Lost Ladies of Lit
A book podcast hosted by writing partners Amy Helmes and Kim Askew. Guests include biographers, journalists, authors, and cultural historians discussing lost classics by women writers. You can support Lost Ladies of Lit by visiting https://www.patreon.com/c/LostLadiesofLit339.
Episodes
Her Life in Ink, a brand new biography by Sharon Harris about Elizabeth Garver Jordan, provides a good reason to plunder our podcast vault this week to revisit an episode about this star journalist, editor and mystery author. Jordan’s riveting coverage of the Lizzie Borden trial for The New York World captivated true-crime junkies of the late 19th-century, and her lengthy career as a journalist, fiction writer and litera...
“Queen of the Dunes” Hazel Hawthorne was a Cape Cod legend who wrote about The Road nearly two decades before her one-time tenant, Jack Kerouac. A uniquely feminine precursor to Beat literature, her novel Salt House captures Bohemian life amid the sand dunes of Provincetown. Though largely dismissed upon its 1934 publication, the book has been re-plucked from obscurity thanks to a new reissue by Provincetown Arts Pres...
In this encore presentation, Kim and Amy take stock by dusting off a "New Year’s" episode from 1921, sharing secrets of what makes their writing partnership work and turning to famous women writers — including Nancy Mitford, Isabelle Allende, Anais Nin and more for advice on setting (and more importantly, accomplishing) one's goals.
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Virginia Faulkner had no family ties to that other famous Faulkner, but she is connected to another icon of classic American literature. A young flapper who made an authorial splash with the New York literati (earning comparisons to a young Dorothy Parker), Faulkner later switched gears, devoting the second half of her life to shaping The University of Nebraska Press into a powerhouse publishing institution. Her dedic...
Before penning the lyrics to “America the Beautiful,” Katharine Lee Bates shone a spotlight on the invisible (and not so invisible) labor tackled by an unsung Christmas heroine, Mrs. Claus. Bates’s 1888 poem “Goody Claus on a Sleigh Ride” imagines Santa’s spouse setting the record straight about who really does most of the work in preparation for Christmas. In this holiday episode, Amy confesses her own cynical feelin...
Dark and disturbing, yet strangely redemptive, Djuna Barnes’s 1936 modernist masterpiece Nightwood left even its greatest champion, T.S. Eliot, a bit bewildered. Guest Margaret Vandenburg, an expert in modernism, post-modernism and gender studies, joins us to illuminate Barnes’s tumultuous life and help us decipher her "ultimate breakup novel,” a work that casts its spell by turning the world upside down in subve...
Likened to a fresh Yorkshire breeze, Malachi Whitaker’s year-in-the-life memoir And So Did I, published in 1939, is a quirky spirit-quest juxtaposing wry humor and contemplative observations amidst the impending threat of global conflict. Valerie Waterhouse, a PhD researcher and executor of Whitaker’s literary estate, joins us to discuss the author’s life and work, as well as her own quest to keep Whitaker’s legacy al...
In this special episode, Kim and Amy recount their recent visit to The Sitting Room, a unique library and literary salon in Sonoma, CA, dedicated to women's literature. Trip highlights included a stay at a Julia-Morgan-designed architectural gem in Berkeley, a private tour of Jack London State Park, and a fascinating tour of The Sitting Room’s extensive collection of books and artifacts. Listeners will also hear ...
Republished this year by Valancourt books, Rosalind’s Ashe’s 1976 gothic thriller Moths is a spine-chilling tale of supernatural seduction featuring a femme fatale who lures men to their deaths like lepidoptera to a flame. Gothic lit expert Lisa B. Kröger joins us to discuss Ashe’s knack for channeling female rage in a novel that’s been compared to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
Mentioned in this episode:
Moths by Rosalind A...
Often called “the lesbian Bible,” Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness has been sparking debate for nearly a century. Banned in the UK after an infamous obscenity trial, the book remains a lightening rod for readers — some revere it, others can’t stand it. We’ll explore what makes this groundbreaking novel so remarkable (and so divisive) with returning guest Iris Jamahl Dunkle, who found inspiration in H...
In this follow-up to our 2021 episode on Nancy Mitford, we’re turning the spotlight on her younger sister, Jessica (a.k.a. “Decca”) Mitford, an activist and journalist whom Time magazine called “the queen of the muckrakers.” Her influential 1963 nonfiction title The American Way of Death exposed corruption in the funeral industry and was lauded by David Bowie as one of his “Top 100” favorite books, whereas her 1960 ch...
With her witty and self-deprecating takes on dating and the single life, the narrator of Miriam Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl: Or the Battle Against Free Love is the 1918 Yiddish precursor to Girls’ Hannah Horvath, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, and Bridget Jones. Guest Jessica Kirzane’s English translation of the novel was published by Syracuse University Press in 2020.
For episodes and show not...
In this encore presentation, we’re reviving a literary suicide scandal that took place among some of the biggest names in the West Coast’s early 20th century bohemian society. Joining us to discuss lost poet Nora May French and her life—and death—is Catherine Prendergast, author of the riveting book The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America.
Discussed in this episode:
Originally drafted in 1939, the Prohibition-era gangster novel The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur remained unpublished for nearly 40 years. Le Sueur used the intervening decades to transform her work into a powerful narrative, focusing on the lives of marginalized women in Depression-era America. Joining us is Dr. Rosemary Hennessy, a Professor of English at Rice University, whose most recent book, In the Company of Radical...
What if we told you that there was an ingenious retelling of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights set in post-war Japan that also has shades of Middlemarch and The Great Gatsby? Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel, first published in 2002, checks all those boxes and more. Joining us to discuss A True Novel is Lavanya Krishnan, co-founder of the literary book subscription Boxwalla. (This episode originally aired in 2023).
Discuss...
Woman yearns for child, adopts orangutan instead. Disaster ensues. That's the premise of Gertrude Trevelyan's wonderfully bizarre 1932 novel, Appius and Virginia. We're joined in this encore episode by guest Brad Bigelow, whose obsession with obscure books was celebrated in the 2016 New Yorker profile “The Custodian of Forgotten Books.”
Discussed in this episode:
Else Jerusalem’s Red House Alley is a riveting exposé of the sex industry in fin-de-siècle Vienna. A bestseller upon its 1909 publication, the novel was banned by the Nazis in 1933 (along with its 1928 film adaptation) and fell into obscurity. Boiler House Press published the first full English translation of this landmark work last year, and translator Stephanie Gorrell Ortega joins us to discuss Jerusalem’s richly-draw...
When Edna O’Brien published her debut novel The Country Girls in 1960, she was branded a “Jezebel” in her native Ireland—but that didn’t stop her from completing a poignant trilogy about a pair of friends coming of age in a world for which village life and convent school failed to prepare them. Despite initial backlash to her sexually frank depiction of young women’s lives and desires, O’Brien’s writing brought her accla...
If Brigid Brophy’s The King of a Rainy Country had a soundtrack, it might include the soft patter of rain on a garret window, jazz drifting from a smoky cafe, the hum of a Vespa on narrow cobblestone streets … and the obnoxious griping of a few dozen uncultured Americans! As the description suggests, Brophy’s 1956 novel has a little bit of everything — atmosphere, nostalgia and poignancy mixed with subversive wit and...
Langston Hughes called Jessie Redmon Fauset “the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance” with good reason. As literary editor at The Crisis magazine from 1919 until 1926, Fauset discovered and championed some of the most important Black writers of the early 20th century. Her own novels contributed to The New Negro Movement’s cultural examination of race, class and gender through the lens of women’s experiences. Fauset’s 19...
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