93. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala — Heat and Dust with Brigitte Hales

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew...

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes, and Kim, today's lost lady was a Booker-Prize-winning novelist (we'll be discussing that book today) but she was also a two time Oscar-winning screenwriter. I believe she's the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar. She wrote the adaptations for so many stellar films, some of which you and I, and I'm guessing our listeners, too, would consider among our all time favorite movies. And yet we both had no idea they were written by a woman. I guess we never paid much attention to the credits. Shame on us.

KIM: That's why we're placing this screenwriter and author, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, in our “lost ladies” file. She's well-known to some, but not to enough people.

AMY: And who better to join us as today's guests than a Hollywood screenwriter, right? We've got one, a good friend of ours, in fact, to talk about Prawer Jhabvala and her movies. Should we cut to the chase and introduce her, Kim?

KIM: By the side of the everlasting "why" (or "should" in this case), there is a “yes.” That's a quote from one of Jhabvala's films. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM:  Today's guest is screenwriter Brigitte Hales, who was a writer on the popular ABC series "Once Upon a Time." Her most recent film project is Disenchanted — that's Disney's sequel to Enchanted, starring Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey, which comes out later this year. She's currently writing another big movie sequel, and we're not allowed to spill the beans on that just yet, but let's just say she continues to run with the princess/fairytale theme. In 2020, Brigitte also worked on Steven Spielberg's reboot of "Amazing Stories" for Apple TV. 

AMY: As a neighbor of mine, Brigitte also was a lifeline for me during the pandemic. I would drag a folding chair down the street and meet with her for coffee every Sunday morning during the pandemic. She'd sit up on her balcony and I'd sit below in her driveway, and it was like "Romeo and Juliet," only instead of two teenagers obsessively in love, we were just venting all our stress and boredom and panic to one another. And then of course, we'd also frequently detour with gossip about the British Royal Family, because we both share that obsession as well. But anyway, we attempted to keep each other sane during that first year of the pandemic and still to this day, I think we're doing that, but I very much look forward to talking about other things than COVID numbers with you in today's episode, Brigitte. Welcome to the show!

BRIGITTE: Thank you! I'm so excited to be here. I've been enjoying these episodes so, so much, and you know, it's, it really still makes me laugh now to think about that time. It was so sad. Like, I really did not feel good while it was happening, but those are really great memories. And I have to say that I was thinking about this book and how great it would have been as a pandemic read because it just totally sweeps you away and takes you to a completely different place, which I was desperately trying to get to when I was stuck in my house. So I'm really sad that this book did not come into my life two years ago. 

AMY: I know, I did read it during lockdown and it was, it was like grabbing a passport and hopping on a plane. The next best thing. 

BRIGITTE: Oh completely. I felt like I traveled after I finished this book. 

AMY: Yeah. Okay. So I think it probably goes without saying that we are all obsessed with Merchant Ivory films, and that's part of the reason, Brigitte, that I wanted to bring you on for this episode, 

BRIGITTE: Oh, absolutely. I feel like Merchant Ivory films are where my obsession with a very specific type of English movie started, you know, like very sweeping, great cinematography kind of repressed emotion, all that kind of thing. Yeah. I love that.

AMY: Kim and I are actually going to delve into this a little bit more in next week's episode. I don't want to get too much into that, but I will say, I found out that there was A Room With a View musical that I had never heard of or known about before. And I love musicals so I'm like, "How have I not seen this? And how do I go see it?"

KIM: I'm scared and excited at the same time to hear that. 

BRIGITTE: Someone needs to reboot that.

AMY: Yeah, 

BRIGITTE: You’ve got to get that going, someone out there.

KIM: So when we're thinking about Merchant Ivory films, we think of the two main guys, right? James Ivory and Ismael Merchant. 

AMY: Yes. And they were a romantic couple in real life as well, but there was actually a third person — a woman — on their team from day one: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. And yes, Kim, I have to clarify the pronunciation; we've been thinking the whole time. It was Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but because she was from Germany and they pronounced the "w" as a "v" I believe it's Ruth [Praver] Jhabvala. I've seen it said both ways. But yeah, we know about Merchant; We know about Ivory; but Ruth was actually their go-to writer on their biggest films. She penned 23 movies for them in a partnership spanning 40 years. And I realized that "Merchant Ivory Jhabvala," it doesn't quite roll off the tongue with the same ease as Merchant Ivory, but it kind of seems like an omission if you ask me, especially since Ruth won more Oscars than those guys ever did. So Brigette, were you aware of her, before we started doing this?

BRIGITTE: Not really. I mean, I knew her name because of the Oscar for Howard's End. But you know, when I was thinking about that, it's not actually that unusual in movies, even today, for screenwriters to get almost zero credit or notoriety, unless they're also the director. And it probably doesn't help that she's a woman. But yeah, it's, it's sadly often the case.

AMY: I know. I feel almost ashamed, like, it's my favorite movie, A Room With a View, and I didn't know a woman was involved with it at all. She won a Booker Prize. She was so prolific. So I'm sure there's a lot of listeners out there that are like, "You guys are crazy. We've known about her all along." 

BRIGITTE: I mean, putting aside how many short stories she wrote and how many novels she wrote, the fact that she wrote 23 movies is insane. That is a massive career all by itself.

KIM: Yeah. That's a huge number. So actually, the story is, Merchant and Ivory first hooked up with Ruth because they wanted to adapt her 1960 novel The Householder. And according to a New Yorker profile, Ismael Merchant telephoned her in India where she lived to ask her about optioning the book. She put them off by pretending to be her mother-in-law, the other Mrs. Jhabvala. That's how interested she was in collaborating with them. It's pretty funny. 

AMY: Apparently she did that frequently. She'd just answer the phone and say, "Ruth is not at home," which, Kim, that reminds me of Mary Astell from one of our previous episodes. She would lean her head out of window and tell visitors, "Miss Astell is not at home." 

KIM: Yeah, that's great. 

BRIGITTE: I wish we could still do that. Can I just jump in and say that that wit is totally in her books? I read some of her short stories. I started reading and it's definitely there. It's great. I love it.

AMY: A lot of humor. Yeah. Um, so apparently when they approached her about adapting her book, she had not seen a lot of movies, so she wasn't really that keen on the idea. But they sweet-talked her and she relented and she wound up writing the screenplay for the movie, The Householder, which premiered in 1963. It was the first official Merchant Ivory feature. It is set in India, and it's about a young couple in the early days of their arranged marriage. 

KIM: So Heat and Dust, the novel we're going to be focusing on today, is also set in India. And this might be a good time to back up a little bit in Ruth's story, because one mistake people frequently make (and made in her lifetime as well) is thinking she is an Indian writer. 

AMY: Yeah, and I will admit, I made the same assumption before looking into her story more closely. Yeah. I actually went to the library to get a copy of The Householder, and when I was checking it out, the librarian looks up and he's like, "You know, she's not Indian, right?" And I was like, "Actually, I do know that." Um, but apparently that's a common misconception, that he had to point that out to me. So the fact that she's not Indian also makes her writing a little bit controversial, but before we get into that, Brigitte, would you mind walking us through some of Ruth's backstory?

BRIGITTE: Yeah, sure. so she was born in 1927 in Cologne to Jewish parents who were at the time very assimilated and successful in their society. Her father was a lawyer. Her grandfather was prominent in the synagogue. Then when she was around seven, both parents were arrested by the Nazis and accused of having ties to Communism. Luckily they were released. Um, and soon after they escaped to Great Britain. They were apparently among the last wave of refugees to make it out. At the end of the war, they learned that more than 40 of their relatives had been killed in the camps. And her father was so broken by this news that he killed himself in 1948. Um, you know, by the time he died, Ruth was already studying English literature at Queen Mary College in London. Although one of the interesting things that I discovered about her, was that she was six years old when she says she realized that she was a writer. She had been asked to write a story about a rabbit. And she said in this interview that I wrote the title "Der Hase," I'm probably mangling that. "At once I was flooded with my destiny only, I didn't know that's what it was. I only remember my entire absorption and delight in writing about der hase to think that such happiness could be." When I read this, I was like, "I don't think I have ever had this experience." I still don't ever say to myself, "To think that such happiness could be," as I'm sitting at my typewriter. It's the opposite. 

AMY: I feel like at one point in school, this teacher or somebody accused her of not having written one of the stories. They said her parents had to have written it, because it was that good. So she had some talent, that little one.

BRIGITTE: She sure did.

KIM: So as you said, she studied English lit at Queen Mary College in London, and at a college party there, that's where she met her husband, an architect named Cyrus Jhabvala. His nickname was "Jhab." They married in the early 1950s and moved to his native India — Delhi, to be exact — where they would live for the next 25 years. The couple had three daughters and they had a long and happy marriage. You think it might have been culture shock for her, and it probably was, but she also loved all the richness and vibrancy of India. She was particularly fond of all the Indian sweets. After all the rationing in England during World War II, she was just thrilled to be able to indulge. So that's a cute anecdote about her. 

AMY: So, yeah, actually being a foreigner wherever she lived became part of her lifelong identity. She once said in an interview with the BBC, "Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can't remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don't give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in." And to explore this idea a little further, at a lecture in 1979, she described herself as quote "a writer without any ground of being out of which to write, really blown about from country to country, culture to culture, till I feel, till I am nothing." She then added, "I like it that way." And she compared herself to "a cuckoo, forever insinuating myself into others' nests, a chameleon, hiding myself in false or borrowed colors." 

KIM: Yeah. And when her novels and stories set in India were published, most of the stories were published in The New Yorker. It seemed like Indian readers embraced her, at first. Based on her married surname, they assumed she was Indian, but when they discovered she wasn't, they accused her of satirizing Indian characters and being too critical of the culture and country. She shrugged her shoulders at the criticism. And at one point she told The New York Times, "If you don't say that India is simply paradise on earth and the extended Hindu family the most perfect way of organizing society, you're anti-Indian. I don't have any readers there." 

AMY: Yeah. This is a tough one. I guess I can see why Indians might instinctively resist an outsider writing about their culture, especially if she was sometimes being a little bit critical of it. They could have also felt like maybe she was taking the spotlight away from actual Indian writers. 

BRIGITTE: Obviously of course, regardless of this episode, for sure there are great Indian writers that you'll find. This issue is, I think, especially prevalent right now, um, and the conversation about who gets to tell what stories and what do you get to write about, or, you know, paint... I guess it's not probably as big of an issue in music, although there are some kinds of sounds and whatnot that are associated with specific, you know, cultures. But the more I thought about this, the more I was thinking about how there are so many fantastic writers that wrote about cultures that weren't their own. Writers like Hemingway or Graham Greene. They were able to walk into a place and observe it in a way that when you live there and you're rushing through life every day, you're not going to be able to pick up on the same types of things that someone who isn't from your culture is able to see. I don't know, it worries me a little bit that we're going to continually shun anybody who isn't from a specific group of people from writing about things that they notice that might be incredible observations for the people who live there. I don't know, it's a very thorny issue.

AMY: She always felt like she didn't have her own tradition to draw on. She didn't have a place. She didn't have her own sort of identity. That's why she says, "I felt like a cuckoo, always in another nest," but if you think about it, so at this point in her life, she moves to India, she had probably been in Germany 10 years before she left. She’d probably been in England for another 10 years. Now she's in India and this is like the longest span that she's been somewhere. She lived there for 25 years. She was married to an Indian. They had Indian children. Her life was there. I don't know, we'll get into this a little bit more, but I agree, Brigitte. She's kind of straddling the line. So she's bringing the outsider's perspective, but then she's also, there submersed in it, you know, related to it. Um, there was a New Yorker profile where the writer Maya Jassanoff says that she actually had “an anthropologist’s curiosity about how society functions…” and that “she’s a decidedly nonparticipant observer; her narrative stance brings together candor and detachment.” So that sort of gets to what you were saying, Brigette. But then on the flip side of that, her very good friend, the Indian novelist Anita DeSai, she kind of said the opposite. In an essay in The Guardian, she wrote that “Ruth, like a great actor, becomes her characters and presents them to us from the inside out, not the outside in. She does not criticize or satirize them – as so many Indian readers accused her of doing – she becomes those she portrays. 

BRIGITTE: I totally agree with that. I mean, obviously, I'm just speaking for myself here, but reading Heat and Dust, I did not feel like there were any caricatures in this book at all. And I actually feel like in a weird way, this book kind of combines both of those quotes that you just read, because there is a sort of anthropologist's curiosity that I sensed in this book, which, you know, I was actually reading some of it in London and it's not a place I've been that many times. And so I felt like that kind of sense was coming alive in me, too. It's what happens when you're in a new place, you know, and your ability to just see these little details about the world that you're walking through is just so beautifully present in this book. And then at the same time, she's writing real people, people that are very complex. She writes about the tensions that existed in the time between the East and the West. Um, she's very hard on the white characters I would say. She often talks about how the white characters have a sense of superiority, which they certainly do. And she even uses some of this to justify a little bit of the violence that's in the book, that there's this simmering resentment that is justified by the Indian characters. So again, just my point of view, but, at least looking at this particular book, I feel like it does justice to the place and the people that she knew and were living with.

AMY: I've heard it said about her that she was the first post colonialist writer and I think this book exemplifies that, because before this a lot of the people writing about India were writing about the Empire. Glorifying it. And she, in most of her literature about India, was writing more about contemporary India and also just real life day-to-day what it was like to be there. So I like Heat and Dust as an example of bridging the gap between those two. And we'll get into it in a second with a synopsis of what the book's about, but she's making those connections between the past and the present . She's making the connection between the East and the West, and who better to do that than a woman who has had a foot in both of those worlds, right?

KIM: Yeah. So this seems like the perfect jumping off point to really get into our discussion about the book, Heat and Dust. She wrote it during a summer dust storm the last year she lived in India. It came out in 1975. It won the Booker Prize that year. Brigitte, do you want to set up the story for our listeners? 

BRIGITTE: Sure. So the book's about two women in two different time periods. One is Olivia in 1920s India, which is the British Raj era. She's the wife of an English official in the colonial government there who slowly falls in love with an Indian prince. And the other woman is essentially her step granddaughter in the 1970s who's completely captivated by this story in her family, which no one likes to discuss. It's kind of a, like, "We don't talk about Bruno" situation.

AMY: I was just going to make that reference. If we wind up doing a musical version of this, a la A Room View, we're going to add in a, "We don't talk about 'Livia."

BRIGITTE: It writes itself, basically. 

AMY: Yes. 

BRIGITTE: So anyway, yes, our woman in the seventies, who interestingly, I believe is never named, and I searched to make sure that this was true because her part is written in first person. But yes, she decides to move to India and try and trace Olivia's path and she ends up on a fantastic romantic adventure of her own.

AMY: And the interesting thing about Jhabvala's process in writing the novel is that she wrote the two narratives separately in their entirety, and then she went back, broke them up and pieced them back together like a puzzle into Heat and Dust, which I thought was really interesting. And I don't know if I would have thought to do it that way as a writer. And you can't tell she did it that way. 

BRIGITTE: I would never have guessed that she did that. Um, I also found out that in the middle of this, she contracted jaundice and was kind of in this sort of dreamy state, 

AMY: Like a fever dream, yeah.

BRIGITTE: I just think the book has such a wonderful dreamy quality to it that I just really kind of sunk into. And when I found out that she was in this kind of basically altered state when she wrote it, it made total sense.

AMY: I have the impression reading it like, "Oh, I'm reading a Merchant Ivory movie." That's the experience I felt. 

BRIGITTE: When we get into talking about the book a little bit, I pulled out a couple of sentences that are a perfect example of action description in screenwriting, because you could take these four sentences, and a director and a DP and a production designer could just make the whole scene come to life. This is why they loved her. They found a writer who could write lyrically and visually, and her characters were really refined and restrained, so great actors wanted to be in these movies. I mean, I get why they loved her.

AMY: And I also want to talk about, this, you know, step granddaughter, from the 1970s who is really wanting to piece together the story about who is this Olivia woman from the 1920s. It's such a mystery built right into the beginning of the book. You know there's drama. You are immediately sucked in, right?

KIM: Absolutely. Yeah. And that same kind of mystique that surrounds Olivia also surrounds this mysterious Nawab that Olivia is said to have run off with. He's thought to be in league with these local bandits who are causing all kinds of trouble for the British colonial officials. And there's something really fascinating, but also a little dangerous about him. Our seventies-era narrator is trying to get to the bottom of this family secret when she asks her Indian guide if he has any intel. Jhabvala writes, “Yes, he had heard rumors about him and his dissolute bad life; also vague rumors about the old scandal. But who cares about that now? All those people are dead, and even if any of them should still be left alive somewhere, there is no one to be interested in their doings.”

AMY: Okay, this is genius on her part because she's just like, no, you don't want to know about this while the reader's just sitting there going, "I do! I'm dying to know! Please tell me!"

KIM: What a great conceit there. Yep. 

BRIGITTE: So good. And I also think that, um, this choice she made to tell it in first person, as diary entries, really makes it feel like you are the person who's arriving in India. And the way she observes the world, it just immediately makes it feel so personal to you in a way that I think is super effective in drawing you into the story. Actually, can I read my little part of this beginning where she notices India, the world that she creates? Um, okay. So here's the little section. This is like page four or something. Our unnamed character from the seventies has just arrived in India. And these are some of her very first impressions that she has. She says, " I go to the window and look down in the street. It's bright as day down there, not only with the white street lights, but each stall and barrow is lit up with a flare of naphtha. There are crowds of people; some are sleeping — it's so warm that all they have to do is stretch out, no bedding necessary." I mean, when you're reading writing like that, it may seem like it's really easy to do that, but it is not easy to do that! In that tiny paragraph you saw in your head a character walk to a window, look down and the whole world came to life. I mean, it's absolutely beautiful prose to read in a book, but if you were writing a screenplay and you wanted to write what a character would do, that's exactly how you would write it.

AMY: Literally it is just telling you the action to set the mood.

KIM: Yep. Absolutely. 

BRIGITTE: But it's giving you just enough detail to tell you what color the light is, to tell you how busy the street is, what the character does, but not with too much description that you really just don't need. Now, sometimes writers love to write that kind of description and it's fun to read, so I don't necessarily diminish writers who are very verbose, but the simplicity of her writing is really just truly beautiful.

AMY: That's why her career dovetails so nicely as a Hollywood screenwriter. 

BRIGITTE: Even though she hated it. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: I don't know if she hated it, but we'll get into that.

BRIGITTE: She looked down on it.

AMY: She saw it as trivial. Yeah.

BRIGITTE: Yes. And all great novelists do, so it's okay. I don't hate her for that.

AMY: Um, in terms of her being able to set the mood instantly, I had a similar vibe when this 1970s narrator goes and visits the old Nawab's abandoned palace from the 1920s. She writes at one point, “One curtain was still left hanging there - a rich brocade, stiff with dust and age. I touched it to admire the material, but it was like touching something dead and mouldering.”

BRIGITTE: And that again, like, what is that, two sentences? 

KIM: So short, but there's so much text in. 

BRIGITTE: You could see how that would become a film, and you could see how a great actor could bring across this feeling of touching something dead and mouldering. I mean, it's just it's Ugh. I'm jealous.

AMY: Um, when we're talking about the flashing back and forth between the two time periods, in addition to feeling like I was Reading a Merchant Ivory movie, I also felt like I was reading The English Patient a little bit. Um, you know, I, I had those vibes, if you liked, or remember that book by Michael Ondaatje. Is that how you say his name? I'm not sure. So if you liked The English Patient, you'll really like this book because it has a lot of the same characteristics.

BRIGITTE: Agreed. 

KIM: So Jhabvala instantly drops us into an India that is pulsing with energy and beauty in one sense, but there's also this feeling that's oppressive in both time periods she switches between. Here's a section early on I want to read where the narrator gives us a great description of that feeling:

 I have not yet traveled on a bus in India that has not been packed to bursting-point, with people inside and luggage on top; and they are always so old that they shake up every bone in the human body and every screw in their own. If the buses are always the same, so is the landscape through which they travel. Once a town is left behind, there is nothing till the next one except flat lands, broiling sky, distances and dust. Especially the dust: the sides of the bus are open with only bars across them so that the hot winds blow in freely, bearing desert sands to choke up ears and nostrils and set one’s teeth on edge with grit.

AMY: Ooh. So yeah, there's this literal heat and dust in terms of the weather and the environment, but then there's also the heat of passion, of course, and then kind of the dust of the bygone era. So even though Olivia, our 1920s era gal, she loves her husband. He seems like a relatively good guy, but she is just bored out of her skull with all the other British citizens in her circle. And then if we flash forward to the 1970s, our narrator there also has some of the same eye-rolls for the English tourists that she encounters in India, right, Brigitte?

BRIGITTE: Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting because during the seventies, the kind of British person that you might've encountered would be, you know, one of these people sort of looking for enlightenment, you know, on the road. And she actually has this couple, and the guy is dressed in an orange robe with a shaved head, a little bit of a poser, you know? He's throwing around language of enlightenment and searching for a guru and that kind of thing. Um, and actually of the girl she writes: “The girl was indignant – not only about this watchman but about all the other people all over India. She said they were all dirty and dishonest. She had a very pretty, open, English face but when she said that it became mean and clenched, and I realized that the longer she stayed in India the more her face would become like that.

   “Why did you come?” I asked her.

   “To find peace.” She laughed grimly: “But all I found was dysentery.”

AMY: So that goes back to, Brigitte, what you were saying: white characters in this book are not always painted in the best light, right?

BRIGITTE: Definitely not.

AMY: And you know, in that passage she's clearly poking fun at the European kind of distasteful attitude about India, and I think if you read some of her other stories, you find this kind of mocking of Westerners. They're either not cut out for life in India, or they have a sort of over-the-top obsession with India where you're just like "calm down, you hippie," you know?

BRIGITTE: Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah, there's actually a famous line Jhabvala wrote in the forward to one of her short story collections. It's about the experience of being a European in India. I'll read it. “It goes like this: first stage, tremendous enthusiasm — everything Indian is marvelous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvelous; third stage, everything Indian abominable. For some people it ends there, for others the cycle renews itself and goes on. I have been through it so many times that now I think of myself as strapped to a wheel that goes round and round and sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m down. When I meet other Europeans, I can usually tell after a few moments’ conversation at what stage of the cycle they happen to be.”

BRIGITTE: I suspect that this might just be the experience of most people when they move to a culture or a country that's completely different or even slightly different from their own.

AMY: Yeah, but then I also think it just seems like everything in India is intense, right? Intensely colorful, intensely hot, intensely miserable at times, you know? 

BRIGITTE: When you're in an extreme environment, it makes all of those feelings even more extreme.

KIM: Yeah. So anyway, back to the novel, Olivia's really languishing in India. She wants to be part of what she sees as the real India. She doesn't want to be stuck in her little bubble of proper Brits. 

AMY: And so enter this handsome, mysterious hottie, the Nawab of Khatm. He lives a decadent life in his palace and he has this magnetic charm, power, a little bit of cockiness, but also generosity, maybe some ruthlessness, even. Brigitte, anything else you want to touch on relating to this mysterious stranger?

BRIGITTE: Besides that I was completely in love with him? I totally was.

AMY: I'm glad you were because I think that's what she intended. I went hot and cold on the guy, but…

BRIGITTE: He's a bad boy, let's just be honest. That's what he is. And I fell for it, and I was really hoping that he was going to completely change his ways for Olivia, meaning myself, you know. I mean, like I just completely imagined the sexiest guy in the entire world reading this thing, but I will say that I also think that he's a great example of how rich her characters are, because he's really not just a one- dimensional hot guy, you know? He does very strange things, like he has this English character, Harry, who he basically keeps hostage in his palace and it's never really quite clear why. The guy wants to leave, and he won't, essentially, let them go. 

KIM: It's very mysterious. 

BRIGITTE: Yeah. In general, I feel like most of her characters are kind of unknowable in some way. And I actually found that some of the reviewers didn't like that about her writing. That was a criticism for them. For me, I love that. I like that you don't really get to know... do you ever really get to know anybody, frankly? 

KIM: It makes it much more interesting 

BRIGITTE: And people are never just one thing. The Nawab, for example… probably, there's a bit of truth in all of the things that you were saying, Amy. He is all of those things at times. Sometimes he's ruthless. Sometimes he's generous. Sometimes he's loving. Sometimes he's just hot. 

KIM: And he's a lot of fun! Like that game of musical chairs at the shrine that they were at. 

AMY: I like to call that "Musical Chair Foreplay." 

KIM: Yeah, I've never heard of "Musical Chair Foreplay." 

AMY: That's what it was. There was no other way to describe that! 

KIM: Sexy!

BRIGITTE: I mean,! Someone out there is doing it right now because that's the world we live in.

KIM: Okay. So naturally of course, Olivia falls almost instantly madly in love with the Nawab, but when she turns up pregnant, she's in a major quandary.

AMY: Yeah, Yeah, exactly. She knows when this baby is born it's going to be a dead giveaway that her very blond husband is not the father. And we don't want to give away anything else that happens after that, either to Olivia or to the 1970s narrator, whose own story sort of parallels that of her predecessor. So, we won't go into more detail about what happens. 

BRIGITTE: It's not what you're thinking though. I did not see where it was going, I will say that. 

KIM: No, I agree. 

AMY: Okay, so sometimes when I hear that a book has won the Booker Prize, I'm like, it's not going to be my beach read — my fun beach read, but this one really was a page turner. It was nice to read. It didn't feel like a slog.

BRIGITTE: No, no, no.

AMY: What was a slog, however…

KIM: Oh yeah.

BRIGITTE: Oh! 

AMY: …the Merchant Ivory adaptation of Heat and Dust. 

KIM: We did a little film festival, the three of us, and we watched the movie. 

AMY: Treated ourselves to some Indian cuisine. 

BRIGITTE: Which was really good. The food was great.

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: And how, how do you mess this up? Because like I said, she wrote it like a Merchant Ivory movie. All you have to do is just…I don't know. It didn't work. It didn't work. 

BRIGITTE: Well, I have a theory.

KIM: Yeah. Tell us what happened. What went wrong, Brigitte? 

BRIGITTE: I think, and it actually has made me want to read her screenplay for this, and also for Howard's End, um, specifically… I think in her early adaptation process, I don't want to say she didn't have faith in the filmmakers because I don't think she understood enough about screenwriting to have faith or not have faith, but what she tried to do was to take all the sort of subtext of the book and the undercurrent, and she just made it all text. Now that could have been alongside their direction. I'm not gonna blame her, you know, for those choices, but what happened was all of the mystery and the sort of subtle undertones of things were completely gone, and they hadn't really found their visual style yet. So this book that is just rich with these incredible descriptions of India, is just completely, the movie is just flat. Like, it doesn't really look nice at all. So it's just, it's sad.

KIM: Yeah, the characters are one-dimensional. And like you said, it's flat, too, visually. 

AMY: We couldn't finish it. 

KIM: Listeners, we didn't finish the movie. 

AMY: So read the book is what we're saying. Stick to the book. Um, but anyway, getting back to the elements that some people find problematic in the book, there's an Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel condemned the novel, saying it was “stereotyped in its characters and viciously prejudiced in its vision of the Indian scene.” Then, on the other hand, Ruth’s friend and literary protegee Anita Desai  wrote: “It’s very sad that there was, and continues to be, resentment towards a foreigner writing about India with such frankness and irony.”

KIM: I think the best we can do is let you, our listeners, read the book and decide for yourself. I can understand both sides of the debate, but I personally appreciated, for a change, a woman's experience of living in India as an expat during that time. And as you said, Amy, she was writing about what she knew and really attempting to give a nuanced perspective. 

BRIGITTE: Yeah, I think this is one of those things everyone's just going to go round and round and round about, and it could be a conversation you get in with someone that's really fun. And it could be one in which, you know, you have to maybe prepare yourself that your point of view isn't right. And I will say the one thing that I feel confident in saying is that she's a great writer. It's one of the better books I've read in a while.

KIM: I agree. It's a wonderful book, and I want to read more by her, so I want to get a list from you of what you've read after this. You can jot down what to read next. Um, and I will also say we would love to hear from our listeners, too, if they want to share their feelings about it as well, because we do want to listen to other viewpoints 

AMY: So Brigitte, I wanted to bring up a few remarks that Ruth had made about the process of writing for film and see if you sort of agreed with what she had to say or not.

BRIGITTE: Sure.

AMY: Okay. So she had one said, “I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can’t follow the form of the novel. It’s a different thing completely. It’s impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure for the whole thing. You have to crack that.” So I don't know if you've ever had to adapt a book... 

BRIGITTE: I did actually. My first staff job was adapting a Stephen King novel called 11/22/63. And it was a huge book, and obviously, for a multi episode show, that process is going to be way different than for a movie. But she's right. A movie is a totally different thing. The rhythm is different. When you start trying to put all your scenes into that kind of format, it just doesn't read the same. It doesn't feel the same. And sometimes things that were said in the book are much better not said when you have a great actor. So yeah, I don't think she's wrong about that. 

AMY: I actually watched an interview with Ruth where she was kind of talking about this. And she said that when she adapted The Householder, she thought she could just take the dialogue from her book and just plug it in. And she's like, "This is easy." But then she said, "After the fact, I realized that was a bad idea. Like, you can't just take the dialogue and put it in the screenplay." Okay, so, so the next thing she said, about Hollywood: “Film is not like a book; it’s not a writer’s baby at all. So many people have put in their talent, by that time that you feel grateful for what they’ve done, you don’t feel possessive about it in any way.” Do you agree?

BRIGITTE: Oh that's a tough one. I think sometimes that's true. If you've been on a project that's been really difficult, or that wasn't necessarily your original idea, then I a hundred percent agree. And she's right. In movies, it's not a writer's baby. It's just not. It's the directors. It's pretty much everyone but the writer, even though they wouldn't be there, like, if there wasn't a writer, but they don't seem to remember that most of the time. However, in TV and streaming as we would probably call it these days, that is not true. The writer is king there.

AMY: You know whyI think she didn't feel that possessiveness is that it wasn't her first love. Writing novels was what she enjoyed. She didn't feel possessive about the screenplays because it was a hobby. 

BRIGITTE: So many screenwriters just fell down weeping. "Just had a little hobby," when they're desperately trying to have a career!

AMY: I know, but that's how everyone who knew her described it. She just didn't care that much about the movies. Okay, one last thing. She says that she spent tons of time in the editing room on each Merchant Ivory film and was described as merciless in the editing process. Is that typical ?

BRIGITTE: Not in film. When you're in TV, you are in the editing room and you do have to be merciless by the way. And you often don't have a choice, because it's really obvious that it's not working or that a line that you really liked should go. In fact, most of the time, it's you taking out dialogue because a lot of it just plays better when it's just an actor doing their thing, rather than saying the stuff that you wrote. And one of the things I actually read about her, I think it was in regards to Howard's End, was that her writing really allows for actors to do the kind of thing that they love to do best, which is to sort of sit in emotion and just let it play across their face. And that's what you find in the editing room. It's those kinds of moments where you're like, you know what, I didn't need the 16 lines that I wrote around this. All I need is for Anthony Hopkins to sit there and do the thing he does, you know? Like, that's it.

AMY: I think for the very few screenplays that Kim and I have written, that's the part that's really hard as a writer, is that you can't just be like "Anthony Hopkins, figure out this blank spot." 

BRIGITTE: You have to put it in. And very often working in studios, they make you put it in. They make you put in every single line that would describe anything that anybody would be confused about. And then you get on set and actors look at you and they say, "Do you think I'm stupid or the audience is stupid?" And you have to sort of, you can't say... 

AMY: Maaaaybe.

BRIGITTE: You just say, "well, you know, I thought it better that we just have it there just in case." That's what you always say. "Just in case." But you know what? Almost all the time, when you have a good actor, you don't need it. You don't. 

AMY: So let's circle back to ...

KIM: Ruth's life. Yeah. Her story. So as she became more and more involved professionally with Merchant and Ivory, Ruth and her husband ended up settling in New York City. This was the third major move of her life. She and her husband bought her an apartment there with her proceeds from the Booker Prize. Actually, it was in the same building as James and Ismael's apartment, so they were always hanging out just an elevator's ride away from each other. That would be great, Amy, if we lived in the same building. Also, she and her family would spend the summer at Claverack, which is a beautiful house that James and Ismael had in the Hudson River Valley. Sounds gorgeous. 

AMY: I just love the idea that they were all friends and basically kind of family. 

KIM: For such a long time. 

AMY: James Ivory just published a memoir that came out last year, and he said the three of them kind of came to be known as a triumvirate, but Ruth didn't like that word, triumvirate. So maybe in a way she was kind of glad that she was not part of the official branding. Maybe she didn't want her name on that heading Merchant Ivory. Yeah, it seemed like she valued her privacy and I think maybe she was like, I'll let them be the front men and I'll just go back to writing my novels, which is what I really enjoy anyway. 

KIM: Yeah. 

BRIGITTE: I think a lot of writers have that personality, which makes it easy to be taken advantage of because you don't really want the accolades in the way that sometimes other people who have a more public role do. It's just not why you're in it, you know? You're in it to sit in a dark room and make stuff up, and the other part of it can be uncomfortable. I always hesitate assuming that she was happy to like never be mentioned ever, because I mean, I was a fan of Merchant Ivory and I never thought about her. Never, ever, ever. And I feel like they could have, without disturbing her privacy, they still could have said, "and also this woman!" more. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah, 

BRIGITTE: But they didn't.

KIM: I think we could have easily said “Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala.” Come on.

AMY: We could have made it roll off our tongues. 

KIM: We totally could have. It would have, it would be so natural. So anyway, she died in 2013. In addition to all these screenplays she wrote, she wrote 21 novels and volumes of short stories.

AMY: You know, speaking of screenwriting, Brigette, we've been talking about it a lot, but I want to find out a little bit more about Disenchanted. When is it coming out, and also, what was it like writing a movie musical? I think that was a first for you, right?

BRIGITTE: That was a first, yes. It was very fun and challenging. I got to work with amazing people. Alan Menken, who is a Disney legend. And Stephen Schwartz, who was the lyricist who, you know, created Wicked. So I felt imposter syndrome every day of that experience, but it was probably a once in a lifetime. I don't know how much I'm allowed to say about what it is about, except that it's a musical and that it's really fun and big. And then it comes out on the Friday after Thanksgiving. So Black Friday basically, and it's a family movie. Everyone in your family will enjoy it. Um, and yeah, but all I can think about right now is that I need to write a lot of novels and short stories because woman's leaving me in the dust!

AMY: No, I feel like you're having your musical screenplay training, so that we're now going to go back and do "we don't talk about Bruno...

BRIGITTE: Right.

AMY: Well, "we don't talk about Livia"

BRIGITTE: I should pitch myself for this project. It's a perfect fit.

AMY: Because the first movie wasn't very good. 

BRIGITTE: No, 

KIM: I know, it needs to be redone. 

AMY: Yeah. Anyway, I am sensing another viewing party to watch Disenchanted. We can't wait for that. Brigittte, thank you so much for being a guest with us. We loved hanging out with you!.

BRIGITTE: Oh, thank you so much. It was so fun. I'm so glad that we don't have to see each other from what was that? 20 feet away

AMY: Oh my gosh.

BRIGITTE: Yearning for human contact.

AMY: I'm glad I had you. I'm glad I had you.

BRIGITTE: Ditto.

AMY: And also, as we mentioned earlier, Kim and I want to keep this Merchant Ivory kick going, so join us back here next week, because we're going to be giving you a rundown of some of their lesser known films. And we'll tell you which ones we think are worth your time. 

In the meantime, if you're liking our podcast, don't forget to give us one of those five-star reviews because it really helps new listeners find us.

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

92. A Very Brief History of the Proust Questionnaire

Note: Transcripts are generated, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM: Hey, everybody, welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes…

AMY: Hi, everyone! Kim, I was trying to think of a topic for this week’s mini episode, and I I don’t know, as part of my brainstorming, I was like, “maybe some of our listeners might want to know more about us.” And then I thought, yeah no probably not. We’re better off sticking to more interesting topics.

KIM: I’d rather talk about other people, personally.

AMY: Yeah, but anyway, this train of thought got me thinking about something else: the Proust Questionnaire. You’re familiar with it, right?

KIM: Oh, yeah. Vanity Fair magazine, famously, ends each of its issues by having a celebrity fill out the Proust Questionnaire. It’s a list of thought-provoking and kind of fun questions which are hopefully going to reveal a bit of the interview subject’s personality. (And typically, I think they do.)

AMY: Yeah, it’s usually the first thing I read whenever I pick up a copy of Vanity Fair. But then I started wondering, okay, why is it called the Proust Questionnaire? I gotta assume Proust, the French novelist, must have come up with the list of questions or something like that.

KIM: Yeah. I felt like maybe, um, he had a similar thing that he did and they took the name from that. But Yeah. I wasn't really sure. I'm curious to talk about it more in this episode. 

AMY: Yeah, so that’s what we’re going to do. And turns out he did not create the questionnaire. All he did was answer a few of them, because it turns out this questionnaire was a popular pastime in the Victorian Era. Some refer to it as a “parlor game,” 

KIM: They loved those games. They loved those parlor games!

AMY: Well, they had nothing else… they didn’t have Netflix! They had nothing else to do. THey had to come up with stuff if they had people over.

KIM: Yeah. They had their little science experiments and Blindman’s Bluff.

AMY: Yes. Ooh! We should do a mini episode on all the different Victorian parlor games!

KIM: Yeah, I think they all make an appearance in Dickens’s novels. We could probably just do Dickens novels and parlor games. Anyway, making a note of that.

KIM: Yes, okay, so this questionnaire actually has its origins in a printed book. It was called a “confession album.” I think there were various versions of them. But they would feature pre-printed questions with blank spaces that your friends and guests to fill out. (It feels very slumber-party-ish to me!)

KIM: Yeah, all of a sudden when you were saying that I was thinking Burn Book or something like that.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. Kind of. Yeah. So, for example, Kim, you would come over to my house one evening and then I’d give you this book and be like, “Here, fill this out!” It kind of keeps a memento of the person that came to visit you, but it’s also fun and something to do. And a lot of famous people from the era have filled these out and some have been saved. So there are examples from notable people like Oscar Wilde (which, I didn’t really have time to do a deep-dive looking for his responses, but can you imagine how good his must have been?)

KIM: Oh my god. I’ve got to go read those. 

AMY: He’d be really good at filling out this form. Umm…Arthur Conan Doyle…

KIM: Ooh! I want to read Arthur Conan Doyle’s!

AMY: Yeah. Paul Cezanne. Karl Marx did one. The author A.A. Milne also remembered them from when he was a boy.

KIM: That’s so interesting, but it still doesn’t answer why this questionnaire is now called the Proust questionnaire. Is it because his answers were particularly enlightened or amazing?

AMY: Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking. You know, maybe he somehow answered these questions SO REMARKABLY that he came to be associated with it.” Well, I found his responses, and I will let everybody judge for themselves. He first filled out the questionnaire when he was around 14-years-old. And it was from a book called Confessions. An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, Etc.” It was printed in English but he wrote his responses in French. So then when he was in his early 20s he filled out a second one which had slightly different questions. So I’m going to read you some of the answers and his questions from both of these just to give you a little bit of an idea. And you might hear my paper rattling a bit while I do this, so just disregard that. Okay, so I’ll just run through some of these:

So… your favorite virtue? His second one, he responded “the need to be loved more precisely the need to be caressed and spoiled much more than the need to be admired.”  

What do you appreciate the most in your friends? “To have tenderness for me, if their personage is exquisite enough to render quite high the price of their tenderness.” (Not really sure what he's going for there.)

Um, what is your idea of perfect happiness? “Not, I fear a very elevated one. I really haven't the courage to say what it is and if I did, I should probably destroy it by the mere fact of putting it into words.”

Who is your favorite hero of fiction? “Hamlet.”

KIM: I would probably have answered that at different points. I don't know. I'd have to think about it now, but yeah.

AMY: ​​Uh, what are your favorite names? “I only have one at a time.” (I don't think he really answered that one.)

 Um, which talent would you most like to have? “Willpower and irresistible charm.”

KIM: He put all of his work into his writing, not into this.

AMY: Well, I mean, remember that he was 14 for one of them, but…

KIM: Yeah. That’s true.

AMY: What is your current state of mind? “Annoyance at having to think about myself in order to answer these questions.” (I kind of sympathize with that.)

KIM: Oh yeah, for sure.

AMY: But then we have ones like, “Your favorite color and flower?” and he wrote, “I like them all. And for the flowers, I do not know.” (I mean, you could do better than that!)

KIM: He wanted to get into the party.

AMY: Yeah. He's like, come on. He was starting to get over it. Yeah. Um, let’s see. 

Your idea of misery? “Being separated from Mama.”

KIM: I was going to say something about his mom had to come up. If you didn't read one where his mom was the answer, I was going to be shocked. 

AMY: His favorite qualities in a man? “Feminine charm.”

KIM: That’s funny.

AMY: Favorite qualities in a woman? “Manly virtues.”

KIM: I love that he swapped that that's also very fitting as well. I'm very revealing. That's great. 

AMY: I'm trying to find a few more good ones. Oh:

If not yourself, who would you be? “Since the question does arise I prefer not to answer it. All the same, I should very much have liked to be Pliny the Younger.” It’s like, okay!

Anyway, so I don’t know. I’m not getting any major “genius” vibes with his answers.

KIM: No, no, no. I think he did save all of the good stuff up for his novels, which is fine with me.

AMY: And truly the whole concept of this questionnaire, when you hear the genesis of it, it feels very junior high, actually. Here I was reading Vanity Fair thinking it was this intellectual exercise and had, you know, something very “Proustian” about it. And no, it was just really  some dumb confession albums that the Victorians were doing. And I guess by the end of the 19th century, if you asked a guest to fill one out, they would probably roll their eyes and be like, “Really? Oh my God, this lame guy is still into this?”

KIM: Yeah, as would happen now, like I think it would be too silly at this point.  

AMY: Yeah, it’s kind of forced. There’s one line from a novel by the Canadian novelist Annie Sevigny in which she writes: “did any of you ever come under the torture of that modern Inquisition, the 'Confession Book?'”

KIM: I love it. 

AMY: So she’s kind of being snarky about it. 

KIM: She’s over it. Okay, so we haven’t quite gotten to the burning question, which is why Proust’s name came to be associated with the questionnaire? I still don’t know.

AMY: Right.  Because it's like yeah, he filled some out, but so did all these other writers.

KIM: Yeah, why is it not the “Oscar Wilde Questionnaire?”

AMY: Yeah, okay. I kind of have an answer, and that is that the first one Proust filled out when he was 14, that was a confession album belonging to his friend, Antoinette Faure. (And her father Felix eventually went on to become the president of France.) So Antoinette’s son eventually found that confession album in 1924 (two years after Proust’s death) and he ended up having Proust’s page published in a French literary journal. Now Antoinette’s son was a psychoanalysis, so alongside Proust’s answers he published an article sort of parsing out Proust’s responses with a psychoanalytic bent. 

KIM: Remind me to burn my papers, one, and two, that’s pretty funny. That’s pretty interesting to take that and do that. But yeah, I wonder what Proust would have thought of that. 

AMY: Yeah, so while confession albums kind of went the way of the dodo, the proust questionnaire made this resurgent comeback and it got people interested in this idea of the questionnaire again. started appearing in French literary magazines, sort of as Vanity Fair does now where intellectuals would answer the same list of questions. A German newspaper started running it and so did England’s Saturday Correspondent paper. Vanity Fair started featuring it in 1993, which is actually pretty recent all things considered. So then the idea of the questionnaire has also cropped up on TV a bit. I don’t know if you remember the TV show Inside the Actor’s Studio?

KIM: Oh yes.

AMY: With James Lipton. Yes. They made fun of that on Saturday Night Live, too, but he always ended his show with those sorts of questions. And today it kind of signifies that you are “somebody,” if you get asked to answer one of these today, right? Which makes it even more funny because it just started as this dumb pastime, as we said. I want to credit a 2016 New Yorker article by Evan Kindley, which provided some of the information that I've relayed here in this episode. And if you want to learn more about the Proust questionnaire and that story of how it came to light we'll link to that in our show notes.

KIM: It was interesting. I'm definitely wanting to read some more of these answers from famous people. 

AMY: Yeah.  And Kim, I don't know if you know this, but when I worked at, I had my magazine job for like 20 years that I did, um, one of my sections that I was in charge of it was called StarTalk, but it was basically, we would ask one question each week in the vein of, one of these Preuss questionnaire questions, , it's like a fan magazine.

KIM: Yeah, you’ve got to sound really interesting and pithy and a short answer. Like it's gotta be set sort of revealing. And if you want to present who you are, you want to come across as intellectual or whatever. That's a lot of pressure.

AMY:  You're always going to think of the correct cooler answer later that night when you’re lying in bed.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: Right. But part of the fun of it is that you do have to answer on the fly.

KIM: Right.

AMY: So that said, I know that we said we didn't want to bore listeners with anything about ourselves, Kim, but maybe we should try to do a few.  Maybe we should end the show answering a few of the Proust questionnaire questions, and I did not plan for this, so I have not premeditated my, um, answer so well, we'll just do a few and see if we come up with anything amazing. So we’ll just ask a few back and forth if you want.

KIM: Okay.

AMY: Um, I'll start easy. Your favorite color and flower?

KIM: My favorite color is black.

AMY: It is?! That is so dumb!

KIM: It’s a flattering color!

AMY: Okay. All right. Like your favorite color to wear, I’m guessing? Or anything?

KIM: Both. I like the darkness of it. I like it. Yeah.

AMY: Oh my gosh. I am getting real insight into you.

KIM: Oh, okay! So what else can we find out? Okay, so let’s see…

AMY: You didn’t do flower.

KIM: Oh, I didn't do flower. Um, my favorite flowers are Ecuadorian roses.

AMY: Oh, that’s specific.

KIM: Dark red and gorgeous.

AMY: Okay. Since that's an easy one, I'm going to answer it too, because I can just, I know the answer already. So my favorite color is yellow, cheerful. Happy. And then, yeah, I know, like you'll never see me wearing yellow, but it's my favorite color.  And then, um, flower is tulip.

KIM: A tulip is a cute flower, and yellow and tulip seem to go great together. I like it. I think it does show a little bit of who you are as well.  Okay. So, oh yeah. I think I see some of these that could be funny for you to ask me.

AMY: Which one?

KIM: Your favorite name? Do you remember the time? Long before I had my daughter…

AMY: Yes, I don't. I, you don't even need… does it start with a W?

KIM: I just, I had announced during… when we were shopping or something. And I said, “You know what I think would be a great baby name?”  And you said no. And I said, “Well, Waverly.” And you said “What?” And then later at dinner you were like, “Oh yeah, Kim said, um, that she wanted to name her kid Waverly.” And I was like, “Wait a second.

No, I didn't.” And then I was like, “Oh yeah, you're right. I did.”AMY: It sounds very Bronte-esque…like “Waverly climbed the moors.”

KIM: I used to love all those really dramatic names. Victoria Elizabeth, or queen leanings. Those were always my favorite. I don't know if that's going to sound funny to anyone besides us, but Waverly. I immediately thought of Waverly when I saw that question. Okay. Where would you like to live?  

AMY: England.

KIM: That doesn't surprise me. 

AMY: London.

KIM: The Anglophile in us. Yes.You know, what's crazy is you didn't come to visit me when I was living in London. It wasn't for that long. 

AMY: It wasn't’ for that long. 

KIM: Yeah, I’m surprised.

AMY: I was engaged at that point and…

KIM: You were planning your wedding. 

AMY: There was a lot going on.

KIM: Yeah, because I flew back for your wedding and then not long after that I ended up moving.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: But anyhow…

AMY: I love how I answered that so quickly. That must truly be like, I didn't even miss a beat on that. Okay. 

KIM: We don’t need to analyze that one. That’s just right there for the taking.

AMY: I mean, Simon Thomas, the offer still stands. Subletting your house. Okay. I have one for you, Kim. What is your pet aversion? 

KIM: Cats.

AMY: What?

KIM: I know, that’s not the question.

AMY: Cats? Oh, like “pets.” Okay, okay.

KIM: Um, But it would actually be making any phone calls after 11:00 AM. I think it's kind of an introvert thing. I hate calling to make appointments or doing anything like that after 11, like I just don't have the energy for it. 

AMY: But before 11 is fine?

KIM: I only want to do it before 11, Like when I'm highly caffeinated and everything after that,  just, I just can't do it. 

AMY: I hear you. I don't even like to do it before or after 11. I would prefer neither. Yeah, I get it. I was always nervous as a kid, too, when I would have to make a phone call. 

KIM: Me too. I still am. Yeah. I don't know how we interview all these amazing people now. It just becomes it's become so, so fun and easy. But, 

 If you had told me this when I was like, you know, 21, even that I'd be doing this, like no way. What about your misery? The thing that is, what is the question…? Um….

AMY: Right. Where he said, “Mama.” My idea of pure misery.

KIM: What is your idea of pure misery?

AMY: Um,  accidentally taking someone's life, like hitting somebody in a car.

KIM: Oh, wow. You went, I did not expect you to go there. I was literally going to say being at the DMV without a book!

AMY: Kim! I’m taking these very seriously!

KIM: Oh my God. I'm like, I mean, I'm, I'm having heart palpitations because I can't even think about that.

AMY: The depth of human misery?

KIM: I can’t even go there. It’s awful. 

AMY: I’m taking it real dark!

KIM: I love that your colors are yellow and your flowers, the tulip, and

you're getting really dark. And I'm the one who's like black with Ecuadorian roses. And I'm like “My pet aversion is a cat!” Anyway. 

AMY: Okay, on that note…

KIM: Yeah, we should go. 

AMY: I need to go have a drink while I contemplate deep, morbid thoughts.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: If you're still listening, we want you to join us next week when we'll be joined by a Hollywood screenwriter, Bridgette Hales, to discuss the life and work of Ruth Prowler job Vala. She's a Booker prize-winning novelist, and two time Oscar winner who pinned the lion share of Merchant-Ivory films. I didn't know that until we started looking into doing her for this episode!

KIM:  So, so crazy, so amazing. It's going to be such a great episode.

We both love Merchant-Ivory movies. So if you're loving this podcast, do us a favor and leave us a five-star review over an apple podcasts to let us know you're out there. We might even give you a shout out in an upcoming episode to thank you. 

AMY: We will.

KIM: We promise. Let’s just say we will.

AMY: Bye, 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 Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s podcast. Join us next week when we’ll be joined by Hollywood screenwriter Brigitte Hales to discuss the life and work of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a Booker Prize winning novelist and two-time Oscar winner who penned the lion’s share of Merchant-Ivory’s films!

KIM: I can’t wait for this episode! We both love Merchant-Ivory movies! Also, if you’re loving this podcast, do us a favor and leave us a five-star review over at Apple podcasts to let us know you’re out there! We might even give YOU a shout-out in an upcoming episode to thank you!

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

91. Rose Macaulay — What Not with Kate Macdonald

Note: Transcripts are generated, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES: Hi everybody. Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast that celebrates the work of forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes.

KIM ASKEW: And I'm Kim Askew. Today, we're discussing a novel set in the world of civil servants, government offices, and maddening bureaucracy. 

AMY: How many people are about to hit stop on this podcast right now? But don't do it, you guys, because this novel, What Not, by Rose McCaulay is totally wild, witty, and so clever. It will have you laughing and thinking,

KIM: Yes, it will. And thinking is the operative word in this novel, which was originally published in 1918. It's set in an alternative early 20th century England, where the government has raised the stakes on trying to improve the intellect of its citizens by passing laws dictating who can marry whom and have children. government run system of eugenics, basically.

AMY: And it's a dystopian novel, and yeah, Kim, I'm starting to warm up to these, but it's written in a satirical style that is absurdly entertaining.

KIM: Yeah, it's funny on one level, but it's also deeply disturbing on another. It's thought to have possibly inspired Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. And it's also pretty easy to draw parallels between this novel and the cultural and political quagmires we're facing today. We are so lucky that we have a literary historian who actually got this book back in print joining us today to help us put it all in context.

AMY: I can't wait to introduce her, but first we're going to ask you, our listeners, to take a number and please wait while we place you on hold. We'll be back momentarily to raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Kate MacDonald, an academic and writer with a particular interest in early 20th century popular British literature and the history of publishing from that time period. She's written and edited numerous scholarly articles and books, including the first collection of scholarly essays on Macaulay. She's currently a visiting research fellow at the Oxford International Center for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes University. 

AMY: In addition, Kate is also bringing forgotten writers back into print through the Handheld Classics branch of the publishing company she spearheads, Handheld Press. She oversees pretty much everything from finding and commissioning books to editorial production and marketing. And I'm really interested in talking to her more about that job, as well. Kate was also a pioneer in the world of podcasting about forgotten books. She has retired that podcast, but she's still writing book reviews, which you can find over on her website, Katemcdonald.net. Kate, welcome to the show.

KATE MACDONALD: Glad to be here. Thank you for asking me.

AMY: Okay. So when it comes to today's lost lady, Rose Macaulay. I hadn't previously read anything by her, but Kim, I know you've read at least one of her books. Her name, however, is one that tends to pop up on my radar a lot. And I think maybe that's because during the first half of the 20th century, she wrote a lot: 23 novels, as well as poetry and scads of non-fiction. So Kate, I'm wondering where you actually think Macaulay falls in this scale of "lost," and do you remember how you were introduced to her?

KATE: Okay, well, I think she is a lot less lost now than she was about 10 years ago, but at that stage, very few people had heard of her unless they had read the old Virago reprints of some of her novels. Now Virago Press didn't reprint everything. They just did a few. And then another couple of publishers did reprints, but those novels had not been reissued since the 1980s. So we're talking a good 30 years, which is a generation, you know. That's fairly lost. I cannot now remember when I first started reading Rose McCaulay, but it was probably in my early twenties, and I'm pretty sure it was her most famous novel, The Towers of Trebizond, which is the one that really brought her a huge amount of fame, but it was also her last novel. I got into Rose Macaulay more because I wanted to teach her, and I couldn't find the texts that my students could buy. And that is critical because if you're going to bring a lost author back into better knowledge, you have to have the books to give to students so they can study them So I started reading around the subject and I said, "Well, there's very little work extent on Macaulay that's been collected." So there's plenty of academic papers, but that's no good for my mum who might want to read about Macaulay. She's not an academic. So that was one of the reasons why I thought, "Well, we can put together a collection of essays." It took six years as a project to get people together, to produce the essays, and I boiled them into a book. And I wrote quite a few of myself. And now we have the first proper collection of that. There have been three biographies and a fourth one if you count it, but you don't really because it's a special category of book. The last biography was published in 2003. Um, that could do with reprinting. My company Handheld Press, we re- published a book by the biographer Sarah LeFanu about her process of writing and researching that biography. So it's kind of a biographer's journal in which you revisit Rose McCaulay's life. And you learn about her and also discover all the secrets that she had and things that were very different to what she actually said they were like, and it's a great discovery book. So Sarah LeFanu and the biographical process have helped bring Rose McCaulay back to, I think, greater popularity now. But look for her in the mainstream bookshops and you might find The Towers of Trebizond and that would be it. But as you say, she wrote well over 20 novels. Where are they? Why are they not in print? 

KIM: So we're going to be discussing What Not today. And it was actually the first bestseller for Handheld Press, is that correct? 

KATE: Yes. 

KIM: How did you find it? 

KATE: Well, I found it because when I was putting this collection of essays together, I needed to do an annotated bibliography of everything Rose Macaulay had written and also all the criticism about her. So I methodically went through old her extant books and read all the novels right from the beginning. And then I came across this title going, " What is this? I've never heard of What Not. Where's this?" Couldn't find a copy anywhere. So I had to go to the British Library, which like the Library of Congress, there are libraries in Britain where publishers have to send a copy of every book they publish. So they're called the statutory libraries. So the British Library had a copy. Terrific. I went there. You can't take the books out, you have to go visit it. And I looked at it and thought, "Well, this is amazing. It's science fiction. It's speculative, it's dystopia. I detect Aldous Huxley, and this is such a great novel. Why is this the second edition? Why isn't this the first edition?" Because at the same time, I went back to Sarah LeFanu's biography and I realized that when What Not first came out, it had been pulled pretty quickly by the publisher and a particular section of text had been rewritten because they were terrified of being taken to court because the text was potentially libelous. And I realized that the British Library only had the revised edition. And I thought, "Well, I want to see the original, where can I find it?" I could not find it. So I had no idea what that was. So four years later, I think, I was leaving academia and setting up my own company. And What Not was top of my list as a book I wanted to bring back to print because it was science fiction, because it was a work by a woman who's not known for such a thing, and because it was just so readable and so interesting and so important for the eugenics, the post first world war political angle, the love story, which is pretty good. All these things. I really, really wanted to republish it, but I wanted to do it with that missing text. And I didn't know where to find it because copies of that novel are so scarce. And I was complaining about this when I went to visit a friend of mine called John Clute, who is a good bit older than me. He is one of the, oh, I don't know, the brave new world of science fiction writers in the 1960s. He's Canadian. He now lives in London. I said, "John, Rose Macaulay and science fiction and speculative novel and tell me what you know." And he said, "Oh, I've got the first edition here." He reaches out and brings 

AMY: Oh my 

KATE: the original first edition, because he's also a book collector. It was the most exciting moment. So he showed me and said, "This is the passage," and I went, "But what are these pencil marks?" and he said, "Oh my goodness, I've never seen these." This was the copy that Rose McCaulay's publisher had and wrote on the margins of the offending pages: "Cut here, cut this." So I reinstated the missing text, I added the replacement text as a footnote, so people can see and compare. And then as the publishing process goes along, I sent the information about What Not to The Bookseller, which is a British trade magazine. And the woman who writes the column which is relevant for reprints, she emailed me saying, "I want to see a PDF of this." I said, "Oh, nice. Very exciting." I was really very naive. Sent her that. Didn't think much more of it. And then about a week and a half later, I'd just come out of the gym and my phone started jumping up and down in my bag and I'm like, "Well, what is going on?" The orders were piling in because The Guardian newspaper had got the story that we were republishing and bringing back Rose Macaulay with the novel that Aldous Huxley had plagiarized from to create Brave New World. and because The Guardian were an online newspaper, they printed the link. So everybody all over the world was busy buying the book. I had to reprint it three times before March. So that was how we got our best seller,

AMY: This is what we love to hear! We just want people to know about these authors and start reading them and I mean, you, you did it! 

KATE: It was amazing. It was just the best thing. And it got reviewed and reviewed and people bought shed loads, and it still sells quite well. And I think also because of that, um, people like British Library Publishing, they started to go, "Oh, well, Rose Mcaulay, she's clearly marketable. People want to buy her, therefore, what can we publish?" And suddenly there was a little flurry of people wanting to bring back Rose Macaulay from the backlist and make it front list again. And I think that we proved it with our edition. She's marketable. She may be a century old, but my goodness, this book will sell.

KIM: So, Kate, what do we know about Macaulay's upbringing and early life? And what was her personality like? 

KATE: Well, it's very interesting. She was part of what has been called the intellectual aristocracy of Britain, and in a way she's similar to Virginia Woolf in that the parents and the generations above, they came not from the landed aristocracy or from very rich families, but they came from families where the men all went to Oxford or Cambridge, and the women were extremely intelligent. And Rose McCaulay was the second oldest of a family of seven children. Her father was a schoolmaster. He was also a professor. When she was about six years old, the family moved to a small seaside town in Italy, near Genoa, and they lived there because it was a heck of a lot cheaper. And I think the family were a little bit straightened for money, and with seven children, you can hardly blame them. And the father was writing a book or doing something that didn't require him to be in England. So you can imagine a very small seaside town, which was still fairly populated with Italians but there were very few other English people. And so Rose grew up over the next seven years with her brothers and sisters, this tight knit, flamboyant rampaging group, doing what the family thought was normal. And it was Sarah LeFanu who said in her biography, Rose didn't actually learn what it was to be a girl. She wasn't restricted by the Victorian conventions, or then the Edwardian conventions of how young girls ought to behave. So when the family came back to England, when her father had a professorship, suddenly Rose McCaulay was forced to learn how to behave correctly. And I think that colored her attitude to how she ought to behave in social situations ever after. So she went to Oxford high school and eventually she went to university at Oxford at Somerville College. Now these were the days where girls could go to university and even if they passed the exams for a degree, they certainly weren't awarded a degree. That did not happen until the early 1920s. And she studied history. She had a happy university life. She had friends. Some of them, she kept all her life. But in the end, she didn't take her final exams because we think she suffered a nervous breakdown and I think that was a sore point for her, for the rest of her life, because she was intellectually very, very able, but she didn't have a degree. So she went back home, and her father then got a job in Wales. So they had to move to Wales, and she started writing novels. Her sixth novel was, and I will say casually her sixth novel... She just wrote novels and they got published. And then the sixth novel won a prize and the prize was absolutely massive. It was about 75,000 pounds, nearly a hundred thousand dollars. It made her financially independent. And by this time she was in her mid twenties. And so she instantly moved to London, and for a precious two years, she mixed with people her own age and younger. So she mingled with these poets, artists, intellectuals, and then the war happened. So she moved back with her mother. Her mother was living in Cambridgeshire. She went to volunteer as a nurse. Absolutely hated it because she couldn't really cope with blood, so she gave up on the nursing and then she wrote a novel called Non-Combatants and Others, which was her eighth novel. And this is the one that really brought her. Into mainstream literature, and this was in her mid thirties and it's the first pacifist novel to be published in Britain during the First World War, and it's a stupendous work of art. I could talk about that for ages. And then January, 1917, she began work as a civil servant. First in the particular branch of the Ministry of War called The War Office, which examined applications for exemption from military service. So these are conscientious objectors. This is something she had written about in Non-Combatants and Others. So that was an interesting parallel. And I think at some point she also worked in the Ministry of Information, which is where she met Gerald O'Donovan. Now Rose is about 37, 38, at this point. Gerald O'Donovan is an ex Roman Catholic priest. He left the priesthood in about 1908 in Ireland. He married, he had two children and he and Rose fell in love and they had a secret passionate affair which lasted until the end of his life in 1942. And almost nobody knew about it. And when you read What Not, you'll think, "Ooh! Parallel!" There's a lot in What Not about the heady, emotional rush of falling in love when you know you're not supposed to, when social and legal barriers are in your way and you can't do anything about it. You're just in love and whoosh. There's a lot there to choose from. 

KIM: Yeah. So let's talk some more about her time working for the government during WWI, because that relates directly to the novel as well as this affair that we're talking about too. She actually dedicates the book "To all the civil servants I have known." Why might she have been inspired to write a novel set in this world of government bureaucracy? 

KATE: Um, probably because she found it completely ridiculous. The civil servants she is writing about in What Not belong to The Ministry of Brains. So she invented an entirely new department. Rose Macaulay clearly found the way people had to behave and the rules and regulations quite ridiculous. But I think her satire was really aimed at government departments trying to control people's lives and emotions. That's what she's getting at really. You know, she had a great friend called Marjorie Grant who we've also just published, who wrote a novel from 1921 about women civil servants working at the end of the war and about how they managed to make the life of a single young woman working in London. It's called Latchkey Ladies. And Marjorie was clearly drawing on the background that she and Rose together had experienced when they were working in offices in London. So it's not just, this is a target for satire. This is a target for criticism. It's just, this is what life was like. And for many, many women, it was really quite a new kind of life because it was only in the war when the men were all fighting that the women were allowed into these offices to hold these positions of responsibility, to make decisions that men had to abide by, and that's really quite exciting. 

AMY: Okay. So to summarize the basic premise of this novel, we have two single young career women. One is Kitty Grammont and the other is Ivy Delmer. They are both working for The Ministry of Brains, the department you described Kate. It's dedicated to increasing the average intelligence of England's citizens in the hopes of preventing another world war. And as part of the Mental Progress Act, people are classified according to their intellectual level. And so they can only get married or have children with people who are in the correct category for their classification. Now, if you follow the regulations, you will receive payment for your progeny, but if you break the rules, you have to pay sometimes insurmountable fines on these unsanctioned children that you might have.

KIM: Right. So as a result, many babies end up being abandoned at birth on church doorsteps, or even left to die. Anyone deemed to have deficiencies is prohibited from marrying or having children altogether. So the character of Ivy is an underling at The Ministry of Brains, but Kitty has a more important job in The Propaganda Department trying to convince society to go along with the government's outlandish edicts for the common good. Both women spend their off time visiting family in the village of Little Chantreys, where we get to see how everyday citizens are coping with and reacting to these government policies. Kate, can you give our listeners some historical context in terms of issues of the day that Macaulay was reacting to?

KATE: Okay, I'll do my best. Um, the first thing to remember is that the world was emerging from an exhausting appalling war, as well as the Spanish Flu epidemic. That level of death and destruction had not been seen for decades. So the economy is staggering, politics was in a foment, which is normal after war because everybody wants to get rid of the old faces and get the new ones in. Eugenics is part of what The Ministry of Brains was trying to do, to manipulate the population by breeding out those qualities which it deemed to be unfit. People with lower mental capacities, that's what The Ministry of Brains was targeting. The eugenics movement in Britain and in the USA was the target of Macaulay's very dark satire. Now the USA had enforced sterilization at this point in several states. Britain never went that far, but there was a small and vocal eugenecist movement which was advocating for banning people with lower mental capacity to breed. So that's a sort of a right- wing movement to control the populations through eugenics. At the same time in Britain, you have a pretty long history of radical left politics, which want to give contraception to the working poor to allow them to pull themselves up economically and not be burdened by large families they can't support. So in a really weird way, at the end of the First World War, you've got a policy of controlling and manipulating how people can have children which is being supported by lots of different political colors. It's a really odd moment. So this is the background to what McCaulay was writing against. 

KIM: Um, we would love it. If you would like to read a passage from What Not to give our listeners a feel for how the book sounds. 

KATE: Okay. So I'm going to read a passage which is about a London tube train. It's the Bakerloo line, and this is the line that Kitty Grammont and Ivy Delmer take when they get off their commuter train that lands at Marylebone and they get from the Bakerloo line and go to the center. 

The carriage was full of men and women going to their places of business. There were tired young men, lame young men, pale and scarred young men, brown and fit young men, bored and blase young men, jolly and amused the young men, and nearly all, however brown or fit or pale or languid or jolly or bored, bore a peculiar and unmistakable impress stamped, faintly or deeply, on their faces, their eyes, their carriage, the set of their shoulders. 

There were, among the business men and girls, women going shopping, impassive, without newspapers, gazing at the clothes of others, taking in their cost, their cut,  their colour. This was an engrossing occupation. Those who practice it sit quite still, without a stir, a twinkle, a yawn or a paper, and merely look all over, up and down, shoes to hat... They are a strange and wonderful race of beings, these gazing women; one cannot see into their minds, or beyond their roving eyes. They bear less than any other section of the community the stamp of public events. The representatives of the type and the Bakerloo this morning did not carry any apparent impress of the Great War. It would take something more than a great war, something more even than a food crisis, to leave its mark on these sphinx-like and immobile countenances. Kingdoms may rise and fall ,nations may reel in the death-grapple, but they sit gazing still, and their minds, amid the rocking chaos, may be imagined to be framing some such thoughts as these: "Those are nice shoes. I wonder if they're the ones Swan and Edgar have at 30 shillings. She's trimmed her hat herself, and not, well. That skirt is last year's shape. That's a smart coat. Dear me, what stockings; you'd think anyone would be ashamed. These women had not the air of reckless anticipation, of being alert for any happening, however queer, that, in differing degrees, marked the majority of people in those days. For that, in many, seemed the prevailing note; a series of events so surprising as to kill surprise, of disasters so appalling as to numb horror, had come and gone, leaving behind them this reckless touch, and with it a kind of greed, a determination to snatch whatever might be from life before it tumbled again into chaos.

KIM: I was hoping you would read from that part. It's such a great way to set up what's going on here, showing it in the microcosm of this little car in the train. 

KATE: And it's so modern. This is modern transportation that we have today. Every one of us listening has sat in a train, and thought, "What's she got that on for?" Or "Where'd she get those shoes from?" It's just so human. 

KIM: Yes. 

KATE: And it's a hundred years old. It's fabulous.

AMY: And this idea of, "Okay, we got through that war." The Ministry of Brains, what they're trying to do is make sure that society never has to go through that again, ironically, because we know that they will be having to.

KATE: Yeah. 

AMY: As we get into the book we're dealing with these unwanted babies and controlling who can have babies with whom. The satirical tone of all that reminded me a lot of Jonathan Swift's essay, "A Modest Proposal." I don't know if either of you guys are familiar with that.

KATE: I am not. I know Swift, but I'd never read that one.

AMY: Okay. He wrote an essay that was his idea of solving poverty in Ireland. And he was like, "I have a great idea, guys. We need to just start eating Irish babies. Let's turn them into delicacies." Just the way she approaches, it reminds me of his version of satire. 

KATE: What's interesting is that Sarah Lonsdale, in the introduction to our edition, she points out that Macaulay pulls the reader along with her along this logical train of thinking. Well, of course, if we're going to stop people breeding, we have to have a penalty. Then what happens to the babies? Well, they die. And this is slipped past the readers' consciousness. You're going nod, nod. Yeah. Whoa!!! Wait a minute. 

KIM: Yes. exactly. 

KATE: It's so clever.

KIM: Yeah, 

AMY: She's messing with you a little bit, because I did find myself wishing at times, you know, especially around election time, if we just had a smarter, more educated base of voters, this would solve a lot of our problems. So, Macaulay's criticizing government overreach, but she also is kind of poking fun at the idiocy of the common man in certain places, too. 

KATE: Yeah.

AMY: And Lonsdale, in the introduction, she says that "Macaulay's refusal to come down on one side or the other forces the reader to work hard at asking what their own viewpoint is." The characters in What Not do this as well. So it seems like a lot of the civilians are willing to go along with it, right? They're fine with it until it gets to the point where it actually impacts them. And therein lies the problem. 

KIM: Yes, exactly. And to that point, Kitty ends up having an affair with her boss. He's the Minister of Brains, a man named Nicholas Chester. And it's not just the fact that he's such a high-ranking public official that makes their relationship verboten. It's the fact that Nicholas is classified as "uncertified" due to his family background. He's not supposed to marry or have children with anyone, even though he is very intelligent himself. But Kitty and Nicholas are madly in love, and this leaves them in a quandary. Do they or do they not flout the very rules they are touting and expecting everyone else to follow?

AMY: And yeah, while I was prepping this episode, I see the headline in the news that Boris Johnson, prime minister for England, is issued a fine for breaking the lockdown rules during the pandemic. Instantly I thought of Nicholas Chester you know? The rules are for everyone but the people in charge. And of course we have politicians here in the United States who have been caught for similar sort of hypocrisy. Um, but in terms of Kitty and Nicholas having their unsanctioned affair, that gets us back to Rose Macaulay and what did you say his name was? 

KATE: Gerald O'Donovan.

AMY: Okay. Which we already kind of touched on a little bit, um, but I don't know if you have anything further to say.

KATE: Well, the thing is, Gerald O'Donovan's wife really liked Rose, and Rose was frequently a guest at their home. She became a godmother to one of their daughters. I have no idea how Beryl O'Donovan did not realize what was going on. Um, Gerald O'Donovan and Rose went on holidays together in Britain and abroad. So they carried on their relationship discreetly. She had her own flat in Marylebone and he could visit any time he wanted. She didn't have a servant on the premises. That meant that Gerald could come and visit Rose and stay overnight. And in her last novel, which was written long after Gerald had died, one of the subplots is that the narrator is in love with someone else who is married and it's a secret affair and then something dreadful happens at the end. And Rose is purely torturing herself with a reenactment of what she went through. Yeah, it's structured her life, this relationship.

AMY: It seems like some of her friends were shocked to hear about it after the fact. A lot of people painted her with, like, the spinster brush?

KATE: She did not look like a mistress. She was a stick insect. She was tall and skinny, not particularly pretty. She wasn't voluptuous. She wasn't a physically sensual sort of person in her appearance. Rose confided to possibly her closest sister and possibly also to a cousin, but until she died, nobody in her wider circle of friends knew that she'd had this long standing affair for about 20 years, except a Anglican priest who lived in the States, with whom she set up a correspondence in the last two or three years of her life. Because she was a really devoted Anglo-Catholic high church, and when she began the affair with Gerald O'Donovan, she decided she couldn't, in good conscience, take Holy Communion. And that was a great torment to her because she believed very passionately in her religion. So after Gerald died, um, I don't know when she went back to taking communion, but as part of the correspondence with this priest, they discussed the religious aspects. He encouraged Rose to go back to church, and she reports to him her great joy and pleasure of being in the church again. And then she dies, and her biographer, who was also her literary executor, a very remarkable woman called Constance Babington Smith, she published the correspondence between Rose and the priest, with his permission, and thus the affair came to light. So when these were published a couple of years after Rose died, her literary establishment was in a furor because a Dame of British literature, Dame Rose Maaulay, to find out had this secret affair with a married man and an ex- Catholic priest. And she's a big, big name in the Anglo- Catholic community, and an Anglo- Catholic priest broke the secrets of the confession, in effect. So you've got all these taboos being broken, and then underneath all that, you've got this probably quite personal response of, "Why didn't I know? Why did not Rose, who was my great friend for years and years, why did she not ever tell me about this affair?"

KIM: Yeah. And here it is, she's been writing about it, and nobody saw it. 

KATE: Absolutely. Yeah. So a lot of people were really upset, and Constance Babington Smith was really criticized for making these letters public. 

KIM: Fascinating. 

AMY: And you can see why in What Not, you know, Kitty and Nicholas are so worried about their affair coming out, because everyone would be having the same reaction that we're having right now to her affair.

KATE: Absolutely. It's such a foretelling of the thoughts and the deeply hurt feelings and the social codes being broken in all sorts of ways. So Rose knew right at the start what the stakes were. And she wrote about it in his novel, which then disappeared because of commercial reasons. I don't think she ever wanted to suppress it, but for commercial reasons, this novel did not do well. The secret of her affair was kind of buried, which is so strange.

KIM: Very strange. That's fascinating. There's so many fascinating aspects to her story. So let's talk a little bit about the influence the media plays, and it plays an important role in this novel. Um, it's a theme that Macaulay ends up diving into more in the next novel. She wrote Potterism, which is another book available from Handheld Press. We're obviously still talking about the power and influence of the media today, not to mention social media. Kate, do you want to tell us a little bit about Macaulay's particular interest in this subject? 

KATE: Well, even in 1916, she was writing very critically about the media, so in Non-Combatants and Others in 1916, her pacifist novel, she is really concerned about the way the wartime newspapers and the Defense of the Realm Act, which was the censorship law if you like, we're controlling the way people responded to the war and how news about the war was being disseminated. In What Not, the newspapers get hold of the story about Chester and Grammont. And this is what the libelous passages were about, because in the novel, a tabloid editor goes to see Nicholas Chester in his home and says, "Okay, I know you're having an affair, admit it," and Chester doesn't. But the reason why the publisher got very worried about this section was that it takes the view that this is what the tabloid newspapers do all the time: they blackmail people. And this was liable. Um, and also at the time there were two very, very important newspaper magnates in Britain who would have taken immediate offense, and they had a huge amount of money and could have completely sued this publishing company too high heavens. So that's why the passages were pulled. So Macaulay makes the power of the press not only an agent of truth, but also an agent of manipulation the same way the Ministry of Brains is an agent of manipulation. The press is not necessarily the bad guy. In a way the press is doing the right thing by revealing hypocrisy by a public figure. But it's also doing a terrible thing to two human beings who just want to love and be happy. So you've got two sides there and this is Macaulay absolutely through and through. She does not take a side. She says this and then there's that, and you decide. You can make the decision, because I'm just going to give you the facts. 

AMY: And she almost has like an anthropologist's point of view in how she's sort of dissecting what sorts of people read what sorts of publications. 

KATE: Yeah. 

AMY: But my favorite was Stop It. A magazine called Stop It, which I honestly, if we could just have one newspaper that would put everybody in their place, like, "Stop it, stop it with that." Um, yeah, I think that's brilliant.

KIM: Me too. I love that. So can you talk to us a little bit more about how this book is said to have possibly influenced Aldous Huxley's Brave New World? 

KATE: So Brave New World was published 14 years after What Not. Um, and Aldous Huxley uses a system of classifying people by grade that reflects their intelligence and also the nutrients they were given in their test tubes. This grade is bad. This grade is good, and so on. And each grade are given different brainwashing routines, if you like. So he uses alpha double to Epsilon minus; that's his different grades. And those are Greek letters. Rose Macaulay uses a similar grade, but she just goes A to C3. That's one of the big similarities between the two novels. Other interesting facts: Huxley was a friend of Rose Macaulay, and at the end of the war, she was renting a room in her friend Naomi Royde-Smith's house. So they have lots of parties. Aldous Huxley went to those parties while Rose was writing What Not. So that's circumstantial evidence. Huxley also uses Rose's mind training program that citizens are obliged to go and do by the Ministry of Brains, whereas Huxley creates his as emotional engineering. So he uses the idea of the population are obliged to go through propagandistic training in both novels. The societies are controlled by a shadowy elite. Rose has, um, a United Council, which takes the place of all the governments of the world. And Huxley has the World Controllers. So that was interesting. He's pinched quite a lot. And he did not acknowledge Rose in the slightest. George Orwell is routinely trotted out as someone who was also influenced by What Not. Personally, I cannot see it. But Orwell had probably read it and maybe he enjoyed it. Maybe he pinched an idea and then reworked it massively. In literature, ideas get recycled all the time, and it's quite dangerous to say, "this must be a completely different thing from that," or "this must be a borrowing from this." It's more useful to say, "Well, what did they do with it?"

AMY: Yeah, that makes sense. You can see how different people would kind of come to the same conclusions about government. Um, which brings me to my next point, which is the fact that she wrote this before the rise of fascism and Nazi-ism, it makes you realize, she was kind of prescient, and she even says in her kind of forward to the book, she said, "I'm not trying to make predictions, I'm making suggestions." 

KATE: Yeah, it was way too early to predict anything like National Socialism or fascism, but she wasn't stupid. She was politically very astute and she knew about the patterns of history. One of her forebears, I think her grandfather or great-grandfather was Thomas Babington Macaulay. He was one of the greatest historians Britain had. So she would have been brought up not only on the legend of her grandfather Macaulay, but she would have read his histories. And she studied history at university, so she knew about the patterns of political movements and the way that, you know, empires rose and fell. And she could not possibly predict fascism, but I think she could predict that something bad's going to happen, because we've been through one cataclysm and Germany's in a really, really bad way. And economic devastation is going to lead to really bad politics. I think that's what she might've assumed.

AMY: Right. The idea of we're in a vacuum now, and something has to fill the vacuum and yeah.

KATE: Hmm. 

KIM: Macaulay's final novel is widely considered to be her masterpiece. It's called The Towers of Trebizond, and it examines the conflict between adulterous love and the demands of the Christian faith. Ding, ding! It goes right back to what you were saying earlier about Rose Macaulay. Now that I know about her own affair, the subject matter for this book  Towers of Trebizond, um, it becomes an even more interesting choice for her. The narrator in that one is a woman who travels with a group of people, including, uh, the narrator's Aunt Dot, who is supposedly based on Macaulay's friend, Dorothy L. Sayers. And they go to Istanbul, and it won the James Tait Black Memorial prize in 1956. It's a madcap farce. It's very smart and very funny.

AMY: And then a year later in 1957, McCauley was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Um, she died at the age of 77, however, the following year. And incidentally Macaulay was acquainted for decades, I think, with the author, Rosamond Lehmann whom we did an episode on last year. And I read that Lehmann apparently had thrown Rose a little celebration party after she was appointed Dame or however you call that. 

KATE: When she received her damehood, I think 

AMY: When she received her damehood. Okay. but it does sound like they were maybe kind of frenemies. And this goes back to the fact that Rose Macaulay had written a not completely unkind, but not glowing review of Dusty Answer decades earlier. In that review, she said "the only question, Judith, who is the main character of Dusty Answer asked of life was 'does he or she love me?'" And given how many big, important meaning-of-life questions Rose is asking in her novels, you can kind of understand where she would have had that criticism.

KIM: I guess if she took it that way though, I felt like there was a lot more going on there then I guess Rose Macaulay. 

AMY: Well, but I mean, Rosamond's books definitely did not have the scope of, you know, it was a love story at the end of the day. 

KATE: Yeah. 13 years is a long time to carry a grudge for a slightly critical review.

AMY: Maybe they got over it. Like I said, she threw her a party, so... 

KIM: It reminds me of, uh, Mary Taylor. She was friends with Charlotte Bronte and rebuked her for not having a doctrine to preach in Jane Eyre. She thought Jane Eyre was too light. 

KATE: This is one of the reasons I like Rose Macaulay so much is that emotional attachments are strong for her, but her novels are never just about a woman sitting at home being vulnerable because she's not married. They're about far more: social history. There are intellectual questions. There are problems about human behavior and the way society is made up. And what can we do about changing it to make it better? So much more is happening. She took her fiction seriously. It wasn't campaigning literature; she wanted it to entertain, it's always enjoyable. And she exercises her wit and her very dry humor a lot in her novels, but it's never just about romance. 

KIM: We wanted to find out how things are going over at handheld Press. We're so fascinated with what you're doing there. Is there anything specific that you look for when you're deciding whether or not to bring back a lost book?

KATE: Um, the first criteria is I have to absolutely love it. The second criterion is I have to think it will sell. And many of Rose Macaulay's novels I don't think will sell so that's why I haven't brought them out. Because we can't afford to have a dud. We can't afford to print a book, especially with paper prices absolutely rocketing at the moment, so we have to be very careful. I'm also very interested in the kind of books that aren't supposed to be written. So Rose Macaulay writing science fiction. She did it once, with What Not; didn't do it ever again. I find that really interesting. We published a book by Margaret Kennedy who was a very well-respected playwright and novelist, but during the Second World War she wrote a memoir in 1940 from her diaries. And at that time, nobody knew if Britain was going to be invaded by Germany. So she sent this memoir to the States and it was published by Yale University Press and then promptly vanished from sight and was never published in Britain. And we republished it, and that helped bring Margaret Kennedy back into fashion last year. I love to publish discoveries that people have completely forgotten. So in November, we're bringing out two books by the Welsh writer John Llewellyn Rhys who died in the war, Second World War, at the age of 29, having written two novels. His widow put together a collection of short stories that he had already written. It won a prize, and then he vanished from sight. Nobody knew about his books. They're really hard to get hold of, but we're bringing out all his works in two volumes in November, and they're just amazing. You've heard of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry? John Llewellyn Rhys is the British de Saint-Exupery. He is an absolute discovery. I could not be more excited about him. So that's what we're doing in November. I mentioned Latchkey Ladies by Marjorie Grant, which is a 1921 novel about single women living and working in London and exploring their new social and economic freedoms, but also running the risk that every woman runs: getting pregnant. And somebody gets pregnant. And that got such a great review in The British Times, it's done really well. Next week, well, in May we publish a lost Australian writer, Helen de Guerry Simpson. Supernatural short stories. We do a lot of classic supernatural short story anthologies. Our first collection was called Women's Weird and its successor was Women's Weird II. And then we're producing single collections by some of the writers from those anthologies. We publish about six, seven books a year. And in June, on June 10th, we will be five years old, which feels amazing.

AMY: And how many books have you released in those five years?

KATE: We will by then have published 31.

KIM: That's incredible. 

AMY: It sounds like a lot of work, but I can imagine you must love it.

KATE: I do. It's the best job I've ever had.

AMY: That's amazing. And I just love that you're bringing us all these wonderful writers that we wouldn't have known about. I can't wait to read some more. And we also hope that maybe you'll come back again and join us to talk about them in the future.

KATE: I would be delighted. That would be really nice. This has been such fun. Thank you so much for asking me to take part.

AMY: So we'll sign off now, but don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter where we'll occasionally be giving out sneak peek info on which books we'll be featuring in future episodes. 

KIM: And as always, you can check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of the show and further information.

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

90. Literal Beach Reads

Kim: Hi, everyone! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew, here with my writing partner and longtime friend Amy Helmes…

AMY: Hey, everyone. Welcome to summer, if you’re listening to us in real time! My kids are just about wrapping up school and people are gearing up to go on some fun summer vacations. Maybe even to the beach! What are your thoughts on the beach, Kim? Love it? Hate it?

KIM :I love to read on the beach, under a big sun hat or an umbrella. I'm not, you know, like a beach person per se. I never thought I was until I moved to LA, and then I learned to find my place at the beach, which is, yeah, under a sun hat, with a really good book. 

AMY: Do you know that when I first moved to LA, I lived on the beach basically? 

Half a block from the beach. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: I just had to walk out my front door and I was there. Boom. 

KIM: Yeah. And remember when we first met, I lived in Santa Monica.

AMY: That’s right! I forgot!

KIM: So it was like half a block from Casa Del Mar, which is like a “Downton-esque” hotel, and Shutters on the Beach, which is where everyone has brunch.  And I used to go work in Casa Del Mar; I would write there. So I would work on whatever, you know, writing I was doing, by the fireplaces at the Casa Del Mar. 

AMY: I can’t believe you just segued to a fireplace. That kind of explains your and I, our relationship to the beach. 

KIM: That's our aesthetic.

AMY: We're not exactly California girls, even though we live here. Part of it, I just, I hate having to get all the sunscreen on. If they could invent another way. Like, if you could just take a pill and then suddenly you were protected with SPF, that would be a game-changer. But just applying everything to my pasty white skin is just, it's almost not worth the effort sometimes. 

KIM: Definitely not. And I love winter layering, but anyway, I'm getting off on a tangent. Yeah, I'm not going to be anti the beach and I'm not going to be anti this episode. 

AMY: But we're just, we're not quite, you know, the Beach Boys’ kind of vision for…

KIM: No. Amy, you at least are blonde. So you have that going for you. But we are both really, really pretty pale. We get sunburned so easily.

AMY: But I will say before we started doing this episode, Kim and I realized that we were both huge Gidget fans.

KIM: Oh yeah. I love Gidget. I watched Gidget reruns. I watch movies. I loved Gidget. 

AMY: Yeah, we didn't have cable TV growing up. And for some reason on like the three channels that we got in the summertime, they would run tons of Gidget. So yeah, I liked the, um, Doris Day movie and I liked the Sally Field TV show. I can still sing the theme song. Um, yeah, but I know you had read the books 

KIM: I had some of the books. I don't know if I had all of them, but one of our family things that we would do on the weekends would be to go to garage sales and look for, um, old books.  And so I collected  the Gidget series of old books. So I didn't have all of them, but every time I found a Gidget book, I would get it.  I mean, the books, the TV show, the movies, you can't get more wholesome than Gidget. So, you know, I was reading them pretty young, but…

AMY: And that book and the film and the TV series all kind of sparked 

surfing in the United States. 

KIM: I know how crazy is that? 

AMY: Yeah, so basically this guy, Frederick Kohner, I'm not sure how you pronounce his last name,, he was a Czech screenwriter in the German film industry, but he wound up immigrating to Hollywood in 1933  and he was inspired to write the book Gidget after watching his teenage daughter, Kathy and her friends  who were all, um, kind of getting involved in this nascent surf culture in Southern California.  So that book, the first book came out in 1957.  I don't know how many sequels there were, but it was very popular.

KIM: Yeah. And to people who don't know what the heck we're talking about, a very young Sally Field played Gidget in the TV series. 

AMY: So cute and Moondoggie and the Big Kahuna. Oh my gosh. 

KIM: Yeah, adorable. Yeah.

AMY: Love it. 

KIM: Yeah. But if you have plans to go to the beach this summer, maybe with a good book, we’ve got some recommendations for some  “beach reads” to get you all imagining the sand between your toes. Can you feel it?

AMY: Yeah. But I almost think that the selections we're going to be giving today are not your typical  light, page-turner beach reads — at least not all of them. 

KIM: It wouldn’t be us if they were your typical beach reads.

AMY: Yeah. I think there's gobs of popular fiction that said at the beach,  but what we're going for are the English major, literal beach books;  novels that are somehow set by the sea, the beach, the shore.

KIM: Yeah, we're taking it literally. “Beach reads literal.” 

AMY: So anyway, we’re going to go ahead and share some of our beach recommendations; you know, books set in beachy environments, And I think KIm, let’s just sort of toss it back and forth like a game of beach volleyball. You want to do it that way?

KIM: Yeah, I like it. I mean, I’m terrible at beach volleyball, but I can do this, sure. Let’s do it.

AMY: It’s a verbal sport. So let me get to my list. I got a few, but, um, I'll share my first one would be Jill Eisenstadt's From Rockaway. And the reason I chose this is because it hearkens back to the "Once Upon a Time at Bennington College" podcast, Kim, which we talked about at the beginning of the year how much we love that podcast. So Jill Eisenstadt went to Bennington College, and this was the novel that she wrote while the other writers there were having their big hits; this was her debut novel. And it is set in Rockaway Beach, as you can tell from the title. It's kind of, if I were going to describe it, it's kind of a mashup of "Jersey Shore" meets Catcher in the Rye.

KIM: Oh, I love that description! That's great!

AMY: I mean, they're not in Jersey, but  it's kind of like a group of recent high school graduates, kind of knuckleheads. They get up to all kinds of shenanigans. It starts at prom senior year, and then it kind of goes through the summer. A bunch of them are lifeguards on the beach. A few of the girls work at the little  amusement park right on the beach there.  Um, and then a couple of the characters go off to college. The main girl who I would guess is sort of based on Eisenstadt's own life, she goes off to college at a place called Camden College, which is very reminiscent of what I think Bennington was like. It  switches back and forth between her college experience and the experience of the guys that did not wind up going to college or sort of stayed back home.  And I say "Jersey Shore" meets Catcher in the Rye because there's a lot of imagery of like the end of childhood and lamenting that. And also children needing to be saved, a theme that's also in Catcher in the Rye sort of thing. So very beachy. Makes you feel very sticky, hot, sandy and drunk, because they’re drinking all the time.

KIM: Okay. I like it. It sounds good. Um, so I'm going to go in a different direction with a novel called Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead.  I'm a fan of his work. He's the author of The Underground Railroad, which I'm sure a lot of our listeners have either read or know about. And he likes to experiment with genre so he has a zombie novel Zone One and the recent Harlem Shuffle is a noir mystery thriller. That's really great,  but I don't think I've ever read his novel Sag Harbor.  It's about a teenager spending his summer in a black enclave in a predominantly white town. I'm definitely adding it to my list of summer reads. Have you read it, Amy? 

AMY: No, I haven't.  And you're right. That sounds interesting, and also, I can't think of a lot of books set at the beach that feature a Black experience either. So that's interesting. Okay. Um, I'm going to jump to what I would call my kind of "desert isle" reads. And I'm just going to throw a few in here: The Beach by Alex Garland. If you remember, that book was turned into a movie in like the early Nineties or something starring Leo DiCaprio, right? It's like a bunch of tourists, like young Gen X tourists that decide to start this commune on the beach, in like a deserted island.

KIM: Radiohead is probably in the soundtrack.

AMY: Oh yeah, probably. Um, and of course things go awry in the same way that, you know, in Lord of the Flies things go awry in that.  And that Lord of the Flies mention also makes me think of a book called A High Wind in Jamaica, which is by  the author Richard Hughes. Have you ever read that, Kim? 

KIM: No I've heard it, but I never read it. Tell me about it. 

AMY: Okay. I'm going to do a mashup comparison again. This one is Goonies meets Pirates of the Caribbean meets Lord of the Flies.

KIM: Ooh. 

AMY: I say Goonies as if it's some sort of mad-cap fun, and there is humor in it, but it is twisted and dark and there's some really upsetting parts. It's not a children's book, but once again, like Lord of the Flies, there's a murder. Things go really bad. Um, that book came out in 1929 and supposedly  served  as a bit of an inspiration for William Golding when he wrote Lord of the Flies. So...if you haven't read that one... but yeah, lots of pirates  so it's a little Treasure Island-y too, uh, basically some English families  live in Jamaica  and there's a kind of hurricane that destroys their home. So the parents decide to send the kids back to England on a ship, thinking they're going to be safe. Well, that ship gets hijacked by pirates, and so the kids wind up on a pirate ship and have to fend for themselves. And yeah.

KIM: Yeah, that does remind me a little bit of Treasure Island and  Swiss Family Robinson. When I was in, I think the first grade, those were some of my favorite books. I loved those seafaring adventure books. 

AMY: Yes.

KIM: Um, okay. So I was gonna mention Patricia Highsmith; The Talented Mr. Ripley --  it's obviously a classic, but if we're going to keep talking about more dark beach reads, what about Death in Venice by Thomas Mann?  Would you consider that a beach read? 

AMY: Or Tomas MAHN... I feel like if he's German, it should have that sort of yes, but we're American. So, um, I think, yeah, what I remember from that is  the narrator goes to the Lido a lot.

KIM:  Yes. And he would hang out there and look longingly at the boy that he was in love with. 

AMY: Yes. Yes. I've never been to the Lido.  That feels very sophisticated 

KIM: Yes. I haven't been to the Lido either. I've always thought I would get back to Venice again and I haven't yet.

AMY: It's probably touristy now. I mean, it's probably, I don't know if we'd like it or not, since we're not super beachy. 

KIM: Yeah. We'd have to go check it out in the winter when no one was, there 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: It would be a different vibe but.

AMY: I feel, yeah, the idea of it sounds glamorous and I do remember that portion of the novel, so, yeah.  Okay. Um, So my last pick, A High Wind in Jamaica, I did clarify was not really appropriate for children, I  don't think.  Um, but  my next choice is actually a children's book.  It's called  The Penderwicks at Point Mouette. 

KIM: I love that title. 

AMY: Yeah, so it's not that old. It was written in 2011, but if you know the Penderwicks series, um, it's by an author, Jeanne Birdsall,  those books feel really old-fashioned,  in a quaint way. They feel like they could have been written in the forties. Um, it's a series about a group of sisters and in the Penderwicks at Point Mouette, they are summering on the beach, you know, for the duration of this book. If you love the Betsy-Tacey books, you'll love this one. 

KIM: Great. 

AMY: It's a girly book, because they're sisters, but there is a brother, I think. And Jack and Julia both liked these books. So.

KIM: Um, okay. So Amy, you probably guessed I was going to bring up this book that I'm going to talk about next, because I've been  raving about it, I think, for like a year or two, since I first read it.  It's called A Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff. It was published in 1931. But Persephone books has republished it and it is terrific.  Amy, I can't remember. Did you get a chance to read it? 

AMY: No. I remember you recommended it on that "Bennington" episode that we did.  It does sound like it's up my alley. I just haven't had time with all the other books we have to read. 

KIM: It's written by a man. RC sheriff is a man, so we don't have much time to read male authors because we're so busy reading lost ladies. 

AMY: Yeah. Uh, but I do want to read it. Do you have it? 

KIM: I do. I'll give it to you. Yeah, I'll give it to you. It's short and it's, um, you know, a pretty quick read, but so I'll talk a little bit more about it. It's about a working family's vacation to the seaside for two weeks. Thus the title A Fortnight in September.  Nothing much actually happens, but it's so beautifully poignant and about just the day-to-day experience of living.  And I read it, I think, near the beginning of the pandemic, and it really got me in the gut. So listeners, if you haven't already read it, I can't recommend it enough. Go get it. Go read it. 

AMY: Okay. I'm going to have to squeeze it in. Um, the next one I'm going to mention, I actually have not read, but I have watched the PBS series that is based on these books. It's the Corfu Trilogy by Gerald Durrell. Um, his brother  is the novelist Lawrence Durrell who wrote The Alexandria Quartet. But this series by Gerald is basically autobiographical about when  the family, led by their single mom, moves to Greece.  My Family and Other Animals is the first book in the series. So I have to read them because a friend of mine raves and says they're so funny. And I love the series on PBS.

KIM: I need to watch that. You said that was good. I haven't watched it, but it looks beautiful from what I've seen 

AMY: Yeah. And they're always at the beach because obviously they live on a Greek island, so.

KIM: Well,  let's go back to Italy now to Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. That's the 2012 novel set on the Italian Riviera. And it's loosely based on Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton,  their filming of Cleopatra. Have you read that one? 

AMY:I have. Yes. I don't think  they are here, but it reminds me of when I visited Cinque Terre in Italy. 

KIM: Oh, yeah. 

AMY: The sort of seaside towns they're in. I don't remember specifically, uh, you said the Italian Riviera. They kind of jump around to, um, different little towns as I recall. Yeah, there's some drama there. 

KIM: Yep. Yeah, it's really fun. Read. There's got to be drama if you're talking about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of course.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. Um, okay, my next book, Kim, I don't think you've read it and I'm halfway through it because it's a big, big, long novel.  I think you'd like it. It's called The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch. A lost lady of lit.

KIM: I love Iris murdoch. I have not read The Sea, The Sea though. 

AMY:I mean, I guess, yeah, she's not that lost; a lot of people know her, but I think this might be the first novel of hers I've read. It won the Booker Prize in 1978, so a big deal.  It's about this retired actor-slash-director in the British theater who has recently moved to a small seaside village in England, and he decides  he's going to write his memoir. It's like a novel-slash-memoir. And along the way,  I want to say ghosts of girlfriends past start, um, Influencing him. And there's something very Gothic about it all. The house that he lives in is on this like rocky outcropping overlooking the sea.  And it's almost like a haunted house.  It feels like a thriller, like something dangerous is going to happen.  I would call it a slow drip. You're just like, "Something's going to happen. Something's going to happen." And then stuff does start to happen.  There's lots of Shakespeare references throughout, because he is a former actor and he kind of compares himself to Prospero from "The Tempest." It's not your bright, sunshiny beach read, but it's interesting. And as I'm reading it, I'm like, "Oh, Kim would like this."

KIM: It sounds really good.  Um, all this talk of the ocean and cliffs and islands and everything. It has me thinking of a childhood classic. And I know you've read this. You know what I'm thinking about? Island... 

AMY: Islands of the Blue Dolphins!

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Yeah. I loved That book. That was one of my favorite books.

KIM: It's unforgettable. I mean, I haven't read it since I was a child, and I still remember viscerally the feeling of reading that book. It just, it sticks with you.  Um, the author's name, I had to look it up, it's Scott O'Dell. I didn't remember his name. The book was published in 1960. And if you haven't read it, probably a lot of you have, but if you haven't read it, it's about a 12-year-old girl who gets stranded alone for years off the coast of California. And it's actually based on a true story of a Nicoleno native Californian woman who lived alone for 18 years on San Nicolas island. It's one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California. Such a good book. 

AMY:I read that for the first time in fifth grade and I don't even think I knew it was based on a true story, but I have always, even as a little kid, I've always loved, um, kind of those sort of adventure, survival, alone-in-the-wilderness sort of stories. Like I love My Side of the Mountain. Now, I'm getting to mountain reads, but whatever, we'll get back to the beach in a second, but anything where somebody has to fend for themselves all alone, I love those sort of books. So I was obsessed with that book.

KIM: And how interesting? Well, it was written by a guy, um, but there are very few  books like that with a female heroine where they're in sort of an really scary adventurous situation  of course there's Anne of Green Gables and all that, which I love, but this is like really an adventure tale where she

AMY: Survival. Yeah, exactly. 

KIM: Survival! That's the exact word. She has to take care of herself on this island. 

AMY: There's another one like that. Julie of the Wolves. 

KIM: Okay. 

AMY: Julie of the Wolves was another one of my favorite books, and taking you to Alaska. So again, I'm getting like way off the beach theme here, like a glacier.  She is an Inuit girl and she's by herself. I don't remember how she got  all by herself  in the Tundra, but she has to study the wolves to figure out how to survive. So she's going to die unless she figures out how to feed herself. And so she starts watching the wolves and kind of becomes part of their pack. 

KIM: Oh, wow. That sounds so cool. 

AMY: I forget who the author of that one is. Let me just look it up really quick so we can say it. Oh, my gosh, that's by Jean Craighead George also! So Jean Craighead George is the one who wrote My Side of the Mountain.

KIM: Okay. Which I have heard of, and I don't think I've read. I think I might've seen  a movie version 

AMY: Oh, it's so good. It's like a boy on the mountain with a hawk. Um, but yeah, so Jean Craighead George also  wrote Julia of the Wolves. So that makes sense why I love it so much. Okay. And actually, Island of the Blue Dolphins, they're still reading in schools. Because my daughter in fourth grade was assigned that one. 

KIM: It doesn't surprise me, though. I mean, like we said, it's unforgettable, 

AMY: Yeah.  Um, okay.  My last pick, and I'm very excited for this because we're actually going to be featuring this story in a full episode here in a few weeks.  It's a nonfiction book called The Gilded Edge by Catherine Prendergast, who Is going to be joining us to talk about this story. I pick it for "beach reads," because it is set in an artists' community in Carmel-by-the-Sea, in California. And it's about a group of California Bohemians, including a last lady of lit, Nora May French, who we will be discussing. The book is so good. So, and actually, if you guys want to gear up for that episode, I would suggest you start reading it now.  

KIM: Yeah, I just started reading it. You had been raving about it and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. Now I'm reading it and it is absolutely fascinating. So I'm so excited. We're going to be talking to her soon.  So that's just our little roundup for this week. We know there are so many  books that we're leaving out, which begs the question for you, our listeners. What are your favorite novels in which beach settings factor heavily?  Email us or leave us a comment on Instagram letting us know.  We'd love to hear from you. 

AMY: And don't forget to tune in next week when we'll be talking all about the English writer, Rose MacAulay, and her satirical, dystopian novel, What Not.  Joining us will be publisher and academic Kate Macdonald for that discussion. 📍 

KIM: I cannot wait. Thank you for the five-star apple podcast reviews and Instagram shoutouts. They keep our spirits buoyant, if you will. 

AMY: Oh yeah, that's a good metaphor there! Um, our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced  by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew. 

89. Tess Slesinger — The Unpossessed with Paula Rabinowitz and Peter Davis

Note: Transcripts are generated, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

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

AMY HELMES: Hey everybody. Today we're back with another lost classic that deserves a spot on your nightstand. Tess Slesinger's 1934 novel, The Unpossessed, is a satirical portrait of Depression era left-wing New Yorkers. Extremely popular for a brief period, it was printed four times within a month of publication, making Slesinger a minor celebrity almost overnight. 

KIM: And we are lucky enough to have two incredible guests with us today. The author's son, Peter Davis, and cultural critic and professor Paula Rabinowitz. As you know, Amy, when I read this book a few years ago it immediately became a personal favorite. I'm kind of obsessed with the 1930s, both in books and in film. We've done a few episodes on books from that era, and we've learned a lot. 

AMY: Yeah, and we highly recommend you also go back and listen to our episode on Margery Latimer's book, We Are Incredible. Our guests on that show, Joy Castro, gave us a really great primer on Modernism while discussing that.

KIM: But back to The Unpossessed, I have the New York Review Books edition and it is now heavily annotated and highlighted. And I know yours is as well, Amy, right? 

AMY: Yeah. And in fact my daughter actually said, "Mom, your book has a beard," because it had that many Post-it notes sticking out of it. Almost every line of this novel stood out to me and made me think.

KIM: It's true. There are just so many great lines and passages in The Unpossessed. We have a lot to discuss, so let's read the stacks and get started.

[intro music]

AMY: So as Kim said, we have two guests today. Dr. Paula Rabinowitz is an author and professor emerita of English at the University of Minnesota. Her area of specialty is American materialist, feminist cultural studies. And she's the recipient of numerous awards, including a Mellon Fellowship, a Rockefeller residency at Bellagio, Italy, and a Fulbright professorship in Rome, and then Shanghai. She also wrote the afterword to a new collection of Tess Slesinger's stories out this month from Boiler House Press's Recovered Book Series. That collection is titled Time: The Present. 

KIM: And our second guest, Peter Davis, is a filmmaker, author, novelist, and journalist. His film, Hearts and Minds, about American military action in Vietnam, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1975. Peter, I believe you're our first Academy Award winner on the podcast, so we're very excited. As a reporter, he covered the US war in Iraq for The Nation. He's also written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, New York Woman, The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Times. His most recent novel, 2015's Girl of My Dreams, follows a young screenwriter in the 1930s when Hollywood, the Depression, and the Communist Party intersected powerfully in the American psyche.

AMY: You're actually the first relative of a "lost lady" that we've been able to have on, so very exciting. How does it feel to see the world taking such a renewed interest in your mom's work in recent years? 

PETER DAVIS: How it feels is thrilling. I'm delighted to see her rediscovered for a new generation. The work speaks to this generation, to the generation that is of not only my own children, but my own grandchildren.

AMY: Absolutely. 

KIM: We'd love to start the show off by giving our listeners some background on her, because I think it will lead nicely into our discussion of the book. Tess Slesinger was born into a Jewish family in New York city in 1905. Her mother was a welfare worker who later became a prominent psychoanalyst, which is kind of fascinating in its own right. We were even thinking about maybe doing a future mini episode on her. She sounds great. Slesinger's father was a dress manufacturer, and Tess was the youngest of four children. She had three older brothers. Incidentally, Amy, I found out while researching this episode, that one of her brothers created Red Rider, the comic book character that most of us probably know from the movie A Christmas Story.

AMY: "You'll shoot your eye out kid," right? Clearly we've got a creative family here. Peter, is there anything else that you happen to know that can round that out a little bit? 

PETER: Well, her father actually was kind of a ne'er-do-well, and one of the interesting things about that marriage is that my mother went east to be at their 50th anniversary in 1942. And the morning after that, my grandmother Augusta Slesinger, kicked him out of the apartment and said, "I never want to see you again "

AMY: After their 50th anniversary party? 

PETER: Yeah. The morning after the celebration. 

KIM: Oh, wow. 

PAULA RABINOWITZ: Well, Tess foresaw that all in many of her stories about the morning after the party. 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: That is incredible. So Paula, what else can you tell us about Tess's early years? 

PAULA: Well, um, she was born into a milieu that was part of the Upper West Side, upper middle-class and even very upper-class immigrant Jews who came mostly from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire. So this was a fairly established community. Uh, mostly they were quite secular, and she was educated at Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and then went to Swarthmore, and then went to Columbia. At Columbia, you know, she became part of a much larger group of left-wing Jewish intellectuals that I think we'll get into a little later. Much of her work draws on her autobiography. I mean, at some point she does say she's an inveterate liar. That's why she writes. 

PETER: My mother told me -- we had some pretty serious discussions, even though she died just after my eighth birthday -- but one of our discussions, I asked her, "Why are you a writer?" And she said, "Well, when I was late coming home for dinner, I would come in and tell tremendous whoppers. And they said to me, 'Okay, stop, stop. You don't need to lie. What you do is you make those stories, just write them and then there'll be stories.'" And so she said to me, "That's how I became a writer." 

KIM: That's wonderful. That's great. Um, at Columbia, Tess met and eventually married a classmate named Herbert Solow, and marrying Solow really opened up a whole new world for her. Can you tell us any more about that? 

PAULA: Well, um, the people who she hooked up with there were in the process of founding a magazine called The Menorah Journal, which is central to the novel The Unpossessed. And they were part of what are now known as the New York intellectuals. They're all aligned with the Left. These were people who were not, you know, necessarily part of the Communist Party milieu; they were maybe satellites of it. And some were students, some were faculty members at Columbia, or became faculty members, Lionel Trilling, and so forth. They were part of a anti-Stalinist side of the Left. And I think part of the reason that Slesinger's work is interesting, again, it's part of a resurgence that's going on. Unfortunately, we're living in a moment where, you know, we could be on the verge of World War III. People's livelihoods are very precarious. They don't have job security. I mean, we're not in a Depression, but I think there are reasons that there's a resurgent interest in the 1930s. 

AMY: Yeah. Kim and I have been doing several other novels from the 1930s for this podcast. I feel like I'm reading the morning newspaper and then I'm reading these novels and they're lining up in a scary way. And so we should also mention that Tess's marriage to Solow disintegrated. 

PAULA: I think that's the whole central, you know, point of The Unpossessed in a way. Um, I mean, it's almost written in real time as her marriage is coming apart at the seams.

KIM: Did you want to say something about that Peter too? 

PETER: Well, yes, because there was a political split between my mother and Solow too. My mother really did become a Communist. She would never, and my father, who also was a Communist, they would never call themselves Stalinists, but they were Communists. Solow was a Trotskyite, and that was a curse word among Communists. They used to say, "He's nothing but a Trot." Well, um, Solow, like a number of Trotskyites, took a fairly hard right turn, which was incredible. And Solow worked for Fortune magazine. Henry Luce, who was quite a right-winger, he hired a number of Trotskyites to work on his magazine.

PAULA: That's right. I mean, the Time Life Corporation, you know, Luce's corporation, Fortune, people were subverting things, you know, on the inside and they have many, many, you know, articles. about the Moscow subway station, as it was being built.

KIM: I had no idea. That's so interesting. Yeah. I had no idea.

PAULA: Everything is always more complicated than we think.

KIM: Sure, sure. 

AMY: Yeah. So needless to say. Having gone through this divorce, you know, all these complicated political things happening, she decides to write this novel, The Unpossessed. She's 29 years old. It's 1934. She basically uses her experiences among this radicalized Left and draws on all that for the book. And let's just say she doesn't pull any punches. So Paula, could you please give our listeners a little spoiler free summary of what The Unpossessed is all about? 

PAULA: Well, what's great about it is it really doesn't have much of a plot. It's really episodic, but it follows a kind of dual track of the Establishment and this dream of this left wing magazine that was going to be a home for these intellectuals who could critique Capitalism and so forth. And that's sort of the story of The Menorah Journal, which started in the late Twenties. And I should say my father-in-law published a poem in there. 

AMY: Wow!

KIM: I love that connection. 

PAULA: Furthermore, he and Tess shared the same literary agent, Max Lieber, who was probably a Soviet agent, but anyway, that's another story. Um, and then the other track is following the sort of disintegration or the problematic relationships of these three couples, two of whom are married, one is cousins of each other who have a kind of incestuous sort of desire for each other, and then sort of an orbit of people around them. And it's written almost like a rondo. It's very indebted to Stefan Zweig, so that each chapter will feed into another chapter. Even though they're on very different subjects, she will use a verb or she will use some gesture like in Hollywood of a door opening to introduce the next character or the next scene and so forth. So it's beautifully structured, which I have to say, I wrote my dissertation in part on this novel and I just in reading it now picked up on all these things that she had done, it's so sophisticated, that I didn't pick up on, you know, 35 or 40 years, whenever that was, uh, too long ago. Um, it's kind of like Edith Wharton, cause it's about New York, meets James Joyce, meets Stefan Zweig and many, many things, like Preston Sturges's movies, pick up on many of the things that she's pulling off there.

AMY: I love that analogy. 

KIM: Yeah, me too.

AMY: And what you said about having found something new that you discovered about it, I absolutely feel that you could read it every year for the rest of your life and not find everything that she was intending. And to be able to have a professor here with us, this is what I need! I need you to walk me through some of it. It's so layered. 

KIM: Um, and in the introduction to the New York Review Books edition, the late great Elizabeth Hardwick actually compares The Unpossessed's fractured eloquence and polyphonic pages, that's what she calls it, to the serene and controlled works of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. 

PAULA: I should say that she's basically stealing that from Lionel Trilling's introduction from the 1964 papers.

KIM: Okay. So Lionel Trilling said it first. Okay. 

PAULA: She's in a way quoting him.

KIM: Perfect. Okay. So yeah, so we're adding Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield to our comparisons. I can see all of that. 

PAULA: I'm going to read a little section from early in the novel. You really get a sense of what Tess does so well. So she's always referring to actual things and objects and places and situations. So taxi cabs or going into the grocery store, the butcher or whatever. And then of course, those all have symbolic meaning. Then there's always the interior, you know, monologue of the characters. And then those are all being contained. In some larger social circumstance. There is hardly a paragraph that doesn't somehow refer to what's going on at the moment. It's set in 1932, so it's the Scottsboro Boys trials and the hunger march. Okay, so she, Margaret, she's one of the main characters, is in the kitchen with Jeffrey, one of the other main characters. They're not married to each other:

the reviews Jeffrey, tell me what they did to you. The reviews.

He said, obediently taking the sugar returned with characteristic absorption in his test. Idiotic as usual, his hands move, competently, opening bottles, all that economic drivel, you know, well miles subscribes to it and bring know too about my dot, dealing with social distinctions. When I'm concerned with life transcending class lines, where you hand me the lemons now, Maggie.

And anyway, thanks. I'm something of a mystic. He poured with an expert narrowing of the eye from a brown bottle into the cocktail shaker. They did speak of me though. Two of them, he numbered modestly and just studiously pushed the lemon peels back off the cocktail off. As America's DH Lawrence, more ice cubes tumbled in I'm terribly fed up with Grenadier and aren't you to hell with it.

And of course they missed my most symbolic meetings. I thought you were a Colombian earnest. She murmured and thought about how miles would add this week. She wished that miles, his ghost would stay outside with miles, arguing marks with Nora. Of course I'm a Marxist intellectual, I should say. He stirred and tasted, edit another spoon of sugar.

She wondered if his revolution existed just as cocktails did as something for Jeffrey to enjoy. And as a matter of fact, I have it on good authority that certain members of the left wing, you know, I'm pretty close to them. He paused and thought it's fine. Brow wrinkled. Oh, yes, I'm ready for the bitters. Maggie. 

AMY: Well you've read that beautifully. The action-packed pacing of everything she does. 

KIM: Yeah. And it encapsulates everything that we're talking about, like, what are these people doing? You know. It's very performative. 

AMY: She goes on a little bit after that to describe Jeffrey as synthetic cheese. 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: He can be spread thin everywhere, like a synthetic cheese. And I'm like, oh, that is totally Jeffrey! 

KIM: Paula, did you want to talk a little bit more? Maybe you already said what you wanted to say, but you were going to talk about the structure of the novel and its sentences. 

PAULA: Yeah, no, I can, I can go on forever about this. So these two couples, Jeffrey and Nora, um, and Maggie and Miles are having drinks together at Nora and Jeffrey's house. And Jeffrey is a serial philanderer, and he's been after Maggie for a while, but she keeps pushing him off. But she and Miles have just had a fight, so she's kind of succumbing to him a little bit. Anyway, they have a kiss in the kitchen and, um, just at the point that everything seems to be, I don't know, they don't know what to do with it, they mentioned Bruno, the third of the three men. And then the next chapter happens. There's a knock on the door and Bruno enters. And that is how the whole novel moves from the beginning to the end. It starts with wilted celery. Margaret has gone to Mr. Pappelmeyer's grocery store and is complaining because the celery is kind of wilted and, you know, she can't really bring this lousy celery home to her husband. She says, he's from New England after all, he's not gonna take lousy, soft celery. And the motif of vegetables and fruits kind of runs through the whole thing. So here we have them mixing the cocktails with the lemon. Later on in this big party celebration scene, there's people sort of literally stepping on top of the table that's laid out with pineapples and so forth. And at the very end there's this giant mishegoss that goes on over this fruit basket. This vegetable fruit metaphor that runs through the whole thing is indicative of things. And, you know, there are moments when someone is lying in bed and then the next chapter, somebody else is lying in bed, and it's just brilliant. 

AMY: I mean, the way you're describing that feels very cinematic too. Like I can see the filmmaker making those kinds of decisions. 

PAULA: I'm surprised it hasn't been made into a film yet. 

KIM: Oh, it would be a beautiful film. So The Unpossessed shines a light on society, but it's also a story about a marriage that's imploding. And actually the marriage plot, which revolves around whether or not a couple, the Flinders, will keep a pregnancy. It seems like she's trying to explore whether or not it's possible to be a radical and also have a happy home. Paula and or Peter, do you have any thoughts on this? 

PETER: Well, this desire to have a child that Margaret Flinders has conflicts with her husband's desire not only not to have a child, but to remain political, political, political. And so that last chapter that Paula referred to where fruit comes into it again after she's had a D&C, an abortion, that was also very true to life. That's exactly what happened. Uh, my father told me about this. As a political act, he refused to have a child 

AMY: This is Solow then? 

PETER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. No, no, no way. My father also told me some interesting things about the Unpossessed. There were two reviews in the Communist paper and the first one in The Daily Worker praised it. "This is a novel of the Left. It's terrific!" About a week later they realized it was a satire. And the second one condemned it. Well, long after that, I interviewed for something that I was doing, Earl Browder, who had been the head of the American communist party. I asked him, "Did you ever remember a novel called The Unpossessed that was written by my mother?" He said, "Oh, yeah. I'll tell you what that did. The Unpossessed was like a breath of fresh air, which we needed to have. It's always a good idea to be able to laugh at yourselves, but we didn't know that then." Anyway, that was Earl Browder.

AMY: I think that's exactly what she's doing, is nobody gets a break, you know? She's got a criticism for every group in this novel, um, you know, the bourgeoisie, but also the magazine people, themselves, the students. Nobody gets a free pass. 

KIM: No one comes off looking great. Yeah. 

PETER: Yeah. Nobody gets a free pass, but she also has sympathy.

KIM: Yes. 

PETER: My mother's prose, which was anything, but prosaic, really shows itself in this chapter called Elizabeth, which was the greatest breakup chapter. Elizabeth, also one of the alter egos of my mother, had been living in Paris with this guy. And I just want to read it because what's not said in this chapter is so important: why it's snow?

She did not exclaim with joy as she flew to the window for a first fresh breath of morning. Why it's my first Paris snow. She did not cry out as she threw back the curtains and let showers of snow reflected sun spatter, Denny, and the bid in glory. Oh, it's snowing. And maybe this is love and I don't want to leave you.

She could not help. Not saying again, not, not once, but not numberless times as she ran about the room, looking for stockings without holes. Oh, but I like it here with you, Elizabeth. He did not reply. Although he heard plainly every word she had not spelled. 

AMY: I'm so glad you read that. When I read the chapter, Elizabeth, I just put the book down for a second. I texted Kim and said, "That's the greatest breakup scene in all of literature," like you just said, Peter. Everybody can understand that concept of a couple breaking up and all the things that they are thinking, but they're not saying that could even, almost maybe salvage the whole thing, you know what I mean? I don't throw the word genius around too often, but yes, I mean, that was incredible. 

KIM: It gives me chills hearing it again. 

PETER: And then two chapters later, um, The Fast Express, which I'll just mention briefly, she's on her way home now and their copy of Ulysses is left on the floor crying. 

AMY: Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's weeping on the floor, which gets us back to James Joyce, right? 

KIM: Yeah, exactly. 

AMY: I was going to read a little bit from fast express just because, I mean, that whole chapter is exhilarating. So it's after the breakup with Dennis, um, she's basically on a ship home, back to America. She's going to go back to her cousin, Bruno, who has cabled her. Her thoughts are basically echoing this idea that she's on a metaphorical train. You can kind of feel the locomotive in her thoughts, you know? So I'm just going to read a little section. Oh. And I should mention that she sees a man kind of noticing her as she's having these signs: Love don't touch me. Love. Keep your hands off this proud modern daughter. Happiness girl, no brooding there. It's a matter of friction, of scientific friction. If you go sentimental, you have only yourself to blame. Don't be obsessed by inhibitions. Don't be possessed by old traditions. Ah, stranger. I see you at yon corner table. You know me. You know me as if I were naked. Haywire play, girl drink-sodden gay girl. Sel-fpity is the lowest form of wit, wit is the purest form of self-pity. I was tired of artists, artists. I'm tired of unloved lovers. Bruno, what is the object of my game? Hell-bent for what is my fast express, my jingling jangling cocktail express. Lust without love and joy without joy, we pound down the tracks on our sex express, no stopping, no loving, no time to take breaths. So I'll stop there, but I mean, you can kind of get the chug, chug chugging along that she's feeling, like I'm just going from one lover to another, like, what's the point? What's it all about? Yeah. Love it.

KIM: So that's Elizabeth, then we've talked about Margaret. There's also Nora. She's the wife of Jeffrey. He's a charming and rakish philanderer, but she's really complacent and maternal in the face of all of his obvious affairs. Paula, what do you think Slesinger is trying to show with these three different women?

PAULA: Well, I mean, interestingly, you say she's maternal, but she does not want to have a child. When Margaret says to her I'm pregnant, why don't we have kids? Nora looks at her and says "What are you, nuts?" Like, "No, I already got one in the form of my husband". But it's fairly clear that these three positions of the woman who takes care of her man and that's her job, the woman who wants to be a mother, but keep some kind of identity, and the woman who is, you know, the ex-flapper; the new woman. I mean, 1932 is only 12 years after women got suffrage in the United States. And while the discourse has always been that the second wave of feminism didn't really start until the Sixties, that is not true. As Bruno says, at some point in the novel, the most important revolution is the revolution between the sexes. So I think what she's looking at are these various dimensions of what it means to be female and the fact that there really is no way in a sense to reconcile them, given the constraints of the social world in which they live and the economic constraints. And so forth. 

AMY: And yeah, moving over to the men in this book, the fact that they're trying to do something important with this magazine, it's basically farcical, but then she also does have some empathy and affection for the men because they're each having their own existential crisis. Is there anything else Paula, you could add on that? 

PAULA: Well, the novel is mostly interested in terms of the interior qualities in the women, but I don't think she's just mocking these guys. I mean, I think she's trying to understand what is going on amongst a generation of men who don't want to participate in this kind of bourgeois world of business. They have this problem of where they say, "We're sterile. We don't know what to do." Because they're intellectuals. They spend their time thinking. They're more interested in the idea of the thing than the act. That's what Bruno keeps saying, you know, "Is there a magazine?" He doesn't really want there to be a magazine, because he'd rather think about the magazine than actually do the boring work of proofreading it. So I think she's trying to come to terms with a new kind of masculinity. She's sympathetically trying to figure out these guys. There's a kind of undercurrent of pathos there, but there's also a lot of mocking of everybody.

PETER: One of the things that Elizabeth Hardwick said in her introduction, which I think is very true, she referred to the characters in The Unpossessed as "conversational communists." So they not only weren't going to really start a magazine, they also weren't really going to foment revolution. They were conversational communists.

KIM: Like "Let's start a literary 'zine!" 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. 

KIM: I did that once. Anyway. 

AMY: Um, so the novel reaches its climax at this fundraising party thrown by the magazine's rich benefactress. All the characters in the novel come together. It's really brilliantly written and we have this character of Bruno who gave us a showstopping speech. Peter, do you want to talk about that? 

PETER: Yeah, Bruno, when he harangues the crowd, he goes on and on: "Listen, fellow bastards," roared Bruno unheard at the punchbowl. "Drink, drink with me. Up with your glasses, down with your hopes. To the Revolution!" I have to just say that in my own novel, which took place in 1934, all the characters are fictional except for one. And that's Bruno Leonard. Bruno Leonard, he walked out of my mother's novel, and I apologize in the notes at the end. I said, I think it's okay to steal from your mother. 

AMY: I love that Bruno lives again, 

KIM: Yes. Me too. 

PETER: Yeah, he does.

PAULA: In a way, he's probably the one who never died. I mean, he has these great lines: "We believe in nothing but aspirin and sex. The full bladder is our only goal. We sponsor sublimation, constipation, procrastination, masturbation, prevarication, adumbration equivocation." And he goes on and on and on. 

AMY: It's a great speech. Yeah. 

PAULA: But you would think the novel would end at this disastrous end of the party, but then there's this Part Four called Mrs. Flinders. And that's the scene of her leaving the maternity hospital after her abortion, which as she says to Miles when he is putting her into the taxi cab, "What's a D&C between friends?" Kind of a devastating line, because, she doesn't want to have this abortion, but after this party where it seems clear that there's no hope for communism or capitalism, it's all just falling apart, they say, well, how can we bring this child into this world? And the taxi driver is carefully driving because she's coming out of this hospital with this gigantic basket of fruit that Miles has brought her because he doesn't know what else to do. 

AMY: I love that you brought up the limp celery at the very beginning with the basket of fruit at the very end. I hadn't really thought of the limp celery as a euphemism until now. And I know what that stands for now. It makes a lot more sense 

PAULA: Because all through the novel, the word sterile or the word empty, or the word barren is running through it. 

AMY: Also like a hostility from the men towards the women because of their ability to create. We intrinsically create something with our bodies, whereas these men failed to create something intellectual.

KIM: They can't even get their magazine going. 

PAULA: Well, I mean, this novel is also coming in just 12 years after "The Wasteland." I mean, we're in the great year of the hundredth anniversary of "The Wasteland" and of Ulysses, of the two seminal works of Modernist literature in English. And you know, "The Wasteland" is all about those empty kind of cardboard boxes, our intellectual men. And so, you know, she's talking to a lot of different strains of literary and social and political discourses simultaneously, and you know, there's a real pathos to it because there doesn't seem to be a way to get out of it. The magazine's a wreck. All the relationships are wrecks. They don't have the baby. So it's like, "Well, what is there?" She, Tess, goes on to write this great novel about it. 

AMY: Yes. Yeah. And then also she has even further success in her career. So let's circle back to Tess's life, Peter, you know, her second act. Do you want to kind of share what she went on to do after writing The Unpossessed?

PETER: Well, she went to California, kind of summoned by Irving Thalberg, to write the script for Pearl Buck's novel The Good Earth. And there is someone in The Good Earth, a wife, as a matter of fact, who says, "Forgive me for dying." Well, one of the people who wrote her dissertation about my mother's work and she, at one time had wanted to write a biography, she called it, forgive me for dying, which is also a sadness about my mother. Anyway, she met my father, Frank Davis, in California while she was writing that screenplay. And he was a young producer at MGM. He hated producing, and so they then wrote screenplays together, the last of which was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

AMY: They were nominated for an Academy Award for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? 

PETER: They were nominated, and my mother had died by the time of the Oscars and they didn't win. 

PAULA: But can I just mention one of her other films that they worked on together, which was 1940's "Dance, Girl, Dance," which is a feminist classic of different women who are in different circumstances, but who are all connected somehow. In this case, through a dance troupe and then a burlesque show. And the remarkable scene towards the end of the film when Maureen O'Sullivan breaks the fourth wall and just speaks to the audience. This is at a burlesque show, these men are laughing at these women and coming to look at their bodies, but these women are professional dancers and they're just doing their jobs. And so it's a remarkable moment. It's about voyeurism, about exploitation, about patriarchy and so forth and, and about class and how, you know, women bond together as performers. 

KIM: I loved reading about that in your afterward to the new collection. I want to watch that movie. Is that available to watch? 

PAULA: Oh yeah.

KIM: Okay, great. I'm going to look for that. So, Peter, as you said, your mom sadly died from cancer at a very young age, 39. Such a young woman. She'd accomplished so much in such a short time. We're so sorry for your loss, and so honored to be able to get the word out about her incredible life and work. Although you were quite young when she died, do you have any other childhood memories of her that you'd be willing to share?

PETER: I can remember so many things. Both she and my father moved away from Los Angeles to a place about 60 miles east to what we called a ranch. Tiny. Seven acres, but we had animals, chickens, and pheasants and stuff, and grew a lot of things. And they did that because they both wanted to see what it was like to get away from the city, away from Hollywood and away from the Communist party. Now they didn't stop being Communists, but they got sick of the humorlessness of the party, and the fact that, as my father did tell me, that there was this hierarchy and within the hierarchy of the party, there was also snobbery. So it was just the same thing that you had in the capitalist world. But so, yeah, and I can remember, um, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, my mother very patriotically would become a lookout. You had to go to a particular place where you could see the sky very well. It was like a hill. And on this hilltop, they would be from midnight until 6:00 AM. They would take the midnight to 6:00 AM and my mother did that, and on other nights, my father did. Also, she was a beautiful swimmer for whatever that matters. And when she would dive into our pool, it was as though there was no wake at all. My father would dive and create waves all over, but when my mother dove, it was just a very clean dive. And they also would sometimes go in the pool without suits.

AMY: She was a new woman! 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: But you said your mom didn't make a splash when she dove into the pool, but she is making a splash now, in fact. This month we get to celebrate the release of a collection of her short stories called Time: The Present. Paula, can you tell us anything about this? 

PAULA: Well, the story about your mother being a great swimmer ties into the story in the collection that I find the most compelling, which is "Kleine Frau." It's about this young couple who are on their honeymoon in Austria. She's bought a dirndl and she's walking around in her native peasant costuming. And they come down from their hotel to the lake and there's all these local people staring at the water and it's because one of the children of one of the families has drowned. And it's all told from the point of view of the woman. Her husband has gone up to the shore and she's like "Really?" You know, she's this sort of petty annoyed, young woman, you know, privileged young woman, like "Why are these people doing this? I'm cold and where's this husband and what's going on?" And finally, when it's clearly determined that they're never going to get this boy who's drowned, the husband admits to her and says, "You know, I was a champion swimmer. I should have gone in the water and saved this boy." And she looks at him in sort of this incomprehending, what are you talking about? Because she's been angry at him in her head for not paying attention to her. And it's clear, at this moment at the end, that this marriage is already over. And I didn't realize that your mother was a great swimmer, but that sort of ties into this. And if you think about it, I mean, you know, people got married barely knowing each other. And many of the stories in this book are about the sort of tension in these young women who have gotten married and they're like 20, 21, 22, and they're still really tied to their mothers. And they've sort of left their mothers in order to marry these guys whom they barely know. I mean, they sort of met them and went out with them and got married to them and it's like, "Well, you know..."

KIM: "Now what do we do?"

PAULA: Exactly? 

PETER: One of the stories I really like a lot, and Paula mentioned this too in her afterward, is "The Times So Unsettled Are." It doesn't take too much of a reach for you to say that about today. 

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. We don't even have to state all the ways that there's the relevance between what we've been talking about and what's going on.

PAULA: Yeah. And again, it's really about the dissolution of a marriage, but it's also in the context of the politics of Austria and the destruction of the socialist government there as it's sort of eventually will become a welcoming zone for Nazis. 

PETER: The other story I want to briefly comment on is "On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover."

PAULA: The greatest title ever. 

KIM: It is! 

PETER: As my father pointed out, he was her second husband, and she didn't even know him when she wrote that! She wrote it while she lived in New York. She didn't have a second husband in New York! But once again, it's about infidelity in marriage, and she talks about in her first marriage, which was more kind of an open marriage, they were both unfaithful, but in this marriage only he gets to be unfaithful. So yeah, that is the patriarchy writ large. 

AMY: And listeners, I don't think we can stress enough how exciting it is that there's this new collection of stories out. And we have Boiler House Press to thank for that. It was released just this month.

KIM: Yeah. This collection is actually a really important companion to The Unpossessed book. I highly recommend readers who love reading The Unpossessed or are at all interested in Slesinger pick up this book as well. 

AMY: We also wanted to give a special shout-out to the man who was instrumental in the release of Time: The Present -- Brad Bigelow of Neglected Books. He was our guest from episode 59 on G.E. Trevelyan, you might remember, and he was actually kind enough to introduce us to our guests today. So thank you, Brad, for that. We appreciate you so much! And of course, Peter and Paula, it goes without saying that this has been truly a thrill and an honor. Thank you so much, both of you, for bringing your perspectives to the show.

PETER: Thank you. The thrill is mine. 

PAULA: I mean, I have to say Peter Davis has been one of my heroes since the Seventies, when his film came out. In fact, my other life is as a documentary film critic, and in part it's because of Hearts and Minds. So the fact that I get to not only talk about his mother, who was instrumental in one part of my life, but her son, who was instrumental in another part... I would never have contacted him personally. It's... I don't do that. 

AMY: I love it. I want you guys to be good friends now! 

PAULA: We intend to be! 

PETER: Well, yeah, so thank you, Amy and Kim. And Paula, lots of thanks to you, and it's a great pleasure to see you.. 

PAULA: Now this is what I feel. Thank you. 

KIM: Bye-bye 

AMY: So we'll sign off now, but don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter, where we'll occasionally be giving out sneak peek info on which books we'll be featuring in future episodes. You can get a jump on your reading if you're inclined to read along with us. Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.

88. Maud Wagner — Lost Lady of Tattoo Art

Join us as we learn more about the first known female tattoo artist in the United States, Maud Wagner. Born in 1877, Maud grew up to become a circus acrobat and, once most of her body was covered with tattoos, a walking exhibition unto herself. 

Discussed in this episode: 

Pride & Prejudice Temporary Tattoos by Litographs

Lily Rose at Wayfarer Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles

Dark Academia

Gibson-Girl hair

Maud Wagner

St. Louis World’s Fair 1904

Winston Churchill

Lady Randolph Churchill

Tattooed Lady: A History by Amelia K. Osterud

American Jennie: The Remarkable Life of Lady Randolph Churchill by Anne Sebba

Maud’s Circus by Michelle Rene

Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Cate Blanchett

88. Maud Wagner — Lost Lady of Tattoo Art

Note: Transcripts are generated, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM: Hi, everyone! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode, wherein we dive into another tangential topic that interests us. I’m Kim Askew, here with my friend and writing partner, Amy Helmes.

AMY: Hey, everyone. Kim, I think our regular listeners would be a little shocked to hear that we’re going to be discussing tattoos today. It doesn’t necessarily seem like us. Do you have any tattoos?

KIM: I do.

AMY: You do?!

KIM: You didn’t know that?

AMY: Uh, no! I don’t think I know…

KIM: Yeah, I think you knew. Because I’ve had it the entire time I’ve known you. I have it on my (actually I don’t remember) I think it’s my right hip, the upper buttock area. I have a heart with vines around it.

AMY: Well, I wouldn’t have seen that!

KIM: Well, no, with swimsuits or something. I mean, we don’t wear swimsuits that much. I don’t know why; we live in L.A. but we’re not swimsuit-type people. We’re more like fireside, tea people. So she didn’t know that I had one. I have a heart with vines around it that I got a long time ago. Anyway.

AMY: All right, you learn something new every day.

KIM: That’s hilarious. But Amy, what about you? I know you don’t have one; you don’t even have your ears pierced. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s not my aesthetic, but also I think the main reason really is that I would be too paralyzed by indecision to even know what I would want permanently emblazoned on my body. You know, I’ve thought about it. (I’ve never actually really thought about getting a tattoo, but I have, for fun, thought about what I would get if I were going to get one.) It would have to be a word or a quote or something, but how do you even begin to choose? I just don’t know.

KIM: Yeah, that’s the thing. I have a very spontaneous side, as you know. There wasn’t much thinking involved in my tattoo.

AMY: That makes sense.

KIM: But I never regretted it.

AMY: Okay, good, good. Now I will say, and I'm going to hold this up to the screen and show you…. I think, um, Meg who, you know, my old college roommate Meg, she gave me  temporary literary tattoos and I have yet to use them, but maybe I will put them on now that this episode is coming up and we can put pictures of my bicep on Instagram with my literary tattoo.

KIM: You should wear them to our next tea.

AMY: Yeah. And they’re all Pride and Prejudice themed. So we have, of course, “Obstinate, headstrong girl.” Uhh.. “Pemberley,” including a silhouette of Pemberley.

KIM: I love that one. Can we fight over them?

AMY: “I am all astonishment.” I like that one. These are made by Litographs, it’s called. 

KIM: So Meg, if you’re listening, do you have a tattoo? I don’t think so, but let us know…

AMY: Oh, that’s a good question! Yeah, I don’t know if she has one either. 

KIM: Okay, so anyway, listeners, if tattoos are something Amy isn’t passionate about, you might wonder why we’re even discussing them today. It all stems from an outing Amy and I had in January to go have afternoon tea at a venue called Lily Rose in downtown L.A.

AMY: Yes, so it’s this super cool bar in the Wayfarer hotel… it’s got a funky-bordello vibe with all kinds of cool Victorian art and photos covering the walls. Sort of almost Dark Academia in certain respects. But the centerpiece of the decor is this large, maybe four-foot tall photo of a Victorian woman. She’s got a rose affixed to her poufy, Gibson-girl hair. She’s wearing a four-strand pearl choker. She’s got a truculent expression on her face… AND, she’s wearing a barely there strapless bodice that reveals the fact that her body is covered in tattoos. It’s so surprising.

KIM: Yes, she’s inked with tons of artwork, including two lions across her chest, a hummingbird, butterfly, serpent, palm trees, and an eagle carrying an American flag in its beak. 

AMY: So naturally, the portrait caught our attention, and being the curious girls that we are, Kim and I flagged down a waiter to ask him who this was in the picture. You’d think it being the focal point of the bar, he would know. No, he said he wasn’t sure and had to go ask someone. 

KIM: Yeah, and he returned a minute later and said, “Oh, that’s Lily Rose,” a.k.a. the bar’s namesake, which made sense.

AMY: Made sense, but god bless him, but he was lying! 

KIM: I think he made it up on the spot.

AMY: I think he totally made it up. So I went home and googled Lily Rose trying to find out more about this woman, and I DID find the photo online — it’s everywhere. But the woman’s name was not Lily Rose. It’s Maud Wagner. She happens to be the first known female tattoo artist in the United States. So we’re going to tell you a little about Maud Wagner in today’s episode.

KIM: And of course, we’ll link to some photos of Maud Wagner (and her tattoos) in our show notes. (And, you know, in case any of our listeners want to go get a tattoo after this episode, maybe she’ll inspire you.) So Amy, what do we know about Maud Wagner?

AMY: Well, she was born Maud Stevens in Kansas in 1877, and when she was young, she apparently ran off and joined the circus.

KIM: I love her already.

AMY: Yes. Apparently she worked first as a contortionist, aerialist and acrobat in her early days with the circus. My daughter Julia would love that because she takes aerial lessons. She takes the silks… 

KIM: I know, I love that. It’s so beautiful.

AMY: I know, it scares me and Mike half to death to watch her. We’re  always joking that she might run off to join the circus someday also. So hopefully she doesn’t pull a “Maud.”

KIM: You know I try everything, right? I did take a lesson in that once and I was horrible. I didn’t have enough upper arm strength to pull myself up.

AMY: Did we do that together because I did that also?

KIM: Did we? Was it with Isobel?

AMY: Was it in Hollywood?

KIM: Yes! It was years ago.

AMY: It was so hard!

KIM: Oh, you have to be so strong to be able to do it. It’s not like you could just unless you’re super strong, you could just walk off the street and do it.

AMY: No, no. It’s like climbing the rope in gym class, but even harder. I was crippled the day after I tried it. 

KIM: But it looks so beautiful. 

AMY: It does, it does. 

KIM: But anyway, we digress. While performing at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 Maud met the man who would become her husband, and he was a tattoo artist. His name was Gus Wagner and he sported 800 tattoos himself.

AMY: Yeah, there’s a book by a woman Margo DeMello called Inked about the history of tattooing and in that book it basically says Wagner gave Maud a tattoo as a way of getting a date with her. 

KIM: Yeah, that wouldn’t have worked on me. No.

AMY: No, but apparently a needle and ink is a turn-on for Maud, because she fell for Gus and they ended up getting married and he taught her everything he knew about the art of tattooing. Apparently he did it the old-fashioned way; not with like a gun kind of thing, just a needle and ink. And because she wound up having him decorate most of her body with tattoos, she became an exhibition unto herself. Now instead of being an acrobat, she was a walking work of art. 

KIM: Nice pivot… there’s a lot more career stability than as an acrobat, I think.

AMY: Yeah, probably. Safer. Safer to be on the ground. In researching Maud, I came to find out that actually, tattoos in the Victorian era were not as taboo as you might think. Yes, they did kind of start with prisoners and sailors getting them, but some members of elite society actually sported tattoos including Queen Victoria’s eldest son. And there were even some upper class Victorian women sporting ink, too.  Apparently (and we’ll get into this in a second, but) Winston Churchill’s own mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, is said to have had a tattoo! Her name was Jennie Jerome, and she was an American heiress (one of the “buccaneers” if you will). 

KIM: We love the buccaneers.

AMY: Yes. She reportedly had a tattoo of a snake coiled around her left wrist. 

KIM: Oooh!

AMY: Yeah. I say “reportedly,” because it was written about in a newspaper article in 1894 and I’ll just read from that:

“There are certain women of the world who capture public attention to that degree that everything they do is promptly chronicled. Lady Randolph Churchill is one of them. When returning home from India with Lord Randolph she noticed a British soldier tattooing a deckhand… She had the artist brought before her and asked him for some designs. He suggested the Talmudic symbol of eternity- a snake holding its tail in its mouth. Lady Randolph was charmed and bared her arm for the operation. Lord Randolph swore and protested. But the tattooing was done- so it is said, at least- and it is described as a beautifully executed snake, dark blue in color, with green eyes and red jaws. As a general thing it is hidden from the vulgar gaze by a broad gold bracelet, but her personal friends are privileged to see it and hear the story of the tattooing.” 

KIM: Oooh, I love that. I’m not going to get another tattoo, probably ever, but that sounds really cool. Good for her!

AMY: Yeah, if it looks like a bracelet or whatever. But here’s the problem. When you look up photos of Jennie (and there are many) there is no snake tattoo to be found on any, even potentially hidden under a bracelet. You just can’t find them. She would have gotten the tattoo when she was around 40, supposedly, but no one’s been able to find any photographic evidence she was sporting ink. 

KIM: That would be hard to hide.

AMY: It would be. And I’d love for that story to be true, but it could be fake news. They even kind of said in the article, it’s almost written as if they didn’t have an eyewitness account. Like, “So it is said,” you know? But I want to credit a web article by Amelia K. Osterud, a historian and author of the book Tattooed Lady: A History. She provided the intel on all this about this mystery of Jennie Churchill’s tattoo. Anyway, it’s really making me want to go read Anne Sebba’s 2007 biography of Jennie Churchill. Even if she didn’t get a tattoo, she sounds like she was quite the spitfire in many other ways, and if you’re into the Gilded Age like we are, she’s a lady you ought to know better.

KIM: I’m super into that idea. Anyway, getting back to Maud Wagner, she died in 1961. Because she and her husband spent so much time on the road in traveling vaudeville shows, county fairs and amusement arcades, the couple is credited with helping spread the tradition of tattooing across the United States. 

AMY: There’s also a historical novel based on her life called Maud’s Circus by an author named Michelle Rene (I’m not sure how that’s pronounced)   But If you liked Sara Gruen’s 2006 novel Water for Elephants, this one sounds like it would kind of be in that same sort of world, which would be fun.

KIM: Oh, yeah, and that’s making me think of one of my favorite books ever, but the name is not coming to me. The wonderful book… it’s like a cult favorite. 

AMY: It’s not the lobster boy?

KIM: No, no, it’s not called The Lobster Boy, but yeah it’s set in the circus. Geek Love! 

AMY: Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking of! Geek Love.

KIM: I didn’t hear you say that. 

AMY: I didn’t say it, but I feel like there was a Lobster Boy in Geek Love.  

KIM: Oh yeah, there is. Yeah, Geek Love, which I read a few years ago again because Eric had never read it and I had him read it and he loved it. Such a great book.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: We would never have known about Maud if we hadn’t gone to tea together and seen her photo so once again once of our field trips turned into inspiration. It always does.

AMY: Yeah, although still not as great as our Cate Blanchett sighting during our afternoon tea we had at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. Remember that?

KIM: Oh, I won’t ever forget it. We were having a brainstorm for one of our projects that I think maybe our first book or something.

AMY: Yeah, and we thought, “This is all meant to be, the fact that we’re seeing Cate Blanchett here!!!”

KIM: And it was!!

AMY: Anyway, it’s making me think we need to schedule another of our fancy teas. Let’s get it on the books.

KIM: Yes, let’s, because who knows what adventure might await. So that’s all for today’s episode! Be sure to join us again next week when we’ll be discussing the author Tess Slesinger and her unforgettable Modernist novel, The Unpossessed.

AMY: We’ve got Dr. Paula Rabinowitz joining us next week, and get this: Tess Slesinger’s son, Peter Davis, will be with us, too! How cool is that?

KIM: I cannot wait! Bye, 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 Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.

87. Kay Dick — They with Lucy Scholes

Note: Transcripts are generated, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Episode 87: Kay Dick — They with Lucy Scholes

AMY: Hey, everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner Kim Askew. 

KIM: Hi, everyone! Our guest today wrote of the lost dystopian masterpiece we’re going to be discussing: it’s “a surreptitious, later-career aberration…whose strangeness never seeped into what she wrote after.” So intriguing, right?

AMY: A weird one-off! Yeah, that is interesting. And Kim, as you said, this novella, They by Kay Dick, is dystopian, which is usually more your speed, but I actually loved it, too, I’ll confess.

KIM: I know, and I think, Amy, that this podcast is changing you, because you thought you didn’t like dystopian or sci-fi or noir, but I kind of feel like maybe you just thought you didn’t like them?

AMY: Could be. I’m not sure I’m going to agree 100% yet, but I’m definitely a fan of this book, and I’m of course a fan of our returning guest, the wonderful Lucy Scholes. 

KIM: Yes, we are  so glad to have her back on the show! So let’s raid the stack and get started! 

[introductory music]

AMY: Our guest today is Lucy Scholes, and after you listen to this episode, you may want to go back and listen to the episode we did with her last September on Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer. Lucy is a London-based critic who writes for The Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, The Financial Times, The New York Review of Books and Literary Hub, among others. In addition to all that, she hosts “Ourshelves,” the official podcast of Virago Books. Every two weeks you can find Lucy interviewing big names in the literary world, talking to them about their own favorite books, music, TV shows and more. We highly recommend you go check out that podcast. 

KIM: Yes, it’s one of our favorites. And in Lucy’s must-read column for The Paris Review, “Re-Covered,” she writes about out-of-print and forgotten books, which as you can imagine is a treasure trove of lost ladies of lit. In her August, 2020 column, she wrote about Kay Dick and They; we’ll link to the column in our show notes. Now, Lucy is also the Senior Editor of McNally Editions, and McNally has recently issued a new edition of They with an afterword by Lucy. Welcome, Lucy! We’re honored to have you back! 

LUCY: Well, thank you both so much for having me back; I’m really grateful that you invited me on the show again! It was such fun last time.

AMY: Yeah, absolutely. In your Re-covered column on Dick, you write “Kay Dick is a name all but forgotten today, but in the mid-twentieth century she was at the heart of the London literary scene.” I love the story of how you discovered her! Do you want to share it with our listeners? 

LUCY: Yes, so it was about two and a half years ago now, I guess not long before the pandemic hit, I stumbled across an obituary that the British newspaper the Guardian had run for Kay Dick when she died in 2001. But what was so fascinating about this particular piece was how spiteful and nasty it was. It was written by a writer named Michael de-la-Noy, and he accused Dick of  having —and I’m quoting him directly here: “expended far more energy in pursuing personal vendettas and romantic lesbian friendships than in writing books.” The thing was, though, the description of her life that then followed sounded so intriguing, and so full of achievement! So, I mean, she published ten books of her own, and edited various anthologies and magazines—which all seems pretty productive to me, or by my standards, at least it is! But anyway,  the very worst thing that de-la-Noy had to say about her— and he draws the obit to a close by describing her as “a talented woman bedeviled by ingratitude and a kind of manic desire to avenge totally imaginary wrongs”— so this only made me more fascinated to find out a little bit more about her. So I immediately tracked down copies of her books. 

KIM: When you actually started reading her, though, you were a little bit disappointed. Do you want to talk about that? 

LUCY: Yeah, I was a little bit. Her first five novels—which were published between 1949 and 1962—weren't terribly exciting. They’re written very well, but they’re just not especially noteworthy; I guess I’d describe them as elegant novels of manners. They’re set in polite society and they now feel a bit dated. But then I kind of persevere. I kept going because I thought there would be something maybe there eventually, and I picked up THEY: A SEQUENCE OF UNEASE, which was first published in 1977, and from the very first page—I mean, I guess really from the title.  I mean who titles a book with the subtitle  “a sequence of unease”?—I knew I was reading something very special. And I think this was partly because the voice was so utterly different to that I’d encountered in her earlier work, as was the style—it was very pared down, stripped back, quite raw and visceral—and then there was the fact that it was this kind of strange and uneasy dystopian tale, set in an England that’s both instantly recognizable, and also utterly alien. 

AMY: And you mention that subtitle, and I feel like that’s the first I’m kind of hearing of that subtitle. Does the McNally edition use that?

LUCY: Yeah, I think we use it on the sort of inside page.

AMY: Okay, it’s not on the cover.

LUCY: No, and I think even when it was first published, They was very on the front page, but then it has got this subtitle, this kind of strange one.

KIM: Yeah, I love the beautiful spare cover with the striking image and then the word They. It’s very nice.

AMY: But yes, “A Sequence of Unease,” though, as you said, tell me more! But let’s just back up some and find out more about Dick’s life. She was born in 1915 to a single mother who had left her somewhat privileged life to go be part of the bohemian cafe society. So, Lucy, can you tell us a little more about Dick’s childhood?

LUCY: Yeah, it was fairly unorthodox, I think, to say the least! Her mother had her illegitimately, and in those days that can’t have been particularly easy. I’m sure it meant that she was ostracized from her own parents if she hadn’t already made the break herself. And Dick told the wonderful story that the day after her mother gave birth to her, rather than heading home from the hospital, the new mother, with her baby in her arms, headed straight for the Café Royal, which was one of the most famous night spots in London, popular with this bohemian, fast-living crowd—and everyone there toasted the new baby with champagne! And Dick called this her “baptism” later, because she hadn’t had a church baptism. This had been her entry into the world.

KIM: I love that story; what a start in life! 

AMY: I know, Kim, why weren’t we going straight to the nightclubs from the hospital?

KIM: Yeah. It sounds so glamorous. But then, I guess when she was around seven, her life changed a bit. Do you want to talk about that?

LUCY: Yeah, this was when Dick’s mother married the Swiss man who she’s been previously having an affair with, I guess you would put it. Mother and daughter had always lived quite a sort of cosmopolitan, privileged life— and this was paid for by Dick’s mother’s lover. But the marriage gave them access to a very different world, something slightly different to the more haphazard, bohemian existence they’d lived up until this point. Dick was sent to boarding school out of London for a while, but I don’t think she got on particularly well there, so she was taken out of that school and then sent to school in Geneva in Switzerland, where she apparently lived with a host family, and this was much more to her liking. 

AMY: So did she have ambitions to write from a very young age? How did she get her start?

LUCY: Well, I think her stepfather had been quite wealthy at one point, and by the time Dick came of age, he’d lost quite a lot of his money, which meant she had to go out and earn her own living. But I don’t think she minded doing this; if anything, she had quite a great time! She worked as a bookseller, and as an assistant editor on various magazines, before being quickly promoted, and then she eventually started writing novels of her own.

KIM: So then it sounds like she basically reconnected with this bohemian community she’d been welcomed into as a child, right?

LUCY: Yes, absolutely! I found a wonderful interview that she gave a newspaper in the 1980s in which she recalled leaving home at the age of 20 to gad about London with what she describes as “a louche set”—and she talks about wandering Soho with her bisexual friend Tony, both of them wearing capes and sporting canes! Looking a bit like Oscar Wilde I’d imagine!

KIM: I love that image!

AMY:  Totally. So then we know that she worked at Foyles bookshop in London's Charing Cross Road and then when she was only 26, she became the first woman director in English publishing at P.S. King & Son. She later became a journalist at the New Statesman. While she was a journalist she wrote under the nom de plume Edward Lane. And she also edited the literary magazine The Windmill. Do we have any idea why she used a male pen name ?

LUCY: To be honest, I’m not sure. She used a couple of different male pen names for various projects, and “Edward Lane” was the most famous of the two. I doubt she was the only woman writer doing this at the time, but I’m also inclined to say it might not necessarily have been for the reasons that we might assume. In that interview that I just mentioned, she says at one point that she “cannot bear apartheid of any kind—class, colour or sex,” and then adds that “gender is of no bloody account.” So I think she was clearly quite a character, very dramatic, and, I suspect, liked to play with and tease people, so I would imagine she would take a certain amount of delight in pretending to be someone else, you know, male or female.

KIM: And given all that and what you told us, it’s actually unsurprising that she and her partner of many years, Kathleen Farrell, actually entertained some of the most successful and popular writers of the era in their home. But how were Kay’s own books received by the public and the critics?

LUCY: She got very decent reviews. None were bestsellers, or huge hits, but the writing was generally well respected. The novels were often described as “Proustian,” these early novels, which I think is pretty complimentary to be honest. And then in the early 1970s she went on to publish two volumes of interviews with her writer friends—Ivy and Stevie, as in Ivy Compton Burnett and Stevie Smith, and then a second volume called Friends and Friendship, which included interviews with people like Brigid Brophy, Olivia Manning and Francis King. And these were also well received. They’re not in print today, but amongst certain people today who are interested in these writers, they’re considered important artifacts.

AMY: I’m hearing some potential subjects for Lost Ladies of Lit in that list.

LUCY: Yeah.

AMY: And I love the fact that we can potentially mine some info about them from Kay Dick if we were able to get our hands on a copy of either of those books that you just mentioned.

KIM: I love that idea.

LUCY: Yeah, no I definitely recommend it. They’re out of print, but you can get second-hand copies, and they are a sort of wealth of information because she was very good friends with these writers so they have a very personal tone to the interviews, not the kind of classic interviewer-and-subject who don’t know each other. There’s a really kind of intimate element.

KIM: Oh, that sounds so good. So, let’s go back to that not entirely complimentary obituary you mentioned earlier. That was pretty harsh.… Do you want to talk about the dichotomy between what was written in that obit versus what you found out about her doing your research? 

LUCY:  Well, she was obviously not someone who suffered fools gladly, and she could certainly be prickly, and she did sometimes hold grudges, but she was also a woman whose friends meant everything to her. I guess because her own family life had been rather unconventional, as we’ve discussed, she had no children, and no life-partner—though she and Farrell did remain close, and an integral part of each other’s lives, long after they broke up. But this meant that Dick’s friends were everything to her. And to many of these friends she was deeply loyal and supportive. I’ve had the great luck of getting to know the wonderful executors of her Estate, as well of some of her other friends and neighbors from her later life, and all of them have spoken with such fondness of how much fun she was, and how much she loved spending time with people, and introducing the people she loved to one another, which I think is such a rare kind of talent and a gift to have, wanting to share your friends around with other people. And also they’ve all mentioned about how much she loved young people. She hosted these soirees in her flat in Brighton—which was where she lived after she left London in the 1960s onward after her relationship with Farrell ended. And apparently she served cucumber sandwiches and glasses at these and everyone drank Campari and orange or glasses of champagne. I mean, it  really sounds rather wonderful. And she devoted a lot of time, I think, to encouraging young, up and coming writers too apparently. In fact, the minute that awful obit was published in the Guardian, the paper received quite a lot of complaint letters from her friends who were outraged that she’d been depicted so shoddily in it. If I may read an extract from the letter her friend and neighbor the writer Roy Greenslade wrote. He writes: 

She was, in fact, a most perceptive critic, preferring too often to spend her time reading the works of others rather than writing herself. Few people read as much as Kay. “Darling, I’ve just been rereading Scott,” she once said. “He was brilliant.” I asked: “Which novel?” “All of them,” she replied, without the least sign of boasting. Her other great talent lay in introducing people she met to her wide network of friends and contacts. She loved our children, helped them, made them laugh, made them think. Both of them, like my wife and I, benefited from knowing the lady with the cigarette holder and the succession of dogs along the terrace.

KIM: That is so beautiful. I mean I love that her friends rallied…

AMY: Coming to her defense.

KIM: I know. Good for them, too.

AMY: And also, that description that he just painted, if you Google images of her, that’s sort of what comes up. She looks like she could be a little intimidating in the photos, but then she also looks extremely interesting. Like somebody you want to know.

LUCY: Yep, yep.

AMY: So let’s get back to her novel They. When you read it, was it a surprise given that you started with these novels of manners? How shocking was it for you to then stumble upon They in the list, and like, “What?!!” 

LUCY: Yeah, it was completely shocking. Like I said, I enjoyed the first novels, but I wasn’t particularly excited by them. And I guess I’d been lulled into a false sense of security after reading a few of them. And then I picked up They, opened it up, and it was a complete surprise.

KIM: I love that you kept going and didn’t stop too soon. That would have been really sad for all of us. It’s a good lesson to keep reading!

LUCY: Perseverance! It’s important!

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: I purposefully didn’t look up anything about the book before I read it, either and yeah, I was like, “Whoa!” I don’t think we’re going to give away too many spoilers, but we will set the premise of sort of what the book’s about. So Lucy, do you want to go ahead and do that?

LUCY: Yeah, it’s not a hugely plot-heavy book, which isn’t to say nothing happens in it—far from it, in fact—but the way it’s written, the chapters can almost be read as stand-alone vignettes. They seem to be linked by the presence of the same main character, but there’s no obvious chronology between them. In essence though, the novel is set amongst the countryside and the beaches of coastal Sussex, in England, which is home to the narrator—a writer—and her—or his—their gender is never revealed—various friends, all of these people are artists or craftspeople of some kind or other. It starts off all very beautiful and bucolic, but pretty soon, you realize that something is amiss. Plundering bands of philistines are actually prowling the country destroying art, books, sculpture, musical instruments and scores, punishing those artistically and intellectually- inclined outliers who refuse to abide by this new mob rule.

AMY: Is there any favorite passage of yours from They that you’d like to read to kind of give listeners a little bit of a feel for the prose? 

LUCY: Yeah, this was kind of a tricky ask, because I think each chapter brings a bit of a different dimension to the fear. And so I wanted to give you a bit of a taste of it. But I’ve chosen one from the chapter called Pebble of Unease. So we’ve got the narrator and a friend of hers are walking on the downs, which are the hills around Sussex, and although we’ve seen smaller bands of these “They,” these mysterious “They,” this is the first time we’re seeing them en masse as it were. Okay.

We turned round. There they were on the ridge. We looked behind us. A similar column in line, each one holding a pole to match his height. They began to move downward with deliberate precision. ‘Hold my hand,’ Julian said. ‘We must go on, as we intended, homewards.’ 

   They broke formation, in slow motion, gyrated towards us, executing a pattern of zigzagging movements, crossing and recrossing one another’s steps. 

   ‘If we’re lucky, we’ll miss the symmetry of their course,’ Julian said.

   We felt them as rank after rank of them moved past us. Pockets of air hit us as their intricate patterns of movement slid past us. I stumbled. Julian pulled me up fiercely. ‘We mustn’t alter our pace or sway in the slightest,’ he said.

   As we moved up the track they surrounded us on all sides, never deviating an inch from their rigid exercise. Others followed in their tracks. The crossings and recrossings of their lines went on, relentlessly slow, totally in unison. I was sweating. I was tired. I wanted to pause. Julian urged me upwards. I could see the kissing-gate in the distance. Another relay began their descent. ‘Don’t look back,’ Julian said. ‘Keep with the stream of our natural route.’ I saw one of the poles as one of the men moved a fraction past my body: it shone like steel. To the left and the right of my vision they swirled. I pressed my arms closer to my body, fearing I might knock against one of the poles. Their precision was monstrously accurate as they repeated the movements of those who had descended before them. I caught glimpses of eyes, heads, chests, arms, legs, and, ever, the shining steel poles. I saw the last three of them as they veered toward us. One went to the right of us, the other to the left. Quickly Julian pushed me away from him as the third one crashed into the space between our two bodies and went on. 

   We reached the kissing-gate. ‘Don’t look back,’ Julian said. ‘We must not appear inquisitive.’ He sounded frivolous. 

AMY: It reminds me kind of of the Death Eaters from Harry Potter. Like, “Oh my god, they’re coming” This terrifying mass inching towards you; how frightening that is. 

KIM: And that unease is so perfectly illustrated in that passage. Each of these chapters is its own story that could be in The New Yorker on its own without even reading the rest of them, although as a complete piece it’s beautifully woven together, but they are definitely stand alone and they all have that sense of unease. It also reminded me a bit of this book called Wittgenstein’s Mistress. It’s by David Markham. David Foster Wallace called that book "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country." (Meaning the U.S.)  Have either of you read that one?

LUCY: No, I haven’t. I think you’ve mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago that it was similar so I’ve been wanting to get hold of a copy ever since. I’m fascinated by it.

KIM: Yeah, it came out about a decade after They, but it has some interesting parallels, which is what made me think of it. It’s one of my husband’s favorite books, so I read about it because of him and I really loved it. The woman named Kate is the narrator. She believes she is the last human on earth (and she’s likely mad), but she’s remembering all the art and literature that have shaped her, from Brahms to Shakespeare. As you said, in They, the narrator is trying to retain the ability to write and, along with the other artists in the book, is trying to remember the works that have shaped them. And it really feels like the world is dying around them — for sure art is dying and maybe individuality even — and these are the last few vestiges of what humanity once was. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s like literally the narrator will return to their cottage and notice that books are missing from the bookshelf or pages are missing from the bindings. 

KIM: Yeah, on a certain level that could be innocuous, but within the idea of all of the books being slowly taken away, I think to people who love art and books and music, there’s nothing more chilling than the idea that these things are being taken away.

AMY: Lucy, I had finished the novel, started reading your afterword, and you mention that the narrator could have been a man or a woman, and I was like, “Wait, what?” I was just automatically reading it as if the narrator was a woman. It made me kind of want to go back and reread it thinking of it being possibly a man as well and seeing if it would give me any different understanding of it. But why do you think she kept the storyteller’s gender unknown?

LUCY: Yeah, it’s a tricky one, isn’t it? I would imagine that if it’s got to do with anything, it’s more her thoughts about gender being of little interest. I have to confess, I agree with you. I automatically think of the narrator as a woman, but I think that’s because I came to They after reading five of her earlier novels. I think I was already conditioned to think of the narrator in a certain way. So Sunday, the novel that she wrote before They is highly autobiographical, as is The Shelf, the novel she wrote after They, and even though They is set in this kind of strange, parallel version of England, I think it’s a book about friendship and love and art, all the things that Dick held dearest. So to me, it still feels like it’s actually a deeply personal book to Dick.

KIM: It definitely feels that way when you’re reading it. It almost feels like a diary or a memoir or something. And as we said, people and books are literally disappearing from the narrator’s life on a daily basis. Yet, the narrator makes this choice over and over in each of the stories to continue living alone. It’s an explicit choice to be a target, given the nature of these mobs, which targets single people. In doing so, he or she is taking a stand to continue to be a writer and also maintain that artistic part of their personality in spite of everything they are up against. Dick definitely seemed to live by her own rules. What do you think she’s trying to say about non-conformity and artistic integrity in They?

LUCY: She’s upped the stakes in They, of course, in that those who refuse to conform are risking actual bodily harm and violence , and being killed. But even without such terrible threats hanging over one’s head, I think she’s explaining that being an artist involves a certain degree of bravery, right? It’s a risky business. In Friends and Friendship (the second books of interviews that she published) she writes, “it is an extremely courageous act to be a writer, painter, composer, because you are out on your own, in limbo, totally unprotected, not much encouraged, driven only by some inner conviction and strength, and the discipline is yours alone.” So this is clearly what she believes, and this—I think—is what lies at the heart of They.

KIM: That’s a perfect quote to give context to the book. Wow. That completely makes sense with the narrator.

AMY: In your afterword, you talk about grief being an important theme in this novel. And it’s also key in the genesis of how the book came to be. Can you talk about what you think she might have been trying to convey about grief in the book?

LUCY: I find it so fascinating that she takes the time to note how influenced she was by this particular newspaper article—it was called ‘Coping with Grief’ that apparently described this new kind of psychiatric treatment in which one’s emotions are “burnt out” and the grief is expelled—she mentions it on the imprint page of the book, so it’s clearly super significant; and the “They” of the book’s title have a hatred of people showing their feelings; everyone has to be numb and calm, drama in any shape or form has been completely outlawed. It sort of suggests to me that Dick might have felt sort of stymied by something—whether it was polite society, convention, that idea of the English stiff upper lip, maybe the struggle of living in a world that didn’t afford her romantic relationships with other women the same degree of respect that heterosexual couples around her got. What we do know for sure, though, is that she went through a period of intense and prolonged loss and grief in the run-up to writing They, and I would suggest that she was still trying to kind of process all her emotions—she was still grieving when she wrote this book.

KIM: Yeah, so, as we mentioned in the intro, They came out later in Dick’s career — I think you said about a fifteen-year gap. Can you tell us a little bit more about what was going on during that gap and more about what might have driven her to write such a divergent work? 

LUCY: Yeah, so those fifteen years were really quite traumatic for her, I think. A few major things happened in quite quick succession: so her twenty-odd-year relationship with Kathleen Farrell broke down and the two women parted ways, though as I said, they did stay in touch but they weren’t together after that; Dick tried to kill herself, which she writes about in Friends and Friendship; and a woman that she had a brief affair with in the aftermath of her relationship with Kathleen, this woman went on to commit suicide (and this is talked about in much more detail in the novel that that follows They, a novel called The Shelf). And during this time Dick also moved from London to Brighton, she was getting older, she was no longer I guess at the heart of the literary scene that she had been for many years, and I think she was struggling to finish various writing projects that she’d begun work on, a couple of big biographies that she started and they never got started. And you know if you look at her archive there’s a lot of kind of unfinished projects there. I think all this loss seems to have taken quite a toll on her, and it seems to have drastically changed her writing as well. You know, I wrote in the afterword that in many ways, They reminds me a lot of works like  Anna Kavan’s novel Ice, which was published in 1967, and this is this kind of strange, enigmatic, almost psychedelic novel in which this man is pursuing a woman across a snowy, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Kavan famously switched the register of her prose after a huge kind of mental breakdown—she started out by writing relatively conventional, what you might describe as women’s fiction, and then she ended up in an insane asylum for a while, and she emerged out of this with bleached blonde hair and this kind of crazy heroin addiction, and a whole new way of writing. And I think something similar also happened to Dick’s friend Christine Brooke-Rose, another writer from this period. She survived a near fatal kidney operation in the early 60s, and then started writing much more avant-garde after that. Works that Dick, herself, described as quite Orwellian. And I think something similar must have happened to Dick; I mean her life was upended. Maybe not quite so dramatically; maybe through a series of events. But I think she became a different writer as a consequence of this huge upheaval. They is completely different to the novel that precedes it, Sunday, and there is that large gap in which something is obviously happening during that time. 

KIM: In his February New Yorker article, that you have a cameo in, Lucy, Sam Knight called They a collection of “quietly horrifying stories,” and I love that description. They is quiet in almost this sort of cozy English way. The characters interact with each other and the normal sort of things they say and do like trimming rose bushes, having tea together, having parties. They’re staying calm together and mostly stoic, while at the same time all this horrible stuff is happening around them and to them. 

AMY: You’re right, Kim. There’s something very calm and almost pretty to me (I don’t know if that’s the right word) but that’s kind of how I felt in reading it. So much attention is paid to color in the stories, so I’m just going to read a little excerpt that shows that.  

[reads excerpt]

To me, that reads like a painting, which is appropriate because the book is so much about art and tangled up in that. 

KIM: Yeah, it almost seems like everything could be more vivid to the narrator because these other things are being taken away. I don’t know. Anyway. The book came out in 1977. Do you want to maybe talk about maybe how it fits in, or doesn’t, I guess, with other dystopian books from this time and maybe hone in some more on what political statement Dick may have been making with They?

LUCY: Well, I think as I just said, it sort of sits alongside other “experimental” novels from the period—like Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out (1964), which is a post-apocalyptic race reversal story, Anna Kavan’s work, and also Ann Quin’s novels too, if anyone’s familiar with her writing.. But then, too, there are also similarities with earlier works, like Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 with the book-burning firemen. I think it takes something from that. I think more generally though, the 70s was quite a time of great unrest, especially here in England, where we were dealing with things like the miners’ strikes, electricity blackouts, IRA bombings, and a lot of racial prejudice and hatred. They doesn’t reference or engage with any of these things specifically, but I think the miasma of fear and violence that hangs over the book surely draws on things that were going on in the real world at the time. I would imagine that in a sense, Dick was responding to the real world in her fictional version. 

KIM: Yeah, and it also feels very timeless, too. I think we’ve been going through similar upheaval, so I think reading it, you wouldn’t necessarily know that it was written in the 70s.

AMY: No. And in fact, I was thinking it was set in the 1930s until I saw the word television set. But yeah, it’s very nonspecific, as you say.

LUCY: Well, I think, also, you have to remember that she was not young when she wrote this, right? She’s not like a young writer starting out in the 70s. She’s already in her sixties. So i think some of the more traditional elements about it, whether it’s the more pastoral scenes or some of the more dystopian elements are definitely harkening back to that sort of 30s and 40s version of dystopia and I think that makes sense because if you think about the time when she was young and when she was being formed as a writer, let’s put it that way.

AMY: Right, I’m thinking of fascism and all the things that the world was facing. That’s where I was approaching it.

LUCY: Yeah, and I think that bit I read earlier with the hordes of men coming down the hill, they almost seem like a fascist rally, right? That’s what it makes me think of.

KIM: Absolutely. So it is a very dark book. (And it actually made me think of the 2015 film The Lobster--I don’t know if I saw that with you, Amy.)

AMY: No, I’ve never seen that.

KIM: Okay. Singledom is also deemed unacceptable in that film: single people are given 45 days to find romantic partners or otherwise they’re turned into animals). It’s very surreal, but also very chilling. 

AMY: As if single people don’t have enough pressure on them.

KIM: I know, seriously. Yeah.  They is cataclysmic, basically. But do you feel that there’s hope to be found in it Lucy?

LUCY: I think I do, though perhaps only a fleeting sense. But then I do think there are moments of serenity and beauty in this book, friendship and love. And I also think there’s a strange sort of hope to be found in its style even—because it’s written in these vignettes, so even if one chapter ends in utter darkness—and some of them really do! They’re kind of horrific—you then turn the page and you start a sort of new story in this world. And I guess, I don’t know, it seems to be saying that as long as there are people willing to resist, there’s hope, and that even the tiniest action can be an act of resistance. And I also think it’s probably important to think about how that final story in the book ends, you know: “Hallo Love.”  The last lines of which are: “My tension relaxed. There were possibilities. ‘Hallo love,’ I said, greeting another day.” And I feel that if you’ve got these vignettes that you can technically move around, there must be something about ending on that hopeful note.

KIM: Oh, yeah, and actually, you need that I think.

LUCY: Yeah. That’s true

KIM: You want to believe there’s something that you can do and that the characters can do to retrieve what was lost. 

AMY: Yeah, and you get a sense throughout that the narrator just approaches everything like “just keep going. Just keep going.” In that New Yorker article we mentioned earlier, Knight quotes literary editor Becky Brown as saying, “It’s incredibly unusual to find a book this good that has been this profoundly forgotten. That almost never happens.” And Dick herself really loved this book too. So why do you think it did kind of fall off the face of the earth (well, until recently, thank goodness). Would you agree that this novel seems kind of appropriate for today? (I hesitate to use the word “relevant” because I remember from the last episode you don’t necessarily think a book needs to be relevant to be enjoyed…

LUCY: [laughing] Well done.

AMY: But I think this one in particular does seem like it really is relevant. 

LUCY: Well, firstly I completely agree with Becky. I think this particular cocktail rarely happens when you find such a wonderful book so forgotten, so relevant for the day it comes out in again. So all of us involved with the various re-prints have been incredibly lucky, and we kind of know this. And I guess every time I listen to any episode of this show and it’s an author I’ve never heard of, I end up asking myself the same question: Why has this person been forgotten? Why do I not know about them? And of course, the sad thing is that it’s often quite arbitrary, right? There are so many reasons why a book falls out of print. I guess in the case of They, the reviews weren’t amazing—a few critics did get it, others hated it, and some were just rather bemused by it. The Sunday Times called it “a fantasy sprouting from some collective menopausal spasm in the national unconscious.”

AMY: Oh, stop.

KIM: Yeah. Harsh.

AMY: Blame the uterus.

LUCY: Right. I mean, I also don’t really know what that means, but it doesn’t sound particularly great, let’s put it that way. I mean, the book did win the now defunct prize called the South East Arts Literature Prize, but it didn’t sell especially well, so it quickly fell out of print and thus was forgotten. Obviously there were people who recognized it throughout the years, but by and large it’s been off the radar. I think maybe the world wasn’t quite ready for it. Certainly didn’t quite know what to make of it—and although I’ve just listed all those other novels from the 60s and 70s that it shares similarities with, it is a little bit dated in other ways, a little bit old-fashioned, perhaps even quaint, we might describe it as. It does hark back to a sort of earlier era of English fiction. All the cream teas, and seed cakes, the pruning of the roses that you’ve mentioned, the beautiful countryside. And I think in terms of striking a chord today, sadly I guess it’s because the vision presented in the book feels closer to home than ever before right? We’re all quite conscious of certain freedoms being eroded. Mob rule has taken on this kind of horrifying new relevance, whether it’s actually out on the streets or online. And we’re on the brink of a climate catastrophe yet people are looking away and not kind of engaging with it. So I think it feels quite often that “They”—whoever “they” are—are already amongst us.

AMY: I just want to go back for a second to the menopausal spasm because I feel like if there were an entire genre, I would read it.

LUCY: Yep.

AMY: The “menopausal spasm” section of the book store. I’d probably head over there. 

KIM: I think that’s a great podcast name: Menopausal Spasm. Sign me up! I’m going to download that one!

AMY: But you’re right, when you talk about the quaintness of the book, that’s what appealed to me in terms of somebody that doesn’t typically like dystopian, this book does not have that “Bladerunner” feel, which I don’t get into, so I think that’s maybe why I liked the book. 

KIM: Yeah. That makes sense. Lucy, as we said, you are senior editor of McNally Editions, which is so cool, and we’re so excited to read some of the other books in the series. You must love all of them, of course, but are there one or two you’d like to particularly share?

LUCY: Thank you very much for this! Yeah, I would obviously recommend them all, as you said,  but there are a couple already that are out alongside with They that I think your listeners would be particularly interested in. The first is Winter Love by Han Suyin, which is a beautifully kind of brittle story about a doomed love affair between two women in London during the Second World War, and then there’s Margaret Kennedy’s Troy Chimneys, which is a Regency-set tale about a man torn between two different sides to his personality, and this reads like a lost Jane Austen novel; so it’s completely delicious. And last up, if I may, there’s soon to be published is Penelope Mortimer’s utterly brilliant Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, which is the most incredible story of a housewife’s breakdown in late 1950s England, and her desperate bid to arrange an abortion for her student daughter, so as to prevent history repeating itself. I’ve been  a huge fan of Mortimer’s writing for a long time now —I think she’s a genius—and it’s a real thrill in particular to be re-issuing this one in the States. 

KIM: I feel like I’m being pulled in three different directions here. Like I can’t even decide which one to read first!

AMY: I know! I’m salivating!

KIM: Yeah, totally. All of them, but then the Jane Austen and then the Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting… you actually sent us Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, so we can read that.

LUCY: Please read it! I mean, I’m sure everyone on this show says this, but like I say, Mortimer is such a favorite of mine and she’s sort of under-recognized, let’s say. It is of its era, absolutely, but it just feels so relevant as well, particularly with issues of aborition going on in the States right now and stuff like that. So yeah.

KIM: Yeah. Great. Lucy, thank you so much! This was a wonderful conversation. Love this book and love you.

AMY: Yeah, it was so great having you back!

LUCY: Oh, honestly, I’m just so grateful you let me come back and talk about, you know, this wonderful book, which I hope people read, but also McNally Editions. It’s a real pleasure to be here again. I love listening to this show, so please keep making wonderful episodes, ladies.

KIM: Oh, thank you. We will. 

LUCY: And, um, hopefully see you again at some point!

AMY: Yeah! Absolutely.

KIM: Definitely. Bye, Lucy! That was super interesting, and I can’t believe the incredible people we’ve been able to talk with over the last couple of years, Amy. I’m pinching myself every day. It’s basically a dream come true!

AMY: And the good news is we have so many amazing guests coming up, right, in the weeks and months ahead. (And amazing lost ladies to talk about, too.) So we’ll sign off now, but don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter, where we’ll let you know which books you can get a jump on for upcoming episodes. 

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

85. Mary Taylor — Miss Miles with Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney

Note: Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY: Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes... 

KIM: and I'm Kim Askew and today's episode is Bronte-adjacent. I guess you could say. 

AMY: Yes. In addition to her literary siblings, Emily, Anne and Branwell, Charlotte Bronte had a very close lifelong friend who was also a writer. Her name was Mary Taylor, and in some ways Taylor bears all the hallmarks of a classic Bronte heroine. She had a stubborn and rebellious nature. She was fiercely independent and she was a vocal feminist. 

KIM: Yes. And unlike a classic Bronte heroine, she had no time for caustic jerks like Mr. Rochester. Far from being a love story, her 1890 novel Miss Miles: A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago makes the forceful argument that all women ought to have the right and the wherewithal to provide for themselves, financially speaking. She was basically fed up with the options available to women for getting by in the world.

AMY: So it's no surprise that such a girl-power themed book would have strong female friendships at the heart of its story. And I'm excited to welcome the two guests today who introduced us to Mary Taylor: Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. We mentioned them last summer in our mini episode on literary sisters. 

KIM: Right. And in that episode, we had put a wish out into the universe, just hoping these authors and friends might agree to come on the show. And we were so thrilled when they said yes. So without further ado, let's read the stacks and get started!

AMY: Our guests today are Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. Emily's work has been published in The Washington Post, the Paris Review, Lapham's Quarterly, Time and elsewhere. She is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and her most recent book, which came out last year is Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice. She teaches at New York University London. 

KIM: And Dr. Emma Claire Sweeney is a central academic at the Open University where she chairs and designs undergraduate and postgraduate creative writing courses. She's won the Society of Authors, Arts Council and Royal Literary Fund awards. And she's written for The Paris Review, Time and The Washington Post. She was named an Amazon Rising Star and a High- Rising Writer for her debut novel 2016's Owl Song at Dawn. It was inspired by her sister, who has cerebral palsy and autism, and it went on to win a Nudge Literary Book of the Year. 

AMY: Together, Emily and Emma co-authored the 2017 nonfiction book A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. In her forward to this book, Margaret Atwood described the work as "a great service to literary history." And I think I would just hyperventilate for the rest of my life if I got that kind of seal of approval. Uh, also A Secret Sisterhood was called "an exceptional act of literary espionage" by The Financial Times. So Emily and Emma, welcome to the show!

EMMA: It's a real pleasure and privilege. Thank you. 

EMILY: I'm a big fan, as you already know, so it's really particularly great to be here. 

AMY: Okay. So Charlotte Bronte's friendship with Mary Taylor is one of the four main friendships you guys focus on in your book, The Secret Sisterhood, but it does sound, in reading your book, that it required some sleuthing on your part to kind of piece together their bond. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the work involved with that. 

EMILY: Yeah. So this is Emily. So although Mary Taylor is by no means a household name, if you've read a biography of Charlotte Bronte or the Bronte sisters, you will have probably heard of Mary Taylor. She was a close friend to Charlotte Bronte and also her sisters to some extent, but we were really interested in the literary influence that she had on Charlotte Bronte, both in terms of her creative output, but also really pushing Charlotte Bronte to establish herself as a professional writer. And we could talk more about the ways that Mary did that a little bit later in the interview. Um, but it did, as you say, require some sleuthing. I mean, sadly, very few letters between the two of them have survived. Mary destroyed a number of these letters in a fit of caution, she said, which we can only assume she was concerned about the letters' incendiary contents. And Mary Taylor was not usually a particularly cautious person, so it really makes one wonder what was there. So yeah, we had to find other ways of finding out about their friendship. Looking at the letters that did survive, looking at other letters to other individuals who had hung on to the letters, and also other things that Mary Taylor had written later. 

AMY: Sounds juicy.

KIM: Yeah. So what were you able to find out about their early friendship? Do you have any favorite anecdotes about them from their school days together?

EMMA: Yeah. It's Emma here. Um, sadly they did not get off to the best start. It's actually a little bit heartbreaking reading about Charlotte Bronte's school years. She was ostracized for being shortsighted, for being diminutive in height, um, for being unable to really throw herself into the sort of playground games. And Mary Taylor didn't seem terribly impressed by Charlotte Bronte when she arrived at the school, and from what we can gather, didn't seem to do anything to defend Charlotte Bronte against the other children's laughter. And then at one point they did have an interaction and the story actually gets worse. Mary Taylor apparently told Charlotte Bronte, "you are very ugly." This was something that really haunted Charlotte Bronte for years to come, and, you know, she referred to it in later years. But at the same time, she did grow to really appreciate Mary Taylor's bluntness. She referred to "the sincere and truthful language" that her friend would use, because they did become friends. One of the anecdotes I love about them, actually, is that having got off to this terrible start, they ended up getting into political debates. Um, Charlotte Bronte was much more conservative as a school kid and she actually was really interested in politics from a sort of ridiculously young age. So they used to get into these quite fiery debates, because Mary Taylor was from a family of radical Nonconformists. So she had a much, much more progressive and liberal outlook. Um, so yeah, the idea that they were talking about these kinds of political subjects from a young age, I think said something about the two of them and perhaps shines a bit of a different light on Charlotte Bronte, because I think we often think of her as sort of quite timid. And I think in some way she was, but she also was very well-informed and not afraid to speak her mind when she felt that she knew her stuff. 

AMY: And there was also another young woman in the mix, too, their other friend, Ellen Nussey. So how did Mary fit in along with Ellen? 

EMILY: The three were very close, but Mary and Ellen were quite different individuals. Ellen was quite a gentle person, particularly as a school girl. Um, she was someone who was much more cautious than Mary Taylor. As we've already heard from Emma, Mary Taylor and Charlotte Bronte's relationship was much more robust. And Charlotte would go to Mary, you know, to thrash out thoughts on issues of the day, or maybe actually just to try and get advice of what she should do in her own life. So I think Charlotte needed both of them, but for quite different ends, I would say. 

KIM: Yeah. And in some ways you really argue that Mary was instrumental in helping Charlotte Bronte become the woman we now know and love. Is that right?

EMMA: Yeah, I think we would definitely argue that. Um, when Charlotte Bronte was working as a teacher at the school they had formerly attended together, she was desperately unhappy. And Mary Taylor said, you know, "How can you give so much of yourself for so little money?" Because she knew that Charlotte Bronte wasn't managing to, you know, put much aside. So I think that encouragement to think beyond the conventional ways in which women of that class and time could earn a living and to take herself seriously as a writer, to think of that as something that maybe she could pursue. Um, and then If we know anything about Charlotte Bronte beyond the Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire and the moors, we might know that, um, she spent some time in Brussels in Belgium, and that was a trip that was sort of instigated by Mary in many ways. Mary had planned to go there and study, and telling Charlotte Bronte about this, you know, inspired her to think maybe this could be an option for her. And she talks about Mary giving her "a wish for wings." So I think that sort of life beyond the sorts of family was a life that Mary Taylor kind of opened up in many ways. And then of course the radicalism that was inspired by Mary Taylor, you know, went on, we would argue, to shape a lot of the thoughts that we might associate with Charlotte Bronte in her later novels.

AMY: She also kind of had a tough-love attitude towards Charlotte, and that leads into her response to Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre. Can you talk a little bit about how she responded to that? 

EMILY: Well, she responded in a mixed way, I would say. She did praise it as being, you know, a wonderful work of art. Um, she clearly could see that there was some literary merit with it, but really, you know, something that she really wanted to take Charlotte Bronte to task for was at least, in Mary's eyes, she felt that she had not included a strong enough social or political message. She said to her, you know, "Has the world gone so well with you that you have no protest to make against its absurdities?" Now, this may have come as something of a shock to Charlotte. And I think, you know, to us today, it doesn't actually necessarily feel like reasonable criticism because although Jane Eyre had been hugely popular when it came out, it had also been quite controversial. And the very thing that it has been criticized for in some quarters was, you know, challenging the status quo, presenting this woman who was not going to just fit in with the way things were done. And so I think all of that is there in Jane Eyre, but it was not perhaps right on the surface, because it's all wrapped up in the storytelling. Mary, I think, wants things to be on the surface. She wanted the political message, the social message to be right there, where everyone could see it. 

AMY: That's exactly what she does with her book, Miss Miles. And so let's move on to this novel. 

EMILY: Yes. So the subtitle of Miss Miles is A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago. The book came out in 1890, so we're talking, you know, the 1830s. It's a book that looks at the whole community, but it specifically looks at some key female figures within that community. The Miss Miles of the title, so Sarah Miles, who's a working class young woman who seeks to better herself. Although initially she doesn't even really know quite what she's pursuing with this idea of bettering herself, but by educating herself and trying to become independent. I won't go through all the different female characters, but two that I think are particularly interesting are Maria Bell, who is a clergyman's daughter who falls on hard times and then establishes herself as a school mistress, and really tries to make a go of things that way. And her friend, Dora Wells, who has actually got this quite dreadful family background in the sense that her mother has been left a widow and she remarries into a family, really, just with the aim of shoring up her own financial circumstances and for her daughter, as well. And to some extent this is successful, although not to the extent that she would have envisaged, but she also brings her daughter into an environment that's extremely unwelcoming, um, and really just a complete misery for Dora. And Dora really finds herself unable to extricate herself from the situation. And I think the friendship between Maria and Dora is particularly interesting because we do see aspects of Mary and Charlotte's own friendship kind of played out in the way that these two connect with each other. So I think it's interesting in terms of portraits of women of the time, but also anyone interested in the lives of Mary and Charlotte. 

AMY: So the setup is kind of these four women from four completely different circumstances. And she's sort of using each one as an example for, you know, the difficulties that women face, including one of the ladies, Amelia is from a wealthy family, but we see a reversal of fortune in her case. But really, what Taylor's doing is exploring poverty and the workforce of the time and the fact that there were no safety nets. So a bad year at the mill meant, you know, possibly the poor house or starvation for people. 

KIM: Yeah, I mean, she really gives us a frightening vision of what can happen to women when they aren't able to support themselves. And yeah, the same threat does hang over the men in the book too, but there's this feeling that at least they have some agency in the situation that the women lack. 

AMY: Right. And Taylor kind of underscores this point when she writes about Maria, "For in truth, it amounted to this: that she had no more control over her own good will or ill luck than a little child." So what if anything from Mary Taylor's own life would account for her being so fiercely focused on this idea of wanting women to be able to support themselves?

EMMA: I think a lot of this, um, might stem from her relationship with her father. Her father had quite progressive attitudes towards marriage. He advised her not to marry for money, and not to tolerate anyone who did. And that seems to be advice that she took to heart and advice that was, you know, it was quite extraordinary at the time. But also her father went from being a really quite well-off industrialist to mounting debts and bankruptcy. And so, you know, Mary as a, as a girl, saw a real change in fortunes and, you know, went from a high level of comfort to having to take care of, I suppose, in terms of not having new clothing and looking out of place with the sort of more fashionable children at school. And then, when her father died and he had actually become bankrupt, there were tensions between her mother and her three brothers about the remaining property and assets, and the division of those. So I suppose that situation would have really highlighted to Mary the vulnerability of women when they're reliant on their menfolk to earn the money and make the financial decisions.

AMY: Right. And let's get back a little bit to this character of Dora that you brought up, Emily. This is Maria's best friend. Her mom has no other recourse to provide for them but to marry an abusive evil husband. Dora says at one point, "From what terrible destiny did she rescue me when this was the price? Once a beggar, always a beggar, she seems to have thought, and then accepted her position and took the means that are supposed to make all things right for womankind." Meaning, of course, that marriage was the only real option that she had. 

KIM: So, yeah, we mentioned Taylor complaining that Bronte had no doctrine to preach. Well, Taylor preaches in Miss Miles. Boy, does she! And oftentimes it's via Dora. She actually says to Mariah, "Darkness is ignorance, I tell you. It is what is recommended to us women. If people knew that the women in the church yards were alive, those in the coffins I mean, and were waiting for us to dig them up, do you think anyone would do it? No, they would not. They would say ladies did not want to get up. That they had all they wanted and the men did not like them to get out of their graves." 

AMY: Yeah, she really doesn't hold back. And then she has hatched this idea, like her one long shot, Hail Mary pass that is going to get her away from this horrible house she's living in. She's going to try to be a lecturer. Kim and I were cracking up because she has no experience. She doesn't even basically have a speech prepared. She's just going to wing it when she gets up there. But she gets Mariah to go out to all her neighbors and sort of gather them together, sell them on the idea of paying for this lecture. And then when Dora does give her speech, it's a moment, right? She brings the house down. 

EMILY: And do you really do get the sense that the people who have turned up for this speech, you know, they've basically come for the novelty of seeing this crazy woman getting up and, and giving a talk, which I think we do have to remember how unusual, how novel it would really be to see a woman standing up in public and speaking about anything, really, at that stage. And she talks about social issues, really in the speech. You know, she talks about the plights of working people. We get the sense that Dora has been pushed to breaking point, but we also get, of course, the sense of Mary Taylor, the author, using Dora as her mouthpiece to say, you know, what she really thinks. So it's interesting, I think again, from those two points of view, and, um, as you say it's a speech that's extremely well-received in the book, and it marks a complete shift in the way that Dora sees herself as a character, and it allows her to finally see a way forward in what has become, you know, a very long, drawn- out, dreadful situation for her. 

AMY: Yeah. And so like you said, the people in the town are not just skeptical, but a little scandalized by it too. And in fact, Maria has this would-be suitor who is trying to win her heart. And he sends her a letter, basically, lecturing her about her friendship with Dora and saying, "You should not be associating with this woman. It doesn't make you look good." A super annoying letter. And I love the fact that she writes him back with this mega "talk to the hand" moment. 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, Amy and I texted each other when we were reading that part, like, "Oh my God, this is great." She's like, "no." Um, and then also another thing that happens is Sarah punches her love interest in the face. So there's this visceral female strength happening in both of these different ways, and throughout the book. Do we know if any of this squares with Mary's relationships with men in real life? 

EMMA: Well, it's hard to imagine that Mary was the kind of woman who would put up with any kind of mansplaining. And the kind of upbringing she had from a father who encouraged her not to marry for money probably set her up quite well, that feeling that she had a right to some kind of equality and independence. I think she liked to be able to do the things that men might be able to take for granted. One of the lines from one of Mary Taylor's letters that I particularly love, and I think it gives a real sense of her character, she was talking about studying algebra and she said "it is odd in a woman to learn it, and I like to establish my rights to be doing odd things." I think that sorts of sums Mary up, really. 

KIM: What a great quote. Oh, I love that. 

AMY: She sounds like just a spitfire. 

KIM: Yeah. I love her. 

AMY: Um, in the book, I think Mary Taylor throws more than a little shade around at upper class women and even some middle-class women. They don't always come across particularly well in the book. In fact, um, the young woman, Sarah, who's decidedly from a lower class, she has these great fantasies about being like a fancy lady someday. "I want to be a fancy lady" and then she would always stop and be like, "What do they actually do?" And then people would kind of explain "Well, they do this or this." And she's like, "No, but I mean, what do they do?" I love those moments. 

KIM: Yeah. The more she found out about it, the more she was kinda like, "Hmm. I don't know about that." 

EMILY: Yeah. There was a sense of how even people who are in relatively comfortable social positions can be trapped just by the nature of being a woman and having so little agency, so little control over their own fortunes, you know, other than marrying a rich man who may or may not treat you well. Whatever you say about Miss Miles, there is a strong social message to it. You can see what the argument is, and I think that could only really have been honed through years of experience and years of thinking about the subjects that she wants to include.

AMY: Yeah, I, I kept thinking like, why did it take her so long to write this? But then when you think about her life, it does make sense because she was working, basically. It's like any career woman having to try to write on the side, and we'll get into this in a moment, but let's back it up a little. So in the autumn of 1844, Charlotte received a letter from Mary that shocked her to the core. Mary announced that she was moving to New Zealand. And Kim, I couldn't help but think of the moment, long ago, when you told me that you were moving from LA to San Francisco, and I'm pretty sure we both burst into tears. 

KIM: Yeah, I'm sure we did. 

AMY: Luckily Kim came back, but I know that feeling of like, "Oh my gosh, my best friend is leaving. Like halfway around the world." Luckily San Francisco was a lot closer. Um, can you talk a little bit though, why Mary made this move and why it was such a pivotal move for her? 

EMMA: Well, she had seen her brother make this Intrepid move, and I think she had realized that in New Zealand, British social mores had not embedded themselves. The kind of conventions were more malleable. And so I think she thought of it as a place where she could be pioneering. She could be part of a process that was defining what that culture might be, for better or worse. On the plus side, as a British woman traveling, she was afforded a huge amount more independence than she could have hoped for back in Yorkshire. So she ended up, you know, building, I assume, not with our own hands, but commissioning a five-bedroom rental property to be built. So she was able to get this, this rental income in. She helped her brother with his import-export business and she honed these entrepreneurial skills, which she then later used when a cousin of hers joined her in New Zealand and the pair of them ran a shop together, All of these things things would have been quite difficult for her to have engineered as a middle class woman in Britain at that time. And it was a pivotal moment for Charlotte Bronte, too, I think. I mean, you know, you two were talking about how devastated you were when you were going to be moving further apart. And I mean, Charlotte Bronte referred to Mary Taylor's news as "feeling like a great planet falling from the sky." And so, in a way, I think it was pivotal for Charlotte, just as it was pivotal for Mary. Partly through hearing about this alternative way of life for a woman, and it feels to me that in some subtle way shaped Charlotte's own thoughts about female independence. 

KIM: That makes sense. That makes complete sense. So when she got to New Zealand, that is when she supposedly started writing Miss Miles, maybe, um, even though she didn't finish it for 40 years. Is that right? 

EMILY: Well, there is a letter where she talks about how she's working on her novel. She doesn't specifically call it Miss Miles. Perhaps it wasn't called Miss Miles at that stage. But I think it was this book or something similar to it. But even then at this stage, she says, you know, she doesn't have that much chance to work on it. She was so busy with other things. You do get the sense that this is something that is being put on the back burner while she concentrates on doing other things.

EMMA: Yeah, she talked about how, um, active work promoted her imagination and creativity, but it's hard to think that it didn't simultaneously make it difficult for her to find the time. She was busy with her business, she was busy with, you know, the sort of practical elements of life. And also, you know, she did a lot of fun stuff. She was, um, very interested in her sort of explorations. She was dancing until three a.m. on one occasion with her cousin. So I think she, you know, she was someone who probably found that solitary occupation of, you know, sitting down with pen and paper, something that was quite difficult to sustain when life was full of so many enticing distractions for her. And she was writing other things, too. So we know in 1848 that she'd written 150 pages of a novel, which may or may not have been Miss Miles. She was also writing a political book that she thought of as being, you know, potentially seminal. She was writing radical articles and these weren't published, um, but she didn't know they weren't going to get published at the time. So she was someone who, maybe she spread herself a bit thin when it came to the writing, or maybe you could say she just had a really rich and fruitful life. 

KIM: I think the latter. I'm going to go with the latter. I love that.

AMY: But in the meantime, while she was in New Zealand, Charlotte Bronte died in 1855 and then not too long after that, Mary helped Charlotte's friend Elizabeth Gaskell with her famous biography on Charlotte's life. And in a way, her contributions to that kind of represented her first published work, you could say. Because Gaskell ended up using a lot of what Taylor had written out. But in the end, Mary Taylor was not thrilled with the final result of that biography, right? 

EMMA: Yeah. Mary embraced the opportunity to work with Elizabeth Gaskell on the first biography, because she wanted to show how Charlotte Bronte's life had been kind of inhibited and limited. She wanted readers, I think, to take a lesson from that and to see that there needed to be changes. And I think she thought that the biography could act as a source of catalyst. But unfortunately, although people did see that Charlotte Bronte had had suffering in her life, it seemed that critics read her life as a depiction of Christian suffering and a sort of heroine who had endured and that she had been full of forbearance. So rather than seeing it as a kind of call to arms that women cannot be treated in this way in the future and we must change things, it seemed as if Charlotte Bronte was being held up as this sort of mythical figure as, um, what women should aspire to. We should all be able to enjoy our suffering with such forbearance. And Mary Taylor was even more cross when there were complaints about the first edition. Um, for example, the head teacher at the first school that Charlotte Bronte attended... There was a sort of potential libel case being brought by the head teacher, and so Elizabeth Gaskell released a second edition with passages redacted and changed. And Mary Taylor felt that this was a real act of cowardice, and that for all its faults, the first edition at least contained truthful elements, whereas she felt that the changes in the second edition meant that it was a less reliable source. 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, I can clearly see why she was so frustrated. I mean, this is somebody who is really important to her and she has a vision for how it's supposed to be, and everyone completely misinterpreted it. That's super frustrating. 

AMY: Yet she was bringing her own world view onto Charlotte's life also, so then it's like, what is the right story? 

KIM: Yeah, that's true. Um, so then Taylor returned to England in her forties and she ended up living what her neighbors described as an eccentric and independent life. When she was almost 60, she led a party of women on a climb of Mont Blanc in Switzerland. The women subsequently published an account of their 10 week adventure called Swiss Notes by Five Ladies. That is so cool. I mean, I don't know that I'd actually want to do it, but I would love to read about it. That sounds amazing. 

AMY: Yeah. Is there anything else you know about the later years of Taylor's life?

EMILY: As you've also just alluded to there, she was thought of as extremely odd, I think, in her local community, including by Ellen Nussey, her old school friend. Um, she actually didn't live that far away, and she certainly subscribed to the view that Mary had become even more eccentric in her old age. But, you know, she had the freedom to do this because she had come back having enough money to build her own house when she came back and set herself up independently. She didn't have anyone to answer to. So, you know, as Emma's talked about earlier, she liked to do odd things and she now had the freedom to do that, and I think it also gave her the chance finally, after all these years of kind of putting it off to really get down and finish her book, Miss

Miles. So it came out towards the end of Taylor's life. She was in her seventies. I think, you know, she rightly realized that she probably didn't have that many years left and she wanted to get this out into the world, you know, before she was no longer able to do so. 

AMY: Um, Miss Miles, I will say, I don't think it's a perfect book. I think it had moments of brilliance. There were moments that stood out. There were also parts of the book that I'm like, "Nah, it's not a Jane Eyre- level masterpiece. I would say." What do you guys think about that? How would you rate the book overall? And do you know how the book was received when it came out?

EMILY: Yeah. So, um, I would agree with you. I don't think I would ever say to somebody, "Oh, I forgot about Jane Eyre, read Miss. Miles instead." But I think, you know, there are moments that are really interesting in the book. And particularly if you're interested in the lives of the Brontes, you could read the book as a kind of companion piece to Charlotte Bronte's works in particular. In terms of how the book was received when it came out, it didn't really sort of set the literary world on fire. I think it suffered in two different ways though. Um, as I'd already mentioned with the subtitle, it's A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago. So perhaps it was seen as a bit dated. And, conversely, I think it was also a book that was quite ahead of its time in terms of its social message. So you could argue that it sort of fell down in both of those aspects, perhaps seeming a little bit old fashioned and also just talking about things that would have just seemed so strange to people at the time or the way everything's just so there front and center with Mary Taylor's work. I think it would probably look a little bit too much for readers of the time to tell. 

AMY: It really was interesting to see all of her ideas about the oppression of women, basically. And just knowing that she was a friend of Charlotte Bronte, that is what makes it an interesting read, as you said. And I really loved reading your book, A Secret Sisterhood. Each of these four stories unfolded to me like a really riveting movie, and I could almost see some of these friendships being adapted to film, somehow. I could see like a movie version of Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot, which is crazy because they never even met as you explained in your book. And that ties into Charlotte Bronte too, because apparently Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to George Eliot and said that she was being visited by the ghost of Charlotte Bronte. And I loved George Eliot's reaction is just kind of, trying to be tactful. "I'm not sure how to react to this, but I really don't believe you." Um, so anyway, I want to encourage everyone to read A Secret Sisterhood because I thought it was going to be like, "Oh, friendship, pleasantries. Everybody's being so nice to one another, you know, like we just love each other. We have such a bond." There is drama. There is bitchiness. There is betrayal. There's cattiness. There are poignant moments too. That's what I wasn't expecting out of your book. I thought it was amazing. 

EMMA: Well, one of the things that really fascinated us was this notion that female friends, if they had hard moments, or moments of conflict, were kind of written off as being enemies or competitors. And yet all the really famous male literary friendships you could throw a stick at, you know, Hemingway and Fitzgerald or Coleridge and Wordsworth, they all had the huge rows that it was possible as readers and as consumers of literature to accommodate into their friendship as well. Of course ambitious, intelligent, creative men will have sorts of fiery tensions. That doesn't stop them being friends or collaborators. Whereas with women, when they have these kinds of robust intellectual, um, sort of bust-ups, it's suddenly like, "Okay, that can't be accommodated into the friendship." And that was something we found, really, with all the pairs that we wrote about. There were moments of tension and conflict, and yet the writers themselves continued to consider themselves to be friends, even if later commentators decided that they weren't. 

AMY: I can picture you guys writing A Secret Sisterhood and how much fun that must have been in terms of making discoveries. And the moment that I'm thinking of is the Jane Austin and Anne Sharp. I think it was that story where there was like a hidden, a little hidden envelope that you guys discovered within the binding of a book that no one knew was there. 

EMMA: Yeah. It was a real highlight of the whole process for us. So, um, I had gone to an archive on my own cause we had to share out some of the research and I had taken photographs of reams and reams of diaries that had been kept by Jane Austen's niece, who was taught by Anne Sharp and then transcribed them over many, many, many, many weeks. And there came to a moment where the niece had said she had written a description of a play that Anne Sharp had written and that Jane Austen and the children had performed along with other relatives, and that she had folded up this description and tucked it in the little pockets in the back of her diary, because it was too long to fit in the diary itself. And so I contacted the archivist and asked her, "Can you see if this is there?" She told me, "Oh, it definitely won't be. If it was there we would have found it already. But if you and Emily want to come back to the archive and take a look, then you're very welcome." So we took her up on the offer and we, we traipsed over there. Um, yeah, that moment where we, uh, first you couldn't see that it was there, then we had to really gingerly open this pocket and pluck out this really fragile piece of paper, trying to unfold it without it crumbling. And there it was this description of this play that hasn't survived. It's as close as we could get to Anne Sharp's own writing.

KIM: That's amazing. Wow. 

AMY: That would have just been still sitting there hidden away if you guys hadn't done this. Also, I wanted to find out when I saw that the foreword of the book was written by Margaret Atwood I was like, "How'd they get that? That's amazing." And then you guys talk about that in the back of the book. Can you tell that story?

EMMA: Yeah. That was really funny in a way. So we had been asked to commission a famous female writer to write the forward, and we were racking our brains, about who might, you know, be an appropriate person. And obviously Margaret Atwood was top of our list, but we were thinking, how could we get in touch with Margaret Atwood? Because neither of us had any contact with her. And then Emily helpfully reminded me that I was actually booked in to go to an event that Margaret Atwood was speaking and reading at at the British Library. Emily actually couldn't join me on that night, so we decided the best way to approach this was that we would compose a letter and we would hand write it. And I was sent off with the task to try to slip this letter to Margaret Atwood in which we were requesting her to write our forward. And you know, obviously I entered into this task with some trepidation, and I was actually going to this event with my husband. I didn't even tell him that I had this intention to pass on this letter because I just thought it's just far too embarrassing to admit to it. So Margaret Atwood gave her speech and actually during it, she mentioned how sad it was that people no longer exchanged hand-written letters very often. And at the end of this event, um, I still didn't think I'd really get to speak to her because, you know, there were hundreds of people in the audience. I didn't know how I would actually get close enough to hand her the letter, but as luck would have it, there was actually a party being hosted in her honor after the event. But Margaret Atwood herself actually could not attend it because she had a flight to catch. So everyone else went into this party and Margaret Atwood was kind of standing on her own in the lobby. If it hadn't been for having promised Emily, I think I would have chickened out, but because I'd promised Emily I would try, I felt that I had to give it go. Because I thought how likely was it that I was going to end up in an empty lobby with Margaret Atwood. So I went over and slipped this letter to her and said, "Oh, you mentioned that it's such a shame that people don't write hand-written letters and just by coincidence, I've written one to you." And I said it was to thank her because she had actually tweeted about our website when we'd launched it and it had helped generate some traffic to our site. So I said that it was a thank you letter. I didn't mention, we were actually asking her a huge favor. Um, so then much to my surprise, a few weeks later, we got an email from her saying that she'd like to read the draft and then yes, and Margaret Atwood was actually the first person to read our draft before our editors, which was a bit of a nerve- wracking moment.

AMY: Fortune favors the bold.

KIM: Yeah. Good for you. 

EMMA: Yeah. "Fortune favors the bold" is a great motto for Mary Taylor. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. She was bold as they come. So while I was preparing for this episode, I actually found something online. There's some controversy that some people think maybe Charlotte could have actually written Miss Miles and that Taylor, for whatever reason, just attached her name to it after Charlotte's death. Kim and I just can't believe this could possibly be true, but what are your thoughts? 

EMMA: Well, I don't think we have much truck with that interpretation either. I mean, we do know from Mary Taylor's letters that she was writing a novel. We do know that the subject matter accords with Mary Taylor's lifelong passions and interest, and that she's exploring issues that have long angered her. When you asked this question, it made me think of some of the negative reviews that Charlotte Bronte received on the publication of Jane Eyre and even the really negative reviews, they say things like, um, "Jane Eyre is a murmuring against the comfort of the rich and against the privations of the poor." And I think that word murmuring is really key. So, whereas with Charlotte Bronte's work, there's this subtle kind of subversiveness, with Mary Taylor you know, things are on the surface in a way that would never be described as a "murmuring." So that makes me very dubious. But Emily, I'd be interested to hear what you make of that theory. 

EMILY: Well, I mean, I think the voice of Charlotte Bronte's novels is not the same as the voice we find in Miss Miles. So, I mean, there's that for starters, you know, they don't feel as if they've been written by the same author, even though, you know, they do touch on some of the same concerns as you say, it's presented in a very sort of different way. I think sort of beyond that, I just don't think Mary Taylor would have done something like this. She was always very forthright, very honest. The idea that she would try to pass off somebody else's work as her own just, it doesn't really fit at all with anything that we know about Mary Taylor. As Emma touched on before, she could often be far too blunt, far too straightforward about things, so the idea that she would have taken part in this kind of deception, it feels nothing like the character that we researched and got to know. 

KIM: Quite a reach there. Quite a reach, I think we all agree. 

AMY: Yeah. Charlotte, if she's hearing this from her grave, she's like, "I don't want that book on me." Not that it doesn't have its merits, but It's, it's not a Bronte work. 

EMILY: It's a shame she hadn't say any of this to Harriet Beecher Stowe at the time.

And then this..

AMY: Oh yes! That could have cleared it up. Totally cleared it up. Well, anyway. It was so fun having you guys on 

KIM: This was a blast. 

AMY: Yeah. 

EMMA: Thank you so much for inviting us. 

EMILY: Thank you!

KIM: So that's all for today's podcast. Don't forget to rate and review us over at Apple Podcasts if you liked what you've been hearing. Or tell a friend. 

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

84. Quilt-Making As a Feminist, Political Act

In this week’s mini, we’re exploring the work of contemporary fine artists Faith Ringgold and Bisa Butler, whose quilts are inspired by a rich African-American quilting tradition, and Adeline Harris Sears’s 19th century signature quilt with autographs by notables including Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

Discussed in this episode: 

“In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” 

Met Gala 2022

Adeline Harris Sears

Charles Dickens

Jacob Grimm

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Washington Irving

Julia Ward Howe

Harriet Beecher Stowe

William Makepeace Thackery

Abraham Lincoln 

Q*bert background

Sarah Josefa Hale

Faith Ringgold

Bisa Butler

“Street Story Quilt” by Faith Ringgold

Maya Angelou

Frederick Douglas

Josephine Baker

Nina Simone

Jean-Michel Basquiat

83. Dorothy Evelyn Smith — O, the Brave Music with Simon Thomas

Note: Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES: Hi everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes...

KIM ASKEW: ... and I'm Kim Askew. The book we're discussing today, Dorothy Evelyn Smith's O the Brave Music, takes an established look at a young English girl, a minister's daughter, at the turn of the 20th century.

AMY: Yes. And we've featured a few books on this podcast by American writers looking back at that time period. I'm thinking of Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacey books as an example. So when I started reading O the Brave Music, I was expecting another book in that vein; a sweet, witty, charming novel with maybe some swoon-worthy romance.

KIM: Yeah, me too. This book checks all those boxes for sure, but this coming- of- age tale becomes more profound and nuanced with each passing chapter. The narrator's reflections on her youth are far from idyllic, and her struggle to square her inner longings with life's many bitter disappointments will leave your heart tangled up in knots. Yet it's also quietly joyful, too. It was aptly compared to Betty Smith's novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at the time of its release, which was in 1943.

AMY: I was also getting some I Capture the Castle vibes while reading this book. And that's a novel by Dodie Smith that I absolutely love, so needless to say, it was pure delight to read O the Brave Music, and we're so glad that today's guest brought it to our attention. We can't wait to discuss it with him today, so let's read the stacks and get started! 

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Dr. Simon Thomas, who for the past 15 years has been writing about lost ladies of lit, particularly those from the interwar period of the 20th century on his blog, Stuck In a Book. You can also find him dishing on all things literary on his wonderful podcast Tea or Books? alongside his co-host, Rachel. In addition, Simon is a consultant for the British Library Women Writers Series, which curates works by forgotten female writers. It's their edition of O the Brave Music, for which Simon wrote the afterword, that we read in preparation for this episode.

AMY: And also shout out to the British Library Women Writer Series because I think they have the best book covers. They are silhouettes of each author. I'm always like, "Ooh, I like that one! I like that one!" Anyway, Kim, I can remember the exact moment -- I was walking the dog -- I got a text from you saying that Simon had given our new baby podcast, in its early days of existence, a shout- out on Instagram. We were both elated that a PhD in English from Oxford University was recommending our podcasts to others. It was just a moment, right?

KIM: Yeah. It definitely made us feel like we were doing something worthwhile and it's like, "Okay, let's keep going. Something's working." 

AMY: I also want to say that my dream would be to sublet Simon's home for about a year, especially after listening to one of your recent episodes where Rachel basically goes through your bookshelves. 

KIM: I love that. 

AMY: …hang out with your cool cat and kind of pilfer from your collection. So I don't know if you're interested in like, uh, apartment swap Simon. You can come out to LA and live with my family. 

KIM: Business idea: Airbnb, but for book lovers only. 

AMY: I love that.

SIMON THOMAS: I will say, as someone who lives in LA, you might find it's rather wet here, and there is a hole in my roof currently. So if you can take the rain coming down the walls as well... 

KIM: Ambience. We'll take it. 

AMY: What you don't know about Angelenos is that when it rains here, we all get super excited, don't we, Kim? It's like a novelty. But anyway, Simon, thank you for coming onto this podcast. We're so excited to have you here.

SIMON: Yeah, I must say I'm delighted to be invited. I sort of invited myself, really, but it's really wonderful to be here. And I don't remember how I first came across your show other than to say I was there very early and shouting it out on Instagram, but it just, when I saw even the name, Lost Ladies of Lit, I was like, "These are my girls." I think you're doing such a wonderful job of bringing these lost ladies of lit back to attention, and I'm delighted that I could be on an episode and bring my home girl, Dorothy Evelyn Smith, with me. 

KIM: So as we've established, in your line of work you are well acquainted with a lot of women writers. What is it about Dorothy Evelyn Smith that prompted you to suggest her in particular for this episode?

SIMON: So as you said earlier, I am the series consultant for the British Library Women Writers Series. And so most of the books that come out in that series are ones that I've suggested to them, and they're meant to represent women's lives in whichever period they're published. And as we'll talk about, O the Brave Music doesn't quite fit because it is written in the 1940s and set in the 1900s, 1910s. It's never quite clear, but before the First World War and in the 20th century. And I managed to just get it into that series, basically, because I just kept saying, “This book's too good for us not to include.” I know it doesn't quite fulfill all the criteria and I know I was not supposed to have favorites, but this is my favorite of the series. And it's one of my favorite books. And that's why I have suggested it for this episode. I came across it in a little bookshop in St. David's in Pembrokeshire, Wales, which is technically a city, but it is, you know, the size of a village. I'd read one book by her and I'd always kept an eye out. I didn't think the title was particularly enticing. I didn't actually recognize the quote. We'll talk about that later as well, I'm sure. But I thought I'll give it another go. And I started reading it, and almost instantly I was completely beguiled. It's one of those books that just, um, I find completely envelops you in the world that she's created. I'm glad you mentioned  I Capture the Castle in your introduction. I've been told off for comparing the two because I've been told they're not the same. They're not the same plot or anything like that, but the same feeling of bringing you into a world and just living in that world and missing it when it's finished. And that's why I just want everyone to read it, and almost everyone who does read it loves it. So I just want everyone to at least try it.

AMY: When I started the first few pages, the vibe I was getting was, "Oh, this is sweet. You know, it had some, it's cute. It's funny, blah, blah, blah." I was just like, "huh." And then once we start getting into the meat of it you realize it's not just the sweet coming of age story. There's a lot more to it than that. 

KIM: Yeah, the dark undercurrent starts to pull at you and carry you through. 

SIMON: Yeah. I will say it starts maybe like it could seem quite twee, but then it is not twee, is it? There is so much, there's so much darkness, but it's also, I think we'll talk about all this in more detail, but I think despite all the sad things that happen, I think it's such an uplifting novel as well. I think that's what I came away with --a sense of it's just suffused in hope, despite everything that Ruan, the main character, goes through. 

KIM: Yeah. And that's the best kind of book, I think, so we probably all agree. Um, so do you want to share with our listeners a bit of a spoiler-free summary of the book, introducing us to the heroine?

SIMON: So, as I say, she's called Ruan. A strange name, R- U- A- N not one I've come across elsewhere. And like Dorothy Evelyn Smith, and indeed like me, she is the child of a minister. Although my dad was an Anglican vicar, not a Nonconformist like her father is. She lives in the north of England in, I think, Yorkshire, but I'm not sure if that's ever quite stated. She is in an industrial town, which is surrounded by these wonderful, beautiful moors. At the start of the novel she is seven and it takes us until she's on the cusp of adulthood, I guess. And the first section of the novel is about her living quite unhappily with her minister father and his wife. They were briefly in love, but now the marriage is quite unhappy, really. Ruan goes through a lot more in the space of this book than most of us go through in the space of our lives, I think. 

AMY: When I was reading the first part of the book, I kept thinking, "There's no way that you would pronounce this "ruin." Who would name a child "Ruin," right? And so I kept saying "Ru-Anne" in my head, but I love that there's a little poem that one of the friends came up with about Ruan. And it all rhymes with "brewin,'" you know, things like that. So then I was like, "Oh my gosh, it is pronounced "ruin!" So, um, I was glad to have that little clarification. And then another clarification: I never knew that the word manse referred to a minister's house, right? So we did an episode on the Findlater sisters who lived in a manse. And I remember mentioning that in the episode and I thought it was like a small mansion, basically. 

SIMON: Yeah.

KIM: Yeah, 

AMY: We don't have those here. I mean, we don't use that word.

SIMON: Yeah. It's not really a term that's used that much anymore now in England, but yeah, obviously it was quite common at one point. You'll still occasionally have people referring to the manse or to "manse land," which is land belonging to the rectory or vicarage or something. But, um, certainly I grew up in vicarages or rectories, not manses. 

AMY: Okay. Um, so let's talk about Smith's life a little bit. She was born Dorothy Evelyn Jones in 1893 in the Peak District of Derbyshire. Derbyshire, I don't know how you say that. 

SIMON: "Darby-shire. "

AMY: Okay. yeah, (I'm a Yank) which was located kind of smack in the middle of the country. And I don't know much about that part of England, but Simon, I would guess that we'd find a lot of moors there?

SIMON: Um, you'd find some. As Peak District suggests you find more mountains, but, um, it sort of bleeds into moors which go across the center of the country. I guess it's also not an area of the country I know that well, although I was just staying on the edge of the Peak District last week, but, um, Yeah. The moors are more famed for Yorkshire, and as anyone who reads this will see are very significant in the book. And I think one of the interesting things about why they're chosen both in this book and in English, British literature, is that in the UK moors are the biggest uninhabited spaces. And they're pretty small, unlike, you know, America or Canada or Australia, we only have a few square miles basically scattered here and there. So to an American reader the moors are probably near the park at the end of the street, but to us, it's this wild expanse. Quite often, particularly in the north of the country, you'll get moorland near the industrial plants. So the places like where Ruan and her family live that have factories at the heart of them and quite dispiriting or smoggy areas around them will also, as soon as you've got out of that area, tend to be moorland. And I think in O the Brave Music, it's a place where Ruan can really be herself. I think she finds her sense of her identity on the moors where she doesn't feel the troubles of her family or the unhappiness echoing around her house. Later she goes to school and she also doesn't love that, so the moors are just a place of freedom for her.

AMY: I want to just chime in for a second, because yes, we don't have moors in America, but I feel like I grew up a little bit on the moors because my family, when I was in eighth grade, we moved into a newly being built subdivision, and our house was one of the first houses there. And so it was all this empty land and it was kind of hills and there were some lakes in the little subdivision, but it was all empty and we called it the moors, and there were teenagers that lived there and we would go play flashlight tag at night on the moors. I had read Wuthering Heights by that point, so I probably was like, know, fantasizing.

SIMON: Can I jump in with a British question? What is a subdivision? 

KIM: Oh, good question. 

AMY: So it's like, um, what would you call that? Like tract homes. 

KIM: People would pick out where their house was going to go and they 1 of 4 styles, you know, or whatever. So every fourth house... 

AMY: They all look the same. 

KIM: They're all plotted and planned out.

AMY: It's suburbia. 

SIMON: All your clever, straight roads and easy map sort of 

KIM: What you're talking about actually made me go to Poltergeist, because in Poltergeist it's a subdivision that's built on hallowed cemetery ground 

SIMON: Oh my gosh. Okay. 

AMY: Did you ever think Dorothy Evelyn Smith was going to lead to a Poltergeist reference?

SIMON: I always assumed she would. I mean, it's the natural next step. 

KIM: Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, and it's so funny that you said that, because in my mind, I know that England is small, you know, obviously compared to the U S and a lot of places, but in my mind, the moors do automatically make me feel like a vastness. So I guess there is something in the way that it's described, in the way it must feel to our character and also other people to be on that moor. There is a vastness to it, even though it's kind of small. 

SIMON: Yeah. I mean, I think it's all in your perception. You know, to Ruan, they are vast. I mean, you could walk across them in half a day, I imagine, or less, but yeah I think when people think of literary moors, they think Wuthering Heights. Or Kate Bush's song, you know, "out on the wild windy moors." Um, but yeah, I think It's really different in terms of the moors in Wuthering Heights are so dangerous and unsettling, and they are places where people find themselves, but it's always quite ominous. Whereas as I say, I think in O the Brave Music, they're the opposite of that. They're a friendly space. There's a lovely bit where she talks about going "up, up through the purples of the heather ," that sort of thing, and it feels like she's coming out of this dark, difficult place out into freedom. And yeah, I think as a reader, I will say I felt when we were off in the moors, you just feel lighter and happier. Almost everything that happens on the moors in the book is positive. 

AMY: Yeah. It's like the mothering side of Mother Nature, you know? Nurturing. Yeah. So anyway, we can get into Dorothy Evelyn Smith's life a little bit more as we go along, but I think we should just dive right into the story. At the beginning of this novel, we see seven-year-old Ruan sitting in church on Sunday as her father sermonizes, and she's daydreaming about cutting up a pink ribbon that she sees on a fellow churchgoer's hat. She would love to use the ribbon to make a new suit for her Little Man, which is her imaginary friend . But as lovely as the ribbon is, she knows that if she were actually to cut into it, it would be finished. No more ribbon; it's done. This little plot might seem kind of trivial, but it actually represents the crux of the entire novel. Can you explain that a little bit, Simon?

SIMON: Yeah. I think you're right. It's such a small moment, and then it recurs throughout. There's a bit later where she talks about maybe going to the circus. And I'll quote: "To go would spoil the splendor I now possess. Like the pink ribbon out of Rosie's hat, if I never had it, I could never lose it." And I think Ruan, particularly in the younger years, lives so much of her life in potential and in the possible, and is scared to grasp it. You can understand why when she's living in a really difficult situation and hasn't had a lot of experience of grasping something and it being good. So it's much easier for her to see the pink ribbon, metaphorically, whatever that might represent, in the distance. And yeah, if she never tries something, she can never fail at something. If she never trusts someone then she can never be let down by them. Over and over again, the perfection is on the horizon. Later in the novel she realizes, on the instruction of others, that she will have to grasp something real at some point, not just live in the potential, but that's a thread that lasts quite a while.

KIM: Yeah. And then unlike her seemingly perfect older sister, Sylvia, little Ruan is a bit of a misfit. She's feisty. She acts out. Um, she's reminiscent maybe of Ramona the Pest or Harriet the Spy. She's always threatening these extreme acts of violence against Sylvia, and her inner thoughts are actually wickedly funny, right? And there are lots of laugh- out- loud moments. She's passionately in love with words, and she has a wild imagination and her father actually tries to curb it to help her. He even insists she give up her imaginary Little Man, which she does actually, even though she doesn't necessarily have to. It's imaginary, but she does, even though it's painful to her. But it doesn't stop her from being her essential self.

AMY: Yeah. And all of these childhood anecdotes, I mean, even though she, in her head, is going through some difficult times and they're maybe not so funny to her, the way Smith writes them is so funny. I'm thinking about the encounter with a circus clown. And then there's a Stand By Me moment where one of her friends asks her if she wants to go see a dead body and, you know, they covertly, creep into the house of a poor family and go see an actual corpse, basically. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of that clown incident, I want to go back to that and read a passage from the book about that. Right after she gets home, after the clown has kissed her outside of a circus tent. Here I go: "There was a terrible fuss, of course. Tears and explanations from Tanner. Tears and explanations from me. I was scrubbed with carbolic soap. I gargled with Condy's fluid. The small tooth comb was brought into vigorous play. Father lectured me on the sin of forwardness. Mother searched my clothing for fleas , and at length, disinfected and prayed over and bitterly clean, I was put to bed with a good book and a dose of opening medicine and all because a clown had kissed me."

SIMON: What I love about that moment, and lots of other moments in the first half of the book, is that they add nothing to the plot. They're just there. Because you think "Oh, is it going to be a circus novel?" It's like, no, the circus, it never comes back. It's never mentioned again. 

AMY: Circuses are weird and creepy

KIM: They are. That is true. 

SIMON: No one likes a clown, do they? 

KIM: No, no. And they definitely won't after they read this. The idea of being kissed without, you know, wanting it by a clown is...

AMY: Horrifying. Yeah. Um, I probably make the mistake a little bit when I read, I kind of assume things are autobiographical. And I don't know if that's the case with this book. I don't know what she might've pulled from life or what she didn't. Simon, do you know if there are any parallels we can draw between the author and Ruan based on anything we know about her?

SIMON: It's interesting you say that, because I also felt that it seems so autobiographical and I think a lot of it has to do with the small details. They don't add to the storytelling so much as just to add to the feeling of the novel and they feel so real. And I'm afraid the truth is that I don't actually know that much. Sadly, her children have died now, but when I was writing the author bio for the British Library edition, I did get to speak to two of her grandsons, which was wonderful. So they'd only known her as children. She died when they were still children. So obviously not the most in-depth knowledge of everything about her, so they could fill me in a bit. And what is true is the area of the country she lived in and the fact, as I said, that she was the daughter of a minister. They didn't think that she'd ever had a brother. I don't know how much I'll say about Clem, her baby brother in the book, who has mental and physical disabilities that are never really specified exactly what they are. I assumed he was drawn from life, but he wasn't. Um, something that works really well the other way, sort of life taken from art, is, in real life, she named a house Cobbetts after the house in the novel, which I thought was really lovely, that the legacy of that house lived on in reality. I think ultimately the only people who'd be able to answer the question of how biographical it is not with us anymore. 

KIM: We'll never know. Yeah. You could see the grandkids not knowing if there had been, you know, a brother. But so back to Ruan, we really can't blame her for being as precocious as she is. She is actually bearing witness to the disintegration of her parents' marriage, which for a child of seven would obviously be really difficult. Smith does a really great job of putting us inside the brain of a young girl. She doesn't understand quite what's going on, but she's smart enough to see the writing on the wall. Simon, I was wondering if you have any favorite passages from this first section that we're talking about, that you'd care to share with our listeners to give them maybe a feel of both Ruan's personality and Smith's writing style. 

SIMON: Yeah. I do want to reiterate before I read this, that this is a hopeful, happy book, really, often, but the passage I wanted to read was about Clem whom I just mentioned. The passage I've chosen is where Ruan is coming to understand the severity of the illness that he has. And I've chosen it because I think it is a great example, both of the heart and the emotion of the book, but also the way in which Smith manages to combine what the seven-year-old Ruan is going through with the older perspective of the adult writing the novel, I guess, which we'll talk about in a bit. Um, yeah, here it is: That night when I was alone with father for a few minutes, I plucked up my courage and said, "Father, is Clem all right? I mean, will he walk and talk soon like other babies?" He stared at me searchingly. "Who has been talking to you?" "Annie Briggs, Father. She came through the fence and I couldn't stop her. She, she said..." "Well?" he demanded harshly. "She said Clem was only 11 pence ha'penny and a shilling, Father." For a long time Father stood still looking, not at me, but right through me. Then he said in a queer, strangled voice that was humble, yet angry. "Thy will be done, Ruan. Always." I was frightened and crept out of the room. An hour later on my way to bed I peeked around the corner to whisper goodnight and Father was still standing there, quite still, his face hidden in his hands." Oh gosh, I'm choking up just reading it. 

KIM: I feel the same way. I will never forget that passage. 

SIMON: It's just so striking, I think, such depth. Because I think Smith is fair to all her characters. She gives us the truth of all of them and doesn't just see them as being all bad or good. Things like that really add a depth to the novel, I think. 

KIM: Yeah, for sure.

AMY: There's so much that I wish I could say in regard to Ruan's mother, in particular, but it's hard to do that without giving away some major spoilers. So I'm just going to bite my knuckles and hold it in. But suffice to say, Ruan and her sister find themselves shuffled around with no concrete place to call home at a certain point. And since Ruan isn't incredibly close with her sister, she ends up cleaving to several people outside her family who seemed to know her best and love her unconditionally.

KIM: Yeah. This brings us to David, who I guess is, is sort of the Gilbert to our Anne here. Um, he's a young acquaintance of the family. Though he's about five years older than Ruan, he takes it upon himself to be a sweet friend and protector to her. And he truly becomes her lifeline through all the stuff that she's going through with her family.

AMY: I loved David, the same way Ruan does in the book. I was smitten, and he starts off at 12 years old, and I'm already, like, in love with the kid. 

KIM: He's so charming. From the get-go, he's so charming.

AMY: So it's not a romance in the traditional sense. I don't know, some readers might get a weird vibe about it because they are kids.

KIM: The big age difference. 

AMY: Yeah, but I didn't mind it. What do you think, Simon? 

SIMON: Yeah. I'm glad that you pointed out that it's not a traditional romance, because yeah, there is that five-year age gap, which at the beginning, when she's seven and he's 12 is one thing. But then later when he's an adult and she's still in her early teens, if it were a romance, it would be very unsettling. To borrow your Anne and Gilbert thing, it's kindred spirits, isn't it? And I think in some ways, David has the same function as the moors. He's the only human who's able to let her be herself and give her freedom to be herself and sees who she really is. He is so wholesome. He doesn't treat her with any sort of undue dignities. He's quite sarcastic. He calls her Tinribs all the time, a nickname. I don't really know what's going on there and I've never seen it before or since, but he latches on to it immediately. He's not the only person who's kind to her, but I think he is the only person who really recognizes who she is.

KIM: Yeah, he's really honest with her, and he can even criticize her. If he has any criticisms of her, as they start to get older, it's the fact that she's scared to fully live as we talked about. So at one point he actually says to her, "The trouble with you, my child, is that you're an idealist, which is a fancy name for a coward. You live in your imagination and you're frightened to look life in the face for fear it's not quite so attractive as your own idea of it. It doesn't seem to occur to you what a hell of a lot you may be missing."

AMY: Right. And that also, you could say, ties into the book's title. And Simon, I know that you are not a huge poetry fan, um, but can you explain where Smith got this title and how it kind of factors into the book?

SIMON: Yeah, I wish I were a poetry fan. I'd like to be that person, but you're right, I'm not. And I had to explain where the title came from when I wrote the afterword for this edition. I find it quite hard to explain exactly what it's doing in the book, but it comes from a book called The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam which was written many centuries ago, but translated by Edward Fitzgerald, I think, in the late 19th century. A very popular book at the time. The line is "O the brave music of the distant drum." I think in this novel, it's both Ruan always looking forward to the future and the narrator looking back, that is to say, to her past . She is looking at it through a certain lens, maybe elevating it. Some sort of nostalgia. She wouldn't want to go back there, I'm sure. A lot of horrible things happened, but that sort of lens that she's put on viewing her childhood, as something separate and special that she's no longer part of and can look back on differently from the way she experienced it, I guess. I hope that makes some sense.

KIM: It makes sense, that idea of music sounding so brave from a distance, but you're not seeing the brave music of the drum, maybe a drum for war or all the other things that could be coming from that drum, because it sounds so brave and so inspiring from a distance. That's how I see it. 

SIMON: Yeah. 

AMY: So in the second half of the book, Ruan ends up going to live with her uncle Alaric. Is that how you say that name? 

SIMON: Oh, I don't know. I just said Alaric, but that's not based on any actual knowledge. 

AMY: Okay, well, however you say it, uh, he's, he's a kind, but taciturn man, and the house he owns is sort of this crumbling down estate that belonged to Ruan's mother's family. That whole section is what really reminded me of I Capture the Castle. The home's glory days are long past and Alaric resorts to selling off paintings from the house to have enough money to live on. This makes Ruan upset. She doesn't like seeing the portraits of her ancestors being ushered out of the house, but her uncle gives her this advice about not becoming attached to people or things. So he basically shares Ruan's philosophy of sort of being like this insular, you know, separate, island of a guy, right, Simon?

SIMON: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I'll quote a bit where he does say that, where he says, "You must not care about Madame Margaret [that's one of the paintings] Ruan, or indeed about any possessions. They are a nuisance, a hindrance. I have found that out. The less you care about people and things, the less hurt they can do you. Always remember that you yourself are the only important thing in your life. People and possessions come and go, making a pattern around you, but nothing really touches you. You began alone and you'll end alone. The essential you is alone all the time." So I didn't think is particularly good advice, but it's certainly the advice he gives, and he does have this whole sense of being on your own and not to be pulled down by anything, but also at the same time he is pulled down or believes people are pulled down by their family lineage, even by their homes. He's still staying in Cobbetts even when any reasonable man might've left. Books, which I'm sure we all applaud, are the exception to his rules. He still has plenty of those around. He still has lots of books to pass on to Ruan. 

KIM: Yeah, I don't think we go into detail in talking about this, but there is a level of snobbery or snobbishness, I think in the book. Ruan, I feel like, has it too. Um, it's almost presented in a positive light, but I don't know, as an American reader, I don't know. 

SIMON: It is interesting. I mean, you're right, because it's a British book from the 1940s so of course there's snobbery. But I think in lots of different ways the book is surprisingly not discriminatory. We have that character, Moses, the young black boy, and Ruan passionately believes that people shouldn't discriminate against him and she wants to be friends with him. There were quite a lot of disabled characters in the book, physically or mentally disabled. And again, they're probably not written about in ways that would be published now, but they are written about compassionately and they're certainly not figures of fun. And then class.... yeah, we have lovely Luke, the, I guess servant, but he's just as deep and wonderful a character as the others, so Ruan and all the characters who are middle or upper class do have some internal snobbery, as I say, everyone did and probably still does in this country. Um, but, I think it's a surprisingly progressive work in lots of different facets.

KIM: It is progressive.

AMY: So as Ruan's growing up and becoming a young teenager, she actually does have a legitimate suitor in the book. It's one of David's friends. And he's a good guy, but she cannot deal with the idea of a romance with him. And it's partly due to the fact that she's resisting this idea of growing up. Smith writes: "Life. Grown-up life. That mysterious business that still lay far ahead of me. I knew suddenly, and quite definitely, that Stebbing's key would never unlock that door for me or his kid- gloved hands tear down that veil. Life was a lovely, a terrible thing. To be dreamed of, but not experienced. Like the pink silk I would not cut and the circus I didn't want to see, the day I knew was so sweet ...so sweet. Why trouble about tomorrow?"

KIM: That is so beautiful. And it shows what we've been talking about, this darkness and the light and everything. And it also even comes down to when Smith was writing this portrait of childhood or whatever, she says she was writing it at the kitchen table during World War II while bombs were actually dropping around her. Sadly, we're actually recording this episode while Russia is dropping bombs on the Ukraine. So that detail feels particularly poignant to me right now. 

SIMON: Yeah.

KIM: But anyway, let's back up a little bit in Smith's story and talk about her bio a little bit more. In 1914 when she was 21 years old, she married a banker named James Norman Smith. And after that she adopted the nickname Miffy. That's a play on her married name. Reminds me of Pooky, your mother-in-law.

AMY: Yeah, my mother-in-law's name is Pooky, so I can relate. So during World War I, Smith's husband signed up to fight, and then Dorothy worked as a clerk in the war office. 

SIMON: Or "clark," as we would say in the UK.

KIM: I like It it sounds even better that way. 

AMY: I feel like such an idiot trying to pretend, although I, in my heart, I wish... you know what? Somebody once gave me the best compliment. It was a British woman, and she said to me, you are very English, Amy. And I remember just being like "best compliment ever!" 

SIMON: Can I say, actually, I was listening to an episode where you mentioned Red Pottage. And I did enjoy it because I think you pronounced the author as Mary "Colemandly," not knowing that in Britain, that same name is pronounced "Chumley," which you could never have predicted, but it...

AMY: Wait, what?

SIMON: It’s spelled C H O L M O N D E L E Y. 

AMY: Yes! Yeah. Yeah. "Shallmondelay." 

SIMON: Yeah, it's pronounced, “Chumley.”

AMY: “Chumley.” Okay. Like Worcester/Wooster, okay. 

SIMON: You’d have no way of guessing that. 

AMY: See, this is why we need you! 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: Um, I'm sure there are so many moments like that in our podcast where British listeners are like, "Uggh."

KIM: I'm sure American listeners are rolling their eyes at my pronunciation, but anyway, that's why language is so fun.

AMY: Yeah. So it's interesting to me, and you mentioned it a little in regard to the title of the book that, you know, she is reflecting backward as she's writing this story, you know? She didn't have to do that. She could have just told the story chronologically and not presented herself as future Ruan. How do you think that maybe serves the story she's trying to tell?

SIMON: Yeah, I think it was such a wise decision on her part, because it enables her to just soak the narrative with wisdom. I think if it were a first-person who's just seven, you'd just see that world as a seven year old sees it. And we do get that part of it, as you say, but because she's able to look back as well with maybe a bit of world weariness, maybe a bit of things she's learned over the years, there's that sense, always, of seeing the greater reality. She doesn't have to have a childlike naivety to what she's saying. Or rather, she does have that, but combines it, I think really cleverly, and she balances the things really well of, um, also having the years of experience. I think it happens a lot when she's looking at her childhood and thinking about how she got out of that situation. But I think there's also moments like where characters are discussing whether or not there'll be a world war. And there's that small element there that we know David will probably fight in that war. And we obviously have no idea what happens to him in it. But because she's writing with the 1940s standpoint so firmly there, we can, I think, experience two narratives at once that don't take away from each other, but really enhance each other. And I think it becomes a much more sophisticated and interesting book than if it had just been a chronological book from a child's point of view. I don't know if you feel the same.

KIM: I feel completely the same. It adds complexity and depth. Yeah, it was a really great decision on her part to do that.

AMY: And I actually have one more passage that kind of relates to this. If you don't mind, I would love to read it. She's talking about memory here. She writes, " How strange a thing is memory. Something happens, something horrifically beautiful, or poignantly sad, something that changes the whole course of life and looking backwards to yesterday and through a thousand yesterdays, and the only things remembered clearly are the color of somebody's tie. A wrong note played on a piano. The tuppence lost down the back of a sofa. The heart keeps the stone that splashed into the quiet pool, but the brain remembers only the shallow ripples that ran glinting across the surface that will go on running forever and ever until they reached the ultimate shores of time."

KIM: I remember tearing up when I read that too. I'm so glad you read that for the episode, because those lines really impacted me, too. 

SIMON: When I read that, I did think I should earmark this for my funeral, which is hopefully not coming up anytime soon, but what a beautiful thing to read at a funeral. 

KIM: It's gorgeous. Okay. We're all going to be doing that. We're all going to make notes. 

AMY: It's interesting too, because I just finished a new book that's out called Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso, and Kim, I'm going to be lending it to you. Um, but the two books have nothing in common. I'm not comparing Manguso's book to this book, but she's writing about a child, a young teenage girl, who has a kind of hard life. And she tells it through these little snippets of memories, basically. And so in that sense, it kind of reminded me of this book. But both books also give the feel of how tough it is to be a child. In childhood, kind of, life happens to you. You don't have a lot of ability to change it. As an adult, when something bad happens, we have a choice of like, well, you walk away, you know? You change your situation, you do something different. Children don't have that ability. They just have to go on with what they're being told to do. And, um, so there's a sadness that runs throughout this book, as we said, but you're right, Simon. It's so life-affirming and joyful by the time you get through it. In terms of what happens with Ruan and David and whether they end up together or not, we're not going to say, but I do think the way Smith chooses to answer the question actually fits in with this whole undercurrent of the book. The idea about "Do you cut the pink ribbon or do you not cut the pink ribbon?" And we'll just leave it at that? 

KIM: Oh, yeah, so, um, Simon, you had mentioned other books that you had read. You've already read one by her when you found this book. Are their favorites of hers you'd want to recommend to our listeners? What should we read next by her?

SIMON: Sure. I'll say, I've read three other books by her. There's one other one that's in print, Miss Plum and Miss Penny, which is quite different. It's sort of a cuckoo in the nest thing about a woman who invites another woman to move in with her and that goes quite awry. That one came back in print around the same time actually as O the Brave Music but with different publishers. A lovely coincidence that she was returning to print in two different places. I think the one that I've read that I would most recommend after this one is Proud Citadel, that I've got all my fingers crossed will eventually be a British Library title. I keep recommending it to them, so I'm hoping they'll say yes, uh, which is in some ways quite similar. It's another young girl on the moors, but those are coastal moors. So the sea also plays a really important part. It goes for a much longer period. She's 20, I think, maybe even 30, at the end of the book, but similarly there's another David. He's not called David, and he's not quite as nice, but it's similarly a coming of age thing in a bigger community. We see more people for longer, I guess. So Proud Citadel is the other one of hers I recommend people hunt for, but I do think O the Brave Music is a cut above the ones I've read. It's um, yeah, the other ones are enjoyable, but this one is really something special.

AMY: And I should also add that if you want to hear more discussion about O the Brave Music Simon and Rachel in their podcast Tea Or Books? actually have a whole episode that compares O the Brave Music to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. It's funny that they have the same last name, come to think of it. Um, but yeah, so those two books are often compared to one another, right? 

SIMON: Yeah. And I hadn't actually read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn until after I read O the Brave Music. So I was seeing it more the other way around. And it's a very different setting, of course. It's very, you know, urban and American, but there are a lot of similarities. Uh, I will say, sadly, Rachel is one of the few people that hasn't liked O the Brave Music, but don't let that turn you off if you do listen to the episode.

AMY: I know, I was surprised to hear that. Yeah. 

SIMON: I was so sure she'd love it. I was astonished that she didn't.

AMY: That makes sense now that you were a little worried when you were waiting to hear back from us. You were relieved when we said we loved it.

KIM: You're like, "Am I the only one?" We absolutely loved it.

SIMON: I was so pleased that you guys did love it.

AMY: I feel like there are more things about O the Brave Music I still want to discuss with you guys, but we don't want to give any spoilers away to our listeners. Um, so I just want to say what a joy it's been having you on the show. I feel like I knew you already a little bit just from listening to your podcast, but I do wish that Kim and I could go picnic with you on a moor some sunny afternoon. We're going to figure out how to do that. 

KIM: Yeah, I love that idea.

SIMON: I hope to get you to a proper British picnic where it's far too cold and you have to go for a brisk walk halfway through because your fingers are numb. But yeah, thank you so much for having me. I love the podcast. You're doing great work, and I'm so pleased I got to be on this episode. 

KIM: My anglophile heart is about to burst right now with happiness. It's too much. I can't handle it.

SIMON: Take care. 

KIM: You too. Bye. Sad to say goodbye almost!

AMY: So we'll sign off now, but don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter where we'll occasionally be giving out sneak peek info on which books we'll be featuring in future episodes. You can get a jump on your reading if you're inclined to read along with us.

KIM: Yeah. And as always, you can check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of the show and further information.

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

82. The Polarizing Ambiguities of Motherhood in Books

Note: Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

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

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. Last week we had the privilege of speaking to Hilma Wolitzer about her wonderful short story collection Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, and this idea of writing that speaks honestly about the experience of being a wife and mother really got us thinking.

AMY: Yeah, and there were actually a few moments of discussion with Wolitzer that we didn’t have space to include last week but that really speaks to this. Let’s roll some of that audio.

HILMA: “And somebody, and now I’m blocking another name, who said, “If women ever told the truth about their lives the world would shatter.” and women telling these truths, the world isn’t shattering. People are listening and accepting it. Rachel Cusk’s book about Motherhood – I love that book. It starts out about childbirth, but it’s not really about childbirth. It’s about raising this stranger who demands all your time and all your attention and how your life is altered by this. And it goes on and on and on, as you said. It’s never ending. Which is also wonderful.”

AMY: So that quote she initially referenced is actually from a lost lady of lit. Her name is Murial Rukeyser, if I’m saying that correctly, and she wrote:  “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” That’s from a poem she published in 1968, so kind of around the time Wolitzer’s stories were first being published, in fact.

KIM: Yeah, and it’s so perfect that she brought that up in relation to Rachel Cusk’s memoir about motherhood (that book is called A Life’s Work) because it basically does just that. It told the truth about her life and, in some sense, at least to the critical world and the people who were paying attention to it, split apart in some ways. Cusk’s book is beautiful, and funny and smart and it doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to describing how hard childrearing can be--how much it can take from you on all levels, physical, emotional, and career-wise. But also how wonderful and amazing it is at the same time. She wrote it when her children were very young, so she was in that super exhausting, particularly alienating period of motherhood, if you know what I’m talking about.

AMY: Oh, yeah, I remember.

KIM:  The book came out in 2001 and it made a lot of people angry. One reviewer wrote: "If everyone were to read this book," it said, "the propagation of the human race would virtually cease, which would be a shame." That reviewer was a woman, by the way! 

AMY: Oh my gosh. I was going to say, maybe a bit of hyperbole there. Come on.

KIM: Yeah. And so, because a few years later after she’d kind of processed all this sort of outrage that she didn’t expect (or she said she didn’t) she wrote a piece in The Guardian about it, basically saying how floored she was by people’s response to her book. This was before, you know, people were really talking so much about the ambiguities of being a mom. (You know, we’ll talk about that later, but I think people are talking about that more.) The backlash Cusk felt actually made her feel hugely ashamed and guilty at first, -- not for anything she’d actually done to her children, but for not being 100% beatific about motherhood! She finally realized that she’d basically effed with people’s ideal by writing this book, and in reality there’s a huge spectrum of the experience of motherhood, and it’s going to differ from person to person. The book was really ahead of its time.

AMY: I don’t think I realized that she had written the book that long ago.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: I’ve never read it, so now I’m really intrigued.

KIM: I think you would love all of her books. I’ve already talked to you about her most recent one, which I can loan to you, but yeah, she’s great. She writes fiction that’s sort of auto-fiction-ish, and this was a memoir…

AMY: So yeah, and this kind of ties into the movie The Lost Daughter that we referenced in last week’s episode as well. I can’t remember where it was from, Kim,  but you’d sent me an article around the time the movie came out and the writer of the piece sort of argued that, you know, oh everybody thinks this movie is so shocking and surprising because it’s touching on a taboo topic about motherhood, a non-perfect mother who abandons her kids, but there are a lot of mothers in literature, if you look back across the years. This idea of the “unnatural” mother. And so I thought that could be something we could talk about today.

KIM: Yeah. Even Lady Macbeth, like, she’s not a mother, but there’s a lot of speculation based on some of the things she says about motherhood that she had maybe miscarried or something like that. So we’re talking Shakespeare…Grendel…

AMY: Right!

KIM: Yeah, so I mean, we’re talking way, way, way back. Anyway, we’ll have to try to find that article somewhere and link to it in the show notes.

AMY: Yeah, if we can figure it out, we’ll link to it.

KIM: But to your point, on the one hand in literature, you have characters like Marmee from Little Women: She’s basically perfect. She’s caring, nurturing, selfless. As a young kid, you know, reading about Marmee and other characters like that, I really wanted that, but it’s not realistic, I don’t think. So yeah, let’s talk about some literary mothers who don’t necessarily live up to that ideal, or mothers who are driven to desperation (or even abandon their children) like Leda in Lost Daughter.

AMY: So in terms of books we’ve already discussed on this podcast, the first character that comes to mind for me is Kate Comstock from A Girl of the Limberlost. That character is a mother who is emotionally abusive — like shockingly so, right? I think we both felt that way when we were reading that book. And then you can drift over even to Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, you know? That main character, Linda Radlett, basically abandons her daughter at birth and lets her in-laws go ahead and raise the child. And even at birth, Linda tells her cousin Fanny that the baby’s so ugly “it’s kinder not to look.” It’s hard not to be shocked by that.

KIM: Yeah, can you imagine if someone said that now? Then there’s Mrs. Bennett from Pride & Prejudice. Though she’s not a villain, per se, she is selfish in that she makes everything about herself. She’s also just super annoying. Definitely not a “Marmee,” but you know, she has her own reasons for why she kind of acts that way I could argue. 

AMY: Yeah, not sympathetic in an entirely different way.

KIM: Yeah, you have to think about it. You’re like, oh yeah, her husband is actually kind of annoying, and she does have to marry off all those daughters to save them from poverty, because the house is going to be taken over by someone else. Anyway.

AMY: Definitely not a “Marmee.” (I’m thinking Caroline from the Little House books, too. She was pretty perfect, as well.) But getting back to our mothers today, we have characters like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina who also abandoned their children for their lovers. That’s always a tough one to wrap your brain around. And I kind of took issue with that aspect, actually, of The Lost Daughter. I didn’t love — I mean, spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t seen that…

KIM: You probably already know by now.

AMY: Yeah, I imagine by this point… the Oscars are probably done by the time this comes out. But I didn’t love Leda’s decision to leave the family, the fact that it was wrapped up in her attraction to that lechy professor. That made me feel a lot less sympathy for her. 

KIM: Yeah, I agree. Adulterous women equal bad mothers is basically the timeworn line of thinking there. But the same thinking doesn’t automatically apply to men. There’s a double standard there, don’t you think? The men sort of, they did just kind of leave and start whatever new life they were going to start.

AMY: Paging Charles Dickens!

KIM: Exactly. And even through the Eighties. I mean, I think there’s more of an idea now of equal partnership than there was even a couple of decades ago.

AMY: Yeah, but when talking about Anna Karenina, though, I think a big crux of that story is like, “Oh my gosh, she’s choosing Vronsky over her son!” But you do feel a lot of her angst at being separated from her little boy, because she’s absolutely obsessed with him in that novel. With Emma Bovary, I think it’s a little bit different, and actually, to get a little “meta” for a second here, I found an essay that Elena Ferrante wrote (and we’ll link to it in our show notes). But she wrote about reading Madame Bovary and how Emma’s attitude toward her children basically cut her, Ferrante, to the core, especially when Emma says of her daughter, “It’s strange how ugly this child is.” And Ferrante wonders if that’s a phrase a woman could ever really say. She thought only a man without children could think up a line like that because it’s so cruel.

KIM: Yeah, it’s very cold.

AMY: Yeah, but as we just mentioned, Nancy Mitford had her character say something very similar about her newborn. But I think Ferrante makes a good point that both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary were both characters written by men, so that does kind of complicate things even more when we’re looking at this topic.

KIM: It also does call to mind that anecdote about Daisy Fellowes not recognizing her own children in the park.

AMY: But at least she thought they were lovely.

KIM: Yeah, that’s true.

AMY: If you’re not going to recognize your own kids, at least think they’re cute kids.

KIM: Yeah. But to your point, it’s interesting that men wrote both those characters and were able to sort of have them say those things about their children and leave them for men.

AMY: There’s another character, though, that was written by a woman author, who also abandons her children after taking a lover. I’m not going to say any more in terms of storyline, but the character is named Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. 

KIM: English majors out there will probably have read this.

AMY: Yes. Chopin wrote at one point in the novel, “In short, Edna Pontellier was not a mother-woman.The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.”  I feel like I saw you have an “a-ha” moment there, Kim.

KIM: I had a moment while you were reading that, because “protecting wings” made me think of the opposite of that, which is moths, and the terrible mother who sacrifices her daughter in Moths [by Oudia] which is another book that we did on Lost Ladies of Lit maybe a year ago or something like that.

AMY: Oh, she was a terrible mother!

KIM: And she was written by a woman.

AMY: Yes, okay.

KIM: It’s been a long time since I read The Awakening. Maybe high school or college. I probably should re-read it, though. It’s making me want to re-read it. 

AMY: Yeah, for sure. But that idea of maternal instinct not necessarily coming naturally to all women is an interesting one, and it reminds me of the book Motherhood by Sheila Heti. I actually just recently read this for the first time. She’s kind of weighing the idea of whether or not to have children, and she actually uses a sort of coin-toss system (like her own version of a Magic Eight Ball) to help her parse through all of these philosophical questions about whether it would be wise or not for her to procreate, basically. It’s a really interesting premise in that sense. relating to being a mother and what you give up or gain in the process. And it’s also a book that I think would appeal to mothers and non-mothers alike, because she kind of just takes you through all of the questions about what being a mother means and what you either give up or gain when you have children.

KIM: Yeah, it sounds like since she was using that way of doing it, it almost could have fallen either way, so somebody who decided not to have children might also appreciate the book just as well.

AMY: Oh, exactly. I mean, I don’t want to give away the ending, but a decision is made by the end. But yeah, I think it’s a book that would appeal to almost anybody. I really enjoyed it. I just lent it to you, Kim, so it’s on your reading list.

KIM: Yeah, I can’t wait to read it. I’ve been wanting to read it. When you think about some of these classic characters from literature like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina… Anna Karenin… (Oh my god, I can’t even say Anna Karenina) …women who felt like they had no recourse, you realize that times have changed so much. Today women not only have so much more agency but I think there’s also the freedom to vent and discuss these things that didn’t necessarily exist for earlier generations. And as we talked about, I mean, this is fairly recent.

AMY: Yeah, Yeah. It’s actually also making me think of the novel Mrs. Bridge by a man named Evan S. Connell. Hilma Wolitzer actually turned us on to this novel because\ it’s a favorite of hers and she even references it in her story collection. It’s about a prim-and-proper white, upper-middle-class housewife in Kansas City. She leads this very conventional life that’s all politeness and pleasantries and she doesn’t want to ruffle any feathers. He writes the whole novel in these little vignettes, so in that sense it almost reminds me a little bit of E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady which was our second “lost lady” that we ever covered. So one of these little vignettes that he does is called “Guest Towels” and she basically almost has a coronary because she puts out the nice, brand-new guest towels that nobody’s supposed to use when company comes over, and her son actually deigns to use them. It’s hilarious. And there are so many hilarious moments in the book, but there are so many heartbreaking moments, because she is the way she is, you know? So she’ll do anything, she’ll go above and beyond to avoid having a confrontation with somebody.

KIM: I’m familiar with that.

AMY: Yeah, so it’s very painful and it’s awkward and hilarious, but it’s just this sort of saga, and it covers more than 20 years in her life as a wife and mom. Very bittersweet, in a way. So I would recommend that one.

KIM: Yeah. Oh, I was going to mention The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, which is another one I haven’t read since high school or college, but I read it in a gothic class, and it’s actually about a woman who’s pregnant. It’s almost like a thriller, a psychological thriller. And the baby is essentially a monster inside her who’s eating her up from the inside, and like, out of control and huge and it’s completely crazy and gross and everything. And I think, you know, it’s obviously a metaphor for having a child and all that gets strained in the process of childbirth and child-rearing and everything. So I want to re-read that one again, too.

AMY: I’ve never read that. Okay. But yeah, like you said, we can now kind of have more honest conversations here about motherhood and say things you couldn’t say outright in previous generations, like, you know, “I’m having a bad day,” even. I think it’s why Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s book The Homemaker, which we also did an episode on, previously, that was such a big deal and had everybody talking when it came out in the, I think it was the Thirties, right?. Like speaking of horror, this wasn’t even a horror novel, but yeah, people took it that way. But yeah, just being able to vent now, being able to talk about it, almost helps kind of dissipate some of that angst, you know? Like it kind of solves the problem in a lot of ways. One of the most unhelpful things you can say to a frazzled mom…

KIM: Oh my god, what is it? I probably have heard it.

AMY: I mean, I know it’s always said with the best of intentions, but when people (usually from an older generation will say something like, “They grow up in a blink of an eye” or “It’ll all be gone in a flash”.... “Before you know it, they won’t be around anymore.”) And I know that it’s true. What they’re saying is dead-on and it’s a good point, but right now, in this moment, I just need to vent, you know what I mean? And so suddenly now I’m not just having a bad day or frazzled, but now you’re making me sad, too.

KIM: You’re sad and guilty! Like, “I’m not appreciating every single second.” And it’s the worst feeling, and you already feel that as a mom anyway. Because you do know every second they’re growing up and growing away from you. Totally. That is the worst thing.

AMY: And it’s just not helpful. It’s like telling somebody that had a terrible day at work, like, “Well, one day you’re going to be retired, you know.” And it’s like, “Guess what? That day is a decade or more from now. So I’ll worry about that in a little bit, but right here, today, I just needed somebody to listen to me for one second.” And like you said, it’s almost like by saying that they’re putting a lid on your emotions, because there’s no comeback to that other than like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. I guess I’ll shut up. I guess I’ll just sit silently.”

KIM: I should be appreciating it all. And you know, be the perfect mom. It brings back the whole “perfect mom” idea. Like you’re not supposed to be frazzled, you’re supposed to be like Mother Earth every second and that’s just impossible. Oh my gosh, you can tell I have a three-year-old.

AMY: Who’s about to walk into the bedroom at any moment because she didn’t want to go to bed tonight. So yeah, I vow not to say that to younger mothers when I’m older, but footnote: I probably will, because at that point I’ll be feeling nostalgic. And I do understand why people say that.

KIM: Yeah, I already do say it, but you know, not in that moment. So I’ll try to remember not to say it in that moment.

AMY: Yeah, just say, “Is there anything I can do to help?

KIM: Yes, exactly. Or “It is hard. It’s hard for everyone.”

AMY: This episode is making me think of that Calgon commercial… remember that? Calgon, take me away!” When the mom is like flipping out: “The dog! The washing machine! The kids!”

KIM: And you know, there was no way in hell she actually did get a bath. I mean, come on. It Was the Eighties or something. There was no way she got a bath, because I can barely get one now and I have less responsibility than that. Poor Eighties Woman!

AMY: Clearly a dude wrote that ad, because then it cuts to her actually taking a bath and it’s like a porn movie…. Saxophone music and dimmed lighting. No. Nobody’s getting that.

KIM: Yeah, totally.

AMY: I will never forget that commercial. That one always sticks with me.

KIM: And it does make me want to go take a bath right now.

AMY: Alright. Well, maybe we should sign off now. Maybe you can fit one in.

KIM: Okay, that’s all for this episode, tune in next week when we’ll be diving into another great book by a woman author you might never have heard of before. And we’re excited about our guest for next week. He’s blogger, podcaster and PhD Simon Thomas. He’s an expert on women authors from the first half of the 20th century in particular. And he’ll be joining us to talk about one of his favorites with us: Dorothy Evelyn Smith. Her novel O the Brave Music calls to mind A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

AMY: We love Simon. He’s such a nice guy, right?

KIM: Yeah, he is.

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

81. Hilma Wolitzer — Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

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

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everybody! Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers, or in today's case, celebrating the almost-forgotten work of a woman writer we think deserves a lot more recognition. I'm Kim Askew... 

AMY HELMES: ... and I'm Amy Helmes, and that's right, Kim. Today's lost lady isn't exactly lost. She's a well- respected writer who, at age 92, is alive and well, living in Manhattan and still writing, in fact. But a collection of her short stories were lost, so to speak, until quite recently. And Kim, I keep thinking back to our very first episode on this podcast when we sort of spelled out our mission statement, which was something to the effect of, "This author is incredible. Why hadn't we heard of her before? People should be reading her." And those are exactly the thoughts that came to mind when I think about our subject today, Hilma Wolitzer. She ought to be more of a household name. 

KIM: Yes, she should. And specifically anyone who is or has a mother would appreciate this new, but old, collection by Hilma Wolitzer. It's called Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket. Talk about a title that stops you in your tracks, right Amy? 

AMY: Yeah, no kidding. I mean, as soon as I heard that, I'm like, "Yes, please." And if you're itching to know more, we've got an exciting surprise for you today because we reached out to Hilma Wolitzer herself, and she agreed to join us for today's episode to talk about it. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, Amy, what the heck are we waiting for? Let's raid the stacks and get started.

[intro music]

AMY: Our guest today is the accomplished and award-winning writer, Hilma Wolitzer. A self-described late bloomer, her first novel Ending was published in 1974 when she was 44 years old. And incidentally, that's a book that loosely inspired Bob Fosse's 1979 film All That Jazz. Wolitzer has since published 13 books, including the 2012 novel An Available Man.

KIM: She's received honors and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also taught creative writing at Columbia University, NYU, the Breadloaf Writer's Conference and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. 

AMY: She's an inspiration for a new generation of writers, I think, and in one sense, you could say that quite literally. Her daughter is bestselling author Meg Wolitzer, who actually had an instrumental role in bringing her mom's latest story collection to the light of day. The book was published just last summer to great critical acclaim, earning raves from authors like Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, Tayari Jones, and Gail Godwin.

KIM: In addition, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket was named an NPR Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editor's choice, a People magazine Book of the Week, and a Kirkus Fully Booked Editor's Pick. Electric Literature named it the best short story collection of the year. Hilma Wolitzer, we are so excited to talk to you today. Welcome to the show. 

HILMA WOLITZER: Thank you for inviting me. 

AMY: Okay. So as we said, your book came out last summer, but Kim and I didn't catch wind of it until a previous guest on our show, author Anne Zimerman, mentioned it on Instagram. She is the biographer of MFK Fisher. We had her on, maybe Kim, about four months ago I think?

KIM: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

AMY: Here's what she had to say about the book. "Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket by Hilma Wolitzer is, I think, one of the best books I've ever read in my life. Like permanent place in the special stack kind of good. It's a collection of short stories, mostly from the 1960s/ early seventies about domestic life, marriage, mothering, and the particular restlessness that being a woman in the world inspires. It is SO GOOD. [All caps.] And unfortunately for me, at least, proves that the more things change, the more things stay the same. Update the fashion and other specific details and any of these stories could be written now." So Hilma, I think that's the first time you're hearing that. 

HILMA: Yes, it is! I'm thrilled! 

AMY: How does it feel to be getting such effusive praise like that for these stories, some of which were written half a century ago? 

HILMA: More than half a century ago. The oldest one is now 56 years old, the title story. It's surprising and very gratifying. I must say what pleases me the most is hearing from both young people and from men, as well, because the stories focus so much on the women's interior lives. The point of view is usually female in the stories, and I'm getting really positive feedback from men. And even though the stories are, most of them, are quite old, I'm getting very good feedback from young women as well. 

KIM: That's wonderful. Um, I'd love to hear a little bit more about how this recent book came about. I know the stories have been previously published most of them, in various magazines, right? So what prompted them getting back out there into the world? 

HILMA: Well, it had to do inadvertently with COVID. My husband and I both came down with it at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. It's almost two years now, which is hard to believe. We were hospitalized in separate hospitals, and he died two days before I was released from the hospital. And I came home feeling really ill and devastated and very sad, and my daughter, Meg, had been looking at the stories while I was in the hospital and she decided that they would be a good collection and she approached me about it. And I just wasn't interested. I was too sad. I was too sick. Um, I was in mourning. Uh, I really didn't want to do it and she pursued it. She even pursued it with my agent. She petitioned him to look at them as a collection. And after a while, I began to think, “I need something to do and I need something to look forward to,” which was very hard at that particular period. And then putting the stories together and writing the new one, especially writing the new one, became a way of grieving. Because the usual ways of grief, even, were just not available. I never saw my husband when he was dying. Nobody saw him. Nobody saw me afterward. The family didn't get together. I mean, we spoke on the phone, but nobody put his or her arms around anyone. And, uh, my husband was cremated, nobody was there to see him off. It was just a terribly sad time and it didn't seem real. That was part of it. It seemed that he hadn't died, but that he had just vanished. And writing about it gave it reality. And though it was painful. It led me to acceptance. 

AMY: Yes. And so that story that you wrote, it sort of caps off this collection and I'm so sorry for your loss. I can't imagine going through any of that. Um, and sadly, there are people out there that can relate to it because a lot of people have had to go through it in the past few years. Um, but in terms of the stories themselves, these earlier stories, did you have any apprehensions about introducing them to modern readers in the sense that you know, they are old stories? Did you worry, "Oh, they might be too dated?"

HILMA: Yeah, I did worry about it. Uh, you know, in the stories, nobody has a computer. Nobody has an iPhone. Um, the women in the stories mostly don't even have jobs. That's how dated they were. And I think my editor was a little concerned about this as well, but I came up with a solution by putting the date that the story was published after each story. And that put them in perspective. I think. 

AMY: Well, first of all, it didn't occur to me at all the lack of technology.... anything like that wasn't problematic to me. And in terms of the women not necessarily having careers or they're not being mentioned in the stories, that didn't bother me either. And it made me think, you know, yes, the majority of women today have careers, but it doesn't mean that we don't still also have this life that you were writing about. It doesn't replace the domestic life, you know? We can have jobs and then we still have all this stuff going on at home. We just happen to have both now. 

KIM: Especially during COVID too, because a lot of women were home with their families and really immersed in, you know … even if they're still working, a lot of us have been home.

AMY: And I lost my job during COVID, so I went back to, "Okay, I'm vacuuming now. I'm doing, you know, I'm doing that sort of stuff." Like, "Oh my God, here I am." So anyway, we want to talk about the stories in this book a little more, but first I wanna know about your backstory. You were born in Brooklyn in 1930. Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer even, as a little girl?

HILMA: Well, as a little girl I wrote really bad poetry. And, uh, I did not grow up in a literary household. My parents were respectful of any creative effort that their children had, but there were hardly any books around. But then, uh, one day my mother went to school for a parent-teacher conference. I was in the fourth grade and she came home glowing and she said to my father, "Do you know what Ms. Fredericks said? She said Hilma shows great promise." And from that moment on, they took these little poems I was writing more seriously. In fact, they had me recite them when they had their weekly card game with their friends. These poor people really just wanted to deal out and next hand, and instead they had to listen to this kid in her pajamas reading these awful poems and then applaud afterward. And that felt very good. And I felt that it was really due to this parent- teacher conference with Ms. Fredericks. And then believe it or not, about 50 years later, I was a published writer and I was giving a reading in a library in Montclair, New Jersey, and a little old woman came up to me after the reading. And she said, "You won't remember me, but I was your fourth grade teacher, Ms. Fredericks." And I started gushing. I just said, "I'm so grateful to you. You really jump-started my career by getting my parents to be encouraged about my writing. You told my mother that I showed great promise." And she said, "Oh, honey, I told that to all the mothers." Really put me in my place.

KIM: But what a wonderful woman!

AMY: And that just goes to show the power of words, because whether she meant it or not, it did change your life, you know? It did encourage you. So... 

KIM: And it's lovely that your parents actually took it to heart and wanted to show you off to their friends. That's so sweet. 

HILMA: I think that all children are born with talent and it's either encouraged or knocked out of them. 

KIM: Mm-hmm mm-hmm yeah. 

AMY: Speaking of talented kids, uh, is it true that you also went to high school with Maurice Sendak? 

HILMA: Yes, not only did I go to high school with him, but we shared a desk in major art. I started out as a visual artist, and Maurice was already doing marvelous drawings for the high school literary magazine. It was a rather tough high school in Brooklyn. (I think it's since been closed.) And years later, Maurice and I shared the same editor, and there was a dinner party in honor of the editor. And I sat next to Maurice. He was just as unhappy in high school as I was; we both couldn't wait to get out. And I said, "Maurice, you and I graduated, and everyone else was sent up the river!" That was such a tough high school. 

AMY: And then you did not attend college after that, right? 

HILMA: No, I did not go to college. I was 16. Maurice was 18 when we graduated. I was 16. I couldn't wait to get out into the workforce, unprepared to do anything. I became a file clerk, um, a bookkeeping machine operator. Even before that, when I was 13 in the summertime, I worked under the boardwalk in Coney Island, renting beach shares and umbrellas. Um, I worked in a place that made these sort of Swan Lake feathered head dresses for women. My job was to steam the feathers, and because I was such a daydreamer, I burnt most of them and then I would just open the window and throw them out, not realizing that they were drifting past my boss's window on a lower floor. So I was quickly fired from that job. 

KIM: I love that imagery. That's great. 

AMY: Totally. 

HILMA: But I feel all this experience is useful, even if you don't use it directly. It gives you a sense of... well, a sense of irony and a sense of humor about yourself. 

AMY: Yeah. More life experiences than if you're just following the traditional route of everyone else sitting in a college classroom.

HILMA: I wish I had sat in a college classroom. I see that my daughters' education really made a difference in the way they not only viewed the world, but the way they read books. I mean, I was reading Jane Austen in my forties, and one of my daughters said, "Oh, mom, that's much better. You're coming into it as a mature person." I said, "No, I think it's much better to come to it first as a young person being guided by a mature person." 

AMY: But you did start taking writing classes then? 

HILMA: Yes, I began taking a writing workshop at the New School when I was in my mid thirties, married with two children, with Anatole Broyard, who then became a daily book reviewer for The New York Times. At first, it was a terrible experience. I had to get a big babysitter. I had to get to the city on the Long Island railroad. We were living in the suburbs then. And, um, the classroom was very crowded, and he had read all of our stories, and he called on me first in this crowded classroom to come to the front of the room and read my story aloud. I was super shy. I was very embarrassed, especially when he asked me to spit out my gum. I think I spit it into my pocketbook because I had no place else to put it. Uh, and I read the story very quickly, hyperventilating without any affect at all. And then I collapsed into my seat and Anatole called upon the other people to comment on the story, and a man in the front row raised his hand and said, "That was the most boring thing I've ever heard."

AMY: The opposite of Ms. Fredericks. 

HILMA: Yeah. Yeah. I was ready to just pack it in, go home and just be a housewife forever and ever, but Anatole came to the rescue. He passed me a note, which I still have 32 years after his death, and it says, "The story is fine. See me later." And then he said to my critic, "You're perfectly entitled to dislike the story, but you have an obligation to tell the writer why and how you think she might make it better." And in that moment, I understood revision and teaching, the balance of honesty and charity that's necessary when you lead a class in anything creative. And he saw me later and put me into an advanced class and the following week, he had me read the story to that advanced class. And they didn't like it either, but they gave me constructive criticism. So I felt less shattered. Just slightly less shattered, frankly, but, but less shattered. And eventually the story was published. 

AMY: That's amazing. 

KIM: That's incredible. And what was the first story?

HILMA: Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.  

KIM: Okay? Yes, so that was the story

AMY: Oh, it was that story! 

KIM: Okay. So you were already drawing from, I guess, the suburban life you were living and pulling it into your stories from your first story, right?

HILMA: Yes.

KIM: Wow. That's so fascinating. 

HILMA: I mean, I was raised to be a domestic goddess. I was raised by a housewife to be a housewife. And I assume that I had to do this. This was my job, was to get married and have children and make jello molds. And I was putting so much creativity into my domestic life. My children always had homemade, from scratch birthday cakes that were decorated until they collapsed. They had homemade Halloween costumes. They had tuna fish men, not tuna fish sandwiches. Tuna fish men had carrot stick, arms and olive eyes. And I just had to do it that way. The whole family was sort of relieved when I began to write and was using that creative energy somewhere else, leaving them alone.

KIM: That's great. 

AMY: Um, it was kind of surreal the day that I discovered your book. First of all, it was just a few days after I had watched the film The Lost Daughter. And so I was texting back and forth with mom friends of mine, because everybody was kind of in a tizzy over this movie because it brought up so many emotions for everybody who's a parent, uh, or everybody who's a mother, I should say. So we were texting back and forth, and one of my friends was like, "Oh, I'm gonna go read The Lost Daughter. And I realized she was really into this idea of books about motherhood. And I had said to her, "You should read Meg Wolitzer's The Ten-Year Nap, because that was a book that was, for me, really thought-provoking about motherhood in the same way. And then later that night, I saw Anne Zimerman's post about your book. And I was like, "Oh my gosh." At first I didn't even make the connection. I just thought, "This sounds like a book I want to read." And then I saw the last name Wolitzer, and I was like, "Wait, what? How is this possible?"

HILMA: There aren't many people by that name. 

AMY: No, exactly. But it made me realize, I think women are starving for art and literature that speaks frankly about the experience of being a woman, and specifically, motherhood. What are your thoughts on that? Do you agree? 

HILMA: Yeah, I do. This is partly why I think the stories are still timely, because women are still struggling with these issues; wanting to be the best wife, the best mother, but at the same time, have something else in their lives. They're restless in the same way that I was restless, in the same way that my characters are restless about their lives. I loved being a wife, being a mother of young children. I adored it. It was so much fun, but at the same time, I did feel that I wanted to do something else. And eventually I discovered it was writing. And had I not been in Anatole's class and had I not had the good fortune to get an agent in the strangest possible way, I might never have had a career. Because I didn't know any writers. The town we lived in in the suburbs didn't even have a bookstore. I had never met another writer before I took that class. I had never taken even an English literature class past high school. So I wrote this first short story, and my husband, who was not exactly thrilled with this switch of my violating the contract that I'd signed to be a wife and mother only, uh, suddenly I was doing something else that was really taking up a lot of my concentration, but I showed him the story, and I said, "Is this a story?" I was uneducated, but he had a PhD and he had a lot of literature classes behind him. He was a psychologist and he said, "Why don't you send this?" And he mentioned the name of a friend who was a critic and an artist and who we both thought was very astute, "and see what he thinks of the story." And he read the story, and then he put it in his pocket and went to a party where he ran into a literary agent. It happened to be John Steinbeck's agent, and he gave her the story and she called me the next day and said, "I'd like to represent you." But she was like a fairy godmother. Overnight, I'd gone from the cinders into the beautiful coach and I was a writer, and I couldn't believe it. I went into the bathroom and I tried on scarves and things to see if I looked more like a writer. And then I felt an obligation to keep writing, and I bombarded her with stories and they were rejected. Um, And the rejections... it's good for writers to be rejected because once you get past that and you're still writing, you know that you're a writer, um, that you're not in it for the money or for any modicum of fame. But I did find that other people judged you. You feel like a writer, but other people do not think of you as a writer unless you're published 

AMY: Mm-hmm . 

HILMA: And when I published that first story and it was to The Saturday Evening Post, which was a very important magazine in those days, I remember telling my parents about it. And my parents used to call me all the time in stereo on two different phones. And, uh, my mother would say, you know, "What are you doing today?" And I would say, "I'm writing a short story." And she would just not respond to that. She would say, "What are you making for dinner?" But when I sold that story and I called them and I got so much money for that story... our income was extremely modest at that point. My husband was a school psychologist and I wasn't working. I was like the women in my stories. I didn't have a car. I was living in the suburbs with two children. My husband's working a couple of jobs to make ends meet. So the car was never around except on Sundays when I went to the laundromat and to the supermarket. And I walked everywhere. The afternoon that I sold that story to The Saturday Evening Post, I went right across the street to the Rambler dealer and put a down payment on a car. So in a sense, writing brought me freedom as well. 

AMY: I love that story and yeah, that does bring up another question, because you said your time was very limited. You had three kids? Three? Two?

HILMA: Two kids. And we happened to live so close to the school that they came home for lunch. So I never had a full day. But the thing was, I stopped making tuna fish men. They get tuna fish sandwiches and I'd go right back to the typewriter. The typewriter was at the end of the kitchen table. My older daughter said she loved the sound of that as she was going to sleep of my typewriter. I wasn't neurotic then about privacy and quiet. We had a dog. The dog would be barking or needed to go out. The children would be fighting. The phone would be ringing. Everything was going on, and I could interrupt the flow of thought and then go right back to it. Of course that changed. 

AMY: Yeah, I was gonna say, I wish I could have that ability because that's one of the, the biggest challenges is when, you know, you have 20 minutes, say, to feel like, "Can I use that 20 minutes creatively and, and really dive into something?" And I always feel like my brain can't, you know? 

HILMA: Yeah. It was really hard. People said, "Did you have a, a routine? Did you write three hours a day? Did you write in the morning?" The minute I got out of bed, I would rush to the typewriter. Amy Tan refers to it as "going from dream to dream," which I think is very apt, because sometimes you are thinking about the story in your sleep and the characters would wake me up. I mean, they would say, "Hurry up! This is what I wanna say." And I'd have to get there and put it down. And it was very thrilling, and I could work like that. Once everybody was out of the house, I could work like that and then suddenly look up and it was dark out. I mean, I would get up to go to the bathroom or the kitchen in between, but you lose yourself completely. Even now, when I was writing the final story in this book, I was 90- years old and I forgot how old I was until I passed a mirror. I mean, you just, you lose yourself in the fictional universe so much. So that story is more autobiographical than my other stories. So people think your work is autobiographical, which is a great compliment. There's that willing suspension of disbelief. 

AMY: Yeah, I will admit when I started reading the stories, I thought for sure they were autobiographical. It's hard not to; they feel so real. The one that really struck me as, "Oh, she for sure lived this," was "Photographs," which was about pregnancy and childbirth because, well, first of all, it's completely wild and hilarious, which is perfect because the experience of childbirth is so absurd and hilarious in a lot of ways. But I thought, "I can't imagine, imagine somebody writing this that hadn't experienced it."

HILMA: Yeah, I definitely used some of my own experience there. The screaming part.

AMY: Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The chaos involved in that whole delivery. Um, but I loved, there's one particular line from that story where the narrator is at an obstetrician's appointment and you write "other pregnant women in the doctor's waiting room and I smiled knowingly at one another. We found ourselves in a vast and ancient sorority without the rituals of pledging." And I love that because I feel like it kind of sums up what your stories offer, which is that sort of communal joy and comfort. Like you're belonging to this ancient club of women who have also been there and kind of experienced what you've experienced.

HILMA: That's good. I do feel that though we live in families I think we also live in communities and we live in the world. This pandemic has proved that to me, because though I felt somewhat isolated because of being quarantined, I still felt so many other people around the world were having the same experiences. I felt somewhat comforted by this. And I think this is what you get from reading books. You like, you try to find some universality in the characters, but they also have to be idiosyncratic. It can't be a book about every woman or every man. I'm hoping every woman and every man will find something of himself or herself in the book, but the stories have to be about particular people. And they're not me, and they're not my husband, generally speaking. Uh, the stories that repeat in this volume about Paulette and Howard are completely invented. 

KIM: The stories in your book, they're a combination of poignant, funny, relatable, as we've been talking about. Also unsettling and even haunting, at times. We wanted to talk about the title story from the book, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket. As you said, it was first published in The Saturday Evening Post magazine, and that was in 1966. The narrator encounters a woman at the supermarket who is having a breakdown. She's practically catatonic. You write: "She gripped the handle of her empty cart and said ‘There is no end to it.’ It was spoken so simply and undramatically, but with such honest conviction that for a moment, I thought that she was referring to the aisle of the supermarket. Perhaps it was blocked ahead of us and she couldn't move up farther. But then she said, ‘I have tried and I have tried, and there's no end to it. Ask Harold. Ask anybody. Ask my mother.’” Do you remember what sparked you wanting to tell that particular story? 

HILMA: I have no idea. I'm sure that I felt the supermarket was the ideal place to talk about domestic angst because of, I think I describe it in the story, the bloody cuts of meat, the towering cans of Campbell's soup and so forth and so on. All the fancy Jell-O I was gonna make for my husband's colleagues' dinner parties. It all added up to the perfect atmosphere for a story about a woman losing it. 

KIM: Yeah. It's unforgettable I mean, no wonder your writing instructor was like, "This is a writer here." 

AMY: It's more than "fine." 

KIM: Yeah. I'll never forget reading that story for the first time. 

AMY: So I also loved, "there is no end to it" -- that reminded me totally off topic, but the series "Downton Abbey," my very favorite line from "Downton Abbey" is when the dowager Maggie Smith, she's talking about children and she says, "Oh, children, it's just the on and on-ness of it." That exactly sums up the experience of having children is like, for better and for worse. It's the on and on-ness, there is no end to it. That feeling, you know? 

KIM: Yeah. Yep. 

HILMA: You sort of have them wantonly, uh, and in my generation you had them because you were supposed to. Now women make choices. Um, some people have children, some people don't. My 97- year- old sister, she talks about the old lady who's asked if she had to do all over again, if she would have children. She said, "Yes, but not these children."

KIM: That's hilarious. 

HILMA: Yeah, but I don't feel that way. I love my children. My children are marvelous. They got me through everything. 

KIM: Hilma's children, if you're listening, you're okay. You're good in her book. Um, so were these stories more subversive, do you think, in the Sixties and Seventies when you first wrote them than they are today? I can imagine maybe an audience 50 years ago might have been shocked when you were supposed to pretend like everything was just fine and dandy, but today, you know, we're starting to have these more honest conversations, I think, on the subject. 

HILMA: Yes, and actually my daughter, Meg, pointed this out to me. She said, "Mom, these are such nervy stories!" And I realized that I may have been hiding behind these stories. I was the angry person. I was a nervy person who wanted to talk out, who wanted to curse and so forth and so on. And instead I did it subliminally through the stories and I, I didn't realize it, but when the kids showed me this and said, "I can't believe you wrote this!" in fact, one of my kids said that, uh, after my novel Ending came out, there's a, a very graphic sex scene in the book. And she said she was so embarrassed in high school when boys would sort of taunt her about her mother's sex scene in the book. I understood her embarrassment. 

KIM: Yeah. Uh, I can't wait to read Ending. I've only read this collection, so I can't wait to read more of your books. I wanted to ask about your revising, because you said that one of your favorite parts of writing is actually revising. Why is that? 

HILMA: Well, first of all, you're not facing a blank page or a blank screen. You're not starting from nothing. You have something in front of you. There are two type of writers. There are writers who overwrite and there are writers who underwrite. And they're not insurance brokers, but they don't write enough. Um, and I found out the kind of writer I was when I was taking this course in sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum. The first thing they gave me was a little piece of soapstone. And I thought, you know, like Michelangelo, I'm gonna release the figure from the stone by chiseling away at it. And the next thing I know, I had a pile of dust. I chiseled it all the way down. And then when they gave us clay the following week, I built up, and I actually had a portrait of someone. And I realized that I was somebody who would write the minimum and have to add. So I would pull my pages out of the typewriter, or print them now, and sit down or get into bed or wherever I wanted to go with a pencil and just add things. This was very pleasurable. And reading your work aloud really helps you hear what's missing and what is too much. 

AMY: Well, I want to read something aloud from your story "Nights." This is a story about insomnia, and as someone who experiences insomnia almost nightly, it really struck a chord. 

KIM: I get a lot of emails from Amy that are dated like 2:00 AM, 4:00 AM when I wake in the morning. 

HILMA: I am an insomniac as well.

AMY: So, okay, okay. So first I'm gonna read, this is the narrator awake in the middle of the night: "A song I have not heard in years comes into my head. First I'm mouth, the words. Then I try to whisper the tune. But my voice is throaty and full.

“Shhhh,” Howard warns in his sleep. 

Oh, think, think. Come up with something else. But the song is stuck there. Doo-be doo dee-dee, a song I never really liked. I try to overwhelm it with something symphonic. So, this is what I've come to, I think, and the song leaves my head like a bird from a tree. Instantly other birds flock in: shopping lists, the 20/20 line on the eye chart, a chain letter to which I never responded. Do not break the chain or evil will befall your house. Continue it and long life and good health will be yours to enjoy and cherish. In eight weeks you will receive 1,120 picture postcards from all over the world. 

Will I?

Learned men wear copper bracelets. My mother weeps over broken mirrors. Hearts are broken, bones. They crack in the silence of the night." 

So to me, that kind of stream-of-conscious, manic feel to the story exactly mimics the way my brain works when I wake up. You totally nailed it. I find myself being like, "Why are you thinking this? This is so random. This is such a nonsequitor stop, stop!" I'm trying to will my brain to stop. And I think moms, in particular, have this sort of mental load that kind of spills over so that in the wee hours of the morning you're still thinking all of these things. Um, but yes, wanted to find out, are you sleeping better at this point in your life? Tell me there's hope. 

HILMA: I'm afraid not. I think part of it is not letting go of the day, and part of it is dreading the next day. I sleep very well if I don't have anything planned the next day, but if I have something planned, I start thinking about it when I'm in bed, you know? What am I going to do? Will I need an umbrella? Uh, stupid thoughts. 

AMY: Yeah. Stupid thoughts. Yeah. 

HILMA: They don't even make sense. I can't meditate for the same reason. When I start to meditate, I keep thinking. And I remember my older grandson saying when he was about four years- old, "Grandma, I have thoughts all day long." And I was so thrilled. I said, "This is the beginning of consciousness," never realizing or never remembering how difficult consciousness could be, how overwhelming it could be with flights of ideas coming into your head. 

AMY: Yes. Like birds. And I've since kind of flipped the script, and I welcome it in a weird way, like, okay, this is my time of night. So I'm able to have a different perspective on it now, basically. But I just, I love the story because it just really felt like my experience. 

HILMA: Thank you. And I think insomnia is something that seems to run in families too, I've noticed. So there may be something genetic to it as well, but I think that your mind is just working on overtime.

KIM: I feel like as the years go by, I'm turning more and more into an insomniac myself, but I've not gotten to the point where Amy is. I don't see it as a gift yet, but I'm gonna try to do that. 

HILMA: Don't hang around with Amy. It's catching. 

AMY: Yes, yes. The award for best opening sentence, I think, in this book has to be from a story called "The Sex Maniac." It starts off, "Everybody said that there was a sex maniac loose in the complex and I thought — it's about time. It had been a long asexual winter." 

KIM: That narrator in that line. Ugh. It's so good.

AMY: It's such a good story. There's another story where the narrator's husband has been arrested for indecent exposure. Um, that was also quite a ride. But you also, in other stories, write about nakedness as sort of the ultimate vulnerability I'm thinking of in "Mother," which is just really an anguishing, yet beautiful, story. You write: "The very worst thing, she was certain, was not human misery, but it's nakedness, and the naked witness of others." So I'm wondering, does writing ever feel like a form of nakedness to you? Because you have said that you were quite shy at one point in your life?

HILMA: Yeah, I, I think it does. And I don't mind exposing myself, if you pardon the expression, of, especially in that final story, which is not about my husband and me; it's about Howard and Paulette, but I assign what happened to Morty and me to these fictional characters. And many of the details are really, really true. 

KIM: Yeah. Which is a loosely fictionalized account of your pandemic experience and losing your husband Morty to COVID. You dedicate this book to him, and we're so sorry for your loss. Um, we wanted to know why you felt it was important to end the book with that particular story.

HILMA: Well, when we collected the other stories, it was a slim volume, and I felt it needed to be beefed up. But I also felt compelled to write this final story. Um, it just seemed I had to put it down, and this has never happened to me before, except, maybe, that childbirth scene, um, where I felt it was necessary. But here, as I said, it was a way of grieving as well. And, um, what was amazing to me, I had stopped writing fiction. I was writing poems again in my old age. Uh, actually getting them published in good little literary magazines. And I was satisfied with that. My husband and I had a good, companionable life in our old, old age, and then this happened and it seemed really important to write about it. But it was wrenching to write about it. And it was cathartic at the same time. And the amazing thing was how all my recent attempts at writing fiction had failed. I would start something and it wouldn't go anywhere. When I began this story, I couldn't type fast enough. It was sort of almost as if I was taking dictation. My characters aren't real, but they are like neighbors who've moved away and I wonder what happened to them. And so I've always wondered what happened to Howard and Paulette, so to use my own experience and to find out what happened to them that way seemed so appropriate. They always had parallel lives. They weren't our lives, but they had parallel lives. They were the same age as my husband and myself, and I had to bring them to old age. I, I want to write one more worry about Paulette. Uh, and I want to write about widowhood. I hate the word "widow." I was thinking the other day, that it's "window" with the N knocked out, which takes away the light that comes through the window. It's a dark word. And I don't like it. Uh, I feel more that I'm a married woman without a husband.

AMY: Mm-hmm would you be with, to read a short passage from "The Great Escape?" 

HILMA: Yes, I'll read the very opening. 

AMY: Okay. 

HILMA: "I used to look at Howard first thing in the morning to see if he was awake, too, and if he wanted to get something going before, one of the kids crashed into the room and plopped down between us like an Amish bundling board. Lately though, with the children long grown and gone to their own marriage beds, I found myself glancing over to see if Howard was still alive, holding my breath while I watched for the shallow rise and fall of his, the way I had once watched for a promising rise in the bedclothes. 

Whenever I saw that he was breathing and that the weather waited just behind the blinds to be let in, I felt an irrational surge of happiness. Another day! And then another and another and another. Breakfast, vitamins, bills, argument, blood pressure pills, lunch, doctor, cholesterol medicine, the telephone, supper, TV, sleeping pills, sleep, waking. It seemed as if it would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful away. But of course it wouldn't; everyone knows that. T

There were running death jokes in our family. My father, driving past a cemetery: “Everybody's dying to get in.” My mother: “Death must be great — nobody ever comes back.” Howard's mother: “When one of us dies, I'm going to Florida.” That would've been funny, except that she actually meant it. Now, none of them was laughing or ever coming back." 

AMY: Thank you for sharing that with us. 

HILMA: Now, I promise you the story gets funny. 

AMY: No, it really does. It gets funny and then it gets sad again. Yeah. Um, it makes me think though, a, I am excited to hear that you are at least gonna write one more about... Paula or Paulette? 

HILMA: It's Paulette, and then she's called Paulie.

AMY: Okay. Oh, okay. Got it. Um, But given the critical success of this book that just came out, I'm also wondering if you maybe have any other old writing hiding in a drawer somewhere that might still see the light of day. Are you holding out on us? 

HILMA: No, no, no. I don't think so. I, uh, I'm afraid to look because if I find something that I like and I didn't include in this collection, I'll really feel bad.

KIM: I love what you just read. It reminded me of my grandmother. She lived to a hundred-ish. She used to say, "I'm afraid all my friends are gonna think that I got sent to the other place," and she'd point down, "It's taken me so long for me to get up there." So yeah, I mean, you know, she meant it with a sense of humor. So...

HILMA: Yes, I know. You've gotta have it. You have to, I mean, um, you have no choice. If you want to have any friends, you can't keep complaining and you can't keep, uh, expressing dread. The dread may be there, but it's not there all the time. You're so easily distracted by life. I mean, somebody asked me the other day what my superpower is and my superpower is curiosity. I can't wait to find out what happens next, even though everything in the newspapers is usually horrible and has been certainly for a few years. I'm so curious and this, I think, keeps me going. I want to find out what happened and, and I think that's one of the reasons I read, one of the reasons I write, and one of the reasons I get up in the morning. I'm always surprised when I get up in the morning, please and surprised, no matter how stiff or lousy I feel. It's another day. 

AMY: You seem like you could be in your seventies. 

KIM: I know, absolutely!

HILMA: What I really love is people who say, "Oh, you don't look 92. You look no more than 88." Like, who would wanna look 88?! I might as well look 92! Seventies is pretty good. I considered myself still sexy in my seventies.

KIM: Well, you make 92 look amazing. 

HILMA: It doesn't feel horrible to be 92. And especially when you can still read and go into other people's lives and other universes to expand the one you're living in now. I mean, it is different. Um, I walk as if I'm drunk sometimes , um, 

KIM: I do you that too. 

HILMA: You keep on trucking. I wrote a poem about it that was published in a lovely journal called Women's Review of Books. Katha Pollitt was the poetry editor, and I wrote a poem about it. The beginning was something like, um, "Sometimes I tell myself don't just lie there. Keep moving." And that's how the poem starts, and that's actually how I feel in the morning. I have this idea that if I keep moving, I'll keep moving. Yeah, it's an illusion or delusion, but it, it feels right. And it feels optimistic, which I want to keep being. 

KIM: So you're obviously still reading a lot, it sounds like. And that's, you know, one of your great pleasures. Are there any other lost ladies of lit that you can think of that you might wanna give a shout out to for our listeners? 

HILMA: Yes. Some of them are living and some of them are dead. Um, among the living is Lori Siegel who is now I think 90 or so a terrific writer. Other People's Houses is one of her books. And another one is My First American. Marvelous books. Another one is someone I have only read. I know Lori and we taught together once at Breadloaf and I’ve known her a long time, but somebody named Nancy Huddleston Packer, P A C K E R, who is still alive. She's in her nineties. Uh, I think the book is called Small Moments. Absolutely marvelous to me. She was right up there with John Updike and John Cheever, uh, in her writing and her daughter, by the way, is Ann Packer, who's The Dive From Clausen's Pier... she’s a wonderful writer herself. This is her mother. A nonfiction writer who I love, and she's not lost yet, but she may become lost unless we keep talking about her, is Jenny Diski. I don't know if you've read her. D I S K I. She's British. Her essays are brilliant. Some of the best essays I've ever read. Talk about light and darkness in one sentence. She's really terrific. Um, Elizabeth Taylor, not the actress, but the British writer Elizabeth Taylor, who I had the pleasure of reviewing a book that turned out, unfortunately, to be a posthumous book, her first posthumous publication called Blaming. But, um, I went on to read Mrs. Paulfrey at the Claremont and a collection of stories called The Devastating Boys. Just a brilliant, wonderful writer. And then, uh, a really good friend of mine named Bharati Mukherjee. She wrote a book called Wife. Not my daughter's The Wife, but just Wife, which is really good. And she was married to a Canadian writer named Clark Blaise and together they wrote a memoir called Days and Nights in Calcutta. She's really just a wonderful writer. And I love that Lucia Berlin came back into..

AMY: Yes. I actually wanted to ask you about her because you guys were kind of writing across the same timeframe. 

HILMA: I think she's more imaginative and more innovative than I am. I just love her work. Those scenes in the laundromat.

KIM: Uh, mm-hmm , they're incredible. Just amazing. 

HILMA: Yeah, she's really good. So there are lots of people out there, and then I have to give a shout out to one of my great friends, who's not a writer, but an ongoing actress in her nineties, Estelle Parsons. Estelle and I met in a coffee shop and we began talking and began sitting together, I would say about 10 years ago when we were only in our eighties. And we've been fast friends ever since. And Estelle is going to be in a movie. She's just preparing a new role in a new movie. She's an inspiration to me. 

KIM: She sounds incredible. It has been, I can't say… I'm gonna speak for both Amy and I, this has been an absolute joy to have this discussion with you today. We are just so happy we were able to read your work and we want to read more, and we feel so lucky we got to spend the last hour with you. Thank you so much.

HILMA: It was my pleasure. 

KIM: And we can't wait to read the next story about Paulette.

HILMA: Well, I can't wait for you to read it. I can't wait to write it. Good luck with your kids. 

KIM: Thank you. 

HILMA: And your careers. 

KIM: Thank you so much. Bye! 

AMY: Bye!

KIM: …She was incredible! I'm not that with it now, let alone at 92! 

AMY: I'm not either! 

KIM: Oh my gosh, she's sharp as a tack, that woman. 

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: Wow. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you haven't read Hilma's latest book Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, make buying it your first order of business after hitting stop on this podcast, please. It's that good. I also have her most recent novel An Available Man in my reading queue. And I can't wait to dive into that one, too. I am expecting a lot of humor in this one. 

KIM: I wanna read that now, too. Anyway, if you're enjoying this podcast, please tell a friend or several. You'll not only be helping us, but you'll also be giving other people the gift of great book recommendations and who doesn't want that?

AMY: Right, right. Until next week, bye everyone. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant lost. Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.

80. Ukrainian Poet Lesya Ukrainka’s The Forest Song

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

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

AMY: Hey, everyone. Today we wanted to focus on a “lost lady” of Ukrainian literature. It goes without saying that Ukraine has been on all our minds. 

KIM: Yes, It’s heartbreaking and deeply unnerving to watch and listen to the news. And it’s surreal, too. We did that episode on Virginia Cowles’ Looking for Trouble a couple months ago… and that was set in World War II, but now it feels like history is repeating itself in a sense.

AMY: Yeah. And in Cowles’s book, she writes in great detail about Germany’s invasion of Poland and the world’s reaction to it. It feels like something similar is playing out now. I mean, Ukraine has spent centuries living in the shadow of Russia’s tyranny. But you’re right, it’s still hard to believe what’s happening. I was listening to an interview on NPR recently with the director of the Ukrainian Art Center here in L.A and she was talking about how the West has long just assumed that Ukraine was “Russian,” culturally, when in fact Ukraine has always had its own language, its own identity and its own culture. But Russia and the Soviet regime has a centuries-long history of suppressing, arresting and killing Ukrainian writers and erasing Ukraine’s language, art and cultural identity. The killing of hundreds of Ukraine’s writers and artists in the 1930s under Stalin’s regime is known as the Executed Renaissance, and there’s an important anthology of that same name that was published in 1959 which single-handedly saved the work of that generation of writers. So we’ll link in our show notes to an article that details how that whole anthology came to be, because it’s kind of an interesting story.

KIM: In today’s episode, we wanted to focus on one of Ukraine’s best-known poets and playwrights, Laryssa Kosach, who wrote under the pen name Lesya Ukrainka (LESS-ya oo-CRANE-ka).

AMY: Oh, good job, Kim. You actually, I think, did a pretty good pronunciation there, um, for you. I do want to point out to listeners that we are not experts on Ukraine’s history but we’re going to do our best to talk about Ukrainka’s life and work as we understand it. So she was not part of that generation known as the Executed Renaissance which I just mentioned. She lived a few decades earlier. But a little bit about Ukrainka’s life first: She was born in 1871 in the northwestern part of Ukraine. And actually, her mother was also a writer and political activist who wrote under the pen name Olena Pchilka. Her father was a lawyer who edited a literary journal. They were both very involved in the Ukrainian nationalist movement and so consequently, Ukrainka was exposed to a lot of important Ukrainian cultural figures, even in her childhood. 

KIM: Ukrainka’s writing embodies nationalist themes, which makes sense because Ukraine was under Russian control during her lifetime. When she was a little girl it was actually illegal to print any books in the Ukrainian language. Incidentally, she and her siblings were privately tutored rather than attending the Russian-style schools in Ukraine. So her parents were clearly attempting to counteract this Russian indoctrination.

AMY: She was a very frail child who was frequently bed-ridden (she contracted tuberculosis at age 12, which plagued her for the rest of her life. She suffered greatly from it). She had hoped to become a concert pianist, but her illness made this dream impossible. So instead she distracted herself by reading voraciously and learning multiple languages. She spoke 12 languages as an adult which meant she could read a wide-range of books from around the globe and she could also translate works for a living later in adulthood. As a child, she wrote verse, and one of her first poems was actually a reaction to the politically-motivated arrest of her aunt. 

KIM: Wow. Her mother encouraged her to submit her poetry for publication, and she did so under this pseudonym she became known for. And if you think about her pen name, Lesya Ukrainka, which means “Lesya the Ukranian woman” she’s making a sort of bold proclamation about her identify, right?  Because Russia banned writing in the language of Ukraine, her work actually was published across the border from Ukraine in Austro-Hungary where there was more freedom. By her early 20s she had published several collections of poetry. To think of this frail and sickly young woman being the person who would rally a nation with her words is really moving. 

AMY: Then in 1905 there was a revolution in Russia that brought a little bit more freedom to Ukraine and the ability to use their own language a little more freely. Two years later in 1907 Lesya married a man who was also afflicted with tuberculosis, and her health continued to decline after she married. She had the means, though, to travel to many different countries, including Egypt and Italy, in search of a cure for her health, but all her attempts to find some relief proved fruitless. She died at the age of 43 in 1913, but not before writing the play “The Forest Song,” which she’s well-remembered for. 

KIM: Yes, Amy and I read it for this episode. It’s considered a masterpiece of Ukrainian drama and is based on popular Ukrainian folklore. She wrote the original draft over the span of 10-12 days, and it was staged for the first time five years after Ukrainka’s death. What did you think of the play when you read it, Amy?

AMY:  I thought it was beautiful and haunting. I kept thinking how much I would love to see it staged, because it just seems so visual. In my own mind, I was picturing kind of the aesthetic of —  I don’t know if you remember in Dead Poet’s Society when they put on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and it was very sort of eerie and dark? That’s how I pictured “The Forest Song,” from an artistic standpoint. If I was the artistic director, that would be the vibe I’d go for. I think it could be really visually very stunning.

KIM: It also makes me think of Pan’s Labyrinth, I think. That’s Guillermo Del Toro, right? That’s so beautiful, I love that movie.

AMY: Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, like that sort of otherworldly, mystical… Yes. And I mentioned “Midsummer Nights Dream” from Dead Poet’s Society, but this play is very “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” It’s got all these different spirits of the forest, and the lyricism is very reminiscent of Shakespeare, too, I think.

KIM: Definitely. So I’ll go ahead and summarize the plot of the play for our listeners: It’s a three-act story of a forest nymph named Mavka who is torn between her loyalty to the world of the forest and her love for a human named Lukash who is a gifted flute player. Mavka is enchanted by the music he plays. 

AMY: Yes, and Lukash is hot and heavy for Mavka when they first meet, and although she remains hopelessly devoted to him, he eventually treats her with disdain. He moves on, basically, and takes up with this human peasant woman of his mother’s choosing. The play ends badly for everyone, but the ending is somewhat bittersweet and there’s quite a visual there at the end. It’s hard to shake; I don’t want to give it away. The play can be read as an eco-parable about humanity’s encroachment upon nature, I guess you could say.

KIM: Yeah, that’s beautifully put. Amy, should we resurrect “Lost Ladies of Lit” theater for this episode to give listeners a very brief little taste?

AMY: Yeah, sure. And this, in fact, I feel like it gives a little bit of that Shakespearian element of it. So I thought we could read the part where Rusalka, who is basically a vengeful mermaid, convinces a pair of lost babes to try to lure Lukash to his death while he is out collecting fireflies to decorate Mavka’s hair. The lost babes in this case are babies who are conceived out of wedlock and then drowned by their mother because she is sort of ashamed. And indeed, a Makva (who is our heroine in the play) is said to come from similar origins — a female infant who dies before being christened. So I’ll play Rusalka the wicked mermaid who doesn’t like this human hottie skulking about in the forest making eyes at Mavka; Kim, I’ll make it easy on you. You can just read the part of the lost babes.

KIM: I’ll do my best.

Rusalka: 

Little Lost Babes, in the night, 

Kindle now your lanterns bright!

[the Lost Babes show up in the reeds, bearing lanterns.

Rusalka: 

See there, that one who’s wandering about

He’s like that father who abandoned you,

Who ruined your dead mother, let her die

He should no longer live!

Lost Babes

You drown him then!

Rusalka

I do not dare; the Forest Elf forbids.

Lost Babes

But we’re not strong enough; we are too small.

Rusalka:

You are tiny,

Light and shiny;

With your lights in small hands sure

You can foolish folk allure.

Go into the rushes there

Where no Forest Elf can hear.

Should he come out,

Put your lights out,

Disappear!

Be like lights deceiving always

O’er pathways;

Burst out bright o’er reeds and rushes,

Lead him into bogs and slushes,

When he’s slipping,

Send him dipping

Down into the deepest slime …

Then I’ll finish him this time!

Off now, like a flash!

KIM: Ooh, it’s very dramatic.

AMY: Yeah, very Shakespearian, right?

KIM: Totally. Like the Three Witches or something.

AMY:Yeah, for sure. And actually I was getting some old-fashioned Disney vibes reading it too, I think probably because it’s a fable and has fairy tale-like qualities to it. So of course I wasn’t too surprised to discover that it’s been made into an animated movie — from a Ukrainian film studio called Animagrad. (That’s the name of the studio.) The film is called Mavka. The Forest Song, and it was supposed to be released sometime this year (both in Ukrainian and in English) They have a trailer out, and it looks somewhat faithful in terms of the different characters but this kids’ movie also touches on one other aspect of the myth of the mavka, which is that the mavka can tickle people to death. So our girl Ukrainka was basing her story on an older mythology that Ukrainians would have been quite familiar with. (But I’m glad Ukrainka didn’t go the “torture tickle” route in her play! She left that out.)

KIM: Yeah, that’s good. Anyway, I hope the animated film still sees its release this year! We’ll go ahead and post a link to the trailer of the English-language version of the movie in our show notes if you want to check it out. 

AMY: So yeah, the play is very much a parable about the devastation humans wreak upon the natural world. I’ve seen the word “ecofeminism” used in describing “The Forest Song.”

KIM: Yeah, I love the word eco-feminism being applied to that. There is definitely a feminist bent to the play. I’m thinking of when Rusalka, the mermaid, gives a lovelorn Mavka some tough advice about the true nature of love.

AMY: And then even the wise Forest Elf tells Mavka that she has done the betraying, and she’s like, “What do you mean? How am I the one that did the betraying? He’s the one that left me?” And he says, basically, “you betrayed yourself.” But then he adds: 

“Not all the stars are faded out for you. 

Behold, see what a festival is here!

The maple-prince has donned his golden robes.

The wild rose all her wreath of corals wears;

While innocence has changed to purple proud

Upon the cranberry, whose flowers you wore

When nightingales intoned your marriage song.

The ancient willow, e’en the mournful birch

Have put on gold and crimson, rich brocades,

For autumn’s festival. And you alone

Will not cast off that beggar’s garb of yours.

You seem to have forgotten that no grief 

Should ever triumph over loveliness.”

I mean, can we cue the Gloria Gaynor anthem ‘I Will Survive’ right about now?.... There’s a bit of that going on in this play. I also love the line when Mavka confronts Lukash, who has abandoned her. It’s like one of those “I’m so disappointed in you” moments, because she says: “I’m only sad because you cannot bring your life up to the level of your soul.” What a great line.

KIM: That’s like l’esprit d’escalier, you know? Wit of the staircase.

AMY: I don’t know what that means, but okay.

KIM: It’s a French phrase, but it actually means the thing that you think of to say when you’re walking away but you always think of it too late. I probably announced it horribly, but yeah, that’s the idea of it.

AMY: Ooh, I love that!

KIM: But anyway, I also thought this would make such a terrific opera or a ballet. There’s something kind of Swan Lake about it.

AMY: Oh yeah, for sure. And I think they did turn it into an opera at one point in the 1950s. I remember reading that somewhere.

KIM: Well that makes sense. There are a lot of monuments honoring Ukrainka including a statue of her on a quiet street in Moscow as well as a beautiful statue of her in Kyiv.

AMY: Yeah, it’s interesting that she resides today in both those countries, right, you know, that are at war. And in terms of what’s happening in Ukraine right now, we thought maybe we’d let Lesya Ukrainka have the last word for today’s episode. So even though she was in a lot of physical pain during her life and she lamented the oppression of living under Tsarist Russian control, she did write poetry that was really hopeful. One of her most famous poems, “Contra Spem Spero” is a good example of that. (The title translates to “Hope Against Hope”). It was published in 1890, and I’ll go ahead and read it because it seems like a hopeful note to end on given the state of the world today:

Thoughts away, you heavy clouds of autumn!

For now springtime comes, agleam with gold!

Shall thus in grief and wailing for ill-fortune

All the tale of my young years be told?

No, I want to smile through tears and weeping.,

Sing my songs where evil holds its sway,

Hopeless, a steadfast hope forever keeping,

I want to live! You thoughts of grief, away!

On poor sad fallow land unused to tilling

I'll sow blossoms, brilliant in hue,

I'll sow blossoms where the frost lies, chilling,

I'll pour bitter tears on them as due.

And those burning tears shall melt, dissolving

All that mighty crust of ice away.

Maybe blossoms will come up, unfolding

Singing springtime too for me, some day.

Up the flinty steep and craggy mountain

A weighty ponderous boulder I shall raise,

And bearing this dread burden, a resounding

Song I'll sing, a song of joyous praise.

In the long dark ever-viewless night-time

Not one instant shall I close my eyes,

I'll seek ever for the star to guide me,

She that reigns bright mistress of dark skies.

Yes, I'll smile, indeed, through tears and weeping

Sing my songs where evil holds its sway,

Hopeless, a steadfast hope forever keeping,

I shall live! You thoughts of grief, away!

79. Frances Harper — Iola Leroy with Dr. Koritha Mitchell

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

AMY HELMES: Hi everyone. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes. 

KIM ASKEW: And I'm Kim Askew. The novel we'll be discussing today, Frances Harper's Iola leroy was reissued a few years ago by Broadview Press, and we're excited to have Dr. Koritha Mitchell with us today to discuss it.

AMY: Dr. Mitchell edited the edition and wrote the book's introduction. And what I learned from it left me a little gobsmacked and wondering why I had never heard of Frances Harper before. 

KIM: Yeah. I had the same reaction, Amy, and you're right. It's shocking once you understand what a hugely important figure Harper was, not just as a writer, but also as an activist. She was a well-known abolitionist and suffragist of her day, she toured the United States on lecture circuits. And in terms of her writing, she was a prolific and popular writer of poetry and prose for over half a century. Her story, "The Two Offers," written prior to the start of the Civil War, is believed to be the first short story ever to be published by an African-American woman. 

AMY: She earned huge acclaim while she lived, yet it's fair to say Harper has not been as well remembered as she ought to be. 

KIM: The same holds true for her novel Iola Leroy, which is an eye-opening look at what it was like for Black Americans in the midst of, and in the decades following, the Civil War. It also examined society's one-drop principle of racial classification and its implications.

AMY: There's a lot in this book that felt revelatory to me and what's more, it still feels soberingly relevant today, 130 years after it was written. I can't wait to dive into it, so let's read the stacks and get started. 

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is a professor and literary historian. Dr. Koritha Mitchell, author of the award-winning Living With Lynching, which examines how African-American communities historically used lynching plays as a coping mechanism to combat racial violence. Her second title From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African-American Culture was named a Best Book of 2020 by Ms. Magazine and Black Perspectives. She teaches English at the Ohio State University and she has lent her cultural commentary to outlets such as time CNN, Openly,

Good Morning America, The Huffington Post and NPR's Morning Edition. Korthisa, we are so thrilled and honored to have you here. Welcome to the show.

DR. KORITHA MITCHELL: Thanks so much for having me. It's an honor to join you.

AMY: So African-American literature is a particular specialty of your scholarship, but I want to know how, and when you first actually became aware of Frances Harper and this novel Iola Leroy. 

KORITHA: It's a great question because you know, she's certainly not someone that most people have heard of. And I did not discover her until I was in graduate school. So it was, um, an American women writers class taught by Carla Peterson at the University of Maryland College Park, where I went to grad school. And once I became a professor it was the book that I was most invested in teaching regularly because it covers so much ground and it's ground that determines the current historical moment. So much of what happens in those decades is what we are still living with. And so it was always important to me to expose my undergraduates to a book like that. Um, in other words, earlier than I was exposed to it. 

KIM: Okay. Um, in terms of Harper's life, she was born Frances Ellen Watkins in Baltimore in 1825. Koritha, what can you tell us about her early life and how it might've shaped the public figure she would become?

KORITHA: Yeah. So she was born free. Both of her parents were free, but they also died when she was really young. And she is basically reared by her uncle, Reverend William Watkins, and he runs a school for black children in Baltimore. So she's able to go to school until she's about age 12 when she has to start work at a very young age, but the people she works for, they allow her to read in whatever spare time she has. And in fact, they also have an actual bookstore and so she's able to maximize that exposure to literature very early on, not only from her employers, but also with the foundation that being educated by her uncle created for her.

 As early as 1846, she publishes her first collection of poems. It's called "Forest Leaves." And for many decades scholars thought that that was lost to us, but it was rediscovered in the two thousands by a graduate student, I believe her name is Johanna Ortner. It was a really exciting find because, you know, everyone was convinced that this wasn't available. And so when she found it, it was a really big moment of celebration. 

KIM: How cool. I love that. 

AMY: hidden treasure. Okay, so tell us a little bit about Harper's activism and how she came to be a speaker. I think, in the introduction to your edition it talks about the Fugitive Slave Act and how she got really fired up over that. 

KORITHA: Absolutely. So the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 passes and what happens in 1853 is a black man is punished, violated under that law, and he ends up dying, and she writes to a friend that on his grave, she is just simply committed to abolition as a cause. So shortly after that, in 1854, she has an opportunity to speak. And she's not the renowned orator at that point. She reads one of her poems, and because she's so skilled and because people are mesmerized, um, she gets herself on a speaking podium in the next year. This is early in her career. I believe she's like 28 at this point. The reports are that the crowd is 600 strong. just blows my mind. And it's another reason why, the more I learned about Frances Harper, the more I was like, "Oh my goodness, I need to know more." Just an absolutely astonishing person. She ends up being the first black woman that we know of to be paid for lecturing for an abolitionist cause in the United States, speaking to audiences that are both black and white, both men and women. How is it that we don't know Frances Harper's name as well as we know Frederick Douglas's name? How is it that we don't know her name as well as we know Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B, Anthony? This is ridiculous, right? career spans more than 50 years. Basically every progressive issue that you can think of, she was a part of.

KIM: And it's interesting you mentioned Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, because she was a little bit at odds with them, right?

KORITHA: And see, I wouldn't even put it in those terms. So the rift comes in in terms of the amendment that will give the formerly enslaved black men the right to vote. That's the moment at which Stanton and Anthony kind of stake their claim and say, "If we're going to watch Sambo march into the kingdom first, then I'm out." That's basically what they say, right? They're just like "we good white women have been all about helping the Negro, but now that they're no longer at the bottom does it really make sense for us to let them march into the kingdom first?" Like that's literally the language that's used. And so Frances Harper has to face how much white women are going to choose race over gender. But what I find so compelling about her in that moment, too, is that even as she watches women hold themselves to incredibly low standards, she refuses to do the same herself. She is stunning for the example she gives us that she's going to keep her focus on what she believes is going to make the country better, make society better, make something like a public good. I'm telling you, one of my role models.

KIM: She's inspiring. 

AMY: The strength of her convictions. Um, all right, so we can speak more about Harper's life as we go along , but let's jump into the book right now, Iola Leroy. She wrote it in the later years of her life. It was published in 1892 and it was her first and only novel to be printed in a single volume. So her other three novels were serialized in periodicals. Koritha, do you want to go ahead and give our listeners a little kind of spoiler- free synopsis of the story? 

KORITHA: Sure. So Iola Leroy is about the title character, Iola, and her journey through the United States. She is born to an enslaved woman that she does not know is enslaved and her so-called owner. And so Iola and her brother grow up sure that they are white and the people who were enslaved on their property are nothing like them. It's only after Iowa's father dies and people invalidate her mother's marriage to him that Iola now is considered enslaved. Her brother is considered property, and basically we follow what happens after Iola realizes that her country does not see her as a human being, but in fact, sees her as property. 

AMY: It's just chilling, the idea of not even expecting it and then out of the blue, you're just thrown into slavery.

KORITHA: Well, and what you're describing as chilling is something that Harper highlights, right? She really forces readers to think about how brutally arbitrary slavery is in the first place. It's okay for all of those darker skinned black people to be enslaved until you're the person who's being treated this way. So Harper is brilliant in making the country look at itself through Iola's eyes, I think.

AMY: She has to face her own hypocrisy in the fact that, yeah, she was defending slavery until suddenly it happened to me. 

KIM: Yeah. And then everyone who reads it, you know, would presumably do the same thing. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. 

KIM: So unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, this book was actually written decades after the Civil War. Could you maybe give some context as to why Harper wrote this book when she did? Who was she writing this book for, and what was her aim?

KORITHA: Part of what she's doing is she's telling a community story. She starts the novel with the enslaved community, and it is only later that we actually meet Iola in the first place. It's giving readers a way to understand and appreciate the enslaved communities and how those communities supported each other through the violence of this country. The other way to answer it though, this idea of who is she writing for and what is she aiming for? As we've said already, this is the first novel that she publishes as a bound book rather than serialized in a magazine. Her other novels that are serialized in the Christian Recorder we might say are focused on the audience of the Christian Recorder for her to put this in a bound book, suggesting that she's willing to reach out to readers who might not be so Christian and they also may not be a Black audience, primarily. She is aiming to reach as many readers as possible. You know, by the 1880s you have what we would call plantation fiction being best-sellers right? So Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, these kinds of denigrating narratives that basically caricature African-Americans and look back to the good old days of slavery. So, you know, here comes Frances Harper by 1892 suggesting that we actually look seriously at not only the brutality of what slavery was, but also the remarkable resilience and intelligence of the people who fricking survived it. She's giving us a way of looking back at the kind of resilience and intelligence of a community that was robbed of everything. And as we look to build a future, how might we account for their brilliance as we march forward? So that's a beginning of an answer. You can see I could go on, but that's the beginning of an answer.

KIM: I love that though, because the story belongs to the people in these communities, in the story. But the story was basically being taken from them and written from a viewpoint perspective of people that it wasn't about. She's taking that back, and it's amazing. And it is kind of an antidote to the other stuff. And then, you know, you keep going forward when you still have Gone With the Wind being a bestseller and a big movie and everything. So, you know, obviously these words were needed. 

AMY: And you can tell, and we'll get into this a little bit later, but you can tell the last chapters of Iola Leroy are kind of like a clarion call for the community, like you said, for like, this is how we need to band together going forward into the 20th century. 

KORITHA: But not just the community, right? The entire nation. Part of it is an indictment of the nation, like, look at how brutal this country is. And can we do better as a country? 

 One of the things I love to say about Frances Harper is that she is a model citizen who could not vote. So one of the things she talks about is the way that she's doing these speeches around the country and meddling in slaveholders' business. Enslavers are the people who have a vote in this country and get to set the agenda for the country, but I'm going to be bold enough to meddle in their business because I have a larger vision for what the country should be about. So the clarion call, I think, is national in scope. And that's the other reason why I think it's her first bound book, because she has that much of an ambition about trying to change the conversation. 

AMY: Okay, love it. So when I started reading this book, it was just a few months after I had watched the Netflix film Passing based on Nella Larson's book. That's the story of a black woman who chooses to pass as a white woman in the 1920s. This book is about a young woman who lives as a white woman, unaware that she is actually biracial. And then once she learns the truth, she's got this identity crisis, you know? Who do I want to choose to be? Because she could proceed as a white woman. She kind of has an option. So can you talk about the significance of her choice once she does learn the truth about herself? 

KORITHA: Yeah. I mean, there's so many angles from which I can address this. I mean, I think the first angle since you mentioned Passing, you know, in African-American literary studies, passing narrative is basically a genre. And that is because this country has decided that the only people who should have benefits and rights are white people. That's still how we do. Ahmaud Arbery is on my mind. We have a country that still does that. One of the scholars that I'm thinking of, as I say this, you know, Gabrielle Foreman talks about Iola Leroy as an anti-passing narrative. I might argue that we only had about 12 years where the country actually tried to, I don't know, treat me as a human. Reconstruction is the only time that, as a nation, we were like, no, we actually ought to be making things more decent for people who are Black. Literally, the only time. So what, 1865 to about 1877. That's it. And so that 12- year period is the only time that it felt like maybe you could have a chance in this country and not be white. And so in that moment of enlarged possibility, people who were light enough to pass, but didn't, we're aggressively suggesting that my so-called African blood is not anything to be ashamed of. And the country was actually affirming them in that, so that being racially- ambiguous actually became a way of arguing for improved conditions for other black people. I think that's part of Harper's investment in offering us a character like Iola, but here's the other thing I have to say. This is the other way to look at it. And this is influenced by, Allison Hobbs's book, and I'm not going to remember the name of it right now, but part of what she makes so clear is that when you study passing in the United States, what she finds is that it's not so much what you pass for, it's what you pass away from. It's what you lose. Harper has given us Iola Leroy as a character who helps us understand what Allison Hobbs found, which is that what you lose, and the connection to family and black community, actually makes it not so worth it to have all of those unearned benefits that the country showers just on the basis of whiteness.

KIM: Beautifully said. I think Harper does an amazing job of making the reader feel really immersed in the fear and doubt and confusion of this era that we're talking about. And even reading it today, there's a real sense of, "Wow, it actually wasn't really that long ago." And you've kind of mentioned how, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Are there any moments from the first part of this novel that you thought were particularly powerful or effective that you might want to read a passage from?

KORITHA: So I'm going to read the absolute opening of the novel. [reads passage]

KIM: How could you not want to keep reading that book after that opening? I mean, it pulls you in on this meta level, this conversation, but there's this whole idea of rebellion. I mean, you think of Hunger Games, you think of, um, Handmaid's Tale. Like all those things. I just love it. 

AMY: Yeah, it's all just bubbling under the surface, ready to explode, and the coded language that they use to convey this network of communication amongst slaves on different properties. 

KORITHA: That to me is a perfect way of understanding this insistence on Harper's part of beginning with the community. They are violently kept from learning to read and write, and yet they have done what they needed to do to become literate in other ways. All of this is dangerous stuff that they're doing, but she's making it clear that this is something they're invested in doing. The other thing that I think is so fascinating in that opening is the narrator tells us that we're talking about Thomas Anderson, although he was known as Master Anderson's Tom. That's how he's known, but that's not how we're going to talk about him. He's Tom Anderson! So at the very start, Harper is helping us understand the complexity of this community and also the complexity of her language and the language that the characters are using, right? 

KIM: This is a great place to also point out something that you talk about in the introduction to the book, how some of the characters don't speak in standard English. And we wanted to have you maybe talk about the difference in the dialect and what she's doing with that.

KORITHA: Yeah. I mean, what she does is very, um, kind of, I would argue common among black writers who understand that language is always marking power, right? Why am I speaking English in the first place, except for colonization and slavery. This isn't my mother tongue. And so for me, part of what Harper does when it comes to dialect is underscoring that the use of dialect or not is not the marker of intelligence, and I think part of what I find fascinating, too, is even if you have black characters who speak similar dialect, they can have very different outlooks. She kind of marks the diversity within black communities as well. Which of course is just again, honoring their humanity in ways that the system doesn't. The Reason to do a novel rather than nonfiction in this case is because she is interested in those debates and disagreements and interested in painting a community of people. Like they are people, that's why they disagree.

KIM: Yeah. Of course they don't all have the same opinions, you know? They're going to have different ideas of how to do things, so let's actually look at what a real community of people would likely talk about. 

AMY: Reading the book felt to me like going back in time and maybe reading op-eds from newspapers of the time. Yes, there's a plot, but a lot of it is just the talking. Um, you can see that that's the message she wanted to get across. I found the second half of the book to really be the most compelling in a lot of ways. This is after the Civil War has concluded and so you're like, "okay, things are somewhat resolved," but then you see what the freed slaves have to contend with during the years of Reconstruction.

KIM: Yeah. People were trying to reunite with their loved ones and that being a whole aspect of Reconstruction that you don't really hear about. Um, and you actually included a really interesting appendix among many in the book. Um, it lists the actual newspaper notices from emancipated slaves seeking to track down their loved ones. And it's heart-wrenching, as you'd imagine.

KORITHA: That's part of why I was so invested in creating those appendices and especially the one on Black families, both in slavery and in freedom, because what Harper works so hard to do is to show that the country had to brutally lie about how black people are not fully human. Their emotions are not of the same order as white people. So it's no big deal if you separate mother from child, they're just like separating puppies. That is what this country built its wealth on doing. Even in that passage I read where we open up, Robert's mother was sold away from him and for the rest of the narrative you're going to watch him be driven by the impact of that early trauma. Not only did these people do everything they did to try to get from under a brutal system, but then after they got out of that brutal system, that doesn't erase all of what they've lost. And so in one of the examples from the newspapers that I include in the appendix is a brother who is looking for a sister. They hadn't seen each other in 35 years. And so that was one type of historical document that was really important for me to put at people's fingertips. 

AMY: I loved it, cause you're like, wow, this is the real example of what she was writing about. And we should say that Iola has some romantic suitors in the course of the book. There's a little kind of love story. Really the love story in this book is about families reuniting. That's what you're rooting for. That's what you're worried about. I don't care who she winds up married to, to be perfectly honest, but I want her to find that mom, you know? So we don't want to give away any spoilers about her search for her family, but, I think we can say that Harper puts forth some powerful ideas in terms of what sort of future the Black community could and should forge. And one example that really struck me was her argument that mothers were going to play a critical role going into the future. Koritha, can you explain that in a little more detail and why was that important to Harper?

KORITHA: Well, I think this is an opportunity for me to say again, that I really feel like Harper is invested in a kind of, as you put it, clarion call for the nation writ large, not just for Black communities. And so part of the reason why Iola's investment in motherhood becomes important is because she also has been so invested in education. She's a school teacher, she's a nurse. She spends an entire, you know, at least chapter looking for a job. And her uncle is like, "You know, you're going to be okay, you're not going to go hungry if you don't have a job." And she's insisting, "No, there would be fewer unhappy marriages if women were educated." So there's a way in which Harper is really invested in having us think about what are the limitations that are put on people who actually have a lot of potential. But the other thing I wanted to bring up though, in relationship to this, and this is why I'm so invested in thinking about how she makes it a bound book, because she wants to speak beyond the audience of the Christian Recorder. This is one really powerful example toward the end. This is Dr. Latimer, just talking to Iola. So Dr. Latimer is a light-skinned person who could have passed, too, just like Iola, but here's one of the things he says: "To be born white in this country is to be born to an inheritance of privileges, to hold in your hands, the keys that open before you, the doors of every occupation, advantage, opportunity and achievement." A passage like that is so important because we have watched Iola look for a job. And every single time she gets the job based on her demeanor and qualifications, she gets let go the moment that they find out that she has a drop of black blood, right? So Harper is bringing to our attention, what are the arbitrary things that gives you benefits? What gives you rights? What gives you humanity and what doesn't? Here's another passage I just have to read, even if I don't have a good excuse for it right now.

AMY: Go for it.

KIM: Yeah. Please do. 

KORITHA: 

This is when Iola is a teacher. She has started a school: One day, a gentleman came to the school and wished to address the children. Iola suspended the regular order of the school. And the gentlemen assayed to talk to them on the achievements of the white race, such as building steamboats and carrying on business. Finally, he asked how they did it. “They've got money,” chorused the children. “But how did they get it?” “They took it from us.” So she goes on and then here's the narrator chiming in again: The school was soon overcrowded with applicants and Iola was forced to refuse numbers because their quarters were too cramped. The school was beginning to lift up the home, for Iola was not satisfied to teach her children only the rudiments of knowledge.She had tried to lay the foundation of good character, But the elements of evil burst upon her loved and cherished work. One night, the heavens were lighted with lurid flames and Iola beheld the school, the pride and joy of her pupils and their parents, a smoldering ruin.

Cause this is what happens. Black people do something to advance themselves and they are attacked. Very often the racial violence in the post -Reconstruction era, which becomes the lynching era, and when Jim Crow segregation starts to settle in, very often the violence that's happening isn't because Black people have done something wrong or that they're criminals. It's because they're succeeding in some way. And this country says, "Nope, there's a proper place for you. And that's under my foot."

AMY: This novel is just packed with ideas. It really is. She covers so much ground with this book. 

KIM: Yeah, sadly, it's timeless too . 

AMY: Okay. So there's so many lines in this book, but there was another one where Harper wrote: "When we have learned to treat men according to the complexion of their souls and not the color of their skins, we will have given our best contribution toward the solution of the Negro problem." And I'm like, Martin Luther king speech, one of the most famous lines that we remember from his speech. That's almost paraphrased from what she was writing in 1892. 

KORITHA: Well, what I would say though, when these Black people who are laying out the case say something like that, they're talking about how they've never been treated according to their character. That's what they're talking about. But if we were more honest than we would have to see how much we don't treat white people according to their character. They can be despicable and still get the benefit of the doubt. If you're white, you don't get judged by what you do or don't do, you get assumed good. And even when you do something despicable, we will find ways to see your humanity. If you're black or brown, no thanks; never happened. Haven't seen it happen yet. So that, to my mind, is the only way that we could do any kind of justice when people like Harper or Martin Luther king say that. It's actually looking at how the character of white people can be....despicable. despicable.

AMY: That's the first time that's ever been presented to me with the flip side. Cause you're right. We think of it as this shiny, happy platitude: Let's treat everyone great. And It's like, no, let's treat everyone equal in terms of, if you're a jerk, we're going to treat you that way too. I didn't think about it as it works both ways. 

KORITHA: It's never worked both ways, right? And that isn't an accident. It's not an accident that you don't hear what I just said often.

AMY: Right. 

KIM: Yep.

KORITHA: It's not an accident. Everything is set up to say the exact opposite, to make whiteness act like it's just neutral. It's just there. And maybe one day we can treat you a little better, Koritha. No, I'm looking around and I'm seeing how raggedy y'all are. And so I want to just simply be treated according to what you claim you respect, but these are your standards and you don't even live up to them, right? So I have to admit to you, and I'm going to shut up, but I have to admit to you that trying to expose all of the vicious work that treating whiteness as neutral does informs every element in my edition. It's my goal with everything I chose to put in there. I want us to see whenever we act like whiteness is neutral, we are doing great harm. It is not neutral. It is doing harm. 

KIM: Absolutely. Yup.

AMY: Um, I don't know if this was in your introduction or if I saw it somewhere else, but that a hundred years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, Frances Harper did that on a trolley car. Do you know that story? 

KORITHA: Yeah. And actually the truth is Harper tells a story also about, I believe it's Harriet Tubman, about this same kind of violence on transportation. So part of what we have to understand is the way that Black women of the 19th century, especially, are over and over again being treated brutally on public transportation. And as they are being brutalized, white people, including white women, sit there just as comfortable as can be. That is one way to understand the experience of Black feminist thought. Because at the end of the day, we live in a country that acts as if being a woman should include things like, I don't know, dignified treatment, but that's not what happens to me even now. That's not an automatic thing. This country is geared toward making sure that no matter how dignified my presentation, I do not have to be treated that way. And so it makes all the sense in the world that in the 19th century you have Black women who are having the experiences that are not very far removed from what we come to associate with Rosa Parks. That's how Black women's activism so often has operated, that it's very capacious. Black women are always attuned to all of those forces that are unnatural and evil forces, man made forces that have nothing to do with my humanity, nothing to do with any of that, it just has to do with power dynamics, and people's willingness to create systems that take away my life chances. 

KIM: Harper also mentions in this later section of the book the need for Black people to write their own books. When Iola explained to one of her suitors that she aspires to write but isn't sure would do any good, he responds, "Ms. Leroy out of the race must come its own thinkers and writers. Authors belonging to the white race have written good racial books for which I'm deeply grateful, but it seems to be almost impossible for a white man to put himself completely in our place. No man can feel the iron which enters another man's soul."  Koritha, considering the importance of having Black people write their own stories, why do you think Frances Harper isn't better remembered today?

KORITHA: There are so many answers to that question, and I think at the end of the day, what's crucial to remember, especially given the lovely context that you just gave us, is that not being well remembered has very little to do with whether Black people actually did the writing or not. And even earlier than that, even before they're writing books, there's plenty to appreciate and keep record of, so it's not that Black people aren't doing the intellectual and other work to preserve the truth about their communities. It's simply that there are a lot of forces against it. So with Harper as a specific example, part of what I delve into in explaining this in the introduction is that a lot of times she is selling her books at her speaking engagements. So especially for someone who commanded 600 people on the first try, you can imagine you're commanding those kinds of audiences, then the people who are following you know what a big deal you are. It's not until after she passes away in 1911, that there's even a possibility of people not appreciating what she left as a legacy, but sure enough, that starts, and it starts, I would argue, with W E B Dubois. So part of what we can not neglect in this conversation is that it's not just white women who hold themselves to low standards in relationship to other people, namely Black women, it's also Black men who can hold themselves to low standards in relationship to Black women. So Dubois, I would argue, is one of the people who begins the pattern of diminishing what Harper had achieved. And then as the decades move on, I would say that part of what happens is in the Black Power era, there's a way in which Iola Leroy can be discounted because of this light-skinned heroine. In the Black is Beautiful, Black Power era you want someone more chocolatey like me to be the protagonist. And so that's another reason to kind of diminish the importance of Iola Leroy. Part of what's tricky about that, though, is if as a culture we valued periodical literature more than we would have been more attuned to her three serialized novels, at least two of which have dark-skinned heroines. ButI lola Leroy is the bound book that comes to represent her contribution. And so in the Black Power era, that's not so cool. At the same time though, by the Seventies, you're starting to get more in higher education in terms of feminists pushing for, you know, something like Women's Studies. A lot of that is happening through white women who don't think in terms of Black women. So all of these forces, I think, come together to create a scenario in which someone like Harper falls out. So I think that's one way of answering that question. The good news is because people have worked so hard, against the worst odds, to leave a legacy like this, it's here for the kind of recovery that has been happening around Harper for some decades now. And I'm very proud to be a part of that.

AMY: It's crazy to me that when we think back on this time period we think Harriet Beecher Stowe. That's the slave book, right? And I know that book was galvanizing for the Civil War and everything, but to me, this book offers so much more. Why are we forgetting this Black woman writing about the time period and our go-to girl is a white woman telling the story of slaves? It's kind of crazy to me. 

 You're like, 

Amy, what have I been trying to tell you for the last hour and a half? 

KIM: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

AMY: So this is the bound book, as you said, that she's known for. Um, if people wanted to check out any other titles, what would you say would be the next thing that people might want to read? 

KORITHA: Yeah. The two things outside of Iola Leroy that I always hope people will look at would be her 1859 short story, "The Two Offers." And as we talked about that, as far as we know, is the first short story published by an African-American woman. And "The Two Offers" is fabulous to teach because I love for my students to see how in 1859, this Black woman is making a very clear argument about why staying single would be smart.

AMY: Yeah, I love it. 

KIM: That's awesome.

KORITHA: Um, and then the other one that I like to bring up is a poem I actually included in the edition, but it's called "The Slave Mother: a Tale of Ohio." And because I'm at Ohio State University and have been for the last 17 years, I always like to underscore Ohio connections. And that poem, it's the story of Margaret Garner who ran away from slavery and was trying to kill all her children and killed at least one. And that becomes the story that Toni Morrison kind of uses as a point of departure for Beloved. Just the tradition of Black women who have engaged with Margaret Garner' story. "So The Slave Mother, A Tale of Ohio" is a poem I would suggest as well.

KIM: Great. 

AMY: I feel like I wish I could take a course from you or something. I wish I was there at Ohio State.

KIM: You're obviously an amazing professor. 

AMY: Yeah. I mean, we had our sort of line of questioning together for this, but now that I've talked to you, I want to rethink about everything that I thought I knew about this novel, because you've really made me think about it in some different ways. wAnd I hope that our listeners are inspired to go pick up a copy of Iola Leroy too, so they can experience everything we've been talking about. 

KIM: Yes. And we should add that Broadview Press, the publisher, is generously providing a discount code for any listeners who purchase the book between now and the end of April, 2022. Go to BroadviewPress.com and use the code Iola20, that's I-O-L-A- two-zero for 20% off your purchase of the book.

AMY: Thank you, Broadview Press for doing that. And you should really check out some of their other titles while you're at it because they have a lot of other great books by forgotten women writers and Koritha, this has been so fascinating. Thank you for lending us your expertise on Frances Harper.

KORITHA: I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for shining a light on Harper. She is freaking amazing. And so thank you for making sure that gets some attention.

KIM: So that's all for today's podcast. If you enjoyed it, consider giving us a shout out on social media.

It's a really great way to help us find new listeners, but it's also a great way for us to connect with you. Let us know you're out there.

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

78. The Gillian Beer Fan Club

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

AMY: Hi everyone. Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Amy Helmes. 

KIM: And I'm Kim Askew... 

AMY: So Kim, if there were a fan club for this week’s subject, the literary critic Gillian Beer, you'd for sure be in it, right? 

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. I've turned to her scholarship quite a few times, and I'm talking way back in my undergrad days, studying medieval and Renaissance lit and all the way through my graduate studies when I was primarily focused on Victorian lit. I just love her work so much. I'm so excited to talk about it today. And also, I'm excited to learn more about her, because even though I've read her work, I've cited her often ... I don't actually know that much about her. 

AMY: Well, I guarantee you know more than I do, ’cause this is one of those episodes where I consider myself a complete newbie. And I will also confess to being almost scared of anyone at her level of academia. When you hear the number of accolades and awards this woman has, it's incredibly intimidating. I mean, she's actually a Dame of the British empire, awarded that title in 1998. 

KIM: I know, pretty fancy, right? 

AMY: Yes. So anyway, I'm going to be relying on you in this episode, Kim, to walk me through things a little bit. I read a few interviews with Beer, and she really seems like a nice lady. 

KIM: Yeah, she does. Don't be intimidated. It actually reminds me of something. I'm not sure if you know, but, um, the writer Alain de Botton, he wrote, um, How Proust Can Change Your Life and a bunch of philosophy. You know him?

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: So when I was living in London, briefly, several years ago, I actually wrote him a letter -- an email -- asking him if he knew of any Proust clubs in London, because I thought, you know, who else would know if there are Proust clubs in London? And he wrote me back! Like within 24 hours, the nicest email. No, he didn't know of any, but he was very complimentary about my writing, which, you know, I had a blog at the time (of course, like everyone did back then.) And he was very complimentary and nice. And we actually exchanged a couple of emails. 

AMY: That's amazing! We're going to say you and he are great friends. We're just going to like, augment that.

KIM: I definitely think so. Yeah. We’d know each other in a crowd. Yeah, for sure. Anyway...

AMY: Yeah, that's a good point. Just because somebody's super smart and intellectual doesn't mean they're unapproachable. 

KIM: Yes.

AMY: Um, okay. But getting back to Gillian Beer, what do we know about her in terms of her life story?

KIM: Okay. So let's start out with the fact that she was born in Surrey, England in 1935 and she was the daughter of a teacher and a university professor.

Okay. That makes sense right off the bat. The children of teachers are always smart, I think. And I can say that pretty brazenly as I am the daughter of a school teacher.

KIM: Hi, Phyllis! (That's Amy's mom.) Um, my mom had a few careers, one of them was teaching high school computer classes. So I guess I'm kind of in that club a little bit, too. Anyway, there's a great article by Claire Armistead in The Guardian that talks a bit about Beer’s childhood (and we'll link to it in the show notes) that was super helpful. 

AMY: Yes. Okay. And so that is one of the first articles I read when we were getting ready for this episode, and it was great. It really filled me in, and I suddenly was super into this woman just from reading one article. You turned me on to somebody and hopefully we're going to do that to some listeners.

KIM: All right. So to summarize her article a bit, as a young child Beer lived with her divorce mom, and they lodged in the home of a family of bricklayers, but then she was sent off to convent boarding school at age 11. And it sounds like from the article that local officials actually got involved because they didn't think her living conditions were safe at the bricklayers. 

AMY: They decided that she needed to be carted off to this boarding school for her own good, it sounds like. 

KIM: Yeah. But she didn't like being away from her mom, of course, and that sounds really sad. But then something happened to her. 

AMY: Right. She fell down a flight of stairs and hurt her back, which sounds awful. Thank God she survived that. But in a weird twist of fate, it sort of sent her on this trajectory that would become her career because while she was home laid up for six months, she started to read a ton of great literature to pass the time. Just whatever she could get her hands on. She particularly loved Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde…

KIM: Yeah. And there's a funny anecdote where she actually says, "I remember being very struck by Ghosts (the play by Ibsen), which I didn't really understand because I didn't know about venereal disease, but I knew about people going mad in a cloistered life." So reading that, I wonder if that was how she felt about convent school, which is ... Yikes! 

AMY: What would you say, she was about a preteen, kind of?

KIM: I think preteen. 

AMY: I can't remember what the article said, but it was like, can you imagine reading those sophisticated writers at that age? It's pretty impressive. Okay, so after boarding school, she went on to St. Anne's College at Oxford. It was a women's college then, and even today it still accepts the highest proportion of female students of any college at Oxford. It was around this time she got married to another scholar and literary critic named John Beer. And while she was pregnant with their first child, she was offered a research fellowship at Girton, the Cambridge college we have mentioned a few times on this show. Rosamond Lehmann, the subject of our episode back in September, went there and she wrote about the college in her book, Dusty Answer. Um, I kind love that Gillian was diving into career stuff at the same time she was having babies. (She gave birth to three sons.) But in that interview we mentioned with Armitstead, she admits that having children did slow her down some, as she really wasn't able to write for five years while her children were young. And I found that refreshing to hear, just because she wasn't some superhuman new mother that was doing all this, you know, intellectual career stuff, and also still raising babies. She was having to juggle, and it was a challenge. But she did say that having kids at that time in her career was so valuable to her because it contributed to the sort of scholarship that she would go on to write about.

KIM: Yeah. It was really interesting that while she was observing her children, she started thinking and mulling over all this stuff about evolution, childbearing, child raising, and all of this ultimately inspired her later writing on Victorian literature. So she was teaching, writing these incredibly academic books and raising her sons. Kind of reminded me of The Lost Daughter, which we have talked about actually quite a bit since we saw it. 

AMY: Yeah. It sounds like Gillian handled it a lot better than, um, well, I can't remember the character's name...

KIM: Yeah. It's like the positive side of being an academic and a mother. 

AMY: Yeah, Gillian Beer said she really enjoyed motherhood when her kids were young. There was no facet of her that wanted to run away and flee. 

KIM: No, it doesn't sound like it. 

AMY: In fact, it sounds like her early career at Girton was really magical for her.

KIM: Yeah, she actually said, "I don't want to construe my life romantically as this poor little girl who somehow managed to end up a Dame and a professor. But at the same time, all that happened. I'm a historical remnant from the great days of free education I was carried through by the state." I love that she acknowledges, you know, the big part that that played in the experience that she had and what she was able to do with her career and her life. 

AMY: Yeah, you got to love a rags to riches story. Anyway, her first book came out in 1970. It was called Meredith: A Change of Masks. That's about the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith. And, forgive me for saying that I do not know George Meredith.

KIM: I didn't either. I had to Google him, so don't feel bad. I had no idea. He might be more well-known in England. 

AMY: True. Um, my cursory internet search of his books did inspire me to bump him higher up on my to-be-read pile after I looked him up because one of his novels, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is inspired by the collapse of his first marriage, and apparently shocked people with its sexual frankness. He was also nominated for the Nobel prize in literature seven times. So now I'm really feeling like an idiot for not knowing George Meredith, but I digress.

KIM: We digress. So getting back to Beer, the same year she published her book on Meredith, she also had another book out. So two in the same year. And this one was called The Romance. It's about romantic literature from the Middle Ages through the 20th century. So especially the stuff from the Middle Ages and Renaissance I was using all the time and referring to while I was writing my papers in college.

AMY: I think it's interesting, Kim, because I know that you are not as much of a fan of reading non-fiction stuff. What's different about reading her that you super get into it?

KIM: I think because she is writing explicitly about fiction that I'm interested in. So there's that connection there. And then also just the way she looks at science. The way she relates that to fiction, the connection between science and fiction. It's like basically Frankenstein, a nonfiction version, if that makes sense. 

AMY: Okay. Yeah. And we’re going to get into that a little bit more in a second, but getting back to her professional journey, um, she wound up working as a fellow at Girton college for 30 years. And then later she was the King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge.

KIM: Whoa. 

AMY: Yeah. She eventually became president of Claire Hall, Cambridge's postgraduate college. So Kim, as I've already said, I've never read anything she's written. Tell me what else I should know about her in terms of her work.

KIM: Right. So I talked about the connection she makes between humanities and science. She just does it in this really beautiful, compelling way and it kind of appeals to the way my brain works. Um, I think I understand Victorian science better than maybe contemporary science. Um, but also, she's keying in on the symbiotic relationship between narrative storytelling and science, and I really dig that.

AMY: I don't know what you're talking about. 

KIM: Okay. Okay. So I gave a paper at a conference at Claremont Graduate College. It was called Darwinian Theory and its Role in Bleak House. 

AMY: You did?!

KIM: I did. Yeah, didn't tell you? I just did that, you know, one weekend. Anyway. 

AMY: That's really impressive, Kim!

KIM: Thank you. Anyway, so Beer has a 1983 book called Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and 19th Century Fiction. It was a big inspiration for the paper that I gave. And she doesn't discuss Dickens too much in the book. He was my subject in the paper, but um, her writing was more about Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, but it applies Darwinian theory with those authors and it really helped me see Bleak House in a whole new and fascinating way. And then my Henry James thesis was on the literary detective novel, and Victorian science played a big role in that paper too, specifically forensics. So she says in her book, Arguing With the Past, "We need to learn the terms of past preoccupations to experience the pressure within words, now slack, of events, anxieties, and desires." So basically, when you're reading Thomas Hardy, when you're reading George Eliot, when you're reading Henry James, there is a current underneath everything that they're learning about in contemporary science at the time. And it's incredibly impacting their work because all these new innovations are coming up. Darwin is coming up with these incredibly new thoughts that are like sending sparks throughout the entire society. And if you'd read those works from our viewpoint, you don't necessarily get that. She sort of connects you with that. What were they trying to understand then? What were the things they were grappling with at that time? Does that make sense? 

AMY: Yes, that is perfect, how you just described it. Okay. Oh my God. It's like a double whammy because not only is she referencing all these classic books that we love anyway.... I mean, Thomas Hardy is a favorite of mine. I know he's super depressing, but I love him. But you're getting like a master class on how to read it.

KIM: It's so important to understand through that lens, what they were thinking of, what was exciting to them, what they were talking about. And at that time, scientists and writers were almost sometimes the same people because they were doing both. They were in the same journals. I mean, they were in the same places in society. They were in salons. They were all interacting with each other. It's not necessarily the way it is now, which feels much more fragmented. 

AMY: Got it. Okay. So we need to learn the terms of past preoccupations. That's what she meant by that. 

KIM: Yes. Yes. 

AMY: I love that. I feel like I'm Oprah, like, "light bulb moment!" 

KIM: Oh yeah, totally. Ding, ding, ding! 

AMY: Okay. So I can see now how reading her work would give you a new lens with which to look at some of your favorite novels. I totally love it.

KIM: I knew you would. So now you can join the fan club with me. There's stuff of hers that I haven't read. She's also written a book about Virginia Woolf where she looks at To the Lighthouse in relation to the philosophers David Hume and George Berkeley. And I've read Hume and Berkeley in grad school, so I need to re-read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and also read her book on that. And this is interesting: she's been a judge for the Booker Prize twice. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and Yale, and her most recent book came out in 2016, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll. She won a Truman Capote Award for literary criticism for that book. 

AMY: As somebody who's always wondered what the hell Lewis Carroll was doing... actually, I love Alice in Wonderland, but to have somebody really smart walk me through it sounds amazing. It's making me think of how much we loved being English majors. And you would have your favorite English professors, and it was so fun to just sit in class and hear them talk. Reading her work is like getting to go back and do that and just geek out over all this stuff.

KIM: Exactly. That's exactly how I feel. Oh, I just wanted to also add that she takes quite a bit of time to work on these. So it's not like she's just putting one out every year. These are actually works that take sometimes many years, even decades to write. There's a lot of scholarship that's going into every single book. 

AMY: She just sounds like an academic rockstar.

KIM: Absolutely. And if you loved hearing about her life, she has a short memoir about her childhood in England, just before and during WWII. And I only found out about it while researching this episode, it's called Stations Without Signs, and we'll link to where you can buy it in our show notes. And I think the title refers to the train station signs in England being removed during WWII so as to confuse the enemy. I've ordered the book and I can't wait to read it. And really, everyone who loves reading 19th century fiction, please, please go out and read Darwin's Plots. It will give you an excuse to reread all your favorite novels, as if you needed one. 

AMY: She's kind of the sort of person I would love to go have tea with or something. I feel like she would just be a fascinating conversationalist. And like I said, she seems so nice.

KIM: Yeah, very smart, but very kind at the same time. 

AMY: I mean, I'm thinking if you and I ever go to London, we are going to meet up with all of our UK previous Lost Ladies of Lit guests. So that's Laura Thompson, Lucy Scholes, Judith Mackrell, Lauren Elkin... who am I forgetting? 

KIM: I'm thinking also of future guests, so there's Kate McDonald and Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. That would be a really great party.

AMY: Somehow we’ve got to get Gillian Beer there, and we're going to just all sit at her feet and worship her like accolytes. And then she will tell us to stop all that stuff and nonsense and pass her another cucumber sandwich. That's what I'm envisioning anyway. 

KIM: Somehow I feel like you two would get along. I feel like I can hear you saying that. 

AMY: Well, anyway, that's all for today's episode. Keep those emails coming in to us, and tune in next week when we'll be introducing you to yet another lost lady of literature.

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. 

77. Daisy Fellowes — Sundays with Leigh Plessner

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

AMY HELMES: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes here with my writing partner, Kim Askew, and we're about to get super glamorous and sophisticated on you for this episode, right, Kim?. 

KIM ASKEW: Yes. And by super glamorous and sophisticated, we mean French. We're going to be talking about Daisy Fellowes, and while her name sounds tres English, Fellowes was half-French and half-American and spent her life in Europe where she was a French socialite as well as an acclaimed beauty and heiress and the Paris editor of Harper's Bazaar, among other things. But in addition to being the epitome of 30s chic, she was also a minor novelist, which is why we're discussing her today. And we're super excited to have the multitalented Leigh Plessner on to discuss Fellowes and her 1931 novel Sundays with us. 

AMY: Oola la la! I can't wait. So let's read the stacks and get started. 

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Leigh Plessner, the creative director of the cult favorite jewelry store Catbird. She also writes for New York Magazine's column "The Strategist." And I'm so thrilled to have you on, Leigh, because not only am I a huge fan of Catbird -- I have many tote bags in my house from all the orders -- but I also follow your beautiful Instagram account. It's romantic and charming and erudite, and, like Catbird, has this wonderful element of fantasy, which is one of the reasons why you are perfect for the discussion of this book. (The full title of it by the way is actually Sundays: A Fantasy.) Listeners, I found out about the book in the first place because Leigh posted it in her Instagram stories. So thank you for introducing us to this arch and frightfully chic little novella and for coming on the show with us to talk about it. 

LEIGH PLESSNER: Thank you so much for having me. I am an avid listener of Lost Ladies of Lit, and I'm so pleased to be here. 

AMY: Yay. Um, so now we know that you studied English lit in college, right? Is that how you first encountered this? 

LEIGH: So I did study English literature in college, and then right afterwards, I went and I worked at this really wonderful independent bookstore where I got to sort of get a second degree in the art of reading. And I had heard Daisy Fellowes's name over the years, but very much in passing. Then a snippet of Sundays turned up in this newsletter that I get called Opulent Tips, which is by a fashion writer and editor named Rachel Tashjian. And I immediately began the eBay search to try and track down a copy. 

AMY: Which is challenging! When we had agreed to do this book with you and I went to get a copy, we had a moment of panic because I was like, "Kim, we can't get this book! What are we going to do? Can listeners get this book?" And we will discuss that later. So listeners, don't worry. You're going to be able to get a copy of this book. But yeah, it's hard to find. 

LEIGH: It is indeed. It took me a few months of searching. And then there's some really expensive copies, and I got super lucky with a not-very-expensive copy. But it is very hard to find.

AMY: And I even remember you so kindly offered to let us borrow that copy, which luckily we didn't need to do..

KIM: Yeah, we were like, “No, we don't want to do that.” 

AMY: I know, because I was like, "If that got lost..." Oh my gosh. 

KIM: Yeah.

LEIGH: Well, I would love to share it. If anybody is desperate to read it, you can DM me and we can see about a little book loan. 

KIM: A little Lost Ladies of Lit lending library. I love it. 

AMY: Okay. So Kim mentioned in the introduction that Daisy was an heiress, but she was not your garden-variety heiress. She was an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune. Her grandfather was New Yorker Isaac Singer, who invented the first practical and commercially successful sewing machine. Her mother was heiress Isabel Blanche Singer, one of Isaac's 24 children. And I just needed to take a moment to let the idea of 24 children sink in. Um, but anyway, that was her mom's side of the family. Daisy's father was the Third Duke of Glucksberg, an aristocrat and sportsman. So she was actually an heiress twice over. And to say she was enormously rich does not even do it justice ... like filthy, filthy, filthy rich. Daisy was born in 1890 in Paris, and Lee, do you want to share with us, if you know anything more, about Daisy's youth? 

LEIGH: I might butcher some names, but I will try my absolute best. So Daisy was a middle child. She had an older and a younger brother. Each sibling was born within one year of each other. And when Daisy was only six years old, their mother committed suicide. The children were then raised mostly by their aunt, Winaretta, who was also known as Princess Edmond de Polignac. Winaretta had a really remarkable life of her own; she was a patron of the arts. She established a music salon in Paris where her proteges included Debussy and Ravel. Uh, she also had a couple of entirely chaste marriages and several high-profile relationships with women. 

AMY: She sounds like she could have her own episode, a mini episode, in the future, right, Kim? 

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. She's super interesting. So Daisy emerged from this "poor little rich girl" childhood to become one of the first "It Girls." She was on the cover of Vogue and Diana Vreeland said of her: "She had the elegance of the damned." I love that quote; it's so good. Karl Lagerfeld reportedly said she was "the chicest woman I ever laid eyes on." She was a friend of Coco Chanel and the muse of Elsa Schiaparelli, who invented the color shocking pink just for her. Leigh, can you tell us more about what set Daisy's style apart? 

LEIGH: Absolutely. So Daisy was very daring in her personal style, and that appealed deeply to the Surrealists of the time. She was said, also, to have directly inspired Coco Chanel. She wore clothes by Schiaperelli and she was a favorite subject of Cecil Beaton. She also had the most amazing jewelry collection. 

AMY: Which appeals to you, right?

LEIGH: It does indeed. 

AMY: Probably a bit more ostentatious than the typical Catbird design. 

LEIGH: Opposite ends of the spectrum. But, um, uh, both devoted to materials and craftsmanship. 

KIM: We're talking pieces by Van Cleef and Arpels, Belperron and, famously, Cartier. Apparently jewelry historians are fascinated with this collection. Lee, since this is your area of expertise, do you want to tell us more about that? 

LEIGH: I would love to. So I was looking at all of the photos of Daisy that I could find, and she had this amazing pair of diamond and emerald bracelets, and in the photos she would stand exactly just so, so that they fanned down perfectly around her wrist. I've never really seen bracelets quite worn like this, where they occupy the wrist and then they go somewhat down the hand as well and they wrap around either side of the fingers. They're really spectacular. So they are a matching pair and they also could be worn together as a necklace. Um, 

AMY: I want to jump in for a second because I read an anecdote about these bracelets and the reason she had them on each wrist was because she didn't like asymmetry. I don't know if that's true but yeah, 

LEIGH: But I love the juxtaposition of somebody who is inspiring the Surrealists and who was so, sort of unconventional in so many ways and yet had such a strict order about things. That makes it so much richer and more interesting. So she also owned... Cartier had this collection, this series, called the Tutti Frutti collection, and she owned the most spectacular of all of the Tutti Frutti pieces. It was full of just an enormous ruby and emerald and diamonds and some sapphires, and it tied shut with a black silk ribbon. 

KIM: That sounds gorgeous. 

AMY: I'm salivating. And also, you mentioned the Surrealists, and I had a great anecdote about Salvador Dali. She apparently told Dali that she could make anything fashionable. And he said, "Very well, take off your shoe and put it on your head." And she did, and she made a shoe hat become a sensation. There's a total style of hat called the shoe hat that springs from this anecdote, which I think is fabulous. It looks like an upside down shoe. 

KIM: That's crazy. I love it. 

AMY: Serious confidence. Anyway, uh, getting back to her personal life, Daisy was married a couple of times. Her first husband committed suicide, sadly, after his affair with a chauffeur was exposed. Then at one point, Daisy took Duff Cooper, the British ambassador to France, for her lover. And she also famously set out to seduce Winston Churchill, right? 

LEIGH: Yes. This is true. So Winston Churchill's secretary wrote a memoir, of course. And in it, he told the story of Winston telling him that one time he fled from a room when Daisy Fellowes, who had asked him to tea, received him lying on a tiger skin chaise longue. This seduction did not go well, but Daisy did end up marrying Winston's cousin, Reginald. 

KIM: Wow. She really went all out. I mean, that's kind of embarrassing. 

LEIGH: It's so not the Winston Churchill we think of, right? 

KIM: No. 

LEIGH: But apparently even Clementine forgave Daisy for this overture. So all was well, 

KIM: Yeah, there's so many great anecdotes about her. So another thing, she was also a mother, but really hands-off and by really hands-off, there's an anecdote about that as well. Do you want to tell it, Leigh? 

LEIGH: Sure. So, there's a story about Daisy that goes something like this: she saw a group of girls playing in a park and she turned to the nurse who was watching them and said, "Whose lovely little children are those?" To which the nurse replied, "Yours, Madame." 

KIM: I love it.

AMY: Oh man. So in addition to being this incredible fashion muse, she was also the editor of Paris Harpers. The Daily Mail, which is kind of known for its sensationalism, I think we can say ... they wrote of Daisy: "She lived on a diet of morphine and grouse and the occasional cocktail."

KIM: Ouch.

AMY: Yeah. And the title of that profile is "The Most Wicked Woman in High Society." I kind of think she probably saw that and loved it and almost would not have taken offense. 

KIM: It's almost like performance art. 

AMY: Yes. She was a collector of jewelry, art, lovers, erotica, you name it. But then she also wrote several novels and an epic poem, which is starting to give her a lot more depth, right? 

KIM: Yeah. And after reading Sundays and learning more about Daisy, I kind of have to wonder if there was a lot more there there, if you know what I mean. I can't wait to hear what you both think. Um, anyway, Amy, that is an excellent segue into talking about Sundays, which was not at all what I expected. I knew absolutely nothing about who Daisy Fellowes was before we started researching this episode, and based on her name and the title of the book, I kind of imagined Sundays was going to be this charming little innocent, English romp of a book, maybe set in a pastoral English countryside. And it is a romp, but it's a completely different kind of romp, right? 

AMY: It feels very French. We read an English translation, and even if you took the French names out of it, I feel like you could still tell this was French, you know? Sundays was originally published as Les Dimanches de la Comtesse de Narbonne or The Sundays of the Countess de Narbonne in 1931, it came out. But it was translated in English as Sundays in 1960. So the version we're actually using is the 1960 translation. Leigh, can you give our listeners a quick spoiler free summary?

LEIGH: I would love to. So in a spa town in the French countryside, Mademoiselle Mélanie Emperor, a gray-haired masseuse, lives in her once-grand family's home with her young servants, Germaine. One day Germaine runs away from her life with Ms. Melanie and she runs towards beauty and opulence. But the path along that road is very, very bumpy and not everything is as it seems. 

AMY: Did you have any favorite passages from the book that would maybe give listeners a little bit of a feel for the prose?

LEIGH: I do. This is from page 20, if anybody is able to get their hands on this. This is Mélanie waking up in the bedroom of this home. And it had once been her mother's bedroom. So she has all of these childhood memories of this room:  She loved them all; especially the high satin-wood cupboard incrusted with ebony that bore as a proud pediment the letter 'E' tenderly embracing the letter 'M.' Upon the serpentine chest of drawers stood a plaster bust of Napoleon the III that baby Meélanie had playfully decorated in Indian ink with sardonic eyebrows and a military moustache. The armchairs, hassocks and pri-Dieu were covered in a raised plush of Gothic design. Next to the opulent curtained bed surmounted by a circular dome stood the conjugal two-decker commode with a slate top that held a painted carafe, small vial of orange flower water and a sugar basin. Also a nightlight in the shape of a castle. The only new item, added by Mélanie, was the fancy kidney-shaped dressing table decorated all over in thick lace over rose satinette. It had a large three-sided mirror attached to the back which made it impossible for the person sitting at the table to see anything but the top of her head. 

KIM: I feel like that is the perfect passage. And it's so interesting that Daisy chose to inhabit in this book the life of a poor working girl, who's basically the subject of this novel. But it's subtitled "A Fantasy," and it is quite funny. I'm thinking of the character you're talking about in your passage, Mélanie. She cleverly uses the bridge over a passing train as a vibrator, so that's pretty funny. But it's also somewhat tragic, too. The brother's a pedophile. There's a hint of incest. Germaine has an abortion she doesn't want. Do you think the subtitle is merely ironic or is there more to it? What do you think she was doing with that?

LEIGH: I was also struck by how much it wasn't a fantasy. And I didn't leave this book feeling resolved or as if I understood it, really very much at all. There's this light tone to the book. There's like frippery, there's satin bed covers, but there's also a lot of darkness. I don't even totally know what I mean by this, but was it a fantasy of how hard life could be? We know that Daisy had so much hardship in her life alongside of so much luxury. So was she exploring that in a different setting? I truly am not quite sure. 

AMY: I have the exact same note. That there's this lightness and buoyancy to the book, but then there's this undeniable sadness. And the main character's kind of flitting from lover to lover. And we know that Daisy had lovers galore. So I'm wondering if it's a little bit of an elegy about, you know, not really being able to find what you're looking for sort of thing. I also feel like it's a book that maybe you're not meant to read so much into. I do not understand parts of this. It is weird. 

LEIGH: I thought it was really, um, noteworthy and surprising that Mélanie was such a fully developed character and that she had gray hair and she had bad feet. She was not glamorous in the way that I think the people that Daisy interacted with were. She was normal in many ways in this fantasy. And I really wasn't expecting that. And I found that very sweet and tender. I didn't feel as though she was laughing at her. 

KIM: I love the way you put that. I completely agree. 

AMY: And also for this heiress who has money galore to write about a character whose main dream in life... Germaine doesn't quite know what she wants; she's figuring it out as she goes along. She thinks she wants money. She thinks she wants the high life, but we come to find out that what she really dreams of is a little house in the country, you know, near a pine grove. She wants something very simple at the end of the day. And to look at this woman who had everything that money can buy, there's almost like a wistfulness, that life was sort of unavailable to her. So maybe that's her fantasy in a strange way.

KIM: Yeah, like Marie Antoinette and her dairy. 

AMY: A little country house. Yes. There was one little other passage that I really wanted to read because I loved it. And so if you guys don't mind... also getting back to Germaine's quest for love, there's a moment in the book where she finally, she thinks, is experiencing her first moment of truly falling in love. And I loved the description of it. I think it's a great scene. So I'm going to read it. She basically meets this sort of playboy viscount. They are at a festival and they go on the carousel, which we just recently had a mini episode on carousels. Um, so they get onto the carousel and I'm going to read what happens next: 

A stuffy family settled on the scarlet cushions of the open sledge pulled by two white swans. They immediately became an Imperial Family and smiled while bowing graciously to left and right. The merry-go-round began wheezing and turning sluggishly with the effort of an old suburban train getting going for the day. Then the organ and the machine moved faster and faster. Moving like mad, The Blue Bells of Scotland went into a crazy rhythm, one grew dizzy, the spectators became blurred, a galaxy of coloured stars. Germane cried, 'Faster, faster.' Just as she spoke, they stopped suddenly with a double hiccup that much upset the Imperial Family. When she got down Germaine found that the ground was playing at ocean waves.. She bent back a little to steady herself but lost her balance. A strong arm took her by the waist, 'Ho la' said that Playboy, for it was he. Still rather dizzy, she felt a delicious tingle that started from the small of her back and ran all over her, exactly just the opposite of what one feels when one's foot has gone to sleep. This wonderful sensation entirely pervaded her unsuspecting body. She was waking up for the first time in her life. They walked about like this closely linked, separating only for major reasons like firing a shot or throwing a hammer. Germaine's lips parted in a ravishing smile. "Myosotis," said he gently leaning close to her ear, for he was quite tall. [Myosotis is going to be his little pet name for her.] Presently they found they had strayed outside the Fair grounds on to a deserted avenue where stray paper and dust danced merrily. The avenue led past a deep declivity where the old fortifications had one stood. He took her in his arms. She realized that she knew nothing about love. 

I love that. I mean, it just gives you the feeling of what it is like to have that initial stage of being swept off your feet, literally. 

KIM: Yeah, that was gorgeous. So, um, while I was trying to find out more about Daisy and the book Sundays and what people thought about it, I thought maybe some critical, popular or academic reception of it might help me understand it. So I looked on Jstor. I Googled, I looked everywhere and I couldn't turn up anything in English or French. So I reached out to Laura Thompson, our guests for the Nancy Mitford episode. She has a new book, Heiresses: the Lives of Million Dollar Babies, and lo and behold, Daisy Fellowes is one of her subjects! So I messaged her to find out if she'd uncovered anything regarding Sundays while she was researching Heiresses. Fortunately for us, she had. Nancy Mitford actually read it and liked it! How perfect is that? She wrote in a letter to Evelyn Waugh that "old Daisy has written a nouvelle, which isn't bad at all in a sort of Firbank way." So I then had to Google Firbank, and she's referring to Ronald Firbank, an English novelist whose novels were dialogue-filled sexcapades. He had, and has, a lot of fans from Evelyn Waugh to Alan Hollinghurst, and the late Susan Sontag named his novels "part of the canon of camp" in her 1964 essay "Notes on Camp." And this is all making me think of the Met Gala's 2019 camp theme. I'd been wondering why Sundays was translated to English in 1961 and not earlier, and maybe this idea of camp as a clue... there's something very Sixties about it. I don't know. What'd you guys think about that?

AMY: I'm not sure. I don't know. She died in 1962. So this English translation is actually a few years before that, but I also kind of wonder if maybe there was, you know ... sometimes famous people are getting towards the end of their life and there's almost like a looking back at them, kind of a renewed interest. I don't know, but... 

KIM: Maybe England wasn't ready for this in the Thirties. And they were in the Sixties. 

AMY: Yeah, I don't know. I love that Laura Thompson was able to weigh in on this for us too. And it just makes total sense that there'd be a connection between Daisy and Nancy. They were both bright young things of their time. I'm sure they crossed paths a lot. 

KIM: Yeah. And I mean, the one little tidbit that I was able to get about Sundays happened to be from Nancy via Laura, and that's so cool. Also there's a little more, too. Laura said that Nancy actually got along really well with Daisy, but at one point, Nancy got chucked from one of Daisy's yachts, she had two of them, and it was to make room for one of Daisy's lovers. So all's fair in love and war. Right? 

AMY: The lover comes first. The lover du jour, we should say. And speaking of love, one of Daisy's so-called vices was her collection of erotica that she loved to show off. I think we touched on that earlier. We need a traveling exhibition of this. When is this coming to the States? Field trip, if and when it does. We should also mention that Sundays is beautifully illustrated with charming scenes and nudes by a guy named Vertes. Vertes was Marcel Vertes, a French costume designer and illustrator who won two Academy Awards for best art direction and best costume design for his work on the 1952 John Huston film Moulin Rouge. 

KIM: Yeah. And I would say that this book almost seems like it should be judged as a whole package, these lovely illustrations being an important part of the overall fantasy of the book.

AMY: What'd you think of the illustrations, Leigh? 

LEIGH: I very much agree that it's the whole package. It almost feels like a grownup picture book. And Sundays grew out of a trip that Daisy and Vertes took to take the baths in France together. And they conceived of these stories about the locals in town, and, I suppose, at the spa as well. So it was born out of working together. 

KIM: Oh, that's so playful. I can imagine them totally being like, "Oh, what do you think that person's life story is?" 

AMY: Here we are trying to read deeply and it's probably just, they were having fun. 

KIM: What a clue! I love that you found that! That's wonderful. 

LEIGH: It's on the inside flap. 

……

KIM: I think that's super illuminating. 

LEIGH: I did learn, also, from here that she, um, was friends with Cocteau, which makes so much sense. Yeah. 

AMY: She was friends with everybody; she knew everyone. Yeah. 

LEIGH: Amazing that given the world in which she inhabited and how central she was, as the center of this web in so many ways, that there hasn't been a film about her. There hasn't been a biography about her, there hasn't been even very many articles written about her. 

KIM: Yeah, it's really, really limited. I mean, we've talked about some obscure women on this show and she was one of the hardest to find anything about. And she is one of the more recent people!

AMY: I know, and she was so famous! I mean, it's really odd. 

LEIGH: Did you guys see the picture of her bathroom? 

KIM: No... 

LEIGH: I'll have to find it and send it to you, but it's very much like talking about that deluxe, double decker commode. She had, uh, this very beautiful cane chair that sat over and around the bathroom. And the whole piece was about, um, sort of the bathroom as a salon.

KIM: Oh, interesting. I love that, we'll link to it in the show notes. 

LEIGH: Seeing that photo of her bathroom really reinforced that description... 

KIM: The idea of "the throne." Okay, so we know The Daily Mail called her "the most wicked woman in high society." And she had this really extreme reputation for being sharp and hardened, for being a thief of other women's husbands, for being a bad mother, all these things that we talked about. But I read that she actually donated all of her salary as editor in chief of Harper's and a large amount of her total fortune to a local orphanage. I thought this was really interesting considering that anecdote about her not recognizing her children in the park. It's obviously a ridiculous anecdote. Probably not true, of course. But you have to wonder how many of the other stories about her were just malicious gossip?

LEIGH: I agree, I think that she was probably very complex, and complexity can get reduced , often for women, into being wicked or bad and being a bad mother. The snippets that are around her really turned her into this Cruella-like character, but, um, there was this tenderness and curiosity in Sundays that really belies this notion that she was just flip and glamorous. I also think about how her mom left her life when she was so small and what a heavy burden that is to carry. Who knows the way that that manifests itself? 

AMY: I agree completely. In terms of the anecdote about her mothering, in Sundays, we end on a portrait of the main character as mother, and it's this very sweet, poignant moment between her and her child. And she's also very mothering and nurturing to her brother. 

KIM: Yeah. I almost feel like the level of viciousness about her, The Daily Mail and things like that, it seems like it can't be true because it's just so dark and over the top, like obviously somebody was mad for some reason, you know? 

AMY: Like I said, I feel like she seems like the type of person that actually wouldn't have even cared, you know, like she would just lean into it. 

KIM: The performance is working. They're believing it.

AMY: So, as we mentioned at the top of the show, we did find it a little challenging to track down a copy of this book. Kim and I managed to borrow it from the library at Mount St. Mary's College here in LA. So, you might check your library. But affordable copies do pop up online, you just have to keep checking. So by the time we finished prepping for this episode, we were able to purchase a $25 copy online. Leigh, have you by chance read any other works by her? I know she has another title called Cats in the Isle of Mann. 

LEIGH: Um, so Sundays is all I have read, but I do have an eBay search and alerts set up right away. And you also remind me that I need to email one of my favorite book sellers here in Brooklyn to see if he ever comes across anything to let me know. 

AMY: I will say about Cats in the Isle of Mann... we haven't read it either, but I will refer back to a previous guest of ours, Brad Bigelow from neglectedbooks.com. He did a blog entry on this book and he rated it "justifiably neglected." He didn't think it was that great. 

LEIGH: Maybe that's the meanest thing anybody's ever said about her.

KIM: So while we're lucky enough to have you on with us, would you like to recommend a couple of other books that struck your fancy? 

LEIGH: Yes. I would love to. One of them is lost, but not a lost lady. So I've been reading the adult writings of -- that sounds like a euphemism for something, but it's really just the not-children writings of Ludwig Bemelmans who wrote Madaleine and illustrated Madeline. And it is so wonderful. And for all of the reasons why everybody loves Madeline and going to Bemelmans bar, it should be all of the reasons why everyone should spend some time with his other work. 

AMY: What is it? Is it fiction? Nonfiction? 

LEIGH: It's everything. So I have a collection that his wife pulled together after he died that was called, Tell Them it was Wonderful. And it comes from, I believe he wrote for The New Yorker. He wrote for many other publications, but he also published novels. And I just got off of eBay a lot of books. I think it's five of them, including The One I Love Best, which was devoted to his friendship with the decorator Elsie de Wolfe.

AMY: I feel like that name came up for us, Kim, when we were doing, um, um...

KIM: Marjorie Hillis?

AMY: Yes. Yeah. Marjorie Hillis. Yeah. Okay, um, well I don't even think of him as having written anything but Madeline books. 

LEIGH: He had such an enormous life, and did so many things. And it's all just really beautiful. 

KIM: That's wonderful. 

AMY: Yeah. Thanks for recommending that for us. And then also thank you so much for joining us today. This has been such an interesting conversation and we're so glad that you had posted that Instagram story when you did. It's been great having. 

LEIGH: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure. And I'm so glad that I got to navigate this sort of unexpected and strange book with other people. It made it so much more fun. 

KIM: Thank you for being willing to come on and do this with us. And also, merci to the ever lovely Laura Thompson for providing some great anecdotes for this episode. I pre-ordered Heiresses and I can't wait to read it. 

AMY: Yeah, same. And if you want to know more about Daisy Fellows, I think you'll find it in the pages of Heiresses. So definitely check out Laura's book for more. We'll sign off now, but don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter where we'll occasionally be giving out sneak peek info on which books we'll be featuring in future episodes.

You can get a jump on your reading if you're inclined to read along with us. 

KIM: And as always check out our website lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of this show and further information. 

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

76. Lost Ladies of Aviation

KIM ASKEW: Hey everyone, welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew.

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes. And today we're switching gears a little bit to talk about a pioneering female pilot from the 1930s who became a celebrity, thanks to a historic solo flight across the Atlantic. 

KIM: Amelia Earhart. Right?

AMY: Well, no, hold that thought because we're also going to discuss a female aviator who tragically went missing. Her body was never found after her plane crashed. 

KIM: Okay, well, now that's Amelia Earhart, right?

AMY: Nope. At least that's not who we're focusing on in this episode and see, that's sort of the problem when it comes to women in the history of flight. She's the big name everyone knows, but there are dozens of other women pilots that deserve recognition. And we're going to focus on two of them today. Their stories have much in common with Earhart's, and their lives were flat out fascinating. 

KIM: All right. Let's expand our horizons, especially since one of the aviators we're going to be discussing today. Beryl Markham, was also an author who, like Earhart, wrote about her adventures. So technically a lost lady of literature too. And Ernest Hemingway of all people admired her writing. 

AMY: Knowing Hemingway, who knew her, that's probably not all he admired about her. 

KIM: I can only guess.

AMY: She was a good looking lady. Um, anyway, the other aviator we'll be talking about today is a name that actually cropped up in books we discussed in last week's episode, Noel Streatfeild's The Whicharts. Amy Johnson is the pilot that the flying-obsessed little girl in her book idolized. 

KIM: Okay, this is so cool. I'm loving the synergy. So fasten your seatbelts, everyone, and return your seat backs and tray tables to their upright positions, because we are going to tell you about a couple of female pilots who deserve to be filed away in your brain right alongside Earhart. Who should we discuss first, Amy?

AMY: I think we should start with Beryl Markham. I did want to say though, I think you sound like you could be a flight attendant. 

KIM: I've always wanted to say that!

AMY: I liked your delivery. So while Earhart may be the first female pilot to pull off a transatlantic crossing, she did it from east to west. Beryl. Markham was a British-born pilot who pulled off the same feat in the opposite direction. Now she did it four years after Earhart's historic flight, mind you, but it's actually a much longer flight. You're heading west right into the jet stream. So definitely nothing to sneeze at. 

KIM: God, I hate long flights, even when I have in-flight movies and free biscotti and beverage service and all that. But anyway, Beryl's backstory is also pretty interesting because at the age of 40, in 1904, her family moved from England to Kenya. Her mother was really not feeling it there and so she moved back to England, which meant Beryl was basically raised by her dad and his Masai servants who taught her Swahili and how to spear hunt .Later in adulthood, she befriended Baroness Karen Blixen. That's author Isak Dinesen of Out of Africa fame. In fact, if you remember the pilot Denys Finch-Hatton from Out of Africa, he was Blixen's lover. He was also Markham's lover for a while. He's the one who sparked her interest in learning to fly\.

AMY: Yeah. And so in her late twenties, around 1931, she began taking lessons and she became the first commercially-trained female pilot in Africa. To get that certification meant knowing how to strip and rebuild her plane's engines. So she started off as a bush pilot earning her money helping big game hunters spot game animals from the air. Prior to that, as a young woman in Africa, Beryl was actually the first woman to earn her license as a race horse trainer at the age of 18. That's the same trade as her father. She eventually trained six winners in the Kenya Derby, in fact. But getting back to her love life for a second, I know it's not as important as her career feats, but it's really just as interesting. She was glamorous and captured the eye of many men. Apparently she had a scandalous affair with Queen Elizabeth's Uncle Henry, the son of King George V. She met him when he was big-game hunting in Kenya. 

KIM: Ooh.

AMY: She was married at the time. Uh, so the Windsor family was pretty aghast at this affair and they nipped it in the bud, but it's quite a salacious story. Uh, there's a lot more to it, and we'll link to an article in our show notes, explaining. 

KIM: Yes, but anyway, back to her career, being a pilot in Africa was a dangerous undertaking considering you were flying over pretty remote locales. If something were to go wrong, say, it would go really wrong. All that training in the bush obviously prepared her for this historic transatlantic flight that she took in 1936, which actually did go slightly wrong. She ran in a field and crashed-landed her small single-engine plane in a peat bog in Nova Scotia. She got a bloody gash on her forehead and then wandered through the bog thinking she would probably die there until she stumbled across some local fishermen and explained who she was. So it wasn't pretty, but she did it. She'd flown across the Atlantic from England, making her the first person to do it. The first man to do it had technically started in Ireland. She received a ticker tape parade in New York City for the feat. That is so cool.

AMY: I know, I love that the first guy started from Ireland and she's like, "Oh yeah? Let me back it up a bit." Um, incidentally, Markham's original motivation for wanting to break records as a pilot sort of stemmed from bad blood with an ex-boyfriend. Um, I am so sorry to keep harping on her love life, but it's all kind of part and parcel of her story. So she had become romantically involved with the man who taught her how to fly. His name was Captain Tom Campbell Black, and there was a famous air race in Australia that she dreamed of winning with him. But she found out that he'd flown the race and won it with another pilot. So she was kind of ticked about that. And then shortly thereafter, she found out he had married someone else. It spurned her to want to prove to him that she was every bit as good a pilot as he was, if not better. She wanted to make him eat his heart out by making headlines. 

KIM: To the soundtrack of, uh, Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" in the background.

AMY: Um, yeah. 

KIM: And she did it! Good for her. If you want to know all the incredible details of Markham's transatlantic flight, go read her 1942 memoir. It's called West With the Night. What a great title.

AMY: Yeah, and Kim, you and I haven't yet read this one, but maybe the testimony from one Ernest Hemingway can speak to its merit. So this is from a letter that he wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and it was later used as a blurb on West With the Night when it was re-published in the early 1980s, because Hemingway gushingly wrote, "Did you read Beryl Markham's book West With the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well --and marvelously well --that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen, but she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. The only part of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true. I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book." 

KIM: Wow. Knock me down. That is incredible praise from Hemingway, especially. Anyone who's a famous writer to write that kind of praise for another author. He must've really meant it. Wow.

AMY: Yeah, but there was one line that was omitted from all of that effusive praise when they put it as a blurb on the book, because in the original letter, Hemingway called her unpleasant and I quote a "high-grade bitch." 

KIM: "And now we've got bad blood..." Anyway, that's so Hemingway; true to form. 

AMY: Yeah, totally. You would expect nothing less from him, but I guess in a way that makes the praise all the more authentic. He didn't even like her, and he gushed about her in her writing. Um, it really does make me want to rush out now and read West With the Night. The book was pretty much forgotten by history, but then it was reprinted in the early eighties, as we said. But you should also know there is some controversy about whether or not she really wrote the book or if it was ghostwritten by, or at least jointly written with, her third husband, screenwriter Raul Schumaker. That's another whole rabbit hole you can dive into. The answers remain inconclusive. I don't know, I haven't researched it really enough. 

KIM: I mean, hang on a second. Would they say that if it were the other way around and this was a man's? Uh, no, they wouldn't, so…. 

AMY: Just have to suddenly feel like, could she really have written this? The fact of the matter is all the anecdotes in the book are her anecdotes, you know, so...

KIM: Oh, and I'm sure if he wrote it he would have told everyone anyway.

AMY: I think that might kind of be what happened. I'm not sure. Um, anyway, Beryl died in 1986, but lived long enough to see the book republished to massive critical praise. There are also several biographies of Markham out there which might be of interest and also a 2015 novel called Circling the Sun by Paula McClain. McClain also wrote the hit novel The Paris Wife about Hemingway's first wife Hadley Richardson. So anyway, there are many more resources out there to check out if you want to know more about Beryl Markham. We really barely scratched the surface of her incredible life. There are so many anecdotes that I didn't get a chance to put it in. 

KIM: Yeah, it almost seems like, um, she could be a whole episode on her memoir about that trip. 

AMY: yeah, yeah. 

KIM: Anyway, let's pivot to the pilot Amy Johnson, who Noel Streatfeild, our last "lost lady," references in her book, The Whicharts.

AMY: Yes, Amy Johnson's life, on the surface, I guess, might not be quite as sensational from a personal standpoint as Beryl Markham's, but her aviation feats certainly were. After I saw her name pop up in The Whicharts, I thought, "Wait a second, who's this?" Um, I did some Googling and discovered that she was the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia. She was nicknamed "The Queen of the Air" and she set many long-distance flying records in the 1930s, both flying solo and with her Scottish pilot husband, Jim Mollison. Jim proposed to her during one of their flights only eight hours after meeting her, which sounds so romantic. Uh, but also maybe not a huge surprise that marriage only lasted six years. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Um, but anyway, if you check out Amy Johnson's Wikipedia page, there's a gorgeous photo of her staring off at the camera like such a bad-ass. She's got her leather bomber jacket and her goggles are pushed up on her head, and you're just like, "This woman is so clearly fire." 

KIM: This is your next Halloween costume. 

AMY: Oh my God. I 

KIM: It's perfect. And she has the name, Amy. Anyway, this other Amy apparently had several white-knuckle moments in her mini adventures. She and Mollison crashed landed their playing in a drainage ditch in Connecticut on a route from England, but survived with only a few scrapes. She also crashed landed in India and had to get a village tailor and carpenter to help her fix up the plane's wings so she could keep going. She also overturned her glider during an exhibition in England, but was not seriously hurt.

AMY: She was always literally flying in the face of danger, but ultimately Amy's luck ran out in 1941 when she was serving as a pilot in WWII. She was part of the air transport auxiliary, which transported Royal air force aircraft around the country. And she was flying near Oxford in poor weather conditions when her plane crashed into the Thames estuary. It was supposed at the time that she ran out of fuel, but more recently, it came out that she was maybe probably struck by friendly fire, and this was all covered up so as not to hurt the country's morale during the war, because she was such a legend. A convoy of wartime vessels saw Amy escape the plane in her parachute, and she was spotted alive in the water calling for help. An attempt was made to rescue her, but because of the bad weather, it was difficult to get to her. The captain of one ship actually dived into the water and tried to swim out to save her and he actually died in those efforts. So really sad. Um, they tried tossing ropes to her from one ship and they almost got to her, but she got swept under the boat and they lost sight of her. And anecdotally, one crewman on board, he years later stated that it was thought that she probably got sucked into the blades of the ship's propeller, which is horrific. Her body was never recovered, though her belongings and her log book eventually washed ashore. She was only 37 years-old when this happened. We'll link to a recent news article about the circumstances surrounding her death, because they've, you know, since uncovered a lot more information. So if you'd like to learn more about what really happened the day she died, you can check that.

KIM: Wow. And I'm reminded of the young girl in Streatfeild's book who was so enamored with Amy as a celebrity figure and how devastated the entire British public must have been to have heard of her death. That's so tragic. Wow. And also, someone needs to make a movie about her life.

AMY: Yeah, there were several films made about both Amy Johnson and Beryl Markham. But yeah, as Streatfeild kind of implies in her books, Amy Johnson was basically an obsession of the British tabloids for better or for worse. She was beloved by that country, and she always told people, "Call me Johnny." That was her nickname for Johnson. Um, she was very down to earth despite her fame. People knew how perilous these long- distance journeys were and how much courage and physical stamina and determination and intelligence it required. And to think of little girls of the time being able to read about women like Beryl and Amy in the newspapers, and to have these brave women icons to look up to and to follow their exploits, it's really pretty remarkable. 

KIM: Yeah, I'm so impressed by what these women were able to accomplish in their lives. It's incredible. Well that's all for today's episode. Tune in next week, when we'll be discovering another lost lady of literature. We're going to be talking about Daisy Fellowes with Catbird's Leigh Plessner. 

AMY: Perfect guest for that book, right? So off we go into the wild blue yonder, but keep those five-star Apple podcasts, reviews, and Instagram shout- outs coming. They are the metaphorical wind beneath our wings. Don't make me sing it people! Um, they make our hearts soar. Is that enough flying metaphors or should I keep going?

KIM: No, that's okay. Thanks. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant.

Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes. And Kim Askew. 

75. Noel Streatfeild — Ballet Shoes and The Whicharts with Wendy-Marie Chabot

AMY: Welcome back to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes here with my friend and co-host, Kim Askew. 

KIM: Hey, everyone.

AMY: Kim, did you ever take ballet lessons when you were a little girl?

KIM: Yes, uh, for like a minute. I did tap, jazz, and ballet. I loved the idea of it. The reality of me doing it wasn't great. In high school, I did take modern dance also for one semester. My sister used to sneak and peek at me while I was practicing, and she can probably have you rolling with laughter describing me dancing to Joshua Tree.

AMY: Oh my gosh. Well, I took dance, too, and the joke in my family was that I always would have my tongue sticking out. So there are lots of pictures of me with my cute little outfit and my tongue is just hanging out like a dog.

KIM: That's hilarious.

AMY: But as you know, Julia, that's my 12 year old, she's very into ballet. 

KIM: Oh yeah. She looks like a professional, compared to me, especially. She looks like the vision of a ballerina, and I loved getting to see her in "The Nutcracker" this year. That was so cool.

AMY: Yeah, it was fun. And actually a neighbor of ours gifted her with a small statue of that famous Degas sculpture. It's called Little Dancer, Aged 14. 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: Only fairly recently, did I discover that there's an ugly undertone to Degas's depictions at the ballet.

KIM: Yes, and I have known about that for a while. The ballet in France and elsewhere was a brothel culture, basically. He was a realist painter who took for his subject matter people in the lowest sphere of society: laundresses and prostitutes, for example. And ballerinas fell in that classification too.

AMY: You can, even in his paintings, occasionally see gentlemen lurking lecherously and, uh, you know, what we once naively viewed as charming is now just kind of sad. And in fact, the young woman who was the model for that sculpture (the one, Julia was gifted), her name was Marie van Goethem. She was one of three sisters trained in the ballet, but it's also known that their mother was basically pimping them out at the same time. 

KIM: Hmm, whoa. And actually, it's really interesting how this sort of ties into the books we'll be discussing today. These books offer up a dichotomy between our idealized notions of ballerinas and the darker and more disturbing reality.

AMY: Yes. And we're pretty excited that today's guest suggested we examine these novels in tandem. I can't wait to introduce her so let's rate the stacks and get started. 

[intro music]

 KIM: So our guests today, bibliophile and bookstagrammer Wendy-Marie Chabot, holds a special place in our heart as she is one of the first people to reach out to us after we started the podcast to let us know she was a fan of the show. Amy and I were like, "Wow, a real person out there is actually listening to us. And she likes us!" 

AMY: Wendy-Marie was kind of new to Instagram at the time, and we started following her, only to discover that she has amazing taste in books and really smart and interesting insights into them. I'm always writing down titles that Wendy or her tiny companion recommend. And if you want to know who her tiny companion is, go follow her @whiskeytangowendymarie. Honestly, she reads more books in the time it takes to sneeze than I manage to read in a month. I think I'd even trust her with my credit card to go into a book store and buy a few titles for me. Wendy Marie, incidentally, is also the author of the non-fiction book, Wannabe: Confessions of a Failed Bibliofile, which she wrote under her former online pseudonym, Badgwendel. You are definitely a kindred spirit, I think, although I kind of hesitate to use that phrase, knowing that you're not really an Anne of Green Gables fan. Maybe that's one place where our tastes diverge a little bit, but that said, welcome to the show, Wendy-Marie!

WENDY-MARIE: It’s so amazing to talk to you guys, and about Anne of Green Gables, I have a theory that there are certain classic books you have to be the right age to be introduced to, otherwise you may not appreciate them properly. At the age when most little girls were reading Anne of Green Gables, I was deep down in the Little House on the Prairie, Noel Streatfeild, and Louisa May Alcott phase. Anne of Green Gables never crossed my radar. Forgive me? 

AMY: I get that. I feel the same way about certain books. Now that I have that explanation, I get it. So listeners, prior to this recording, Wendy-Marie, Kim, and I actually kind of debated the correct pronunciation of today's lost lady. I had always been saying it “Noelle Streetfield.” What do you think, Wendy-Marie?

WENDY-MARIE: If you have Spotify or any other podcast app, you might want to look up "Desert Island Discs Archive.” Their January 17th, 1976 episode, I believe it's Roy Plomley who is the presenter.The Castaway was Noel Streattfeild and that's exactly how Roy pronounces her name. And she did not object to or correct his pronunciation.

AMY: Okay. That's helpful! 

KIM: Well, I'm terrible with pronunciation anyway, as anyone who listens to this podcast already knows. So I'm sure I'll be saying it wrong no matter what. I'll be sure to switch back and forth to confuse everyone. But anyway, now that we've got that straight, um, Wendy Marie, when we reached out to you about guesting, you'd suggested Streatfeild, and I'd remembered reading her 1936 children's book Ballet Shoes when I was a kid, but I was unfamiliar with her other novel she'd published five years earlier, The Whicharts. You described it as the "shadow twin" to Ballet Shoes.

AMY: Right. And we're excited to get into all that and what that means. But unlike Kim, I had never even heard of Noel Streatfeild, let alone read anything by her. I kind of suspect that this book is still pretty well-known in the UK, and British listeners, you can feel free to weigh in on that, but I think it's much less known here in the States. That's despite the fact that Ballet Shoes is a book that comes up in the 1997 film You've Got Mail and it was also made into a film starring Emma Watson in 2007. 

KIM: So Wendy-Marie, what do we know about Streatfeild's life, especially as it pertains to the books we're discussing today?

WENDY-MARIE: Well, she was one of five children. She was the second in line. Her father was a vicar. And whenever there was any entertainment that needed to be done for the parish at the vicarage, the children were responsible for organizing it and performing it from soup to nuts. So Noel would be the one who would write the sketches. She would help create amazing costumes. She knew how to do the violin. She was very talented with different things. This was her introduction to the theater and to being different. In her family, she actually stood out. Her sister was a wonderful artist; very beautiful. Her younger sister was incredibly beautiful. Her younger brother had an amazing life. But she didn't really click with the family, and she didn't really connect or click with her mother. There wasn't really a solid bond between the two. And she did have a better bond with her father, but of course, he's a vicar. He's paying attention to the whole parish, versus just the needs of one of his five children.

KIM: That's really interesting. I love thinking of them all entertaining everyone who comes over and like being in charge of that. 

AMY: "Partridge Family," vicarage-style!

KIM: Yeah, yeah. 

AMY: So even though The Whicharts came out prior to Ballet Shoes, let's start off discussing Ballet Shoes, because it's probably the book she's most famous for. And I think it’s kind of good, in a way, to read this book before you dive into The Whicharts.

KIM: Yeah. I think that makes sense. So we'll get into the book's plot in a moment, but can you first talk a little bit about what kind of reception the book received when it came out in 1936, Wendy-Marie? It was basically an instant hit, right?

WENDY-MARIE: Correct. This was her first published juvenile fiction. She had written adult fiction, some of it under a pseudonym, since the early thirties, but this book came out and it just hit a chord. It's in the middle of the Depression. You've got these three sisters, the characters in the book, who are struggling against the odds. There's this wonderful family bond. And it's very hopeful, so it just sold beautifully. This made her career, truly, as an author. She still continued to write adult fiction throughout the rest of her life, but she's best known for her juvenile work.

AMY: And then her subsequent children's books sort of had the similar title to Ballet Shoes, right?

WENDY-MARIE: Correct. In the UK, her books have different names. For example, there's an amazing book which I'm very fond of by Noel Streatfeild called Dancing Shoes here in America. It came out under the title Wintle's Wonders in the UK. There's another book that was written during World War II for children which is known as Party Frock in the UK. Here in America it's known as Party Shoes. Curtain Up, which is also a wartime book, is known as Theater Shoes. So they did capitalize in the US to brand it out, because if you just put these books out without the "shoe" name, it would not have translated very well to the audience. So I can understand the branding with the publisher saying, "We've established yourself with shoes; let's keep going."

KIM: Yep. That totally makes sense.

AMY: So in terms of Ballet Shoes, can you explain the premise a little bit more for our listeners?

WENDY-MARIE: Of course. This is in the late Twenties into the Thirties, London. We have a young lady called Sylvia and her eccentric -- and when I say eccentric, I'm talking about, "Let's go explore and not tell people where you're going to be for a couple of years," -- Great Uncle Matthew. And he brings her back presents. The first present he brings her back is an orphan little baby girl named Pauline that he found after a shipwreck. He goes away again and brings her another present, which is a beautiful little Russian girl whose name is Petrova. And then the third present, he brings her an adorable little red-headed baby, whose name is Posy. And the children, they're very creative. Pauline is a natural actress. Petrova is a mechanical genius. And Posy is like the next Pavlova; I hope that's how you pronounce that dancer's name. (Also, I cannot pronounce words either.) And they go into theater to earn a living because they're very poor. So Sylvia now has to turn into taking borders in order to keep the girls fed and clothed. And the girls also need to learn a trade because they're orphans; they don't really have any family to rely on, except for Sylvia and possibly Great Uncle Matthew.

AMY: Wherever he is, right?

WENDY-MARIE: Correct.

AMY: Um, okay, so you can't really go wrong kicking off a children's book with foundling children, right? It's kind of a time-tested literary trope.

KIM: Yeah. And I kind of liked that the book doesn't really dwell too much on what happened to the girls' parents. Ostensibly, they came to tragic ends, but it really doesn't dwell on that. It's just like, "Oh, something happened to their parents and he found them on his adventures, or whatever, and he's bringing them home and it's lovely." 

AMY: Yeah, and in that first chapter Great Uncle Matthew, nicknamed GUM, he's collecting these babies the same collects his fossils which is why they end up taking the last name of Fossil. It’s all very quirky, and it reminded me very much of the premise for the Netflix series Umbrella Academy, if anybody there has seen that. There's this wise old man bringing together all these orphan babies ... in this case, they don't have superpowers; they have power of the dance. Um, as we said, unfortunately, Great Uncle Matthew doesn’t stick around long enough to the girls' talents. Sylvia is left with these children. There's another adult in the house, Sylvia's long-time nanny, who's referred to as Nana in the book. She's kind of that loving, but stern, nanny that we always see in literature. Her temperament kind of reminded me of Ol' Golly from Harriet the Spy, that kind of "tough love" thing.

WENDY-MARIE: Tough love and very resourceful. A mother figure that's usually a servant of a lower class, who's very resourceful is a definite trope throughout all of Noel Streatfeild's books. It's like she's trying to work out the problem she had with her mother, where the few people in the family who really truly loved and treated her properly were the servants.

AMY: Yeah. Interesting. So if I had any major qualm from this book, it's the fact that none of the characters are really that broken up about the fact that GUM has gone completely AWOL and might be dead somewhere. And their only real worries are that they are flat broke because they've run through the funds that he left them. I would have liked to have seen a little more hand-wringing about, you know, his whereabouts, but I guess the girls were babies when he left. So I can see how maybe he's just almost a mythical entity to them, but you'd think at least Sylvia and Nana would be a little more like, “Hmm I wonder okay?"

KIM: Yeah. but there's something so British about that. 

WENDY-MARIE: Exactly. It's like the British explorers that would go off into the jungle and their wives would be, like, twiddling their thumbs, like, "Okay, are you coming back? Yes or no? I don't know."

KIM: Yeah. And then one day, Sylvia basically realizes that GUM's return is long past due and they haven't any money left, but they come up with solutions and they move forward. It's that stiff upper lip, like, "We're not going to let it get us down." Right? "We're going to keep going."

WENDY-MARIE: Exactly. She looks at the options, even though it might move her down a little bit on the social class, she's willing to do what it takes. She's not technically their mother; other people might just shuffle them off to the local foundling society, but she keeps them and takes care of them and does cherish them in her own way.

AMY: So as you mentioned earlier, because they're strapped for cash, Sylvia winds up taking in boarders. They're living in this huge house; they might as well put It to use. I think the addition of these extra people in the house makes the story that much more interesting all of a sudden.

KIM: Yes. For sure.

WENDY-MARIE: It certainly does. And that's one of the beauties of Streatfeild is she had such an eye for all of the people around her that when you read about the doctors (and they're not medical doctors; they're doctors of literature of mathematics) you can almost picture them in your head. And then one of the boarders is Theo, a dance teacher at a prestigious, and when I say prestigious, the proprietor of the school used to dance for the Imperial Russian Ballet, you can just picture Theo perfectly. And then of course, there's some other boarders that come through. There is a gentleman, John Simpson, and he loves cars. He's very mechanically-inclined, and I can picture him very, very clearly in my head. 

AMY: So suddenly we have a whole house filled with super interesting people who are sort of lending their expertise and their talents to teaching these children. But even with the renters, money is still tight, which is why Theo, the dance teacher, suggests that the girls maybe ought to get into performing. This is one way where they can make money. Um, I will say that the amount of budgeting that this family does and the detail with which Streatfeild gets into the dollars and cents or the pounds and shillings of it all, is super specific to a crazy degree. There's so much math in the book that I felt like I was doing, you know, every time they needed a new dress. It was like, "Okay, we've got to add this all up in our head. Is there enough to go around?"

KIM: Yeah, they were literally counting every single penny.

WENDY-MARIE: As the daughter of a vicar, she did have what was known as a dress allowance that her father would give her every year. And it was very, very small. In her semi-autobiographical adult books, The Vicarage series, she does talk about how she had to keep everything so very narrow because even though she came from a good background, there wasn't money in her family. And she had to live on a very, very narrow budget. And she herself trained in the drama school. The drama school that she trained in is now The Royal Academy of Drama and Arts, I believe. RADA. And even those fees for her father was a huge drain on the family even after her siblings had already left home. So she grew up with money being very, very, very tight. That's why it's such a relatable book. Even though you might not be going on the stage or a mathematical and mechanical genius like Petrova, or, you know, you might not be Posy who is a light, fairy butterfly of a dancer who's going to make the history books, you can still know what it's like to go, "Golly, I need to budget. I need a new pair of shoes, or I need to upgrade my computer," Or, "Oh my God, my car... I took it for an oil change and I need repairs." It’s that part of doing what you need to do to try to cover what you need in life is so relatable.

KIM: Right. 

AMY: And so Sylvia is a little bit skeptical about this plan to have the girls money by performing. But she reluctantly goes ahead with it. The ballet school is a kind of classy place. You know, it's not going to ruin their reputation or anything like that to be involved in it. Um, I think it is really interesting to follow them behind the scenes and get to see what it's like to be backstage at a theater. What's it like to audition for these shows? It seems like it would innately appeal to little girls. I mean, I was the kid who was always in my basement listening to the Broadway recording of Annie and pretending I was in the show, right? So it's just like a fantasy world that I think young girls would really get into.

KIM: Right. And then on the flip side of that, we have this middle sister, Petrova. The fact that she wants something so much different out of life is a key point of this novel, right Wendy-Marie?.

WENDY-MARIE: Yes, it is. Petrova is an interesting case. Out of all of the characters in Ballet Shoes, Petrova is pretty much Noel. She has this beautiful older sister, just like Noel had. She had a beautiful younger sister, very talented. And then you have Petrova, who doesn't quite fit in with the family, even though she's very loved and cherished. And technically, because of the way her mind works, Petrova can just learn those dance routines and get them drilled right down into her. But she doesn't have that passion that will translate on the stage. So she doesn't quite fit in because as you're looking through her, she's the sister that really stands out. She's doing mechanical things. She's talking about airplanes. When Mr. Simpson comes to live with them in the boarding house, the two of them bond over cars and mechanics, to the point where he even gets her a little tiny coverall so she can work on the cars without getting dirty. She always wants something more. And throughout the novel, she kind of cherishes the thought that, “If I'm old enough, maybe I can retrain for something.” She wants to fly planes. She wants motor cars. She just wants something different, which is a very relatable thing to small children. And even adults, you know? You might not fit in in your chosen or found family. So she's very appealing and very relatable.

KIM: Yeah. Um, without her character, it would be, I think, a much flatter story.

AMY: I think that's kind of the appeal of these novels, is that there's a personality for everyone. You know, you have three very different sisters, and as a reader, you're going to identify with the one that, you know, speaks to your own heart a little bit. What I like, also, is that none of these sisters is too precious. I feel like it could have almost tipped over into that, where they're just such good girls. No, they can be a little bratty! All three of them.

WENDY-MARIE: They do learn some very human lessons. When Pauline has her first big theatrical contract, I mean, well, she's only making four pounds a week doing a pantomime, which is a very popular British thing to do, entertainment-wise, around Christmas time. Very, very popular -- many stars get their start in that. But she acts up and you know what? Life slaps her down. And she does kind of learn a little lesson that she does carry with her throughout the book. But it's not pushed down your throat in a twee fashion. I wish there had been a sequel that would have been probing deeper into what happens to the sisters. In other Streatfeild books, you get little glimpses, but I think I'd like to see more of Pauline's journey. Posy, we already know, is going to be an amazing ballerina. We already know she's going to be awesome and amazing. Petrova, I'd love to see Petrova's path more as an adult, but we don't get that, unfortunately. Just glimpses. Just little nibbles.

AMY: Well, if you want to dive deeper into a version of these characters, sort of maybe the dark underside of these characters, we can pivot now to The Whicharts.

KIM: The moment we've all been waiting for!

AMY: Yes, exactly. So Ballet Shoes was a massive success for Streatfeild, but its genesis actually springs from this earlier book of hers that we mentioned, The Whicharts. Wendy-Marie, talk us through this and how it kind of evolved into Ballet Shoes.

WENDY-MARIE: Noel Streatfeild's first career was actually as an actress. She trained at what ultimately became RADA, which is still well known and still going today. And she would go on tour. And while she was on one of the tours, she realized that she was not going to be the success that she wanted to be. Her father died, and when she was coming back home, she realized that what she wanted to do was something else. So why not try writing? And I definitely suggest you listen to the "Desert Island Discs" episode with her from the archives, because her reaction about having a writing career as being more stable than an acting career is perfection. So she decides to write a book. She had already dabbled in writing a little bit, but she decides to write this book about three sisters... who ended up in the theatrical world... 

AMY: It's sounding very familiar, huh? To the degree where I finished reading Ballet Shoes, I downloaded The Whicharts to read next. I was still on the very first page when I had to stop myself and double check because I thought I had accidentally opened Ballet Shoes again on my Kindle. It’s that similar. I was like, “Wait, what? Huh?” I had no idea it was practically the same story, albeit a much less sanitized version.

KIM: Yes. The beginnings start off nearly verbatim, but then you quickly realize this isn't a kid's book, right?

AMY: No. It's like a book meeting its evil twin. As I kept reading, I just was like, “Holy crap. I cannot believe the detour that this book is taking from the other one.” 

KIM: Completely completely. I mean, it is tawdry! It would be really fun to showcase the contrast by reading a sample from each book. So you can actually see this in action. Um, so Amy and Wendy-Marie, do you want to take it away?

AMY: Sure. I think it would be fun to read from the section where the third and youngest baby girl turns up in each book. So Wendy-Marie, why don't you read the passage from Ballet Shoes first? Um, we'll do just after GUM, which stands for Great Uncle Matthew, has sent baby Posy to the house. 

WENDY-MARIE: I'm going to try. My voice is a little rough today, but I'm going to give it a try: 

"The sudden arrival of little Posy caused an upset in the nursery. Nana, it was who took in the basket, and when Sylvia got in and went up to see the baby, she found her crumpled and rather pink, lying face downwards on Nana's flannel-aproned knee. Nana was holding an enormous powder puff, and she looked up as Sylvia came in. 

“This is too much, this is,” she said severely. 

She shook a spray, a fuller's earth over the baby. 

Sylvia looked humble. 

“I quite agree, Nana. But what are we to do? Here she is.” 

Nana looked angrily at Posy. 

“It isn't right. Here we are with Pauline rising four, and Petrova sixteen months, and down you pop this little fly-by-night. Two’s enough, I’ve always said. I told the Professor so perfectly plain. Who is she? That’s another thing I’d like to know.”

“Well, her name’s Posy, and her mother is a dancer.”

“Posy! With the other two called as nice as can be after the Holy Apostles, that's a foolish sort of name.” Nana gave a snort of disgust, and then, in case the baby should feel hurt, added, “Blessed lamb.”

“Right.” Sylvia turned to the door. “Now I know how you feel, I shall make other arrangements for her, perhaps an orphanage…” 

“Orphanage!” Nana's eyes positively blazed. She pulled a tiny vest over Posy’s unprotesting little head. “Who’s thinking of orphanages? The Professor’s taken her, and here she stays. But no more, and that’s my last word.”

KIM: That was great. 

AMY: Yeah, I think somebody has a future in audio book recording.

KIM: I know seriously, 

WENDY-MARIE: If I only wasn’t dyslexic and stuttered!

AMY: Now I'm going to read a similar section from The Whicharts, and just to set this up, once again, in Ballet Shoes, we have the young woman, Sylvia, with three babies left by the globetrotting Great Uncle. In The Witcharts, the Sylvia character is now named Rose, and she is actually a young woman who fell into a love affair with a married brigadier who summarily dumped her, but then started saddling her with his subsequent mistresses' unwanted babies.

KIM: Yeah. Not quite the professor of Ballet Shoes.

AMY: And by page five of The Whicharts, the word "fornication" is used. So Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore. Totally different book, but you will see similarities in what I'm about to read. Now, the third baby in this book is named Daisy, so I'll just start with Daisy's arrival. 

"On the evening of her arrival, after the Brigadier had left, Rose had gone up to examine the baby. She found its little crumpled red body lying face downwards on Nannie’s flannel-apron knee. Nannie, holding an enormous powder puff, looked up as Rose came in.

“I was ’opin’ you'd come up, Miss. This is too much, this is.” 

She angrily shook a shower of “Fuller's Earth” on daisies underneath. 

“I know, Nannie, but what can I do? Here she is.” Rose looked helplessly at Daisy.

“Tisn’t right. ’Ere are we, Mamie four-and-a-’half. Tania nearly three. Old enough as you might say to know what’s what. And suddenly down you pops this little fly-by-night, come by God knows ’how. ’Tain’t right.”

“Oh, but Nannie, they’re half-sisters.”

“And ’oo’s the Mother? That’s what I likes to know in my nursery. Miss Anybody for all we knows.”

“I believe she was a dancer.”

“So I should say.” Nannie snorted in disgust. “Just the sort of Mother I should expect. Blessed lamb!” she added to the baby.

Rose was worried.

“After all,” she said; “the other mothers were —”

Nannie interrupted.

“As nice a pair of young ladies as you could wish. If unfortunate. If I lives to be a hundred I’ll always speak well of Miss Mamie. Speak as you find I say. As for Miss Tania: well, she was quite the little lady. As I often says to Cook, it was ’hard to believe she ’hadn’t got no wedding-ring. And now this! A dancer indeed!”

Nannie bristling with indignation pulled a tiny vest over Daisy’s unprotesting little head.

“Well, Nannie, if that’s how you feel, she must go.”

“Go! ’Oo said go? She’s come, an’ she must stay. But she starts with a nasty ’andicap, poor little thin’.

So just comparing those two passages that we just read, you can really see how the first book kind of informed the second. It's so similar, right? 

KIM: Yeah. It's like an adaptation, basically.

AMY: Exactly. 

KIM: So while both books follow the same plot and feature most of the same characters, the stories do start to diverge a bit as they go along. And we won't reveal any major spoilers, but let's just say the Whichart girls end up being a lot less sheltered than their Fossil counterparts.

AMY: Yes, and Wendy-Marie, would you like to explain really quick for our listeners why they take the last name the Whicharts?

WENDY-MARIE: Well, the Whichart sisters actually have a slightly different origin than the Fossil sisters. The Fossil sisters are all orphans, adopted at various points in GUM's adventures. The Whichart sisters are actually half sisters. They know that they're half sisters; they can't really hide the fact, but they're never told their father's last name and they have to go to school and they need to have a name to be registered under. And the name the children choose is “Whichart,” based on the Lord's Prayer, where it's "Our father, which art..." So they always refer to their father who's most certainly not named Whichart, as Whichart.

AMY: Very cute. 

WENDY-MARIE: Their origin is kind of, "Okay... okay, Noel...." 

AMY: The irony, yes. Um, so we sexual exploitation in the world of ballet at the top of this episode. And Streatfeild delves into that a bit in this book. Wendy-Marie, would you care to explain? And also, listeners, this isn't an enormous plot point, so we're not giving away anything here.

WENDY-MARIE: Well, here's another part where the Whichart sisters definitely have a much more interesting existence than the Fossil sisters. The Fossil sisters never encounter anything bad in the book, being exploited in that way. They're very safe and protected. The Whichart sisters end up at a ballet school, which is not prestigious. It is very low class. So we have Mamie who's the eldest Whichart sister, who is the first to go onto stage. She ends up in the chorus, and she's very young and she's very tall, and very blonde and very gorgeous. So she is catnip to just about any predatory male. She does end up becoming involved with a choreographer whose name is Dolly, and Dolly is known for preying on young female dancers. There's points where the other dancers are like, "Stay away from him. He is bad. He will ruin your life." Dolly starts creeping up on her and gets her other jobs beyond the first one. And invites her to his apartment late one night and comes up behind and gets her on the couch and starts kissing her. She can't be any more than 15, 16, 17 years old. And this is one of the beauties of Noel Streatfeild's writing. She perfectly encapsulates the terror of doing something for the first time and wondering, "Oh my God, have I made a mistake? Can everybody tell? And am I pregnant?"

AMY: It's super creepy. It's um child abuse, basically, is what it was.

KIM: Oh yeah, for sure. But Mamie gets over it pretty quickly and just kind of moves on and then she ends up making some questionable choices going forward because of this world that she's in, but she's pretty unapologetic about it all. So the book gives this more sobering look at the various options women had for getting by in the world. So different from the more, as you said, "safe" world of Ballet Shoes.

AMY: Yeah. So it's interesting in this book that the mothers of the three orphan babies, we do meet them. We get to know them. That's one facet of this book that I found interesting is that a lot more peripheral characters that are super interesting in The Whicharts, I think. She benches out; she delves into other people's stories. I think these characters are so much more richly drawn than they are in Ballet Shoes. Like the comparison of the Madame Ballet Shoes with the owner of the dance company in The Whicharts is night and day. And it's so much more well-crafted in The Whicharts. 

KIM: Yeah, it's like a Dickens character, actually, a lot of the characters, but especially her,`reminds me of a Dickens character.

WENDY-MARIE: And she also reminds me of the owner of the theatrical school in Penelope Fitzgerald's At Freddy's where it's a decaying, decrepit world where things are literally falling apart. When you walk into this school that this Madame runs, it's dirty, it smells, it's filthy. You kind of want to just entirely coat yourself in hand sanitizer after even walking in there.

AMY: It's sordid. Yeah. 

WENDY-MARIE: Sordid is an excellent word.

AMY: But yeah, so I liked Ballet Shoes a lot when I was reading it, but then reading The Whicharts and comparing it, it just popped off the page. Ballet Shoes suddenly became a little bit more flat to me. 

KIM: Yeah, it's very sanitized. While The Whicharts actually, because it feels more real, it's more poignant. I think it tugs at your heartstrings in a whole other way than Ballet Shoes does. 

WENDY-MARIE: Ballet Shoes is a cucumber sandwich at a tea party, whereas The Whicharts is your roast chicken; it's your meat and two veg. You really can dig down in it, and of course, it's because they're meant for different audiences. You don't want to terrify small children with books. You want to be able to escape into them and show parts of the reality, but if you had put half of the things that happened to the Whichart sisters in Ballet Shoes, it would not have been the classic bestseller that we have, because there's so much escapism. With The Whicharts, there's no escapism. It's just unrelenting poverty. It is hard work. It's just grinding. There's so much meat on the bone with The Whicharts. It's that good. 

AMY: Um, yeah, I think one thing that both books really have in common is the sisterly bond. I mean, she does a great job in both of the books of really knitting these girls together, 

KIM: Yes, even though they're so different, underneath it all there is like this really, really tight bond between all three of them. It's really great.

WENDY-MARIE: They're willing to stand up for each other. An example for both books, the very similar circumstance where they do whatever they can to scrape together the cash so that particular sister has an outfit so she can get the job. There's something very similar in The Whicharts where the character, you think wouldn't do this for her sisters, Miss “I like older dudes and I'm a really pretty tall blonde girl…” Mamie has a gentleman friend who she goes to for money to get the money for the sister's outfit. It's just this amazing sisterly bond. Tania is so desperate in The Whicharts to keep her family together, that she goes on stage for one of the worst jobs ever. It's the most horrific job, but she's willing to do it because that will give money so the family can stay together in an apartment and not have to be parted. And that's one of the strengths. Noel, even though she may not have loved all of her siblings, she had very strong ties to her siblings. Her youngest sister, she adored, Richenda, who was born much later than she was. There's almost a 20 year difference. She loved Richenda like a sister, like a daughter. Her eldest sister, Ruth, illustrated the original edition of Ballet Shoes. So just that strong sisterly bond that Noel had with two of her siblings is transformed and continues, not only in Ballet Shoes, but in her other children's books. So that's just another one of those marvelous parallels, just like these little nibbles from Noel’s life that she's able to bring into her books. So that just makes it so relatable and so real.

AMY: So I've never really had the experience of reading two books like this from the same author that are such mirror images of each other. It was just fascinating for me to get to do that. And I wonder what Streatfeild must have thought initially about turning The Whicharts, this sort of seedy, tawdry story into a children's book. I can see her thinking, “You want me to do what? Huh?” 

WENDY-MARIE: And again, that's where I'm like, listen to the Desert Island Discs. In a way, she was like, “Okay?” Because they wanted a book like The Whicharts, but a children's book. And it was very easy to basically just lop off half of it and make things nice and pretty. But as a challenge, as an author, that's one of those things where I don't think I've ever seen a book like that where it's written from two distinctly different points of reference. I mean, you have Stephen King's books. Um, he had two that came out: Desperation and I believe it's The Regulators that came out and were written by his two different author personas, but they were essentially the same story written by a horror author. I've never seen it done by someone doing juvenile and adult, I don't think I've ever seen another example that's quite as compelling. And let me tell you, I've read those two Stephen King books and they're not my favorites. But The Whicharts and Ballet Shoes, um, how fast did I reach for my Kindle and my wallet?

AMY: Obviously Ballet Shoes is pretty popular still. I mean, it's pretty well known. Um, but I wonder if The Whicharts is lesser known because they wanted to sort of, um, keep everything all prim and pretty and just have people know Ballet Shoes. I can see where the publishers might've been like, “Let's just pretend The Whicharts never existed.” And maybe you can answer this Wendy-Marie, like as a little girl, if you read Ballet Shoes, do you then go read The Whicharts and are you sort of crestfallen? Like, “Wait, huh?”

WENDY-MARIE: Well, when I'm reading it in the early Eighties as a little girl living in Michigan with my parents, I had no idea that there were other books that she'd written as an adult. To me, Noel. Streatfeild just wrote these amazing books about amazingly talented kids in really interesting careers. You have the ballet, you have the theater, you have tennis, there's even a book about the circus. There's later books that she wrote in the Sixties and Seventies about children that are TV stars or musical stars or musical geniuses. So I had no clue until I was an adult. that she had written adult novels. But also I think the publishers may have also seen the two Noel Streatfeilds. So it's almost like there's two separate entities the publishers are looking at, you have adult Noel Streatfeild, which I do believe came out under Sylvia [Susan] Scarlett. 

AMY: Oh, okay. She had a pen name?

WENDY-MARIE: And then you have juvenile fiction. It's almost like, because there were two different perceptions of Noel Streatfeild depends on what publisher and what sort of genre that you were looking for. I don't know that your average child is going to stumble across The Whicharts, and The Whicharts, honestly, I have not seen as a reprint until within the last four or five years when it did come out on Kindle.

AMY: Got it. Let's talk real quick about the film adaptation of Ballet Shoes. It has Emma Watson and a host of other faces from British cinema that you will recognize. And it sticks with the pretty sanitized version of Ballet Shoes, but they did cherry pick a few more innocent things from The Whicharts to include. Wendy-Marie, what'd you think of this one?

WENDY-MARIE: I have thoughts, but, um, they might not be everyone else's. You guys might not love me anymore. Uh, I really do not care for the 2007 adaptation. I don't really go with Sylvia getting a boyfriend that's Mr. Simpson. (Sorry, spoiler.) I do like the fact that it sticks more with the aesthetic and the vibe. Um, there is a 1975 version that was done by the BBC which is also available to view on YouTube, which is much shorter. It was a serial done in about six episodes of 22 minutes or so, which is a little bit sharper and focuses more on the training and focuses more on the first part of the book. I think I prefer that version because that version really gives you the overall sense of what it was like to be a dancer. What it was like to train. You just get right into it. The Madame in that version, she’s  just got these marvelous villainous eyebrows. She's got this amazing accent. But there are some things I do like about the 2007 version. Sylvia becomes more of an individual. Even though I might not like her romance, you see a friendship that she develops with Theo; you just get to see this wonderful bond of how the borders become a found family, not only for the girls, but for Sylvia, who has no one but her governess, no one but her nanny. Her mother has died. Her great uncle is who knows where.

AMY: I liked the 2007 version a lot, and I actually liked that they gave Sylvia a romance. I thought it made the whole thing a little more cohesive and gave her something more to do. And she was played by the actress who plays, um, Miss Darcy, Darcy's little sister in the original BBC Pride and Prejudice. So I liked seeing her face again, and I thought she was a great actress. But I have not seen the 1970 version, so I will reserve judgment and maybe need to check that one out well.

KIM: I have no skin in the game as far as those adaptations. I haven't seen either, but, um, if you are looking for a still darker side to ballet, you could watch the Natalie Portman film Black Swan, and also, there's a movie called Six Weeks. I think it's from 1982 with Dudley Moore and, um, oh gosh, Mary Tyler Moore. Yeah, Dudley Moore and Mary Tyler Moore. It's a melodrama, and the little girl in it is a ballet student, but it is darker. Then also, when I was in high school, in addition to reading all the library subscriptions of Ballet magazine (I was obsessed with it) I also read Gelsey Kirkland's autobiography. It's called Dancing on My Grave. She was one of America's most famous ballerinas in the seventies and she studied under Balanchine and danced in the Nutcracker with her lover, Mikhail Baryshnikov. She was eventually fired from the New York City Ballet for using drugs. But there's a lot more to that story, of course. So if you do want to get some more insight into that world, those are some places that you can look.

AMY: Ooh. Yeah. That darker world of ballet. But Kim, this is making me think of your one and only thespian moment in elementary school. Would you care to share?

KIM: Uh, yeah. So I wrote an epic poem about a unicorn, and I got up in front of my whole school during the talent show and recited it. Only, you know, I was a bit shy, so I actually cried all the way through it. I recited the entire thing while tears were streaming down my face. So that was a moment that stagefright, uh, came upon me and then it took a while for it to come off. But yeah, that is my one big thespian moment.

AMY: You were just really feeling the emotion!

KIM: I was, yeah. It was there. Yeah.

WENDY-MARIE: As a listener, I demand this to be a bonus episode. I want to see video or hear audio of this, please.

KIM: Luckily, none exists, but it's seared into my brain. Like, literally, I can still remember… We were living in Texas at the time and my grandparents came from California for this performance and, uggh, it was just … it's an excruciating memory. But look how far I've come!

AMY: I just want to give you a hug right now, just feeling this. 

KIM: Thank you.

AMY: Yeah. Um, and Wendy-Marie, I want to give you a hug too! I know that if you were on the West Coast with us, we would be hanging out. 

KIM: Definitely. 

WENDY-MARIE: Thank you so much. It's actually been, ever since I heard your podcast, I was like, “Can you imagine the luxury of being on an episode and talking books with two people that you just connect with?” There's just something about the podcast that was so amazing. I actually was introduced to it with your E.M. Delafield episode. I love Diary of a Provincial Lady and E.M. Delafield so very much, so when I was looking for a podcast to listen to at work, I found your podcast and I just was enchanted and I could not stop listening to it. So actually, talking with you is a dream!

AMY: That's one of the great things about our podcast is we know it's helping us find people who like the same things that we do. So, um, it's really awesome. 

KIM: So that's all for today's podcast. The three of us will now take our final bows. Feel free to throw roses.

AMY: Yes, but Kim and I will be back next week with another mini episode. In the meantime, don't forget to rate and review us over at Apple Podcasts if you like what you've been hearing, or tell a friend.

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

74. A Short History of Carousels

Episode 82 Carousels in Literature

AMY HELMES: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Amy Helmes.

KIM ASKEW: And I'm Kim Askew. So last week in our discussion of noir novelist Dorothy B. Hughes, we mentioned her book Ride the Pink Horse. The pink horse is actually based off an actual vintage carousel that's famous in Taos, New Mexico. 

AMY: Yeah, they call it Tio Vivo, which means "lively uncle" in Spanish. And I'm not sure why it's called that, but I do like it. I think that would be a great band name, don't you? The Lively Uncles.

KIM: I love that. Yeah, one of your kids is going to have to start a band or something  and you can prompt them to use that name. Anyway, we talked last week about wanting to maybe explore this idea of carousels more for a mini episode. And so here we are because I mean, who doesn't love carousels, right? 

AMY: Right. They're fun. They're kind of even magical. Although I've got to say, personally speaking, carousels always give me a little tinge of anxiety. Are you feeling this at all? Do you know what I'm talking about?

KIM: Maybe. Tell us more. 

AMY: Okay. So I have memories of being a kid standing in line for carousel rides at a fair or amusement park, or what have you. And when you're standing in line, you have all this time to pick out exactly which horse you have your eye on, right? "I'm going to go get that one." And then once they let you in, everyone makes this mad, crazy dash to the horse of their dreams. And nine times out of ten, you don't make it to the horse that you were hoping to get. And then it's an out-and-out wild, frenzied race to make sure that you at least get on a horse that goes up and down.

KIM: Right. I mean, who wants one of the stationary horses? It's so boring. You don't want the horse just sitting there. 

AMY: No. And to take that one step further even, I was always so paranoid that I'd somehow have to end up on the gondola bench seat and not get a horse at all. I felt like that was a fate worse than death, to end up on the bench on a carousel.

KIM: Yeah, and I was worried that would happen. I don't remember it ever happening, but one thing that always worried me, too, is I would see, I don't know if you were at the ones where you would try to also put a hoop over something while you were on it. So I would see the hoops. They were trying to land the hoop over the hook from the horse.

AMY: It's interesting you mentioned this because when I was researching carousels for this episode, that idea comes up. So we're going to talk about that a little bit more.

KIM: Oh, cool. Okay. 

AMY: I'm fascinated that you've actually seen a carousel where you have to do that. 

KIM: I have, and I think it's almost like, you know how nervous I get when we're watching the Olympics And I'm like completely biting my nails that someone's gonna fall during the ice skating? It felt like that for me; it's not a sport, but in my mind, I think I took it a little too far, right? And speaking of these frenzied panics, in last week's episode, I happened to mention the Alfred Hitchcock film that featured a whirling carousel at the end. And I couldn't quite remember what movie it was, but I've since figured out it actually is a scene from the movie Strangers on a Train. Do you remember that? Which was adapted from a book by Patricia Highsmith, another female novelist known for her psychological thrillers. 

AMY: Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen that movie. 

KIM: Oh, okay.

AMY: I know Patricia Highsmith. She is best known for writing The Talented Mr. Ripley book series, and those have been adapted into several films, including the most famous one, I think, which is the Matt Damon/Jude Law/Gwenyth Paltrow one from 1999. You could sort of say that Patricia Highsmith maybe is another lost lady of lit. I think she's probably more well-known than last week's lost lady, Dorothy B. Hughes, though.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: But I'm glad that you figured out that that's where the carousel was from.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: I grew up calling them merry-go-rounds, I don't know about you, but, um, I started looking into the history of carousels or merry-go-rounds and honestly my eyes sort of glazed over a bit reading about them from a mechanical standpoint. I just really don't care how they were made or when they were invented. But I did find some interesting merry-go-round trivia if you'd care for me to delve into that a little bit. 

KIM: Oh yeah. Definitely. 

AMY: Okay. So first up, did you know that carousels in England spin in the opposite direction from ones in North America?

KIM: I had no idea. 

AMY: Yeah. So here in the U S if you're standing on the outside of the carousel, the horses always face right. In the UK, the horses are looking to the left, apparently. 

KIM: Huh....

AMY: I didn't know that either.

KIM: I know the cars, they were on opposite sides of the road. And so what drives that...

AMY: I don't know. 

KIM: Is it all that way? 

AMY: I don't know. British listeners out there, let us know if you can confirm this. 

KIM: Yeah, Simon Thomas, we're waiting for you to answer this question. 

AMY: And I also learned that the premise of ponies going round and round in a circle -- it actually springs from knights' training in the Middle Ages and even dating back further in the Middle East. And so I don't know if it's a game that they would sort of host or just more of a training activity, but there was an exercise where knights or riders would gallop their horses in a circle and toss a ball back and forth amongst each other while they were circling.

KIM: That seems like a sport I could be into. I could care less about football or anything like that, but, you know, with the horses and knights and all that. I think that's pretty cool. 

AMY: A new Olympic sport. But I mean, honestly, Kim, you and I can't even really catch a ball standing on our feet. 

KIM: We would just watch. Spectators. Yeah. 

AMY: Yes, but like I said, it was kind of a training exercise for horsemen in the Crusades, and the word carousel apparently stems from a Spanish term carosella, which means "little battle."

KIM: Interesting. I love this. I actually just assumed maybe it had something to do with the word carouse. This is so cool.

AMY: Yeah. And later, instead of riding the horses and tossing the balls back and forth, skilled cavalry types would actually gallop their horses in a circle and they would spear or swat down rings that were hanging from poles overhead.

KIM: This is what I must've seen when I was a kid. And now it makes sense that that's where this came from. What I saw. I had no idea that it went back that far. That's cool. 

AMY: So eventually that whole idea of spearing the rings or catching the rings became a fun thing to do at festivals and places like that. Now there was also another version of the term carousel. It was more of a ceremonial type of parade, like a military parade where knights and noblemen would ride around a pavilion or town square on their horses in a circle. Louis the XIV of France held this kind of display in the courtyard of his Tuileries Palace. I think I'm saying that right: Tuileries Palace. He held one of those to celebrate the birth of his son, and the location of that today is right next to where the Louvre is. And it's still called Le Place du Carousel in Paris. So it's like a famous landmark in Paris. 

KIM: Yeah. Now I know why it's named that. 

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: So now in terms of the carousel rides we know today, the first ones featured flying horses that hung from chains and they spun out with centrifugal force. Others moved because they were towed by horses or people who walked in a circle, pulling a rope. And then there were also hand-cranked versions. 

AMY: Yeah. And so Tio Vivo, the carousel that is mentioned in Ride the Pink Horse it works that way. It's a hand-cranked kind of thing where a guy actually has to do manual labor to get it to go around. And that particular one dates back to the 1890s. But today in North America the oldest platform carousels (and that's the kind we generally think of now where there's like a floor to the carousel) um, there's two really old ones. One is located in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, and there's another in Westerly, Rhode Island. And they both date back to 1876 and they were constructed by one of the most famous carousel makers in history, an Englishman named Charles Dare, which actually now has me thinking: if a British guy designed it, did he have the horses facing left or right? I believe these two, I've looked up pictures, and they go to the right, as we said North American horses do.

KIM: Well, I think we need to add this to our list of field trips. The list keeps getting longer. I guess we need to go see this for ourselves. Um, and also, uh, this is reminding me of that memorable scene from Mary Poppins where she takes the children on a carousel ride. 

AMY: It's probably one of my top 20 all-time favorite movies. But actually, I've never read any of the Mary Poppins books and those were written by P L Travers, a woman. It stands for, um, Pamela Lyndon Travers. So I guess she's another lost lady of lit that maybe we could do an episode on. I mean, she's not that lost, but I actually haven't read the Mary Poppins books, so...

KIM: No, I haven't either. And I don't know if I even remembered anything about the author or really knew much about the books. And that name isn't familiar to me, so....

AMY: Oh, okay. I thought everybody kind of knew that name. Okay. No, so I don't know, even, if the merry-go-round scene in the Disney movie actually even takes place in the book or if something Disney-fied, which is possible, I'm not sure.

KIM: Speaking of Disney, as we mentioned in last week's episode, in Griffith Park out here in Los Angeles, there's a famous carousel that you and I know really well, Amy. It's a stone's throw from your house, actually. 

AMY: Yeah. So Walt Disney, once upon a time, lived in my neighborhood after he moved to Los Angeles and he frequently took his kids to go ride this carousel that's at a nearby park. It was built in 1926. It's quite pretty. So one day while he was sitting on a bench watching his daughters ride the ponies, he was struck by the inspiration to build a theme park. You know, why can't we have a whole amusement park with all kinds of rides like this?

KIM: Yeah, and how often do we hear that you should stop and play and relax and you'll have great ideas. So that's probably the best example of that ever. And also side note: when Walt Disney had a carousel built for Disneyland, he wanted to ensure that every horse on the ride was a jumper. So there were no stationary horses, Amy. He was worried about that anxiety you mentioned at the top of the show. Thank you, Walt!

AMY: So nobody has to be standing in line, like sweating it out. Only jumpers! Guess that's what makes it the “Happiest Place on Earth,” right? 

KIM: Yep. Allegedly. 

AMY: But getting back to the Griffith Park merry-go-round that actually inspired him. If you go there today, they have a "Walt Disney sat here" plaque on a bench that's right by the carousel. And then, interestingly, at Disneyland you'll find another park bench from the same park, supposedly, that is said to be the actual bench that he was sitting on the day he hatched the idea. You've taken Cleo on it, right?

KIM: No, we haven't yet, but I've been talking to her about it lately and we are going to go now after this surge. It's top of the list and she has a book called Los Angeles and it's one of the things in the book. It's all Los Angeles landmarks, so that's in it. So she's super excited. 

AMY: Okay. perfect. Cause yeah, she's a great age for it. But speaking of this particular carousel, the gondola benches on this one are super duper weird. So like carved onto them is this little creepy, hairy naked guy and he's chasing a naked girl. So when you take Cleo, look for this. I remember the first time being like, "What is this? Why are these naked weirdos on the gondola?" I want to say that they are supposed to be Caliban and Miranda from "The Tempest." I do remember reading that somewhere, that that's who that is on the bench. So keep an eye out for that when you take her.

KIM: That makes sense, but it's still really a strange choice. Unexpected. Anyway, trying to think of other carousels in literature though.... I know one factors into the book Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. You've read that, of course. 

AMY: No, I don't like science fiction very much. 

KIM: That's true. That's right. Okay. I read all the science fiction.

AMY: All right, so there's also the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Carousel," which was originally adapted from a Hungarian play. I know you're not into musicals, but have you seen "Carousel?"

KIM: I'm into some musicals. I love "The Music Man" and stuff, but I don't have a wide repertoire of musicals and no, I have not seen "Carousel."

AMY: So it's really kind of creepy. Um, there's a kind of predatory love interest/leading man named Billy Bigelow, who works at a carnival as the carousel barker, and that musical, "Carousel," has come to be known as "the wife-beater musical." 

KIM: No. 

AMY: Yeah, cause he's just, he's kind of a bad dude and he doesn't treat the heroine all that great. But she loves him anyway. 

KIM: You're not selling this for me, for sure. 

AMY: I know. Um, my high school put on a production of this musical way back in the day. And actually Jennie Malone, who wrote our Lost Ladies of Lit theme music, she was the star of that production. So I went and saw it, but I remember watching it and thinking "This story is disturbing on multiple levels." And I think it's kind of now been #metoo'd out of existence. But it does have really good music.

KIM: Um, I wouldn't have thought a musical called "Carousel" would be so troubling. Um, maybe there's a reason I never watched it. It doesn't sound like "Grease," which is my speed. But anyway, since we're on topic of riding horses, albeit fake ones, this is kind of a great segue into mentioning that we received a couple of letters recently regarding our mini episode on the lost art of riding side saddle. That's an episode that aired about a year ago. Suffice to say, I think we maybe touched a nerve with a few sidesaddlers out there. 

AMY: Ruh-roh, what did we do? Um, of all the episodes I thought could be contentious, that is not one I ever anticipated. But then again, the fact that we even used Suzanne Somers' ThighMaster in that episode to explain how a side saddle works should be evidence enough that we are maybe not your official authority figures on riding side saddle.

KIM: No kidding. And in fact, I feel like that episode should have been maybe listed as a comedy in terms of how much we actually know about side saddles, but anyway, we welcome any and all perspectives, of course, especially since these two letters are from people with actual experience in riding side saddle. So without further ado, let's share the gist of those letters. 

AMY: So our first letter writer says, uh, "Firstly, I'm very disappointed to hear how you describe side saddle and side saddle writers. You say we "just perch on the side." You mentioned it taxes the muscles unevenly, and that the poor horse would be written by someone not centered on its back. These comments you have made are categorically false and many women that currently ride sidesaddle would find them highly offensive. I ride side saddle myself. I am not perched to the side and my muscles are not taxed unevenly because my hips are central on the horse's back, no different to if I was astride. I have spent hours in the saddle, and because I am central, I have no aches or pains. This style of riding isn't any more dangerous than astride riding, and apart from if your saddle wasn't to fit correctly, it doesn't affect the horse any different. I am deeply offended by your comments. If you have no idea about this style of riding, how can you possibly make such indecent comments? Ladies like myself work and train very hard to be at a level of sidesaddle, and to hear two women portray it with false information like you have is absolutely appalling. You should be praising women like ourselves who are trying to keep tradition and history alive, not slating us with false facts. I shall be not sharing your podcast to fellow side saddle riders or equestrians in fear they will also be offended. You should be utterly ashamed with your preposterous comments." And then the next day we received a kind of similar letter.

KIM: Yeah, coincidence.

AMY: Yeah. Um, this is from a member of the Sidesaddle Association who currently competes against astride riders in dressage, show jumping and eventing. And she writes: "You ride centrally over the horse's back, and it is not cruel. As to the unsafe nature of riding astride, I would argue that in some cases, being attached better to your saddle, as you are aside, makes you safer than astride, particularly for difficult horses. The safety mechanisms developed over the years to protect riders, male and female, riding sidesaddle proves that lives did matter." Um, so it's good to have that perspective from somebody that actually does it, you know. Charmian Kittredge London, who lobbied against the practice of riding sidesaddle, might beg to differ with those claims, but honestly, Kim, you and I have no pony in this race. Pun intended. I mean, as we mentioned in that episode, so long as riding side saddle is a man or woman's choice and not their only socially acceptable option, we're all for it. We are not trying to get side saddle riding canceled, rest assured. 

KIM: Yeah, we're actually incredibly impressed by people who choose to do it and compete in it. We would not be able to do that in our wildest dreams, but we think that you're awesome. Anyway, all this hullabaloo about this makes me wonder if they'll still let us wear tweed and attend the Dianas of the Chase race in England. And that's the most important thing. I don't want to be kicked out of that! 

AMY: I hope they don't come after us with riding crops.

KIM: I know, and actually one of the letter writers encouraged us to give sidesaddle riding a try. So maybe we'll have to put that on our bucket list alongside going falconing and that sort of thing. 

AMY: Probably not though. Probably not going to jibe with my current healthcare deductible.

KIM: My balance isn't that good. 

AMY: Well, anyway, that's all for today's episode. Please though, keep those emails coming in to us. We appreciate them all, and tune in next week when we'll be introducing you to yet another lost lady of literature.

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. Giddy-up!