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We’re back January 30, 2024 with all new episodes.  Did you know there was a controversial, now-forgotten 1888 novel written in response to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda by a writer who has been described as “the Jewish Jane Austen?” Until recently, neither did we. Join us as we talk with Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith about author Amy Levy and her stunning, sardonic novel Reuben Sachs, which fan and friend Oscar Wilde deemed a classic. 

Discussed in this episode: 

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot 

Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy from Persephone Books

Oscar Wilde

Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith on Amy Levy and Ellen Wordsworth Darwin 

“Swotting Up” by Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith (TLS)

Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society Blog

Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Nathalia Crane - Lost Ladies of Lit Episode 13

Brighton and Hove High School

Newnham College, Cambridge University

Amy Levy’s obituary by Oscar Wilde

Ellen Wordsworth Darwin

Cambridge in the Long by Amy Levy

Eleanor Marx

Vernon Lee/Violet Paget

The Jewish Chronicle

The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy

Julia Neuberger 

Emile Zola

Alphonse Daudet

Anthony Trollope

A Suppressed Cry by Victoria Glendinning

The Third Miss Symons by F.M. Mayor

The Rector’s Daughter by F.M. Mayor

Girton College, Cambridge University

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We’re back January 30, 2024 with all new episodes. 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 series The 100 and Netflix’s Wu Assassins.

Discussed in this episode:

The Brontes

Henry James

Virginia Woolf

Rudyard Kipling

Crossriggs by Jane and Mary Findlater

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Benson Sisters

Emma Approved

Jeopardy!

Nora and Delia Ephron

Bewitched

You’ve Got Mail

Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

White Christmas

Mean Girls

The Green Graves of Balgowrie by Jane Findlater

Ellen Terry 

Lady Dorothy Gray

The Downton Abbey Christmas Special

The Birds’ Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin 

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin 

The Affair at the Inn by Jane Findlater, Mary Findlater, Allan McAuley, and Kate Douglas Wiggin 

Mary Cholmondeley

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

Emma by Jane Austen

Emma Woodhouse

George Knightley

The Witchlands by Susan Dennard

Jim Henson Company

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We're back with all new episodes on Jan. 30, 2024. Join us for a wonderfully funny and poignant conversation about life, death, and motherhood with award-winning writer Hilma Wolitzer. Her short stories, most of them originally appearing in magazines in the 1960s and 1970s, were re-discovered by her daughter, bestselling author Meg Wolitzer, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and published last summer in a new collection earning great critical acclaim. Today A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket has received rave reviews from authors like Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, and Tayari Jones and was named an NPR Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. 

Discussed in this episode: 

Today A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket by Hilma Wolitzer (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021)

Ending by Hilma Wolitzer

All That Jazz (1979 film) 

An Available Man by Hilma Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer

Elizabeth Strout

Lauren Groff

Tayari Jones

Gail Godwin

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode with Anne Zimmerman on M.F.K. Fisher

Maurice Sendak

Jane Austen

Anatole Broyard

The Lost Daughter (2021 film)

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

The Saturday Evening Post

Downton Abbey

“Sometimes I Tell Myself” by Hilma Wolitzer

Other People’s Houses by Lore Segal

Her First American by Lore Segal

Small Moments by Nancy Huddleston Packer

The Dive from Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer

Jenny Diski

Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

The Devastating Boys by Elizabeth Taylor

Wife by Bharati Mukherjee

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Join us as we discuss Mary McCarthy’s best-known work, The Group, published in 1963. An instant hit, it remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two years and follows eight friends over the course of seven years following their graduation from Vassar College in 1933. It was banned in Australia, Ireland, and Italy for its frank discussion of topics ranging from sex and contraception to lesbianism and mental illness. 

Discussed in this episode:

Lost Ladies of Lit Patreon Wait List

Norman Mailer’s review of The Group

Trailer for Sidney Lumet’s film adaptation of The Group

Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City

Lost Ladies of Lit episode No. 112 on Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything

Lost Ladies of Lit episode No. 142 on Miriam Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl

Lost Ladies of Lit episode No. 138 on Ursula Parrott’s Ex Wife

Lost Ladies of Lit episode No. 10 on A Falling Out Among Friends (Willa Cather’s feud with Dorothy Canfield Fisher)

Lost Ladies of Lit episode No. 159 on Verbal Faux Pas and Mondegreens

Vassar Daisy Chain

Mary McCarthy’s The Group

The Groves of Academe

The Company She Keeps

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt

Feud with Lilian Hellman

Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron

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In this week’s bonus episode, we dig into the poem “Thanksgiving” by lost lady Lydia Maria Child. AND we remain ever thankful for you, our listeners! 

Discussed in this episode: 

Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life by Lydia Moland

“The Thanksgiving Poem”

The Paul Curtis House 

The Frugal Housewife by Lydia Maria Child

The Mother’s Book by Lydia Maria Child

An Appeal in Favor of the Class of Americans Called Africans by Lydia Maria Child

Flowers for Children: Part 2 

“1900 House” television show

Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 63 on M.F.K. Fisher

How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

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Novelist and university professor Joy Castro returns to the show to discuss the 1952 novel Forbidden Notebook by Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Cespedes. In a New York Times review of a 1958 English edition of this novel, de Céspedes was called “one of the few distinguished women writers since Colette to grapple effectively with what it is to be a woman.” 

Discussed in this episode: 

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes

Her Side of the Story by Alba de Céspedes

Muriel Rukeyser poem “Kathë Kollwitz”

Hell or High Water by Joy Castro

Flight Risk by Joy Castro

Island of Bones by Joy Castro

One Brilliant Flame by Joy Castro

The Truth Book by Joy Castro

“Burning It Down” by Joy Castro

Lost Ladies of Lit episode on Margery Latimer

Lost Ladies of Lit episode on E.M. Delafield

Lost Ladies of Lit episode on Miriam Karpilove

Lost Ladies of Lit episode on Lorraine Hansberry

Literary scholar Merve Emre

Carlos Manuel de Céspedes

Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter

Mercé Rodoreda

Elena Ferrante

Katherine Mansfield

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

Natalia Ginsburg’s essay “On Women” in Mercurio and a response by Alba de Céspedes

America Ferrera speech in Barbie movie

Real Women Have Curves

Rhi Johnson

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Last week, with guest Kathleen B. Jones, we discussed Christine de Pizan and her Book of the City of Ladies. Could a woman's hand have been behind any of the beautiful illustrations in this medieval work? Given what we know about women's involvement as artists in the medieval manuscript making process, it's certainly possible. Kathleen, the author of the new novel Cities of Women, is back with us for this week’s bonus episode to talk about it. 

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A widow who turned to her pen to support herself and her family, Christine de Pizan was described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex as the first “woman to take up her pen in defense of her sex.” Published in 1405, The Book of the City of Ladies is Christine’s history of Western civilization from the point of view—and in praise of—women, showcasing them as the intellectual and moral equals of men. Joining us is San Diego State University women’s study professor emeritus Kathleen B. Jones, whose recently published debut novel, Cities of Women, was inspired by the life and works of de Pizan. 

Discussed: 

The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones

Charles V of France

The Rest Is History podcast on The Hundred Years War

Charles VI

Queen Isabeau of Bavaria (married to Charles VI) 

The Mutation of Fortune by Christine de Pizan

The Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meunes

Famous Women by Giovanni Boccaccio 

The City of God by Augustine of Hippo

Phaedra

Circe by Madeline Miller

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Dr. Laurel Hendrix

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode on Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Cicero

Artemisia Gentileschi

Philip of Burgundy

Christine de Pizan Society

The Book of Peace by Christine de Pizan

The Tale of Joan of Arc by Christine de Pizan

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Learn more about the feminist open source publisher cita press and An Immortal Book: Selected Writings of Sui Sin Far, a curated collection of short fiction and nonfiction by the pioneering writer, Sui Sin Far (also known as Edith Maude Eaton), one of our past "lost ladies." A journalist and writer of Chinese and British descent who moved to the U.S, Sui Sin Far wrote about what it was like to live as a Chinese woman in a white America. We welcome back our previous guest Victoria Namkung as well as the founder and design director of cita Press, Juliana Castro Varón, the publisher of this new collection. 

Discussed:

Cita Press

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode on Sui Sin Far with Victoria Namkung

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode on Winnifred Eaton with Mary Chapman

Papel sensible by Juliana Castro Varón

An Immortal Book: Selected Writings of Sui Sin Far by cita Press

These Violent Delights by Victoria Namkung

The Things We Tell Ourselves by Victoria Namkung

The Beautiful by Vernon Lee (a.k.a. Violet Paget)

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Behind a Mask by Louisa May Alcott 

Men, Women and Ghosts by Amy Lowell

The Poor Clare by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Meditations on the Song of Songs by Santa Terese de Jesús

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Old Maid by Edith Wharton

Voices Around Me: Nobel Prize Lectures 

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Originally drafted in 1939, the Prohibition-era gangster novel The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur remained unpublished for nearly 40 years. Le Sueur used the intervening decades to transform her work into a beautifully-written, powerful narrative, focusing on the lives of marginalized women in Depression-era America. Joining us is Dr. Rosemary Hennessy, a Professor of English at Rice University, whose most recent book, In the Company of Radical Women Writers, rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven writers, including Le Sueur.

Discussed:

Meridel Le Sueur

The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur

“Women on the Breadlines” by Meridel Le Sueur

“The Dread Road” by Meridel Le Seur

“Annunciation” by Meridel Le Sueur

“Women Know a Lot of Things” by Meridel Le Sueur

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Women Talking novel by Miriam Toews

Women Talking film by Sarah Polley

Kansas City by Robert Altman

Badlands by Terrance Malick

“Getaway Car” by Taylor Swift

“My People are My Home” film by Meridel Le Sueur

Lost Ladies of Lit episode No. 106 on Dirty Helen Cromwell’s Good Time Party Girl

John Crawford and West End Press

Workers Alliance

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