June 5, 2026 • 27 mins
Tracy talks about a book that she didn't use for research on Viola Roseboro'. Holly talks about how wealth inequality has shaped science history.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. This week on the show, we
talked about Fila Roseboro. Oh yeah, I it was really
(00:22):
that apostrophe that caught my attention at the end of
her name, that made me go, why is that spelled
that way? Fila? What are you doing? I had one
specific difficulty with research for this, which is that, as
we alluded to, there is one book length biography that
(00:42):
I know of of her. Oh yeah one. It is
by Jane Kirkland Graham, someone I could find no information
about other than the fact that she wrote this biography
of rosebro It was published in nineteen fifty five. It
(01:04):
is more than six hundred pages long. WHOA, that's a
minutia biography. That's a lot and it is two volumes
published under one cover. So sometimes I can find when
there are obscure books like this. I do have access
to a lot of different libraries, and sometimes when there's
(01:27):
something pretty obscure, I can find it in one of
those libraries. That was not the case this time. There
are maybe nine copies of this book in any library
anywhere in the United States. It's possible that some of
them can be sent through inner library loan. But like
an extremely rare book that was published in nineteen fifty five,
(01:50):
maybe not. Also, six hundred pages is like really long
for our show, Like that's that's not really an amount
of time that we can devote one subject. Yeah, unless
you're just like doing nothing else with your week, and
I mean right, nothing else, absolutely nothing, or if it's
gonna become a two part episode, that could potentially work.
(02:13):
So I guess I lied a little bit. I could.
Also in addition to Jane Kirklin Graham having written this book,
I also did find out that she lived in Bamberg,
South Carolina and was a school teacher. That was it.
So what I wound up doing was I read every
review that I could find of this book, and there
(02:33):
are a number of reviews of it that were published
in like literary journals, okay, and the reviewers the same
kinds of words showed up in a lot of the reviews,
the words like unusual and unorthodox because, apparently, as Holly guests,
(02:55):
from the fact that it was more than six hundred
pages long, it does get into the minutia of things.
Apparently there's a lot of discussion of where individual facts
came from. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, who said what? Some
of the chapters of the book apparently have extensive citations
(03:16):
basically throughout the text, but there's no index and there's
no formal bibliography, which the reviewers all found made it
very hard to like rEFInd information right, Like there was
no index to refer back to if they were like,
where was the part that she was talking about that
(03:37):
time she was in Rhode Island? Who could say? It's
some there? So she needed Viola Roseboro to edit that
biz Maybe so it's possible that Jane Kirkland Graham was
really Jeane Kirkland, who was one of Rosebrow's correspondents, friends
(03:58):
with Roseboro, friends with some frosper As friends, and decided
to write a biography of her after her death, but
it's not totally clear. One of the reviewers, named Scott
c Osborne, pointed out the many flaws in this biography,
but also called it quote prodigious research obviously performed with love.
(04:20):
So all of that, I was like, I could see
if I can get this through Inner Library a loan
which would mean delaying when I could work on this episode.
I would have to wait for the book to arrive.
But after having read the same consistent criticisms of the biography,
I was like, I feel like this biography is just
going to make it harder, right, It's gonna drag down
(04:45):
the research process. Yeah. I would have filled in some
of the gaps that I do have about her, but
it would have added so much to the research process
just to get through it. I did really love one
particular thing that was said by Isabelle Howell in the
Tennessee Historical Quarterly in their review of this book, which
(05:06):
was quote, her cordial and generous acknowledgments of indebtedness to
the Vanderbilt and Tennessee State Library staffs ought to be
an encouragement to all librarians. So I guess Jane Kirkland
Graham was full of thanks and praise for the librarians
who helped her with the prodigious research obviously performed with love.
(05:29):
Villa Roseboro was also featured in that Southern Women in
New York article that we talked about in the Elizabeth
Bisland episode. Oh yeah, yeah, she did have a similar trajectory.
That was one of the reasons why I did not
immediately jump into figuring out more about her. After Elizabeth Bisland,
I was like, this does seem like it's going to
have some of the same right moments of you know,
(05:51):
person who grew up elsewhere moving to New York trying
to make a living as a writer. So let's wait
just a couple months before we get into it. I
feel like if I had known her, I would have
loved and hated her. I think I would have just
hated her. Is that terrible to say? No, there's a
(06:12):
specific personality that she seems to fit the bill of
that I have encountered many times in my life, and
people go, you will love this person because I am
a chatty person and I like to chitter chatter. But
I don't like people. I mean. When I was younger, yes,
but as I have gotten older, more mature, I do
not like people who are mean for sport. Okay, I
(06:36):
don't care how witty you are. If you're being a jerk,
I think you're a pretentious jerk. That's the nice way
I can use. There are much much more salty words
bubbling in my esophagus right now. I just I don't
I don't care that you're you're a hoot. I think
you're a jerk at the end of the day, like
her whole like, ah, I hate that I can't just
(06:57):
insult people. I'm like, I'm out, I'm out like a trout.
You're done, You're done. Swimming away from this one. Yeah,
I was reminded of Steel Magnolia's and if you don't
have anything nice to say, come sit by me, which
is also attributed, as we've discussed on the show before,
to Alice Roosevelt. I forgot that, which is an interesting
(07:18):
yeah connection point. Yeah, yeah, I mean, listen, I love
a little gossip. I love calling it like it is.
But I also just think if you are going into
conversations because you want to be mean. There's also that
thing where she's like, I take control of it, and
I'm like, I'm out. That's a boss person. I don't
mind if you are a person that dominates conversations as
long as you're a delight. But if you're just kind
(07:40):
of being bossy because you think you're better than everybody else,
then you're done. I'm sorry, Viola, I don't think we
can hang. The things I loved about her are how
(08:02):
much she loved reading, how much she really seems to
have found joy in finding interesting new work in the
mail bag at the magazine, how much she really seems
to have never lost sight of the fact that that's
an incredibly cool job to have, if that's something that
(08:24):
you find joy in, right, I think it's easy for
everybody in every job, no matter how cool it is,
to eventually kind of fall into a mundane rut with it.
And it doesn't seem like she ever did that. It
seems like she always was like, all right, I get
to go to work, and I get to find some
amazing new story in this mail bag full of stories,
(08:45):
and then I get to help that writer get more
well known in the world. And I think she really
loved that and put her heart into it for as
long as she was doing it. The fact that somehow
she was at least briefly able to afford apartment in
New York and multiple cottages, that's the thing I'm curious about.
Did she actually have enough money to do that or
(09:07):
was she really financially overextending herself? And that is what
contributed to the nineteen twenties being so much harder for her.
I had Initially, before I quite realized the timeline, I
had attributed that more to the Great Depression, right, but
a lot like the height of the Great Depression was
after she was having a lot of those struggles that
(09:29):
struck me while we were trying you through this, and
like ooh, she hit the downramp before the depression even
hit that. Yeah, been a rough rough time. Yeah, so uh,
I like that she liked to make her own way
that I similarly to you don't necessarily like that she
enjoyed being mean or insulting. I just you know, that's
(09:54):
how it is, that thing where it's like, okay, what
is that person getting out of it? Like uh huh,
why do you want? Why is that a thing you prize? Right?
And it usually doesn't take you to a good place.
Yeah yeah, yeah. That seems to have I think been
one of the contradictions about her, because people also talked
about how she was really generous with her friends, and
(10:15):
even when she didn't have any money, she was always
scraping something together to try to buy little treats for people,
and especially books, Like if somebody came to visit her
and they always left with a book. But then sometimes
she could be very blunt in her criticisms of people,
sometimes beyond what's really necessary. The other thing, too, is
(10:39):
that she wanted to make her own way in the world,
which I love, but not to put any of that
effort towards ensuring other women could do the same. Sure, Sure,
and I'm like girl, yeah, yeah, yeah. The contradictions and
how she was living her life she thought politically. I
(11:02):
wonder if that six hundred and something page biography sheds
any light on that, like where that was coming from.
Was it like I got mine and I don't need
to worry about anybody else, or was there something else
going on there? Don't know, Yeah, I don't It's really
hard to Is that her form of rebellion because she
(11:23):
grew up with hippie parents? Is it? You know what
I mean? Like? Sure, trying to parse that file is
a little tricky. Yeah, yeah, maybe someday, Because I think
there are various services is not even the right word,
sort of prints on demand situations that will print rare
(11:48):
out of print books on demand, right, And I think
one of those does have this biography, So I also
could have spent money and waited a long time to
get it. Uh So maybe I also have a question
for you, okay, because I'm curious what your take is
(12:09):
on Willa Cather's will, okay, and it being disregarded after Okay,
So here is my understanding of this situation. And I'm
gonna say I did not I got to a point
where I felt like I had a satisfactory answer, but
I do not know. I cannot promise this is like
(12:30):
the whole story. So Willa Cather's will said none of
my correspondence published in whole or in part right. And
then also there was an executor who all of that
was tied to, and that executor eventually died, and at
that point everything that the will had specified to go
(12:53):
through the executor, all of that expired, and the setup
that had been established to maintain her literary legacy dissolved
with the expiration of all of that. So then a
new basically executor, like the will is over, but like
a new organization had to be sort of developed to
(13:13):
maintain the Willicather legacy, right, and that organization ultimately decided
that it was importance to history and literature and study
of Willa Caather to be able to publish that correspondence.
And also I think she had specified in her will
(13:34):
not to have any adaptations of her work, huh, and
so I think they may have revisited that also. So
my understanding is that all of this was within the
bounds of what was legal, within the terms of her will. Yeah,
it just made me feel icky. I get it. Like
she she literally said she did not want this. She
(13:56):
said forever, and you where I for Okay, but later
now legally we can so well. And I don't know
if the details of the will were do not ever
publish this until after the death of this person Gosch executor,
or if it was do not ever publish this ever ever?
(14:18):
I mean, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't either,
And I don't really feel like doing an episode on
Willa Cather to figure it out more. As we said
during recording, I'm not that not really a fan of
her work. Yeah, And I'm also like, I'm not a lawyer,
and that what I Everything I just said was sort
(14:39):
of my understanding based on having to try to figure out, like,
wait a minute, this thing that here says that she
said for her letters never to be published. But I
read some of her letters while researching this episode. What's
going on. So yeah, I don't for sure not either.
(14:59):
I mean I'm going through the like logic flow right of, Like, well,
she did try to get her letters back from people,
so she didn't want them out there, but maybe that's
because she wanted to control it with a weird clause
in her will. I don't know, yeah, read her will. Yeah,
and it's possibly it's possible that we will get an
email either from a lawyer or someone who knows a
(15:20):
lot more about Willa Cather who can give a fuller
explanation than my layperson, not a lawyer who looked just
enough to figure out if she said, no, why is
this on the internet? Yeah, yeah, fascinating. Yeah, I kind
of like not necessarily with Willa Cather, because again, no
(15:42):
plans to do a Willicather episode. But there's definitely been
times that we have worked on episodes on the show
where like there's a question of would this person want
these details right out there? And sometimes there's sort of
a question of like the history storical interest about something,
(16:03):
what is the importance of understanding this versus like what
is the harm to this person or their legacy or
what they would have wanted, And sometimes those things are complicated, Yes,
because often too they involve other people. Yeah, which makes
it layers and layers are trying to figure out what
path feels the the right feels like the right one,
(16:24):
right anyway, history you complicated thing. Yeah, okay, I have
several things I want to discuss about Robert Boyle. Great.
The first is now a personal bucket list item sort of.
(16:48):
Lismore Castle, Yeah, where he was born, is available for booking. Oh,
you can book out the whole property. I don't know
how much it is. They won't say so on their
web site, so you know it's a lot. A lot.
That's that means a lot. Come on, lattery whin. We're
all going to this wreastle like if it happened, If
it were to happen, if I just stumbled into a
(17:09):
Redonka doodle sum of money, I'd be on that website
getting quotes. Yeah, it's beautiful and it's obviously been renovated
and kept up and it's now like an event space.
They'll rent it out for special events, but you can
also just rent out the property to stay for a
weekend with your friends or whatever. Imagine the cool party
you could have there. Yeah, it's gorgeous. I think it is.
(17:32):
Also I don't have their website up in front of me,
but I think it is also like a property you
can just go visit for the day, like a park
area and green spaces that you can look at, and
also architecture that's obviously interesting but so pretty. And I
like that it's been there since the twelfth century. Said, yeah,
that's cool. It's cool. The next thing I want to
(17:55):
talk about is that third person autobiograph. Yeah, A lot
of discussion of it calls it a fictionalized autobiography, and
it might be. It doesn't seem super embellished to me.
I didn't live his life, obviously, I don't know, but
like the details of his birth, his family, upbringing, where
(18:17):
they were all very very identical to his actual life.
And then I came across a portion of it where
he was introducing a letter he had written to his sister,
I believe, and I was like, this is why you
wrote this in the third person, my dude, because in
not saying it about himself, he can praise himself because
(18:42):
he's introducing this letter and he's like, you know, essentially
like you'll see what a good writer this person is.
They're amazing, and I'm just like, I see what you
did here, I see I'm onto you, Robert Boyle. It
made me laugh so hard. Also because when you read
his letters, they're so clunky. Yeah, I'm sure in the
(19:05):
time he was giving himself points for verbosity, but like
in terms of clarity. Yeah, no, yeah, when I was
reading through the outline, all the things I had to
read that were quotations of his work were read through
repeatedly by me to try to make sure I understood
what he was saying. They're clunky. But again that also,
(19:27):
I mean that becomes an interesting discussion point of the
ways that different things have been valued in writing and
intellectual communication and correspondence over the centuries. Right to him,
it was I know a lot of big words, and
I can string him together, whereas I think today we'd
be like, I don't know what you're talking about. Clarity
(19:48):
in scientific writing in particular, clarity in all things. Well,
and we read clunky stuff in the Heart Lib episode two,
didn't we, Yeah, remembering that right, Yeah, it's a clunky time.
They were all clunky writing each other. So you know,
it's if you believe that adage that you're the average
of the five people you're closest to. Yeah, they're all
(20:10):
just writing that same style. It just is a feedback loop,
a self replicating feedback loop. Yeah, but that third person
did crack me up. But then when he did the
Skeptical Chemist and he chose to do that as a
fictional dialogue, there was also part of me that's like,
maybe he just likes to mix it up, like he
doesn't like the directness of an actual scientific essay or
(20:34):
a scientific writing style. Well, and there are other things
that were written as dialogues. Yeah, so it's like he didn't,
he didn't make that all up. But no, no, no, no, no,
it's interesting that he chose it for that particular thing.
It did make me chuckle. Yeah, Okay, the big thing
I want to talk about, yes, is wealth and wealth inequality. Okay,
(20:57):
because listen, Robert Boyle was a man born to incredible privilege, right,
and if you really look at his whole life, everything
he was able to achieve was a direct result of
that privilege. Right. He inherited a big, empty castle that
(21:18):
he could go stay at, right set of castle, or
in any case, a big where he could go stay
and do experiments. Because he didn't have to work and
he didn't have anything else going on. Not many people
have that ever. And then you know, even when he
was like at Oxford, he you know, he fell in
(21:40):
with a lot of great thinkers in part because that
the work he did in his big, empty home opened
the door for him to have, you know, intellectual discourse
with other people that did experiments, which then brought him
into their circle at Oxford and then at London, and
even in his later years when he's living with his
sister Catherine, they are living in a very fancy part
(22:03):
of town. They were on Pall Mall, which you know
was where all of the wealthy people lived, and he
was able to afford to set up a whole lab
of his own that was not part of his Oxford setup. So, like,
it is one of those things that especially kept jumping
out to me. And I don't know if I'm just
being hypercritical of poor Robert Boyle, but like he gets
(22:24):
held up as the first modern chemist, but he didn't
really invent or discover a whole lot, right, He just
spent a lot of money in his lab doing things,
which is cool, and it does again fostered that idea
of exploration and experimentation among his peers. But I'm also like,
(22:47):
the one thing that you're really well known for was
kind of an accident, And I mean, I shouldn't boil
it down to that. He was doing a very clearly
laid out experiment and observing the results. But I feel
like a lot of his place in the history of
science is because he was a wealthy dude who got
to do wealthy dude stuff and then met other wealthy
(23:09):
dudes and they wealthy duded together. Yeah. Well, we had
the whole era of like the gentleman's science scientists gentlemen like.
Some of that was a bit later than Robert Boyle,
like more into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prior to
as much formalization and professionalization of like the educational system
(23:33):
and the idea of what a chemist is. Yeah, but yeah,
I think about that too, And I also think about
how many of them also had a sister or a
daughter or a wife who was doing a lot of
record keeping or note taking or whatever. Well, and Catherine
is actually on my list because she had her hands
(23:55):
in a lot of pies in the best way of
like supporting financially just supporting, like through encouragement a lot
of people that were doing a lot of science and
other things. She is a pretty interesting figure and really
pretty pivotal in that surge of discovery at the time.
(24:16):
But yeah, it makes sure you start to look at
like all of the people that I shouldn't say all,
many of the people that are lauded as you know,
great pioneers in their field were able to be that
because in many cases there was general wealth in the mix.
Now there is an interesting flip on this though, because
(24:36):
then I think about less than one hundred years earlier,
Thomas Harriet and Galileo were both looking at the moon
through a telescope at the same time. Oh sure, but
because Thomas Harriot had tons of money, he didn't publish
anything because he didn't need to, whereas Galilea was like,
I look at the thing I looked at. I know
what the moon looks like. You guys, somebody pay me.
(24:58):
So there's a flip on that one. But and so yeah,
it's just I'm fascinated by the way that wealth plays
into the stories that we tell about discovery, pioneering in
scientific fields, et cetera. When there are so many other
people who were probably working as hard or harder, possibly
(25:19):
even in the same fields, but maybe even not in
you know, some other job that don't ever get recognized anyway.
That's I gotta be in my bonnet today about this.
I don't know what's up with that. It's a voting day,
so maybe it's just maybe that's anyway. Robert Boyle, I
(25:41):
find him fascinating. I didn't know anything about the like
religious elements of his work at all. Oh, yeah, it
is weird because he was he was so hell bent
on the idea that everyone that was not Christian was
doing it wrong, which is such a weird mindset for
(26:05):
someone who is kind of trying to bumble their way
through understanding the world more deeply. Mm hmm, Like you know,
you don't know everything because you're trying to learn things,
but also you think you know everything. Yeah, what's going on?
Rob anyway, Robert Boyle fascinating person, very important in history,
(26:30):
but also got you gotta look at the context. Yeah.
May may we all have the good fortune to get
a ton of money and do experiments and putter in
the way we desire. If this is your weekend coming up,
I hope you have whatever financing you would need in
place to do something cool, maybe experimental, but in a
(26:51):
safe way. But also I just hope, like you have peace,
you have some rest and relaxation and time to just
think about whatever you would like and putter or if
you want. I love a good putter, Oh, I love
it so much. If you don't have time off this weekend,
I hope that you still get some puttering in. I'm
gonna putter around in my sewing room after we're done recording.
Will I do anything about you, I don't know, but
(27:12):
I'm gonna putter. I hope though, that if you are working,
that you have as smooth as time as possible in
those endeavors. And I hope that everyone is kind to
one another and we all take care of each other.
We will be back here on Monday with a brand
new episode. We will also have a classic episode for
you tomorrow. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
(27:38):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. This week on the show, we
talked about Fila Roseboro. Oh yeah, I it was really
(00:22):
that apostrophe that caught my attention at the end of
her name, that made me go, why is that spelled
that way? Fila? What are you doing? I had one
specific difficulty with research for this, which is that, as
we alluded to, there is one book length biography that
(00:42):
I know of of her. Oh yeah one. It is
by Jane Kirkland Graham, someone I could find no information
about other than the fact that she wrote this biography
of rosebro It was published in nineteen fifty five. It
(01:04):
is more than six hundred pages long. WHOA, that's a
minutia biography. That's a lot and it is two volumes
published under one cover. So sometimes I can find when
there are obscure books like this. I do have access
to a lot of different libraries, and sometimes when there's
(01:27):
something pretty obscure, I can find it in one of
those libraries. That was not the case this time. There
are maybe nine copies of this book in any library
anywhere in the United States. It's possible that some of
them can be sent through inner library loan. But like
an extremely rare book that was published in nineteen fifty five,
(01:50):
maybe not. Also, six hundred pages is like really long
for our show, Like that's that's not really an amount
of time that we can devote one subject. Yeah, unless
you're just like doing nothing else with your week, and
I mean right, nothing else, absolutely nothing, or if it's
gonna become a two part episode, that could potentially work.
(02:13):
So I guess I lied a little bit. I could.
Also in addition to Jane Kirklin Graham having written this book,
I also did find out that she lived in Bamberg,
South Carolina and was a school teacher. That was it.
So what I wound up doing was I read every
review that I could find of this book, and there
(02:33):
are a number of reviews of it that were published
in like literary journals, okay, and the reviewers the same
kinds of words showed up in a lot of the reviews,
the words like unusual and unorthodox because, apparently, as Holly guests,
(02:55):
from the fact that it was more than six hundred
pages long, it does get into the minutia of things.
Apparently there's a lot of discussion of where individual facts
came from. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, who said what? Some
of the chapters of the book apparently have extensive citations
(03:16):
basically throughout the text, but there's no index and there's
no formal bibliography, which the reviewers all found made it
very hard to like rEFInd information right, Like there was
no index to refer back to if they were like,
where was the part that she was talking about that
(03:37):
time she was in Rhode Island? Who could say? It's
some there? So she needed Viola Roseboro to edit that
biz Maybe so it's possible that Jane Kirkland Graham was
really Jeane Kirkland, who was one of Rosebrow's correspondents, friends
(03:58):
with Roseboro, friends with some frosper As friends, and decided
to write a biography of her after her death, but
it's not totally clear. One of the reviewers, named Scott
c Osborne, pointed out the many flaws in this biography,
but also called it quote prodigious research obviously performed with love.
(04:20):
So all of that, I was like, I could see
if I can get this through Inner Library a loan
which would mean delaying when I could work on this episode.
I would have to wait for the book to arrive.
But after having read the same consistent criticisms of the biography,
I was like, I feel like this biography is just
going to make it harder, right, It's gonna drag down
(04:45):
the research process. Yeah. I would have filled in some
of the gaps that I do have about her, but
it would have added so much to the research process
just to get through it. I did really love one
particular thing that was said by Isabelle Howell in the
Tennessee Historical Quarterly in their review of this book, which
(05:06):
was quote, her cordial and generous acknowledgments of indebtedness to
the Vanderbilt and Tennessee State Library staffs ought to be
an encouragement to all librarians. So I guess Jane Kirkland
Graham was full of thanks and praise for the librarians
who helped her with the prodigious research obviously performed with love.
(05:29):
Villa Roseboro was also featured in that Southern Women in
New York article that we talked about in the Elizabeth
Bisland episode. Oh yeah, yeah, she did have a similar trajectory.
That was one of the reasons why I did not
immediately jump into figuring out more about her. After Elizabeth Bisland,
I was like, this does seem like it's going to
have some of the same right moments of you know,
(05:51):
person who grew up elsewhere moving to New York trying
to make a living as a writer. So let's wait
just a couple months before we get into it. I
feel like if I had known her, I would have
loved and hated her. I think I would have just
hated her. Is that terrible to say? No, there's a
(06:12):
specific personality that she seems to fit the bill of
that I have encountered many times in my life, and
people go, you will love this person because I am
a chatty person and I like to chitter chatter. But
I don't like people. I mean. When I was younger, yes,
but as I have gotten older, more mature, I do
not like people who are mean for sport. Okay, I
(06:36):
don't care how witty you are. If you're being a jerk,
I think you're a pretentious jerk. That's the nice way
I can use. There are much much more salty words
bubbling in my esophagus right now. I just I don't
I don't care that you're you're a hoot. I think
you're a jerk at the end of the day, like
her whole like, ah, I hate that I can't just
(06:57):
insult people. I'm like, I'm out, I'm out like a trout.
You're done, You're done. Swimming away from this one. Yeah,
I was reminded of Steel Magnolia's and if you don't
have anything nice to say, come sit by me, which
is also attributed, as we've discussed on the show before,
to Alice Roosevelt. I forgot that, which is an interesting
(07:18):
yeah connection point. Yeah, yeah, I mean, listen, I love
a little gossip. I love calling it like it is.
But I also just think if you are going into
conversations because you want to be mean. There's also that
thing where she's like, I take control of it, and
I'm like, I'm out. That's a boss person. I don't
mind if you are a person that dominates conversations as
long as you're a delight. But if you're just kind
(07:40):
of being bossy because you think you're better than everybody else,
then you're done. I'm sorry, Viola, I don't think we
can hang. The things I loved about her are how
(08:02):
much she loved reading, how much she really seems to
have found joy in finding interesting new work in the
mail bag at the magazine, how much she really seems
to have never lost sight of the fact that that's
an incredibly cool job to have, if that's something that
(08:24):
you find joy in, right, I think it's easy for
everybody in every job, no matter how cool it is,
to eventually kind of fall into a mundane rut with it.
And it doesn't seem like she ever did that. It
seems like she always was like, all right, I get
to go to work, and I get to find some
amazing new story in this mail bag full of stories,
(08:45):
and then I get to help that writer get more
well known in the world. And I think she really
loved that and put her heart into it for as
long as she was doing it. The fact that somehow
she was at least briefly able to afford apartment in
New York and multiple cottages, that's the thing I'm curious about.
Did she actually have enough money to do that or
(09:07):
was she really financially overextending herself? And that is what
contributed to the nineteen twenties being so much harder for her.
I had Initially, before I quite realized the timeline, I
had attributed that more to the Great Depression, right, but
a lot like the height of the Great Depression was
after she was having a lot of those struggles that
(09:29):
struck me while we were trying you through this, and
like ooh, she hit the downramp before the depression even
hit that. Yeah, been a rough rough time. Yeah, so uh,
I like that she liked to make her own way
that I similarly to you don't necessarily like that she
enjoyed being mean or insulting. I just you know, that's
(09:54):
how it is, that thing where it's like, okay, what
is that person getting out of it? Like uh huh,
why do you want? Why is that a thing you prize? Right?
And it usually doesn't take you to a good place.
Yeah yeah, yeah. That seems to have I think been
one of the contradictions about her, because people also talked
about how she was really generous with her friends, and
(10:15):
even when she didn't have any money, she was always
scraping something together to try to buy little treats for people,
and especially books, Like if somebody came to visit her
and they always left with a book. But then sometimes
she could be very blunt in her criticisms of people,
sometimes beyond what's really necessary. The other thing, too, is
(10:39):
that she wanted to make her own way in the world,
which I love, but not to put any of that
effort towards ensuring other women could do the same. Sure, Sure,
and I'm like girl, yeah, yeah, yeah. The contradictions and
how she was living her life she thought politically. I
(11:02):
wonder if that six hundred and something page biography sheds
any light on that, like where that was coming from.
Was it like I got mine and I don't need
to worry about anybody else, or was there something else
going on there? Don't know, Yeah, I don't It's really
hard to Is that her form of rebellion because she
(11:23):
grew up with hippie parents? Is it? You know what
I mean? Like? Sure, trying to parse that file is
a little tricky. Yeah, yeah, maybe someday, Because I think
there are various services is not even the right word,
sort of prints on demand situations that will print rare
(11:48):
out of print books on demand, right, And I think
one of those does have this biography, So I also
could have spent money and waited a long time to
get it. Uh So maybe I also have a question
for you, okay, because I'm curious what your take is
(12:09):
on Willa Cather's will, okay, and it being disregarded after Okay,
So here is my understanding of this situation. And I'm
gonna say I did not I got to a point
where I felt like I had a satisfactory answer, but
I do not know. I cannot promise this is like
(12:30):
the whole story. So Willa Cather's will said none of
my correspondence published in whole or in part right. And
then also there was an executor who all of that
was tied to, and that executor eventually died, and at
that point everything that the will had specified to go
(12:53):
through the executor, all of that expired, and the setup
that had been established to maintain her literary legacy dissolved
with the expiration of all of that. So then a
new basically executor, like the will is over, but like
a new organization had to be sort of developed to
(13:13):
maintain the Willicather legacy, right, and that organization ultimately decided
that it was importance to history and literature and study
of Willa Caather to be able to publish that correspondence.
And also I think she had specified in her will
(13:34):
not to have any adaptations of her work, huh, and
so I think they may have revisited that also. So
my understanding is that all of this was within the
bounds of what was legal, within the terms of her will. Yeah,
it just made me feel icky. I get it. Like
she she literally said she did not want this. She
(13:56):
said forever, and you where I for Okay, but later
now legally we can so well. And I don't know
if the details of the will were do not ever
publish this until after the death of this person Gosch executor,
or if it was do not ever publish this ever ever?
(14:18):
I mean, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't either,
And I don't really feel like doing an episode on
Willa Cather to figure it out more. As we said
during recording, I'm not that not really a fan of
her work. Yeah, And I'm also like, I'm not a lawyer,
and that what I Everything I just said was sort
(14:39):
of my understanding based on having to try to figure out, like,
wait a minute, this thing that here says that she
said for her letters never to be published. But I
read some of her letters while researching this episode. What's
going on. So yeah, I don't for sure not either.
(14:59):
I mean I'm going through the like logic flow right of, Like, well,
she did try to get her letters back from people,
so she didn't want them out there, but maybe that's
because she wanted to control it with a weird clause
in her will. I don't know, yeah, read her will. Yeah,
and it's possibly it's possible that we will get an
email either from a lawyer or someone who knows a
(15:20):
lot more about Willa Cather who can give a fuller
explanation than my layperson, not a lawyer who looked just
enough to figure out if she said, no, why is
this on the internet? Yeah, yeah, fascinating. Yeah, I kind
of like not necessarily with Willa Cather, because again, no
(15:42):
plans to do a Willicather episode. But there's definitely been
times that we have worked on episodes on the show
where like there's a question of would this person want
these details right out there? And sometimes there's sort of
a question of like the history storical interest about something,
(16:03):
what is the importance of understanding this versus like what
is the harm to this person or their legacy or
what they would have wanted, And sometimes those things are complicated, Yes,
because often too they involve other people. Yeah, which makes
it layers and layers are trying to figure out what
path feels the the right feels like the right one,
(16:24):
right anyway, history you complicated thing. Yeah, okay, I have
several things I want to discuss about Robert Boyle. Great.
The first is now a personal bucket list item sort of.
(16:48):
Lismore Castle, Yeah, where he was born, is available for booking. Oh,
you can book out the whole property. I don't know
how much it is. They won't say so on their
web site, so you know it's a lot. A lot.
That's that means a lot. Come on, lattery whin. We're
all going to this wreastle like if it happened, If
it were to happen, if I just stumbled into a
(17:09):
Redonka doodle sum of money, I'd be on that website
getting quotes. Yeah, it's beautiful and it's obviously been renovated
and kept up and it's now like an event space.
They'll rent it out for special events, but you can
also just rent out the property to stay for a
weekend with your friends or whatever. Imagine the cool party
you could have there. Yeah, it's gorgeous. I think it is.
(17:32):
Also I don't have their website up in front of me,
but I think it is also like a property you
can just go visit for the day, like a park
area and green spaces that you can look at, and
also architecture that's obviously interesting but so pretty. And I
like that it's been there since the twelfth century. Said, yeah,
that's cool. It's cool. The next thing I want to
(17:55):
talk about is that third person autobiograph. Yeah, A lot
of discussion of it calls it a fictionalized autobiography, and
it might be. It doesn't seem super embellished to me.
I didn't live his life, obviously, I don't know, but
like the details of his birth, his family, upbringing, where
(18:17):
they were all very very identical to his actual life.
And then I came across a portion of it where
he was introducing a letter he had written to his sister,
I believe, and I was like, this is why you
wrote this in the third person, my dude, because in
not saying it about himself, he can praise himself because
(18:42):
he's introducing this letter and he's like, you know, essentially
like you'll see what a good writer this person is.
They're amazing, and I'm just like, I see what you
did here, I see I'm onto you, Robert Boyle. It
made me laugh so hard. Also because when you read
his letters, they're so clunky. Yeah, I'm sure in the
(19:05):
time he was giving himself points for verbosity, but like
in terms of clarity. Yeah, no, yeah, when I was
reading through the outline, all the things I had to
read that were quotations of his work were read through
repeatedly by me to try to make sure I understood
what he was saying. They're clunky. But again that also,
(19:27):
I mean that becomes an interesting discussion point of the
ways that different things have been valued in writing and
intellectual communication and correspondence over the centuries. Right to him,
it was I know a lot of big words, and
I can string him together, whereas I think today we'd
be like, I don't know what you're talking about. Clarity
(19:48):
in scientific writing in particular, clarity in all things. Well,
and we read clunky stuff in the Heart Lib episode two,
didn't we, Yeah, remembering that right, Yeah, it's a clunky time.
They were all clunky writing each other. So you know,
it's if you believe that adage that you're the average
of the five people you're closest to. Yeah, they're all
(20:10):
just writing that same style. It just is a feedback loop,
a self replicating feedback loop. Yeah, but that third person
did crack me up. But then when he did the
Skeptical Chemist and he chose to do that as a
fictional dialogue, there was also part of me that's like,
maybe he just likes to mix it up, like he
doesn't like the directness of an actual scientific essay or
(20:34):
a scientific writing style. Well, and there are other things
that were written as dialogues. Yeah, so it's like he didn't,
he didn't make that all up. But no, no, no, no, no,
it's interesting that he chose it for that particular thing.
It did make me chuckle. Yeah, Okay, the big thing
I want to talk about, yes, is wealth and wealth inequality. Okay,
(20:57):
because listen, Robert Boyle was a man born to incredible privilege, right,
and if you really look at his whole life, everything
he was able to achieve was a direct result of
that privilege. Right. He inherited a big, empty castle that
(21:18):
he could go stay at, right set of castle, or
in any case, a big where he could go stay
and do experiments. Because he didn't have to work and
he didn't have anything else going on. Not many people
have that ever. And then you know, even when he
was like at Oxford, he you know, he fell in
(21:40):
with a lot of great thinkers in part because that
the work he did in his big, empty home opened
the door for him to have, you know, intellectual discourse
with other people that did experiments, which then brought him
into their circle at Oxford and then at London, and
even in his later years when he's living with his
sister Catherine, they are living in a very fancy part
(22:03):
of town. They were on Pall Mall, which you know
was where all of the wealthy people lived, and he
was able to afford to set up a whole lab
of his own that was not part of his Oxford setup. So, like,
it is one of those things that especially kept jumping
out to me. And I don't know if I'm just
being hypercritical of poor Robert Boyle, but like he gets
(22:24):
held up as the first modern chemist, but he didn't
really invent or discover a whole lot, right, He just
spent a lot of money in his lab doing things,
which is cool, and it does again fostered that idea
of exploration and experimentation among his peers. But I'm also like,
(22:47):
the one thing that you're really well known for was
kind of an accident, And I mean, I shouldn't boil
it down to that. He was doing a very clearly
laid out experiment and observing the results. But I feel
like a lot of his place in the history of
science is because he was a wealthy dude who got
to do wealthy dude stuff and then met other wealthy
(23:09):
dudes and they wealthy duded together. Yeah. Well, we had
the whole era of like the gentleman's science scientists gentlemen like.
Some of that was a bit later than Robert Boyle,
like more into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prior to
as much formalization and professionalization of like the educational system
(23:33):
and the idea of what a chemist is. Yeah, but yeah,
I think about that too, And I also think about
how many of them also had a sister or a
daughter or a wife who was doing a lot of
record keeping or note taking or whatever. Well, and Catherine
is actually on my list because she had her hands
(23:55):
in a lot of pies in the best way of
like supporting financially just supporting, like through encouragement a lot
of people that were doing a lot of science and
other things. She is a pretty interesting figure and really
pretty pivotal in that surge of discovery at the time.
(24:16):
But yeah, it makes sure you start to look at
like all of the people that I shouldn't say all,
many of the people that are lauded as you know,
great pioneers in their field were able to be that
because in many cases there was general wealth in the mix.
Now there is an interesting flip on this though, because
(24:36):
then I think about less than one hundred years earlier,
Thomas Harriet and Galileo were both looking at the moon
through a telescope at the same time. Oh sure, but
because Thomas Harriot had tons of money, he didn't publish
anything because he didn't need to, whereas Galilea was like,
I look at the thing I looked at. I know
what the moon looks like. You guys, somebody pay me.
(24:58):
So there's a flip on that one. But and so yeah,
it's just I'm fascinated by the way that wealth plays
into the stories that we tell about discovery, pioneering in
scientific fields, et cetera. When there are so many other
people who were probably working as hard or harder, possibly
(25:19):
even in the same fields, but maybe even not in
you know, some other job that don't ever get recognized anyway.
That's I gotta be in my bonnet today about this.
I don't know what's up with that. It's a voting day,
so maybe it's just maybe that's anyway. Robert Boyle, I
(25:41):
find him fascinating. I didn't know anything about the like
religious elements of his work at all. Oh, yeah, it
is weird because he was he was so hell bent
on the idea that everyone that was not Christian was
doing it wrong, which is such a weird mindset for
(26:05):
someone who is kind of trying to bumble their way
through understanding the world more deeply. Mm hmm, Like you know,
you don't know everything because you're trying to learn things,
but also you think you know everything. Yeah, what's going on?
Rob anyway, Robert Boyle fascinating person, very important in history,
(26:30):
but also got you gotta look at the context. Yeah.
May may we all have the good fortune to get
a ton of money and do experiments and putter in
the way we desire. If this is your weekend coming up,
I hope you have whatever financing you would need in
place to do something cool, maybe experimental, but in a
(26:51):
safe way. But also I just hope, like you have peace,
you have some rest and relaxation and time to just
think about whatever you would like and putter or if
you want. I love a good putter, Oh, I love
it so much. If you don't have time off this weekend,
I hope that you still get some puttering in. I'm
gonna putter around in my sewing room after we're done recording.
Will I do anything about you, I don't know, but
(27:12):
I'm gonna putter. I hope though, that if you are working,
that you have as smooth as time as possible in
those endeavors. And I hope that everyone is kind to
one another and we all take care of each other.
We will be back here on Monday with a brand
new episode. We will also have a classic episode for
you tomorrow. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
(27:38):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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