0:01

Hello and welcome

0:04

to Backlisted, the podcast

0:06

which gives new life to old books.

0:29

Today you find us in the drawing

0:31

room of a small cottage in the Thameside

0:33

village of Lower Halliford watching a

0:35

family interact. It's 1853,

0:39

an elegant woman holds a baby. The man

0:41

complains bitterly of stomach ache. There

0:44

is a novel open on the table, Adolphe

0:47

by Benjamin Constant, the

0:49

tale of a young man who falls in

0:51

love with an older woman. I'm

0:54

John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where

0:56

people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And

0:59

I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading

1:01

Dangerously. And today's

1:03

episode of Backlisted is a little different.

1:06

We're dedicating it to our friend and former

1:09

guest, the legendary publisher

1:11

and writer Carmen Khalil, who

1:13

died a year ago on the 17th of October 2022.

1:18

Carmen joined us on a couple of occasions, the

1:21

first of which was to discuss

1:25

Elizabeth Jenkins' novel The Tortoise

1:27

and the Hare. And

1:30

as we tend to do on Backlisted, we asked

1:32

her where she was when

1:34

she first read that novel. And

1:38

it's the question we always ask Carmen, which

1:40

is, where were you when you

1:42

first read this book?

1:45

Do you remember? No, I don't. I

1:47

don't remember. No, I don't.

1:50

I don't remember. But I think I would have been

1:53

living in

1:56

Hammersmith, I think

1:58

it would have been then, about 1932. 1980 something

2:01

like that and that time I used to

2:03

go and have supper regularly

2:05

with Rosamund Lehman and Anita Bruckner

2:08

and why

2:11

were laughing? Andy's

2:14

such a man. I'm looking my brow. I'm

2:18

so thrilled. Please carry on. Can

2:20

you imagine listeners how

2:23

that wasn't just a good moment in the history of Backlisted.

2:25

It was one of the happiest moments of my

2:27

recent life. Sitting

2:30

with Carmen for a couple of hours and hearing

2:32

her reminisce about the incredible

2:35

work she did, friends she made

2:37

and authors she knew. She

2:40

very kindly

2:41

read a copy of

2:44

The Year of Reading Dangerously. After she'd been on the book, she

2:46

sent me a really lovely, thoughtful

2:49

letter about it afterwards which

2:51

obviously I treasure.

2:54

So this

2:55

show is dedicated to her.

2:58

You

2:58

heard her there and the book we'll be discussing

3:00

is one of her favourites and the suggestion

3:03

of her friend Rachel Cook who

3:05

is back on Backlisted and

3:08

she's phoning us apparently from North London

3:10

which listeners will know is very unusual. Hello

3:12

Rachel, how are you? Rachel

3:15

previously appeared on episode 11 all

3:17

the way back in April 2016 which introduced

3:20

us to David Seabrooks Unforgettable

3:23

All the Devils Are Here and more recently

3:25

with Carmen herself on episode 102

3:28

which was dedicated to the novelist Elizabeth

3:30

Taylor. Rachel writes and reviews

3:33

regularly for The Observer, is a TV

3:35

critic for The New Statesman and since 2010

3:37

has chosen the graphic novel of the month for Guardian.

3:40

In 2014, Birago published Her

3:42

Brilliant Career, Ten Extraordinary Women

3:44

of the Fifties. Next month, Pfeidenfelton

3:46

Nicholson published Kitchen Person, a

3:48

collection of her Observer food columns and

3:51

in 2024 she will release

3:53

the Birago Book of Friendship, an

3:55

anthology dedicated to the special pleasures,

3:58

intensities and power. pains that

4:01

is female friendship. Two

4:04

things I want to say to you, Rachel. The first

4:06

is the pleasures,

4:08

intensities and pains that is female friendship.

4:11

What was it like being a friend of Carmen's?

4:13

It was the best thing in the world.

4:16

I mean, she was a pain in the

4:18

arse. She's

4:23

very difficult, but I think all the best people

4:25

are difficult. But

4:28

I got the best of her because I

4:30

never had to work with her. So

4:32

I was only ever a friend and

4:34

I had a very, very intense

4:38

friendship.

4:42

It's very hard to explain because she wasn't maternal

4:45

at all, but she was maternal

4:48

to me, I suppose. I

4:51

really, really loved her. She would email

4:54

me every single Monday morning to

4:57

tell me what she thought of what I'd done

4:59

in the day before the observer.

5:04

As you can imagine, I miss that

5:07

very, very much because she was

5:09

my reader, really. She

5:13

was absolutely brilliant.

5:16

She used to come here

5:18

for Christmas. We used to go on holiday.

5:20

We were very, very close.

5:22

I loved her.

5:26

It's like losing a very

5:29

beloved person, but also losing a huge

5:31

library that has been

5:34

knocked down. For me, I

5:36

used to roller-dex through

5:38

her brain. I

5:40

really miss that. The

5:43

book I'm working on at the moment, she would have been able

5:45

to do it for me. It's quite annoying

5:47

that she's

5:48

not around. Did she

5:50

ever read

5:52

All the Devils are Here?

5:54

I don't think she did. Although

5:56

she read everything in the whole world.

5:59

Bizarre. Amazing.

6:01

But I don't think she, I don't know if she did read

6:04

that, no.

6:05

And how do you feel about, you know,

6:07

you and we can claim a sliver

6:10

of credit for bringing

6:12

that book back into the world, you know, it's,

6:14

it's since you came onto this and

6:17

talked about it seven, eight years ago, it sort

6:19

of achieved some status of modern

6:21

plastic. How do we, how do we feel about that? We're

6:24

still loyal to it, right?

6:26

Yeah, I feel a bit proprizethorial. I'm

6:28

always like that. It's like, well, I just,

6:31

that was my book.

6:32

Yes,

6:38

we know that. I know.

6:41

I mean, in general, obviously, I feel good

6:43

about it. I feel happy

6:46

about it. So many people

6:48

have talked about that recording to me and about

6:50

that book to me since.

6:52

And so, yeah, it was memorable.

6:56

It was memorable for your puffin to start sending out. Yes,

6:58

yeah, the puffin's still in the residence.

7:01

A few listeners will be released. That

7:04

is good. We're also joined

7:07

today. Hooray by Lucy Skoles.

7:09

Hi, Lucy.

7:10

Hi, everyone. Love you, Cebat.

7:12

Lucy is a backlisted regular and a notable

7:15

Virago fan. And this is Lucy's

7:18

sixth appearance. Having

7:21

previously joined us to talk about

7:24

Barbara Cummings, Anita Bruckner,

7:26

Penelope Fitzgerald,

7:28

Jack Higgins. No, I'm only joking. Not

7:38

Jack Higgins, Penelope Mortimer. That's strange,

7:40

isn't it? And most recently in July

7:43

for the episode on Margaret Drabbles,

7:45

The Millstone.

7:47

Lucy is a senior editor at Minnelli Editions,

7:50

a series of paperbacks devoted to

7:52

Hidden Gems. She hosts

7:54

Our Shelves, the Virago podcast, and

7:56

wrote the recovered column for the Paris

7:59

review. of print and forgotten

8:01

books that shouldn't be. A different

8:03

sound, a collection of stories written by

8:05

mid-century women writers that she selected

8:07

and introduced, was published by Pushkin

8:10

Press earlier this year. Lucy, you

8:12

wanted to come on this episode because

8:14

although you never

8:17

met Carmen, I think I'm correct in saying,

8:19

clearly a lot of your work

8:22

and your reading and your enthusiasm

8:25

are connected to hers.

8:27

Yes, absolutely. I owe her a great debt

8:29

as I do all the women who worked at Verago

8:31

over the years. So it's

8:34

a great sadness, I think. I'm trying to think if

8:36

I did it. I think I might have bumped into her at a party occasionally,

8:38

but I never got to know her at all. And

8:41

that is a great sadness, especially

8:43

hearing Rachel talk about her here.

8:45

But yes, she's been hugely influential in my reading

8:48

life and I suppose my writing life as well.

8:50

Lucy, can you recall the first

8:53

Verago modern classic that

8:55

you read or the first time you remember

8:57

reading a book and thinking, this is interesting, this

8:59

is published by this particular

9:02

publisher, The Green Spine, what

9:03

have you? Well, when you first asked me about

9:06

that earlier, I was thinking, oh God, I actually can't remember the first

9:08

one I read, I was really embarrassed. But then listening to Carmen

9:10

say she can't remember when she read something like The Tortant

9:12

of the Hair.

9:12

There you are. I don't feel

9:13

quite so bad now. But I think, I

9:16

would say that the first one that really made an impression

9:18

on me was reading Dusty Answer by Rosamund

9:20

Lehman actually, when I was an undergraduate. And

9:22

I think it was probably the first time that I really clocked

9:25

that yes, this was a kind of green spy and this

9:27

is a particularly kind of, not

9:29

just a brilliant book, but a brilliant book that really spoke

9:31

to me in a very personal way

9:33

that made me feel like it had been written just for me and exactly

9:36

what you want out of a wonderful novel. And

9:38

that sort of ignited my love for Rosamund Lehman's

9:41

work, which I kind of read through. And I think that

9:43

was probably the point at which I really started to look

9:45

at more kind of recent work. I think up

9:48

until that point, I'd read a lot of older stuff, things

9:50

that you might read when you're schooled

9:52

for university, things like that. But I hadn't really

9:55

come into my own reading for the women of the late

9:57

20th century, which has become the thing that I'm... of

10:00

most passionate about now. So I think Virago

10:02

was a way into that for me.

10:04

Yeah

10:05

and Rachel how about you you know

10:07

in the in the 70s or 80s or or 90s?

10:11

I won't speculate. I

10:14

was going to say be careful. Yeah

10:16

yeah I realised I realised the ground

10:19

went underneath me please carry on. I

10:21

mean of course one thing that

10:23

always was amazing to me was that Carmen

10:26

became my friend because if

10:29

someone had told me when I was a girl that

10:31

that would happen I wouldn't have believed

10:33

it. How I discovered the

10:35

Virago books was obviously everyone

10:38

knows I'm a professional chef

10:40

elder and on

10:42

Saturdays my dad used to take me to the bookshop

10:45

W

10:46

Hartley Seed. My

10:48

parents were divorced so my father didn't know what to do

10:50

with me on a Saturday. So every

10:52

Saturday we would go to this bookshop my

10:55

dad used to go and like you know stare

10:57

at the early William Boyd's

10:59

and I used to.

11:00

Stare

11:05

longingly right? Perfect. Rachel

11:07

perfect. And I

11:09

used to go off and you know

11:11

wander around and as you will recall

11:14

that Virago's used to be on a sort

11:16

of carousel. It

11:18

was really interesting in those days books were sold

11:20

so much by their

11:22

identity, the imprint,

11:25

the colophon, all of that and that

11:27

was you know Carmen's real

11:29

marketing genius because she

11:32

really cared about the way the books looked. Anyway

11:34

they were on a kind of round thing. I don't

11:37

think I read

11:38

one for a long time. I was more into

11:41

The Secret Seven that kind of thing but

11:45

the first one I did read or

11:47

I certainly looked at was Novel on

11:49

Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith

11:52

whose poetry I liked because her

11:54

poetry was very easy to read so I

11:56

thought oh this is good I'm reading poetry even

11:59

though it's only like you

11:59

tiny. And of

12:02

course novel on yellow paper is a different

12:04

thing I thought it was gibberish

12:05

at the time and

12:07

about 30 years later

12:10

I then wrote the introduction when they,

12:12

Verado, reissued it so I

12:14

don't know how that happened but you know

12:16

it's a good...

12:17

Actually

12:19

you know what Rachel, novel on yellow paper

12:21

has that opening sentence

12:23

or line read on reader and decide

12:26

for yourself or I'm paraphrasing. That's

12:28

not so very far away from the tone

12:31

of the book we are about to talk about John

12:33

which is the book that Rachel's

12:35

chosen is the true history of

12:37

the first Mrs Meredith and other

12:40

lesser lives that was originally published

12:42

in 1972 by Alfred A. Knott

12:44

in the US and the following year

12:47

in the UK by William Heinemann and

12:49

has been reissued in 2020

12:52

by as a New York review

12:54

of books classic. It's

12:57

now acclaimed as a groundbreaking

12:59

work of feminist history and it tells the story

13:01

of Mary Ellen Peacock, the daughter

13:04

of the romantic writer Thomas Love Peacock

13:07

and wife of the celebrated Victorian novelist

13:09

George Meredith. Raised

13:11

in the heady atmosphere of the circle surrounding

13:14

the poet Shelley Mary Ellen was taught

13:16

to question traditional morality

13:18

and particularly that concerning the relationship between

13:20

the sexes. As a result she

13:22

grew up with a strong sense of her own value

13:24

and talent very much at odds with the prevailing

13:27

notions of what was appropriate for a young woman.

13:30

Having lost her first hopes on the sea after just

13:32

a few months together she married the promising

13:35

young writer George Meredith who was seven years her

13:37

junior. The

13:39

marriage was a turbulent one and

13:42

after eight years she left him having had an affair

13:45

and a child with the pre-Raphaelite

13:47

painter Henry Wallace most famous

13:49

now for his portrait

13:52

of Chatterton

13:53

on his deathbed. I'm sure as soon as I say that it

13:55

will come to your mind. Meredith

13:58

punished her by refusing to let her see the child

14:01

and by suggesting that she was immoral and

14:03

unstable, ensuring that for most of the century

14:05

that followed she became merely an embarrassing

14:07

footnote to the so-called great men

14:10

she was connected to. Diane

14:13

Johnson's book changed that. By

14:16

making creative use of primary sources

14:18

such as letters and commonplace books

14:21

she reconstructed Mary Ellen's inner life

14:23

and in so doing not only delivered a vivid

14:26

and revealing portrait of Victorian literary

14:28

culture but also flew a flag

14:30

for all the lesser lives particularly

14:32

those of women that history has routinely

14:35

ignored. And I would like to bring to the attention

14:38

of long-term listeners that

14:40

this book begins with

14:43

the discovery of a cache of Mary

14:46

Ellen's letters in a suburban

14:48

house in Pearly in

14:50

Surrey. Ha ha ha. Just

14:53

a short drive in 1970,

14:55

just a short drive from where I as

14:58

a toddler was taking my

15:00

first faltering steps and yet

15:02

there is no mention of me in

15:04

that introduction, presumably because

15:06

as a Croydon resident mine is

15:09

a lesser life. We

15:11

love this book, we absolutely

15:13

love this book. Rachel,

15:15

where, when did

15:17

you first read this?

15:19

Well I had wanted to read it for a long

15:21

time because a book I love

15:24

is parallel live by Phyllis

15:26

Rose which is about Victorian

15:28

marriages, George Eliot, people like that and

15:31

Phyllis Rose

15:33

completely sort of copied,

15:35

I mean Phyllis is on you know open about

15:37

this, she got the idea for her book

15:40

from Diane Johnson's book. So

15:43

I had wanted to read it for a long time but

15:45

I hadn't really got round to it and then New

15:48

York Review reissued it

15:51

and the

15:52

reason really why it came to my mind

15:54

for today is partly because of what's

15:57

it's subject, connects.

15:59

to Carmen very much.

16:01

But in the summer

16:03

of 2020, do you remember we had that

16:06

weird

16:06

reopening and there were a few months

16:09

where we could all travel so long as you had

16:11

all these the right bits of paper.

16:14

And

16:15

I took Carmen to the south of France

16:18

to stay with some friends of ours, rather

16:20

rich friends. Carmen was very sybaritic

16:23

and absolutely loved to be entertained.

16:27

This is a brief aside, we were

16:29

in terminal five at Heathrow, very,

16:31

very quiet.

16:33

Everyone was in mass, very few people around

16:36

it, very strange. And suddenly

16:38

this the sound of Carmen

16:41

like a parrot

16:42

telling the entire

16:46

airport that she couldn't wait to

16:48

get to France because she needed to buy some knickers

16:51

from Monoprey.

16:52

This

16:55

is imprinted in my mind.

16:58

Anyway, we arrived in this

17:00

amazing place where we were staying at Cap

17:02

Bena and I was reading

17:06

Mrs Meredith by then and I

17:08

said to Carmen, he was

17:10

lying next to me. Carmen was like a lizard,

17:12

she just loved to lie in the sun

17:15

for hours. She didn't care about sun tan

17:17

lotion or if you said, Carmen,

17:19

I'm so worried you're going to get skin cancer, she'd say,

17:22

darling, I'm Australian.

17:24

As though that was an answer.

17:27

And we were sunbathing

17:30

and I was reading this book and I said, I'm reading this

17:32

amazing book. I never really

17:34

learned and I should have known.

17:37

I said, have you heard of it? And she

17:39

said, oh darling, of course, I've

17:42

read it and I knew Diane. So

17:45

it's really a book

17:48

that I read on the last holiday I was able to take

17:50

with Carmen. So it's special to me

17:52

for so many different reasons.

17:55

And I think it's a masterpiece.

17:57

Lucy, had you read this book?

17:58

before and were you aware

18:01

of it?

18:02

I think I was aware of it. I

18:04

mean, I was aware of Diane

18:07

Johnson as a writer and I

18:09

think I was maybe aware of it on the sort of periphery of

18:11

my vision, but I have a confession.

18:13

I hadn't read it until you asked me to come

18:15

on the show. And I think, I don't

18:18

know, I suppose another confession is that I'm always

18:20

a little bit adverse to reading about the lives

18:22

of Victorians

18:23

who have never been,

18:26

yeah, probably not the right

18:27

time to say this, but they've never been a particular

18:29

interest to me. I think my interest much more lies

18:31

in the 20th century and the women writers in that

18:33

era. However, I have

18:35

a great, you know, you were great better thanks,

18:37

Rachel, because this was just a fascinating

18:39

book to me. I mean, in one way, I'm sure we're gonna

18:42

talk about this. I'm less interested in maybe the

18:44

actual life she's writing about, even though they are, say

18:46

she makes them all sound wonderful, but the

18:48

way that she talks about biography and the actual

18:51

practice of biography in this book was sort of eye-opening

18:53

and really wonderful. So it's made

18:56

me maybe slightly rethink my choice

18:58

about

18:59

Victorian writing.

19:00

John, were you aware of this

19:02

book with Diane Johnson? I

19:05

was completely unaware of this book

19:07

until I got the

19:10

email from Rachel suggesting it. And

19:12

I suppose the same way, I was

19:15

thinking, well, you know, it could be

19:17

great. I'd love footsteps by the

19:20

biographer. Richard

19:22

Holmes. Richard Holmes. But

19:24

I hadn't heard of this slightly, the kind of the

19:26

theme of this show. And obviously is

19:28

that we find things that

19:30

didn't know about that turned out to be masterpieces,

19:32

but it really, really is. I have

19:34

not enjoyed a work of

19:37

what I would call real scholarship. Real

19:39

scholarship, but also one of the questions

19:42

we're gonna address is what the

19:44

hell is it? What is this book, right?

19:46

This is one of the subjects that I

19:48

wanna tackle. I would just like to say,

19:51

I'd never heard of this book and

19:53

for which I, you know,

19:55

I actually apologize. I feel embarrassed

19:57

having read it. But I was. aware

20:00

of it because it's one of those books, Rachel

20:03

and Lucy, that makes

20:06

you feel, exactly as you were saying,

20:08

it makes you feel it was written for you.

20:11

Even though it clearly wasn't written for

20:13

me of all people, I spent

20:15

the whole thing thinking, oh my

20:17

goodness, and we'll come onto it.

20:20

She does something towards the end of the

20:22

book which for me shifted

20:24

it from being a really

20:26

good book into, ascended

20:29

into glory in the footnotes which

20:31

we'll come onto later, later in

20:33

the show. This is what makes it all

20:35

the more inexplicable that it's so obscure,

20:37

not just Phyllis Rose who's written about it

20:40

and Vivian Gornick who's written the introduction

20:42

to the MIRB.

20:44

I found reviews by

20:46

V.S. Pritchett,

20:48

our former guest for Miami-Lee,

20:50

our former guest Francesca Wade,

20:53

our former guest Tessa Hadley,

20:55

by Jeffrey Grigson, not our former guest

20:57

because he wasn't available, by Margaret

21:00

Drabble,

21:01

by Peter Ackroyd.

21:03

This was a widely

21:05

reviewed book both on

21:07

its original publication and on its

21:09

re-publication by extremely

21:12

well-known writers. All of those reviews,

21:14

bar one, were very positive

21:16

and yet

21:18

it seems to float away. I'm

21:21

going

21:22

to say something a bit,

21:25

perhaps a bit controversial, but

21:29

I mean I read Tessa's piece.

21:33

I think that this is a book that

21:35

you need to write passionately about.

21:37

I don't always feel

21:40

like that. I sometimes feel that

21:42

people

21:43

should really write criticism and they

21:45

shouldn't bring themselves to it

21:47

too much, but I think that this is kind

21:50

of an exception because

21:52

if you just write about it as though

21:54

it's a study of a dead Victorian,

21:58

then you get a

21:59

strangely dusty review

22:02

and the book is not dusty. She

22:04

writes with incredible lightness about

22:07

things that should be dusty, but they just

22:09

aren't. I actually wrote to the

22:11

LRB after test

22:13

review appeared because I was so cross about

22:15

it. And

22:17

they didn't print. And she's here today.

22:20

They didn't print my letter unaccountably,

22:22

but I think that

22:26

this is one of those books. It's

22:29

very generous. It's very

22:31

hard to write about unless

22:33

you do what we're kind

22:36

of trying to do now, which is to say,

22:38

my God, this book is living

22:41

in my heart. And I can't quite explain

22:43

why. It's so interesting.

22:45

It's so moving. It's so

22:48

huge in the things it encompasses

22:50

and the number of people, the number

22:53

of the eras, the

22:55

clothes, the food, the everything is

22:57

in it. It's an everything book. And yet it's

22:59

very short. It's not a long book. And

23:02

I just think that all of those reviewers,

23:04

you can imagine, acroids sort of, right.

23:08

It doesn't work

23:11

for that

23:11

kind of criticism.

23:13

I would just like to note that Peter,

23:16

would you like to hear a bit of acroids review? I'm

23:19

just going to make you cross Rachel. And you're going to write

23:22

to the Sunday Times in 1973.

23:26

Mary Ellen was to put it briefly, the

23:28

daughter of Thomas Love Peacock and the wife of

23:30

George Meredith. She was also the subject

23:32

of the modern love sonnets. And it was to be

23:34

expected that her role in literary biography

23:36

would end there. We know from the example

23:39

of Meredith himself, how decent obscurity

23:41

is to be preferred to a fame one at the cost

23:43

of happiness. But Mrs. Johnson,

23:46

for reasons that have has as much to do with

23:48

women's liberation as with literary

23:50

history, has written this life.

23:53

The style is that which in a less enlightened

23:55

age than our own would be called the feminine.

23:58

This is not of course.

23:59

denigrating and on

24:02

he goes. I would just like to note

24:04

that ten years after

24:06

writing that

24:07

review about

24:10

a biography that cites

24:12

the story about Thomas Chatterton

24:15

based on the discovery of a cache of

24:17

letters in an attic, Peter

24:19

Aykroyd went on to write a novel that

24:22

cites Thomas Chatterton as the basis

24:24

on the basis of some letters found

24:26

in an attic. It's a coincidence, it's

24:28

a massive coincidence clearly. Nevertheless,

24:33

Rachel, this was one

24:35

of the problems that people have with this book, if

24:37

they had a problem with it, is they don't know

24:39

what it is. Even

24:42

the recent reviews are saying, well, why

24:44

does she do this? Why does she do that? That's

24:46

not good academic

24:48

practice.

24:49

Lucy, did you find the

24:53

refusal to adhere to a

24:56

proper

24:58

academic

24:59

or generic template,

25:02

a barrier to enjoying the book?

25:04

God no, I mean I found it absolutely thrilling.

25:07

That's the point of this book, right? That it

25:11

throws everything that you think you're reading

25:13

about biography, it throws everything you're thinking you're reading

25:15

about the Victorians up in the air and you're sort of

25:17

left trying to then put these pieces together

25:19

and yet she's doing it for you and she's kind of putting together this

25:21

collage writing front of you that is just illuminating

25:24

and fascinating.

25:27

I think I was thinking a little bit when I read it about how

25:29

much I wondered that when it was first published

25:31

how much people were talking about

25:34

it just as this other product of second wave feminism

25:36

and thinking of it in that sense and that maybe

25:38

in the process maybe missing some of the

25:40

much more interesting things it's doing and

25:43

I think it's probably very contemporary

25:45

that I think what we're seeing in biography today

25:48

we're starting to see writers pushing the

25:50

boundaries and doing all sorts of interesting

25:52

things whether they're putting themselves in the book or they're

25:54

trying to think about how the genre itself

25:56

can be stretched in different ways and yet

25:59

you know here's John. and doing it back in

26:01

the early 70s.

26:03

I so agree. It's a thing that, Rachel,

26:05

you were saying as well, the lightness of it.

26:07

It feels so contemporary in

26:09

terms of tone and

26:12

trying to find a fresh way to approach

26:14

potentially a very dusty subject. Yeah.

26:17

Also the refusal to indulge

26:20

in cheap psychoanalyzing,

26:23

which she always said as she

26:26

described that as

26:27

she finds psychoanalyzers and novels merritritious.

26:30

She had her work badly marked by Christopher

26:32

Isherwood once who said, this

26:35

is terrible. You can't write this because you have to explain

26:37

why people do what they do and you have to trace it

26:39

back. And she said,

26:42

no, that's not what you have to do. You could do

26:44

it differently. So I think on all those

26:46

levels, you're quite right, Lucy. It

26:49

is extraordinarily contemporary.

26:51

And the fragmentary style with

26:53

which she builds what turns out to

26:56

be, I think, a genuine picture

26:58

of an entire, you get a sense of the age,

27:00

more of the Victorian age than very few books I've

27:03

ever read. Isn't that what Vivian

27:04

Gornick says in the introduction? She

27:06

says something about the genius of it lies and the decision

27:09

to keep pulling people into the story

27:11

of Mary Ellen, so that finally an age

27:13

stands revealed.

27:14

Absolutely. And we come away

27:16

from it. I mean, I come away from this book feeling like I know

27:18

more about the Victorians than I do having

27:20

read countless sort of more stuffy

27:23

biographies or historical accounts.

27:25

Rachel, you were talking earlier about the Victorians.

27:28

So how does this contrast with other writing

27:30

about the Victorians?

27:31

Well, you'll all have your own

27:34

views about this. I think that's something

27:36

that has happened quite recently. And

27:38

this actually applies to all historical

27:42

biography. This idea

27:44

of, well, we're all human beings. We

27:48

all love. We

27:50

all get our hearts broken. Many

27:54

of us dislike cabbage.

27:58

The point

28:00

is

28:01

that those things are true, but

28:04

I think it's a really grave

28:06

mistake

28:08

to think that

28:10

the Victorians are at all

28:12

like us in the way that they think

28:14

about the world and the way their

28:16

minds work. And you

28:18

know of course that's why Mary Ellen's

28:21

life was so hard because

28:23

she was

28:24

operating within

28:27

such rigid structures and it was very

28:29

very hard to break out and one of the

28:31

things that I think is genius about

28:33

this book

28:34

is the way it shows that the previous

28:37

generation,

28:39

the sort of shelly generation, who

28:41

her father's friends,

28:43

they were much more modern

28:46

and free living and interested

28:48

in you know the idea that if you didn't

28:50

get on you would separate, you didn't have to stay

28:52

married and then the Victorians

28:54

come along and they just react against that and it's

28:57

very very repressive. And I

28:59

think that this book

29:01

shows

29:02

even as Diane Johnson

29:05

is so you

29:07

know the way she skips along and she makes

29:09

jokes and all of that and she herself

29:12

is really whispering

29:14

in your ear but she never loses

29:16

sight of the fact

29:18

that Victorians are seriously

29:20

weird

29:21

and they thought weird

29:22

things, they did weird things and

29:25

they are hard to understand

29:27

and she's attentive to that and

29:29

she makes us attentive to that

29:32

and of course that makes it so

29:34

much more rich to read about because it's

29:36

not glib, it's not pat,

29:39

nothing is straightforward, it

29:41

just moves you so much and

29:43

it makes what Mary Ellen goes through

29:46

you know leaving aside all this

29:48

crap about second wave feminism

29:50

or whatever, you just feel she

29:52

was rather extraordinary

29:57

and her extraordinaryness is in

29:59

this weird

29:59

context.

30:01

Diane Johnson,

30:02

for me, brilliantly, and this has never

30:05

really occurred to me, makes the point that

30:08

the Victorian era is, you know, the

30:10

19th century preceded by the 18th century,

30:13

in which Mary Ellen has the misfortune

30:15

to be raised by her father, Thomas Love

30:17

Peacock, in at the more libertarian

30:21

avant-garde end of things, which

30:23

swings back wildly in the Victorian

30:25

era. So she's

30:28

out of time twice over, which

30:30

seems to me really powerful as,

30:32

you know, an animating

30:34

principle for a personality,

30:36

but also speaks to now, actually,

30:39

in a really, in a really fascinating

30:41

way. Rachel, this seems like a good moment

30:43

to read the

30:45

extract you wanted to.

30:47

Okay, one of the things she does

30:49

very well is she kind of steps out of the

30:51

narrative, and she gives these

30:53

little mini lectures, but that lecture

30:56

makes them sound preachy, which they're not, but

30:58

she just gives you

31:00

some notes, and she asks you

31:02

to think about various things, and here

31:04

is how I'm the Victorian. Common

31:07

sense urges us to suppose

31:09

that beneath the Victorian's public postures

31:12

of rectitude, formality,

31:13

and reserve,

31:15

beneath the bottles and beer,

31:18

looked beings much like ourselves.

31:21

But closer inspection

31:23

suggests

31:23

that our sympathy is misplaced.

31:26

They were not like us.

31:29

People's psyches conformed as

31:31

much as their manners did,

31:33

to the peculiar notions they created.

31:36

Women did loathe sex,

31:39

and they did call their husbands by their

31:41

surname.

31:42

Husbands

31:45

did suffer to feel base sexual

31:48

impulses

31:49

toward the pure creatures they marry,

31:52

and they did creep ashamedly after

31:54

prostitutes, or became impotent,

31:57

another widespread affliction

32:00

the time. And then she

32:02

says,

32:02

everyone had headaches

32:04

and lay about on sofas.

32:06

Many households,

32:09

like the peacocks, had someone

32:11

crazy or invalid upstairs,

32:14

as often a victim of the bizarre psychological

32:16

patterns as of the pitiable

32:19

medical ignorance then abounding.

32:21

He totally grasped

32:23

the sort of, you know, it's what I call,

32:25

I have a shorthand for this, I call it the

32:27

smelliness of Tennyson, because

32:30

Tennyson was famously smelly

32:32

and

32:33

Tennyson was very

32:35

weird.

32:35

And if you were talking about Victorians

32:38

and how weird they are, I always say, ah, it's the

32:40

smelliness of Tennyson.

32:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

32:44

So this book is published in the early 70s. I assume

32:47

this book seemed more confrontational

32:49

in 1972 or three than it does to

32:52

us now. The practice

32:55

of illuminating the lives

32:58

of

33:00

the wives, partners, girlfriends, or

33:02

those in the shadow of quote unquote great

33:05

men

33:06

was a much more radical

33:08

project then than it probably

33:10

seems now. I'm

33:13

thinking, John, it predates Nora,

33:16

about Nora Barnaclic predates, Claire

33:20

Tomlin's book about Dickens wives.

33:23

Or Lucy, when you read this, does this feel

33:25

like it came before those books or

33:27

after them?

33:28

Well, I think like I said, I feel like it,

33:30

for me, it feels like a very modern book. If you've given

33:32

this to me and not told me when it was published, I

33:34

think, I mean, it could have been published yesterday, it would fit in with,

33:37

I was thinking we've never read the new Anna Funder book

33:39

about, you know, the

33:42

first wife, which wife, which I'm

33:44

really gonna call exactly the same sort of act trying

33:46

to wrestle somebody out from under a much more famous

33:48

figure, and a biography itself that really

33:50

pushes the boundaries of sort of active imaginative

33:53

empathy as much as it is a kind of recreation

33:55

of an actual historical life. So I

33:57

think it could have been written at any time.

33:59

This is not exhaustive. I can't think of many books

34:02

that are written earlier than it that

34:04

do something similar The only one that did vaguely

34:06

switch your mind was a salty month by Alicia

34:08

Hater I don't have anyone's read that and that's slightly

34:10

different because it's not necessarily pulling out Characters

34:13

from underneath maybe the characters and that

34:16

are the real people and that are all very well known

34:19

It is winding together sort of a variety

34:21

of lives in the same way and it is animating

34:23

them in a sort of narrative nonfiction manner,

34:26

which I think works well here, but it's

34:28

definitely not as Kind of excitingly

34:30

groundbreaking. I think is what Johnson

34:33

is doing Rachel was saying

34:35

those aside that she kind of has to the reader.

34:37

It's almost like she's breaking a fourth wall, right? She's

34:39

kind of coming out of the character Yeah of

34:41

the character the barographer or out of the characters

34:44

and the raiser and then becoming the barographer

34:46

or vice versa And saying to us look at this

34:48

differently like what I'm telling you here Yeah, you

34:50

know you need to take this with you need this information

34:52

We need this bit of pinch of salt with it That

34:55

I think is really exciting to read

34:57

in her review in the listener

35:01

1973 Margaret travel, of course,

35:03

it's an excellent analysis of

35:05

the book

35:06

Margaret travel says

35:08

Diane Johnson is biased against

35:10

Meredith but at least she

35:13

lets us see it and lets us see

35:15

why and I

35:17

think that is one of the elements that must have seemed Preposterous

35:21

to some readers in the early 70s.

35:23

Don't you think I mean I

35:26

can't tell

35:27

how well known and

35:30

respected George Meredith was

35:32

in 1972, but he's Almost

35:36

unknown here in 2023, right?

35:39

so

35:40

I was doing my

35:42

degree from

35:45

1988 and Most

35:48

people didn't want to read Meredith because

35:50

you know that if you've got a choice between reading,

35:52

you know Diana

35:55

of the crossways and Tesla d'Urberville. So you're

35:57

gonna read Tesla

35:58

d'Urberville, right?

35:59

Unless you're Andy Miller. Yeah. Carry

36:02

on, carry on. Move on, move on. But

36:04

one thing I do

36:06

remember vividly was the

36:09

shooters telling us that

36:12

Meredith then was still spoken of

36:14

as the kind of great modernist of the Victorians

36:17

and as the feminist and

36:20

that someone that Virginia Woolf admired.

36:23

And one thing that I think is very

36:25

interesting about this

36:28

book and why it speaks to me now is,

36:31

as we know, we see the gap

36:33

between what Meredith

36:34

said about women

36:37

and how he treated a woman. And

36:39

that is very relevant to now

36:41

where a lot of men are, I'm

36:44

afraid, policing women and telling

36:46

us, you know, I'm

36:48

nicer than you. You've got to think this, you've

36:50

got to think that. And the gap between what

36:52

they say and what they

36:54

do is quite

36:56

marked in my view. And I think this book

36:58

is very interesting on that. And

37:00

I think that in the

37:03

early 70s, you're right,

37:05

Andy, that people would have still been

37:07

thinking, even people who hadn't read Meredith

37:10

would have had this sort of, he had this

37:12

veneer of, you know, well, he was

37:14

modern and he wrote modern

37:17

love and he understood that couples

37:19

weren't necessarily compatible and all

37:22

of that. And this makes you see

37:25

his hypocrisy without ever saying

37:27

he's a hypocrite, which would just be tedious.

37:31

I think the lightness Lucy

37:33

does for massive,

37:36

it's a superb artistic choice,

37:39

because actually it doesn't

37:42

feel vindictive.

37:47

It feels sort of a

37:50

shruggingly amused, you know,

37:53

statement of how she sees it realistically.

37:55

Yeah,

37:56

yeah, she's got such a light touch and such

37:58

a wish I want to pick up on something that Rachel said. about how

38:00

witty the book is and this is wonderful. So

38:03

at the very end of the book, that section where she gives

38:05

brief lives and she gives the birth dates and death

38:07

dates and the characters. And when you get

38:10

to George Meredith, it says Meredith

38:12

George 1828 to 1909, important

38:15

English novelist and poet. He was known in his

38:17

day for his quote advanced views

38:19

on such matters on women's lot. And

38:21

then of course, Mary Ellen Peacock Nichols comes

38:24

underneath 1821 to 1861, an unfortunate

38:27

but courageous woman. I mean, it's

38:30

such a wonderful kind of bit that you could just pass

38:32

over and kind of forget, but these little nuggets

38:35

of information, it is this kind of cleverness

38:37

and the sharpness of it. But I was also going to

38:39

say, I think Johnson, she wrote some kind

38:41

of academic dissertation on Meredith herself at

38:43

one point, didn't she? And then I listened to an

38:45

interview and she says something like, she was a fan of

38:48

his, but by the end of writing this book, she came to

38:50

actually hate the guy. So it's a

38:52

shame for her heart over the course

38:54

of

38:54

it. Well, that's in the tradition

38:56

of a great backlisted favourite that we've never

38:58

actually made an episode about. Roger

39:01

Lewis's Life and Death of Peter Sellers, where

39:05

the whole animus of that

39:07

moment, incredible book is how

39:10

much Lewis comes to hate Sellers by

39:12

the time you finish his writing it.

39:14

Built into the footnotes and footnotes, of course,

39:16

feature in this book as well, and we'll come on to those. But

39:19

I know how much our

39:22

listeners will want to hear about those

39:24

footnotes.

39:24

So please stay with us for

39:27

a moment while we go to a break to

39:29

hear from our sponsors.

39:30

Welcome back.

39:32

I would like to say

39:34

to John Mitcheson, one of the things that I loved

39:37

about featuring, that we were going to talk about this book,

39:39

is we have a long standing belief

39:42

on backlisted that all the best books are

39:44

books about other books. And

39:47

it struck me

39:49

that

39:50

the true history of the first Mrs Meredith

39:53

is one of the best books

39:56

about books we've ever featured

39:58

on this podcast, right?

39:59

I mean, Rachel, you were saying

40:02

about

40:02

second wave feminism, and we should try and

40:05

explain, I think, why

40:07

this was perhaps

40:09

radical in that context. But for me,

40:12

reading it now, I was thinking, my goodness,

40:15

this is so,

40:17

so elegantly, wittily

40:20

done to say to the reader,

40:23

I barely know more than you do.

40:26

Let's agree to pretend that

40:28

we can recreate this world

40:31

via something factual, which

40:33

simultaneously is impossible without

40:35

the introduction of fictional

40:37

techniques.

40:39

I thought that was magnificently

40:41

done. Inspired conjecture, yeah.

40:47

One of the most subtle

40:49

things, I think,

40:50

the books about books thing that Johnson

40:53

does here is

40:55

she, you know, we've had the out

40:57

the bare outline of the story, you know,

40:59

the marriage fails,

41:00

and

41:02

she leaves Meredith

41:04

and has, and it was probably already

41:07

having the affair with with the

41:08

painter, Henry Willis has

41:10

a child with him. You know, the sense of her agency

41:13

is really strong and Meredith,

41:15

really, after that, he can't stand

41:17

even for people to mention her name. He's incredibly

41:20

cross about her. So and

41:22

most biographers have left it at that right. But what Johnson

41:25

does is shows that he can't leave.

41:28

He can't leave her alone in his own

41:30

writing. Not only does he write this quite

41:33

weird sequence of

41:35

sonnets called Modern Love, but continually

41:38

through his career, he comes back to

41:41

the issue of what happens between

41:43

men and women and lies in marriage

41:45

and independence and

41:47

beauty and all the things. I mean, she

41:50

was an older woman and obviously

41:52

she died after the marriage that she

41:54

left. She didn't have very long on

41:57

her own. She died at age 40 from. renal

42:00

failure. And that

42:02

is perhaps also why she's kind of

42:05

fallen out of the historical record. But

42:08

it's a book at

42:10

a very deep level about how

42:13

writing works at all,

42:15

both fiction and nonfiction.

42:17

And that's the thing I think that sets it apart

42:19

from, this is not

42:21

a biography in my view. Yeah,

42:23

well, I would like to ask you all,

42:25

what is this book?

42:29

It arrives in your hands in the bookshop

42:32

and you're only allowed one section to

42:35

put it in. Where does it go? Does

42:37

it go in women's writing,

42:39

fiction,

42:40

biography, licorice

42:42

or other?

42:46

Other. It goes in one of those bookshops that has the weird

42:49

system where you can never find the book you want, but you always find

42:51

wonderful gems along the way. You

42:53

could put it in all of those and in none of those.

42:55

And that's the genius of it, right?

42:57

I sort of feel it is a biography.

43:01

She doesn't go too far. So

43:04

she does imagine

43:06

things. She does,

43:10

you know, what was that John said, imaginative

43:13

conjecture. That's all true.

43:15

But she doesn't do what Anna

43:18

Funder does, which I think is Anna

43:20

Funder goes too far. She

43:22

knows when

43:25

she can't

43:27

be right.

43:32

She doesn't know about wrongness,

43:34

so she can make some guesses. But she

43:37

knows when she should not certain things

43:39

are not possible. And

43:41

I think that that's one of the brilliant things about

43:44

it, that it's like a tightrope walk.

43:47

That she

43:49

makes

43:51

little guesses and

43:52

she draws little pictures, but

43:54

she never

43:56

spoils it by saying

43:58

something extreme. And I

44:00

feel like if I was writing this book, I would

44:03

ruin it because I'd say something like, Mary

44:06

this was just a pig.

44:08

And she never does that. You

44:10

know, she, that's what, that's

44:12

what podcasts are for, right?

44:15

I just, you see what I mean? It's

44:17

incredibly

44:19

well judged. Everything in it is kind

44:21

of true. The facts are all true. Even

44:24

when she pushes it, Diane Johnson wasn't available

44:27

to answer the question directly.

44:29

But here is a clip of

44:31

her talking about the relationship

44:34

between truth

44:36

and lies, fiction and nonfiction, from

44:39

a lecture that she gave about 10

44:42

years ago.

44:43

One of its observations is that my hometown

44:46

of Moline was a very quiet place. One

44:49

passage describes how the most shocking

44:51

thing that ever happened in Moline was

44:53

that someone did once draw a rude chalk

44:56

outline on the playground pavement of

44:58

our Calvin Coolidge junior high school principal,

45:01

Mr. Congdon, with a 10 foot penis.

45:05

When I sent a few chapters

45:07

to my childhood friend, Alice Kago

45:09

for verification of some facts,

45:12

was our elementary school playground to

45:14

the west of the school and so on. She wrote

45:16

back several pages of objections.

45:19

Logan School he says North

45:21

South not East West. Our Latin teacher

45:23

was Miss Macadire and no

45:25

one ever drew a rude picture of

45:27

Mr. Congdon on the pavement. How disgusting.

45:30

How could you make something like that up? But

45:34

no, I remember our

45:37

amazed fascination and our

45:39

discussions about whether we ought to rub it out

45:42

and whether Mr. Congdon, what he would do

45:44

if he saw it. Can

45:47

we claim that something is true because we remember

45:49

it that way. The unreliability

45:52

of memory is well known. The safe

45:54

disclaimer of fiction forestalls lots

45:57

of indignation to say nothing of lawsuits.

46:00

Scholars love to find the lies in

46:02

bygone works of nonfiction. Dickens

46:05

exaggerations about the blacking house, for

46:07

example. But such inquiries

46:09

are never really productive. For what is truth,

46:11

it's many levels. It's literal and emotional

46:13

divergences. At some level,

46:16

everything we write is true because it's true to our

46:18

own perception. But we still have to be

46:20

careful what we call it.

46:22

We still have to be careful

46:24

what we call it. That seems to me really

46:27

wise, right? It doesn't

46:29

have to be one thing, but we

46:31

have to be in the age of the

46:33

crown.

46:35

We have to be very clear about what

46:38

it is we are doing. And Rachel, I agree with you. I

46:40

think one of the, almost it feels

46:42

to me instinctive,

46:46

elements of this book is the way in which she

46:48

knows, it feels to me instinctively,

46:50

where to draw that line. The

46:53

judgment is not merely tonal, but

46:56

actually relevant to the subject

46:58

as well.

46:58

I was interested that you

47:00

said that she said that she came

47:02

to hate Meredith because one

47:05

of the things I think about the book is that it's

47:07

so generous

47:08

and that she has sympathy

47:10

for everyone,

47:12

no matter really how badly

47:14

they behave. She sees that people are

47:17

complicated, obviously, but also sometimes

47:19

they can't help themselves.

47:21

They do things

47:24

that they probably know themselves are wrong,

47:27

but that's what human beings are.

47:29

We're always kind of

47:31

cocking things up for ourselves, particularly

47:34

when it comes to our hearts and the people

47:36

that we love. And

47:38

I think that with Meredith

47:41

and all of them, it's especially

47:43

tender at the end where she writes

47:45

about what Wallace did

47:48

after she dies. And

47:51

he just seems to be so,

47:55

in many ways, sort of lovely, but in

47:57

another way, kind of distant and a bit

47:59

like a trusty.

50:02

since she died. So this is visitation

50:04

of ghosts at her grave.

50:06

Next, some grislier shades appear,

50:09

wet, dripping, adorned with

50:11

seaweed and starfish and other regalia

50:13

of the drowned.

50:14

Two are young men whose permanently resentful

50:17

expressions, fixed so at their deaths,

50:19

are mitigated here by looks of sorrow

50:22

and of cosmic anger

50:24

in their glaring dead eyes. The first is young

50:26

Lieutenant Nichols,

50:28

Mary Ellen's husband, when she was 22.

50:31

They were married for three months before his drowning.

50:33

For him, she remains his beautiful bride.

50:36

He weeps. The other is the poet

50:39

Shelley. He had told Peacock that the

50:41

little stranger was introduced

50:43

into a rough world. He shrugs,

50:46

but his eyes stink. This Mary Ellen

50:48

had been brave, but she was born in the

50:50

wrong time. Like his contemporary

50:52

poet, Shelley thought there was nothing in the

50:55

world so sad as the death of a young and beautiful

50:57

woman. He grasped the arm

50:59

of Edward Nichols. They had not known

51:01

each other in life, but they find a certain

51:03

camaraderie now. Of

51:06

no importance to Mary Ellen, a bit of interest to us,

51:08

are two other drowned and ghastly figures in

51:10

discrete distance away, definitely attending

51:13

Shelley and Nichols. The one pale and bloated is Harriet

51:15

Shelley, and the other is a one-armed sailor

51:18

whose name is not known. Seaweed

51:20

decorates his dripping hair. Shrill

51:23

and scolding voices, female voices, rustle

51:25

of petticoats, brisk feet. Mary

51:27

Shelley is the one in the wide skirt, and the woman in

51:29

the high-waisted Regency gown is her mother, Mary

51:32

Wollstonecraft. They have pretty pointed

51:34

faces and thin lips.

51:36

They are angry on Mary Ellen's behalf. Their

51:38

impatient feet tap. They pace over the

51:40

grave.

51:41

Must it always be this way for women?

51:43

Here was one they thought might persevere in women's

51:45

name. She had promise. She

51:47

had courage. I

51:49

mean, I

51:50

think A, that's a terrific bit of writing,

51:53

but also you'll go with her because she's

51:55

making a very important point. I

51:58

thought it was fascinating. that

52:00

Diane Johnson, 10 years after

52:02

writing this book, penned

52:05

a biography of the

52:08

writer Dashiel Hammett,

52:10

a great man who

52:12

we featured on the backlisted who also did

52:14

awful things. And that biography was authorised

52:17

by Lillian Hellman, who

52:19

made something of a name for herself after

52:21

Hammett's death by saying, well,

52:24

I

52:25

contributed much to Dashiel's career.

52:27

It seems implausible to me that

52:30

she wasn't attracted to employing

52:32

Johnson to do that job because of Johnson's

52:35

work on this particular book.

52:38

It seems as I can obviously think. Now, Rachel, I know

52:40

you've read some of Diane

52:42

Johnson's novels. She had this very peculiar

52:45

career. What sort of thing

52:47

has she gone on to write?

52:49

I read this book,

52:51

Le Divorce. Le

52:54

Divorce, made into a film by Merchant Ivory.

52:56

It's

52:56

about Americans in

52:59

Paris. It's a very kind of witty

53:02

update on water. And

53:05

Americans, by Johnson's telling,

53:08

are a bit

53:09

sort of, you know, they're gauche.

53:12

They don't know what to eat. They don't know what

53:14

to wear. They don't know how to have sex

53:16

properly. Like

53:17

Victorians. Yes, exactly. And

53:22

the French sort of, you know, teach,

53:24

if you are open

53:27

hearted and young, then the French

53:29

can teach you how to eat, have sex

53:31

or, you know, wear a jacket properly, all

53:34

of it. And they're very really

53:36

well plotted, really well

53:39

written. And actually,

53:41

the book that Mary Ellen

53:44

is reading, which you referred

53:46

to right at the beginning, John. Adolphe.

53:49

Adolphe. The epigram of

53:51

each chapter is from Adolphe in

53:54

Le Divorce.

53:56

So she's so sophisticated.

53:59

She can do anything.

55:59

chose the king,

56:01

but in the process

56:04

of having talked to me and Stephen King probably

56:07

decided I was more docile or, you

56:09

know... How much steak on his part? That

56:14

I was the one who wanted to work with him.

56:18

So that's how it came about. I

56:21

just kept getting these phone calls from him every

56:24

night at 11.

56:25

Why? So you were not physically together? No,

56:28

just this

56:29

strange man would call and want

56:32

to talk about the literature and everything.

56:36

And when it finally got to the screen, did you see any of your

56:38

work up there? Oh sure. You did? Yeah,

56:41

I wrote the script. Well,

56:43

I understand that,

56:46

but he went with it. He didn't necessarily manipulate

56:48

it to his own...

56:49

There were some changes. Well,

56:52

he was very involved in the process all the way

56:54

along. I wrote

56:57

it in England, sitting around

57:00

his

57:01

house, basically.

57:03

So there were no surprises by

57:06

the time the script was finished.

57:09

When it came to the shooting, he cut out

57:11

a lot of Wendy's lines,

57:13

in fact. So

57:16

the wife, Wendy, who

57:19

ended up...

57:20

Shelly Duval. The Shelly Duval

57:23

character

57:25

really has very little to say. In

57:27

my

57:28

version, she was more articulate. But

57:31

apparently, Kubrick hated her. They

57:33

didn't get along. He and Shelly Duval. He

57:39

didn't like the way she would say the lines.

57:41

And it's like, oh, then never mind. Cut that.

57:45

So finally it came down

57:48

to her just screaming

57:49

a lot, basically. She probably remember.

57:54

My favorite scene in The Shining

57:56

is the scene where Shelly Duval comes

57:58

across manuscript.

59:59

should talk about feminism now. Well

1:00:01

there

1:00:04

is something that I think is good

1:00:06

about this book in

1:00:09

a feminist way which is that

1:00:12

a lot of the sort

1:00:14

of you know with big quote marks

1:00:16

around feminist biographies that

1:00:19

I've read recently overstate

1:00:23

the case of the woman

1:00:25

and I understand why they do that but

1:00:28

so for instance if we were to take Eileen

1:00:30

Orwell as an example you know

1:00:33

oh she she could have been a

1:00:35

genius too that kind of thing and

1:00:37

what I like about this book is

1:00:40

that Diane Johnson doesn't make

1:00:43

any great claims

1:00:46

for Mary Ellen she says

1:00:48

how clever and lively and

1:00:50

witty she was and actually how

1:00:52

independent she was

1:00:54

but she doesn't sort of say you

1:00:57

know she was a genius and

1:00:59

if only we could rescue her

1:01:01

and what's fascinating about it is

1:01:03

that it's left to Mary

1:01:06

Ellen's daughter to have a career

1:01:08

because she ends

1:01:10

up running this

1:01:12

cookery school and she continues

1:01:14

to run it even

1:01:16

after she marries and of course

1:01:19

she learned about cooking from her mother

1:01:21

and her grandfather from the peacock who were

1:01:23

you know these great greedy pigs a

1:01:26

bit like me and so I

1:01:28

love that about the book that

1:01:31

Diane Johnson it's again a case

1:01:33

of not going too far she absolutely

1:01:37

sees Mary Ellen but she doesn't overstate

1:01:39

her case you know she and

1:01:41

then she brings us Edith the daughter

1:01:43

right at the end who's you know making

1:01:46

pies and teaching people to make pies

1:01:49

and that I just find that so wonderful there's

1:01:51

something incredibly cheering

1:01:53

and inspiring about it for me.

1:01:57

And it's true to say I suppose the link

1:01:59

with Carmen.

1:01:59

is, Carmen's publishing, it seems

1:02:02

to me, was always

1:02:04

motivated by, I remember

1:02:07

her saying to us actually, John,

1:02:09

was there something interesting about it? Was

1:02:12

there something good about it? Not

1:02:14

was there something on message about

1:02:16

it, though that obviously was

1:02:18

an important part, but did it pass

1:02:21

muster? Was it good? And I

1:02:23

assume, Rachel, she liked this

1:02:26

book, even though it clearly was old news to her,

1:02:29

it feels so part

1:02:31

of her project.

1:02:31

Yeah, I mean, this is so her

1:02:34

kind of thing, and you're right about that. I

1:02:36

mean, you know, famously Carmen had this thing

1:02:38

she used to talk about the Whipple line, which

1:02:41

is that she thinks that Dorothy Whipple

1:02:44

was a shit writer, and that she

1:02:46

would never be published. She

1:02:48

would never be published by Verrigo, and of course that

1:02:50

makes Nicola Bowman, who runs the session, he absolutely

1:02:53

livid. But Carmen's view was

1:02:55

things have to be interesting and good,

1:02:57

and to just be something by or

1:02:59

about a woman isn't enough, that

1:03:02

that is, in a way, that's

1:03:04

counterproductive. You know, that's how Carmen

1:03:06

saw it. And I think that that's

1:03:08

definitely the case with

1:03:09

this book. As you say, it's not about

1:03:11

formulaic,

1:03:13

reclamation history. It's about

1:03:15

whether it's well told. It's always the

1:03:17

Carmen, it seemed to me, it was always about the actual

1:03:19

quality, the actual literary quality of the books

1:03:21

that she was publishing.

1:03:22

Totally. And I, yeah, and that's why she

1:03:24

used to get so

1:03:26

annoyed about people writing

1:03:30

certain

1:03:30

men off, you know,

1:03:33

on the grounds that they were, they

1:03:35

have used the word already pigs. And

1:03:38

so she didn't go along with that, because she,

1:03:40

her view was, well, let's look at the book,

1:03:43

and we'll think about the book, and then we'll

1:03:45

think about their character. And that's

1:03:47

definitely a play here,

1:03:49

isn't it? That, you

1:03:51

know, we don't, you don't, you don't come

1:03:54

away loathing Meredith. In

1:03:56

fact, I actually feel more curious

1:03:58

about him than ever.

1:03:59

Yeah, and

1:04:01

I love looking at the pictures of him.

1:04:03

He's rather a beautiful looking man

1:04:05

in my

1:04:05

view objectified

1:04:08

George Meredith I'm

1:04:10

gonna do a Victorian hotties

1:04:12

calendar You

1:04:18

could feature John with that beard, you

1:04:21

know what Rachel Mitch has been making 197 episodes

1:04:24

of this podcast so that finally someone will refer

1:04:27

to him as a Victorian hot I

1:04:30

could not be more happy

1:04:34

Thank you to Rachel for suggesting what

1:04:38

I hope we've

1:04:39

Demonstrated as a stone-cold classic to

1:04:41

Lucy for adding her usual depth

1:04:43

and perspective to this discussion to Nikki

1:04:46

They're making us all sound even more professional

1:04:49

and of course to Carmen

1:04:50

who would surely have been lobbying

1:04:52

in astute Observations brilliant insights

1:04:55

and marvelous gales of laughter Had she been

1:04:57

able to join us if you'd like show

1:04:59

notes with clips links and suggestions

1:05:02

for further reading for this show and the 196 that

1:05:06

we've already recorded Please visit

1:05:08

our website

1:05:09

at backlisted FM

1:05:11

if you want to buy the books discussed visit

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extra exclusive podcasts every

1:05:46

month We call it lock listed

1:05:48

because it began in the when locked haven just before

1:05:50

lockdown It features the three of us talking

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and recommending the books films and music we've enjoyed

1:05:54

in the previous fortnight But those of you who

1:05:56

are enjoyed are what have you been reading

1:05:59

Andy slot?

1:05:59

That's where you'll now found it. Plus,

1:06:02

drop listeners get their names read out and accompanied

1:06:04

by lessons of thanks like this.

1:06:06

Rob Clucas, thank you. Mimi Smith, thank

1:06:09

you. Nick Randall, thank you. Andrew

1:06:11

Oakley, thank you. Erin Graham, thank

1:06:13

you.

1:06:15

Sylvie Urb, thank you.

1:06:17

Rachel Dressler, thank you. Sharon McPhee,

1:06:20

thank you. Sarah Hodgkinson,

1:06:22

thank you. Henry Giardina, thank

1:06:24

you. Thank you all for listening.

1:06:27

You're going to hear another

1:06:29

little bit from Carmen,

1:06:32

one of Carmen's appearances on Batlisted.

1:06:35

We hope she's

1:06:37

agreeing with this or disagreeing

1:06:39

with it or, you know,

1:06:42

buying Nick as in Monoprey right

1:06:44

at this moment. Anyway, thanks

1:06:47

very much, everybody. John, anything you want to add? Yeah, good.

1:06:49

Just to say on the Nick's name, there is, I'm

1:06:51

not going to read it out, but there

1:06:54

is some brilliant, some brilliant footnote

1:06:56

about ladies underwear or the lack of

1:06:58

ladies underwear. That

1:06:59

is the one footnote we should have read

1:07:00

out. Well, look, come on, let's

1:07:03

have it and then we'll go. The speculation

1:07:05

is, did she remove them to have sex with

1:07:08

her underwear, to have sex with Henry

1:07:11

Wallace? And the footnote says, if

1:07:13

she removed them, ladies often

1:07:15

wore no drawers in those days. The drawers, though

1:07:18

known, were new in 1856 and

1:07:20

were thought to be masculine in that they imitated

1:07:22

trousers. So the whole thing may have been simpler than we

1:07:24

think. Not much is known about

1:07:26

Victorian notions of propriety and dress

1:07:29

for erotic occasions. Did

1:07:31

they remove their clothing or only the better glasses

1:07:33

or any prostitutes? Much would depend

1:07:36

to, no doubt, upon the season of the

1:07:38

year. As

1:07:43

the autumn nights draw in.

1:07:45

All right. Thank you so much, Rachel. Thank you,

1:07:47

Lucy. Thanks, everyone.

1:07:49

We'll see you in a fortnight for Halloween. Halloween.

1:07:52

Bye-bye. See you next time. Goodbye.

1:08:09

Can we discuss now for about 24 hours, female masochists?

1:08:16

Let us not throw breath on the subject.

1:08:19

Let us turn on and on and on. I'm

1:08:22

sure our producer will have something to say on

1:08:24

that topic. She was so

1:08:26

extraordinary about Elizabeth Jenkins. She knew

1:08:28

about it because she was an exemplar

1:08:31

of it.

1:08:32

And that's what they do for their men, you

1:08:34

know, in those days. In

1:08:37

those days? They did. Because

1:08:39

what they got as a reward

1:08:40

was the protection of a great strong

1:08:42

man with an iron, a door of an iron

1:08:44

box.

1:08:45

But

1:08:48

many of

1:08:49

the writers who wrote introductions

1:08:52

to these novels, when I first published them now, what is

1:08:54

it, 40 years ago, republished them, sorry.

1:08:57

Or a different class of writers.

1:09:00

You know,

1:09:01

it's wonderful to think

1:09:03

how much women's lives have improved. Because

1:09:05

there's always the element of astonishment

1:09:07

when

1:09:08

you read a novel like this,

1:09:10

to think what women suffered before

1:09:14

everybody tried to change their lives in the Western

1:09:16

world anyway.