Lost Ladies of Lit

Episod

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  ENCORE WITH UPDATE: Brigid Brophy — The King of a Rainy Country 04.08.2026 31min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 madcap antics. Kim and Amy play “tour guide” examinin...
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  ENCORE: Lucy Irvine — Castaway with Francesca Segal 21.07.2026 36min

  Send us Fan Mail Our "sweltering summer" series continues this week with a re-play of a truly wild desert-island memoir. When Lucy Irvine answered a classified ad to play Girl Friday to a real-life Robinson Crusoe on a remote tropical island, she embarked on an enthralling—and at times harrowing—year-long adventure. The result was her bestselling 1983 memoir, Castaway, a beautifully-written tale of survival. We’re diving into Irvine’s unforgettable story with special guest Francesca Segal, wh...
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  ENCORE: Miles Franklin — My Brilliant Career 07.07.2026 34min

  Send us Fan Mail This week we're revisiting an Australian author — and the 1979 film adaptation of her work — which originally captured Kim and Amy’s fancy back in 2024. Published in 1901 and written when author Miles Franklin was only eighteen years old, My Brilliant Career became an instant classic of Australian literature and still delights readers with its feisty heroine, Sybylla Melvin, and its realistic depiction of Australian life and lingo at the turn of the 20th century. In our discu...
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  ENCORE: Jane White —Quarry with Helen Hughes 23.06.2026 41min

  Send us Fan Mail We're celebrating summer with another sultry, almost-suffocating novel from our podcast vaults, one clearly written with William Golding's Lord of the Flies in mind. When Jane White’s gripping and unsettling debut novel Quarry was first published in 1967, a review in The Scotsman called it “the most frightening novel of the year.” Joining us is White’s daughter-in-law, Dr. Helen Hughes, of the University of Surrey, who wrote the afterword to the new Boiler House Press edition...
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  ENCORE WITH UPDATE! Ruth Prawer Jhabvala — Heat and Dust with Brigitte Hales 09.06.2026 49min

  Send us Fan Mail With Counterpoint Press's new editions of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's work (including her Booker-Prize winning novel Heat and Dust and a new short story collection Disinheritance: The Rediscovered Stories) we're inspired to revisit our 2022 episode on this prolific writer of fiction and films. Pivotal to the success of Merchant/Ivory films like A Room With a View and Howard's End, Jhabvala used her experiences as an "initiated outsider" to tell stories brimming with nuance, h...
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  Nettie Jones — Fish Tales with Hannah Eko 26.05.2026 46min

  Send us Fan Mail First published in 1983 after being championed by Toni Morrison, Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales recounts one woman’s trauma-filled, hedonistic quest for personal freedom amidst a “Disco-Era,” drug-fuelled backdrop — one inspired by Jones’s own lived experiences in 1970s Detroit and New York City. Nigerian-American author and Lit Club founder Hannah Eko joins us to discuss the ways power, pleasure and pain converge in Jones’s transgressive work, which was reissued by Farrar Straus ...
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  Josephine Tey — The Daughter of Time with Jennifer Morag Henderson 12.05.2026 43min

  Send us Fan Mail Considered one of the greatest crime novels of all time, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time flipped 450 years of British history on its head by re-examining Richard III’s purported involvement in the murder of his two young nephews, the Princes in the Tower. How did a shopkeeper’s daughter-turned-high-school gym teacher become one of the 20th century’s greatest writers of mystery, literary fiction and theatrical plays? Tey’s biographer, Jennifer Morag Henderson, joins us to...
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  Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry—The Tale of the Rose with Sara Kippur 28.04.2026 42min

  Send us Fan Mail Though her high-flying literary husband took center-stage, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry was more than just the metaphorical “rose” in his novella The Little Prince. She was a writer and artist in her own right, with a gift for storytelling that’s evidenced in the now out-of-print novel Oppède. Following her death, an undiscovered memoir she wrote about her marriage to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry surfaced among her belongings and was published to great acclaim in 2000 as The Tale of...
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  María Amparo Ruiz de Burton — Who Would Have Thought It? with Quite Literally Books 14.04.2026 42min

  Send us Fan Mail The first Mexican-American woman novelist to be published in English, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton chose a surprising subject matter—East Coast high society—for her first novel, Who Would Have Thought It? She was uniquely qualified to skewer the hypocrisy of Northern abolitionists, lampoon corrupt politicians and even mock Abraham Lincoln as a figure she deems more “party-boy” than presidential. Bremond Berry MacDougall and Lisa Endo Cooper, founders of Quite Literally Books, ...
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  Juanita Harrison—My Great, Wide, Beautiful World with Cathryn Halverson 31.03.2026 50min

  Send us Fan Mail Determined from a young age to escape the Jim-Crow South and see new places, Mississippi native Juanita Harrison managed, as a working-class Black woman, to cultivate her own version of a grand world tour, paying for her globe-trotting by picking up piecemeal work as a maid, nanny or cook in far-flung places. My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, her remarkable written account of this eight-year international adventure became a bestseller in 1936 and was the most commercially succ...
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  Magda Szabó — Abigail with Deborah H. Sussman 17.03.2026 43min

  Send us Fan Mail A literary icon in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó was relatively unknown to English-speaking readers until recent translations of her work opened the door to her powerful storytelling. In today’s episode we focus on her 1970 novel Abigail, which follows a headstrong teenager at an all-girls boarding school during WWII. Dangerous secrets, emotional complexity and an unexpected guardian angel add intrigue to this poignant coming-of-age tale. Our guest, Deborah H. Sussman of th...
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  Mary Elizabeth Braddon — Lady Audley's Secret with Kristine Huntley 03.03.2026 42min

  Send us Fan Mail Pass the smelling salts! Readers of the Victorian Era eagerly (or furtively) set scruples aside to read Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret — the title of which was enough to tempt even the most puritanical schoolmarm into sneaking a peak. But it was Braddon’s sumptuous prose, eye for drama and sophisticated understanding of social mores which won her the admiration of contemporaries like William Makepiece Thackery, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robe...
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  ENCORE and updates! Elizabeth Garver Jordan — The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Stories with Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan 17.02.2026 44min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 literary editor still resonates today. Lori Harrison-Kahan and...
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  Hazel Hawthorne — Salt House with Allison Bass-Riccio and Livia Tenzer 03.02.2026 47min

  Send us Fan Mail “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 Press. Guests Allison Bass-Riccio and Livia Tenzer join us to d...
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  From Jane Austen to Zadie Smith — Advice from Women Writers for a More Productive 2026 (Encore Presentation) 20.01.2026 19min

  Send us Fan Mail 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. Support the show For episodes and show notes, visit: LostLadiesofLit.com Subscribe to our substack newsletter. Follow us on instagram @l...
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  Virginia Faulkner — Willa Cather Champion, with Brad Bigelow 06.01.2026 41min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 dedication to scholarship on Willa Cather helped solidify Cather...
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  Katharine Lee Bates — "Goody Claus on a Sleigh Ride" 23.12.2025 13min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 feelings about the Yuletide season and reads this humorous poem w...
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  Djuna Barnes — Nightwood with Margaret Vandenburg 09.12.2025 55min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 subversive defiance of fascism. Mentioned in this episode: Nightwood ...
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  Malachi Whitaker — And So Did I with Valerie Waterhouse 25.11.2025 41min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 alive, including securing a commemorative blue plaque for her...
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  The Sitting Room: A Treasure Trove of "Lost Ladies" 11.11.2025 44min

  Send us Fan Mail 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 snippets from an engaging evening with library co-founder J.J. W...