Cool Dead Women

Do we owe rock music to a queer black woman from Arkansas? Probably. 

Edna St. Vincent Millay was the highest paid poet-dramatist in American history, won the Pulitzer Prize, and was praised by the likes of Thomas Hardy and A.E. Houseman - yet most people hardly knew she existed. What happened?  

When a mother is internationally famous, it’s hard for a child, especially for a daughter, to step outside her mother’s shadow. And that’s why, really, it’s impossible to separate Ellen Terry, the most beloved actress of the late nineteenth century—the Meryl Streep of her day—from her daughter, Edith Craig. Edy (as she was always known) was an accomplished theatre producer, and
activist for women’s suffrage—plus a member of the most famous lesbian threesomes of the early twentieth century.

Now you finally have something to talk about with your dentist! 

We're back for Season Two with Lillian Nordica! She was of the foremost dramatic sopranos of her day, a Coca-Cola model, an outspoken advocate for women, and now...a very friendly ghost. 

Arson, shootouts, and sugarcane: the story of the first woman mayor of the south.

This story is very personal to me, not because I ever knew Una Marson - she died in 1965 and our paths never crossed - but because I’ve been researching her for decades. I've taken dangerous taxi rides in Kingston, Jamaica; drunk straight rum for breakfast in London, and called everyone in the Washington, DC phone book with a particular last name - but you do that for old friends and Una's like an old friend to me. You'll soon see why.  

The story of Jean Rhys, a writer from Dominica who moved to London and Paris, who found success but never happiness. Featuring commentary from Elaine Savory (Jean Rhys, Cambridge University Press) and Christine Pountney (The Guardian). Archival interviews from Jean's legendary editor Diana Athill and much more!

Incest rumors, an overbearing mother, and golden years alone in an apartment, talking to photographs: an abandoned soap opera plot, or the story of Dare Wright, a photographer best known for The Lonely Doll series, dubbed by The New Yorker as the “Creepiest Children's Book.”

A spy who used "sexpionage" to help win WWII, flirtatious safe cracking, several unexplained deaths...