Lost Ladies of Lit

Subscriber-only episode Send us a text This week’s episode was born out of Amy’s recent visit to London’s Highgate Cemetery, where fortuitous timing (or, perhaps, the graveside spirit of Christina Rossetti?) revealed a bit of juicy family drama. Find out why the tragic death (and later exhumation) of a pre-Raphaelite m

Send us a text In this week"s hiatus replay, we’re focusing on one of Ukraine’s best-known poets and playwrights, Laryssa Kosach, who wrote under the pen name Lesya Ukrainka. Her play The Forest Song is a masterpiece of Ukrainian drama.  Discussed in this episode:  The Forest Song by Lesya Ukrainka Looking for Trouble 

Subscriber-only episode Send us a text Once upon a time, a young woman escaped to a primeval forest, befriended the animals there (including a lynx, raven and wild boar) and met her handsome prince. Sounds like a fairy tale, but in this week’s episode Amy discusses the enchanting true story of Simona Kossak, a Polish s

Send us a text Novelist and university professor Joy Castro returns to the show to discuss the 1952 novel Forbidden Notebook by Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Cespedes. In a New York Times review of a 1958 English edition of this novel, de Céspedes was called “one of the few distinguished women writers since Colette to g

Subscriber-only episode Send us a text Books are a time-tested cure-all, so in this week’s bonus episode Amy weighs a few of the titles that have helped her forget life"s latest troubles and doubts … (sort of). She leaves no stone unturned in her quest for distraction, from Proust’s meandering sentences to a behind-the

Send us a text At the age of eight, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (later known by her pen name Zitkála-Šá) left her Yankton Dakota reservation to attend a missionary boarding school for Native Americans, a harsh and abusive experience about which she eventually wrote a series of articles published in The Atlantic Monthly. Je