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If Brigid Brophy’s The King of a Rainy Country had a soundtrack, it might include the soft patter of rain on a garret window, jazz drifting from a smoky cafe, the hum of a Vespa on narrow cobblestone streets … and the obnoxious griping of a few dozen uncultured Americans! As the description suggests, Brophy’s 1956 novel has a little bit of everything  — atmosphere, nostalgia and poignancy mixed with subversive wit and madcap antics. Kim and Amy play “tour guide” examining Brophy’s life and accomplishments, including this wonderfully quirky book, recently reissued by McNally Editions.

Mentioned in this episode:

Pilgrimage online Reading Group with The Sitting Room library

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 116 on Dorothy Richardson

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 270 on The Sitting Room

Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson

McNally Editions The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid Brophy

Marginalia article about Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch by Maria Popova

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 51 on Rosamond Lehmann

Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 150 on Elizabeth Smart

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 184 on Elizabeth Taylor Vs. Elizabeth Taylor

BBC program “Take it Or Leave It”

In Transit by Brigid Brophy

Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy

The Snowball by Brigid Brophy

Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and ??

The Crown Princess and Other Stories by Brigid Brophy

“Spleen” by Beaudelaire

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

“As You Like It” by William Shakespeare

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Our "sweltering summer" series continues this week with a re-play of a truly wild desert-island memoir. When Lucy Irvine answered a classified ad to play Girl Friday to a real-life Robinson Crusoe on a remote tropical island, she embarked on an enthralling—and at times harrowing—year-long adventure. The result was her bestselling 1983 memoir, Castaway, a beautifully-written tale of survival. We’re diving into Irvine’s unforgettable story with special guest Francesca Segal, whose own island-centric novel, Welcome to Glorious Tuga, was recently optioned for TV by See-Saw Films.

Mentioned in this episode:

Castaway by Lucy Irvine

The Lucy Irvine Foundation

Welcome to Glorgious Tuga by Francesca Segal

Runaway and Faraway by Lucy Irvine

The Islander by Gerald Kingsland

The Secret Life of a Schoolgirl by Rosemary Kingsland

Castaway 1986 film trailer starring Amanda Donohoe and Oliver Reed

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

“Alone” on the History Channel

See-Saw Films

One is One by Lucy Irvine

The Innocents by Francesca Segal

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This week we're revisiting an Australian author — and the 1979 film adaptation of her work — which originally captured Kim and Amy’s fancy back in 2024. Published in 1901 and written when author Miles Franklin was only eighteen years old, My Brilliant Career became an instant classic of Australian literature and still delights readers with its feisty heroine, Sybylla Melvin, and its realistic depiction of Australian life and lingo at the turn of the 20th century. In our discussion of the novel and its film adaptation (starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill) we’ll explain why Franklin’s fear of being a literary one-hit-wonder proved unfounded, and why her name today graces one of Australia’s top annual literary prizes.

Mentioned in this episode:

Miles Franklin

My Brilliant Career film

My Brilliant Career novel

Judy Davis

Sam Neill

Director Gillain Armstrong

Oscar and Lucinda

Charlotte Grey

Blackwood’s publishing house

Anne of Green Gables

The Thorn Birds

Brent of Bin Bin

Up the Country by Brent of Bin Bin

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 128 on Margaret Oliphant

Henry Lawson

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Bring the Monkey by Miles Franklin

My Career Goes Bung by Miles Franklin

All That Swagger by Miles Franklin

S.H. Prior Memorial Prize

The Miles Franklin Award

The Stella Prize

Miles Franklin: A Short Biography by Jill Roe

Of Foreign Lands and Peoples by Robert Schumann (soundtrack to film)

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We're celebrating summer with another sultry, almost-suffocating novel from our podcast vaults, one clearly written with William Golding's Lord of the Flies in mind. When Jane White’s gripping and unsettling debut novel Quarry was first published in 1967, a review in The Scotsman called it “the most frightening novel of the year.” Joining us is White’s daughter-in-law, Dr. Helen Hughes, of the University of Surrey, who wrote the afterword to the new Boiler House Press edition of Quarry. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Oxford's summer Lifelong Learning seminar on Josephine Tey

Quarry by Jane White

Norfolk Child by Jane White

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Proxy by Jane White

Beatrice, Falling by Jane White

The Neglected Books page on Jane White

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With Counterpoint Press's new editions of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's work (including her Booker-Prize winning novel Heat and Dust and a new short story collection Disinheritance: The Rediscovered Stories) we're inspired to revisit our 2022 episode on this prolific writer of fiction and films. Pivotal to the success of Merchant/Ivory films like A Room With a View and Howard's End, Jhabvala used her experiences as an "initiated outsider" to tell stories brimming with nuance, humor, truth and beauty.

Mentioned in this episode:

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Disinheritance: The Rediscovered Stories by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Brigitte Hales 

Disenchanted (2022 film)

Merchant Ivory Productions

A Room with a View (1985 film)

Howard’s End (1992 film)

The Householder by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Nissim Ezekiel

The Householder (1963 film)

Heat and Dust (1983 film)

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First published in 1983 after being championed by Toni Morrison, Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales recounts one woman’s trauma-filled, hedonistic quest for personal freedom amidst a “Disco-Era,” drug-fuelled backdrop — one inspired by Jones’s own lived experiences in 1970s Detroit and New York City. Nigerian-American author and Lit Club founder Hannah Eko joins us to discuss the ways power, pleasure and pain converge in Jones’s transgressive work, which was reissued by Farrar Straus and Giroux in 2025

Mentioned in this episode:

Fish Tales by Nettie Jones

Honey is the Knife by Hannah Eko

The Lit Club’s 2026 event calendar

Toni Morrison

Village Well bookstore

Lucumi

Oshun

Charles Abramson

Jean Toomer

Longreads article on Nettie Jones by Michael Gonzalez

Numa Perrier

Zola film

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerny

Hunter S. Thompson

Anais Nin

Gayl Jones

The Hitachi Magic Wand

Yoruba Art

Lost Ladies of Lit Patreon page

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Considered one of the greatest crime novels of all time, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time flipped 450 years of British history on its head by re-examining Richard III’s purported involvement in the murder of his two young nephews, the Princes in the Tower. How did a shopkeeper’s daughter-turned-high-school gym teacher become one of the 20th century’s greatest writers of mystery, literary fiction and theatrical plays? Tey’s biographer, Jennifer Morag Henderson, joins us to discuss the double life that allowed Tey to rocket to stardom while also flying under the radar in her home town of Inverness, Scotland.

Mentioned in this episode:

Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Kif: An Unvarnished History by Josephine Tey

The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

Claverhouse by Josephine Tey

Richard of Bordeaux by Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey: A Life by Jennifer Morag Henderson

Daughters of the North: Jean Gordon and Mary, Queen of Scots by Jennifer Morag Henderson

Jofrid Gunn by Jennifer Morag Henderson

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Richard III Society

Anstey Physical Training College

Richard III: The King in the Car Park documentary

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Though her high-flying literary husband took center-stage, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry was more than just the metaphorical “rose” in his novella The Little Prince. She was a writer and artist in her own right, with a gift for storytelling that’s evidenced in the now out-of-print novel Oppède. Following her death, an undiscovered memoir she wrote about her marriage to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry surfaced among her belongings and was published to great acclaim in 2000 as The Tale of the Rose. Wellesley professor Sara Kippur joins us in conversation to discuss the glittering life and literary merits of this often-overlooked 20th-century figure.

Mentioned in this episode

The Tale of the Rose: The Love Story Behind The Little Prince by Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry

Oppède or Kingdom of the Rocks by Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry

New York Nouveau: How Postwar French Literature Became American by Sara Kippur

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

José Vasconcelos

Enrique Gomez Carrillo

Nelly de Vogüé

Alain Vircondelet

José Martines Fructuoso

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 117 on Zelda Fitzgerald

André Gide

André Breton

Oppède

Website with photos of Consuelo’s art

Varian Fry

Elsa Triolet

Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute

The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras

The Volcano Daughters by Gina Maria Balibrera

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The first Mexican-American woman novelist to be published in English, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton chose a surprising subject matter—East Coast high society—for her first novel, Who Would Have Thought It? She was uniquely qualified to skewer the hypocrisy of Northern abolitionists, lampoon corrupt politicians and even mock Abraham Lincoln as a figure she deems more “party-boy” than presidential. Bremond Berry MacDougall and Lisa Endo Cooper, founders of Quite Literally Books, join us to discuss their new reissue of this 1872 book and why it still resonates so loudly in the era of Donald Trump.

Discussed in this episode:

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton

Who Would Have Thought It? By María Amparo Ruiz de Burton

Quite Literally Books

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 246 on Jessie Redmon Fauset

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 79 on Frances Harper’s Iola LeRoy

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Henry S. Burton

Mary Todd Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

Varina Davis

James Baldwin

Dr. Jessie Alemán

1863 Habeas Corpus Suspension Act

The Squatter and the Don by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton on Project Gutenberg

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Determined from a young age to escape the Jim-Crow South and see new places, Mississippi native Juanita Harrison managed, as a working-class Black woman, to cultivate her own version of a grand world tour, paying for her globe-trotting by picking up piecemeal work as a maid, nanny or cook in far-flung places. My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, her remarkable written account of this eight-year international adventure became a bestseller in 1936 and was the most commercially successful book by a Black author at that time. Cathryn Halverson, author of a brand-new biography on Harrion, joins us this week to discuss this “born writer,” whose sheer pluck and adventurous spirit helped her take the world by storm. 

Mentioned in this episode: 

My Great, Wide, Beautiful World by Juanita Harrison (free online version).

A Born Writer: Juanita Harrison and Her Beautiful World by Cathryn Harrison

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 210 on Mary Maclane

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 246 on Jessie Redmon Fauset

Chimene Jackson

Mildred Morris

Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers

Anthony Bourdain

Era Bell Thomson

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