33. Peg Bracken — The I Hate to Cook Book with Helene Siegel

KIM: Do you enjoy reading cookbooks, Amy?

AMY: Well, I don’t actually really enjoy cooking, ergo I generally do not enjoy reading cookbooks, no. 

KIM: Okay, so I do enjoy cooking, but only recipes that have fewer than maybe five ingredients and even fewer steps. And I have a gazillion cookbooks that, to be honest, I actually enjoy reading more from than actually cooking … I have a couple of cookbooks by Mimi Thorsson, they have these pictures of her chateau in France… and I own just about everything by Nigella Lawson, to my husband’s consternation. But the truth is they are mostly aspirational and remain so. And I’m totally okay with that. But, Amy, what if there were a cookbook that could make you laugh? A cookbook that, in fact, was once described as a “mashup of Martha Stewart and Amy Sedaris.”

AMY: That’s a weird combo, first off, but I would say you’re definitely starting to get my attention. 

KIM: Good because the book we’re discussing today is called The I Hate to Cook Book. It was written by Peg Bracken in 1960. As we know, that was a time when women were starting to rebel against these traditional gender stereotypes. The book was revolutionary in some ways in that it gave women permission to say: “Cooking just isn’t my jam.” (And literally, in this case — Bracken wouldn’t be caught dead making her own homemade preserves.) Anyway, Bracken’s book offered shortcuts and cheats so that women could still manage to provide arguably tasty sustenance for their families without being in the kitchen all day. As Bracken’s daughter, Jo, wrote in the introduction to the 2010 reissued version of her mother’s classic, “The I Hate to Cook Book was born from a group of professional women who would have been much happier sipping martinis with their husbands than spending the cocktail hour in the kitchen slaving away over a hot stove.”

AMY: Now that definitely sounds more my speed. So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit everyone, the podcast dedicated to dusting off books (even cookbooks) by forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. Three years before Betty Friedan wrote the seminal feminist work The Feminine Mystique, quirky cookbook writer Peg Bracken gave desperate housewives permission to throw in the towel rather than attempt to emulate Julia Child. She was recommended to us by today’s guest, a woman who definitely knows her way around a kitchen far better than you or I, Amy. We can’t wait to introduce her — and talk about Peg Bracken — so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

INTERVIEW PORTION

KIM: Los Angeles food writer Helene Siegel is the author of the bestselling series Totally Cookbooks for 10 Speed Press. She co-authored four cookbooks with celebrity chefs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, the Too Hot Tamales of early Food Network fame, and a lavish coffee table book, Pure Chocolate, with Seattle chocolatier Fran Bigelow. As a solo author she wrote the Ethnic Kitchen series for HarperCollins and the Barbie Party Cookbook for Mattel. 

Helene has written for the LA Times’ food, book, and travel sections, as well as Bon Appetit and Gourmet. Helene is a dear friend, and over the years, she has shared many a hilarious story about working in the cookbook publishing and food industres as a woman and as a feminist. So really, there’s no one more perfect to be our guest on this episode. And don’t worry, we plan to get her to share some of those amazing tales on today’s show! 

Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, Helene! We’re so happy to have you!

HELENE: Thanks, Amy and Kim! I’m excited to be here!

AMY: All right, so I think, Helene, the best way to introduce the I Hate to Cook Book is to just read the first few lines of it. So I will do the honors there:

   Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them. This book is for those of us who have to, who have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking. This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of a long day. 

   When you have to cook, life is full of jolts: for instance, those ubiquitous full-color double-page spreads picturing what to serve on those little evenings when you want to take it easy. You’re flabbergasted. You wouldn’t cook that much food for a combination Thanksgiving and Irish wake. …. And you’re flattened by articles that begin: “Of course you know that basil and tomatoes are soulmates, but did you know…”. They can stop right there, because the fact is, you didn’t know any such thing.

KIM: Okay, so we can establish right away she’s hilarious. And though Bracken tells women right off the bat, “If you love to cook this book isn’t for you,” that’s clearly not true, because Helene, you love to cook. When did you discover this book, and what did you enjoy about it?

HELENE: Well, I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties in the Bronx in New York, so I had very little personal experience with the book. It wasn’t on my working mother’s bookshelf (way too suburban for her), but it was a cultural phenomenon that was just in the air at the time, sort of like The [Official] Preppy Handbook in the Seventies. It made a big impression on me as a little girl. It did go on to sell 3 million copies, by the way, and, like James Beard, she became a professional spokesperson for Birdseye frozen food, which made perfect sense. Peg was a regular TV guest. She wrote articles in women’s service magazines like Family Circle and McCall’s. Just the book’s title was so daring in those days when women were supposed to be happy being “indentured servants” as she said. I love that she was thumbing her nose at being a good housewife. I think this one line captures her snark: 

   What should you do, ladies when the onions are frying? Smoke some cigarettes and stare at the sink. 

KIM: I love it.

AMY: I love her ennui.

HELENE: Yeah.

AMY: Okay, so there’s actually a really interesting anecdote about the collaborative origins of Bracken’s cookbook. Helene, can you fill our listeners in on where the idea for the book (and also some of those recipes) sprang from?

HELENE: Well, Bracken wrote in the introduction that a group of friends who were gathered over lunch just started talking about how bored they were with cooking. That sounds familiar, right? They decided to save time by pooling their recipes and gathering about 200, which, by the way, is a lot. In a sly dig at The Home Economist, she wrote in the book’s intro, These recipes have not been tested by experts … Experts in their sunny spotless test kitchens can make anything taste good. As for where the recipes originated, she assumed, she said, that they were created long ago by a good cook who liked to cook. And she says to those bizarre women who like to cook: Invite me over often, please. And stay away from my husband.  So remember, those were the “Mad Men” days. 

AMY: Oh yeah.

KIM: I can picture it completely. And it’s interesting when you read a little bit of those excerpts, because she actually started out as an advertising copywriter along with Homer Groening, father of Matt Groening of “The Simpsons.” And she and Groening also made a comic strip, Phoebe, Get Your Man, together, which sounds pretty fun considering how entertaining Bracken is in this book. I tried to find pictures of that comic and I couldn’t, but it sounds really interesting. And she truly was busy at this time, raising a daughter and doing all of this other stuff, so the book wasn’t just a gimmick.  

AMY: No. And with all due respect to my mom, this book really reminded me a lot of her approach to cooking when I was growing up, and I think it was either maybe a Midwestern thing, or a 1960s, 1970s thing, but I personally grew up in the era where cooking meant just opening up various cans and jars and tossing them all together. So in my childhood, many a casserole was built around a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup. And all the women in my family were way into Jello salads (and they were tasty, I don’t care what you say… in fact there was one Jello salad we often ate that had pretzels mixed in and that sounds super gross, but I’m sorry, it’s TO DIE FOR. Don’t knock it till you try it!) And I even remember a certain recipe for crockpot meatballs that involved dumping in a jar of grape jelly. So this book actually really spoke to me.

KIM: Oh my gosh, Amy, I’m right there with you. In fact, I don’t think it’s just a Midwest thing because I grew up in Texas, Germany, California… all over, and I can hardly remember a meal that didn’t involve canned vegetables or canned soup. I don’t think I knew what a regular vegetable was. And both our moms worked, so I’m not going to blame them at all. Who could blame them?  But Helene, I know you recently cooked a meal that actually took four hours to prepare, and it sounds like you liked it; but you were a working mom, too, when your kids were growing up. How is this ringing bells as far as your own mom?

HELENE: Well, my 1950s mom did not embrace all these shortcuts and conveniences. While she worked (and she was always short on time), she still used fresh ingredients. She was kind of old-school. Except, of course, for canned veggies and fruit cocktail in syrup, we ate fresh foods. Maybe that’s why when I left home and went to college in the West, I could never get used to food in cafeterias or anything smothered in condensed, canned soups. I didn’t even know what a tuna casserole was. But on a few very special occasions, like the Academy Awards night, my mom did treat us to individual TV dinners. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, I love picturing you with the TV dinners watching the awards. How wonderful.

AMY: The irony.

KIM: Yes.

HELENE: Years later when I was a working mom, I had a deep desire to cook for my family. So a cookbook editor once told me when I was starting out, “You’ll get tired of that one day, and you’ll just stop cooking.” And she was right in that I took a nice long break after the kids were gone. But back in the day, it was like I was running a marathon. I would make this mad dash at the end of every work day. After driving at least an hour in L.A. traffic, I would blitz through the door, get out of my work clothes, throw on an apron and get ready to make dinner every night. And when I look back, I think I was crazy. 

KIM: So some of the recipes titles in this book are just priceless: There’s “Stayabed Stew” and “Skid Row Stroganoff”... “Hurry Curry,” “Idiot Onions” and “Hootenholler Whiskey Cake.”

AMY: She’s also got the classic cheese ball in there… you know, the kind you roll in crushed nuts. That’s always been a staple at family functions where I’m from. And her dessert titles are pretty funny, too. Actually, her whole Chapter 9 is called “Desserts: Or People are Too Fat Anyway.” And then her chapter on vegetables and side dishes is subtitled “This Side of Beriberi.”

KIM: Doesn’t that make you think a lot of Marjorie Hillis, who we dedicated  an episode to back in February?

AMY: Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean that was about 30 years prior to when this book was written, but you can still see some vestiges. Lots of tinned things. At least she had moved away from aspics, but some of it’s definitely questionable. I think we can agree that tastes have come a long way since this book was written. And yet, Bracken, early on in the book, she sort of issues a caveat about some of the bizarre ingredient combos you’ll find in her book. So she kind of owns it a little bit. In her recipe for Beef a la King, she says, “Don’t recoil from the odd-sounding combination of ingredients here, because it’s actually very good. Just shut your eyes and go on opening those cans.” In other words, she’s basically like, “I know it sounds gross, but it tastes like the bomb, so just trust me.” And some of the ingredients for that dish were: the condensed chicken noodle soup condensed cream of mushroom soup, of course — you have to have that; then there were two sliced hard-boiled eggs, ¼ lb chipped beef… (there is so much chipped beef in this book); green pepper, pimento, cheese and a small can of mushrooms. So toss that all together and… wow. I mean that sounds a little bit like prison food, but what do you think, Helene?

HELENE: Well, first of all I want to ask the question, “Where’s the beef?”

AMY: Totally true!

HELENE: It’s a tiny amount in this cream-heavy swamp of condensed things. So one of my favorite footnotes on one of her recipe lists was: If you don’t like this, leave it out. It reminds me of the time a cookbook editor of mine on a Mexican cookbook I was writing, told me, “I hate cilantro, take it all out.”

KIM: [laughing]

AMY: That’s a challenge! Oh my gosh. 

KIM: Oh, that is so funny.

AMY: So, well, getting back to chipped beef, though, I remember that was an ingredient we always had in our house. I remember that was a thing. I don’t think that’s a thing at the store anymore, though, is it? Can you even find that anymore?

HELENE: Do you know what it is, Amy?

AMY: We used to call it “dried beef.” It was like really thinly sliced… kind of like prosciutto, but beef. 

KIM: So dried and sliced?

AMY: Dried and sliced. Sometimes it would come in a jar, even. But it was slices, and my mom would make this thing… the chipped beef, or dried beef (I don’t know, I think it’s the same thing). She would make it in a cream sauce and then put it over toast. My grandpa would always say that you’re making “shit on a shingle.” That was a World War II recipe.

KIM: Yes! My dad used to say that, too.

HELENE: We had that also, in my house.

KIM: Yeah, I think they must have said it in Vietnam, also.

AMY: I liked it. I actually liked it!

KIM: Did you guys have Spam? The cans of Spam? We would have Spam on toast. 

HELENE: Maybe because you were in the military.

KIM: Yeah, maybe. I mean, you could get it at the store, but maybe that’s why they got the idea for it, it was something that they served in the military. But, like, UGGH. But anyway.

AMY: Maybe we should be careful about being too critical of these recipes, because when Peg Bracken, herself, showed her second husband the manuscript for this cookbook, he apparently answered, “It stinks,” according to their daughter, Johanna, and that couple got divorced not long after. So don’t tell Peg that these are bad recipes. 

KIM: Yeah, I like to think she made the decision to end that based on his response to the manuscript. [laughing]. So, suffice to say, this book is more readable today for her witty chapter introductions and sardonic asides. But to honor the spirit of Peg Bracken, Amy actually tried out a recipe for her family and I will let her take it from there.

AMY: I selected, actually, a couple of recipes from this book. One was the very first recipe in the book. It’s called “Sweep Steak,” and that one appealed to me because it really only required two ingredients: pot roast and a packet of French onion dip mix. I mean, how can you mess that up?

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: The second recipe was a rice casserole dish called “Hellzapoppin Cheesy Rice.” That was basically just rice baked with cheese and eggs and butter and Worcester sauce. So, I thought maybe that could be okay? Well, the pot roast literally took me less than three minutes to prepare. I guess it’s called “Sweep Steak” — there’s no steak in it, but.... I was pretty pleased about how quickly I managed to get this in the oven, but then I proceeded to overcook it to a criminal degree. And later when I sampled the cheesy rice after taking it out of the oven, it tasted a little bland, so I decided to add more salt, which was a huge mistake. So…

KIM: Were you drinking a martini while you were cooking? I hope so. I hope so.

AMY: I probably had a glass of wine.

KIM: It was her anniversary dinner. [laughing]. It was her anniversary dinner! 

HELENE: Oh my god, that was risky! But I do want to say, that recipe, I have had in people’s homes. People still make it, they love it.

AMY: The rice dish or the pot roast?

HELENE: No, the pot roast. And whenever this friend of mine brings it to the table, she’s like, “Oh la la, I made zee special pot roast!” And I’m always like, “Oh my god, don’t make me eat it.”

KIM: Here’s the other thing: I was going to cook something, but um...it was really hard to find anything vegetarian.

HELENE: Yeah, she was not vegetarian. Not a healthy person.

AMY: Anyway, my whole meal was a total fail. I don’t know that it was Peg’s fault, fully. My family were good sports about it, and let’s roll a little audio clip of that.

[Clip begins]

JACK: So far I had the pot roast, and I’d say it’s pretty good. 

AMY: Pretty good?

JACK: Yeah.

AMY: The pot roast?

JACK: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Okay. You like the flavor?

JACK: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Okay. You can be honest, too.

JACK: It’s a little chewy though.

JULIA: The cheesy rice wasn’t my favorite.

MIKE: So I would say this takes me back to my childhood. It feels like a meal my mom would have made. I would say that the meat’s definitely on the well-done side and the cheesy rice is on the super salty side…

JACK: I think the rice is VERY salty.

MIKE: But I can get where I would appreciate the rice. I do like the rice a little.

AMY: How do you feel about this being the meal for our wedding anniversary?

MIKE: It’s always nice to keep things fresh and new. This meal certainly does that.

JACK: I don’t really like it that much. 

AMY: No? Not for you? Even with the cheesy, “Hellsapoppin” title? Maybe a miss.

[end clip]

KIM: That was hilarious, and honestly, it was sweet how supportive they tried to be in the face of all that salt and overcooked meat. Props to you, Amy, for giving it a try! Okay, with all respect to Peg Bracken, I think I'll stick with some of your recipes, Helene, like your latke recipe, that, unlike Bracken’s recipes, basically made me a hero with my husband at Hanukkah.

AMY: I think I’ve had those latkes, Kim… at your house. I think I’ve been over there for those.

KIM: Latke party, yeah. Pre-pandemic latke party. We’ll be having them again.

AMY: Yeah. Helene, do you think there was any sort of stigma in the 1960s for women who didn’t cook?

HELENE: Well, it’s interesting. I think at that moment, women were beginning to publicly question their subservient role in society — especially in marriage. The idea of a married woman not cooking, not doing the laundry or, in general, not making her husband’s life easier, was subversive. My mother-in-law once told me that she ironed her husband’s underwear.

KIM: Hell, no!

AMY: Jeesh! Too much!

HELENE: Yes, well, at the same time as Peg Bracken’s book came out, you had Julia child’s breakthrough French cookbook and her TV show, with six-page recipes for Beef Wellington and menus for elaborate, multi-course dinner parties. As Julia would say, “for the servantless American woman.”

AMY: Thanks for clarifying, Julia.

HELENE: Her audience was affluent, educated, and no doubt, competitive. They were professionalizing, in a way, the home dinner party. One other interesting thing that’s happening at pretty much exactly the same time is the arrival of smart-alec women standup comics like Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers on TV. They were breaking barriers, poking fun at men in general, especially their hubbies, “Fang,” and Edgar. And if cooking ever came up in their jet-fuelled tirades, it was self-deprecating, for sure.

AMY: That's a really interesting insight, because it does make a lot of sense that they were giving women permission to A) laugh at the situation. (Like how ridiculous is this that we’re ironing our husband’s underwear? This is stupid!) and at the same time, sort of saying, “I don’t want to do this crap.”

HELENE: I think they were really subversive, and as a little girl I adored them both, so I probably had a bunch of rage myself. 

AMY: So, Helene, as somebody who enjoys cooking, you’re almost stuck in the middle, because you’re a feminist, but you enjoy being in the kitchen.

HELENE: First of all, I go through a lot of phases with the cooking. I did not start cooking until I was pretty much until I had my first child, although I dabbled a little bit in college. I was a college student, and I recognized that I liked to cook and what I cooked tasted better than what was in the cafeteria. So I just cooked. And even when I had the smallest apartment, you know, my starting-out apartment in New York City, I did always invite people over for dinner parties. But the great thing was that I wasn’t obligated to cook. I was cooking out of choice.

AMY: That’s the key.

KIM: Mmm-hmm, exactly.

HELENE: And I do love food, in general, so that helps.

AMY: We made a crack about Julia Child earlier in this segment, but Helene, is it true you actually met her? 

HELENE: Yes, I did! And I’ll never forget it. I have a picture, actually, of it. So I was writing cookbooks (I guess this was during the Eighties) and I used to be a member of professional culinary associations. And we had annual conferences where Julia always showed up. But anyway, we gathered all to eat and drink A LOT, but she was always the grande dame at these conferences. I mean, there were crowds around her everywhere she went. Everybody just adored her. What everyone would always say about her is, when you meet her, she’s Julia, exactly as you see her on TV. Totally authentic… doesn’t put on any airs… she just is who she is. So she was a big, cheery, mountain of a woman. She did not cut corners (as she famously said) when it came to butter and cream. But she was so kind to everyone along the way, and I think that’s why she was so well-loved.

AMY: She sounds like a real character.

HELENE: She knew how to have a good time.

KIM: Speaking of people who know how to have a good time, Helene, you recently started an amazing project that I want to tell our listeners about. It’s a blog called the Pastry Sessions. It is so great and so timely. Let’s tell everyone more about it and maybe give a little bit of information about how you came about starting it. What prompted you to start it?

HELENE: Well, a few months into the pandemic, I started baking on Zoom with my 8-year-old granddaughter in Texas. (Her name is Piper). I just missed her so much, and of course, I couldn’t visit her. So baking was a natural thing to do, since it’s an activity that we’ve been doing together since she was about four, in person. Anyway, I started The Pastry Sessions to keep a record of what we were doing and to share my stories so she can know more about me later.

AMY: That’s so sweet! It has been really hard on grandparents this whole past year, and I love that you have turned it into a… is it a weekly thing? How often do you do it?

HELENE: It’ bi-weekly. She would do weekly, but I need a little break in between, you know, because it’s work.

AMY: I get that.

KIM: I love it because you really get to tell all these stories, so every blog post has some information about what you cooked with Piper, and sort of what the experience was like for her, but usually you bring up some story or anecdote from your past, or some sort of insight on cultural history or something, to really bring it to life, and I love that, so I’m enjoying it. I can’t wait to see your new updates every week.

AMY: Tell me about these magic brownies that you are known for. The ones that you got an interesting reaction with when you took it to a dinner party once.

HELENE: Oh, yes! The notorious brownie story! These brownies were my go-to for holiday buffets and parties. Once, when I brought them to a swanky Hollywood gathering, the host whisked me and my brownies into the kitchen and closed the door.

AMY: Oooh! Wait a second! Helene, is this going to be appropriate for our podcast?

HELENE: PG-13? [laughing] He said to me, “These are going here.” He stashed them high up in a pantry. He said, “These are for later.” In other words, he was hiding them from his friends so he could nibble them in solitude at his leisure after the guests were gone. As Bracken said of women who like to cook, “Stay away from my husband, ladies!” That’s the power of good baked goods.

KIM: Oh, yes it is! Yes it is!

AMY: All I know is, being somebody that doesn’t necessarily enjoy baking or cooking, I really can appreciate someone that does enjoy it. And I’m so thankful, because I like eating it all.

KIM: Mmm-hmm. Yeah.

AMY: Whether you’re totally gung-ho about cooking or if it’s not your thing at all, it’s all okay. Do what you love.

KIM: Yeah, it’s your choice and your life. Yep. I can just keep reading all my beautiful cookbooks and never cooking anything in them, and Eric will just have to live with all the cookbooks!

AMY: So, Helene, it’s been a blast getting to talk with you today about food  and all your stories, and I think with this Sunday being Mother’s Day, Peg Bracken is probably the perfect person to remind us of how hard mothers everywhere (in every generation) work for their families, whether they’re dishing out homemade delicacies or their own best rendition of Hamburger Helper. 

KIM: Bottom line, they were all serving it up with love, as are we. Thank you, Helene. This has been a real delight getting to share your funny stories. Thank you so much for joining us! 

HELENE: Well thank you! And I do want to tell the listeners that I hope you’ll visit my blog. It’s called ThePastrySessions.com. And I do want to tell you that all of the recipes are tested.

KIM: Yes. And we will be sharing all of it in our show notes and on our social media. Thank you, Helene.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode. If you like what you’ve heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast to help us grow our audience and help other book-minded people find us. 

KIM: Visit LostLadiesofLit.com for a link to Helene’s Pastry Sessions blog and subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss a single episode. Tune in again next week to help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

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.

32. All For the Love of Libraries

AMY: Hey everyone — welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my friend and writing partner, Kim Askew. And Kim, okay, it occurred to me the other day that this podcast (and actually, more specifically I guess, our reading habit in general), might just be hazardous to my health.

KIM: Uh-oh. How so? 

AMY: Well, I was in bed one night this week, about to turn off my bedside lamp to go to sleep… the stack of books that was hovering over my head on the nightstand could potentially collapse on me in the event of an earthquake (and we are prone to those here in L.A.). It would probably take a search and rescue dog to unearth me if this pile of books collapsed on me. So I ended up relocating two or three of the topmost books from the stack onto the floor, but let’s just say the book pile is getting totally out of control. 

KIM: Okay, I am right there with you, and I love this conversation, because Eric has been begging me to clean up my nightstand because it was turning into a Tower-of-Pisa sort of situation. And I did, but honestly, if left to myself, I would pile books up all over the house and love it. But he’s a bit of a neat freak as you know, and it’s not the worst thing, though, of course, in the general sense. But anyway. 

AMY: We both, I guess, are fortunate to have neatnik husbands so they kind of offset our own tendencies.

KIM: Yeah, they’d probably love to live together! Just stick us in the other house…

AMY: And we would live in our squalor happily. Mike’s not super thrilled about the state of my bedside, and I will totally post a photo on Instagram to show you the marked difference between his side of the bed and mine. Yeah, it’s funny. I wish I could say that my books resemble the wonderful, perfectly stacked and organized titles that you see on social media, but I just don’t think that I would ever qualify for being a Bookstagrammer.

KIM: Me neither. But I do love looking at people’s pretty Instagram photos of their bookshelves. My bookshelves aren’t color coordinated or in alphabetical order. I’d say it’s maybe glorious chaos, personally. But I often wish I had it in alphabetical order when I’m trying to find a certain book and searching and searching. Usually it’s just right where I looked over and over and finally, I see it. There’s just too many books.

AMY: Yeah, your eyes kind of glaze over. But this point in the podcast is when I sheepishly have to make a controversial confession. It’s going to come as no surprise to you, Kim, but maybe it might surprise some of our listeners. Yes, I have several dozen books piled up by the side of my bed, but I don’t have books anywhere else in the house really. I don’t have bookshelves. Or books.

KIM: You heard that right, everyone. She doesn’t. Have. Bookshelves.

AMY: That sounds so scandalous!

KIM: Ominous.

AMY: Dah-dum!!!! I know that it makes me a really odd bird among book lovers… and I do love books. I just don’t keep books, with the exception of one cabinet where we keep our kids’ books… and I DO have one shelf in my office cabinet where I keep books that were written by friends… or, you know, I have the collected works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Some of the biggies. But those are hidden away in a cabinet. Other than that, I don’t hang onto books. If I buy a book, I read it and I give it away, and I’m happy to give it away. 

KIM: Okay, so I read many of mine over and over again. I loan them out, I refer to them, and the ones I don’t reread, it really just makes me happy to have them. To see their covers and their spines there. But Amy, I know what a voracious reader you are. Why do you not hang onto your favorites?

AMY: I guess to begin with, I very rarely re-read a book and when I do, it’s years later. For example, I just re-read The Great Gatsby, but it’s probably been 20 years since the last time I’d read it, so I don’t understand why I would hang onto the book for two decades just because I might want to re-read it. It just doesn’t make sense. And also, I really love the library. I go to the library at least once a week (that’s even now, during a pandemic.) Growing up, my mom and dad both took me to the library probably once a week as well. I just love the idea that these books are constantly circulating and being read by other people who lead different lives. I feel like books are meant to be read. They’re not meant to just sit on a shelf and collect dust, they’re meant to be out there getting used.

KIM: Just talking about libraries makes me feel really good. I’m actually smiling just talking about them. And my parents used to take me and my sister to the library every weekend too, and I would always leave with the maximum number of books allowed, so I’d carry this huge stack out. When I got home, I would just read and read, and I hated to be interrupted for anything. (Actually, not much has changed, really.) And then when I was in fourth grade, I was asked to assist the librarian with shelving books in the school library because I spent so much time during recesses and lunch there. Even now, yes, I have a ton of books, but I do read so many that I probably went to the library maybe once a month before the pandemic. I don’t have any great libraries in my neighborhood, and definitely nothing I can walk to, so I would actually drive over to this pretty little library in South Pasadena, which is not close, as Amy knows.

AMY: Across town from you. Yeah.

KIM: Exactly. And I used to walk from my office downtown to L.A.’s main branch at lunch before the pandemic. It’s a stunning library. It’s art deco circa the 20s and 30s, and it actually was mysteriously set fire to about 30 years ago. Over a million books were burned or damaged in the fire. Susan Orlean wrote a book about it in her book, which is called The Library Book. 

AMY: I actually took a tour of the downtown library and they told us this anecdote about that fire and that rush to rescue all of these books. I mean these books wound up being completely water-logged. They have a process with which they can dry the books out, so they wound up recruiting freezer space in restaurants across L.A. and they stacked tons of soggy books in the freezers, because once they’re frozen, nothing can happen to them. So all these books were piled into freezer spaces across the city so that then they were able to slowly take the books out little by little and do the process of thawing them out and drying them meticulously, and that saved so much of their collection doing that. It was pretty amazing.

KIM: It just feels very much like an L.A. story. I love that. Um, it also makes me think of Han Solo, but anyway, that’s just me…

AMY: Coming out of the carbonite? Is that what you’re talking about?

KIM: Yeah, exactly. Everything’s “Shakespeare” or “Star Wars.” Anyway, I miss going to the Downtown Library’s ALOUD series too. It’s so great! I saw Rachel Cusk, Hanya Yanagihara (she wrote A Little Life), Ta-Nehisi Coates, and so many more, and I’m a proud member of the Library Foundation. Every year they have an annual Stay Home and Read a Book Ball and it’s extra perfect this year, since that’s really all we can do anyway! So support your local library!

AMY: Yeah. Happy to have it still operating during this pandemic, that’s for sure. One of my criteria any time I moved to a new place, a new apartment, was that it had to be in walking distance of a library. So with one exception (I’ve moved around a few times) but every apartment I’ve lived in (or now, my current house) has had a library just a couple of blocks away. And the fun fact about my current local library, which is about an 8-minute walk from my house, is that it sits on the location of Leonardo DiCaprio’s boyhood home. He actually donated $35,000 to the construction of the library, and so in his honor, they have a special “Leonardo DiCaprio Reading Room,” and there are all sorts of signed posters from him on the walls — posters of him as [Titanic’s] Jack Dawson or from Romeo + Juliet. It makes me smile every time I see them all.

KIM: That is such a great L.A. story, too! I love it! I love that story. My friend, illustrator and author Ann Shen (Amy, you’ve met her), she wrote Bad Girls Throughout History. She turned me on to this great 19th century library video on YouTube. I play it on my TV while I’m reading and it goes on for hours and hours. It’s got a crackling fireplace and a rainstorm and piles of books. And every so often a door creaks open mysteriously. Talk about a mood! 

AMY: So it’s just the ambience of a library basically?

KIM: It’s a room, and it feels like it’s in an old castle or a big old mansion. You can see the fireplace. It’s like a view from one part of the room to the other, so you can see furniture, stacks of books, the rain on the windows. It’s computer generated, but it looks really cool.

AMY: We have to link to that.

KIM: It’s really good. Basically for the last four months, I’ve had the YouTube fireplace thing going non-stop, and when Ann told me about this, I switched to this one and I’m even more addicted. But speaking more about libraries, Amy, I feel like you used to work at a library at one point, right?

AMY: It was my first job, actually, when I was a teenager. It was not quite as thrilling as you might expect for a high school kid because it’s a very quiet environment, obviously, and there were four high school workers on staff, and our shifts never overlapped, so I never had anybody my age to interact with, which is what you want. You want to work at the mall, you know, or somewhere where there are a bunch of teenagers that you’re goofing off with. But it was still a really good job for a book lover. My main responsibility was reshelving books, so I’d basically walk around the stacks with the big rolling cart of books and I put everything back in its proper place. And I really got to know a lot of different authors and genres that way. I shelved a ton of mysteries and trashy romance novels and Tom Clancy kind of books... those were always popular ones that most of the patrons were checking out. There were lots of children’s picture books, too though… that was always a big job. When you would come in and see all those kids’ books on the cart and go “Oh, boy, here we go.” I discovered Edward Gorey’s children’s books on that job, and I remember taking The Gashleycrumb Tinies, which is a book all about children who die gruesome deaths… it was the first time I had seen the book and I took it up to the librarian on duty and I was like, “Are you sure this is supposed to go in the children’s section? It doesn’t really seem appropriate!” And it probably actually didn’t belong there. I think she might have set it aside.

KIM: Your true crime fascination began with Gashleycrumb Tinies. Speaking of children’s books, that makes me think of Anne Carroll Moore. She was the influential New York City librarian who lobbied for children to be allowed to patronize libraries. Prior to that, people didn’t believe children under the age of 14 should even be allowed inside libraries, which is crazy to think about now. They were considered a nuisance. And Anne Carroll Moore (or ACM as she’s known in the literary world) headed up children’s library services for the New York Public library from 1906 through 1941.

AMY: Yeah, there’s actually a really super cute children’s book by Jan Pinborough called Miss Moore Thought Otherwise. It’s all about Anne Carroll Moore’s crusade to start children’s departments in libraries. Moore also wrote children’s books herself, one of which was a runner-up for the Newbury medal in 1925.

KIM: Right, but she was also a really controversial figure, too, in that she was a very powerful gatekeeper in the world of children’s literature. She was friends with Beatrix Potter, for example, but she could be super critical of some children’s book authors. She hated Goodnight, Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, for example! (One that I’ve been reading a lot lately.) She refused to carry it in the New York public library.

AMY: Yeah, wow. I read that book to both my kids every night before bed for YEARS, so I have my own love-hate relationship with that book (trust me), but I really cannot imagine disliking it to the point that you would have refused to allow it on shelves, right?

KIM: Right.

AMY: She also decided that L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and E.B. White’s Stuart Little were not worthy of her library shelves because she just really didn’t like them. She also hated Charlotte’s Web, too, and she didn’t love any of the Little House on the Prairie books! So I don’t know what to think about Anne’s taste in books, but she had some strong opinions there.

KIM: I mean how can you hate Charlotte’s Web? I can see maybe having opinions on the other ones, but, I mean, I don’t know how you can hate Charlotte’s Web.  Anyway, it’s wonderful that she was a champion for children’s literature, but as a woman who could make-or-break books, she also sounds like a bit of a tyrant! Maybe she let all that power go to her head a bit? She’s like the Robert Moses of children’s lit or something! 

AMY: I think you could say that Anne Carroll Moore was equal parts “hero” and “villain.” And I think we could probably devote an entire future episode just to her, and I’m sure we probably will because there is a LOT to say about her, and we are really only scratching the surface today.

KIM: Did you ever watch Party Girl with Parker Posey, Amy? Remember?

AMY: Yeah!

KIM: Right. She aspires to become a librarian and then she gets fired from her job at the library by sneaking in one night to sleep with her boyfriend. But I kind of imagine any infractions you committed in high school were more like… sneaking off to read or something like that. 

AMY: Yeah, I didn’t have any boyfriend to sneak into my library, so I don’t think I was having as much fun as Parker Posey’s character. But yeah, I would kind of sneak off behind the stacks when we weren’t busy, hide myself out of view from the adult librarians working the desk and then flip through books that were of interest to me. You were NOT supposed to do that, though, because even on a slow day at the library, you had to straighten the stacks. “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean…” that kind of McDonald’s motto? So you’d start at one end of the library straightening the shelves. You would make sure all the books were lined up with the front of the shelves and pat them all into place nice and neat, and it’s kind of funny because given the current state of my nightstand, which we talked about, keeping books tidy and orderly is not necessarily a priority for me. But it was a really good first job…

KIM: It almost feels cruel that they would give you a job at the library and then not let you read as much as you possibly could while you were there. I mean, that’s the worst!

AMY: I think it’s kind of a misconception about having a library job. I don’t think librarians are sitting around reading all day. They’re kept busy with their regular job. Another interesting thing I learned while I worked that job, because this was pre-Internet… people would call in to ask questions about anything under the sun. I never realized that you could even do that. I didn’t know that was an option, that you could bother a librarian to look up information, but people would call in all the time with just a question, like, “Can you figure out how tall Abraham Lincoln was?” The librarian would be like, “Sure!” And they’d walk over and look up some books and they’d try to get the answer and they’d go back to the phone and give the answer, so it was kind of like an early Google. I didn’t even know you could do that before I worked at the library.

KIM: It’s so quaint, and it reminds me of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set, where she’s working at the desk where everyone calls to get their questions answered.

AMY: Oh, right! Yeah...

KIM: But yeah, that is so funny to think about. Instead of Google, people were calling an actual person at a library and asking them questions. But another cool thing was you got to see all the books people checked out… it’s like a window into their soul or something.

AMY: Right. You know what else people really loved to check out, though… gobs and gobs of cookbooks. And I didn’t like putting those away because they were really heavy and unwieldy most of the time. They were sort of oversized books. Never liked having to put those back.

KIM: Funny you should mention cookbooks, because in next week’s episode we’ll be featuring a cookbook author. She was really well-known in the 1960s for her witty, sarcastic writing-style and for her time-saving recipes.

AMY: That’s right. Peg Bracken started a bit of a revolution by making it acceptable to not spend your days in the kitchen. We’ll be discussing her I Hate To Cookbook next week with the help of Kim’s good friend and prolific cookbook author, Helene Siegel. 

KIM: Until next time, let us know your stance on collecting books. Is your house filled from floor to ceiling with books like mine, or are you more like Amy and consider the library your home away from home? 

AMY: And what state of chaos is YOUR book collection in? Is your nightstand stack higher than mine? We want to know, so email us or let us know on our Facebook page or Instagram. 

KIM: I would be really happy if we had a whole nightstand stack competition and everyone was posting their stacks of books. So feel free to get in on that.

AMY: I want to see the messiest and the neatest.

KIM: Oh absolutely. Yeah, just share them. All shelves are welcome. We can’t wait for your responses…and for everyone who’s already reached out to us to let us know you’re listening, thank you! It means the world to us! 

AMY: We also wouldn’t mind your reviews of this podcast wherever you listen to us also, hint hint!

KIM: Bye, everyone!

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

31. Amy Levy — Reuben Sachs with Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith

KIM: Amy, I think we’ve both read all of George Eliot and Jane Austen’s novels multiple times, but all this time we’ve been missing out on a novel that was written in response to Eliot’s Daniel Deronda by an author who has been described as the Jewish Jane Austen. How could that be? 

AMY: I know, right? How had we not heard of her? The novel we’re discussing today, Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy, was published in 1888, twelve years after Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. 

KIM: And here’s what Oscar Wilde had to say about the novel: “Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic.” 

AMY: I mean, high praise from a man known for his brutal honesty, wouldn’t you say?

KIM: Mm-hmm. When I first picked up the Persephone edition of Reuben Sachs, I was immediately enveloped in the beauty of the language and the evocative descriptions of the characters and their surroundings. I’d even go so far as to say it was hauntingly beautiful. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s very poignant, and when we tell you more about the compelling and tragic story of its author, you’ll understand why that’s an all-too-apt description. We have a special guest on this week’s episode to give us more insight into Levy and her novel. We’ll introduce her in just a moment. As for myself, I’m Amy Helmes. 

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit. We’ve got a really interesting show for you today, so let’s raid the stacks and get started.

[Introductory music]

AMY: Our guest today is Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith, an author, critic, and researcher based in Cambridge, England. Her articles and reviews have been published in, among other outlets, the Guardian, the Dublin Review Of Books, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and the TLS (she was featured on their cover in January 2020 for her essay on female intellectuals of the 20th century). Ann specializes in writing about and lecturing on 19th and 20th century Cambridge women, including the author we’re discussing today, Amy Levy. You can find more of Ann’s writing at her blog, Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. Welcome, Ann. We’re glad to have you on the show today. 

ANN: I’m delighted to be here, thank you.

KIM: So let’s begin our discussion by telling our listeners a little more about Amy Levy. Would you like to start us off, Amy?

AMY: Sure! So Amy Levy was born the second of eventually seven children in 1861 in Clapham, which is an affluent area of London. Her family was Jewish, although they apparently had a “casual attitude toward religious observance.” Amy showed talent and an interest in literature at an early age. She won a junior prize for a critique of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh when she was just thirteen. And then at fourteen, her own poem “Ida Grey: A Story of Woman’s Sacrifice” was published in a feminist journal.

KIM: Wow, precocious. She reminds me of the episode we did on Nathalia Crane, the child poet.  

AMY: Yeah. I mean, in that case, Nathalia… there’s a question of whether or not she was really writing those poems, but in this case it’s pretty clear that Levy was obviously a very intelligent young woman.  

KIM: That’s right. Anyway, Levy’s family was supportive of her education. She went to Brighton and Hove High School, a day school for girls in East Sussex. And then at 17 she began her studies at Newnham College, an all female college at Cambridge University. She was the first Jewish student at Newnham when she arrived in 1879, but she left before completing her final exams. (And a side note, at that time women could study and attend lectures with a chaperone, but they weren’t given degrees at Cambridge until 1948.) She then published three novels and lots of poetry and essays before taking her own life at age 28. So young — and we’ll talk more about that later. But I did want to note that Oscar Wilde actually wrote her obituary, which really says something about her. But let’s go back a little. Ann, can you tell us more about what is known about Levy’s time at Cambridge and why she may have left?

ANN: Sure. Well, as you said, she went to a progressive girls’ school in Brighton, and that was at a time when well-off families would usually have governesses. And with governesses, the standard could be very variable depending on how good an education they, themselves, had had. So this was a period in the 1870s when new girls’ schools started, and they very much put an emphasis on academic achievement and excellence. Some of those teachers had attended the very first women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, which were just starting, and one of them was very influential on Amy. She was a Classics teacher — she was actually the head mistress — and her name was Edith Creek. She had been at Newnham herself. She was one of, literally, the first five students at Newnham College. She was a hero to Amy, and she wanted to follow in her footsteps. In a way, she was perfect Cambridge material, because she was so bright, she was so hard-working. She was, as you say, a very early achiever in that she had already published her poetry in adult journals, which is extraordinary, I think. But then probably Newnham didn’t quite live up to her own expectations, and perhaps that did have to do with being Jewish. I think at that time, even though the family was very assimilated, a Jewish woman stood out. And she was the first Jewish woman at Cambridge, so I think she did feel a bit isolated in that regard. I got interested in her because of what I write about: the research on the first Cambridge students and the first teachers at the colleges. And she became very friendly with Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, who taught her English literature. I think they developed a close friendship and that’s what Amy enjoyed most about Cambridge, probably.

AMY: You can actually find a lot of Amy’s poems on the Internet, and there was one that she wrote about Cambridge called “Cambridge in the Long,” and it seemed to convey her conflicted feelings about being at Cambridge, whether it was homesickness or feeling like she didn’t fit in. There was a sadness to that poem in that at the very end she writes that “the pain of living is too keen.” That’s already… when she’s at Cambridge we’re already starting to see that. So she decides to leave Cambridge. She moves back into her parents’ house — they were living in Bloomsbury by this time. I think I had seen somewhere, also, that it was possible she left Cambridge just because she was ready to start her work as a writer. So maybe it had more to do with just being like, “I’m ready. I don’t see the need for this as much anymore; I’m starting to publish.”

ANN: Yeah. And I think the year that she left, 1881, is a big year in Cambridge women’s history, because that was the year they were allowed to sit the final exams, and for most of Newnham students and Girton (the other women’s college) that was a great achievement because suddenly it looked as if women were becoming equal to men. They could sit the exams; they had a right to sit the finals. But I think Amy Levy had, you know, she knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a writer. And to sit the final exams, you had to study mathematics, and she had no interest in having to jump through hoops and study mathematics; she wanted to do her writing, as you say.

AMY: She is a girl after my own heart if she was trying to get away from the math exams.

KIM: I know, I was thinking the same thing! If you can’t get your degree anyway, why take the exam in math? Yeah.

ANN: Yeah.

AMY: Her circle of friends, as we said, included Ellen Wordsworth Darwin. She was the daughter-in-law of Charles Darwin). Then there was Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx), and Violet Paget — she was a gay writer who wrote essays on art and supernatural fiction under the name of Vernon Lee. I guess we need to add her to our episode list, because I had never read anything by her. It’s thought that Amy Levy was actually in love with her. 

KIM: Yeah, and Amy Levy first met Vernon Lee on a trip to Florence in 1886. She visited the Jewish ghetto there and it had a huge impact on her. As a result, she wrote a series of essays on Jewish culture and literature for The Jewish Chronicle, including “The Ghetto at Florence,” “The Jew in Fiction,” “Jewish Humour,” and “Jewish Children.” In her essay “The Jew in Fiction,” she criticises the treatment of Jewish characters by different novelists, including Disraeli, Dickens, and Eliot. Ann, do we know anything about how these essays were received by the Jewish community and the writing community, respectively? 

ANN: Yes, I think it’s very interesting, actually. The reason that she went to Florence was she was commissioned by The Jewish Chronicle to go there and report back and say how the Jewish ghetto (which, it was a tourist place; it was a beautiful area to visit, really), so they asked her to go. So that shows you how much trust they already had in her as a writer and that she would report back. And that was the first time, I think, that she’d written about Jewish issues, so that made her start examining how she fitted into the community as a woman. And the political situation at the time in Florence opened her eyes to women who perhaps lived life in a more unconventional way, such as Vernon Lee. Vernon Lee encouraged her to reach out a bit more with her poetry, with the themes that she tackled, to be more ambitious as a writer. And also at that time in London she was living in her parents’ house, but she was very much acting as an independent woman — going to the British Museum, meeting (as you say) Eleanor Marx, Beatrix Webb and socialists and feminists, so that was the circle she was mixing in, and she started to branch out and become more ambitious in her writing. And so, as far as I know in terms of the reception of her work at the time, the fact that The Jewish Chronicle kept commissioning her work shows that they liked it, that it went down well with their readers. So she was taking an intelligent look at their community. She wasn’t seen as somebody who was undermining any things that they felt were important at the time. 

AMY: And then it does seem that with Reuben Sachs, which we’ll be discussing, her perspective on the Jewish culture in London does get a little more complicated, I think. But let’s go back and talk about her first novel, The Romance of a Shop — that was published in 1888, and she wound up being one of twenty leading female authors who were invited to take part in the first Women’s Literary Dinner at Piccadilly, which became an annual event until 1914. And so Ann, you write a lot about the Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. Are those connected in any way?

ANN: Yeah, I like to think they are. I mean, I don’t know for sure. The Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society was a gathering of friends. They were twelve women who all knew each other mostly as the wives of male Cambridge academics. (All our academics were male). But also some of the women lecturers like Ellen Darwin, she had been a lecturer at Newnham; when she got married, she had to give up her work. But women like that, who were very intellectual but also good friends. So there were Newnham women and former students and wives who all had something in common. My feeling is that they knew what was going on in London. So I think it was a Cambridge version of the London women’s dinners. They decided that they’d have these dinners once a term. They’d discuss a set topic. I don’t know what topics they discussed, but I’m guessing they were often to do with literature and the “new woman” and issues of the day (women’s suffrage and things like that). The fact that they had these connections… (and obviously, Ellen Darwin knew Amy Levy and some of the women who were at the Piccadilly dinner.) This was very unusual; women didn’t just have dinners on their own. They always went with their husbands. You could have tea with other ladies in the afternoon, but you didn’t have an evening meal, and you certainly didn’t have an intellectual discussion, but that’s exactly what they did. So I think there was a sort of an echo between London and Cambridge at that time. Intellectual women were saying, “Look, we don’t need men to have intellectual conversations. We actually have better intellectual conversations among ourselves when we don’t have to play the part of the devoted wife and the mistress of the home,” sort of thing. So that, I think, was a nice connection. So that’s how I discovered Amy Levy, really, was that they had similar experiences with women’s clubs.

AMY: It never occurred to me that that was a novel or a sort of revolutionary sort of thing for them to be doing. And in fact, in my head, I was picturing it more as teas. I was picturing it as more of a daytime, “pretty lady,” …

KIM: Ladies who lunch.

AMY: Yeah. That’s the thought I had in my head. 

ANN: But the other funny thing is, in London, they said there were reports at the time that they were speaking to each other through a cloud of cigarette smoke. Of course, in those days, no nice lady would smoke in front of a man. They did smoke, but they would only smoke with other women. So that was a nice thing, that they could be free, they could express themselves and have a half a cigarette. That was how daring it got.

AMY: And also just to think about maybe what kind of conversations they were having about men.

ANN: Indeed.

AMY: To be a fly on the wall!

ANN: Yes, yes.

AMY: So I think this is probably a great time to begin our discussion of Reuben Sachs, which is Levy’s second novel, published in 1888 (the same year that The Romance of a Shop came out). What do you remember about first reading Reuben Sachs, and what was your initial response to it?

ANN: My initial response was how beautifully written it is. It takes you straight into the story of Reuben Sachs and his family life, and you feel the connections between all these people. It’s a little bit shocking, because she very much strikes you with a satirical component of it. She does mention Jewishness, race, the tribal community. And she’s quite funny (but in an ironic way) about the foibles of these families, that they care about money and they care about social advancement. Even Reuben Sachs, who is our hero, he’s an aspiring lawyer. At the beginning of the book, he’s had a nervous breakdown and he’s come back from six months in the Antipodes, but there is this question mark over what’s gone on. Why has he had a breakdown? And the sense is that perhaps it’s because of the social expectations that he is under. He is the “golden child” of the family. He’s expected to become an MP (a member of Parliament). He’s expected to make money. He’s expected to marry well. And all those things probably weigh on him, but in a sense, he doesn’t mind it. So it’s a funny sort of conjunction of humor, but almost with this slight bitterness to it. It’s funny. I mean, it’s funny, but it’s quite striking, with a political edge to it. It’s not something you would expect from a Victorian novel, I think. 

KIM: No, that’s absolutely right. That’s similar to what I felt when I read it for the first time, too. And I think this might be a great place to give our listeners a little overview of the plot. We’ve given them a little taste of it with a little bit about Reuben, but Amy, why don’t you give a stab at (without any spoilers) a little overview.

AMY: Okay. It’s about these two young people of marriageable age who live in London. We have the title character, Reuben, who is the scion of a wealthy Jewish family. And then there is Judith, a poor relation of his by marriage, who has been brought up by The Leunigers. They are Reuben’s rich aunt and uncle. Judith’s own family lives in a less-than-desirable neighborhood and it’s seen as a great advantage for her to be brought up alongside the rest of her cousins. So Judith and Reuben have this sort of unique opportunity to be around each other often in a casual, family setting and they are very close as you would tend to be with somebody that you’ve known your whole life. So, as Ann mentions, at the beginning of the novel, Reuben has returned from abroad — he was sent away by the family doctor to recover from nervous exhaustion caused by overwork — he has ambitions to become a member of parliament). His family, as a result, expects him to marry someone wealthy of their choosing, and they are deeply opposed to a union between Reuben and Judith even though it’s clear there is an unspoken spark between them. I’m going to read a passage from the novel… this is from Reuben’s perspective… he is thinking about Judith and trying to justify the fact that he’s sort of playing her both ways. He is enjoying their flirtation even as he also knows it can lead nowhere: 

She liked him immensely, of course, but she was unsentimental, like most women of her race, and would settle down happily-enough when the time came. He told himself these things with a secret, pleasant consciousness of a subtler element in their relationship; of unsounded depths in the nature of this girl who trusted him so completely, and whom he had so completely in hand. Nor did he hide from himself that she charmed him and pleased his taste as no other woman had ever done. A man does not so easily deceive himself in these matters, and during the last year or two he had been fully aware of a quickening in his sentiments towards her. Yes, Reuben knew by now that he was in love with Judith Quixano. The situation was full of delights, of dangers, of pains and pleasantnesses. A disturbing element in the serene course of his existence, it added a charm to existence of which he was in no haste to be rid.

KIM: In some ways it’s a typical “star-crossed lovers” plot, but one of the things that makes Reuben Sachs stand out from your standard late-Victorian novel is its feminist polemic. You can kind of see that in the passage Amy just read. I mean, it’s clear that Reuben knows that he could eventually hurt Judith, but he’s just going to do it anyway. And, even though the novel is called Reuben Sachs, I felt like, in a lot of ways, Judith was really the heroine of the book. 

AMY: Yeah, this book felt like Judith’s story, and I kept wondering why Levy didn’t use her name as the title of the book. Going into it, I thought, “Okay, this is going to be a whole novel about this man, Reuben,” when really Judith, to me, was the focus. Do you think Amy was making any sort of statement with regard to the title? Maybe this idea that women don’t get to win in the end? (They don’t get the boy of their dreams and they don’t get to be the title of the book, either!)

ANN: That’s a very good point, and I think there’s a contrast with her previous novel, which was published the same year. (I mean, she was just in a frenzy of creativity.) But what’s unusual about Romance of a Shop is that the sisters all run this photographic studio themselves. They’re independent and they don’t need to attract a man. They’re getting on with their lives. But Reuben Sachs takes a more oblique view of the marriage market. It’s a more cynical view and I think it emphasizes the fact that, more realistically for women, particularly Jewish women, was that to have any sense of identity they would have to get married and have children. And they’d have to marry well. Reuben Sachs would be an advantageous marriage for Judith Quixano, because she has no money and she needs the support. She is generously supported by the Leuniger family. Bear in mind that even though Amy Levy is very savagely ironic in this book, she makes it clear that the families are very kind. They have looked after Judith. They have treated her as one of their own. They don’t see her as a threat, even though she might possibly marry the golden son whom they want to do well and climb the social ladder. They don’t dislike her for that or shun her or treat her as a poor relative. They actually treat her very well. And so part of the novel is about the closeness of families. But within families, there is a bit of jockeying for power, for what way of life they aspire to. Reuben has to be the successful son. We have the contrast with Leo, who plays the violin beautifully, but he’s never going to do anything important. He’s never going to make a lot of money, whereas Reuben is their chance. So I think their relationship with Judith, he’s not toying with her. We’d probably see it today as that he’s being very selfish, but in a way, that represents a part of him that’s probably his truer part, but he knows he has this responsibility to the family to climb the ladder to do well. And so the novel is a critique, that it’s as hard on him as it is for Judith. But Judith, as you say, is the heroine. We understand what she’s thinking; we see things very much from her point of view and how she accepts that the love she has for Reuben isn’t going to be possible in the community that they live in.

KIM: That’s actually a perfect segue into getting Judith’s perspective. So in counterpoint to what Amy read with Reuben’s feelings for Judith, I’m going to read a little more about Judith’s feelings for Reuben (and it’s also from the beginning of the novel):

Meanwhile Judith, acquiescent, receptive, appreciative, took the good things this friendship offered her, and shut her eyes to the future. Not, as she believed, that she ever for a moment deceived herself. That would scarcely have been possible in the atmosphere in which she breathed. She had known from the beginning, how could she fail to know? that Reuben must do great things for himself in every relation of life; must ultimately climb to inaccessible heights where she could not hope to follow.  Her pride and her humility went hand in hand, and she prided herself on her own good sense which made any mistake in the matter impossible. And that he was so sensible, was what she particularly admired in Reuben.

Judith sees herself the way society does: that he’s “inaccessible” to her. And, to underline our point regarding Levy’s focus on Judith and women in general, Julia Neuberger writes in the preface of the Persephone edition, “This is a novel about women, and Jewish women, about families, and Jewish families, about snobbishness, and Jewish snobbishness.” 

AMY: Levy is very critical of the day-to-day life of women in the book. It’s very different from Levy’s own life among these intellectual women writers that she was palling around with. The women in this novel are basically kind of shallow — they’re gossiping, playing cards, and shopping. I’d say that Levy’s tone is mocking and cynical, at times. 

KIM: It’s not exactly flattering, but she also shows how the women are fairly trapped in that lifestyle. It’s what’s expected of them. She’s writing about Jewish high society, and as a Jewish author, you would think that Levy might have been lauded for what she saw as a more realistic portrayal of Jewish characters in this milieu, but it actually resulted in a lot of controversy at the time the book was published — people were shocked. And it’s also potentially problematic for modern readers as well. Ann, can you help us by delving into Levy’s portrayal of contemporary Jews in the novel and maybe what she was trying to do with that?

ANN: I think at the time she was criticized, very much, when the book came out, and I think it probably took her by surprise because probably the milieu that she was in at a daily level were intelligent women, writers, people who could understand approaching things in a slightly different way. I think that Levy didn’t see it as an attack on the Jewish community. You have to remember that she herself (as far as we know) she seemed to be attracted to other women, and she wanted to have a relationship with another woman. I think she craved acceptance in a community and to find an attachment to another woman and live that life. But she knew, particularly with Jewish women, that wouldn’t be possible because as far as they were concerned, they had to get married; they had to have children. They couldn’t have a romantic female friendship. And probably Gentile women, Amy felt she wasn’t very attractive to them. She felt, as a Jewish woman, they would look down on her and they would not see her as the same social level that they were. So she felt a bit trapped and she was satirizing the society that made her feel so ostracized. But she didn’t dislike her community. She was very close to her family, to her cousins, to her friends. So the fact that people read the book in a very literal sense to say that she was criticizing the community, I think they just didn’t get it. She was criticizing and satirizing the sort of English society as a whole that commodified women. That made getting money the only important thing. That made climbing the ladder of success the only important thing and sacrificed women in the pursuit of money and power. I think she felt she was making a funny riposte to novels like, as we’ve said, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, which has been called a philo-Semitic novel — she’s trying to create very positive Jewish characters. But Amy Levy thought, “No, that’s just creating another set of cliches. This is what I want to show it’s like, and I’m making a sort of funny, almost documentary-like study of a community and this is how it works, from the very garish furniture to the not-very-well-designed clothes that the women wear, and so on.” I think it’s actually meant to be affectionate, in a funny way, and I think it hurt her when people turned against her for that.

AMY: Yeah, it seems like as a member of the community you do have a little more license to be satirical about your own people, right?

ANN: Yeah. It’s like Woody Allen or Philip Roth or somebody like that. It’s an “in joke” for the community. That’s how I see it.

AMY: You can definitely see that as you’re reading the novel, but at the same time, as a modern reader, you do feel a little uneasy. Like, “Am I supposed to be laughing? I know she meant that to be funny, but I don’t necessarily feel like I should laugh.” And then there are also… the fact that she kind of paints all the different members of the family differently with regard to how they practice their faith. So you have the devout patriarchs of the family. Then you have one cousin who’s basically a nonbeliever; she doesn’t even bother going to synagogue at all. The cousin, Leo, that you mentioned, he’s an artist who’s grappling with what he doesn’t like about the Jewish culture, whereas Reuben eloquently defends the faith at every opportunity. So it feels a lot like she was making the family be a microcosm for the whole Jewish community and how they interact with one another and how they treat one another. They will have their little spats within the community. I think I’d even read that at the time there was a large influx of Eastern European Jews immigrating to England at this time and you could almost sense that there’s a kind of hierarchy. Who’s the “correct Jew?” Who’s the “right Jew?”

ANN: Yeah. Her own family, they did assimilate a lot in English society and they were English people, but they were Anglo-Jews. It was almost like the deal was that you could fit into English society if you didn’t appear too Jewish. You could be Jewish, but you weren’t really allowed to mention your religion or expect to have it respected. They were in an uneasy sort of relationship with the other middle class people that they knew, and as you say, this influx of immigrants caused (as it has done in modern times) a sort of increased racism in general in English society). So the people who were Jewish almost had to play it down in wider society, whereas in the privacy of their own homes and the connections to their own families, they could be themselves. They were on a tightrope, really, between the two different lifestyles that they had and what they aspired to, which often involved them denying their important Jewish rituals and family values. 

KIM: I think that’s really great context to help us understand sort of what Levy’s trying to do here and what her community would have been like, and maybe also, why she was surprised that they were shocked. And I think we’ve probably intrigued our listeners enough that it might be a great time to share another passage from the book so they can get a feel of the beauty of the writing in the book that we describe. Ann, would you like to read a passage?

ANN: Sure. So this passage is from near the start of the book after Rueuben has returned from his travels and is being welcomed with a small family reception, and his cousin, Leo is there. Leo is a talented violin player. It’s funny, because he’s studying classics at Cambridge, but none of the family think that’s very important. But when he starts to play his violin, then the mood changes a little:

Then, all at once, the music broke forth. The great, vulgar, over-decorated room with its garish lights, its stifling fumes of gas, was filled with the sound of dreams; and over the keen faces stole, like a softening mist, a far-away air of dreamy sensuousness. The long, delicate hands of the violinist, the dusky, sensitive face, as he bent lovingly over the instrument, seemed to vibrate with the strings over which he had such mastery.

The voice of a troubled soul cried out to-night in Leo's music, whose accents even the hard brilliance of his accompanist failed to drown. As the bow was drawn across the strings for the last time, Ernest’s solitaire board fell to the ground with a crash, the little balls of Venetian glass rolling audibly in every direction.

The spell was broken; every one rose, and the card-players, who by this time were hungry, came strolling in from the other room.

AMY: It’s almost foreshadowing the fact that Judith’s spell is going to be broken, too, you know, the spell that Reuben has cast over her, the beauty of their relationship... it’s all about to come crashing down, sadly, for her. 

ANN: Yes, because the music is very much tied in with Reuben’s feelings about Judith; that if they could just escape from all the stuff that surrounds them, from the life, from the expectations, that they could soar to a higher level of love and communication. And it’s that feeling of bitterness, in a bittersweet way, that they have such love for each other (it’s very clear) but somehow the spell has to be broken. The solitaire game breaks it up and the card players come in and the family chat commences. It’s a lovely moment, I think, because it shows you the promise that true love could find, and I think it shows something of Amy’s own yearning for a moment like that and how the spell keeps getting broken; the sadness comes back into the happy unity they found.

AMY: Judith had very limited options for her future, and maybe Amy felt that way, as somebody that was attracted to women. She felt like, “Okay, there’s not a route for me,” you know, so in the same way that Judith just has to accept what she’s been dealt, Amy just has to realize that maybe she’s not going to get to have a relationship like that. 

ANN: Yeah. That poignancy of soul mates, that you can feel very close to somebody, and they can be a soul mate, and yet, something intervenes. Society intervenes. You can’t build your life around that person because there are too many expectations of you to do something otherwise, I think. Yes.

AMY: She wrote that Judith would have had to just “open her mouth and shut her eyes and swallow what the fates had sent her.” So basically, this idea that life is a bitter pill for women and their only option is to accept it.

ANN: Yes, and I think it’s also important to say there is a great sadness in the book, but there is also a hopefulness, and I think, without any plot spoilers, the book ends on a hopeful note. Despite everything that’s happened there is promise for the future, and I think part of that promise is that women will be more fulfilled in the future. That they will be truer to themselves. There’s a certain hope that that will take place. That things won’t always be like this.

AMY: Which is true. It did change for us.

ANN: Indeed. Yes. 

KIM: I think we can say it’s not an entirely happy ending, but maybe there is a little hope. 

ANN: Definitely. 

AMY: Of course, Levy’s own ending is not happy, either. It’s quite sad. As we said, she took her life just a few days before her 28th birthday and she left instructions to be cremated, which was very unusual for a Jewish person. 

KIM: Yeah, I think I read she was the first Jewish woman in London to ever request to be cremated, in fact. Ann, do we know much about the final months or weeks of her life and do we know what prompted her to take her own life? I know there are a couple of different theories. What are your thoughts? 

ANN: Well, I think, as you said, she suffered lifelong bouts of clinical depression, and depression was not well understood at that time. I mean, it’s still not well understood, in a way, but people thought, “Oh, she’s a poet; she’s melancholy; that all fits with her.” Nobody, perhaps, took it very seriously, how debilitating it was for her. Her brother had died (had probably taken his life) the year before, it’s thought because he suffered from syphilis. So that’s bound to have affected her. And even though she seemed not to be affected by the criticisms of Reuben Sachs, she put it to one side, she carried on writing and socializing, there was obviously a sadness underneath it all. During this period, the book had come out, she was doing well — it was selling well — and she met the poet W.B. Yeats. He said later about her she was a very striking-looking woman but you could tell the sadness beneath it all. So that’s very telling. He wasn’t the only person who commented that she had a slightly, perhaps manic, side to her. She was working incredibly hard, but there was a sadness underneath it, that perhaps she was holding it at bay. And then the month of August, she’d heard The Jewish Chronicle made a negative comment about Reuben Sachs, and perhaps that just sent her into a spiral of despair. She’d had spirals before and come out of them, but this one, she didn’t get better, and she took her life in September, 1889, so it’s desperately sad, and it’s such a shame because she was actually making a name for herself. At this time, she was going out, she was socializing; she was making plans and arrangements and writing essays and planning to be published. She knew her career was taking off at this point, but she just fell into despair and she didn’t come out of it. So it’s very sad.

KIM: I’m wondering if the issues with the satirical portrayal of Jews is maybe one of the reasons this book isn’t as well-known as maybe it should be? What are your thoughts on sort of why it’s maybe not as well-known?

ANN: Yes, I think it is partly to do with that. It was felt people read it very literally; that Amy Levy would still, some people would describe her as a self-hating Jew. But I think that’s very unfair and I think it oversimplifies what she was trying to do. I think she was trying to show something of the life of her Jewish community. The good things, the bad things. But do it in a witty, literary way, and she was very much placing herself along with Trollope, along with George Eliot and Dickens and people like that, to show people that she could use a literary novel to subvert some of the expectations of Jewish life at the time. She told herself she wanted to be like Zola or Alfonse Daudet, French naturalists. She wanted to do something similar for her own community. So I think if she’d been male, people would have seen the book, perhaps, on a different level, but almost like some women writers, we’ll say today, “Well, women publish more memoirs; women write about their experiences.” But it’s almost like, well, that’s what they’re expected to do and that’s what they’re allowed to do, rather than say, she’s being very clever; she’s subverting expectations of what a woman writer can write about. And she’s been forgotten about and neglected because of that. 

KIM: I agree with you completely, and I think it is a real shame. I hope that at least a few of our listeners will read this book, because honestly, it is so worth your time. It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in the last few years, and as you can imagine, I’ve read a lot of books in the last few years. So yeah, please, please read this book. 

ANN: It’s also worth mentioning Oscar Wilde’s obituary for her. As you said, he saw her work as having “a touch of genius,” and she wrote several things for his magazine. He said, even if you just read her poetry (because you can read her poetry; it’s online, it’s available) he said, “that would be enough to mark the writer as a poet of no mean excellence.” and that “no intelligent critic could fail to see the promise of greater things in her poetry.” And I think the same thing would go, even more so, for her fiction, because she would have developed into much deeper novels. I think she was very much at a beginning period. But the fact that she could write with such extraordinary sophistication and beauty at such a young age shows the promise of greater things that were sadly not to be. She was a Jewish writer who wasn’t afraid to take on some of the precious beliefs of what a woman should be, and that marriage and children were the highest object of a woman’s life. I think that she was prepared to challenge that in her own life, the way she lived her life and how she earned her living and how she had ambitions as a writer and wanted to take on the established writers of the time. And I think that’s very moving when you think how early on that was — 1889 — it was just the beginning of women finding their voice, finding their unique individualism in society and being able to be themselves. The fact that she didn’t fit in so much but that she dared to write what she believed and what made sense to her and what was beautiful to her is very moving, and I think it’s very valuable for that reason. As long as you don’t take it too seriously and feel that she was being entirely serious. She’s being very ironic. She’s being satirical. And it’s just taking it with a pinch of salt. It’s very moving that her family, even long after she died, her sisters were approaching publishers and saying “Won’t you reissue this book? It’s really good.” Nobody who was close to her… didn’t feel she was somehow criticizing them; they felt this was just her and that’s how she wrote and that she should be better known.

KIM: Mm-hmm. There’s always the people that take things too literally, unfortunately.

ANN: Yes.

AMY: Do you have any other favorite lost ladies of literature that you would recommend taking a look at, especially any other Cambridge ladies?

ANN: Yes, well one of the nonfiction things I would suggest is called A Suppressed Cry by Victoria Glendinning, and it’s a biography of a woman at Newnham at the same time (or just after) Amy Levy. It’s a very short little biography, but it brings to life what it was like to be a student at that time. She actually enjoyed her studies there, but she couldn’t make it work. She didn’t stay very long at Newnham, and it’s good to read the story to find out why that was. As far as fiction is concerned, there’s a novelist called F.M. Mayor. She wrote The Third Miss Symons in 1913. Flora Mayor had been a student at Newnham in the 1890s. She then became an actress, but wasn’t very successful. Ended up going back home and living with her parents in the vicarage and becoming a writer. And actually, she was quite happy with her single life as a writer, but she writes about the third Miss Symons as a very lonely woman who never married, who was a bit like Amy Levy — always wanting to find love — and she never found it. So the book is very poignant about what it was to be a single woman, a rather superfluous woman, at the time. And the other one that she wrote is The Rector’s Daughter. It’s almost looking at it from the other point of view, about a woman called Mary whose father is a rector. She’s quite happy living at home looking after her father, and then she falls in love. It’s just how that disrupts her peace and quiet. It’s just an absolutely lovely book, and it very much sums up that era in a really nice way, I think.

AMY: Newnham College is all new to me. I was unaware of it, really, as being a part of Cambridge until we started working on this episode, and now I’m really kind of fascinated by this women’s college and what it would have been like… (what it’s like still) but also what it would have been like in the early days.

ANN: It’s a good year to notice Newnham because it’s exactly 150 years that Newnham was first established, so there’s going to be a lot of celebrations this year. But I should also mention Girton College, because that was the other women’s college. It was outside of Cambridge and it took a different approach to Newnham, but they both sort of grew up together and eventually became incorporated into the university. Newnham is the last all-women college of Oxford and Cambridge, and it’s very much stayed only women. 

AMY: This discussion has been fascinating. It was so fun getting to dive into this author and this book a little bit more with you! Thank you so much for lending your expertise to us!

KIM: Thanks again, we really appreciate you.

ANN: Well thanks so much for inviting me. It’s been lovely.

KIM: Until next week, don’t forget to sign up for our Lost Ladies of Lit newsletter to keep up to date on all our future authors. And if you have a moment, if you could give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast, it would be really helpful. 

AMY: Thanks for joining us everybody! Bye!

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

30. Martha Gellhorn

AMY: Hey everyone! Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And so, we are actually recording today’s episode a week before the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick Ernest Hemingway documentary starts airing on PBS, but by the time this episode airs, it will be readily available for everyone. I live for these documentaries. I’m so excited. I’ve been looking forward to this one for probably the last 10 months … the minute they announced it.

KIM: As soon as you mention Hemingway, I think of the podcast episode we did a few months ago on Stella Gibbons. She actually said her idea of hell was having to go shopping with Hemingway for fishing rods at Harrods (or something like that).

AMY: Yeah, exactly, I know Hemingway is a literary legend, but he’s also kind of divisive. You either probably love him or you can’t stand him, and it definitely goes without saying that his relationships with (and portrayal of) women are both complicated and, at times, pretty problematic. 

KIM: Right, he had some serious “Mommy” issues, didn’t he, as I recall. And he actually had four different wives, is that right? 

AMY: Yep. He was notorious for lining up the next lady in his life before he walked out on the current one, but there is one exception to that: Martha Gellhorn, his third wife — she dumped him after five years of marriage. She was sick of his drinking, bullying and jealousy. (Granted, he did kind of have the next wife pretty much waiting in the wings by that point, but it was Martha who officially ended things.) She was a journalist and author with a career of her own, and she had no interest in dialing back her own professional pursuits to suit him, which is what he wanted from her. 

KIM: The fact that she had this writing career of her own very much reminds me of Charmian Kittredge London, Jack London’s wife, whom we devoted an entire episode to back in March. In Charmian’s case, she did end up putting her husband ahead of her own career, but I’m intrigued by the fact that Martha Gellhorn was kind of like, “No, I’m outta here.”

AMY: For sure, yet in some ways it’s kind of sad that she’s always been best known for her association with Hemingway. Because there’s so much more to her than that. She famously noted, “I was a writer before I met him, and I have been a writer for 45 years since. Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life?”

KIM: Uh, yeah, exactly! And I mean, we did learn the repercussions of that with Charmian, because that’s sort of what ended up happening to her. Had you ever read anything by Martha Gellhorn?

AMY: Honestly, no, I hadn’t (which I kind of feel bad about) but I did get a book of her novellas in preparation for this episode, so I’ve been reading those. She published 14 novellas, 5 novels and two collections of short stories. And we can touch on some of the novellas in a moment… her extensive travels and her experience as a journalist definitely shaped the fiction-writing that she did.

KIM: Ooh, I want to borrow those soon when you’re finished — the novellas. Looking into Gellhorn’s life, completely independent of Hemingway, she’s pretty fascinating on her own. Her mother was a famous suffragette, from whom she clearly inherited that fearless, “take-no-crap” attitude. Martha got her start as a foreign correspondent in 1930 when she dropped out of Bryn Mawr college and moved to Paris. But she got fired from one of her first gigs working for the United Press after she reported being sexually harassed. 

AMY: Yeah, and I was surprised by that fact. (I mean not surprised that she was sexually harassed on the job because we all know that’s not a new phenomenon), but to think of a woman in the 1930s blowing the whistle and not standing for it is interesting and cool. And then, of course, for her to be fired for it is just so maddening, but not surprising. She obviously did not let this slow her down, though. Her journalism career continued for several years abroad, and then in 1934 she returned to America. She was really interested in the plight of the common man, and so when she was 25, she ended up taking a job working for the Roosevelt administration’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration. As part of this gig she traveled all over the American South observing the grim poverty that so many people were living in during the Great Depression. She later used these experiences and observations as a basis for a book of four novellas called The Trouble I’ve Seen, and these are among the stories that I’ve recently read. They reminded me a lot of Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath kind of thing. They’re very grim, and very journalistic in the portrait that they paint. 

KIM: Right, and she may have been a champion of ordinary people, but for a time there, she was actually living in the White House before she even met Hemingway, right? How on earth did that happen?

AMY: I know! Who just gets to go live in the White House? But yes, Eleanor Roosevelt had gone to school with Martha’s mother, the famous suffragist that we mentioned earlier — Edna Gelhorn. Eleanor was very interested in the reports that Martha was making as part of her job with the Emergency Relief Administration, so she invited her to the White House so she could relay what she was seeing to FDR himself. (Sort of “Tell Franklin what you’re seeing,” that kind of thing.) And though Martha actually later got fired from that organization for inciting a riot among unemployed workers in Idaho…

KIM: Whoa!

AMY: Yeah, wow, she sounds like a firebrand! The Roosevelts were fans of hers, though, and they ended up extending an invitation for her to come stay with them for a spell at the White House. So she lived there for two months and she even helped Eleanor with her “My Day” newspaper columns that she wrote. (Sidenote: she was also friends with H.G. Wells. So Martha was hanging in some high circles.]

KIM: Wow. Okay, but it seems really crazy that she’s so associated with Hemingway when she has all this other stuff going on for herself. I mean, wow, how did she have time for him and all of his stuff? And let’s not forget that, like Hemingway, she was a war correspondent, as well, covering every major war for six decades, starting with the Spanish Civil War and ending with the Vietnam War. Wow. She was totally fearless. During World War II she convinced British bombers to let her come along on flights for night bombing raids for example.

AMY: Right, and then her coverage of the D-Day invasion is basically the stuff of legend, and I can’t believe I’d never heard this story before now. Just to set the stage for this, her marriage to Ernest Hemingway was very much on the brink of collapse by this point. It was the summer of 1944. He had even sent her a cable saying, “Are you a war correspondent or a wife in my bed?”). 

KIM: First of all, whoa, and second of all, cables are great. I love getting these glimpses into the things that people would put in a cable! Can you imagine?

AMY: Yeah, that’s true. It’s a funny thing to telegraph. But you can imagine her reaction to receiving it, right? Not happy. And it gets worse for their relationship, because with the approach of D-Day, Hemingway managed to secure credentials to go cover the invasion for Collier's magazine. Gellhorn, though (she typically wrote for Collier’s) she was unable to get official press clearance to cover it because each magazine could only send one reporter. (So he basically swiped her spot for Collier’s). She did not let that stop her, though. She snuck onto a hospital ship by flashing an expired press badge, and she lied that she was there to interview nurses. They let her get on to the Red Cross ship. She couldn’t believe it even worked. But once she was on board, she locked herself in the bathroom of the ship in order to just be able to sneak along for the ride, basically! She stayed there for the course of the night and the next morning, she looks out a ship window and there are the beaches of Normandy! So she manages to get off the boat later by posing as a stretcher bearer. So she’s blending in, but she’s actually helping evacuate patients and all that. She’s doing her part to actually help with what’s going on. But in effect, she wound up getting to the invasion site before Hemingway did… so she beat him to the punch, because all of the other actual credentialed journalists had been kept farther offshore waiting on boats. So her report of the incident wound up being published in Collier’s first. Not only was she the only woman on the beaches of Normandy in the days following the Allied invasion. (It was her and 160,000 men!), she was also the first American correspondent to land on French soil after the troops did. 

KIM: Okay, I feel like giving a standing ovation after that. I mean, that’s incredible! Where is the Steven Spielberg movie about this story? Oh my gosh, this is incredible! It’s movie-making stuff! Wow, wow, wow. 

AMY: So much cooler than just the fact that she was married to Ernest Hemingway. This is the story, right?

KIM: Totally. This is the story, yeah. She also reported from Dachau when it was being liberated, which naturally was an extremely sobering experience, and her accounts of what she witnessed there are almost excruciating to read. She also ended up adopting an Italian orphan boy while she was in Europe. It required assistance from Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt for her to be able to bring him back to the U.S. with her after the war.

KIM: So then following her divorce from Hemingway, she had a string of relationships, including another marriage, but really, her work remained her predominant passion in life. She even wrote, “Be advised, love passes. Work alone remains.” And she continued to report on wars until she physically could not anymore. That was in the 1980s — her eyesight was starting to fail her. I think being in the middle of war zones is where she actually felt most alive. She liked to live on that knife’s edge of danger and adventure. And a conventional life that most women of her era were living would never have suited her. She just needed that adrenaline rush all the time. In the later decades of her life, she called London home, and at the age of 89, like Hemingway, she took her own life — swallowing cyanide. She had been suffering from ovarian cancer and that just became too much for her to bear. That was in 1998.

KIM: Wow. What a life. And having learned all this about her makes me so much more interested in learning more about her. I know there was a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen called Hemingway and Gellhorn, which could be worth checking out. And I’ll do that now. 

AMY: Yeah, I think you can rent it on Amazon Prime. And of course, don’t forget to check out the PBS Hemingway documentary (which I’m sure she factors into) if you haven’t already. I know it’s not going to disappoint!

KIM: So if I wanted to start reading some of Gellhorn’s work, where do you think I should start?

AMY: Well, like I said, she’s wrote five novels including one called A Stricken Field, which is set among refugees in Czecholslovokia just prior to the Nazi invasion… There’s another book, Liana, which is set in the French Caribbean. But I would actually recommend starting with her novellas. Many critics deem her novellas better than the novels even. There’s a collection that came out from Knopf in 1992… and that includes The Trouble I’ve Seen, the one I’ve mentioned from her time working for the Roosevelt administration. That collection also includes The Weather in Africa, which is actually three novellas set in Africa. I expected those to be very “Hemingway-esque,” but they’re not at all. They reminded me more of maybe Isak Dinesen or something like that. I think my favorites, though, are the stories about marriage and relationships. Some are set in England, some in the States. There was one passage I loved from a story called For Richer or For Poorer that I’m going to read, because it will give you a sense of how (unlike Hemingway) she is really able to draw her female characters so well. So this is just about a character who is sort of luring a man in, and I think it’s just very telling:

She watched Tippy with a practiced, almost a scientific eye. She had seen this happen so often: the male blooming, expanding, flowering, and not because one took any real trouble, simply because one listened. Years of successful experiment had taught her that she need, in fact, hardly listen at all. It was done with a gleaming, approving look, while thinking of whatever one chose to think about; with an encouraging or admiring smile — you could always sense, either by their expressions or the note of their voices, when the moment had come to enlarge the smile into a delighted laugh; with an occasional frown of sympathetic agreement. It was unbelievable that women actually went to bed with men to get what they wanted, when all you had to do to ensnare the gentleman was listen or seem to listen. Heavens, Rose thought, while Tippy’s voice droned senselessly around her, how I listened to darling Alan. It was a completely safe and infallible method, and the first thing mothers should tell their daughters.

KIM: It even reminds me of all the dates I had through online dating where I would listen because the guy would just be talking and talking and talking and there wasn’t really much to say, and I wasn’t really interested in saying more because I knew it wasn’t the guy for me, or whatever. But they always wanted another date and they would desperately think that I was interested in them too!

AMY: I agree! I’ve had those conversations. They’re so wrapped up in their own ego that they don’t even get that you’re just like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh!” Just with a smile on your face.

KIM: It’s all it takes, it’s true. She’s absolutely right. For some men.

AMY: Maybe that’s how she landed Ernest.

KIM: It makes me wonder. So this mention of male/female dynamics reminds me also of the “lost lady” we’re going to be discussing next week. Amy Levy wrote a critique of the Victorian “marriage market” in her novel Reuben Sachs, which is set in an affluent Jewish community of London. We’ve got Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith joining us to discuss this one. Until next week, don’t forget to sign up for our Lost Ladies of Lit newsletter to keep up to date on all the future authors we’ll be covering. And if you have a moment, please give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast.

AMY: Those five-star reviews really help! So long everybody! 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. 

29. Jocelyn Playfair — A House in the Country

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

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. The book we’re discussing today was published more than 75 years ago, but in some ways, it couldn’t possibly be more suited for a reader living through the turmoil of the world today.

AMY: I totally agree with you, Kim. You originally lent me this little book by Jocelyn Playfair and I looked at the title (which is A House in the Country) and I thought, “Oh, lovely! This sounds like the perfect idyllic escape from all of the world’s cray-cray right now, you know? Let’s have a charming romp through the country!” And though the book is set in a very pastoral location, at least partly, the circumstances of the story are anything but idyllic. So I was a bit misled by that title -- (actually the introduction of the Persephone version of this book calls the title “misleadingly cozy,” which I think is accurate) -- but I’m definitely glad that I read it. 

KIM: Yes, it’s very thought-provoking.

AMY: I felt like this was one of those books that kind of fell in my lap right when I most needed it, you know? It sheds light on how to make some sense of chaos and uncertainty, which is something that we’ve been living through a lot lately. It’s really a lovely elegy on the human experience and how to find meaning in strange, dark times, and in that sense, I found it comforting.

KIM: You said it perfectly, and I can’t wait to talk about that — and A House in the Country, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music begins]

AMY: So I have this habit when the world gets scary (which it has sort of felt that way for the past four years for me, anyway) … I reach for certain types of books to try to make myself feel better. Usually it’s nonfiction, but I have turned to history and I read about times that were worse than anything that I’m experiencing. So, for instance, I might read about the Salem Witch Trials, or World War I, things like that, and it helps me be able to put things in perspective and be able to say, “Alright, you know what? Those were bad times, but we got through them and so we’ll get through these bad times.” Or at the very least I can think, “Boy, I don’t have it as bad as THAT.”

KIM: I know exactly what you mean. I teeter-totter between stuff like that and lighter fare like Bridgerton-- and maybe that’s weird or maybe that’s completely normal… anyway,  when it comes to this week’s lost lady, Jocelyn Playfair, I almost have to wonder if writing is the thing she turned to for that sort of reassurance. She started writing books in England on the cusp of WWII, and then by 1952, she’d written the last of her 10 books, never to publish again. And with A House in the Country, which came out smack in the middle of that time period, it really felt like she was using the book to sort out all of the doubts and fears and worries she was likely experiencing along with every other British citizen at the time.

AMY: And I think it’s easy for us to forget (especially we Americans) that an Allied victory was far from a certainty. Before the U.S. entered the war, in particular, England was the world’s only hope, and it felt like a David vs. Goliath match-up. It’s scary enough looking back in hindsight, but to imagine living through that time period, you know, the constant stress and terror people must have been under really must have overwhelmed them.

KIM: Yeah, and then you couple that with a sort of eerie normalcy in the midst of all that panic. And that’s what Jocelyn Playfair depicts so well in this novel. This sort of calm dread that was experienced by everyone in England, even people far removed from London. Even the residents of a lovely house in the country. The Times Literary Supplement called the mood of the novel “battered but sincere optimism.” And that famous motto “Keep Calm and Carry On” is what the protagonist of this novel, Cressida Chance, is trying to do.

AMY: She is the Lady of the House at Brede Manor, a fine Georgian house shut up behind these decorative iron gates. But she has opened the gates to allow lodgers into the grand home… Everyone has to help with the war effort, so this is one way that Cressida can really pitch in. The house is filled with a random mix of guests who have been displaced due to the war. The combination of the war and changing times means there is a shortage of servants, and so the beautiful Cressida (who’s in her late 30s — I was picturing Cate Blanchett)...

KIM: Oh, I can totally see that!

AMY: She basically rolls up her sleeves and gets to work, running what’s essentially become a hostel. So there’s breakfast to get on the table and linen to be washed and there are these rows of cabbages that she can see through her kitchen window. They’re in a village that, by day, is peaceful and quiet. And one of the lodgers remarks to Cressida:

“Sometimes I feel the war’s just something one’s read about and — had nightmares over.”

And Cressida’s response is: “And yet you look out of the windows and there are the cabbages.”

So the story is unfolding right after one of the worst disasters of the war at that point in time (The Fall of Tobruk in the Middle Eastern Theater, in which 30,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner). This was seen by everybody as a just devastating turn of events. And there’s this juxtaposition between news from the front (and even the blitz that’s happening in London) and then the more ordinary days that are being spent back at Brede. 

KIM: Right, and that’s what we see playing out with Cressida. She’s trying to keep that intrinsically British “stiff upper lip,” but she can’t manage to shake thoughts of a man she loves who is part of the war effort (note that we say “a” man she loves, not “the” man she loves). Playfair actually bounces back and forth between the life at Brede Manor and the experiences of this man, Charles, who is floating alone and wounded in a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic after the ship he was on is torpedoed and sunk.

AMY: And sidenote: I was really struck by the similarities between the set up of this book and that of Monica Dickens’ Mariana from our very first episode of this podcast, because both books are centered around this news of a sunken ship in WWII, and we, as the reader, are wondering what’s going to become of a certain man who was on that ship.

KIM: Yeah, and it’s really interesting that she actually takes us into the experience of that man in the torpedoed ship in a way that Mariana didn’t, which, it actually goes to a pretty dark place, and it’s very interesting. And it makes me think about how it was unfortunately an all too common event, probably, to be hearing news of this sort. Also, I just wanted to mention what a fantastic heroine Cressida makes. She’s truly the center of the novel and what holds it together, just like she holds together Brede Manor. She’s kind and sympathetic but also really strong and sensible at the same time. 

AMY: Yeah, she’s just very lovely, even-keeled… a lot of the men who are lodging at her house have small crushes (small or not so small crushes) on her. So as I mentioned before, this book felt really applicable to the times we’re living in now. This idea that a colossal horror is unfolding all around us, while we, meanwhile, are somehow removed and holed up in our homes, but still collectively part of it. I couldn’t help but think about the pandemic we’re living through. (And I think we could toss in the political shitstorm we’ve basically been living through in America as well, because I was reading this book the same week that Trump rallied his supporters to go storm the U.S. Capitol and we were all glued to the television.) It’s all so crazy. And yet that quote that I read earlier, about the cabbages, sums it up so perfectly. Here I am reading about this ongoing nightmare and watching it all unfolding in our country and then, I’m still playing in the backyard with my kids, you know? I’m still making dinner. I’m still doing the laundry. Life goes on. And it’s a really weird dichotomy, don’t you think?

KIM: I couldn’t agree with you more, and I always actually wondered how people who lived through the world wars were able to go on somewhat as though things were normal. And now, after living through the last 11 months, I have a better idea. The book also touches on the sacrifices ordinary citizens were forced to make during this time period. Yeah, things seem normal by day, but at night, there’s the blackout, and Cressida has to stay awake on certain nights to watch for fires in the villages should an Air Raid occur (and one does happen in the course of the book, and it’s a very vivid account of this.) And then there’s a character, Miss Ambleside, Cressida’s pampered aunt, who pays a visit. She clearly represents the privileged class who don’t feel as if THEY are to be included among those making sacrifices for the war. 

AMY: Miss Ambleside is this older woman who feels indignant when she’s at the railway station when she finds herself confronted by a poster that reads, “IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY?” (and her journey in the book was so not necessary by the way). Playfair writes about the people who are still taking hot baths up to their necks and hoarding biscuits and using their central heating… the ones who refuse to let troops quarter in their country houses for fear their boots will ruin the carpet. You’re reminded of the people who refuse to wear masks in this day and age … the people who think the rules don’t apply to them. And of the rich Miss Ambleside, Playfair writes: “She suffered from emotional disturbance of the very rich who suddenly find themselves in a dilemma from which money has no power to deliver them.” And that reminded me of today, too, you know, when there was a run on toilet paper last year, it didn’t matter how rich you were… we were all reduced to that same feeling of panic at the empty grocery store shelves, right?

KIM: Yeah, exactly. And there’s this real sense in the book that their world has changed so drastically… that they are living in this strange new normal, which is what we’re undergoing right now. And all things considered, WWII was far worse, far more terrifying than anything we’re experiencing right now, but Playfair’s insights are really prescient. Cressida is musing about the war at one point and thinks to herself: “Funny how often lately it had occurred to her that there was something to be said for the war. It was frightening to consider how enormous personal worries and tragedies would look without the infinitely more immense background of the war to dwarf them into insignificance.”

AMY: Yeah, so that idea of just putting everything into perspective in your life is so true.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Kim, do you remember last spring, we had that amazing good news professionally, something we’d been working on for a long time that had been finally greenlit last spring and it looked like it was going to happen, and then the pandemic brought the whole thing crashing down, which is something that, yes, it was a bummer, but we would have been so much more upset normally, however with everything going on it just felt so trivial to dwell on something like that. 

KIM: Yes, absolutely. It gives you complete perspective on what’s happening in your life versus what’s happening out in the world. She also, in the book, contemplates the hostility between the two sides fighting the war, and it’s pretty easy to transfer those passages to the current political divide right now in our own country. This idea of “what are we even fighting over?” One of the lodgers staying at Brede is a man named Tori, a former concentration camp prisoner, who ends up having a lot of very deep conversations with Cressida about what it all means. At one point he says, “Cressida, there is war now in all the world, not only internationally and with guns and bombs, but in men’s hearts and minds with weapons more dangerous still. In each human being is their own war taking place, a war of thought, of feeling. ….Perhaps for so long the kindness in human hearts has been defeated by greed, selfishness, personal desires, for comfort, power, money, what you like, that can make a man forget so simple a thing as love towards his neighbors.” 

Could that possibly be any more on the mark with regard to the division happening right now in our country?

AMY No, it honestly sounds like something that could have been written today in an op/ed or something like that. The conversations among the characters in this book, meanwhile, with each other and with themselves, really runs the gamut… whether they’re discussing war or romantic love, it all gets quite philosophical, don’t you think?

KIM: Yes, and that’s what ends up making it so much more than just “a house in the country,” which is perfect. Even when Tori says, “It is not enough to be not unkind” — oh my gosh, I think we could liken that to the conversations we’re having today about systemic racism. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly, and Cressida says at one point that she wonders if everything that’s happening, all these tragedies, are the prices they’re “made to pay for being allowed to — to see, instead of merely looking.” And, you know, I feel that way a lot too about the times we’re living in. It’s a strange wake up call. It’s forcing us to appreciate and really see what’s important. To find happiness in simpler things, you know? When you can’t go out, you can’t be with your friends… you have to find things that bring you joy in a different way, right?

KIM: Yeah, this idea of being grateful for every moment. Several of the characters in the book say that explicitly. So we won’t give too much away about the book’s conclusion, other than to say that, like the rest of the book, it definitely also makes you think.

AMY: Yeah, I’m not sure I was in full agreement with decisions made by certain characters, but I think that’s kind of the point of a great crisis. It changes people permanently… and life can never be what it was before. So, anyway, what do we know about Jocelyn Playfair in terms of the war years? What was her experience there?

KIM: Well, we know that her husband, who was an engineer, was abroad for most of the war years. He was serving in Southeast Asia. And her two sons were away at boarding school, so she, like Cressida, was sort of fending for herself a bit during this time period. She was kind of a loner with just a few close friends, so she didn’t have any real social life to keep her busy… she basically just dove into her writing. Her first two books were crime novels. Apparently the second book she wrote in 1940 (it was called Eastern Weekend) had the exact same plot as Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, coincidentally. Like Cressida, she did take in paying guests during the war, too, and she did away with having servants as well.

AMY: And then politically, it seems as though she was very left-wing, bordering on socialist almost, which was probably a bit out of step with the country set she was living amongst, you know? She ended up moving to London after the war, and left off with her writing. She was just done with it — took up other hobbies, basically — and interestingly though, she became much more right-wing in her old age. She apparently said once, “What the world needs is another war.” (And I found that so shocking given the tone of this book.) 

KIM: That’s so interesting. On the right-wing side, part of me wondered if maybe there was some dementia or something making her go right-wing, but the idea of “what the world needs is another war…” On some weird level you can almost see thinking, wow, that was a time that made a huge difference in my life and it made me grateful for things, and maybe people need an experience like that (even though obviously we don’t wish that on people). Maybe somehow she felt that people needed the experience that they had had. So on some level, I guess I can maybe understand where she was coming from with that quote, though I don’t agree we need another war.

AMY: But no, I get that. It’s like a wake-up call. We’ve said that about the pandemic in a weird way. You find the silver linings… you have to find the silver lining, right? I mean, how do you get through it otherwise?

KIM: Yeah, there’s no way that you could go through a year of being at home pretty much all the time without looking inward on some level, I would think.

AMY: And yeah, this idea of privilege. We’re really seeing that play out with the pandemic in terms of there is a serious divide in how this virus is impacting people.

KIM: Yep, on so many levels, from the virus itself to, like you said, jobs and everything. It really is a wake-up call in a lot of ways to many, many ills in our society that are sort of hidden when, or you can choose to not see them when you’re just going about your regular, day-to-day life, which we haven’t done in quite a long time!

AMY: We should mention that Cressida does have a child, a young boy, and he doesn’t factor into the story very much, but it did make me think of my own kids and the fact that you know, you’re going through these hard times and you really have to put on a show in some ways and not let them see how it’s affecting you; not let them see that you’re nervous or worried about anything. They have to just know that they’re safe. It definitely does not give you time to wallow, and everybody’s got their own journey through it all, just like the characters in this book. 

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: So I actually have an interesting anecdote to share about those “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters made famous during WWII in England. People still sell things with that motto on it, like all kinds of novelty items. But despite what we think about that poster now, it actually wasn’t even a thing really in England at the time, because they had made two and a half million of the posters, but that particular poster was a set of three different mottos. And they were saving, “Keep Calm and Carry On” because they knew they wanted that to be the one that they started putting up when things were starting to get really bad. So when the bombing was starting to get bad, they were holding off and were like, “We’re going to use this one when it’s push comes to shove and we really have to motivate everyone.” So they put out the other two mottos first. I don’t, off the top of my head, remember what they were, but they were not anywhere near as memorable as “Keep Calm and Carry On.” They got a lot of negative feedback about these posters because people’s response was sort of what we talked about earlier, just this idea of the common man has to make the sacrifice when the privileged don’t really have to. That was sort of how people were reading it: DO YOUR PART! And people were like, “Well, I have been doing my part. What about the rich folk?” So they got a bit of blowback on the first two motto posters that they had put out and they wound up eventually just being like, “We’re not doing the third one.” They destroyed most of them.

KIM: Are you kidding me?!

AMY: It’s like an urban legend that that was this, like, rallying cry. Most people did not ever see those posters.

KIM: That’s fascinating. So when… Do you know when “Keep Calm and Carry On” became sort of the pop culture phenomenon that it became?

AMY: We can link in our show notes to a few of the articles I found about the origin of that poster, but what I do know is that they really thought there were none left. I think there was some sort of Antiques Roadshow kind of show where somebody came and they had a batch of, like, 15 of them, and that was a big find, because they were like, “We haven’t seen these…” There’s just so few that survive today because they actually destroyed the allotment of them.

KIM: I feel like we could do a whole episode on this, because I feel like it really distills the idea that people have of the British — the “stiff upper lip” and all that. But I wonder what British people (English people) think about that phrase, and whether they feel like it pigeon-holes them… whether they feel good about it?

AMY: I feel like it’s something to be proud of. To be able to maintain that decorum in the face of calamity is…

KIM: I agree. 

AMY: While it might not have been this sort of unifying rally cry for the English during WWII, I think it’s still pretty sage wisdom. I like it.

KIM: So as we said, if you’re looking for something to read that will sort of help you take stock of your emotions in the midst of our current “crazy,” we highly recommend checking out A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair. 

KIM: That’s all for today’s episode. Consider giving us a rating and review if you enjoyed it, and check out LostLadiesofLit.com for further reading material.

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

28. A Short History of Riding Side Saddle

KIM: Hey, everybody! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew, here with my writing partner Amy Helmes…

AMY: Code name: “Valkyrie.” That’s what I’m going to start calling myself.

KIM: I love it... It’s in homage to our “lost lady” from last week’s episode, Charmian Kittredge London.

AMY: Yes. And if you haven’t checked out that episode yet and our interview with biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle, we’d encourage you to give it a listen. Charmian Kittredge was quite the trailblazer, and one of the things we didn’t have time to include in the episode last week was the fact that she was among the first of a wave of women who rejected the idea of riding side-saddle on horses.

KIM: Dunkle actually filled us in on how this completely unnatural practice of women riding side-saddle came out. Let’s play that soundbyte:

[plays clip]

IRIS: Yeah, it was the norm for women to ride side saddle, and Charmian (who really wanted to gallop past young children shouting she was a Valkyrie) she didn’t think it was safe to ride side saddle. So first she solved the problem, and of course, women couldn’t buy pants at the time, so she bought a skirt and she cut it in half and kind of sewed her own culottes so she could ride astride. And then she looked up the history of riding side saddle to find out that it was really just a trend that had started in an English court because the king’s wife, the queen, was disabled and had to ride sitting on the side. All the ladies of the court were like, “Oh, I want to be like the queen!” They started doing what she did and then it just stuck.

[end clip]

AMY: Okay, so just think about the extra level of balance and core strength that you’d have to have to ride side-saddle. I mean, I didn’t know that that was the actual reason it came into practice. 

KIM: Yeah, I just thought it was a modesty thing, or maybe it was because women wore voluminous skirts and dresses, so it was the only way they could sit atop a horse.

AMY: So Charmian Kittredge wrote an article for Out West magazine called “Cross Saddle Riding for Women” in which she tried to make the case for doing away with side-saddle riding. And in that piece, she writes that the queen in question (that was mentioned in that clip), Anne of Bohemia, she suffered from a hip disease which was why she needed to ride this way. So I tried to find out more about this and I couldn’t find any other corroborating information about that. The only thing that I could find on the topic was that Anne of Bohemia rode side-saddle on her way to her wedding in order to “keep her virginity intact,” --  you know, protecting the royal hymen, as it were, which seems pretty crazy, but, you know, at that time in the 14th century, I can  kind of buy that as an explanation as well. That people would somehow think that riding a horse could be a problem.

KIM: Actually, for aristocrats and royalty and things like that, they often did some sort of physical examination of them, so they actually were encouraged not to ride for that reason, if it would look like they had, in any way looked like they had lost their virginity some other way.

AMY: Right, just keep it all “protected” down there, I guess, just in case!

KIM: Horrible!

AMY: But in any case, once Anne started riding that way, it was “monkey-see, monkey-do” for everyone else who wanted to follow the queen, of course, and it’s crazy to think that it wasn’t until the early part of the 20th century that the practice finally ended. I mean, if you stop and think about it, it’s just kind of preposterous and counterintuitive to sit that way.

KIM: Yeah, and dangerous! I mean, “Hey -- why don’t you just perch sideways on a 1500-lb horse!”

AMY: Yeah! Give that a whirl! But it was dangerous in more ways than one. Obviously, you were more likely to get seriously injured if things went awry in any way, but then there’s also just the physical toll that it would have taken on a woman’s body. So Kittredge London wrote in this article, “A side-saddle makes riding a more difficult feat. It increases the danger a hundred fold. It makes perfect poise and harmony of body an impossibility. It taxes the muscles unequally and makes long distance riding harmful.” In other words… get thee to a chiropractor!

KIM: And I can’t imagine the horse loves it either, so if you’re an animal lover, I mean come on. The poor horse is being ridden by someone not centered on its back….that can’t be comfortable.

AMY: As time went on, riding side saddle was seen as the only dignified way for a true lady to ride (especially in European culture)… there were some exceptions. Catherine the Great, famously … There is an amazing painting of her in uniform, sitting astride a horse which is a portrait meant to depict her badass military coup when she dethroned her incompetent husband.

KIM: She’s like, “Yeah, screw this… I’m going to run this country, AND I’m going to be comfortable while I do it.”

AMY: Yeah, totally, and she’s running the show, so why shouldn’t she, right? And, you know, as for that OTHER Catherine the Great “horse story…” (you probably know the one I’m talking about, and if you don’t, you can Google it because it’s too disturbing to mention here….)

KIM: Maybe don’t Google it.

AMY: Yeah, maybe don’t Google it. But just know that that anecdote is completely and utterly false. It’s just misogynistic b.s. that was spread by her political enemies and it ended up getting perpetuated over time, sadly, because whoever’s in power is the one writing the history. But that’s another story, and we’re not going there. So my experience with saddlery and anything else equine-related basically begins and ends with those coin-operated ponies outside the grocery story that I would beg my mom for a quarter to ride growing up. So I’m going to do my best to kind of describe how riding side saddle worked and what the tack was like. I just know that word “tack.”

KIM: Yes.

AMY: That’s what you call horse equipment right?

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Okay, so the earliest side saddles back in the Middle Ages were basically just a pillow and a piece of wood. And the woman always sits facing the left, by the way… not sure why, but I think maybe because\ you mount a horse from the left, so that’s the side you’d be getting on -- or maybe because most people are right-handed. I don’t know. But the ladies were not really “riding” the horse at that stage. They were really just sitting there clinging on for dear life and hoping they didn’t fall off. And there was no way of controlling the horse with that kind of equipment. But there was something, also, called a pillion, which was a sort of cushion that a lady could sit on facing sideways perched behind a male rider.

KIM: Yes, I’ve seen that in movies. And I also remember in the Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath was remarked upon as riding astride, which would have been something out of the ordinary.

AMY: Yeah, which is really kind of perfect for the “Wife of Bath” given her personality, right? Confident, strong-willed, defiant… gotta love her. So getting back to the mechanics of the sidesaddle, the ever-fashionable Catherine de Medici came up with a version that was a bit of an improvement. It involved a pommel that you sort of hook your right leg around, and then your left leg fitted into a stirrup on that side of the horse. Then in the 1830s, a saddle with two pommels was invented. So it kind of hooked both of your inner thighs…(And the only way I can think to describe that -- I looked up pictures -- is kind of like Suzanne Somers’ “Thigh Master,” if you remember that.

KIM: I had one. I shouldn’t have admitted that, should I?

AMY: There you have it! Anyway, so it’s on the inside of your thighs, but it’s a little more curved, so it cradles both of your legs. That way, as a rider, you had a lot more stability and control sitting up there. The problem with this, of course, is if you run into trouble, there’s no easy way of jumping free… especially with all the voluminous skirts. There was a serious risk that you could be dragged by the horse if things went wrong. And also it was much harder to mount and dismount without some assistance. It wasn’t until 1875 that the invention of the “safety apron” came along that was meant to open up if it got caught on these pommels. It’s basically like a hybrid apron-slash-wrap skirt, and it unsnaps if the skirt were to get caught on the saddle. You wear jodhpurs underneath the apron as well… (I did read that the snaps on this apron skirt is where the trend of pearl-button snaps on Western shirts originally comes from. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

KIM: Huh. I just have to say, come on! How many women probably died or were seriously injured riding this way? It’s ridiculous! Uggh, it makes me actually kind of mad. That really fits with the fact that naturally, women began to rebel against this idea of riding this way. I mean it was so dangerous. Especially in the American West, where horseback riding was kind of a way of life. But even in 1905, a male writer in the Los Angeles Times wrote: “The woman does not live who can throw her leg over the back of a horse without profaning the grace of femininity; or grasp with her separated knees the shoulders of her mount without violating the laws of good taste; or appear in the cross-saddle with any semblance of dignity, elegance or poise.”

AMY: Okay, he’s a jerk, and also he’s probably the guy spitting tobacco juice all over the floor, among other things, you know?

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Don’t lecture us about dignity and elegance please.

KIM: Exactly. So women in the Eastern United States were a little more married to the tradition of riding side saddle. It was seen as a more artistic way to ride. And I do get that on some level. I mean, it looks “pretty,” I suppose. I mean, remember the early seasons of Downton Abbey where Lady Mary is riding in her fabulous Edwardian riding habit sitting side saddle? 

AMY: Yeah, I do agree, it does look quite elegant in some respects, at least when I see it in film. And it did require some serious athleticism. But I think the women who lived in more rural areas just didn’t see the point, and why would they, you know? In the late 1800s Annie Oakley (who actually lived for a time in my hometown of Cincinnati and I was obsessed with her as a kid -- but that’s another episode). Annie was having none of it, obviously. So there were definitely women who did their own thing as time went on.

KIM: Yeah, there’s also another woman who was eventually part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, her name was “Two-Gun Nan Aspinwall,” (a great name) who accepted the challenge of riding a horse from San Francisco to New York. She rode astride in a split skirt just like Charmian Kittredge did. 

AMY: The Suffragettes were the ones who ultimately took this issue by the reins, pun intended. They wanted the right to vote, and they also wanted the right to ride a horse however they damn well pleased. They saw the practice of riding side saddle as oppressive. So, for sort of the same reasons that they embraced bloomers, they took up the cause of ending the side-saddle tradition. 

KIM: Yeah, they brought a lot of attention to the issue just as a sort of aside to their fight for the right to vote. By the 1930s it became culturally acceptable for women to ride astride. But there are still people today who enjoy the challenge of riding sidesaddle, and it remains a category of equestrian sports. There’s a famous annual sidesaddle steeplechase race called “Dianas of the Chase” in England.

AMY: I saw some pictures of that event in The Tatler and everyone just looks so posh. I have to admit I could see myself attending (on the sidelines) and wearing tweed of some sort. That sounds fun. And you know, even though the notion of riding sidesaddle is preposterous to me on one level, when I see it being pulled off, I am kind of in awe.

KIM: Yeah, first of all, I think that an idea of a costume party where we do the “Dianas of the Chase'' for our outfits after Covid would be amazing, and I think we need to put that on our list of things to do after Covid. And also, there’s a difference in knowing someone chooses to ride that way as opposed to it being the only allowable option. But Amy, you can dust off those tweeds next week, if you want — because we’re heading back to 1940s’ England and checking out yet another lost lady. This one is Jocelyn Playfair, and her novel A House In The Country.

AMY: And it’s not at all what you might expect from the title, is it?

KIM: No, it’s absolutely not, and we can’t wait to tell you guys all about it. It’s a quick little novel, so perfect for checking out in advance between now and next week if you have time and want to do so.

AMY: Until then, don’t forget to rate and review us, and consider sharing our podcast with anyone you know who might like the conversations we’re having. 

KIM: Or hey, a shout-on social media is always helpful for us to get the word out! And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more fun stuff to read about! Bye, everybody!

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

27. Charmian Kittredge London with Iris Jamahl Dunkle

INTRODUCTION

AMY: “Behind every great man is a great woman.” It’s a well-known platitude, but Kim, what do we think of it?

KIM: It’s kind of annoying, actually. Wouldn’t the more accurate wording maybe be, “behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes”?

AMY: Yeah, for sure. I think so. In any case, the woman we’re discussing today, Charmian Kittredge London, has always been relegated to the status of “the woman behind the man,” but when it comes to her famous husband, Jack London, she was every bit by his side (and was sometimes leading the charge). Smart, fearless, and ahead of her time, she was adventuring and writing right along with him — not to mention helping him shape his own published works. Her first book, The Log of the Snark, is a vivid and insightful account of the two-year sailing voyage (a sometimes harrowing voyage) that she and Jack charted through the South Pacific. She has always been eclipsed by her husband’s star power, however, so let’s drag her out of his shadow today, shall we?

KIM: Absolutely. So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, everyone, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes, and we’ve got a fantastic guest with us today to discuss Charmian Kittredge London’s fascinating life story. 

KIM: I can’t wait. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Iris Jamahl Dunkle, the author of Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer, which was published last year and is the first full-length biography to be written on Charmian London. Based in Northern California, Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She was also Poet Laureate of Sonoma County from 2107-2018 and has published multiple collections of poetry, including West: Fire: Archive which challenges preconceived, androcentric ideas about biography, autobiography and history. (And Charmian Kittredge London factors into this work as well.) Her work has been featured in Tin House, The San Francisco Examiner, Fence, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Split Rock Review and the Chicago Quarterly Review to name just a few. Iris, welcome to our show!

IRIS: Thank you so much! It’s great to be here!

AMY: So, it was such a pleasure to read this biography of yours, I have to say. I discovered after you wrote an article about Charmian for Electric Literature, and I’m so glad that I pursued that a little further and checked the book out, because I absolutely loved it. I tore through it in, like, two or three days. I thought it was really compelling.

KIM: I completely agree. You really brought her remarkable story to life in a way that I was gripped with every page, so thank you for that!

IRIS: Thank you so much!

KIM: So can you tell us a little bit about how you came to know of Charmian Kittredge and what inspired you to want to tell her story?

IRIS: Definitely. There’s really two little stories that lead to this. The first is, I grew up in Sonoma County, which is where Jack London State Park is located, and I went there on a field trip in sixth grade and kind of got to know Jack London as the first writer I ever met. Little did I know, though, by visiting that museum, that there was another writer that I was meeting that day, and that was Charmian. Because they didn’t depict her as a writer in the museum. So fast-forward years later, I’m at that park and looking at these photographs that are on the garbage cans. They’re of Jack London on a hillside — it’s an iconic photo. And I was like, “That’s really strange. I wonder who’d taken that photo?” And I was doing some research for a poem that I wrote and found out that Nelle Griffith Wilson (the poet I was researching) was friends with Charmian, and I was looking through her poetry book and found the same photo attributed to Charmian. And I was like, “Oh my gosh! Charmian took this picture!” So I reached out to a Jack London scholar and I asked them, “Did you know that Charmian took this picture?” And they were like, “We never really thought to ask that question.” And that’s when I was like, “Oh my gosh. What else did they not think to ask??!!”

AMY: Did I see somewhere that you actually worked at that museum? For some reason I had it in my head that you were a docent there or something, too, for a while.

IRIS: I did. I worked as a volunteer leading their book club, and so I brought Charmian’s books to the museum and we read them together. And I spend a lot of time at the park, because I’m kind of a book nerd. I’ve been volunteering there for years, because I’ve been a Jack London scholar for most of my adult life.

AMY: That all makes sense now. And I love that story about you visiting when you were a kid, too, and little did you know that you would be devoting so much of your life to writing about that place. One of the things about your book that you do so well is you cultivate this instant connection with Charmian right away. I knew basically nothing about her going into this, and by the time I finished reading your prologue, I was so emotionally invested because you set things up in such a way that you show us how in her later life she was kind of betrayed by people and in one instance cruelly scammed by various writers of her husband Jack’s biography, his life story — including the famous writer Irving Stone.

KIM: Yeah, that’s a heartbreaking anecdote, actually, and I wondered if the prospect of finding the truth and doing her justice, did you find it intimidating at all in light of the fact that she’d previously been so misrepresented and misused by previous biographers?

IRIS: Honestly, yes, it was really daunting. I mean, trying to write anyone’s life is daunting because you want to get it right, but writing the life of someone who has been forgotten, really, from history or misremembered, puts even more pressure. But honestly, I got really mad at Irving Stone, and that chapter, that first chapter, I had to rewrite like 10, 15 times, because I was really mad at first. And if you read, actually, all of the archival material around it, his actual letters to her, it just makes you furious.

KIM: He’s like a villain in a movie. I mean, yeah, absolutely. That is such a betrayal and so premeditated. Ugh, yeah.

AMY: He basically rifled through her secret belongings in the home when she was out. And it was disappointing, too because you’d like to think … He was the biographer of Lust For Life, the Vincent Van Goh biography that made him famous, basically, and you’d like to think that he was a great writer who does these people justice and then it really made you take a second look. And also, Rose Wilder Lane, I felt a little disappointed about her treatment of Charmian with regard to her biography of Jack. So I can imagine how you must have felt.

IRIS: Yeah, well, and if you think about those two characters, Charmian was not the only one who was wronged by them. So going back to Vincent Van Goh, the family of Vincent Van Goh actually were very, very upset by the work of Irving Stone because of the false, the untruths he was circulating about Vincent Van Goh. And if you’ve ever read Prairie Fires, the amazing biography about Laura Ingalls Wilder, the truth about her daughter, Rose, comes out as well. She doesn’t get a very good name in that book, for sure. 

AMY: But anyway, moving back onto Charmian, she was born in 1871 and she was essentially a California girl through and through. It seems like the West Coast really shaped her. There were several other women in her family who were gifted writers, right?

IRIS: Yes. Both her mother and her Aunt Ninetta. Her mother and her family came over from Wisconsin and they came over the Overland Trail to Utah and then Charmian was born in Wilmington in Southern California. But her mother, from the time she was very young, published poetry and short fiction, and Charmian kept all of her stories with her. There’s a beautiful poem called “Charmian” that she wrote for her daughter when she was, like, six months old, it’s really… anyone who has a child can really relate to it. But her Aunt Ninetta published in national magazines as well, including East Coast magazine. She wrote a novel about their life in Utah but ended up not getting it published. And she was really, really, a big part of The Overland Monthly crowd in the Bay Area.

AMY: And that was like a literary scene?

IRIS: Yeah, it was the main literary scene in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially relating to Berkeley around the turn of the century.

AMY: So before her love affair with Jack began, Charmian was an independent, financially self-sufficient young woman with a paying job. (She worked as a stenographer and was just starting to venture into writing.) But she’d also traveled by herself cross-country via railroad and she’d toured the great cities of Europe. She loved sailing and horseback riding. And there’s a quote from your book that really brings her personality into sharp focus. This is a recollection from a young neighbor of Charmian’s who reported seeing her when he was 8-years-old. And he recalled: “The first glimpse of Charmian Kittridge sparked a bright windy morning in Berkeley when, with tresses flying, she galloped past our cottage on Dana Street astride a white horse, shouted, “I’m a Valkyrie!’ to a startled child, and vanished down the highway in a cloud of dust.” What a badass she is!

KIM: She sounds SO COOL! 

IRIS: Yeah, don’t you just want to hang out with her?

KIM: So you write that her aunt Netta Eames had very liberated ideas about sex, and that’s something that she definitely passed on to her niece. They weren’t prudes when it came to sexuaity at all, we learn in the book. And on the flip side of that, history often makes Charmian out to be this loose woman who stole Jack London away from his first wife. What’s the real story of how they got together?

IRIS: Well, just to start off, Charmian was someone who was very comfortable with her sexuality, and as you said, her aunt and her uncle had an open marriage and Nanetta really believed in Victoria Woodhull's idea that a woman should be able to own her own sexuality and her own desires. So that was something that shocked me when I read it. I was like, “Oh, who knew ladies were like that back in the day?” And when I started to read about Jack and Charmian getting together, I mean… when Charmian first met Jack he was fresh off the boat, literally, from sailing to Japan, and he was a sailor, you know, like kind of bow-legged and not so refined. And so when she met him, she was like, “That’s Jack London?” But they had a luncheon together at Young’s restaurant down by the Ferry building, and they instantly hit it off as far as conversation. Jack London loved reading banned books and at the time, Tess of the D’Urbervilles [by Thomas Hardy] was a banned book, and he found out that she had a copy and he was like, “Can I come over and borrow it?” and she was like, “I guess! Sure!” He ended up coming by what she called her “den,” which was her room, and they just talked books for hours at a time. They found immediately that they had this, like, intellectual attraction to one another and this connection. I mean, his mind was like a jar full of bees and hers was exactly the same, and they would just ZING, ZING, ZING off each other in conversation. And so once they had that they felt a really, really strong attraction.

AMY: And he was single at the time?

IRIS: Yes, he was single when they first met. And they had this date set up in the future, like, a few weeks out, and all of a sudden she gets this note from Jack: “Uh, sorry, can’t make the date… I got married.” It was out of the blue. He had married Bess Maddern as a way to settle down and have some children. He thought that she had good bone structure so they could have great children together.

AMY: But clearly, he couldn’t get Charmian out of his mind…

IRIS: Like you previously said, Charmian went back East, travelled all over Europe and then came back. When she came back, she got invited to Jack London’s party. He had these parties up in the Berkeley hills. It was just, like, him, and a bunch of artists and a pot of spaghetti that Bessie made, with the small children. And so Charmian came and she immediately asked Jack to a fencing duel. He didn’t know that she had studied fencing at Mills College. She was quite good. So she challenged him, and he was like, “I got this…” and lo and behold, they had a match and she kicked his butt! He was so shocked that he ran over and kissed her, and so that was the beginning of it. Now, Jack London at the time was probably kissing a lot of ladies, but there was something about their connection from the den that carried over, and this affair started. They were in the same circle. It wasn’t like they were never seeing each other. The Overland Monthly, that literary crowd, they all intermingled at all of the events around the Bay Area, and so they were constantly seeing each other, and eventually it just started to become this really fiery, beautiful relationship where they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. And they wrote the most intense love letters that I have ever read, and funniest that I’ve ever read in my life. 

KIM: And she’s literally the opposite of what it seemed like everybody was being told you’re supposed to be at that time as a woman. She was doing everything that you weren’t supposed to do, and of course that’s incredibly enticing! I mean, how could he not fall in love with her?

IRIS: Yeah! It’s so true. And what’s really interesting is that they called each other “Mate.” They reason why is because of that connection. So he saw in her someone who was like a man, right? Somebody in his time period who didn’t follow female gender norms, and so she was what he called “game.” If they were going to go on an adventure, she would go first, you know. She’d be like, “Let’s do this.” She had no fear and always sought adventure and just was really, really intellectually engaged all the time as well. So it was a really interesting pairing, for sure. 

AMY: So, after some time he manages to extricate himself from his marriage, but Charmian does have to wait a while for that and kind of keep it on the down-low that they are together, but they do eventually get married, and for her, it was basically like being romantically involved with a national celebrity … a global celebrity…  which kind of complicated things for their courtship. He was a living legend and so they literally had the early 20th century version of paparazzi chasing after them on their wedding night at the hotel. Following that, she was doomed to be relegated to the public role of “Jack London’s wife,” but it seems like Jack was the one person who viewed her very much as his intellectual equal. 

KIM: Right, I mean, she basically took over as Jack’s personal assistant, she was his editor, his literary sounding board, and in some cases, it seemed like he even “sub-contracted” out some of his writing to her. Would you tell us a little bit about their working partnership? It was really important, and do you think her relationship with Jack ultimately encouraged or impeded her own writing pursuits?

IRIS: That’s a really good question and it’s kind of at the heart of where my study was, because what I realized when I started doing research into Charmian, the amount of help she had given Jack London in his writing… that was something that no one had ever talked about before. So I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’d better really check my facts on this one.” So I started really documenting whenever there was some sort of collaboration. So beginning with The Sea Wolf, which was the first book Jack London worked on while they were together, he’s writing to her… this was within a year of their relationship, he is writing to her asking her to help him switch the magazine version of The Sea Wolf into the novel version because it’s repurposed and it has to be changed around. In his letter he’s like, “Go ahead and make whatever changes you’d like. I trust your instinct.” So that kind of quote in the beginning, I’m like, “Oh, wow. That’s Year One.” So this idea that she was his secretary, which has stuck in Jack London scholarship for so long, was infuriating to me as I started to go deeper and deeper into this, because she had a better education than Jack London first, and second, she actually was the editor. That’s what she was trained to do. One of the ways that Jack London composed was...he composed in his head a great deal and so people were like, “Oh, he’s a genius, he just sat down and wrote the book in one draft!” Which is a bunch of bull honkey becuase he actually would go through several drafts with Charmian. They would talk through stories all the time. They were constantly talking about his work. And then much later, he started relying on her more and more. When they were writing on the Dirigo, which was a ship they sailed on from Baltimore around Cape Horn to Seattle, they worked on The Valley of the Moon, and they had done all the research for that book together and Charmian’s full pages of description were placed directly into that novel and she notes that in her diaries so there’s clear evidence of that. But you can see her input in so much more of that book because of the experiences and the way that it depicts a woman. It’s really the only book from that time period that depicts a woman that’s actually, like, a real woman and the reason why is because it was written by a real woman!

AMY: Yeah, Jack basically was like, “You’re really good at writing descriptive narrative, why don’t you just take on this part.” Who would have thought that he would do that? Everybody just attributes it all to him!

KIM: That picture of the two of them working together in the book and they’re looking into each other’s eyes and you can just see the intellectual stimulation. It very much seemed like meeting with each other on an intellectual plane and working together.

IRIS: Absolutely.

AMY: If our listeners know anything about Jack London, then they probably know about The Cruise of the Snark, which is his telling of the couple’s famous sailing trip around the world. I thought it was really interesting to discover that, of the two of them, it was Charmian who sort of willed this trip into being, is that right?

IRIS: That’s absolutely right. She’d come across Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum when it first came out in the early 1900s and she saw his exhibit when she was in Buffalo at the Pan-American Exhibit, and so when she got home, she had this dream of sailing around the world. And then when she met Jack, they both were very nautical. They both loved to sail on the bay, and so that was one of their dreams they had together was, “Oh, let’s sail around the world together.” Their relationship began with that dream and it kind of became the center of their lives.

AMY: But as you write, Jack was basically like, “Yeah, wouldn’t that be cool? At some point we can do that.” It was like a “bucket list” sort of thing, and she’s like, “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go do it!” And he was like, “Oh, okay. Yeah!” So she kind of lit the match on it a bit, which I think is cool.

IRIS: Definitely, yeah. She was ready to go. As I said, she was “game,” and she loved to travel. It was the time when she felt most like a writer, when she was traveling. 

KIM: Yeah, so on top of being able to hold her own on board the Snark, she was also kind of kicking Jack’s ass in other ways, too. There’s this surfing anecdote about Hawaii. Can you tell the story for our listeners? It’s great.

IRIS: Definitely. So they were in Waikiki when they first got to Hawaii and they had had a difficult voyage there. So one of the surfers wanted to teach Jack and Charmian how to surf. So they spent all day trying to learn how to surf on 75-lb wooden surfboards, which just sound awful, and it turns out that Charmian was able to stand up even before Jack. Jack also surfed, but the way that it was recorded in Jack’s account, and this is all in Charmian’s diary. Of course, she always recorded when she beat Jack in cards or when she did something adventurous that he couldn’t really pull off… she made note of it, but she didn’t publicly do so. So he did it finally as well, but ended up getting the worst sunburn of his life and was in bed for three days. But the way he depicts it in his Cruise of the Snark, his account of their Snark journey, it’s only him surfing; not Charmian. He totally omits her.

AMY: Of course. All right. Badass Exhibit A: “I am a Valkyrie.” Badass Exhibit 2: beating him at a fencing duel. And then Badass Exhibit 3: Getting up on the surfboard before he did.

IRIS: Again, we all just want to hang out with Charmian now.

AMY: Yeah, for sure.

KIM: Absolutely. 

AMY: And as you say in your book that omission about the surfing incident “...would re-occur throughout Jack’s account of the trip. … his feat of surfing on a ten-foot wooden surfboard would not have looked so adventurous if his small, fit wife had also accomplished the same thing.” We should also mention that Charmian basically taught Jack how to ride a horse, or at least, be way more comfortable on horseback than he initially was… It felt like she wasn’t just matching him step-for-step, but not only that, really besting him in a lot of areas. 

IRIS: Absolutely.

AMY: So we know they had a great intellectual and professional partnership, this couple, but did they manage to hold onto that love and passion that you described throughout the years? After all, Jack was seen as something of a philanderer.

IRIS: Yes, they did, actually. It was something that Charmian recorded everytime they had sex in their journal.

AMY: I was wondering about that! In this biography you have a very specific detailing of when and sometimes where…

IRIS: Yeah, it’s even more specific in the diary, so they… they called them “Lollies.” That’s their code word. It was very important to Charmian for them to maintain that intimacy. She actually would make her own lingerie, and they loved to dine naked when they went to hotels. It was a big part of their lives, their intimacy. They even on the Snark, which this was a very small ship and there were six other people on that ship — on that yacht — and they had sex almost every day. So I don’t know how they pulled it off. It probably was pretty awkward! 

AMY: There was a restaurant booth in there, too, as I recall.

IRIS: Oh, yeah. In Sacramento at the fair, they were at a restaurant and they were upstairs and people were dancing down below and they found a little intimacy there. 

KIM: Wow, intellectual… professional… sexual… it’s all there. So Iris, we were wondering if you might read us a short passage from Charmian’s book, The Log of the Snark, just to give our listeners an idea of her writing style.

IRIS: You bet, I would love to. This is a short passage from about a year into their journey, so this is 1908 and they’ve just arrived in Bora Bora. I thought I’d read this because it really gives a sense of her description. And Tehai and Bihaura, the people she’s going to mention, are two of the people they’re traveling with.

After Tehai and Bihaura had been set ashore at their request, Jack said to me: “What do you say we go over for half an hour or so?” Ernest took us to the long jetty, and we wandered in the soft cool air, attracted by music, which was accompanied by a concerted, regular chug as of some dull and toneless instrument. The grass grew to the water’s edge, and on this village green, by the forgotten graves of the decaying Mission church, we beheld an idyllic pastorale of youths and maidens dancing under a spreading flamboyante to the strange, rhythmic chant. The maids were all in white, garlanded with sumptuous, perfumed wreaths of allemanda and blumeria and tiare, mixed with drooping grass-fringes, the men likewise garlanded, and girdled in white and scarlet paréus. They moved in twos and threes, arm-in-arm, closely around the mouth-organ musicians in the centere, like bees in a swarm. The curious chug-chug was made by a measured grunt-grunt! grunt-grunt! of the dancers. There was witchery in it all — the wheel of graceful revolving forms, twining brown arms, bright eyes and white teeth glistening in a soft and scented gloom that the moon had not yet touched; and the last least veil of enchantment was added by flitting soft-glowing lights amongst the dancers’ heads. These spots of soft radiance were curly fragments of phosphorescent fungus, culled from dead and dying cocoanut trees, and set in red and silken hibiscus blossoms, worn over the ears of these flower-like women — curled flowers of captured moonshine, sometimes tender, luminous blue; sometimes evasive green, and again, mere phosphorescent white. 

KIM: That is so sensuous and evocative! Aah!

IRIS: Can I give you a contrast? Now this is Jack’s depiction of the same exact scene in his book The Cruise of the Snark:

Under the rising moon we came in through the perilous passage of the reef of Bora Bora and dropped anchor off Vaitape village. Bihaura, with housewifely anxiety, could not get ashore too quickly to her house to prepare more abundance for us. While the launch was taking her and Tehai to the little jetty, the sound of music and of singing drifted across the quiet lagoon. Throughout the Society Islands we had been continually informed that we would find the Bora Borans very jolly. Charmian and I went ashore to see, and on the village green by forgotten graves on the beach, found the youth and maidens dancing, flower-garlanded and flower-bedecked with strange phosphorescent flowers in their hair that pulsed and dimmed and glowed in the moonlight. Farther along the beach we came upon a huge grass house, oval shaped, seventy feet in length, where the elders of the village were singing himines. They, too, were flower-garlanded and jolly, and they welcomed us into the fold of little lost sheep straying along from outer darkness.

AMY: Hers is so much more poetic.

IRIS: Right?

AMY: And maybe it’s the way that you read it, too, being a poet, that it was lyrical!

KIM: Can you talk to us a little bit more about the differences between the two and actually how it sort of plays out in the complete pieces that each of them did about that voyage?

IRIS: Definitely. I think it’s important to realize that when Charmian’s entering these places she’s already an other, because women were not found in these areas at this time; white women traveling were not often the ones who were the travel writers. There was a woman that came before her named Isabella Bird, who was an amazing woman. If you haven’t read Isabella Bird you should check her out. She wrote about what were then the Sandwich Islands — Hawaii. And she traveled all over the world, including Korea and the Far East, but she wrote about Hawaii from the perspective of a woman, so she saw it differently than somebody who was in the dominant part of society, right? And so when Charmian was in these places, she saw it differently. She also had an eye for beauty, right? She had an eye for seeing things. Like, she paid attention to what kind of flowers they were; she didn’t just say that they were wearing flowers, they were hibiscus flowers with these glowing phosphorescence in the middle. Her attention to detail is very poetic. And although she did write some poetry and it was terrible (she was a terrible poet), she was very good at travel writing because not only did she seek adventure, but she knew how to capture that adventure on the page. 

AMY: As a biographer, Iris, you were fortunate that Charmian recorded so much in her personal diaries. She suffered a lot of heartbreak in her life, not the least of which was related to her desire to be a mother. 

IRIS: Definitely. One of the most important stories I wanted to tell in this book was the story of the child that Jack and Charmian lost: Joy Baby, as they called her. It was an important story that I couldn’t imagine why it was erased, and so when I started researching Charmian… She got pregnant right at the end of their Snark journey. When they came home, she was like, “I don’t feel very good,” and she found out she wasn’t sick with malaria; she was pregnant. And so she was so excited for this baby and was told all along that nothing was wrong. But when she went into labor… first off, Charmian was a very small woman, and the baby was over nine pounds, so a very large baby. So they had difficulty delivering the baby. They used forceps, and meanwhile, during this time period when a woman’s giving birth, she’s completely out, right? You’re not awake at all. And so they used forceps and messed up on baby Joy’s spine — the top of her spine — when they’re delivering her, and then, Charmian doesn’t deliver the placenta so she starts to bleed out on the table. So she’s rushed into emergency surgery. So unfortunately, baby Joy died 38 hours after she was born, and Charmian never got to see her. And then, on top of that, the doctor who did her surgery to deal with the placenta scarred her uterus so that she could no longer carry a child to term. But she didn’t know that, and so she kept trying and losing children for years to come. But she so desperately wanted to become a mother, and the diaries she wrote about that period of being in the ward and hearing all the babies crying and her milk coming in… just the pain she suffered, the depression she suffered from losing her child… it was so touching to read, and I had never seen anything like that about the Londons, so for me, it was a very personal thing that needed to be a part of this book.  

KIM: Absolutely. It was a heartbreaking and unforgettable part of it, and I feel the same, too. That’s part of her story that really needed to be told, and I’m glad that you were able to share that, as hard as it was to read it, too. So, getting back to another aspect of their relationship was her spending all this time helping him with his writing, and it really ended up coming at the sacrifice of her own writing. Amy and I wondered if that caused any tension between them? And when she did finally start really being able to put herself first, professionally speaking, when did that happen? When was she able to do that?

IRIS: You know, it was really a tough thing. When she was on the Snark was when she started to realize “Yeah, I really want to get back to being a writer.” She was a writer before she met Jack. It was really hard to do! She was in charge of Jack’s correspondence; she was in charge of Jack’s books; it was a lot of work. They did have a servant who worked for them. He did help Charmian with some of her typing, which eased up some of the work, but then she wasn’t there to help edit, right? That was her role as well. So there was a lot of tension. When she would back off at all, Jack would get upset because he needed her. She was part of his writing process. Towards the end of his life he started to get sicker and sicker, and that’s when she started to take a stand. He started to have renal failure, so he was very irritable, and she was like, “You know what? I’m just going to write my books.” She started to really commit to her life as a writer about the time of the Dirigo. Around 1912, about four years before Jack London died, she started to really focus on the fact that, “You know, I’m going to be a writer as well. And that’s what I wanted to do.” But she really was of two minds. It took a while for her to be able to let go of that role, even after Jack died. It was really difficult for her to just… she couldn’t let go of the stewardship of his career and his works, you know. She still didn’t have all the time to devote to her writing. 

AMY: After The Log of the Snark came out (which was well-received by critics), she also had two more books published. One was called Our Hawaii, which was another travelogue type book, and then she also wrote a biography of her husband following his death. But those books didn’t really do as well. So even after Jack’s death it seemed like, as you mentioned, a lot of her time was still consumed with being the protector of his work and his legacy, but she was able to carve out a new life for herself after he died, would you say?

IRIS: Yeah, she did, and in fact, she wrote four books. Our Hawaii was two different editions, and the second one was quite different. So when she was going to write the biography on Jack London called The Book of Jack London, which was a two-volume biography that she wrote about him on the urging of Jack London’s editor. So he had asked her to come take the train to New York and work with him about that. She was also in charge of dealing with all of the rights and copyright and everything, and writing the end of some of his books. So when she’s in New York…. A few years before Jack died, they had gone to a show at the Orpheum Theater in Oakland and it was Harry Houdini’s magic show. Jack was enamored; he was like, “That guy is so cool!” And went backstage and of course was like, “I’m Jack London!” So they all end up having dinner with the Houdinis. Harry Houdini was also married to a woman named Bess. They became friends, and when Jack died, Harry Houdini sent a letter of condolence to Charmian. So when she was going to New York, she mentioned to him that she was going to be there and he was like, “You have to come to my show.” So she went and sat in the front row with these tickets, went backstage afterwards, and Harry Houdini fell instantly in love with her. They started seeing each other all the time. Meanwhile, Harry Houdini is married. He invited Charmian on the first date to go to dinner with him and his wife, and she was like, “I don’t know, this is kind of weird.” But they ended up having a several-week-long affair, very, very well-documented, again, in her diaries. She called him her “Magic Lover.” But what she realized is Harry Houdini, much like Jack London, was really a charismatic and kind of self-absorbed man, and needed a lot of attention and needed a lot of her energy. She left New York for a little bit, went back up to Mt. Desert Island where her father was from and her relatives lived, and really came to terms with the idea of, like, “You know, I don’t want to get on this train again. I actually want to focus on me.” So when she went back, she was like, “Sorry, Harry, it’s over,” and went back to Glen Ellen and basically broke Harry Houdini’s heart.

AMY: That’s amazing. I love that whole anecdote. It’s crazy that she had these two amazing men in her life, even if that one was only brief and it ended on a kind of very weird note, as I recall.

IRIS: Yes.

AMY: But she also wanted to realize this dream of building her dream house, the dream house that she and Jack had always intended on building that, sort of, they didn’t quite complete during his lifetime. Can you talk about that?

IRIS: Yeah, so in their life together, from the time they got together they wanted to build this mansion called The Wolf House. And they did. They built this amazing mansion that no one had ever seen before. They spent all of their money on it. And then several weeks before they were going to move in, it burned to the ground. And during their lifetimes, both Jack and Charmian thought it was arson, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that these forensic scientists realized that, in Glen Ellen, it gets to be over a 100 degrees in August and the linseed oil that they had been putting on the floors, they left the rags next to the house and they combusted. And the house went up in flames because it was covered in linseed oil at the time. So that was a huge loss for both of them. Luckily, none of their stuff was inside because it was weeks before they were going to move in, and so Charmian dreamed of making a home where she could house all of their artifacts and really make a museum that would not only honor Jack’s life, but also honor their life together, to tell their story. Because in her first version of her biography [of Jack] it was called The Story of Us. It was the idea of both of them, because she understood that it was both of them that made the adventure. So she started working on The House of Happy Walls, which was a house she built so that it would never burn. I don’t know if you keep up with the news in Sonoma County, but we have a lot of fires here. She built this house over a decade long, slowly, with profits that she slowly earned, and the house became this amazing reflection of her. She loved to live in a place of beauty, and so the House of Happy Walls was really her final act of creating a place of beauty; a museum for Jack London, but also a home that was exactly what she wanted. She had dishes from the South Seas that had once been Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and used the coloring from those to make an aqua-colored kitchen and the tile in the dining room is all this turquoise color. There’s a fountain in that room. Upstairs, it looks like the belly of a ship, because that was the place that she loved to be. There were huge fireplaces and there were nautilus shells over the light bulbs. Everything’s just specific and totally an act of art. It’s amazing. And just a side note about that place: that is now a museum, The House of Happy Walls at Jack London State Park, the very museum I went to when I was in sixth grade. But several years ago I was asked to be part of the committee for them to refurbish it, and I was so excited. I gave them my manuscript before it was with a publisher to use as a reference, and that’s why now, you walk through and you see baby Joy’s bootie (so she’s in the story), all of Charmian’s feats and accomplishments… the whole top floor is called Trailblazer Exhibit and it’s so that little girls that go there like myself later on, will now see this kind of role model that I didn’t get to see. I started crying the first time I walked through, I was so excited. It was just like, “Oh my gosh.”

KIM: You should feel very proud.

IRIS: Thank you very much. I do.

AMY: Kim, I’m seeing a road trip at some point in our future, because I’ve never ever been there and I would love to visit. 

IRIS: Oh, we’d love to have you! We’ll go wine-tasting, too!

AMY: Absolutely. Sounds fun!

KIM: So we mentioned her passion for protecting Jack’s legacy, and you talked a little about that. Is there anything else besides the House of Happy Walls that is also Charmian’s legacy that you think people should know about as well?

IRIS: I think one thing (and this is also something I learned from writing the book), is that I considered myself to be a feminist my entire life, but it wasn’t really until I started researching Charmian that i realized that I kind of had stereotypes for what women were like at the turn of the century. And when I met Charmian in the “real,” as I call it, I realized that all of these preconceived conceptions I had of what women were like then were absolutely wrong, that of course women were just like they are now and of course, they weren’t recorded because they weren’t following “the rules.” It was really the first time I felt like I had truly done something to correct history in some way, and it felt like I got more out of the book than even anyone else who’s ever going to read it, you know? I learned a lot about what it means to be a woman in this world today. 

AMY: I feel like, reading your book, you brought her to life so well that as I mentioned, it took me about two or three days to get through this, and by the third day she felt like my friend...she felt like my gal pal. She was so cool. And I can only imagine if I felt that way, how you must have felt about her spending years getting to know her, poring through her diaries and really understanding her. I mean, you must have a really special connection with her in your heart. 

IRIS: Definitely.

KIM: So, Iris, we know that you’re a poet as well. Was switching gears to writing a biography a challenge? 

IRIS: Well, you know, it’s interesting. It became kind of part of my process. So I originally did not approach this as a biography. I was working in the archives, just curiously, because I do archival work for my poetry. The first thing I found was the Dirigo diaries, which are super lyrical. They were never published as a book. So I was reading them, and I couldn’t … I had to respond by writing poetry. So what happened was, I actually wrote poetry about all the artifacts as I was working through it, and about the process of trying to find a life that’s been buried by another. And so it became a whole book project, so I kind of wrote two books at the same time, because as a poet, I had to write a poem first, and then write prose.

KIM: That’s really cool. 

AMY: Is that the collection that you recently had published?

IRIS: Yes, it’s called West: Fire: Archive, and it talks about not only Charmian’s life, but also it talks about the fires that we had in Sonoma County and the disasters that have ravaged the West through generations. And kind of the myth of the West that we have; this whole phallocentric idea of what the West was like, the single narrative.

KIM: Do you have any other projects on the horizon?

IRIS: Yeah, so I’m working on my next book proposal and it is on another lost woman of literature named Sanora Babb. So Sanora Babb wrote this amazing book called Whose Names Are Unknown that she wrote in the Thirties while she was working at Arvin Sanitary Camp outside Bakersfield dealing with all of the refugees coming from the Oklahoma Panhandle where she had grown up. She was a writer and she worked in the camps, really connected with everyone and wrote this amazing novel. But she had shared her notes with her boss, which was Tom Collins, and one day they had a writer visit named John Steinbeck and he borrowed a lot of her notes. In fact, he quotes that he used these writer’s notes in his book. Sanora had a contract with Harper Collins and she was flown to New York that summer to finish the novel. (I mean, how awesome is that?) But a few weeks in, her editor took her into his office and said, “I’m so sorry, we’re going to have to cancel your contract because there’s another book about the Dust Bowl called The Grapes of Wrath and we can’t have two books about the Dust Bowl.”

AMY: Girl...now you’re making me angry!

IRIS: Yeah! And then it gets worse! She didn’t publish it after that. She actually was friends with Ralph Ellison. They worked on it together, but then after that, she put it in a drawer and it didn’t get published until 2004, the year before she died. It’s such a good story about the Dust Bowl. Because my family’s from the Dust Bowl and when I was growing up, my grandmother was like… I read The Grapes of Wrath and I’m like, “Grandma! It’s so exciting! I read a book about our people!” She was like, “Steinbeck didn’t get it right.” I was like, “You’re just grumpy, Grandma,” and she was like, “No, he didn’t.” And she was totally right! He set it in the wrong counties … it wasn’t the Dust Bowl that actually happened. All of the different types of people that were working in the fields … the women had these strong roles. None of that’s in The Grapes of Wrath. 

KIM: I am dying to do an episode on that! Wow, that’s incredible!

AMY: Yeah, that sounds amazing, and once again, literally a woman getting left behind in the dust.

IRIS: Yeah.

AMY: Jeesh.

KIM: Iris, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about Charmian Kittredge London. Everyone, go read Iris Dunkle’s biography of Kittredge London, then follow it up by checking out Kittredge London’s Log of The Snark!

AMY: Yeah, Iris, thank you so much! It was so fun chatting with you, and I’m so glad we got to finally know Charmian and that she’s now part of my vernacular.

IRIS: It’s been such a pleasure talking with you both, and I’m subscribing to your podcast because I love what you’re doing. Thank you!

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

[start closing music]

KIM: For more information, 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: 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.

26. Dear Film Industry, Please Consider Adapting These Books by Women

AMY: Hey everyone, welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. So Amy, a few episodes back we talked a bit about “Bridgerton,” and it got me feeling all nostalgic for when you and I used to binge costume dramas together.

AMY: I think we should back up and first explain how our love of BBC miniseries is what sparked our friendship in the first place. As I recall it, I got dragged along by a colleague of mine to a media “networking” event (which, I never used to go to things like that), but he begged me to come along with him.

KIM: Our friend Matthew.

AMY: Yes. And Matthew and I were sitting at the bar just sort of like, “Why are we here?” I looked four feet away and I saw you in the middle of the crowd, standing there with your glass of wine with a smile on your face, but just like, “Oh my god, I don’t know anybody.”

KIM: I actually didn’t want to go at all. My boyfriend at the time was like, “Go! You need to meet new people and get out there.” I was trying to look for a job in L.A. I had moved without one. And I did not want to go all the way across town, because in L.A., that’s a huge deal, but I went to this MediaBistro event. I got my glass of wine and then I stood there, looking around, wishing I had not come. Until….

AMY: Until I said hello, because I was like, “This girl needs rescuing. I cannot sit here and watch her flounder.”

KIM: You felt sorry for me, and I needed someone to help me in that moment. I was actually desperate and alone! [laughing] And you! You made friends with me, and we hit it off!

AMY: It was during our conversation that we realized we had this mutual love.

KIM: Yeah. Of “Masterpiece Theater.” 

AMY: [laughing] Yes.

KIM: And also, just to add a little context, there are people that love “Masterpiece Theater” in Los Angeles, but it’s hard to find them. I mean, it’s a big city. It’s hard to find your tribe, so it was kind of amazing to me that I actually met someone who totally was into “Masterpiece Theater.”

AMY: “Masterpiece Theater” is kind of like code for “This person is going to understand everything that I like.” 

KIM: Yes. Exactly. They love to read, they’re an English major like I am, they see the world in a similar way. Basically, we became “Masterpiece Theater” buddies.

AMY: Yes. That actually leads us to our discussion topic for today’s episode which is “Which books by women authors would you love to see adapted for film?”

KIM: Right. Great question, and so Amy and I decided to each choose some books that we’d love to see turned into a movie or miniseries, and we’re going to share them with each other. So, Amy, do you want to go first?

AMY: Sure! So the first book I picked was Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. It’s the story of hellbent social climber Undine Sprague. She’s an American beauty from a new-monied family and she has this never-ending quest for social success. She leaves a series of husbands in her wake in the process of trying to conquer society. And like all Edith Wharton novels, this one would be so visually stunning with all the filthy rich characters living in both New York and Paris. 

KIM: Oh, yeah. That would make an amazing miniseries or movie, for that matter.

AMY: And actually, we might not have to wait that long, because apparently, Sofia Coppola will be turning this one into a film. I guess she’s working on it.

KIM: Please let that be true. I mean, that would be incredible. 

AMY: Yeah, it would be good. Okay, so what did you come up with?

KIM: Besides adaptations of every book we’ve done an episode on so far, let’s see… I would really love to see an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Rose In Bloom. It’s a sequel to her novel Eight Cousins. The heroine in the book is Rose Campbell. She’s an orphan and heiress who goes to live with her wealthy relatives who all live near each other. She has various love interests, and she has to decide between one cousin who’s everyone’s favorite; he’s really handsome but troubled — and another, who’s sort of the underdog bookworm type. There are all these aunts and uncles and cousins with various personalities. It would be such a fun miniseries. I would love to see it adapted.

AMY: Okay, I’m going to make a confession though: I’ve never read it.

KIM: Oh my god, I have it! I think this is my mom’s copy from when she was younger that I actually have. I can loan it to you and you can read it!

AMY: Okay. Yeah. I’ve only ever read Little Women.

KIM: Yeah. I think most people have only ever read Little Women. Anyway… So what’s another one that you picked?

AMY: Okay, so, with the success of “The Queen’s Gambit,” it got me thinking about another story set in the1960s, that kind of era. This one is set in Paris, and I think it could be a fun film. It’s The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. 

KIM: Oh my god, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? That’s brilliant! I love it, that would make a great miniseries! Absolutely, yeah.

AMY: So like my first pick, Custom of the Country, this one is also about a young American who ends up going to Paris looking for love. It’s really funny, it has a sort of “Bridget-Jonesy/Sex in the City” vibe. It was a bestseller when it came out and I know at some point we’ll probably devote some time to it in a future episode. I can totally picture this movie with that swinging, 1960s French yé-yé pop music in the background, and just the fashion and the colors. I think it would be really cute.

KIM: Yeah. So my next one is The Little Duke. It’s by Charlotte Mary Yonge, and it’s on our list of possible lost ladies episodes because it’s wonderful. It was published in 1854, and I loved it as a child. I think it was another of my mom’s books from her bookshelves. I have this gorgeous hardback copy from back then, and I should loan it to you, Amy, because I think Jack and Julia might like it. It’s set in the 10th century, and the title character, the Little Duke, is Richard, Duke of Normandy. (He’s the great-grandfather of William the Conqueror.) In the book, his father was murdered (as he was in history) and then he’s essentially kidnapped by his overlord, King Louie, and becomes a playmate of the king’s spoiled children. The character of the little duke is just so well done; you feel really committed to his journey, and it’s really a moral and historical tale. And actually, this is really cool, Mark Twain said it inspired his book, The Prince & The Pauper. So I think it would make a great adaptation.

AMY: It’s so long ago; that would be interesting to see something that far back.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah, it’s not as common. I guess some people might think it’s a little saccharine. I don’t. I think it’s beautiful.

AMY: I know this next book gets put on every list of books that need to be made into movies. I really don’t know why it hasn’t been adapted yet. It’s The Secret History by Donna Tartt. 

KIM: It was supposed to be made? A long time ago, right?

AMY: I had read that Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne were originally planning to write the screenplay for this one.

KIM: Wow!

AMY: The director who optioned it was Alan Pakula. (I don’t know how you say his last name) But he optioned the film rights, but then he died, and so it all just went nowhere. 

KIM: Okay.

AMY: And then in 2002, Gwyneth Paltrow and her brother wanted to make it with Miramax, but that didn’t go anywhere either.

KIM: Right.

AMY: And then more recently, Bret Easton Ellis and one of Tartt’s old classmates at Bennington College, Melissa Rosenburg (who I believe is some sort of producer/director), they wanted to turn it into a television series. I don’t know, though. Apparently the adaptation of Tartt’s other bestseller, The Goldfinch, kind of got less-than-stellar reviews. I didn’t even bother seeing it because it got such terrible reviews.

KIM: They’re so different though. I mean this one needs to be made. I’m up for that. I mean, I think this is a moneymaker for whoever decides to do it.

AMY: It’s set at a small liberal arts college, and it revolves around a murder that happens among this group of kind of young Bohemian “cool kids.” You would cast this movie with beautiful young actors and actresses, and it would have a very Dark Academia aesthetic, because the characters in the book are all Classics majors, like Greek and Latin classics. So I could see what this movie would look like, and it would be really cool.

KIM: It would be brilliant. I think now is the perfect time.

AMY: Yeah. Your turn.

KIM: This one is for “Masterpiece Mystery.” Sarah Caudwell’s “Hilary Tamar” mystery series. I read them a while ago, and they’re wonderful. They’re very British, very clever and really funny. And the books are: Thus Was Adonis Murdered, The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder and The Sybil in Her Grave. And the narrator is a professor of medieval law at Oxford. Hilary Tamar is the narrator, and we never find out his or her gender, so that’s a mystery all the way through (his, her or their gender). And the mysteries revolve around his four former students who are now practicing barristers and the characters are just so charming and the mysteries are so fun. There’s all this wordplay and inside jokes about British society. And the covers are illustrated by Edward Gorey, so I mean, how perfect? It would be great for Masterpiece!

AMY: I love that idea. They could go either way with the casting.

KIM: Absolutely. Oh, it would be so fun! Maybe we should adapt this for ourselves?

AMY: Yeah. Would be good. Okay, my next book… this one is really kind of kooky. It was published back in 1915 and it’s called Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, about a lost society of women living in a remote part of the world that are able to reproduce asexually and they’ve never had men in their midst for 2,000 years because the men were all killed in a volcanic eruption. So it’s kind of that land where Wonder Woman originates from… it’s kind of like that combined with maybe Planet of the Apes, which is a weird comparison, but it’s kind of like that because these two male explorers happen upon this community. The men are taken prisoner, but they come to find out that the women have created this utopian, perfect society. It’s very sci-fi. The men wind up forming romantic attachments on the island, and that does not go very well. But it’s a very feminist story, so I think it’s very of-the-moment, even though it’s a bit wacky.

KIM: I want to read that, and I think we should also probably do an episode on that.

AMY: Yeah. For sure. So listeners, we’d love to hear your recommendations for miniseries you think we ought to watch, so if you have any favorites that are already out there (any past BBC productions or “Masterpiece Theaters”) let us know what your favorites are.

KIM: Yeah. You can share them in our Facebook group, or on Instagram. And books by female authors you’d love to see adapted for film? Tell us what you think. We want to hear that!

AMY: I’m pretty sure next week’s Lost Lady of Lit would not have wanted to sit on the couch for hours at a time watching television, unlike us.

KIM: No, she was far too great an adventurer for that, and thank goodness. She was busy literally sailing around the world with her literary superstar husband (but sadly, she tends to get lost in his shadows even though she, herself, was a published author and had an incredibly intriguing life.)

AMY: We’re talking about Charmian Kittredge London was a bona fide BADASS. So we’ll be discussing her and her most famous work, The Log of the Snark, next week, and we’ll be joined by the pre-eminent authority on Charmian London, poet and biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle.

KIM: I can’t wait for that!

AMY: So don’t forget to rate and review us where you listen to this podcast, and we will see you next week everyone! 

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

25. Margaret Wolfe Hungerford—Molly Bawn with Jessica Callahan

KIM: So Amy, I was wondering, have you read James Joyce’s Ulysses?

AMY: Yes, or rather, I guess I should say I tried, because it was a pretty difficult go, and I don’t think I fully understood half of it. But have you read it, Kim?

KIM: I did. I read it in grad school, and I’m so glad I read it and discussed it with a class and a professor, because it really helped me make sense of it all. And, if I remember correctly, it actually took a whole semester to read it, too. But absolutely worth it.

AMY: But, you know, our listeners might be wondering right now why we’re talking about James Joyce. He’s not exactly lost….nor is he a lady.

KIM: True, but this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” author is, and one of her novels, Molly Bawn, happens to be mentioned in Chapter 18 of Ulysses. More on that later. 

AMY: That’s right. Margaret Wolfe Hungerford was a 19th century Irish novelist who specialized in Victorian-era romance novels. In fact, she wrote at least 57 known works, and possibly there were more that she wrote anonymously. We should note that Wolfe Hungerford (also known by her nom de plume, The Duchess) wasn’t exactly celebrated for great character development or depth, but we will say her books are very fun to read. They are filled with humor and really quippy banter. And isn’t that kind of what we want sometimes? Some escapist fare? (Especially these days.)

KIM: Yeah, her books are real page turners, which is why she was an incredibly popular novelist in her day (thus, as we mentioned, her novel being name-dropped in Ulysses, one of the most critically acclaimed books of all time).  

AMY: But we’re guessing most people breeze right past that reference to Molly Bawn in Ulysses. So we were curious to learn more about The Duchess and exactly what made her novels — including Molly Bawn — so insanely popular with Victorians. We brought on a special guest for this week’s episode who is going to help us dig into all that. And bonus, she’s of Irish descent, so it’s only fitting that with St. Paddy’s Day right around the corner she jumps in on this discussion of an Irish “lost lady.”

KIM: So, Amy, let’s raid the stacks and get started! 

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]

KIM:  Who better to welcome to the show this week to chat about romance novel Molly Bawn than our good friend of many years (and fellow English major) Jessica Callahan? She is Vice President of Development at Crown Media Family Networks, home to Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, Hallmark Drama, and the on-demand streaming video service, Hallmark Movies Now. During her time at Crown Media, Jessica has directed the development of over twenty Movies of the Week. Prior to her time at the network, she spent a decade at Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions producing Movies of the Week for CBS and ABC. Before transitioning into television in 2006, she was an editor of romance and mystery novels at Penguin Group in New York City. Welcome, Jessica! 

Jessica: Hi! Thanks for having me, guys!

KIM: Okay, so thank god we’ve all had the Hallmark Channel to get us through this pandemic. I know it’s only March, but is it safe to assume you’re already hard at work on Christmas movies for this coming year? 

JESSICA: Yeah, we had a very small respite in January, but honestly, it’s never not Christmas at Hallmark. It’s always Christmas, but, you know, we’re here for your romantic needs all year long!

AMY: Is it every hard to have it be Christmas all year long?

JESSICA: Yeah! It’s exhausting, because you just have to sort of keep yourself in that spirit on some level, and we make so many of them that it’s very hard to figure out a new way to bake cookies or a new way to make a snowman or a new way to get your characters into these very sort of traditional norms that we all know but also to keep them feeling fresh and to make them feel organic within the story. So I’ve made anywhere between 8 to 6 in a year (just Christmas alone — that’s not including the out of holiday franchises), but yeah, it’s rough! Once you just get done with it, to start thinking about Christmas the next year and to keep it going… it’s a little too much sometimes!

AMY: And then you actually have Christmas in your own life to celebrate.

JESSICA: Yeah, and that’s like the craziest part because we get done with making the movies in October. Like October, beginning of November, so by the time we’re coming out of it and we’re thinking about spring movies, Christmas is actually all around. The stores are decorated! The carols are on! People are asking what you want for Christmas and all that. So it is funny and it does sort of happen every year in the same way. So it’s fun and yet really kind of weird at the same time. 

AMY: Okay, so lucky for you with all this Christmas overload, we are switching gears. Next week is St. Patrick’s Day, and since your last name is Callahan, we knew we had to bring in the “Irish girl” for this episode. I’m just wondering, how strongly do you identify with your Irish roots? Do you bust out the soda bread and corned beef next week?

JESSICA: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My mom is half Irish. Her father was Irish descent; my dad is half, because his mother was half and his father was half. So there’s definitely this pervasive Irish American-ness to both sides of my family, and we actually would celebrate St. Patrick’s Day like an Easter or a Thanksgiving growing up. It was a very big part of my childhood memories. We would not only eat the corned beef and cabbage and wear the green and all that, but my mom used to buy me a corsage back in the day. It would be a green carnation with the white ribbons around it. She would pin it to my coat and so everybody knew all day long that I was a little Irish girl. So I have really very ingrained memories of that. My grandfather used to say that the worst thing an Irish person could do was to forget where they came from. So just sort of knowing Irish history and knowing the history of Irish Americans in this country was sort of ingrained in me very early, and so there’s always sort of a bit of a lens through which I look at American history, and it’s definitely through my Irish heritage. So, yeah! Begosh, begorrah! I totally am!

KIM: So given all that, have you read many classic works from Irish women authors, and had you already heard of Margaret Wolf Hungerford before this?

JESSICA: I hadn’t heard of her before this, so I was pleasantly surprised because when you talk about classic Irish literature, you think of Yeats; you think of Oscar Wilde; you think of James Joyce. There are these names that sort of just pop into your head, and not one of them are female until you get to the 20th century and then you finally get to Edna O’Brien or even Iris Murdoch, who I don’t necessarily think of as an Irish writer because she didn’t really grow up there. She was more of an English writer. But this was the first time I’d ever heard of this woman, and she was a romance novelist, so to me, I was like “Oooh! Who’s this lady? I want to know her!!” So I was pleasantly surprised, so thank you for introducing me to her!

AMY: Of course. Let’s start off by finding out a little bit more about Margaret Wolf Hungerford, a.k.a. The Duchess. (I mean, how much do we love her pen name? That’s awesome. To clarify — she was not ACTUALLY a Duchess, we need to make that clear.) She was born Margaret Hamilton in 1855, and raised in [feigning Irish accent] County Cork, Ireland…. That’s horrible.

JESSICA: [laughing]

KIM: I thought that was great!

AMY: County Cork, Ireland — and this was just about a decade after the Great Famine had ravaged the country. Even at an early age, Margaret showed a lot of writing talent, and she won some school writing competitions. At the young age of 17, she married. She moved to Dublin and had three daughters, and then, sadly, she became a widow at just 23 years old, with all three of her children still under the age of six. Sounds like a pretty precarious position to be in, wouldn’t you say, Kim?

KIM: It sure does. So that was when she made the always bold decision to attempt writing for a living to support herself and her young family. She headed home to Milleen House in County Cork and fairly quickly had her first novel, Phyllis, published in 1877. That novel is available to order online and we’ll link to it in our show notes, but I couldn’t find a description of the plot. Molly Bawn, though, was only her second novel, out of dozens, and that was published within a year of Phyllis, in 1878. She apparently had a very methodical approach to writing, and she wrote every morning for three hours. After she moved back to Cork is also when her life takes a plot twist straight out of one of her romance novels. Do you want to fill us in on that story, Jessica?

JESSICA: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I should be saying this in my best “bodice-ripper” copy voice, honestly, because it does get very interesting.

AMY: Bodice-ripper!

JESSICA: [laughing]. On her return to Cork, Margaret actually struck up with her neighbor — the boy next door, literally, Thomas Henry Hungerford, who was the eldest son of the local landlord. So Thomas Henry lived in Cahermore House, which was situated right around the corner, and his mother was not happy with this new relationship with the Protestant minister’s daughter. He was the eldest son of Henry Jones [Hungerford] and Mary Boon Couper, and as the eldest he was trained for the army and had to go off to the Boer wars. But while he was fighting here, he gets this message from his mother that calls him home, claiming she’s worried about his father’s behavior. When he gets there, he discovers that it was all a grand matchmaking scheme. Mom just wanted to marry him off to a rich young lady by the name of Miss Townsend of Derry House. Thomas Henry turns down this idea, much to his mother’s dismay. (And just a little bit of a footnote: Miss Townsend goes on to marry George Bernard Shaw a few years later.) His mother was then appalled to find out that he then goes and secretly marries his neighbor lady who is three years his elder (Our little Margaret is quite the cougar here!) while they were in London when she went there on a business trip to meet with her publishers. Here she is a widowed writer with three children and regarded as a very disagreeable match by mom, so you can just imagine what her relationship with her mother-in-law was after that.

AMY: That is some soap-opera caliber stuff right there! And you’re right — apparently the mother-in-law never really did make peace with Hungerford. She sounds like she was a real harridan and made her life hell).  But another interesting fact about The Duchess: She is credited with being the first person to pen the phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” (It’s actually a line she wrote in Molly Bawn.) 

KIM: Right, and before I knew this, if I had to guess, I would have said it had to have come from Shakespeare, right? And he actually did write something similar. It’s in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and I’ll read it to you:

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,

Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues

AMY: I think we all like Margaret’s better. It’s just simpler. Pithier, right? But that said, she did seem to be a big fan of Shakespeare’s, and you can see a lot of his influence in her work I think, including in Molly Bawn. Sadly, the Duchess died of typhoid at the age of 42, but it’s pretty amazing when you realize how many novels she managed to write in a fairly short period of time, which, I think is a great segue into our discussion about her most famous novel, Molly Bawn. Jessica, before we get too deep into it, do you want to give our listeners a quick, spoiler-free overview of the plot? 

JESSICA: Sure. Eleanor Massereene was orphaned as a child and raised by her much older half-brother, John, who gave her the nickname “Molly Bawn,” and bawn means “fair,” according to our Molly. Since she was a fair-haired, sweet child, the nickname stuck. At the open of the story, Molly is 19 and longing for adventure when a dashing cavalry officer arrives, a young friend of John comes to visit. Tedcastle Luttrell is instantly smitten with our Molly and the novel follows the adventure of this young couple as Molly is called to her estranged yet ailing grandfather’s estate for a house party filled with grandfather’s scheming heirs. Let’s just say hijinx, drama and romance ensue.

KIM: House parties!

JESSICA: Woo! House party!

AMY: There’s always hijinx at the house party, man. Always.

KIM: So you’ll be interested maybe to hear that “Molly Bawn” is also the name of a traditional Irish folk song, and we’ll be playing it for you at the end of the episode because Molly references it in the book. So, we mentioned that Hungerford’s novels were Victorian, and her plots and love scenes certainly stayed mostly to Victorian social mores and especially expectations of women. There’s a lot of flirty dialogue, but the love scenes are quite chaste. Apparently, she very skillfully captured that tone of fashionable society of the time, which is one of the reasons that people really liked her books.

AMY: And if I may be so bold to say, Jessica, I think the first third of this book had some quintessential “Hallmark movie” moments. Would you agree?

JESSICA: Uh, yes. Romance genre tropes are eternal, it seems! As Kim just said, there’s a lot of flirty “will they/won’t they?” banter. The baking scene, of course, with the flour-throwing… nothing like a good flour-throwing to get people to gaze longingly into each other’s eyes and wipe something from a cheek! The strawberry-picking scene could have been right out of one of our “Summer Nights” movies. And then of course Letty showing up when Ted corners Molly in the school house. We call that the “Act 6 Interrupted Kiss.” So yeah, there’s a lot of things in there that I felt were right at home and still in the pocket for what we do in the romance world.

AMY: If we had the Hallmark “Bingo Game” or the Hallmark “Drinking Game” that you see going around, going viral on the Internet, we could definitely have put it to work for this novel, as well.

JESSICA: Yeah, I think you would have had a couple of shots. [laughing]

KIM: We should have done that! Jess, would you like to read one of your favorite excerpts from Molly Bawn to give our listeners a feel for what it sounds like?

JESSICA: Yeah, sure. I picked the one that starts out Chapter 5, and I think this kind of goes back to what you guys were saying about sort of Shakespearean influences and these sort of romantic notions. So I’ll just start:

   It’s four o’clock and a hush, a great stillness, born of oppressive heat, is over the land. Again the sun is smiting with hot wrath the unoffending earth; the flowers nod drowsily or lie half dead of languor, their gay leaves touching the ground. 

   “The sky was blue as a summer sea,

    The depths were cloudless overhead;

    The air was calm as it could be;

    There was no sight or sound of dread,” 

quotes Luttrell, dreamily, as he strays idly along the garden path, through scented shrubs and all the many-hued children of light and dew. His reverie is lengthened yet not diffuse. One little word explains it all. It seems to him that the word is everywhere: the birds sing it, the wind whistles it as it rushes faintly past, the innumerable voices of the summer cry ceaselessly for “Molly.”

   “Mr. Luttrell, Mr. Luttrell,” cries someone. “Look up!” And he does look up. 

   Above him, on the balcony, stands Molly, “a thing of beauty,” fairer than any flower that grows beneath. Her eyes like twin stars are gleaming, deepening; her happy lips are parted; her hair drawn loosely back, shines like threads of living gold. Every feature is awake and full of life; every movement of her sweet body, clad in its white gown, proclaims a very joyousness of living. 

   With hands held high above her head, filled with parti-colored roses, she stands laughing down upon him; while he stares back at her, with a heart filled too full of love for happiness. With a slight momentary closing of her lids she opens her hands and flings the scented shower onto his uplifted face.

   “Take your punishment,” she whispers, saucily, bending over him, “and learn your lesson. Don’t look at me another time.”

   “It was by your own desire I did so,” exclaims he, bewildered, shaking the crimson and yellow and white leaves from off his head and shoulders. “How am I to understand you?”

   “How do I know, when I don’t even understand myself? But when I called out to you ‘Look up,’ of course I meant ‘look down.’ Don’t you remember the old game with the handkerchief? — when I say ‘Let go,’ ‘hold fast;’ when I say ‘hold fast,’ ‘let go?’ You must recollect it.”

   “I have a dim idea of something idiotic like what you say.”

   “It is not idiotic, but it suits only some people; it suits me. There is a certain perverseness about it, a determination to do just what one is told not to do, that affects me most agreeably. Did I..” — glancing at the rosy shower at his feet — “did I hurt you much?” With a smile.

   There is a little plank projecting from the wood-work of the pillars that supports the balcony: resting his foot on this, and holding on by the railings above, Luttrell draws himself up until his face is almost on level with hers, — almost, but not quite: she can still overshadow him.

AMY: Oooh! Molly!

KIM: Yeah!

AMY: As we’ve said, flirty dialogue abounds in the novel, and you can see it in action there. The two main female characters wield their charm like a weapon, and where the men are concerned it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. The ladies turn flirting into an Olympic sport, and when it comes to a war of words, the women ALWAYS win. It’s so hilarious, but at the same time these men are also fully tormented by it. Jessica, what do you think Hungerford might have thought of such coquettish behavior? 

JESSICA: I think she was having oodles of fun with it honestly. I was reminded more than once of Lydia Bennett being, like, a determined flirt, and Lizzy says to her father, “If you don’t take her in hand, dad, she’s going to be the ruin of this entire family.” But in Molly Bawn, Hungerford is just letting Molly and her friend, Lady Stafford, run wild. They’re laughing, they’re flirting and they’re making all sorts of bad decisions that would be the ruin of any of them in any other novel of that time period, right? So I think she’s having fun, and further, they’re always quickly forgiven, right? So much so that I started wondering if she was actually skewering the men because she portrays them as these lovelorn fools who will basically do anything for a pretty face, right? They’ll forgive anything, and these women are doing some pretty outrageous stuff. But maybe that’s the secret to its success. The norms regarding women were so restrictive and the stakes were so high for them, so the freedoms sort of reflected in this novel must have been just both sensational and tantalizing to a female reader, right? I mean c’mon.

AMY: I had no preconceived notions at all about this book, and while I was reading the first fourth of the book and we see Molly being so flirtatious… she’s playing a dangerous game in some ways, and I kept thinking to myself, “What is Hungerford going to do here?” Is she going to suddenly have Molly have to have her comeuppance? Is she going to somehow… is there going to be some sort of victim blaming going on? And coming from our current social context, I was like, “Oh, please don’t do this. Please don’t make this a book about she gets in trouble because she was being a flirt.”

JESSICA: Yeah.

AMY: And I was happy to see that that actually doesn’t happen. 

JESSICA: Right.

AMY: I thought that that was kind of cool. It’s as if Lydia Bennett is the heroine and doesn’t run into any trouble, and it’s kind of refreshing.

JESSICA: Yeah, I mean, just to piggyback off of that, I kept thinking of House of Mirth, right? Edith Wharton. A married man just flirted with her and she refused to get married and that was the end of her. So there are these other novels that are being written at the same time period that were cautionary tales to their female reader.

KIM: She never would have sort of survived a Henry James or an Edith Wharton novel.

AMY: No! And that brings us back to the mention of this book, Molly Bawn, in Ulysses. It appears in the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom, who is Leopold Bloom’s wife. It happens at the end of Ulysses. The context is that Molly is rationalizing having flirted with her friend’s husband, and she begins listing some novels that come to mind that might have shaped her thoughts on how men and women should behave toward one another. And that includes Molly Bawn, as well as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. 

KIM: Yeah, it’s really interesting that such a modern, experimental novel like Ulysses would mention Molly Bawn. And the big takeaway from this book for me was that Hungerford really did have a lot to say about marriages, incompatibility, and the positions women are placed into because of the need for them to make a suitable marriage. Given what I’d read about Hungerford and Molly Bawn before I read it, I wasn’t expecting some of her commentary to be so modern and feminist. And as we mentioned, Molly Bawn, in spite of being a Victorian heroine, is kind of unapologetically… boy crazy, but she’s also very aware of the inequities of romance, the double standards. And here’s what Molly Bawn has to say on it: 

“‘A man may love as often as he chooses, while a woman must only love once, or he considers himself very badly used. Why not be on equal footing?’”

And later she explicitly states the idea of women being a commodity in the following lines:  

“'...who ever heard the opprobrious term 'fortune-hunter' given to a woman? It is the legitimate thing for us to sell ourselves as dearly as we can.'”

AMY: But, she does end up playing with fire in some respects. One of the men she flirts with in the book ultimately has a rage-filled reaction toward her when they’re out in the forest. And while reading that, I couldn’t help but think to myself, “Oh boy, some things don’t change…”

JESSICA: Yeah, I mean I was honestly taken aback by that scene. I didn’t expect it. It really kind of came out of nowhere after all the sort of “flirty” and “hijinx!” Especially some of the more comedic moments back at the house. Here we are back now in Molly’s home of Brooklyn and she’s going to meet Luttrell and she goes to the woods to sort of see him and who appears but her cousin, Phillip, who she had been flirting with. And he had been framed up to this point as pretty dispassionate. He was definitely flirting with her in this other way, but he was a gambler. He already had a fiancee or an understanding with another woman. And so the flirtation that kind of occurs between them is not very well drawn out in the novel so when it gets to this point and he’s shaking her and he’s grabbing her and he’s basically saying, “If I can’t have you, no one will… I’d rather kill you,” I thought, “Ooh, gosh! Here’s this guy! The guy you didn’t think would be the abuser is now the abuser.” He was supposed to be the guy that you would want at the top of the novel, and now he’s just devolved into the captain of the football team who you find out is the ever-present “football rapist.” So it was shocking, honestly.I was surprised.

KIM: It was like a Lifetime movie got mixed up in our Hallmark movie, and no! We don’t want that!

AMY: Oh, perfect! That’s right.

JESSICA: Off brand!

AMY: Off-brand! Off-brand! I did think, “Okay, here’s my moment that I was worried about.” Suddenly the tide is going to turn for Molly and she’s going to have her fall from grace and it’s going to be awful. That didn’t quite happen, but we did have that sort of scary wake-up call for her a little bit, I think.

JESSICA: I think that’s the consequence, right? She hadn’t had any consequences up until that moment, and so at some point she had to … I think Hungerford had to give her some stakes around that, that that kind of behavior isn’t okay. And that was sort of the point of the moment. 

KIM: I agree. And also, there’s another interesting that Molly proudly and unconventionally decides to make her living singing on stage in front of crowds, even though it’s considered to be something almost akin to prostitution for a lady in that time, and that’s even alluded to in the novel. What’s your take on that, Jessica?

JESSICA: It was an interesting creative choice, right? I mean, Hungerford could have skipped that whole part. That wasn’t an important part of that novel, and in fact, it felt very tangential to the rest of the story. And when she makes this assertion that she’s going to go do this, I was sort of like, “Wait, what? You can’t go do that, girl! That’s it! Your reputation is done!” But she does, and Hungerford sort of makes this a part of the novel to make a statement about women using their talents to claim some independence without censure, which was interesting, because you kind of make that parallel between the writer and her creation. Hungerford is this successful female writer of popular novels which probably was not very well celebrated in her time period. She’s not Nora Roberts like we have today, right? So it’s not hard to see her using Molly as her proxy in that way, and Molly’s unapologetic about that choice, which was kind of interesting because then it’s very clear that Hungerford is not apologetic about her choices, either, so it felt incredibly modern.

KIM: Yeah, it’s another great relief that we have: Okay… nothing bad happened there, either. And then Molly’s good friend, Lady Stafford, also seems ahead of her time in many ways. She has a clever act of deception where she manages to arrange a marriage that allows her to be completely independent, both financially self-sufficient and free of ever having to associate with her husband. Wow.

AMY: Yeah, so Lady Cecil Stafford and her husband have actually never even laid eyes on one another at the start of the book even though they’re married. (It’s really kind of a funny story laid into this plot), but once they do finally meet in person, they have their own love story set into motion and it’s really basically another Hallmark trope, isn’t it Jessica? The case of mistaken identities?

JESSICA: [laughing] Yeah, it was great.

KIM: And can we also discuss the character of Plantagenet Potts (which is an awesome name) really quickly? He’s a peripheral character not too vital to the plot, but he brought in some extra comic relief. I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the stunts he pulls to stave off boredom during the house party.

JESSICA: Yeah, you probably hit upon my two favorite characters actually, which is Lady Stafford and Plantagenet Potts. I could have read an entire novel just on the adventures of Lady Cecil and Mr. Potts, honestly. The scene in the library where he lights the gunpowder on fire and it sort of blows up and they hide behind the curtain in the alcove and they’re standing there as statues when Sir Penthony opens up the curtain. And Penthony and Ted are so upset because Potts has his arms around the ladies as he’s trying to hold them in place on the statuary. It was just comical. It had me in stitches, and I think I need a sequel actually.

AMY: In my head I was envisioning James Corden playing Plantagenet Potts. Like, how perfect would he be?

KIM: Oh, totally.

JESSICA: And they kept making a point of his red hair.

AMY: Yeah, if you’re a ginger, yeah, trigger warning a little bit. So, though the novel is set in the late 1800s, there’s a lot about the book (particularly the middle third, which is basically the months-long house party at the Amherst estate that reminded me of a Jane Austen book (complete with the requisite ball)… But, Jessica, I was wondering if there were parts of this book where you thought, okay, I can see the Irish coming through? 

JESSICA: Yeah, probably the way she handled her ensemble scenes with multiple characters. Lots of writers can go in close and do that intimate character work, but it’s harder to handle dialogue amongst three or more characters within a scene. And she often found her stride in those moments. And when I think of Irish writers like Oscar Wilde or Frank McCourt or Maeve Binchy, there’s that ear for dialogue that they have. It’s a quick-wittedness; it’s a sense of the absurd that gives their scenes fun and energy, and it doesn’t really move the plot forward, but it really gives you a sense of those characters. She definitely had that, so that’s probably where I saw it the most, was in those moments. 

KIM: That’s a great point. I love that perspective. So Jessica, what’s your verdict on Molly Bawn, to put you in the hot seat. What did you like most about it? What did you think about it overall?

JESSICA: I think the critics are right! I loved her way with characters, but I also loved her feminist take, right? As light and fluffy and sometimes even as melodramatic and soapy as it got, every once in a while she’d make these piercing social commentaries. Marrying your cousin is weird: Yeah, it is! I met you last week, I’m not going to want to marry you yet, Ted: Tell him, girl! I’m too young for this — I need to live! So I think that was probably my favorite piece of it, was just, every once in a while she’d be like, “Yes you will”/”No I won’t”/”Yes you will”/”No I won’t … I’m a feminist and I’m not going to take this anymore.” It was just like, “Where’d THAT come from?”

AMY: Yeah, you’re right; that was great. One of my favorite parts was when you mentioned the Plantagenet gunpowder fiasco where they had to hide behind the curtains and pretend to be statues so as not to be caught, whenever she would have those moments in the book, she would sort of cap off the scene by writing “Tableau!” And it was basically the equivalent of going “And… scene!” It made me laugh every time because I’ve never seen it done in a book that way. But it also reminded me that this book was made into a silent film in Britain in 1916. And putting you on the spot again, Jessica, as a Hollywood type, if you found a pitch for Molly Bawn in the slush pile, would you consider it worthy of a film adaptation today? 

JESSICA: Probably not. It’s a little too episodic and the way the characters tended to get in their own way versus having to overcome an external obstacle would make it probably very difficult for a modern viewer to watch, but you know, like I said… maybe if it’s “The Modern Adventures of Lady Stafford and Plantagenet Potts” we can talk, you know? I think with a little reshaping, right? We could get there.

KIM: I think that’s an incredibly valid and astute critique, and I would expect nothing less from Jessica.

JESSICA: Yeah, yeah, right.

AMY: It’s still a fun read, though.

KIM: It absolutely is. Completely worthwhile read. And I love the idea of taking the subplot and turning it into the mini-series or the movie. I think that would be great.

JESSICA: When I was reading it, it kind of kept bringing back my own career choices, because before being at Hallmark I was at Penguin and I was doing romance novels and mystery novels, and I also was doing classic literature; I did the Signet Classic line. So I have this broad understanding of the “canon,” the classic literature canon, but I also understand genre writing, and so I know the difference between those two writing styles and what I thought was really interesting about this novel was she was drawing from these different disciplines and these different well-known writing styles while sort of selling it into this genre and it was fun for me, because I thought, “Oh, here’s Shakespeare,” and “Here’s Edith Wharton,” and “Here’s this writer and that writer,” or “Oh, here’s this trope: the interrupted kiss.” It just sort of all fell together and I thought, “Wow, this is really interesting.” She’d have at one point, she said, “Improvise!” and I’m like, “This is like someone writing ‘Ad-lib’ in a screenplay: ‘Actors ad-lib’” So it was this sort of hodge-podge. It didn’t really stick to one thing or another, and she was just throwing it all in and she just had this expectation of her reader to go along on that ride, and you do! That was the crazy part. It was always just slightly unexpected, which I enjoyed. 

KIM: Jessica, we can’t thank you enough for coming on to talk about Molly Bawn. This was the most fun I’ve had in at least two or three weeks!

JESSICA: Well, I’ve missed you guys, and thanks for having me on. And Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Slainte!

KIM: We loved having you!

JESSICA: Thank you, ladies!

***

KIM: So what did we learn from today’s episode, Amy?

AMY: Well, we learned that if something’s referenced in Ulysses, it’s worth checking out…

KIM: Yeah, and luckily, Molly Bawn doesn’t require assistance from a grad school professor to understand it… We also learned that if flirting was an Olympic sport, Molly Bawn would have clinched the gold.

AMY: For sure. She was a pro. And finally, we learned that an unabashedly romantic novel can also be feminist at the same time.

KIM: It sure can.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode, and as promised, we’ll go ahead and play you out with a version of the Irish folk song, “Molly Bawn.” We hope you check out Hungerford’s delightful romance novel and let us know what you think. 

KIM: And don’t forget to let us know what you think of this podcast, as well, by leaving us a rating and review. It really helps.

AMY: Until next week, may the road rise to meet you… bye, everybody!

24. The Gilded Age

Episode 24: The Gilded Age

AMY: Hi everybody, and welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my co-host Kim Askew, and okay, so Kim, let’s talk about how thankful we are that we’ve had television during this pandemic to keep us sane. I know you don’t watch quite as much as I do, but…

KIM: Yes, but even I have my “must-see” shows, and we’ve both been watching “Bridgerton,” which we talked all about in our last mini episode.

AMY: Yeah, so much fun.

KIM: And I can’t wait to eventually watch “The Gilded Age” — we are both waiting for that, and probably all of you are, too. It’s coming from “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes. This show cannot come soon enough for me. I’m dying for it.

AMY: Yeah, I agree. It’s kind of a bummer that Covid basically had to slam the brakes on production of that one, which is, I think going to eventually air on HBO. But let’s talk about it anyway just to get ourselves excited about what we know so far — it’s something to look forward to on the horizon, and we can all use that.

KIM: Yes, for sure. Let’s talk about The Gilded Age.

AMY: We can always talk about The Gilded Age! Let’s face it.

KIM: Exactly. So knowing we’d be discussing  this this week, I took the liberty (which I know you won’t mind) of pulling the synopsis for the show straight off of HBO’s website: 

AMY: Okay, I’m dying to hear it; let’s go!

KIM: All right!

The American Gilded Age was a period of immense economic change, of huge fortunes made and lost, and the rise of disparity between old money and new.

Against this backdrop of change, the story begins in 1882 — introducing young Marian Brook, the orphaned daughter of a Union general, who moves into the New York City home of her thoroughly old money aunts Agnes van Rhijn and Ada Brook. Accompanied by Peggy Scott, an accomplished African-American woman, Marian inadvertently becomes enmeshed in a social war between one of her aunts, a scion of the old money set, and her stupendously rich neighbors, a ruthless railroad tycoon and his ambitious wife, George and Bertha Russell.

In this exciting new world that is on the brink of the modern age, will Marian follow the established rules of society, or forge her own path?

AMY: Ooh, that sounds good! You know what’s interesting is how much it actually sounds like “Bridgerton.” You have the neighbors living next door — one house is “old money,” high-society, the other house is “new money.” 

KIM: That’s true, you’re absolutely right. That’s a really good point. Hmm.

AMY: And it’s going to be a 10-episode miniseries and I think it ends at that. Which is cool, but I’d also be down for watching something that goes into more seasons. I’m kind of bummed out that it’s just going to be a limited series. 

KIM: Oh, yeah, I could stay in the Gilded Age. I’d be willing to invest in that world for much longer. We’ll all be so busy partying, though, I don’t know. Maybe 10 episodes is fine. If it were on right now, I’d want, like, 300 episodes.

AMY: That’s true, that’s true. We’ll all be hopefully traveling the globe, and oh my gosh, can you imagine if we suddenly had no time to watch this? I will always make time for it, Julian Fellowes, don’t you worry.

KIM: Absolutely. Totally. Yeah.

AMY: So in addition to being set in New York City, it’s also naturally going to take us to Newport Rhode Island, which I’m thrilled about. It’s going to be gorgeous, and you can only assume they’re going to be filming at or in, hopefully, some of those grand mansions. And they’re also going to be on location in Troy, New York, which is known for its historic Victorian homes. So, it’s going to be a lot of good backdrops.

KIM: Oh my gosh, I love it. It was sadly supposed to start production last March (so basically three weeks before the world completely shut down.)

AMY: That’s crummy timing! 

KIM: I know. So now, at the time we recorded this, they were supposed to be filming from January through June of this year, but it’s difficult to know how on-schedule  anything really is because of Covid, so I don’t know.

AMY: And you’ve got to wonder how all the new filming protocols are going to affect things. Cynthia Nixon, who is one of the stars, told Variety in the fall that things are pretty slow-going, because they had managed to get back into production in the fall (or start production in the fall) but she said they can’t have so many people on set. It sounds like it’s been challenging. She said they’ve also had to cut back a lot on the number of extras they’re going to be able to use. So hopefully it doesn’t feel too pared down. Hopefully we won’t notice that they’ve had to make cuts when we’re watching it, because for something called “The Gilded Age,” you want to feel like they just went all out, right?

KIM: Oh, absolutely. With all that said, though, even me, the ultimate optimist, is thinking maybe we won’t be able to watch this one before 2022, but I have a feeling it’s going to be worth the wait. You mentioned “Sex and the City’s” Cynthia Nixon. Who does she play in this? And who else makes up the cast? I am curious to know.

AMY: So Cynthia Nixon plays one of the rich spinster aunts that Marian goes to live with — Ada Brooke. The other aunt is played by Christine Baranski, who I think is going to be fun. She really knows how to bring her perfectly snooty A-game to any project she’s on, so that’ll be good.

KIM: I love her.

AMY: And then get this, Marian, the main young heroine, is played by Louisa Jacobson who is none other than the daughter of one Meryl Streep! 

KIM: Ooh, okay, so I knew that Meryl Streep’s daughter Mamie Gummer acted, but I did not know about her other daughter. Okay, so Louisa Jacobson. I’m going to be googling her to find out more after we record this.

AMY: How awesome would it be if Meryl made, like, a cameo?

KIM: Oh, I would love that. Everyone would love that. 

AMY: Okay, so, now, the next-door neighbors — the “railroad money” next door neighbors that you mentioned — are played by Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector, who I’m not very familiar with, but they have a lot of big credits to their name. Carrie Goon was in Gone Girl and HBO’s “The Leftovers” and Morgan Spector was in “Homeland” and “The Plot Against America.” And then we have a couple of Broadway stars in the cast in Denee Benton and Audra McDonald (love her!) and Jeanne Triplehorn shows up as a beautiful art collector with a potentially scandalous past that makes her a pariah of this high-society world. And that sounds very “Edith Wharton,” doesn’t it? 

KIM: It does. And it sounds like we’ll also be getting a bit of that “Upstairs/Downstairs” vibe in that a variety of servant characters are mentioned in the cast list. So thumbs up to that.

AMY: It will be interesting to see how much they’re incorporated into the show and if it will sort of hew to that “Downton Abbey” template. Speaking of, I had thought originally that this series was supposed to be a prequel to “Downton Abbey” (that it was going to tell the backstory of Cora Crawley back when she was living in America). Obviously, that’s not the case, but I would have liked to have seen something like that.

KIM: I had heard that there was going to be a prequel with Cora Crawley, too, and I would love that. I wonder if there will still be something like that separately, because I think that’s a great idea.

AMY: At the same time, I guess I understand Julian Fellowes going with a fresh slate here with the story, but there’s so much that they’re going to be able to work with in terms of the time period. I mean the tension between old money and new money … this desperate race to marry well … Mrs. Astor and “the 400” I believe that pops up in the show as well.

KIM: Oh, right, so that’s a good point. Did you know that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner actually coined the term “The Gilded Age?”

AMY: No, but I don’t even know who Charles Dudley Warner is.

KIM: So Mark Twain wrote a book with Charles Dudley Warner called The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. It was a novel. And “The Gilded Age” phrase was inspired by Shakespeare (as everything always comes back to Shakespeare, this does too) in the play  King John. And I’m going to quote from that play: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily … is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”  So the phrase “the Gilded Age” actually refers to the period of prosperity and greed between the 1870s and about the late 1910s. The 400 list that Amy referred to is a list of New York society from that time which included the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Morgans (as in JP Morgan). 

AMY: I know they were being wasteful and lavishly irresponsible with their money, and if you read anything about these parties in Newport, Rhode Island, they really, really went over the top. However, I just want to say I totally could have lived in that era.

KIM: I can imagine you living in that era.

AMY: Speaking of Newport, have you ever been there, Kim?

KIM: Only in my mind… I’ve never been to the “The Breakers” or “Marble House” or any of those beautiful old houses there, but I would love to go. Have you?

AMY: Yes, yes. Twice, I want to say. It’s amazing. It is just spectacular, so the fact that they’ll be filming there… I know that they put out a call for extras in Newport to come be part of the production, and they also were looking for people in the food industry that could come in and play actual kitchen servants because they wanted those people to look really accurate in what they were doing. I thought that was interesting. So..

KIM: Oh my gosh.

AMY: What?

KIM: I’m just imagining us being extras in “The Gilded Age!” We’d have to move to Newport or something, but…

AMY: How do we do it? Oh my god!

KIM: And I would not want to play a servant. I’m sorry to be snobby, but I want to play a Vanderbilt or something so I can wear a gorgeous Vanderbilt dress.

AMY: I want the costumes! Yes!

KIM: What about favorite books relating to the Gilded Age? Let’s talk about that.

AMY: Well, anything “Edith Wharton, right?” She’s got to be your go-to-gal. She’s the biggie.

KIM: True, and I have been to her house, The Mount, which we’ll probably talk about in another episode. That’s in the Berkshires. I love The Buccaneers. It’s a novel by her, and I think it was her last novel because she never finished it. And I think Amy has read it, too. We love that book, and it was turned into a  great miniseries.

AMY: I don’t know if we watched it together. You might have lent me your copy or something. But it stars Carla Gugino. It came out in 1995… if you haven’t seen it, now would be a great time to bust that one out because it’ll sort of whet your appetite to get you ready for “The Gilded Age” series. 

KIM: Yeah, okay. You really need to if you haven’t seen it because it’s literally one of my “Top 10” costume dramas. It’s wonderful. I think Carla Gugino is amazing in it. And Mira Sorvino is also in it. She plays Conchita Clausson. She’s basically inspired by the real-life Consuelo Vanderbilt. She married England’s Duke of Marlborough. She’s known as the American heiress who saved the British aristocracy.

AMY: Yeah, so she was basically “OG Meghan Markle” back in the day. The aristocracy in England was starting to be in jeopardy because they were losing their money, basically. They needed an influx of cash, and they needed it to save all their estates. And so they looked to America and these daughters, particularly daughters of some of the newly rich who were… It’s almost like an “odd couple” scenario, right? You have nobility in England looking to marry sort of brand new upper-crust Americans.

KIM: They wanted the money, and then the Americans wanted this air of aristocracy and nobility that we don’t have here in the States. So it was a “give and take” kind of thing.

AMY: Yeah, everybody got something out of it.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: But that’s basically the plot of The Buccaneers and that’s basically what Consuelo Vanderbilt ended up doing. She got engaged to the duke, went over and sort of had complete culture shock trying to fit in and learning a new way of life. There’s a biography about Consuelo and her mother, Alva, by Amanda MacKenzie Stuart that tells her story and it really transports you into this world. I think, yet again, Kim, you lent me that book, but I’m not even sure you read it yourself?

KIM: I actually got you that book, I think as a gift, and then you loaned it to me to read and I think still have it. As Amy knows, I’m not that great on nonfiction, sometimes, but it is really good, and it’s got a gorgeous cover with a painting of her on the front. 

AMY: She was beloved by Englanders. They really took to her because she was so glamorous and wonderful, and I think she lived in England for the rest of her life. But Kim, if you want another novel from this time period that is interesting, I liked also The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin. It’s sort of that same kind of “Buccaneer,” “new money” American girl that’s brought to England to find a husband. It’s also a good fictionalized account of that time.

KIM: All the girls in The Buccaneers ended up going over and basically bringing their money to England and marrying (or at least trying to marry) into the aristocracy there. It’s really interesting. The American Heiress sounds great, too. So, as we said, The Gilded Age was basically taking place in America in around the 1870s and 1880s and a little bit later, and the next novel we’re discussing, was written around the same time, but in Ireland.

AMY: Yes, and just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, we’re going to be discussing “lost lady” Margaret Wolf Hungerford and her best known book, the delightful, funny and romantic Molly Bawn. 

KIM: And with us to discuss Hungerford is our favorite Irish lass (or Irish-American lass) Jessica Callahan. She’s a development executive at Crown Media Family Networks and that’s the company behind everyone’s favorite Hallmark movies.

AMY: Ooh, it’s going to be a good one! 

KIM: We’re also having a lot of fun getting to engage with you over at our Facebook page, so if you haven’t yet, go over, check out our “Lost Ladies of Lit” Facebook page and follow it so you can be part of our updates.

[start closing music]

AMY: And don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast and leave us a review if you’re liking what you’ve been hearing! All right, bye, everybody!

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.

23. Marthe Bibesco — The Green Parrot with Lauren Cerand

KIM: Amy, The New York Times called the novel we’re discussing today “A strange and beautiful story, with the faintly arid charm of a miniature painted on the cover of a seventeenth-century snuff box.”

AMY: That’s actually a great and (in some ways) literal description of this book — The Green Parrot by Marthe Bibesco. 

KIM: Yes. It’s also got a little bit of everything to keep a reader enthralled: forbidden love, the intrigue of war, incest, twin-mix-ups, suicide and (I never thought I’d be saying this but) an interspecies love affair.

AMY: Yeah, you heard that right, people. All right, so now all that might initially sound like a bit much, but you’ll have to trust us—it’s so artfully rendered that it absolutely works. This book is equal parts haunting and lovely, and the writing is so graceful and memorable. Really, it is a little gem.

KIM: And to add to the intrigue, as if we needed to… this book was written by an actual princess! And we’ve got a special guest with us today to help tell you all about her. We’ll introduce her in a moment. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes, and welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit. We’ve got a great show in store for you today, so grab your tiaras everyone… let’s raid the stacks and get started.

[Introductory music]

KIM: I’m especially excited to introduce our guest today, Lauren Cerand, because we go way back. We’ve been acquainted for many years, from our early days of blogging. Lauren has since founded a thriving global communications consultancy, prompting Time Out New York to dub her one of the “cultural gatekeepers in the literary world.” She also happens to be one of the most generous people I know, sharing her knowledge and connecting people in this utterly charming, witty way that feels serendipitous, but is actually thoughtful, strategic, and wise. She’s also a person who treats living itself as an art. 

AMY: True to this, in 2019, Lauren actually took a year’s sabbatical from her career as a publicist and moved to Florence, Italy to study jewelry making. (I just love a gal who pursues and lives her dreams! That’s amazing!) Now she’s returned to New York having crafted a life that includes jewelry making (she’s studying at the Pratt Institute), writing, and working as a highly-sought after communications consultant. She also serves on the advisory committee for Film Forum and the advisory board for Turtle Point Press in New York, and is a member of the City University Club in London. 

KIM: Because Lauren, who probably lives the life closest to a princess of anyone I know, actually introduced me to Princess Marthe Bibesco and The Green Parrot, I really can’t think of a better person to be our guest for this episode. Welcome, Lauren. 

LAUREN: Thank you.

AMY: Let’s start by telling you guys a little bit about Princess Bibesco because she is fascinating! She was born Marta Lucia Lahovary in 1886 in Bucharest. She was the third child of Romanian aristocrats, and she grew up on the family estates in Romania, but she summered at the stylish French beach resort Biarritz, where much of The Green Parrot is set. As was typical of Romanian aristocracy, she learned to speak French before she learned to speak Romanian, and was she extensively, though not formally, educated in history and classic literature as well as Romanian folklore. She made her debut into society in 1900, and was secretly engaged for one year to her cousin Prince George III Valentin Bibescu . Now, he came from one of Romania’s most prestigious aristocratic families, and they married when she was only 17-years-old. She wrote on her wedding day that she felt as though, through this marriage she had, “stepped onto the European stage through the grand door.” 

KIM: And that sounds glamorous (and okay, it is really glamorous), but in the early years of her marriage, she was actually pretty bored. It kind of reminds me a bit of what we now know about Charles and Diana. George was off racing cars and chasing women and Marthe was stuck at home with his mother. She almost died giving birth to a daughter in 1903, and then, in 1905, George was sent on a diplomatic mission to Iran and that changed everything for her. She basically was completely inspired by this trip to Iran and she began using the research from her journals and everything to write her first novel, which is called The Eight Paradises. She became the toast of Paris.

LAUREN: I think The Eight Paradises is one that I saw talked about on Twitter as being out of print that people quite hoped would be brought back into print.

KIM: That would be great. Maybe this podcast will help. We can only dream! So basically, at that point, she started to be known for her literary prowess in addition to her connections.

AMY: Her career as a writer kicked off from there. She was awarded the Prix de l'Académie Française (which is one of the oldest and most prestigious French literary prizes) and around that time she met Marcel Proust, who wrote her a letter praising The Eight Paradises. He said, “You are not only a splendid writer, Princess, but a sculptor of words, a musician, a purveyor of scents, a poet.” Can you imagine getting that kind of feedback?

KIM: Oh, yes.

AMY: So they became really good friends.

KIM: Proust was also lifelong friends with another of Bibesco’s cousins, Prince Antoine Bibesco. Prince Antoine was married but had a rep as a ladies man. And what makes him important, I think, in our discussion is this: Marthe dedicates The Green Parrot to him. And this fact that will be especially intriguing a bit later, when we tell you more about the novel. 

AMY: Right. So the princess, Marthe, was strikingly beautiful as well as intelligent, and she held sway over a glittering, elite social sphere, which included royalty, the politically powerful, and literary luminaries throughout Europe. Her circle of friends included Jean Cocteau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Vita Sackville West, and Winston Churchill, among many others. So she wrote about herself and her position, “I am the needle through which pass the filaments and the strands of our disjointed Europe to be threaded together in a necklace.” Lauren, I’m guessing you can dig the jewelry metaphor here.

LAUREN: I do really dig the jewelry metaphor, and actually, I find that reading memoirs by women who lived in Romania are always especially amazing to me because prior, obviously, to the forces that changed the 20th century, it was really one of the kind of unimaginably glamorous, decadent, luxurious cultures on the world stage in Europe. So it makes perfect sense to me that she would have experienced the kind of cosmopolitan and glittering scene that she lived in as being at the absolute center of everything that was happening, and of course, an enormous necklace would have made so much sense to her. In the end, when she had no access to any of her money because it was all in Romania which had become Communist, she was able to live the rest of her life, basically, I believe, just selling jewels that she had taken with her.

KIM: And she actually wasn’t joking at all about her importance in that quote Amy read for us! She was even supposedly asked to secretly mediate a political disagreement between France and Germany. (And that’s not the only story like that.) Although she was a bright light of society and the arts, unfortunately her marriage wasn’t a happy one. She did, however, have well-known men from all over Europe literally throwing themselves at her and she had a string of notable lovers over the years. One of them, Prince Charles-Louis de Beauvau-Craön was super serious about her. He wrote her many love letters and—get this——he even gifted her rose petals which he’d had inscribed with a secret message. Marthe pressed the flowers, and they remained in her possession throughout her life. 

AMY: Okay, I’m swooning over that one. Well done to him. We’ll link to an article about how the petals were discovered among her papers, actually, and the process, in 2016, by which conservators at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center were able to unfurl them to read the inscriptions. I love that stuff, and I love that they still exist.

KIM: It is really fascinating, but it’s also just sooo romantic too! Lauren, do you have any favorite anecdotes about the Princess you want to share?

LAUREN: I tried to track down a biography of her before the show, but it’s long out of print. My favorite thing about it was the only thing I was able to get access to, which were the reviews of it, which were “Why would anyone want to read about this much glamor?” When I visualize her, I think a lot about this amazing exhibition of dresses that I missed in Paris, but I saw in New York at the FIT museum maybe five or 10 years ago. It was the dresses that belonged to the Countess Greffulhe, who was a huge inspiration for Proust. And one of the dresses was the dress she was wearing at a garden party the day that she met him, and it’s so incredibly fragile that it was laid on the floor on a mirror, and you were only allowed to look at the reflection of it. So I feel like Marthe has this kind of fascination for me as well. Like, I want to know everything about her life, I want to understand everything about her life, which is actually quite sad. Even in reading up for this episode, I learned that many of the things that happen in the book that are unspeakably tragic, hence the appearance of the green parrot, actually were directly from her life. It’s quite autobiographical. And obviously, the political time that she lived through is unimaginable to us. I can imagine how glittering it was and also something of what it must have felt like to have the glass shatter.

KIM: So to get into a little more about the specifics of the tragedy that she experienced in life that also plays into The Green Parrot, in 1892 (when she was around 6 years old) her brother, the only son and heir to the family fortune, died of typhoid fever. An elder sister died of cholera in 1911, and her younger sister Marguerite killed herself a few years later. Marthe's mother and favorite cousin also took their own lives.  

AMY: During World War I, she served as a nurse in Bucharest, which is pretty interesting, and in 1948, the Communist government confiscated all of the Bibesco property in Romania. So she was exiled. She spent the remainder of her life in Paris and England, and sadly, her daughter and son-in-law didn’t make it out of Romania and were placed in detention for almost nine years. 

LAUREN: Talking about this sort of idea of finding your identity in exile reminds me of another book that I really love: Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I don’t know if you’re familiar with anything about his life. He essentially was sort of living out of a suitcase, and everything in Russia is lost to him, and he’s part of this large colony of Russians in Paris. There’s this really beautiful section about being separated from everything that you know, including all of your material possessions, that I think about all the time. And it’s: She did not really need them, for nothing had been lost. As a company of travelling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, the windy heath, the misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored.

KIM: That’s a really interesting quote, and it’s perfectly suited to this conversation about Bibesco.

AMY: So The Green Parrot was published in France in 1924, and translated into English about five years later by Malcolm Cowley.

KIM: Right. And this seems like a great place to begin our discussion of this terrific little novel. Lauren, do you remember how you were introduced to it and what your initial response was?

LAUREN: I actually came about this book in a very funny way. I was looking on this really great web site one night of a vintage and used bookstore in New York called High Valley Books that I follow on Instagram. There was something interesting, and I texted it to my friend, Tynan [Kogane], who’s an editor at New Directions, and we started having this exchange where we were looking through the inventory of the bookstore while we were also talking about the things that we like. It was actually the first time since the entire global pandemic that I had had the experience of really feeling like I was in a bookstore with a person, talking to them. And then I happened to see this copy of The Green Parrot, so I ordered it immediately. A few days later it showed up. It was incredibly beautiful. It’s leather-bound with a marble cover, and it’s got these incredible gold, gilded lilies on the spine. It’s from 1924, from an edition of, I believe it’s 500. It was published in Paris. But it’s in French, which I can read for, you know, menus and the newspaper, and, like, a text message, but I can’t really appreciate the beauty of a novel. So I was like, “Oh, I can’t believe I got so caught up in kind of the romance of that moment.” And then, I agreed to be on the board of advisers of a press in New York called Turtle Point Press. They were asking me about how to market their French back list. I said, “Oh, well, why don’t you send me the books and I’ll tell you how to hook up with all of these kind of French governmental organizations that are involved with promoting French culture that I worked with in New York.” Three or four days later, this big box showed up at my door — actually someone delivered it. And The Green Parrot was in there because they published it. I thought, “Oh, I’m really meant to have this book in my life.” So yeah, I read it and I was just completely, completely blown away. There are other books that I like that deal with a similar period. There’s The Balkan Trilogy [by Olivia Manning]. Eleanor Piryani wrote an incredible, incredible memoir called More Was Lost… this period, actually, when you could still meet a man on a boat who happens to live in a castle. She moves there with him, but, like, right before the Iron Curtain falls. I think the original version that I read was on Turtle Point Press, actually, but it was reissued by the New York Review of Books Classics. I feel that there’s kind of a shelf of books that The Green Parrot belongs on, but at the same time, it’s like absolutely nothing else I’ve ever read in my life. Like, I immediately knew that I was in the hands of someone who was just in full command of their powers, and that was the first page, you know? That was the first line. What was surprising to me was the idea that someone had been in such intimate conversation with people that we consider absolute immortals at this point, and had just kind of been swept away from history. And I found that really interesting. I really find it remarkable about women writers, because you know, history has a funny way of doing that. But I was really amazed to discover that something so rich and so vivid could have that beautiful quality of a book that is just waiting to be discovered by you, the reader, on an ordinary day.

AMY: The novel is written in first person, and begins with our young narrator describing how life in her family revolves around grieving over her dead brother, Sasha. The family lives this beautiful and seemingly lush existence in the south of France and yet there is this oppressive pall that hangs over the household, and it robs our young narrator of joy. Lauren, I had the same reaction to the first page of the book. Seldom do I have to stop and re-read twice or three times an opening paragraph, and I did it with this one, like rubbing my hands together salivating basically. So I’m going to read it for everybody:

“There are Russians of Nice, just as there are wines of Bordeaux and violets of Parma. For our part, we belonged to a closely related species, the Russians of Biarritz; we were a Muscovite family that had settled in the Gulf of Gascony. But above all, we were a family in mourning; this was our originality, the first of our titles of distinction. More than our wealth, more than the great number of children and servants, more even than the mansion built by my father between a vast garden and a private beach, our sorrow gave us a sort of superiority over the other foreign families and, as it were, a personal luster. For mourning is always brilliant; it embellishes those who wear it, and sets them forth by covering them with darkness, as night does with stars.” 

KIM: That is gorgeous. I got the chills again hearing you read it aloud. It really gives you a feel for the tone and style of the book, and it’s so gripping, just from those first few lines. Beautiful.

LAUREN: And also a sense of just how incredibly cosmopolitan this family is, you know, that there are these kind of references of this particular expat community. They are intimately familiar with the best wines available. They are totally familiar with violets of Parma, which are renowned for lasting less than a day, and there’s this incredible, incredible sense that she’s sort of speaking to you from a vanishing world that somehow exists just out of reach. It’s smoldering away, but she has the absolute full vision of everything.

KIM: It’s really a gorgeous meditation on this longing and loneliness and literal and figurative exile, like you mentioned. On the one hand, there’s these attempted and successful suicides that happen in the book, and at the same time there’s this idea of living in an emotionally closed-off way that’s also like death. Did it remind either of you at all of The Virgin Suicides [Jeffrey Eugenides] in that way? 

LAUREN: I’ve never seen it or read it.

AMY: I don’t remember enough about The Virgin Suicides to make a comparison there, but how rife is this book for a Sofia Coppola adaptation? If she were to get her hands on this, I think that would be wonderful.

LAUREN: Yeah, I mean I think it has a very cinematic quality to it. And I think, also, there’s something about a kind of texture and the tapestry of sadness in the family that is really really deep, and it has different kinds of cultural connotations and, you know, she talks in the book about how they shift from being Greek Orthodox to Roman Catholic, and there’s just all of these kind of rituals around sadness. The first pages are really devoted to really a catalogue listing of her miseries, right down to the kittens that are dying on the ledge in the cesspool and she’s forbidden to rescue them. And so I think that there was this real kind of sense that it's a kind of weight and a weather that has settled over this family. There are definitely some books that I can think of that have that quality. I think that a really good story is able to kind of take you out of yourself and to remind you that we all have those periods that are like Picasso’s Blue Period where you just remember a time in your life and you just think, “I just couldn’t imagine anything else but the kind of sadness that was sort of living in my house with me.”

AMY: So, Kim, you obviously drew that comparison though. Were you thinking of the movie or the book? 

KIM: Uh, both, but I think just the sadness that sort of reverberates throughout the family. In The Virgin Suicides, in the book, the narrator is a neighbor, and he’s trying to understand where that’s coming from. The context and everything is completely different, but just that similar idea of the deep loneliness of a family and then the resulting suicides I thought was interesting.  

AMY: So, Lauren, we asked you if you would like to read one of your favorite passages from the novel ahead of this podcast, and I’m curious to know what you’re going to select!

LAUREN: Well, I think what I would like, if it’s not too much of a kind of giveaway to introduce people to the appearance of the parrot. So this is from a chapter, Chapter 3 called “The Prodigious Birth of Love.” Also, I currently have a muff that I really love that I got as a Christmas gift, and so this story begins with a girl walking wearing her muff:

Children no less than adults prefer to believe, need to believe, that they are the objects of an exclusive preference. This illusion, which is indispensable to their happiness, is assured to them at first by their nurse and later by their mother. But never for a moment was I allowed to think that I occupied the first place in my mother’s heart: it was forever taken by another. Never did I enjoy a privileged position with any one whatsoever,and no mark of preference had ever been given me until the day when, falling from the skies, the green parrot lighted on my muff. Yes, this miracle happened! And nothing ever happened in our family; we were the four little girls in mourning, to whom every distraction was forbidden as a matter of principle; and our life, like that of the Jews, had been the memory of a great happiness in the past. I could not even assure myself that Sasha’s death, the invented misfortune that served to nourish my young emotions, had touched me directly. But now, in this life deprived of affection, empty of adventure, entirely concentrated on an event anterior to my own past, something had suddenly appeared; a prodigy had taken place; I had seen the miraculous rift in the skies through which the unpredictable future invades the present and occupies it wholly.

KIM: Beautiful.

AMY: And I think it’s interesting, Lauren, that you referenced Nabokov earlier in our talk, because this whole portion of the book where she becomes obsessed, basically, with the green parrot, I was reminded of Nabokov’s Lolita. Just the way she talks about her desire for this bird (which doesn’t yet come through in the passage you just read, but you start to see it) and it’s a desire which, I dare say borders on sexual. Am I right? Kim? 

KIM: How about I read a passage from the book? 

AMY: Okay. [laughing]

LAUREN: We can only speak to the book right now. [laughing].

KIM: Exactly.

Love at first sight, the coupe de foudre …. Neither the wildest nor the wisest of the remarks I was later to hear on this burning question were destined to surprise me in the least. I was both credulous and forewarned. I knew all about passion, though my marriage was completely unromantic, and though I had the reputation of never falling in love. I had only to think of the green parrot to understand the truth of the improbable words that the chronicler of Verona assigns to Juliet a few moments after the meeting with Romeo. “Prodigious birth of love!” she exclaims after telling her nurse: 

Go, ask his name — if he be married, 

My grave is like to be my wedding bed. 

Why were the mysteries of passion revealed to me prematurely, with the help of a green parrot? I cannot say. It was not until long afterwards that I discovered a partial explanation for this overpowering emotion. 

AMY: Basically, she finds this green parrot as a child and longs for it, and an old family doctor tells her that she has fallen in love with this bird because of the boredom and lack of love from her parents (who were obsessed with her dead older brother). And so right now I think it’s a good time to point out that the theories of Sigmund Freud were really coming into vogue when this book was published and maybe that explains a lot where this novel is concerned. Lauren, what do you think her obsession with the green parrot is really all about?

LAUREN: I mean I think the green parrot is the absolute symbol of just this kind of wave of sensuality that has absolutely no other way of expressing itself in her life. Like, she’s not even allowed kind of simple, basic sensual pleasure that we sort of associate with the sun shining on us or taking a bite of a peach. All of these things are denied to her and she sort of has the sense of being no one’s favorite and so this idea of being chosen by this kind of larger-than-life animating force that has this just incredible force of will inside of it, I think is very powerful. I went falconing once and when I was holding the hawk on my hands I actually understood completely and wholly for the first time in my life that animals are completely different from us. That we anthropomorphize them, that we make up stories about them, that we have relationships with them, but this hawk and I, we wanted nothing of the same thing. So I think that she’s sort of projecting her desire to be free from what she sees as the constraints of civility onto this bird. But I would like to better express myself with a short passage from the next page!

AMY: Okay!

LAUREN: My eye had kept the delightful impression of the green parrot resting like a bouquet of young leaves on my dark muff, and afterwards I frequently endeavored to create this harmony about me. Of all the paintings I had ever seen, the one that delighted me most was the Annunciation of Lippo Memmi and Simone Martini, which hangs in the Uffizi galleries in Florence. When I came upon this picture, I felt almost the same shock as on seeing my bird for the first time. I could not believe my eyes; instinctively I closed them to protect myself from a joy that was too keen. The gleaming angel who kneeled like a sleeping whirlwind at the feet of the terrified Virgin — this angel whose wings are as sharp as knives, whose face bears a look of malice, and whose eyes slant upwards under the crest of his diadem — resembled my lovely parrot like a brother.

That’s a painting that I know, so I find it very meaningful. 

AMY: I also just want to say, Kim, how cool is it that we have a guest on that says, “I went falconing once.”

KIM: I’m not surprised at all. It’s perfect.

LAUREN: I was in this really beautiful part of Vermont called The Northeast Kingdom with my best friend, and we were out in the woods and there were like moose everywhere and I grew up around deer in Maryland and I’m really used to deer, but everyone just sort of explained that if a moose saw you it was kind of too late, and I became really really terrified, and I couldn’t really enjoy myself and walk around. I was like, “We’re going to go falconing so we can have a new relationship with animals.” I think I was way more obsessed with it than he was, which is a direct throughline to this conversation right now, but I remember very clearly looking into the bird’s eyes and just thinking, “We are not the same.” All of the Disneyfication of my childhood was just swept away, so yeah, I do understand that idea of a sort of transformative enlightenment that’s received by a surprise arrival.

AMY: So yes, you understand our narrator’s captivity with this bird. Her fascination with the parrot just ties into everything about this book that feels very mystical. As a child, the narrator has these visions of her dead brother while staring into cloud formations that are like waking dreams. Then there’s an incident with a medium who predicts her future, there’s also a religious commune that the narrator visits, and talk of time travel and a pair of fabled Persian lovers. And then there’s also this theme of physical doubles. Lauren, would you care to elaborate on that?

LAUREN: Well, I think that part of what is so fascinating (and in some ways intoxicating) about this book is the search for understanding that the narrator undergoes. She kind of travels throughout the book looking for that in all of these different things. The parrot is a kind of grief and an overwhelming kind of introduction to her life, and then her relationships become a way to connect with other people. It’s a kind of very interesting, sort of almost like a Russian nesting doll kind of aspect to many of the relationships where there are twos, there are threes… there are people that seem to have the physical characteristics that represent the direct opposite of the person that’s being addressed, and it’s like so stark that you can’t believe it. It’s almost an allegory. So I found it very interesting when I was reading the book and re-reading it I just kept thinking “This is so incredibly surreal.” But I think it also lends it the quality of a fable because you start to see … the characters are kind of reduced sometimes to a description of the way that they are: I am the opposite of you, or I am the other half of you, or I’m a mythical figure and you’re my cosmic counterpart, and so it’s definitely an idea of doubling, but I also see it as an idea of duality that echoes back to the idea of the parrot being this sort of missing central part of her life, you know, that has suddenly come to reclaim his place.

AMY: And so we have this younger sister, Marie, who is basically a doppelganger for the narrator. She’s the narrator’s “mini me” and she is strikingly beautiful like the narrator. And because I know that Bibesco was described as gorgeous in her life, her commentary that she gives on Marie’s beauty and her own beauty really stuck out to me in the book. That it’s a sort of curse that alienates you from everyone after a certain point. I could totally imagine Bibesco feeling this way in her life. And so I’m just going to read that passage:

The first effect of beauty is the only one that is not mixed with bitterness; It puts men in unison and makes them understand one another. Later, they begin to quarrel over the ownership of this treasure, which at first was held in common. The charm is broken immediately; what had caused agreement becomes a reason for dispute; what had pleased is now a source for unhappiness; and in this second phase, which follows all too soon after the first, Marie would have to pay dearly for the joy she was thought to give. When this time comes, the girl with “looks” should, if she loves peace, hasten to disappear from the eyes of the world. The same quality that made her loved will cause her to be hated…” 

And this commentary on beauty goes on for several more pages. I just totally could picture Marthe feeling this way.

LAUREN: Yeah, I mean, to return to your jewelry metaphor, I do think that most, if not all, of the characters in the book are a facet of her consciousness that she wants to interrogate in a way that allows her to really kind of analyze the characteristics of this part of herself.

KIM: One thing I wanted to circle back to was the dedication of the novel to her cousin Antoine. I can’t help but wonder about her dedicating it to a male relative and he was a known womanizer, as we said, with whom she clearly had a close relationship. As I said, I couldn’t find anything more about it. It is a bit mysterious. It reminds me of the nesting dolls you were mentioning, Lauren. And I was also thinking back when you were speaking earlier about the fable-like quality… Amy mentioned in the beginning, I think we were talking a little bit about Marthe and the stuff that she studied. She also, I think, had a governess that taught her the Romanian folk tales, so she was immersed in that in addition to all of the other Francophile-type things. 

LAUREN: Yeah, and I mean, she would have spoken (for someone in her social level and the time that she lived in) she would have spoken at least five languages. Five or six. And certainly everyone who would have come into her orbit would have shared something of their own life, and so I can see how some of the parts of the story that feel like a bit of a pastiche, you know, for someone who probably never received any formal education, it would have been encyclopedic in a way.

KIM: There’s such a mysterious, lovely quality to her writing that is really haunting. Lauren, is there anything else you wanted to say about The Green Parrot?

Lauren: Well, I find it really interesting that this book continues to bring intriguing new people and dimensions into my life. When I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to have this conversation and I invited people to share their thoughts, I discovered another book with a green parrot as a very important plot device. It’s A Simple Heart by Flaubert, and it’s a completely different story. It’s about a woman who’s a maid in a house and it’s a very similar psychological portrait. I actually think that these two works are read really gorgeously in conversation. Flaubert has this kind of quality of telling the story of overlooked lives, and it’s just really, really incredible, and it has a very kind of similar arc. It’s about a woman who feels quite unloved, has no family, no one to look after her. She begins to admire someone’s pet parrot, so much so that they give it to her when they leave town. She nurtures it, and it dies, and the rest of her life is about her kind of keeping the parrot in an altar and then it talks about the arc of her life, but no detail is overlooked. I found it just incredibly, incredibly touching and incredibly charming. There are so many points in the book where the people in the book are determined to overlook this woman, and yet the author just keeps the focus so totally on this love story between her and her parrot, and I think that they’re both unhappy, to quote another great writer, in their own way. I started to think, “Should I read all the books with parrots in them?” And then I was like, I think two French books from more or less the same time period is enough! But I started thinking a lot about women's lives and regardless of your socio-economic class, what kind of feelings you would have been allowed to feel. Some of the kind of huge passions of French novels of the 19th century I think have a lot to do with this fact that like sensuality cannot be legislated. It was Adam Moody on Twitter who was talking about A Simple Heart, and I’m really glad that I read it. It was one of those nice connections that you have online where you think, “Oh, I remember why I’m here!” So I promised that I would give him a shout-out.

AMY: Now you’re raising memories for me of another novel where a caged bird factors in prominently, and I cannot figure it out. I don’t know if it’s The Awakening [by Kate Chopin] ... But there’s some book like that… Birds are suddenly becoming a theme.

KIM: Yeah, Michael Chabon I thought had… I don’t know if his was a green parrot but I think it’s a novella or a short story [The Final Solution]. I’ll have to look now that we’re talking about this.

AMY: Who knew parrots could stir up so much passion in people? I guess parrot owners.

KIM: Yeah. And it makes me want to read more of her books, and I don’t know… I don't know how many of them are actually translated, or Lauren, if you’ve read any of them. She wrote the popular romances under a pseudonym, Lucile Décaux. Do you know anything about other translated works by her, or have you read any other works by her in French? 

LAUREN: No, there’s very little in print. I mean, The Green Parrot is considered her towering achievement, for sure.

AMY: I just want to point out that The Green Parrot was a really quick read, but it’s also one that I can see myself going back to for another look, and I don’t typically re-read novels that I’ve read. I just move on to the next one, but this is one that has so much packed into a little tidy package. The little “snuff box” that we mention in the introduction. There’s so much involved that I think on a second or third reading I would just get more and more out of it, and it’s so gorgeously written.

LAUREN: Oh, absolutely. The level of detail alone. Like if you were looking for inspiration on how to set a scene or even a table, I mean, you can just picture these rooms, you know and the door and then the door and then the door and door and doors kind of going on forever.

AMY: And the fact that she died almost penniless is really sad given that her life was so sparkling. The ending just feels like something out of a novel in a strange way.

LAUREN: Yeah, I mean I feel that that kind of casualty of the world changing was something that was lived so closely. I studied Russian in college and actually, working as a dance publicist in my 20s, I remember reading a lot and understanding a lot about the kind of exiles in Paris from various countries across Europe, you know, that just were not able to live where they were from anymore. So I think we’ve lost a lot of stories that way, where someone just doesn’t necessarily live happily ever after, although I wouldn’t say anything about her life, you know... I feel like the thing about Marthe is that she… she always gets the last word.

KIM: Lauren, it was an absolute delight to have you. You were perfect, perfect to talk about The Green Parrot with us! I am just thrilled.

LAUREN: Thank you, it’s so great to connect. It’s great to be here and obviously, I’ve been living my life … I started the lockdown living in Florence and then I came back to New York in the middle of it and sort of restarted my life here, and the entire time, whenever I’m feeling uncertain about anything I just repeat that epitaph from Howard’s End, “Only connect.” So I have done it for today!

KIM: Thank you so much, Lauren. Thanks again. So be sure to find a copy of The Green Parrot. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and visit Lostladiesoflit.com for further reading materials. 

AMY: If you liked what you’ve heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast…

KIM: And also check out our mini episode next week because we’re going to be talking about The Gilded Age. 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

22. A Real Life Lady Whistledown

KIM (CO-HOST): Hi everyone! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Kim Askew…

AMY (CO-HOST): And I’m Amy Helmes. We’re best friends and co-authors of the Twisted Lit series of young adult novels, and though it’s been a few months since this television show became available, we’d be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to briefly dish about “Bridgerton.” What do you say, Kim?

KIM: Okay, let’s just do it. We’ve held off on discussing it until now because we really didn’t want to spoil it for anybody who didn’t get to binge it right out of the starting gate.

AMY: And actually, we’re not going to give any spoilers away today, either, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet. The Internet has been abuzz for months now with all sorts of recaps and commentary on the show. So we don’t really need to go there. But that said, we think you’re going to find this episode’s topic pretty interesting even if you have not watched “Bridgerton” and even if you don’t intend to. Kim, first things first, we never really got a chance to compare notes about the series — so what’s your verdict? Did you enjoy it?

KIM: Okay, Amy, I enjoyed every episode, and then I promptly forgot about every episode. I’d say it was like a bag of M&Ms rather than a box of Godiva. That said, sometimes — especially during a pandemic (and in L.A. where we are pretty much on “stay-at-home” orders right now) — sometimes a bag of M&Ms is just what you need. 

AMY: I couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s exactly the right analogy for this show. It’s not Godiva. It was totally a bag of M&Ms. Kind of works in a pinch when you need that chocolate fix, you know? I really appreciated the fact that the production value was so high. I mean, that kept my interest going. The casting was amazing, they did not skimp on the costumes or the scenery, the locations… anything like that. Regé-Jean Page and his chiseled bod… he’s got to be in the “Top 10 Costume Drama Hotties.” 

KIM: They’re talking about making him the next James Bond. I don’t know if it’s just the Internet, but I’m there for it honestly. I’m probably more into James Bond if he were James Bond.

AMY: I think that would actually be really good casting. And I’ve got to say, Phoebe Dynevor, who played Daphne, I thought she was incredible too. I loved her. My one problem was that she really reminded me of Wendy from Peter Pan, so then when she would go into the full-in sexy stuff, it was just really hard for me to watch because of the bangs and the innocence. You know what I mean? I just kept thinking of Disney’s Wendy!

KIM: I agree. I felt that, too. I loved the sister.

AMY: Eloise.

KIM: Yeah. Eloise.

AMY: I loved Eloise. I loved Penelope across the street.

KIM: Me too.

AMY: I thought she was really good. I also thought it was interesting to see a Regency-era story set in the heart of London because so many times, except for a few scenes here and there, it’s always set in the English countryside. In Bath or wherever. So to see it actually in the city was pretty cool. But my problem, I guess, a little bit was that it felt like, “Hollywood” was writing it. It felt like Americans were writing it.

KIM: Totally. It was not the BBC.

AMY: The English speak with a specific sort of cadence and they have a certain wit — a very specific wit — and I don’t think it was captured in that series. But I still loved it. I do think it’s funny to see people finally freaking out about costume dramas, like suddenly the rest of the world has caught on to this. If it’s going to spur production of more shows like this, then yes, I’m down for it.

KIM: Absolutely, and we’re always here to give you advice on what other things you can watch that are even better. So for those of you who weren’t aware, the premise around which “Bridgerton” is built is that there’s this anonymous gossip columnist in Regency-era London who goes by the name of “Lady Whistledown.” She loves to stir up scandal by spilling all the tea about members of high society.

AMY: And all the characters on the show are just itching to get their hands on her newsletters as they are printed, and what they read either fills them with wicked amusement or abject mortification, depending on who she’s talking about that week. They never know who will be the subject of Lady Whistledown’s high praise or the target of her scathing exposes. And this mysterious figure has the ability to make or break people’s reputations and, ergo, their very happiness.

KIM: Hmmm, sounds a little bit like “Gossip Girl,” doesn’t it? 

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Anyway, so, is “Bridgerton’s” Lady Whistledown based on a real person, Amy?

AMY: Well, there’s no specific person, historically, that we could equate with Lady Whistledown, but according to historian Catherine Curzon, who gave a recent interview to Town & Country magazine, she does take after a gossip writer from early 18th century England known as “Mrs. Crackenthorpe.”

KIM: Are you sure that’s not a Dickens character, Amy?

AMY: It does sound like that, right?

KIM: There’s the same number of syllables in their names. 

AMY: Yeah, “Whistledown.” “Crackenthorpe.” Yeah. So anyway, I decided to dig a little further to see what all I could find on Mrs. Crackenthorpe. So “Mrs. Phoebe Crackenthorpe” (her tagline is: “a lady who knows everything”) was an anonymous author who wrote the short lived magazine The Female Tatler, which was published from 1709 to 1710. (It was basically a rival of The Tatler, but it was one of the first periodicals aimed solely for a female audience). It was known for its “scandal and scurrility.” 

KIM: Oooh.

AMY: I like that word: scurrility. Mrs. Crackenthorpe, unlike Lady Whistledown, did not out people by name, however, she used codes to disguise their identities that were pretty easy to see through. 

KIM: So basically the historic equivalent of “blind items.” 

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: It reminds me actually a little bit of the anonymous “case studies” that are in the books of Marjorie Hillis, which we talked about in last week’s episode, although Marjorie Hillis’s examples are meant to be sort of self-help, cautionary tales. But as for Mrs. Crackenthorpe, I like the idea of people having to look for the clues to determine exactly who she’s talking about. That sounds really cool. 

AMY: Yeah, and interestingly, she also chastised any readers who sent in letters trying to expose people… she did not play that way. It’s fine for her to dish the dirt, because she saw herself as impartial, but if you were trying to out someone vindictively, she was NOT on board and she was not going to help you out with that.

KIM: Ooh, I like her! So do we actually know who she really was?

AMY: That remains the big question, actually: the identity of “Mrs. Crackenthorpe” has never been established. Some scholars theorize that it could have been a man, but that’s just speculation. And actually “Mrs. Crackenthorpe” had words to say about that theory. She wrote:

Whereas several ill-bred critics have reported about town that a woman is not the author of this paper, which I take to be a splenetic and irrational aspersion upon our whole sex, women were always allow'd to have a finer thread of understanding than men, which made them have recourse to learning, that they might equal our natural parts, and by an arbitrary sway have kept us from many advantages to prevent our out-vying them; but those ladies who have imbib'd authors, and div'd into arts and sciences have ever discover'd a quicker genius, and more sublime notions. These detractors cou'd never gain admittance to the fair sex, and all such I forbid my drawing room.” [Issue No. 11]

So she’s not having any “only a man could have written this.” Don’t talk to her that way. Side note on this: a baronet once referred to her drawing room as the “scandal office.” I feel like I need a placard for my office that just says “Scandal Office” on it. 

KIM: I love that. It very much makes it almost, in a salacious way, kind of business-like, which a woman, potentially, of Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s ilk, probably wasn’t actually “working” so to speak in other ways than this, so I kind of like that.

AMY: Yeah, she was brokering in scandal, in gossip, and having people come in and out of the drawing room telling her what to dish about. So as to her identity though, some people have also suggested that she could have been the playwright, best-selling novelist and political satirist  Delarivier Manley (or Delia Manley, for short). And I don’t know if it was her or not, but we could devote an entire episode to her as a “Lost Lady of Lit,” because she put out a lot of great works and she is sometimes referred to as one of the “fair triumvirate of wit” (the other two in that triumvirate at the time were the writers Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood.) 

KIM: Oh, we’ve got to research her for a potential “lost lady,” you are right. She sounds fascinating. Let’s look into that more.

AMY: She would have been in her 40s around the time Mrs. Crackenthorpe was writing, so that all pans out. And I’ve also seen scholarship that debunks the idea that Manley was Lady Crackenthorpe… what’s actually really interesting, thought, is that Delia Manley was arrested for libel at one point for lampooning certain politicians in her novel The New Atalantis, and right around that time she got arrested, the The Female Tatler’s next issue (the 52nd issue) was suddenly published under a new authorship… someone else took over — these two sisters named Lucinda and Artesia. But what happened to Lady Crackenthorpe?

KIM: Ooh, the plot thickens! 

AMY: All that said, Lady Crackenthorpe was at work in the early part of the 18th century, so that was basically a century before the time period in which Bridgerton is set. So she’s not necessarily the perfect parallel for Lady Whistledown.

KIM: Right, but if we want to look to something a little more of that Regency era, we could mention Town and Country magazine (which, by the way, is no relation to the Town & Country publication we know of today) It had a column called “Tete-A-Tete” which is another early gossip column. It was like “Page 6” in that it focused on celebrities of the day.

AMY: We’re talking celebrities like Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire…

KIM: We love her.

AMY: She was played by Keira Knightley in a biopic called The Duchess. If you haven’t seen that, it’s worth checking out. And then similar to today, there were also a lot of stories centered on the royal family, including The Prince of Wales and his lover, who was actress Mary Robinson. The gossip columns could not get enough of this couple and they referred to them as “Perdita” and “Florizel,” which were apparently their pet names for one another.

KIM: I love it! Okay, so while we’re talking Regency Era romance, Amy I think this might be a good segue to talk about the new book you have an essay featured in.

AMY: So yeah, even today’s modern newspapers love to dish about real life romances — and several years back I contributed an article to The L.A. Times’ “L.A. Affairs” column. It’s a weekly column that they publish having to do with dating, relationships and marriage in Los Angeles. Well, they have recently published a book compiling some of the “greatest hits” from the “L.A. Affairs” column, and I’m so excited that they chose to include my essay in it! 

KIM: I’m excited about the book, too. It’s called L.A. Affairs: 65 True Stories of Nightmare Dates, Love at First Sight, Heartbreak and Happily Ever Afters in Southern California. We’ll include a link in our show notes of course for that, but Amy, tells us about your essay, which I love.

AMY: It was called “Searching for Mr. Darcy,” and it’s basically about my search for a soul mate in Los Angeles and comparing it to that of a Jane Austen heroine.

KIM: Can you read us a bit of it?

AMY: Yeah! I’ll read you sort of the beginning part.

Approaching self-declared spinsterhood, I blamed Jane Austen. Having read all her novels and watched achingly gorgeous film adaptations thereof, I would consider only men who epitomized one of those gallant and stouthearted Regency-era heroes (barring the breeches and riding jackets because, well, I had to be realistic).

Yet here was the sad but universal truth: If Jane Austen couldn’t find a suitable mate in her day and age — she never married — there was no way in hell I’d ever find my “Mr. Darcy” in L.A., of all places.

Sure, you could find a regimental army’s worth of rogues at any bar in Hollywood. And this town was teeming with preening and sniveling “Mr. Collins” types, those smarmy social climbers (typically agents and aspiring screenwriters) in hot pursuit of their trophy wife. Insufferable. As for honorable gentleman callers — the kind that would make you swoon while earning your mother’s seal of approval? — they were as rare as snow on the Sunset Strip.

Occasionally, a dashing young dandy had me blushing under my nonexistent bonnet. That’s when friends would set me straight by insisting that my gentleman caller definitely wasn’t. (“His favorite movie is ‘Xanadu,’ Amy! How are you not seeing this?”) Like a foolhardy Lydia Bennet, I was briefly led astray by an L.A. transplant from England, naturally besotted by his British accent and rakish charm only to discover, to my disgrace, that he was both a coke addict and a married man. Quelle horreur!

There was only one way to meet my 18th century ideal: Use 21st century tactics. 

And it goes on from there, basically, to explain how, in fact, I did meet my husband, Mike.

KIM: I was there for all of it, from “Single Amy” to “Married Amy,” and it is a very romantic story. You’ll definitely want to read the rest of this brilliant, wonderful essay.

AMY: I did find my “Mr. Darcy.”

KIM: Yes. Thank goodness. So, speaking of love stories, I’ll segue into a rather unusual one we have coming at you next week. (You’ll want to stay around for that): The Green Parrot, by Princess (and yes, you heard that right) Princess Marthe Bibesco. And we have a wonderful guest joining us to discuss her. She’s literary publicist Lauren Cerand, who has been dubbed a “cultural gatekeeper in the literary world,” no less. 

AMY: And by the way, Lauren had these beautiful “parrot” headbands made for us by Kevin Burke who has a shop on Etsy. We’ll link to that in our show notes, and I’m sure you can find the pictures of those on our Instagram. We’ll see you next week. Until then, be sure to do all the things they tell you to do at the end of podcasts: subscribe, rate and review us. And hit us up on social media to let us know what you think!

KIM: We’d really love if you’d review us. 

AMY: Please!

KIM: Our theme song was performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by the wonderful Harriet Grant. 

AMY: Lost Ladies of Lit was produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.

21. Marjorie Hillis — Live Alone and Like It with Joanna Scutts

AMY HELMES (CO-HOST): Hi, everybody! So, as you know, we are recording this podcast in our homes during a pandemic, and in this episode, it just happens to be three moms with kids of various ages in the house while we are trying to record the podcast.

KIM ASKEW (CO-HOST): You may hear small outbursts from a child in the background.

AMY: That’s motherhood.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: With that said … Valentine’s Day. Never has a single holiday had so many wide-ranging emotions associated with it. 

KIM: Yes. Glee, dread, weird pressure and anxiety — all of those things come to mind for me, you’re right. 

AMY: There’s something a little bit off about a holiday that so obviously makes people who aren’t in a relationship feel bad. I’ve had a lot of lonely Valentine’s Days in my past, Kim. I remember one year when I opted not to wallow and instead got crafty and made all of my single friends beautiful and elaborate Valentine’s cards. And I think you got one that year.

KIM: I still have it, in fact, and it’s one of my favorite Valentines, for sure! So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off some of history’s long-forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes… and okay, listeners, as you might have guessed, we’re not selecting some long-lost romantic novel in honor of Valentine’s Day this week.

KIM: No, we wouldn’t do that to you. Instead, we’re going in the completely opposite direction. We’re going to focus on Marjorie Hillis, a writer whose book, Live Alone and Like It (a self-help guide celebrating the single life) was among the top-10 bestselling nonfiction books of 1936. 

AMY: She gave non-married women of all ages (Live-Aloners, she called them) the green light to view themselves not as spinsters but rather, as chic and sensational singletons who could waltz through life with a freedom to do exactly as they pleased — and to really savor it. Her pithy tome (along with its subsequent sequels) is charming, witty and chock-full of advice that, honestly, still seems really solid even today, no matter what your relationship status is.

KIM: It’s a delightful read, and we’re thrilled to be discussing it today, especially since we have the ultimate authority on Marjorie Hillis with us today to chat. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

AMY: So we are so very lucky to have literary critic and cultural historian Joanna Scutts here with us today. She graduated from King’s College, Cambridge, and went on to earn her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia. She helped curate exhibits and events for the New York Historical Society's Center for Women’s History, and she’s written for The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time and The Washington Post, to name just a few. Her 2017 book The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It was published to rave reviews and named one of 2018’s feminist must-reads by the UK’s Red magazine, and it’s her book that introduced me to Marjorie Hillis. Joanna, thanks so much for joining us!

JOANNA SCUTTS (GUEST): Thank you for having me! I’m so excited to talk about this.

KIM: So, Joanna in your book, you talk about how you first discovered Hillis, and it’s a really special anecdote and we were hoping you would share the story with our listeners.

JOANNA: Sure! I often say that it was a gift that came into my life. It was at a time in my life when I was kind of flailing. My father had died recently; I was single; I was almost thirty and finishing up a pHd program and had no idea what was coming next. One of my oldest friends when I was home in London gave me a copy of this book, which I read and devoured having kind of gotten over the title, because the title is kind of a bit of a punch in the gut in some ways: Live Alone and Like It? It’s like, “Oh, this is my future.” But it was so funny, and my friend sort of insisted, she was like, “Read on and listen!” So she’s reading me passages from it, and we started reading them to each other, and then I devoured the whole book and really was just fascinated by this voice. Really captivated by her sense of humor and I was just like, “Marjorie Hillis…” I had no idea who this person was, and I Googled and there was no Wikipedia page — there was not a hint of who this person was. Eventually I found somebody’s blog that had talked about it, and there’s kind of a little bit of a cult of Marjorie Hillis out there, so I tapped into that, but I sort of knew there was a story here, and I wanted to figure out what it was. 

AMY: I love the fact that not only did you write a biography of Hillis but you actually kind of used her as a sort of fulcrum to tell a larger story, about the history of women in the 20th century. What do you think makes her the perfect figure with which to tell that larger story?

JOANNA: That’s such a great question, and there’s sort of a “meta” answer and a more substantive answer. The meta answer is what I was saying about how completely she had disappeared. As I started to research, I realized how hugely famous she had been for this very brief moment and how enormously successful this book was. And that kind of interplay of fame and disappearance is something that is very common with women writers, historically, who can be famous and successful but don’t have the sort of establishment...don’t get into the “academy,” don’t get canonized in the way that men do more easily. And I was interested in that moment of fame and disappearance as a story of women’s literature even as relatively recently as the 1930s. But then she also kind of has a trajectory, a life story that we’ll talk about. The journey that she took is a very typical one in some ways. Her family was from the Midwest and sort of moved to New York at the turn of the 20th century when the city became this sort of huge metropolis. And she was a minister’s daughter and she went to work for a magazine and became this journalist/editor, really embraced her working life, her professional life, her professional identity… came of age as women were given the vote and so kind of became successful and independent in a way that hadn’t been possible for previous generations. She basically became famous by writing a self-help book about how to be more like her. (Takes a certain level of confidence and success!) Obviously, hers was a very privileged story. She was not fabulously wealthy by the standards of the time, but certainly wealthy and secure, and she had opportunities that weren’t available to poorer women; certainly weren’t available to black women, women of color at the time. So her life story is a particularly privileged white feminist story, but I think the way that she reached this much wider audience makes for a really interesting bigger story. 

KIM: Can you tell us a little bit about the origin of the title of your book, “The Extra Woman” and where that springs from? 

JOANNA: Well, it’s her subtitle. So the book, Live Alone and Like It is a “Guide for the Extra Woman.” And in a way, that extraordinarily blunt phrasing (kind of a two-punch title) but it was quite a common phrase. In the book she talks about it sort of as a “social extra”  — being sort of undesirable at dinner parties because you mess up the numbers. But also there’s a really important sense of how you sort of were legally “extra” at the time, and for many, many years, historically, the status of women in the American legal system was that you were “covered,” (the legal term is coverture — you were covered by your husband or your father) and women who were unmarried were sort of outside that system in a way that the system didn’t really have a place for. Being “extra,” being outside of the expected kind of “two by two” formation of culture and identity. She was really speaking, as she often does, of this much larger legal problem but approaching it in a very light way.   

AMY: It’s funny, too, because now, that term “extra” is almost a good thing: “She’s so extra!!” But yes, the original version of it? A little insulting.

KIM: Yeah, it’s worse than being a third wheel.

JOANNA: But it’s true, I think you’re always both. You were surplus to requirements but you also had the possibility to be bigger than life, and I think there was always some potential in there.

AMY: I think we need to give listeners a taste right off the bat of what Hillis’s book — Live Alone and Like It  — is like. 

KIM: Right. So in a nutshell, it’s an advice book, and it’s organized into 12 chapters that address key topics centered around living your best solo life, be it advice on how to set up the swankiest apartment, how to be a single party hostess and witty conversationalist, how to dress chicly, and even tips on cooking for one. It’s all about cultivating a cultured, pampered existence for yourself. 

AMY: And yeah, she even delves into the “pleasures of the single bed” (Oooh!) and takes a no-judgment attitude about sex and having affairs, which was pretty daring for her era. But I think the best way to illustrate the book is to just go ahead and share some of her fabulous advice, so to that end, Joanna, Kim and I are going to share some of our favorite nuggets of wisdom from the book. Joanna, would you care to start us off?

JOANNA: Okay! Well, one of my favorite sections is the chapter which is composed as a kind of Q&A about etiquette. There’s all kinds of arcane rules about where you’re supposed to sit at a dinner party if you have single women there. They were really apparently a big problem for dinner parties! But one of the questions was “Is it permissible for a youngish un-chaperoned woman living alone to wear pajamas when a gentleman calls?” It really depends, Marjorie says, assuming she knows one pajama from another, it’s entirely permissible. And then she goes on to give you the different kinds of pajamas. Sleeping pajamas — those are not acceptable to receive anyone; beach pajamas (which I’m still not quite sure what those are); lounging pajamas; and then hosting pajamas. I fell in love with this idea of “hostess pajamas” — I think there’s a great untapped market there.

KIM: I mean, we need this for Zoom, if someone hasn’t already written it, but which pajamas you can wear for Zoom depending on who you’re talking to on Zoom. I think that would apply. And I think we do need different types of pajamas!

JOANNA: Absolutely.

AMY: Kind of piggy-backing off that question was one of my favorite tips: Once you have a gentleman caller at your house and it’s time for him to go, how do you tactfully get him to vamoose, as they say? I will just read the little snippet that she says: If you want him to come again soon, a little tact is usually wiser. You might begin with “Let me get you a glass of water.” (Nothing stronger). “It’s hours since you had that highball.” This will get you both up and give you the advantage. You can keep on standing, which will eventually wear down any man if you don’t drop first. There is little danger that you will have to call the elevator man or open the window and scream. It may happen, but don’t get your hopes up. You have to be pretty fascinating.

KIM: This is like the opposite of “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” How do I get him out?! That’s hilarious.

AMY: Kim would you care to share one?

KIM: Yes, I have so many, but I’m going to go to the beginning of the book, Chapter One: Solitary Refinement, and it’s mentioned a little in the preface, too, but I’ll skip straight to this: You have got to decide what kind of life you want and then make it for yourself. And it sounds really simple. It could be the premise of, I guess, many self-help books, but honestly, I think if you stop to think about it, it’s about being active rather than reactive, and if you can take that little first step, then you’re sort of on your way to figuring it out. Says someone who lived alone, off and on, for two decades and finally figured it out. I wish I had had her as a guru.

JOANNA: I’m so glad you quoted that line, Kim. It’s one of my favorite lines in the book and I just love that it’s true. It’s the simplicity that kind of stops you in your tracks. She goes on to say that having traditional marriage and kids is often a way of kind of avoiding that question and the reason why it’s that much more urgent for people who live alone is that, you know, you’ve got nothing standing in the way of you and that decision. So it’s a really proactive stance that runs through the book.

AMY: Okay, Joanna, any other fascinating tidbit that you can share?

JOANNA: Well, I think we were going to talk about New York a little bit later, so I don’t want to go too much into it, but I love the pages when she’s talking about exploring your city, essentially. It’s kind of this whole litany of “Have you been here?” “Have you been to this?” “Have you hunted up the little French restaurants that are the cheap, out of the way ones?” “Have you been to the Yiddish theater?” It’s both a kind of wonderful snapshot of New York in the Thirties, but also, what’s interesting about that section is this is the part that really confused me, because the first version of the book that I read was the translation of this American book into a British context. So in the British version of the book, instead of going to Broadway, it’s the West End, instead of Central Park, it’s Regent’s Park. And so everything about it is tailored to London. I love that there’s this kind of vision of a really active, engaged life in the city, but it kind of almost doesn’t matter which city because the same thing is there wherever you are.

AMY: Which brings me to my next bit of advice that I loved, about travel. She says: A reasonable amount of travel ought of course to be listed among the necessities. And an unreasonable amount if you can manage it. (And this is my favorite part:) If you don’t agree with this, there is something wrong with you and you should see a doctor or a minister or at least read a few travel books and folders. I mean, hilarious!

KIM: I have one that, I would be surprised if Amy didn’t pick this one, too, because I could hear her saying this: Anyone who pities herself for more than a month on end is a weak sister and likely to become a public nuisance besides. Basically, like, yeah, you can feel sorry for yourself for a little bit, and I think she even goes into the details of having a good cry in your bed and everything, but wallowing in the pity is not going to get you any closer to living the life that you want. So kind of, “Chin up, now. It’s time to sort of get with it and start living.”

AMY: Also, she strongly urges you to maintain a sense of fabulousness. One of my favorite recommendations is to make sure you put a mirror at the foot of your bed so that when you wake up in the morning, you can be sure to look at yourself and make sure that you’re not falling apart.

KIM: I won’t be taking that advice!

AMY: You know, it’s a reminder to not let yourself go if you have to look at yourself in the mirror every morning.

KIM: Good advice, but no thanks.

JOANNA: So the mirror at the foot of the bed is also, I always thought, a bit of the minister’s daughter coming through. That kind of sense of like keeping yourself honest and that sense that you’re always accountable to you god or to your mirror. It’s frivolous, but this is one of those moments where I feel like the frivolity slips and there is a serious, quite tough-mind, Protestant advice here about “You’ve got to keep your standards up even if no one’s watching.”

KIM: I love that insight into it. That actually makes a lot of sense. 

JOANNA: So one thing that I’ve always liked is about the importance of friends, because one of the things that she emphasizes over and over again is that being a successful Live-Aloner is not about being a hermit. And actually, the social life that you build is vital to your happiness. She says most people’s minds are like ponds and need a constantly fresh stream of ideas in order not to get stagnant. So she has this idea that you should always be feeding your mind and you should be keeping up on books and theater and culture and also seeing your friends. Your friends are a really key part of keeping that active. She has another line about being something, doing something in the world. One that gets quoted a lot, but it’s: Be a communist, be a stamp-collector or a ladies’ aid worker if you must, but for heaven’s sake, be something. It reads very differently in 1936 than it would have in 1946, but the idea that you just go out and be a part of your community, part of your world, socially, politically. Just because you’re alone it doesn’t mean that you have to stay inside.

KIM: In some ways it feels like, “Yeah, of course,” but I feel like so many people, especially when you’re first starting out on your own, really don’t get that. I know that I didn’t, and it did take me a while to figure that out for myself. To really stop waiting for an event or a person to sort of direct my life and to take it upon myself to do all those things. So I think if women read something like this as they were starting out, especially particular types of women (maybe like me), they might have had an easier time of it from the beginning and enjoyed themselves a little bit more.  

AMY: She also talks about, you don’t want to venture into “old lady” territory. Or, you know, you don’t want to be the person at the dinner party who is a bore, because you’re not going to get invited back, and that’s a lot of the reason why she kept emphasizing to make sure you’re up on current events; make sure you have a selection of recent books that you can talk about, movies that you’ve been to, plays that you’ve been to.

KIM: The woman who treats herself like an aristocrat seems aristocratic to other people, and the woman who is sloppy at home inevitably slips sometimes in public. It sort of reminded me of that idea of dressing for the job you want to have, and I think a lot of her advice is sort of geared toward presenting yourself, but in doing so, you begin to turn inward and look at what you really want, and I love that aspect of what she’s saying.

AMY: And she’s so funny, too! Every bit of this advice, I don’t think we’re doing justice to the fact that she’s hilarious. But at the same time, she kind of gets really “tough-love” with you, too. I was reminded of the “Snap Out of It!” moment in “Moonstruck,” for anyone actually old enough to get that reference. She cautions readers against feeling sorry for themselves, writing: “...you can figure out for yourself just what you’ll become with a mental picture of ‘Poor little me, all alone in a big bad world.’ Not only will you soon actually be all alone; you will also be an outstanding example of the super-bore.”

KIM: I love that. So Joanna, when this book was published in 1936, there was really an appetite for this sort of thing. Can you tell us a little more about that?

JOANNA: Sure. Our picture of the Depression obviously is that nobody really had anything, and yet there is a lot of up and down obviously in those years. In 1936, the Depression has been dragging on for most of the decade. There was a real sense that people were on their own to kind of make their way. There’s a huge boom in self-help books in the middle of the 1930s. How to Win Friends and Influence People is also 1936. People were very eager for stories about how you could succeed and how, if you just change your mindset, you can overcome circumstance. So this is also the time when Norman Vincent Peale, who goes on to become kind of the guru of positive thinking, he’s getting his start around this time. And there’s a lot of other people. Napoleon Hill, who had a big bestseller called Think and Grow Rich. There’s just kind of this real sense of like, you can mentally overcome your circumstances and succeed. Marjorie Hillis is one of the few people who was specifically writing to women and writing in a way that isn’t about how to find a husband or how to be a thrifty housewife or how to push your family’s budget, but she’s there saying, “figure out what you want, go after it. Move, leave your family. Sell your old house and take a chic apartment in the city.” All of these things that are just very much about making your own way. She kind of capitalizes on that hunger for self-help, but sort of does it with this interesting feminist twist.

AMY: So Hillis was in her 40s when this book came out, and it might be surprising, especially for that era, to think of a woman her age writing a book about how to epitomize fabulousness, basically. But she also had a seemingly glamorous job, I think, that no doubt gave her really a specific insight for this task. 

JOANNA: Yes! Absolutely! She had been at Vogue magazine at this point for more than 20 years. She worked her way up. She was an editor. When she got started, she worked with Dorothy Parker briefly when she was at Vogue writing underwear captions. Brevity is the soul of lingerie, famously. Dorothy Parker, years later, talked about Vogue at that time and said actually back then it wasn’t a very glamorous place; it was kind of dowdy, that these women were very nice and very genteel, kind of white-glove ladies. It was over across the hall at Vanity Fair where they were much more dashing and glamorous. But over the years, Vogue did get more racy and more glamorous, and Marjorie became good friends with the editor in chief, Edna Woolman Chase, who was there for almost 40 years. And her autobiography is an interesting ride as well, but she loved her work and even when she was wealthy and when she had a family, she didn’t give it up. Marjorie was very much the same. She loved her work, and so they were sort of like-minded women. Marjorie described herself as very plain. That she was dowdy and she never had boyfriends, she never had much interest from men when she was young, but she knew how to dress, because Vogue taught you that. It taught you how to make the best of what you have and how to be confident, and she really thought of fashion as what we were saying earlier, it was really a tool for women to present themselves to the world. She has a great line about It takes a genius to make an impression in rundown heels and an unbecoming hat. She thought women should study it as a manual. As kind of, “Okay, I have to learn what goes with what,” and if you learn that, you can dress better and then you can essentially put your best foot forward. But she really didn’t think it was just something for beautiful women or young women or rich women. It was something that everyone sort of had a right and a duty to embrace.

AMY: Although Live Alone and Like It was written for women everywhere, a lot of the advice seems particularly suited to city girls, and it feels like this book is a real love letter to New York. Now, Joanna, as someone who now calls New York home, I can imagine that’s something you appreciate.

JOANNA: Absolutely. So I’m from London originally and I’ve lived in New York now for 20 years soon, so it really does speak to me as a city girl and I think that’s right, Marjorie does essentially say that part of the challenge of being single is escaping the judgment and the well-meaning help and advice of family and friends and so a large part of it is about getting to somewhere you can reinvent yourself, and of course historically, traditionally, that’s been cities. Marjorie loved New York. She wrote a book about New York, a guide book to the city, in 1939, and we actually had a friend read a passage from that at my wedding, which was in a park on the edge of the East River. She talks about the beauty of the rivers kind of wrapping around Manhattan. It’s just a wonderful, simple evocation of what it means to be at home in New York. She had talked about being in a New York apartment and she says, you can’t be lonely if you’re surrounded by all these other lives. There’s “Nowhere else, except for perhaps on a mountaintop can one feel so securely snug and remote, so sure of being able to live one’s life as one wants to, as in a New York apartment, where you never see your neighbor and choose your friends because you like them and not because they live around the corner. That always kind of struck me as a fantasy, but it’s a very powerful, enduring one, for sure. 

KIM: And even that apartment building that she moved to, there’s something just so “of the moment,” and modern. It felt like she was at the beginning of some exciting time and right in the middle of it. There’s one whole chapter in the book devoted to budgeting and finances, and Hillis cleverly titles it “You’d Better Skip This One.” (Which of course makes you want to read it.) So much of the book is about finding life’s little luxuries, but this book was written during the Great Depression as we talked about. So how did Hillis manage to square that?

JOANNA: Well, the simplest answer is that she was rich, but the serious answer is that she, I think, recognized that self-help has a lot to do with inspiration and also aspiration, so she was really aware that part of what people were looking for was something to kind of inspire them to greatness and to more than they had. Her second book, which was all about budgeting, is called Orchids on Your Budget. She’d initially called it An Orchid on Your Budget. (An orchid. A single orchid). And then she ran it by her colleagues at Vogue and they thought that that was stingy. So it became Orchids, which I love. And she does say in that book, she says explicitly that this isn’t advice for people who are struggling to survive, fairly obviously. She says it’s about people who are able to make the choice between butter on their bread; it’s not for people who are struggling to get the bread. She makes that distinction fairly self-consciously, but of course, it’s still a very privileged kind of book. But that didn’t seem to get in the way of its popularity.

KIM: And while you might think a lot of her advice would be maybe a little dated almost 100 years later, it really isn’t! You know, there are a few things …. She mentions having servants to wait on you … something most of us today DON’T have… those sections can get a bit cringey at times.

AMY: And yeah, tastes have literally changed a bit in terms of, let’s say, the chapter on cooking. I probably won’t be serving my guests noodles mixed with chicken livers and tomato sauce which was one of her recommendations. But I really loved her advice about making a habit of planning your social life out a week in advance, so that way when the weekend rolls around, you already have a ton of engagements lined up -- you’re not sitting at home twiddling your thumbs. That’s solid advice, I think!

KIM: Yeah, definitely, and I loved the chapter on serving cocktails and what to stock your liquor cabinet with — you’d still today be considered extremely cool if you followed her guidance on that today. 

JOANNA: Yeah, I mean certainly the cocktail thing is sort of: learn the classics and don’t try to improve on them. She’s very strict about that. Yeah, and I think she has a great many relevant things to say about not only pajamas but other forms of bedwear. She really… there’s a whole wardrobe out there: bed jackets she’s very keen on, so you can have breakfast in bed.

AMY: And she also says dress for bed as if you’re not going to bed alone, which I love.

JOANNA: Yes, she has a great deal of fun with the sort of prurient assumptions around single women and even though from her own life, from what I was able to glean, she clearly wasn’t especially scandalous in her own life, but she definitely understood that single women (especially financially independent women) were a scandal in some sense, and so she sort of leans into that very much with all the advice on glamorous negligees. It was clearly a kind of titillating glimpse behind the curtain of what the single lady in her apartment is doing.

AMY: And I think she said I can’t tell you whether or not to have an affair, but if you are going to have one, wait until you’re 30. That was her advice also.

JOANNA: Yes, I like that advice. She just says, “There’s just too much drama before that, but by the time you’re 30, you know what you want. You’re not going to put up with nonsense. Your family’s kind of given up on you anyway, so you’re fine.” There’s something to that! I do also think that her advice about material objects is really… i really have sort of taken that to heart since reading all of this. She genuinely believed that beautiful surroundings, beautiful clothes do have a real effect on your life and how you feel. That line about if you don’t look your best how hard it is to come across well. And also it’s very hard to be happy in an apartment surrounded by all sorts of crap that you hate. It’s about spending time and attention and daring to sort of choose the things you love.

AMY: Definitely the precursor to Marie Kondo: Find what sparks joy. So at the end of every chapter, Hillis includes these “case studies” of various women who serve as examples of either what to do or what not to do… Honestly, they were my favorite parts of the book, because she’s so dramatic and funny in telling their stories — often cautionary tales and sometimes horror stories. Now I presumed they were fictitious, but it seems from reading your book, that she really did base some of these on people she knew.

JOANNA: Yes. So they’re often sort of too well-disguised at this distance to really figure that out, but certainly there are moments where she got a little sloppy and she didn’t really disguise them enough and people recognized themselves. I think especially in the second book about budgeting. People were like, “Umm… is that me?” In Live Alone she has one which is very recognizable which is a “Miss. W.” who stands on her head at parties. Which was a reference, clearly, to this very famous interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, who was a kind of scandalous figure in various ways. She was an out lesbian; she was a big enthusiast of yoga when it was brand new, and this was her party trick, was to stand on her head. So that’s one where clearly everybody knew who she was talking about. But for the most part, I think her mix of known people and maybe there are amalgamations, but they are, I think, yeah, you’re right — very lively and really do make the case that there’s this army of women out there who are desperate for this kind of advice and stumble upon it in some way, but there’s an untapped market that she’s identified.

KIM: So, can you tell us about how this book was received when it came out? I know it was marketed in a rather unusual way?

JOANNA: Yes. This was so fascinating to look at. There was a kind of snapshot in my research about the opportunities for book marketing, which turned on the fact that every town of any size had several department stores and several newspapers. All the newspapers had women’s pages and columns to fill, and all these department stores had windows to fill. Again, Depression Era, they’re open to anything that’s going to bring people in the door. So the publisher's archive has all these amazing marketing plans that were incredibly detailed that they had their salesmen go around to these department stores with a list of quotations from the book and a list of products that they could tie in. So you had your hostessing pajamas, your bed jackets, your negligees, your cocktail shakers and all of your kind of small furniture that was appropriate for your city apartment. I love to imagine these traveling salesmen kind of going to the head of these department stores saying, “This is your new client. The housewives who were your existing client base are all pinching their pennies, but apparently there’s these young women out there who have jobs and don’t have families and they want to be glamorous. So this is what you need to put in the window.” There’s a great window display I found from San Francisco with a quote from the book about the importance of pampering yourself and there’s a mannequin in a negligee and [a sign reading] “negligees, fourth floor!” So there was this big campaign that took the book out of the realm of humor or self-help and sort of took it out of bookstores and put it in department stores.

AMY: Such a brilliant way to tie that in and I’m sure it really made her sales go through the roof, doing it that way.

JOANNA: Yeah, and she was game for all of that. So she was going around and did all kinds of public appearances and book signings and things. So it was clearly a big cultural phenomenon as well as just another book.

AMY: And speaking of “cultural phenomenon,” in your book you mention President Franklin Roosevelt at one point was seen reading this book! Was that just an apocryphal anecdote, or did that really happen?

JOANNA: There’s a photograph of him on his yacht reading this book! Probably maybe it was Eleanor’s copy of the book…

AMY: Well, that just speaks to the fact that it’s very very entertaining; it’s very funny. So I could see him getting into even though it’s written for women. I can see him getting a chuckle out of it.

JOANNA: Absolutely.

AMY: I wish, like Kim said, that I had known about this book when I was a “live-aloner” in my 20s. She seems like the ultimate cheerleader and saleswoman for the single life. For example, she notes some of the benefits here of being single:

You don’t have to turn out your light when you read, because somebody else wants to sleep. You don’t have to have the light on when you want to sleep, because somebody else wants to read. You don’t have to get up in the night to fix somebody else’s hot water bottle, or lie awake listening to snores, or be vivacious when you’re tired, or cheerful when you’re blue, or sympathetic when you’re bored. You probably have your bathroom all to yourself, too, which is unquestionably one of Life’s Greatest Blessings. You don’t have to wait till someone finishes shaving, when you are all set for a cold-cream session. You have no one complaining about your pet bottles, no one to drop wet towels on the floor, no one occupying the bathtub when you have just time to take a shower. From dusk until dawn, you can do exactly as you please, which, after all, is a pretty good allotment in this world where a lot of conforming is expected of everyone.

So apologies in advance to my husband, whom I adore, but this sounds pretty incredible after 11 months of being confined to the house with my entire family for a pandemic. I am so jealous after hearing that passage and I could not agree more.

KIM: She makes it sound really enviable. That’s all I’m gonna say.

AMY: And yet, in 1939, just a few years after finding major success with Live Alone & Like It, Hillis drops a major bombshell on her fans. Joanna, would you care to explain that for us?

JOANNA: “Live-Aloner No More!!!” This was an actual headline. She got married! I know! There were headlines all over about how she was betraying her readers. She had to take her phone off the hook. But yes, she announced in the summer of 1939 that she was getting married to a widower named Thomas Roulston who owned a big New York grocery chain. So they married when she was 50. She went from being well-off and comfortable to being rich-rich. So she moves from her independent single woman’s apartment to a huge house in Brooklyn on Prospect Park, and she settles into kind of a life of a rich man’s wife, and she seems to have enjoyed it. They were married for a decade and he was older than she was. He was in his mid-60s, and sadly after 10 years, he had a heart attack and he passed away and she was faced with living alone again! She actually writes a very moving book about what it’s like to pick up and it’s called You Can Start All Over and it kind of really speaks to people who’ve been divorced and widowed. She packed up this big mansion and she moved back to New York. She moved, I think to the Upper East side. She was back in the city.

KIM: When you were talking about her meeting her future husband and then getting all that press, it sounds like a Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movie… I could absolutely picture that, and you could see the headlines rolling up on the screen. That was great. How many sequels did she end up writing?

JOANNA: Before she was married, she wrote four books. Live Alone and Like It and then there was the budgeting book, a cookbook which she co-wrote with a colleague at Vogue which is terrifying! Oh my goodness, there’s so much potted crab meat and canned everything, it’s really quite a journey! It’s very fun, but it is really something. And then she wrote the New York guidebook to tie in with the World’s Fair which was 1939, and a book of poetry about female friends in New York. And then after she was widowed she wrote this one about picking up and carrying on and then in the mid-Sixties, she wrote a sort of light-hearted kind of reiteration about growing older glamorously and it was sort of a lighthearted capstone book, but still, she was playing the same tune right to the end.

KIM: She just sounds great. She sounds like someone really fun to spend time with. 

AMY: I kept thinking of Auntie Mame when I was thinking of Marjorie Hillis. This idea of just, “I want to live, live, live!” You know? She wants to live life to its fullest and be utterly glamorous and take advantage of everything the world has to offer. That fictional character kept coming to mind for me, so I loved that you introduce that in your book. 

KIM: One of the other tidbits from your book, Joanna, that I loved is the fact that Hillis dabbled briefly in playwriting. She wrote a three-act comedy called Jane’s Business, which is the plot of Jane Eyre set in a modern office setting. As if I didn’t already love her! I want to read that play! It Sounds great!

JOANNA: Oh, I know. I wish I had been able to track it down. That was like a little tiny notice in a newspaper that was talking about this evening of plays and I just was like, “Oh my goodness! Where is that?” So, if it’s out there, I hope it turns up and that we’re able to see it.

KIM: So, Marjorie Hillis died in 1971. She was 82-years-old, and it was just in time to see the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism take off. What legacy would you say that she left behind, Joanna?

JOANNA: Oh, that’s a big question! I think that she’s a great reminder that there’s so much fun still to be had in feminist history. There are so many untold stories and untold lives out there, and sometimes I think that gets presented to us as a duty, like, “Who are all these people we ought to know about and didn’t?” I don’t think you need to read about Marjorie Hillis in school, but there’s just such a pleasure to discovering her voice and her story and sort of understanding that there have been so many interesting women who we are grappling with the status of their lives that we overlike when we want to sort people into easy boxes of like, What did they do? What did they achieve?... What did they SAY? And so it’s really lovely to go back and find these voices, so yeah, dig around in your second-hand bookshop bins and just find these women. They’re out there! In terms of her actual life, you know, I think it’s really important in knowing about 20th century feminism that it did go back and forth, but we get very stuck into the idea that there were these waves — first wave and second wave, and sort of in between the waves there wasn’t very much happening. And of course, there absolutely was, and women in the Thirties were grappling with questions about how to be in the workplace, how to balance home and family and professional and public lives, just as they had been in previous generations and subsequent generations. 

AMY: It’s a completely empowering book, I think, and I would never have discovered Marjorie Hillis without you writing this book. Like you said, just absolute shock that somebody that was so thoroughly entertaining and witty would have been completely forgotten. So if you have not yet discovered Marjorie Hillis, listeners, just go immediately pick up a copy of Live Alone and Like It. It was reissued by Virago, and we totally promise that you will reall\y get a kick out of it, no matter your relationship status. It is smart and snappy and hilarious. And then when you finish reading it, follow up with Joanna’s book, The Extra Woman, which does an amazing job of putting it all into context in a really interesting way. What can we expect from you next… is there anything interesting you’re working on?

JOANNA: Yes! I’m actually working on another really fun feminist history. I’m writing about a group of women this time who are members of a secret club called Heterodoxy who met in Greenwich Village in the 1910s and were all activists and suffragists and feminists of various kinds, and it’s just a really fun, fabulous group, and really a wonderful moment to be digging into another set of rebellious lives, so that will be coming out when I finish it!

KIM: That sounds amazing. We can’t wait to read it and maybe have you back on to talk about that! I know these projects take a lot longer than a podcast. Thanks for joining us, Joanna, this has been really illuminating and a real joy talking to you.

Joanna: Thank you so much. This was so much fun, and I’m so glad to see more and listen to more of what you’re doing and who you’re uncovering. There’s so much out there.

AMY: And now that we’re finishing here, I’m going to go put on my lounge pajamas. Or my hostessing pajamas … one of those.

KIM: Yeah.

JOANNA: Wonderful.

AMY: And that’s all for today’s episode. If you like what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast.

KIM: Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and visit LostLadiesofLit.com for further reading materials. 

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

CLOSING MUSIC

20. Rosa Bonheur — Lost Lady of Art

KIM: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. In today’s episode, we thought we’d mix it up and talk about a woman who was once an international superstar whose genius earned her a fortune, but whom almost nobody remembers today. Royalty, statesmen and celebrities all gushed over her — including Queen Victoria, Napoleon’s wife (Empress Eugenie), and Czar Nicholas II.

KIM: She’s not a lost lady of lit, but rather, she’s a lost lady of the art world, and today we’re mixing it up today because, after learning about the 19th-century French painter Rosa Bonheur we couldn’t resist the urge to tell you about her.

AMY: Yeah, her life and her career trajectory is totally WILD — and we mean that quite literally. This woman had a pet lioness who roamed around her house, you guys!

KIM: Okay, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. She was one fascinating personality. Her life story would make a great movie.

AMY: Yeah, totally. I came across an article about her in a recent issue of Smithsonian magazine. It was written by Elaine Sciolino (and we’ll link to in our show notes), but today we’re just going to give you some of the highlights. Bonheur was best known for painting animals. She did this in lifelike (almost photographic) detail, and she was also a genius at self-promotion and she lived her life in very gender-defying, I-am-who-I-am sort of glory, which was pretty unheard of for the day.

KIM: Bonheur grew up in poverty — her mother died and was buried in a pauper’s grave when she was only 11. Her father was a struggling artist, and Bonheur trained under him. She loved to paint animals because she believed they had souls just like humans did.

AMY: So, when she was 19 years-old, a painting she did of two rabbits nibbling on a carrot was exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon. Later, her giant canvas of two teams of oxen pulling plows — this was titled Plowing in the Nivernaisˆ— was dubbed a masterpiece by critics, and it’s still on permanent display in the Musee d’Orsay.)

KIM: Although she was tiny in stature, she liked to paint these really huge paintings — her most famous is called The Horse Fair. It’s 8 feet tall and 16-and-a-half feet long and it was once referred to by an American publication as “the world’s greatest animal picture.” It was sold at auction to Cornelius Vanderbilt and now you can find it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

AMY: So she got some serious cash for this painting, and with that money she was able to buy a grand chateau about 50 miles south of Paris bordering the royal forest of Fountainbleu. She specialized in painting animals, so it’s no wonder that her property wound up becoming a veritable zoo. She kept dozens of species of animals including, you know, sort of the run of the mill sheep and horses, but also monkeys, lions and tigers at various points in time. She also spent lots of time at animal auctions and slaughterhouses in order to study her subject matter in more detail. In addition, she was obsessed with the earliest iterations of photography and had built herself a dark room in the chateau as well.

KIM: All this work didn’t really jibe with wearing fancy dresses, naturally, so she wore pants. She was a tomboy growing up and continued that trend into adulthood.

AMY: She actually received a special “cross-dressing” permit from the Paris police, which she had to get renewed every six months (which I found totally fascinating). I think the article said she had a doctor write her a note basically saying that for health reasons and going to these slaughterhouses and places like that, she needed to dress like a man. So she was often mistaken for a man when she was out and about. She rode horses astride instead of side-saddle like ladies of the day. She kept her hair short, and she also ain smoked at a time when smoking for women was associated with prostitution.

KIM: She never married, and while we can’t really make assumptions about her personal life this many years after the fact, her closest relationship as an adult was with her childhood friend, a fellow painter named Nathalie Micas. They lived together, and Bonheur did once write, “Had I been a man, I would have married her.” 

AMY: When Micas died, Bonheur went on to live with another woman — an American painter who was 34 years younger than she was — her name was Anna Klumpke. Bonheur called Klumpke “the daughter I never had,” but then in another letter she referred to her as her “wife.” Yet, at the same time, she’s also been quoted as saying, “I wed art. It is my husband.”

KIM: Right, and whether or not she was a lesbian, she does remind me a bit of English diarist Anne Lister, the women who inspired the HBO series “Gentleman Jack.”

AMY: Yes, I definitely agree. Although I read that she did wear dresses for public appearances and portraits. She wasn’t necessarily ostracized for who she was. People seemed to accept it. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor medal from Napoleon’s wife, who declared of Bonheur that, “genius has no sex.” She also received honors from Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian and Spain’s King Alfonso XII. Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra met her once at the Louvre, and she was visited by Queen Isabella of Spain. So, hanging out with tons of serious VIPs. She was befriended by Buffalo Bill Cody when he toured through France with his Wild West show. She was so popular in her day that a porcelain doll was made in her likeness, and a variety of rose was named after her. But today, she’s not a household name, even in the art world. I’d read a New York Times piece that said she sort of failed to have a lasting appeal in France because she was seen as having sold out, you know? A lot of her paintings wound up being bought by English and Americans, and she painted more in an English style. So it’s possible she was considered sort of a deserter, and no longer authentically French, even though she was still living in France.

KIM: Right. And after her death in 1899, this sort of hyper-realistic art she was known for began to really fall out of fashion and was replaced by Impressionism. What’s amazing, though, is that today, one French woman is spearheading the efforts to resurrect her legacy and turn Bonheur’s Chateau into a museum dedicated to her.

AMY: Yeah! So a woman named Katherine Brault (I’m not sure how to say her last name) bought Bonheur’s home (which was in a crumbling state of disrepair) she bought it a few years ago — it took her three years to find a bank that was willing to give her a loan for this. Now, she is slowly and painstakingly uncovering all kinds of treasures that she’s finding in the attic and elsewhere on the property as she renovates the place. She’s luckily also been awarded a financial grant for preserving French cultural heritage, which is helping her turn this dream into a reality, which I think is great. It’s a museum now, but paying guests can stay overnight in Bonheur’s bedroom and the chateau can also be rented out for special events like weddings and conferences — things like that. I loved hearing about the fact that her art studio in the house is sort of like a time capsule. When you go in, you see her painting tools, there’s an easel with one of her unfinished works. She has all sorts of taxidermied animals in that room, and then there’s a pair of her old worn, lace-up leather boots. I kind of got the chills hearing about that studio room. 

KIM: It sounds amazing, and according to the Smithsonian article, little by little the world is showing a renewed appreciation for her Bonheur’s work, too. In 2019, the Musee d’Orsay had a small exhibition of her little-known caricatures. I’m happy that people are starting to circle back to her, and it’s also nice to know that she actually knew huge success and admiration while she lived.

AMY: Crazy coincidence, Kim: When we were getting ready to record this, I happened to be watching the Netflix show “The Queen’s Gambit” — I had just started it. And in the second episode, they name-drop Rosa Bonheur! 

KIM: No way!

AMY: Yeah! The main character is going to a new home and the person that lives there is sort of giving her the quick tour and points out that the paintings on the wall are reproductions of Rose Bonheur! It makes total sense, too, because “The Queen’s Gambit” is a show about a female chess player who’s sort of fighting to make her mark in this male-dominated chess world, and so the fact that they kind of dropped her name into...Rosa Bonheur’s name in — just seems really fitting, this artist that was also trying to make a name for herself in a man’s world.

KIM: That is amazing. The coincidence is great, and I absolutely want to watch that show now that I hear that, even more. It shows that the creators are really thinking about what they’re doing.

AMY: So yeah, I think that does go to show that she is starting to come back in people’s consciousness. I love the fact that she was just a woman who lived life on her own terms, and that kind of leads us into our next “Lost Lady of Lit,” who’s another woman who didn’t just split from convention but totally OWNED IT.

KIM: That’s right. Next week, we’ll be discussing Marjorie Hillis, a writer who urged women in the 1930s to “Live Alone and Like It” with her wry manifesto that makes the single life look pretty damn awesome, at a time when unmarried women were looked upon with suspicion.

AMY: And we’ve got the authority on Marjorie Hillis coming on the show — her biographer, Joanna Scutts, is going to be here to chat with us next week, and it’s going to be a really fun one, I think.

KIM: Yeah, so until then, check out our show notes to find out more about today’s topic, Rosa Bonheur, including some links to see her greatest works of art. 

[start closing music]

AMY: It’s all on our website, Lostladiesoflit.com. And don’t forget to leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts if you’re enjoying these episodes. It really helps new listeners find us. 

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.

19. Louise Fitzhugh — Harriet the Spy with Leslie Brody and Laura Mazer

Episode 19 (Louise Fitzhugh with Laura Mazer and Leslie Brody)

AMY: So, Kim, I figured between the both of us we’d read just about every seminal children’s book worth reading, but turns out I was wrong. We both somehow missed out on one of the funniest, most endearing, socially aware and subtly subversive kids’ books to have ever made it to print.

KIM: I know! It’s a great book, and it’s also a little embarrassing to admit we’re both late to the party where this classic 1960s-era title is concerned. Especially since it’s all about a young girl who wants to be a writer. 

AMY: It is so up our alley, and we were both instantly smitten with the book when we recently read it. I feel like I had heard of the title as a kid or maybe seen it on shelves at the library, but I bypassed it a million times, and I don’t know why I never read it!

KIM: And the fact that it was kind of a radical book in children’s literature, you’d think that the author behind it — Louise Fitzhugh — would be more of a household name.

AMY: Well, we’ve thankfully got two very special guests today on Lost Ladies of Lit — literary agent Laura Mazer and biographer, Leslie Brody — to tell us all about Louise Fitzhugh and her famous children’s novel, which we’re guessing some of you are probably very familiar with. And if you’re still wondering what book we’re talking about, let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music]

INTERVIEW

AMY: Okay, so let’s just dive right into introducing our first guest. Laura Mazer is a literary agent with Wendy Sherman Associates. She was previously executive editor of Seal Press, and among the titles she helped guide through publication are Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race? as well as From Cradle to Stage: Stories From Mothers Who Rocked and Raised Rock Stars by Virginia Grohl. (And yes, that’s Dave Grohl’s mom.) Laura has worked as managing editor of Counterpoint Press and executive editor at Soft Skull Press, and prior to joining the book-publishing industry, she oversaw editorial operations for Creators Syndicate, a global news agency representing some of the most influential opinion writers and editorial cartoonists of the day. She was also a senior editor at Brill's Content magazine, as well as special sections editor at The Los Angeles Times. 

KIM: As a board member of the OpEd project she is a champion for underrepresented voices in the publishing world, and like us, she has an interest in resurrecting the legacies of forgotten women writers. Welcome to the show, Laura Mazer!

LAURA MAZER: Thank you! I’m so happy to be here!

AMY: When we first discussed having you join us for an episode of the podcast, you suggested that we could talk about Louise Fitzhugh, who wrote the 1964 children’s novel Harriet the Spy. So I have two initial questions for you: One, did you grow up with Harriet, or did you discover her after the fact the way Kim and I did? And also, what kind of impact did the book have on you when you read it?

LAURA: Oh, I definitely grew up with Harriet. In fact, I have my copy still. I keep it on my shelf all the time, right near me. I loved Harriet. Harriet gave me permission to be a little different. Harriet gave me permission to spy on people and learn what I could beyond the confines of what I was being told. I asked my parents for a toolbelt for a birthday present one year, because Harriet wears a toolbelt with her spy tools that she can wander the neighborhood. And I do remember my father looking at me a little strangely and saying, “They don’t make them in your size.” But I did grow up with Harriet. I adored her. I felt that she was something of a lifeline for kids who did not want to live up to the girly-girl expectations that, in that era, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, we were expected to be.

AMY: So I guess that leads to the fact that you were editor of the book that we’re going to be also discussing today, Leslie Brody’s biography of Louise Fitzhugh. So you must have been excited to acquire this book.

LAURA: Oh, absolutely! When Leslie and I started talking about this, I knew right away this is going to be a (excuse the idiom, but) labor of love.

KIM: So Harriet the Spy sold 2.5 million copies in its first five years in print, and by 2019, over five million copies had been sold worldwide. Laura, could you give our listeners a quick overview of what the book’s about for anyone who’s actually unfamiliar with the plot?

LAURA: Oh, I will do my best, and for anyone who is unfamiliar with the plot, please go read it, because if there’s one thing that I can assure you, it is not dull or boring, regardless of your age. Eleven-year-old Harriet Welsh lives in the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her parents and her beloved nanny, called Ol’ Golly. Harriet is sensitive and perceptive and sometimes crabby, and she aspires to be a professional writer and a spy. She takes these goals very seriously — this is not a game. This is a practice that is at first encouraged by Ol’ Golly, who is a reader of great literature and encourages her writing. Some of her observations that she writes in her notebook are unsparing caricatures — snap judgments. Others are deeper examinations of what she’s discovering around her, but regardless, Harriet really is curious about people and the way the world works, and that writing what she sees around her is seminal to her understanding of who she is and how everything functions as a society. Every day after school, after cake and milk, she goes out dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt with her toolbelt, and she goes out on a spy route. This is a route that’s regular; every day she goes to the same places. She hides in dumb waiters, and she hides in back alleys and listens to conversations and observes facial expressions. Families, children, elderly, the rich, the poor, the marketplace… she listens and watches and writes it all down. One day, a classmate finds her notebook and passes it around, and all of her friends find out what she has said about them in her notebook, and you can imagine what happens from there. Harriet is ostracized. If that weren’t bad enough, at the very same time, her beloved nanny who raised her, Ol’ Golly, she gets engaged and she moves away. She was really the one adult that Harriet had truly admired and relied upon as a child. Between losing the esteem of her classmates and her friends and Ol’ Golly going away, and suddenly the adults are telling her that her notebooks are not healthy and they’re forbidding her from writing in her notebooks — it’s all too much. And I think I should leave it there, because what happens next, if I were to tell you, would be too much of a spoiler. But I will say that by the end of the novel, she is changed, and she learns a way to hold her own truths to herself and navigate the world around her that’s so complicated. It’s a beautiful story.

AMY: Yeah, and the book is just filled with so many swings of emotion, too, like one minute you’re laughing out loud, one minute you’re fighting back tears a little bit. It’s really a must-read for anybody, child or adult, who has an interest in literature or the process of writing. I found it so fascinating, so provocative, and so too, is the story of the woman who wrote it, Louise Fitzhugh.

KIM: Which leads us to introducing our second guest (we have two today) Leslie Brody. She’s a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands in California, the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts award and the PEN Center USA West literary award for creative nonfiction. We are thrilled to get to talk with her about her latest biography: Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, which was published by Seal Press in December. This biography was among The New York Times’ list of seven new books to read in December, and The Wall Street Journal calls it an “engaging” and “highly enjoyable” read.  So good to have you here, Leslie!

LESLIE: Oh, thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.

AMY: Before we dive any deeper into Louise’s own life story, let’s focus a little on Harriet to start. Thanks to Donald Trump, feminists everywhere are happy to claim the title of “nasty woman.” And the character of Harriet is described (even by Fitzhugh, herself) as a “nasty little girl.” And Leslie, I’m guessing that connection was not lost on you, based on how you sort of started the book off.

LESLIE: Of course. Louse Fitzhugh began writing Harriet the Spy the same year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Seventeen-year-old singer Leslie Gore came out with her song “You Don’t Own Me,” with the lyrics “don’t tell me what to do and don’t tell me what to say,” and Gloria Steinem published “A Bunny’s Tale.” So Harriet is raucous, she’s unruly, she’s unwilling to compromise. She sees phonies and finks everywhere which is sort of a reflection of the early 1960s alternative counterculture. And she’s a pint-sized harbinger whose schoolroom battles for respect and understanding look, in microcosm, like the battles for equality many women and girls would wage over the coming years.

KIM: It seems like  Harriet the Spy was pretty revolutionary for a children’s book. I mean, in the earlier part of the 20th century, people were reading more sweet and wholesome books, and suddenly here we have this protagonist who is pretty much the opposite of “Pollyanna.” It seems like it broke a lot of taboos in children’s literature. Laura, can you explain a little bit about the “New Realism” movement in publishing and maybe how Harriet the Spy fits within that?

LAURA: Sure. Harriet was one of the very first children’s characters that was not saccharine, sanitized… it didn’t present a vision of children’s lives that were full of “Mommy and Daddy and a dog, Spot, skipping through the park every day.” Louise allowed Harriet to be real. She could be angry. She could be ill-mannered. Adults could be fallible. Babies could be ugly. 

AMY: Little girls can plot to blow up their school…

LAURA: Yes! Absolutely! They could be angry and resentful. Harriet has a best friend named Janie. Janie is a self-determined scientist and she has decided that she is going to blow up the school. She’s just waiting for the right time and the right materials in her laboratory to do this thing. Harriet is not necessarily against this. She thinks that Janie’s crazy, but she also understands why she wants to blow up the school, because look at all of these adults around them. Adults are feeding them a load of bunk, and the kids all know it! This is a book that allows children to speak their truth and to be suspicious of adults. It allows children to be suspicious of each other. At that era, in terms of a “spy story,” spies and girls, we had the conventional one in Nancy Drew, right? And even if you’re going to look for the so-called “tomboy” prototype character, we have Laura Ingalls. But Nancy Drew was so lovely and gracious, and her manners were always impeccable and her dress was never creased. And if you look at Laura Ingalls (who I absolutely adore, don’t get me wrong. She was also a lifeline to me in my childhood) but she was, umm… “hard work, respect for adults, do your part around the farm and don’t complain.” All these wonderful, noble attributes. Adults could look to Laura Ingalls and say, “Why can’t you be more like her?” Well, nobody’s pointing to Harriet and saying to their children, “Can you be more like Harriet, please?” Because Harriet is difficult, and she does give adults a hard time. She calls them on their crap. She curses and yells. She’s real. And we hadn’t really seen that in children’s literature until Louise came along, wrote this story, created the character. She knew adults did not have it all figured out, and that left her to figure things out for herself. If you can’t trust the people who are giving you the rules of life, then you’re going to have to figure them out yourself, and that’s what she did. She was a self-proclaimed spy trying to make sense of the world around her, all by using the written word.

AMY: I think that’s so right because I have an 11-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son, and I read out loud to them a lot. With this one, they were obsessed with it. (Case in point, they were rolling around on the carpet pretending to be onions for about a full week following our read-aloud, the way Harriet does in the book). And I think it’s true that they were just enthralled by the fact that Harriet was so outrageous and so naughty, and it felt almost a little naughty for them, by extension, to get to be a part of it. My husband would sort of be walking in and out of the room while we were reading this, and he was appalled. He was just like, “What are you reading them? This girl is awful!” He was laughing, too, but he was definitely in disbelief about Harriet’s behavior, and I think that really kind of sums up the controversy this book stirred up when it came out. So Leslie, can you weigh in on that a little bit?

Leslie: Well, Louise created Harriet to be a nasty little girl. That’s how she described her in the letters she wrote James Merrill, the poet, who was a longtime friend of hers. She wrote that she was creating “a nasty little girl who keeps notes on all her friends.” And what she intended was to create a child who was a free-thinking individual, and she mocked adults. She did it in a satirical way to make clear their flaws. So a lot of kids love it for the way she mocks authority. She’s a heroine. A liberator.

AMY: And yet, there were some parent groups, very conservative-minded people, that were kind of angry when this book came out, right?

LESLIE: Yeah! Oh yeah. Not everybody approved of her breaking and entering homes or speaking truth to power. I would say that it was more common to think that children should be seen and not heard.

LAURA: The other thing that we haven’t touched on yet, which I think is fascinating, is it’s not just Harriet’s character that is so disruptive, but it’s Harriet’s awareness of issues like money and class and race that come in and out of the narrative throughout the whole story in a way that we hadn’t really seen children being aware of these adult issues. And that’s truthful! And for me as a kid, for other people I know as a child, we were very aware of financial strains that our parents had. Marital arguments. Setbacks that adults were experiencing filtered down to kids, but then they tried to pretend that they’re shielding us from it, but are they really? Harriet wasn’t shielded, and neither were her classmates. So Louise’s acknowledgment that kids could have that kind of adult awareness of these issues… that has to be at the heart of why so many kids felt seen and heard by Harriet.

AMY: I totally wish that I had read this book when I was younger to just know that, like, my own weirdo thoughts were not so weird. You know?

KIM: Exactly.

LAURA: Yes! And she had so many weirdo thoughts! That’s what’s so great about her. We can relate to the weirdness.

KIM: Leslie, before we jump into Fizhugh’s own fascinating history, can you give us an idea of what she thought about being a “children’s author” considering it wasn’t really her game plan initially?

LESLIE: Sure. She wanted to make some money. She was on an allowance from her family and she was really eager to be independent. She was sort of embarrassed that at her age she was still receiving money from this very wealthy family, from her trust fund, and she was trying all sorts of things to earn this independence (except actually get a job). That was one thing she was not prepared to do. She had one job, as far as I could tell in all my research. She was a gift-wrapper at S. Klein on the square in New York City for about two weeks, and she had the opportunity, among other things, to wrap an entire couch with gift wrap and bows. But she quit and that was really her only job. But she thought she would try to write a children’s book as she had had some success writing Suzuki Bean with Sandra Scoppettone, who had been her collaborator then. So she kind of spent some time sketching out a proposal for a children’s book and came up with about nine pages and a couple of sketches for the characters. That was it. She thought, “Well, I’ll try this. I’ll send it to my agent and see what she can do with it.” The agent thought it was delightful, sent it off to Ursula Nordstrom, and the rest is history. Her friends said she always presented herself as an artist first. Her close friend, Maryjane Meaker, who came to be known as the author M.E. Kerr, said she didn’t even know that Louise was writing a book until Harriet was published. She had started writing Harriet as a commercial venture, and it sort of overwhelmed her life. It became the one thing that she was recognized for, and her painting was something she loved deeply and something she always wished she could be recognized for as well. But it kind of went into eclipse when Harriet emerged.

AMY: Did she begrudge at all the fact that she was most known for this children’s book, or was she happy about it? I mean, when she was younger I know she wanted to be, like, a serious poet.

LESLIE: Yeah. She always thought that poetry and fine arts were higher on the hierarchy of art. Being a novelist was something she deeply wanted to do, but she also was very funny. She was a comic writer and a satirist and somehow she just found her way into this book.

AMY: So like Harriet, Louise Fitzhugh was very much a spitfire in her own right She was outspoken and defiant and very much ahead of her time when it came to racial equality and women’s lib and class consciousness. Which is actually a little unexpected given her background, because she came from a high-society family in the Deep South. Like you said, Leslie, she was a trust fund baby. And the picture you paint of Memphis during that era in your biography is so amazingly descriptive, I loved it. It totally drew me in. But even more compelling than all that is the story of Fitzhugh’s early life. As a baby, she was at the center of a very public scandal, the truth of which she didn’t fully learn about until she was in her early adulthood. It’s quite a saga. Can you tell our listeners quickly about that story?

LESLIE: Sure. In the summer before she left Memphis to start college at Bard to study poetry and painting, she worked at the local newspaper, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, for one day as far as I can tell. She was assigned or she found her way into the newspaper morgue, which is where all the old articles are indexed, and among the archives Louise found a massive folder dedicated to the history of the Fitzhughs. She found the clippings about her parents’ scandalous divorce in 1927 and she found it traumatic. Her mother’s lawyers had been outmatched in the courtroom and her mother had been defamed outlandishly. Her father won custody, and until she was around five, had told Louise that her mother was dead. So she found this all out and she left work, and I don’t think she stayed until 5 p.m.

KIM: Yeah, one might not after reading something like that and discovering such an interesting story about yourself and your past.

AMY: And there was the one detail, I think, which really haunted her: that as a baby, I guess there was the accusation that her father’s family had made against her mother that said that her mother had thrown her onto a sofa. It’s a claim the mother denies, but it seems like Louise was always really shocked and horrified by that, in particular.

LESLIE: Yeah. I mean, she was dedicated to protecting children’s imaginations and protecting them from abuse — all kinds of abuse. Emotional abuse, physical abuse… and she felt that she had been abused in some way; although she didn’t remember it, it was something she read about.

KIM: I’m just going to read a quote here from Leslie’s book to give everyone an inkling of what Louise’s childhood was like: “There was the eccentric opera-singing grandmother who would fling money out the window while somebody stood below with a basket. A crazy uncle confined to the attic, sawing up dolls. The father who kidnapped her, then told her, falsely, that her mother was dead. Not to mention the servants who would turn her grieving mother away from the door of her father’s house.”

   So, it’s no surprise that she had a complicated relationship with her family as a result of all this. How do you think it shaped who she went on to be in life? It seems like she wanted to get as far away from the South as she possibly could.

LESLIE: Yeah, for sure. She had mixed feelings about her family. She decided in her teens that her father was controlling and took against him. She loved her grandmother, but the only people she felt comfortable with as a child were the household staff. She grew up during the Jim Crow era in Tennessee and came to abhor the milieu of white supremacy, which she fled as soon as she was able. And she always recognized, however, that the elements of her childhood made a good story, and she relied on them in her painting and writing.

AMY: So in high school then, she began having relationships with women — she was a lesbian — but I was struck by how many men she also had throwing themselves at her. She was basically swatting them away like flies at times (and she even eloped with one of them, though that marriage didn’t even last longer than 24 hours I don’t think). But it leads me to think she must have been an amazingly charismatic person to have all these people pining away for her. So what was her personality really like? Did she have a lot of “Harriet” in her?

LESLIE: She was charismatic. She was very attractive, high-spirited, charming. They said she was a wonderful dancer and she had a beautiful singing voice. She was very petite. Her friends referred to her as having a fairy-like figure. She was a sprite or a nymph. She had a swagger, though, and she didn’t suffer fools. One thing about her: she liked to play devil’s advocate. She was very quarrelsome. She didn’t like to lose an argument.

AMY: So Fitzhugh eventually settles down in New York city’s Greenwich Village. And once again, Leslie, you do a brilliant job of describing this world for us in vivid detail and historical perspective. Fitzhugh had the trust-fund to support her artistic endeavors, and she also had a series of long-term girlfriends who influenced her life. It seemed like an amazing, intellectually-and-artistically stimulating existence she was carving out for herself, and I was super jealous of her lifestyle in her 20s and all the influential people she was pal’ing around with! 

KIM: Yeah, I don’t think I had enough fun in my 20s. I wish I’d had more fun.

AMY: I wish I had that fun, and I wish I had her trust fund.

KIM: Yeah. That, too!

LESLIE: Yeah, in her youth she fell in love with France Burke, who was an artist herself and the daughter of Kenneth Burke, who was a philosopher and critic. Through the Burkes, she met Greenwich Village royalty like poet Marianne Moore, author Djuna Barnes, photographer Berenice Abbott, Dorothy Day… and later, Louise’s social circle expanded to include many high-flying, mostly queer careerwomen who, in their youth, had crashed through ceilings in literary and artistic professions. The friend circle had some grand parties and I always loved reading about those. Some costume balls were legendary, like the one with the sophisticated theme of “After Mayerling” set in late 19th-century Vienna.

AMY: I wished I had been invited to those costume parties. They sounded really fun! I don’t think I would have been on the invite list, but… Okay, so Fitzhugh’s first foray into the publishing world came about when she illustrated and collaborated on a book that was a spoof on the Eloise children’s books by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight. And Leslie, you sort of mentioned this briefly. It was called Suzuki Bean. Fill us in a little more on that, because I love the idea of this book.

LAURA: Oh, yeah, it’s a great book. Really brilliant. Louise and Sandra Scoppettone were buddies, drinking buddies mainly, in the Village. They were looking for a great idea and the way to make an impression as authors and artists. The Eloise at the Plaza books were hugely popular and really successful. It was an era of novelty books and spoofs, and they decided to try to write a downtown version of Eloise. Suzuki is a baby Beatnik. Her father is a poet, and her mother makes sculptures out of tin cans. Her best friend at school is a boy from Uptown from a family of snobby socialites, and the book is a satire about children who feel they don’t belong in the place they are raised. Eventually, they both run off to start what is essentially a Utopian commune somewhere where people will be accepted for who they are. That is obviously a theme that runs through Louse’s work. 

AMY: It’s such a clever idea, to do a spoof off those books. I love it, and I tried to find the book at the library, and did not have any luck. And you can’t buy it, except for a lot of money. What happened to it? Why is it not available anymore? Does anybody know? 

LESLIE: Sandra says that the estate was not helpful when she wanted to publish it. They had some falling out and so I guess they couldn’t agree on rights.

AMY: I feel like that book would still be popular today if it could be reissued somehow.

LESLIE: Oh, yeah. It’s a tragedy.

KIM: Yeah, that’s a real loss.

AMY: So, like many people, I really loved the character of Harriet’s nanny, Ol’Golly in Harriet the Spy. She’s not exactly Mary Poppins, but Laura, please fill our listeners in on why she’s so great in this book.

LAURA: Ol’ Golly has to be one of the most profound, special, heartening characters, and thank goodness she is there, because there really are no other adults in this book that provide some solid barometer for Harriet. Here’s Harriet with adults (teachers, parents) telling her, “Go be a good girl. Wear a pretty dress. Put a smile on your face. Be nice to your friends. Be nice to adults. Don’t cause any problems.” And Ol’ Golly is willing to go a little deeper with her. Ol’ Golly is willing to grapple with more complex issues, the philosophical pushes and pulls of daily life. And she is the one adult that nurtures her. So here we have a character, a child, being given that nurturing life-lesson program from somebody who, not only we don’t expect it from because she’s set up to be this stern, disciplinarian governess-type nanny, but underneath those top level layers, there’s all this warmth and intelligence. And meanwhile her own teachers and her own parents really aren’t getting her. They’re not understand why she won’t just fall in line and behave the way people want her to. So here’s Ol’ Golly, who spouts life lessons from Dostoevsky… who takes her on this little mini daytrip to visit her own mother, who does not behave in any way that Harriet would have expected from the life she’s seen so far in the Upper East Side, you know, this life of privilege. Ol’ Golly wants her to see more and to understand more, and that is what Harriet wants, so even if Ol’ Golly isn’t always right on the mark, and even if Ol’ Golly does leave, which she eventually does (she pursues her own life), Harriet needs her. Harriet needs her to center her, to give her just that occasional spark of confidence that even though she is looking at life in a way that other adults seem to be telling her to stop it, cut it out, that maybe she’s really onto something good, and that she should be true to herself and what she sees around her.

AMY: So that basically also takes us to the most pivotal advice that Ol’ Golly gives Harriet at the end of the book: “Sometimes you have to lie.” Laura, what do you think Fitzhugh was ultimately trying to say with that sentiment, and why do you think it’s the perfect title for Leslie’s book?

LAURA: Oh, I just love this title for her book! Leslie knows that I adore this title. We thought about a lot of different ways to title the book, and we just kept coming back to this one because it clicked. It sings the story that is Harriet and Louise. I don’t know that I can crawl inside of Louise’s head enough to really know what she was thinking, but I will say this: If you had to choose one core theme we can take away from Harriet the Spy (and maybe Louise, too, if we’re going to take it that one step further) it’s that nothing is simple. That life is complex and that the lessons we’re taught as smaller children that seem so straightforward, they seem so simple — “Always tell the truth!” When 9-year-olds lie, they feel badly, but by the time you get to 11, you’re starting to learn that sometimes you do have to lie to get by in this world. To be successful. To not be ostracized. To make connections with others. Sometimes that means that the better thing to do is to do the thing you were always taught not to do. And it allows a children’s book to actually be, like, what I consider a morality tale. Yeah, the morality at the core of it is flipped. She took the script and flipped it by saying, “Lying is sometimes the better, higher moral act, but you’re going to know that and own it now because you are an adult.” And that’s what we learned from Harriet. Harriet has always known this world is a crazy place to live. Harriet has always known that the adults are full of it, and she’s finally being allowed to own that truth for herself and for Ol’ Golly who gives her that advice. Yeah, I think that’s at the center of this book and the whole story for her.

AMY: So when I first saw the title, Sometimes You Have to Lie and found out that Fitzhugh was a lesbian, I thought for sure that she was closeted, that as a children’s writer, she was having to keep this under wraps about herself and she had, like, a double life. Then I started reading the book and I found out that wasn’t the case at all. She was actually very open about being a lesbian. So talk to me a little bit about that.

LESLIE: For one thing, she had a lot of money and she had a lot of friends, and once she left Memphis and went to what was a sort of protected environment in Greenwich Village, where it was kind of more typical that people could be themselves more often (not always), she just decided in 1950 when she received an inheritance from her grandmother that she would never wear women’s clothing again. And so, typically, she had fantastic suits made for herself. She wore a lot of capes. We’re talking about moving into the 60s, so she had a very mod look. So in 2005 there was a librarian named K.T. Horning, who published an article in the Horn Book in which she talked about Harriet the Spy’s influence on her own childhood and observed a queer subtext throughout the book. Horning interprets Ol’ Golly’s advice to Harriet (so we’re getting back to that again)  — that sometimes you have to lie, but to yourself you must always tell the truth — as evidence of Louise’s embedded instructions to gay kids: You’re not alone. You know, look around, be careful, come out when it’s safe, we’re here. You know, there were a lot of homophobes during the culture wars, and Horning suggests there are secret messages in Harriet the Spy, benign and comforting ones which offer fellowship and reassurance to young people figuring themselves out.

LAURA: Louise’s legacy is often noted by writers: “I became a writer because of Harriet the Spy.” “I became a writer because of Louise Fitzhugh.” But what is also true right next-door to that is that there are a lot of kids who grew up to come out and be confident and comfortable with their own sexuality and to say, “I always suspected that Harriet was gay.” And again, by translation, it wasn’t Harriet, it was Louise who created her. Does that mean a straight person can’t create a gay character? No, of course not. But to have understood what it meant to be a different kid in an era when fitting in was everything — that was essential to the LGBTQ movement. And I love that Louise was so willing to go against the grain. She always was. We have to remember that yes, she did live in the counterculture 60s, but she began living her own life well before that. I think that probably, to some extent, fueled her willingness to go to the space where, “I’m going to wear the men’s suits and I am going to flirt with women and be with women and be done with you men. I don’t need any more men in my bed, I’m over that!” And not worry about what people would think because she had experimented with it enough to be at home with it.

AMY: So I understand, Leslie, that you also came late to finding Harriet the Spy, and I guess you are in good company with Kim and I in that regard. So tell us a little bit about that.

LESLIE: Well, I’m exactly the same age as Harriet the Spy. When she was 11-years-old, I was 11-years old, and I was born in the Bronx, and Harriet lived in an elite quarter of Manhattan, but we still shared a lot of the cultural references around New York City in the 50s and 60s. When the book was published in 1964, I wasn’t reading kids books anymore. I had missed the wave with Harriet and the New Realism, and I was reading adult books — I liked to think they were “big books,” like The Agony & the Ecstasy or Rebecca. 

AMY: You were like a 40-year-old in an 11-year-old’s body.

LESLIE: I was. I was particularly fond of reading the memoirs of Borscht Belt comedians. That was a specialty of mine. So it was, gosh, it wasn’t until 1988. I was a playwright at the time. I was hired to write an adaptation of Harriet the Spy (I’d never read it before) for the Minneapolis Children’s Theater company. Again, I remember reading through it several times and having the response that you have had as well, as you talked about at the beginning of this program. Completely stunned at how I had somehow missed this artifact, this incredible experience and how after all this time, somehow, this rendezvous with fate had happened. I wasn’t writing biographies for another 10 or 15 years, but once I started, Louise was in my mind and I just wanted to follow her and see where she’d lead. And then I met Laura, and Laura also wanted to do that, so we came up with a project together.

KIM: If you haven’t already, go read Harriet the Spy.  And then pick up a copy of Sometimes You Have To Lie. It’s wonderful, and we should also point out that Leslie has another biography under her belt, one on author Jessica Mitford.

AMY: Leslie, we might have to invite you back for a Hons & Rebels discussion, which would be awesome!

KIM: So Laura, and Leslie, it’s been wonderful getting to talk to you about Louise Fitzhugh, and we are so grateful to you for turning us on to Harriet the Spy after all these years!

Laura: Oh, enjoy it! I’m so glad you did! It’s never too late

Leslie: Thank you so much for having us!

[Interview ends]

KIM: So, Amy, what did we learn from today’s episode? We learned that “nasty little girls” can grow up to be badass feminists.

AMY: We learned that it’s never too late to discover a great children’s book.

KIM: And we learned that sometimes… you have to lie.

AMY: And that’s all for today’s episode. If you like what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast. 

KIM: Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss a single episode. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and visit LostLadiesofLit.com for further reading materials. 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.

18. On Books We Love... and Books We Hate

KIM: Hi everybody! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode.

AMY: Today, we’re going to have a lively (and maybe a slightly controversial) discussion about our favorite (or not so favorite books). And we’re hoping that maybe some of you guys reach out to us and let us know your own thoughts on this subject. This idea came to us thanks to one of our listeners named Ruth, who confessed the following to us on Facebook. She said: “I am not a fan of Jane Austen. There, I’ve said it. I don’t care if anyone agrees with me or not. You’re welcome.”

KIM: Uh oh, them’s fightin’ words, as they used to say! Just kidding. We consider this podcast a completely safe place to air out any and all book opinions. So we don’t have any judgment, Ruth. Jane’s not your jam, and that’s A-OKAY with us.

AMY: I think we all have our own example of books that the rest of the world seems to love and admire yet, try as we might, for whatever reason we just don’t connect with, you know? What are those books that everyone you know goes wild about but you either weren’t able to finish? Or they just made you go “Meh. I don’t get it. It’s not my thing.” For example, I’m going to go out on a limb, and maybe this is going to tick people off, but there’s a book that I tried reading — I want to say I tried reading this book three different times. I gave it a good, solid go on three occasions in the last few years, and every single time, I could not get more than a fourth of the way through the book. That book was… Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend trilogy. And I’m so sorry. I’m not even going to apologize because there are so many people who love this book. She (or whatever her name is, we don’t actually know if that’s the author’s actual name) she’s going to be fine with me saying I didn’t love it. She’s wildly successful and has made a fortune off of these books, and people love them. I’m the weirdo here. There’s something wrong with me, I fully believe that I couldn’t get into these books, but I just couldn’t connect with it at all.

KIM: Okay, Amy, hold on a second. That’s my book, too!

AMY: No! Is it?

KIM: Yes! Oh my god! Literally everyone else in the world loves this book, and I want to love it because I feel like I’m missing out on an entire series of books that are supposed to be life-changing and wonderful and literary, but also a guilty pleasure at the same time. Somehow, I’ve tried, and I just never get past the first few chapters!

AMY: I’m actually surprised to hear you say that because one of the times that I tried to read this book was when I was subletting your house. Okay, so listeners, there was a point in time where my house was being renovated and I “borrowed” Kim’s house, so I got the treasure trove of her bookshelves for about four months, which was amazing, and I read so many awesome books off your bookshelf and there, staring at me scornfully, shining like it had a halo around it the whole time, was My Brilliant Friend, and I was like, “Well, Kim obviously loves it. I’m going to give it the old college try one more time.” And I sat there on your couch and I tried to read it, and I just couldn’t do it! It’s an HBO series now!

KIM: I know! And I don’t even want to watch it!

AMY: Same.

KIM: I still have the book on my bookshelf, by the way. I haven’t managed to get rid of it because I feel like there’s something wrong with me and that one day I’ll just wake up and like it. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, but good luck to everyone that loves it, and I’m happy for them, but nope. And that’s why we’re best friends and also podcasters together.

AMY: I know. We have a mind-meld thing happening there.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: Okay, now on the flip side of that, is there any classic book that you put off reading or avoided for a long time because you didn’t think you’d like it, only to eventually discover that you totally love it? Kim, I’ll let you go first.

KIM: Okay, yes I do have a book exactly like that, except that it’s a modern classic. So I carried around through my many moves (I’ve moved a lot) for years, Infinite Jest. And then when I first met Eric, who is now my husband, we had similar favorite authors that we both loved, and so the fact that he liked this book made me want to give it another try. And so I had his copy. It actually had his notation in it, and I thought it was fantastic and funny this time around. And we even read it out loud to each other, which sounds really cheesy, but we did, and it was great. We did a fundraiser bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles the next year after this, and we actually called our two person team “The Howling Fantods,” which is, if you’ve read the book, it’s an expression used in the book. The thing is, apparently David Foster Wallace was kind of a jerk in real life, but I didn’t know that when I read the book. So, anyway. How about you, Amy, do you have a book like that also?

AMY: Well, I want to say, first of all, about David Foster Wallace being a jerk, that reminds me of Charles Dickens and do you like an author even though their personal life is questionable sort of thing? How does that change how you think about them? But that’s another episode. I’ve never read Infinite Jest, because it’s giant. It’s the size of a cinder block, basically, and I just cannot. I can’t. But that book, for me, which is also pretty ginormous, is The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I have never read it. All the movies came out. I did watch the movies, and I loved them, but I had never actually read it. I remember as a kid, my brother had a copy of The Hobbit, and I have this memory of sitting in my brothers’ bedroom and trying to start The Hobbit, and I don’t know if you know Tolkien very well, but he goes into these genealogies of the characters, where it’s like, “Gloin, son of Ioan… who descended from the house of Yorl!” And it goes on and on and on for like 13 pages of that before story happens again. I was very young and I just was like, “Nope. Can’t do it.” And I was turned off from Tolkien forevermore. However, my son was gifted a copy of The Hobbit for like his fifth or sixth birthday, so we read The Hobbit and we loved it so much that I decided we've got to move on. We’ve got to do the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. We are just about finished with The Two Towers. It is so good! Yes, he still does that genealogy stuff, and it’s ridiculous, and he sometimes is way too descriptive geologically for me. He’s always like “The river bent north-north-east…” But I loved the story, and I had so much fun reading the book, and I’m glad I actually got back around to it.

KIM: I am so glad you found it and loved it. That makes me really, really happy because I have a very distinct memory when I was a child. This is so funny, but my parents’ friends had all of the Lord of the Rings books, and every time we would go over to their house, my sister would play with their two daughters, who were younger than me. And I would sit on the floor and I would read the books. I literally read the entire Lord of the Rings series on their living room floor every time we went to their house. I don’t think I ever had them at my house — maybe when I re-read them later. But the first time, it was all on someone else’s living room floor. That’s how much I loved them.

AMY: That’s so you with your nose buried in a book! Baby Kim, nose buried in a book from the minute she was born.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: It’s such a monumental undertaking that you guys must have gone to their house frequently!

KIM: Yes! I have many other similar stories, but I won’t bore you with them. But yeah. It did take me a while, though, but I did finish them.

AMY: Okay. So next book-related question. Has there ever been a book that you really didn’t like the first time you read it, but then you changed your mind about it? Maybe upon a subsequent reading you now have a more favorable opinion of, or even complete affection for?

KIM: Yes, I do. I’m not sure what other people’s take on this is, but the first time I read Romola — I don’t know if I’m saying it exactly correct, but it’s a George Eliot novel — I didn’t love it. It’s a historical novel. It’s set in the 15th century, in Florence, and I thought that it was going to be more like Middlemarch, I guess. I just expected it to be more like her other books, and because it was a historical novel, it somehow didn’t take with me. And I read it all the way through, but I just didn’t love it. And then later, actually fairly recently, I re-read it, and I completely loved it. So I don’t know if it was just expectations, I think, is what happened. I just took it on its own, and I already knew at that point, that it was going to be a historical novel, and since I had already read it before, I had a feeling for what it was, and I think it allowed me space to actually appreciate it.

AMY: I read Romola as part of my assigned reading in college. Being an English major, I remember reading that one and having the same reaction. It’s dry, at times, because of the historic element. However, the professor that taught that book was my all-time favorite professor and maybe even my favorite teacher of all time. Xavier University, Dr. Ernest Fontana — he was so dramatic. He had so much flair. He was an incredible English professor, so I think he helped enliven it a bit, but yeah, it’s definitely not my favorite George Eliot book, by far. It’s kind of like that saying, “You never step in the same river twice,” you know? You never read the same book twice because you’re life experiences and who you are with age change. 

KIM: I love that. I think that’s true, because there are books we read over and over again, and it’s because we get something different from them every time. I read A Room With A View over and over, and it’s a short novella, almost, but I notice different things every time and I get something out of it every time.

AMY: Yeah. Okay, so my book that I was lukewarm about the first time I read it and then I came to appreciate it is Harry Potter. So I was in my twenties and there was this Harry Potter craze and I felt like I needed to look into it because everybody was talking about this book. Even though it was a children’s book, I was like, “You know, I’m going to give this a whirl.” And I had no interest in it. I don’t even think I finished book one. I was like, “I get it. I don’t need to go on.” But then having kids changed all that. We sat down and made a big production of reading the entire series, and when you read the entire series (first of all, Book One is not the best book. It’s just sort of the introduction. It gets better. It gets darker. It gets more involved.) There will be Harry Potter in your future, Kim, now that you have a child, so just prepare for it.

KIM: Okay.

AMY: But I will say, I think the difference is, that book came out when we were already adults. But this was an event for children. I’ll never have the experience of reading it as a child.

KIM: Right.

AMY: So I’ll never have that kind of magic associated with it, but seeing it through the eyes of my kids gave me a new appreciation for it, I think.

KIM: I’m excited to read that with Cleo one day. I actually have read I think, if not all of them, at least almost all of them, but to me, my thing is The Chronicles of Narnia, because I passionately loved those as a child, and so I was always comparing the feeling. But I think that’s the thing. It’s when you come to it as a child it’s completely different than coming to it as an adult. The magic of it is different.

AMY: Yeah. Since we’re on the subject of childhood books: Kim, I don’t think we’ve ever actually discussed this, but I’m curious. What was your sort of “gateway” novel? And by that, I sort of mean, what was the book you first read as a young person that sort of ushered you into reading more adult books, even the classics? What was the book that kind of launched you from reading, say, Judy Blume-type books into reading more sophisticated adult novels. Can you remember?

KIM: Okay, so hmm. That’s a great question. As far as Judy Blume, I read Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret a million times in sixth grade. I think I had it memorized. But other than that, I really didn’t have a Judy Blume phase or anything like that. I don’t think I even read any of her other books. My mom had a real extensive bookshelf, and it had a lot of classics in it and things she’d read in college. And so after Little Women and Rose in Bloom, I just kind of kept going with everything on her bookshelf. And then I also distinctly remember the first time I read what really was an adult novel. It was in fourth grade, and we were on a flight from Germany to California. And I’m guessing my mom didn’t have anything else to give me and all I wanted to do was read, so the only thing she could do was give me this book. But it was a historical romance. It was set among Native Americans before the arrival of the Europeans. And I’m not sure how I ended up with it, you know, but I still remember the name. It was called Mesa of Flowers. It was definitely not classic literature, by any means, but it made a huge impression on me. I still remember scenes from it today! (And also, that’s because maybe it was a little steamy for a fourth grader.) But as for classics, one of the first ones I remember reading was Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge. Do you know it? 

AMY: I’ve never heard of that, no. 

KIM: I think it might be considered a classic, but maybe it’s actually a lost classic, so we might end up putting it on our list at some point. I think it was published in the 1940s. Anyway…

AMY: That’s lost to me. I mean, I know Island of the Blue Dolphins?

KIM: Totally different.

AMY: Okay. Okay.

KIM: I don’t know. I’m going to have to look into it a little bit more now that we’re discussing this, because it’s making me think about it. But what was your gateway novel?

AMY: Well, it’s interesting that you mentioned your mom’s bookshelf because I think my mom was sort of instrumental in sort of steering me into these more mature books as well. The story I have to start is, do you remember, like, the Scholastic fliers that would come home from school where you could order books?

KIM: Yes.

AMY: They still have those, by the way.

KIM: That’s great.

AMY: I remember bringing home the flier with the books, and I wanted to buy some books out of it, and my mom… I mean, my mom didn’t really let me buy stuff like that, but she was like, “I will buy you some books if you let me choose.” She chose Little Women and she chose Heidi. And those were sort of “older books” out of the flier. Everything else was kind of like kiddy books, you know? The only reason I got them was because she chose Little Women and Heidi, and I was probably like in the third grade, and they might have been slightly abridged versions for younger children, but they were still thick books, and I remember reading them. I wore them out. I loved them so much. So Little Women: We have that in common, really. I really didn’t know that that was your book, too. But then in eighth grade, my English teacher, his classroom was just a wall of books. Maybe two walls of books, floor-to-ceiling, and he had tests on every single one of those novels. It was a massive library in his classroom. So he had this really long list of the books, and it was our job to pick out which books we wanted to read and do the tests on. So I took this list — it was like an eight-page list of books — and I gave it to my mom and I was like, “I don’t know what to read. I don’t know anything about any of these. Can you just circle the ones that you think I might like if you know any of them?” And she circled Wuthering Heights and she circled Jane Eyre.

KIM: Oh my gosh.

AMY: So those I read in eight grade, and I remember especially with Wuthering Heights, the book that was in Mr. Moning’s English class, it was so old that it was just falling apart at the seams. Clearly nobody ever got this book out. It was the dusty one. It wasn’t the popular book for kids to read. I showed him because the cover ripped off of it while I was reading it, because it was just so dilapidated. And I felt awful, and I took it up to the teacher and I was like, “I’m so sorry but the cover fell off of this.” He just looked at me and he said, “You keep that book. I can get a new one. You keep that version.” I loved it. I was so happy that I got to keep the book. So the Bronte sisters. Little Women and the Bronte sisters, for me.

KIM: Have you told your mom anything about this recently? Does she know the impact that she had?

AMY: No, I don’t think so.

KIM: You should tell her!

AMY: She’s probably listening now, so she knows, but…

KIM: Oh my gosh, I love this. Oh my gosh, this episode is dedicated to Amy’s mom.

AMY: Phyllis!

KIM: Hi, Phyllis!

AMY: And Dianne.

KIM: And my mom.

AMY: We’ll raise a toast to her, too.

KIM: Absolutely. I love that. So, talking about all the books we read when we were younger, it makes me wonder: Did you ever read Harriet the Spy when you were growing up?

AMY: Not when I was young, no. In fact, I just read it for the first time a few weeks ago in order to prepare for our next special guests.

KIM: That’s right, everyone. Next week we’ve got two more guest experts coming our way. We’re going to be talking with literary agent Laura Mazer and biographer Leslie Brody about the fascinating life of Harriet the Spy author Louise Fitzhugh.

AMY: What most people don’t realize is that Louise Fitzhugh was quite the renegade, and we’re looking forward to chatting with Laura and Leslie next week about her unexpected life story. So that’s all for today. And listeners, we’d love to hear your feedback on our questions from today’s episode. So hit us up by email or on social media to tell us what your gateway novels were and which books you’ve never quite managed to gel with despite your best efforts to enjoy them.

KIM: I can’t wait to hear some of your responses. So 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: Do you have ideas for long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know.

[closing music starts]

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.

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

17. Stella Gibbons — Nightingale Wood

AMY: So it’s January, 2021, and as we discussed in last week’s episode, Kim, it feels like the time of year for fresh starts, right?

KIM: Yeah, and we really need one after last year, for sure.

AMY: Of course. Yes. Please, god. So the literary heroine we’ll be discussing in today’s episode is getting a new start in life, but “fresh start” might not be the best way to put it.

KIM: No. I mean, if there’s such a thing as a “stale start,” then I think that’s what this character is getting, sadly. At least in the beginning anyway.

AMY: Yeah, in the case of Stella Gibbons’ Nightingale Wood, a somber change in circumstances for protagonist Viola Withers sets the stage for a charmingly unorthodox 1930s-era Cinderella Story.

KIM: So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off lost classics by some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes, and we’ll be your fairy godmothers this week, discussing Stella Gibbons’ novel Nightingale Wood.

KIM: Yes, and Stella Gibbons is an author who is not particularly well known, but if you do know her, it probably means you’ve read her best-selling novel, Cold Comfort Farm, and it was adapted into a film starring Kate Beckinsale in 1995.

AMY: It’s basically about “something nasty in the woodshed,” and if you want to know what I mean by that, you have to go read the book.

KIM: Don’t scare everyone, Amy. There’s a lot more to it than that. It’s been described as a burlesque satire of the rural novel, which is a great description of it. It's completely hilarious, but I also do find myself sometimes wondering about that incident in that woodshed. It’s very mysterious. And because Cold Comfort Farm is Stella Gibbon’s most well-known work, we highly recommend you go read that one if you’re new to this author. 

AMY: Yes, you’re going to love that book. But it’s also precisely because Gibbons is really only known for Cold Comfort Farm that we wanted to use today’s episode to talk about another one of her deserving titles, we think: Nightingale Wood. 

KIM: Yes, and we can’t say anything nasty happens in the woodshed in this book, but there’s plenty of wry comedy, a realistic take on romance, and some sexcapades and high drama, too! So let’s raid the stacks, and get started!

[Intro music]

AMY: So, Kim, I want to start by saying there’s a biography about Stella Gibbons by her nephew, Reggie Oliver, called Out of the Woodshed. Duh-da-DUM!

KIM: [laughing]. Wow, that is great! That is too much! Her legacy is never going to be able to live down what happened in the woodshed.

AMY: No. And maybe something bad really did happen, because she apparently had a pretty unhappy childhood in a household of “violent egomaniacs.” She was born in 1902, the daughter of a London doctor, and she described him as “a bad man, but a good doctor.” He was apparently an alcoholic, a womanizer and physically violent and emotionally abusive.

KIM: Wow. And then we see alcoholism come into play in Nightingale Wood, so it’s sad to think she was likely drawing on her tangible experiences there.

AMY: Yeah, it was certainly not an idyllic childhood for her, and it’s easy to see where a lot of her cynicism as a writer comes into play as a result of that. But on the flip side of that, as the oldest of three children, a heavy responsibility fell on her shoulders and she said that she was inspired as a child to invent many fairy tales that she told to her two younger brothers, these happy-ending stories to help them forget their miserable circumstances. Actually, in her early twenties, both her parents died within quick succession of one another and she was basically the sole breadwinner looking after those two younger brothers.

KIM: Right. And around this time she was a journalist. She was writing articles about pretty much everything under the sun. And then when her first novel — Cold Comfort Farm, as we mentioned —  was published in 1930, it was to instant success. 

AMY: And like we said, it was a spoof on this genre of rural novels that were written by women in the 1920s. (And these were books that Gibbons hated. She thought that they were so stupid.) So she was poking fun at that, and this novel was so loved by critics that one even suggested “Stella Gibbons” was probably a pen name used by the male writer Evelyn Waugh. Nobody could believe a first-time author (and a woman) could have written such a sophisticated parody. Having become an overnight celebrity, Gibbons was assured by her agent that she’d be able to make a comfortable living writing novels for the rest of her life. (Oh my god, how much would we love to hear that?) So she quit her job at the women’s magazine she was working for, and did just that. 

KIM: Well, Cold Comfort Farm won the Prix Etranger, a French literary prize, and Virginia Woolf was actually irked by this, because Gibbons had beat out two of her good friends in the category. Woolf thought one of them ought to have won instead. And some have suggested that Gibbons was given the cold shoulder by the literati in her lifetime because she always sort of distanced herself from those circles and even mocked the literary establishment. But Gibbons does in fact reference Woolf in Nightingale Wood and not in a bad way, so maybe that’s all been a bit overblown?

AMY: I read that she actually grew to resent her association with Cold Comfort Farm because she felt like people were just ignoring the rest of her 20-some subsequent literary works and she didn’t like that.  She said the book was like, quote, "some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore." 

KIM: [laughing] I love that description.

AMY: She was widely regarded as a “one-hit wonder” of the literary world, and she hated that, because she wrote prolifically all her life, really almost until the end of her life in 1989.

KIM: As for her personal life, after a broken engagement with the first love of her life (a German man named Walter Beck), she ended up marrying an aspiring actor and opera singer named Allan Webb, and he was described in one article as a man of “frail constitution.” Her only child, a daughter named Laura, was born the same year Nightingale Wood was published.

AMY: And then, a few other fun facts about Gibbons: Despite her scathing wit and caustic sense of humor, which is what she’s really known for, she considered herself to be much more of a serious poet than a writer of comedy. She loved Keats, in particular, and Nightingale Wood could really be seen as a subtle nod to him. Gibbons also once claimed that her idea of hell was having to go shopping for fishing rods in Harrods Department Store with Ernest Hemingway. Kim, I think I would have really gotten along with this chick. She kind of just says it, consequences be damned. I like that about her.

KIM: Definitely. And if you do need another reason to love her, she was a longtime admirer of Jane Austen. In 1960, she wrote a science fiction story for Punch magazine called, Jane In Space, which was written in the style of Jane Austen. Wow.

AMY: Yeah, I saw that, and I immediately went online and tried to find a copy of it, with no success. So I would love to read it. If anybody listening is able to find that on the “interwebs,” would you please let us know and send us the link? It’s got to be out there somewhere.

KIM: Please. Yes, somewhere. Another one of her novels, Enbury Heath, is a thinly fictionalized account of her harrowing family life growing up, and that could be worth checking out too.

AMY: Yeah, it could be sad, though, given what we know about her youth. Although apparently she didn’t really wallow in her troubled childhood or have any sort of self-pitying attitude about it. She famously wrote that, “Happiness can never hope to command so much interest as distress,” which actually seems like a good segue that could bring us into our discussion of Nightingale Wood right now.

KIM: So let’s get right into it. The protagonist of Nightingale Wood, Viola Withers, seems to be at a hopeless crossroads to kick off the novel. Having wed very young to a man she wasn’t even in love with, she ends up forced by necessity to go live with his in-laws after his sudden death. And these in-laws, the Withers, are rich, but really joyless, people. The father-in-law is money-obsessed and a spendthrift, and the mother-in-law is judgmental and insipid. And then there are two sisters, Tina and Madge, whom you could maybe consider the “ugly spinster stepsisters” of the novel… at least in the beginning anyway. 

AMY: Right, and all of them judge Viola because she comes from a different class. She was a shop girl before she married into the family and they all look down their noses at her. Gibbons writes, “She wore clothes that were subtly incorrect, played no expensive games, and was not quite a lady.” So she’s basically financially dependent on this family, the Withers, and she kind of feels doomed to a life of never-ending dreariness and loneliness living at the Eagles, which is the name of their dark and stuffy old mansion. 

KIM: And that’s not to say, though, that she’s one of those perfect, fairy tale heroines at all. Gibbons makes it really clear she has very little depth even though her heart is in the right place. In one telling quote from the book, she describes Viola by writing: “She never felt cross with anyone for long; her deplorably weak nature hardly seemed capable of sustaining a healthy indignation.” 

AMY: So yeah, she’s kind of flavorless in some ways, and you find yourself (and I think it’s actually intentional on Gibbons’ part) rooting much more fervently for some of the other women in this story. But we’ll get to that momentarily. For now, suffice to say that the one bit of excitement in Viola’s life comes in the form of the dashing Victor Spring, the Bentley-driving equivalent of “Mr. Big,” basically, whose ego matches the size of his house and bank account. So, like the Shakespearean character she’s named after, Viola finds herself pining over this princely figure even though he is already engaged to one Phyllis Barlow. (Think of the Baroness Schraeder from The Sound of Music, basically. She’s a beautiful, badass bitch, and she loves that she landed one of England’s most eligible bachelors, but she sees some flaws in Victor.

KIM: And don’t we all! He is an arrogant jerk! 

AMY: He’s awful.

KIM: Yeah. Even Viola feels a strange distaste for him the first moment they meet, whereas he sees her as an easy sexual conquest. He can’t even remember her name correctly for a while. Gibbons writes: “He had stupid, old-fashioned, ultra-masculine views on women. He never lost the feeling (though of course he had to suppress it in front of Phyllis and her friends) that women ought to be kept busy with some entirely feminine occupation like sewing or arranging flowers or nursing children until a man wanted their attention. He had not a shred of admiration for women who flew the larger expanses of sea, won motor-racing trophies, wrote brilliant novels, or managed big business. He admired women only for being pretty, docile, and well-dressed.” 

AMY: Boo! Get off my page! And yet, despite his selfishness and chauvinism, Viola is completely infatuated with him for the entirety of the novel, and they end up dancing together at the proverbial ball, but their subsequent encounters upset Viola, who describes him as “beastly.” And at this point as the reader, you’re thinking: “What kind of fairy tale is this?” It’s not exactly what we were expecting.

KIM: Yes, and that’s what you should be thinking, because Gibbons is obviously subverting the whole idea of a fairy tale with this novel. There’s this sense that the ideal prize is really just an illusion that people are chasing. Maybe there is no happily ever after, even for the people who get exactly what they want?

AMY: So while Viola and Victor Spring are having their hot-and-heavy, but also disconcerting tete-a-tetes, there’s another blossoming romance in the works. 

KIM: Yes. Viola’s sister in law, Tina Withers, who is pushing forty, starts up an illicit romance with the family’s chauffeur, Saxon, who is 12 years her junior. But when the town drunk, a hermit who lives in a shack in the woods, publicly calls them out for sleeping together, Tina gets cast out of the house in disgrace. 

AMY: This is basically a riches-to-rags story, a kind of reverse “Cinderella” if you will, and it’s really sweet, I think, but my favorite scene in the whole book is when the Tina/Saxon drama comes to a head, especially when Tina launches into a whole speech about how she’s been “sexually starved for years.” It was awesome. You almost had to gasp out loud as that scene spilled onto the page. Gibbons writes, “Her family were all raw-minded about sex; their natures all had that one secret, sore place and when it was touched, they winced and ran mad. Only they themselves knew what old longings and crushed miseries her warm naked truths had let out of prison. But millions of people were like that.” Wow, girl!

KIM: Uh, yeah, I think there’s a reason people thought maybe that she was Evelyn Waugh because that rings very “Evelyn Waugh-ish.” I was so rooting for Tina in that moment, too! But she’s not the only spirited young woman in this novel. Victor’s 21-year-old cousin, Hetty, is a real spitfire, too. She always says exactly what she thinks (to the shock and horror of Victor’s mother and fiancee, Phyllis). She’s obsessed with literature and feminism and learning, and she seems to exist on this higher mental plane than anyone else in the book.

AMY: Yeah, I like to think Hetty is the character closest to Gibbons’ own personality. I’m imagining that. She’s witty, shrewd, progressive, and doesn’t give a damn about societal expectations, and she absolutely hates Victor’s fiancee, Phyllis. She calmly states over breakfast one morning, “I detest her. To me she typifies all the varnished vulgarity and falseness of this horrifying age. Everything that she is, poetry is not. I wish that she would die, preferably violently.”

KIM: Tell us what you really think! Without giving the rest of the story away, we’ll just say that, like all fairy tales, this one ends happily for pretty much everyone … or does it?

AMY: Yeah, that’s the big question. Every character, in one way or another, ends up getting exactly what they were after all along, and yet, as Gibbons catalogues their fate, we learn that no one is actually entirely satisfied, except for maybe the D.O.M. -- the dirty-old-man Hermit who lives in the woods (who, Kim, in my mind, needs to be played in the movie by Ian McShane. That’s who I pictured the whole time). 

KIM: Oh, yeah. That’s great.

AMY: So the book’s ambivalent ending really reminded me of that final scene of The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross are sitting at the back of the bus, like “Okay, now what?” and we hear the opening bars of “Hello Darkness, my old friend….” You know, it’s sort of, like, bittersweet?

KIM: That is the best comparison! That’s great. And I also wanted to bring up another interesting aspect of the book. The wooded area between the Withers’ home and the Springs’ home has special significance. While the human stories unfolding are jarringly, almost depressingly real, the wood seems to hold all of that fairy tale magic. Her description of the natural beauty and the birds living in this part of the English countryside… it’s all juxtaposed against the materialism and the general misery of these characters.

AMY: Yeah, and when I read that Gibbons was a huge fan of Keats, all those references to birdsong, and that feeling of freedom in nature versus the constraints of society, sort of made sense — especially putting it in the context of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is basically a poem all about the fact that happiness is just kind of illusory or ephemeral for humans. I think that’s maybe where she was getting the title from, frankly. And at the end of Keats’ poem, he wonders if the nightingale was actually really there or if it was all just a dream.

KIM: Right, and that ties into the last few lines of the novel, too, but we’ll leave that to you, as the reader, to experience for yourself. Now, what do we think Gibbons was trying to say with Nightingale Wood?

AMY: I think maybe that there’s just no such thing as “happily ever after,” you know? She references Shakespeare a lot in the book, including, at one point, the phrase “violent delights have violent ends.” And it’s a very cynical take on romance, I think, and it’s a rude awakening of sorts. Even Phyllis, who is Victor Spring’s fiancee at the beginning of the book, she goes on to marry a minister of parliament, but Gibbons writes: “Sometimes when she and the M.P. are going home from a party at five in the morning, she observes to the M.P. that life is very different from what you thought it was going to be when you were a kid. But the M.P. is too tired to ask her what she thought it was going to be, and even if he did, it is possible that she could not remember.” It’s kind of wistful, you know?

KIM: Yeah, I agree.

AMY: So Kim, this idea of these idyllic childhood fairytales really got me thinking about the stories that we tell our children, particularly our daughters. So, you know, Julia’s 11 now, and she’s already been through and is now past her fascination with princesses, but there was a point in time where she was all-in. Her obsession took hold when she was about two years old, without my even introducing her to it (it was her babysitter who got that ball rolling), but I was fine to let her, you know, go with that princess fantasy, because the joy she took in it. I didn’t want to throw a wet blanket on it. But what do you think though? Do you see princesses and that whole trope as problematic? Would you try to steer Cleo away from it as she grows older?

KIM: That’s interesting. I actually have thought about it. And my niece, Chloe, went through a princess phase. She’s now 11 and she is completely into the Marvel superhero thing, so it totally wore off and she went in the other direction. I think with Cleo, if she’s interested, I’d let her enjoy it and then hope when she’s a little older, it can maybe be something we can talk about a little bit more. I have a feeling trying to steer her away from it wouldn’t really work. It might do the opposite. And I’d probably also try to find some really positive, modern princess stories, too… I know there are more of those these days and you probably have some great suggestions for that, having been through that phase.

AMY: For sure, in the last decade we’re starting to have representations of more feminism in fairy tales. And I think Disney finally gets it. We’ve seen a switch in movies like Frozen and Brave and even Mulan, which was prior to 10 years ago, where the women are the heroes and it’s not solely about landing the guy. There’s also a great scene with all the Disney Princesses in the Wreck It Ralph sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet that sort of turns that idea of helpless princesses on its head in a really fun way. So I think times are changing, but I do love that Stella Gibbons, back in the Thirties, was clearly light years ahead of her time in raising some of these issues.

KIM: Yes, I think that definitely goes to show that she wasn’t just a one-hit-wonder. So what did we learn from today’s episode? 

AMY: Well, we were reminded that Ernest Hemingway really would be super annoying to go shopping with.

KIM: Yes … and probably super annoying to do most things with. But we also learned that Prince Charmings, when you scratch the surface, aren’t all they’re cracked up to be either.

AMY: We learned that the times, fortunately, are changing when it comes to modern fairytales.  

KIM: Thank goodness. And we learned that there’s a lot more to Stella Gibbons’ writing than whatever nastiness is in that woodshed. (And seriously, do read Cold Comfort Farm if you haven’t already to understand that reference.) You will thank us later.

AMY: But if you want to thank us now, there’s a way you could do that. Consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast. It’s the single most important thing you can do to help us grow our audience and help other book-minded people find us. It’s a fast and easy way to show your support for us, and we’d be so grateful.

KIM: Yes, and we really hope you enjoyed this episode. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

AMY: Do you have ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. 

[start closing music]

KIM: And tune in again next week to help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

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.

16. From Jane Austen to Zadie Smith — Advice from Women Writers for a More Productive 2021

KIM: It’s the first week of January, and you know what that means, Amy…

AMY: Let me guess: I’m going to say falling off the wagon from the New Year’s Resolution you JUST made, like, five days ago.

KIM: Probably [laughs]. Everyone’s like, “Mm-hmm, that’s me.” So, what’s the key to NOT letting that happen?

AMY: I’m not sure, because I’m really not in the habit of making New Year’s resolutions. Do you?

KIM: I usually jot some things down, and then I immediately forget about them for the rest of the year. But, you know, they say that if you can do anything for 30 days it becomes habitual. So I guess that’s one place to start.

AMY: Yeah, it’s a place to start, assuming you’ve taken the first step. Which in a lot of cases, is actually the hardest thing to do. There’s a quote from C.S. Lewis who said, “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” But, I mean, really what’s the difference between setting the goal and dreaming the dream and actually making it happen? There’s a big difference, I think. And I feel like that’s a question for you, Kim, because between the two of us, you’re the one who is always thinking big for the both of us.

KIM: Hmm. Maybe that’s true, and I guess now that you mention it, I’m thinking I may have a little something in common with Mrs. Spring Fragrance. She’s actually one of the protagonists from the short story collection by Sui Sin Far that we featured in our last episode. And in case you haven’t listened to that one yet, she comes up with these unlikely, yet really creative ideas to help her friends and neighbors with their romantic problems. And she was very successful at following through and making it work! That said, in my case, sure, I can come up with ideas, but without an accountability partner, (and one who happens to be really smart, really creative, super organized, and doesn’t take any crap, I might add), I wouldn’t have made it this far I don’t think.

AMY: Oh, I’m blushing, Kim. And I am going to start calling you Mrs. Spring Fragrance, by the way.

KIM: I like it.

AMY: It’s a good analogy. You are like her. I’m the pragmatist between the two of us, I think, and that can be my own worst enemy. Sure, in many instances in life it’s very helpful to have that sort of mentality, that sort of healthy skepticism about what’s possible and what’s not possible, but when it comes to empowering yourself, those kind of mental “reality checks” that I tend do in my head, those are like a hand-brake that hampers me. I can always seem to find a MILLION reasons not to do something because I think things through way too much.

KIM: I know you do. [laughing]. But luckily I’m here with a million and one reasons why we should do it.

AMY: Yes, and listeners, you should know that Kim is the person that just comes up with these ideas like: “We need to go to Argentina next Saturday!” And you’re like, “Umm, what? I don’t think that’s going to work, Kim!” Maybe not so much anymore, now that you’re married and have a child. You’ve kind of toned that spontaneity down a little bit. But you always have these big, big, big ideas, and I’m like, “Sure….”.

KIM: I know. You humor me.

AMY: But I do think that you’re the person who first prods us into an idea and then once I’ve steadily ruminated on it for many days or weeks even, and I can distill the idea in my head, in a lot of cases I come around, and I’m like, “Yeah, we should do that!” That’s the case with the blog that we first started almost 20 years ago, and also the book series that we wrote and now, with this podcast even. You had been talking about it for a while before I was like, “Ah, yeah, that’s exactly what we should do!” But I was a little hesitant at first.

KIM: Yes, so I just want to say you did come up with the idea for the Lost Ladies of Lit, that that would be sort of the concept, so… I wanted to do a podcast, but you actually brought us around to what we would do. So. 

AMY: I think that’s part of the way that we work.

KIM: Yeah, we usually are completely in sync when we know the idea is right and we don’t look back. We could have sat around for months talking about it and planning and thinking about it and questioning ourselves, but instead, we decided to just go for it. We did it and here we are!

AMY: We’re still learning as we go, obviously, but it feels good to have set the wheels in motion. And speaking of Lost Ladies of Lit, it got me wondering whether we can sort of glean any New Year’s wisdom from our literary ladies, tips, perhaps, on how to become a “do-er” and not just a “dreamer.”

KIM: Oh, I know we can. Amy and I have compiled a list of quotes from women writers that we think can inspire us (and hopefully you) to have greater productivity in the new year. 

AMY: Alright, so we’re going to begin with George Eliot. She has a quote: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” The takeaway is just very basic: don’t make excuses, you know? It isn’t too late. I think so many times we feel like, “Oh, in another life, I could have been this…” or “If only I had done that when I was younger…” and it doesn’t matter. Don’t make excuses, just find a way and do it.

KIM: Considering I’ve always felt a little bit like a late bloomer, that one really speaks to me. So here’s one from Emily Dickinson: “The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” 

So, my takeaway from that is that you need to be flexible, ready to pivot, ready for opportunities. Actually, I have a note on my bulletin board that says: “Enjoy the experience, make it a great memory.” Luck is the convergence of preparedness and opportunity. So, Amy and I already had a manuscript for our first book. It was in a drawer, so to speak. It was actually on our computer. When the call came for a submission to the person who became our editor, it was there waiting. So you have to be ready for opportunity and be willing to keep an eye out for it when it’s about to show up. 

AMY: Yeah, actually at the start of this pandemic, I had been reading a nonfiction book that was all about the science of luck. Two scientists got together and studied why are people lucky. And those were the two main takeaways. It was about yes, being at the right place in the right time, and there are certain ways to position yourself for that, but also being prepared when that opportunity strikes, and if you don’t have both of those components, you’re going to miss the ball, basically. So I love that quote. So, of course we have to have something from Jane Austen, right?

KIM: Of course.

AMY: She said (or wrote, I guess you could say): “There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” The lesson there? Easy enough. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t say “can’t” and then also don’t let others say it for you.

KIM: I want to put that on my bulletin board, too. That’s good. Thank you, Jane. I have one from Mary Shelley, and it’s simple, but really wise: “The beginning is always today.” And I think that’s true. I love that message, it’s really freeing. So basically, don’t wait. There’s no time like the present. But also (this is really comforting), every day is a fresh start. 

AMY: So don’t beat yourself up when you feel like, oh, man, I should have been doing more on my goal, or I should have been, or I really blew it for the past few weeks (or whatever the problem is). Instead of having that mentality, have the mentality like, I get back on the tracks today. And also, just take things in little pieces sometimes. Sometimes it’s just one foot in front of the other. Today, I can write an email. Today, I can do a little brainstorming memo for myself. Whatever, even if it’s just a little bit every day towards your goal.

KIM: Yeah, I think that’s really true. I totally agree with the idea that, just taking a little step toward your goal is a lot easier to bite off than trying to envision your end goal and get there.

AMY: And it can start momentum, like a snowball rolling downhill.

KIM: Exactly.

AMY: Zadie Smith, who isn’t necessarily a “classic” lady of lit, but I thought she had a really good quote, so I wanted to include it. She said: “Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.” Now, in some ways that feels maybe a little selfish, especially if you have a family to consider, but I don’t see it like a selfish sort of way. I see it more as learning how to say “no” to the things that don’t matter. There are some things that you need to just let go and you have to prioritize your own ambitions. I think as women, sometimes we want to put everybody ahead of us. We want to serve everybody else first, and then when the time comes to work on our own things, we are just out of gas. The only way to make a switch with that, is to find time… my time and space is often the middle of the night, because that’s when it’s quiet. That’s when I know I’m not going to have anybody tugging me in a million different directions. I’m going to just have several uninterrupted hours to do what I need to do, and it sounds crazy and maybe I’m part vampire, but to me, I feel better about myself if I’m getting stuff done. I usually wake up in the middle of the night and my eyes pop open and I need to go and take care of business. And so I will, and then once I get it out of my head I can sleep. So, that’s kind of how I address it.

KIM: Okay, so I have one from Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” And the takeaway from that is, if you see a space for something, put your passion into it, do it and see what comes of it. So have a passion for what you’re trying to accomplish. See the spaces where there’s room for things, and fill them.

AMY: That’s basically what we’re trying to do with this podcast. I think if there are listeners out there (and we know that there are, which is amazing and fun and great), but really, Kim and I do it because we love doing it and it’s fun, and if we had no listeners, we probably would still do it because it’s just a passion project for us, and it’s a time that we get to spend together, so when you’re having fun doing something, you’re more likely to put the energy and effort into it.

KIM: Absolutely.

AMY: Okay, I have one from Octavia E. Butler. She said: “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.” Obviously, she’s talking about writing here, but I think it applies to anything. It’s what we said at the beginning about New Year’s Resolutions. When you do something for 30 days, it starts to become ingrained in you, and suddenly it’s not an effort anymore. For me, I think, especially with writing, there is a combination of habit and inspiration. I mean, I still rely on inspiration, but I don’t think you can be inspired unless you’re putting yourself in the mindset and putting yourself in front of the computer monitor. 

KIM: One hundred percent. I think a lot of people wait for inspiration, and I think I used to do that, and I realized the only way inspiration’s going to come is if i sit down and start writing or start doing whatever it is I want to do. And then the inspiration comes while you’re there actually putting in the work. That daily practice of writing, or doing whatever it is that you want to do, it sort of makes room for inspiration to arrive a lot more often.

KIM: So I have one from Isabel Allende, and this is: “You only have what you give. It’s by spending yourself that you become rich.” I love this one. So this is twofold for me. One, it feels like the more that you put out there, the more that you have within yourself. So it’s not like you’re going to run out of inspiration. It’s not like you’re going to run out of ideas. It’s not like you’re going to run out of creativity. It’s all in there, so keep spending it. Don’t be afraid. Don’t hoard it. And then also, invest in yourself, whether it’s financially or with your time, because what you have within is the thing you have to offer the world, so it’s important to invest in that. Yeah, I sound really wise.

AMY: [laughing] You are! You are! Okay now, I have one from [I always call her An-EYE-is Nin, but is it ANA-EES Nin?]

KIM: I think it’s ANA-EES.

AMY: Okay, Anais Nin: “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” I’m practically almost choking up reading this one, Kim, because that friend, to me, is you. And I have such a clear memory of meeting you and my life changed after I met you because we started working together and I can’t imagine the path my life would have taken if I hadn’t met you that night. Just knowing that that instant changed everything because we went on to do so many great things together. 

KIM: I can still remember that moment, too, and then sometimes I just stop and think about all the things that we’ve done since we’ve known each other and it’s kind of… it’s pretty amazing. It makes me feel really good. 

AMY: Yeah, absolutely.

KIM: I’m feeling a little choked up, too.

AMY: So basically, get yourself a “Kim” or an “Amy.” Find an accountability partner or find the person that inspires you. And maybe it’s not like a partnership like Kim and I have. Maybe it’s just somebody you check in with. You each have separate goals, but you’re sort of working in parallel tracks. Somebody that you want to exercise with, somebody that you want to have be your writing buddy. Whatever it is that you’re working towards, it helps to have somebody that can be your support system and your cheerleader. And also the person that holds you accountable.

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it can be a career coach, it can be taking a class. Whatever it is that you know you’ll be accountable to, that’s a real key in accomplishing things, especially for people who are givers. I have one from Nancy Mitford, which is very dry: “Oh, how television diminishes everything.” (I can just imagine her saying that.) But the takeaway from that… I think we can broaden that and say don’t get trapped in time sucks. It can be TV. It can be social media. It can be the rabbit hole of the Internet. But basically, the idea is to be conscious of how you choose to spend your time, and spend it deliberately. I know that’s not always possible, but if you can stop yourself sometimes and just think, Okay, is this really going to add to my life? Maybe I could be writing right now or doing something else that accomplishes my goals.

AMY: That’s a tough one for me because I love television. I love television way more than you do, Kim. I know that for a fact. But I think it also goes back to an earlier tip, which was “Find your passion.” Because when you do have something that you love to do, you’re willing to tear yourself away from… the TV or the Internet is not as exciting as getting to work on what you love to work on. Uh, Virginia Woolf… this is a famous one: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” When you have been working for a while and you’re doing good, take a breather! Don’t forget to stop and smell the roses a little bit along the way, but also kind of reward yourself a bit. Kim and I like to reward ourselves when we hit certain milestones in our work, and one of our favorite things to do together is going to afternoon tea. And usually we work during the afternoon tea because we’re excited to talk about whatever project we’re doing, but that ritual of going to have this decadent high tea at a fancy hotel is one of our favorite things to do.

KIM: And I cannot wait until the pandemic that we’re in is over and we can actually go have afternoon tea again. That’s one of the things that I’ve been looking forward to.

AMY: For sure. So that’s all great advice, frankly, and hopefully we can keep that in mind for 2021 as we continue to work on projects together. Yet If anyone needs a new life plan and a path for achieving it, it’s the young heroine of our next novel. She’s a former shop girl who finds herself down and out (and living with her rich, but comically dour and depressing in-laws) following the death of her husband. 

KIM: Stella Gibbons’ Nightingale Wood is an interesting twist on the classic “Cinderella Story,” and it’s really every bit as delightful as Gibbons’ more well-known farcical gem, Cold Comfort Farm.

AMY: I so love Cold Comfort Farm (both the book and the movie) so I was so happy when you recommended I give this other book by Gibbons a read. I hadn’t really thought that she had any other books, so of course she does. I was thrilled to read it.

KIM: I knew you would love it. And until we dive into that one next week, you can check out our website, Lostladiesoflit.com. It has more information on this episode and further reading. And if you love this episode, please leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find us. Happy New Year, everyone!

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.

15. Sui Sin Far — Mrs. Spring Fragrance with Victoria Namkung

KIM: Hello, and welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: … 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.

AMY: This week we’re going back a century to yet another incredible book we can’t believe we hadn’t heard about before, this one by the author Sui Sin Far. 

KIM: And it’s really interesting the way her name kept popping up on our radar in recent months. At least two people mentioned her to us, our guest last month, Anne Boyd Rioux, and today’s guest. 

AMY: And we’re so glad they did. Clearly great minds think alike — and have the same taste in books! So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music]

KIM: Okay, so full disclosure, I’m proud to say that today’s guest is a friend of mine. We’ve worked together for years. Her name is Victoria Namkung, and she’s a journalist and author who’s been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, VICE, The Washington Post, USA Today, and InStyle, among other publications.

She's also the author of two wonderful novels: The Things We Tell Ourselves and These Violent Delights, and she has a degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA. Her master’s thesis on import car racing and Asian American masculinity was published in the anthology Asian American Youth. 

Welcome, Victoria, and thank you for bringing this brilliant, but relatively unknown, author to our attention! 

VICTORIA: My pleasure! Thank you, guys, so much for having me.

AMY: So listeners, first off, when we refer to Sui Sin Far, we want you to know that that’s actually her pen name. Her real name was Edith Maude Eaton, and so you’re going to be hearing us using those two names interchangeably throughout the course of the episode. So for a little background: Eaton was a journalist and writer of Chinese and British descent. She was born in England, but lived the majority of her life in both Canada and the United States. Her father was an English merchant and her mother was a Chinese woman he’d met on a business trip to Shanghai. And honestly, her mother was a pretty amazing woman. She had formerly been enslaved and toured the world as a tightrope dancer as well as the human target of a knife-throwing act (which, I don’t know if that was voluntarily, or probably not, but wow!) She was finally rescued by missionaries from her abusive owner in London in 1855. But that’s another whole story.

KIM: Wow, that is a “truth is stranger than fiction” story right there, and also, it sounds harrowing. So Eaton’s family moved to Montreal in 1872, and her father eventually began a business smuggling Chinese into the U.S. from Montreal. The family struggled financially, but their home environment was actually intellectually stimulating. Eaton was the eldest of fourteen children, and she left school in order to help support them. She did this by writing articles about the Chinese experience for Montreal’s English-language newspapers. 

Amy: And then by age 18, she was working as a type-setter for The Montreal Star. She additionally worked as a stenographer and legal secretary, and her experience with all of this plays into the story collection we’re going to be discussing.

KIM: Right, and later, Eaton lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, before she moved to Boston. She “passed” for white (and this is actually a historical term used for a person of color who assimilated into the white majority to escape legal and social discrimination), but in 1896 she began writing articles about what it was like to live as a Chinese woman in a white America. Her collection of short stories, written mostly in the late 1800s, was published in June of 1912, as the novel Mrs. Spring Fragrance. 

AMY: Let’s toss it over to Victoria now. When did you first discover Sui Sin Far and this collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and what do you remember about reading her for the first time, Victoria?

VICTORIA: So I discovered her in an Asian American literature class at UC Santa Barbara where I was an undergrad in the late Nineties. We read her first-person essay, Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian. I, (being Eurasian myself, or biracial,) I could definitely relate to this experience of being exotified and dehumanized by white and Asian people, and I just remember, because I was a young journalist at the time who really wanted to write fiction, I just thought she was a badass. I didn’t even really know Chinese women in America wrote books at that time. So I just remember being really blown away, and then I read Mrs. Spring Fragrance shortly after that. And some of those stories have stuck with me, even though it’s been more than 20 years since I read it.

Kim: The story collection is actually the earliest known publication by a Chinese woman in the United States, and it’s a window into the lives of Chinese immigrants living in Seattle and San Francisco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eaton’s stories really humanized Chinese immigrants for her readers at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was really rampant in America. 

AMY: I want to read a short passage from the book that really illustrates that. This is from the first story in the collection, which is all about Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the title character. She is a Chinese immigrant living in Seattle who happens to be visiting San Francisco at one point in the story. A white American lady friend of hers asks Mrs. Spring Fragrance to accompany her to a lecture, the title of which is “America, the Protector of China!” So you can already imagine what this is going to be like. So Mrs. Spring fragrance later writes home to her husband to recount the whole experience, and she does so with an amazing tongue-in-cheek cynicism. I’m going to read that.

“It was most exhilarating,” [she writes] “and the effect of so much expression of benevolence leads me to beg of you to forget that the barber charges you one dollar for a shave while he humbly submits to the American man a bill of fifteen cents. And murmur no more because your honored elder brother, on a visit to this country, is detained under the roof-tree of this great Government instead of under your own humble roof. Console him with the reflection that he is protected under the wing of the Eagle, the Emblem of Liberty. What is the loss of ten hundred years or ten thousand times ten dollars compared with the happiness of knowing oneself so securely sheltered?”

Can we all just give her a slow-clap right now for the sarcasm? I mean, love it, but then at the same time, it kind of is upsetting. 

KIM: Yeah, it’s entertaining, but it also shows a little of what the Chinese newcomers were up against, both in terms of discrimination and in terms of Americans having this patronizing attitude toward them. So Victoria, can you add anything to this in terms of historical and social context? 

VICTORIA: Yeah, so Chinese immigration in this country has had a very long and fraught history. It started when predominantly male immigrants from China came to the U.S. in the 1850s to try their luck during California’s Gold Rush, so they worked in mining. And then by the 1860s, around 15,000 Chinese workers were hired to help build the Transcontinental Railroad and they also worked in agriculture and fisheries and as domestic servants and laundrymen. So by the 1870s, there was a widespread depression in the U.S. so this already-brewing hostility toward the Chinese really reached a fever pitch and you started seeing them vilified as moral heathens who were a threat to white America. This went on in speeches and cartoons and even in congressional hearings, which may sound a little familiar today. And they were also rapidly expected to assimilate, and a lot of Christians wanted to convert them as soon as possible. So then, various taxes and racist immigration laws came next to restrict their immigration. The most famous law is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which halted all Chinese immigration for 10 years and prohibited the Chinese who were here from becoming U.S. citizens. This also prevented the reunion of families who were left back in China, you know, wives and children, and anti-miscegenation laws in many western states kept them from marrying white women as well. So the earliest Chinese immigrants certainly faced plenty of discrimination.

AMY: The context you just gave already adds so much for me in terms of what I got out of this book. While I was reading the stories, I kept thinking to myself, “I really want to go back now and start reading some nonfiction about this time period,” because there’s just so much that I was unaware of, like you mentioned, the detentions. The stories give such “slice of life” tales into what these people were going through, and so yeah, I would love to dig a little bit further with some nonfiction, and maybe you have some suggestions for that which we can talk about later. But as delightfully charming as these tales are they are also really ironic in a lot of cases, but also very dark and disturbing. A lot of these stories struck me, though, as surprisingly modern and feminist in that time period. I was surprised by that. 

VICTORIA: Yeah, I think a lot of her stories are an indictment of the unrelenting patriarchy, both in the U.S. and in China. So I think she’s absolutely a feminist pioneer in that regard, just to accurately portray the Chinese community and the historical realities, including some of the atrocities committed by our government. No one had done this, to my knowledge. So yes, while some are “slice of life” stories as you mentioned, others kind of feel more like a slap in the face. I’m thinking mainly of “In the Land of the Free,” which is about a Chinese merchant who’s waiting at the San Francisco waterfront to welcome his wife and his two-year-old son, who are coming from China. Upon disembarkment, they take the child away due to a lack of paperwork, and this expensive, 10-month struggle ensues. In the meantime, the boy is sent to a missionary school and renamed, and the eventual family reunion is absolutely crushing.

AMY: Yeah, as I said, a lot of these stories are charming and delightful, but this one was probably the story that I have been thinking about long after closing the book. It was just a gut-punch for me, and it really reminded me of the awful (and pretty similar) plight facing families right now coming across our Southern border. 

VICTORIA: Yeah. The other story, in “Wisdom of the New,” you really see the culture shock faced by the Chinese women, in particular, who came to the U.S. to join their husbands. So in this story, the wife character doesn’t speak any English. She has no real life outside the home, and she’s so scared for her child to assimilate to western ways, because that just challenges everything she knows and her whole identity. So the story also highlights the differences in how Chinese and white American women were subjugated at the time.

KIM: So I wanted to talk about the story “Its Wavering Image.” In this one, a journalist woos a half-white, half-Chinese girl. Her name is Pan. And he’s doing it in order to get her to reveal the cultural “secrets” about her Chinese neighbors for a newspaper article he’s writing. I thought that was really interesting, because Eaton was also a journalist and one who could “pass” as white. She wrote articles about the Chinese experience in the U.S. Do you know if she felt any ambivalence herself about sharing the Chinese culture with non-Chinese readers?  

VICTORIA: Well, I think her approach was very intentional. Like you said, she could have passed as white and just lived her life in a more privileged way but she purposefully made her home within this Chinese American community and had a very deep interest in the lives of everyday Chinese immigrants. So I think by portraying multidimensional and realistic characters, both in the journalism and her fiction, it really was intended for a non-Chinese audience. I don’t think the Chinese immigrants at the time would have been reading books or articles like these. So I don’t think she felt an ambivalence, per se, but probably just more of a duty to accurately represent as a counterpoint to all this widespread demonization that was going on at the time.

AMY: As a writer, was it risky for her to go ahead and claim this Chinese side of herself publicly when she didn’t have to, or was there something going on in that time period where there was a fascination with Chinese culture, that it was maybe helping her as a writer? Do you happen to know?

VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I know we’re going to talk later about her sister who chose a Japanese-sounding pen name, so she sort of passed as Japanese, which is a whole different conversation, but I think for Eaton, when the Chinese first came, there was this sort of exotification, and a lot of western white people were very fascinated with the culture and thinking, “Oh, we’ll educate them. We’ll assimilate them. Great!” But as soon as the economy started going bad, Chinese just basically became demons to white America, so yes, for her to publicly claim a Chinese identity or even choose this pen name that made her sound far more Asian than maybe her looks would show someone, I think that was a revolutionary idea and certainly more dangerous than just living as a white woman, who could have reported on these communities.

AMY: Right, and we can see the conflict that a lot of these characters face as immigrants. They are so desperately trying to hang on to their Chinese culture while also adapting to the “American” way of life and, at times, being pushed into it by sort of well-meaning (I guess?) white folk. And it’s maddening for these immigrants, at times. So knowing Sui Sin Far’s own lineage, she had obviously a singular insight into this sort of crisis, straddling both cultures. And Victoria, I know you come from two seemingly disparate backgrounds yourself, which I’d love to hear a little bit more about. I’m also wondering if you can relate to Eaton on that level?

VICTORIA: Absolutely. My dad’s Korean, but he attended British and American schools in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. And then my mom is Jewish but was raised in super Catholic Dublin, Ireland. So when you’re multi-racial or multicultural like I am, I think sometimes you just have a larger world view of things. When I was young, when it was far less common to be mixed like this, people would always say to me, “Oh, you have the best of both worlds! You’re ‘East’ meets ‘West!’” They meant that as a compliment, but I think a lot of times being mixed or having a biracial identity means that you experience a lot of racism from both sides and you experience this feeling of a sort of a pressure to choose. So I think with Eaton and myself, we’ve chosen to go with this identity that I guess is more subjugated, which is a strange thing. Like, I have family members who are half-Korean, half-white, but they can pass as white and they sort of live and move through the world as a white person. But I look more Asian, so I kind of felt like that decision was made for me, because that’s how society treats me. So whether or not I feel Korean, it’s not really up to me. So yeah, I think with Eaton, our unique backgrounds give us this different insight into the world and also maybe more empathy for marginalized people because we can feel that experience on both sides.

KIM: Thank you for sharing that, Victoria. We’ve mentioned that Eaton’s writing has a lot of depth and it has all these ironic plot devices, and there’s a lot going on there, but I want to switch gears a little bit and just talk about how exquisite the prose is; how much we loved reading this book, sentence-by-sentence. And I was hoping maybe Victoria you could read one of your favorite passages from this collection.

VICTORIA: Sure! I’m going to read from the opening lines of a story called “The Three Souls of Ah So Nan” which is a story about marriage and grief:

   The sun was conquering the morning fog, dappling with gold the gray waters of San Francisco’s bay, and throwing an emerald radiance over the islands around. 

   Close to the long line of wharves lay motionless brigs and schooners, while farther off in the harbor were ships of many nations riding at anchor. 

   A fishing fleet was steering in from the open sea, scudding before the wind like a flock of seabirds. All night long had the fishers toiled in the deep. Now they were returning with the results of their labor. 

   A young Chinese girl, watching the fleet from the beach of Fisherman’s Cove, shivered in the morning air. Over her blue cotton blouse she wore no wrap; on her head, no covering. All her interest was centered in one lone boat which lagged behind the rest, being heavier freighted. The fisherman was of her own race. When his boat was beached he sprang to her side.

AMY: As you can tell from that, the description of the environment that we’re talking about — the cities, the locales — she does such a great job at just placing you right smack in the middle of it, and if you’ve visited any of these cities that she writes about (Seattle, San Francisco, that sort of Pacific Northwest region) she nails it, obviously, because she lived there as well. But Kim, so did you, actually, and I remember when visiting you when you lived in San Francisco, we basically had to walk through Chinatown every day when we were out in the city to get to your apartment. Did that sort of take you back, getting to read about that?

KIM: Yeah, definitely. So even though the “main” thoroughfare when you go to Chinatown in San Francisco is a very touristy experience — I’m sure a lot of people have been to cities and had that “Chinatown” experience — there are streets on either side of the main thoroughfare that really are where, it seemed, Chinese residents actually lived. So, to an outsider anyway, that’s what I saw. I loved walking on those streets, going to the little stores, but what I think is interesting is I was getting an outsider view of Chinatown, and I actually feel like I learned more from these stories about what the Chinese experience has been in the past than I did being so close to that community. Which I think is a shame, and it’s partly on me for not actually looking into that more. And then also, I wish that I had read this (or something like this) earlier so I could have had this window into some of the experiences of people who were living in that neighborhood.

AMY: And yeah, Kim, I understand that sort of idea of being an outsider, which Sui Sin Far shows us in the stories with a lot of these white women characters who are sort of inserting themselves (helpfully and unhelpfully in a lot of ways) which sort of takes us back to the idea of these women characters in the book if you want to touch on that a little more, Kim.

KIM: So yeah, a  running theme throughout the stories is the struggle of the independent woman, both Chinese, American, and “mixed” — and they show all the things that they’re up against. They have the weight of cultural and societal norms, but also the patriarchy that they’re working against as well.

AMY: Yeah, it’s like a double whammy, for sure.

VICTORIA: That’s so true. A lot of the stories also highlight women supporting women, which is, I think, how most of us survive living in a patriarchy for our entire lives. In these stories you see instances of white women standing up for or advocating for Chinese women, and you see women backing off from a rivalry or coming to the aid of another woman, so I’m sure that was very intentional on Eaton’s part.

KIM: She also shows a lot of sympathy for Chinese men as well, and the difficulty that they had in culturally assimilating with everything that was stacked against them. She doesn’t seem, though, to have a lot of sympathy for the white male… I’m thinking of the stenographer’s first husband and also the journalist from “Its Wavering Image.” There’s also the depiction of the American smuggler, which ties in to Eaton’s father and the fact that he earned money for a while sneaking Chinese people into America from Canada. 

VICTORIA: Yeah, I think since white men have historically been the oppressors or the colonizers, I’m not surprised to see the way she rendered them here. But Eaton does show a ton of sympathy for Chinese men, but at the same time, she doesn’t hesitate to call out China’s policies at the time of, let’s say, educating boys only or how Chinese women had to take their meals after their husbands or at a separate table, or the men who took secondary wives back home. I think it’s really worth noting that Eaton herself never married. Some scholars have read the story “The Chinese Lily” (which is about a disable homebound woman and her sudden friendship with a neighbor) with queer undertones, and I don’t know if Eaton was a lesbian, but she certainly was more concerned with promoting  and defending issues of gender and race versus the white men who already dominated society at the time.

AMY: Oh, that’s really interesting about that story you mentioned. I hadn’t read it in that context, but now looking back, I’m like, “Hmmm, yeah.” I can see that a little. And also, I think through a lot of these stories, you can tell that Eaton clearly was a romantic despite the fact that she never married. I mean, these are predominantly tales about marriage and falling in love, and the stories about the young couples struck me as really Shakespearean in a lot of respects. There was a lot of this “star-crossed lover” theme running throughout the stories; that “Romeo-and-Juliet” vibe thanks to this tradition of arranged marriages that the younger people were starting to rebel against.

KIM: Right, and a couple of stories featured women disguising themselves as boys for various reasons… also Shakespearean.

VICTORIA: Well, you guys are the experts on what’s Shakespearean, so I fully agree.

KIM: Everything’s Shakespearean!

AMY: We will find a way to work Shakespeare into everything when we have an opportunity.

VICTORIA: Totally understandable.

AMY: We should also point out, though, that the second half of this story collection are “Tales of Chinese Children.” It takes a really kind of abrupt switcheroo halfway through. These stories are all really quick reads. They’re morality tales. They’re fun, but they’re also, in many ways, I think as dark as the Brothers Grimm. I’m not sure how I felt about them as part of the full collection. I really liked the first half of this story collection a lot more.  Victoria, how were her stories received by the public at the time? And do you think she had any sort of agenda in terms of shaping public opinion with her writing, even with these children’s stories?

VICTORIA: Yeah, so she was able to earn a living from her writing and was very widely read in national publications even until her death in 1914, so I would say she was quite successful. And one of my theories is sometimes stories like this are more palatable coming from someone who has maybe a mixed background as opposed to being a Chinese woman with a thick accent or something like that. Of course back then, people would just be reading her, not seeing her in interviews or anything, but Mrs. Spring Fragrance, in particular, was very well-received by critics at the time, and I think it helped shape the reading public’s opinions of the Chinese immigrants because this is just such a different representation compared to what was out there by the U.S. government and politicians and people like that. So I think she did such a great job at just highlighting that Chinese immigrants have the same joys and pains as European Americans.

AMY: I don’t know if anybody else would have been able to successfully accomplish what she was trying to do. I think you almost had to have a writer who understood both sides. Don’t you think?

VICTORIA: I think that’s such a great point, and sometimes I’m asked if just being mixed is a hindrance when I’m working as a journalist, or if it’s impeded my life in some way, and I always say it’s the complete opposite. It just gives you so much more freedom to move between different communities, so I can feel very comfortable with white people, with Asian people, with other groups, and that’s why I love living in Los Angeles, because it’s just so incredibly diverse.

AMY: Do we know if there’s a biography written about her? There must be.

VICTORIA: There is, I don’t have the name handy, but we can maybe talk about it at the end, but yes, there is a biography on her and there’s also one on her sister that I found out. I would just love to see a book on the sisters, even if it was fictionalized because it sounds like there is a lot more to this story.

AMY: And I just think it would be fascinating because she does claim, you know, she was raised basically British, but she knows so much about Chinese culture and her mom must have been a huge influence in terms of all that. I would love to know more about how each parent influenced her, and of course, I want to know more about the mom’s life story because it sounds fascinating.

VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean the mom clearly needs her own book as well, based on what Kim explained about her background. I think, you know, here’s my theory just because I’ve been around so many half-Asian people my whole life: I think most cultures pass down from the mother to children, especially in this era when women tended to work in the house and things like that. So my theory is that when you have a mixed person, even if they look more white, if their mother is the Asian one they tend to be more connected to their Asian culture. In my case, my mother is the Jewish one, so even though I don’t feel super Jewish, I certainly have a lot of her culture and from her growing up in Ireland and living in England, that all got passed down to my sister and I. So even though Eaton didn’t look as Asian as someone who we would all recognize as an Asian person, she may have felt 100 percent Asian in her identity and culture for all we know.

AMY: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Speaking of her sister, let’s get back to that. Victoria, have you by any chance read anything by the sister? 

VICTORIA: No, I haven’t read any of her work, but I’m so eager to after learning a little more about her. Winifred chose the Japanese sounding pen name Onoto Watanna, which is a made-up Japanese name. And I think she did this to protect herself from the scorn of the Chinese at the time. So by being “Japanese,” maybe she would be more successful and palatable, and she was capitalizing on her unusual looks. I saw some pictures where she’s posing in kimono, which today might be called cultural appropriation. So she essentially became Japanese and then wrote these lighthearted and risque romance novels and short stories. Her novel A Japanese Nightingale sold thousands of copies and made her famous. It was even adapted to Broadway and to film. And she wrote other bestselling novels and was part of this New York literati scene, and then she also worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter, so both sisters found pretty real success.

AMY: I wonder how authentic she was able to write, though. We should go back and look at some of those books, A Japanese Nightingale and see, like, did she write in a lot of details. Could you tell that she was faking it as opposed to her sister, who added so many details that you were like, “this is a Chinese lady, for sure.”

VICTORIA: Well, I’m sure you both noticed as you’re reading, there’s some language that Eaton uses that’s a little outdated today, like the word oriental. Today we say Asian or Asian American. So I have a feeling if we go back and read Otana’s there’s going to be a lot of exotification of Japanese culture and maybe playing into some of the stereotypes. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I’m just guessing that she knew what the American people wanted to read, and at the time, that was sort of what would sell would be to trade on the “mysterious, submissive geisha” or something like that. So I’m dying to read it. Maybe that can be a future episode.

AMY: Yeah, absolutely! And we’ll have you back on for it.

KIM: I loved Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and I only wish (and it’s the same for all of the books that we’re talking about on the podcast) I just wish that I’d read it sooner. And I also think that although it’s over a hundred years old, it is so relatable to now. We’ve touched on that a little bit, but do you have anything to add about that, Victoria?

VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s disturbingly relatable, you know, considering it’s over a hundred years old, it shouldn’t be as relatable as it is. You know, non-white immigrants and refugees are still vilified right at this moment. The U.S. still has racist immigration laws like the Muslim ban and the Trump administration drastically cut the number of refugees that we accept. And I think Muslims and other groups that racist people mistake for Muslims have just had to deal with such an insane amount of hate crimes and scapegoating since 9/11. I feel like 9/11 was a major shift in racism in this country. And the border crisis and the child separation policy that we’re all horrified by, that experts call torture, is definitely one of the ugliest stains on the country and is so relatable in this book itself. And then the last thing that I would just add is that the Coronavirus pandemic, Asians are now vilified again like they were in Eaton’s day and at other points in history like during World War II. So now you see these racist and xenophobic incidents against Asian Americans and the Human Rights Council at the U.N. called it an alarming level, so I think it’s very clear that Mrs. Spring Fragrance is still resonating today for really upsetting reasons.

AMY: Yeah, the more things change… you know? Well, thank you, Victoria, for sharing your appreciation of Sui Sin Far with us. I don’t know if I would have come to her on my own because I’ve never heard of her, and that’s kind of why we’re doing this podcast — to find out and learn. It’s been so fun to have you on to discuss her! But are there any other Asian-American women writers, especially writers we might not be very familiar with, that you’d also recommend we check out? 

VICTORIA: Yes, there are so many! Monica Sone’s Nisei’s Daughter is a memoir of Japanese-American internment, and that book had the most profound impact on my life. I was actually going to become a criminologist prior to reading this book and I just couldn’t believe the way America treated Japanese Americans. I didn’t know anything about it from high school. I was just so stunned, and so that really changed the trajectory of my life. And then some other writers I read at the time are Lois-Ann Yamanaka, who’s from Hawaii. Diana Chang, Jessica Hagedorn, who’s a brilliant Filipina playwright and author. And then Bharati Mukherjee… those are all authors I suggest you check out. And then earlier we talked about reading more nonfiction about the era. So the definitive book that I always recommend to people is by Helen Zia and it’s called Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. That will just give you a comprehensive overview of the Asian American experience, which started with the Chinese immigrants.

AMY: Perfect. Thank you!

VICTORIA: I know we were talking earlier about a biography on Eaton, so there is a book called Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eton. I believe there’s a very thorough introduction with more biographical data, in case anyone’s interested.

AMY: And we will include that whole list that Victoria gave us in our show notes, so no worries to listeners trying to catch all that.

VICTORIA: Well, I used to teach History of Immigration at UCLA so this is my, like, jam. I never get to talk about this stuff anymore. So I could have gone on for hours.

KIM: This is like our dream, though, to just spending all this time talking about books.

VICTORIA: Oh, good!

AMY: So we highly encourage you to put Mrs. Spring Fragrance by Sui Sin Far on your 2021 reading list. And be sure to check out our mini episode next week because we’ll be talking about New Year’s resolutions and how we, as a writing team, go from an idea to a reality.

KIM: And we’ll also be revealing our next author and book title.

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! 

[closing music starts]

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 makes a difference!

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.

14. Kate Douglas Wiggin — The Birds’ Christmas Carol

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]: Happy Holidays, Kim!

KIM ASKEW [CO-HOST]: Happy Holidays, Amy! It’s been QUITE a year!

AMY: No doubt, no doubt. Boy. It’s going to be a different sort of holiday season for a lot of us this year. Sort of feels like when all the Whos down in Who-ville got robbed of their Christmas but they still held hands in a circle and celebrated. As cliche as that sounds, we’re going to have to make the best of it and remember the real meaning of the Yuletide spirit during this pandemic holiday.

KIM: I know a lot of people are going to be feeling sad about having to forego traditions, not getting to travel this year, perhaps, and also maybe not getting to see their loved ones.

AMY: I don’t know, it always feels to me like Christmas is an event that has some sad undertones to it anyway. Is it just me, or are there certain things about Christmas that just feel kind of maudlin and bittersweet? Personally, I tend to always get choked up listening to Christmas carols in my car, which is kind of embarrassing. But there’s so many sad ones!

KIM: That’s why we’re friends. I’m exactly the same way, and even George Winston’s piano music from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special feels a bit wistful to me, so I totally get it.

AMY: Yeah. The ones that really get me: “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” You’re just like, “Aww, man!”  And then Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” is a doozy.

KIM: Yep. Mm-hmm.

AMY: But the worst of all — the absolute worst — is the song about the Christmas shoes. Which, fortunately doesn’t get played too much on the radio, but do you know which one I’m talking about?

KIM: Remind me.

AMY: Okay. So the guy singing the song is telling this story about standing in line at a store on Christmas Eve buying some last-minute gifts. And there’s this little boy in front of him dressed in rags and counting out his pennies. He’s trying to buy a pair of women’s shoes and he notes that they’re for his mother for Christmas, but he doesn’t have enough money. And the little boy tells the cashier that he needs to hurry, because his daddy says there’s not much time. Mommy’s been sick for a while and I want her to look beautiful if she meets Jesus tonight!

KIM: Okay, you’ve got to stop! First of all, that’s ridiculous, and second of all, I’m going to start crying any second! I don’t know if you remembered, but Johnny Cash had a song like that, too, called “Ringing the Bells for Jim.” It’s about a little girl ringing the church bells at midnight for her dying brother.

AMY: Oh, god. But that image of the church bells makes me wonder, honestly, if Johnny Cash read the story that we’re going to be discussing on Lost Ladies of Lit this week. Everybody’s of course familiar with Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol...

KIM: Speaking of, Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, every one!” always chokes me up too.

AMY: You and Scrooge both. But the book we’re featuring this week has a similar title: The Birds’ Christmas Carol and it’s by Kate Douglas Wiggin, who I’d never heard of before.

KIM: She actually wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which I’ve read as a child.

AMY: Okay, so I have heard of that, Never read it, though, but I know  Shirley Temple starred in the movie version of it. 

KIM: I loved Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and I feel like because you like Anne of Green Gables — okay, you love Anne of Green Gables, and who doesn’t? — I think you’d really like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I’d recommend it.

AMY: Okay! Anyway, The Birds’ Christmas Carol was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1888 after being printed privately two years earlier.So Wiggin, she published the book (it was really one of her first literary endeavors) and she wrote it in order to raise money for the Silver Street Free Kindergarten which she ran in San Francisco.

KIM: Yeah, that’s really sweet. And Wiggin and her sister, Nora, establish over 60 kindergartens for children living in poverty in the San Francisco and Oakland area. This was a time when schooling wasn’t really seen as essential for kids living in poverty. So she was really ahead of her time in her thinking. She also established a training school for kindergarten teachers.

AMY: That reminds me a bit of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who we featured a few episodes ago!

KIM: Yeah, for sure. Definitely the educational interest. So you’d mentioned Charles Dickens earlier. Wiggin, who was born in Philadelphia and raised in Portland, Maine, actually met Dickens once, and it’s a really interesting anecdote as you’d expect: Her mother and a friend were going to hear Dickens speak in Portland, but Wiggin, who was only 11, was not included in that outing (the tickets were too expensive.) But the following day, she found herself on the same train as Dickens and she chatted with him for a good portion of the journey. 

AMY: That’s cute. She sounds like she was probably a pretty precocious child. I love imagining her talking his ear off on the train, and I wonder what he thought of the whole thing.

KIM: Well, she wrote a short memoir of that experience (so we can hear her side of the story) in 1912, and it’s called A Child’s Journey With Dickens.

AMY: I love that. So getting back to this other Christmas book that Wiggin wrote, The Birds’ Christmas Carol, despite its title, it doesn’t bear any relation to Charles Dickens’ story, but her book was also a hit when it was published. 

KIM: Which is kind of amazing, because it’s a bit of a downer, shall we say?

AMY: Yeah. Like I said, people are suckers for sad things at Christmas and this book is no exception. This one is about the well-to-do Bird family, who welcome a beautiful baby girl on Christmas Day at the beginning of the book. They name her Carol, after the Christmas carols her mother hears wafting through her window from the church.

KIM: But then we flash-forward a few years later to when Carol’s a little girl. We find out that she doesn’t actually have long to live. She’s a sickly child, she sits in her bedroom and she looks down into the alley at these poor children from a family that lives just a stone’s throw from them. She loves to watch them play.

AMY: Okay, and this family is called The Ruggles. There are 9 Ruggles children, and seriously, in my opinion, the Ruggles are pretty much THE reason why anybody should read this little novel. They are extremely entertaining. They’re the best part of the book.

KIM: Yeah, they’re complete scene-stealers. So, Wiggins’ depiction of the Ruggles — complete with their mom’s Irish dialect — is fantastic. The rest of the story has this high “sap” quotient, but you’ve got to love these Ruggles children and their mother is an absolute riot. Amy’s going to read a brief excerpt concerning them. This is at a point in the story when Mrs. Ruggles, the mother, is desperately trying to school them in manners and etiquette for the party at the Birds’ that’s happening later that night. So she asks them to leave the room and then enter in an orderly fashion. Amy?

AMY:

The bedroom was small, and there presently ensued such a clatter that you would have thought a herd of wild cattle had broken loose. The door opened, and they straggled in, all the younger ones giggling, with Sarah Maud at the head, looking as if she had been caught in the act of stealing sheep; while Larry, being last in line, seemed to think the door a sort of gate of heaven which would be shut in his face if he didn’t get there in time; accordingly he struggled ahead of his elders and disgraced himself by tumbling in head foremost.

   Mrs. Ruggles looked severe. “There, I knew yer’d do it in some sech fool way! Now go in there and try it over again, every last one o’ye, ‘n, if Larry can’t come in on two legs he can stay home, — d’yer hear?

   The matter began to assume a graver aspect; the little Ruggleses stopped giggling and backed into the bedroom, issuing presently with lock step, Indian file, a scared and hunted expression on every countenance.

   “No, no, no!” cried Mrs. Ruggles, in despair. “That’s worse yet; yer look for all the world like a gang o’ pris’ners! There ain’t no style ter that: spread out more, can’t yer, ‘n’ act kind o’ careless-like — nobody’s goin’ ter kill ye! That ain’t what a dinner-party is!”

KIM: I love it. That’s great, Amy.

AMY: So the Ruggles children totally reminded me of the outrageous shenanigans of the Herdman siblings from The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Kim, did you ever read that book when you were a kid?

KIM: No, I did not.

AMY: Okay, that’s a 1971 novel by Barbara Robinson, who, I guess you could say is another “lost lady of lit” we ought to mention here. It’s a really cute and comical book that you should check out if you haven’t read it yet. It’s fantastic. But the Herdman siblings in that book are very similar in that… they’re actually quite worse, to be honest, because they're known for cussing, shoplifting, drinking jug wine, smoking cigars. So they’re really unpolished.

KIM: Oh wow, yeah! I hadn’t heard of that one, but it sounds great. Getting back to Wiggin’s book and the Ruggles, though, little angelic Carol — who knows this will probably be her last Christmas, tells her parents that the only thing she really wants this year is to be able to have the Ruggles children over for a fine dinner. So she wants to plan the whole thing. So that’s just what they do. The whole family gets involved. But when the Ruggles show up, comedy ensues, and it ends, basically, with Wiggin attempting to leave her reader in tears. 

AMY: So yeah, Wiggin is really trying to turn on our waterworks and she may or she may not be successful with that, depending on how cynical of a reader you are. To be fair, little Carol is probably no more of a sympathy case than Dickens’ Tiny Tim was, but still, I was rolling my eyes during some of these maudlin moments. Yet, I will say, the Ruggles made this book totally worth the read, and it got me in the holiday mood.

KIM: Oh, for sure! I was into it from the first page. It’s a great holiday read. I definitely recommend it. It’s also a very quick read. I easily read it in one sitting one night. And since you mentioned the movie version of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the one with Shirley Temple, we should also point out that The Birds’ Christmas Carol was adapted for film as well. It was a silent movie called A Bit o’ Heaven.

AMY: If I was rolling my eyes reading the book, but I can only imagine how over the top they probably made the melodrama for movies.

KIM: Oh, yes.

AMY: But you know, a lot of Christmas stories for children are morality tales, and this one really fits the bill as well. I can totally picture this being read around the hearth by families in the late Victorian era, maybe making it a little Christmas Eve tradition It seems exactly like the sort of book people would have loved.

KIM: Absolutely. So if you’re celebrating Christmas this week, we wish you a memorable and merry one, and we’ll see you back here next week to round out our 2020 with a very special guest.

AMY: That’s right! Author and journalist Victoria Namkung will be joining us to chat about Sui Sin Far, a Chinese American writer from the late 19th century. We’ll be discussing her collection of stories entitled Mrs. Spring Fragrance.

KIM: Ooh, a whiff of spring in the dead of winter sounds pretty good to me, actually. So until next week, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com for more information as well as further reading material. And if you’re loving this podcast, make our holiday extra special by leaving us a review!

AMY: Thanks for listening, and “God bless us, everyone!”

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.