She Wrote Too

After the publication of Shirley Jackson's story The Lottery in The New Yorker in June 1948, hundreds of people wrote in asking whether the account of shocking events in a New England village was based on reality. The ordinariness of human cruelty appalled some – and prompted others to ask where they could go and watch.

In this episode, we discuss Jackson’s life and work – including her complex relationships and vibrant unconventionality – and look in detail at her most famous short story. What can it tell us about what Hannah Arendt described as ‘the banality of evil’? How does it subvert Gothic tropes and invite the reader to question their own complicity in harmful traditions?

We will have to give spoilers as we can’t discuss the story without them – so if you haven’t read The Lottery, you might want to do so before listening. The full text is available online here.

We also mention another of Jackson’s stories, The Witch, which you can find here.

For a superb biography, we highly recommend Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson – A Rather Haunted Life (2016).

The opening of Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel Maria, or, The Wrongs of Woman, sets up a Gothic stereotype of spooky castles and supernatural entities. But these imaginary terrors are nothing to the reality experienced by her main character, Maria, who has been incarcerated in a lunatic asylum at the behest of her abusive husband.

Horror, Wollstonecraft reveals, is right here in the real world.

In this episode, we look at Wollstonecraft’s life and her use of fiction to reveal the injustice facing women from all strata of 18th-century society. We ponder whether the novel would have ended in tragedy, and we investigate why William Godwin’s loving tribute affected Wollstonecraft’s legacy so disastrously. We also agree to disagree about whether the controversial A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft is a fitting memorial.

You can find Maria, or, the Wrongs of Woman available to read free of charge at Project Gutenberg.

Get your copy of 📖 She Wrote Too: Women whose words changed the world

Last time on She Wrote Too, we talked about Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein – but there is much more to her writing than the novel that made her famous. In the second of our two episodes about Mary Shelley, we look at a couple of her shorter Gothic works: The Mortal Immortal and Transformation.

Both stories take us into strange and supernatural territory, but behind the Gothic themes, Mary Shelley explores some thoughtful questions about what it means to be human.

You can find both titles in Tales and Stories (1891), which is freely available on the Internet Archive.

Why has Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein fascinated generations of readers (and theatre-goers, film-goers, comic book fans, Hallowe’en mask makers and more) for over 200 years?

In this first episode of our Gothic season – and the first of a two-parter about Mary Shelley – Nicola and Caroline discuss just a few of the myriad questions posed by this work of genius.

Nicola Todd-Morgan and Caroline Rance talk about Nicola's appearance on Good Morning Britain and her call for changes to the legislation surrounding sexual offences. They also discuss how the inspiring stories of women from history gave Nicola the courage to speak out.

Join us as we visit 18th Century Dublin via the memoirs of Peg Plunkett: courtesan, survivor, businesswoman and someone who knew what cards she had to play. In 18th-century Dublin, Peg Plunkett scandalised society, outwitted powerful men, survived poverty and violence, and then did something extraordinary, she wrote her own story.

This is a remarkable memoir of a clever woman who, given very limited options, managed to create a life of excitement, glamour, culture and adventure. She was the woman who knew what went on behind closed doors - you would not want to get on the wrong side of her. Woe betide you if you did or you would end up in her memoirs and everyone wanted to read those.

Advisory: there is mild swearing in this episode and brief discussion of sexual matters.

Catherine Dickens was married to the novelist, Charles Dickens. We do not, as a rule, remember the woman who wrote What Shall We Have for Dinner? (published in 1851). In this episode we discuss her book. It was not published it under her own name, but under her pseudonym Lady Maria Clutterbuck.

It’s a really interesting text. It isn’t just a collection of recipes; it’s organised into monthly menus, illustrating what a well-run Victorian household might serve across the year, balancing cost, season, and variety. In many ways, it reads like a guide to managing life, not just cooking - a clue, perhaps, to the invisible labour she was doing every day as the angel at the hearth. In literary history, Catherine Dickens appears, if she appears at all, as a footnote to her husband (they never actually divorced); wife, mother of ten. He ensured that she was sadly associated with domestic inadequacy, largely because that is how he chose to describe her when he wanted her gone.

Her book was published before Mrs Beeton was the first famous domestic goddess and reflects the skills and complexity of running a Victorian household at that level - which was no small feat. It required logistical precision, social awareness, and emotional labour on a scale we tend not to acknowledge. Catherine was not simply cooking; she was orchestrating a complex system that sustained not only a large family but also the social and professional world of one of the most famous men in England. This social and household management went alongside her duties as the wife of an internationally renowned writer and her work on facilitating his literary life. She was a popular and well-respected woman in those circles.

Essentially, Dickens dumped her. After 16 years of marriage, he wanted her gone - in this episode we discuss part of her story and how one of the Britain’s most famous novelists used his story-telling to write her out of his. The story we inherit about Catherine Dickens is not neutral but shaped, deliberately, by Charles Dickens himself during the breakdown of their marriage. He publicly distanced himself from her, implying a lack of compatibility, a failure of understanding, even a kind of personal deficiency. In a move that feels startlingly modern in its manipulation of narrative, he controlled the story.

We consider Catherine’s story and the value and importance and many achievements of her life.

The biography we refer to in our discussion the most is The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth by Lillian Nayder.

Born in 1884, Naomi Jacob, ‘writer, performer, trouser-wearer, truth-teller’ wrote this novel as part of her epic Gollantz family saga. This novel is the founding story: the prequel to an extraordinary tale spanning seven books, starting in the 18th Century and following through to the Second World War. It is full of love, deception, disappointment, drama and hope - following a group of determined yet troubled characters as they take on the world in pursuit of their love of beauty and honour.

In this episode, Caroline and I revel in the humour and humanity of this prolific writer. She published nearly eighty novels - something she described as ‘a job of work’.

We ask the question: why on earth hasn’t this been made into a Sunday night costume drama? It was a best seller at the time and, really, everyone should have heard of it. Especially Netflix.

In this episode of She Wrote Too, we discuss a book that doesn’t shout, doesn’t rant, and doesn’t ask politely either.

In 1694, Mary Astell published a slim, elegant, and quietly radical text called A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. She proposes that women should be allowed to think. Not to charm.Not merely to endure. Not to be good company or good wives. Her suggestion was that they use their minds well - to be educated, reflective, intellectually alive, and taken seriously as rational beings.

When you consider the state of society in the late seventeenth century, this was a fairly explosive suggestion.

What makes A Serious Proposal to the Ladies so fascinating isn’t just that Mary Astell is arguing for women’s education, though that alone would be remarkable enough. It’s how she does it. Astell doesn’t present herself as angry, unruly, or unreasonable. Instead, she uses the very tools women were told they lacked: logic, theology, philosophy, and a beautifully controlled clarity of thought. She writes as if it is entirely obvious that women have minds and that those minds deserve care, discipline, and nourishment.

She asks, calmly why women are so often criticised for being frivolous, vain, or foolish when they are deliberately denied the education that would allow them to be anything else. In other words, she doesn’t say that women are inferior. She says that women have been made inferior and that this has been done by design.

What is quietly radical about Mary Astell is that she never once asks permission for this argument. She doesn’t frame it as a radical experiment or a dangerous novelty. She simply assumes that women matter and then builds her case from there.

Reading her now, more than three hundred years later, you can feel just how modern her thinking is. All this and yet, she was a High Church Conservative-thinker. How did she reconcile this?

A Serious Proposal to the Ladies isn’t just a historical curiosity. It’s a reminder that women have been articulating these ideas clearly, intelligently, and courageously for centuries. So many of those voices were sidelined, softened, or simply forgotten.

Same old s**t, different millenia.

There are some writers who feel permanently modern - they just recognise unchanging aspects of the human psyche. I wonder if Muriel Spark is one of those.

In this episode of She Wrote Too, Caroline Rance and I were delighted to be joined by writer Jenn Gale to talk about Spark’s deliciously subversive novel Loitering with Intent - a tale about writing, ambition, faith, power, and the dangerous thrill of telling your own story before anyone else can get hold of it.

Loitering with Intent follows Fleur Talbot, a young writer navigating literary London, dubious mentors, and the unsettling realisation that when women write their lives, other people often feel entitled to revise them. It’s funny, unsettling and fiercely intelligent.

Our conversation ranges across Spark’s sly humour, her moral clarity, the slipperiness of truth, and the particular freedom (and peril) of writing as a woman who refuses to be modest, grateful, or quiet. We talk about control and authorship, belief and betrayal, and why Spark still feels so bracingly alive.

This is a discussion about a novel; but it’s also about voice, permission, and what happens when a woman decides to loiter with intent rather than wait to be invited in.