In Walks a Woman

Spoilers…but hey, if you don’t know what TWILIGHT is, come out from the rock you call home and join us for a lively and insightful conversation with our special guest, Dr. Giselle Anatol, editor of the 2011 collection of critical essays, BRINGING LIGHT TO TWILIGHT. Dr. Anatol has provided popular texts and the legacy of the vampire important scholarly attention, and we’re incredibly lucky to have...

Warning:  SPOILERS!  SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!!! After you have read VICTORIAN PSYCHO–a novel that made NPR's Books We Love 2025 List for “seriously good writing”--come back and listen to a lively run down of the historical background that Feito weaves into her narrative.  There’s so much of it that we can’t begin to cover it all in an hour! Feito brilliantly conjures the Victorian social landscape, an...

Warning:  SPOILERS!  SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!!! Get lost vampires: there are some even scarier monsters in the Gothic-sphere. They live in High Place, the mysterious, ramshackled (...and seemingly undulating) house at the center of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Best-Selling 2021 novel, MEXICAN GOTHIC.   Join IWAW this week as Sonja shares some deep and fascinating research into Mexican history, European Vict...

WARNING: SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! What if Count Dracula came to small-town America?  That’s the premise of this brilliant vampire novel by the most famous and successful “What if?” writer, ever: Stephen King.  Not only is this novel gripping and satisfyingly plotted, it’s beautifully written and goes way beyond the mere category of “horror” novel.  The characters are engaging and the an...

Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful for the amazing women in your life, and in honor of that, we’re proud to air this fresh, energetic, edgy interview with comedian, author, and entrepreneur, Lynn Harris.  Lynn has lived and breathed comedy for over 30 years, and she has dedicated over a decade to bringing more diversity into comedy through her company, Gold Comedy, by offering classes, resource...

WARNING:  This episode contains SPOILERS!!!! In 1959, one hundred and sixty five years after Ann Radcliffe’s THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO, one might reasonably have thought that there was nothing new to be found under the gloomy Gothic moon.  Such a supposition, however, would be discounting the immense talent of Shirley Jackson, one of America’s greatest writers.   In THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, Jack...

Welcome to Manderley…or, rather, the romantic dream of Manderley.  Who needs a repurposed abbey or a Alpine castle when you have the genuine fire-devastated, ivy-swarmed, misty ruins of a historic manor house along the tempestuous north Atlantic coast? As if that were not Gothic enough, let’s go all out with an orphaned heroine and a very carefully guarded family secret. SPOILERS Ahoy when you joi...

If you’ve ever contemplated a governess career, perhaps Henry James’s THE TURN OF THE SCREW will give you pause.  Or maybe this bite-sized Gothic ghost story will thrill you with the chance of being in charge of a beautiful English country house with no master to tell you what to do.  But choose your adventure carefully because you might end up haunted and/or crazy and/or murdering someone.   Join...

In the world of the Gothic, after you bang on a few castle doors, you’re bound to run into a vampire.  Bram Stoker, barrister and theater manager, notably closed out the 19th century by leaving us with his vampire masterpiece, DRACULA. In this week’s episode, Sonja and Vanessa explore how Bram Stoker brews his very own brand of Gothic.  Legends of the Carpathian mountains mix with modern invention...

Who wants to break all the rules? Who wants to tear it all down and make the world anew? Emily Brontë does, that’s who.  If you imagined WUTHERING HEIGHTS was some quaint Victorian romantic ghost story…think again.  Honestly, there is just no other book like it.  This 1848 work is truly sui generis. It’s like Emily Brontë, in her one and only book, before she dies at age 30, writes an off-the-scal...

Once a genre gains popularity, here come the parodies.  Jane Austen grew up, petticoats deep in Gothic novels, and Jane had thoughts on reading them, writing them, and the effect they had on women readers. Our last novel, Ann Radcliffe’s THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO is mentioned multiple times in Jane Austen’s NORTHANGER ABBEY, finished in 1799 but not published until a few months after Austen’s death...

McCormick Templeman’s atmospheric, twisty, gothic mystery novel, ATLAS OF UNKNOWABLE THINGS came out October 7th, and if you haven’t ordered your copy, run–don’t walk–to your local bookstore!   In this special double interview, McCormick talks about her book (no spoilers!), her literary influences, her creative process, and her friend and colleague, Rachel Feder, author of THE DARCY MYTH, offers h...

Heather Aimee O’Neill published her debut novel, THE IRISH GOODBYE, on the last day of September, and it’s already started a reading wildfire:  People Magazine just made it their Pick of the Week, it’s Apple Books’s October Staff Pick, and Jenna Bush Hager announced it as her “Read with Jenna” on the Today Show last week.  Go, Heather!   Join Sonja and Vanessa as they ask Heather about dyslexia, h...

Welcome to Season 4: “Haunting Women”! Here’s your first scare: Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 gothic classic, THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO, is 290,897 words long.  For the average reader, reading at a speed of 300 WPM, that would take 13 hours and 5 minutes to read. And that does not count potty and snack breaks. If you are up for it, go for it!  If not, as Sonja likes to say, we offer “Cliff’s Notes for Adult...

As with the first part of our Udolpho episode, this is full of spoilers, so don’t listen if you are up for reading about 300 pages (approximately half) of this Ann Radcliffe novel.  However, if you are seeking a lively summary that will allow you to chat confidently about THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO at your next cocktail party, do push play. When you do, you will find yourself waist deep in banditti...

Sonja and Vanessa thought it best to put the last episode of season 3 safely on their Patreon ...if you go there, you'll find out why! www.patreon.com/InWalksAWoman

In the third of our author interviews, Sonja & Vanessa are proud to feature another Lawrence, Kansas local author:  Rachel McCarthy James.  If the name sounds familiar, it’s because she co-authored 2017’s cold-case cracking tour-de-force, Man on the Train, in which she and her coauthor, Bill James, solve a hundred-year old serial axe murderer mystery.  In her new book, Rachel traces the histor...

This book and this episode is like a fruit smoothie by the sunny seashore–light, sweet, gentle first love vibes. This is a YA selection we have chosen to find out what the youngest set values in romance stories.  Appropriately, it is not an “E” episode–first time in the season!  Sonja and Vanessa are joined again by their Designated Gen Z Reader, Sage McHenry, to better understand the meteoric ris...

Welcome to our 2nd episode of “In Walks a Woman Writer”!   Amy Stuber joined us in the studio, and the time flew by.  Listening to this conversation, you’ll feel like you are sitting in your favorite coffee shop with Amy who is so kind, so unassuming–and yet so ridiculously talented.   Amy’s 2024 short story collection, Sad Grownups, won the prestigious Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short...

Sonja and Vanessa go on a thrilling journey with Millennial reader and Romantasy fan/expert, Haley Bajorek.  If you’ve ever wondered what Romantasy is, why it has a huge fan base, whether it’s for you, and where to start, this episode fills in all the blanks! For Gen X readers like Sonja and Vanessa who grew up on tales such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the focus of this episode, Sarah J. Maas...

Welcome to our first episode of “In Walks a Woman Writer”!  We are proud to kick off this special author series with talented Kansas poet and veteran teacher, Melissa Fite Johnson.  You are in for a treat as Melissa’s warmth will make you feel welcome, and, like Sonja and Vanessa, you’ll be grateful for Melissa’s shrewd insights about life and writing.   Melissa’s third collection, MIDLIFE ABECEDA...

First, you should rush to read Sarah Waters’s THE PAYING GUESTS, a fantastic romance thriller set in 1922, post World War 1 England.  We don’t give spoilers, exactly, but the historical context we cover gives you some idea of events and situations that come up in the novel.  And the novel is wall-to-wall women’s issues:  society’s expectations of decorum, cooking, cleaning, birth control, wifely d...

Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 A FAREWELL TO ARMS is almost always captioned as a tragic romance.  Is it?  Tragic, yes.  Romance…debatable.  Is Frederick Henry a compelling romantic hero and Catherine Barkley an inspiring romantic heroine?  Join Sonja and Vanessa as they run through the text (SPOILER ALERT), and give their verdict on the love story. This show will also offer you a mini Hemingway bio, an...

Sonja and Vanessa LOVE Alice Winn’s 2024 novel, IN MEMORIAM, a moving love story of two soldiers fighting on the fabled Western Front in World War 1.  Winn nimbly weaves numerous, real historical events through the friends-to-lovers romance of two teens who fight bravely for their country but have to keep their love secret from that very government–on pain of death. Our goal in this episode is not...

Sonja and Vanessa dip into a wonderful historical romance novel by Julie Ann Long, THE PERILS OF PLEASURE, Book 1 of 11 in her marvelous Pennyroyal Green series.  We set up the first three chapters, but that’s just the premise of the book, and there are no spoilers.  We discuss the literary lineage of regency romance novels, like this one, both to Pride and Prejudice and even to Tristan & Iseu...