June 1, 2026 • 36 mins
Viola Roseboro’ isn’t well-known today, but she played a big behind-the-scenes role in the careers of a lot of American writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, shaping what’s thought of as the American literary canon.
Research:
- “4 New Features.” Washington D.C. Evening Star. 4/29/2013. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045462/1913-04-29/ed-1/?sp=10&r=-0.115,-0.055,1.648,0.596,0
- Dykeman, Wilma. “Tennessee Women: An Infinite Variety.” Newport. Wakestone Books. 1993.
- Gorton, Stephanie. “The Strange, Forgotten Life of Viola Roseboro’.” The Paris Review. 2/24/2020. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/02/24/the-strange-forgotten-life-of-viola-roseboro/
- Gregorie, Anne King. “Reviewed Work(s): Viola, The Duchess of New Dorp: A Biography of Viola Roseboro by Jane Kirkland Graham.” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Apr., 1956). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27566059
- Howell, Isabel. “Reviewed Work(s): Viola, the Duchess of New Dorp, a Biography of Viola Roseboro' by Jane Kirkland Graham.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, December, 1956. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42621315
- McClure, S. S. “My Autobiography.” London: J. Murray. 1914. https://archive.org/details/myautobiography00mcclrich/
- New York Times. “VIOLA ROSEBORO', FICTION EDITOR, 87; Former McClure's, Collier's Executive Dies--Helped O. Henry Get Start Bought Tarkington Stories Praised by Will Irwin.” 1/30/1945. https://www.nytimes.com/1945/01/30/archives/viola-roseboro-fiction-editor-87-former-mcclures-colliers-executive.html
- Osborn, Scott C. “Reviewed Work(s): Viola, The Duchess of New Dorp: A Biography of Viola Roseboro by Jane Kirkland Graham.” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (May, 1956). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2954261
- “Person Annotations.” From “#0088: Transcription of Letter from Willa Cather to Viola Roseboro', June 14 [1903].” The Complete Letters of Willa Cather. Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. https://cather.unl.edu/writings/letters/let0088#ref001
- Robinson, Phyllis C. “Willa: The Life of Willa Cather.” New York. Doubleday. 1983.
- Roseboro, Viola. “Begging as an Avocation.” New York World. 12/11/1887. Via New York University “Undercover Reporting.” https://undercover.hosting.nyu.edu/s/undercover-reporting/item/13733
- A. W.. “Reviewed Work(s): Viola, the Duchess of New Dorp. A Biography of Viola Roseboro' by Jane Kirkland Graham.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908-1984), Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring,1956). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40189490
- Schmalhofer, Stephen. “The Making of My Ántonia.” First Things. 12/17/2018. https://firstthings.com/the-making-of-my-ntonia/
- Schmalhofer, Stephen. “Viola Roseboro’s literary garden.” The New Criterion. 12/12/2018. https://newcriterion.com/dispatch/viola-roseboros-literary-garden-10164/
- Skaggs, Merrill M. “Viola Roseboro': A Prototype for Cather's ‘My Mortal Enemy’.” The Mississippi Quarterly , Winter 2000-01, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Winter 2000-01). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26476820
- Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. “Willa Cather's New York: New Essays on Cather in the City.” Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 2000.
- Tarbell, Ida M. “All In The Day S Work An Autobiography.” The Macmillan Company. 1939. https://archive.org/details/allinthedayswork010810mbp/
- The Georgia Historical Quarterly. “Reviewed Work(s): Viola, The Duchess of Nenx Dorp. A Biography of Viola Roseboro'. Two volumes in one by Jane Kirkland Graham.” Vol. 40, No. 2 (June, 1956). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40577676
- Adkins, Gilbert R. “Two Daughters of Tennessee.” Franklin County Historical Review. 1986: XVII:1, 30-42.
- Johanningsmeier, Charles. “Unmasking Willa Cather's ‘Mortal Enemy.’” Cather Studies. Vol. 5. https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/5/cs005.johanningsmeier
- Williams, Jay. “Author Under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London, 1893-1902.” University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Project MUSE. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/35026.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Fryn. When I was working on our
episode about Elizabeth Bisland back in March, I stumbled across
the name Vila Roseboro, and that last name was spelled
ro se bo R with an apostrophe at the end
and then nothing after the apostrophe. That's not something that
(00:36):
happens in English language names very much, unless it's a
name that ends in an S, and that apostrophe is
making it possessive. So I wondered who this person was
and why her name was spelled that way, and my
cursory look into it landed her on the shortlist. Villa
Roseboro is not well known today, but she played a
(00:58):
big behind the scenes role in the careers of a
lot of American writers in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, including several writers who continued to be staples
in English and English literature classes in the United States.
By extension, she helped shape what is thought of as
the American literary canon. Viola Roseboro was born on December third,
(01:21):
eighteen fifty seven in Pulaski, Tennessee. That's in the south
central part of the state, roughly fifteen miles from the
border with Alabama. Pulaski is named for Casimir Pulaski, a
Polish soldier who fought in the American Revolutionary War. Tracy
has had him on her shortlist for quite a while.
Viola was the only surviving child of the Reverend Samuel
(01:44):
Reid Roseboro known as Reed, and Martha Collier Roseboro, who
after their marriage, insisted that she was Missus Martha Coliar Roseboro,
not Missus Samuel Reid Roseboro. Yeah. I also read an
account that said that she refused to have the part
about obey in their marriage vows. She seems like she
(02:07):
had very solid opinions. The Roseboros were abolitionists, and that
put them at odds with a lot of their neighbors.
Pulaski is also where the original Ku Klux Klan was founded,
and it put them at odds with some of their
family members. This was a factor and their moving to
Missouri when Viola was only a baby. From there, they
(02:27):
moved to Illinois, and that's where they were when the
Civil War started. When Viola was four, Viola's father became
a chaplain in an Illinois regiment of the US Army,
and his parents disowned him for that. While Reid was
in the army, Martha supported herself and her daughter by
teaching sewing and working at a hotel.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
The Civil War ended when Viola was seven, Martha took
her back to Tennessee and visited her family while they
waited for Reed to be discharged from the army. He
joined her in Tennessee, but before more long they went
back to Missouri after he got a position as a
minister at a Congregationalist church there After they moved, Martha
(03:08):
invested some of the money that she had saved during
the war in a small farm. When that farm started
to struggle, that took the family finances with it, and
she took Fila to Tennessee to get the advice of
her brother, Arthur Saint Clair Collier. He was a Democrat
and had been a slaveholder before the Civil War, and
(03:29):
she found him embroiled in an effort to unseat Augustus E.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Alden, who was the radical Republican mayor of Nashville. Martha
and her brother were really on opposite sides politically, and
he seems to have thought that associating with his abolitionist's
sister would damage his reputation and any attempt that he
might make to run for office. So Martha wound up
going back to Missouri without getting a lot of help
(03:55):
from him. Back in Missouri, Reed had some kind oft
with some of the more influential members of his church congregation,
and by the time Martha returned, it had started to
seem like they would need to move again. Martha really
loved the area of Tennessee where she had grown up
and thought she had gotten an exceptional education there and
(04:17):
that's what she wanted for her daughter. So when she
was offered a job at a school in Shelbyville, she
went with Viola while Reid stayed behind in Missouri. But
this didn't last long either. While Martha was waiting for
the school year to start, she talked about a plan
to spend her free time teaching black children to read.
(04:37):
That was something else that threatened her brother's political aspirations.
Then she started trying to integrate the schools in Shelbyville,
and that led to her being branded Meddlesome Mattie. She
wound up taking Viola back to Missouri, but the family
was not reunited there for very long. Reed went to
work in Nevada and then to California. Several years passed,
(05:02):
and in eighteen seventy four, when Viola was sixteen, her
mother took her back to Tennessee again so she could
attend Fairmount College, which is a private women's college. Her
father eventually got a job at a church in Tennessee,
although not close enough to the college for them to
all live together. While she was in college, Fiola developed
(05:23):
an interest in performing, starting out with giving dramatic readings.
A write up in the Winchester, Tennessee Home Journal describes
a night of entertainment that was arranged for Carrick Academy,
which was a boys' school, that rite up ends quote
we regret not getting there in time to hear the
beautiful and intelligent Miss Roseboro, who never fails to deserve
(05:45):
and illicit applause. By late eighteen seventy eight, Viola had
gone beyond doing recitations at schools and was performing in public,
including traveling to other states to do so. Eventually, she
rolled in theater classes in Cincinnati, Ohio, when it quickly
became clear that her parents did not have the money
(06:07):
to pay for these classes, she started writing articles for
her uncle's newspaper, The Daily American, which was headquartered in Nashville.
She made her acting debut, now in a staged play
rather than a recitation or reading, in Nashville in May
of eighteen seventy nine. Over the next few years, Roseboro
(06:27):
tried to earn a living by both freelance writing and performing.
Her parents really did not approve of this, especially the
performing part, and it raised some questions among her father's
church congregations. They did not think this was an appropriate
career path for their minister's daughter. At the same time,
her father was always on the lookout for positions at
(06:49):
churches that would allow them to be closer to her,
so Martha continued to move around with him as he
tried to just stay near their daughter. Allegedly, this combined
career of writing and performing is where Roseborow's unusual name
spelling came from. She used the name Roseboro with the
ending ough for the stage, while the shorter Roseboro ending
(07:13):
in the o Apostrophe was for her published work.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
It does seem like later in her life she insisted
on that apostrophe spelling, but her name appears with and
without those last three letters in various publications and documents
across the whole course.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Of her life.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Sometimes there's an assumption that the original spelling of her
name was the longer one, but her father's name also
appears as Roseboro minus that ugh at the end and
with no final apostrophe, and a lot of official records,
including his marriage license and his entry in the death
index from the New York State Department of Health. Vila
(07:53):
and her parents are all buried at Clifton Springs Village
Cemetery in New York, and their markers all ye she
used that same shorter spelling, although with no apostrophe, but
it's hard to draw a conclusion from that since we
don't really know who made the arrangements for those engravings
on their markers.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
To return to Viola for a while, she moved to
Nashville to work for her uncle's newspaper. She was also
in theatrical touring companies, with starring roles in at least
two melodramas, one called Two Orphans, which was set during
the French Revolution, and another called The Lights of London.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
In eighteen eighty two, Roseboro moved to New York City,
and she continued to divide her time between writing and performing.
But in eighteen eighty seven, when she was about thirty,
she developed pneumonia. There are references to Roseboro being sick
a lot in her own letters and in the accounts
of people who knew her, and she also had trouble
with her eyesight. This bout of pneumonia put an end
(08:54):
to her time on stage, possibly because it affected her voice.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
From this point on, Deola Roseborow's career was a literary one.
We'll talk more about that after a sponsor break.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
From eighteen eighty seven until about eighteen ninety three, Villa
Roseboro made a living as a freelance writer, selling stories
and essays to publications like The Cosmopolitan and The Century Magazine.
She also did some of the kind of stunt journalism
that we talked about in our episode on Elizabeth Bisland
and past hosts episode on Nellie Bly. For example, she
(09:38):
published an article in the New York World on December eleventh,
eighteen eighty seven, titled Begging as an Avocation. An adventurous
woman goes out asking for alms in the street. It's
probably unsurprising based on that title that this article came
off as cluelessly insensitive. It starts with a discuss of
(10:00):
how hard it is to find appropriately ragged clothes to
pretend to be a beggar. Later on, she talks about
how every time anyone gave her anything, she would immediately
jam it into her pocket, and quote to possess a
pocket seemed indicative of fraud. A couple of people were
kind to her, but many just ignored her, and only
(10:21):
women seemed to be willing to give her money. She
wound up with sixty three cents. Unfortunately, I'm not sure
what she did with that money, because the one scan
I was able to find of this article is completely
illegible at the bottom. So she wrote that she was
going to give this money to charity, but then the
text becomes completely unreadable as she's sort of overthinking whether
(10:45):
any of the people who gave it to her might
be opposed to churches, or might be Protestant or Catholic,
or might just hate institutional charities. Rosebrow's first book, a
collection of stories called Old Ways and New came out
in eighteen ninety two, and it included work that had
originally been published in Century magazine.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
She dedicated this book to her mother, quote my earliest
and still my best companion in the blessed world of letters.
This was in spite of increasing tension between the two women.
They were both proud and stubborn.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Viola has been described as arrogant, and Martha was apparently
prone to clipping out Viola's published articles, writing corrections on them,
and then sending those corrections to her. Martha Roseborow died
of cancer the year after the book came out and read.
Roseborrow died in eighteen ninety two. By that point, Samuel
(11:41):
Sidney McClure had hired Rosebrow as a reader. That happened
in eighteen ninety three. This started with a writing contest.
McClure realized he had way too many manuscripts from those
contest entries for him to read just by himself, and
he brought Roseburrow on because he already knew her. From there,
(12:02):
she started working for McClure's magazine and for his other
publishing ventures. McClure wrote of her in his autobiography, quote,
Miss Roseborow was of great service to the magazine in
discovering promising material by unknown writers. She had a singularly
open mind toward the manuscript bag, a natural attitude towards stories,
(12:23):
which is rare in professional readers, who, like everybody else
in time, become the victims of their own tastes and
their own successes, and are therefore always hunting for the
thing they themselves like best, instead of for the thing
that new writers are writing best. Miss Roseborow seized upon
the early stories of O Henry, Jack London, Rex Beach,
(12:47):
Myra Kelly, and the Emmy lu Stories when their writers
were unknown, with as much shortness and conviction as if
she had known what the end was to be in
each case, and exactly how popular each of these writers
was to become. Ida Tarbell's work at McClure's magazine overlapped
with Roseborow's. We talked about Tarbell and her expozea Standard Oil,
(13:11):
which was published in McClure's in a two part episode
in November of twenty twenty one. Tarbell and Roseborow were friends,
and Tarbell had similar things to say about her in
her own autobiography. Quote by good fortune McClure's in this
period happened on a reader of real genius. Viola Roseboro,
the only born reader I have ever known. I found
(13:34):
her in the office after one of my frequent jaunts
after material. It was as a talker that I first
learned to admire and love her. Her judgments were unfettered,
her emotions strong and warm, her expressions free, glowing, stirring,
and she loved to talk, though only when she felt
sympathy and understanding. She loved to share books, of which
(13:55):
she read many, particularly in the biographical field. She wanted
none the best, no imitation, no mere fact finding. Her
eagerness to let no good things slip. Her consciousness of
the all too little time a human being has in
this world to explore its riches, made her rigid in
her choice, an unsleeping eagerness to find talent and give
(14:18):
it a chance. And secondarily, she said to enrich the
magazine made every day's work with the unsifted manuscripts and adventure.
If she found exceptional merit that was also suited to McClure's,
she might weep with excitement. And she stood to it
till faith grew in those less sure of the untried.
(14:38):
We've talked about McClure, and that magazine more in the
context of muckraking journalism, but the magazine also developed a
reputation for publishing very high quality fiction, and a.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Lot of that credit goes to Roseboro.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
She was the first person to read every fiction manuscript
that arrived at the magazine. Her cultivating of unknown talent
included people like William Sidney Porter, who published most of
his work under the pen name O.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Henry.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Roseborrow started corresponding with Porter while he was in prison
for embezzlement and offered him or feedback over the course
of about two years. Finally, she purchased his story Whistling
Dick's Christmas Stocking in eighteen ninety nine, and that was
the first story that he ever published under that pen name.
We did an episode on Oh Henry that came out
(15:26):
on December twenty first of twenty twenty. According to Ida Tarbell,
when Rosebrow first read a submission from Booth Tarkington, she
went into S. S. McClure's office in tears, exclaiming, quote,
here is a serial sent by God Almighty for McClure's magazine.
That serial was Tarkington's first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana,
(15:48):
which was published starting in May of eighteen ninety nine.
The Gentleman from Indiana was later published as a book
and became a best seller for McClure and Tarkington went
on to be one of only four writers to earn
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice. The other three in
that group are William Faugner Near Dear to My Heart,
John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. A lot of sources credit
(16:11):
Rosebrow with discovering Jack London, who's most well known for
books like Call of the Wild and White Fang in
the short story to Build a Fire.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Rosebrow did accept some of his.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Early stories for McClure's and McClure commissioned London's first novel,
A Daughter of the Snows, but Jack London's work was
already appearing in other publications, including Overland Monthly, which published
really a pile of his stories before anything appeared in
McClure's s s. McClure's interest in Jack London started after
(16:45):
he read a piece that had been published in the
Atlantic Monthly, and that was a piece that Roseboro had
read and rejected. She had also rejected other early submissions
of London's although some of those rejections also included her
very thoughtful feedback and advice about how to improve the
stories structurally. Mcluur's magazine did play a role in London's
(17:09):
early career, and an important role, but it just it
doesn't seem like Roseberg really pulled him out of the
slush pile, even though McClure himself made it seem that
way in his autobiography. Roseburrow definitely played a role in
the literary career of Willa Cather. McClure published Cather's first
volume of short stories, The Troll Garden, in nineteen oh five,
(17:31):
and Rosebrow's influence included helping to decide which stories to include.
Later on, Cather went through rounds of rejections on her
nineteen eighteen novel My Antonia. She finally sent it to Rosebrow,
who read it and told her she'd written the whole
thing through the point of view of the wrong character,
that it needed to come from the perspective of Jim Burden.
(17:54):
Cather rewrote it, and today My Antonia is considered to
be her first masterpiece. Later on, she earned a Pulitzer
Prize for her novel One of Ours, Roseburrow was sixteen
years older than Cather and had been working for McClure's
magazine for more than a decade when Cathere was hired
for a staff position in nineteen oh six. A lot
(18:16):
of accounts give Rosebrow a lot of the credit for
this hiring decision. At first, Cather seems to have really
admired and respected Roseburrow as somebody with talent and experience
and wisdom, but that shifted somewhat as they worked together
at the magazine. Roseborrow had a reputation for being generous
and kind, but she could also be extremely blunt with
(18:39):
her feedback. As paraphrased by a friend, she told Cather
that she was quote pouring out one dead, pretentious story
after another that nobody could read, and she got published
only because mister McClure knew she had genius. Roseburrow also
advised Cather to quote write something she had some feeling about.
(19:01):
When Cather became managing editor of mclure's magazine, Rosebrough suspected
that she was publishing her own work without running it
by anybody else except maybe McClure himself. They didn't become
enemies by any means their discussions around by Antonio were
a decade after this, but it definitely became less of
a mentor mentee relationship.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Nineteen oh six was a tempestuous year to be working
at McClure's. About a month after cather started, most of
the staff quit. They were dissatisfied with McClure's business and
editorial decisions, and with his ongoing womanizing, including having affairs
with young women whose work he then published.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
This included his.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Taking a trip across the Atlantic with both his wife,
Hattie and one of the other women on board, and
Ida Tarbell, who was friends with Hattie. Cathere remained at
the magazine after this mass exodus at McClure. She had
moved to New York to take the job, and as
a newcomer she probably didn't have the same emotional involvement
(20:08):
in the situation as a lot of the people who had.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Been there longer.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
She publicly supported McClure and dismissed the various allegations of womanizing,
and Roseboro stayed as well. This may have been partly
due to a sense of loyalty to McClure and to
the magazine where she had worked.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
So many years.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
But it's also possible that she was just shielded from
a lot of that drama because she was almost never
in the office. She would have manuscripts delivered to her
at her apartment in New York, or during the summers,
to her cottage on the coast of Massachusetts or Connecticut.
Then she'd take the manuscripts outside and she would read
them there, which sounds like a pretty dreamy working scenario.
(20:49):
When she was in New York, she was particularly fond
of working from Madison Square Park. If she needed to
have a face to face meeting with someone, she would
usually meet them there or at her home.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Villa Roseborow. Was quite a character, which we will talk
about more after a sponsor break. Bila Roseboro certainly was
not unique for preferring to be outside on a park
bench rather than cooped up in an office all day.
(21:24):
What was fairly unique was that she actually made it work.
She relentlessly tried to live her own way, and she's
been described as a female bachelor. She never married, and
if she ever had a romantic relationship with anyone, it's
not mentioned in anybody's surviving writing, at least not that
I could find. She did seem to like the idea
(21:45):
of having a child, though, or more specifically, a son.
While she was still acting, she and one of her
castmates took in a boy who had run away, and
later in her life there were young men that she
would describe as godsons or as almost like her adopted sons.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
For a while, Rosebrow did well enough financially that she
was able to afford her apartment in New York and
at least one cottage near the ocean. She also traveled
around the United States, and she made a series of
trips to Europe. But while she was making her own
life and having a career, she was opposed to the
suffrage movement. She viewed feminists with suspicion. This was another
(22:25):
difference between her and her mother, who was a passionate
advocate for women's rights. Roseburrow smoked constantly, swore, and refused
to wear a corset. She also loved Shakespeare and went
to every play that she could. She carried around a
gin bottle with the label still on it, which she
filled with water so that she could have a drink
(22:45):
whenever she got thirsty. This seems to have been about
not just shocking people by appearing to drink gin out
in public in the middle of the day, just spontaneously,
but also because she was really fixated on staying well
highed rated. She was also into yoga and eating raw foods,
although that last part might have been mostly because she
(23:07):
hated to cook, not for any philosophical reason other than
the hatred of cooking. Rosebrow's friends called her vr, and
her colleagues at McClure's called her Rosie. In both circles,
she had a reputation for both talking very quickly and
for being a witty and absorbing conversationalist. S. S. McClure
(23:31):
said of her quote, when George Meredith talked, the air
was full of flaming swords. When Robert Lewis Stevenson talked,
it was like the play of the Aurora borealis. But
I can't find any expression to describe that woman's talk.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
It is too varied.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
He also called her the greatest conversationalist of her time.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
One friend is quoted as saying, quote, anybody who does
not acknowledge that something is happening when Viola Rosebrow is
talking is stupid. Her friend Francis Perkins said of her
quote of course, I remember her vividly, her conversation, her attitudes,
her courage. Miss Rosebrow was essentially an expressive person. She
(24:13):
couldn't bear to enjoy things alone. And that is why
she would ask me to go along with her, because
she said, I like to go with you because you
enjoy having.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Me talk about it.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Another of Rosebrow's contradictions is that while she was friends
with Francis Perkins, who was a labor advocate and Secretary
of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rosebrow was opposed
to social reform, and she denounced Roosevelt's New Deal. Rosebrow's
conversations that she was famous for were not necessarily nice.
(24:48):
A friend once said, she characterized the greatest defect of
modern civilization as quote the absence of any place where
one could adequately insult people. Either you were in the
relationationship of guest and hostess, or you were both guests
of someone else. And when you chanced upon each other
at the Grand Central Station, there was no time for
(25:09):
you were dashing for a train. For her own part,
Rosebroow liked to say, quote, when conversation grows dull, I
take charge of it.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
To return to her career.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Rosebro wrote a novel called The Joyous Heart, which was
published by McClure Phillipson Company in nineteen oh three. McMillan
published her short story collection Players and Vagabonds the following year,
and she continued to work for SS McClure until nineteen eleven,
when he lost control of McClure's magazine. She left the
(25:40):
magazine at that point. Although her work had been focused
on the magazine's fiction, she had also convinced McClure to
publish a set of essays by her friend John LeFarge,
an artist who worked in a range of media, including
stained glass. His work at Boston's Trinity Church came up
in our episode on the history of spray paint last August.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
In addition to.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Freelancing, Roseborrow supported herself as a writer's consultant, kind of
like an editor, offering writers feedback on their work and
how to get it published. Two years after Rosebrow left
McClure's rival magazine, Colliers started running ads announcing that they
had a new price of only five cents a copy,
down from ten. They had a new publishing day of
(26:25):
Tuesday rather than Thursday, a new distribution method being that
people could buy it at newsstands rather than having to
subscribe and a quote new story editor Colliers has engaged
Miss Viola Roseboro, whose ability to choose stories needs no
mention to the story loving public.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Roseburrow's final book, Storms of Youth, was published by Scribner's
in nineteen twenty. In nineteen twenty one, McClure returned to
his magazine and Roseborow went back to work at it
as well. Rosebrow seems to have had a gift for
recognizing and nurturing the talent of writers. She did not
have the same ability with money. She had a series
(27:09):
of financial difficulties and lost her summer cottages and her
ability to travel abroad. Things became increasingly difficult until nineteen
twenty eight when one of her former clients, Elizabeth M. Chamberlain,
died and left Roseborrow some money. This got Roseborow back
on stable financial footing, and she did take at least
(27:29):
two more trips to Europe after this. In the early
nineteen forties, Roseborow had a falling out with Willa Cather.
Cather asked Roseborrow to return all of her letters, and
Rosebrow seems to have thought that Catherine was trying to
erase all evidence of her influence on Cather's work and career.
(27:49):
This was not just about Roseburrow's correspondence, though, in nineteen
forty three, Cather wrote a will specifying that her letters
never be published in whole or in part. This applied
to all of her correspondents, not just her correspondence with Roseboro.
She was kind of gathering things up to protect them.
(28:10):
Catherine died in nineteen forty seven, and that request was
honored until twenty eleven, when the terms of her will expired.
Viola Roseboro spent the last years of her life living
alone in Newdorp, Staten Island. In addition to her lifelong
poor vision, she lost much of her hearing, and she
developed arthritis in her hands, which she attributed to years
(28:33):
spent rewriting people's work. She died on January twenty ninth,
nineteen forty five, at the age of eighty seven, after
an illness of a few months. In the words of
a review of the one book length biography ever written
of her, quote, she died in poverty, but not in want,
because many of her old friends saw to that. She
(28:54):
had allegedly been working on a memoir called let Me
Tell You, which she does not seem to have and
no known manuscript of it has survived. It is possible
but unclear, that she may have converted to Catholicism during
her last days. She had a fascination with Catholicism, and
at various points after the nineteen ten death of John LeFarge,
(29:17):
she reportedly said that if he had been alive, she
would have allowed him to convert her. She also paid
very close attention to how Willa Cather's nineteen twenty seven
novel Death Comes for the Archbishop was received by Catholics.
In the last days of Risboro's life, she refused to
talk to the Protestant clergy who came to visit her,
(29:38):
but she had multiple visits from her maid's priest. There
is also some speculation that she may have been the
inspiration for the character of Myrah Henshaw in Willa Cather's
nineteen twenty six My Mortal Enemy, but that's not known
for sure, and there are a lot of other people
who might have possibly been the inspiration for it.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
Yeah, yeah, entirely possible. Don't fully know.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
I find her fascinating though, too, and I also feel
like I have big gaps in my understanding of her,
which we'll talk about on Friday. Do you also have
some listener mail for us? I do also have listener mail.
It is from Tanya, and Tanya wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy.
I was just listening to your episode about the color blue,
(30:27):
and it reminded me that I recently watched someone making
blue dye from Woade. It was in an episode of
Secrets of the Castle, of video series featuring Ruth Goodman,
among other historians and archaeologists. Ruth is actually featured in
a whole series of videos exploring life in various time periods.
I think they would be right up your alley. My
only complaint is that they are British and the DVDs
(30:49):
do not typically play in American DVD players anyway. In
Secrets of the Castle, they are living and working in
the Gelong Castle project in France. I'm just gonna say
I'm sorry if I said that wrong. I forgot there
was French in here, and I didn't look it up
before I started reading this email. They're building a castle
using thirteenth century techniques. I seem to remember that a
(31:12):
large amount of old urine was also used when dying
fabrics using wode based dye. Did you uncover any mention
of this in your research? I enjoy your show as
much as I enjoy Ruth Goodman's history series. That significant
since I bought a new DVD player just to watch
my British DVDs on keep up the great work for
ped tax. I am attaching photos of my roosters, Barnaby
(31:35):
the Colorful one and Rusty the Golden one. I raised
them along with seven hens from eggs that I incubated
last spring. And then that was from Tanya. So Tanya,
I love that somebody has sent us rooster pictures.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
I do two.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
I have questions about the roosters. Yeah, only because growing
up on a far, my experience with roosters was not cool.
So if her roosters are sweet, because ours were not?
Speaker 3 (32:05):
What a good question? I think.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
What I know of chickens, and broadly including roosters, is
that they can be very mean to one another as
they establish a hierarchy out in the out in the
chicken yard. Oh yeah, no, we had a rooster growing
up that we had, you know, several acres of land
(32:28):
and a lot of it was woody, and if you
were walking along, the rooster would go and hide in
bushes and wait for you to pass, and then it
would come out talon's up like to attack you. Oh no,
my rooster experiences are not cool. I think they're so beautiful,
but I'm curious anytime I talk to somebody that has
(32:50):
roosters of their own, what they're like behaviorally. A lot
of cities that allow like urban chicken coops, explicitly don't
allow roosters correct because of their supposedly being noisy. Supposed Oh,
I mean, they do tend to crow, but the chickens
(33:11):
also make noise, so there's And also I would say
I have neighbors whose barking dogs are at least as
loud as a rooster could hypothetically be. Anyway, I wanted
to read this email number one because the rooster pictures,
that's great. But then also number two is that Secrets
(33:33):
of the Castle and these other history shows that Ruth
Goodman was on. They were some of my early early
COVID like Comfort Binge Watch, and they are these sort
of living history shows in which Ruth Goodman and usually
there was like another historian and archaeologist. They would go
live in the manner of a farmer from a specific
(33:57):
time period, and then this one where they go to
the castle in frame. I don't remember anything about the
dying of fabric in this particular show. It would not
at all surprise me that large amounts of old urine
were used for it, because large amounts of old urine
have been used for a lot of things historically, including
(34:20):
a number of things involving textiles and dies and.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Fabric scent paper.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
I have definitely heard of it being used as a fixative,
so it's not the pigment. It's like the same way
there are ammonial washes that people will do on dye
processes now that are not urine based. So it makes
sense because there's a high amount of ammonia in urine.
So yeah, yeah, so yeah. I think very fondly of
(34:50):
Ruth Goodman and those TV shows. I watched them on
streaming services. I do not have a DVD player, specially
bought to play British DVDs. I also have really enjoyed
the similar shows that have played on PBS with similar
setups in the United States, although a lot of those
were not necessarily a historian doing those things, but you know,
(35:12):
regular people to pretend to live in whatever historical setting.
I find those to be fun. So thank you so
much for this email and these pictures.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
Tanya.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
If you would like to send us a note where
at history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. If you would
like to read the show notes of our show, you
can code to our website which is at missed Inhistory
dot com, and you can subscribe to the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
(35:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Fryn. When I was working on our
episode about Elizabeth Bisland back in March, I stumbled across
the name Vila Roseboro, and that last name was spelled
ro se bo R with an apostrophe at the end
and then nothing after the apostrophe. That's not something that
(00:36):
happens in English language names very much, unless it's a
name that ends in an S, and that apostrophe is
making it possessive. So I wondered who this person was
and why her name was spelled that way, and my
cursory look into it landed her on the shortlist. Villa
Roseboro is not well known today, but she played a
(00:58):
big behind the scenes role in the careers of a
lot of American writers in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, including several writers who continued to be staples
in English and English literature classes in the United States.
By extension, she helped shape what is thought of as
the American literary canon. Viola Roseboro was born on December third,
(01:21):
eighteen fifty seven in Pulaski, Tennessee. That's in the south
central part of the state, roughly fifteen miles from the
border with Alabama. Pulaski is named for Casimir Pulaski, a
Polish soldier who fought in the American Revolutionary War. Tracy
has had him on her shortlist for quite a while.
Viola was the only surviving child of the Reverend Samuel
(01:44):
Reid Roseboro known as Reed, and Martha Collier Roseboro, who
after their marriage, insisted that she was Missus Martha Coliar Roseboro,
not Missus Samuel Reid Roseboro. Yeah. I also read an
account that said that she refused to have the part
about obey in their marriage vows. She seems like she
(02:07):
had very solid opinions. The Roseboros were abolitionists, and that
put them at odds with a lot of their neighbors.
Pulaski is also where the original Ku Klux Klan was founded,
and it put them at odds with some of their
family members. This was a factor and their moving to
Missouri when Viola was only a baby. From there, they
(02:27):
moved to Illinois, and that's where they were when the
Civil War started. When Viola was four, Viola's father became
a chaplain in an Illinois regiment of the US Army,
and his parents disowned him for that. While Reid was
in the army, Martha supported herself and her daughter by
teaching sewing and working at a hotel.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
The Civil War ended when Viola was seven, Martha took
her back to Tennessee and visited her family while they
waited for Reed to be discharged from the army. He
joined her in Tennessee, but before more long they went
back to Missouri after he got a position as a
minister at a Congregationalist church there After they moved, Martha
(03:08):
invested some of the money that she had saved during
the war in a small farm. When that farm started
to struggle, that took the family finances with it, and
she took Fila to Tennessee to get the advice of
her brother, Arthur Saint Clair Collier. He was a Democrat
and had been a slaveholder before the Civil War, and
(03:29):
she found him embroiled in an effort to unseat Augustus E.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Alden, who was the radical Republican mayor of Nashville. Martha
and her brother were really on opposite sides politically, and
he seems to have thought that associating with his abolitionist's
sister would damage his reputation and any attempt that he
might make to run for office. So Martha wound up
going back to Missouri without getting a lot of help
(03:55):
from him. Back in Missouri, Reed had some kind oft
with some of the more influential members of his church congregation,
and by the time Martha returned, it had started to
seem like they would need to move again. Martha really
loved the area of Tennessee where she had grown up
and thought she had gotten an exceptional education there and
(04:17):
that's what she wanted for her daughter. So when she
was offered a job at a school in Shelbyville, she
went with Viola while Reid stayed behind in Missouri. But
this didn't last long either. While Martha was waiting for
the school year to start, she talked about a plan
to spend her free time teaching black children to read.
(04:37):
That was something else that threatened her brother's political aspirations.
Then she started trying to integrate the schools in Shelbyville,
and that led to her being branded Meddlesome Mattie. She
wound up taking Viola back to Missouri, but the family
was not reunited there for very long. Reed went to
work in Nevada and then to California. Several years passed,
(05:02):
and in eighteen seventy four, when Viola was sixteen, her
mother took her back to Tennessee again so she could
attend Fairmount College, which is a private women's college. Her
father eventually got a job at a church in Tennessee,
although not close enough to the college for them to
all live together. While she was in college, Fiola developed
(05:23):
an interest in performing, starting out with giving dramatic readings.
A write up in the Winchester, Tennessee Home Journal describes
a night of entertainment that was arranged for Carrick Academy,
which was a boys' school, that rite up ends quote
we regret not getting there in time to hear the
beautiful and intelligent Miss Roseboro, who never fails to deserve
(05:45):
and illicit applause. By late eighteen seventy eight, Viola had
gone beyond doing recitations at schools and was performing in public,
including traveling to other states to do so. Eventually, she
rolled in theater classes in Cincinnati, Ohio, when it quickly
became clear that her parents did not have the money
(06:07):
to pay for these classes, she started writing articles for
her uncle's newspaper, The Daily American, which was headquartered in Nashville.
She made her acting debut, now in a staged play
rather than a recitation or reading, in Nashville in May
of eighteen seventy nine. Over the next few years, Roseboro
(06:27):
tried to earn a living by both freelance writing and performing.
Her parents really did not approve of this, especially the
performing part, and it raised some questions among her father's
church congregations. They did not think this was an appropriate
career path for their minister's daughter. At the same time,
her father was always on the lookout for positions at
(06:49):
churches that would allow them to be closer to her,
so Martha continued to move around with him as he
tried to just stay near their daughter. Allegedly, this combined
career of writing and performing is where Roseborow's unusual name
spelling came from. She used the name Roseboro with the
ending ough for the stage, while the shorter Roseboro ending
(07:13):
in the o Apostrophe was for her published work.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
It does seem like later in her life she insisted
on that apostrophe spelling, but her name appears with and
without those last three letters in various publications and documents
across the whole course.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Of her life.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Sometimes there's an assumption that the original spelling of her
name was the longer one, but her father's name also
appears as Roseboro minus that ugh at the end and
with no final apostrophe, and a lot of official records,
including his marriage license and his entry in the death
index from the New York State Department of Health. Vila
(07:53):
and her parents are all buried at Clifton Springs Village
Cemetery in New York, and their markers all ye she
used that same shorter spelling, although with no apostrophe, but
it's hard to draw a conclusion from that since we
don't really know who made the arrangements for those engravings
on their markers.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
To return to Viola for a while, she moved to
Nashville to work for her uncle's newspaper. She was also
in theatrical touring companies, with starring roles in at least
two melodramas, one called Two Orphans, which was set during
the French Revolution, and another called The Lights of London.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
In eighteen eighty two, Roseboro moved to New York City,
and she continued to divide her time between writing and performing.
But in eighteen eighty seven, when she was about thirty,
she developed pneumonia. There are references to Roseboro being sick
a lot in her own letters and in the accounts
of people who knew her, and she also had trouble
with her eyesight. This bout of pneumonia put an end
(08:54):
to her time on stage, possibly because it affected her voice.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
From this point on, Deola Roseborow's career was a literary one.
We'll talk more about that after a sponsor break.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
From eighteen eighty seven until about eighteen ninety three, Villa
Roseboro made a living as a freelance writer, selling stories
and essays to publications like The Cosmopolitan and The Century Magazine.
She also did some of the kind of stunt journalism
that we talked about in our episode on Elizabeth Bisland
and past hosts episode on Nellie Bly. For example, she
(09:38):
published an article in the New York World on December eleventh,
eighteen eighty seven, titled Begging as an Avocation. An adventurous
woman goes out asking for alms in the street. It's
probably unsurprising based on that title that this article came
off as cluelessly insensitive. It starts with a discuss of
(10:00):
how hard it is to find appropriately ragged clothes to
pretend to be a beggar. Later on, she talks about
how every time anyone gave her anything, she would immediately
jam it into her pocket, and quote to possess a
pocket seemed indicative of fraud. A couple of people were
kind to her, but many just ignored her, and only
(10:21):
women seemed to be willing to give her money. She
wound up with sixty three cents. Unfortunately, I'm not sure
what she did with that money, because the one scan
I was able to find of this article is completely
illegible at the bottom. So she wrote that she was
going to give this money to charity, but then the
text becomes completely unreadable as she's sort of overthinking whether
(10:45):
any of the people who gave it to her might
be opposed to churches, or might be Protestant or Catholic,
or might just hate institutional charities. Rosebrow's first book, a
collection of stories called Old Ways and New came out
in eighteen ninety two, and it included work that had
originally been published in Century magazine.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
She dedicated this book to her mother, quote my earliest
and still my best companion in the blessed world of letters.
This was in spite of increasing tension between the two women.
They were both proud and stubborn.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Viola has been described as arrogant, and Martha was apparently
prone to clipping out Viola's published articles, writing corrections on them,
and then sending those corrections to her. Martha Roseborow died
of cancer the year after the book came out and read.
Roseborrow died in eighteen ninety two. By that point, Samuel
(11:41):
Sidney McClure had hired Rosebrow as a reader. That happened
in eighteen ninety three. This started with a writing contest.
McClure realized he had way too many manuscripts from those
contest entries for him to read just by himself, and
he brought Roseburrow on because he already knew her. From there,
(12:02):
she started working for McClure's magazine and for his other
publishing ventures. McClure wrote of her in his autobiography, quote,
Miss Roseborow was of great service to the magazine in
discovering promising material by unknown writers. She had a singularly
open mind toward the manuscript bag, a natural attitude towards stories,
(12:23):
which is rare in professional readers, who, like everybody else
in time, become the victims of their own tastes and
their own successes, and are therefore always hunting for the
thing they themselves like best, instead of for the thing
that new writers are writing best. Miss Roseborow seized upon
the early stories of O Henry, Jack London, Rex Beach,
(12:47):
Myra Kelly, and the Emmy lu Stories when their writers
were unknown, with as much shortness and conviction as if
she had known what the end was to be in
each case, and exactly how popular each of these writers
was to become. Ida Tarbell's work at McClure's magazine overlapped
with Roseborow's. We talked about Tarbell and her expozea Standard Oil,
(13:11):
which was published in McClure's in a two part episode
in November of twenty twenty one. Tarbell and Roseborow were friends,
and Tarbell had similar things to say about her in
her own autobiography. Quote by good fortune McClure's in this
period happened on a reader of real genius. Viola Roseboro,
the only born reader I have ever known. I found
(13:34):
her in the office after one of my frequent jaunts
after material. It was as a talker that I first
learned to admire and love her. Her judgments were unfettered,
her emotions strong and warm, her expressions free, glowing, stirring,
and she loved to talk, though only when she felt
sympathy and understanding. She loved to share books, of which
(13:55):
she read many, particularly in the biographical field. She wanted
none the best, no imitation, no mere fact finding. Her
eagerness to let no good things slip. Her consciousness of
the all too little time a human being has in
this world to explore its riches, made her rigid in
her choice, an unsleeping eagerness to find talent and give
(14:18):
it a chance. And secondarily, she said to enrich the
magazine made every day's work with the unsifted manuscripts and adventure.
If she found exceptional merit that was also suited to McClure's,
she might weep with excitement. And she stood to it
till faith grew in those less sure of the untried.
(14:38):
We've talked about McClure, and that magazine more in the
context of muckraking journalism, but the magazine also developed a
reputation for publishing very high quality fiction, and a.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Lot of that credit goes to Roseboro.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
She was the first person to read every fiction manuscript
that arrived at the magazine. Her cultivating of unknown talent
included people like William Sidney Porter, who published most of
his work under the pen name O.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Henry.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Roseborrow started corresponding with Porter while he was in prison
for embezzlement and offered him or feedback over the course
of about two years. Finally, she purchased his story Whistling
Dick's Christmas Stocking in eighteen ninety nine, and that was
the first story that he ever published under that pen name.
We did an episode on Oh Henry that came out
(15:26):
on December twenty first of twenty twenty. According to Ida Tarbell,
when Rosebrow first read a submission from Booth Tarkington, she
went into S. S. McClure's office in tears, exclaiming, quote,
here is a serial sent by God Almighty for McClure's magazine.
That serial was Tarkington's first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana,
(15:48):
which was published starting in May of eighteen ninety nine.
The Gentleman from Indiana was later published as a book
and became a best seller for McClure and Tarkington went
on to be one of only four writers to earn
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice. The other three in
that group are William Faugner Near Dear to My Heart,
John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. A lot of sources credit
(16:11):
Rosebrow with discovering Jack London, who's most well known for
books like Call of the Wild and White Fang in
the short story to Build a Fire.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Rosebrow did accept some of his.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Early stories for McClure's and McClure commissioned London's first novel,
A Daughter of the Snows, but Jack London's work was
already appearing in other publications, including Overland Monthly, which published
really a pile of his stories before anything appeared in
McClure's s s. McClure's interest in Jack London started after
(16:45):
he read a piece that had been published in the
Atlantic Monthly, and that was a piece that Roseboro had
read and rejected. She had also rejected other early submissions
of London's although some of those rejections also included her
very thoughtful feedback and advice about how to improve the
stories structurally. Mcluur's magazine did play a role in London's
(17:09):
early career, and an important role, but it just it
doesn't seem like Roseberg really pulled him out of the
slush pile, even though McClure himself made it seem that
way in his autobiography. Roseburrow definitely played a role in
the literary career of Willa Cather. McClure published Cather's first
volume of short stories, The Troll Garden, in nineteen oh five,
(17:31):
and Rosebrow's influence included helping to decide which stories to include.
Later on, Cather went through rounds of rejections on her
nineteen eighteen novel My Antonia. She finally sent it to Rosebrow,
who read it and told her she'd written the whole
thing through the point of view of the wrong character,
that it needed to come from the perspective of Jim Burden.
(17:54):
Cather rewrote it, and today My Antonia is considered to
be her first masterpiece. Later on, she earned a Pulitzer
Prize for her novel One of Ours, Roseburrow was sixteen
years older than Cather and had been working for McClure's
magazine for more than a decade when Cathere was hired
for a staff position in nineteen oh six. A lot
(18:16):
of accounts give Rosebrow a lot of the credit for
this hiring decision. At first, Cather seems to have really
admired and respected Roseburrow as somebody with talent and experience
and wisdom, but that shifted somewhat as they worked together
at the magazine. Roseborrow had a reputation for being generous
and kind, but she could also be extremely blunt with
(18:39):
her feedback. As paraphrased by a friend, she told Cather
that she was quote pouring out one dead, pretentious story
after another that nobody could read, and she got published
only because mister McClure knew she had genius. Roseburrow also
advised Cather to quote write something she had some feeling about.
(19:01):
When Cather became managing editor of mclure's magazine, Rosebrough suspected
that she was publishing her own work without running it
by anybody else except maybe McClure himself. They didn't become
enemies by any means their discussions around by Antonio were
a decade after this, but it definitely became less of
a mentor mentee relationship.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Nineteen oh six was a tempestuous year to be working
at McClure's. About a month after cather started, most of
the staff quit. They were dissatisfied with McClure's business and
editorial decisions, and with his ongoing womanizing, including having affairs
with young women whose work he then published.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
This included his.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Taking a trip across the Atlantic with both his wife,
Hattie and one of the other women on board, and
Ida Tarbell, who was friends with Hattie. Cathere remained at
the magazine after this mass exodus at McClure. She had
moved to New York to take the job, and as
a newcomer she probably didn't have the same emotional involvement
(20:08):
in the situation as a lot of the people who had.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Been there longer.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
She publicly supported McClure and dismissed the various allegations of womanizing,
and Roseboro stayed as well. This may have been partly
due to a sense of loyalty to McClure and to
the magazine where she had worked.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
So many years.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
But it's also possible that she was just shielded from
a lot of that drama because she was almost never
in the office. She would have manuscripts delivered to her
at her apartment in New York, or during the summers,
to her cottage on the coast of Massachusetts or Connecticut.
Then she'd take the manuscripts outside and she would read
them there, which sounds like a pretty dreamy working scenario.
(20:49):
When she was in New York, she was particularly fond
of working from Madison Square Park. If she needed to
have a face to face meeting with someone, she would
usually meet them there or at her home.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Villa Roseborow. Was quite a character, which we will talk
about more after a sponsor break. Bila Roseboro certainly was
not unique for preferring to be outside on a park
bench rather than cooped up in an office all day.
(21:24):
What was fairly unique was that she actually made it work.
She relentlessly tried to live her own way, and she's
been described as a female bachelor. She never married, and
if she ever had a romantic relationship with anyone, it's
not mentioned in anybody's surviving writing, at least not that
I could find. She did seem to like the idea
(21:45):
of having a child, though, or more specifically, a son.
While she was still acting, she and one of her
castmates took in a boy who had run away, and
later in her life there were young men that she
would describe as godsons or as almost like her adopted sons.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
For a while, Rosebrow did well enough financially that she
was able to afford her apartment in New York and
at least one cottage near the ocean. She also traveled
around the United States, and she made a series of
trips to Europe. But while she was making her own
life and having a career, she was opposed to the
suffrage movement. She viewed feminists with suspicion. This was another
(22:25):
difference between her and her mother, who was a passionate
advocate for women's rights. Roseburrow smoked constantly, swore, and refused
to wear a corset. She also loved Shakespeare and went
to every play that she could. She carried around a
gin bottle with the label still on it, which she
filled with water so that she could have a drink
(22:45):
whenever she got thirsty. This seems to have been about
not just shocking people by appearing to drink gin out
in public in the middle of the day, just spontaneously,
but also because she was really fixated on staying well
highed rated. She was also into yoga and eating raw foods,
although that last part might have been mostly because she
(23:07):
hated to cook, not for any philosophical reason other than
the hatred of cooking. Rosebrow's friends called her vr, and
her colleagues at McClure's called her Rosie. In both circles,
she had a reputation for both talking very quickly and
for being a witty and absorbing conversationalist. S. S. McClure
(23:31):
said of her quote, when George Meredith talked, the air
was full of flaming swords. When Robert Lewis Stevenson talked,
it was like the play of the Aurora borealis. But
I can't find any expression to describe that woman's talk.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
It is too varied.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
He also called her the greatest conversationalist of her time.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
One friend is quoted as saying, quote, anybody who does
not acknowledge that something is happening when Viola Rosebrow is
talking is stupid. Her friend Francis Perkins said of her
quote of course, I remember her vividly, her conversation, her attitudes,
her courage. Miss Rosebrow was essentially an expressive person. She
(24:13):
couldn't bear to enjoy things alone. And that is why
she would ask me to go along with her, because
she said, I like to go with you because you
enjoy having.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Me talk about it.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Another of Rosebrow's contradictions is that while she was friends
with Francis Perkins, who was a labor advocate and Secretary
of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rosebrow was opposed
to social reform, and she denounced Roosevelt's New Deal. Rosebrow's
conversations that she was famous for were not necessarily nice.
(24:48):
A friend once said, she characterized the greatest defect of
modern civilization as quote the absence of any place where
one could adequately insult people. Either you were in the
relationationship of guest and hostess, or you were both guests
of someone else. And when you chanced upon each other
at the Grand Central Station, there was no time for
(25:09):
you were dashing for a train. For her own part,
Rosebroow liked to say, quote, when conversation grows dull, I
take charge of it.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
To return to her career.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Rosebro wrote a novel called The Joyous Heart, which was
published by McClure Phillipson Company in nineteen oh three. McMillan
published her short story collection Players and Vagabonds the following year,
and she continued to work for SS McClure until nineteen eleven,
when he lost control of McClure's magazine. She left the
(25:40):
magazine at that point. Although her work had been focused
on the magazine's fiction, she had also convinced McClure to
publish a set of essays by her friend John LeFarge,
an artist who worked in a range of media, including
stained glass. His work at Boston's Trinity Church came up
in our episode on the history of spray paint last August.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
In addition to.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Freelancing, Roseborrow supported herself as a writer's consultant, kind of
like an editor, offering writers feedback on their work and
how to get it published. Two years after Rosebrow left
McClure's rival magazine, Colliers started running ads announcing that they
had a new price of only five cents a copy,
down from ten. They had a new publishing day of
(26:25):
Tuesday rather than Thursday, a new distribution method being that
people could buy it at newsstands rather than having to
subscribe and a quote new story editor Colliers has engaged
Miss Viola Roseboro, whose ability to choose stories needs no
mention to the story loving public.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Roseburrow's final book, Storms of Youth, was published by Scribner's
in nineteen twenty. In nineteen twenty one, McClure returned to
his magazine and Roseborow went back to work at it
as well. Rosebrow seems to have had a gift for
recognizing and nurturing the talent of writers. She did not
have the same ability with money. She had a series
(27:09):
of financial difficulties and lost her summer cottages and her
ability to travel abroad. Things became increasingly difficult until nineteen
twenty eight when one of her former clients, Elizabeth M. Chamberlain,
died and left Roseborrow some money. This got Roseborow back
on stable financial footing, and she did take at least
(27:29):
two more trips to Europe after this. In the early
nineteen forties, Roseborow had a falling out with Willa Cather.
Cather asked Roseborrow to return all of her letters, and
Rosebrow seems to have thought that Catherine was trying to
erase all evidence of her influence on Cather's work and career.
(27:49):
This was not just about Roseburrow's correspondence, though, in nineteen
forty three, Cather wrote a will specifying that her letters
never be published in whole or in part. This applied
to all of her correspondents, not just her correspondence with Roseboro.
She was kind of gathering things up to protect them.
(28:10):
Catherine died in nineteen forty seven, and that request was
honored until twenty eleven, when the terms of her will expired.
Viola Roseboro spent the last years of her life living
alone in Newdorp, Staten Island. In addition to her lifelong
poor vision, she lost much of her hearing, and she
developed arthritis in her hands, which she attributed to years
(28:33):
spent rewriting people's work. She died on January twenty ninth,
nineteen forty five, at the age of eighty seven, after
an illness of a few months. In the words of
a review of the one book length biography ever written
of her, quote, she died in poverty, but not in want,
because many of her old friends saw to that. She
(28:54):
had allegedly been working on a memoir called let Me
Tell You, which she does not seem to have and
no known manuscript of it has survived. It is possible
but unclear, that she may have converted to Catholicism during
her last days. She had a fascination with Catholicism, and
at various points after the nineteen ten death of John LeFarge,
(29:17):
she reportedly said that if he had been alive, she
would have allowed him to convert her. She also paid
very close attention to how Willa Cather's nineteen twenty seven
novel Death Comes for the Archbishop was received by Catholics.
In the last days of Risboro's life, she refused to
talk to the Protestant clergy who came to visit her,
(29:38):
but she had multiple visits from her maid's priest. There
is also some speculation that she may have been the
inspiration for the character of Myrah Henshaw in Willa Cather's
nineteen twenty six My Mortal Enemy, but that's not known
for sure, and there are a lot of other people
who might have possibly been the inspiration for it.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
Yeah, yeah, entirely possible. Don't fully know.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
I find her fascinating though, too, and I also feel
like I have big gaps in my understanding of her,
which we'll talk about on Friday. Do you also have
some listener mail for us? I do also have listener mail.
It is from Tanya, and Tanya wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy.
I was just listening to your episode about the color blue,
(30:27):
and it reminded me that I recently watched someone making
blue dye from Woade. It was in an episode of
Secrets of the Castle, of video series featuring Ruth Goodman,
among other historians and archaeologists. Ruth is actually featured in
a whole series of videos exploring life in various time periods.
I think they would be right up your alley. My
only complaint is that they are British and the DVDs
(30:49):
do not typically play in American DVD players anyway. In
Secrets of the Castle, they are living and working in
the Gelong Castle project in France. I'm just gonna say
I'm sorry if I said that wrong. I forgot there
was French in here, and I didn't look it up
before I started reading this email. They're building a castle
using thirteenth century techniques. I seem to remember that a
(31:12):
large amount of old urine was also used when dying
fabrics using wode based dye. Did you uncover any mention
of this in your research? I enjoy your show as
much as I enjoy Ruth Goodman's history series. That significant
since I bought a new DVD player just to watch
my British DVDs on keep up the great work for
ped tax. I am attaching photos of my roosters, Barnaby
(31:35):
the Colorful one and Rusty the Golden one. I raised
them along with seven hens from eggs that I incubated
last spring. And then that was from Tanya. So Tanya,
I love that somebody has sent us rooster pictures.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
I do two.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
I have questions about the roosters. Yeah, only because growing
up on a far, my experience with roosters was not cool.
So if her roosters are sweet, because ours were not?
Speaker 3 (32:05):
What a good question? I think.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
What I know of chickens, and broadly including roosters, is
that they can be very mean to one another as
they establish a hierarchy out in the out in the
chicken yard. Oh yeah, no, we had a rooster growing
up that we had, you know, several acres of land
(32:28):
and a lot of it was woody, and if you
were walking along, the rooster would go and hide in
bushes and wait for you to pass, and then it
would come out talon's up like to attack you. Oh no,
my rooster experiences are not cool. I think they're so beautiful,
but I'm curious anytime I talk to somebody that has
(32:50):
roosters of their own, what they're like behaviorally. A lot
of cities that allow like urban chicken coops, explicitly don't
allow roosters correct because of their supposedly being noisy. Supposed Oh,
I mean, they do tend to crow, but the chickens
(33:11):
also make noise, so there's And also I would say
I have neighbors whose barking dogs are at least as
loud as a rooster could hypothetically be. Anyway, I wanted
to read this email number one because the rooster pictures,
that's great. But then also number two is that Secrets
(33:33):
of the Castle and these other history shows that Ruth
Goodman was on. They were some of my early early
COVID like Comfort Binge Watch, and they are these sort
of living history shows in which Ruth Goodman and usually
there was like another historian and archaeologist. They would go
live in the manner of a farmer from a specific
(33:57):
time period, and then this one where they go to
the castle in frame. I don't remember anything about the
dying of fabric in this particular show. It would not
at all surprise me that large amounts of old urine
were used for it, because large amounts of old urine
have been used for a lot of things historically, including
(34:20):
a number of things involving textiles and dies and.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Fabric scent paper.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
I have definitely heard of it being used as a fixative,
so it's not the pigment. It's like the same way
there are ammonial washes that people will do on dye
processes now that are not urine based. So it makes
sense because there's a high amount of ammonia in urine.
So yeah, yeah, so yeah. I think very fondly of
(34:50):
Ruth Goodman and those TV shows. I watched them on
streaming services. I do not have a DVD player, specially
bought to play British DVDs. I also have really enjoyed
the similar shows that have played on PBS with similar
setups in the United States, although a lot of those
were not necessarily a historian doing those things, but you know,
(35:12):
regular people to pretend to live in whatever historical setting.
I find those to be fun. So thank you so
much for this email and these pictures.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
Tanya.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
If you would like to send us a note where
at history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. If you would
like to read the show notes of our show, you
can code to our website which is at missed Inhistory
dot com, and you can subscribe to the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
(35:48):
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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