13. Nathalia Crane — The Janitor’s Boy and Other Poems

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM: Hey, Amy, are you in the mood for some poetry?

AMY: That’s a loaded question. And a scary one. I mean, there’s a lot of bad poetry in the world.

KIM: Okay, but the poetry we’re going to be talking about today was written by an 11-year-old child prodigy.

AMY: Prepubescent poetry? C’mon, Kim. Now I’m absolutely terrified. Yikes.

KIM: Don’t be terrified! The writer’s name is Nathalia Crane, and her story is completely fascinating, if mostly forgotten. It’s going to spark an interesting conversation for today’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” episode, whether you actually like her poetry or not. 

AMY: Okay, if you say so… then all right, let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music]

AMY: Hi again, everyone, I’m Amy Helmes and I’m here with my writing partner, Kim Askew, for another episode dedicated to shedding light on female writers who have been buried in the shadows. Only today’s episode isn’t about a “lost lady” so much as it’s about a “lost little girl.”

KIM: You’re right. Nathalia Crane was only 9 years old, living in Brooklyn, New York in 1924 when she first began receiving attention for her poetry. She originally wrote her verses alone in her bedroom on a typewriter. But then her father convinced her to send a few to the Brooklyn Daily Times, and later, she sent some to The New York Sun. In both instances, they were accepted, but also in both cases the editors, at first anyway, had no idea that they weren’t dealing with an adult. 

AMY: Yeah, so The New York Sun editor, Edmund Leamy, recalled the moment he actually first met Crane in person. He said: “A call at the office made by the author in answer to a letter about the poem The Army Laundress disclosed to my amazement that the writer was none other than a little girl -- a shy, unassuming youngster who was as embarrassed during the interview as I was myself. For I must admit I was embarrassed -- or rather taken aback.”

KIM: Okay, so from that point, she pretty much became a sensation. She was dubbed “The Brooklyn Bard,” and journalists of the day flocked to write about this pint-sized literary phenom. 

AMY: Her first book of poetry was rushed into print. It was a collection called The Janitor’s Boy, and Pulitzer-Prize winning poet William Rose Benét wrote the foreword to the book. Although he admitted that he was usually skeptical of claims of child prodigies, he felt that Nathalia could be the real deal. He has a very measured take on her talents in this introduction. He’s not fully gushing. But at one point he does compare her to Emily Dickinson, of all people.

KIM: Yeah, and that’s pretty high praise. I mean, almost the highest to some people.  Then a year later, her publisher advertised that Nathalia had been elected into the British Society of Authors, Playwright and Composers (and that was presided over by Thomas Hardy! It was claimed that no poet since Walt Whitman himself had received this distinction… )

AMY: So that sounds pretty impressive on paper, but actually, if you do a little more looking into it, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. That society (that sounds so fancy) it had no really stringent criteria for submission and her dad basically just paid the standard dues so that she could join. (It’s sort of how it works to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If you’re willing to pay, you can get one.) That’s kind of how she got into it, and the publisher eventually backpedaled that brag a little bit, but still, she was receiving a lot of accolades for her work.

KIM: So Crane put out several other volumes of poetry in her early teens, so it wasn’t just a “one-hit-wonder” kind of thing, and that led to some controversy as well, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. First, let’s take a look at some of her early poems.

AMY: And since Nathalia was only 11-years-old when The Janitor’s Boy was published, we thought who better to help introduce us to a few of her poems than an actual 11-year-old girl. We recruited my daughter, Julia, to drop in to today’s episode to help us read a few of Nathalia’s early poems!

KIM: Hi Julia! 

JULIA: Hi!

AMY: So Julia, as you know, we’re talking about a child poet today, Nathalia Crane, and her book of poems that’s called The Janitor’s Boy. Just so you know, she lived in an apartment in Brooklyn, and she actually had a huge crush on the red-haired son of the janitor who lived in her building. His name was Roger Jones. So the first seven poems in the book are about Roger Jones. Okay, Jules, if you were ever to write poems about a boy that you had a crush on, how would you feel about having it published for all the world to read? Would you be down for that?

JULIA: Probably not.

AMY: No? Might be a little embarrassing? Well, Nathalia was cool with it, apparently. But, I want you to go ahead and read one of those initial poems in the book. It’s called “The Vacant Lot.” It’s basically about a property next door to where Nathalia and Roger used to play. And listeners, we’re going to have Julia read it so that you can keep in mind that, basically, a 10-year-old girl wrote this. So go ahead, Jules. 

JULIA: Okay. 

They’re going to build a flat house on the lot next door to me;

And Roger Jones, the janitor’s boy, is mad as he can be.

That lot was like a tropic isle, with weeds and rubbish fair,

The rusty cans and coffee pots that looked like Roger’s hair.

‘Twas oft we strolled among the weeds, we were in love, you see,

And Roger Jones was going to build a bungalow for me.

We used to rest upon a rock just where the weeds were tall;

We were engaged, I think, until the builders spoiled it all.

But now they’ve ruined Roger’s plans, they’ve dug up all the lot;

With all the brick and mortar round, you’d never know the spot.

They came with carts and horses; tore our wilderness apart;

No wonder Roger Jones is wild; it nearly broke my heart.

We could have done some wondrous things if time were not so slow;

The weeds, they might have grown to trees, fit for a bungalow.

With rusty cans and broken glass, we’d planned a home so nice;

But they dumped their brick and mortar in our little paradise.

They dumped their brick and mortar, ‘mid the smoky lakes of lime,

Yet we won’t forget, ‘twas Eden -- Eden, once upon a time.

Eden, where we dreamed supremely -- rusty can and coffee pot;

Eden, with weeds and rubbish, in a vacant city lot.

And now we’re simply waiting, oh, that janitor’s boy and me,

Until the janitor’s boy grows up and finds himself quite free

To just discover areas where builders never go,

Where we may live forever in a little bungalow.

KIM: Julia, that was beautiful.

JULIA: Thank you!

KIM: Yeah, I mean, really, poetry needs to be read. When I hear it read, I love it so much more, and I feel it so much more than reading it on the page. I have a whole new appreciation for that poem after having you read it.

AMY: And hearing it read in the voice of a child, who would have written it.

KIM: Exactly. It was perfect.

AMY: It kind of makes it a little magical.

KIM: Yeah, and you were very expressive, but not too expressive. It was really nice. A lot of these poems really give you that feel of being a kid growing up in Flatbush. Her other poems about Roger talk a lot about all the make-believe they used to play in the neighborhood. It sounded really idyllic in this poem and in the other ones that are in the book.

AMY: Yeah, and at the same time, I think this poem, in particular, represents the sort of ending of childhood innocence, which, to me, seems mature for her to have written that at the age of 10. But, by the same token, a lot of her poems are just kind of silly, and they do seem like they would have been written by a child. They rhyme, and they feel very “Ogden Nash” maybe. Definitely I get a Shel Silverstein vibe. They’re cute, but pretty basic, and we’ll have Julia read one called “Suffering,” for us. So Julia, take it away.

JULIA: 

I sat down on a bumble bee

In Mrs. Jackson’s yard:

I sat down on a bumble bee:

The bee stung good and hard.

I sat down on a bumble bee,

For just the briefest spell,

And I had only muslin on,

As any one could tell.

I sat down on a bumble bee,

But I arose again;

And now I know the tenseness of

Humiliating pain.

AMY: That was a fun one, what did you think of that one, Julia, about her sitting on a bumblebee?

JULIA: I do think it would hurt a lot if you sat on a bumblebee, so, it really explains the pain.

AMY: Now, can you picture a girl your age writing something like that?

JULIA: Well, I mean, I think it’s really cool that she can write this poetry only at the age of like 11 and 10. I just think it’s really cool, how she, like, wrote it.

AMY: And you did a good job, too, and it’s almost past your bedtime now, so we’re going to let you sign off and go to bed, okay? But it was fun having you on. 

JULIA: Okay.

KIM: Thanks, Julia. That was great.

JULIA: Thank you!

AMY: So back to the poetry now…

KIM: Okay, so there’s this other poem, “Jealousy,” which is all about her having to stand guard and be her mother’s “signal corps” whenever Nathalia goes out in the neighborhood with her dad. She knows she has to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn’t cheat on her mother. So that takes us into a whole new area from the bumblebee poem.

AMY: You just don’t expect that a 10-year-old girl is going to have concerns like that going through her mind. It was kind of funny, but it also stops you in your tracks a little. And one of the final couplets from that poem says: “And mother knows when I go out with Pa, things are O.K./For I belong to the Flatbush Guards -- we don’t let father stray.” Watch out ladies! Nathalia is on patrol!

KIM: It made me laugh, but it also kind of made me cringe that she even had to think about that! Speaking of Nathalia’s father, he was the person who probably most encouraged her writing. He was an erstwhile poet himself with a background working in newspapers, and he used to read aloud poems by Kipling to her, and he was always regaling her with stories from his own travels and adventures. He was a war veteran, both of WWI and the Spanish American War. You can see his influence in the fact that she wrote a few poems with military themes.

AMY: That seems like a pretty unexpected topic for a 10-year-old to me. There’s a whole poem about her playing “toy soldiers” with her dad on the living room floor called “The Battle on the Floor,” and I loved the last few lines from that poem, which read: “For Father feels that every girl/Should have some nerve and tone,/And know just how to manage in/A battle all her own.”

KIM: I love that. That’s good.

AMY: Yeah, like he was getting her ready, you know, ready for the world. But I’m actually going to read another poem which is about this fort that sits in the New York harbor, called Castle Williams, but I guess people know it as “Castle Bill” for short. When Nathalia was a child, it was actually serving as a prison, and so she writes about it in this sort of haunting, romantic way, as the prisoners hear the echoes from this battle in the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish American War. That seems like a history that I can’t imagine any 10-year-old girl would know about, but I have to imagine this this was inspired by tales her father told her. So I’ll go ahead and read that one:

Castle Bill

Down on Gov’nor’s Island,

Ivy etched and chill,

Hollow as a halo,

There is Castle “Bill.”

Once the pride of outfits--

Prisoners under guard,

Form for evening roll-call

In the castle yard.

Sentries with their side arms,

Counting, one by one,

While the twilight tarries

For the sunset gun.

Miles away the music

Soundeth at parade

Chanting of Cochita,

Filipino maid;

Chanting of Cochita

Of Corregidor;

Piping of the palm trees

’Long Lunetta shore.

Dusty gunners listen,

Lead and chain and wheel;

Long ago Manila

Held them all to heel;

Boys from all battalions,

Saberless and still,

Waiting on a sunset --

Down in Castle “Bill.”

AMY: So that’s an example of the fact that just a good majority of the poems in this collection don’t necessarily focus on kid themes. The acclaimed poet and critic Louis Untermeyer, who was a champion of Crane’s work, said that this book “was alternately juvenile and mature, frivolous and profound, absurd and mystical.” And I know, Kim, you kind of liked some of the poems in the second half of the book, I think, getting a little more way from some of the rhyming, cutesy stuff.

KIM: Yeah, and speaking of going back to things prior to her time, my poem that I’m going to read goes back even farther. I’m not going to say too much about it until after but I’m going to read “The First Story”:

Mid seaweed on a sultry strand, ten thousand years ago,

A sun-burned baby sprawling lay, a-playing with his toe.

The babe was dreaming of the day that he might swing a club,

When lo! He saw a fishy thing, a-squirming in the mud.

The creature was an octopus, and dangerous to pat,

But the prehistoric infant never stopped to think of that.

The baby’s fingernails were sharp, his appetite was prime,

He clutched that deep-sea monster, for ‘twas nearing supper-time,

Oh! Suddenly, from out the pulp a fluid black did flow,

‘Twas flavored like a barberry wine and gave a sort of glow;

It squirted in the baby’s eyes; it made him gasp and blink,

But to that octopus he held, and drank up all the ink.

The ink was in the baby -- he was bound to write a tale;

So he wrote the first of stories with his little fingernail.

KIM: So I loved the clever idea of this poem. There’s a prehistoric baby imbibing the ink of an octopus and writing the very first story with his fingernail. And the imagery is really great, but it also made me think of Nathalia, herself, a young child, herself, writing these stories, seemingly out of nowhere, with all this arcane knowledge.

AMY: That is a good metaphor, I guess. for Nathalia. I never really thought of that. And you’re right, that in some of these poems, in fact, her vocabulary and the knowledge she’s able to reference seems really astonishing for a girl her age. Especially in her subsequent books of poetry, we see even more of that cerebral sophistication that shines through. And yet, some of Nathalia’s own teachers remarked that she wasn't among their brightest students, or the most well-read. 

KIM: So we’ve dropped some little hints about the controversy. Let’s get completely into it right now. As more and more attention became focused on her, people started to really question whether she could actually have written the poems. In 1925, an American poet named Edwin Markham suggested it was all fake. He said:  "It seems impossible to me that a girl so immature could have written these poems. They are beyond the powers of a girl of twelve. The sophisticated viewpoint of sex, ...knowledge of history and archeology found in these pages place them beyond the reach of any juvenile mind."

AMY: And even her own publisher, Thomas Seltzer, wondered about it. He said: “I am as much mystified as anybody. Nathalia Crane is either a miracle or she is the most colossal hoax in history.” So what do we think of this? Is she a legitimate literary wunderkind or a complete hoax?

KIM: Hmm. I’m not sure. The poems really did seem to have -- as you suggested earlier -- some of these adult concepts. And hearing that her teachers didn’t consider her particularly bright or well-read, you’d think someone that precocious would really stand out at school in one way or another. (Maybe she’d just be annoying.) But that said, I didn’t think the poems were as good as some suggested. But given the evidence, we have, it’s hard to know. I guess she’d at least had some help from her father. He was described in one article as a “raconteur.” 

AMY: Hmmm. Yeah, it’s hard to know this many years later, but he definitely feels like a “stage father,” a little bit. But he also loved poetry, as we mentioned. Could he have maybe finessed or edited some of her works a little bit? Perhaps. I think it’s maybe possible. But I do think that probably most of the poems in The Janitor’s Boy  were written by her. For a normal 10-year-old child, her writing ability would be considered extremely advanced, yes. But it sounds like she was inundated with poetry by her dad growing up, and that probably could have rubbed off on her and given her a gift for writing verse. And given that I know what she does later in her life, I’m willing to say that yes, she had a passion for writing. We don’t know how much editing happened before these books were published, but you know, “the bumblebee” poem, for sure. I totally buy that an 11-year-old wrote that. And even probably the Roger Jones poems. They definitely sound like a child would have written them. But yeah, there are some poems where even I didn’t know the vocabulary words, and that’s saying something. 

KIM: Yep. It is.

AMY: So that said, at one point, Dorothy Parker, one of the founding members of the Algonquin Round Table, she commented on Crane’s talent (or lack thereof, depending on how you choose to read it.) So Parker was writing about an anthology of poems written for a contest about Charles Lindbergh, which she thought was a totally stupid idea in the first place. In The New Yorker magazine, she explains that she's holding this book of poems about Lindbergh in her left hand, and quote: “with my right hand, I am guiding the razor across my throat. Honestly, this book contains the worst stuff you ever saw in your life.” She goes on to say she hoped the aviator would be spared from having to read the “sickly, saccharine, inept, ill-wrought tributes.” This relates to Nathalia Crane because Nathalia won the top prize in this poetry contest and her poem was featured in this book. 

So Parker goes on to say: “The first prize, an award of $500, was given to Nathalia Crane, the Baby Peggy of poesy. [Which, I believe Baby Peggy was some sort of Hollywood Shirley Temple precursor.] A couple of years ago, a controversy raged,” Parker goes on to say, “as to whether or not the twelve-year-old Miss Crane wrote her own works. They were ascribed to various older poets, though whether for the purpose of taking the credit or shouldering the blame I never knew.”

KIM: Ouch! That’s pretty funny, but also, I feel sort of bad for Nathalia if she read any of this stuff. I do love Dorothy Parker, though. She’s very witty and it shows. 

Amy: The New York Times also weighed in on the Nathalia Crane debate. They were of the opinion that she did write her own poems, but like Parker, they weren’t necessarily tactful in their review of her second book of poems, Lava Lane. I’m going to read you just a portion of their review of Lava Lane: “For our own part, we have not the slightest doubt that little Miss Crane is the author of the several versifications attributed to her. We see no reason why there should not be youthful geniuses in poetry as well as musical and mathematical. And after all, poetry is not such a difficult thing to achieve as the quantity of bad verse turned out annually attests. And Nathalia’s verse is bad. Very bad. That is, just so long as it is considered to be poetry as serious-minded critics insist. As soon, however, as it is put in its proper place and treated as juvenilia, it is very good indeed.”

So, I don’t know. Maybe that’s where we fall in line with Nathalia Crane, Kim. You know, I think for a child her poetry is… blows you away. Is it Emily Dickinson? After reading Janitor’s Boy, what do you think?

KIM: No. No. I’d say it’s not Emily Dickinson, but i do think for juvenilia it is quite good. So I think a lot of people saw her as merely a gimmick. And Crane wasn’t the only “girl poet” of this time period. It was kind of a thing. There was a sort of interest around this time in uncovering prodigies in art or music or literature. In terms of poets, there was also Hilda Conkling and Sabine Sicaud, and then later Minou Drouet.

AMY: I haven’t read any of those girls, but yeah, it would be interesting to go back and look at some of their work and compare it to Crane’s and see how they sort of measured up against each other. In any case, public interest in Crane waned when she got older. When she was no longer the cute little girl sensation, people really didn’t pay her as much notice.

KIM: Amy, do we know much about what happened to her once she grew up?

AMY: I could only find bits and pieces of information, really. She studied at Barnard College and then she also attended the Universities of Madrid and Granada as well as the Sorbonne. And, interestingly enough, I read that she graduated from the Gemological Institute of America, which is in Los Angeles. Because she went on to live on the West Coast. She became an assistant professor of literature at San Diego State University, and she continued writing poetry in adulthood, but I couldn’t find too much about those titles, beyond their names, basically. She wrote two novels when she was still quite young, teenager, basically. They’re out of print though The Sunken Garden is one she wrote when she was 13 and I did find an excerpt from it in a 1926 issue of Vanity Fair. It’s about a young girl that’s ship-wrecked on a tropical island. It’s sort of a young girl Robinson Crusoe. It was okay. It was definitely sort of lyrical. It reminded me of her poetry even though it was prose. But the most interesting about this all is the fact that she was famous enough in 1926 for Vanity Fair to decide to print a portion of the book. I feel like that’s a big deal. It just shows that the public was sort of clamoring for her.

In terms of her personal life, she did not grow up to marry the Janitor’s Boy, but she did marry. Her first husband died, and then in 1973, she fell in love with Peter O’Reilly, who was a Roman Catholic priest. He was teaching philosophy professor at CSU San Diego. He gave up the priesthood so that they could get married, and this made news in The New York Times that year in a small announcement, and that’s where I found out some of these details about her life as an adult.

KIM: Oh, that’s really interesting, and I like that she sort of stayed true to her love of literature and taught. It seems to lend her more credence, like you said earlier. That’s really interesting. We also have some other interesting trivia for you. It’s said she’s related to Stephen Crane (who wrote The Red Badge of Courage) and — this one’s really good — Natalie Merchant of the 10,000 Maniacs turned “I’m in Love with the Janitor’s Boy” into a song (And we’ll link to a video of her performing that in our show notes.)

AMY: Yeah, I think it’s kind of cool that Natalie Merchant not only knew about her, but was inspired by her. And speaking of music, it’s actually time to cue our theme song and say good-bye everyone. 

[closing music]

KIM: For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, you can check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, please leave a review. It really helps new listeners to find us!

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

12. Somewhere In Time On Anne’s Mackinac Island

KIM ASKEW [CO-HOST]: So, Amy, I know the time machine hasn’t been invented yet, but if it were, would you give one a whirl?

AMY HELMES [CO-HOST]: Ooh, I’ve thought about this quite a bit in my life, and the answer, I think, is yes. How cool would it be to get to go back in time to all of these places that we read about and actually experience it? Ideally, I would like to have the option to safely return to present day, if possible, but yeah, I’d be down for some Outlander-type scenario.

KIM: Yeah, a kilt or corset or something like that. All these costumes are just whirling through my head. Or maybe we could even meet up with a few of the authors we feature on “Lost Ladies of Lit.” So hey, everybody, welcome back to another one of our mini podcasts. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. Okay, so Kim, one of the next best things to having an actual time machine is getting to travel somewhere that feels like it’s another place and time. And one of those places, for me, is Mackinac Island in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

KIM: Oh yeah. I know you love that place and I can’t wait to hear all about it from you in today’s episode. I’ve definitely heard you gush about that place, and I can’t wait to hear more in today’s episode. So, Mackinac Island, we should point out, is one of the primary settings of last week’s featured novel, Anne, it’s this amazing novel by Constance Fenimore Woolson.

AMY: Yeah, and tucked away on a wooded hillside on Mackinac Island is a shrine, of sorts, dedicated to Woolson. It’s a bronze plaque called “Anne’s Tablet”  that commemorates the novel and the beloved heroine, Anne. There’s a fort on Mackinac Island (one that’s also featured in the novel) and you have to take a hike from this fort up to a scenic vista to find it. It’s kind of hidden out of the way a little bit. But it’s in the exact sort of location where I envision Anne and her childhood sweetheart, Rast, used to have their talks in the novel, if you remember that, Kim.

KIM: Oh, that is so sweet! I can picture it. And I’ve actually seen a photo of the plaque online. It features a sculpture of Anne hanging the Christmas wreath, from the opening passage of the book.

AMY: Woolson really did such a great job of describing the natural beauty of the island and so it just feels like the perfect tribute. I think it was her nephew that raised the funds to have this plaque put up, but I’m glad somebody wanted to remember her, because she’s really worth remembering, I think.

KIM: Yeah, if you haven’t listened to that episode on her, I would go back and listen to it. She, in addition to being an amazing writer that time has forgotten a bit, she really had a really interesting life which we get into during the podcast. So Amy, I have not yet visited Mackinac Island, though I really want to, and I know you love it, so could you tell us a little bit more about it?

AMY: Well, I’ve only been once. It’s perched right up at the top of the Great Lakes on the straits of Mackinac, which is where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron connect. And today, it’s obviously a tourist destination, but when you visit it, you feel like you’re entering this magical, enchanted place that’s separated from everything, you know, this sort of isolated fantasy world kind of thing. So there are no cars on the island, and that’s part of the reason that it’s so enchanting, I think. Motorized transportation of any kind is not allowed, although I do think there might be golf carts that are only allowed on the golf course. And, of course, like motorized wheelchairs, that’s fine. But you get there by ferry and then you’re either going to be walking, bicycling or riding in horse-drawn carriage to explore the island. So cool.

KIM: I would definitely be exploring the island via horse-drawn carriage, for sure! So, once I’m there and I’m in my horse-drawn carriage, where am I going? What is there to do on the island?

AMY: So when you first arrive and you’re at the docks, very nearby is the Main Street which is historic architecture, but really, you know, a lot of fudge and salt water taffy kind of shops. It’s the place where the tourists are. But once you venture a few blocks out from there and it becomes so pastoral. There are all these Victorian homes with clapboard siding dotting the whole island. And in the spring and summer, the whole place is in full bloom with flowers. There’s Lily of the Valley, bluebells, creeping myrtle. It’s like walking around in a painting, or a picture postcard. It’s so adorable. And then I’m also kind of intrigued about what the place might be like in the winter time, because after the tourists leave, the people that live on the island are pretty much shut off from the rest of the world. They’re literally snowed in and they really can’t get supplies except maybe by plane. So they kind of have to hunker down until spring and the next tourist season. It’s very much as Woolson describes it, the winter there.

KIM: It could be really magical or it could be the shining.

AMY: Exactly, exactly!

KIM: Yeah, that’s where my mind goes.

KIM: That sounds really beautiful, though. We learned from last week’s guest, Anne Boyd Rioux, that Constance Fenimore Woolson had a strong interest in botany. So no wonder she loved Mackinac and was able to describe it so beautifully! She was really into all the flora.

AMY: It’s definitely a nature-lover’s paradise. But actually, the biggest structure on the island, which you can see in all its glory when you’re approaching by ferry, is the Grand Hotel. It first opened in 1887, which is a few decades past the time period that we read about in Woolson’s novel,. but again, it’s a place that is just a complete throwback to another era. So it’s a national historic landmark and it feels incredibly old-school, but in the best way possible. You eat dinner in this magnificent dining room with formally-dressed waiters with white towels over their arm, and the Grand Hotel orchestra is playing in the background. They totally pull out all of the stops for the dinner service. It’s an experience you can’t miss if you happen to visit.

KIM: It kind of sounds almost like being on board the Titanic, only on land.

AMY: Yes, exactly. It does feel that way.

KIM: That sounds so cool. Okay, so a few weeks ago I was saying that we needed to go to Concord MA together, but now I’m thinking we also have to go here, too. So let’s put this on the list also.

AMY: Yeah, okay, that’s going on the bucket list. I know you would definitely find the whole thing exhilarating, I promise you. And the “grandness” of the grand hotel that I was trying to explain is actually captured really well in the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time starring Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve who play these star-crossed lovers from two different centuries. They actually filmed the movie at the hotel.

KIM: Yeah, whenever I hear anything about Mackinac, for better or worse, I immediately think of Somewhere In Time. 

AMY: I know. It’s been a pretty long time since I’d seen the movie, but I just always remembered it being SO SWOONWORTHY, you know? From the Mackinac scenery, which is breathtaking, to Christopher Reeve’s breathtaking blue eyes and then there’s all that sweeping Rachmaninoff music. I love it.

KIM: I love that theme song: “Rhapsody on a Theme from Paganini…” I can hear that in my head right now. I remember watching it for the first time on cable TV when I was in junior high. I was home sick with the flu, and somehow, I think it was because I was sick while I was watching it, it really stuck with me and I’ve never forgotten that.

AMY: I have this memory of just gasping all over the place the first time I saw it. I was just like, “Oh my god! It’s so dreamy!” That said, you know, we both watched this when we were young and impressionable and probably hormonal, so was it really all that good? Does it still hold up today, or is it just super cheesy and we are completely embarrassing ourselves right now? Maybe we were just suckers for those Christopher Reeve eyes. I don’t know. 

KIM: Right, so basically, Amy and I decided to put ourselves to the test, and while we were preparing for the podcast we actually embarked on the Somewhere In Time Challenge. 

AMY: Our first ever movie challenge! So Kim and I both agreed that we’d watch the movie again and decide what we really think of it some decades after first falling in love with it. Is it swoon-worthy or cringe-worthy? That’s the question we’re facing today.

KIM: Well, can it be both?

AMY: Maybe. Maybe.

KIM: To me, I mean Christopher Reeve is very swoon-worthy. It was one of his first movies. He had done Superman, the first Superman, and then this movie. But there are a lot of cheese-worthy moments in the movie, I feel like, still. It had the feel, to me, of very “TV movie of the week” even though it was a feature film. I have more to say, but maybe you should jump in.

AMY: All right, I’ll take that and then I will respond with my verdict, which is GLORIOUS.

KIM: I knew you were going to say that!

AMY: There were a few moments where I laughed. I mean, the moment where he first saw her portrait in the Hall of History…

KIM: Yes!

AMY: Okay, that one was a bit over the top. There were a few more moments like that.

KIM: That was not an Oscar-winning scene…

AMY: However, we’ve got to just talk about the fact that Jane Seymour is absolutely exquisite.

KIM: Okay, she is, but I had not remembered, even though I saw it, I thought that I remembered almost everything about the movie, because like I said, it made an imprint on me. But really, almost half the movie is Christopher Reeve’s character trying to get back to her and he has all these crazy, pretty silly ways of trying to get back to her before he actually sees her. So on the one hand, it is a big build-up and she does live up to that with her beauty, but it’s a really long time before they actually have their meet-cute.

AMY: However, Christopher Reeve, can we just say, is probably the most beautiful man of the 1980s? Yes. I will answer that for you.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: He plays the role very earnestly, at times, which I loved, but he also did bring a subtle sense of humor. I think he didn’t take himself too seriously.

KIM: I think you’re right. It had a little bit of a feel of a comedy (and not in a bad way) in his acting. In his style and the way he was responding to things.

AMY: Exactly.

KIM: He had so much charisma that even though, I will say, it was a bit cheesy, he could definitely pull it off.

AMY: And then, of course, we have Christopher Plummer, who, you can never say a bad word about that man. He plays the villain. 

KIM: Yeah, I thought it was funny seeing him (Captain Von Trapp from The Sound of Music) as this mysterious, vaguely evil character.

AMY: I know you said “TV movie…” I kept getting a Hallmark movie vibe from it…

KIM: Oh, yeah, definitely.

AMY: ...and I think, people love Hallmark movies! It brought the romance. It brought it all. It checked all the boxes for me.

KIM: Oh, I was into it. I was definitely into it. But it was not Criterion Collection, by any means. 

AMY: But the Rachmaninoff elevates it. For sure.

KIM: Yes, it does. It definitely was worth watching.

AMY: It’s a movie that I think I can always go back… if I catch it on TV, I will stop and I will watch it. It’s one of those movies.

KIM: Costumes: It’s got them. Really gorgeous music: It’s got [it]. Two gorgeous leading actors: It’s got them. Christopher Plummer: It’s got him. And a beautiful, beautiful set on this island.

AMY: Yes, the backdrop.

KIM: And going back to the Grand Hotel in its glory days.

AMY: All right, so we’ll give it a qualified “swoon-worthy,” I think.

KIM: Yeah. I’ll give it a thumbs-up.

AMY: Swoon-worthy with a dotting of cringes throughout. Campy cringes.

KIM: Yes. And cheesy is not necessarily a bad thing. 

AMY: No. Not at all. Okay, so we settled it. That was fun though. I enjoyed watching it again and I was kind of nervous watching it because I didn’t want my memory of loving it so much to be changed, and it didn’t. I still love it.

KIM: Okay, good. I hope my comments didn’t negatively impact your feelings for the movie.

AMY: Never. 

KIM: You are a hundred percent loyal.

AMY: Like Richard’s love for Elise, my love for this movie will never die.

KIM: Timeless?

AMY: Timeless.

KIM: Yes. So okay, wait. Was Somewhere In Time also based off of a book? 

AMY: Yes. There was a book called Bid Time Return, by Richard Matheson, and I actually did check it out of the library once, but I couldn’t finish it because it just didn’t come anywhere near the magic of the movie. The story is not set in Mackinac. It’s set at the Hotel Coronado. So I actually got the book out after I had visited Hotel Coronado in San Diego because I was curious about the hotel. But, meh, it didn’t do anything for me. However, since I know, Kim, that you have been to Virginia City, Nevada, and I have also, I wonder if you’ve ever been to the Opera House there. Because there’s a photo of a woman hanging at the old Opera House. It’s a portrait of a woman named Maude Adams, who was a Broadway stage actress. She was actually the very first person to play “Peter Pan” in America. The photo of Maud Adams actually inspired Matheson to write his book. So she’s actually the inspiration for Jane Seymour’s character in the movie.

KIM: Oooh. Yeah, I have been to the opera house in Virginia City. I don’t remember seeing that photo. I wish I had known. I would have looked for it when I was there. But I do know that Mark Twain, Lily Langtry, and Errol Flynn have all been on stage there. 

AMY: Yeah, it was like a place where the big names in the country would hit up when they were touring through. So that brings us back to Adams, who was a huge actress in her day. She was only 8 years old when she appeared in a play at that Virginia City Opera House, and then she went on to make her Broadway debut at age 16

KIM: And that also makes her a great segue for our next “lost lady of lit.” In next week’s episode, we’ll be chatting about Nathalia Crane, a girl poet phenom whose work was first published at the tender age of 11!

AMY:  Yeah, this is an interesting one, and I mean, my daughter’s going to be eleven in two more months so I kind of know that age of little girl and I’m very interested to hear more about her.

[theme music plays]

KIM: So for more information on this episode as well as further reading material, check out our website: Lostladiesoflit.com. And if you loved this episode, please leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find us.

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

11. Constance Fenimore Woolson — Anne with Anne Boyd Rioux

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES [CO-HOST]: What if I were to tell you that there’s a 19th-century American novel that combines the sweetness of Little Women, the adventure of Great Expectations, the heroine of Jane Eyre, the social drama of Age of Innocence and the mystery of a Sherlock Holmes tale?

KIM ASKEW [CO-HOST]: I’d say, “Whoa, that sounds incredible.” I’d also say it also sounds like the plot of a little-known novel called Anne by Constance Fenimore Woolson.

AMY: Get ready, everybody, for some serious fan-girl gushing on this episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, because this book totally blew our minds. 

KIM: Yeah, Amy, had you even heard of Woolson before we started researching authors for the podcast?

AMY: Not at all, no, but I did think that her name sounded pretty familiar: “Fenimore,” as in James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote The Last of the Mohicans. But I know you had heard of this author, right?

KIM: I had heard of her, but only as a little footnote to the bio of her friend, Henry James. I wrote my master’s thesis on his novel Wings of a Dove.

AMY: So, while we didn’t know much, if anything, about Woolson before we started the podcast, it’s for that reason, especially, that we’re excited to talk about it here today, because we have our very first Lost Ladies of Lit guest! 

KIM: Our guest is Dr. Anne Boyd Rioux, and she knows a LOT about Constance Fenimore Woolson. In fact, it was a review of a new edition of Woolson’s Collected Stories — that was edited by Anne, our guest — in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, that inspired me to add Woolson to our list of Lost Ladies. Anne is an expert on American women writers. She uncovers the stories of their lives and fosters renewed appreciation for their forgotten or undervalued works.

AMY: She is also the recipient of three National Endowment for the Humanities awards and has a Ph.D. in American Studies. She is a professor of English at the University of New Orleans and is on the board of directors of the Biographers International Organization. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, Lit Hub, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. She’s also been interviewed on the BBC and NPR. 

KIM: And on top of all that, her most recent book, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, is an indie bestseller and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, The Daily Mail, and A Mighty Girl. Also it’s out in paperback right now. 

AMY: So one of the reasons we wanted Anne to come chat with us today is because she actually wrote the biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Her 2016 book Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist received considerable attention. It was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The Chicago Tribune. Also, she edited a collection of Woolson’s short stories, called Miss Grief and Other Stories, and that’s also helping bring Woolson the renewed attention that she deserves.  

KIM: Okay, with all that said, it’s pretty clear Anne’s going to be able to bring a lot to our discussion of the OTHER Anne, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music] 

INTERVIEW:

AMY: Welcome, Anne, thanks so much for joining us today! 

ANNE BOYD RIOUX [GUEST]: Well, I’m excited to be here! Thank you for inviting me.

AMY: Now, it was just a few months ago that I was introduced to this book, and I’ve got to say, within… I hadn’t even reached the end of the first chapter before I was just beside myself with joy. I cannot believe I didn’t know about this author, this is so wonderful already… and the book just kept getting better and better. How did you first become interested in Woolson and when did you first read Anne?

ANNE: I was in graduate school at Purdue, and I was in the library stacks and I just saw this book with my name on it, you know, in bright gold letters: Anne. It was calling to me, and so I stopped and looked. It was an older edition, original-ish edition. They had her other works there, and nearby was a more recent collection of stories called Women Artists, Women Exiles. And I thought, “Well, that sounds right up my alley!” So I actually started with that collection of stories that was published in the Rutgers [University Press] “American Women Writers” series that was recovering a lot of lost women writers. That was published in the Eighties, just to give you a sense of how long ago she was “recovered” by scholars. It’s taken a really long time to get her into the more public consciousness. I’m just thrilled that you all found her, too. Let’s see, when did I first read Anne? I read it when I was still in graduate school, so I probably read it around the time that I went to Mackinac. The Constance Fenimore Woolson Society was having its second (I think it was their second) conference, and they were having it at Mackinac Island. I was just so keen to go and to meet all of these… I met, to me they were famous, right — Sharon Dean, Cheryl Torsney — all these people who had written about Woolson. Caroline Gebhardt was there. Nina Baym was also there. She’s a big-time scholar in American literature. She was the keynote speaker. So it was just a thrill to meet all of them. Lyndall Gordon was there. She wrote a really important book about Henry James. Anyway, going to Mackinac Island was such a treat, and getting to meet all those people when I was still a graduate student.

AMY: By the way, listeners, we’re going to be getting into Mackinac Island a lot more in our next episode because I want to dive into all of that: the little kind of shrine that exists there for Constance these days. But let’s go back and talk a little bit about Constance’s life. I know she had an interesting, kind of tragic childhood. She had three of her older sisters die of scarlet fever when she was very young,and then, when she was five years old, she had a younger sister that died in infancy. Can you tell us a little more about her youth and maybe how it impacted her adult life and her writings? 

ANNE: We don’t know tons, right? What we do know, though, is pretty tragic. So these three sisters died of scarlet fever. They started dropping off days or weeks, right after she was born. Because she was a newborn and was nursing, apparently she was protected by her mother’s antibodies. There were five girls that came before Connie, and the three youngest of those five girls died, and that was just … her mother was never the same after that. In that respect, it had a huge impact on her life, because her mother suffered periods of invalidism and she always had to look out for her. So she kind of grew up looking out for her mother. The two older girls, Georgiana and Emma, died quite young in their late teens/early 20s. And so by the time Connie was 13, even though she was the sixth child born, she was the oldest of her surviving siblings. By that point, she had a younger sister and a younger brother. So it was quite a lot of responsibility thrust on her, and it was a lot of death to witness. She learned very early that life was fragile, and particularly the deaths of those two oldest sisters had a great impact on her because she was alive and she knew exactly how it happened. In both cases, they were viewed as sacrificing their own lives for love and family: One of them had died after marrying a man who had had consumption. He died and then she died, so it was a really tragic, Shakespearean kind of story, right? And her oldest sister also died of tuberculosis (it appears) after giving birth, even though she was told she shouldn’t have another child. So you know, the idea of marriage was treacherous. The idea of having a family was treacherous. Boy, you were just setting yourself up for so much potential loss and sacrifice and potential death. Those deaths in her family had a huge impact on her, and I think we see that reflected in her work.

AMY: Did she go by “Connie?” I hadn’t ever heard that nickname associated with her.

ANNE: Hmm, yeah, sorry, “My good friend, Connie…” Yes.

KIM: I love it.

ANNE: That was the name that her family gave her. So especially when talking about her when she was little, I guess I just kind of slip into that. That was her family name. 

KIM: That’s interesting, everything you said about her sort of living with this childhood tragedy in her life, because it kind of plays into the little bit that I did know about Woolson before we started this podcast. And I think a lot of people may have heard this story and not also know much more about Woolson. But what I did know was that supposedly, her life ended when she threw herself from the third story of a palazzo in Venice because Henry James didn’t return her affection. And that sounds kind of tabloidish, but I think the real story that I learned about is just as interesting, if not more so. So I’d love to hear what you have to say about it. How did they meet? What is the real story?

ANNE: Well, I’m glad you brought that up because that is what most people seem to know about her. I decided when I wrote my biography of her to just start with that, not ignore it. And also to make this point that the real story actually is much more interesting and satisfying, I think. The problem with that story — there are a few problems with it — but it’s based on anecdotes that are not verifiable. There are no real facts there, except that we know she died and she was living in Venice in a room that was three stories up. There’s also a story about him drowning her dresses in the lagoon months later. These dresses kept ballooning up because of the air inside of them, so they just wouldn’t drown. So it’s this very interesting metaphor for how she kind of haunted him after she died. Unfortunately, she’s become a kind of ghost figure in his life and didn’t have a real presence of her own. And so, it was really important for me to tell her story and get some of her writings republished. But the real story about her friendship with James is that there’s no smoking gun here. There’s no evidence that she was in love with him romantically and there is negative evidence that she killed herself because of him. There’s plenty of other evidence to suggest that it was more complicated than that. We don’t know for sure and may never know exactly what was going through her mind before she fell and if it was intentional. My own opinion is that it probably was, but it was maybe less premeditated than some people maybe assumed. But i don’t think those final minutes of her life should define the rest of her life as tragic and as somehow thwarted and misspent. I think she had an incredible life for her time, and she was such an amazing person. The difficulty though, in uncovering what the “real” story is about her and Henry James is that they had a pact to destroy their letters to each other. Only four of her letters to him have survived. They were letters that she wrote to him when he was at home in America visiting his family. And so the letters came to him in America and he didn’t bring them back to Europe with him. They stayed behind. So it was later, then, that they developed this agreement to destroy their letters. The four letters ended up in his brother’s papers, William James’s papers, at Harvard. Henry James’s biographer, Leon Edel, found them. At that point, I think that was in the Fifties, Claire, her niece, was still alive.  And Leon Edel wrote to her and told her there were four letters that he found. Her response was, “That’s a shame.” Because these were four letters that were written early on in their friendship. There were no letters from him to her; it was one-sided. So the impression these four letters have left is that she was the one chasing after him. But it’s such a tiny picture of the story. They were friends for 12 years. They met in 1880 in Florence. She had a letter of introduction that she had brought with her from America from his cousin, whom she’d met in Cooperstown. She met “the great man.” He wasn’t even “the great man” yet even. He was kind of the darling of the Atlantic Monthly, and Woolson recognized that he was much favored, particularly by William Dean Howells, and had the kind of recognition already that she would like to have, too, but she was just as well-known at the time. She was writing in Harper’s and Scribner’s and The Atlantic Monthly. She hadn’t published any novels yet, but when she met him, she kind of hoped and expected that they would meet as writers. Unfortunately, he didn’t know who she was. He claimed he didn’t know her and hadn’t read her work. So instead they met as he’s a gallant man and she’s a damsel who needed his chivalry kind of thing, you know. Very 19th century. It was unfortunate for her that they met that way, because she wanted to get beyond that. It took her a few years to build up that kind of relationship with him. But it was clear, even though they destroyed these letters that they had a kind of… I call it a quasi-sibling relationship because I think they did love each other, but not in a mad, romantic, “let’s have sex” kind of way. Whether or not she had those kind of feelings for him, I didn’t find a single scrap of evidence to support that reading, or I would have put that in the book because that would have been interesting. But instead I think she was in love with a couple of other people that I write about in the book. And Henry James was gay, right? He wasn’t interested in women. So their relationship did become very close, and they spent a lot of time together — more so than any other women in his life at that time. But we do know that when they met in Florence in 1880, he was writing The Portrait of a Lady. It was going to be a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and he wrote to William Dean Howells and said, “Umm, I’m going to be a little bit late getting the next installment to you because of all of the distractions here in Florence.” It turned out that that was exactly when he met Woolson. We know that they started spending pretty much every day together. He was taking her to show her around the museums and the galleries and the churches. She was soaking up all of his knowledge about art, which she didn’t know a lot about yet. I think, and I wasn’t the first to point this out (Lyndall Gordon did in her book), that Woolson had a lot of similarities to Isabel Archer, the character he was writing about. The aspect of Woolson discovering Europe for the first time the way Isabel Archer does...learning about art and being sort of overwhelmed by it all...and over-awed, but also being independent. They had this great way of talking about that then; they called it a woman was “self-contained” if she wasn’t needing to be attached to a man, if she seemed to have her own sort of individuality. And that was a rare thing! That’s how James writes about Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady. She was so remarkable because she didn’t seem to need to be attached to a man, and that is what Woolson had too. So I think he was gathering material for his book. At the same time, she was collecting material, too! She wrote this great story, A Florentine Experiment, that is drawn from that period of meeting Henry James.

AMY: So as fascinating as all this is when it comes to Woolson’s relationship with James (their friendship), I think we need to jettison him now from the conversation and let her stand in her own right for the rest of the podcast. So let’s talk about Anne, her novel. As Kim said, we kind of first chose it because of the fact that it was set on Mackinac Island, which I love, but once I dove into the book I realized there are so many different settings. In the same way, the plot is very winding and very inventive, to say the least. It’s a mash-up of a lot of crazy different things. I was beside myself with all the twists and turns in this book, especially the second half of this book.

ANNE: Yeah. I think she’s trying to do everything. It was her first novel. She spent many years writing it. So we don’t know what previous incarnations of it looked like, but I imagine she was developing her ideas over such a long period of time that when it came time to make decisions about the plot it was hard to give up some things, right? Hard for her to “kill her darlings.” And so in some ways, it almost feels like there’s too much going on, but really, I mean, Middlemarch is also a really sprawling book, right, where you have two protagonists and you have these parallel plots and all of this back-and-forth and twists and turns and, you know, in some ways it’s just a good old Victorian novel, Anne is. It was written for serialization in Harper’s, so a lot of the twists and turns would maybe be for the magazine readers, to keep them engaged month-by-month. It ran for a year-and-a-half in Harper’s, which was a crazy amount of time. Really, really long. They held it for two years before they published it. She was going nuts wanting this to be published. They wanted it to appear in their first trans-Atlantic issue, so it would be published simultaneously in the U.S. and in London. So she gained all this tremendous exposure in London and after that, all of her books were published there, too, and there were great reviews. Yeah, I thought of something about Henry James, but I won’t say it. But I do want to say one thing, actually, about Henry James. I think it’s really important to recognize this: His best-selling book of his entire lengthy career was Portrait of a Lady, that sold 6,000 copies, and that came out just a few months before Anne. Anne sold 57,000 — almost ten times as much as his book did. Yet Portrait of a Lady has never been out of print and probably never will be. It’s considered a masterpiece of literature. And I’m not saying that Anne is. I’m just saying, why was it completely forgotten? It was her most popular book. It was the book she was known for throughout her life. But after she died (and we can talk about that later, because we still want to talk about Anne) but yeah, to be so completely forgotten when it was such a popular book… I think there are some reasons for it, but it’s very unfortunate because it is such a good read! I taught that book many years ago in a course on the female bildungsroman, the coming-of-age novel. Boy, my students, they just loved it, and they were all upset that they all grew up reading Jane Eyre or George Eliot and Emily Bronte but hadn’t read this. Because it is kind of in that vein. Those are the sorts of writers who were influencing her.

AMY: That’s exactly what was running through my head. I kept thinking, “This is right on par with a Bronte novel.” And George Eliot came to mind, too. I felt a little indignant as I was reading it that I had been deprived. Like, I’m halfway through my life! I read the Bronte sisters when I was in eighth grade and I’ve had them in my life this whole time. Yet this is a novel that I’m just now finding out about. Where did she go and why? It’s crazy!

ANNE: Right, and I think when we’re young we do need books like this, because Anne is the sort of heroine that has that sort of presence, I think. She is a young woman who would stand out with Jo March and Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennett. I think she would hold her own with those kinds of heroines that we all admire and adore. We can never have enough of them.

AMY: Kim, is this a good time to sort of pause and give a little overview of the plot for our listeners?

KIM: I think that’s a great idea. Just make sure you don’t give any spoilers, but a quick overview would probably help people.

AMY: This is a book that you do not want to read any summaries of before you dive in because the fun of the book lies in the shocking surprises that pop up. So you don’t want to know any of that ahead of time, but that said, here’s a little spoiler-free introduction: On Michigan’s remote, yet-idyllic Mackinac Island lives a kind, smart, and atypically beautiful young woman named Anne, who is orphaned and has to leave everything and everyone she knows and loves (including her beloved Mackinac Island) in order to make a living so she can support her half-siblings. And then, of course, adventures, including the romantic kind, ensue… 

KIM: Anne, would you like to read one of your favorite passages from that early part of the novel that’s set on Mackinac Island? 

ANNE: Sure! So, it really is a book to kind of just let yourself sink into. It’d be great, you know, to spend some rainy weekends on the couch reading this. It’s that kind of immersive book. But I think the opening is really kind of interesting. At the opening, she’s hanging up a wreath in the church on Mackinac Island, this remote place, and her father criticizes the wreath because it looks too perfect. It was looking too smooth and neat and nice. Too geometrical. It should be more natural-looking. And Anne says that she didn’t notice that. We’re introduced to Anne and she’s described: Anne, standing straight again, surveyed the garland in silence. Then she changed its position once or twice, studying the effect. Her figure, poised on the round of the ladder, high in the air, was, although unsupported, firm. With her arms raised above her head in a position which few women could have endured for more than a moment, she appeared as unconcerned, and strong, and sure of her footing, as though she had been standing on the floor. There was vigor about her and elasticity, combined unexpectedly with the soft curves and dimples of a child. Viewed from the floor, this was a young Diana, or a Greek maiden, as we imagine Greek maidens to have been. The rounded arms, visible through the close sleeves of the dark woolen dress, the finely moulded wrists below the heavy wreath, the lithe, natural waist, all belonged to a young goddess. But when Anne Douglas came down from her height, and turned toward you, the idea vanished. Here was no goddess, no Greek; only an American girl, with a skin like a peach. Anne Douglas’s eyes were violet-blue, wide open, and frank. She had not yet learned that there was any reason why she should not look at everything with the calm directness of childhood.

It’s just a wonderful description, isn’t it? I love that last line, too, because it’s like saying, you know, she hadn’t learned yet to be demure and proper and feminine. She was just being herself.

AMY: The book kept pointing out that she’s like this all-American girl, sort of from the wilderness almost, and she’s a goddess, but the characters kept describing her as not necessarily beautiful. And it kept making me laugh, because of course, all the men were falling all over her. But she had this unorthodox beauty that everybody had to remark upon, like, “She’s very plain, but in a beautiful way.”

ANNE: Right. I think at one point this analogy might be used. If not, it was used a lot in other literature of the time, that she would have been more like a wildflower whereas the other women around her later are more like hothouse flowers, greenhouse flowers. The perfect rose that has been cultivated in the hothouse, where she grows naturally on the side of the hill or something like that, right? So it’s that kind of beauty that she is meant to represent.

KIM: So we got to hear a little bit about what it was like when she was young and on the island, and then, she actually leaves. She ends up going to New York and she goes to a French finishing school. Her rich, misanthropic aunt sends her there. She’s this poor, provincial country girl, completely out of place in a totally new environment. It sounds like Woolson had a really similar experience in some ways. Can you tell us a little bit about Woolson’s experience?

ANNE: Yeah, there’s a lot of Anne in Woolson, or Woolson in Anne, I guess. She was also very physically active and physically fit and could row for a whole hour without her arms getting tired like Anne. Things like that. Woolson had a very unconventional education in Cleveland where she grew up, at the Cleveland Female Seminary. It was a sort of higher education for women. She went during her high school years and she learned all kinds of advanced science and math, geography, Latin and other languages, French and German, and she was learning literature. That’s when she began gaining praise and recognition from her teachers for her writing, but it was a very rigorous education. Very unusual for the time. That, apparently, wasn’t enough for her family. They didn’t feel quite comfortable sending Connie out into the world with a man’s education. They had to send her to a finishing school in New York, to top it all off. It’s just so incongruous, right? It’s a very severe education she had and then suddenly Connie’s family sent her to this finishing school that was filled with basically a lot of Southern belles. I think there were only a few northerners there. She felt way out of her element.

AMY: I can speak Latin, but I need to be able to sing these Italian arias and do embroidery, so I’m not complete yet, even though I’m smarter than most people in the room right now.

ANNE: She wasn’t “ornamental” enough for her day, so she had to get some finishing touches, yeah.

AMY: I really loved all the peripheral characters from Mackinac Island in that first section of the book, and that part of the book, especially, felt quintessentially “American” to me, because we had people from so many different walks of life. I was surprised at how much I really enjoyed some of the commentary at the beginning about religious faith. We have the Calvinist point of view, we have the Roman Catholics, we have the Episcopalians. Woolson writes about that in a really telling, and almost funny sort of way. These characters kind of hate each other because of that but then they also wind up coming together, rallying around Anne, and it kind of echoes the tribalism that we see a little bit today in our culture. I loved the fact that they came together despite their differences and was wondering if you knew anything about Woolson’s take on religion or what kind of commentary she might be making there.

ANNE: What she’s doing there, in some respects… she did have a tremendous interest in religion and was very, very well-read, so you see that coming out there. But what she’s also doing is commenting on the kind of regional differences that had kept Americans apart and had led to the Civil War. This is a post-Civil War book set in a pre-Civil War period. Actually, the war comes up later in the book, but her childhood in Mackinac Island is pre-Civil War. So Woolson’s writing at a time when the country is tired of division and they become extremely interested in all the different regions of the country and trying to explore them. So there’s this real boom of regionalist literature in the magazines. And she wrote a lot of stories from the Great Lakes region that were part of that movement, and from the South, as well, later when she went to the South. So she’s keenly aware. She’s actually living in the South when she writes this book, so she’s living in the midst of the aftermath of the war there. So this idea of division and tribalism is still very much on her mind because of that experience, but Americans are tired. I should say white Americans, northern Americans, are tired of talking about the Civil War, about all of the death that happened, and also about slavery and what’s happening with the freed slaves and whether or not they’ll have a place in America. All of those are questions that Woolson was very interested in and was told by publishers not to talk too much about because people were tired of that and wanted to move onto other things. (Which is why Reconstruction failed.) So I think she’s, in some ways, trying to encapsulate those tensions and divisions, maybe through looking at religion instead of region. I think it’s so fascinating that even though the book starts on Mackinac Island, she’s showing us, first of all, how diverse that region is, and then she takes her heroine and puts her on the road and she goes to all these different parts of America. This is an American novel and I think there was interest then, starting to be interest in the “great American novel,” right? Would we have a novel that kind of encapsulated this country? People were looking to their literature for a kind of great American novel, and I think Woolson had that sort of ambition when she wrote it, even though she was writing a book about a young girl becoming a woman. I think it’s so fascinating that she combined those two things together: tremendous literary ambition and this idea of a great American novel that would somehow encapsulate the country, through the figure of a girl. It’s something I’ve written a lot about in my work on Little Women. And this book is a big, big ambitious book, and if it doesn’t quite, if it didn’t quite become the great American novel, it was certainly greeted as a contender for that when it was published.

AMY: We see a lot of resilience and resourcefulness and independence in Anne Douglas in the novel. She’s determined to just do it by herself and make it on her own. And yet, she had some romantic relationships along the way. That is sort of the thing, I think, that makes this book, with all its twists and turns, a page-turner as well, because you’re trying to figure out who she’s going to end up with, if she’s going to end up with anybody. First we have Rast, who is her best friend from childhood on the island. They try to maintain this long-distance relationship. But then when she’s in society she becomes courted by these much more sophisticated suitors. I found myself completely wrapped up in that. Both of the main guys, Mr. Dexter and Mr. Heathcote, I found both of them quite swoon worthy at various points. I felt like both of them were doing a pretty good job at winning MY heart at least! But yeah, I think that contributed to the page-turner aspect of the book. But also, when you said it was serialized… I don’t think I knew that, and that makes a lot of sense because every chapter ends on such a cliffhanger moment. And I want to say I also really loved the intros to each chapter. She selected little passages from classic literature that kind of summarized what the chapter was going to be about. I really enjoyed that as well.

ANNE: It shows how well-read she was, and also, there’s a little bit of showing off going on there, right?

KIM: She’s earned it.

 ANNE: Yeah. It’s a mark of a serious work of literature, rather than just a magazine-ish kind of story.

AMY: I was expecting before I read the book that it was going to be a lot more schmaltzy than it actually was. You know, I’m so used to writers from that era sort of just dripping it on a little bit with the sentimentality. And there were moments of that in the book, but there wasn’t nearly as much as I expected. I found it was kind of modern the way it was written. It felt like it could have been written today.

ANNE: I think Woolson’s writing is incredibly modern. That was exactly the word I was going to use. It’s not particularly sentimental. I mean, she would have been horrified if anybody called her a sentimental writer. She thought that, unfortunately, most women writers wrote too sweetly and too sentimentally, and she said she wanted her writing to be strong and vigorous, even if that meant she was sacrificing her femininity as a writer. In fact, I mean this book is remarkable in that it’s about a girl because many many, many of her stories that she published — she was a very prolific short-story writer — so many of those are about a male protagonist. They’re written from a male point of view. We’ve been saying a lot about Anne before even getting to the fact that there are suitors and a potential love story here. It is not the main theme of the book. And even once she has realized who she’s in love with, he’s not even there for most of the rest of the story. It’s still about Anne, right, and her adventures and her finding her way to him, but also proving herself to be an independent person along the way.

KIM: Yeah, and female friendships are really important, too, not just the romantic relationships. She has a deep friendship with a wealthy young widow named Helen. It’s a really interesting portrayal of female friendship. They’re from two completely different backgrounds. They meet at the French finishing school. They’re singing partners. Anne becomes a little bit of a project for Helen, and reminds me a little bit of the Moffats and Meg in Little Women and Anne almost being her “pet,” but it became so much more than that. Their friendship had a lot more depth, and it was more than a minor subplot, it was kind of defining in the novel, what happens with them. I won’t say anymore about that, but…

AMY: I will say a little more about that without giving anything away, but we’ll just say that this friend, Helen, her story unfolds very dramatically in the book, to the point where I was gasping and I was a little ahead of Kim in my reading, and so I was texting her in all caps at certain points, like, “HANG ONTO YOUR HAT! YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHAT’S COMING!”

ANNE: You won’t even see it coming.

KIM: No.

ANNE: So Woolson was a fan of the dramatic plot, and that was something I think that she was told by some people like William Dean Howells, the arch-realist, to tone it down. But she’s doing it, I think, because what she’s trying to convey is not just everyday life and women talking over tea and having a social call or what have you. She’s trying to put her characters in these dramatic moments to reveal their true character. She’s very interested in the moments in which the mask comes off, right? The social veneer comes down. All the social conventions go away because, “Oh my god, this is happening! We have to do something, now! It’s a crisis!” Or what have you. That’s how true feelings are revealed. They are only revealed under severe pressure like that. Woolson was somebody who cared about those kind of eruptive, volcanic feelings inside of us and how they come out under pressure, so that’s why you get sometimes these very dramatic… and they don’t feel like they’re manipulative or plot devices, because we see character revealed through them. It’s almost the revealing of a character that’s the real drama rather than the external event, would you say? Did you feel that way about it?

AMY: Yeah, but I also felt like it was just entertainment factor. It was like watching a movie. I could visualize everything. I’m surprised it hasn’t been made into some sort of miniseries or movie. I think it would be an excellent one. But those twists, and those dramatic cliff-hangers, I should say, sometimes literally… they were very cinematic to me, and it just drew me into the story even more.

KIM: So you’ve studied Alcott. You’ve studied Woolson. You’ve written books about them. Why has Little Women stood the test of time and Anne hasn’t? Not as many people know about Constance Fenimore Woolson.

ANNE: First of all, Little Women was a bigger success. It was so, so huge. And it was a book that girls read when they were young and carried with them through their lives and passed down to their own granddaughters or nieces or whatever, right? Anne never had that chance to become that kind of book. Partially, I think, because Anne was the only book like this that she wrote. Whereas Alcott, children’s writing became an industry for her and her publishers made new editions of the book: illustrated editions, right, to kind of crystalize its status as a “classic” and promoted the book tremendously. And then there started being adaptations starting with the Broadway play in 1920. Anne on the other hand, it became her signature book, her most important book, but by the time she died, she had written so many other kinds of things. She was a varied writer. She was a writer who had some many talents and so many interests. She wasn’t writing sequels to this, right? It wasn’t becoming a cottage industry for the publisher. It’s interesting to compare it to Little Women because I hadn’t really thought about that before. I’ve thought about it more as compared to a book like Portrait of a Lady. But no one would ever compare Little Women and Portrait of a Lady.

KIM: Good point.

ANNE: But in some ways, Anne kind of exists in that middle space in between, doesn’t it?

AMY: I was going to say when you mentioned the part about daughters enjoying Little Women when they’re girls. This isn’t that book. I mean, this is not so innocent. For that time period, it was a little bit of a scandal in certain sections.

ANNE: Oh, gosh. I need to go back and reread it. So there’s spicy parts? That would be interesting, because I can see the ways in which Alcott was deliberately toning that down in Little Women. So, I went and saw the manuscript. There are two manuscripts of Little Women that have survived, and if you compare them to the published book you can see how she’s cutting out potentially spicy parts, and showing the ways in which her little women are becoming women and inspiring lustful thoughts in men and that sort of thing. Maybe having feelings themselves. But you’re right, Woolson didn’t shy away from that. She wasn’t trying to write a story for girls the way Alcott was deliberately trying to do and had been asked by her publisher to do. This was meant to be, as I said, a great American novel, or a novel like Middlemarch or something like that. Like Jane Eyre. The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre were Woolson’s favorite books when she was growing up. Yeah. And you can definitely see their influence here. She was writing much less about a girl than she was writing about a young woman. I think it’s very telling that a book like Little Women that is more about girls from whom their sort of sexual essence that’s developing had been stripped, that is the book that has stood the test of time, rather than a book like Anne, where we see it developing, and Woolson’s not afraid to show that within the Victorian context within which it was written, but you feel it there. You feel the passion and the energy that Alcott couldn’t write about. Alcott did in other things, but not in Little Women. So I think that’s fascinating, actually, these questions about what survives and what doesn’t, and I think it has everything to do with our culture’s fear of women’s sexuality. I think that could really be part of it. 

KIM: What should we read next now that we love Anne?

ANNE: Well, as I said, she never read another book quite like Anne. I think you should read her short stories. She’s particularly masterful at the short story form and her stories are exquisite works of art, I think. And they’re in print. There’s a paperback edition that I edited and also the Library of America edition that I edited. Those are in print, so you can get your hands on those pretty easily. For other novels… For the Major was her next novel. It is much, much shorter. More of a novella, and has more of the qualities of a lot of her short stories. The kind of precision and narrow focus. They’re just exquisitely wrought. Anne feels sprawling and sometimes that like it might go out of control, right? But that’s part of what you enjoy about it. The next novel that she wrote after For the Major is East Angels, that, in some ways, scholars have thought of as a response to Portrait of a Lady. But it’s set in America in Florida. Yeah, you should read East Angels next, because there’s definitely quite a bit of this restrained passion happening, or suppressed passion that comes out in interesting ways. That’s kind of the theme of that book in many ways. So yeah, yeah, you should read East Angels next.

AMY: You had me at “restrained passion.”

ANNE: Yep.

AMY: I love it.

KIM: Yeah, I’m ready. We’re going to have to do another episode with that one. So, we have you here and you know all about these lost ladies of literature so you’re the perfect person to ask if you have any recommendations for other authors that we need to put on our to-read list.

ANNE: Yes. I actually have a list that I made for subscribers when you sign up to my newsletter. A list of what I think are the best forgotten books by American women writers. These are books that I’ve taught and my students have really responded to. So some of the books that I have on there are Fanny Fern ... The Morgersons by Elizabeth Stoddard… what else is on there? Well, some of them are more contemporary like Gayl Jones’s Corregidora which is, wow, a gut punch of a book. It’s amazing! Toni Morrison said that African American women’s literature would never be the same after that book. That was when Toni Morrison was an editor. She was an editor [on that book] at Random House. Another interesting one is Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. That’s a Harlem Renaissance book. She also wrote another novel, Passing, but I really like Quicksand because she goes to Europe in that book, and I just find that element of it fascinating. There are some other interesting late 19th century writers who didn’t write novels, but wrote stories. Sui Sin Far is an Asian American, Chinese-American writer and her stories are just wonderful, and Sikala-Sa, was the Sioux name of Gertrude Bonnin who wrote some really interesting stories about her own growing up that were published in The Atlantic Monthly. As well as Alice Dunbar Nelson who was a Creole woman from New Orleans. They’re just fascinating to learn about, these women writers of the 19th century. First of all, we’ve been brought up to think there weren’t very many women writers, right? There was George Eliot and Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, Emily and Anne, but that was it, right, until we get to Virginia Woolf or something.

KIM: Yep.

ANNE: But whoa, wait a minute… there were a lot of them. And there were a lot in America, not just in England. And they weren’t all white. They weren’t all white, privileged women either. The writer I’m obsessed with right now is a 20th century writer who wrote about the World War II era. She was part of the Lost Generation in Paris, and then she didn’t come home when all the other writers came home. She stayed and witnessed the rise of fascism and the beginning of the war in France. Her name is Kay Boyle and I’m writing a book about her now. Her writing reminds me of Woolson’s, and that’s why I think I’m so drawn to her, because there’s so much empathy and passion in her work. She’s also very intense and dramatic, but also such an artist, you know? Just really an amazing, amazing writer.

AMY: I think I had a misconception for a long time that if a book didn’t withstand the test of time, there was a reason it didn’t. It was because it wasn’t very good. And now I realize that’s so not true, and that women have been shortchanged for whatever reason and I’m still trying to still get to the bottom of that a little bit, because it doesn’t make sense.

ANNE: Right. And this is what I studied in graduate school, or that’s why I went to graduate school and I was just so full of excitement to be part of this recovering women writers thing, right? All these women writers that were there… it was a very exciting time. And then, you know, I went out into the world and started teaching and you know, I just kind of naively assumed somehow that the rest of the world had caught up with me and that now people knew about these writers. My students kept coming to me year after year — it’s been 21 years now —  saying, “Who are these women writers? I thought there weren’t any women writers. I thought a book that didn’t stand the test of time wasn’t any good. Why have I never heard about Alice Dunbar Nelson or Tikala-Sun or Sui Sin Far or Constance Fenimore Woolson, for that matter?” And not only that, but at the same time that I’m hearing this over and over again, year after year from my students (who still aren’t getting it in high school and aren’t getting it from many of my colleagues that they’re taking literature courses from all over the country), at the same time, the works that were part of that first wave of recovery, that were republished like I mentioned that collection of stories which was my gateway to Woolson, Women Artists, Women Exiles, they went out of print because not enough people bought them. So we were getting them back into print, but they weren’t staying there.

KIM: I cannot imagine a better guest for this episode than you, and a better first guest for our podcast!

ANNE: She’s always been my favorite of that period, and I’m so thrilled that you all discovered her and that you’re sharing her with more readers.

AMY: Okay, so Kim, what did we learn from this episode?

KIM: Well, we learned you can sell more books than your male BFF but still be lost in his shadow.

AMY: We also learned that in the 19th century you could be the smartest woman in the room and still not be deemed “worthy” unless you’ve graduated from finishing school.

KIM: And finally, we learned that calling in an expert is always a good idea. And we’re going to link to Anne Boyd Rioux’s website in our show notes, as well as to her books that we’ve mentioned in this episode.

AMY: So be sure to check out our mini episode next week, because we’ll be talking about Anne’s Tablet, an off-the-beaten track memorial in honor of Constance Fenimore Woolson.

KIM: And we’ll be chatting about why Mackinac Island remains one of the country’s most magical travel destinations.

AMY: That’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode.

KIM: Do you have ideas for other long-lost forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For more information on this episode as well as further reading material, you can check out our website: Lostladiesoflit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really makes a difference.

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Constance Fenimore Woolson and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her” into one of your new favorite authors. 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.

CLOSING: 

AMY: So, Kim, what did we learn from this episode?

KIM: Well, we learned you can sell more books than your male bff, but still be lost in his shadow.. 

AMY: That’s for sure! In the 19th century, you could be the smartest woman in the room and still not be deemed “worthy”  unless you’ve graduated from finishing school. 

KIM: And, finally, we learned that calling in an expert is always a good idea. And speaking of, we’ll link to Anne Boyd Rioux’s website in our show notes, as well as to her books that we’ve mentioned in this episode. 

AMY: Be sure to check out our mini episode next week because we’ll be talking about Anne’s Tablet, an off-the-beaten-track memorial in honor of Constance Fenimore Woolson.

KIM: And we’ll be chatting about why Mackinac Island remains one of this country’s most magical travel destinations.

AMY: That’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

KIM: Do you have ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really makes a difference!

[start closing music]

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Constance Fenimore Woolson and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

[closing music.]

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

10. A Falling Out Among Friends — Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM ASKEW [HOST]: Hi, and welcome to this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episodes. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY HELMES [HOST]: And I’m Amy Helmes. Last week we introduced you to Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Home-maker, and if you go to our show notes for that episode, you’ll see some amazing still photos from the silent film adaptation of that book. Since then, I found a review of the movie from August 8, 1925 in a publication called Moving Picture World, which sounds like the old-time version of The Hollywood Reporter, or something like that.

KIM: Yes. Very much so.

AMY: So the review is unlike anything you would find today in terms of movie criticism, so I’m just going to read a few lines. It said: “This is a box-office picture par excellence for all audiences. It is hard to conceive an audience that will dislike it. The drama is simply done but so tense and absorbing in its import that it will hold the eyes glued to the screen. Women will eat it up, and cry, and men will like it fully as well as the women, for it does man no injustice by putting woman on an unscalable pinnacle.” 

God forbid it would do that, Kim!

KIM: I know, seriously, the patriarchy is even in the review of the movie! I’m not even sure what to make of that review! That’s hilarious. Reviews have changed, as well as movies. So Canfield Fisher, as we mentioned last week, she was great friends with author Willa Cather, and we love this idea of women writers supporting one another in their careers. We are all on board with that. That said, their friendship was not without some bumps — actually, some major drama — which we’re going to tell you about.

AMY: Yeah, it was kind of crazy. In fact, these two women ended up not speaking to one another for 15 years, and I can’t imagine. I mean, Kim, I can’t imagine not talking to you for two days let alone 15 years!

KIM: I know. That’s never going to happen. It’s some serious bad blood, though. And they originally became friends in 1891, but from 1905-1921 they didn’t speak to each other hardly at all, it was “cold shoulder” time. Their feud was actually prompted by a story that Willa Cather published in 1905 in a collection called The Troll Garden, which is actually a perfect name for the collection given what Amy’s going to tell you next.

AMY: So here’s the backstory to what went wrong: In 1902, the two women were pal’ing around in Europe together, and they were joined by another friend of Canfield Fisher’s named Evelyn Osborne. Sounds great right? Sounds like a fun time.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Well, side note: Evelyn had a large and very noticeable scar on her face. So three years later, Canfield (We’ll just call her Canfield because she hadn’t married yet, so her last name was just Canfield) she was reading a manuscript of Cather’s for The Troll Garden and in a story called “The Profile” she encountered a character that was a young woman with a disfiguring facial scar. 

KIM: Mmm.

AMY: Hmm. So I’m going to read you a few sentences of what Cather wrote about this scar: It had evidently been caused by a deep burn, as if from a splash of molten metal. It drew the left eye and the corner of the mouth; made of her smile a grinning distortion, like the shameful conception of some despairing medieval imagination. It was as if some grotesque mask, worn for disport, were just slipping sidewise from her face.

So, I read the entirety of the short story, it’s very short, but it goes on to have an ending out of something from Edgar Allen Poe, honestly. It’s a pretty salacious little story.

KIM: Oooh, that’s pretty harsh. Wow. Ouch. So Canfield read this, and she immediately freaked. She of course recognized that this character had been inspired by her friend, Evelyn, and she was not having any of it. She wrote to Cather and begged her to remove it from the manuscript.

AMY: She said in that letter: “I am quite sure you don't realize how exact and faithful a portrait you have drawn of her. … Oh Willa don’t do this thing. . . . I don’t believe she would ever recover from the blow of your description of her affliction.”

KIM: Whoa, you can tell how distressed she is by those lines. So how did Cather respond?

AMY: Well, pretty indignantly, actually. She wasn’t about to change a word of her depiction, and she told Canfield that the character had very little to do with Evelyn, even though there were a couple other similarities besides the scar, mind you. But Canfield was so furious that she went over Willa Cather’s head and actually contacted her publisher directly.

KIM: That’s really bold, wow. But also, I mean, on the end of being her friend, Evelyn, that’s being a really good friend. To reach out like that and try to stop it.

AMY: And actually, the publisher listened and agreed to remove the story from the collection, so it seemed for a moment like maybe everything was settled down, however two years later, “The Profile,” this same short story appeared in McCall’s magazine. 

KIM: Uh-oh. I’m guessing Canfield wasn’t too happy when she saw that.

AMY: Nope. But it actually gets worse if you can believe that. It appears that Willa Cather basically doubled down on the insult, because she later published a story that was an obvious satire of Canfield’s own mother, Flavia, who was an artist. So that story was called, “Flavia and Her Artists,” and really, there’s no disguising the fact that she was using Canfield’s mom in her depiction. It was pretty blatant.

KIM: No, that is harsh, and it would be the last straw for Canfield. So with the exception of a few letters they exchanged, that was the last of the authors’ interaction for 15 years.

AMY: Yeah, and then at one point, the ice began to thaw. So, Canfield got married and she wound up writing a review of Cather’s latest book for the Yale Review. And that review was pretty positive and diplomatic, even given the hurt feelings. So she took the high road there, and it prompted Cather to write to Canfield Fisher and suggest that they get together. They were slowly able to make amends from there, and it seems as though Cather at long last acknowledged that maybe she had been out of line. And she said ‘I have matured a little bit since then’ so that kind of went a long way toward smoothing things over.

KIM: I’m glad they worked it out in the end, though it’s kind of amazing that they did considering how bad that was. I mean, it’s pretty rough on a friendship. I imagine it would have been pretty divisive, so good for them, just to kind of make up. 

AMY: Yeah, put it behind them. But it does sort of beg the question of a writer: Are you willing to offend or betray or hurt somebody’s feelings in the pursuit of your own writing? You always hear this edict that writers, to be any good, have to be brutally honest, you know? But I, personally, I don’t know that I’m capable of that. Which, maybe, that’s a problem, I don’t know. But I’m always too conscious of who’s reading it and what they might ultimately think of what I put down.

KIM: I know what you mean… It’s part of the reason I could never be a critic as a profession. I’d be worried about hurting someone’s feelings or somehow impacting their career. I just couldn’t live with that I don’t think.

AMY: Yeah, but Kim, you actually kind of faced this conundrum, this idea of writing about real people when you wrote a personal essay for the anthology The May Queen. So I’m wondering, was that difficult to write about your own history and relationships knowing that the people involved would read it?

KIM: That’s a great question. So the actual writing of it wasn’t difficult at all. That was just easy. But after the book came out, and I went on the book tour and read it aloud, I did have some lingering regrets. And having had that experience, I’d probably think twice before I revealed anything about my friends or family in the future, particularly in a nonfiction format. So with fiction though, there’s room for disguise. I think people could think, “Oh, maybe that’s me,” but they might think [characters] that you didn’t intend to be them are them. So it gives you a lot of room. Not that I’ve done that, friends and family who are listening! I’ve not done that!

AMY: I think it’s one thing to sort of decide for yourself whether or not you want to “go there,” so to speak, but in this case of Willa Cather, she was sort of dragging Canfield Fisher’s friends and family into it, which doesn’t really seem like fair game. 

KIM: Nope.

AMY: But then, on the other hand, as a writer, you’d kind of hate to feel as though things are “off limits” to your imagination. I mean, why can’t you be inspired by the events and people you encounter in your life?

KIM: Yeah, that’s a really difficult one. I mean, if you’re a writer on the level of Willa Cather, maybe somehow all bets are off. Your art might have to come first, but if you can stomach it. I feel like using Canfield Fisher’s mom’s unique name was probably going too far, and was unnecessary, but I think maybe Cather’s intention might have been to wound! I mean, she used her mother’s name!

AMY: Yeah, she could have changed that name.

KIM: Exactly.

AMY: Even if she’d been inspired by her mother, there was no need to use the specific name. 

KIM: Yeah, that seems purposeful.

AMY: That was pointed.

KIM: Yep. So, it’s great that we’re talking about this, and there’s a reason.

So our next “lost lady,” had a similarly contentious friendship with another famous author. Constance Fenimore Woolson’s relationship with Henry James was so fraught with drama it may even have potentially driven her to her death!

AMY: When we were first discussing her, I could not believe the story involved here, and I can’t wait to get to the bottom of it. And, actually, in order to try to figure out this mystery (and Woolson’s beautiful novel, Anne) we’re going to be joined by a special guest (our very first guest expert, in fact) — Dr. Anne Boyd Rioux.

KIM: Okay, she literally wrote the book on Constance Fenimore Woolson. We are so, so excited to talk with her about this unbelievably talented, but forgotten author!

[theme music plays]

AMY: Until then, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com for more information as well as further reading material. And if you’re loving this podcast, be sure to leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find us! Bye, everybody !

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

9. Dorothy Canfield Fisher - The Home-Maker

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES, HOST: Hey, everybody, welcome to The Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes...

KIM ASKEW, HOST: And I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: We’re best friends and co-authors of the “Twisted Lit” series of young adult novels, and we’re on a mission to unearth some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: We’re all stuck inside in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic and basically staring at our filthy houses. Am I right?

AMY: I do have an anecdote relating to that. Did I tell you about my experiences this week with Old English wood polish?

KIM: No, but I can’t wait to hear it.

AMY: Okay, earlier this week, I decided on a whim that I needed to use Old English wood polish, which I have never used before. I guess maybe the name of it appeals to me? “Old English?” That sounds right up my alley. I used it on my wood desk and it was like magic to the point where I had to call my husband out of the office and be like, “Look at this! Would you look at this?” and he was like “Oh, my gosh, that’s amazing.” I spent an hour going through all the wood in my house. I have wood steps and they’re starting to look kind of worn. So i did one tread — the bottom tread — and it’s oil. And as soon as I did it, I was like, “Oh my god, my family runs up and down these stairs all day, someone is going to slip and break their neck!” So then I had to put a bath towel over the stair. At one point, I was like, “How do I dirty it up? Can I sprinkle dust on it or something?” It was just so ridiculous and stupid. 

KIM: Well, I don’t do a lot of cleaning, as my husband will happily tell you over and over. That’s his favorite joke. But i am doing a lot of childcare while I’m working, and this week, Cleo, my 18-month-old, decided to make a special unplanned guest appearance during a Zoom meeting. She’s teething, so she was not a happy camper. I got flustered. Everyone was really nice about it, but it was still really embarrassing. She is the cutest little distraction I could ever want and I am loving getting to spend so much time with her, so that is the silver lining to all this insanity, but I would be lying if I said my productivity hasn’t suffered. It has suffered. Very much.

AMY: Of course, our domestic challenges kind of feel intensified in recent months, but the book we’re going to discuss today takes “House-cleaning rage” to a whole new level.

KIM: Oh, yeah, and yet Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s novel, The Home-Maker also takes a more serious deep dive into child-rearing, women in the workplace, and gender roles in a book that was pretty eyebrow-raising in the era it was written.

AMY: I had never heard of the book before we chose it for this episode, but once I started reading it I wasn’t surprised to find out that it sold like hotcakes back in the day.

KIM: No, and it was actually among the 10 bestselling novels in the US in 1924, so it’s a pretty big deal. It’s a pretty simple story but it has relevance that makes it well worth revisiting, and I’m looking forward to diving into this discussion. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

(SOUNDBITE OF INTRO MUSIC)

KIM: So I think we could use a rundown about who Dorothy Canfield Fisher was. 

AMY: She had a pretty interesting life, I’ve gotta say. Born in Kansas in 1879, her father was kind of a big shot at several universities (including being the president of Ohio State University at one point) and her mother who was a painter, who I think was maybe a little bit of a frustrated artist. She probably wanted to spend more time pursuing that than she did, but she took Dorothy to Paris for a short while when she was a girl when she was pursuing painting there. 

KIM: It’s interesting about her father being an academic, because his favorite book was Middlemarch, and his favorite character was Dorothea, and that’s who he named his daughter, Dorothy, after. And Dorothea, in the book, is idealistic and intelligent, which seems really apt, because Dorothy received her PhD in Romance Languages from Colombia University. That’s a pretty rare accomplishment for a woman in that time period. Amy’s going to be telling us more about how she put her idealism to work. It’s almost as if she lived the very life Dorothea would have lived had she not married Casaubon. 

AMY:  Yes, as you said, I think she made a better marital match. She married John Redwood Fisher in 1907. He was a Colombia grad, just like she was. That same year is when she also inherited her great-grandfather’s farm in Arlington, Vermont. She basically spent most of the rest of her adult life in Vermont, and that’s the state she’s really most associated with. She was a highly engaged activist, particularly in the fields of education and child development. She managed America’s first adult education program. She did war relief work in Paris while her husband was a medic in the war, and it’s there that she also established a Braille press for blinded veterans. She worked for many years to improve rural public education as a member of Vermont’s board of education. She was really into prison reform — especially in women’s prisons. 

KIM: And then, think about the fact that from 1925 to 1950 she was a Member of the Book of the Month Club Book selection committee, too. She shaped, basically, what Amercians were reading for 25 years. Wow, I mean…

AMY: How did she find time to do all this? It’s incredible.

KIM: I can’t even… it makes me feel lazy.

AMY: One hundred percent. In addition to all that we just mentioned, she also became an expert on Montessori teaching methods. She brought the technique back to the States, and we definitely are going to see a shout-out to this in the book we’re talking about today, The Home-Maker. She had a clear belief system with regard to how children should be nurtured and raised — namely, with respect and with great attention paid to their feelings. This was kind of radical for a time period that still subscribed to the mentalities that “children should be seen and not heard” and “spare the rod, spoil the child” sort of thing. Over the course of her lifetime, as if she didn’t do enough, she also wrote 22 novels and 18 nonfiction books. One of the most famous that people know about is a children’s book she wrote in 1916 called Understood Betsy, which is sometimes compared to The Secret Garden which I’m intrigued by.

KIM: Okay, so she’s doing all this, all these amazing things for society. She’s writing all these books. In a 1920 review of The Age of Innocence that was in The New York Times Book Review it referred to four women writers as being “in the front rank of living American novelists.” She was up there with Edith Wharton — that was one of the other writers mentioned. I mean, come on, how do you do everything she did and also be right up there with Edith Wharton and how do we not know about her now?

AMY: Exactly. How did she just kind of fade away from our consciousness?

KIM: An interesting anecdote about her: She refused to wear corsets, calling them an “implement of the Inquisition.” I love the drama of that!

AMY: This doesn’t surprise me that she was busting out of the constraints that were put on women in her era, both figuratively and literally!

KIM: She also had a decades long friendship with Willa Cather, whom she met when both were traveling in Europe. They wrote letters to one another for almost 50 years. And she corresponded with other writers including Isak Dinesen and Robert Frost.

AMY: Also, Norman Rockwell was her neighbor and in their later years she and her husband posed for one of his portraits 

KIM: Eleanor Roosevelt called Canfield Fisher “One of the 10 most influential women in America.” Wow, her bio is just mind-blowing.

AMY: So, like many figures from previous eras, Canfield Fisher has not escaped controversy. In a few of her books she depicts Native Americans and French Canadians with the sort of insulting stereotypes that would make the modern reader kind of bristle. And though it’s difficult to tie her directly to the eugenics movement of that era, it seems likely she was in tacit agreement with the idea of having the “right people” populate the state of Vermont. 

KIM: Yikes, yeah. Not great to hear that. And you could argue, maybe, that this belief was just one blemish in an overwhelming record of admirable public service and advocacy, but it’s become increasingly problematic in the same way that people are taking a look at Laura Ingalls Wilder because of her support of eugenics. So I think it’s something important to talk about.

AMY: In 2019 the Vermont Board of Libraries opted to remove Canfield Fisher’s name from the children’s literature award that was created more than 50 years ago to honor her. There was a lot of back and forth about whether or not they should do this, and they ultimately decided to change the name of the award on the grounds that, as a writer she was “no longer relevant to today’s young people.” Regardless of what you feel about Canfield Fisher’s life, that quote feels like a blanket statement meant to make the controversy go away … it doesn’t necessarily seem accurate to me to call her writings irrelevant.

KIM: I think it’s a good time to point out right now that in the process of exploring books written in previous eras, we’re going to bump up against difficult conversations like this in the course of future podcasts. 

AMY: I guess the best course of action we can take when that happens is to just acknowledge any offensive or insensitive information that we find problematic, without necessarily shying away from it or setting it aside altogether.

KIM: Basically, our goal in such cases is to “air it out” in a way that we hope proves productive and useful for all of us. Because it feels like the only way to begin to address these issues is to confront them head on, and that’s what we want to do. And we also want to hear what you have to say about this, so if you have thoughts or suggestions on this, we would love to hear them. Please feel free to send us an email, leave a comment on our site, or message us on Instagram. We’re listening.

The Home-Maker was published in 1924 by Harcourt Brace, and wow, the first sentence throws us right into the subject matter: “SHE was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room." (She is one of the book’s main characters, a homemaker named Evangeline Knapp, or Eva for short.)

AMY: That word, “furiously” really yanks us into things. There is so much bottled-up rage in this first chapter. It feels so raw to read this depiction of an OCD mother and her frustrations with having the perfect house and the perfect children. There’s something almost unnerving about the descriptions of Eva. She literally causes her own family to cower and become physically ill as a result of her passive aggression, wouldn’t you say?

KIM: Absolutely, and then there’s a moment where all this tension boils over while she’s cleaning up after dinner, and her husband and her three children just turn white as ghosts and they try to pretend everything is normal. I’m going to read from the book here: “They heard her begin to pile up the dishes at the sink, working rapidly as she always did. They heard her step swiftly back towards the kitchen table as though to pick up a dish there. They heard her stop short with appalling abruptness; and for a long moment a silence filled the little house, roaring loudly in their ears as they gazed at each other, across the table. What could have happened? And then, with the effect of a clap of thunder shaking them to the bone, came a sudden rending outburst of sobs, strangled weeping, the terrifying sounds of an hysteric breakdown.” 

AMY: And what happens immediately after that, I found so heart-breaking. Her middle child, Henry, becomes sick to his stomach. He actually throws up, and his older sister, Helen, sort of sneaks off under cover to go clean it up because they are all so terrified that Eva will find out about it and lose her you-know-what again. It seems like the whole family is walking on eggshells around her. So yeah, what was your reaction to that whole chapter?    

KIM: One, it was so clear that this was just an almost every-night occurrence. They had such a routine for how they handled it and they were always waiting for that thing to happen — the terrifying thing. I felt awful for the entire family, but I felt the worst for the children. It almost seemed liked community-sanctioned child abuse. And it really made me think about all the women in the past, even people in my own family, who may not have felt a true calling for being a housewife or a mother, but — societal expectations being what they were at the time — they just never had a real choice in the matter. 

AMY: Eva is so carping and critical and her husband and kids are just silently flinching and trying not to anger the dragon. There’s a mention of the clock ticking and how it’s almost taunting her, because she has so much work to do. And Canfield writes, “What was her life? A hateful round of housework … which was never done. …. The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming out. And what else did she have? Loneliness; never-ending monotony; blank, gray days, one after another, full of drudgery…. These were the moments in a mother’s life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence.” Man, that’s not only intense, but it’s also true.

KIM: Oh, that makes my blood run cold. I really did feel bad for her too. I mean, she really hates her life, and she doesn’t seem to be able to see any way out of it. And then there’s her husband, Lester. He’s described as a “broken reed” by one of the other ladies in town as they gossip, and while they say that Eva is “a wonder of competence.” Lester is the epitome of a square peg in a round hole. He’s this dreamer and a poet at heart. It’s even strongly implied that there’s almost something unmanly about it, so the community is not very supportive of intellectuals at this time and this place.

So those are the parents, but what about the children? They all three have issues, Helen is a nervous, insecure wreck, Henry has terrible stomach issues, clearly as a result of Eva’s rage and emotional abuse. But the worst is Stephen! And having a toddler, oh, that was so hard! He’s a troubled child. He’s misunderstood and angry and he already has a bad reputation with everyone at the ripe old age of three or four for his rages and lashing out at neighbors. He and Eva are locked in this daily battle of wills, and actually, it does get physical, which is really hard to read! So to give you a little insight into Eva’s mindset, I’m going to read a couple lines from the book: “Eva had passionate love and devotion to give them, but neither patience nor understanding. There was no sacrifice in the world which she would not joyfully make for her children except to live with them.”

AMY: Oooh. I feel like that one stopped me in my tracks, too. In the same way that Eva is at the end of her rope, Lester also reaches a breaking point. He despises his job working at a department store (and he’s terrible at it.) He gets fired one day (not surprising) and actually contemplates suicide immediately after, but in a strange twist of fate, on his way home from work he suffers an accident that leaves him incapacitated. Of course, we’re left wondering, was it really an accident? This is where we really get to the crux of the plot.

KIM: Right, this is what everything hinges on, basically. So the owner of the department store where he worked, Jerome Willing, he feels terrible about the situation and what’s going to become of Lester’s family, so he ends up offering Eva a job at the store. The interesting thing is, she actually takes the first step by approaching him about this, and we see on several occasions that she has a really take-charge personality and he loves that.

AMY: He sees potential as soon as they meet and talk. I loved that he seemed to have a very modern attitude about hiring women. He was even willing to consider a woman for store manager at what seemed like equal pay to what a man would be offered. And his wife, Nell, she seems very much like an equal partner and sounding board to him. So I thought that couple was pretty cool. 

KIM: Yeah, she does the advertising for the business, and they have this lighthearted and fun banter between them, and they challenge each other mentally in a positive way. Unlike Eva, Nell balances being a wife and mother with this ease and confidence. I will say that that might partly be because they have the money to afford help and they have a different lifestyle because of it. They seemed like a thoroughly modern couple, though, for that time period. But even Nell, in the beginning, she has some doubts about Eva’s experience. She says that “women who have spent 15 to 20 years housekeeping are no good for anything else.”

AMY: I unfortunately think there are some bosses today who still feel that way. Kind of ludicrous, really, because if anything, motherhood should make a woman an asset to any company, right?

KIM: Definitely.

AMY: I mean, you have to be organized, you have to multi-task, manage definitely difficult personalities at times and trying situations. I personally feel like becoming a mom has made me even better at being more efficient and more focused, because I HAVE to be.

KIM:  Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it’s made me more efficient, a stronger personality. And I’ve heard some moms describe their job as being the CEO of their family, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement after experiencing it! So can we talk for a minute about how Eva kicks ass at her new job and she’s quickly promoted, so she’s blossoming at work.

AMY: It’s the opposite of Lester. And you feel so proud for her, right?

KIM: Oh, yeah. It’s like, okay, this is what she’s meant to be doing, and it’s amazing seeing her getting to use all the things that made her so miserable at home into something that makes her happy and successful and makes her customers happy, too. She still tells people, almost as an afterthought, but she says it over and over, how she hates to be away from the children. We know she’s not being genuine here but she feels like, for society’s sake, that she has to say that and that she’s supposed to feel that.

AMY: Which I can identify with because when my two kids were young, I really loved Sunday nights. Sunday nights were like what Friday nights were in my early 20s because after spending an entire weekend with children, you are absolutely exhausted and Monday morning would mean getting to go to work, sit still at a desk and think about something in a more adult sphere for eight hours. So work to me suddenly felt like a relaxing retreat! I could understand why Eva is sort of secretly reveling in getting to go to work.

KIM: I totally understand you now when you would tell me that. I have felt that, and when I was actually able to go into the office before Covid, I felt like I was going on vacation on some level. As much as I love being a mom and obviously love my baby, it is hard work — babies and toddlers especially are hard work. And just because we love our children doesn’t mean we have to love every single second of caring for them. It’s freeing to live in a time and place where we can admit that.

AMY: Amen and Hallelujah! I always sort of thought that women really didn’t find their place in the work world until WWII in America made that kind of a necessity, but when I was reading a little bit about this book, it seems like the idea of women going to work wasn’t necessarily considered outrageously radical in the 1920s. What WAS considered unthinkable, on the other hand, was for a man to stay home with the children. Which is what brings us back to Lester.

KIM: Okay, so this “Freaky Friday” situation has been great for Eva, but it’s actually equally good for poor Lester with time. He’s recovered a bit. He’s still wheelchair-bound; he’s still an invalid, but he’s actually capable of doing some of the housework and taking care of the kids and (surprise!) he LOVES it. He has time to do all the musing and ponderings his heart desires. He’s thinking poetically. And under his watch, the homelife of the entire family is thriving. Okay, so the house isn’t as clean as it was with Eva, but Eva’s too fulfilled in her new job to notice. He and the children are collaborating together to solve problems, they’re putting the newspaper down on the kitchen floor all day to keep the floors clean so all the miserable feelings that Eva had about the stuff dripping on the floor, they’ve just swept it away with an idea that actually came from the toddler. He has the time to provide the attention the children need. The whole family is even playing a card game together every night. Basically, their entire world is turned on its head, in a good way. Who would think that this family that we’ve been reading about is capable of having so much fun every night? So basically, dads can have their own ways of doing things. It’s not worse, it’s just different. So putting down the newspaper on the floor to keep it clean… it’s pretty smart, if you think about it. 

AMY: I thought that the egg-cracking scene between Helen and her dad was so adorable because they’re flying blind in the kitchen for the first time. Neither knew how to crack an egg, but they figured it out together and it was super cute. 

KIM: Yeah, to see Helen have confidence from that and actually gain it instead of being insecure. It was great! In my family, Eric is much more rough and tumble with Cleo, for example. The other day, he had her climbing up the back of the outdoor couch and up the pergola, and I was in hysterics practically, afraid she was going to fall down, but she’s learning this physical confidence, and she’s so happy. It blows my mind (and terrifies me) what she can do, and he brings that out in her, which is fantastic.

AMY: Yeah, dads can get it done, too. I mean, it’s like I’ll never forget, Kim, when you and I had that crazy deadline on our first two novels. I think we had three months to write one of the books from start to finish, and I, meanwhile, had a two-year-old and a nine-month old and a full-time job, and I had no idea how I was going to do it. So I turned to Mike and said, “Give me three days in this house without kids so that I can finish this.” And he packed some bags, hopped a flight to Northern California by himself with two babies to go visit his parents in Northern California, which to me is nothing short of a warrior because I get hives just thinking about taking two kids to the grocery store with me, so I don’t even know how he navigated that on his own. But he did!

KIM: I’ve never even taken Cleo to the grocery store because she hates the car seat, and I would be scared of taking one kid to do that, so yay, Mike, and also, yay, YOU! Oh my god, now that I have a baby, my mind is blown at all the stuff that you did, too, that I didn’t even realize how hard it was.

AMY: We did it though. You get through it, right?

KIM: Yep.

AMY: So getting back to The Homemaker, Lester’s presence at home as “Mr. Mom” has a dramatic effect on the children, as we’ve already mentioned, but particularly on little Stephen, who was described as this holy terror at the beginning of the book, but as we come to understand, through Lester’s eyes, we learn that this little boy has just been misunderstood all along.

KIM: So this is where we see a major plug for the Montessori philosophy that Canfield Fisher espoused. It has an experiential approach to learning. One day in the book, for example, when Lester and Stephen are home alone, Lester sees that Stephen is about to lose his temper. He’s just on that edge where he can see it’s going to go badly, and he decides to give him a little hand-held egg beater to try to figure out how it works. And this is an old-fashioned egg beater, not an electric egg beater. Stephen gets really into it. It magically diffuses his anger. It’s amazing. Basically, this part of the book really shows the idea of thinking of children as human, not just an extension of their family, and actually, it’s very emotional and moving.

AMY: I agree, especially when we’re reading the book from the children’s perspective. She shifts back and forth between Eva’s perspective, Lester’s perspective and then all three children. You get to see how this change in circumstances affects everyone differently. So at this point in the book, things are coming together so beautifully for the whole family. Eva is kicking butt at work, Lester is writing poetry, and the rest of the family are so happy with the new domestic arrangement. But, is it just me, or did you feel like Canfield-Fisher almost laid it on a little too thick?

KIM: Yes.In fact, that was one of the issues i had with the book from the very beginning. It does lean a little toward the melodramatic (or maybe a lot toward the melodramatic). Everything was utterly tragic and then they are all so enraptured by this new, idyllic existence.

AMY: All i know is, I could definitely picture millions of American housewives in the 1920s reading this book and saying, “Damn straight!” 

KIM: Oh yeah, can you imagine the dinner table conversations this book might have sparked in homes across America? 

AMY: Yes, probably intense, maybe not always good conversations. I do feel as though Canfield Fisher seems a little more sympathetic toward Lester in this book. Though Eva is celebrated, of course, as a wonderful career woman, she isn’t quite put up on a pedestal as much as Lester seems to be. Is that just me?

KIM: Yeah… I mean, really Lester comes out as the hero of the book, and so I wondered if maybe even with the feminist notions on display here, the simple fact that Eva wasn’t capable of nurturing her family in this traditional sense was still held against her on some level, even by the author herself? 

AMY: The Knapp family is operating like a well-oiled, happy machine, and right around this point is when I started to get like a sinking feeling in my stomach like, “Oh, no…  something’s going to happen. The other shoe is going to drop.”

KIM: Yeah, you see how many pages are left and it’s like, “Aagh!” And it actually really does drop, but maybe not in the way you might expect, which is interesting. We will not spoil it for you, but let’s just say that something happens that calls everything into question for the entire family, for Lester, Eva, and even the children.

AMY: This book kind of struck a chord with me right from the outset. Newsflash to everybody: I was laid-off from my job a few months ago. The magazine I was on staff with was a casualty of Coronavirus and, you know,  being laid-off really did, on the one hand, free me up to oversee the chaos of two kids at home trying to manage distance learning and dealing with the household, but at the same time, I now sort of find myself feeling kind of adrift in this limbo between stay-at-home mother (but not by choice necessarily) and someone who had had her own career for 25 years. I feel this weird little identity crisis, and the book appealed to me on that level because right now, cleaning the house feels like my new mandate in life basically.

KIM: I get it and I think a lot of women are in the same boat as you or at least feeling it. It seems like women’s careers are more likely to take the hit in this Covid Crisis. 

AMY: Yeah, I’ve read data on that and in terms of couples working from home, the women are still doing the bulk of the childcare. And, I mean, studies show that they did the bulk of it prior to the pandemic, as well. So yeah, women’s careers are under strain and are going to continue to be, and when it comes down to one parent having to leave their job to manage the fact that schools are not back in session, it’s predominantly the women who are walking away from their careers it seems like. The longer schools are closed, the more women will be forced to set  just aside their jobs for a while.

KIM: I mean, you’ve got to think that’s going to have lasting repercussions. 

AMY: And I think one of the reasons why women are the ones who by default are sort of having to leave their jobs is because their salary is not as high as their husband’s, and that’s another whole issue boiling down to pay disparities. So you’ve got to wonder what Dorothy Canfield Fisher would say about all this?

KIM: That’s an interesting question. Based on the theme of this book, though, I think her concern at the end of the day is about making sure that what’s done is in the best interest of children. So she didn’t see The Home-Maker as a feminist book, but she considered it to be more centered around the rights of children — that children ought to be listened to, respected and have their feelings affirmed.

AMY: That reminds me that there was one aspect of the book that I did take umbrage at when I was reading.

KIM: I think i can guess. Tell me.

AMY: So there’s this whole passage where Lester is sort of affirming his role at home (and congratulating himself on what a great job he’s doing, by the way) and he mentally notes that there’s no one who can raise a child better than its parent. I understand the root of that statement, but my experience is that my kids absolutely thrived in the care of someone else when I was working. They benefited from having exposure to someone else who also loved and cared for them. So I’m more in the “It takes a Village” camp, and I don't think working parents should ever feel like their kid is somehow being deprived or harmed in some way by not being raised by a primary parent during the day or during the work hours. If anything, I think it helps a child’s growth to have more than just the parents contributing.

KIM: Absolutely. I mean, if you hadn’t brought this up, I was going to bring it up too. I mean it affects a family, and it affects the entire society. That passage made my hackles rise too. It was a rough transition for me when I went back to work — you know this — but my daughter is so happy, and I think it’s great she is surrounded by several people who love her, not just my husband and I. Also, neither my husband nor I want to be (or would necessarily be good) full-time homemakers. 

AMY: So Universal actually made this book into a silent movie in 1925. I can’t really imagine it being a film now, but for the same reasons this book was such a conversation starter in the 1920s, I can understand how it must have been almost scandalous back then and would have made a pretty juicy movie. But it’s funny to think of the story being told without words. I have a feeling it was probably fully ridiculous.

KIM: Oh my gosh, I can completely picture it in full melodramatic glory in a silent film with dramatic music and captions. It’s perfect for that era. 

AMY: That said, in wrapping up our discussion about Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Home-Maker, what did we learn today?

KIM: Well, we learned that Old English Wood Polish is something a person can really get excited about.

AMY: Yes, that’s right! We learned that it’s okay to rage over housework.

KIM: We learned that dads, when given the opportunity, can really shine as parents. 

AMY: And we’ve learned that while women have come a long way when it comes to gender equality, we still have an awfully long way to go.

KIM: And that’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

AMY: Speaking of, in our next episode, we’ll be discussing Simone Schwarz-Bart’s 1972 masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond, which spans three generations of women. 

KIM: Got ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really makes a difference!

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Dorothy Canfield Fisher and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]

8. Gossip & Heartbreak in the Letters of Emily Eden

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES [co-host]: Hi everyone! We’re back with another “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW [co-host]: And I’m Kim Askew. So, we use our phones these days for just about everything, including listening to this podcast. And technology is amazing in all of these different ways, but I do think it’s kind of turned the practice of letter writing into a lost art. Amy, when’s the last time you put pen to paper and really wrote a letter to someone?

AMY: It’s been a while, for sure. I do still like to write thank you notes when I can, but I have to admit, even that tends to slip, especially these days when you can just send a text or email. However, I am trying to teach my kids the importance of hand-written thank yous. I used to write to friends who lived in other cities back before email was commonplace, but (Oh my gosh, that’s dating me, right? Geesh.) But I only have a few of those letters saved. I never hung onto most of them.

KIM: Okay, so I’m on the same page. I’m really big on thank you notes, too, but since I had my daughter, I’m a little bit guilty of letting them slip up. Though I spend a lot of time feeling guilty when I could have probably just sent the thank you notes instead. But anyway, lesson learned. But as for the letters, I have a box full of letters that I’ve treasured for years. I have some old love letters, I have some letters from my grandmothers and from childhood friends. We moved a lot when I was a kid, so I have a lot of letters from friends, and I really do miss corresponding with people in that way. There was something really special about that.

AMY: Yeah, for sure, and I could see how back in the day, receiving a letter would have been so thrilling. That sort of connection to the outside world was so important. So, the last “lost lady” that we featured on this show, Emily Eden, she published a book of her letters from India while she lived, and after she died, another book of her letters (both those she wrote and received) from her younger days ended up getting published as well. So I’m not really always too keen on reading collections of other people’s letters. I think you have to know so much context, often, and there’s usually a lot of references to places and people and events that, if you’re not familiar with, you can kind of get lost. But I know that is the sort of thing historians love to pore over.

KIM: Yeah, that’s true, I think, typically, you might look at a letter to get some special information, but you don’t necessarily want to read the whole book… unless it’s somebody like Madame de Sevigne (I don’t know if I’m pronouncing her name right) but I love her letters to her daughters and friends. They’re really witty, and they have takes on the scandals of the day, from her privileged “courtside” view, and by “courtside,” I mean the actual court of France. That said, I know you were checking out Eden’s Letters in recent weeks in anticipation of maybe talking about them. What did you find? Did you find anything interesting in there?

AMY: Yeah, it’s definitely kind of that “slice of life” look into somebody’s existence, and I loved that in the case of Emily’s letters you could see her lighthearted, sometimes sarcastic personality on display, but we definitely got to see a sense of humor in the letters that I read. These were mostly letters from when she was a late teen and in her twenties. So for example,  at the age of 17, she wrote to one of her sisters — the family had just found out this friend had gotten engaged to marry Lord Byron, and the whole family was in a tizzy — and she wrote to her sister that the friend… “does not seem to be acting with her usual good sense, is Mama’s opinion, as by all accounts Lord Byron is not likely to make any woman very happy.” 

KIM: That’s, like, the understatement of the year, probably. I love how understatedly funny that is and probably how true from what we know about Lord Byron and his love life. I also love that they have an acquaintance engaged to Lord Byron. I mean, they can gossip about him and actually really have real gossip about somebody they know. It’s perfect. I love that.

AMY: Yeah. And since she was kind of in the upper social spheres in England, she did have these kind of VIP friends. But in another instance, she writes about a man she calls “Rogers the Poet” who came to call on the family one morning. And she says: “I never saw such a satirical, odious wretch, and I was calculating the whole time, from what he was saying of other people, what he could find ill-natured enough to say of us. I had never seen him before and trust I never shall again. Your most affection, E. Eden.”

KIM: Okay, that’s hilarious too, and I love that it brings up the idea of she’s talking about other people, but they’re probably talking about her, too, and she gets that. I would guess, and you would know, was this letter published after her death, maybe? One of the ones after her death?

AMY: Yeah, for sure. These letters didn’t come out until 1919, well after her death. They were put together by her great niece, who was named Violet Dickinson, who, incidentally, was a good friend of Virginia Woolf’s. But despite writing about sort of trivial things like dresses and neighborhood gossip, Emily also has some poignant sections in this collection of letters and sections that definitely I could tell informed her novels. We read The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple, and there are lots of incidents in the letters that you can see directly parlayed into plotlines from the novels. One example of that is after her brother’s wife gave birth, (this is kind of sad, actually), the baby, she says, was not expected to live, and she was writing to a friend to pass this sad information along. So, in the first letter, she basically says that after seeing what her sister-in-law went through, (or hearing about what her sister-in-law went through) she had no inclination whatsoever to ever have kids. She writes: “What a horrid piece of work a lying-in is! I am more and more confirmed in the idea that a life of single blessedness is the wisest, even accompanied, as Shakespeare mentions, by the necessity of chanting faint hymns to the cold lifeless [fruitless] moon, which, as I have no voice, rather discomposes me.” 

So she’s relaying sad news, but she kind of has a little sense of humor when she’s talking about that she never wants to have babies.

KIM: Yeah, and what a great person to correspond with! Clever, witty, poetic… she quotes Shakespeare in her explanation. But it also seems like she’s very honest, which is really great, too. And I also have to say, I would have been terrified to give birth in those days too, so I can really, you know, feel empathetic. 

AMY: Yeah. And sadly, in her next letter to her friend, Eden reports that the infant has passed. And I’m going to read that section, because it’s quite moving. She says: “Dearest Theresa, you will have heard before this that all is over. I could not write sooner, and I knew you would hear. To the last, the poor dear child’s sufferings were dreadful and she never had one moment’s consciousness. Lord Grantham arrived at the moment she expired. I wrote to him on Saturday to say he had better come, or rather, to ask him if he did not think so, and he came off instantly and I am so glad now, for you have no idea of the good effect it had on Mr. R [who was her brother]. Poor Sarah [the mother] surprised me more than anybody. She cried a great deal, but was perfectly reasonable in her grief and has fortunately taken the turn of feeling that it is only by her exertions her poor husband can be supported at all. And she kept repeating all the morning how much worse her calamity might have been, that at all events, she had him left and ought not to repine. She thanked sister and, in short, nothing could be better than her conduct. All hours come to an end at last. All griefs find or make a place for themselves.

So sad, you know! 

KIM: Really sad.

AMY: And people went through this all the time. It’s a reminder of how people lived back in that era. But moving on to a lighter topic, as we mentioned last week, Eden is an author who’s frequently compared to Jane Austen, and that reminded me that actually, last month, a version of Pride and Prejudice that relates to today’s topic of letters.

KIM: Oh, right, yes! So Barbara Heller, who is actually a Hollywood set decorator for film and television productions, she put this book together for Chronicle Books, which of course, always puts out these beautiful works of art in their own right. We love Chronicle Books. So the book itself is the full text of the novel along with 19 letters that are “handwritten” by Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennett and other characters in the story. How cool is that?

AMY: Yeah. The letters, with all the appropriate postmarks, etc, and they are dropped into these actual little envelope pouches within the pages of the book at the appropriate points in the story. They looked really authentic, I checked it out on Amazon to sort of see how it was all packaged. Apparently Heller and the calligraphers she worked with really studied archives of actual English correspondence from that time period to make sure that the handwriting examples would be spot-on. 

KIM: Ooh, I love that. And then she also even includes letters that are original material created by her, by Heller, and they are made to sound as though Austen’s characters would have written them. So it’s like you get some additional work from the characters that Jane Austen didn’t write but Heller has taken it upon herself to add to this, which is really cool.

AMY: Yeah, and I wondered what kind of task that was for her, you know, to add something into Pride and Prejudice? That’s quite a burden, I think, to tackle! 

KIM: That’s some confidence, to be able to do that.

AMY: Yes. There’s actually an article in the September issue of Smithsonian magazine that explains in more detail what went into making the book. And they interview Heller. She talks about creating some of that new content and says that it was “completely agonizing,” because she felt like she was “adding words to a beloved classic.” So I guess she did feel the pressure. 

KIM: Okay.

AMY: But, she apparently had help from two of her sisters (both of whom were also Austen fans), and so, as a trio, they kind of collaborated to come up with these “new” letters, which somehow, that feels very Austen appropriate to me, you know… a trio of sisters sweating over this. She mentioned that some of the lines they used for this new material were actually taken from Austen’s own personal letters, so they had some source material to work with and finesse. 

KIM: That’s so great. One, I want to read the book, and two, I’m nerding out, because I’m like, “Wow, it would be really cool to be mentioned in Smithsonian magazine.” That’s really cool. We’re going to have to link to that in our show notes, if they have it online, which I’m sure they do as well. So, that sounds like such a cute gimmick, and this would be an amazing gift. I’m going to note down that that’s something that I want to consider giving for the holidays. And apparently, Heller is going to be putting out a similar edition of Little Women, soon. Wow! She’s got a great thing going there.

AMY: Yeah! She could keep going with this. I mean, you could do a lot of books. 

KIM: Needless to say, the protagonist at the center of our next podcast had no time to be writing letters.

AMY: No, she didn’t sadly!

KIM: She was too busy scrubbing floors and screaming at her children!

AMY: Aww! [laughing] Poor Evangeline! She’s the heroine of The Home-Maker which actually was one of the top ten bestselling novels of 1924. It was written by the American author and activist, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who is our next “lost lady of lit.”

KIM: Okay, get ready: Anyone who has ever felt angst-ridden and miserable about housework and the gender inequity associated with it will find themselves deeply understood while reading this book.

AMY: I’m raising my hand… high.

KIM: Yes, I know. I’m raising my hand too, even though I said that. Yes. While I was reading it, I was thinking, “Uh-huh… uh-huh… uh-huh.” I could think of a few things today that happened that would check off the boxes for that.

AMY: But yes, we will be venting about that. Be sure to check in with us next week when we “dust off,” this classic, no pun intended. 

KIM: I obviously can’t wait for this one. So for more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, please leave a review. It really helps new listeners find us!

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

7. Emily Eden - The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

EPISODE 7: Emily Eden (The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House)

AMY HELMES: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every Jane Austen fan wishes she could find more books in the vein of Jane Austen.

KIM ASKEW: They say you can never have too much of a good thing, right? So you can imagine how excited we were when we stumbled upon a little known (to us anyway) author who has been described as the19th century’s answer to Jane Austen… with a bit of Anthony Trollope thrown in, to boot.

AMY: Sounds like the perfect subject matter for this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit,” the podcast about history’s forgotten female writers. Whether we’re introducing you to a new author or simply reminding you of one you always meant to get around to reading, our aim is to make sure these talented women don’t get overlooked. I’m Amy Helmes, and this is my pal and longtime writing partner, Kim Askew.

KIM: Hi, everyone. I can’t wait to discuss today’s “Lost Lady”: Emily Eden.

AMY: That name sounds so modern, doesn’t it, Kim? As if she should pop up in my email contacts, or, like she could be somebody I went to high school with maybe. And I wish I HAD known her in high school, because here’s a perfect example of an author I never knew existed, and as soon as I started reading her most well-known books, The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple, I thought,  “Why did it take this long for me to find out about her?” 

KIM: And that’s become a recurring theme for us, that broken-record question which basically prompted us to start this podcast in the first place. We wanted to shout these ladies’ names from the rooftops, but we thought a podcast seems like a safer place to start.

AMY: Whenever I stumble upon some new-to-me, but generally forgotten female writer, I tend to feel a little annoyed that I’ve been denied all this time.

KIM: Yeah, but isn’t it also a little exhilarating to discover somebody like Emily Eden? It’s like finding buried treasure!

AMY: True. And better late than never in this case, for sure. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

KIM: We’re guessing Emily Eden is as unknown to most of you as she was to us. Amy, what do we know about her?

AMY: Well, she’s officially known as “The Honorable Emily Eden,” because she comes from a high-ranking British family at the turn of the 19th century. Her father, William, was a diplomat… he spent time in America and Ireland, and he was a minister at the court of Versailles. (Can you imagine?)

KIM: Wow.

AMY: He was also an ambassador to Spain and Holland, and because of all that, he was given a peerage in 1789 which resulted in the title Baron of Auckland.

So by the time Emily was born in 1797, her parents had settled back on their estate in Kent called Eden Farm. Her father devoted his time to politics, and her mother was busy rearing children (she had 14 total). Eden’s mother was said to be very cheerful with a great sense of humor, which is a trait she clearly passed on to her daughter. We see a lot of humor in her books. Emily was also tutored at home by governesses, which means she was extremely well-educated, and you see that on display with all of the literary and historical references she liberally sprinkles throughout her writing.

KIM: Yeah, it’s interesting that her novels are compared to Jane Austen, because her family was actually involved in the sort of romantic scandal that one might find in an Austen novel. 

AMY: And since we all love a good scandal, I will quickly explain that one: so Eden’s older sister, Eleanor, was the subject of intense public scrutiny when it was rumored that she was going to marry Prime Minister William Pitt, but when their relationship went public, Pitt actually denied having ever proposed to Eleanor, and that sparked her father’s fury, naturally. Eleanor wound up marrying an Earl instead, so she turned out okay, but the prime minister never married…and it was said that Eden’s sister — the one that got away — was the one true love of his life.

KIM: Wow, this really does sound like a novel, and it would be so interesting to know what the real story was there. So clearly, Emily had some fodder to inspire the romantic scandals she writes about later on in life. 

And that wasn’t the only novel-worthy event in her life — not at all. After their parents’ death, Emily and her younger sister, Fanny, ended up “setting up house” for their bachelor brother, George. So when he became governor general of India in 1835, the two sisters went with him, embarking on a five-month sailing voyage to India. Emily was 39 years old at the time when she arrived, and she called it “a hot land of strangers.”  She was always a little homesick and she really did not LOVE it there (she felt very out of her element as you might imagine), but she also managed to have this keen interest in her surroundings and the goings on, and she wrote down everything she observed in her trademark witty writing style. 

AMY: She said that their residence in India looked like “a palace out of Arabian Nights.” They received so much attention there and lived a very lavish existence, hosting weekly “open houses” and balls, and they also traveled throughout India for months at a time in a procession of camels, elephants, horses, carriages and foot soldiers and that way they were able to see a great deal of the country. So when she finally returned to England six years later in 1842, Eden published a book called Portraits of the People and Princes of India, as well as a collection of letters from her time in India, both of which were massive successes.

There’s a well-researched book that delves deeper into Eden’s time in India written by Jagmohan Mahajan called The Grand Indian Tour: Travels and Sketches of Emily Eden, which really captures that era in history, and we’ll link to to that in our show notes in case anyone is interested in reading more.

Eden also was an accomplished amateur artist. She did some amazing sketches and paintings from her time in India, and those are actually still on display at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. We’ll link to slides of her artwork as well. 

KIM: That all sounds worth checking out, for sure. It goes without saying that Eden had a lot of experience in society, hob-nobbing with influential, aristocratic people. She was very familiar with and extremely engaged in British politics, despite not having the right to vote herself. (And we see politics enter the plotline of her book Semi-Attached Couple.) She was a pretty renown political hostess for her party (the Whig party) and most of her friends were members of the upper class. 

AMY: So now that’s a pretty striking difference between her and Austen. Austen’s father was a middle-class clergyman who came from a much more modest social sphere. Yet like Austen, Eden’s writing focuses a lot on class, and social standings and snobbery. Not surprisingly, Jane Austen (whose books were published when Emily was a young woman) was her favorite author. 

KIM: Unlike Austen, Eden was financially independent, so she didn’t NEED to write to earn a living, she did it out of pure passion. Yet interestingly enough, Eden was similar to Austen in that she never married. Serving as “hostess” for her single brother, in her 30s and early 40s, however, did allow her to have the sort of domestic/household management role that married women of the day would have undertaken. So she was, in fact, “lady of the house” as an adult.

AMY: So Kim, apparently some people hoped that Emily would have ended up being the second wife of British prime minister William Lamb after his wife Caroline died. So I guess there was a possibility that she could have married. He was close friends with Eden, and folks thought they might end up together, but she said she was not interested because she found him “bewildering” and she was shocked by his profanity. Oh goodness! Honestly, when I was reading Semi-Attached Couple, in particular, there were moments when I thought to myself that Eden really didn’t seem to like men very much. Her portrayal of them in this book was none too flattering at times.

KIM: Yes, which we’ll circle back to later in our discussion. So while she may have chosen a life of spinsterhood, she was happy living with her brother and sister, until they both died, within three months of one another, in 1849. This was a moment of true grief for Eden, and her health deteriorated quite a bit after that, in part stemming from some chronic conditions from her time in India. She was very frail, physically, for the next 20 years, and rarely left her house. She died in 1869 at the age of 72. She seemed to live quite a life.

AMY: Yeah, absolutely.

KIM: So, let’s dive into the books! The Semi-Attached Couple was written at the tail end of the Regency Period, in 1829, and The Semi-Detached House was written some 30 years later. However, Semi-Detached House was PUBLISHED a year before Semi-Attached Couple, which ended up throwing Amy and I into a bit of a comedy of errors as we were preparing for this episode. 

AMY: Not the first time this has happened, by the way.

KIM: No, and not the last time either, I’m sure. So to spare you, our listener, any similar confusion, we should note that it doesn’t matter which of the books you read first. Despite the similarity of their titles, they have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. They can be read in any order.

AMY: When Virago Modern Classics republished these two books in 1982, 

 which stated: “The only thing more gratifying to find than a good book is a good book which has been neglected. “The Semi-Attached Couple,” written in 1829, published in 1860, popular for years, then largely forgotten, is a comic gem about how difficult it can be to get used to being married, even if you are young and beautiful and your husband is rich and titled. ….”

KIM: Oh, yes. And  I think the best way to describe these two novels is that they’re what happens after the “happily ever after” in a Jane Austen novel. Only the “happily ever after” part is suddenly up for serious debate.

AMY: So these two books basically pick up just after a typical Austen novel would have ended, with young women who are brand new wives and who aren’t at all sure (or happy) about the future. And in the case of Semi-Attached Couple, it really gets kind of dark! We’re introduced to Helen and Lord Teviot (which, think Mr. Darcy for Lord Teviot basically)... and just prior to the nuptials, Helen confides to her sister in an early chapter that she is having some second thoughts about marrying him! The book reads: “She had accepted Lord Teviot on an acquaintance of very few weeks, and that carried on solely in a ball-room or at a breakfast. …. She found every day some fresh cause to doubt whether she were as happy engaged to Lord Teviot, as she was before she had ever seen him.”

KIM: Oh boy. “Houston, we have a problem!” When you think about it, though, how courtships worked during this time period, it’s no wonder she felt this way. Couples were pretty much never given any time alone together. It was all formalities until right up to the wedding day. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s really a pretty stilted way to get to know anyone. I mean, thank god we live in a different time period. Anyway, Helen realizes it would be a disaster (and frankly not even a viable option) to call off the wedding, so she goes through with it, but she and her new husband end up having a number of very testy exchanges in the first few weeks of marriage, which become increasingly vicious. We’re told that they are both at fault. Helen is a bit too reserved and withholding in her affections — she comes across as cold to Lord Teviot. On the other hand, he has this sort of over-the-top adulation of her that she finds a turnoff, and when she doesn’t respond in the way he wants, he just gets angry. Kim, did you find yourself landing more on “Team Helen” or “Team Teviot”?

KIM: Great question, and I must say, probably no surprise, I landed on the side of Team Helen. Teviot had this unchecked temper, and he knew it, too! He basically drives Helen to distraction. He’s really jealous of her family and her friends. I feel like she keeps trying to connect with him, but he’s too busy being SUPER dramatic and self-involved to get it. 

AMY: It’s almost like Mr. Darcy in reverse, you know? He starts off looking great on paper and then all of a sudden he’s a jerk.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: He just seems like a selfish whiner to me, really. I didn’t like his hostility one bit, but I also kept thinking, “How on earth is Eden going to manage to turn things around for this couple? How is this even going to be possible?”

KIM: Teviot’s idea for smoothing things over is to invite a large retinue of houseguests to come visit… 

AMY: Because misery loves company, I guess.

KIM: In this case, absolutely. So a collection of both his friends and Helen’s friends and family arrive for this extended stay at their grand estate. Their presence does lighten Helen’s mood to a degree because she’s feeling homesick and I think it also is a bit of a buffer from Teviot’s MOODS, but it also stirs up even more drama, thanks to the presence of the fantastically bitchy Lady Portmore.

AMY: All right, she is probably my favorite character in the book, despite the fact that she’s completely hateable. She really ranks right up there with Austen’s Miss Bingley, Mrs. Elton, and Mary Crawford, don’t you think?

KIM: For sure. She’s downright insulting to everyone except her favorites — these gentlemen whom she claims all harbor secret obsessions with her. 

AMY: Of course, right?

KIM: Yes, of course. She’s also a narcissist to a comical degree. Eden writes: “One of the odd channels scooped out by Lady Portmore’s restless vanity was a persuasion that she was the world’s universal confidante; and she would enter into long arguments to prove that she must necessarily have foreknown any piece of intelligence or gossip that was imparted to her. Like all very vain people, she was contradictory; and this, added to her pretensions to universal knowledge, rendered her conversation a glorious mass of inconsistencies. 

   “I have heaps of news,” she said one morning when she came down to breakfast. “I dote upon letters, particularly from clever people, though it is a sad thing for me having the reputation of a good letter-writer to keep up. You know there is no vanity in saying so, for my letters are very original.”

AMY: Uggh. She’s just insufferable. And though she really doesn’t help matters when it comes to the Teviots’ faltering marriage, she’s kind of a paper tiger in that most people tend to just roll their eyes at her in the book. But one of the best scenes is when a woman named Mrs. Douglas, a character who comes from a lower social stratum, basically manages to run verbal circles around her. It was, like, a Regency-era mic drop moment if ever there was one.

KIM: I loved that exchange! And Lady Portmore isn’t the only person in the house party causing problems. There are two other unattached young ladies and three young men, and the men are this annoying combination of pointedly rude and narcissistically oblivious. 

AMY: One note I ended up jotting down was: “Men are jerks!” That’s simple enough. That was my take-away. So Eliza, who is Mrs. Douglas’s daughter, has a mad crush on Helen’s cousin, Colonel Beaufort, but he can’t be bothered to even remember her name. While she is repeating in her mind every obscure detail from the conversations they have had, Eden writes, “Little did she know that the ungrateful creature had dismissed from his mind all the conversations that had ever passed between them….. So it will be when young, ignorant girls fall in love as, I grieve to say, they often do with blasés men of the world.”

KIM: Yeah, so Eden really doesn’t manage to draw her male characters as well as she does her females. And there’s also an occasional problem with the perspectives in this book. Every now and then we were thrust into the first-person narrative of Helen’s maid. It was really distracting, and perhaps it was the fault of the edition we wound up reading on Kindle.

AMY: Yeah, it felt like it needed one more editorial pass, maybe.

KIM: Mmm-hmm. In any case, getting back to the story: Lord Teviot ends up being called away to Lisbon to take care of some matters, which only deepens the chasm that’s growing between him and his wife. During this time, there’s a bit of political intrigue that takes place amongst several characters who are running for parliament — it’s pretty funny — and this is where Eden’s interest in politics takes center stage.

AMY: You’d think this might be a dry section of the book, but I actually found it pretty interesting, especially in the build-up to our own presidential election this fall. There’s a nastiness in this depiction that I found quite familiar.

KIM: By the time we circle back to the drama between Helen and Lord Teviot, he is being brought back to England having fallen ill and fighting for his very life! Helen naturally rushes to his side. Enter the literary trope of the “high-tempered man turned helpless.”

AMY: Kept thinking of Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, there, of course. 

KIM: Yep. Exactly.

AMY: Meanwhile, all the other young singletons are slowly falling into the matches they are supposed to end up in. And there’s no real surprise to the ending, but I’ll admit, I was satisfied with how Eden wraps things up… especially since earlier in the book I didn’t see how ANY of the men deserved a happy ending. So we’ve already kind of noted the similarities to Austen, obviously... 

KIM: But I also found a lot of parallels to George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, too. Semi-Attached Couple reminded me of a much lighter Middlemarch in that Helen and Teviot have such clashing personalities a la Dorothea and Casaubon and Lydgate and Rosamund. And then Semi-Detached House, meanwhile, reminded me of a much lighter The Way We Live Now, in that they both involve a financial scandal and the schemy Baron and Baroness are a little bit similar to Trollope’s Melmottes. 

AMY: Speaking of Semi-Detached House, let’s jump on over to that one. I think if I had to choose which of these two books I liked better, it might be this one. It’s just kind of fluffy and fun for the most part. 

KIM: Yeah, I actually really enjoyed them both, but I felt the same way about Semi-Detached House. It ended up being my favorite, especially the second half, because I feel like it really found its feet. There were certain characters I really loved, and I thought the subplot was a little more intriguing than in House. 

AMY: Yeah. So class divisions are even more of a focus in Semi-Detached House. We start off, once again, with a relatively new bride, Blanche, a.k.a. “Lady Chester” who finds herself on her own and pregnant when her husband, Arthur, is called away on a mission to Berlin. So Arthur arranges for her  to live in a semi-detached house while he’s away, rather than on their grand estate, and Blanche is certain that this new living arrangement is going to be a nightmare. She has this sarcastic vision of how bad it’s going to be, and all her forecasts prove absolutely correct, but she winds up, at every turn, being surprisingly delighted by the horrors she imagined. 

KIM: Yes, her “semi-detached” neighbors, whom she imagines are going to be so awful, are all in a tizzy when they hear that Pleasance, the name of the main residence, is going to have a new tenant. It kind of reminded me of the Bennett family’s exclamations that “Netherfield Park is let at last!” in Pride and Prejudice. But there’s a little comedy of errors that happens (one of several throughout the book, in fact) when they mistakenly come to believe that Blanche is some sort of fallen woman. There are a lot of these snafus that happen that are hilarious.

AMY: Yes, to me it kept feeling like some 19th century episode of “Three’s Company,” but once the misunderstandings are all cleared up, Blanche takes a real liking to these solidly suburban neighbors, the Hopkinsons, and despite the fact that they would not normally be welcome into the same social circles she usually keeps, she takes the two daughters, Janet and Rose and their little cousin Charlie, who is an invalid, under her wing. 

KIM: Of course, this doesn’t sit well with THIS book’s social-climbing “mean girl,” Baroness Sampson.

AMY: And what a piece of work she is. Whew! The unfortunate part, though, is that Eden’s portrayal of the Baroness and her husband is unmistakably anti-Semitic.

KIM: Yeah, and, sadly, casual anti-semitism is the case with all too many books from that era, and then again, all the way through the Victorian era as well..  

AMY: Yeah, it’s disappointing, but just a head’s up that this part of the book will, and should, offend the modern reader. 

KIM: Yes. Though I did really like the redeeming member of the Baron and Baroness’s household: their niece, Rachel. For one, she quotes Shakespeare constantly (which annoys the Baroness to no end ) and she ends up being a bit of a secondary heroine of the novel. Of course, the Baron and Baroness get their comeuppance in the end. 

And meanwhile Blanche ends up helping Janet and Rose have a “happily ever after” with the men of their dreams, despite the concerns of her aunt who says: “My dear Blanche, I hope you are not going to turn match-maker; of all the dangerous manufacturies in the world, that is the worst, and the most unsatisfactory.” 

AMY: By the way, I’d like to point out, Kim, that I learned a new word from this book:

KIM: Okay, what is it?

AMY: “Spoony.” Did you know what that word meant when you were reading it?

KIM: No, I actually didn’t know what it meant, but I wondered if it had something to do with spooning?

AMY: No, actually. I looked it up and it’s derived from this carved wooden spoon that, in Welsh customs, a man would present to his fiance. So, a bit of 19th century British slang there. 

KIM: Weird.

AMY: So one character no one seems to be “spoony” about in this novel is Janet and Rose’s brother-in-law, Willis, who is SO TEDIOUS to be around, and yet I couldn’t help but love the guy. He is a widower who is just completely over-the-top in his grief, which is really a surprisingly funny thing to get to laugh at. 

KIM: Eden writes about him: “He had a passion for being a victim; when he was single, he grumbled for a wife, and when he had found a wife, he grumbled for the comforts of a bachelor. He grumbled for an heir to Columbia Lodge, and when the heir was born, he grumbled because the child was frail and sickly. In short, he fairly grumbled poor gentle Mrs. Willis out of the world, and then grumbled at her for dying.” 

AMY: So he actually ends up besotted with this woman who does not return the favor, and there’s this really funny scene where he asks for her hand in marriage and she basically does a spit-take of laughter. I loved that part of the book.

KIM: Yeah, that was hilarious.

AMU: But what happens to them by the ending is actually a somewhat unusual ending, but we won’t give that part away to you.

KIM: No we don’t want to say what happened, but I would agree it is pretty unusual. Blanche and Arthur end up moving back to their grand estate, and they end their time at the semi-detached house, though Blanche says, “It is a pity that Chesterton is not semi-detached…. A semi-detached castle would be lovely.”  

AMY: Yeah, so sweet!

KIM: A happy ending. So Amy, do you think the comparisons between Emily Eden and Austen are just?

AMY: Well, I don’t know. Do Eden’s novels measure up to Austen in terms of the sheer talent on the page? Definitely not, no. But I think these books are really a nice little nibble for anyone who loves Jane Austen and tales from that time frame. They’re really charming in their own way, and it’s really clear that Eden was a true fan of her predecessor. 

KIM: She obviously read Austen many times over, and she even references Austen’s novels in her books. They are a very light and enjoyable read. Highly recommended. But given the fact that Eden isn’t very well known to contemporary readers, it’s not that surprising there haven’t been any adaptations that we could find. I would actually love to see Andrew Davies take on either of these… his version of Sanditon, which debuted on PBS this year… I don’t know?

AMY: Yeah, I think he’d be up for the task. And Sanditon, by the way? Oh my gosh, we need to take a moment and talk about that, because it is so good in a trashy sort of way! There are not many highlights of 2020, but for me, Sanditon is one. And I know not everyone is keen on the whole idea of “sexing up Austen,” which is what he basically does in this TV series, but I, for one, am here for it. 

KIM: I was hanging on to every moment. Totally into it. And I think considering that we took some liberties with Shakespeare in our Twisted Lit YA series, we obviously aren’t going to be the ones to be offended by someone getting creative with a classic work of literature. So go, Andrew Davies! 

AMY: I remember watching Episode One and practically falling off the sofa at what I was seeing and then immediately texting all my Austen-loving friends, including you, Kim.

KIM: Oh, I remember that text. You’ve got to at least watch the first episode of this.

AMY: Watch the first episode and decide if it’s for you or not, but it’s… it’s… I liked it.

KIM: So moving off of that, what, if anything, have we learned from today’s episode?

AMY: Well, first off, we learned that whiny man-babies CAN be redeemed in literature simply by having a near-death experience. 

KIM: I think that’s great. We need more of those. We learned a new word for stupidly-smitten: “spoony.”

AMY: We learned that the bitchiest characters are almost always the best.

KIM: Uh-huh. No offense to heroines, but yep. And we learned that when you run out of Jane Austen books to read, Emily Eden is a fun follow-up.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode! For more information on this episode as well as further reading material, check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really makes a difference.

[start closing music]

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Emily Eden and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone. Special thanks, as well, to Harriet Grant for our logo design. See you next time!

[closing music.]

6. If Books Could Talk

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM: Hi, and welcome to this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episode. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes.

KIM: Today’s episode is all about the latest films and TV shows inspired by books. The ones we’re looking forward to, anyway.

AMY: Ooh, I love it. Netflix is in our wheelhouse right now, because they are certainly keeping us entertained with, for example, the Enola Holmes movie, which came out last month. That starred Millie Bobbie Brown as Sherlock Holmes’ younger sister, and Helena Bonham Carter plays her missing mother, whom Enola is on a mission to track down.  

KIM: And this was based off “The Enola Holmes Mysteries,” which is a YA series by Nancy Springer. I haven’t read it, but I am very interested now. The director on this also was a director on “Fleabag,” which Amy loves, and we’ve talked about in a prior episode as well.

AMY: So yeah, Millie Bobbie Brown is constantly talking to the camera and it’s just a really clever premise and a cute execution. I definitely gave this one a thumbs up.

KIM: Another Netflix movie slated for release on Oct. 21 is Rebecca. This one is featuring Lily James as the second Mrs. De Winter, Armie Hammer as Max De Winter and Kristen Scott Thomas as the dreaded Mrs. Danvers. This is from the producers of Atonement. 

AMY: Ooh, that’s good casting!

KIM: Yeah, really good casting. It’s an adaptation of the 1938 Gothic novel by Daphne DuMaurier.

AMY: And I don’t think that I’ve ever seen an adaptation of Rebecca. I know that Alfred Hitchcock did the movie first, but I don’t think I’ve  seen it. Actually, no…  I did watch a miniseries version that was in the late 1990s because Diana Rigg, who just passed away, she played Mrs. Danvers in it.

KIM: Yeah, the trailer for the new Rebecca looks really good. The sets and scenery are gorgeous. It looks like the kind of thing we’d love. And Kirsten Scott Thomas is always great. And then there’s Armie Hammer, who I love, and he’s going to be Max DeWinter, so I’m excited to see it.

AMY: It looks good. I love that time period, too, like the thirties. 

KIM: So good, so good… the clothes!

AMY: I’m in. Now, Kim, I know you are way more into sci-fi novels than I am. Did you read Frank Herbert’s Dune?

KIM: No, this is embarrassing, but I’m one of the many people who started that book, but never finished it. I did watch, at one point when I was a kid, the original adaptation from 1984. It had Sting in it, but I’m also really excited for the new movie version starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya.

AMY: Yeah, but ooh, Sting! That sounds good! I know, don’t feel bad. I didn’t read it at all. It feels like one of those books that you’re supposed to read but I have a feeling a lot of people are in the same … isn’t it a really fat, fat book?

KIM: It’s really, really long and it’s known for being a book that people never end up reading.

AMY: Then maybe it’s good there’s a movie coming out, because we can all just take the shortcut. And it actually looks pretty intense and exciting. I kind of got a Star Wars vibe, but like, a more complex, dramatic, darker Star Wars, I guess.

KIM: The original director who was going to direct the movie version before the Sting version, he ended up inspiring… and some of his people, his team, actually worked on Star Wars, so there’s a big connection there.

AMY: Oh, cool. So I wasn’t off the mark there.

KIM: Not at all.

AMY: I have not been hitting movie theaters, but if I was, I would certainly have gone to see The Personal History of David Copperfield starring Dev Patel, and also featuring Hugh Laurie, Ben Whishaw and Tilda Swinton. I did see that it was briefly at a drive-in movie theater here, and I contemplated, “Okay, could Kim and I drive to the theater in two separate cars, park next to each other, sit on our hoods or the top of the cars and somehow watch it together?” But we never got our act together, obviously, to do that. It could have been fun, though. 

KIM: I love the dream of us going to the drive-in in separate cars. Maybe it will happen at some point.

AMY: Charles Dickens at a drive-in seems so anachronistic and weird.

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: It could have been fun.

KIM: It would have been. And maybe we’ll still do something like that. But I love everyone in the new David Copperfield so I’m really excited for that. It makes me think, though, of the one from 1999, where Daniel Radcliffe (this was before Harry Potter) played the young David and Maggie Smith was Betsey Trotwood. Do you remember that?

AMY: I do, because weirdly, around that time there were TWO David Copperfields that came out. There was that one that you just mentioned and then there was another one that was on some TV network. It starred Hugh Dancy as David, but then Michael Richards (who is “Seinfeld’s” Kramer) played Mr. Micawber, and Sally Field was Betsey Trotwood! It was the weirdest casting. I kind of liked the movie, but I remember thinking at the time thinking, “Why are there so many David Copperfields coming out?” It’s such an odd thing to suddenly have a glut of. But when it rains, it pours, I guess. I’m not going to complain about that, ever. I’ll always take a Dickens movie.

KIM: That makes me think of the year there were two adaptations of Dangerous Liaisons, and I love both of them, so I was glad that happened too. But back to Dickens, I digress… do you have a favorite Dickens film adaptation? Because I think we both know mine. The Bleak House mini-series with Gillian Anderson, and it is, hands-down, my favorite. I will be watching it forever. In fact, I’ll probably be watching it after we record this podcast.

AMY: Yeah, I knew you were going to say that one! It was so good! And actually, what’s interesting is that Anna Maxwell Martin, who played the lead character of Esther in that movie, she is also in the latest David Copperfield! Her name popped up there. If I was going to pick a Dickens movie, I think I would pick the one with Ioan Gruffudd and Justine Waddell…

KIM: Oh yeah, right, in Great Expectations.

AMY: Yeah, they were, to me, the perfect Pip and Stella. But I also liked Little Dorrit. That came out, I think it was around 2009 or so, with Mathew MacFayden in it. That was good as well.

KIM: I love Little Dorrit. I love the novel and I love the miniseries, too. In fact I want to watch that again right now also.

AMY: You’ve got your work cut out for you!

KIM: I know what I’m going to be doing tonight! But I know your favorite is the one with Ioan Gruffudd, because you love him, and I also want to point out that you actually did see him in real life once, too, which was very very cool. You texted me when I was in San Francisco and it was unforgettable.

AMY: Oh yeah! I forgot about that until you just said that. I didn’t remember ever seeing him, but you’re right, I saw him eating at a restaurant.

KIM: Yeah. I think you saw him with his wife.

AMY: It was a good celebrity sighting in L.A.

KIM: Yeah. And veering back to the current releases, there’s also Death On the Nile starring Kenneth Branaugh, Gal Gadot, Russell Brand and Annette Benning, and that comes out, I think, on Oct. 23. And I don’t know about this one, because Murder on the Orient Express didn’t get the best reviews a few years ago. 

AMY: Yeah, I didn’t see that one and I actually know somebody that went and saw it and they were pretty disappointed. But you never know. Agatha Christie…. I’m usually down for. So maybe I’ll give it a try. The one I really want to try to figure out how to see — I keep Googling it — it’s a BBC series or miniseries which we just don’t have here in the States yet, but it’s

The Luminaries, based on Eleanor Catton’s novel.

KIM: I loved that book.

AMY: It already aired in England, but I’m just hoping maybe PBS will end up running it? I’m sure we’ll get it eventually.

KIM: Or BBC America?

AMY: Yeah. It stars Eva Green (Eeeva, AY-va… I’m not sure how to say her name) from “Penny Dreadful,” who I think is an AMAZING actress from watching that show. I’m kind of obsessed with her. (And side note: anyone who loves classic literature should definitely watch “Penny Dreadful”… although I will say it takes a pretty strong constitution. It’s not for the faint of heart.)

KIM: No. But just a side note, if you’re trying to keep track of all this, frantically, don’t worry, we’re putting all the links to the trailers for every film we’ve discussed in our shownotes, so you’ll be able to see them there.

AMY: So my little 2020 confession that I’m kind of embarrassed about is that I still haven’t watched the new version of Emma that came out this year. I see every Jane Austen movie, without fail. I don’t know why I haven’t seen it. I think it’s maybe because I have my whole family here and we have to try to agree on what we’re watching and there’s not enough votes in this household to do Jane Austen. But I feel like I should have my Jane fan club membership revoked or something. But I will get around to seeing it. 

KIM: That’s crazy. I can’t believe you haven’t seen it, but that’s basically your homework. You need to watch that tonight.

AMY: Yeah, I’ll be watching that while you’re re-watching Bleak House. 

KIM: Exactly. So Emma was the movie I saw… the last movie I saw in the theater before the lockdown. So I’m never going to forget that I saw Emma right before everything shut down. And here’s something...this will make you want to watch it: I’ve already streamed it twice.

AMY: You never told me you loved it so much that you’ve watched it three times already!

KIM: I don’t know how I didn’t tell you that. Maybe I just thought you’d intuited it somehow. But I like it a lot.

AMY: I knew it was going to be good. I’ve seen the trailer. It’s super cute. I just have to sit down and do it. So Emma, I’M COMIN’ FOR YA, EMMA!

KIM: You have that to look forward to, which is good. But I will say, you did get a bit of a “Jane Austen” — your Jane Austen fix, anyway — in a roundabout way by reading our next “lost lady!”

AMY: That’s right! So Kim and I happily discovered the works of Emily Eden, whose two novels, The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House are both heavily influenced by Jane Austen and they bear a similar style to her writing.

KIM: And who doesn’t need a little bit more “Austen” in their life, especially Amy — or at least the flavor of Austen?

AMY: Yes. So check back in with us next week to hear all about Emily Eden and her works — and her intriguing adventures in India. 

KIM: I can’t wait! I’m so excited. For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really helps new listeners find us! Bye everybody!

[theme music plays]

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.

5. Simone Schwarz-Bart - The Bridge of Beyond

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.\

AMY HELMES, HOST: Hey, everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes...

KIM ASKEW, HOST: And I’m Kim Askew… 

AMY: … we’re best friends and co-authors of the “Twisted Lit” series of young adult novels, and we’re on a mission to unearth some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: Today we’re exploring a masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond. And Amy, I can’t believe this book wasn’t included on my reading list in grad school, because it’s just incredible. 

AMY: No kidding! And that’s exactly why we’re so excited to tell everyone about it. The book was originally published almost 50 years ago, but its author, Simone Schwarz-Bart, now 82 years old, continues to leave her literary mark on the world, having published her latest book, a marital memoir, just last year.

KIM: Hmmm.. she doesn’t sound very “lost.”

AMY: That’s a good point. But she’s not really widely known in the U.S., so I’m willing to bet there are a lot of listeners out there who have yet to discover this French-speaking, literary lodestar of Guadeloupean descent, and we’d argue that The Bridge of Beyond deserves a much more prominent place on people’s bookshelves. Now, if you’ve already read this book, then you were probably as captivated by it as we were. If you’re unfamiliar with it, we’re excited to give you your introduction today.

KIM: Jamaica Kincaid, who wrote the introduction to The Bridge of Beyond in the New York Review of Books’ edition, which came out in 2013, said this: “That a book so radical in style, in form and in content, is not widely known in this country, and its influence not deeply felt, is one of those unfortunate mysteries of Time and Place … As if from out of the blue, from the Great Beyond, from the margins, a woman from Guadeloupe has given us an unforgettable hymn to the resilience and power of women.” 

AMY:  I agree with Kinkaid that more people really ought to know about this book, which was translated beautifully from the French by Barbara Bray. There’s something transcendent about it, honestly, and I can almost feel a balmy island breeze beginning to blow as we kick off this discussion … so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

INTRO MUSIC.

AMY: I’m going to start off by saying I really wish I knew even a little bit of French going into this episode. There’s a 100 percent certainty that I am going to really botch some pronunciations over the course of the next 30 minutes.

KIM: Yeah, I’m right there with you. In fact, we just had a sidebar on how to pronounce “Guadeloupe.” So, for those of you that do speak French, try not to cringe, we’ll do our best.

AMY: And with that embarrassing caveat out of the way, let’s learn a little bit about Simone Schwarz-Bart. She was born in 1938. Her parents were both from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. The backbone of the economy in Guadeloupe was its sugar plantations, which were supported by institutional slavery from the 17th century until the mid-19th-century, and in Schwarz-Bart’s writings we clearly see how the Caribbean, French, and African influences all converge.

KIM: So, Simone’s father was abroad serving in the French army during WWII, and for the first six years of her life, she lived solely with her mother, who was a primary school teacher, in Pointe-a-Pitre, which is the main port city in Guadeloupe. One reference described their living conditions as “dilapidated,” so I can imagine that the poverty that’s front-and-center in The Bridge of Beyond is something she actually witnessed all around her as a girl. 

AMY: It’s also said that Simone was inspired by the wisdom of her grandmother during that time. Her grandparents lived in a much more remote part of the island. Schwarz-Bart has said that she did not grow up on books, but instead on tales from the oral tradition, which we learned from them, and we see directly paralleled in the book in the relationship between the main character, Telumee, and her almost-prophet-like, mythical grandmother.

KIM: So at 18, Simone went to study in Paris, and this was a turning point in her life. She met the French writer Andre Schwarz-Bart. He was ten years her senior, and their relationship became both romantic and professional. He encouraged her to write, and they collaborated on two novels that address racism, as well as a six-volume encyclopedia called Homage a la Femme Noir, which chronicled noteworthy black women. 

AMY: Your French was very good there, Kim!

KIM: Thank you!

AMY: Andre Schwarz-Bart’s parents were Polish Jews who were killed by the Nazis when he was 13. He wrote about the centuries of persecution of Jewish people in his award-winning novel Le Dernier des justes (French for The Last of the Just). It was written in 1959 and it won the Prix Goncourt, which is the highest literary award in France. So, one can imagine that these two writers, though from seemingly different cultural backgrounds, would look at the world with a fairly familiar point of view in a lot of respects. I loved going online and seeing photos of these two back in the 60s. 

KIM: They look like such a cool literary couple, and they seemed so happy together, right up to his death in 2006. It made me want to know more about their love story, and I really love the fact that, as writers, they were collaborative, rather than competitive. You hear a lot of stories about married artists who have turbulent relationships, but this doesn’t seem to be the case with the two of them ... at least as far as we know, anyway. 

AMY: No, and in fact, Schwarz-Bart has said that it was Andre who actually first encouraged her to write. He asked her to try writing a short story for him, and when she showed it to him, he basically said, “Okay, you need to start writing down everything that comes into your mind, because you are a really talented writer.” So that’s how she got her start basically.

KIM: Oh, I love that. And then, every evening — oh, wow, this is very romantic — the Schwarz-Barts would read a love poem by Pablo Neruda to each other. They also started a family, and one of their two sons is a jazz musician who lives in New York City. 

AMY: In addition to their time spent in France, the couple lived at various points in Senegal and Switzerland but eventually they settled back in her native Guadeloupe. At a certain point, he stopped writing, and her literary career really kind of eclipsed his. He died in 2006, but she’s still very much alive looking every bit as chic and cool as you would hope she would be.  And Kim, you mentioned wanting to know more about her love story with Andre, the last book she co-wrote and published just last year was a memoir about their relationship, and in this book, she also apparently gives some insight into why she and Andre sort of fell off the radar after the 1970s. It’s written in French, unfortunately for us.

KIM: I hope it’s eventually translated.

AMY: Me, too.

KIM: In 1973, Elle Magazine awarded The Bridge of Beyond its Grand Prix de Letrices award for “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year.” In 2006, Simone was awarded the rank of a Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters which recognizes significant contributions to French arts and literature.

AMY: It appears that she still divides her time between Europe and Guadeloupe these days, and she’s actually done a few interviews in the past few years which you can find on YouTube. And that’s something we’re not normally able to see with most of the featured authors on Lost Ladies of Lit, because most of them lived long before video technology was a thing. So it’s really cool that we’re able to hear her in her own words. I was thankfully able to recruit my daughter’s best friend, Eva Lew, to translate one of the interviews, so thank you, Eva! Getting to hear Simone talk really helped us get a much better sense of her.) So Simone these days has a house with a huge veranda in the middle of what looks like this jungle paradise in Guadeloupe. This property is actually where her grandparents had lived when she was a little girl, and it feels very remote. She calls it her “island on an island.” It looks incredibly peaceful and beautiful there, and you really get such a beautiful vibe from her, as a person. We’ll share that link in our notes if you want to check out what Simone looks like and has to say. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOWSJ7cSYc

AMY: So let’s start talking about “The Bridge of Beyond.” It’s narrated by a woman named Telumee, a character that is inspired by a neighbor of Schwarz-Bart’s from when she was a little girl. So, there was a woman named Stephanie Priccin, whom the locals thought was a witch. Schwarz-Bart was fascinated by this woman, and wanted to tell her story, and the opening paragraph really gives us an overview of the book. It says:

“A man’s country may be cramped or vast according to the size of his heart. I’ve never found my country too small, though that isn’t to say my heart is great. And if I could choose, it’s here in Guadeloupe that I’d be born again, suffer and die. Yet not long back my ancestors were slaves on this volcanic, hurricane swept, mosquito-ridden, nasty-minded island. But I didn’t come into the world to weigh the world’s woe. I prefer to dream, on and on, standing in my garden, till death comes and takes me as I dream, me and all my joy.”

KIM: So this paragraph touches on pretty much every aspect of the plot: her ancestors — specifically three generations of mothers and daughters. It talks about the legacy of slavery and how it impacts the island’s inhabitants. And our narrator, Telumee, comes from a long line of strong, beautiful, Guadeloupe women, the Lougandours, whose lives are peaks and valleys of great love and great tragedy, and her life is a struggle to find meaning, and even moments of joy, in the shadow of it all. 

AMY: The English-language version of the is book is called The Bridge of Beyond, but the title of the book in French is actually Pluie et Vent Sur Telumee Miracle which translates to “Rain and Wind on Telumee Miracle” which, to me is a much better indication of what the book is really all about. 

KIM: Yes, it’s like she’s the “island” in the original title, and I think representing both the individual, herself, and the whole island and its people.

AMY: So speaking of the island, I felt fully immersed in this environment that she describes. It felt like taking a little journey. It wasn’t hard to imagine any of it.

KIM: I agree. I felt immediately transported. Her prose just pulls you straight into that world.

AMY: Now the first section of the novel gives the backstory of Telumee’s great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother, all of whom have really heartbreaking trials and mental anguish that they have to overcome. When Telumee is 10 years old, her mother rejects her and sends her to live with her grandmother, Toussine, who has been nicknamed “Queen With No Name” [ed. Queen Without a Name] by the villagers of Fond-Zombi, a remote village where Toussine lives a peaceful, but impoverished life.

KIM: So this is where Telumee’s story really begins: Toussine (or, as we’ve said, Queen Without a Name) escorts Telumee over this floating “Bridge of Beyond” to Fond-Zombi, and the grandmother and granddaughter have an instant bond. Telumee adores Queen Without a Name, and her grandmother feels that Telumee is something really special, basically, a blessing given to her in her old age. And so then we’re introduced to the villagers and their lives, and it’s miserable in its poverty, but it also had this really magical feel, and there’s a bit of magical realism about the whole description and then the book itself.

AMY: Yeah, it’s almost as though the bridge is a portal to some magical fantasy world. There’s Queen Without a Name with her fables and proverbs, there’s a character Ma Cia, the witch, who can transform into animals and conjure up spirits. There’s the lush beauty of the landscape, and then there’s also, of course, extreme poverty. But everything is described in this language of folklore and allegory. It’s very mystical with ritual and songs sprinkled throughout. And this is where Telumee begins to try and understand the legacy of slavery, searching for “some way of dealing with the life Negroes bear so as not to feel it pressing down on one’s shoulders day after day, hour after hour, second after second.” There’s also this recurring theme of the process by which women become women, (what makes someone a woman?) and whether it’s okay to ever allow oneself to feel happiness. The characters in this book seem to always feel ashamed when they have moments of joy or contentment, and that sort of feels like one of the legacies that slavery has left them with, this idea that joy is ephemeral and something that they should be cautious or wary about.

KIM: Queen Without a Name basically becomes Telumee’s guide. She’s passing on all this knowledge of how to become a woman and how to transcend the inescapable suffering that is their life on the island day-to-day. And as part of this, she takes her to meet her friend, Ma Cia, who foretells that Telumee  “will rise over the earth like a cathedral” one day. Telumee’s response is to deny this and hang her head in shame because she isn’t this and she doesn’t see how she can be this. Ma Cia and Queen Without a Name, they’re going to try to teach her that she is someone to be proud of, that she should respect herself as someone truly special. Telumee also learns from Ma Cia about the island’s history of slavery. She’s actually really curious and asks her about it. Ma Cia compares slaves to poultry tied up to cages in terror and she adds, “Long ago a nest of ants that bite peopled the earth, and called themselves men. That is all.” 

AMY: There was kind of a sad matter-of-factness associated with this history. The practice of slavery may have ceased for them, but these characters still live with its impact and they all have to continuely steel themselves against the hardships they see no path around. 

KIM: Ma Cia’s advice to Telumee is to be a drum with two sides. She says, “Let life bang and thump, but keep the underside always intact.” 

And after this meeting with Ma Cia comes a passage that really stood out to me. 

Telumee says: “For the first time in my life I realized that slavery was not some foreign country, some distant region from which a very few old people came, like the two or three who still survived in Fond-Zombi. It had all happened here, in our hills and valleys, perhaps near this clump of bamboo, perhaps in the air I was breathing.”

So this resonated with me because of the time period we’re in in the U.S. where we’re really seeming to be facing up to our own history of slavery and trying to find a path forward.

AMY: One hundred and fifty years after the fact, which seems amazing, you know, but we are still dealing with the trickle-down from that. And in the book, despite the suffering of the villagers who are constantly “juggling with sorrow,” as Schwarz-Bart explains, there is also beauty, and there are piercing moments of happiness, too, and that’s kind of the wonderful hopefulness at the heart of it. It’s all the more beautiful for the transcendent moments that are woven throughout the book, even throughout the hard times.  

KIM: I completely agree. I think “transcendent” is the perfect word for it. There are so many passages and lines that just give you a chill because they’re so beautiful. One of them, for me, was when Telumee falls in love for the first time. It’s with this boy named Elie. She describes it as when her “first star appeared in the east,” which I just think is an absolutely beautiful description of the moment of falling in love and that person just instantly becoming everything to her. So together they try to understand the pain in the world around them, and Queen Without a Name is there supporting the relationship, but always trying to prepare Telumee for her future, with parables and advice for living and surviving. There’s the story of the bird and the hunter. And the parable of the Man Who Tried to Live on Air. Those are just a couple that I can think of.

AMY: Yeah, there’s a ton of these throughout the book, and I have to admit, this magical realism element and the almost biblical language at times, initially it really did trip me up when I was first reading the book. Almost every page in this book is filled with this GORGEOUS prose that is steeped in meaning, but Ithink because of that, I kept getting hung up on trying to figure it all out and figure out, “what is Queen Without a Name really really trying to say?” I kept re-reading the lines, and at times, it almost felt like an obstacle that was preventing me from connecting with the characters. Kim, I know I mentioned to you while I was reading it that I was struggling a bit at first, but just about a third of the way through, I sort of changed my approach to the book and I just let myself surrender to the words and let it just wash over me and not have such a tight grip on the whole thing. That wound up being a turning point for me with this book. The pieces started kind of falling together for me and I was able to enjoy it a lot more. Now, Kim, you had previously read this book. I wonder what your reaction was both the first time you read it, and then what was your experience reading it a second time? Because I feel like this is one of those books you could probably constantly be finding new things in with subsequent readings. 

KIM: Yeah, I think I read it about three years ago. It was part of the New York Review of Books Book Club, so it was sent to me. I didn’t even choose it, so thank you, New York Review of Books, for that serendipity. I remember loving it the first time, which is why I brought it up again, but I think I found it even more beautiful this time because, I sort of knew how the “plot” is, and there’s not really much of a strong plot, it’s more about how to live in the world and how to survive the inevitable pain of life. There are all these parables and metaphors to explain that for the inhabitants of Fond-Zombi, but also for the overall human experience. So I really, really loved that aspect of it.

AMY: Right, even though we come from a completely different era and a completely different world, time and space, there are nuggets of wisdom that you can kind of take to heart for yourself and work into your own life even though I have no relationship with this island or this history of slavery necessarily.

KIM: Yep, I completely agree. So, Telumee is happy, but she’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Things feel kind of too good to be true, and I felt that as a reader. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, too.

AMY: Right, and this goes back to what I said before about the characters always feeling like they’re not allowed to feel happy in some way. I mean, even Elie, her love interest, he kept thinking, “Something going to go wrong. I don’t deserve this.” It’s kind of sad, because you want to feel really happy for them, but they were never actually able to just fully relax and be like, “life is good,” because they knew, based on their history, that it wasn’t. So then when things do, inevitably, go terribly wrong, Telumee succumbs at first and goes through this period of grief bordering on insanity, basically. She has a breakdown in a major way, something her grandmother also had experienced. But she eventually comes back to herself again, and her grandmother tells her as she’s on her deathbed, she says: “Listen — people watch you, they always count on there being someone to show them how to live. If you are happy, everyone can be happy, and if you know how to suffer, the others will know too. Every day you must get up and say to your heart: ‘I’ve suffered enough and now I have to live, for the light of the sun must not be frittered away and lost without any eye to enjoy it.’ And if you don’t do that, you won’t have the right to say, ‘It’s not my fault,’ when someone seeks out a cliff and throws himself in the sea.” 

KIM: That’s amazing.

AMY: There’s also this push and pull among the community of women in this book, that I really thought was interesting, because on the one hand, they stand in solidarity with one another and they lift each other up at the lowest points in their lives, yet they can be vicious to one another. They tear each other down and are jealous of one another and they really cause each other a lot of heartache. At the same time, the men have their own major issues. There are some men in Fond-Zombie that are loving and gentle, and there are others that are toxic and broken to the point of being evil.

KIM: Yes, so the men seem to be battling their own demons, for sure. There’s the trickle-down effect of slavery, and the persecutions faced by the society that they live in, their employers, and even the very land they are working on. So it ends up resulting in abandonment, addiction, and domestic violence. Speaking of the harsh land, Telumee begins working in the cane fields (something she and Queen Without A Name never wanted her to do) but she eventually finds happiness with Amboise. He has a lot of insight and perspective about the ongoing plight of their people.

AMY: These are people that never stood a chance, and that’s what’s sad. “Everyone knows an empty sack cannot stand up. It falls, it cannot help but fall.” And that sort of goes back to the men in this society. You can’t depend on them. They’re broken men. But how can you expect people who have been completely depleted and unfairly treated to suddenly thrive and be successes? I mean, you can’t. There’s just too much that they’ve been through.

KIM: No, that’s true. And yet even with all that, Amboise tells Telumee at one point: “We have been beaten for a hundred years, but I tell you, girl, we have courage for a thousand.” And that’s what she basically comes to learn throughout the course of this book.

AMY: Be a drum with two sides, you know? You take a beating and a beating and a beating on the once side, but you let the underside stay strong.

KIM: Yeah, I love that imagery.

AMY: Can we just stop for a moment and discuss how, despite being really focused on grief and suffering, this book is also so beautiful? As we mentioned before, the writing is just insane. It’s so gorgeous. I don’t understand why this book wasn’t a staple in college literature courses because there’s so many things  to unpack when you think about the imagery and the symbolism here.

KIM: I agree. And what I did find here when I was researching this, that there are some instructors who use it in post-colonial literature courses, which completely  makes sense. It should be there.

AMY: It’s perfect.

KIM: Yeah, but it feels like it’s also marginalizing it, to just have it there. I think it speaks so strongly to the human experience for all of us, and the ending is so beautiful and life-affirming, even after all of the terrible things that have happened, all the things that we have told you about. She manages to come to terms with all the loss and pain and all the fleeting moments of joy, and she still realizes that in some ways, she can see her suffering as this sort of gift. 

AMY: All this really goes straight back to the “rain and wind” of the French title of this book. Tellumee tells us: “East winds and north winds have buffeted and soaked me; but I am still a woman standing on my own two legs, and I know a Negro is not a statue of salt to be dissolved by the rain.” By the end of her life, she comes to this understanding that she is indomitable, and she is happy, but she says: “As I struggled others will struggle, and for a long time yet people will know the same sun and moon; they will look at the same stars, and, like us, see in them the eyes of the dead.” Here we are reading the book 50 years after it was written, and you’re struck by the fact that we’re still having these same conversations over and over about race and oppression and what’s fair. The book does end on such a hopeful note, this idea that each new generation (like each generation of Lougandour women) offers a light to the previous generation.

KIM: So Amy, what sort of food for thought did this book leave you with?

AMY: I guess this idea of the long-lasting consequences. My experience reading this book also coincided with listening to the first three episodes of The New York Time’s podcast “Nice White Parents,” which is about racial inequality in America’s educational institutions and how well-intentioned white people can be so unaware of how our own decisions contribute to and perpetuate institutional racism. It really sort of illustrates white privilege in the most cut-and-dry, and frankly, sometimes shame-inducing of ways. Just because we think things are better, on the surface, doesn’t mean they’re any better, and I think that is part of what Simone Schwarz-Bart was getting at.

KIM: Oh yeah, absolutely. I can’t wait to listen to that podcast as well. It sounds really good and important for somebody who will eventually be thinking about sending their kid to school.

AMY: What about you, Kim? Did this book correlate at all to anything else that you’ve been looking at in life right now?

KIM: It’s so interesting, because completely unintentionally, I read another book about life on an island, but this island is the deserted one that goddess Circe is banished to for eternity by her father, Helios, after she offends Zeus. It’s the 2018 novel Circe, by Madeleine Miller, and in its own way, it’s also about witchcraft and a woman learning to find moments of joy amid suffering. A very different novel, but I highly recommend it as well. 

AMY: I remember reading about that one when it was released and thinking it sounded interesting, so i’m going to have to borrow that from you when you’re done. Are you done?

KIM: Yes, I’m done.

AMY: Okay, I’ll get it from you. So what did we learn in today’s episode? First off, we learned that a steady diet of Pablo Neruda can be a recipe for a happy marriage.

KIM: I’m going to make Eric start reading Pablo Neruda every night.

AMY: Oooh, girl!

KIM: I don’t think it’s gonna happen. We learned that sometimes, the books that challenge you can be among the most rewarding.

AMY: And we learned how to pronounce a few new words in French, at least semi-correctly? Sorry everybody.

KIM: Sorry about that. And that’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

Do you have ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really helps new listeners find us!

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Simone Schwarz-Bart and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone. Special thanks, as well, to Harriet Grant for our logo design, and Eva Lew, who helped with translations and research for this week’s episode.

4. What’s In a Name?

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone! Welcome to this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episode. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY HELMES: And I’m Amy Helmes. Thanks for tuning in! Our last featured book was Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield. The narrator in that book is never referred to by any name, and a lot of the other characters are referred to in the most generic terms, like “the Vicar’s wife,” and the name of the children’s French nurse is “Mademoiselle.” In the case of this book, it worked really well to keep a lot of the names very non-specific.

KIM: Yeah. Naming characters is tough.

AMY: I mean, when it comes to our books, I just have always agonized over the name situation. I find myself on those baby name websites dissecting the meaning of the name to see if I can work that in somehow. It’s tough, because you want it to be perfect.

KIM: Yeah, you want that name to feel like, “Oh, of course, the person was born with that name.” And the fact that we have our novels based on Shakespeare plays help us a little bit, because we have a starting point, something to riff off of. But it’s still a challenge to find something that’s exactly right. We’ve even changed some names midway through a manuscript because we were either calling them the wrong name or it sounded too much like another character’s name. So that’s happened.

AMY: Yeah. So many times in our writing, whether it’s a script or book, we’ll say, “So-and-so… but not REALLY So-and-so.” Because we know that’s not going to be their permanent name, but we have to refer to them as something. But what do you think is the key to a good character name in a book?

KIM: Well, it has to stick with you, so you don’t want to be going back and saying, “Who is that?” You want it to roll off your tongue. You want it to sound natural and apropos to the character… but unless you’re writing satire or something, you don’t really want to veer into oddball territory. Unless you’re Charles Dickens, I guess.

AMY: Oh my gosh. Yeah. So Speaking of Charles Dickens, I heard about Martin Chuzzlewit that before he chose that name he had a bunch of other names in mind, like Martin Sweezleden, Martin Sweezleback, Martin Chuzzletoe, Martin Chubblewig, Martin Chuzzlewig, before he finally settled on… what was it again? Now I don’t even know the real name… Martin Chuzzlewit. Yes.

KIM: Okay, so any of those names actually could have worked, I think, because he’s so good at naming characters, he is the undisputed master. Uriah Heep. Ebenezer Scrooge, Fezziwig….They’re all great.

AMY: Uh-huh. He actually even had a character who’s a mean schoolmaster in Hard Times that was called Mr. M’Choakumchild. I mean, so hilarious in its literalness there.

KIM: Yeah, that’s a memorable and terrifying one. So let’s talk about our favorite character names in books, but before we do, I just remembered: Did you know that HAL from 2001 Space Odyssey, the novel by Arthur C. Clarke is, consecutively and alphabetically, one letter off from IBM? 

AMY: I did know that, actually. It’s a very good “Jeopardy” question, right? But I know that because my friend’s dads worked at IBM and she told me that anecdote and I always remembered it, because how cool? “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

KIM: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” 

AMY: You’re not as creepy as Hal. Sorry.

KIM: Okay, good! I tried though! So for me, I’d have to say Raymond Chandler’s detective Phllip Marlowe is one of my favorite names in all of literature. I love the character, first of all, and I also love that the surname Marlowe is the same as Christopher Marlowe. He’s, of course, the other Elizabethan playwright. And there is a connection, too, between Chandler and Marlowe. Chandler took the name (apparently, it’s been said) from Marlowe House, which is the house he belonged to when he attended the English boarding school Dulwich College. Marlowe House at Dulwich College was named for Christopher Marlowe.

AMY: I like it! I like when they have connections or other meanings, you know… they’re not just pulled out of thin air. What about sexy leading men in books, like those characters? I’ve got to give it to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, even though when I was a kid and I read Wuthering Heights, I was always thinking of the cat Heathcliff, the cartoon cat. But now, for me, Heathcliff is just that unforgettable hottie, you know? And his name is unforgettable as well. 

KIM: Okay, aside from the cat Heathcliff, which now has completely ruined…

AMY: Have I ruined it? Oh no, I’ve ruined it for you!

KIM: I somehow didn’t really think about the two together, because I was going to say Heathcliff is a beautiful… it’s a very sexy name. It’s really good. And then there’s Fitzsimmons Darcy (a lot of people don’t actually know his first name, but it’s Fitzsimmons.). 

AMY: That’s too much of a mouthful actually, really. Can you imagine if we had to keep reading “Fitzsimmons” over and over in Pride & Prejudice? I’m glad she just stuck to Mr. Darcy. But speaking of sexy guy names from novels that are a mouthful, the one that I’ve always loved saying is Ralph de Bricassart from The Thornbirds. It’s just fun to let that roll off your tongue (And I think “Ralph” combined with “de Bricassart” is just the weirdest contrast.) So I don’t think I’ll ever forget that name. Nor will I forget watching that with you.

KIM: That’s one of our… we have so many great memories of watching that kind of stuff together.

AMY: We laughed so hard watching that movie.

KIM: We did laugh really hard. I like Sir Percy Blakeney and his pseudonym, The Scarlet Pimpernel. 

AMY: Oh, yeah, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Now, I hate to do this to you, but I have another association that’s always weird in my head with that one, which is “pumpernickel.” That always comes up too. I think when I was younger I would always equate that.

KIM: That’s great.

AMY: I think pimpernel is a flower right?

KIM: Yes, it is.

AMY: Okay, right. Actually, about that book, I just learned that that book was written by a woman! I had no idea.

KIM: Yeah, it’s Baroness Orczy. I hope I’m pronouncing that right. And she was a real person, obviously, but her name sounds straight out of fiction. 

AMY: Yeah, it does.

KIM: It’s a good name. What about Tristam... Tristram Shandy? People often get that wrong (which I did just now) and say Tristam when it’s actually Tristram.

AMY: Tristram. That’s almost a tongue-twister. It’s hard to say that way. But either way, I think it’s a good name, you’re right. But let’s talk about some ladies.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: We’ve got Hester Prynne from Scarlet Letter. That’s a pretty good name.

KIM: That’s really good. And Bathsheba Everdene from Far From the Madding Crowd. Which, many times I have accidentally said Far From The Maddening Crowd, because somehow I want to say “Maddening.” Anyway.

AMY: Yes, I agree. Anna Karenina. She has to make the list. And if we are going to talk about kids’ books, my favorites would be Pippi Longstocking — I love her name — and Hermione Granger is really good, too. She wouldn’t be the same if she was just named “Lisa” or something like that.

KIM: No. They’re so memorable. As is Inigo Montoya! 

AMY: “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.” Can you imagine if his name was just something like, “Paul Rogers?”

KIM: Or even Ralph De Briccarsart?

AMY: Yeah! “Hello, my name is Ralph De Briccasart…” What about Natty Bumppo from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales? I don’t even think I read that, but I know that name, Natty Bumppo. And then Atticus Finch, of course! (And Boo Radley) from To Kill a Mockingbird. Those are both good ones.

KIM: I have one you’re going to love! 

AMY: What?

KIM: Horatio Hornblower from the C.S. Forester series.

AMY: Ooooh, YEAH!!!!

KIM: You guys, Amy was obsessed with this series. Obsessed with it.

AMY: I mean, still am obsessed with it. I love it. That character name is flat-out ridiculous, I acknowledge that, but when I was in my 20s, I read every book in the series, and Ioan Gruffudd (I don’t know how you say his last name….)

KIM: I think it’s “Griffith.” I think it’s Welsh.

AMY: That’s the Welsh? Griffith? He played him in the television miniseries on A&E, and that whole thing is just so swoon-worthy. 

KIM: Which you got me into that, and I loved it.

AMY: I always love a good sea-faring novel, which is kind of funny because I don’t think anybody would look at me and think I’d be into that, but I have sitting on my nightstand right now William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth, which is another nautical trilogy. And that was adapted into a BBC miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which… also a good name!

KIM: Great name.

AMY: That’s a real name, but that’s one somebody would write.

KIM: True.

AMY: But yeah. Love me my British sailors.

KIM: I think you were probably in the British navy in one of your former lives.

AMY: Maybe. But I did discover that I know how to make hardtack, in case I ever need to do that, now I know that I can make bread that will last for six months.

KIM: Oh, yeah, you mentioned this a few months ago. Your attempts at pandemic bread-baking didn’t really turn out as you expected.

AMY: No. It was a tremendous fail. So this is when the pandemic was first starting and everyone was getting into baking bread and there’s no bread on the store shelves, right? Slim pickings, basically. So I was like, “Oh, I can make some bread like everybody else that I’m seeing on the Internet!” So, I used a package of yeast in my cabinet that had probably been sitting there for like twe-- 15 years. Maybe not 15, maybe seven years.

KIM: You almost said 20.

AMY: Yeah. It was a really old envelope. And I learned that, oh yeah, yeast has a shelf life and it’s not seven years. So that bread came out like a brick. By that point in time, there was no way you were going to be getting any instant yeast in your grocery orders. It was gone everywhere. I thought, “Well, maybe I should try making my own yeast from scratch.” So I looked up recipes on the Internet. It involves, like, soaking raisins and grapes on your counter in, like, sugar water. The first batch turned out a layer of mold on the top after a couple days. So I threw that out and made another batch. The second batch looked like it might actually work. So I made two loaves of bread, and they wound up, when I baked them, they looked really good. They have a nice crust, perfectly brown, then I went to cut it and it was... just…  jaw-breaker. 

KIM: Oh wow.

AMY: So I could have taken it on a six-month sailing voyage, but I gave up on the bread-baking adventure and I will be buying my bread loaves from now on, thank you very much.

KIM: Okay, that’s a great story. And making bread from a starter is truly a “Lost Art.” Kudos to everyone out there who has picked it up during this pandemic. We’re really impressed with you.

AMY: Kim, have you taken up any lost arts during this pandemic?

KIM: No, but I did start a podcast! 

AMY: Yeah, podcast, that’s pretty good. I’ll give you kudos for that as well.

KIM: Okay, but i have been daydreaming a lot about travel during this pandemic, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners have, too. It would be amazing to just go someplace tropical.

AMY: Yeah. If only. Well, how about the island of Guadeloupe in the French Antilles? You can go there next week with us on our podcast. Maybe not literally, but figuratively, in next week’s episode. That’s where we’re heading.

KIM: That’s exactly right. That was a great segue to the home of our next “lost lady,” Simone Schwarz Bart as well as the setting of her 1972 novel The Bridge of Beyond. 

AMY: She’s an author who we think is very deserving of some more recognition, and we can’t wait to discuss her. So catch up with us again next week!

KIM: For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really helps new listeners find us!

AMY: Got an idea for a “lost lady” you love to see featured on our show? Let us know. And let us know what you think about the books we’ve recommended so far. Until next time, bye everyone!

[closing music]

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.

3. E.M. Delafield - Diary of a Provincial Lady

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES, HOST:

Hello, and welcome to The Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW, HOST:

And I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: We’re best friends and co-authors of the Twisted Lit series of young adult novels, and we’re here to shed a little light on some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: Today we’re taking a look at a famous fictional “diary” from the 1930s, one richly and hilariously rendered by author E.M. Delafield. 

AMY: If you’ve never heard of her, we're going to catch you up to speed, and we can assure you that rifling through her character’s private diary does NOT disappoint. So let’s raid the stacks and get started.

INTRO MUSIC.

AMY: So Kim, you have a 17-month old daughter at home. How is she doing? How’s your week been?

KIM: You know, the usual… (the usual during a pandemic, I should say). I got really excited about doing this socially-distant walk at the Hollywood Reservoir last Friday, so I pictured this beautiful location. I dressed her really cute… It was the hottest day of the year; I was overheated wearing a facemask. She was overheated, too. She was kind of whiny and miserable, and she kept wanting to walk back to the parking lot, so we ended up spending most of our time in the parking lot looking for rocks. She ended up having a great time, but it isn’t exactly what I imagined it would be.

AMY: That’s like they say, “God laughs when you have plans.” I think maybe toddlers do as well.

KIM: That makes sense. I have to try to remember that. What about you? How are things going with your elementary-school-aged children at home?

AMY: Well, we’ve had some adventures in the kitchen this week. My 8-year-old son, Jack, decided he wanted to bake, which is always like giving your kid a hand grenade and letting them trash the kitchen. I let him do it, but I was like, “You’re on your own, buddy. You figure it out.” So he made chocolate chip cookies. They were delicious, but he forgot to put baking soda or baking powder — one of those — in the mix, so it all came out like one big giant pancake of a cookie. It all kind of melted together. Then my 10-year-old daughter, Julia, one morning… she was making a Pop Tart (because we’ve devolved into eating Pop Tarts in this house during the pandemic.) I walked into the kitchen and was like, “Julia, where’s your Pop Tart that you made?” She said, “It was too hot, so I threw it in the garbage.” It was just like, “Where did I go wrong with this child?” I looked in the garbage and there was a complete Pop Tart that was ever-so-slightly singed on the ends.

KIM: She’s too smart for her own good. That’s it. Because she is one really smart cookie.

AMY: I don’t know. Maybe just not as a cook.

KIM: I think it’s pretty safe to say that for every joy of motherhood there’s an equal and opposite moment of wanting to bang your head against a wall.

AMY: It’s almost like if you can’t laugh about it sometimes, you just might cry. And it pretty much applies to every facet of life, and it’s something that E.M. Delafield really succeeds in showcasing in her book Diary of a Provincial Lady.

KIM: You are so right. But before we get into it, let’s talk a little bit E.M. Delafield. Who was she?

AMY: All right, so I’m going to give you the quick hits. She was a master of satire who published more than 40 books over a 26-year writing career. She was born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture (how’s that for a name?) in 1890, and she grew up in Sussex, England, as part of an aristocratic French Catholic family. Her father was a count...

KIM: Wow.

AMY: ...and her mother was a well-known novelist and dramatist of her day who wrote under the name Mrs. Henry de La Pasture (I looked her up. I found 14 titles for her listed on Goodreads including her best-known children’s book, The Unhappy Family.) So Edmee (or Elizabeth as she was known later in life) adopted the pen name Delafield as a nod to her maiden surname (de la Pasture). Kind of clever, huh?

KIM: That’s great.

AMY: Her first novel was published in 1917, called Zella Sees Herself . And then she  continued to publish one or two novels a year for the rest of her life, basically, or until nearly the end of her life. At the age of 29, in 1919, she married civil engineer Arthur “Paul” (I guess he went by Paul) Dashwood, and they moved to a little village called Kentisbeare in Devon, England. They lived on the Bradfield Estate where her husband was  the land agent, and this is where she became the proverbial “provincial lady, ” as this is where we start to see her life falling in line with the narrator of Diary of a Provincial Lady. By the 1930s, Delafield was also moving in more literary circles. She wrote for the progressive literary review magazine Time and Tide, and that is where Diary of a Provincial Lady first appeared in serial installments.  Like the narrator of the diary, Delafield has two children, Lionel and Rosamund. As an adult, Rosamund went on to follow in her mother’s footsteps and wrote a 1950s version of her mother’s successful diary which she called Provincial Daughter. So it’s really interesting, I think, that three generations of women in the de la Pasture family became published authors . Edmee’s son, Lionel, however, died tragically as an adult (possibly by his own hand) as an adult in WWII. Edmee really only outlived him by only a few years. She died in 1943, only 13 years after finding great success with Diary of a Provincial Lady.

KIM: When I saw that, I was so surprised. I had to look twice. I couldn’t believe the book that we’re going to be talking about was written and published and set in the 1930s, not that long before she actually passed away. So a few more interesting things that we found:  In her youth she dreamed of becoming a Catholic nun, which I guess isn’t that surprising for someone raised Catholic, but it does maybe show a little bit of a romantic streak in her. She entered a Belgian convent at the age of 21, but she only lasted 18 months there. She decided that her sister, who was entering another convent, she didn’t want to be so separated from her sister, so she decided not to do it after about 18 months. But she wrote a book about her experience there called Brides of Heaven. I actually would love to read that. I put it on my list. But just think, had she stayed, we wouldn’t have Diary of a Provincial Lady. So that was God’s loss, our gain!

AMY: Exactly. Also, like me, Delafield was fascinated with true crime stories, and she wrote a fictionalized account of a very British scandal, the Edith Thompson-Freddy Bywaters murder case. The book she wrote was called Messaline of the Suburbs, and I have to say, I just picked it up on hold from the library this afternoon, and I’m like a fourth of the way through it already. It is juicy and good, and if we do a future E.M. Delafield podcast a couple years from now when we roll back around to her, this might have to be the book we do, because I’m super into it.

KIM: That sounds great.

AMY: The same English scandal was actually fictionalized again by author Sarah Waters in 2014, who wrote a book about this same case called The Paying Guests, and I highly recommend that book as well.

KIM: I read that too and I loved it! I also want to mention that Delafield was an authority on the Bronte sisters and wrote a biography on them in 1935. So once again, a woman after our own heart in terms of her interests. Things just keep popping up that endear her to us. 

AMY: Absolutely, and so prolific, it seems like.

KIM: Yes. So if you really want to get a sense of Delafield’s life, you really only need to turn to this famous “diary” for a bit of insight. There are several books that make up the diaries of her fictional character. The [first] book, though satirical, really draws on her daily small-town life in Devon and it features this  non-stop, dry-witted social commentary on human nature and human interactions, including marriage, friendships and the trials of raising children. 

AMY: There was actually, Kim, an article in The Guardian a few months ago (in May) written by Kathryn Hughes and the title was “I wish more people would read … The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield.” I sort of did this “Yes!” in my head, because I have felt the same way for so long. The article wonders why the book isn’t more widely read and it suggests that the title seems too “dusty and quaint. Would you agree with that?

KIM: Yeah, I mean, just seeing the title completely on its own without any context, I think it would be really easy to think, “Oh, this is this boring, nonfiction diary of someone completely unrelatable.” Of course, now that I’ve read it and I know the voice of the diarist and how entertaining she is… AND I know the title is tongue-in-cheek... the diarist is called “provincial” by someone as an insult. She’s kind of turning it around and using it as the title of the diary. I think if we could come up with some other name like… I don’t know what it would be… but we could come up with another title that would actually, I think, make people realize what this diary is truly like to read.

AMY: I definitely would say that this book, it had to have influenced Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary.

KIM: Oh, yeah. I would be shocked if it didn’t.

AMY: Right. There’s even that scene that she has that’s very similar to the “Tarts and Vicars” party in Bridget Jones. The narrator of the diary receives a sort of vaguely-worded invite to a maybe/possibly fancy dress party. And all the ladies in town are in a tizzy about whether to show up in costume or not. How many times have you had that happen to you, Kim, whether it’s a Halloween party or some sort of dress-up theme party, and you’re wondering, “Am I going to be the only one?”

KIM: Absolutely. The idea of what to wear, I mean, you can pretty much take that into your daily life. It’s perfect. We’re actually going to go into a little more of that scene, which I loved, later. Amy, what did you really like about the diary format? 

AMY: I think the diary format, first of all, makes it a really easy book to read. It’s in quick portions, so if you are a busy wife and mom, like we are, and you’re pressed for time, you can sort of just get this book in little bite-sized bits. It’s sort of sectioned into these little pithy vignettes. And the diary itself even seems dashed off. She doesn’t use a lot of articles like “the” or “a” … it’s almost  as if she’s so busy she just hurried to write down about her day, however funny. And then so much of the diary deals with the mundane, but she keeps you hanging on her every word.

KIM: She has these little asides, and she uses “query,” “memo,” “nota bene” to make little notes to herself, and it’s hilarious. In fact some of those, I noted, ended up being the most memorable quotes of the book.

AMY: It’s almost her way of “breaking the fourth wall” with the reader because that’s the moment where you feel like she’s talking right to you even though it’s a diary. In that sense, it so reminded me of the TV show “Fleabag,” which, Kim, I know you haven’t had a chance to watch yet because you had a baby last year and TV marathons just aren’t high on your priority list these days, but that sort of tone and humor that Phoebe Waller-Bridge brings to that show is exactly the kind of snark and comedy that we find in this book.  

KIM: I cannot wait to watch that show eventually. 

AMY: You’ll love it. Okay, so, our narrator is never explicitly named in the book, actually, so we don’t know very much about her history prior to the events taking place in the diary. What do you make of that, Kim?

KIM: It’s really interesting. I mean, the diary format kind of allows her to do that because it really lends itself to focusing on the day to day. So she doesn’t mention her parents or her previous life. There’s talk about politics, but not really much about what’s actually going on— there are allusions to reading All Quiet on the Western Front, there’s some allusions to communism and socialism, but the diary is very in the moment of her life and family and their day-to-day challenges which I think is curious but it also helps make it really timeless and comforting. We’ve said the character is autobiographical, and we’ve also said that this book feels really quintessentially English, but then you take the biography that we’ve talked about: Delafield’s father was a count, his family fled the French Revolution, she was also Catholic. I’m just guessing here, but maybe she was a little romantic as well, because as I said, she wanted to go to a convent. Maybe I’m projecting that romanticism, but I feel like there’s a little bit of that there. So I think all these things maybe made her, on one level, a bit of an outsider, and I think that worked in her favor because she was really able to see, clearly, this Englishness and the reserve and the absurdity of all of it and really have fun with it. And I think that comes across in the diary.    

AMY: Yeah. She’s very observant about so many different little nuanced things about society and relationships. You mentioned her French background… she grew up with a series of French governesses, did you know that?

KIM: I did not know that. Oooh, intriguing!

AMY: And that was directly translated into this diary with the character’s children’s nurse, “Mademoiselle,” who is French.

KIM: I love her!

AMY: Oh, I know. She is such a hoot, and is always getting on our narrator’s last nerve but in a very funny way.  And I keep saying, “our narrator,” because she doesn’t have a name, but that almost seems fitting, in a way, because the character seems to be struggling a bit with her identity as a wife and mother. She’s got this single friend, Rose, who lives in London who seems to be living this sort of “Bright Young Things,” sophisticated, alternate life that she might have lived had she made different choices. It’s mentioned at one point, by her husband, that she and Rose were once roommates in London living the Bohemian life, so it’s clear that she did give all that up, and there’s a definite sense of “fear of missing out” that the narrator has whenever they hang out. There’s a little passage that illustrates that. She writes:

July 3rd — Breakfast enlivened by letter from dear Rose written at, apparently, earthly paradise of blue sea and red rocks, on South Coast of France. She says that she is having complete rest, and enjoying congenial society of charming group of friends, and makes unprecedented suggestion that I should join her for a fortnight. I am moved to exclaim — perhaps rather thoughtlessly — that the most wonderful thing in the world must be to be a childless widow — but this is met by unsympathetic silence from Robert, which recalls me to myself, and impels me to say that that isn’t in the least what I meant.

So funny!

KIM:  I love that passage! It cracked me up when you were reading it just now, too, as you can hear. It’s too funny, and it is also, really, very Bridget Jones.

AMY: Bridget Jones in reverse. Bridget Jones is looking to find a husband, and in some sense, she’s wistful about the life that she had before her husband.

KIM: I love that, you’re exactly right. That’s great. That fear of missing out that we just saw here is also so perfectly illustrated in the Italian Art Exhibition gag that’s going throughout the book. Everyone she runs into seems to have been to this exhibit except her, and she doesn’t want to admit that she hasn’t seen it.

AMY: She cannot help herself. She is just lie upon lie upon lie whenever anybody asks her, “Oh, have you been to the Italian Art Exhibition?”  It’s so hilarious to see how she’s constantly dissembling so that she doesn’t have to admit she hasn’t been to it. She’s both jealous that she hasn’t been, and also seriously annoyed at having to hear about it from everyone she knows. (Sort of in the same way that you’re annoyed when somebody tells you over and over that you have to read or watch something, like I do with this book.) If she was a modern-day woman, she would feel like the lady who just wants to stay home and watch some Bravo TV, but she feels like she OUGHT to be going to MoCA’s latest exhibit to feel cultured and sophisticated. 

KIM: I’ve so been there. I get that feeling a hundred percent. The more people tell you to do it the more, almost, you just get sick of hearing about it.

AMY: Yeah. She was just highly irritated by the whole thing by the end, but still lied and said she went, or she would just change the subject, deftly, to get out of having to answer one way or the other. I think there’s a touch of “Jane Austen” in this book that bubbles up in the colorful personalities of the other characters that are sprinkled throughout. Delafield certainly was pretty skilled at carving out some similar archetypes to the Austen characters. So we see the condescending snob in Lady Boxe, who is the grand dame who lives on the estate. We find the sort of pathetic drip of a woman in her acquaintance Cissy Crabbe. We see the self-righteous “barnacle” of a woman in the Vicar’s wife, who always claims she has to leave but she always winds up staying for forty more minutes, and she always overstays her welcome. Then there’s also this revolving door of indignant and impertinent servants who the narrator has to manage. I think she’s almost a little frightened of them frankly!

KIM: I mean, that’s an entire job in itself, managing the servants. They get worked up and then she gets worked up and it just keeps going on and on. 

AMY: She’s constantly having to run around to replace them when they quit and manage their emotions and their volatile tempers.

KIM: It manages to make somebody who has a house full of servants completely relatable because of all these things that she’s dealing with with them. She doesn’t show the ease of having servants. 

AMY: Exactly. You’d think, like, “Oh, she’s got a house full of servants!” but she ends up being like that woman in the “Calgon, take me away!” commercial from when we were kids, right?  

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: She’s always exasperated and pulling her hair out and at her wits’ end.

KIM: So, she’s got such a scathing private take on everyone that we get to peek into, but outwardly, she’s able to keep up this smiling, polished veneer that she shows people. And while she’s brutally honest (about both them and herself) within the pages of the diary, in real life, she is a great liar. She lies to get out of social engagements, she lies about how much she’s enjoying things, she lies about the books she’s read… she adores her children but she pretends having this modern, blase attitude. She writes for a feminist publication, but she doesn’t live as some of the feminists think she should. She has this literary knowledge and loves dropping literary references, but feels like she sounds ridiculous. She’s struggling to look and be this person she can never be. That makes her very universal, I think. 

AMY: She feels like a sham a lot of the time.

KIM: Yes, it’s like Imposter Syndrome before it had a name.

AMY: Yes, exactly, and so that makes any garden party or tennis match or, you know, acquaintanceships, the Women’s Institute meetings, they’re all so awkward in many ways, because she’s struggling on so many levels while interacting with her own insecurities, other people’s snobbishness and judgments of her.

KIM: Absolutely, and I think it gives you that tension that you would have otherwise from a normally-plotted novel. This has recurring themes, but it doesn’t have a traditional plot. But this tension in everyday things, from the Vicar’s wife’s quick visit to the house to buying a hat, it becomes fraught with tension and that makes it, you know, inherently readable. 

AMY: I love that she’s always thinking up witty comebacks or winning arguments with people long after they have gone home when she’s in bed staring at the ceiling. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve won those arguments.

KIM: I’ve been there! Probably staring at my ceiling at the same time in the middle of the night. And she’s second-guessing everything she did and said at a party later that night and beating herself up about that. Been there, too. She’s also, like most of us are, an incurable gossip, along with most of the other ladies she encounters. At one point she writes:

   Am disconcerted to find that Cook and I have been talking our heads off for the better part of forty minutes before I remember that gossip is both undignified and undesirable.

AMY: It’s a perfect example of her telling you the unvarnished truth — we were just gossiping our fool heads off — and then collecting herself very prim and properly and remembering how undignified it is, and “I’m going to stop that.” She’s also really brilliant, I think, at highlighting so many emotions that just feel universal no matter what time period you live in. So, that conversational awkwardness with other people… the inclination to self-aggrandize.... dreading certain obligations in life… saying yes to things that inwardly you really don’t want to do but you’re too wimpy to just say no.

KIM: So speaking of conversational awkwardness, I know that you have a really interesting theory about that, and I think people would like to hear it right about now.

AMY: Yeah, this came to mind when Iwas reading the book because she has so many allusions to tennis. She’s got a tennis court. Her cat is named after a famous 1930s tennis player, Helen Wills. There’s a whole scene where she goes to a tennis party and she’s mortified because she’s a terrible tennis player and it just makes everything so awkward. But those references just reminded me that I have a theory that conversation partners can be compared to the game of tennis. So there’s three types of conversation partners. The first is a fellow tennis player. If you’re having a conversation with a fellow tennis player, everything’s going great. You’re hitting the ball back and forth, you’re having fun, it’s moving, it’s fast-paced, it’s getting something and you’re giving something in return. Kim, I would say you are a fellow tennis player to me when it comes to conversation.

KIM: Phew, that’s a relief!

AMY: Okay, the second conversation partner relating to tennis would be the brick wall. You can hit the tennis ball, and it kind of bounces back to you enough so that you can hit it again, but it’s just not as fun as having another tennis player there. Probably a little conversationally boring, but you can keep it going. The third type of conversation partner, which is the worst, and  — and which I feel like our narrator runs into so many of these in the book — is the mattress. When you’re playing tennis and you can only bounce it up against a mattress. And what’s the ball do? It drops straight down, and you don’t get it back. And you are left hanging. We’ve all met those people at parties, the people that you’re like “Okay, how do I get out of this?” So I remembered that analogy as I was reading this book because I feel like she encounters all three of those types of people. 

KIM: She absolutely does. That is perfect, and I really, seriously think that could be a book. I love that idea: “How not to be a mattress.” So, our narrator is married and has two children: a son, Robin, and a daughter, Vicki. What sort of commentary do we think Delafield may be making on married, domestic life and motherhood?

AMY: What I got from it is that, by and large, it’s a thankless existence! I will say, I did identify with the narrator’s tendencies in motherhood at certain points. First of all, she says at one point, “Remember when before I had children, all of the things that I said I wasn't going to do: I wasn't going to lecture, I wasn't going to say, ‘Don’t’ all the time.” And then she makes a remark about just how often she does that now on a daily basis. Everybody thinks before they have kids that they’re going to be a certain way, and it all changes once you’re actually in it. But I also identify her tendency to downplay her pride in her kids. Now, I am extremely proud of my two kids, but I find myself doing that from time to time. At the very beginning of the book, for example, she has taken her son, Robin, back to boarding school and she’s at the hotel, and she writes:

I sit with several other mothers and we all talk about our boys in tones of disparagement, and about one another’s boys with great enthusiasm. 

I think you do that! You’re trying to downplay your own kid, but then you talk up everybody else’s kids. Later, after her daughter’s birthday party, she writes similarly:

Vicky looks nice on pony, and I receive compliments about her, which I accept in an off-hand manner, tinged with incredulity, in order to show that I am a modern mother and should scorn to be foolish about my children.

I do that all the time, also. When somebody compliments me about my kids, I try to always have a flip side: “Well, she burns her Pop Tarts and throws them in the garbage.” It reminded me that I probably shouldn’t do that as much as I do. I think there’s a happy medium. You don’t want to be like, “Yeah, of course she is! She’s amazing!” You know?

KIM: I’m still completely in the bragging phase, but she’s only 17 months, so give me time to get there. But on the point of her attitude toward marriage, children and the domestic life, it comes across as Sisyphean. Things never turn out the way she hopes. Never. It’s always constantly working, working, working, but on the other hand she never seems to lose her sense of humor and she never gives up. She says straight out that “a banking account, sound teeth, and adequate servants matter a great deal more than love,” and it does seem like she’s practical in that way. But she also has a bit of a romantic side that’s sweet. I think she looks for the best in Robert and she always tries to have a sense of humor through it all.

AMY: Yeah, so speaking of Robert, her husband in the book, what are your thoughts about him?

KIM: Wow. Talk about checked-out, insensitive, unromantic. Not necessarily the most supportive of spouses. I’ll read something to give our listeners an indication of him:

  December 10th.–Robert, this morning, complains of insufficient breakfast. Cannot feel that porridge, scrambled eggs, toast, marmalade, scones, brown bread, and coffee give adequate grounds for this, but admit that porridge is slightly burnt. How impossible ever to encounter burnt porridge without vivid recollections of Jane Eyre at Lowood School, say I parenthetically! This literary allusion not a success. Robert suggests ringing for Cook, and have greatest difficulty in persuading him that this course utterly disastrous.

He never appreciates her literary allusions, ever, and he rarely has anything to say unless it’s a complaint of some sort.

AMY: Yeah, he’s almost a doorstop. It’s almost like he’s not a person, he’s just like a blob sitting there that she’s always looking at like, “Seriously?” I love that she is able to roll her eyes at him, telling us what she really thinks a little bit about him.

KIM: Yeah, that and that she gets her way eventually in her own way, too, which you’ve got to say, “go for it.” 

AMY: Now, given that this book is said to be loosely autobiographical, you’ve got to wonder what Delafield’s husband thought of this caricature of a husband. It’s said that her relatives thought of her husband, Paul, as a sort of “clodhopper” sort of man, similar to the guy in this book, I think. I don’t know if she felt that way about him or not.

KIM: It’s not exactly the most flattering portrayal of him if it is based on him, I’ll say that. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s true.

KIM: So one of my favorite parts of the book was when Lady B invites people to this party and it “throws the entire neighborhood into consternation” when they hear it is to be a “fancy dress” party, fancy dress meaning costumes. Our narrator has already planned to wear a black taffeta dress, but Mademoiselle says that it can easily be transformed into a Dresden China shepherdess. When that idea is rejected she gets wilder and wilder, suggesting Mary Queen of Scots, or Madame du Pompadour, or even Cleopatra somehow. But the narrator goes ahead and wears her black taffeta, has a basically terrible time at this party, and then before bed is writing in her diary about how at the end of a party she doesn’t look nearly as nice as as she did at the beginning, and her husband says, “Hey, come to bed, what you’re doing is kind of a waste of time.” And she does wonder, “Is he right?”

AMY: About writing all her thoughts down… once again Robert’s just a dud.

KIM:  Yes, absolutely. Yeah, thanks Robert.

AMY: In another example where he’s a dud, which is one of my favorite parts of the book, there’s a moment where she’s having a really bad day. All these financial woes come to the forefront, and despite her money problems, she decides she needs a little retail therapy. She’s going to go buy a new hat because there ain’t nothing a new hat can’t fix, that’s her theory. As she’s trying on the hats, she’s frustrated because her hair looks awful, so from there she thinks, “I think I need to go get my hair done.” So she goes to get her hair done. While she’s at the beauty parlor, the hairdresser suggests that maybe she needs to consider dying her hair a different color. And because she’s kind of like us, Kim, in that she can’t say no sometimes when people are making suggestions like that… she’s such a people pleaser, and so she just says, “Okay, go ahead.” And she hates it. It’s just awful. Her friend Mary comes over later after the hideous hair disaster and she writes: 

Worst fears realised, as to hair. Dear Mary, always so observant, gazes at it in nerve-shattering silence but says nothing, till I am driven to make half-hearted explanation. Her only comment is that she cannot imagine why anybody should deliberately make themselves look ten years older than they need. Feel that, if she wishes to discourage further experiments on my part, this observation could scarcely be improved upon.

KIM: Ouch. Worst fears of a hairdo realized.

AMY: And throughout the rest of the book, people keep commenting on her hair color in pretty critical ways. It’s totally inappropriate. Who doesn’t have that insecurity as a woman, right?

KIM: And the dream or the fantasy that you’re going to get the haircut that’s going to change your life.

AMY: Which also, by the way, ties into a plotline in “Fleabag,” where they have to go get the haircut rectified. Her sister gets an awful cut and the main character just storms back into the salon and gives him hell. You’ve got to watch it.

KIM: We all need somebody to do that for us. So this trip to France seems like this one really important moment in the book. She finally has this chance to get away from all of these obligations bringing her down and experience the life that she might have had if she hadn’t opted to tie herself down. But when she gets there she has a comical “near-death” experience trying to swim more than she’s actually capable of. And she jokingly writes “I hope that Robert’s second wife will be kind to the children”. 

AMY: [laughing] She’s fine. She doesn’t drown, she’s just a little embarrassed by the end of it, but it seems to remind her, this episode, that she was never going to be cut out for this sort of free, sophisticated life that she dreams of. So she goes back to her life. She even brings back a souvenir, this blue dress that she buys in the south of France and thinks looks so amazing on her, and when she gets back to Devon she puts it on and realizes it looks awful on her. So it’s sort of symbolic that the grass is not necessarily greener wherever you go. The interesting thing is, she never explicitly complains about her life at all. She accepts it all with a wry and sardonic wit, that “that’s the way it is, and I’m going to make the best of it.”

KIM: I guess that’s very British.

AMY: Yeah, for sure, stiff upper lip. Stiff upper lip, but a kind of snide underbelly.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: So after this first diary, the success was so huge, both in England and America that she went on to write three sequels: The Provincial Lady Goes Further, The Provincial Lady in America, and The Provincial Lady in Wartime. So I’m interested in checking out a few more of these to see what becomes of her and Robert and the children. So sadly, for us, this book has never been adapted into a film or TV show or miniseries or anything like that. I wish it would be.

KIM: It should be, and you know what, I think you should cast this because I think you will have some good ideas for who we should cast.

AMY: Okay, so I think i’m just going to stick with the narrator and maybe Robert. For our narrator, while Iwas reading the book, the tone that she has so much reminds me of the mother from the Masterpiece series, “The Durrells.” She has that same exact politeness but sarcasm. So I could see the actress from “The Durrells,” Keeley Hawes, in this role, no problem, and that’s who I envisioned as I was reading the book. At the same time, I keep mentioning “Fleabag,” and Phoebe Waller-Bridge has the snarkiness, those little asides and everything, down pat. She would be perfect. When I was looking at old photos of Delafield, I think they bear an uncanny resemblance to one another as well, so I think that could work. 

KIM: You are right on there, I mean I haven't seen “Fleabag,” as we said, but it’s a cultural touchstone, so of course I’ve seen clips, and I know what she looks like and I think you’re exactly right. I can completely imagine that. Oh, they need to do this! It needs to happen.

AMY: They do! Yes. And if I was casting Robert, I would get a complete unknown because I don't think you want to distract by having Robert be any name or any familiar face. He’s such a …

KIM: He’s a dud, let’s face it. 

AMY: He’s a dud.

KIM: It can’t be our usual stable of British actors.

AMY: Yeah. Exactly. It just needs to be somebody’s random dad that they bring in, and don’t give him very many lines.

KIM: So what did we learn today from Diary of a Provincial Lady? We learned that having domestic help can be overrated.

AMY: We learned that a visit to a hair salon doesn’t always make a bad day better.

KIM: We learned that the essential skill for surviving motherhood is a sense of humor. 

AMY: We learned that in conversation, you never want to be a mattress.

Kim: And we learned that snooping at a fictional diary can be as gratifying as snooping through a real one! That’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

KIM: Got ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know.

AMY: Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

2. We Went, We Saw, We Concord

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY: Hey! Welcome to our first “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episode.

KIM: Woohoo!

AMY: I know, it feels pretty good to be doing this. Last week was our kick-off. This sort of germinated at the beginning of the pandemic probably, around April, that we had this idea, and now it’s coming to fruition.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Really fun. So we kicked off last week telling you guys all about Monica Dickens and her novel, Mariana, which, Kim, thank you for lending me that book back in April because it was [while] staring at that cover that the idea just sort of hit me. You had always wanted to do a podcast, but I wasn’t necessarily on board, and then for some reason, just having that book — and you had lent me a couple other books with women authors that I’d never heard of — and I started thinking, “That’s the topic! That’s what we talk about on a podcast!”

KIM: It’s one of the things that happens with us in our creative life since Day 1 when we started working together on projects. We just know when we know.

AMY: Yeah. And we feel passionate about it, and we are having so much fun with it.

KIM: And we never even questioned it. It was like, “Oh yeah. Of course that’s what we’ll do.”

AMY: So we really hope that you guys check that novel out, and if you need any further convincing, just know that it’s really only a fraction of the length of one of her great grandfather’s classics. So, you can polish off Mariana in just a couple of days. And it’s a really cute book.

KIM: It also feels really good as a read, I think, right now. It’s nice to have an escapist, cozy novel, which is what that is. You’ll feel good when you read it. 

AMY: Yeah. Especially going into fall. I think it was termed a “hot water bottle novel” right?

KIM: That’s exactly right. Yep. Yep.

AMY: So, Kim, let’s talk about what we’re doing today.

KIM: This week we’re kicking off our “Lost Ladies of Lit” mini episodes, and that’s what you’re listening to right now. Every other week we’re going to publish a shorter episode. It’s going to be bite-sized, basically. We’re going to be sharing tidbits on what we’re reading, a little bit about our creative life, snippets of things we think that you all would be interested in, from lost arts to lost letters. So we’re really excited about adding this to our overall podcasting project.

AMY: Sort of like the little taste, you know.

KIM: Exactly.

AMY: The little “palate cleanser” before we move on to our next “lost lady” in the list.

KIM: I love that. That’s perfect.

AMY: So at the end of this episode, we will be announcing the next author and title in our series. That will be exciting because if you want to, then you can read ahead and be ready to roll when we’re discussing our next author. But speaking of, in the meantime, Kim, what else are you reading this week?

KIM: I don’t know how I’m having any extra time to read, but I am carving it out a little bit, and I’m reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

AMY: Yeah, I have. 

KIM: You have? Okay. It’s basically a Wolf Hall meets Lincoln In the Bardo, and it’s this fictionalized story of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet. He died when he was 11, unfortunately, but it’s the period leading up to his death and it’s a lot about Shakespeare’s wife and her origin story. It’s very fictionalized. That’s sort of what makes me say Wolf Hall, because Wolf Hall is, you know, we don’t know a lot about the characters in Wolf Hall, so the writer takes a lot of license with Wolf Hall, and it’s the same with Hamnet. It’s basically, you don’t need to know much about Shakespeare at all to really get into this book. It’s really dreamy and beautiful, and William Shakespeare is in it, but he’s actually not the primary character at all so far. It’s really his wife, who is strong and dynamic and she’s kind of witchy. I’m about halfway through, yeah, and she’s the main protagonist of the novel. Also, it involves a plague, too, so reading about a plague today feels really different than say if I had read this book maybe seven or eight months ago. Anyway, I highly recommend it. So far, I really love it.

AMY: You and I love a good Shakespeare retelling. I mean, that’s basically what we do with our books. So we went down that rabbit hole ourselves. 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: Well, I told you last week that I am slogging through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa which is like 1,500 pages, so it’s the book that never ends. I have to do it in dribs and drabs. It can’t be my main novel.

KIM: No, it’s your “Covid project novel.”

AMY: Exactly. That’s what it is. But at the same time, so my kids are of the age where we like to read books together, so we just started this book which I think could be… she could potentially fall under a “lost lady.” The author is Esther Forbes and the book is Johnny Tremain which was really a popular book in the forties and fifties. I think Disney wound up doing a movie in the 1950s. It won the Newbery medal in 1944. It actually came up recently at the Democratic National Convention because Michael Bloomberg, in his speech, was talking about the America he wanted to see and, like, patriotism, and he referred to his “favorite book when he was a kid,” which was Johnny Tremain. So me and the kids are reading that right now.

KIM: How have I not heard of that book before you?

AMY: I had heard of it over and over all my life and just never read it. You know what, we were watching “Hamilton” on Disney+ this summer and my kids were really into it, so I was like, “How else can I get them intrigued by the American Revolution? What could we read that would teach them more?” This book is basically set during the American Revolution with Paul Revere and John Hancock... all the historical characters factor into the book. So reading about the American Revolution right now is kind of getting me in the mindset of, Kim, one of our favorite little towns.

KIM: Oh! I know what you’re going to say! Concord, Massachusetts!

AMY: Concord! Yeah! And just what an amazing little literary epicenter it is. You know, I was thinking, for people in the northeast of the country, Concord right now would kind of be a really good socially-distanced day trip people could take, I think.

KIM: Yes. Oh, if I lived on the East Coast, I definitely would be doing that, for sure.

AMY: Yeah, so, for those of you that don’t know about Concord, MA, it’s about a half-hour drive outside of Boston. It’s this little historic town that is almost like this literary epicenter. You wouldn’t believe how many huge names came out of this little town.

KIM: It’s just very charming.

AMY: Yeah. It feels like you’re stepping into a time machine. Kim, I know you’ve been there more recently than I have.

KIM: Yeah, I think it was maybe three years ago, and the first thing I did was head straight for Louisa May Alcott’s house. I took a tour of it. I got the chills. It’s incredible. I mean you’ve been to it, so you know. “Amy’s” sketches are on the wall. So basically, Louisa May Alcott’s sister’s sketches are on the wall.

AMY: Yeah, I don’t think her name’s Amy, but it’s THE Amy.

KIM: Yeah, her name’s not Amy, but quote-unquote “Amy.” The Amy from the book. Yes. and it just gives you the chills. It’s incredible.

AMY: It’s like walking inside the novel. It’s exactly how I pictured Little Women, and I think when they film movie adaptations of Little Women, either they use the house or it’s a recreation. The house is called Orchard… Orchard House.

KIM: Yes. Yep.

AMY: So it’s closed to the public right now, however, they have virtual tours and if you go onto their website, for a $10 donation, which is totally worth it, they have a 15-minute video tour where you can see all the rooms in the house. There’s this cute woman who’s dressed up in period garb who takes you on a tour of the house. So anybody right now can go take a tour of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House if you wanted. 

KIM: Ooh, I love that idea, and that actually makes me think it would be fun to do like a day where you had lined up a bunch of different virtual tours of authors’ homes across the world. 

AMY: Ooh, let’s set that up! Let’s do it! We can provide that for our listeners!

KIM: We can put it in Stories. Yeah, that would be really fun.

AMY: Basically a stone’s throw from Orchard House… in my head I picture it as being right across the street, I don’t know if it’s that close.

KIM: I think it’s just down the road, if I remember correctly. Not far at all.

AMY: Yes. But take it away, Kim. Who lived there?

KIM: Oh, well, Emerson’s house.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: I mean you can see it [from Orchard House]. I think it’s definitely walkable. They were neighbors, so it’s basically across the street.

AMY: I never took the tour of Emerson’s house, so I’ve never been inside that one.

KIM: I didn’t either, and I feel like it wasn’t open when I was there. Maybe it has more limited hours or something. 

AMY: And it’s definitely not open right now because I checked, and there’s no virtual tour of that one, but really Orchard House is the one you want to look at. And then really not that far from the Alcotts’ home and Emerson’s home — I mean, maybe a five-minute drive down the road— is Walden Pond of Henry David Thoreau fame. When you go there, it’s a nice walk around the pond, just to be out in nature, but then there’s also a little replica of his tiny house which is exactly on the spot where he had built the little one-room where he lived for however long that was. He was like the original tiny-house hipster.

KIM: Oh, I love it that way. So, Walden Pond also makes an appearance in a recent book Writers and Lovers by Lily King, I don’t know if you read that book. She goes on a date to Walden Pond.

AMY: Oh, no. Interesting. Oh, yeah, and also about the Alcotts, I wanted to mention, too, earlier this year I read March. It’s about the father’s point of view. So going back to Hamnet and telling the story from a different perspective, this is Little Women, basically, as told from the March family patriarch’s point of view.

KIM: Do we need the man’s perspective of it? 

AMY: Well, it’s his back story. So it tells how he became who he became. There’s not a ton of Marmee and the girls. They’re not in it [as much]. It’s when he was off… it takes place during the Civil War.

KIM: Okay. Interesting.

AMY: And he interacts with Thoreau in the book because he lives in Concord. So there’s a little more Concord sprinkled into March as well. I want to say the author is Geraldine Brooks or something, but I might just be pulling that name out of my head.

KIM: Do you recommend it? Should we read it?

AMY: I do recommend it. I wasn’t sure. I read it after you and I went and saw Little Women in the theater.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Gosh. Remember movies?

KIM: Yes, I know. That sounds so weird.

AMY: So i was in a Little Women fit and I obviously know Little Women like the back of my hand, so I was like “What else can I read?” So I decided to get that one out, and it’s good. I liked it. It’s different. It’s … different. I always like when someone takes a different perspective on a character.

KIM: Yeah, I’m intrigued, based on your recommendation, anyway.

AMY: So then also in Concord…(again, everything’s a quick drive), you have to go visit Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I imagine this is open right now.

KIM: Oh! I love Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I could spend days there. I only had maybe an hour before we were going to dinner, so I went to the Authors’ Ridge where the Alcott family, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau are all buried. Oh my gosh… it’s so beautiful. Being from California, we just don’t have places like that. Oh, so gorgeous.

AMY: No. There’s no old history, really, in California.

KIM: Not that old. No.

AMY: I got chills at the Authors’ Ridge, because I was just like, “I cannot believe they’re all right here. All of them.

KIM: Oh, I felt the same.

AMY: Also, in Concord, not so literary but still worth checking out, there are some Revolutionary War sites. My favorite is the Old North Bridge, which is where the infamous “Shot heard round the world,” (the first shot fired in the American Revolution) took place. I highly recommend taking a tour of the battle sites in that area. You really get to visualize how it all unfolded there.

KIM: And you went to the inn there, right? I remember you telling me about the beautiful old inn.

AMY: It’s called the Colonial Inn. There’s a couple of restaurants. It’s like an old house, or boarding house kind of thing. They have Yankee fare like clam chowder and things like that, but then I saw they also have an afternoon tea, which is right up your and my alleys.

KIM: Oh yeah, we used to go have our brainstorms over afternoon tea. We will do it again one day, after Covid. But I want to go to Concord together as a Lost Ladies of Lit trip! 

AMY: We do need to go sometime together. Maybe when the leaves are changing. Which would be right now. So maybe this time next year, hopefully, when travel will be back on the agenda.

KIM: Yeah, basically we want to go everywhere as soon as we can.

AMY: Yeah, for sure. Oh, speaking of traveling… it’s not really traveling, but I found this thing that I shared with you, Kim, this week, that I thought was cool. Maybe a lot of our listeners already know about it, but I had never seen it before and I keep playing around with it. It’s a web site called Literature-map.com, and it’s this really cool tool for finding new authors, or if you are reading an author and you’re like, “Who does this remind me of?” You basically type in an author’s name and it gives you a graph, kind of, where they plot out all the other authors that are in a similar vein or are somehow connected to that person, or, people might like as well as this author. So it’s funny, because I typed in Monica Dickens, just out of curiosity. I didn’t even know if she would show up because she’s not very well known, but she did come up, and there were a lot of authors around her. I think Howard… I forget what her full name is. Something Howard who wrote The Cazalet Chronicles? 

KIM: Oh, yes. Elizabeth Jane Howard.

AMY: Yes, Elizabeth Jane Howard, she came up. Which, we love her.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Another name that came up very close, which, they put the authors in proximity to the author’s name in the middle. So an author that popped up very close to hers was E.M. Delafield, which is fascinating because E.M. Delafield is actually the next “lost lady” on our list, and that is totally coincidental. We just happened to choose her.

KIM: Okay, so pausing a moment to just reiterate: We’re announcing, officially, our next book, which is by E.M. Delafield, and it’s called Diary of a Provincial Lady. 

AMY: Yeah, basically it’s a 1930s novel. It’s hilarious, charming and I think it’s still very relatable to modern readers.

KIM: Yeah, in fact, I don’t think it’s off the mark to call it the original Bridget Jones’s Diary.

AMY: Similar format, similar comic stylings, for sure. If you are a sucker for snarky, cynical characters, this is one you’re gonna enjoy. It’s basically a book that I have, for years, turned blue in the face trying to convince people to read, so it makes sense that this is the second one we chose because I just love it.

KIM: Yeah, we had to start a podcast for you to get me to read that book, and I love it now! It’s one of my favorites! I should have listened.

AMY: I know. I think that’s the whole reason we started this podcast. We just get super excited about books and we want to tell people about them, and if there’s just even one person that turns to one of these books and then decides, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I never read this. I love it so much,” our work here is done, basically. That will make us happy.

KIM: Well, we really hope you tune in for it, and that’s all for today. We’ll see you next week on “Lost Ladies of Lit!”

1. Monica Dickens - Mariana

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES, HOST:

Hello, and welcome to The Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW, HOST:

And I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: We’re best friends and co-authors of the Twisted Lit series of Young Adult novels, and we’re here to shed a little light on some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: Starting with a great English writer by the name of Dickens.

AMY: No, not that Dickens…

KIM: Who knew there was more than one?!

AMY: Exactly! While the Dickens we’re discussing today may not be so well known, we think she should definitely be on your reading list. So let’s raid the stacks and get started.

(SOUNDBITE OF INTRO MUSIC)

KIM: Okay, so of course everyone knows who Charles Dickens is, but did you know that his great granddaughter, Monica, was also a successful writer?

AMY: I didn’t! I had never heard of Monica Dickens before  you lent me her novel, Mariana, a few months ago. This is a woman who published more than thirty books, including bestselling novels, memoirs, nonfiction books and childrens’ series. In terms of sales and popularity, she was right up there holding her own with Daphne Du Maurier in her day. So we wanted to kick off this podcast with Monica Dickens because it was while discussing Mariana that we started to formulate the idea of creating this podcast.  Over the years, Kim and I have traded and discussed so many books by women authors, books that have become our new favorite classics, and I think the common refrain that kept coming up between us was, “This author is incredible; why on earth is nobody talking about her? Why on earth had we never heard of her before now? People should be reading her.”

KIM: So that’s basically what this podcast is about. We’re going to go beyond the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen and all the authors you’ve already heard of and start discovering some of these other great women writers in history, the ones everyone seems to have forgotten.

AMY: We want to go back in time and take another look at some of these women writers who paved the way and maybe even had success in their lifetime but didn’t really get their lasting due. So this podcast is about giving these literary ladies a much-needed reintroduction.

KIM: Which brings us back to Monica Dickens.

AMY: All right, so let’s just start with a little overview of who Monica Dickens was. She was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her grandfather was Dickens’ eighth child. She was born in 1915 and grew up comfortably upper-class in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London. She never really expected that she was going to turn out to be a writer, it was actually her sister and her mother who were more the “writers” in the family. I think it’s probably good that she didn’t start out with aspirations of being a writer because I think being Charles Dickens’ great granddaughter is probably a pretty heavy legacy if that’s your ambition in life. So when she was younger, she had some troubles. She was a little lost, a little aimless. She flunked out of three different schools, and we’ll talk about that later because it relates to Mariana, the novel we’re going to be talking about. So when she was around 20 years old, she was feeling depressed and directionless, and she made the unorthodox decision, based on her background, that she was going to go into domestic service. This was a move that shocked a lot of her family members because it’s like she was going to be the “downstairs” from Downton Abbey. She went to a cooking school (London’s Petite Cordon Bleu) and she ended up working for two years as a housemaid and a cook general in more than 20 upper-class London households. She wound up taking those experiences and turning it into a memoir that she wrote in her early 20s called One Pair of Hands. I think she was sort of asked to write this book by somebody that connected her with somebody in publishing who I would imagine heard her last name, Dickens, and said, “You know, you should write all this down.” So that was her first foray into writing and she wrote that memoir, (which I have yet to read but I’m really interested in checking it out now) but that book was a huge success for her; everybody loved it. I think it was part social commentary, but also really funny. Kim, have you read it?

KIM: No, I haven’t read it, but I can say that actually it was somebody that had a Dickens-related magazine who read the first pages of this and encouraged her to move forward on it.

AMY: Oh, interesting. 

KIM: So that connection was there with her great-grandfather.

AMY: Okay. So, she wrote this kind of nonfiction book, and then her second book was a novel, Mariana, which is the book we’re going to discuss today. It was also successful. During WWII she went on to enter the nursing field and she published a book that was similar to One Pair of Hands called One Pair of Feet, which was all about her time as a nurse. She ended up marrying an American naval officer, and she moved to the States after the war in 1951. But even in America, she continued to write. In the 70s and 80s, she wrote series for children, the most famous was probably The House At World’s End series. She also published her autobiography in 1978. And then she passed away in 1992. So, before we get into some more interesting tidbits about Monica, is there anything else, Kim, that particularly struck you about her life when you were reading about her?

KIM: I would just say that overall, for someone related to “literary royalty,” like you said, she seems pretty normal, like someone we’d be friends with. And the more that we’re going to go over the novel and what happens in it and that it’s a bit of a memoir of her life, it makes me feel even more and more like that. She seems very real. She’s not larger-than-life, she seems like a normal person.

AMY: Very relatable. A few tidbits that Kim and I really love about her that we read: as I mentioned before, she got expelled or tossed-out of three different schools, and those episodes are all represented to varying degrees in Mariana. First was St. Paul’s Girls’ School. Kim, what did she do to get expelled from St. Paul’s?

KIM: She dumped her uniform over into the river (off the side of a bridge). So nothing too terrible.

AMY: She went to a Parisian finishing school. She didn’t make the cut there, either. Finally, she went to the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Arts, but she got kicked out for lack of talent, which I kind of applaud her for. I feel like that was probably the best for her, that she didn’t go on to become an actress, because I can’t see that knowing what I know about her, really. She was shy and pretty bad at small talk. There’s an anecdote where during her first debutante ball, she disappeared into a bathroom to read Vanity Fair. And I think that’s kind of why we love her: that she hid out in a bathroom at a dance.

KIM: (laughing) I love that she did that! I could see both of us doing that, for sure. We would do that now!

AMY: It sort of  speaks to what you were saying, Kim, about her being somebody that we could love. Relatable.

KIM: That would be us. I could definitely see us doing that.

AMY: She had a dog named Ugly. I just think anybody that names her dog Ugly has to be a cool chick.

KIM: She has a sense of humor.

AMY: Yeah. Exactly. She also had a mild eating disorder in her early 20s and she was almost hospitalized for it, and that sort of comes into play a little bit in Mary Shannon, the heroine of Mariana, as well. We saw some of that struggle that she had with her weight. But yes, in many ways, Monica really is like the heroine of Mariana. She’s inwardly cynical, she’s self-effacing, she’s daring and rebellious but also insecure and awkward at times. There was a lot in her that you could love. Just to give you a little background about the time that Mariana was written. It was published in 1940 when she was in her early 20s. It was republished by Persephone Books in 1999, so you can definitely get your hands on a copy. 

KIM: Shout-out to Persephone Books!

AMY: Yeah. It’s basically a coming-of-age novel. She wrote this book at the start of WWII, but the story itself goes back to the protagonist’s youth in the 1930s. So most of the novel takes place between the first and second World Wars in those sort of happy, halcyon days of England.

KIM: So, the novel was a success at the time, but imagine having your publishing career kick off right at the beginning of WWII. I mean, it’s kind of like if you had a book out right now during Covid. (We’re recording this during the middle of a global pandemic.)

AMY: Right, yeah. It would have been challenging to maybe get a bit of traction… but she did.  The book was a success. So before we get into talking about this book more, we should mention that Kim and I both have cocktails at the ready that we have  made prior to the podcast. How is yours, Kim?

KIM: It’s delicious. It tastes a little bit like sangria. 

AMY: Yes.

KIM: It’s called a Dubonnet Cassis. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that exactly correctly, but it’s from the book! It’s inspired by a drink that Mary orders when she’s trying to be sophisticated. 

AMY: Yeah. So she’s in Paris and she’s attending dress school at the time. Dress-making school… what would you call that? Dress-making school, that doesn’t sound right. Fashion school, whatever it was. She’s sort of trying to be sophisticated in Paris, but she’s brand new, English girl, and when she goes to the bar it’s really the only drink she knows to order, so that’s what she orders. So our Dubonnet Cassis is Dubonnet, which is like a sweet, wine-based aperitif, and Cassis, which is a blackberry liqueur, with a little splash of soda and a twist of lime, and yes, Kim, it tastes pretty much exactly like sangria. I was nervous, because I don’t really like super sweet, syrupy drinks, but I liked it. It’s palatable.

KIM: I think I like it because it was in the book.

AMY: I like it for that reason, but also, did you know that a Dubonnet and gin is the favorite cocktail of the Queen of England?

KIM: Well, that makes me like it even more. That makes me feel sophisticated, too.

AMY: So we will put the ingredients for a Dubonnet Cassis in our show notes, but now that we have our cocktails handy, let’s dive into Mariana! 

KIM: All right, so let’s get to the book. The structure is basically a fairly drama-free coming of age story, it’s kind of a light romance almost. In the preface the book is referred to as a “hot water bottle” genre. I looked it up and I think actually the writer of the preface might have made up that phrase herself, but I take it to mean a cozy and comfortable story.

AMY: Can I just interrupt for a second and say that I actually read this book in a hammock, outside, and it’s lovely for that as well.  

KIM: Yes, I think it could be a beach read sort of thing, a page-turner in that way, because it’s sandwiched between this high-drama, this high-tension plot: she finds out in the very beginning that her significant other’s ship has been sunk by a mine at the beginning of WWII and that most of the men on board have been killed. And she’s out in the country not near a telephone and she has to wait all night to find out if he’s alive or dead. 

AMY: Her mind is just racing at that time, because there’s nothing she can do. It’s interesting, because when I was reading that beginning, you care, you’re concerned for her, but then you’re ready to dive into the meat of the story. And then when we wind up circling back to this little dramatic plot at the tail end of the book, because we have gotten to know her and her life — the main character’s name is Mary Shannon — because we’ve gotten to know Mary, I was just on the edge of my freakin’ seat. I was white-knuckling my way, trying to read as fast as I could. We’re not going to give any spoilers about what happens to the significant other, but I just thought it was really effective to, like you said, sandwich the coming-of-age story between these two segments.

KIM: Absolutely. By the end, you’re so emotionally committed. You know who the love interest is at that point. You very much care whether or not he has survived and we aren’t going to tell you, but I will tell you that it is emotional to read the end by the time you get there. So I think it’s brilliant that she used this tactic to take this “hot water bottle” genre and make it something really special.

AMY: Also, like any young girl growing up, she has several love interests, several crushes, paramours, throughout this story. So each time you would get to a new one (there were three main gents) you kind of reflect back on the very beginning where the navy officer is potentially down and you think, “Is this the guy? Is this going to be the guy she ends up with? Oh my gosh.” So that was kind of fun. Then you finally realize which is the love of her life and you are just fighting to make sure everything’s going to be okay.

KIM: Yeah. No wonder people loved this book at the time. I’m sure a lot of people were going through similar things at the beginning of WWII, wondering where their significant other was and if they’d be okay. So you can imagine they could really relate to this.

AMY: Absolutely. And when I first started reading the book, I assumed that the heroine’s name would be Mariana, right? It’s not. She’s never called Mariana, she’s Mary. The book’s title is actually tied to a poem by Tennyson of the same name, which is pretty much a dirgeful death wish of a poem. It’s about a young woman who is pining for the man she lost. So there’s definitely a connection between Tennyson’s poem and this overarching saga of “Is her sweetheart going to come home?” which I loved. It’s a poem that, when Mary goes to acting school in the middle of the book, it’s the monologue that she winds up having to read, and she does a horrible job of it, basically, because she’s a terrible actress, but yeah, I thought that was an interesting way to spin a prior work of literature.

KIM: Yeah, the theme of powerlessness and sort of events that you can’t control. Basically it feels like she’s taking “Mariana” and making it an answer to how you can handle those things that are out of your control and still try to move forward in your life in spite of them.

AMY: Right, and I think the arc of this novel, once you get into Mary’s story of her childhood and her growing up. It’s really the journey of how she becomes her own person and becomes a strong woman. The book may be sectioned out in a way that’s kind of based on the various men who come and go in her life, but when all is said and done, it’s really a book about her finding herself. So at the end, even though there’s no major plot per se, it’s sort of a slice of her life and we are getting a window into one girl’s existence. There’s not a lot that happens that’s out of the ordinary. You sort of have to like that sort of book.

KIM: I think that’s true, because even though it is the men who come and go in her life, I don’t think too much importance is placed on the men, in a good way. I think they’re part of how she’s figuring out who she is, but it really does remain her thoughts and the things that she’s trying to overcome. It really is about her, I don’t think it gets too caught up in these other characters, which I think is a good thing. 

AMY: So what do we love about Mary? We’ve talked about what we like about Monica Dickens, but now let’s talk about her heroine.  

KIM: Okay, yeah, so what I love about Mary is that she isn’t larger than life, but she isn’t an anti-heroine either. She’s kind of an “every girl” and “every woman” throughout the novel. Her teachers report that she’s seventh in her class. That sounds great until you learn that there are ten other girls in the class. They say she has a tendency in her to resent authority to the point of resistance. I mean, I can identify with that. I definitely didn’t do much of the resisting part, but I definitely thought about it and wanted to. The teacher goes on to write in this report card home to Mary’s mom that: “Although she is popular with her fellow pupils, I am afraid she is a bad mixer, being at the same time intolerant and unconfident of others and disinclined to enter into the life of the community.” It says her heart’s in the right place and she will eventually mature into a fine woman, but it’s not the most enthusiastic review, right?

AMY: No. She’s not academically special at all and she doesn’t see herself as special at all. I mean, she has a lot of mortifying moments and she just thinks she’s very average, which is funny because as you go along in this book, there’s nothing average. She’s a remarkable young lady, but she doesn’t see herself that way at all. But I think, going back to her relatability, that’s sort of endearing.

KIM: Absolutely. 

AMY: So after this very beginning where she hears on the radio that the ship has gone down, the next chapter jumps into, would you say she’s 11 or 12 years old?

KIM: Yes. I don’t think it’s explicitly says, but I think about that age. Yeah.

AMY: We go back to sort of her family’s summer compound. I liken it to the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts. They had this cool estate that belonged to her grandparents and the whole family gathers there in the summer. This place is called Charbury in the novel, but in real life, Monica Dickens had a similar summer house that she’d go to on her mother’s side of the family called Chilworthy. Everything sounds very similar and autobiographical about this.

KIM: Yeah, very much drawn from her experiences and her memory of that and how much she loved that.

AMY: And the important thing that comes out of these summers at Charbury is her cousin, Denys. What did you make of Denys?

KIM: Oh, you know… I found him a bit annoying from the very beginning, actually. It says clearly that everyone worshipped him. All of his cousins worshipped him. He could basically do no wrong. He was great and perfect and all-powerful, but the grown-ups were kind of like, Okay, he’s going to get his when he goes to the next level of school. They’re going to basically beat him out of it, is what it sounded like. But Mary is basically…

AMY: Besotted. Totally crushing on her cousin. When I first was reading this, I was taken aback and I didn’t know what to think. In the context of this time period, was that normal? Because Mary was acting like it was completely normal, right?

KIM: I know you did some research into whether it was or wasn’t. I will say maybe I have read too many historical novels, because I felt like it wasn’t that shocking to me.

AMY: Right. I felt the same way. I thought, “How am I supposed to think about this, because this could be perfectly normal, and she’s acting like, ‘Oh, yeah, I hope Denys and I are going to be the hot ticket here and the family is going to be happy for us.’” British royalty have been marrying their cousins for centuries, even through Queen Victoria’s era. I knew Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were cousins, so i thought, “Okay, maybe in that time period it was more accepted.” So I looked it up and from what I found, after WWI in England it definitely started to be frowned upon. Up until that point, it wasn’t as big a deal. It was kind of commonplace if you wound up marrying your cousin. Not commonplace, but it wasn’t taboo necessarily, but after WWI, it started to be like, “eeeh, Maybe not.” I think I read that around that time period, one in 6,000 couples would have been married in that day. So while I was reading the book, there was some high drama between Mary and Denys. They made out after the fox hunt. Which, by the way, I’ve been to a fox hunt. Did you know that?

KIM: What????! NOoooo! How could I not have known this? Oh, my god.

AMY: That’s a story for another time. But yeah, so Denys and Mary, cousins from Charbury, they kissed at one point, and he was definitely leading her on and so she sort of put all the cards out on the table and said, “What’s going on between us?” And he laughed it off and said, “Oh, silly, we could never have a romance because that would be incest.” And he says the word. That was a complicated little thing to sort out and a little bit shocking.

KIM: it made me really like him even less at the point because I felt like he really was taking advantage of her youth and the fact that she really looked up to him.

AMY: Yes, absolutely. After that whole episode, she gets over Denys pretty quickly and is like, “Okay, he’s a player.” So like Monica Dickens, Mary is kind of aimless after finishing school as a sort of second-rate student. She decides that she’s going to follow in her Uncle Geoffrey’s footsteps (He’s an actor), and she’s going to go to acting school and see, maybe she can be a movie star. This is one of my favorite parts of the book because her description of the acting school is so hilarious.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: I have a little bit that I will read from this part, just because when they get to Miming Class… I mean, you can already imagine. “Individual Miming” is the name of the class: “This was the worst part of all. The students stood in a whispering line against the wall and each in turn had to step into the middle of the room and render in dumb show whatever Miss Dallas’s whimsical fancy conceived. One could not laugh. It was all so sad and embarrassing and too painfully suggestive of what one probably looked like oneself.” Remember the green tunics and tights was the outfit they needed to wear?

KIM:  Aw, it was hilarious.  

AMY: She paints the picture of the acting school so well.

KIM: Yeah, that and when she just has enough of it. She’s in the middle of this live performance and she goes into this blackout rage and I quote: “She began to burlesque.” And that, by the way, is how she gets kicked out of acting school.

AMY: And it’s kind of shocking because what we’ve known of her up to this time is that she’s pretty reserved and just a wallflower, so imagining her up on stage in front of all the parents and relatives of all the students and she makes a fabulous, racy display of herself to the point where she gets kicked out, and then she just runs off stage and leaves the school. It was great. It was great. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: She does not know what to do with her life, but her mother convinces her to go to Paris to study dressmaking, so that’s what she does and there, she meets Bachelor No. 2: Pierre?

KIM: Yeah, Pierre.

AMY: I have to admit, I got kind of swept up in Pierre at the beginning. 

KIM: I thought he was going to be “the one” at first, when she first met him. I thought, “He’s going to be the one somehow!”

AMY: He’s great. He’s great at first, and very sophisticated. He’s got money. It seems like he’s the answer to all Mary’s problems, because back in England, her mom is having financial issues. If she marries this guy (which is what he wants) all that will be solved.

KIM: And Mary is very uncertain about her future. She’s not really into what she’s doing, what she’s studying. She hasn’t really found anything yet so I think he kind of fills a hole there.

AMY: Right I found it an interesting scene when she took him back to England at one point to meet the whole family that usually was at Charbury and she saw him juxtaposed with all her English relatives and realized, “this is not the guy.” By that point the worm has turned a little bit with him and we are starting to see that he’s a jerk. But he reminded me at that point of Cecil Vyse in A Room With a View.

KIM: A hundred percent. Yep.

AMY: Just totally foppish. And thank god, she kicks him to the curb.

KIM: And there’s a great quote where she talks about the difference between Paris and England which is also the difference between Pierre and someone who might be her true love. It says, “If Paris had a feeling of its own in the air, so had England, but you only noticed it when you had been away. It was a feeling of damp, fresh security. Everything was so right and so comfortably unexotic, like a cabbage. It seemed that even the breezes blew there because they knew that England was the only possible country in which to blow. Mary had never been away for so long before, and she stepped down the gangway with the joyful feeling that she was returning to where she belonged.”

AMY: The interesting note about that section, because I loved that whole paragraph as well, and I thought, “Oh, god, her love for her country and just ‘England’s dampness’” — she loves it there and doesn’t want to live permanently in Paris, but I think it’s interesting that Monica Dickens ended up leaving England in the fifties and going to America. She obviously did leave if she felt that way. Kind of interesting. 

KIM: Yeah, things probably changed, maybe, with WWII and everything. Maybe she just couldn’t return to the way it was.

AMY: Okay, so she dumps Pierre, thank God, and she ends up back in England. The woman that wrote the preface for the Persephone version of this novel that was republished in 1999, Harriet Lane, she said the “plot would probably ring some bells with a certain Bridget Jones.” Let’s discuss how she meets Sam, who is the guy that ends up becoming her husband. I don’t think we’re spoiling it to talk about the men this way, that she winds up with this guy. We’re not going to spoil the ending, but Sam is the guy she ends up marrying, and their “meet-cute” is one of the best that I’ve read.

KIM: It’s amazing and so, so real compared to your typical meet-cute that happens.

AMY: Basically, we won’t even spoil this part other than to say that she gets sick to her stomach. 

KIM: It is so very Bridget Jones.

AMY: It’s just very Bridget Jones, it involves vomiting, and it’s really funny, but also your heart just goes out to her because it’s very mortifying. But it all works out in the end.

KIM: It’s very sweet, too!

AMY: So sweet. And there’s a poignant passage in the last chapter where it’s nighttime and she knows  that in the morning she’s going to find out whether her husband is alive or dead. She’s kind of thinking back on Tennyson’s poem and Mariana. In the poem, Mariana is just basically like, “I want to die. I can’t live without this guy. I can’t go on.” Mary has a different perspective and I'll just read that line. She says, “But Mariana was wrong. You couldn’t die. You had to go on. When you were born, you were given a trust of individuality that you were bound to preserve. It was precious. The things that happened in your life, however closely connected with other people, developed and strengthened that individuality. You became a person. Nothing that ever happens in life can take away the fact that I am me.” I loved that because even though we didn’t know what was going to become of her husband, we got the sense that she was going to be okay. She was a strong woman by that point, and she was going to persevere. I thought that was beautiful.

KIM: Absolutely. I agree. It gives me the chills hearing that again. I remember reading that in the moment and having that feeling. I also think that gives a real glimpse into some of the passages that you’ll read in this book. It is a coming of age story, but there are so many really great quotes in the book that I think are inspiring.

AMY: So, as we might have mentioned earlier, it’s not like this book has a really strong plotline or action that’s happening. It’s kind of a slice of this girl’s life. It’s like following along with a friend’s life that you’re catching up with. There are no film adaptations of this novel, and I wonder if it could even work.   

KIM: I think it could be a miniseries. I think it could be like a Masterpiece miniseries. 

AMY: Ohhh! Yeah!

KIM: I do think you’re right though. For a film, though, it might not be quite right. Like a two-hour typical film.

AMY: Right. Definitely Hollywood would have to ‘zhuzh’ it up a bit  in terms of the things that happened in it. The book itself is amazing, but to make it something you’d watch in one sitting, you’d need more that was happening. 

KIM: Yep.

AMY: So let’s say this is a BBC miniseries suddenly. Who would we cast as some of these characters we’ve talked about?

KIM: Okay, I wonder if we’re going to have the same people. We have not talked about this before. So I don’t know that many actors in their 20s by name, but I was thinking Saoirse Ronan for Mary and maybe Callum Turner for Denys. (He was Frank Churchhill in the recent Emma that just came out this year.) Or maybe Timothee Chalamet, but I feel like I should save him because I think I’m going to want to cast him in the future. And then for Sam, maybe Tom Holland, I think he was Superman. I can see him as Sam because Sam seems like such a sweet, personable nice guy.

AMY: Oh, yes. For sure.

KIM: What about you? What do you think? I’m dying to hear!

AMY: So for Mary, I’m saying Maisie Williams. 

KIM: Remind me of who she is?

AMY: Maisie is from Game of Thrones. She’s the youngest Stark sister.

KIM: Oh my god, yes! I love it! Okay, I want to change to that one. I love it. 

AMY: A physical description of Mary from the book, it says: “She was a shrimp of a child with no natural color so that people said triumphantly she looked delicate. When she grinned she looked like a gnome with her narrow chin and little pointed ears.” I mean, that sounds like Maisie Williams to me. Maisie could play both the younger and the grown-up Mary.

KIM: She totally could. She totally could straddle both. Absolutely. 

AMY: For Denys, I’m going to go with Harry Styles. He’s kind of like a charmer, bad boy. He’s good looking, and she always talked about the flop of hair that would hang over Denys’s  forehead and Harry Styles has that. Pierre, I would cast Louis Garrel who played Jo’s German husband in the recent Little Women.

KIM: Oh, I love that. He’s much older though.

AMY: Okay.  So yeah, he might not be young enough. For Sam, I said Harry Hadden-Paton, who, in Downton Abbey, he was the guy that married Lady Edith at the end. They kind of describe Sam in the book as not necessarily drop-dead-gorgeous, but as somebody who looks like he’d be a good husband, a nice husband. That’s how she described him.

KIM: I can see that. You know, I’m seeing a huge problem here. We are going to want to adapt and write screenplays for all of our episodes of our podcasts!

AMY: We’re doing some of the work for ourselves right now basically. We’re getting some of this out of the way.

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: So what did we discover today from reading Monica Dickens’ Mariana? We discovered that crushing on your cousin is a really bad idea.

KIM: Yes, absolutely. Especially your first cousin. We also discovered that throwing up can be wildly romantic. Who knew?

AMY: Who knew? We discovered that acting classes are pretty strange in any era…

KIM: And we’ve discovered that Charles isn’t the only “Dickens” worth reading!

AMY: So moving on, what are you currently reading this week, Kim?

KIM: Oh my gosh, I’ve been wanting to tell you about this, but I saved it. I am reading Ellen Wood’s East Lynne. It’s about an aristocratic woman who abandons her husband and children for a wicked seducer, and apparently it was devoured by everyone from the Prince of Whales to Joseph Conrad. So I’m excited to really dig into this book.

AMY: That sounds amazing, and guess what? I’VE NEVER HEARD OF IT. Sounds like a future episode, don’t you think?

KIM: That’s what I was thinking?

AMY: When this pandemic shutdown started and libraries closed, I realized I needed the fattest possible book to get me through it if I wasn’t going to be able to check books out of the library. So right now I am a third of the way through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: The History of a Young Lady. It was published in 1748, it’s over 1500 pages long in very, very small print. It’s very dramatic. It’s about a teenage girl who has three options. She can either manage this kind of dorky guy that her family is pressuring her to marry who is kind of a cross between Pride & Prejudice’s Mr. Collins and Uriah Heap. 

KIM: Oh, god.

AMY: He’s just an awful human being. Or she can run away with the sort of town cad, womanizer guy that everybody knows has a bad reputation, but he is offering to take her away in the dark of night to get her away from this impending marriage.

KIM: Don’t do it, Clarissa!

AMY: Or her third option is to kill herself! She’s a teenager and she’s very shrewd and clever, but there’s lots of teenage angst.

KIM: That’s a good pandemic read!

AMY: So that’s all for today’s podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode. 

AMY: If you have any ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see featured on our show, let us know.

KIM: Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her” into one of your new favorite authors!

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