Lost Ladies of Lit

Send us Fan Mail Novelist and university professor Joy Castro joins us to discuss Margery Latimer, an all-but-forgotten early 20th century writer whose work has been compared to D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. We’re discussing Latimer’s mind-blowingly brilliant book from 1928, We Are Incredible , as well as Latimer’s fraught friendship with another lost lady of lit, Zona Gale. Supp...

Send us Fan Mail We have so many exciting episodes lined up for 2022, but before we surge (ahem!) into the new year, we want to dish about the Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College podcast, share a roundup of other great books we’ve been reading, and give an update from a listener: Brook Ashley, Dare Wright’s godchild and author of Dare Wright and The Lonely Doll , wrote in to share some of her...

Send us Fan Mail Guest Judith Mackrell’s thrilling 2021 book The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II sets the stage for our discussion of wartime correspondent Virginia Cowles and her sensational 1941 memoir, Looking for Trouble , which was reissued by Faber this fall.  Support the show For episodes and show notes, visit:  LostLadiesofLit.com Subscribe to our subst...

Send us Fan Mail It’s the ghosts of Christmas present here with a holiday mini episode featuring the Victorian short story “The Wicked Editor’s Christmas Dream,” a spoof of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Stay safe and Happy Holidays!  Support the show For episodes and show notes, visit:  LostLadiesofLit.com Subscribe to our substack newsletter. Follow us on instagram @lostladiesoflit .  Email us...

Send us Fan Mail Lucia Berlin has been called one of America's "best kept secrets.” We’ll be discussing Berlin’s engrossing short short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women , published posthumously in 2015 and soon to be adapted for the screen by Pedro Almodovar. Joining us is a longtime friend of Berlin’s, the inimitable Mimi Pond, a cartoonist, illustrator, and humorist whose w...

Send us Fan Mail Kim’s niece Chloe joins us for this mini episode on Esther Averill’s quirky and beloved children’s series Jenny and the Cat Club . In 1954, one of the titles, Jenny’s Birthday Book , was named The New York Times’ Best Children's Book of the Year.  Support the show For episodes and show notes, visit:  LostLadiesofLit.com Subscribe to our substack newsletter. Follow us on insta...

Send us Fan Mail Anne Zimmerman, author of the 2011 biography An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher , joins us to discuss Fisher and her World War II-era book How to Cook a Wolf, which was an attempt to teach people how to eat well and be well amidst personal and collective chaos. Support the show For episodes and show notes, visit:  LostLadiesofLit.com Subscribe to our subs...

Send us Fan Mail There’s always something to be thankful for, and this year, we’re especially thankful for you, our listeners! Join us as we discuss books set during Thanksgiving, and Amy reads aloud from Louisa May Alcott’s charming short story “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving.”  Support the show For episodes and show notes, visit:  LostLadiesofLit.com Subscribe to our substack newsletter. Follow u...

Send us Fan Mail Simone de Beauvoir’s lost novella The Inseparables was once deemed “too intimate” to publish. Newly found, it’s been released to great critical acclaim and we have Lauren Elkin, the translator of the UK Penguin Random House edition, with us to discuss the book and its fascinating author.  Support the show For episodes and show notes, visit:  LostLadiesofLit.com Subscribe to our su...

Send us Fan Mail In last week’s episode we noted that, while at Oxford in the 1920s, author Gertrude Trevelyan was the first woman to be awarded the Newdigate Prize. It was for her 250-line, blank verse poem about a perfectly-preserved young woman from ancient Rome who was discovered during the Italian Renaissance. In this week’s episode, join us as we “dig a little deeper” to find out more about...

Send us Fan Mail Our guest Brad Bigelow’s obsession with obscure books was celebrated in the 2016 New Yorker profile “The Custodian of Forgotten Books.” He joins us to discuss groundbreaking, but now forgotten, English novelist G.E. Trevelyan and her wonderfully bizarre 1932 novel, Appius and Virginia.  Support the show For episodes and show notes, visit:  LostLadiesofLit.com Subscribe to our subs...

Send us Fan Mail Lost ladies of the supernatural, the terrifying, and the macabre rise from the dead for our spooktacular discussion with Dr. Melanie R. Anderson and Dr. Lisa Kröger, authors of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction and hosts of the “Know Fear Cast” podcast. Happy Halloween!  Support the show For episodes and show n...

Send us Fan Mail New York Times -bestselling author Amy Sohn joins us to discuss the fascinating life of Ida Craddock, a self-taught Victorian sex expert, occultist, and writer of “marriage guides” who was harassed by vice hunter Anthony Comstock. Craddock is just one of the incredible women featured in Sohn’s new book The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age...

Send us Fan Mail From Mr. Darcy and billet doux to buzzkill chaperones and dumb cake (it’s a thing), we take a closer look at courtship in the Regency Era and answer the pertinent question, “Would you ever appear on a Regency Era-style dating show?” See if our answers surprise you in this week’s mini. Admit it, though: we already had you at “Mr. Darcy,” didn’t we?   Support the show For episodes a...

Send us Fan Mail The eccentric Victorian-era novelist Ouida wrote more than 40 novels and hobnobbed with literary notables such as Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, and Wilkie Collins. Critic and wit Max Beerbohm called her “one of the miracles of modern literature,” while other critics dubbed her high-society stories “depraved.” We discuss her wildly decadent life and one of her most popular—and equa...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s mini, Amy and Kim discuss the fascinating life and work of “Lonely Doll” series creator, Dare Wright, whose biography and seemingly innocent children’s books both have dark undertones.  Support the show For episodes and show notes, visit:  LostLadiesofLit.com Subscribe to our substack newsletter. Follow us on instagram @lostladiesoflit .  Email us: Contact — Lost La...

Send us Fan Mail Emma Wolf, the first American Jewish writer to be published by the most important presses of her time, lived a life of privilege in upper-middle-class San Francisco society at the turn of the 20th century. Sarah Seltzer, executive editor of Lilith Magazine , joins us this week to discuss the once-popular author and her debut novel of 1892, Other Things Being Equal , which tackles...

Send us Fan Mail Thanks to our incredible guests and our equally incredible listeners, we’re celebrating our one-year anniversary! It’s been a year of fabulous conversation, thrilling book discoveries, a whole lot of laughs, and even some unexpected guests--as you’ll hear about in this mini. We really appreciate all of you who’ve joined us on this journey, and we have many more lost ladies waiting...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s episode, our guest is Lucy Scholes, author of the monthly column Re-Covered for The Paris Review and host of the Ourshelves podcast from Virago Press. We discuss Rosamond Lehmann’s wonderful 1927 debut novel, Dusty Answer. Incredibly popular in its day, this book also caused quite the scandal—which we tell you all about, of course!  Support the show For episodes and...

Send us Fan Mail Whether in fiction or in real life, the relationship between literary sisters can range anywhere from the incredibly productive to the—let’s face it—downright psychotic. Join us as we discuss some lesser known literary sisters and reveal next week’s lost lady! Support the show For episodes and show notes, visit:  LostLadiesofLit.com Subscribe to our substack newsletter. Follow us...

Send us Fan Mail Virginia Woolf wrote that “All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn… for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” We’ll be letting our metaphorical flowers fall for England’s first professional female writer, Behn, in this episode with guest Dr. Sarah Raff, an associate professor of English at California’s Pomona College. Learn more...

Send us Fan Mail Just in time for what’s potentially the most anticipated back-to-school season ever, we go beyond John Knowles’s A Separate Peace and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye to discuss books by women about boarding schools (and school in general). We also compare what we’ve read with Amy’s real-life all-girls’ Catholic school experience and Kim’s imaginary one.    Support the show For...

Send us Fan Mail Sisters Jane and Mary Findlater were literary celebrities in their day and counted the likes of Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Rudyard Kipling among their admirers. We’ll be discussing one of their joint efforts, Crossriggs , which is considered their finest work. Joining us are Hollywood screenwriting sisters Julie and Shawna Benson who worked on the CW’s critically-acclaimed se...

Send us Fan Mail Think you know everything there is to know about Louisa May Alcott? Test your knowledge on this week’s mini episode as we chat with the hosts of the new Alcott mini-series podcast Let Genius Burn . Jamie and Jill are Alcott experts, and in our conversation they reveal five surprising things you might not know about Little Women ’s famed author. Plus, Jamie will share secrets from...

Send us Fan Mail Edna Ferber’s So Big was the top-selling novel of 1924 and it won a Pulitzer Prize, yet it’s little known now! Wildly popular in its day, So Big was adapted for film three times, the second of which (in 1932) starred Barbara Stanwyck and featured a young Bette Davis in one of her earliest roles. Join us for a discussion of the book and the 1932 film with Dr. Caroline Frick from th...