were thought about during this time period, you know. All the corporate farmers, all of the political leaders, no one saw these people as human beings. And it was really important to her and her work to show not only who these people were during their time of tragedy, right after the Dust Bowl has happened and they've had to escape to California, but she also wanted to show them before. Before the disaster happened. I mean, if any of you have known someone that something terrible has happened to (you know, I come from Sonoma County, so we've had some horrible wildfires) and if you met someone the day that they lost everything, they would be a different person than if you knew them six months before. And so the brilliance of Babb's novel is it's in two parts. The first part is set in the Oklahoma panhandle, and we get to know Milt and his family. And we see them living with Konkie, Milt's father, in a dugout. And they're struggling, but they love the land. They're putting in new crops. And then you see slowly, as the weather starts to change, as the Dust Bowl starts to come, and everyone around them starts to suffer, and you see how it's affecting the entire community, so that when they actually have to leave for California, you know they have no other choice. And so your compassion is with them every step of the way.

AMY: Absolutely. The emotional investment. When I started reading this novel, I think I messaged you right away, and I was like, I'm like, "I'm gonna need a moment to recover." It is so intense. It's so staggeringly good. But it's really big emotion, right?

IRIS: Yeah, definitely. And you can really feel how connected Babb is to the characters. Like, she not only knew the people living in the camps, but she knew the people that they were before. Her mother was living in Garden City at the time that some of the biggest Dust Bowl weather events came through. And she kept a diary, and so Chapter 17 is actually these diary entries edited. And we see the Dust Bowl as it's slowly progressing in a single month, like how it's affecting Milt and Julia and their family.

AMY: Can we read some of that, maybe?

IRIS: I would love to. So this is from the point of view of Julia and this is about halfway through the first half of the book. Previous to this chapter, Julia said, "We're never leaving. We're never going to leave."

And then this is when it starts to change:

April 4. A fierce, dirty day. Just able to get here and there for things we have to do. It is awful to live in a dark house with the windows boarded up and no air coming in everywhere. Everything is covered and filled with dust. April 5th, today is a terror. 

April 6th, let up a little.

We can see the fence but can't see any of the neighbors' houses yet. No trip to town today. Funny how we learn to get along even in this dust. 

April 7, a beautiful morning. Everyone's spoiling the happiness of a clear day by digging dust. Sunday afternoon, we walk for miles to see other places. It was a sight.

It looks like the desert you read about in books. Desolation itself. The day began and ended as a real sunshiny western day. 

April 8th morning, bright and skies clear. 10 o'clock dirt began to show up around the edges by noon, the sky and air full. We try to do our work as usual, thinking rain may fall and end our troubles for a while.

We don't speak much of the wheat anymore. Going to bed. Dirt still blowing.

AMY: Okay, this whole section with the diary... we never learned this! I knew the Dust Bowl, the dust came… I just thought it was storms. I had no idea. I didn't understand the ramifications and how literally, they're drowning! It's getting in their lungs. It's seeping through every crack in the house. It's getting in their food. It's killing their animals. It's like a horror movie!

KIM: I know. Amy, I had no idea either! I lived in Texas for eight years when I was a kid and there were some dust storms. Nothing like this. Like, until I read this, I had no idea either. And with the diary format too, it takes you right into it. You can actually feel what that must have been like. And it is horrifying. 

IRIS: Yeah. It is. It's, you know, it was really visceral. When I was at the Harry Ransom Center researching this book, they have a lot of her physical belongings, including one of the dust masks that people wore during that time period. And this is like during COVID, so I'm wearing a mask, looking at her mask and it's just, it felt so visceral because we had already been through so many disasters as a society. Like, I think that's why this really speaks to people right now is because it's what's called “disaster lit,” right?  It's about how human beings survive something like this. 

AMY: And yeah, brief momentary pauses of sunshine when the storm has settled and you're like, "Okay, maybe it's done," and you get a little excited and a little happy, and then it's like, "Nope." Four hours later, it's back again. Terror is the only word I can think of to describe what they were going through.

KIM: So my grandparents, both of them, were impacted by the Dust Bowl and I didn't even know. And I loved my grandparents, I just didn't really connect it and they didn't talk about it. 

IRIS: I mean, they were traumatized. 

KIM: Exactly. Like, to be able to say, "Oh, wow, you went through this," and be able to, you know, talk about with them and hear their experiences. I just wish so badly that I could have. And I feel proud, actually, that I came from that. It's like, oh, some of the strong things I've been able to do in life, I look at, well, I came from very strong stock. And reading this book has made me just have a different feeling about my ancestors.

IRIS: I love that. That really makes me happy. I mean, that's part of the reason why it's so important to have a book like this as part of the educational system. So growing up when I read in high school, The Grapes of Wrath, that's how I was to think of my ancestors,

KIM: I didn't wanna be Okie! Yeah. I didn't wanna be called an Okie. I wanted to be associated with something completely different, and I think that's why I probably didn't ask them to, you know, it was a negative and you didn't want to be called that or thought of that.

IRIS: Oh yeah. We couldn't say that word in our house. 

KIM: Totally. Totally. Yeah.

AMY: When you said your grandmother, she didn't want to be seen as a victim... you see that in this novel really clearly, that these people don't want to ask for help. They're not looking for a handout. They're not looking for anything extra. They're just trying to survive. 

KIM: Yeah. Hard working people, so to take a handout for them is completely antithetical to what they would want.

AMY: And speaking of grandparents, I love the character of the grandfather in this book. His nickname is Konkie, and he's actually based on Babb's own grandfather. She draws from a lot of her own family life in this novel, right?

IRIS: Yes. so Babb was born in Kansas because her grandmother didn't want her to be born in Oklahoma, which was still not a state in 1907. But soon thereafter, they moved to Eastern Colorado because Konkie, her grandpa, had gotten a land grant and built a dugout. And they all lived in this little dugout, farming broom corn. And so she lived in a very small space with lots of people, living from crop to crop. Uh, they were very poor. And, Konkie was just this character that really helped Sanora Babb become who she was in her life. Like he was somebody that didn't really follow the rules. He had been a drinker when he was younger. He had lost his wife when she died in childbirth, and he turned to drinking. And then when he moved to Eastern Colorado, he gave up drinking and would just go on these long walkabouts eating hardtack. And she would go with him. And he was really close to the land, and even though he couldn't really leave his surroundings very much, he taught her how to leave. And that was really the gift that he gave her. 

KIM: My grandfather is Konkie, or rather, was Konkie. Like, he was the sweetest guy, but also didn't talk much. I remember I used to pretend to be asleep so he would carry me to bed. I loved him so much. And reading Konkie, I actually felt a connection to my grandfather again. I loved that character. 

AMY: He was really sweet in the book. 

IRIS: I love that.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: So at a very young age, Babb starts writing. Working for her little local newspapers and kind of interning there, learning the ropes, learning how to write from mentors. She's writing poetry also, and she's submitting it out to literary magazines, things like that. And she starts gaining national attention, actually, and winds up earning the nickname “The Poet of the Prairies.” Iris, you're a poet yourself. Do you see that poetic influence in this work?

IRIS: Oh, definitely. I mean, she was able to use the idea of the lyric sense as a way to describe things like hunger. So in the second part of the book, when Milt's family finally gets into one of the government camps and is, um, you know, slowly getting help — it takes a little while for the help to kick in, you know. — they're starving in their tents. And so she writes this passage in the second half of the book where Milt is, wandering around. He's just witnessed this horrible birth. Um, a woman goes into labor in a tent on a dirt floor, and so he's just wandering around after this and she writes this passage about what he felt like. 

Suddenly he heard the small picks and tings of an orchestra tuning up, then a burst of gay music. Unbelieving, he looked towards the tent the sound came from and through the wide flaps pinned back, he saw a boy about 11 standing by a huge bass fiddle, seeming to pound the strings with a small right hand, bringing forth grave and wonderful notes.

Below him on the bed sat another boy, about nine, strumming a mandolin. A young girl with her back to the door was playing a violin. Deep in the dusk of the tent, a man played a banjo. Over and through it all, the heavy somber strings throbbed like a great heart. They finished the piece and played another, and toward the last they sang, faint, childish voices, blending in delicate harmony.

They played on, not resting, and Milt watched the small boy's pliant hand rising and falling on the responsive strings. He felt the dizziness again, swinging across his eyes and through his ears in time with the music. He walked across the square, hearing the flag on the tall pole flapping in the wind. He thought of the woman lying on the ground with her tense face, looking up at him through the dimness.

He thought of Lonnie, sleeping all day to forget her hunger. He thought of Julia and Mrs. Starwood forgetting theirs. He thought of the carrots tomorrow, the weeds in the carrots. He thought of Friday and surplus commodities. His mind was clear and light like air. Music wafted through it like a feather. He felt very tall.

His broken shoes whispered in the soft dirt far below. Lonnie sleeping Friday. Weeds. Carrots. Three feet wide. A woman screaming. Quarter of a mile tomorrow. Surplus commodities. Walking. Music. Water. Running. Forgetting. Forty cents a day. Sleeping, forgetting, forty cents, floating like air, clear water running, sparkling through the brain, surplus brain, commodities, sleeping, a feather of music tickling.

This is my tent, sitting down like a cloud, floating, music, faces, fluffy sound in my ears, flying away.

KIM: Absolutely stunning,

AMY: His thoughts are swirling. The responsibility is all on him, and it's all encircling him like what the hell is my life right now? 

IRIS: Yes.

KIM: And can I just say something, like, you talked about it being “disaster lit?” And it's relevant, not just in the fact that we have gone through a pandemic, but to me thinking about immigration and camps globally, and what it's like for people to live in that kind of experience. There are people who are living like that right now, and we can impact their lives by some of the choices we make. That was right there with me while I was reading that, especially that second half of the book about California. 

IRIS: I think that's because it's so humanized. There's so much written about people who are going through the worst parts of their lives which makes them look like victims, and you don't feel compassion in the same way for someone when you don't know their backstory.

KIM: Exactly. Exactly. 

AMY: The music, the kids playing the instruments, it's like they're still trying to find ways to make life normal. They're still trying to find community in this harrowing, awful setup that they're in. 

KIM: Yeah. It makes Milt feel human again, almost.

IRIS: Yeah. And that's based on an actual band that was at one of the camps she was working at. There's photographs of it in the Harry Ransom Center. 

KIM: Okay. 

AMY: That's another thing I wanted to point out too. I'm reluctant when we do books like this that we're recommending that we're like, "It's this awful time, and so many hideous, heinous things happen to them, and you're going to be crying." And then it's like, well, I don't know that I really want to read that book that I just described. But it's a hopeful story for humanity, I think, by the end of the book.

KIM: That's exactly right, Amy. I'm glad you said that. As they're dealing with all these things, there's still joy in there and hope.

AMY: But yeah, there is a lot of heartache too, and so many indelible moments that are just kind of seared on your brain after reading it. So without giving away any major spoilers, let's talk about a few of the things that kind of spring to mind for us. The one thing that I always think back on in this book is the little detail of the pepper tea or the pepper soup. These little girls are starving, and the mom, Julia, has nothing to offer them, but she's like, "Okay, I'm going to boil some water, and I'm going to put pepper (I don't know if it's black pepper, or pepper plant, or what it is) I'm going to try to flavor this water, and we're going to call it soup, or tea, or whatever." It just shows you the extent of their starvation.

IRIS: It's actually red pepper. So if you've ever done a fast, people have you drink like water with red pepper and I don't know what else is in it. Cause I don't, fast, but..

AMY: So cayenne pepper, basically.

IRIS: Yeah. Cayenne pepper. Yeah. Yeah. So it kind of makes your body feel like it's doing something, but it's not. That's based on Babb's own experience. They went over a week without food one time, and her mom was so desperate to keep them alive, she kept feeding them pepper tea. And so she was writing from experience on that.

KIM: That's incredible. Wow.

AMY: What about you, Kim? What moments from the book?

KIM: There's so many. Um, I think, the way Julia works so hard to clean the house in between the dust storms, and the layers of dust that she's dealing with, but that she doesn't give up. Uh, I think that really stayed with me. 

AMY: The futility of it…

KIM: The futility, but it's like, she just won't give up. With that and the pepper tea, I think they're similar in that she's trying to keep that feeling of a home and care in the only way she can. There's so little that they're able to do for their children, you know, they can't go to school. They send them home from school because of the storms. They don't have enough food, but she's trying to clean the house and feed them in the only way she can. And to me that is just so emotional.

IRIS: Yeah. I think that's part of what Babb gets right so well in this book is she brings in the point of view of women and children. You know, for me, one of the moments that really sticks with me is when the kids are talking about what it feels like to be called an “Okie,” when they're living in California and they're just sitting there kind of talking about it, And then there's a chapter later, the kids are looking at a bug and the point of view has changed and they have power over the bug and, it's just really an interesting way for us to experience the helplessness that the children are feeling, in inner imagery. Again, it's our poetic devices that are just thrilling in this book.

AMY: Yeah. I'm also thinking of the meeting that the men hold when they're trying to figure out what are we gonna do, and she funnels so many different national issues into this conversation that help explain where things went wrong for them and how they were failed. I thought it was brilliantly done because they're kind of arguing, in the midst of trying to come up with a solution for what they're going to do for their families, but it made me realize, okay, it's not just Nature that has turned on these poor farmers, right? It's all these institutions that have betrayed them too, and that's what that conversation reveals. So, you know, the big banks, the farming conglomerates, the government, I think Babb even has critiques of organized religion throughout this book. Um, there was one line that really struck me like a sarcastic line. I don't know if one of the characters says it or Babb just writes it, but it's "the meek shall inherit the dearth." She's really weighing in on a lot of the root causes for the problem.

KIM: Yeah. The scene where the woman goes to the bank, and the face-off with the bank manager. It was an incredible scene. You're just cheering for the woman trying to stand up for herself with nothing, coming in there and standing up to the banks. And it circles back to your point about realizing all the other people that were involved in the problem that happened there, you know. It wasn't just Nature. It was what was going on that caused Nature to react like that. I mean, climate change, but also the way, um, institutions serve or don't serve solutions for this.

IRIS: Totally. And going back to that chapter with all the farmers meeting, they're at a funeral, right? And it feels like a Greek Chorus almost, because it's kind of like filtering through all of the information. She is kind of setting up what's going to happen later in the text. I really love how she has that element. Actually, when Ralph Ellison read this book (he was a reader for her) he loved that aspect of it. And he loved the way that she included this idea of childbirth and stillbirth and all of these like metaphoric things that were happening to them. 

KIM: Yes. 

IRIS: The craft in that.

KIM: Yeah. Women have such a huge role to play in this novel. And there are, like you said, the scenes of childbirth. Milk plays a huge symbolic role. And you could draw similarities between that and the ending of The Grapes of Wrath. But it also made me think of our discussion last fall on Meridel Le Seuer's The Girl.

AMY: Yeah, milk factors into that novel as well. Babb and Le Seuer knew each other, right? 

IRIS: Oh, yeah. Meridel Le Seuer really loved how Babb always gave women agency, no matter what situation they were in. And she famously told her "You should write shamelessly about women." Like you should always write about women. She's like, "Oh, and by the way, you should read Margery Latimer," who you guys have done an episode on!

KIM: Yeah. Totally, yep!

AMY: It's all coming together. That's great. 

KIM: And that actually takes me back to the conversation about the bank, because she doesn't have a man go into the bank and deal with the bank manager. She has a woman go in, and it makes the scene even stronger. 

IRIS: Totally.

KIM: So, Babb could deeply relate to people living in the migrant camps because she was actually there among them. Can you talk a little bit, Iris, about her involvement in these migrant camps?

IRIS: Sure. So she had just returned, uh, she went on a trip through Russia, being led by Intourist,, who were like giving her a propaganda view, right? Like, "Stalin's great!" She couldn't see what was actually going on. 

AMY: Disneyland Stalin. Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah.

IRIS: “Look at our beautiful model farms!” Right? And everybody's starving in the background. But it gave her the idea that maybe there would be a possible way to save American farmers. And so when she came back, she was really adamant about finishing this novel she'd started, which is about the plight of what was happening in the Dust Bowl. She would visit her mother. She'd go to these towns that she grew up in, and just see them devastated. And she just couldn't believe that there was no solution out there. So she reached out to Tom Collins, who was the one who established all of the migrant camps up and down California, and offered to work for him, and started writing articles about all of the migrants living in the camps, but also going around trying to encourage them. So during her time there, she worked with 472 families. And as Tom Collins added it up, that was, 2,175 men, women, and children that she met with to try to, you know, help them. So she really knew the people that she was working with. She spent her days helping the refugees do, you know, the menial tasks that they needed to do in the camps. Like she helped them figure out how to get clean water, how to get government help, but she also helped organize them into, you know, writing a newsletter, or self governing, and helped them feel their sense of worth again. And so they really connected with her, and any photograph you see of her in the camps, they're all circled around her and she's like one of them. And so it's in that environment that she wrote this book. She would go into her tent late at night and type pages. And you can feel that essence in it, that sense of community that she feels. 

AMY: And that she's listened to all their stories, and she's kind of collating them into this book. And this is kind of where John Steinbeck enters the picture, so let's get into that now. How did he get involved in sort of borrowing her research?

IRIS: So Steinbeck was friends with Tom Collins, and he had visited the camp several times before. Every time he visited, none of the migrants would know that he was John Steinbeck. He went under a false name, which is really interesting. But it was during one of his visits in May, 1938, when he was struggling to write this Dust Bowl novel, like he had already written two versions of The Grapes of Wrath and thrown them out. And he was just about to begin the final version that would become The Grapes of Wrath, and it was a sunny day, and he and Tom Collins and Babb went to a cafe. You know, they had conversations about what was going on and then she handed him her field notes, which, you know, she didn't think anything of. And those really inspired him. When you look at both of their books, you can see where those field notes inspired what he wrote. And she didn't realize when she handed those notes that it would make it so that her own novel would not get published. Um, even though it was at the time it was under contract with Random House.

KIM: In the film, if there were a film about this, this is a big moment. You just see her handing over those notes, it's like, "Aaaaaghhh!"

IRIS: Yeah, I mean, in, in her own words, she said (this is like a later reflection) she said, "Tom Collins had asked me to keep detailed notes of our work every day of the people, things they said, did, suffered, worked. I thought it was our work, for him, but it was for Steinbeck. And Tom asked me to give him my notes. I did. Naive me.”

KIM: Et tu, Brute, oh my god, whoa.

IRIS: I know. 

KIM: So, let's talk a little bit about what Steinbeck got wrong, corresponding with what Babb got right.

IRIS: So, I mean, what Steinbeck got wrong is the fact that he did not approach these people as people. He had met some of these people, he made composite characters, but The Grapes of Wrath is really more of an epic story. It's like a myth of a story, whereas Sanora Babb's story is about real people, you know, it's about the people that are actually struggling. And that difference, really, is exactly what we've been talking about in this conversation, right? That book is used to represent the Dust Bowl in our country and in classrooms across the United States. Everyone experiences the Dust Bowl through The Grapes of Wrath. I'm only saying that if we just brought in Babb’s version of the Dust Bowl, then we would actually see another fictional version that kind of opens it up to look at it more at the human level.

KIM: And closer to factual maybe because she  did more research than he did.

IRIS: Exactly. I mean, Steinbeck had never even really been to Oklahoma. He'd driven through once in his roadster with his wife. But he'd never really gone there and done the research. And even his research in the camps was secondary, right? It was through other people. He didn't really have much of a stomach for what he was seeing when he was there. I mean, he felt deeply about it, but he was so disturbed by seeing these people suffering so much that he just kind of popped in and out. Whereas Babb was in it every single day, and I think you see that at the sentence level in this book.

AMY: And it just makes me think again of that eviction notice, "John and Mary Doe." It's like his book is John and Mary Doe, whereas she goes in and says what their real names are, you know, and she actually explores who they really were. And weren't the migrants, um, when his book came out, didn't they feel a little betrayed by Tom Collins and the fact that they had been used in a way?

IRIS: Yes. And not to mention the people in the Dust Bowl area were like, "Oh, uh-uh!" They hated The Grapes of Wrath when it came out. There was a huge pushback against it. That's forgotten in history, but yes, a lot of people, including my grandmother, did not like the book. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. Oh, I wish I could ask my grandma now. My grandma was spicy, so I'm sure she would have something to say about that.

IRIS: I think you had to be spicy to survive that time.

KIM: Exactly.

AMY: I know I'm just like bringing up another random thing from the book, there's so much I want to say about it. But there's an old man that's literally dying in the tent. He's not gonna make it. And the camp, the farm, um, decides to evict him. And they literally lay this almost-dead guy out on the ground with his belongings. Just the cruelty of that. And the game was rigged! " We're only gonna pay you if you make the certain quota," which was impossible to make, like 900 pounds of whatever the crop was that they were supposed to pick. And it was literally, you could not do that in a day. And they were still trying. 

KIM: And they were charging them. They made the store very expensive. So they were negative at the end of the week. I mean, it just makes you think about migrant workers today.

AMY: Yeah, it's still happening. 

KIM: Yeah, exactly, 

IRIS: It’s happening today. And I think the people running those corporate farms did not see these people as human in the same way that, still, migrant workers are treated in that way. And, you know, I was writing this book at the same time that all of the border issues were escalating, and I teach this book a lot, you know, when I teach. My students were just like, "Oh my God, this is still happening," and I think that's what's so haunting about Babb's book is that when you read it, especially, you know, reading it in California, and a lot of my students come from families that are impacted or somehow related to migration or people who have come to work in the fields in California and they see themselves in this book. They see their families in this book, and they see how little we've learned from the time this book was written.

AMY: And Babb didn't just focus on the people coming from the Dust Bowl area as well, right? She acknowledges migrants coming from Mexico or Black workers there. Like she kind of spreads it to include more groups of people, right?

IRIS: Right. I mean, California has always been a multicultural place, and what she depicts in this book reflects that, you know? She's got Filipinos working in the fields, Japanese working in the fields, there's Indigenous people. And also the issue of segregated camps, like, coming together for a strike, like what that means to both of them, right? What's on the line for both of them? These issues come up, and you can see the influence of, you know, when, like I said, Ralph Ellison, when he read this, he was like, "Thank you. And lean into that more."

KIM: Yeah, and the way that she weaves what's happening politically and in capitalism throughout the book, it's not like you're being lectured at. It seems very real. Um, and the little farmers being taken over by these corporations, and they just have someone out there managing it who's not connected to the people or the land. 

AMY: That's still happening, too. 

KIM: It's even more so that way now, So getting back to Babb's story, you know, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath comes out. It's an instant success. And like we said, her publisher, who she had had a contract with, they were fully planning to put her book out. She was done writing hers, she was ready for it to go, pretty much, um, tells her, "Nevermind, we're not gonna publish it." But lest we think that was her one shot and she missed it, she was very esteemed as a writer. She was very well connected in the literary world and she did have other books that were published, right?

IRIS: Yeah. So after not getting this published, after having the contract taken away by Random House, she was devastated. She spent like a year where she couldn't even write. But then she got right back at it. Um, she got another contract from Random House and started writing her next novel, which is called The Lost Traveler, which is an amazing novel, um, with a strong female character named Robin. It's a coming of age novel, um, she's growing up in a small town based on Garden City, Kansas, and it's like coming into sexuality, coming into being something other than a part of a really dysfunctional family. She also published a great deal of short fiction. She was most known for her short fiction in her lifetime, and they're brilliant short stories. But her, um, memoir An Owl On Every Post is about growing up in Eastern Colorado, and Konkie plays a huge role in that book. I really urge listeners to, to read that book or listen to the audio book. It's just a beautiful book about what it was like growing up in the early 1900s in Eastern Colorado. I wanted to mention too, that she was in a writing group with Ray Bradbury for 40 years, and he thought she was one of the best writers that he'd ever read. And she had, you know, amazingly close literary friendships with Carlos Bulosan, John Fante, William Soroyan, who was in love with her. She had a relationship with Ralph Ellison, like I said. She drove cross country with Tillie Olsen and was good friends, like I said, with Meridel Le Seuer.

AMY: That cross-country road trip is a really great part of your book. I had fun reading that. There were a lot of tensions.

KIM: So let's talk a little bit about why Sanora got so forgotten over time, and what sparked her recovery?

IRIS: You know, this is a story you've heard a lot before on this podcast, right? Women who were writing and publishing in the 1930s, after World War II and the Red Scare, guess who got erased from the story of American literature? The women. And even from biographies, if you look at biographies about William Saroyan, for example, she's not in his biographies at all. There's copious letters between the two. Same thing with Ralph Ellison. Like when you look at the relationship that they had, only one set of letters was available at the time, and so the version of their relationship is really a one sided male perspective of looking at the story, whereas they had a really equal relationship. They respected one another. I mean, she actually read a draft of Invisible Man before it was published. Even when you read biographies about Ray Bradbury, you don't see as much about her. And it's just the way that we look through history through this past century because of the way it was disrupted so many times. It's actually one of the things that scares me the most about the future is if things continue the way they are, with books being banned, with things happening in this way, not to get political, but –

KIM: Get political. I've been thinking about it all through this conversation, to be honest. 

IRIS: Yeah, I'm so worried about what that means for the, you know… A, the story we're just beginning to open back up... that both of us have, you know, come from families that survived the Dust Bowl and did not know the details of what happened tells you a lot about this country.

AMY: And can we just real quick give a Ken Burns shout out, because when it came out, I watched that documentary and it's phenomenal. But Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan the fact that they use Sanora for their research for that documentary is pretty amazing. 

IRIS: Do you want to know why? Let me tell you. I think it's a really important part of the story. So they are amazing. I was really lucky to get to talk to Dayton Duncan and he played a huge role in the epilogue that I wrote for this book. But the reason why her story is there has everything to do with Pauline Hodges. Now, Pauline Hodges is somebody that my friend, Joanne Dearcopp, who was Sanora Babb's very good friend, who is the reason why Sanora Babb's books are in print, because she made a vow to her over glasses of wine, "I'll keep your books in print, I promise." And then kept her promise, so Joanne was giving me all these names of people I should visit to write this book. And so I'm driving around Eastern Colorado and the panhandle of Oklahoma. She's like, "You got to go to this nursing home and talk to Pauline Hodges." And I'm like, "Okay, all right, I'll do it." So I go and I meet Pauline, and she's a firecracker. And she's just like, knows everybody in town, is hooking me up with everything. I take her back to her nursing home at the end of the day, and I'm like, "Thank you so much," and she's like, "Hey, does Ken Burns know about this project?" And I was like, "No, of course not." (Right? Like, why would he?) And she's like, "Oh, well I'll give him a call." And I'm like, "Okay." You know, and I'm driving back to my hotel in Colorado, and by the time I get back, there's a call from Pauline and she's like, "I talked to Ken's people and they're going to be in contact." What I didn't know at that time is that she was on the set. She's one of the people interviewed in The Dust Bowl documentary. So if you go back, you can see her. And they were all having these meetings, and she's just not somebody that sits on her hands. She was like, "Um, I really think, Ken, that you should look at this woman, Sanora Babb. She went to my high school." So she is the one that introduced Sanora Babb to Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, and of course they did a deep dive into her and made that editorial decision, but the way that Ken Burns and his team do that work, and the thing that Dayton Duncan told me in the interview is like, they know that history is something that is constantly needing to be rewritten and better understood. I think that's why we love their documentaries so much. It's because they're willing to open up and change as they tell a story. 

KIM: That's a great point. It's not a regurgitation. They're looking at how they can see it in a new way. And they're willing to listen. 

IRIS: It's so important.

KIM: That's huge.

AMY: I always said working for Ken Burns would be my dream job. 

KIM: Oh my god, you would be great at that. I could totally see that. 

AMY: I just want to work for Ken Burns.

KIM: Yeah. 

IRIS: Call Pauline. She'll get you hooked up. 

AMY: Pauline, give me the hook up! Okay, so, Sanora Babb, thankfully, she did live long enough to see Whose Names Are Unknown get published. She died in 2005, and there are really so many more stories about her that we haven't… we've run out of time. We can't touch on here. So listeners, you'll just have to pick up a copy of Iris's book. It's called Riding Like the Wind. Um, but Iris, if you had one more thing that you could tell our listeners about Sanora Babb, what would you want it to be?

IRIS: I would say one of the things that struck me most about Sanora Babb was her fortitude. So the idea that she grew up really poor, raised by a man who was a gambler and abusive. And she fought like hell until she got what she wanted and kept her eye on the prize. Like no matter what got in her way, she believed that she could be something. It wasn't like a self-centered desire to become a writer. It was because she knew people needed to have their stories told. I feel so lucky that I've gotten to spend the last five years with her and that she's now in my brain, and hopefully that I've recreated her close to what she was, but her fortitude is something that I'll always carry with me. And I hope other women and men will be inspired by her.

AMY: She spent her writing career making sure people's stories were told, and now finally she gets her story told, thanks to you and your biography, the first biography about Sanora, right? 

IRIS: Yeah. It's the first biography about her.

KIM: And we are so lucky that we got to have this discussion with you, and we are so excited to continue it tonight in person at Vroman's Bookstore, which we love Vroman's Bookstore. Thank you for the work you've done to bring Babb's life story and her published works to light. This has been fantastic.

IRIS: Thank you guys so much. It's always such a pleasure to talk with you guys.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Angelinos, we hope to see you tonight at Vroman's bookstore to learn more about Sanora Babb. I'll be back with the show next week for all of our paid subscribers. I'm going to be discussing the calamitous, disastrous, apocalyptic effects of bobbing one's hair in that episode. 

KIM: Yeah! All right!

AMY: If you think the dust storms were bad, wait till you hear what a bunch of flappers did to society. And then Kim and I will both be back in two weeks to discuss another Lost Lady of Lit. 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.

212. Eliza Haywood — The Female Spectator and Betsy Thoughtless with Kelly J. Plante

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast that revives forgotten female writers and celebrates their contributions to literature. I'm Kim Askew. 

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes. A quick heads up for Southern California listeners: Kim and I will be participating in an event at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena on the evening of Tuesday, October 15th. We'll be in discussion with Iris Jamahl Dunkle to celebrate the launch of her new biography on the writer Sanora Babb.So if you're in the area, we'd love for you to join us. If you're not nearby, stay tuned for our upcoming podcast episode on Sanora Babb two weeks from now. Having said that, let's now turn our focus to today's lost lady, an incredibly prolific 18th century writer whose life is still, frankly, a little bit of a mystery.

KIM: Despite Eliza Haywood's extensive body of work, we hardly know anything about her. We don't even know the exact year she was born. 

AMY: What we do know is that she was a woman of many talents — novelist, playwright, actress, and later, a pioneering editor of political periodicals. 

KIM: Her early works were wildly popular, and then she broke new ground, albeit anonymously, as the editor of The Female Spectator, the first periodical written by women for women.

AMY: Her resume is also reminding me a little bit of Aphra Behn, whom we've done a previous episode on. We have a special guest to help us learn a little bit more about Eliza Haywood and her significance in the literary landscape of the 18th century. 

KIM: I am so excited for this, so let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Okay, joining us today is Dr. Kelly J. Plante, an essayist, editor, and scholar specializing in transatlantic 18th century literature. Her research focuses on the evolution of fiction and nonfiction during this period, and she's written extensively about Eliza Haywood's contributions to literature and journalism. Welcome, Kelly. So glad to have you! 

KELLY: Hi, Amy and Kim. Thank you so much for having me. This is such important work that you do on this podcast and I'm honored and delighted to be here. 

KIM: We're so glad you're here. So Kelly, what can you tell us about Haywood's beginnings and how she became this prolific writer?

KELLY: Well, we don't know exactly as you alluded… her birthday or birthplace. We don't know who her parents were or what she was like growing up. But we do know that in her early adulthood, she set out to become an actress, which was one of the few professions if you were a woman and interested in literature and ideas that you could do to fulfill yourself. And so she moved from England to Dublin and she was apparently quite a raucous act on the Dublin stage. She also was involved in the same theater circles as the famous. Henry Fielding, he wrote Tom Jones, and, like Haywood, he wrote novels and plays, and so she hung out and associated with him. She was then involved in manuscript coteries or poetry circles that are described by her biographer, Katherine King, as “psychosexual.”

KIM: Ooh, intriguing. 

AMY: I'm already getting a very saucy vibe from this lady, like hanging out with Henry Fielding… 

KIM: Yep. Actress. 

KELLY: Mm-hmm. “Saucy” is the perfect word. It's a very 18th-century word that Richardson used a lot in Pamela, and um, she wrote in his circle and against him as well. So then when the stage was kind of shut down and no longer reasonable or profitable for her to pursue, she then began writing novels, or what were called fictions. They weren't called novels yet, or they were called “the novel kind of writing.” Her first novel was Love in Excess. 

KIM: Her novels were pretty big in their day, right? 

KELLY: Yeah, the two most popular 18th century novels were Robinson Crusoe and Love in Excess, and they were released at the same time.

KIM: Wow! 

Amy: Who would have known? Oh my gosh, we all know Daniel Defoe. What the heck?! Yeah. Oh, I'm almost like, don't tell me that, Kelly. Like, I don't even want to know that because it's just so irritating. 

KELLY: Well, it gets worse and it gets more irritating once you know the history between her and Defoe and Richardson. But yeah, it may have even sold more copies than Robinson Crusoe. Although we know which one stood the test of time, not because it was better, but because of power dynamics of the historical record. Who gets to tell the stories we pass down? 

AMY: If I'm looking at these two, which one am I going to choose? A man sitting by himself on an island, basically, or this other one called Love in Excess, which has all kinds of crazy, racy, entertaining, interpersonal dynamics.

KIM: Which one would you choose if you were stranded on a desert isle? 

KELLY: Exactly. Yeah. 

AMY: So it sounds like Haywood and her racy novels were quite the sensation early on, clearly. But today's scholars seem to be even more interested in her journalism, and that includes you, Kelly. 

KELLY: Yeah, most of her works that get taught in literature classrooms, especially undergraduate just because they're shorter is, you know, Love in Excess, but even more so Fantomina, which is even shorter. And it's really a whirlwind. Um, I highly recommend reading it. It's crazy. Um, but since, um, “Haywood studies” is rounding its quarter century of age, you know, there's definitely been a critical turn to focus on her later in life periodicals, which she wrote when she was older. So The Female Spectator and The Parrot. And then Epistles for the Ladies, but more so the first two that I mentioned, they've been kind of examined as wartime periodicals. A scholar named Catherine Ingrassia has done a really great chapter in the first book ever to be dedicated or published on 18th century women periodicalists. And that was published just a few years ago. (It's crazy to me as someone interested in the history of journalism and in women writers that that's the first edition.) It's really great. But so she has an essay in there about Haywood as a wartime writer. And while The Female Spectator is talking about “domestic issues” like the marriage plots and things like that, it's done so in this juxtaposition with current events. So one of the major issues going on in England at that time was the Jacobite Revolution, and she's really challenging the energy and the air of England at that time, which was really tense for a time. Really anti-Catholic, depending on whose side you are on, and really fearful of this coming invasion that ultimately we know now ended up failing, but they didn't know that at the time. And so she's really writing for women and men, but she's telling women how to kind of survive in this crazy world. 

AMY: So rather than try to cover the entire output of The Female Spectator for this episode, you helpfully pointed us to one particular book. And it includes a letter by a quote unquote reader named “Clarabella,” but we're kind of assuming that it's Haywood. This story is then followed by a response from The Female Spectator editor. And listeners, we'll share a link to this in our show notes so that you can read it too. It kind of marries what you were saying, the sort of wartime writing with issues relating to women. Why does it have special significance to you to focus on?

KELLY: What I really love about this book is the context that it appears in, but also It is a depiction of a woman, “Clarabella,” this person who's writing in for a friend. So I'm really interested in creative nonfiction and how do fiction and nonfiction play together. She's deconstructing that. She's also deconstructing another binary, which is man and woman. She depicts a woman, Aliena, who, “equips herself in the habit of a man.” She follows her lover, who is a captain of the British Royal Navy, who got orders to deploy to the West Indies. Everybody thought he was going to propose to her and he didn't. So it's kind of embarrassing. She thought she was going to marry this man. So she dresses as a cabin boy and goes to the port town. So she says to his buddy, the lieutenant, “I want to join your regiment.” And he says, “Okay, you can join, you can come on the ship with us.” He puts her in this group of other young boys of her entry level rank. And Clarabella writes: “They start pinching each other on the ribs, as young boys often do, and they found that she had breasts.” So, there's a lot of like, queer and trans overtones. Not even just overtones, just straight up, cross-dressing, all that, going on in this narrative. 

KIM: Very Shakespearean. 

KELLY: Yes. Anyway, so her family is like, “Where did she go?” They launched this public investigation. They come and find her and they confront him thinking that they were eloping. They were not eloping. She just was going to join the military and they don't know that. So they get in this awkward confrontation with him. It doesn't end up good for Aliena. So he gets off the hook. He goes to the West Indies, he deploys. And her family really takes it out on her. She's then somewhat imprisoned in her house, and she's really ostracized in her community and punished for it. So this is why Clarabella is trying to write in as a helpful friend to say, “Hey, Female Spectator, please redress this situation for her.” What we get is a really interesting nuanced judgment from the female spectator on what should happen next. 

Amy: As you mentioned, it's a blurry line between fact and fiction because it's purported to be a true story, right? She's like, “I swear to God, this is my friend, and this is gonna sound crazy, but this shit really happened, and I'm gonna tell you.” And of course it's fake. I mean, it's so over the top. It's like that song, [sings] “The things you do for love!” And you think based on similar stories, like Shakespeare's plays, it would all end up good. And this goes horribly awry. It's awful! 

KELLY: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I love that you point out it's so clearly fiction, but for 18th-century readers, it might not have been so clearly fiction as we think now, because a little bit before this is written, so many women were joining the army that the king had to issue a decree that women were not allowed to wear military clothing.

AMY: This is context I needed. I have no idea about this! Okay. 

KELLY: And so the most famous historical figure is Christian Davies, or Mother Ross, and she is a real life “female soldier” who dressed in military garb and joined the military. And she was successful for several years. There were real life examples in the news and in Broadside Ballads at the time, which, this is another reason this book piqued my interest so much because I was working on a project at Wayne State University about warrior women. And the story is an old tale from, you know, Joan of Arc or Mulan, and it's a really ancient trope, but it was very popular in the 18th century. So there's a lot going on that Haywood's playing with culturally. That's why periodicals are so cool to study because they're blending fact and fiction, and she's really got her finger on the pulse of her culture.

AMY: The reaction to Clarabella's letter, so the editorial response, was not at all what I was expecting. Because I'm reading Clarabella's telling of it, and I'm like, “I can't believe this happened to her; she didn't deserve this.” And then suddenly we get the response, and I'm like, “huh?” 

KELLY: Right. It's so weird reading it from our time, looking back at her time, because like, again, we have to think about the context she's writing it in. And while I just told you like, oh, it really could have happened, you know, there were these real life women who dressed as men and joined the military, It also could be read symbolically because as we talked about before. Because she had a romanticization of the lost cause of Jacobitism or, um, “Bonnie Prince Charlie” who was Charles Edward Stewart, who was known as a pretender to the throne. You could also read Aliena as a symbolic characterization of him, because of when this is taking place in 1745, which is when he dressed as Bonnie [Betty] Burke to invade England. 

KIM: It's all coming together. Yes. 

KELLY: Yeah, it's really complicated. It's really hard when you find an artifact like this, trying to figure out, well, what was she intending as the author to portray and how would people have taken it? So, it could have been taken as she's writing about a political situation, about the Jacobite cause. 

KIM: It totally makes sense when you're saying that. It's like you can't just look at it as a piece on its own. There's so much you need to understand about what's going on at the time, and then there can be more than one reading based on that even.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah, I just took it on the very surface level. The editorial response being, “Ladies, that was stupid. Don't do that.” 

KELLY: Right. 

AMY: “You're going to ruin your life if you go run off and try to join the Navy.” 

KELLY: That's certainly a legitimate way to read it. And maybe it's how she got away with political commentary, you know?

AMY: Interesting. 

KELLY: They could have been like, “Oh, this is seditious libel. This is treason. You're advocating for the Stuarts.” And she could say, “No, it's a true story. It's, you know, this woman really tried doing this.” 

KIM: Ooh, I love this. Do you want to actually read from her rebuttal so we can hear?

KELLY: Sure, and I love her tone in her rebuttal. She starts off very thankful to the correspondent. She is an editor in chief, so she starts, “Of all the letters with which The Female Spectator has been favored, none gave us a greater mixture of pain and pleasure than this. It is difficult to say whether the unhappy story it contains, or the agreeable manner in which it is related, most engages our attention. But while we do justice to the historian and pity the unfortunate lady in whose cause she has employed her pen, we must be wary how we excuse her faults so far as to hinder others from being upon their guard, not to fall into the same.” So at first we think, okay, she's going to take a conservative view. “Ladies don't do what Aliena has done.” So then she says, “Neither is it possible to comply with the request of this agreeable correspondent in passing too severe a judgment on the captain's behavior.” So it seems like she's going to let him off the hook, but further down, she says, “Instances of young people who, after the first wound given to their reputation, have thought themselves under no manner of restraint and abandoned to all sense of shame are so flagrant that I wonder any parent or relation should not tremble at publishing a fault which, If concealed, might possibly be the last, but if divulged is for the most part but the beginning or prelude to a continued series of vice.”

I really love what she's doing here because she's really taking us on a logical trip of: Here's what you think I'm going to say, and this is what I'm going to say. And it's not a problem that Aliena did this. It's a problem that her parents publicized it. 

KIM: Interesting. 

KELLY: Basically, young people are going to do stupid shit, and parents should just expect that. 

AMY: And Clarabella, by extension, like, “Why'd you need to write in?” Do we know that “Clarabella,” was actually Haywood just writing this story? We don't know, do we? 

KELLY: Yeah, she could be replying to herself. We don't have anything to go off of to see what was truly written in. We don't have her letters. We don't have her diaries. We just don't know. And readers at the time didn't necessarily all know that it was Haywood. Like The Female Spectator was a persona. 

KIM: Okay, so it was an entity or collective in their minds, maybe, as opposed to her specifically. Right. So let's shift gears for a minute. Haywood, she wasn't just a periodical editor. You know, we talked about how she wrote novels. She also wrote plays. She was an actress. Do you want to talk a little bit about how these different aspects of her career might have influenced her writing overall? 

KELLY: Yeah, I think that her experience as an actress definitely infuses life and vivacity into her writing. And she's able to convey power dynamics between men and women in such a theatrical way. Her attempt at character development really shines through in her last novel, Betsy Thoughtless, where she critiques John Locke's (the philosopher's) idea of the tabula rasa, or the blank slate, with the idea of a thoughtless female protagonist. It reminds me of The Sound of Music, where, what is Rolf saying about like the I'm totally off the cuff here, but a woman is “a page to write on” or something and… well, I am not going to start singing now, but I just thought that…

AMY: “You are 16 going on 17.” It’s like: “Your mind little girl is an empty page that men will want to write on.” (To write on!!)

KIM: Yeah. And we watched this all through our childhood. Nice. 

AMY: Okay. So Betsy Thoughtless is basically Liesel from The Sound of Music. 

KELLY: Oh my God. Yes. Liesel of 1751. So Betsy Thoughtless, the blank slate, she starts off as a coquette at the beginning of her life, you know, as she's depicted in her 20s. And she meets a man named Trueworth at Oxford or Cambridge when she's visiting her brother. And he's the perfect guy. His name says it all: Trueworth. She doesn't stay with him. She ends up marrying a man named Mr. Munden. Even his name just sounds bland. So this book is so interesting because It shows her growth because unlike Aliena, she doesn't have parents that publicize all her faults. And so she's allowed to make these mistakes, and she doesn't maintain her innocence, but she's this complex woman that… she is able to have happiness after making mistakes. And her major mistake is marrying this man. So this is just a snapshot of their domestic life that she is able to escape:

[reads a passage from Betsy Thoughtless]

Amy: Theatrical! 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: I knew where that was going. And I was like, “No! Not the squirrel! Don't hurt the squirrel! Oh my God.” 

KELLY: She's constantly depicting power dynamics between men and women. And she's constantly showing women who go against sexual social norms and who are rebelling against it. And she's showing how to be subversive and also how to survive in this really competitive marriage market that we've seen later in Jane Austen novels of women's survival really depending on marriage and what does that do for the core female self?

AMY: That's what I kind of took away from the “Aliena” tale. She was saying, “Girls don't do this. If you want things to work out for you, don't do this.”

KIM: Yeah, it's a pragmatic approach. Yeah, yeah, yep. 

KELLY: Or if you're gonna do it, do it right and have that be who you truly are, like Christian Davies. You know, be tough and be able to withstand all of what's going to happen.

AMY: Yeah, if you make that choice then the boys are going to grab your boobs on the boat and you better be prepared for it, sort of thing. There was so much attempted rape in that story, too! 

KELLY: Yeah, and you guys touched on that in your episode on Aphra Behn as well. The culture at the time, you know rape and consent were different. I'm not saying she's condoning it, but she is showing you how to stay safe.

KIM: Yeah, and she's working within the framework of society. 

AMY: Did Eliza Haywood ever face any backlash or controversy surrounding her writings, or was she always able to kind of couch it in a way that it was accepted? 

KELLY: Well, she was under arrest in 1750 because it was suspected that she produced a seditious pamphlet. And she said she “never wrote anything in a political way.” That was a lie, as we've seen. She did write about politics. She was never jailed or anything like that, but there was definitely a risk. So she was able to really successfully tread those waters as a female writer and as a political writer at a time where everything you wrote was under suspect. She definitely had controversy and we talked about Defoe earlier. Defoe and Samuel Richardson, those two men, as far as I'm concerned, they appropriated her amateur fiction methods in Pamela and Roxanna. And while they publicly wrote against writers like Haywood, they really benefited off of her method. There's also the famous case of Jonathan Swift calling her a “stupid, infamous, scribbling woman.” And Alexander Pope who mocked her in his [Dunciad] poem, a satire against Grub Street. I don't even want to repeat the misogynistic tropes that he used, but he talked about her breasts and her two “illegitimate” children. So she definitely had some misogyny that was attacking her at the time. 

AMY: You're giving the examples of all these other male writers that said insulting things about her. It's taking me back to Aliena's story. She did put herself on the boat in a way. She was in this field that is with all the men.

KIM: That's a good point, Amy. 

AMY: She's a lone female figure, relatively speaking, in that world. In that sense, if you compare what she was doing with the parable that she wrote for us, you can see what she was trying to get at. Like, if you're going to get on the boat, it's not for the faint of heart, and it's not for the delicate.

KELLY: Mm-hmm. Exactly. She was doing that in The Female Spectator. She was positing herself as a model for how to be a woman writer and how to withstand society at the time. 

KIM: Um, we talked about Aphra Behn, you know, the other writers of her time, or Frances Burney, for example. Why now does she not have as much recognition as some of those names?

KELLY: Haywood is definitely more often compared to Aphra Behn because their life and career spans seem to be closer to overlapping, but it's really interesting and appropriate that you picked these three. Because their lifespans take us from the beginning to the end of really the long 18th century from kind of the raunchy Restoration of Charles II to the throne and his crazy court life with prostitution and debauchery and ultimately into Jane Austen, who is necessarily influenced by all three, whether she wanted to be or not. And the publishing culture was really built on their legacy — for men as well as women. And so Behn, she lives about 1640 to 1689, and she writes until her death at about age 49. And Haywood was probably born four years after she died in 1693 to 1756. And she also wrote until she died when she was about 63 years old. And Burney, we know so much more about biographically. And her birth date, she was about four years after Haywood died. Burney played with a lot of different genres too, but she's mostly known for the novel, which was a more, by that time, respectable form. You can't have Jane Austen or Frances Burney without having Haywood before them.

KIM: So, we talked about Love in Excess a little bit and Fantomina. Do you think one of her novels is her greatest novel and why? What should we go out and read? 

KELLY: Well, my answer to what you should go out and read first, probably not her greatest in my opinion, but Fantomina is very easy to finish and very, very mind blowing. So that's a really great first read. But in terms of her greatest novel, really, Betsy Thoughtless, it's a really great novel if you can get through it. Broadview Press makes a really great annotated edition of it. 

KIM: We love Broadview. 

KELLY: Yeah, they have a great Introduction. 

AMY: You're holding it up right now to the screen and I'm like, “Wow, that's a fat book.” I'm still not through my Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

KIM: Amy's been on a journey. 

AMY: That was my pandemic novel and I never finished it because it's so fat. 

KIM: It's almost like you can never finish it now.

AMY: I will miraculously explode or disappear or something once I get to the last page, so I just can't finish it. Yeah.

KIM: It just can't happen. 

KELLY: I read Clarissa for my pandemic novel. 

AMY: Oh, are you kidding? And you, you finished it? You finished it. The thing is, I really love it. It just got so repetitive. Like, it's so much of the same over and over. 

KELLY: You know how I got through it? Number one, it was on my qualifying exams for my PhD, so I had to. But actually, my advisor was like, “Don't put Clarissa on your qualifying exam list. It's too long.” And I was like, “I really want to read it.” But there was this group on Twitter, #Clarissa2020, that everybody started 2020 thinking we would read it in real time and we would read the letters on the dates that they were dated. And I had to use audio books to read some of it because it's…

KIM: Oh, that's a good idea. 

KELLY: Yeah, I split it up. But I also happened to be like, I had a son and whenever I was feeding him, like he was a baby, so I'd feed him and just read Clarissa on my Kindle. But I'm teaching it right now. 

AMY: You're not making them read at all, are you?

KELLY: No, no. That's how, yeah, I was looking for Betsy Thoughtless and that's when I thought, I thought, “Oh, it's not as long as Clarissa,” because Clarissa is like three times as big as them. But that's how I found it on my bookshelf because I said, look for the obnoxiously large book. So it's pretty big.

KIM: Lost Ladies of Lit Challenge, listeners. We're gonna read Betsy Thoughtless together. I like that. 

AMY: It's much thinner than Clarissa. We can do it. Yeah, definitely. 

KELLY: Yeah, and it's published about the same time as Clarissa, and I think that they're playing with similar ideas, but it's not epistolary like Clarissa; it has an omniscient narrator, so it's a little bit more accessible in that way. Um, but why I love it so much is you know what I said earlier that it's a female protagonist that is allowed to make mistakes and she's the opposite of Clarissa. Clarissa is perfect, and that's why you can sympathize with her because she's perfect yet all this horrible stuff happens to her and you can't victim blame Clarissa because she's an angel, right? He writes that she's “not of this world.” Betsy Thoughtless is very much of this world, and the reason it's so long, I think, is women would read this and they could really immerse themselves in her world and think, If I had a friend like this, what would I do? If a guy did this to me, what could I do? But what's really valuable, too, about Betsy Thoughtless and that passage that I chose, I think that she was making a point about if you see a man that is mistreating a squirrel (he killed the squirrel, right?) — if he's able to do that, and I think Haywood called it a trifle, like it seems like a trifle because it's just a squirrel, but if somebody's doing that, then what are they doing to the woman that is in their house? So she's really showing the violence that happens outside to the interior self. And I think that it's fascinating to think of Betsy Thoughtless as this way to really grow and become in this really violent world and be able to come out successfully. 

AMY: All right, so clearly we have a lot to choose from with Eliza Haywood. If you guys want to start small, listeners, we're going to link in our show notes to, um, what we read from The Female Spectator, or you could go check out some of these novels. I know I want to now. 

KIM: Yep, me too!

AMY: Kelly, thank you so much for sharing all your insights with us today. Clearly, Eliza Haywood deserves to be more widely recognized, and this was so fun.

KELLY: Thank you again so much for having me and for the work that you do on Lost Ladies of Lit. I really appreciate being here. Thank you so much. 

AMY: And thanks to all of you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you enjoyed this episode. We'll be back next time with another forgotten female writer who deserves a place in the literary canon.

KIM: We also invite you to join our free Substack newsletter and subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive bonus episodes which drop twice a month. 

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.

210. Mary MacLane — I Await the Devil’s Coming — with Cathryn Halverson

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. And Amy, I think you probably stand in agreement with me in feeling incredibly grateful that our teenage diaries were never published for the entire world to see.

AMY HELMES: Oh my god. The angst! The misery! The unintentional comedy! There’s actually a project called Mortified that’s been around since the early 2000s where people go on stage and share excerpts from their old diaries or adolescent love letters or whatever with a live audience. Kim, have you been?

KIM: I thought we'd went together. I’ve been. I think we went together years ago. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s really funny. It usually takes decades for people to work up the courage to share these soul-exposing revelations from their past. (Sometimes humiliating!)

KIM: Yes, and that’s in sharp contrast to the lost lady we’re focusing on in this week’s episode, Mary MacLane. She willingly and eagerly published her confessional “diary” (I use that word in quotation marks — we’ll explain a bit later) soon after writing it at the age of 19. It covers a 10-month span in her life in 1901 in Butte, Montana. She originally titled the manuscript I Await the Devil’s Coming, but it was actually changed for publication to the more deceptively banal title The Story of Mary MacLane.

AMY: Mary MacLane is intense, sublime, defiant, morose, exhausting, a little bit scary, and funny as hell.

KIM: Yep. Sounds like a teenage girl, alright. But we should also mention that in terms of its literary merits, the book is beautifully written, it’s incredibly philosophic and speaks to issues that run much deeper than her own navel-gazing.

AMY: At the start of the diary, MacLane puts forth her mission statement like this: 

   I, of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel. 

   I am convinced of this, for I am odd.

KIM: Great opening lines. This is already feeling like a way-way-back machine episode of “My So–Called Life.” I can’t wait to dive into it with today’s guest. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Cathryn Halverson has a special interest in women’s writing and literature of the American West. Her published monographs include Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West; Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives; and Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly. She joins us today from Sweden where she is a senior lecturer at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Cathryn, thank you for joining us!

CATHRYN HALVERSON: Well, thank you for having me.

KIM: We want to give a special shout-out to one of our most supportive listeners and a previous guest on this show, Rosemary Kelty, for bringing Mary MacLane to our attention. Once you hear about this author and her unusual book, it’s hard not to want to pick up a copy. Cathryn, can you set the stage for us in terms of how MacLane’s debut title was received in 1902?

CATHRYN: Well, it was a mix.  Kind of looking over these collected reviews, it seems that more of the published reviews were negative than positive, but that's because the way readers responded to her was positive, and there were a lot of young women who were excited by her book. Um but also, literary people, too, were impressed by the writing and it really quickly entered the popular culture with all these parodies of it, products named after her and a lot of excitement about her and imitations too. 

KIM: Okay, so clearly love it or hate it, this book was a sensation. What did people find either so compelling in the book or so abhorrent?

CATHRYN: I mean, the biggest thing was that she wrote a book entirely about herself and was shamelessly egotistical about it. I mean, I'm sure she mentions her name virtually every page. And she doesn't really do much in the book. She just talks about herself and what she feels and what she does during the day and how she wanders around the city of Butte and the outskirts. So it was that kind of self absorption that troubled people, plus the claims she makes. She says that she's a genius, that she's brilliant, that she doesn't belong in Butte, she belongs somewhere else. And these things were probably true, but it was also rather obnoxious. But inspiring, too, to other girls and women who maybe felt the same. 

AMY: Yeah, classic teenage girl. So when I first started reading it, without knowing much about it, I took it at face value as her diary. But this isn’t exactly a diary in the way we might typically think of it, right?

CATHRYN: Right. I mean, she was inspired by other books published by women about themselves, especially Marie Bashkirtseff, this Russian woman in France who had published in around 1890  her published journals. So Bashkirtseff had actually published a real diary (it's enormous) with this account of daily life. And then MacLane. took that model and pared it down. When I was looking over the book again, it's surprising how undiary-like it is. It's more like a fable. Some of it does seem very staged, and the repetition and the focus on her emotions and thoughts, as opposed to what she was doing. And the giveaway, of course, that it's not really a diary is that she states several times that she was writing a book. She hopes this book will make her enough money to leave Butte and interestingly, she even goes back to the book after it must have been in production because she refers her readers to the frontispiece portrait and she says, you know, this is a picture of me. Note my beautiful figure, but I should say that I have handkerchiefs stuffed in the bosom of my dress to give myself a little extra padding. So, I mean, she knew that  photo would be on the book. So it's not only she was planning on writing a book, but I think she was going back and editing it and inserting things. So it was quite deliberate. 

AMY: Yeah, you can sense the calculated quality of it as you're going along and then you are sort of like, okay, this isn't her genuine day to day diary, even though it probably does include real elements of her day.

KIM: Didn't some people even think it was maybe a parody or a hoax? 

CATHRYN: Yeah, there's these statements like, maybe this is a roast on this new fad for women writing about themselves in that way, and when I first began researching I mean, this one reviewer referred to the “naked soul lady” genre, but I hadn't heard of that “naked soul lady” genre, so I was trying to figure out what they were even referencing, because now, I mean, we know about MacLane, but we don't know about these antecedents who came before her. So yeah, they wondered. And some wondered if it was a man, and, and the fact that she was from Butte, so far away, there's this feeling that, you know, we don't know what's happening there. So somebody supposedly went to Butte and asked around and figured out she was a real girl who just graduated from high school. 

AMY: You mentioned Marie Bashkirtseff. MacLane actually name-drops her in the diary, pointing out that she has some “fan-girl” portraits of her on her bedroom wall. But she also boasts that she, Mary, is far superior to Marie. She writes: “Where she is deep, I am deeper. Where she is wonderful in her intensity, I am still more wonderful in my intensity….” Listeners, in case you haven’t noticed, Mary has no shortage of ego. She repeatedly calls herself a genius. She’s audacious, and you love her for it. At one point she even has one diary entry, February 19, that just says, “Am I not intolerably conceited?” So she’s laughing about it, you know?

KIM: Totally, but at the same time, she’s also wallowing in angst, rage and despair. She’s feeling completely out of place, misunderstood and alone. Rather than beseeching God for help (a la Judy Blume’s Are You There, God, it’s Me, Margaret?) she pleads with the devil to come to her aid. (Hence her original title I Await the Devil’s Coming.) Cathryn, can you talk about her fascination with the devil?

CATHRYN: I can, yes. Um, she repeatedly asks the kind devil to “deliver me,”  and she specifically says, you know, when I think of the devil, I don't think of that red person with the tail and the or the pointy, whatever. But I think of the hyper masculine, brutal man who will, you know, embrace me and give me this intense relationship. So she says that. At the same time, you know, in a complicated way, she's associating him with the landscape, the Montana landscape. She talks about the red devil and the red line of the sun, and they're out there together, but she also associates the landscape with herself. So somehow the devil ends up potentially being her own sexuality kind of run wild. I don't know. It does seem complicated. And then there's the fact that she's actually quite racist, and her representations of Native Americans, whom she calls the “Red Indian,” are disturbing. Um, so she empties out the landscape from those Native people, and then she puts the Red Devil in instead. So it's, it really feels very multi-layered, and as you say, originally, supposedly, she had that as her title, I Await the Devil's Coming.  

AMY: So you mentioned it briefly, but there’s this passage in the book (it’s a two-page, prayer-like incantation) where she beseeches the devil to save her from a whole list of everyday dumb crap. I’ll read just some of it:

“From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs “limbs”; from bedraggled white petticoats: kind Devil deliver me.” …. “From red note-paper; from a rhinestone-studded comb in my hair; from weddings: kind Devil deliver me.” …. “From pleasant old ladies who tell a great many uninteresting, obvious lies; from men with watch-chains draped across their middles; from some paintings of the old masters which I am unable to appreciate; from side-saddles: kind Devil deliver me.” Then after an exhausting list of these things she hates, she concludes “But, kind Devil, only bring me Happiness and I will more than willingly be annoyed by all these things.”

So what's her beef here? What does this all signify in terms of the bigger picture? What's she looking for?

CATHRYN:  Well, I mean, she was in a really boring situation. Uh, I mean, the reputation now, maybe, is that Butte was this wild,  raucous place, and in fact, at the time, it was. It had more millionaires due to the copper mines than any place in the country, and it had all of these immigrants and people from everywhere, and, and she has some nice chapters in her text describing scenes on the streets of Butte, but she was very middle class, so she was observing some of that, but not participating. And there wasn't much for her to do. And as that passage that you read suggests, she was in a very stuffy, conventional society. And in some ways at the time among the middle class, Butte was more conventional than Eastern societies because there was this kind of defensiveness that we're not going to be these rough Westerners. We're going to be proper. It's very funny, the passage you read, with all those details about this really oppressive conventionality, and she had nothing to do. She was super smart. She graduated from high school, which  wasn't uncommon, but nor was it standard. She had anticipated continuing her education elsewhere, but there wasn't any money for it. So she was stuck at home. She had several brothers and sisters, a stepfather she didn't like, her mother that she said she had nothing in common with. And the house is really very small. Um, when I visited it, as I recall, it's a duplex  and you can imagine these six people crammed in there. And I was thinking when she wanted to write, where would she go? There wasn't a Starbucks. She couldn't hang out at the bar. Um, maybe she  could go out into that wasteland around Butte and settle down with her pen, but she had very little privacy, and again, very little to do. 

AMY: I love that word “wasteland,” because when she does go outside and she describes it for the reader, it's just this utter stillness. And she describes the beauty and she's kind of taken with  the landscape but yeah, you just get this almost apocalyptic boredom, like you said, um, that's a great way of describing it. 

CATHRYN: I mean, this land had been mined, and then the mines had moved on, so  it was blighted. It wasn't just that it was this open undeveloped landscape. It was ruined, really.  But somehow she goes out and makes it her own, and she identifies with that, um, throughout. And then she does find these, you know, moments of beauty, especially in the sky, or in small details, like a flower. But overall, you know, she describes these mine shafts, and dark, drippy, poisonous puddles,  and all sorts of things. This wasn't like Glacier National Park. This barren nothingness of Butte has turned her in on herself. So because there's no outer stimulation or because it's so barren and desolate, then she needs to go interior, which in a way contradicts other sections of the book where she describes the streets of Butte, which are very lively and heterogeneous. And, and there's a lot going on there, but she does write about it in that way. And of course,  many of her reviewers made that conclusion too. Like this book could only come out of Butte, but it's interesting to me that at the same time, she manages to present Butte as just a very small and average and typical town that could be anywhere. So even though at the time, Butte was really distinct culturally and historically, she can make it sound more like it's middle town Indiana or anywhere in the country. So it's kind of interesting the way it goes back and forth between being very regional and just provincial.

AMY: Right, right.

KIM: Okay. So her affinity for the devil reminds me of another book we’ve covered on this podcast, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes: or The Loving Huntsman. The “loving huntsman” in that book is also Satan, and he’s a savior heartthrob kind of figure. Likewise, MacLane describes the devil as a sexy soul mate, “a man with whom to fall completely, madly in love.” She has a very sensual longing for the devil, but at the same time, there are clear indications in the book that she was attracted to women. What do we know about this, Cathryn?

CATHRYN: You know, she mentions it quite a lot. Her second book, I, Mary MacLane, which was published in 1917 after she came back to Montana, no longer quite so healthy and spent the next seven years living in that same house. And that book she says things like, “I have lightly kissed and been kissed by lesbian lips.” So she's not hinting; she's pretty open about it. And it seems like she did live with this woman, this older writer in Boston for some years. Maria Louise Pool, who in her day was famous as a regionalist writer of New England, so there are these sort of indications of these different relationships, um, that didn't really, that wasn't really what people seem to be reacting against, right? It was more the egotism. and these claims to genius and the self-absorption; they didn't really seem to mind these references. 

AMY: I know, I think as a modern reader looking back at this time period, we always think like, oh, they must have been completely shocked  by the same sex attraction, but it was kind of more accepted.

CATHRYN: Uh, yeah, she was at this transition period, I think, between this idea of, you know, these passionate friendships between women and something else. And Lillian Faderman, in her history, has written about MacLane in that context. Um, and you know, she likes her English teacher. I think that felt pretty tame maybe just to have this crush on your English teacher who now has left and she's in Boston. And apparently when MacLane went out to visit her, she wasn't very warmly received since she did make her kind of notorious, this “Fanny” about whom I've never been able to find very much. 

AMY: Yeah, let's, let's get into a little more biographical info about her. So she was born in 1881 in Winnipeg, Canada before ending up in Butte. What else do we know, Catherine, about her upbringing and family life? You said she didn’t get along with her mom?

CATHRYN: I don't know if she didn't get along with her. She just felt she didn't have much in common. I think it was more the stepfather that she had issues with. But, they were in Canada. They left. There was some, um, Native uprising the Reiss Rebellion in Winnipeg, that made it, um, untenable for them. Then they were in Fergus Falls, Minnesota for some time. And I think by the age of ten, she was in Butte. And around then her father died and he was this figure. It interests me that she doesn't really bother trying to mythologize her father. He was called “Flatboat MacLane,” and he freighted, supposedly materials all the way from Fargo, North Dakota up to the Arctic (I'm not sure exactly how) and he was a gambler and had all these big ambitions, so he seems a sort of romantic figure, but she completely doesn't want to have anything to do with him, and he died, but she doesn't want to mythologize him as part of her. She felt no connection or she claims with her brothers and sisters. She does say something like, “Do you think it would affect me in the slightest if they all died?” But instead she creates these other genealogies for herself, you know, with Marie Bashkirtseff, um, Napoleon. She claims that what she is is Highland Scotch and makes a kind of romantic portrait out of that, but she claims the rest of her family, they're not Scotch, only she is. Um, so she makes these different connections, but none of them have much to do with the immediate people around her, except when she goes out into the streets of Butte. But she claims she has these connections with these people, immigrant working women like this old Cornish woman and she get along, and there's another woman and they get along and she has a feeling of connection with this African American woman or so she imagines. And so she creates these links with people of a different class status than she is or her family.

AMY: She likes the idea of being an “other.” We get the sense that her family bonds are a bit tense from one diary entry where she rages about the toothbrushes lined up in the bathroom: “In this house where I drag out my accursed, devilishly weary existence, upstairs in the bathroom on the little ledge at the top of the wainscoting there are six tooth-brushes.” She describes them all and says which belongs to which family member. Then she says, “The sight of these tooth-brushes day after day, week after week, and always, is one of the most crushingly maddening circumstances in my fool’s life…. Never does the pitiable barren contemptible damnable narrow Nothingness of my life in this house come upon me with so intense a force as when my eyes happen upon those six toothbrushes…. I am not undergoing an Inquisition, nor am I a convict in solitary confinement. But I live in a house with people who affect me mostly through their tooth-brushes — and those I should like, above all things, to gather up and pitch out the bath-room window — and oh, damn them, damn them!”

KIM: Oh my God. I mean, on the one hand, I like totally get it. And on the other hand,  it must have been hell to live with her.

AMY: Totally!

KIM: I wonder what her family thought? Oh my god.

AMY: I read that section to my 12-year-old son. He was like off to the side playing with Legos or something while I was reading it, and he just kind of stopped and looked up at me  and said, “I think she sounds like she needs some therapy.” Yeah. How much of this Catherine is performative? 

CATHRYN: Yeah, I mean, we don't know, do we?

KIM: It seems very real, that part.  I mean, it's the little things that can really annoy you, right? 

AMY: Everybody has their thing that sets them off. Yeah. For her, it’s the toothbrushes.

CATHRYN: She also says elsewhere that she really enjoys washing the bathroom — cleaning the bathroom, and scrubbing the floor. It's quite good for her woman's body, and it's a good time to contemplate those different issues.

AMY: I can see girls all over the country reading this, living in big families and small houses, and being like, “damn straight!” You know? Like, I can feel moments like that resonating with young girls. Women everywhere, really.

CATHRYN: I mean, by the time she was writing it, she was 19, so  part of her issue was that she wasn't so young, so she'd outgrown…

AMY: … She wanted out. Yeah.

CATHRYN: And she didn't have much to do. As she says, her mother was pretty into the housekeeping. Um, she didn't need to do that. Um, so she describes all these little domestic tasks she does, but they're all about herself. She describes getting a steak and getting asparagus or cooking an egg. But she doesn't seem to be, you know, cooking for other people. So none of her work seems necessary.

AMY: Given how shocking, sexy and rebellious the book seems, I think it’s hilarious that she initially sent it to a publisher of Evangelical literature. 

CATHRYN: Yeah, that's hard to figure out. It's hard, especially because again, I mean, this was her manuscript. It wasn't just a printout. She was sending her manuscript to someplace that you presumably would just throw it away, but they passed it along to the ideal publisher as it turns out, this Herbert S. Stone and Company who, not so long ago had published Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Which is fiction, a novel, but also about a woman who rebels and doesn't fit into her society. So   I'm sure that was what encouraged them to take her book. Because the reader of her manuscript,  Lucy Monroe (sister of Harriet Monroe, the poet), she had been the reader that recommended Stone publish The Awakening, and she was also MacLane's reader. So I think that's the link.

AMY: Got it.

KIM: So after imploring the devil to come save her, it turns out that Mary rescued herself. The book’s immense success gave her the money to move away from Butte. Where did she go from there, Cathryn?

CATHRYN: She first, um, I think she took a little trip in Chicago, but then she had this publicity tour in the East and Boston and New York. They thought about sending her to Europe, but that didn't happen. Um, and so she, um, you know, had these sort of publicity events and did end up settling in Boston for some years and from there shifted to New York where she lived for a number of additional years doing some freelance work and still trying to capitalize on that name. And originally she had a lot of money. and was doing very well, but she spent it. She spent it, and supposedly she gambled and she lived well, and she quickly became broke and spent a lot of time imploring not the devil, but her publishers to pay back some of the money they still owed her from the book, like a thousand dollars. Um, so she was away in the East Coast for about seven years until finally she got scarlet fever and I believe it was her hated stepfather who came out to New York to take her back to Butte, which is where she stayed for quite a few more years. And now, whereas that first book is all about how healthy she is and so sensual and so vital, the second book is more, you know, now I'm broken in health and my hair is no longer curly. And she figures herself as a kind of a nun in the same household. But she did get that third book published while she was there, that kind of sequel that no one pays any attention to except me. 

AMY: Well, yeah, because you're rooting for the protagonist of the first book to get out. So that's kind of sad almost. She did try her hand at screenwriting too, right?

CATHRYN: Right. And she got out. I mean, she was back in Butte for some years and then got out again. And then she was in Chicago, which is where she lived for the remainder of her life. And she had published an article called “Men Who Have Made Love to Me.” And it was about being courted by these different inappropriate like, I can't remember the names, the Callow Youth was one, and I think the Successful Businessman was another. So there was this movie that she wrote and starred in, a silent film based on that article, supposedly, also called Men Who've Made Love to Me, and  it sort of had some good publicity, but that's really been lost. There are no extant reels of that film, so we don't know so much about it. And originally, they thought they'd have a few films, but it was just that one. And then things got kind of rough for her financially. 

KIM: That would be cool to see that movie though. That sounds interesting.

AMY: I know. It's so sad how many of those old films are just gone.  Um, okay, and then so speaking of sad, she died from tuberculosis in Chicago at the age of 48. Her authorial voice in this particular book is so  unforgettable. Um, Catherine, why do you think she's fallen through the cracks in terms of being more widely remembered today? 

CATHRYN: Well first, I don’t think it's established that it was tuberculosis. 

AMY: Oh, okay.

CATHRYN: It's hard to figure out what exactly happened. Um, she died either maybe of some cancer, if not TB, or if, you know, there's some hints of suicide, but, it's not clear. 

KIM: Okay. 

CATHRYN: I don't know…. I mean, I was at a conference and I mentioned to a graduate student working on MacLane that I was going to be on this podcast, The Lost Ladies of Lit. And her first response was, “She's not lost.” 

AMY: All of you, academic types! You guys know everybody, but we lay-people. We're like, “Who?!”

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

CATHRYN: It's true. It's true. Because like yesterday, I was going to make a case like she's not lost, and so I was doing some research and actually  there isn't so much scholarship about her.  It's periodic. Like she keeps getting rediscovered. And originally in the 70s and 80s, it was more in the context of Montana. Like one of the earlier profiles of her was in Montana

Magazine of Western History. Um, so that was the first context. And then more in the last ten years, it's definitely been about the sexuality. And you see her on these websites about bisexual writers and figures. And she's also inspired these creative people to write novels based on her life or screenplays. For a while there was someone in Australia and if you looked up Mary MacLane, everything was happening in Australia with some play or novel, I'm not sure. You know, she wouldn't fit so easily into an American literature classroom because of genre. Although she could, I mean… in like American autobiography or life narrative, but you know, who gets remembered, who gets forgotten. Well, that's what you do, right?    Every time I teach her or introduce her, everybody loves her. And I also meet people who have stories similar to my story, which is being in the stacks in the library and pulling out this red volume and wondering “What is this?” and seeing her picture and having those opening lines, you know, “I of womanhood of 19 years age, whatever, we'll now begin to make a story.”

So it's very compelling, so I'm not sure why she wouldn't be known to the general public, except  there's so many books that aren't known, 

AMY: You mentioned earlier that she had products named after her. What, what were some of those things?

CATHRYN: Yeah, there was like, supposedly, the Butte drugstore had the devilish, up to date drink, the Mary MacLane Highball with or without ice cream. Supposedly the Butte baseball team was called the Mary MacLanes.  Um, there were some things that she refers to and kind of angrily like, she refers to, like, a paper-cutting knife would be named after her and there's nothing she could do about it, that she was going to be commercialized. So she did enter the culture in that way.  And later she got criticized for not being Mary MacLane-esque. You mentioned performativity, and later she was criticized for not being enough of a “Mary MacLane,” and falling short of that image. 

AMY: It’s like when you meet Will Ferrell and you want him to be “Will Ferrell,” you know?  When you meet Mary MacLane, you want her to be like this angsty 19-year-old.  Um, my one regret from this episode is that we don't have time, there are so many passages in this book that I highlighted that were so memorable, be they serious or profound or comic. It was really maddening for me to not be able to incorporate everything we wanted to in this episode, but I'm gonna circle back next week in a bonus episode with some more of my favorite passages from the book. And I also am going to talk a little bit more about her idol that we spoke of, Marie Bashkirtseff.  I will say now that you say that Marie's book is, like, ginormous, I'm gonna have to skim it. Um, but while we have you, Cathryn, is there any other passage from MacLane’s book that you would like to share with us that you particularly love?

CATHRYN: Yeah, we can end with the passage with which she ends her book. And listening to you and reading the passages that you chose, I'd forgotten how funny she is. I mean, it's really pretty hilarious, but also the way it kind of alternates with this poignancy and this urgency. so maybe that contributed to her appeal too. So I will read this last paragraph.  And this is also where she's. reminding us that she's very deliberately writing this book \ for reasons. So she writes:

None of them, nor anyone, can know the feeling made of relief and pain and despair that comes over me at the thought of sending all this to the wise, wide world. It is bits of my wooden heart broken off and given away. It is strings of amber beads taken from the fair neck of my soul. It is shining little gold coins from out of my mind’s leather purse. It is my little old life tragedy. It means everything to me. Do you see? — it means everything to me. It will amuse you. It will arouse your interest. It will stir your curiosity. Some sorts of persons will find it ridiculous. It will puzzle you. But am I to suppose that it will also awaken compassion in cool, indifferent hearts? And will the sand and barrenness look so unspeakably gray and dreary to coldly critical eyes as to mine? And shall my bitter little story fall easily and comfortably upon undisturbed ears, and linger for an hour, and be forgotten?  Will the wise, wide world itself give me, in my outstretched hand, a stone. 

AMY: Love her. How genuine she is.

KIM: The imagery is so great too, I mean, the wooden heart and the strings of amber beads is beautiful. Listeners, let’s not forget her! Go read this book and marvel at it! And thank you, Cathryn, for spending some time with us today to help us better understand it.

CATHRYN: Well thank you. It was really enjoyable.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you are a Patreon subscriber, I will meet you back next week with more  about Mary MacLane and her teenage idol, the artist Marie Bashkirtseff.  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.

201. Ann Schlee — Rhine Journey with Sam Johnson-Schlee and Lucy Scholes

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off the work of forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, joined by my cohost, Amy Helmes. 

AMY HELMES: The novel we're discussing today, Rhine Journey by Ann Schlee, hadn't originally been on our radar. But when McNally Editions sent us a copy earlier this year (they are reissuing it this month) I found myself unable to put it down. It's giving me A Room With a View, only Germany.

KIM: Yeah, and longtime listeners of this podcast will know that anything that draws a comparison to E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, one of our favorite books and films, is an instant winner in our eyes. Rhine Journey is a work of historical fiction set in 1851, but it was actually written in 1980 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize the following year.

AMY: Honestly, you could have told me this book was written in the mid-19th century, and I wouldn't have blinked. It feels so completely and wonderfully of that era.

KIM: Absolutely. And in the foreword to McNally Edition's republication of this novel, author Lauren Groff admits that she did a double take upon learning the publication date. She writes, “Rhine Journey is graceful, economical, and emotionally acute, but to me, the most astonishing aspect of this novel is the precision with which Schlee replicates the customs, language and atmosphere of 1851.” Yeah, that's absolutely true.

AMY: And we would have loved to have been able to ask Ann Schlee herself how she worked this literary magic, but sadly she passed away last November at the age of 89. Her grandson, author Sam Johnson Schlee, has graciously agreed to join us today to talk about Ann's life and work, and he's joined by a favorite guest of this show, Lucy Scholes. Ready to kick off this “journey,” Kim? 

KIM: Yeah, my bags — or should I say steamer trunks — are packed. Let's go!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Today's first guest, Sam Johnson Schlee, is an academic at London South Bank University and a writer of memoir and literary nonfiction about the politics and culture of everyday life. He is the author of the 2022 book Living Rooms, which examines how we choose to live in and furnish our homes, as well as the connection between place and the personal. Sam's latest book, Hot House, will be published by Faber and explores the history of central heating in homes. Sam, welcome!

SAM JOHNSON SCHLEE: Thank you very much. Yeah, really nice to meet you, and it's very exciting to come on and speak about this book because obviously I care about it a great deal.

KIM: Also joining us today in conversation is McNally Editions editor and literary critic Lucy Scholes, who has joined us on this show for prior conversations about Rosamond Lehmann, Kay Dick and both Elizabeth Taylors. In addition to reflecting on titles once shortlisted for the Booker Prize in her series, “The Booker Revisited,” she's also the editor behind a recently published collection of short stories from mid century women writers called A Different Sound. Lucy, welcome back to the show. We always love having you on.

LUCY SCHOLES: It's always such a pleasure to be here, though I fear your listeners are going to get sick of me at this rate.

KIM: No way. No way. It's always our pleasure.

AMY: Okay. So Sam, you were very close to your grandmother and she features in your first book, Living Rooms, because you actually lived with her and your grandfather (the landscape painter Nick Schlee) for part of your childhood. Did you have any awareness of Ann as a writer as a kid? 

SAM: Very much so. I mean, something that was always very important to me from a very small age was her writing shed, which is what we called it. For a while it was a shed, and then it moved into the house, and it had a very particular smell. In this wooden house, everything smelled slightly of cedar. And it was full of books and pictures of her children, but it was such an incredible place to go and find her. It was often my job to go and find her when it was time to have a drink at the end of the day. Sometimes she would be asleep, with her head in her notebook, and it felt like this kind of incredibly special world of writing and of thinking. And I'm really grateful that I had that experience of being able to be in that world with her. Sitting on the window seat in there asking her questions, sometimes about literature or sometimes about what was going on in my life, was always really important to me. So yeah, my brother and I were very lucky to grow up in the household with her, as well as my grandfather. He's still going. We give him a bit more of a hard time.

KIM: Aw. What was your first experience reading Rhine Journey?

SAM: I actually spent most of my life not reading my grandmother's books. It always made me feel, I think, a bit embarrassed, a bit anxious. I tried to read them lots of times and never quite brought myself to do it. Um, in the last sort of 10 years of her life, her health fluctuated quite a lot, and I took myself aside and said, “You've really got to read one of your grandmother's books,” because she had such a role in shaping my life, my intellectual world. So I read Rhine Journey in an afternoon, I think in the middle of lockdown or one of our lockdowns. And I very quickly forgot that it was written by my grandmother, which I think was always what I was nervous about. It was this perfect, crystalline novel, you know? It's just an unbelievable piece of literature. 

KIM: Yeah, I completely agree. And it's not surprising to me that you would say that you were just sucked into it, because it takes you into the world so quickly. We'll talk about it more as we get into the discussion of the novel, but yeah, that didn't surprise me that you said that. So let's talk a little bit about her early life. Ann Schlee was born Ann Cumming in Connecticut in 1934. Her mother was American and father was a major general with the British military. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about the early part of her life and how that might have shaped her as a writer?

SAM: Yeah, I mean, she's very much a child of empire, in a way that I probably don't want to find out too much about. But I mean, her father, Duncan, who I never met, but he was, I think, a very influential person in her life. And she was born, as you say, in Connecticut, but she spent quite a lot of time in her youth traveling with him. So she lived in the Sudan for a while, and in Egypt. There's a fantastic picture of her with an anteater. Somebody they visited had a pet anteater. She spent a lot of time, I think, being out of place and in different places, and some of her later books actually deal with that kind of legacy of empire. But Rhine Journey… 

I don't want to kind of do a literary analysis of my grandmother, but I think it has this sense of solitariness or being kind of in tense or close relationships with family, and perhaps it comes something from that childhood and that upbringing. I think something about her childhood and that feeling out of place made her a real watcher, a real observer of people. And she told stories like she writes as well, always with these acute — sometimes too acute — ability to kind of pin someone down so you know exactly who they were. 

AMY: That makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking, too, about the book and how other people could have written that story and it probably would have been 

four times as long. But she just has the ability to so succinctly nail down the characters, not needing to say too much more. You know, it's actually not

a very long book, all told. So we know also, right, that she met her husband while they were both at Oxford.

SAM: Yes. Um, I think he pretended he'd forgotten a pencil and used that as an excuse to get a conversation going with her. Although after Oxford, they went to America and he asked her to marry him. Uh, he sort of followed her out there. She was in New York with a friend teaching somewhere and um, she said “maybe,” and then went away on a trip that he says was three months long and she says was three weeks long. So she did make him, um, struggle.

AMY: Okay, so then the couple returned to England in 1957, where they eventually settled with their four children in a house in Wandsworth, which is in South London, I guess, from what I looked up. Is this the same house that you lived in?

SAM: No, that's where my mum grew up. It's a house on Wimbledon Park Road that later was used as the set for a television show about people losing weight; I can't remember what it was. It was very peculiar for everyone. Um, no, I never went there. I knew them in a house called Galvey, which was a wooden house outside of London. It's quite a remarkable place. Um, my understanding of Wimbledon Park Road was that it was similarly ramshackle. Apparently, a journalist asked her when she was shortlisted for the Booker what the prize money would go to, and she said that she would use it to mend the roof, which I don't think ever happened. So that's the tragedy of her not winning the Booker Prize.

AMY: Could never do those home renovations.

SAM: Yeah.

AMY: Okay, so Rhine Journey was the first novel that Ann wrote for adults, But Lucy, she was doing some writing prior to this. Can you tell us about it?

LUCY: Yeah, I don't know an awful lot about it, I have to say, but she did write five children's novels, which The Vandal won the 1980 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. So that was the year before Rhine Journey. Um, I haven't read any of them. I don't think they're in print at the moment, and children's books always sort of fall off the radar slightly if you don't read them when you're at the right age, I think. But I'm interested to know, Sam, did you read these when you were growing up? Were you at all aware of them? Or was it just the adult novels you stayed away from?

SAM: I'm sure I made some attempts to read them. I remember a library copy of one called Ask Me No Questions in our school library, and, um, there were copies around the house, but we were never sort of encouraged to read them, particularly. And I know my mum and her siblings have funny relationships with them because they all sort of find themselves as children in the children's books. 

LUCY: Oh, that's such a strange thing! I think when I first got in touch with her to talk about republishing Rhine Journey, she did tell me that she used to get up very early in the mornings to write these books before she got the kids ready. And obviously her life was very busy with four children and she was always doing bits of teaching and things. So she said she got up very early to write, um, first thing in the morning while everyone was still asleep, which I thought was probably a rather wonderful calm moment of the day, I imagine. 

KIM: So, let's start talking about Rhine Journey, which was published in 1980, and she dedicates the book to “my companions on the Rhine in the summer of 1977.” Sam, do we know anything about this trip?

SAM: Yeah, um, it was my great-grandfather, Duncan Cumming, um, my grandfather, Nick Schlee, and my grandmother, Ann. And on the trip, my grandmother, as she did, spent a lot of time watching the other families on the river cruise that they were taking. And I think there was a particular family that she watched. It was definitely a trip with lots of kind of inspiration and things to observe.

AMY: So the events of this novel are set in the Rhineland in the summer of 1851. Lucy, why don't you tell us a little bit about the historical backdrop and how it relates to the kind of tense psychological plot of the book?

LUCY: Yeah, so I think what she really does here is a sort of stroke of storytelling genius, really, and it's quite a feat of narrative misdirection, because she opens the novel with this very brief historical note that looks to just be setting up this kind of broader context of the era and the setting. And then she says, but none of my characters are really interested in this. They're all too busy thinking about themselves. And so you sort of also dismiss it, too. And you're immediately drawn into their lives, into the main character's kind of interiority. We have Charlotte, who is a middle-aged spinster traveling with her brother and his family. They're in Germany, it's about three years after, um, Europe has been sort of convulsed by workers’ revolutions. And in Germany these were very harshly suppressed, and this is also the period where Karl Marx himself has fled Cologne to London. And he's sort of suspected of fomenting revolutionary plots, and people are getting very worried about revolutionaries sneaking across borders. So there's a sort of general sense of that going on in the background. but as far as we're aware to begin with, the characters themselves are not massively interested in this. 

KIM: So, the book actually opens with the Morrison family. They're about to disembark from the boat that's brought them into the town of Koblenz in Prussia. And Charlotte is being chastised by her brother because she's not keeping her eyes on the luggage. And it's really wonderful, this first chapter, because all of a sudden you're instantly grounded in this family dynamic, which is really interesting. 

AMY: Yeah, I mean, like I said earlier, within a sentence or two, you're suddenly like, “Oh, I have this guy's number already.” Her older brother, Charles, is kind of a bloviator, and you sense in Charlotte that she's kind of speaking through gritted teeth with him.

KIM: Yeah, he's paying for the trip, and so it's almost like the traveling companions we've read about in other novels of that period where she kind of has to do work almost, but she's also a family member. So that dynamic is definitely there, and it's a bit awkward and causes tension immediately.

AMY: I mean, even her brother's wife says, “Oh, there you are,” to Charlotte, and you're suddenly like, “Oh, Charlotte's like their servant.”

KIM: Exactly. Yeah. 

AMY: “Where have you been? I need you for something.”

KIM: Yeah. We have the literal baggage; she's in charge of it. And she's also like extra “baggage” for the family. It's like, how is she fitting into this trip? 

LUCY: But we also learn quite quickly that she is at this sort of a very important moment in her own life, right? That she has been, not in service, she wasn't a servant, but she was a housekeeper for somebody, an older gentleman, who's died and left her some money. And now she has to make a decision about what she's going to do in the future. And that is hugely important because in a weird way, this is her brother and his wife almost sort of auditioning her to come and live in the house with them And she's not a 20th century heroine. She is a 19th century woman who feels the draw of society's expectations. And so this is really hard for her to kind of wrestle with. 

SAM: I was reading it again today, and I think in one sense, it's very much a period piece. In another sense, I think the things that happen in the book foreshadow some of the transformations of gender in the 20th century. In that sense, it feels like a modernist book. Something that works so well about the book and gives it such significance and weight that it carries very lightly, if that makes sense — there are these huge moments of almost dreamlike imagery that really gives it the sense of modernism. Like, I'm thinking particularly, and it's not giving away too much, it's quite early in the book, the scene of her remembering going into a garden and kissing a peony. It's this breathtaking, almost surreal juxtaposition. I know that my grandmother was a great fan of modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, who play with interiority and the dreamlike and things in a similar way. And I think that increases throughout the book, building this incredible kind of psychological tension. 

KIM: Absolutely. Let's give our listeners an idea of what the book sounds like. It's at the beginning, while the boat's docking, Charlotte notices something that unmoors her personally. Sam, do you want to read that?

SAM: She was left on a deck, too congested with the wide dark skirts of the lady passengers for her to press on to the pile of luggage forward of the mast. But, optimistic by nature, trained in the belief that people left in charge of things were infallible, she had no fears at all that the strong young men surrounding the luggage with ropes would fail to lower it over the side, where subsequently they would find it. 

   A space occurred near her at the rail. She fitted herself into it, placed her gloved hands side by side on the polished wood of the rail, and stared down at the scene below. 

   It was at that moment — when the throb and vibration of the engine ceased, the brass bell jangled their arrival, and the steamer made its shuddering contact with the land — that Charlotte felt a sudden intense pain in what she had been taught to believe was her heart. 

   The crowd on the shore stared upwards at the passengers. At one moment their faces were no more than pale shapes among the white scarves of the peasant women and a cluster of spiked brass helmets flashing in the last of the day's sun; at the next, eyes, mouths became distinct, upturned, searching. Then pain brought tears to the eyes so that the whole scene wavered and started on a course of disintegration, as if invisible fumes of some rising conflagration had drifted between herself and the shore. All this because near the space cleared for the gangplank, she had seen, for the first time in twenty years, the face of a man called Desmond Fermer.

AMY: Well done. Thank you. Let's talk about that passage a little bit, because first of all, she appeals to every sense, you know? The glittering 

brass helmets of the soldiers; the clank of the bell; the hubbub of the crowd… you know, you feel it all, you feel like you're there. And also that line at the beginning, “She was trained in the belief that people left in charge of things were infallible.” That line is so pivotal for what's happening between her and her brother. 

KIM: Mm-hmm.

SAM: The other thing I really noticed reading that is how long the sentences are. I think they become shorter and shorter throughout the book to a point of some really spikey bits of writing in the final chapter of the book. And I think, again, there's this transformation of the character from this very Victorian voice into something more edgy by the end.

AMY: Oh, that's fascinating. Okay, so Charlotte's standing on the edge of the boat. She has this moment, that kind of takes her breath away because she sees in the crowd on the shore this complete stranger who bears a vague resemblance to someone from her youth. But in reality, he is a man called Edward Newman, whose own family of four the Morrison family will continue to cross paths with during the course of their travels. 

KIM: Yeah. And she just continues to get distracted by him to the point of I think you would start to say obsession. She's privately freaking out, trying to hold it all together for appearance's sake. That's what is expected of her, right? She's also expected at the same time to keep this guardian-like eye on her 17 year old niece. Sam, could you talk a little bit more about Ellie, her niece, and how she contributes to Charlotte's emotional spiral?

SAM: Yeah, she's an interesting figure, isn't she? I think Charlotte has this… envy is not quite the right word, but there's this feeling of great anxiety in their relationship, which is at once loving and really difficult. Early in the book, there's this really brilliant scene, I think, with Ellie, who wants to wear her hair up to go to dinner. And it does this fantastic job of animating something about the repression of Victorian sexuality. And really, Ellie doesn't have a big role in the book, but her presence kind of brackets the whole book in a way that I think is very beautiful at the end.

LUCY: They are very close in many ways, you know — they're literally sharing a hotel room, that's the kind of way it's set up. But also, Ellie, obviously, is a reminder to her of what she hasn't lived, a life she hasn't lived, and that's complicated.

KIM: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

AMY: As we talked about before, there's really no stray sentence. Everything written has a purpose and it feels like it cinches you, as the reader, closer and closer to Charlotte and her journey of self-discovery. And along the way, there are a lot of recurring motifs that pop up too. So we often see Charlotte looking at herself in the mirror… locks and keys are referenced a lot and the phrase “you aren't yourself” is repeated several times. “It seems like you aren't yourself today,” you know? 

LUCY: Isn't that such a fascinating idea? She's constantly being told she's not herself. And this is a book in which she's struggling to work out who she even is, right? That's the point. She doesn't know who she is, she's not trusting of herself, and she's being told by other people what she should and shouldn't do. That is what her life has been up to this point. She has still these constraints on her and it's so cleverly done, I think, with these moments of, you know, like you said, Sam, these very modern contemporary-feel kind of moments of interiority, but then she has to snap back into being this 19th century woman. Ann sort of walks this really taut and spare tightrope constantly. It's brilliant.

KIM: Yeah.

SAM: I think it would be so easy to make a wrong reading of this text and say that Charlotte is on the edge of some kind of breakdown, that there's something kind of awry, because there is this slippage between dream and reality and between fantasy and real life. But I don't think Charlotte's ever particularly frightened by that thing that's happening to her, these things happening to her. It's all just presented as part of the way that she's thinking through this knotty problem, I think.

AMY: I love the way she ties in the sightseeing to the personal journey. In the first chapter, we have this sense that something's going to break wide open, and you actually see a drawbridge. Everybody standing by is watching the drawbridge lift up. Later there's the church, and she notices that construction has stopped on a portion of it, and it's almost like construction has stopped on Charlotte. And she's stuck in her life. And then, you know, some important things happen inside the church later on. But Sam, your own book, Living Room, sort of talks a lot about place and the importance of it, and there's some moments in the book, too, where Charlotte's kind of envisioning what her future could look like, and it just made me think of your book a little bit.

SAM: Yeah. I quote part of Rhine Journey in my book, which is a piece at the end where she talks about inhabiting this cottage. Can I read it actually? Can I find the lines?

AMY: Absolutely, I would love that.

SAM: So this is from literally the last couple of pages, but I don't think it is a spoiler. Um, “She pictured to herself those whitened cottage rooms where she might quietly extend herself, and, moving from room to room, meet and recognize herself in forms unaltered by the pressures of others upon her.”

I mean, it's such a beautiful, I think, expression of what it can be to dwell somewhere and what it can mean to find a place where you can, um, where she puts it perfectly, extend yourself into it and meet yourself in it. And this is in contrast to what she's being encouraged, or you said maybe auditioned for living with her brother and sister in law, to have this space just kind of her own. It's about what it will do for her sense of self to be able to occupy space on her own terms. And you know, if you think about this moment in the 19th century, and again, this is something that I've written about a bit, it's at the height of chintziness. So the idea of white walls is sharply in contrast to what the home of her family is likely to have been like. So there's a great sense of something far more interesting than just freedom. 

LUCY: It's a sort of psychic space as well, right, isn't it? It's a physical realm in which she can exist, but it's also a realm in which her psyche is allowed to rest. Her narrative train of thought is always being interrupted by someone coming into a room or someone asking her a question and that's not what she dreams of for this space, right?

SAM: It's in contrast to the other space that really compels her, when you mentioned the cathedral in Cologne, where she's been told that she's not allowed to go by her protestant brother. She feels that she's been tricked by this space and by the glamor of the space, and I think that's again, sharply in contrast with these white walls of this cottage, that maybe what she's searching for is not some kind of heightened feeling of the cathedral, but instead something much more still, where she can kind of rest, you said, I think, Lucy, which I think is perfect.

KIM: Yeah. Without the clutter of everyone's expectations, all their history, all their knowledge of her from the past, it's just her. This will not be the only time that I read this novel. I feel like there's so much more. I was so into the story and it, in some ways, it was a quote unquote “page turner” for me, you know? Because I wanted to find out what was happening. There is a lot of tension in it as well. So you want to find out what's going to happen and you're just enthralled by it, but I feel like I need to read it again and again to really dig into the psychology. There are so many layers. We did talk in our intro about how vivid and believable the book is as historical fiction, and it's a great strength and beauty in the book. Do either of you have any thoughts on why or how Ann was so good at nailing these details? I mean, 

it feels like it was written in the time that it's set.

LUCY: I'd love to know what her research process was for it. You read so much historical fiction that sometimes the research drowns out the story and people are so desperate to put details in, you know, that they found out, but this novel wears it so lightly. I don't suppose she ever told you about any of the research?

SAM: I asked her about it, after I read the book, but she didn't tell me very much. I think she probably did a lot, but she's quite self-effacing. I mean, she's incredibly well-read. She read so much fiction, and she had a life of teaching and reading behind her. So her uncle, Walter Houghton, was a professor of English literature in America. He wrote a book called The Victorian [Frame] of Mind that I think probably, until relatively recently, is the kind of tome that English students are still asked to occasionally kind of dig out and consult. (Because I know that my grandmother still got small royalties check from the book every year, which she was quite pleased that was still coming through.) She told me when I asked her about the book, this aspect of it, she said that he did not think that this was how Victorian people spoke or conducted themselves. And she said with great glee, I think it was about an email that Lucy had sent her, or maybe it was Lauren's introduction to the book, that when they talked about how real that Victorian setting felt, it made her feel a great sense of satisfaction. I think she would have liked to have been able to show that to her uncle.

LUCY: It's one of the things that all the reviews at the time picked up on. I mean, she got a lot of very good reviews for the novel, but so many of them picked up on the fact that period detail was beautifully and kind of brilliantly done. So, I hope that when she heard it recently, it was just reiterating something that people had already been telling her.

SAM: Definitely. 

KIM: right. 

SAM: I mean, she was so thrilled to know that the book was being republished. She died in November, but I think Lucy got in touch maybe about six months before then. So she knew it was happening. She saw the cover proofs. She'd really been involved in the whole process, but she was so excited that it was finding an audience again. And she couldn't believe it. As I said, she'd had a stroke about 10 years ago, and if you were not paying attention, you might think that she was sort of not always all there, but she really was. So she was very interested in what was happening and just completely thrilled. 

KIM: I'm so glad, Lucy, that you reached out to her and this all happened and she got to have this resurgence of, you know, knowing that it was going to be back in print and everything. Because I mean, it was nominated for a Booker Prize. The other nominees included Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwen, and Salman Rushdie. He won that year for Midnight's Children. So, can we infer that it was a commercial success at the time it came out, or no?

LUCY: I don't know the exact sales figures. But as I said, it got very good reviews at the time. There were quite a few of them. And I suspect that if it did sort of fall off the radar relatively quickly after that, it was not because of any other reason than I think it was maybe a very particular era of writing and a particular era when Rushdi, McEwen, you know, Ishiguro, like, there's a lot of up-and-coming, young, particularly male, writers who are really kind of appearing on the literary scene here in England. And I suspect that this didn't get the sort of fanfare that maybe they were getting. But clearly at the same time, you know, it was nominated for the Booker, and it was very, very, very worthy of its nomination as far as I'm concerned, and readers seem to enjoy it. Did she ever talk to you about what it was like to go to the award ceremony or what it felt like to her to be amongst the [other writers?] Because some of the names… I know Rushdie is kind of young at that point, but you know, Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing, these are big, big names at the time.

SAM: Yeah, I don't know. She was always quite shy of those kinds of events, but I think she was pleased that the book was received well by her peers. Jane Gardam wrote a really brilliant essay about Ann's writing and particularly Rhine Journey in Slightly Foxed, a while ago. And that, I know, was something that she really cherished, and I think she really, really wanted to be seen as a writer, you know, by her peers. Um, and I'm sure the Booker was a big thrill in that regard. By the way, if there are any screenwriters listening, I do think Rhine Journey would make the most terrific film or miniseries, I think.

AMY: Absolutely. 

SAM: I think though, um, I know that she was disappointed her last manuscript didn't get published — her last novel. And I think she had difficulty with the fact that her writing was viewed as kind of unfashionable. So I think that would have been the early 2000s was the last time she sent a book out. And the thing that she had back was that people loved it, but it was not something that could be published in that moment. I think actually now, if she was writing these books now, I think they would be being received very well. So I'm really pleased that Rhine Journey’s being republished. She was always publishing, always writing, always thinking. And when I went into her study just after she died, one of the favorite things that I saw was a box file that just said on the side of it “plots.” All of these unrealized stories and plots that haven't been found. I think there are lots of

short stories she published actually out there, but I haven't read any of them. My aunt said some of them are very weird. 

KIM: That just makes me want to read them even more!

LUCY: Yeah. Tell me more! I'm very interested. 

AMY: It's these family anecdotes that are so fantastic and why we're so glad you joined us. I mean, we learned things that we would never have known just trying to figure out on our own. You really brought her to life for us. It's been a wonderful discussion.

KIM: So, listeners, this month McNally Editions is reissuing Rhine Journey, and it's also being republished by Daunt Books in the UK. You have to put this on your summer reading list. And I already read Room with a View annually, so I'll probably be adding Rhine Journey to my annual reading list. I loved it that much. So thank you both.

LUCY: It's been my pleasure. It's been great to listen to Sam talking about Ann, and I'm looking forward to new readers discovering it and enjoying it as much as you've done. 

SAM: Thank you so much.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. If you're listening in real time, that is July of 2024, this marks our last new episode for the summer. Amy and I are embarking on some traveling with our families, but we're also going to be hard at work getting ready to bring you new episodes and many more “lost ladies” this fall.

AMY: If you've been considering subscribing to get access to extra episodes, you can do so either through Patreon or wherever you listen to us. Now would be a really great time because we've got half a year's worth of bonus episodes archived there that you can enjoy while we're away. And of course I'll be posting new ones in the coming weeks.

KIM: Thank you as always for listening. We hope all of you have a fun rest of the summer, and please follow us or subscribe to our newsletter to keep in touch. We love to hear from you.

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

199. Miles Franklin (My Brilliant Career)

AMY HELMES: Dear sirs, herewith a yarn which I have written entitled My Brilliant Career. I would take it very kindly if you would read it and state whether or not it is fit for publication. Nothing has been attempted, maybe a few pictures of Australian life with a little of that mythical commodity, love, thrown in for the benefit of young readers. (Always keeping in mind, should there be readers of any age). There will be no mistakes in geography, scenery, or climate, as I write from fact, not fancy. The heroine who tells the story is a study from life and illustrates the misery of being born out of one's sphere. Awaiting reply, faithfully yours, S. M. S. Miles Franklin. 

So, listeners, that's a letter written in 1894 by a budding young Australian writer. (If you couldn't tell by my incredible accent) 18 years old at the time and writing to the Australian publisher Angus and Robertson. 

KIM ASKEW: The letter's signature may initially conjure up the image of a man, but that's intentional, because like many famous women authors of her day, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin thought she'd have a better shot at getting published that way. 

AMY: Alas, the publishers immediately rejected her manuscript. (Womp, womp.) But, they would later readily admit that it was, quote, “a serious mistake.”

KIM: Big mistake. Huge.

AMY: Yes, thank you, Julia Roberts. The book, My Brilliant Career, was eventually published in 1901 by the Edinburgh publisher Blackwoods. The novel earned Franklin instant fame and became a beloved 

classic of Australian literature. 

KIM: It was adapted into a beautiful film in 1979, starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit. We're your hosts, Kim Askew and Amy Helmes. And Amy, I can't wait to talk more about the book, the film, and the woman behind the work.

AMY: Me too, this is going to be fun. So let's raid the stacks (and the film archives) and get started!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Before we dive into today's episode, Kim, we first have a fan of the show to thank for this. A while ago, a participant in our Lost Ladies of Lit Facebook Forum, Susan Dillon, mentioned that she loved the movie My Brilliant Career. I had never heard of it, let alone watched it. So months later I decided to queue it up on Netflix, and I think within maybe 10 minutes of the opening credits, I was frantically texting you, saying, "Oh my god, Kim, you have to watch this!"

KIM: Yeah, I can't believe I had never watched it before. I don't know how I, and we, let this one slip past our radar, but I'm glad it's fixed now.

AMY: I know, at least we've finally come to it. I had also texted my friend, Ruth, who is from Australia, and I said, "I just discovered Miles Franklin!" And she replied, "Congratulations, I'm so happy for you!" So it's one of those, um, “if you know, you know,” sort of things, I guess. This film, though, it's gorgeous. It feels a bit Merchant/Ivory, I would say, maybe because it's kind of from the same era of filmmaking. But it has the flair of the Australian bush, for sure. And it was directed by Gillian Armstrong, who also directed the Winona Ryder version of Little Women that came out in the mid-Nineties. She also directed films like Charlotte Grey and Oscar and Lucinda. Kim, do you want to first set up what the story is about? 

KIM: Yeah, sure. So, it tells the story of Sybylla Melvin. She's a real spitfire of a girl, and the character's played by Judy Davis. And it's set in this fictional locale called Possum Gully. She leads a grimy and toilsome existence on her family's dairy farm, and though she's dreaming of this bigger life, she's basically just another extra mouth to feed on the farm. So she eventually gets shipped off to live with her grandmother and single aunt on their ranch in Caddagat. (And that's not a bad thing — the grandmother's actually relatively wealthy, unlike Sybylla's immediate family.) And the hope there is that this wild child, Sybylla, can be tamed into a proper young lady. Naturally, Sybylla is considered something of a novelty when she arrives at Caddagat, and she attracts the attention of many men who are delighted by her precociousness. This includes an eligible bachelor named Harry Beecham. He's played by Sam Neill. Their relationship wavers between flirtatious and contentious (as the best ones do, right?) throughout the course of this film.

AMY: So yeah, let's start with Judy Davis, who is great casting. I mean, the hair ought to be its own complete character.

KIM: Helena Bottom Carter meshed with Anne of Green 

Gables, right? There's a little Anne of Green Gables about her where she speaks her mind and she has crazy hair and freckles.

AMY: Crazy hair, crazy freckles. She's got that kind of big giant Gibson girl hair, but it's all like falling out. It really showcases the wildness of her personality. 

KIM: Yes. And she has these high aspirations, but she comes from, you know, not the background that she aspires to be in, basically.

AMY: She's rough around the edges. And so when she gets to Caddagat, which is grandma's ranch, there is the obligatory makeover scene right off the bat. She laments the fact that she's so ugly, you know, she's like pitying herself. Like, “I'm just an ugly girl!” And Aunt Helen is like, “Not on my watch, girl!”

KIM: Love it!

AMY: And then they cue the makeover scene, and then suddenly she's a little more polished and put together for the rest of the film. Which gets us to Sam Neill, who is Harry Beachum. TIE ME KANGAROO DOWN, SPORT!!!!

KIM: Oh my god. Oh my god. 

AMY: Who knew he was so hot?

KIM: He's so cute. You know what? This reminds me of a bit… you might disagree, but I'm feeling like Richard Chamberlain and The Thorn Birds where you go back and you look at and you're like, “Oh, wow, that's why our moms loved him.” Yeah. 

AMY: He's attractive! Young Sam Neill reminds me a little bit of Matthew Goode, that British actor. Like, and was..

KIM: He's so cute!

AMY: He’s so cute! I only knew him older from Jurassic Park when he's like, running away from dinosaurs, but oh my god, I'm so sorry for not realizing how incredibly gorgeous you once were! Now let me worship at your feet and hope that Sybylla can snag you. Okay, so, before they meet up in the movie, Sybylla has no intentions of getting married, and she tells her grandmother about this, which does not make the grandmother too happy. She instead decides that she is going to have a career. So here's a bit from the movie: 

[plays clip]

All right, so she's eating an apple there casually while she's having this conversation with her grandmother. 

KIM: Apple….!

AMY: Yeah, the apple which, came from the apple orchard, which 

is where she will soon meet Harry Beecham. Hot Sam Neill. 

KIM: Ooh, I feel like maybe we did not talk about apples 

as symbolism, and the tree, and the Garden of Eden, and Eve. 

AMY: Look at you, English major! 

KIM: I’m like, connecting it. Oh, I know. Seriously. That's the whole thing. Because, talk about the meet-cute

AMY: Okay. Yeah, it's an adorable way that they meet in the film and actually a little bit racy, I think, because, um, her knickers wind up showing or her bloomers wind up showing a little bit when she climbs down out of the tree! He stumbles upon her picking apples, and it's a case of mistaken identity. Here's another clip. 

[plays clip]

Okay. So she storms off through the meadow after that. I'm going to put my foot in your face. 

KIM: Oh my gosh. It also takes me again back to Anne of Green Gables and Gilbert when they first meet. Didn't he like, pull her pigtails or hit her over the head with a slate or something? It's that same idea. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. People like to have that little set up and then, of course, Harry Beecham comes for a fancy dinner that night and…

KIM: …and it's like,”Uh-oh!”

AMY: He is like, “Oh shit,” you know, and she plays with him over dinner, 

make him feel stupid. 

KIM: Yeah, and she's not like the other ladies. 

AMY: Yeah, she's like trying to be more of a sophisticate, but you just 

can't take the girl off the dairy farm, right? There's another fancy dinner scene, and I love the line in the movie. She's sitting with all these adults, and somebody across the table says, “Oh, Furlong's just bought himself 

a fine young bull.” And Sybylla answers, “Oh, that will make some of the cows happy.” Completely inappropriate. And all the other adults at the table are just like, “Oh, my God, this girl!”

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: But she doesn't care!

KIM: They also do love that she speaks her mind, too, at the same

time. 

AMY: She's a breath of fresh air, for sure.

KIM: She's a breath of fresh air, yeah. Oh my gosh, speaking of…we were talking about sexual tension, the pillow fight scene!

AMY: The pillow fight! Oh my gosh. It starts off in the house, they run through the fields chasing each other with pillows…

KIM: And you're like, “How is this gonna end?”

AMY: I know! Well, it ends with them both lying in the grass,

completely panting, out of breath, staring at each other. All that was missing was the cigarette, basically.

KIM: Totally. Totally. Yep. 

AMY: So then we have a dorky character, a jackaroo named Frank Hawdon. He thinks, presumptuously, that he's going to be the one who marries Sybylla, because he's such a catch. 

KIM: A la Mr. Collins. 

AMY: A la Mr. Collins, a la Cecil, from A Room with a View. He's 

dorky, but she shows him who's boss on a number of occasions. And at one point, she pushes him into a sheep corral rather than accept his attentions. And here is a clip of her grandmother admonishing her:

[plays clip]

Grandma's not happy! But actually, we like the grandma, right?

KIM: We like the grandmother. Yeah, she wants the best for Sybylla. They just have different ideas of what that means. 

AMY: Yeah. You know, she's not nice to Frank Hawdon, but she's really not nice to Harry Beecham either, to be fair. 

KIM: She isn't.

AMY: He proposes to her in a scene that's not unlike Pride and Prejudice Mr. Darcy's original proposal to Elizabeth, where it's like, “Dude, you're gonna have to do better than that.” And in this case, Sybylla literally smacks Harry across the face with a stock whip. Feisty!

KIM: I like it. 

AMY: And I have that clip as well. Let me play it. 

[plays clip]

I love that he's like “bloody woman!!” But she's not having it. And I should also mention that Miles Franklin, the author of this tale, she really liked whips. She was happy that a whip was included in the original cover art of My Brilliant Career. And she owned a couple of whips that she would walk around with. So…

KIM: Ooh, why don't you have a seat on the couch? Let's talk about that. Yeah.

AMY: Some pillow fights, some S&M…

KIM: Yeah. But on the bright side, Harry's relationship with Sybylla, it does deepen following this proposal that goes sour, but then he actually loses his family fortune. And of course, our heroine doesn't give a crap about his money, but she does ask him for time. She strikes a deal with him where he'll give her two years before they wed. She wants to find herself. But in the interim, She has to go and be a governess for a brood of rowdy children living in some backwater locale. As the viewer, you're just wondering how she will make her way back from this pit of despair, basically, to a life she truly wants. So Amy, I know you ended up reading the novel after watching the movie. Are there differences from the movie?

AMY: I would say the novel is just so much richer. I mean, if you think Sybylla has big personality in the movie, just wait till you read the book. You get a sense of how absolutely funny she really is. The things she says, the larger-than-life personality. I think the film can only give a small taste of her sassy ways, in that sense. She's really slangy in the book. You know, filthy mouth. She's kind of “Eliza Doolittle meets Anne Shirley with a 

little bit of dirty Helen Cromwell thrown in for good measure,” if you

remember that episode, because her mouth is like a sewer. And I listened to the book actually, which was great because the narrator had an Australian accent. So, um, 

KIM: I love that. I want to listen to it.

AMY: Yeah, I think it's great to listen to just because hearing all the place names said in the Australian accent and the, you know, “dingoes and wallabies and snakes and drovers and duffers and jackaroos.” And then there's, um, every place name is, um, It's like Binbin and Bruggabong and Caddagat, you know? You just feel really transported there. I would recommend to someone who's completely unfamiliar with this title, watching the film first, because you will so fall in love with the film, and then go read the book. Because my one thing that I think the film does better, (and maybe I'm still hung up on hot Sam Neill) but Harry Beecham in the book is not quite as much of a catch to me as Sam Neill is. He's got much more of a temper and is much more kind of taciturn and surly in the book, which in some ways is good because Sybylla needs a guy that can match her feistiness, right? But at some points in the book, you're like, Girl, this guy's, you know, from our modern sensibilities, you're like, “I 

don't like the way he's treating you.”

KIM: Yeah. Plus you've got Sam Neill in the flesh…

AMY: Yeah. He's just so hot. I don't even think he's meant to be attractive in the book necessarily, the way she describes him. I mean, that's all in keeping with the plot of the book. But, um, it's a very feminist text. There's so much throughout the book where she's talking about the status of women. Also, class distinctions, which is going to come into play a little bit more in Miles Franklin's life. I can totally understand this book's appeal to Australian readers. It really is showing their world, the beauty of the land, what their people are like. And you can see how Australians would have gone absolutely nuts for it when it was published. And they did. Miles Franklin was sort of an instant celebrity. She got tons of fan mail and lots of it was from young Australian girls who felt like they could really identify with Sybylla and her hopes and dreams.

KIM: So let's back up a second, though. As we said earlier, the book is based off Miles Franklin's own experiences. And she wrote it when she was 18, but the book at first was rejected. Um, so how did it come to be published by Blackwoods of all places? (Listeners, you may remember that Blackwoods published people like the Bronte sisters, George Elliott, and that one of our previous “lost ladies,” Margaret Oliphant, actually worked for Blackwoods.) How did they come across this Australian novel?

AMY: They're like hit-makers, right? So, I mean, an incredible coup for her. Um, so after she had gotten the rejection from that Australian publisher that I mentioned at the top of the show, she did a bit of revising on the manuscript and she got some helpful feedback from her former tutors and teachers. And she decided to send it to a well known Australian writer named Henry Lawson. He liked it a lot and he said, “Hey, I'm about to go to England. My agent's there. Do you want me to take the manuscript along and see if he can shop it around?” And of course she said yes. So he gave it to his agent in England who also happened to have Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Henry James for clients. And that agent loved it and persuaded Blackwoods to accept the manuscript. 

KIM: So we said earlier she didn't want people to know it was written by a woman, but it sounds like people found out pretty quickly.

AMY: Yeah, because in that Blackwoods edition, they featured an introduction written by Henry Lawson, that Australian writer. And he lets the cat out of the bag in the introduction and says it's written by a young lady. Miles Franklin would go on to write under a different pseudonym later, which is an interesting story. And we're going to get to that in a second. But yeah, from this point on in her career, she continued to go by Miles Franklin. And Miles was actually, A nod to her great great grandfather, Edward Miles, who came to Australia from England as a convict. So, 

she's hitting all the Australia buttons here that we want.

KIM: Totally. Totally. And then, so the book had a lot of immediate fans. The Glasgow Herald wrote of it, “the girl writes as the author of Jane Eyre wrote, out of heart, with a hatred of shams.” There was a Sydney newspaper, The Bulletin, that called it “a book full of sunlight” and also “the very first Australian novel to be published.” And other outlets criticized the book though, citing the heroine as unpleasant and questioning whether it was right that she depicted her own parents in such a negative light.

AMY: Right, so, in the book, I think even more so than in the film, the parents don't come across super great. The dad seems like more of a loser that can't support his family, has drinking problems, things like that. The mom is cold and, um, you know, exhausted by her family. But I think she does that on purpose to contrast Sybylla's own ambitions to kind of rise above what her mother's life was. So I think that's done on purpose. So there were locals and, you know, relatives and neighbors that knew her and knew the family that thought she had gone too far in the depiction of people she actually knew. Her uncle was especially angry and said that the book was all malicious lies. But those people that were closest to her that were depicted in the book, so her parents, her siblings, her grandmother, they all found the novel very amusing and they were pleased with it. Miles really did stress after the book came out that it was fiction. It was not the story of her life, per se. It was inspired by her own life, but she was making stuff up.

KIM: Right. It wasn't a memoir. But there were some similarities though, right?

AMY: Oh, for sure. I mean, many facets of Sybylla's life in the book line up with Miles's own life, including, you know, her family did have financial troubles. The dad went bankrupt. She did go stay with her grandmother, um, for stretches at a time, and she did later become a governess for a spell, although I don't think it was quite as, um… 

KIM: “Cold Comfort Farm…?”

AMY: Yeah, I don't think it was quite as cold as Cold Comfort Farm. 

That section of the film and book also reminds me of Jane Eyre when she goes off away from Rochester in the second half of the book and you're sort of just waiting for her to get through that section so that she can get back. 

KIM: Important though, was there a real Harry Beecham? I want to know.

AMY: Ah, yes, right. That's the big question. Apparently she had lots of suitors. You’ve got to remember that men outnumbered women in the Australian bush around this time — by a lot. Any woman was a hot commodity. Guys were falling over themselves around Miles. And she sounds like she was a total flirt. Not surprising, right. when you're reading the book and watching the film, you get that sense from Sybylla. She likes to play with boys. Um, she had several proposals in her lifetime. Maybe Harry Beecham is kind of a composite of a few different gents in her life.

KIM: Right. 

AMY: In real life though, Miles Franklin didn't get married. She makes a 

different choice with her life. 

KIM: Yeah, and we know from the book and the film that Sybylla Melvin is always glancing toward the proverbial horizons. She's not cut out for spending the rest of her life in Caddagat or Possum Gully, for that matter.

AMY: That's right. And Miles Franklin feels that same yearning. So after the success of My Brilliant Career, she decides it's time to move on, to make a real career out of writing, get out of the bush. Her destination is America. She has big plans to move to New York City, but somehow, en route, she lands in Chicago instead, that's where she settles, and that's also where 

reality sets in for her a little bit. 

KIM: Okay, so tell us more. What happened?

AMY: Okay, so she had this big, easy, kind of success with the first novel, right? In Chicago, she's doing a lot more writing and she thinks it's going to be just as easy to get the next titles banged out and they're going to sell just as well, but her writing is not necessarily landing anywhere. She's finding it difficult to get published the second time around. She gets lots of rejections. The few novels she does get published, they have tepid sales. She, of course, is never giving up, but she's got to make a living. So she ends up getting involved with work in a women's labor union movement. Fighting for change, all that kind of stuff. By the end of her stay in America, she advances to become the national secretary of this cause. And after that, she moves to London and she becomes a secretary to a housing reform organization. And then when World War I strikes. She goes to Macedonia and works as a hospital orderly. And I'm kind of rushing through all this because as fascinating as all this may be, I just want to be back in the Australian Outback. I don't want labor unions. I want jackaroos. I want wallabies. I want “Waltzing Matilda,” you know? I'm missing Sybylla Melvin and her world. And therein lies the problem for Miles Franklin. No one seems willing to let her break out as a writer from this mold that she created with My Brilliant Career. 

KIM: Right. I mean, it's basically the curse of the successful debut novel. And it's funny, because I said Cold Comfort Farm before, but that's what happened to Stella Gibbons, too. She ended up being super annoyed that people only associated her with that particular book. So same thing happened. 

AMY: People still thought of her as that young girl, you know, who wrote My Brilliant Career. And she's in her late 20s now, and she's just not getting the chance to prove she can do anything else. So let's jump back to Australia, which is where Miles finally returns permanently after 18 years living in the U. S. That whole scope that I just glossed over because it bored me (it's not boring at all — she actually did a lot of interesting things) but we want to get back to Australia. She is back with her parents. She kind of hates it at first. It feels very provincial to her after living in Chicago and London. She writes at one point, “Cannot live long in this awful atmosphere. Awful old people killing me by inches.” Which just made me laugh. Think about moving back in with your parents or whatever.

KIM: Oh, yeah. 

AMY: You're just like, “Oh, what am I doing back here?” And maybe she also feels a little bit like she's like, a bit of a letdown. Like she had this brilliant debut novel, but now she's back and she doesn't have major literary success anymore. But she feels determined. She really wants to bust free from the chains of My Brilliant Career. And she's going to do that with the help of an imaginary friend. And this is where her career takes off again.]

KIM: Oh my gosh, what happens? What happens to her?

AMY: Yeah. So right around this time, she's finishing up another book called Up the Country about the Australian Outback. So that's good. She's back in the Australian realm, right? (Some of the stuff she had been writing before was set in America or England or whatever.) So she wants to get this thing published. She approaches Blackwoods again, but this time she pretends to be a man called William Blake, who is writing under the pseudonym Brent of Bin Bin. So she just makes up a new personality for Blackwoods. It's not Miles Franklin at all. Yeah. And it works. Blacksmiths is like, “Oh, here's this new guy. And we like this manuscript.

Let's do it.” The book is published. It becomes an enormous success. He, uh, he, she would, um, you know, continue to write a critically acclaimed series of books under this name, Brent of Bin Bin. And, you know, the books sell relatively well. She's not making a fortune off of it, but it's definitely, the reviews are great, people like these books, and everyone is left wondering, who is Brent of Bin Bin? They know it's a pseudonym, but who is the real writer? And theories abound. Some people start to put clues together. And are wondering if maybe it could be Miles, but she is vigilant about not being outed. She personally handles all the correspondence with the publisher, but she pretends to be another woman who's kind of the go between. It's all confusing, and maybe I don't have that all completely straight, but I mean, imagine her trying to keep it all completely straight. Pretending to be Blake, who goes by another name when he writes, um, yeah, 

KIM: This is fascinating. And it's also reminding me… shades of Elena Ferrante, right?

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: And then the validation Miles Franklin must have felt. She's realizing, “Oh, I can write another book. I'm not a one-hit-wonder. I mean…

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: That must have been a good feeling, even though it's not under her name.

AMY: Yeah. But just knowing she still has the magic. And personally, it would have killed me to watch Brent of Bin Bin have success and have to keep quiet about it. I think if it was me, I would have come forward and been like, “Yeah, that's me!” Um, but in Miles's case, the truth never came out until after her death. She wanted it that way. (Though most people, by the time she died, it was kind of common knowledge. Like, yeah, we're all thinking it really was Miles Franklin.) But this stint as Brent of Bin Bin was a confidence-booster, because once she started having success there with these, Up the Country books, she realizes like, I'm going to start writing again under my own name, and I think I can do this, and so she released a title called Bring the Monkey, which is a sort of novel inspired by the pet monkey of a friend she knew in London. That one sold poorly, but the reviewers were complimentary. She goes on to write, um, a couple of sequels to My Brilliant Career. One of the titles is called My Career Goes Bung, which follows [Kim laughing] I know, which follows Sybylla in the literary world in Sydney. She's probably conveying like, “Here's what really happened to me. I was a one-hit-wonder for a while and I'm struggling now as a writer” is the sense that I get that Sybylla is also having in the book. Um, she wrote a memoir about her childhood called My Childhood at Brindabella. So that would be the story of her life before My Brilliant Career starts. Um, then she's got another book that's really worth checking out called All That Swagger. And it is an epic that follows a pioneering family across four generations. And this book won a literary award called the Prior Prize, which she was elated about. I mean, such validation for her. And here's the funny part: One of the judges for that prize noted “only an Australian could have written it, and there had been nothing written like it except the Brent of Bin Bin novels.” So, I mean, how crazy? She's like, you people are so stupid. Both of those are me! Um, anyway, that book, All That Swagger, actually became her most successful novel. And she began to be recognized as a really important Australian literary figure now. So, yay for Miles Franklin! She's got her mojo back!

KIM: I know, and this is so weird — I had mentioned The Thorn Birds earlier and now, that book that you're describing actually being about the generations of an Australian pioneer family, that has me thinking of the The Thorn Birds again. I wonder if it's anything like that.

AMY: I know I haven't read it, but I'm interested. It's apparently really long as epic novels are, but, um, maybe worth checking out. And also, Kim, we need another Thorn Birds watch party. I don't think we've watched it 

for like 15 years or something like that. So It's time. It's time. Um, we always get a good kick outta that one. But back to Miles Franklin, she died in 1954 at the age of 74. Her ashes were scattered within sight of the original homestead where she was born. And she decided to bequeath her estate to a literary prize endowment that would help Australian writers going forward. So it's called the Miles Franklin award and it's actually Australia's highest literary prize. It's basically Australia's version of the Booker prize, I guess. Um, it's an annual prize that is given to a book about Australian life in any of its phases. So really trying to honor and, you know, celebrate books about Australia. There's also a Stella Prize in Australia that's named after her, real first name, and that's for Australian women writers.

KIM: That's so cool that she did that, um, the, uh, literary prize. So she remains a beloved literary figure to Australians and the 1979 film obviously renewed interest in her work.

AMY: Today you can find a lot of her books available very cheaply, like 99 cents or so, on Kindle. So go check her out. There's no reason not to. I also want to give a shout out to the author Jill Rowe, whose book, Miles Franklin, A Short Biography, proved quite helpful in our putting together this episode for today. And Kim, I will see us out here by reading the last few paragraphs of My Brilliant Career because it's really a poignant passage and it's kind of an homage to Australians. I think it's really beautiful. So I'm going to do that. And I'm going to omit my Australian accent because I think once was enough. Um, and playing in the background, you are going to hear lovely music by Schumann, which is part of the soundtrack to the My Brilliant Career film that I think really makes the film. I love the music in it. So here's how she ends the book. There's a few paragraphs where she says how proud she is of all Australian men and then all Australian women.

And she says, “I love you. I love you” to them. And then she writes: 

The great sun is sinking in the west, grinning and winking knowingly as he goes, upon the starving stock and drought-smitten wastes of land. Nearer he draws to the gum-tree scrubby horizon, turns the clouds to orange, scarlet, silver flame, gold! Down, down he goes. The gorgeous, garish splendour of sunset pageantry flames out; the long shadows eagerly cover all; the kookaburras laugh their merry mocking good-night; the clouds fade to turquoise, green, and grey; the stars peep shyly out; the soft call of the mopoke arises in the gullies! With much love and good wishes to all--Good night! Good-bye!

AMEN

Our theme song was written and performed by Jenny Malone and our logo is designed by Harriet Grant.

Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by AMY Helms and Kim Askew. 

197. Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, Lost Lady of Translation — with Jo Salas

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great women writers, or in this case, a writer whose greatest (but largely unsung) success came in the form of translating the works of a literary giant. Kim, you have been suggesting for almost a year now that we should include a lost lady of translation.

KIM ASKEW: Yes, and so it was fortuitous when the creator of the Literary Lady's Guide, Nava Atlas, tipped us off about the subject for today's show and introduced us to our guest, who happens to have family connections to today's lost lady translator. 

AMY: You may think you have never read anything by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter , but if you've read any work by Thomas Mann, there's a good chance you've read her. She first translated Mann's monumental works from German into English.

KIM: As you can imagine, this was no small feat. Mann's novels are immense, laden with meaning, and linguistically complicated. But not only did Helen Lowe-Porter translate 22 titles from Mann's body of work, in addition to taking on other translating assignments, she did so under seemingly impossible deadlines, while also raising three children and supporting the career achievements of her celebrated paleographer husband.

AMY: Lowe-Porter's translations of Mann's works, including his debut novel Buddenbrooks, undoubtedly led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929. But did she get any high fives for the assist? Not really.

KIM: Translating the German author was typically thankless work and often frustrating, not only because of Mann's mercurial temperament, but also because what she wanted more than anything was to focus on her own writing, a dream that she never truly fulfilled.

AMY: In some ways, it's a familiar story to this podcast. The self-sacrificing woman behind the great man. In this case, Mann with two Ns. But there's so much more to the life of Helen Lowe-Porter, including that she was good friends with Albert Einstein and she's the great grandmother of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

KIM: We know all their names. I'd say it's time we get to know her name. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Jo Salas, originally hails from New Zealand but today calls New York home. In addition to being the cofounder of Playback Theater, an interactive form of improvisational theater now practiced worldwide, Jo is also a Pushcart-Prize nominated writer whose published work includes nonfiction books on theater, numerous short stories, as well as 2015’s Dancing With Diana, a novel about the lasting impact of a fleeting interaction between a young man and a young Princess Diana.

AMY: Jo's latest book, out from JackLeg Press earlier this year, is a work of historical fiction called Mrs. Lowe-Porter. And listeners, I loved this novel. I started it on a plane, and it's usually really hard for me to get into books on airplane flights, but I was just so absorbed in this story. It kept me guessing, I couldn't wait for my return flight so that I could finish it. And so I'm really excited that Jo's with us today to talk about the woman who inspired it. Jo, welcome to the show!

JO: Thank you, Amy and Kim. I'm really delighted to be here with you.

KIM: And we're so glad to have you. Let's start off by explaining to our listeners, Jo, about your connection to Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter and how that connection inspired this book.

JO: Yeah. There is a family connection. Helen Lowe-Porter was my husband's grandmother. I never met her, but I think I would have been inspired by her and her story even if there wasn't a family connection. But the thing is, I probably wouldn't have known about her, because she would have been just H. T. Lowe-Porter, invisible woman behind Thomas Mann's novels. And because she was a family member, I had access to not only papers, letters, and so on, that were hers, but also family stories. So I'd been hearing about her all of my married life. She just became someone in my mind that was very vivid to me, very alive, very appealing. And hidden, you know? Invisible. And I wanted to share what I understood about her and her life. So this is fiction. It's closely based on the milestones of her life, but it also brings in fictionalized elements, because the record of her inner life is quite scant. I mean, she didn't keep a diary. Other people didn't keep her letters, for the most part, and any biographer — and I'm not a biographer — would have to speculate a lot about her life. And for me, it just came much more naturally to make it a novel. So most of the milestones of her life are historically accurate, but I have made up events to give some background to things that she said or commented on in a letter, perhaps.

AMY: Her story is so remarkable, and it would have been so easy for her to get completely lost and forgotten. And really, in some ways, she was almost lost while she lived, you know? She really was a kind of hidden figure. So let's dive into her life a little bit. Helen Porter was born in 1876 in Pennsylvania. She was the niece of Charlotte Endymion Porter, a well known poet, Shakespeare scholar, and literary critic who also translated writers works for the magazine that she co founded, Poet Lore. (She sounds fascinating, too!) But anyway, like her aunt Charlotte, Helen attended Wells College in New York, and then she proceeded to Munich, Germany, which is where your novel kicks off, Jo. So was Helen already fluent in German prior to moving there? And what was important about this time in her life going abroad?

JO: She did know some German. She had studied German, I believe, in high school and certainly in college, and she had done some translations for Charlotte, for her magazine. I don't think she would claim to be fluent. Of course, part of her motivation for going to Munich was to become more fluent. She was almost 30, and she had decided that she wasn't going to get married. She was quite committed as a writer herself. But, Helen went to Munich and there she met Elias Lowe, who was another American. He was a budding paleographer, which, paleography is the study of ancient manuscripts. They became friends, and then, gradually, it was more than that. 

KIM: Right. So they married, Helen and Elias, in 1911, and in reading your wonderful account of their relationship, he seems like a really great match for her. 

JO: Yes. They were passionately in love, way into late middle age, where things didn't go so well (as readers will find out if they read the book.) They were both extremely brilliant and highly educated, and the life of the mind was very important to both of them. But It was kind of taken for granted by most people that men's lives and work was more important than women's lives and work. Helen never fully accepted that. I think she was torn about it. She identified as a feminist all her life and was involved in the suffragist movement, but she did become a wife and mother, and her work did suffer. And his did not. His work was uninterrupted, and hers wasn't. Hers was very contingent on the time that she had, both for translation and her own creative writing, which suffered the most of all. But she had to squeeze that in, you know, between looking after kids and looking after him and dealing with this giant of literature that she was translating for 36 years. 

KIM: Let's talk a little bit about how Helen established herself as a translator and a translator for Thomas Mann, no less. How did this come about?

JO: Yeah, as far as I know, they were living in England, she and Elias and their children. He was a professor at Oxford. She'd been doing some translation for Heinemann, the British publisher, when the idea came up of translating Thomas Mann. And Heinemann had a relationship with Knopf, the American publisher. So it was kind of between Knopf and Heinemann that she was hired. Heinemann already knew about her, and they were looking for a translator for Thomas Mann, who was being brought into English for the first time. I think a few, you know, very brief pieces of his had been translated earlier, but the first novel to be published in English was Buddenbrooks in 1924, exactly a hundred years ago. And that was Helen's translation.

AMY: Okay, so, Buddenbrooks is sort of an epic, multi generational saga of the rise and fall of a merchant class family, and I had never read it before, but I wanted to sort have some sort of exposure to Helen, and this was one novel of his that I hadn't read yet, so I went ahead and listened to this as an audiobook with the intent of, like, really trying to pay attention to the words in English and how she would have done this. (Not that I know German at all.) I really liked the novel, so I would recommend it. And I was able to find Helen's translation on audiobook. But there were clear moments while I was listening to it where I realized the skill that she was bringing to the table. I'm thinking of some of the death scenes in particular, of which there are several, that are just very evocative. And it made me think, okay, she had to do more than just translate the words and put it down. She had to convey all of these big, huge emotions. Tell us a little bit more about what translating Mann entailed for Helen. 

JO: Well, as you were able to imagine reading, it's an enormous task. I mean, any translation requires both immense skill and linguistic knowledge and also artistic skills. And thank goodness, you know, translation as a field is becoming much more understood and respected these days. So for Helen, first of all, she was kind of in awe of him. She recognized what a genius he was as a novelist, so she felt very daunted by that. I mean, daunted and excited, to be asked to translate this huge work. And it was huge — eight hundred pages or something. She had this kind of relish for it, you know? She was kind of dying to get her teeth into it. And then she also kind of role-reversed with him. Like, what was it like for this very important man to depend on her? She had that kind of empathy always, which I think he absolutely did not have. She would just put everything into it. I mean, it would take all her time, all her energy, all her focus, all her creativity, for months and months and months. And meanwhile, Mann and Knopf are kind of breathing down her neck saying, “Hurry up! When can you get this to us?” And so on. So she was always both kind of extremely humble and also utterly committed and confident, feeling that, “I can do this. I want to do this.” And she put everything into it that she could.

KIM: It's amazing the level of research, to understand the context of everything in order to make that translation. And the way that you show that in your novel is fantastic. So, um, initially, Thomas Mann didn't want a woman to do the translation. Did he eventually come to appreciate her, and can you talk about some of the other ways she found working with him to be both frustrating and rewarding at the same time?

JO: Yeah. He seemed fine with her translating Buddenbrooks, and he was very happy with the translation. He said, “It's as though you were born to it.” "Wie geboren," he said. And as soon as it was published, I mean, he became quickly very well known to the English-speaking reading public. But the next book was The Magic Mountain, a very, very dense philosophical book. And she was very excited to do it. And that's where he put his foot down and said, “I don't want you to do it because you're a woman and women can't understand my depth of philosophy.” And she was very troubled, angry, upset, disappointed, and in the end, the Knopfs, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, they insisted. They wanted Helen to do that and any future books, and they prevailed. But he resented it for a long, long time. He resented that a woman translated that book.

AMY: Okay, so he wins the Nobel Prize in 1929, in large part because it was translated into English so well. It seems from your novel as though Helen was at times overly humble about her role as translator, and she didn't want to take credit, you know, a huge amount of credit, and then at other times she felt really hurt that she hadn't been given credit.

JO: I think both of those things are true. I have a chapter in which Helen is kind of chiding Blanche about Alfred not giving Blanche credit for work that she's done, saying, “Don't let him get away with that.” But then she was remembering her own feebleness when Alfred, in an earlier newsletter, omitted her own name as the translator of one of Mann's novels. All she could manage was a coy objection. And then there's a quote, which is a literal quote from Helen: "I was so interested as not to notice for some time that I was not mentioned as the translator of Death in Venice," she wrote to him. "I make this little comment not very seriously, yet, as sort of a protest in the name of the humble craft. People are always so ready to say that we do not get enough credit."

KIM: I mean, it's almost like a ghost writer or something. I just feel like the translator is the co-author. When you think about something that requires so much thought and work and a whole new way of writing it, when you're writing in another language, I mean, the level of work… to not be recognized for that. We still don't recognize translators as much as we should.

JO: I think that there's much more recognition of that now, that translators are seen as kind of a collaborator, in a sense, or a creative artist in their own right, and that the product that they create is not just a facsimile of the novel, it's its own work of art. But with Helen, you know, there was a fair amount of criticism of her during her lifetime, but then around the Seventies, there was a lot of quite savage criticism of her translations, pointing out mistakes that she made and so on. Which she did. I mean, all translators make mistakes. But the thing is that she also had this really beautiful English that really flows. And there are many contemporary readers who prefer her translations for that reason. But one of the things that these critics really bitterly took her to task for was because when she wrote about translation herself, she wrote about how in addition to all the research and linguistic accuracy and so on, she had to accomplish, she also brought her own artistic sensibility to it. And she said something like, I don't send a translation until I feel like I've written it myself, written the book. You can understand, right? I mean, she's not saying, I wrote this book. She's saying that I respect this book so much that I want my translation to honor it as much as I would honor my own writing. And they ripped her to shreds for that, you know? How dare you present yourself as a co-author.

AMY: There's a little section in your novel where you show if she had done a literal translation from a section of Buddenbrooks versus how she slightly tweaked it. I was wondering if you could show how she kind of put her spin on it.

JO: Okay, sure. So in my book, I quote the German passage, but then I'm, sort of in Helen's head: She wrote the exact English for Mann's phrases. The younger master of the house, when the general departure had begun, had grasped the left side of his breast, where a paper was rustling.

The social smile has suddenly vanished from his face to give way to a tense and worried expression and was playing with his temples as if his teeth a few muscles. That's the literal translation. And then Helen thinks, I need to remind readers who the younger master is, she thought. Left side of his breast? Breast pocket, surely. And let's make it clear that they're all headed to the dining room, as we know from the end of the last chapter. No need for the as if. We know he's indeed clenching his teeth, poor man. When she had the whole chapter translated, she came back to the beginning. She relished this more creative step, rendering it in English that readers would actually follow. And here's her rendition. As the party began to move toward the dining room, Consul Buddenbrooks’ hand went to his left pocket and fingered a paper that was inside. The polite smile had left his face giving way to a strained and careworn look, and the muscles stood out on his temples as he clenched his teeth. 

KIM: I love that.

AMY: Yes, I'm sure this is a controversial notion when talking about translation, but in some ways you're serving as editor right?

JO: Well, I don't know that translators would consider themselves editors. They have to edit their own English. In that sense, yes, exactly. If they didn't, it would just be this clumsy... because, you know, sentences in German are not constructed the same as sentences in English, so she has to put it into English that feels like English. And in her case, it has to be English that sounds idiomatic to both American and British readers, and she's very qualified to do that because she's an American living in England, and she's very familiar with both ways of speaking English.

AMY: Yeah, and being aware that the reader has to be enjoying this. And yeah, that whole like British English versus American English, that's something I never thought about either.

KIM: Yeah. I feel like I have even more respect for translators than I had before, which was already a lot. So there's an amazing section from your novel that sums up the process of translating, and I was wondering if you could read that passage for our listeners because it's really beautifully put.

JO: Oh, thank you. Yes. sure. I put on my metaphorical boots and my rucksack. I go exploring the world in which the story takes place. I breathe the air. I smell the vegetation. I walk the furrows. I shade my eyes and gaze at the surrounding hills. I float over farms and cities. I sit in town squares. I eavesdrop on conversations. I observe the clothes and gestures of the book's characters as they argue and conspire, as they love and hate one another. I comb the libraries for books that can tell me the history and geography I will need to know. I seek the writings of experts to fill in the gaps in my own knowledge. The mythologists, the historians, the musicologists, the scholars of archaic Bible translations or medieval German. The pile of reference books grows and grows. And then, finally, I'm ready. I pile a stack of paper on my desk. I take up my pen. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, chapter by chapter, a novel in English takes form alongside its German brother. And then, inevitably, I see that this new work is hideous, clumsy, and unreadable. It makes me ill to look at it. I have snatched a living child out of its cradle and left a crude wooden doll in its place. Then comes the alchemy. I must use my dark arts, my art, to breathe life into the doll. I whisper my incantations over it. The air fills with words. German and English words, idioms, words that are obvious and surprising, beautiful and grotesque, words no longer used, words not yet born, words that fly like birds, sometimes in formation, sometimes in a crazy scatter. The words settle around the wooden doll. They warm it, caress it, clothe it. Slowly, slowly, the limbs move, the heart beats, eyes flutter open. There is new life with its own new grace. I rejoice in its birth. I send it out into the world, a gift given. 

KIM: Fantastic. 

AMY: Such a great way to explain the work that's being done there. I love it. And, also, side note, she's got … three children?

JO: Three girls. 

KIM: I feel so lazy, Amy. I'm not doing enough!

AMY: And to add to that, you know, after successfully translating The Magic Mountain in 1927, Helen goes on to translate 20 more Thomas Mann titles. Twenty! Including Death in Venice and Dr. Faustus. This work spanned the course of three and a half decades. Yet all the while, Helen lamented the fact that it was depriving her of time to do her own writing. And Jo, there's a wonderful section of your novel where you have one of Helen's characters from one of her own novels that she's working on barge in to interrupt her and say, “Hey, why aren't you paying attention to me?” I thought that was such a wonderful device. What do you actually know about her ambitions to write her own stuff?

JO: We do know for sure that she imagined herself as a writer from a young age. She wanted to be a writer. There isn't a lot of evidence of her writing, her creative writing. Tragically, it seems to have been lost. And whether she destroyed it herself or whether it was lost in some other way, we don't know. Only a few things were published. Ironically, one of the ways that we do have evidence of her writing is because she sent things to Mann to read, to get his comments. I have a letter that he wrote in 1942 in response to a short story that she wrote, which he loved, you know? He praised it very, very highly. He said "Any editor that turns it down is an idiot." But it was never published. We don't know why. We don't know where she sent it or what happened to it, the manuscript. And then when she was in her mid-70s, she said to him, "I'm going to retire as your translator." And she said, "The reason is perhaps silly, but I want to work on my own writing while I still can." So she did. She wrote a novel. And again, she sent it to Mann. And again, he praised it. (Although it was a little sort of backhand praise because he said, "I think the subject matter might be offensive to publishers," he said.) Um, it dealt with gender, actually. Two siblings switching gender. And he found that disturbing and suggested that she should not submit it to the Knopfs, which she must've been very hurt by, I think. But again, it wasn't published. It got as far as an agent, and the manuscript has disappeared. The only things that are published are a small book of poems, late in her life, and a play that was very successful. It's a sort of adaptation of the story of Edward VIII's abdication in the Thirties. He abdicated the British throne. She was very inspired by that. She wrote the play in a kind of Shakespearean blank verse, and it was very successfully produced. Once. One run of, I don't know, a few weeks. And never again.

KIM: Would you, um, maybe read something from her writing so our listeners could get a feel for it?

JO: Yeah. I mean, again, all I have that's published is this lovely little book of poems and the play. So she was someone who was very politically aware all her life. I mean, not only women's rights, but, she lived through two world wars and then the McCarthy period here in the U.S. And she was very distressed, heartbroken, by the execution of the Rosenbergs. And your listeners probably know about this, but the Rosenbergs were accused and convicted of spying. Ethel Rosenberg, it seemed like all she did was kind of support her husband. She was not a spy herself, but she was also executed. And Helen wrote a poem about it, and it's called "Waste." 

Before she sat in the chair, she turned and kissed the wardress who had led her there. Then, thus sitting, she died. Was this not fitting? Was this not fine? And was it not well done? For what is rarer under the sun than this, to save in death our humanness? Uh, I do fear we are too blind to see we can ill spare and must not waste such human love as this.

KIM: Wow.

JO: Yeah. I find it very moving.

KIM: Very moving. That's exactly what I was going to use. Wow.

AMY: And it is sad that she didn't have as much time to work on her own writing as she would have wanted to. But at the same time, what she did is so remarkable and such an incredible feat that she should be so proud of.

JO: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, she was very accomplished.

 KIM: In our intro, we had pointed out that Helen had a friendship with Albert Einstein. 

JO: Yeah, they were neighbors. He was friends with both her husband and Helen. They wrote funny little poems for each other, and she would help him sometimes if he was giving a talk. She would kind of go over it and smooth it out for him. And they would give each other presents, and he thought highly of her, it seems like. He was kind of a family friend. My mother in law and her first husband, he was a witness at their wedding. So we have this lovely photo of him standing there looking very benign with the happy couple beside him. My husband, you know, would play in his garden when he was a little kid. His brother would play the piano for him. He was kind of a benign presence somehow both in Helen's life and in the family's life.

AMY: I love that. I'm sure he felt a kinship just having somebody that knew German he could just converse freely with. 

JO: Right, and they saw eye to eye politically, and she was very politically aware, as I think I said. And you know, he was someone who was very concerned about what was happening in Germany. He was very concerned about McCarthyism, and so on. And they shared a point of view about those things.

AMY: We also mentioned earlier that Helen was the great grandmother of former British prime minister Boris Johnson. And you note in the forward to your book that his politics would have appalled her. But I'm also wondering, what do you think she might have thought of your novel? She definitely had opinions.

JO: She definitely did. I think it was in the afterword that I mentioned Boris Johnson, rather than the forward, because I don't want people to have that in the front of their minds as they're reading, necessarily. I know she would have been distressed by someone like him. There are plenty of other members of the family that she would have been very proud of, I think. Um, what would she have thought about my novel? I can't feel the least bit confident that she would have been pleased. I mean, she was such a self-effacing person. And of course, I've made all kinds of things up. I just don't know. I mean, I worry about it sometimes. Have I done her an injustice or not? Or is it the opposite? I mean, my intention, and it comes from a sense of enormous respect and affection for her, is to bring her out of the shadows, to bring her into the light. I hope she would have felt some gratification about that. But she might also have felt that this was her life and no one else had a right to write about it. I'm not sure. I hope, at least, there would have been parts of it that she would have been pleased with. I wish I had met her. I wish I had been able to ask her lots of questions. And in the absence of that, I have to rely on imagination, empathy and fellow feeling in some way.

AMY: Well, we wouldn't be discussing her today had you not written this, and I wouldn't have had a clue about who she was. I mean, I had read Thomas Mann before, and I probably had read her translations. You see “H. T. Lowe-Porter,” and you don't think twice about it, but to now hear her entire story, It's wonderful. I felt like I had a very naive understanding of what a translator does, and I just have a new appreciation for her. And getting to read your novel was like getting your cake and eating it too, because it's such a fun book to read. So thank you, and thanks for joining us today. 

KIM: This was wonderful. 

JO: Thank you so much, Amy and Kim. It's been really a pleasure to have a conversation with you.

AMY: And before we sign off here, I also want to let our listeners know about a wonderful translator and librarian from Melbourne, Australia, named Marie Lebert. She has extensively documented women translators throughout history and has even compiled an online dictionary of 150 different translators, from ancient times through to the 20th century. And we're going to include a link to that in our show notes. Marie reached out to me, and she wrote an article for this podcast, which highlights more than a dozen other important lost lady translators of literature across the centuries. We're going to be sharing that article in our show notes, as well as our Facebook and Patreon pages. It'll be available there to everyone without a subscription. So please go check it out. And Marie, thank you so much for all the work you're doing to recognize these tremendously important women.

KIM: Yes. Thank you, Marie. And listeners, do you have a favorite novel translated from another language? Use the new “fan mail” feature of this podcast to text us directly and let us know. It's in the show notes, wherever you listen to our podcast.

AMY: And don't forget, also, to give us a rating and review wherever you listen. 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. 

195. Elaine May — Miss May Does Not Exist with Carrie Courogen

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books (and in this case films) by forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY HELMES: And I’m Amy Helmes. Today we’re going to be discussing a comedian, screenwriter, director and actor who got her start in the legendary Eisenhower-era comedy team known as Nichols and May. 

KIM: As in Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Some of you may be thinking… “Elaine May isn’t exactly lost,” and you’d be right. Sort of. Because if you do know her name, it’s in spite of Elaine May herself. She adamantly refused to be credited on many of the huge, critically-acclaimed, award-winning films she helped write, including Tootsie and The Birdcage. 

AMY: She’s a fascinating woman whom many have dubbed a genius. Yet I should probably confess: Before prepping for this episode, I knew her name only relative to Mike Nichols. And I certainly didn’t realize what a big deal she was (and is! She’s still alive).

KIM: Same, Amy. I’d heard her name and seen and loved some of her films, oftentimes without even knowing she had anything to do with them! 

AMY: I guess we shouldn’t feel too badly, Kim. Maybe she wanted it that way.

KIM: True. I mean, in the liner notes for her first comedy LP with Nichols, her bio reads, “Miss May does not exist.” 

KIM: Which also happens to be the title of our guest Carrie Courogen’s fantastic new bio on Elaine May, out today from St. Martin’s Press. 

AMY: I’m so excited. Let’s raid the film archives and get started! 

[Intro music plays] 

AMY: Carrie Courogen’s writing has appeared in publications like Bright Wall/Dark Room (where she is an associate editor), Glamour Magazine, NPR, PAPER, Vanity Fair, Vice, and many more, in addition to her Substack, bed crumbs. She is currently the associate director of creative development, digital video, for Pitchfork and the culture collection (that’s Vanity Fair, Teen Vogue, and Tatler) at Condé Nast. 

KIM: Miss May Does Not Exist is already garnering rave reviews. Critic Claire Dederer wrote of it: “Carrie Courogen has written the biography Elaine May deserves. Shimmering with insight and grounded in deep research, this book is as iconoclastic, engaging, and challenging as Miss May herself.” Happy pub day, Carrie, and welcome to the show! 

CARRIE COUROGEN: Thank you so much for having me. 

AMY: All right, so let's jump right into Elaine's story. She was born in 1932 in Philadelphia. Her parents were Yiddish vaudevillians, so she had a really interesting childhood, to say the least. Carrie, is there any defining moment or influences that sort of led to her becoming this comic genius?

CARRIE: I think there were two really formative experiences for Elaine. First, I think she grew up in a vaudeville environment where everything was heightened, and all of the realities of the day in the 1930s, all of the horrors of the world were twisted into melodrama or comedy or heightened into some fantasized version of reality. I think that really shaped her notion that everything can become a story. And then the second thing that I think really shaped who she is was the sudden death of her father when she was 10 years old. He traveled a lot as a vaudeville actor, and sometimes Elaine and her mother went with him, sometimes they didn't. And sometimes when they didn't, he would be gone for months at a time. And so she has this father figure who is so built up in her mind, and she's so kind of worshipful of, because she doesn't really know him all that well. And when she's 10 years old, he dies very suddenly, and it really shakes her world. Her family is incredibly poor at the time and really left with nothing and scrambling to figure out how are they going to survive his absence. And I think that gave her this sudden idea of the world as a really cruel and hostile place, a place that cannot be trusted. Full of people you can't depend on to take care of you. Full of people who will leave you at any moment. And especially if you're a woman, stuff's gonna happen to you and you don't have any control over it. And that's reflected in a lot of her work that would come, especially a lot of her early work. And I think she dealt with that view by turning it into stories, by escaping into these worlds that she could create to leave all of the pain of her real life. And I think later that became comedy, but at first it wasn't. At first I think it was a lot of drama that was just really reflecting her ideas of society that had been shaped by that one single instance.

KIM: So she had this really difficult childhood that you've just shared with us. They didn't have any money, they're moving all the time, her father dies. How is this impacting her education?

CARRIE: So, it's funny that Elaine May is such a genius because she really only has formally an 8th grade education. She was always bouncing around schools, never really staying long enough to go through all of the lessons or to even do a year at a school. And this whole time, she's deeply curious about things, and she's a voracious reader, and she loves to write. And she just keeps thinking, as she gets older, "This is pointless, and I don't know why I'm learning the same rote memorization bullshit. It's not gonna serve me in my life. I'd rather learn what I want to learn." And so by the time she's 14 and living in L. A, she's like, “I'm just gonna drop out. I'm not gonna go to school.” And so she drops out, and she does really teach herself. She spends so much time reading literature, and like at 14, 15 years old, reading Dostoevsky and reading Chekhov and writing all of these short stories and plays in her own sort of way. And I think she learned from it what she was interested in and learned to become an expert in it without actually learning it from a set sort of standard method.

KIM: Right. So then, um, she does drop out. She gets married at the age of 16. She has her only child, Jeannie Berlin, at age 18. 

AMY: Can I interrupt there? Because that sounds shocking to me. She got married at the age of 16. Was that normal for the time?

CARRIE: Not really. I mean, it wasn't as taboo as it is now, but it was still like, you know, you'd wait till you were 18 maybe or 19. It's hard to tell exactly why she got married. I would suspect that it was to get out of her mother's house. They had a difficult relationship, and I think she probably was like, "All right, see ya." Um, but yeah, I mean, she's 16 and he was, I think, 18. So it's not set up for success. By the time they're newly parents, it takes maybe six months for them to separate and for her to go back to her mom's house.

AMY: All right, so she's now a very young single mother. So what happens next?

CARRIE: So she's floundering, trying to figure out, you know, what is her purpose in life? How is she going to make money? How is she going to express her creative side? She goes to acting classes in LA and things start to click for her, but then she's a little bit like, "I think I'll go to college and I'll become extremely educated." But you know, she doesn't have a high school degree, and at the time, certain schools would take you if you didn't have one; not many, but some. And she had friends who were going to Chicago, just kind of like going to hitchhike there and do theater there, and she found out that the University of Chicago would take her without a high school degree. So she joins them. She has like $7 and hits the road and leaves Jeannie with her mother and really goes off to discover herself.

AMY: So this is where her life is going to intersect with a very pivotal person. And as I said in the introduction, I always associate Elaine May with Mike Nichols. Their collaboration is legendary. But how did this partnership come about, Carrie?

CARRIE: Their partnership really came about at the University of Chicago where Mike was studying and Elaine was not really enrolled; she kind of just dropped in on classes and fell in with a theater scene there that Mike had fallen in with. Their first meeting was really like, "I hate you and you hate me." But not long after they were in a subway station, an El station together, and started improvising. They started pretending they were spies and carried this whole routine home. And after that, it was really inseparable. And they started working together, and Mike knew that he could perform best with Elaine. And Elaine could perform with anybody. And they start doing these improvisations that are funny. At the time, improv was solely a theater exercise, but it wasn't the performance itself. And the son of the woman, Viola Spolin, who invented this sort of theater exercise, was part of this troupe that Elaine and Mike were part of and thought, "Well, wait a second. Why don't we try that as the entertainment?" And Elaine just was like a natural at it.

KIM: I just love that part of the story, because it's like she's finally getting to be herself, and it's amazing.

AMY: We think of, like, oh, The Groundlings. We know what that is. But imagine being an audience member and seeing that for the first time and getting to see these people that are thinking so quickly on their feet and making you laugh, and inventing that form, basically. It's amazing.

KIM: It's so cool. 

AMY: It's almost like they're a precursor to “Saturday Night Live,” right? 

CARRIE: Totally. The theater that they were part of became Second City, which is a feeding ground for SNL. They were the ones who started it. And Elaine was one of the ones who created the rules of improv, you know, "Yes, and…" and, you know, "Make a choice, don't deny." All of those things she came up with. She came up with the standard that went and informed everything up through SNL.

AMY: I want to play a quick clip from one of Elaine May and Mike Nichols' sketches. 

[plays sketch]

Okay, so I'll stop it there. It goes on and on 

KIM: I mean, I was laughing aloud while you were playing that. I had to mute myself because it's hilarious. Listeners, you have to go watch it. Um, We'll link to it in our show notes. But basically, she's gorgeous, um, these gestures play into it too. There's a physical comedy. They have incredible chemistry. Carrie, do you want to talk a little bit about the hallmarks of a Nichols and May sketch? What do you think were the key elements of her style in particular that made them basically a sensation?

CARRIE: Obviously, like you pointed out, their chemistry. There was so much like, "Are they a couple? Are they not a couple? Did they? Didn't they?" And they did, um, very briefly when they were back in Chicago and then very quickly were like, "No, no, no, we can't do this. We're just very good friends." But I think obviously that informed their strong connection and sort of, I wouldn't say their "shtick," because they could be all over the place. The thing that I love about Nichols and May is they were unpredictable. They didn't fall into the hallmark funny man, straight man bit. They would trade off. Sometimes Elaine's the straight man, sometimes Elaine's the one who's pulling the gag. They tap into these neuroses of young people at the time — young educated people at the time. They're really making fun of that. And they're making fun of themselves. So many of their sketches were about sex or about romance and how funny that could be. And this is in the Fifties. This is in the super chaste era of entertainment. And people were not used to that. People were shocked by it, but also, the people who started to see them when they were in New York then in the downtown scene are young people, and they want to see something that isn't boring and family friendly, the USO sort of “Bob Hope” of it all. They want to see something that's thrilling and exciting, and they want to see things that are about themselves. And Nichols and May, I think, they could really capture this anxiety and concern of urban young professionals, in a way. People would say they have "snob and mob" appeal.

AMY: All right, so they're doing something kind of radical here, challenging societal norms. Are there any other risks that Elaine was taking at the time that would have been different or unusual? 

CARRIE: Well, I mean, being a woman in comedy at the time was super unusual, especially in sketch comedy, which was still a very young form. It's before Joan Rivers. It's before or right around actually the same time as Phyllis Diller. And it's really like the three of them who are in this club circuit doing variations on stand-up or sketch comedy. I don't want to say that Elaine was doing stand-up, but it was similar in form in the sense that it was really just her and Mike on a set of stools without any props, without anything to aid their storytelling. It's just they were making things up. I was so expecting to see some, like, sexism in the press coverage of her. Like, "Well, she's hot and he's funny." And it was really like, no, she's the funny one outta the two of them. And it was like, "She's so good. She's so talented. And also she's gorgeous." The thing too, is she was gorgeous, but she didn't try to be. She was so unkempt and did not care about her appearance. People would have to make sure she looked suitable for some of the swanky clubs that they performed in because she just didn't care. She was like an absent-minded professor. She was so laser-focused on the work she was doing. She could have two different pairs of socks on or hadn't brushed her hair and didn't even realize it. 

KIM: So all this is happening, but I really want our listeners to understand how hugely famous Nichols and May were during this time. So can you give our listeners a quick sketch of what her life was like at this time? It was pretty amazing. 

CARRIE: She really did have instant fame and it was not for 15 minutes. And that, I think, was really jarring to her. She and Mike come to New York to try and pitch themselves as an act. They're broke. They have nothing. And within like two weeks, they're performing in a club downtown, and within a few days of doing that, they start to get a huge audience that's coming for them and not for Mort Sahl, who they were opening for. A few weeks later, they're Uptown and there are lines out the door. There are people waiting till like midnight to see them. They're New York's hottest ticket. And then they appear on television, and suddenly, you know, it's nationwide fame. Television appearance after television appearance after television appearance. Everyone knows who they are all of a sudden, and they're getting so much press coverage and they're 24 and 25 years old. I think it was really incredibly jarring for them. They take their act to Broadway and it's enormous. That's like the apex of Nichols and May, and all of these incredibly famous people are coming to see them and coming to, befriend them. I mean, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are new friends of theirs. And Julie Andrews is performing across the street and she comes over and, you know, all these writers are there to see them and talking about how much they love them. And Elaine is such an intensely shy person that this is like, "Whoa, I don't like this. And I don't like that now we are so famous, we can't experiment and we can't do things that are new. We're just giving people what they want.” And I think that started to wear at them and wear at their relationship, because Mike was so good at pleasing people and playing the game, and Elaine is like, "It's not interesting to me if it's not fresh." After several months on Broadway, she's like, "I'm out. I don't want to do this anymore."

AMY: I mean, think about walking away from something like that. I'm raking in the money. I'm just doing the formulaic thing that people like. I can almost do it in my sleep at this point. A lot of people would have been like, This is a good gig. But no, she needed to do something new and different. So she, you know, transitions from performing with Mike Nichols to embarking on her own solo career. In your book, Carrie, you cover that period from 1961 to 1967 under the chapter heading, “What the Hell Happened to Elaine May?” She's kind of struggling, while Mike Nichols is off being completely successful. He directs the Broadway production of “Barefoot in the Park.” He does the Elizabeth Taylor Richard Burton film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? followed by The Graduate in 1967. So he's doing A-okay. But Elaine is... where is she? What's she doing? Flash forward to 1968. Seemingly out of the blue, Elaine May is tapped to write, direct, and star in a feature film called A New Leaf.

CARRIE: Yeah, she really was struggling for a long time. And she finds this story in Alfred Hitchcock's Omnibus magazine, and it's about a man who decides he's gonna marry this woman, and then kill her, and she's like, "Oh, this is the perfect idea for a screenplay." And at the time Hollywood's going through this huge shift where the system is struggling. It feels unhip. And Paramount, in particular, they decide, “Alright, here's the new plan going forward. Our new stars now are writers and directors and filmmakers and young people doing cool things.” And there's some uproar, a little bit, in Hollywood where there hadn't been many women behind the camera at all. And when Elaine's agent went to sell this script to Paramount, he really spun it and was like, "You know, you could get her to direct too. It would look really good. She's a woman!" And she's like, "Wait, wait a second. I wanted director approval, but I don't want to direct it." And they're like, "Well, we can't do it unless you agree to direct. it." And she's like, "Uh, okay, I guess I'll do that." And then she wants star approval. They want to cast Carol Channing in this role, and she's like, "No, no, no, she's all wrong for it. The woman has to sort of fade into the background." And they're like, "Well, then, why don't you play it?" And again, she's like, "What?" And really is thrown into this situation where she's a complete novice and has never directed anything, knows nothing about a film set. Now all of a sudden she's in charge of an entire film production, also at the same time only making like 50, 000 to do all of it. Meanwhile her co-star Walter Matthau and the producer on the film are getting a ton more money. And they're really selling her on this like, "We can't make this movie unless you agree to do all of this." And I think they kind of set her up to fail in a way, and that sparked this underdog mentality in her of like, "Well, I'll show them."

KIM: Yeah. So she's in this crazy situation and she's under all this pressure, you know. What happens?

CARRIE: On the first day they ask her where she wants to put the camera. And she doesn't know what the camera even looks like. She looks at the lighting and is like, Oh, I think that's maybe the camera. And she just says, "I don't know." I remember she described it as like a hush fell over everybody. So, you know, she doesn't know what she's doing. 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, how would you? She had no experience in that. It's like, all three of us are writers, but it's like, if somebody just said, Okay, direct a movie now, you know, we didn't go to film school! How would we know?!

CARRIE: Exactly! And no one is mentoring her, you know? Like when Mike went to make Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Billy Wilder was helping him. He had him as a mentor, and Elaine May didn't have that. So she doesn't know that you can't just shoot a wide master shot as if you're filming a play. You have to do another setup where you're shooting close up of the one person, and then you do another shot where you're shooting the close up of the second person. And suddenly she's like, "Oh, I have to go back and redo all of this to get this coverage." And she's a perfectionist. I think as a writer, she could see in her mind every single version or permutation of a scene, and on stage, that's very easy. You have rehearsal time. It doesn't cost you really anything. And on film, it's extremely costly. And she's shooting an enormous amount of material and falls way behind schedule. Producers come out and try to control the situation. And then they're frazzled and they go back to Paramount and they're like, "She's insane. She cannot be controlled. What is going on here? We're gonna have to take over the picture," and they're like, "Yeah, it's gonna be fine. " And then it's time to edit. So then editing goes on way too long. She has a version that she really likes. It's three hours long. It's full of murder. It's way darker than anyone had really expected when they read the script. And Paramount is like, "No way lady! What are you doing?! What is this?!" And immediately try to recut the film, and so she's like, "Well now this isn't my movie. You've completely defanged it. You've completely ruined it. It's not the thing I wrote. It's not the thing I directed. It's your movie. I don't want to be associated with it. You either let me recut it my way or you take my name off the picture." And they're like, "No, we're not doing that." They're threatening to sue her for breach of contract. She's threatening to sue them for breach of contract. And finally they take it all the way to a judge who tried the Rosenberg case. And they played Paramount's version of the movie, and the judge is howling with laughter and he's like, "Her version could be funny, but this is great. Put it out. I don't see what's wrong with this. Put it out." And I think she had this big feeling of betrayal, which is, you know, a common theme throughout her work. It goes back to the childhood thing again, like people are going to betray her. So she had this big distrust in the studios, even though the film ended up being a success.

 AMY: I know, you're, hearing about this complete hot mess of a production and of course you're thinking to yourself, "This movie is going to be also a hot mess." And it actually is not at all. Carrie, uh, could you do us a favor and read from your book where you talk about the response to this film?

CARRIE: Critics for the most part loved the film and loved her both as an actor and a director. In a warm review for The Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel wrote: “Ms. May writes and directs with uncommon grace,” and compared A New Leaf to It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby. “Miss May may be right,” Vincent Canby wrote for The New York Times. “Her version may be better than Paramount's. And theoretically anyway, not having seen the other version, I'm on her side. Still, the movie is so nutty and so funny, so happily reminiscent of the screwball comedies people aren't supposed to be able to make anymore, I'm quite satisfied to let things stand.”  By 1972, A New Leaf had grossed 5 million. And was nominated for two Golden Globes for Best Picture and Best Actress, and a Writers Guild of America award. Had the lawsuit not taken up most of the press coverage, and had Elaine actually participated in its promotion, it might have done even better. Not that it mattered. She had delivered great reviews and made paramount money, and that was enough. Elaine didn't just survive by the skin of her teeth, she found herself suddenly established and respected. A member of the Directors Guild of America, only the third woman, and already at work on her next film, a second chance she had predicted she somehow would get. “Will you do anything different in your next movie?” a New York Times journalist asked her. She thought for some time. “Yes,” she said. “Everything.”

AMY: I will say though, I think I would have liked her version of it.

KIM: Yeah. I wish we could see it. 

CARRIE: I agree, it would have been fascinating to see. And it's long been Hollywood lore or urban legend, you know? Where is “the May cut?” When will we see “the May cut?” And who has it? And what have they done with it? And the sad truth is, I am 90 percent sure that it's been lost. If Elaine owned it, my theory is she would have released it by now. The Paramount archives, they searched for it there, they couldn't find anything. You know, they did mention, "Sometimes, you know, things come up that we're shocked to find.We never want to say something is lost for good, but right now, we don't know where it is." Yes, the script for “the May cut” exists, and I'm going to be honest. It's kind of a mess. I can see the final version being a mess. But I still want to see it, you know? 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. It's like almost an academic thing as someone who studied her, you know, you want to have those missing pieces filled in. 

AMY: If she had had the opportunity to really go so dark with all these murders and everything that she wanted to do, I think I would have been totally there for that film. But I did like this one. It made me laugh a lot.

KIM: I love the way it subverted the romantic comedy idea. There's so many things about it that are unusual and I feel like must be so uniquely Elaine. 

CARRIE: I think it's funny that it's her warmest film, in my opinion, and it's about murder.

KIM: Yeah. 

CARRIE: It's about blackmail. It's about a man killing his wife. And I think she's so good on screen, it makes me wish really that she had performed more in front of the camera. It's almost like she's playing a version of herself, because she really mined her own foibles and idiosyncrasies, you know, the sloppiness and the crumbs everywhere, and tripping over her own feet, and price tags still attached to her clothes, like that sort of absent mindedness.

AMY: That nightgown scene, thescene where he's helping her get into the nightgown. The gag just continued and continued, and it never stopped being funny. It was so good.

KIM: Yeah. And it's in your book. You have the behind the scenes of that, right? 

CARRIE: You know, this is her genius as a director. She wants to elicit a certain response from Matthau as he's trying to get her out of this nightgown that she has on in the wrong way, and she really did sew herself into it. So he's like pulling all these layers over and he really is confused, genuinely, like “What? How? Where are you? How do you get out of this thing?” Oh, the first time I saw it, cackling, I couldn't stop laughing. Just brilliant. Today, if you had a scene like that in a movie, an executive somewhere is going to say, "Do we really need this?" Back then, you could put a scene like this in, where it doesn't move the movie along at all. It has no narrative purpose. It doesn't tell you anything more about either character. It's just funny, and sometimes that's okay. You can have something superfluous in a movie that's just like a gag and it's amazing.

KIM: Yeah, yeah.

AMY: Although I did see tenderness from Walter Matthau's character towards Henrietta in that moment. I got a spark of like, "Oh, wait, he married her to kill her, but he's helping her right now." And there is this little spark…

KIM: Yeah. Which is why it worked. I feel like. yeah. Yeah. So, um, she filmed The Heartbreak Kid in 1972 and then Mikey and Nicky in 1976.

And I want to talk about Mikey and Nicky because I saw it a couple of years ago. I really loved it. It's my kind of movie, I guess. It's a 1970s John Cassavetes and I really just thought of it as his film. I didn't really connect that it was an Elaine May film, and I absolutely had no idea of the story behind the making of it. It is wild. It's like the craziest story! 

CARRIE: Yeah, the myth of it has become almost as big as the movie itself, I think. It was, a lot like A New Leaf, where It's a movie she wrote, and the one difference from A New Leaf is it wasn't an adaptation. It was a story that had begun as a very short play that she wrote all the way back when she was in Chicago in the 50s. It's based on people that she knew as a child growing up when her family was loosely involved with the mob in Chicago, with the Syndicate. And, you know, there are these two low-level mob guys who are buddies and one's trying to help take out a hit on the other. It's not funny. I mean, there are moments of comic levity, but I think from the start, that scares everybody. The studio really kind of thought, "Oh, it's going to be a buddy comedy." I don't think they were prepared for how dark it was going to be. But I think they were absolutely apprehensive of how long it could take to make it based on their experience with A New Leaf. And so, you know, true to form, she had shot, I forget, like a hundred thousand feet of film, something insane that was like triple or something the length of Gone With The Wind, and now she has to edit everything, and she's not sticking to the timeline, and she's replacing editors left and right. Her and Cassavetes come in after hours and undo things that the editors did during the day and put it back together. It's just chaos. It's really chaos. And Elaine is like a mad genius, you know? Her room is a pigsty, and she comes to edit every day like in last night's clothes and is so laser-focused on this as the clock is ticking. And she does a series of very clever maneuvers to buy herself more time, and finally, it's like a year or something after they've been editing and Paramount's like, "We need this film. It's ours now." They come to the edit studio in New York, seize the material, and two reels are missing. And they can't cut it unless they have those two reels. It's like a pivotal part of the film. And they sue her for breach of contract again. All of the stuff comes out in the lawsuit where they're like, “She knowingly took those rolls of film.

She knew that we were coming.” Peter Falk is involved, as like aiding and abetting a criminal thievery or something like that, and he's like, "Well, I might have, I don't know. "Uh, and it turns out that her husband at the time took the two reels of film, put them in his car, drove them across state lines to Connecticut, and hid them in the garage of a friend's house in Connecticut, so out of New York jurisdiction. And they're suing each other back and forth. And finally, the court is like, "You cannot use the court to settle your little petty interpersonal business arrangement. Like, stop this. What are you doing?" So they negotiate how to get the film back. They cut it the way they want to cut it, and they just sort of dump it in the theaters, right before Christmas. And yeah, that was a huge moment for Elaine, where she's like, “Wow, now I've been burned twice.” This film is released, and it's not a success. It's in theaters for like a week and the few reviews that it does get are bad. And she would eventually, a couple years later, buy back the rights and recut it. Although her recut is really nothing major. It's really like, you know, nothing that could have dramatically changed the film. Yet when she re-released it, then suddenly it's getting these reviews like, "Oh, how did we miss this film?" And "This is amazing." And "It's one of the best of the Seventies." And she does sort of get her pride back, but that whole experience is really where she cements this reputation of being difficult and being unpredictable and being somebody that a studio can't control. And a studio needs to control their director in a way, you know. They're spending the studio's money. And a lot of directors will say, and I agree with them, you know, the studio loves you when they're courting you and the second you sign a contract you are the enemy. And the studio is willing to do anything to bend you to their will. So, yeah, it really blacklisted her, I think, for a while. It was really hard for her to get another job directing after that because she had this reputation of being insane.

AMY: Yeah. I mean, at times she really does sound like a pain in the ass. But how much also does the fact that she was a woman factor into any of this? You know, would a male director have been able to do some of these things and they would have been like, "Oh, he's a genius. Let him have his way"?

CARRIE: Yes and no. It depends because this is, you know, the height of new Hollywood and you do have these directors who are behaving badly or are behaving, yeah, in unconventional ways and burning company money. You know, you have Francis Ford Coppola making Apocalypse Now and like selling off all of his stuff to keep financing it. And you have Peter Bogdanovich making a string of flops that become more and more ambitious. They're getting second chances, or they're figuring out how to do it with their own financing, not relying on the studio system. Elaine gets away with the same behavior in the moment, but I think she has a harder time bouncing back from them the way that men do. I think, you know, there's this idea of "director jail," and the sentences for a woman are a lot longer than they would be for a man. Also the fact that she was unpredictable and sometimes unstable really confirmed all of these ideas that male executives had about women directors, where they thought, you know, they're not tough enough to handle it. They're too emotional. How are they going to do it when they're on their period? All this so, like, incredibly cliched, sexist, and just, like, dumb hypotheses. They have Elaine now to point to, and they say, "See, we were right. "And it's the end of the 70s. The feminist movement is in a free fall, and suddenly now the tide is starting to turn and the executives are like, "Oh yeah, actually we don't have to pretend anymore. We don't have to commit to this performance of equality because no one else really cares anymore." And so, yeah, you know, “two strikes, you're out, kid.” It was a huge detriment to her own career, but it was also a huge detriment to other women in the industry and other women getting chances. And, you know, that's sexism at work again, because none of these other guys who were getting put in "director jail" or behaving badly and failing, none of them had to worry about carrying the future of their entire gender on their back. None of them had that added pressure of, “If I fail, every guy is going to be set back like a five years.” That, I think, is a pressure that she was not equipped for. And I also think it didn't concern her. I think selfishly in a way, good and bad, you know, why should she have to care about carrying an entire population of people on her back? But at the same time, that was the reality. She was. And she had no concern for that and was doing things her way. And so it really was a huge turning point, not only in her own career, but in the careers of other women who were aspiring to direct in the studio system in the late 70s and early 80s.

KIM: Okay, so after all this, she basically becomes a script doctor on numerous films. So she's not directing anymore because all this happened and she's basically in “director jail.” But she ends up working on things like Tootsie and The Birdcage. And those things are often overlooked, but they actually had a really big impact on Hollywood. What do you think her contribution was to these films that she worked on?

CARRIE: Well, with films that she really did script doctor or work behind the scenes on like Reds or Tootsie, they really should have a "written by Elaine May" credit. She did incredible, substantial work on both of them. I mean, especially on Tootsie. She created the Bill Murray character. She fleshed out Terri Garr's character. She fleshes out Jessica Lange's character. Gives her the backstory, gives her, you know, the monologue that hands Lange the supporting actress Oscar that year. It really is incredible the amount of work she did on Tootsie. And she wouldn't take credit for things like that because she cared so much about the other writer. And in that situation, at least, she had been told that he knew she was going to come in and fix the script. And then it turned out he didn't, and she really felt like “I betrayed another writer, and so I really don't want credit on this and I don't wanna ever do this again for credit because I feel like that's a betrayal to other writers. They should still get the credit, even if I'm doing work.” And at the same time, you know, it lets her off the hook a little bit too, because if she's a script doctor and she's not having outward-facing credit, if a movie is a huge success, word is going to go around behind the scenes in the industry. “Elaine May saved it.” And that's going to get her more work. But, you know, if it's a flop, she's not associated with it. The few films she wrote with credit, The Birdcage and Primary Colors, they were directed by Mike, the one person where she knows "If I give him my movie, he's not going to mess it up." I think she kind of reached this point in her career where she knew what method of working suited her style best and suited her need for control, but also her need for privacy. 

KIM: She comes across, um, and I think even in your talking about the work she did with Mike Nichols later on, she comes across in your book as incredibly loyal. But she's also been described as "a prickly genius" at the same time. Do you think this prickly genius idea, did it influence her relationship with some of her collaborators? And did it also play into how people received her work?

CARRIE: I think that reputation played out more with executives and non-creative people and their interpretation of how she was to work with. With her collaborators, they were always people who had similar sensibilities as her. You know, Warren Beatty is somebody who you could also call a prickly genius, and they worked so well together because they both were kind of crazy, and really perfectionists, and really like, "We like to fight. We like to argue about the script, and if we're not arguing about the script, maybe it's not good enough." Same thing with Mike. Mike knew how to work with her. He knew how to rein in the prickly side and also, you know, let her loose, but hold on to her with a foot on the ground, be the person who anchors her while she goes off on these flights of fancy. Um, John Cassavetes, another prickly genius. She worked a lot behind the scenes with Bill Murray — also somebody who I just think was on the same wavelength as her. Yeah, everyone that she really collaborated closely with she was extremely loyal to and they were extremely loyal to her. But yeah, I think if you were good to Elaine, then she was going to be good to you, and she would be very loyal in that sense then. But if you were a studio executive who was going to come in and screw with her film, the prickly side could turn on.

AMY: One of my favorite quotes from your book, I don't remember who said it, but, uh, it was the quote, "She seemed like a woman who would murder you." 

CARRIE: Yeah. 

AMY: I think what you did was very daunting in writing this biography of her. I mean, I know that you would have loved to have her involvement in the writing of this book, and you did not. It's almost like that, um, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" kind of article, that you had to speak to all of the people around her to get this story. And in the beginning of your book, you actually talk about the fact that you live not too far from where she lives in New York and you would harbor these fantasies of running into her, but I'm sure there's a little bit of trepidation there too. What do you think she would say about this book?

CARRIE: Oh my God. I've had so many stress dreams about it! I've had so many stress dreams, not with what she would say, but, um, I have these stress dreams where Jeannie Berlin is yelling at me, where I'm just like being completely verbally eviscerated by Jeannie (who by all accounts is a very nice woman actually. I would love to be friends with Jeannie.)

AMY: Just to remind listeners, Jeannie Berlin is Elaine May's daughter.

CARRIE: Elaine, I think, would just play dumb. I think she would play dumb. I think that's kind of her go-to response when she's backed into a corner or when she doesn't want to comment on something or doesn't want to be recognized or when she doesn't want praise for anything. She sort of is like, "Well, I don't know what you're talking about." She'd be like, "Oh, there's a book about me? I didn't know." I have a friend who did see her on the street one time and said something like, "Excuse me, are you Elaine May?" (And like, it's unmistakably Elaine.) And she said she looked at her for like a beat and said, "No. But I know her very well." And, like, that's the sort of, like, reaction that I think I would get from her. I mean, at the same time, I'm totally terrified. I'm totally terrified of what I would…

AMY: I'm having stress dreams for you! I literally am having stress dreams for you, but at the same time, I'm so happy that you wrote this book. 

KIM: Yeah. It's really, really good.

CARRIE: Thank you.

KIM: Carrie, it was a delight to have you on the show, and I'm excited to actually see Ishtar for the first time. I haven't seen it yet, and after reading your book, I'm like, “I'm going to watch it, for May.”

CARRIE: Oh my god, you must! It's on Criterion Channel right now.

KIM: Great. I will watch.

AMY: I just watched it yesterday for the first time. The only thing I had ever known about it was the fact that it's like the world's biggest Hollywood bomb ever, right? So of course, why, why would I watch it? I wouldn't watch it. So it's like "Steer clear of Ishtar." And then so I started watching it yesterday and I'm like, “What the heck?” This is like all those sort of “Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson” buddy movies. Dumb and Dumber. It was a precursor to all of those films in the Nineties where you're totally laughing out loud. I didn't have any concept of what this film was about. I thought it was like Lawrence of Arabia or something. I don't even think I knew it was a comedy. 

KIM: Totally.

AMY: Do not just fall for the "Ishtar is the worst movie ever." You have to judge for yourself. 

KIM: Yeah.​

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Patreon members, I'd love for you to join me, Amy, next week for a discussion on 7 Middaugh, a very special house in Brooklyn Heights once upon a time, whose tenants happened to be some of the 20th century's most talented young creatives. Think a literary version of the sitcom “Friends.” The rest of you can join us back here in two weeks. 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. 

193. Kim and Amy Catch Their Book Breath

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

AMY HELMES: We're actually dropping in today for just a quick episode. We've got a few great Lost Ladies lined up in the coming weeks, but due to the demands of scheduling those interviews, and also wanting to make sure we air our episodes to time with specific publication dates of the books we're featuring, we ended up with a rare hole in our schedule for this week.

KIM: Yeah. Somehow we're almost halfway through the year. So consider this the episode where Amy and I pause doubled over with our hands on our knees to catch our podcasting breath.

AMY: I love how we have to work in a jogging reference. As if we actually do that.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Can you even get shin splints from reading too much?

KIM: I have no idea. I've never had one. I don't know.

AMY: Like, I don't even know that concept.

KIM: I don't even know what that is. Yeah, exactly. Um, but one thing we know is that there can never be enough books. And it's funny because people always ask you and I, Amy, how we managed to find time to read all the books we cover on this show. The funny thing is we actually read a lot more books than the ones we feature on the podcast. So yeah, we're reading all the time.

AMY: So today we thought we'd have a little quick-hits update for you guys on some of the other books we've been reading on the side, not for the podcast. You'll definitely get some more Lost Lady recommendations in this episode, so do stick around for that. But before we dive into it, Kim, I have a little new business venture idea for us.

KIM: Are you sure you want to tell me? Because I might make us do it. 

AMY: Oh, my God. That's right. you're the "let's go" lady.

KIM: All right. Well, let's hear it. I'm sure it'll be good. 

AMY: So remember about a month ago, we went to see a one man production of Hamlet?

KIM: I do remember that. Yes. 

AMY: It was amazing. David Melville, he is from the Independent Shakespeare company here in L.A…

KIM: We love him. 

AMY: He's so good. He did a somewhat abridged, but not very abridged, version of Hamlet, and he literally took every single role.

KIM: We were enthralled the entire time. 

AMY: Well, we were, and we weren't, because the woman sitting to my left, you were on my right, the woman sitting to my left felt the need, every 30 seconds throughout this performance… I don't want to be a hater, but every 30 seconds or so I would hear a “Hmm.” “To be or not to be. That is the question…” “Hmm.”

KIM: Yeah. It's like “thinking in progress over here.” 

AMY: Yeah, it was annoying me. Have you ever heard of “silent disco” or “silent dance party?”

KIM: Yes.

AMY: Okay, so in a silent disco, everybody gets headphones and they get to hear the music, but they don't hear anything else.

KIM: Mm-hmm. The sound cancels everything else out. 

AMY: I think this is the solution to do Silent Shakespeare . 

KIM: I love it. Ooh, that could work for movies too, cause people annoy me in the movie theater too. I like this business idea. Some of you will remember this, but I think the timing is perfect to dust off our list of “Five Things you Can Always Expect at any Shakespeare in the Park Performance,” it’s totally related to this conversation.

AMY: Yeah, I mean, summer's basically staring us in the face, and we're about to be venturing back into these outdoor performances. So yeah.

KIM: Be prepared, folks. 

AMY: Our longtime listeners will probably remember this. It might be new to a few though. Here it goes. 

[audio plays/ends]

KIM: Oh my gosh. Classic. And it still holds true. 

AMY: Listeners, if you have anything that you would like to add to that conversation, give us a text. You can now text us with feedback.

KIM: Oh, no, I'm scared.

AMY: What hath we wrought? No, it's a new feature offered by our podcasting platform, and we thought it would be fun to try it out. So if you want to message us, all you have to do is go to the link that's in our show notes. So basically that homepage, wherever you listen to the podcast, there should be a link there that will just take you to how to text us. And we're going to try to start asking a question at the end of each episode that might prompt you to reach out or comment. And of course, you can always join us on our Facebook page too.

KIM: Oh my gosh, I love this texting idea! This is fun. I can't wait. Please text us! Let us know you're out there. We really love to hear from you. Don't hesitate. If you're thinking of texting, do it.

AMY: You're not bugging us. You're actually making our day. We have the nicest listeners on the planet also. We got a review, Kim, from someone with the handle “Paris Bookseller.” I mean, come on, I'm dying already from that. I'm imagining a modern day Sylvia Beach listening to our show. But anyway, she (or he, I don't know which) writes: “I've been a bookseller for years and owned a bookshop in Paris. With each episode of Lost Ladies, I learned something new and fascinating. Their guests are always top notch.Thanks to them, my book knowledge and collection are expanding.”

KIM: Oh my gosh. That gives me all the feels. Our guests are so great.

AMY: Yeah, she's right, totally. And then one more, I'll share just an email from one of our subscribers named Simon.

KIM: Our Patreon subscribers are superheroes. Thank you.

AMY: Yes, we love them. Here's what he had to say when I reached out to thank him for subscribing. He said: “I came back to fiction only a few years ago after years of non fiction only. I'd been a big genre fan before that and had got very bored with it. My wife nudged me back to more mainstream fiction and then challenged me on why I hadn't read any women authors. I dipped a toe in and haven't looked back. I read almost exclusively women authors now and it has been a total joy. It's given me such insight and empathy. I love that you've done Monica Dickens and Stella Gibbons episodes. Would love one day to hear your thoughts on Margery Sharp, particularly Cluny Brown, which is one of my absolute top reads.”

KIM: Done. We are absolutely adding Cluny Brown to our list, Simon. Thank you for the recommendation. And I loved that message. It's just wonderful.

AMY: And way to tak your wife's challenge and run with it. 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: Okay. So now back as promised, we mentioned at the top of the show, wanting to fill listeners in on some of the other books we've been reading. So, Kim, we've discussed a little bit. You know, off air… 

KIM: Yeah. Exactly. Um, so I'm going to say up front. These are all New York Review Books, because Eric got me a subscription for my birthday last year. And every single month I received something amazing. So these are just three recent ones that I absolutely loved. Um, I've been raving about, um, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters by Rachel Cohen. This initially came out in 2004, but they've re-released it this year. and what it is, it's basically fictional accounts of real world meetings between historical figures in the art and the art. Literary world. So, like Mark Twain, Henry and William James, Sarah Orne Jewett, um, Willa Cather, Carl Van Vechten, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, but it's all woven together. And the cool thing that she does is basically she takes the things that these amazing, brilliant people were thinking and weaves it through her fictionalized version of their actual real life meeting. It's like a perfect combination of fiction and nonfiction for me. I absolutely loved the entire book. I learned a little bit more about some figures. I didn't know as much about, um, and it also made me want to read Sarah Orne Jewett. I can't remember. I think something, Juniper Tree or “tree” something. Oh, the Pine Trees. Yeah. I'm confusing it … juniper trees is another author's book, but yeah, it's something about trees. [ed: The Country of the Pointed Firs.] Um, everyone raved about that book at the time and it makes me want to read that for sure.

AMY: That book is on our database, I remember.

KIM: Yeah. Hopefully I'm going to read her anyway, but so maybe we can move her up on our list anyway. Um, the second book I want to talk about is not, by a lost lady, but, it is A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri and it's so wonderful, Amy. It's fiction. It's a story about a young boy who goes from where he lives in Bombay to his mom's family's house in Calcutta. And it's just the day-to-day life. And in the beginning I kept waiting for something kind of awful to happen, you know, that would drive the plot. It doesn't. Um, I don't think it's a spoiler alert to say this is just a wonderful slice of life, a memory of a child, and it's just transcendent. It's wonderful. And then my third book that I just finished last night is Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner. We just did an episode on her this year. It's Episode 158, if you want to go back and give that one a listen, if you haven't heard it, on the novel Lolly Willowes. This one is a historical novel. It's set during the French Revolution of 1848. 

AMY: Ah, Les Mis! 

KIM: Yes, I was gonna say. So, it starts out in England, and I'd say the first part is very almost Henry James in some ways because there's this aristocrat, Sophia. She's a heroine, um, it's very psychological, I would say, that's what makes me think of it as Henry James-esque, like, just trying to figure out what she thinks, what she's doing, why she's reacting to things the way she is. But then she heads over to Paris because she has a philandering husband there. And then that's when it turns into Les Mis slash A Tale of Two Cities, and so that's a whole other section, like living in Paris and, you know, lots of adventures happened to her there. And I just thought this was a wonderful historical novel. I absolutely loved it. And I texted you as I just started getting into it, I'm like, this book is amazing. So you would love it, I think. 

AMY: Not at all like Lolly Willowes.

KIM: No, totally different.

AMY: Um, and this is also making me think because we have an upcoming book that we're going to be doing an episode on that is also sort of about the years after the 1848 revolution, but in Germany. That's coming up in early July. So I'm into that 1848 revolution all over Europe. 

KIM: Oh, that's perfect. So yeah, you should read this. It's very interesting. 

AMY: I remember when Les Mis first came out, I thought it was about like the French Revolution with Marie Antoinette. I didn't even put together that there was another one.

KIM: Totally. I think a lot of people do that, and that's why I mentioned the year, because it's a huge time and a lot of stuff happened in that. Speaking of the original French Revolution, when I was in France for three weeks, one time I brought Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety with me, which is set during that initial French Revolution, and it's really amazing. Have you read that one?

AMY: No, I've only ever read her Henry VIII, like the Tudor stuff.

KIM: Yeah. It's very different, I would say, than Wolf Hall, I guess, but I loved it. Yeah. She's so amazing. 

Anyway, what about you? 

What have you been reading? 

AMY: So you mentioned Sylvia Townsend Warner, diving into somebody we've already done an episode on. I just recently did the same. Well, first of all, a little backstory here. I decided, and we've talked about this, Kim, I want to not be doing stuff on my phone that's making me feel gross. I don't like getting my news that way anymore. And I'm trying to limit social media.So I need something else for when I'm going to pick up the phone. So I put Kindle on there. Um, even though it's like a small way to read it. So I was looking for another Rosamond Lehmann title.

KIM: Oooh, we did Dusty Answer. I loved that book!

AMY: Yeah. And I've been wanting to check out some of the other titles and I found The Weather in the Streets. So I'm only about 10 percent of the way through that. But It almost reminds me a little bit of that Angela Milne book One Year's Time. 

KIM: One Year's Time. Yeah, okay. 

AMY: She's on the train going home and across the seat from her she realizes it's the brother of her best friend growing up, and so they kind of reconnect and they're having on the train this very flirty kind of conversation. The dialogue reminded me a little bit of One Year's Time. I don't know where it's going. I think it's going to get more messy and complicated because he's married. But that's my little, like, have my phone and I have 15 minutes here and there. 

KIM: Yeah. By the way, I have to say that you inspired me ever since we talked about that. I've been doing the limit too. And it's just, it's making a huge difference. So I'm so glad that you brought that up. It's been great for me too. 

AMY: Okay, I've also this spring, I've read a couple of books by Sigrid Nunez, um, The Vulnerables, which is her COVID book. about being in lockdown. She wound up getting asked to pet-sit a parrot in New York City, and then she kind of got stuck with this bird a little bit because it's like the owners couldn't get back. It's interesting and funny. But then I also read her book, I think it's from 1998, it's a very short little book called Mitz. And it's about Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf's pet marmoset who was named Mitz. And, um, if you are a Patreon member and you listened to last week's episode, then you will know that Mitz features into this.

KIM: I have to say my dad's brother and his wife before I was born, and I think maybe this was back in the 60s or something, they had a pet monkey and I guess, you know, it was kind of a thing. He had been in the Navy and so, I don't know, but anyway…

AMY: It was a thing! I call them like the golden doodles of a century ago. Everybody had one. Um, I also finished the new biography of Carson McCullers by Mary V. Dearborn. Very interesting book. Carson sounds like quite a handful. I don't know if I could deal with her for more than like 20 minutes at a time. Um, but I am going to be talking about her in an upcoming bonus episode as well for Patreon, so look out for that. Another book that I'm reading slowly is by a Swedish lost lady of lit who happens to be the first woman to ever win a Nobel Prize in literature. That was 1909. The author is Selma Lagerlof, and the book, which was written in 1891, is called The Saga of Gosta Berling.

KIM: Wait, are we going to do an episode on this?

AMY: Maybe. So I want to give a shout out to one of our listeners, Carolyn Poselthwaite, for recommending this to me. And I kind of want to do an upcoming episode just because my mother in law, Pooky, is of Swedish descent, so I know she would…

KIM: Hi, Pooky!

AMY: Yes, I know she's listening. She would be fascinated by a Swedish author. But also, I know a few people here from Sweden, like, born in Sweden. And they were both like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody reads that in school.”

KIM: So it's not lost in Sweden. It's only lost here.

AMY: No, it's not lost at all. It's taught in schools. But here's what's funny. It starts off with a priest who is a raging alcoholic.

KIM: Okay. Oh!

AMY: And drinking too much. I don't know if he's a clergyman of some sort. So the people in his community get him, ousted from their community and he goes on to become a cavalier, with a group of other, uh, men at the estate of this very wealthy woman. The woman's kind of a badass, but these men are conspiring. They make a pact with the devil to sort of take her down. It just seems like a very funny topic for children to be reading about. It's kind of allegorical.

KIM: Uh-huh. I feel like if we do an episode, we need a guest of Swedish descent who read it in school so we can get that insight. 

AMY: It was made into a movie starring Greta Garbo i, I haven't gotten far enough in to really get to the story yet, but, um, we'll see. I'm gonna throw out a few lost ladies here that I'm reading, and I kinda want feedback from listeners, like, what do you guys want to hear about? So that leads to my next book, which I read earlier this year, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Written in 1928. The only thing I knew about this going into it was it was one of the first quote unquote “lesbian” novels because the main character is you know coming to terms with the fact that she's attracted to women, and what does that mean and struggling with it. And it was shocking at the time, obviously. I don't think the word gay is even used. The main character, Stephen Gordon (they named her Stephen because they thought she was going to be a boy) but she calls herself an invert, which would have been the term at the time. It's such a good book, Kim! You will love it so much. She's an amazing character. It's so poignant, because of all the conflicting emotions she's going through. Her mom is awful, but her father is perhaps the greatest father I've ever read in a book. I mean, just, he's my favorite father I've ever read in a piece of literature. Yeah, please read it and then let me know if we can do it for an episode because I just loved it so much and also I listened to the audio book. So sometimes when you get a really good reader, it just makes all the difference. And the woman reading this one just was fabulous. So, um, Then the last one I'll mention is The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen. So this trilogy has always daunted me because you hear trilogy and you're like, “I don't have time for this.”

KIM: It’s a big commitment.

AMY: Yeah. It's not though. 

KIM: Mm hmm. 

AMY: The trilogy is about the size of one novel.

KIM: I've been wanting to read this actually, for a long time. I need to do this.

AMY: The three books are divided into titles called Childhood, Youth, and Dependency. And it's set like right in the build up to World War Two and it's about her wanting to become a writer and just life and you know all the stuff she's going through. And then Dependency, though, that third book, is crazy because she delves into her drug dependency, and it's probably the most grueling portrayal of drug addiction that I've ever read. Like Trainspotting-ly intense. 

KIM: Have you read the Patrick Melrose novels?

AMY: I read some of those and it's, it's that, like, yikes. But this is, I mean, her life. It's based on her life. And Ditlevsen did eventually take her own life because she just couldn't beat this battle. But, um, yeah, not as long as you might expect. So don't be daunted by The Copenhagen Trilogy. So if any of these have piqued your interest and you want us to focus a full episode on them, please let us know. And if you want to give us any recommendations for Lost Ladies or books that you love, reach out to us. We keep a database for future episodes. So when we hear titles that you guys throw out, we are writing them down. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. We're keeping track of them. Yep. And we could even maybe do a poll or something. when this episode goes live. Um, yeah. Anyway, there's never enough time to read all the books we want to read. There's too many great women writers. But that's all for today's catch up episode. We're going to be back in two more weeks with another full episode. And in this one, we'll be discussing a famous female screenwriter who is often preferred to remain in the shadows. We're talking about the elusive comic genius, Elaine May.

AMY: Yes, super interesting episode and a little bit of a departure for us since she is more in the movie arena. Next week I'll also be offering up another bonus episode to our Patreon members. And remember, you can get two extra episodes each month. It breaks down to just $3 an episode. I'm thinking, Kim, that I would like to discuss next week something we learned recently from Anne Boyd Rioux, our past guest, about Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal sculpture. There's a debate over whether a woman actually deserves credit for that piece. So I'm going to be diving into that. And I also will be talking about Judy Chicago's art installation, The Dinner Party.

KIM: Ooh, I can't wait to listen. Thanks for tuning in everyone. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.

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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.