November 10, 2023 • 19 mins
Tracy shares her cat’s input on the Empress of Ireland outline. She and Holly also discuss the relatability of Mary Somerville’s writing.
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Episode Transcript
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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. We talked about the Empress of
Ireland this week, a particularly sad shipwreck story of It's
(00:24):
a dark week for stuff you missed in History Class.
This dark dark week, we just minutes ago recorded the
behind the scenes for our other gruesome murder episode of
the week. And when I knew this was a sad shipwreck,
something about it just being everyone drowned in the cold
(00:44):
in the dark, I was like, this is extra sad,
and that is one reason why I did not put
a sad cat story. There's two reasons why I did
not include the sad cat story in this episode. One
is I found it in one source and I was like,
(01:04):
is this real? And the other was it just was
too sad. So I'm going to give the sad cat story, okay,
but then I'm gonna follow it with a funny cat
story that sounds great. So sad cat story is that
in this one account that I read, the ship's cat
was named Emmy, and Emmy jumped off the boat in
Quebec City, and somebody found Emmy and brought her back,
(01:28):
and Emmy left again but left her kittens on board
and right, and the ship left without her. And later
people were like, this was a terrible omen does seem
that way? And I was like, that is so sad
(01:50):
on this already very sad episode. And also I found
like this I couldn't find confirmation of it. I mean,
if there are lots and lots of survivor testimonies that
you can read, like first hand accounts, stories that people
have submitted of like their relatives who were on board,
things like that, I just I wasn't able to confirm that.
(02:12):
So the sadness plus not being able to confirm it
here is the funny cat story. My cats don't get
on the keyboard that much. But in this case, Opel
has a contribution to this episode that I am going
to read to everyone. The Empress of Ireland left Liverpool
(02:34):
for a routine trip across the Atlantic on May fifteenth,
nineteen one hoo. For that is what Opel would like
everyone to now. Yeah, also likes to add a little
now and again to episodes, and I try to correct them,
but sometimes letters that I don't think I even did
(02:59):
it entirely just this. It stretches the whole width of
my screen. Another thing, As I was putting together Saturday
Classics for upcoming episodes of Saturday Classics, I realize we
have another episode we have already done on the ss Arctic.
That episode came out January fifteenth, twenty fourteen, so that
(03:20):
may sound familiar to longtime listeners of the show or
people who've been working their way through the whole back catalog. Holly,
I think he wrote that episode. I had no recollection
of it existing. It is very similar in terms of
ship's colliding and a lot of people then not surviving
(03:41):
the wreck, but it was not a case where the
ship sank so quickly. It wasn't. That was a case
where the ship took a while to think, but the
evacuation was chaos. And I did not pick that as
a Saturday Classic because I was like, no, this is
too much, too much sad to have another to follow,
(04:03):
right to follow this with a separate sad thing about
the same general topic. I'm really glad you did not
include the cat story because I think we all know
I'm not emotionally tall enough to ride that ride. Yeah,
had we actually had to talk about it in depth.
I don't really remember much about that other episode either.
(04:25):
I mean I didn't. I didn't remember it at all.
I literally was going through the list of old episodes
and was kind of like, ss Arctic, what was that about?
Is that something we should run as? And then I
read the synopsis and I was like, did I write this?
And then I listened to the first five seconds. I
think we've said this little inside baseball moment before. Whoever
talks first in the episode wrote it? Yeah, I can't
(04:48):
think of any exceptions we've had to that. I don't
think so, but yeah, you talk first on that. One
says like, I guess I didn't write that, this thing
that I have no recollection of from almost a decade ago. Yeah,
it's a long time. And we have said this before too,
like we don't retain everything. No, we really don't. And
I whole episodes. I have sometimes felt bad when someone,
(05:10):
like in a live show or an event, will ask
a question about an episode that's like five years old,
and I'm like, I don't know. I'm not from your country,
I don't know your ways, and I just kind of
run away and hide. Yeah, I I the brain something
stick forever. Yeah, some fly away into the night. And
(05:33):
like Tracy, I think we've both had that moment of like,
did I write them? I wrote this? I don't remember,
yes at all. I've definitely had whole episodes that I
wrote and I don't remember. And I for a long
time I thought this was just the nature of our jobs,
that you know, we are writing a new episode every
week and and like we have to mentally move on
to the next thing. That's the only way that it works.
(05:55):
But for some reason, the TikTok algorithm has decided that
what I want to see when I look at TikTok
is clips from old episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I think
I watched one of these once and TikTok was like,
all right, this is what you want for the rest
of your life. And it has showed me so many
clips of Grey's Anatomy that I have absolutely no recollection
(06:16):
of at all. Oh, I thought you were gonna say
the opposite. Uh uh, Well, I mean sometimes it's stuff
that I do remember vividly, but like so much stuff
that I have no recollection of at all whatsoever. And
I've seen every episode of that show so it's like,
I know I saw this episode, but I don't remember
that there was one about a person with toxic blood
(06:37):
and everybody passed out in the or this totally forgot
had did not ring any kind of bell. I think
I might sadly be the opposite. One of my friends
offhandedly mentioned while we were at dinner the other night
an episode, an older episode of Bob's Burgers, and I
was just like, right, because then this and this happened.
(06:57):
I could see where that And she was just like,
when was the last time you watched this episode. I'm like,
I don't know, but you've seen it more than once
I have. I also have fly paper in my brain.
If it relates to like Bob's Burger's, older episodes of
the Simpsons, you know certain I mean Star Wars, obviously,
(07:19):
certain Disney things like there are definitely things where I'm like,
I have no no valid reason to have retained this
information for so long yet I don't know where my
keys are or how old my father is. Like, yes,
so anyway, that's everyone's update about our memories. Uh yeah,
(07:42):
this episode was very sad, as many of the shipwrecks,
but not all of them are Hey, sorry that we
started out dark, but then we got to talk about
(08:02):
Mary Summerville, who I think is a delight Yeah. We
often but not all the time. We record two episodes
a week, and those are the two episodes that come
out on a week together. Yeah, this is not the case.
That was not the case this time, and we had
recorded a recording session that was just sadness all the
(08:23):
way through, and those episodes did not come out in
the same week Monday and Wednesday. But like we were
sort of talking about how there needed to be something
a little lighter. Yeah, yeah, And I actually had not
intended for Mary to be that thing. M M. But
(08:46):
I was kind of bottoming out on the other thing
I wanted to do because I felt like I need
more time for that one, because there's a book I
want to order and like, you know, all of that stuff.
And then I stumbled across Mary, not on my primary
list but on another one that I had hand scribbled
in a book while I was looking for other stuff,
and I was like, wait, let me revisit this, and
(09:06):
I was like, I love her, so she's perfect. Her
memoir is a really, really delightful read. It is notated
a lot with her daughter Martha's work where her she
won't talk like she doesn't talk, as we said in
the episode, that much about her husband's death. But then
(09:29):
Martha notes like, of course my mother was bereft, and
like it's more evident when you see the letters that
other people wrote her, saying like I know your world
has just fallen apart. Essentially, yeah, please know we all
love you and we're thinking of you. But she I
mean it came up also when she mentioned the passing
of their other daughter, that she didn't ever seem to
(09:51):
hover on that stuff. She would just say it and
be done and move on. And I think that was
probably part of how she mentally compartmentalized that while she
was doing other things. Sure, I'm not going to wallow
in this moment. I'm going to acknowledge it and move
to the next thing. Her writing, she mentioned in her
writing towards the end that she didn't like to sleep
(10:14):
by herself ever, and this is something that she wrote
about in various points during her life, and she wrote
about it so poignantly from the point of view of childhood.
That's the first time she remembered really being upset by
the idea. And I want to read this passage because
(10:35):
it's really like the best description of what that feels
like when you're a scared kid in a not scary way,
because it has distance on it. So I'm going to
read this passage, which is quote, children suffer much misery
by being left alone in the dark. When I was
very young, I was sent to bed at eight or
nine o'clock, and the maid who slept in the room
(10:56):
went away as soon as I was in bed, leaving
me in the dark till she came to bed herself.
All that time I was in an agony of fear
of something indefinite. I could not tell what. The joy
the relief when the maid came back were such that
I instantly fell asleep. Now that I am a widow
and old, although I always have a night lamp, such
(11:17):
is the power of early impressions that I rejoice when
daylight comes, which is just such a I'm like, oh,
I know this, I know all of this. Like I'm
that kid that had night terror. So I'm like, I
have the same thing, like when I can't sleep, daylight
breaks and I conquered out. I'm one of those people.
I'm like, Mary, I feel you. I really love the
(11:41):
idea that she was. We mentioned on an episode we
did recently that there are autodidacts who become experts in
their field, and she is such a strong example of that,
where she's said, oh, no, I get it, I figured
it all out. I love It's easy to think, in
our hubris of the modern era that one, like people
(12:04):
doing science in the past were much simpler in their
understanding than we are. And it's one of the reasons
that I wanted to include that longish excerpt from her
paper about how she did her needle magnetism experiment, because
she's so clear about everything she's doing and it is
(12:27):
not simple stuff, even though it's like the components of
it are simple, but her like talking about no, we managed,
like with the prism, to continually move the needles so
that the end only stayed in the violet light. And
that's like, I love all of it. I love the
way she talks about science. She's like the precursor to
Bill Nye and demystifying science. She's amazing well, and like
(12:50):
being a science communicator is a specific set of skills
that has overlapped with being a scientist. But like not all,
not all scientists are great science communicators for sure. Uh So, Yeah,
I don't know if we have ever talked about somebody
(13:12):
on the show that like I would have categorized specifically
as a science communicator. Yeah, which I love because there
are some science communicators in my life who are dear
to me that I love what they do and how
they do it. And so having this sort of historical
counterpart going back earlier than a time that I think
(13:32):
I've really thought about science communicators, it's great. Speaking of
which there is a thing that I have seen people
bickering about in various corners of the Internet where sometimes
she will see a little factoid about her that says
she is the reason the word scientist was coined, which
(13:54):
isn't entirely accurate. It gets misconstrued a little bit because
it was coined in a review of her work that
included some other stuff that was written by William wool
who we talked about briefly, where he's kind of it's
(14:16):
it's prompted by her work, but it's a lot of
people are like because you know, there was no gender
neutral way to talk about somebody who did science, and
that's that would sound great and it's a cool thing
to think about, but that's not really what happened. And
so it's kind of a false description of what was
(14:39):
actually going on because he was really like, we don't
have He wasn't so much separating it as like by sexes.
He was like, we just don't have a good word
for a person who does science. You know, we know
what a mathematician is, and we know what a chemist is,
and we know what a a naturalist is, and we
know what an artist is, but we just we need
we need a word. And so that's the first reference
(15:04):
in writing the word scientist that we know of. But
it's not quite the feminist effort that sometimes people want
to make it. It's still very cool, but just not
quite accurate. So we only touched on a few of
the people that she knew, but she knew everybody. She
(15:24):
knew the Brownings. She tells a very funny story in
her book about the first time she met Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning kind of ignored her, and
then she meets them later again in Italy and she's like,
she's a completely different person. I love her now, look's
I don't know what was going on at that earlier event,
but now she's great funny. She also knew Joanna Bailey,
(15:46):
who we talked about recently on the show, for her
writing and the confusion about her initial anonymous work. She
knew everybody everywhere she traveled. She met the scientists in
that area. Everybody wanted to meet her. Everyone wanted to
know her. She sounds like she was a very good hostess.
People loved to drop by her house, and she and
(16:08):
William were, uncharacteristically for the time, casual about people just
stopping by. You did not have to send notice ahead
of time. You could just pop in and they would
be like, all right, let's put out a spread and
we'll talk about science and have some cognak or whatever.
I don't know that they had cognak. I'm just throwing
that in. But her life sounds so great, like the
(16:30):
way she lived her life. I mean, the good fortune
to have a pension that basically sets you up for
life based on your pretty early work, and to be
able to cultivate that life that you want. The one
thing that I kept thinking while reading her memoir, though,
the thing that I would struggle with in her life
(16:50):
is the constant bouncing around. Yeah, like I need a nest.
I need a nest feathered with my weird stuff. I
need my sewing room, I need my perhaps an indicator
of my own problems. But they would just live in
a different place every couple of months, And that sort
of nomadic lifestyle to me sounds like I would feel weird.
(17:13):
But I think her home was in books, so she
didn't care. She could carry them. But yeah, it's just
it's always like And then we moved to Florence for
a minute, and then we were back in Rome, and
then we decided we'd go to Sweden and hang out
for a while and then and they had two daughters
with them through most of that, which is extra wild,
but that seemed to be the way their family worked,
(17:34):
and they all seemed very happy and close. So yeah, yeah,
could not could not fathom it. I now that I
have done this research, I really want there to be
a movie about her, like a good one, though you don't.
You don't need to make it dramatic anymore so than
(17:56):
it is. You just make it a cool movie about
a lady doing cool things, hanging out till she's ninety two.
She's still doing her science Yeah. I love everything about that.
I love it. I love the idea that she's like, well,
you know, I read. I read math in bed for
four hours when I wake up, and then I go
do my writing elsewhere, and then I walk around the
town and then I have supper. Great. That does sound
(18:21):
great living the dream Mary Summerville. So I'm very glad
we got to talk about her this week. I hope
that if this is your weekend coming up, where you
have actual time off, maybe you sit in bed for
four hours doing whatever you want, watching TV, reading books,
you like, petting a cat or a dog, just hanging
out being happy if you can. If you don't have
(18:43):
time off and you don't have the luxury of several
hours to sit in bed, I hope that you still
have a great time this weekend. We will be right
back here tomorrow with a classic and then on Monday
with a brand new episode. If you missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(19:05):
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. We talked about the Empress of
Ireland this week, a particularly sad shipwreck story of It's
(00:24):
a dark week for stuff you missed in History Class.
This dark dark week, we just minutes ago recorded the
behind the scenes for our other gruesome murder episode of
the week. And when I knew this was a sad shipwreck,
something about it just being everyone drowned in the cold
(00:44):
in the dark, I was like, this is extra sad,
and that is one reason why I did not put
a sad cat story. There's two reasons why I did
not include the sad cat story in this episode. One
is I found it in one source and I was like,
(01:04):
is this real? And the other was it just was
too sad. So I'm going to give the sad cat story, okay,
but then I'm gonna follow it with a funny cat
story that sounds great. So sad cat story is that
in this one account that I read, the ship's cat
was named Emmy, and Emmy jumped off the boat in
Quebec City, and somebody found Emmy and brought her back,
(01:28):
and Emmy left again but left her kittens on board
and right, and the ship left without her. And later
people were like, this was a terrible omen does seem
that way? And I was like, that is so sad
(01:50):
on this already very sad episode. And also I found
like this I couldn't find confirmation of it. I mean,
if there are lots and lots of survivor testimonies that
you can read, like first hand accounts, stories that people
have submitted of like their relatives who were on board,
things like that, I just I wasn't able to confirm that.
(02:12):
So the sadness plus not being able to confirm it
here is the funny cat story. My cats don't get
on the keyboard that much. But in this case, Opel
has a contribution to this episode that I am going
to read to everyone. The Empress of Ireland left Liverpool
(02:34):
for a routine trip across the Atlantic on May fifteenth,
nineteen one hoo. For that is what Opel would like
everyone to now. Yeah, also likes to add a little
now and again to episodes, and I try to correct them,
but sometimes letters that I don't think I even did
(02:59):
it entirely just this. It stretches the whole width of
my screen. Another thing, As I was putting together Saturday
Classics for upcoming episodes of Saturday Classics, I realize we
have another episode we have already done on the ss Arctic.
That episode came out January fifteenth, twenty fourteen, so that
(03:20):
may sound familiar to longtime listeners of the show or
people who've been working their way through the whole back catalog. Holly,
I think he wrote that episode. I had no recollection
of it existing. It is very similar in terms of
ship's colliding and a lot of people then not surviving
(03:41):
the wreck, but it was not a case where the
ship sank so quickly. It wasn't. That was a case
where the ship took a while to think, but the
evacuation was chaos. And I did not pick that as
a Saturday Classic because I was like, no, this is
too much, too much sad to have another to follow,
(04:03):
right to follow this with a separate sad thing about
the same general topic. I'm really glad you did not
include the cat story because I think we all know
I'm not emotionally tall enough to ride that ride. Yeah,
had we actually had to talk about it in depth.
I don't really remember much about that other episode either.
(04:25):
I mean I didn't. I didn't remember it at all.
I literally was going through the list of old episodes
and was kind of like, ss Arctic, what was that about?
Is that something we should run as? And then I
read the synopsis and I was like, did I write this?
And then I listened to the first five seconds. I
think we've said this little inside baseball moment before. Whoever
talks first in the episode wrote it? Yeah, I can't
(04:48):
think of any exceptions we've had to that. I don't
think so, but yeah, you talk first on that. One
says like, I guess I didn't write that, this thing
that I have no recollection of from almost a decade ago. Yeah,
it's a long time. And we have said this before too,
like we don't retain everything. No, we really don't. And
I whole episodes. I have sometimes felt bad when someone,
(05:10):
like in a live show or an event, will ask
a question about an episode that's like five years old,
and I'm like, I don't know. I'm not from your country,
I don't know your ways, and I just kind of
run away and hide. Yeah, I I the brain something
stick forever. Yeah, some fly away into the night. And
(05:33):
like Tracy, I think we've both had that moment of like,
did I write them? I wrote this? I don't remember,
yes at all. I've definitely had whole episodes that I
wrote and I don't remember. And I for a long
time I thought this was just the nature of our jobs,
that you know, we are writing a new episode every
week and and like we have to mentally move on
to the next thing. That's the only way that it works.
(05:55):
But for some reason, the TikTok algorithm has decided that
what I want to see when I look at TikTok
is clips from old episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I think
I watched one of these once and TikTok was like,
all right, this is what you want for the rest
of your life. And it has showed me so many
clips of Grey's Anatomy that I have absolutely no recollection
(06:16):
of at all. Oh, I thought you were gonna say
the opposite. Uh uh, Well, I mean sometimes it's stuff
that I do remember vividly, but like so much stuff
that I have no recollection of at all whatsoever. And
I've seen every episode of that show so it's like,
I know I saw this episode, but I don't remember
that there was one about a person with toxic blood
(06:37):
and everybody passed out in the or this totally forgot
had did not ring any kind of bell. I think
I might sadly be the opposite. One of my friends
offhandedly mentioned while we were at dinner the other night
an episode, an older episode of Bob's Burgers, and I
was just like, right, because then this and this happened.
(06:57):
I could see where that And she was just like,
when was the last time you watched this episode. I'm like,
I don't know, but you've seen it more than once
I have. I also have fly paper in my brain.
If it relates to like Bob's Burger's, older episodes of
the Simpsons, you know certain I mean Star Wars, obviously,
(07:19):
certain Disney things like there are definitely things where I'm like,
I have no no valid reason to have retained this
information for so long yet I don't know where my
keys are or how old my father is. Like, yes,
so anyway, that's everyone's update about our memories. Uh yeah,
(07:42):
this episode was very sad, as many of the shipwrecks,
but not all of them are Hey, sorry that we
started out dark, but then we got to talk about
(08:02):
Mary Summerville, who I think is a delight Yeah. We
often but not all the time. We record two episodes
a week, and those are the two episodes that come
out on a week together. Yeah, this is not the case.
That was not the case this time, and we had
recorded a recording session that was just sadness all the
(08:23):
way through, and those episodes did not come out in
the same week Monday and Wednesday. But like we were
sort of talking about how there needed to be something
a little lighter. Yeah, yeah, And I actually had not
intended for Mary to be that thing. M M. But
(08:46):
I was kind of bottoming out on the other thing
I wanted to do because I felt like I need
more time for that one, because there's a book I
want to order and like, you know, all of that stuff.
And then I stumbled across Mary, not on my primary
list but on another one that I had hand scribbled
in a book while I was looking for other stuff,
and I was like, wait, let me revisit this, and
(09:06):
I was like, I love her, so she's perfect. Her
memoir is a really, really delightful read. It is notated
a lot with her daughter Martha's work where her she
won't talk like she doesn't talk, as we said in
the episode, that much about her husband's death. But then
(09:29):
Martha notes like, of course my mother was bereft, and
like it's more evident when you see the letters that
other people wrote her, saying like I know your world
has just fallen apart. Essentially, yeah, please know we all
love you and we're thinking of you. But she I
mean it came up also when she mentioned the passing
of their other daughter, that she didn't ever seem to
(09:51):
hover on that stuff. She would just say it and
be done and move on. And I think that was
probably part of how she mentally compartmentalized that while she
was doing other things. Sure, I'm not going to wallow
in this moment. I'm going to acknowledge it and move
to the next thing. Her writing, she mentioned in her
writing towards the end that she didn't like to sleep
(10:14):
by herself ever, and this is something that she wrote
about in various points during her life, and she wrote
about it so poignantly from the point of view of childhood.
That's the first time she remembered really being upset by
the idea. And I want to read this passage because
(10:35):
it's really like the best description of what that feels
like when you're a scared kid in a not scary way,
because it has distance on it. So I'm going to
read this passage, which is quote, children suffer much misery
by being left alone in the dark. When I was
very young, I was sent to bed at eight or
nine o'clock, and the maid who slept in the room
(10:56):
went away as soon as I was in bed, leaving
me in the dark till she came to bed herself.
All that time I was in an agony of fear
of something indefinite. I could not tell what. The joy
the relief when the maid came back were such that
I instantly fell asleep. Now that I am a widow
and old, although I always have a night lamp, such
(11:17):
is the power of early impressions that I rejoice when
daylight comes, which is just such a I'm like, oh,
I know this, I know all of this. Like I'm
that kid that had night terror. So I'm like, I
have the same thing, like when I can't sleep, daylight
breaks and I conquered out. I'm one of those people.
I'm like, Mary, I feel you. I really love the
(11:41):
idea that she was. We mentioned on an episode we
did recently that there are autodidacts who become experts in
their field, and she is such a strong example of that,
where she's said, oh, no, I get it, I figured
it all out. I love It's easy to think, in
our hubris of the modern era that one, like people
(12:04):
doing science in the past were much simpler in their
understanding than we are. And it's one of the reasons
that I wanted to include that longish excerpt from her
paper about how she did her needle magnetism experiment, because
she's so clear about everything she's doing and it is
(12:27):
not simple stuff, even though it's like the components of
it are simple, but her like talking about no, we managed,
like with the prism, to continually move the needles so
that the end only stayed in the violet light. And
that's like, I love all of it. I love the
way she talks about science. She's like the precursor to
Bill Nye and demystifying science. She's amazing well, and like
(12:50):
being a science communicator is a specific set of skills
that has overlapped with being a scientist. But like not all,
not all scientists are great science communicators for sure. Uh So, Yeah,
I don't know if we have ever talked about somebody
(13:12):
on the show that like I would have categorized specifically
as a science communicator. Yeah, which I love because there
are some science communicators in my life who are dear
to me that I love what they do and how
they do it. And so having this sort of historical
counterpart going back earlier than a time that I think
(13:32):
I've really thought about science communicators, it's great. Speaking of
which there is a thing that I have seen people
bickering about in various corners of the Internet where sometimes
she will see a little factoid about her that says
she is the reason the word scientist was coined, which
(13:54):
isn't entirely accurate. It gets misconstrued a little bit because
it was coined in a review of her work that
included some other stuff that was written by William wool
who we talked about briefly, where he's kind of it's
(14:16):
it's prompted by her work, but it's a lot of
people are like because you know, there was no gender
neutral way to talk about somebody who did science, and
that's that would sound great and it's a cool thing
to think about, but that's not really what happened. And
so it's kind of a false description of what was
(14:39):
actually going on because he was really like, we don't
have He wasn't so much separating it as like by sexes.
He was like, we just don't have a good word
for a person who does science. You know, we know
what a mathematician is, and we know what a chemist is,
and we know what a a naturalist is, and we
know what an artist is, but we just we need
we need a word. And so that's the first reference
(15:04):
in writing the word scientist that we know of. But
it's not quite the feminist effort that sometimes people want
to make it. It's still very cool, but just not
quite accurate. So we only touched on a few of
the people that she knew, but she knew everybody. She
(15:24):
knew the Brownings. She tells a very funny story in
her book about the first time she met Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning kind of ignored her, and
then she meets them later again in Italy and she's like,
she's a completely different person. I love her now, look's
I don't know what was going on at that earlier event,
but now she's great funny. She also knew Joanna Bailey,
(15:46):
who we talked about recently on the show, for her
writing and the confusion about her initial anonymous work. She
knew everybody everywhere she traveled. She met the scientists in
that area. Everybody wanted to meet her. Everyone wanted to
know her. She sounds like she was a very good hostess.
People loved to drop by her house, and she and
(16:08):
William were, uncharacteristically for the time, casual about people just
stopping by. You did not have to send notice ahead
of time. You could just pop in and they would
be like, all right, let's put out a spread and
we'll talk about science and have some cognak or whatever.
I don't know that they had cognak. I'm just throwing
that in. But her life sounds so great, like the
(16:30):
way she lived her life. I mean, the good fortune
to have a pension that basically sets you up for
life based on your pretty early work, and to be
able to cultivate that life that you want. The one
thing that I kept thinking while reading her memoir, though,
the thing that I would struggle with in her life
(16:50):
is the constant bouncing around. Yeah, like I need a nest.
I need a nest feathered with my weird stuff. I
need my sewing room, I need my perhaps an indicator
of my own problems. But they would just live in
a different place every couple of months, And that sort
of nomadic lifestyle to me sounds like I would feel weird.
(17:13):
But I think her home was in books, so she
didn't care. She could carry them. But yeah, it's just
it's always like And then we moved to Florence for
a minute, and then we were back in Rome, and
then we decided we'd go to Sweden and hang out
for a while and then and they had two daughters
with them through most of that, which is extra wild,
but that seemed to be the way their family worked,
(17:34):
and they all seemed very happy and close. So yeah, yeah,
could not could not fathom it. I now that I
have done this research, I really want there to be
a movie about her, like a good one, though you don't.
You don't need to make it dramatic anymore so than
(17:56):
it is. You just make it a cool movie about
a lady doing cool things, hanging out till she's ninety two.
She's still doing her science Yeah. I love everything about that.
I love it. I love the idea that she's like, well,
you know, I read. I read math in bed for
four hours when I wake up, and then I go
do my writing elsewhere, and then I walk around the
town and then I have supper. Great. That does sound
(18:21):
great living the dream Mary Summerville. So I'm very glad
we got to talk about her this week. I hope
that if this is your weekend coming up, where you
have actual time off, maybe you sit in bed for
four hours doing whatever you want, watching TV, reading books,
you like, petting a cat or a dog, just hanging
out being happy if you can. If you don't have
(18:43):
time off and you don't have the luxury of several
hours to sit in bed, I hope that you still
have a great time this weekend. We will be right
back here tomorrow with a classic and then on Monday
with a brand new episode. If you missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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