Lost Ladies of Lit

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We're concluding our own "Hot Girl Summer" with the writer Mary MacLane, a defiant and wildly egotistical 19-year-old resident of Butte, Montana, whose confessional diary implored the “kind devil” to deliver her from a life of bourgeois boredom. Professor Cathryn Halverson joins us to discuss MacLane’s life, angst and the reading public’s reaction to her adolescent intensity.
Mentioned in this episode:
I Await the Devil’s Coming/The Story of Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane (Project Gutenberg)
MTV’s “My So-Called Life”
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
Herbert S. Stone & Co.
Marie Bashkirtseff
The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff: I am the Most Interesting Woman of All Volume I and Lust for Glory Volume II
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
“Men Who Have Made Love to Me” 
I, Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane
Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly by Cathryn Halverson
Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West by Cathryn Halverson
Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives by Cathryn Halverson

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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” examining Brophy’s life and accomplishments, including this wonderfully quirky book, recently reissued by McNally Editions.
Mentioned in this episode:
Pilgrimage online Reading Group with The Sitting Room library
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 116 on Dorothy Richardson
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 270 on The Sitting Room
Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson
McNally Editions The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid Brophy
Marginalia article about Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch by Maria Popova
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 51 on Rosamond Lehmann
Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 150 on Elizabeth Smart
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 184 on Elizabeth Taylor Vs. Elizabeth Taylor
BBC program “Take it Or Leave It”
In Transit by Brigid Brophy
Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy
The Snowball by Brigid Brophy
Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and ??
The Crown Princess and Other Stories by Brigid Brophy
“Spleen” by Beaudelaire
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
“As You Like It” by William Shakespeare

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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, whose own island-centric novel, Welcome to Glorious Tuga, was recently optioned for TV by See-Saw Films.
Mentioned in this episode:
Castaway by Lucy Irvine
The Lucy Irvine Foundation
Welcome to Glorgious Tuga by Francesca Segal
Runaway and Faraway by Lucy Irvine
The Islander by Gerald Kingsland
The Secret Life of a Schoolgirl by Rosemary Kingsland
Castaway 1986 film trailer starring Amanda Donohoe and Oliver Reed
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
“Alone” on the History Channel
See-Saw Films
One is One by Lucy Irvine
The Innocents by Francesca Segal

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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 discussion of the novel and its film adaptation (starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill) we’ll explain why Franklin’s fear of being a literary one-hit-wonder proved unfounded, and why her name today graces one of Australia’s top annual literary prizes.
Mentioned in this episode:
Miles Franklin
My Brilliant Career film
My Brilliant Career novel
Judy Davis
Sam Neill
Director Gillain Armstrong
Oscar and Lucinda
Charlotte Grey
Blackwood’s publishing house
Anne of Green Gables
The Thorn Birds
Brent of Bin Bin
Up the Country by Brent of Bin Bin
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 128 on Margaret Oliphant
Henry Lawson
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Bring the Monkey by Miles Franklin
My Career Goes Bung by Miles Franklin
All That Swagger by Miles Franklin
S.H. Prior Memorial Prize
The Miles Franklin Award
The Stella Prize
Miles Franklin: A Short Biography by Jill Roe
Of Foreign Lands and Peoples by Robert Schumann (soundtrack to film)

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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 of Quarry. 
Mentioned in this episode:
Oxford's summer Lifelong Learning seminar on Josephine Tey
Quarry by Jane White
Norfolk Child by Jane White
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Proxy by Jane White
Beatrice, Falling by Jane White
The Neglected Books page on Jane White
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