22. A Real Life Lady Whistledown
KIM (CO-HOST): Hi everyone! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Kim Askew…
AMY (CO-HOST): And I’m Amy Helmes. We’re best friends and co-authors of the Twisted Lit series of young adult novels, and though it’s been a few months since this television show became available, we’d be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to briefly dish about “Bridgerton.” What do you say, Kim?
KIM: Okay, let’s just do it. We’ve held off on discussing it until now because we really didn’t want to spoil it for anybody who didn’t get to binge it right out of the starting gate.
AMY: And actually, we’re not going to give any spoilers away today, either, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet. The Internet has been abuzz for months now with all sorts of recaps and commentary on the show. So we don’t really need to go there. But that said, we think you’re going to find this episode’s topic pretty interesting even if you have not watched “Bridgerton” and even if you don’t intend to. Kim, first things first, we never really got a chance to compare notes about the series — so what’s your verdict? Did you enjoy it?
KIM: Okay, Amy, I enjoyed every episode, and then I promptly forgot about every episode. I’d say it was like a bag of M&Ms rather than a box of Godiva. That said, sometimes — especially during a pandemic (and in L.A. where we are pretty much on “stay-at-home” orders right now) — sometimes a bag of M&Ms is just what you need.
AMY: I couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s exactly the right analogy for this show. It’s not Godiva. It was totally a bag of M&Ms. Kind of works in a pinch when you need that chocolate fix, you know? I really appreciated the fact that the production value was so high. I mean, that kept my interest going. The casting was amazing, they did not skimp on the costumes or the scenery, the locations… anything like that. Regé-Jean Page and his chiseled bod… he’s got to be in the “Top 10 Costume Drama Hotties.”
KIM: They’re talking about making him the next James Bond. I don’t know if it’s just the Internet, but I’m there for it honestly. I’m probably more into James Bond if he were James Bond.
AMY: I think that would actually be really good casting. And I’ve got to say, Phoebe Dynevor, who played Daphne, I thought she was incredible too. I loved her. My one problem was that she really reminded me of Wendy from Peter Pan, so then when she would go into the full-in sexy stuff, it was just really hard for me to watch because of the bangs and the innocence. You know what I mean? I just kept thinking of Disney’s Wendy!
KIM: I agree. I felt that, too. I loved the sister.
AMY: Eloise.
KIM: Yeah. Eloise.
AMY: I loved Eloise. I loved Penelope across the street.
KIM: Me too.
AMY: I thought she was really good. I also thought it was interesting to see a Regency-era story set in the heart of London because so many times, except for a few scenes here and there, it’s always set in the English countryside. In Bath or wherever. So to see it actually in the city was pretty cool. But my problem, I guess, a little bit was that it felt like, “Hollywood” was writing it. It felt like Americans were writing it.
KIM: Totally. It was not the BBC.
AMY: The English speak with a specific sort of cadence and they have a certain wit — a very specific wit — and I don’t think it was captured in that series. But I still loved it. I do think it’s funny to see people finally freaking out about costume dramas, like suddenly the rest of the world has caught on to this. If it’s going to spur production of more shows like this, then yes, I’m down for it.
KIM: Absolutely, and we’re always here to give you advice on what other things you can watch that are even better. So for those of you who weren’t aware, the premise around which “Bridgerton” is built is that there’s this anonymous gossip columnist in Regency-era London who goes by the name of “Lady Whistledown.” She loves to stir up scandal by spilling all the tea about members of high society.
AMY: And all the characters on the show are just itching to get their hands on her newsletters as they are printed, and what they read either fills them with wicked amusement or abject mortification, depending on who she’s talking about that week. They never know who will be the subject of Lady Whistledown’s high praise or the target of her scathing exposes. And this mysterious figure has the ability to make or break people’s reputations and, ergo, their very happiness.
KIM: Hmmm, sounds a little bit like “Gossip Girl,” doesn’t it?
AMY: Yeah.
KIM: Anyway, so, is “Bridgerton’s” Lady Whistledown based on a real person, Amy?
AMY: Well, there’s no specific person, historically, that we could equate with Lady Whistledown, but according to historian Catherine Curzon, who gave a recent interview to Town & Country magazine, she does take after a gossip writer from early 18th century England known as “Mrs. Crackenthorpe.”
KIM: Are you sure that’s not a Dickens character, Amy?
AMY: It does sound like that, right?
KIM: There’s the same number of syllables in their names.
AMY: Yeah, “Whistledown.” “Crackenthorpe.” Yeah. So anyway, I decided to dig a little further to see what all I could find on Mrs. Crackenthorpe. So “Mrs. Phoebe Crackenthorpe” (her tagline is: “a lady who knows everything”) was an anonymous author who wrote the short lived magazine The Female Tatler, which was published from 1709 to 1710. (It was basically a rival of The Tatler, but it was one of the first periodicals aimed solely for a female audience). It was known for its “scandal and scurrility.”
KIM: Oooh.
AMY: I like that word: scurrility. Mrs. Crackenthorpe, unlike Lady Whistledown, did not out people by name, however, she used codes to disguise their identities that were pretty easy to see through.
KIM: So basically the historic equivalent of “blind items.”
AMY: Yeah.
KIM: It reminds me actually a little bit of the anonymous “case studies” that are in the books of Marjorie Hillis, which we talked about in last week’s episode, although Marjorie Hillis’s examples are meant to be sort of self-help, cautionary tales. But as for Mrs. Crackenthorpe, I like the idea of people having to look for the clues to determine exactly who she’s talking about. That sounds really cool.
AMY: Yeah, and interestingly, she also chastised any readers who sent in letters trying to expose people… she did not play that way. It’s fine for her to dish the dirt, because she saw herself as impartial, but if you were trying to out someone vindictively, she was NOT on board and she was not going to help you out with that.
KIM: Ooh, I like her! So do we actually know who she really was?
AMY: That remains the big question, actually: the identity of “Mrs. Crackenthorpe” has never been established. Some scholars theorize that it could have been a man, but that’s just speculation. And actually “Mrs. Crackenthorpe” had words to say about that theory. She wrote:
Whereas several ill-bred critics have reported about town that a woman is not the author of this paper, which I take to be a splenetic and irrational aspersion upon our whole sex, women were always allow'd to have a finer thread of understanding than men, which made them have recourse to learning, that they might equal our natural parts, and by an arbitrary sway have kept us from many advantages to prevent our out-vying them; but those ladies who have imbib'd authors, and div'd into arts and sciences have ever discover'd a quicker genius, and more sublime notions. These detractors cou'd never gain admittance to the fair sex, and all such I forbid my drawing room.” [Issue No. 11]
So she’s not having any “only a man could have written this.” Don’t talk to her that way. Side note on this: a baronet once referred to her drawing room as the “scandal office.” I feel like I need a placard for my office that just says “Scandal Office” on it.
KIM: I love that. It very much makes it almost, in a salacious way, kind of business-like, which a woman, potentially, of Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s ilk, probably wasn’t actually “working” so to speak in other ways than this, so I kind of like that.
AMY: Yeah, she was brokering in scandal, in gossip, and having people come in and out of the drawing room telling her what to dish about. So as to her identity though, some people have also suggested that she could have been the playwright, best-selling novelist and political satirist Delarivier Manley (or Delia Manley, for short). And I don’t know if it was her or not, but we could devote an entire episode to her as a “Lost Lady of Lit,” because she put out a lot of great works and she is sometimes referred to as one of the “fair triumvirate of wit” (the other two in that triumvirate at the time were the writers Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood.)
KIM: Oh, we’ve got to research her for a potential “lost lady,” you are right. She sounds fascinating. Let’s look into that more.
AMY: She would have been in her 40s around the time Mrs. Crackenthorpe was writing, so that all pans out. And I’ve also seen scholarship that debunks the idea that Manley was Lady Crackenthorpe… what’s actually really interesting, thought, is that Delia Manley was arrested for libel at one point for lampooning certain politicians in her novel The New Atalantis, and right around that time she got arrested, the The Female Tatler’s next issue (the 52nd issue) was suddenly published under a new authorship… someone else took over — these two sisters named Lucinda and Artesia. But what happened to Lady Crackenthorpe?
KIM: Ooh, the plot thickens!
AMY: All that said, Lady Crackenthorpe was at work in the early part of the 18th century, so that was basically a century before the time period in which Bridgerton is set. So she’s not necessarily the perfect parallel for Lady Whistledown.
KIM: Right, but if we want to look to something a little more of that Regency era, we could mention Town and Country magazine (which, by the way, is no relation to the Town & Country publication we know of today) It had a column called “Tete-A-Tete” which is another early gossip column. It was like “Page 6” in that it focused on celebrities of the day.
AMY: We’re talking celebrities like Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire…
KIM: We love her.
AMY: She was played by Keira Knightley in a biopic called The Duchess. If you haven’t seen that, it’s worth checking out. And then similar to today, there were also a lot of stories centered on the royal family, including The Prince of Wales and his lover, who was actress Mary Robinson. The gossip columns could not get enough of this couple and they referred to them as “Perdita” and “Florizel,” which were apparently their pet names for one another.
KIM: I love it! Okay, so while we’re talking Regency Era romance, Amy I think this might be a good segue to talk about the new book you have an essay featured in.
AMY: So yeah, even today’s modern newspapers love to dish about real life romances — and several years back I contributed an article to The L.A. Times’ “L.A. Affairs” column. It’s a weekly column that they publish having to do with dating, relationships and marriage in Los Angeles. Well, they have recently published a book compiling some of the “greatest hits” from the “L.A. Affairs” column, and I’m so excited that they chose to include my essay in it!
KIM: I’m excited about the book, too. It’s called L.A. Affairs: 65 True Stories of Nightmare Dates, Love at First Sight, Heartbreak and Happily Ever Afters in Southern California. We’ll include a link in our show notes of course for that, but Amy, tells us about your essay, which I love.
AMY: It was called “Searching for Mr. Darcy,” and it’s basically about my search for a soul mate in Los Angeles and comparing it to that of a Jane Austen heroine.
KIM: Can you read us a bit of it?
AMY: Yeah! I’ll read you sort of the beginning part.
Approaching self-declared spinsterhood, I blamed Jane Austen. Having read all her novels and watched achingly gorgeous film adaptations thereof, I would consider only men who epitomized one of those gallant and stouthearted Regency-era heroes (barring the breeches and riding jackets because, well, I had to be realistic).
Yet here was the sad but universal truth: If Jane Austen couldn’t find a suitable mate in her day and age — she never married — there was no way in hell I’d ever find my “Mr. Darcy” in L.A., of all places.
Sure, you could find a regimental army’s worth of rogues at any bar in Hollywood. And this town was teeming with preening and sniveling “Mr. Collins” types, those smarmy social climbers (typically agents and aspiring screenwriters) in hot pursuit of their trophy wife. Insufferable. As for honorable gentleman callers — the kind that would make you swoon while earning your mother’s seal of approval? — they were as rare as snow on the Sunset Strip.
Occasionally, a dashing young dandy had me blushing under my nonexistent bonnet. That’s when friends would set me straight by insisting that my gentleman caller definitely wasn’t. (“His favorite movie is ‘Xanadu,’ Amy! How are you not seeing this?”) Like a foolhardy Lydia Bennet, I was briefly led astray by an L.A. transplant from England, naturally besotted by his British accent and rakish charm only to discover, to my disgrace, that he was both a coke addict and a married man. Quelle horreur!
There was only one way to meet my 18th century ideal: Use 21st century tactics.
And it goes on from there, basically, to explain how, in fact, I did meet my husband, Mike.
KIM: I was there for all of it, from “Single Amy” to “Married Amy,” and it is a very romantic story. You’ll definitely want to read the rest of this brilliant, wonderful essay.
AMY: I did find my “Mr. Darcy.”
KIM: Yes. Thank goodness. So, speaking of love stories, I’ll segue into a rather unusual one we have coming at you next week. (You’ll want to stay around for that): The Green Parrot, by Princess (and yes, you heard that right) Princess Marthe Bibesco. And we have a wonderful guest joining us to discuss her. She’s literary publicist Lauren Cerand, who has been dubbed a “cultural gatekeeper in the literary world,” no less.
AMY: And by the way, Lauren had these beautiful “parrot” headbands made for us by Kevin Burke who has a shop on Etsy. We’ll link to that in our show notes, and I’m sure you can find the pictures of those on our Instagram. We’ll see you next week. Until then, be sure to do all the things they tell you to do at the end of podcasts: subscribe, rate and review us. And hit us up on social media to let us know what you think!
KIM: We’d really love if you’d review us.
AMY: Please!
KIM: Our theme song was performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by the wonderful Harriet Grant.
AMY: Lost Ladies of Lit was produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.