Lost Ladies of Lit

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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 and Giroux in 2025
Mentioned in this episode:
Fish Tales by Nettie Jones
Honey is the Knife by Hannah Eko
The Lit Club’s 2026 event calendar
Toni Morrison
Village Well bookstore
Lucumi
Oshun
Charles Abramson
Jean Toomer
Longreads article on Nettie Jones by Michael Gonzalez
Numa Perrier
Zola film
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerny
Hunter S. Thompson
Anais Nin
Gayl Jones
The Hitachi Magic Wand
Yoruba Art
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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 discuss the double life that allowed Tey to rocket to stardom while also flying under the radar in her home town of Inverness, Scotland.
Mentioned in this episode:
Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Kif: An Unvarnished History by Josephine Tey
The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey
Claverhouse by Josephine Tey
Richard of Bordeaux by Josephine Tey
Josephine Tey: A Life by Jennifer Morag Henderson
Daughters of the North: Jean Gordon and Mary, Queen of Scots by Jennifer Morag Henderson
Jofrid Gunn by Jennifer Morag Henderson
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Richard III Society
Anstey Physical Training College
Richard III: The King in the Car Park documentary

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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 the Rose. Wellesley professor Sara Kippur joins us in conversation to discuss the glittering life and literary merits of this often-overlooked 20th-century figure.
Mentioned in this episode
The Tale of the Rose: The Love Story Behind The Little Prince by Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry
Oppède or Kingdom of the Rocks by Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry
New York Nouveau: How Postwar French Literature Became American by Sara Kippur
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
José Vasconcelos
Enrique Gomez Carrillo
Nelly de Vogüé
Alain Vircondelet
José Martines Fructuoso
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 117 on Zelda Fitzgerald
André Gide
André Breton
Oppède
Website with photos of Consuelo’s art
Varian Fry
Elsa Triolet
Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras
The Volcano Daughters by Gina Maria Balibrera

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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, join us to discuss their new reissue of this 1872 book and why it still resonates so loudly in the era of Donald Trump.
Discussed in this episode:
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton
Who Would Have Thought It? By María Amparo Ruiz de Burton
Quite Literally Books
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 246 on Jessie Redmon Fauset
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 79 on Frances Harper’s Iola LeRoy
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Henry S. Burton
Mary Todd Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Varina Davis
James Baldwin
Dr. Jessie Alemán
1863 Habeas Corpus Suspension Act
The Squatter and the Don by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton on Project Gutenberg

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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 successful book by a Black author at that time. Cathryn Halverson, author of a brand-new biography on Harrion, joins us this week to discuss this “born writer,” whose sheer pluck and adventurous spirit helped her take the world by storm. 
Mentioned in this episode: 
My Great, Wide, Beautiful World by Juanita Harrison (free online version).
A Born Writer: Juanita Harrison and Her Beautiful World by Cathryn Harrison
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 210 on Mary Maclane
Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 246 on Jessie Redmon Fauset
Chimene Jackson
Mildred Morris
Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers
Anthony Bourdain
Era Bell Thomson

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For episodes and show notes, visit: 
LostLadiesofLit.com

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