699 Gatsby's Daisy (with Rachel Feder) | My Last Book with Francesca Peacock

Summary

Episode Summary: The History of Literature – Episode 699: "Gatsby's Daisy (with Rachel Feder) | My Last Book with Francesca Peacock"

Release Date: April 28, 2025
Host: Jack Wilson
Guest: Rachel Feder, Associate Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver

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1. Introduction to the Episode

In Episode 699 of The History of Literature, host Jack Wilson delves into a centennial celebration of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, The Great Gatsby. This episode features a compelling conversation with Rachel Feder, an esteemed literary scholar and author of the poetry collection Daisy. Feder offers a fresh, narrative-poetic retelling of Daisy Buchanan’s character, reimagining her as a 1990s teen poet. This innovative perspective aims to explore Daisy’s inner world and agency, providing new insights into one of literature’s most enigmatic characters.

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2. Guest Introduction: Rachel Feder

Rachel Feder, an associate professor at the University of Denver, brings a rich background in literary arts and critical analysis. She has authored several poetry collections, including Birth Chart and Words with Friends, and has contributed scholarly works on diverse topics such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and Jane Austen. Feder’s expertise in narrative poetry and her role as an editor for the Norton Library edition of Dracula position her uniquely to reinterpret Daisy Buchanan’s character from The Great Gatsby.

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3. Rachel Feder’s Background and Literary Journey

Feder shares insights into her formative years, highlighting a childhood immersed in literature. Growing up in Boulder, Colorado, she developed a profound connection with books, from children’s classics like A.A. Milne and Beatrix Potter to more complex works like Mrs. Dalloway and Beloved. This early exposure fostered her passion for writing and storytelling, eventually leading her to academia and literary criticism.

“I was always writing, I was always reading and I was always imagining and putting stories together and understanding myself and my world kind of through that lens.”
— Rachel Feder [17:51]

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4. Discussion on "Daisy" – Reimagining Daisy Buchanan

Feder introduces her latest work, Daisy, a narrative poetry collection that reinterprets Daisy Buchanan as a 1990s teen poet. This reimagining situates Daisy in a modern context, allowing for an exploration of her character beyond Fitzgerald’s original portrayal. Feder emphasizes the desire to give Daisy a more nuanced inner voice and agency, challenging the archetypal “beautiful fool” trope.

“I've had a bone to pick with the novel since I read it when I was a teenager myself.”
— Rachel Feder [42:08]

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5. Critique of Fitzgerald’s Depiction of Daisy Buchanan

Feder critiques Fitzgerald’s characterization of Daisy, arguing that she embodies the “charm of women” archetype, which diminishes her agency and depth. She questions the limited portrayal of Daisy as an object of male admiration, devoid of her own motivations and complexities.

“What is the role of the beautiful fool archetype? And what would it mean to occupy that role within the intellectual and literary history that is girlhood?”
— Rachel Feder [48:28]

Jack Wilson echoes this sentiment, highlighting Fitzgerald’s reduction of female characters to mere objects of charm without meaningful agency.

“The characters are so inert, and so, you know, they don't have the agency that the courage of men would have.”
— Jack Wilson [51:14]

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6. Themes in "Daisy": Charm, Agency, and Gender

Feder explores the dual interpretations of "charm" in her work—both as an appealing trait and as a manipulative force. She delves into how Daisy’s charm affects her relationships and her own sense of self, ultimately limiting her ability to pursue personal happiness.

“Charm in the other sense. So that control is always sort of fluctuating and the power of the one is defined by the attention of the other.”
— Rachel Feder [52:05]

The discussion expands to examine how literary tropes surrounding romance and gender roles contribute to the perpetuation of Daisy’s limited portrayal. Feder challenges these conventions, advocating for a more empowered and self-aware representation of female characters.

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7. Autobiographical Elements and Writing Process

Feder provides a glimpse into her creative process, describing the writing of Daisy as an almost spontaneous and intuitive act. She likens the experience to channeling a separate persona, allowing Daisy to express her own narrative independent of Fitzgerald’s original text.

“It almost feels like I just sort of channeled her somehow.”
— Rachel Feder [26:22]

Despite incorporating elements from The Great Gatsby, Feder maintains fidelity to the original characters while infusing them with new depths and contemporary relevance.

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8. Future Perspectives and Intended Impact

Fed discusses the broader implications of her work, positioning Daisy as both a tribute to and a critical reexamination of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. By reimagining Daisy in a modern setting, Feder aims to inspire readers to reconsider traditional literary archetypes and recognize the complexities of female characters in literature.

“I think it's an elegy for the hope of the 90s in a lot of ways.”
— Rachel Feder [58:47]

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9. Conclusion

The episode concludes with reflections on the enduring legacy of The Great Gatsby and the importance of reinterpreting classic literature through contemporary lenses. Jack Wilson expresses admiration for Feder’s innovative approach and encourages listeners to engage with her work, Daisy, to gain a deeper understanding of Daisy Buchanan’s character.

“Her book is fun too. Daisy, do check it out.”
— Jack Wilson [69:36]

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Notable Quotes

• “I am Jack Wilson, your host of today's festivities.”
  — Jack Wilson [01:00]

• “Her voice is full of money.”
  — Jack Wilson [12:17]

• “It was so an experiment.”
  — Rachel Feder [30:37]

• “Daisy is a very complicated person.”
  — Rachel Feder [54:31]

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Final Thoughts

Episode 699 of The History of Literature offers a thought-provoking exploration of Daisy Buchanan’s character, challenging listeners to rethink established literary norms. Rachel Feder’s Daisy serves as a testament to the evolving nature of literary interpretation, demonstrating how classic characters can be reimagined to reflect contemporary values and complexities.

For more information about Rachel Feder and her work, visit historyofliterature.com or follow the podcast on Facebook.

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hey there. I'm David Harbour from Marvel Studios Thunderbolts. I don't mean to interrupt your favorite podcast. Well, actually, maybe I do just a little bit, but I have a good reason. My new film hits theaters Friday, May 2, and it's got everything. Action, suspense, humor, heart. And Bob. Who's Bob? Find out by getting tickets now. Okay, now back to the show or onto the next ad.

[Rachel Feder]

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[Jack Wilson]

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[Rachel Feder]

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[Jack Wilson]

Hello. The Great Gatsby turns 100 this year, and we are celebrating it from all different angles. Today might be the most unusual angle yet. A lover of literature, Rachel Feder has brought us a narrative, poetic retelling of the classic Fitzgerald novel from the perspective of a 1990s teen poet. Youthful passion in evocative verse and a chance to see one of Fitzgerald's most famous characters with fresh eyes today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast, everyone. I like fresh eyes, don't you? Seeing things with fresh eyes. You ever do this? Do you ever brush your teeth and have a little toothpaste on your finger without knowing it? Little smear, a little toothpaste juice still on your finger? Don't try to do this, but it happens accidentally sometimes. And then you rub your eyes and suddenly your eyes are. Are stinging with clarity. And if you're like me, you think of Freud putting a little cocaine in his eyes and feeling something like this, or something a hundred, probably one imagines. So anyway, and by one, I mean one weirdo, which usually boils down to me. Only me, Jack Wilson. I am Jack Wilson, your host of today's festivities. And festivities they are my friends, because we have Rachel Feder, courtesy of the University of Denver and Northwestern University Press, and an editor of the Norton Library edition of Dracula. Don't worry, I asked her about that, too. And she clearly loves books and great books. And she's looked at the Great Gatsby very carefully and said, hello. Here's an interesting character, Daisy. Let's put her in a new context and see what we have. What was the original context? Well, we've been talking about this for a while now. Maybe most Prominently in our episodes with Mike, where we looked at the story Winter Dreams, kind of proto Gatsby story. And we have one coming soon where he and I are going to read and examine the diamond as big as the Ritz. There's an essay by Malcolm Cowley called Hemingway's Wound and Its Consequences for American Literature. You might say something similar about Fitzgerald, but in his case, his wound, so to speak, was Genevra King. And her father. Genevra King was one of a collection of Chicago debutantes known as the Big Four. A group of high schoolers in Lake Forest, Illinois, who lived a carefree life of tennis and riding polo ponies and attending dances and house parties. This was around the turn of the century. The newspapers picked it up. Turn of the century. Maybe it was like 1912, 1914, right before the First World War. The newspapers picked up on these four glamour girls and they became famous or notorious, enormously privileged. Her father was a stockbroker. Her friend Edith Cummings, another member of the Big Four, was the daughter of a banker who'd gone to Yale. That one, Edith became an amateur golfer, a champion successful enough to appear on the COVID of Time magazine. She was the inspiration for Jordan Baker, also in the novel the Great Gatsby. Courtney Letts, third member of the Big Four, wound up married to an Argentine ambassador and becoming one of the world's 10 best dressed women. And Margaret Carey, the fourth member, was the daughter of the president of the Pullman Company. Why do we care about these people? Well, they did kind of make Chicago and America what it is today. Fitzgerald refers to a Chicago beef princess in his story the diamond as big as the Ritz. And several of these incredibly wealthy families were from the meatpacking industry, made their way that way in Chicago and also banking, dry goods, agricultural machinery, the Palmers, the McCormicks. The names are still prominent in Chicago buildings, streets and plazas. Fitzgerald came down from Minnesota and was dazzled by this group of people. And he, like many a good Midwesterner, went east for college and so did these Chicagoans. Genevra and Edith went to Westover in Middlebury, Connecticut, where their classmates included Rockefellers and bushes. Fitzgerald was two years older than Geneva King, but she was visiting St. Paul one day. One of her Westover classmates was there, was from there. And the 16 year old king met the 18 year old Fitzgerald at a sledding party. And they had enough of a spark that they kept going, chasing the perfect hour of that sledding party, dreaming up a life for themselves that would include many such hours. They exchanged letters that grew passionate. They arranged meetings with one another. And her mother eventually blocked Genevra from attending a dance at Princeton. I know why you're going there. You're going with that Fitzgerald boy. He's a middle class boy. No way. No chance. Not for you. Genevra was devastated. She wrote Fitzgerald a story about a young woman in love with a man without money who gets married to a man with money, but always thinks about the first guy, pines away for him, and then can join him when he finally does have money. Well, hello, Gatsby story in utero. It's nice to see you. Damn it, Scott, you took so much from these women. Zelda and Geneva King both. Fitzgerald visited King in Chicago, and there he received the fateful remark from Geneva's father that was going to affect him. Like that wound of Hemingway's. The father was blunt. His daughter Genevra was madly in love with this guy Fitzgerald. Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls, he supposedly said. And Fitzgerald was devastated. Genevra accepted her father's veto. And she was also such a flirt that she got kicked out of Westover. The headmistress regarded her as something of a hussy. And Genevra said, scott is top man, but I go for quantity as well as quality. But when she was flirting with a crowd of young suitors below her window, the headmistress of Westover threw her out of school. Until her father intervened and threatened to sue and got her reinstated there. But then they decided that they'd had enough of Westover. Well, this was trouble for the King Fitzgerald relationship. Westover and Princeton were near enough to one another for Fitzgerald to keep his slippery hold on his firecracker flapper. But once he had to court her back in Lake Forest, where he was the poor boy showing up on the family estate, very much unequal. Unlike Princeton and Westover, where the two of them were more or less equals. They had both been students, and Fitzgerald maybe even had a bit of an upper hand because he was further along at school. Westover was not college. Princeton, of course, was college boy. Well, once that was gone, once he was just a fading suitor showing up on the Lake Forest estate. Everything was shattered. The devastated Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton and enlisted in the army headed for World War I. He was transferred down to Alabama, and there he met Zelda. He began courting her, but he was still writing letters to Geneva King. She was the one who got away. Got away in life, perhaps, but not so much in literature. He pinned her to the pages of his novel like a collector of butterflies. And there she lives as Daisy, preserved, immortal, as is Fitzgerald's obsession with her and what she meant to him. The unattainable, the out of reach, the wealthy. It's interesting to think about the story Fitzgerald didn't write. The rich girl who falls in love with the novelist who chooses art, the artist, the intellectual instead of wealth. Maybe he couldn't even imagine it. Instead he has the fantasy of Gatsby, who makes money and as a consequence, or subsequently, I guess I should say reappears in the rich girl's life. Here's the scene where Gatsby shows Nick something that Nick hasn't recognized before. Remember that Tom Buchanan is Daisy's clunky husband, much like the man who married Geneva King. At least in Fitzgerald's eyes. Gatsby, though, is the one who really gets Daisy. They went upstairs to get ready while we three men stood there shuffling the hot pebbles with our feet. The silver curve of the moon hovered already in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed his mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly. Have you got your stables here? Asked Gatsby with an effort. About a quarter of a mile down the road. Oh. A pause. I don't see. The idea of going to town broke out Tom savagely. Women get these notions in their heads. Shall we take anything to drink? Called Daisy from an upper window. I'll get some whiskey, answered Tom. He went inside. Gatsby turned to me rigidly. I can't say anything in his house, old sport. She's got an indiscreet voice, I remarked. It's full of. I hesitated. Her voice is full of money, he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money. That was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it. The jingle of it, the. The cymbal song of it, high in a white palace. The King's daughter, the golden girl. Now all that is fascinating. The obsession with wealth and money and the ceaseless striving. As a Midwesterner myself, I've felt the pull of it, the feeling that everything happens on one of the coasts. New York, where the money and culture is, or la, with its beaches and celebrities. Fitzgerald chronicled it better than anyone else ever has, and he captured the women, but from a very particular point of view. Fitzgerald's view of narratives, storytelling was that all literature boiled down to two stories. Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer, as he put it. The charm of women and the courage of men. Is that enough for Daisy? Was it enough for Geneva King to be charming and courted by courageous men? Didn't she need to show some courage herself, or some agency at least? Didn't she have thoughts, choices to make, directions to go? I think most people today would say yes, of course, the life of Geneva King is intensely interesting. She she wasn't just a prize to be won by some giant killer. And so too with Daisy. We get glimpses of it in the Great Gatsby, but we don't get her full throated voice. Enter today's guest, Rachel Feder, who has reimagined daisy as a 90s era poet. We'll talk to her about Daisy and a lot of other things too, after this. I'm Alan Sisto, the man of the west here at the Prancing Pony Podcast. And I'm Sean Marchese, the real life Lord of the Mark. Every week here at the Prancing Pony Podcast, along with Sean or other co hosts, I explain explore the works of J.R.R. tolkien, author of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, bringing along lots of pop culture references, plenty of nerd humor, and the occasional bad pun. It's just a couple of friends hanging out at the pub, talking about our favorite books. We cover just a few pages every.

[Rachel Feder]

Episode, reading important sections of the books.

[Jack Wilson]

And having a chat about what we've read. Now we do a ton of research for each episode so that we can bring as much background information to our conversation as possible. We do all the heavy reading so you don't have to. It's a great way for first time readers to learn the basic basics of Tolkien's world. While for Middle Earth veterans it's a deep dive into their favorite stories, the Tolkien fandom is like no other. So we spend time in the community, giving talks at Tolkien events, recording live episodes, and hanging out with our listeners on Discord to engage with our audience every chance we get. So if you're ready to dive into the most beloved world in fantasy literature and become a part of a vibrant, active community of listeners, then look for the Prancing Pony podcast wherever you listen.

[Rachel Feder]

I think you're on mute.

[Jack Wilson]

Workday starting to sound the same.

[Rachel Feder]

I think you're on mute.

[Jack Wilson]

Find something that sounds better for your career on LinkedIn. With LinkedIn job collections, you can browse curated collections by relevant industries and benefits like Flexpto or hybrid workplaces so you can find the right job for you. Get [e-mail] jobs finding where you fit. LinkedIn knows how 24 chefs, 24 culinary showdowns for 24 hours straight. Which chef will out cook, outpace, outlast the competition?

[Rachel Feder]

No chef escapes the clock.

[Jack Wilson]

Season premiere 24 and 24 Last Chef Standing Sunday, April 27th at 8. See it first on Food Network Stream.

[Rachel Feder]

Next day on Max.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay. Joining me now is Rachel Feder, an associate professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver. Her poetry collections include Birth Chart and the chapbook Words with Friends. And her other works have looked at Frankenstein, Dracula, Jane Austen, the Stars and Taylor Swift. She's here today to discuss her new book, Daisy, which retells the Great Gatsby by putting the narrative in the hands of a messy, ambitious and possibly devious teen poet. Rachel Feder, welcome to the History of Literature.

[Rachel Feder]

Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

[Jack Wilson]

So I want to get to Gatsby and Daisy and I also want to ask you some questions about your previous books. But let's start out by backing up even further so we can get some context for all of these literature based projects. Where did you grow up?

[Rachel Feder]

I love that you're starting with that question because this book is so much my book about girlhood in a way and about girlhood as a form and formation of intellectual history. So I love starting at the very beginning. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, very luckily.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. And what kind of childhood did you have and how did books fit into it?

[Rachel Feder]

I would describe, well, I would describe my childhood as fairly bookish.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Rachel Feder]

I guess very, you know, in lovely, in lovely ways. And, you know, I grew up in Colorado, so books and friends and family and animals and nature were my constant companions. It sounds very, it sounds very children's literature coded when I put it that way. But I certainly grew up from a very early age. I was always writing, I was always reading and I was always imagining and putting stories together and understanding myself and my world kind of through that lens. So it's a very sort of early and constant childhood passion. Yeah, that, yeah. A big part of my kind of intellectual development comes from those early childhood experiences of reading.

[Jack Wilson]

Were you reading classic literature? Did you discover Jane Austen and Frankenstein and so on early or I mean, I read the great illustrated classics when I was really young and I didn't realize how formative those were until I, I saw a copy of them at my parents house and felt like weeping. They were so powerful in my imagination. But did you, was that something you had discovered too, or did that come later?

[Rachel Feder]

So both Austin and Shelley were Kind of the slow burns for me that I began and their works began to take hold of me in college. But I certainly was reading classics and classics of children's literature when I was young, kind of along with everything else. And I have, you know, formative kind of memories, core memories of reading the works of A.A. milne and Beatrix Potter when I was very, very young. And then as I got a little older, Little Women and the Phantom Toll Booth and James Harrieti books, Black Beauty, pretty much any classic with a horse or a dog. I think children's literature is so fascinating and then. But, you know, also Cereal Bo and Archie comics and Twist Magazine and Goosebumps and Fear street and all of that, along with the other classics that I read then into my preteen and teen years. Mrs. Dalloway and Beloved. And I Capture the Castle is a really big one for me when I was young, Dodie Smith, I Captured the Castle. My childhood best friend and I had one copy that we sort of shared and passed between us. And every book I write is in some sense an attempt to get back to that experience of reading I Capture the Castle for the first time, I think. But in addition to those, to those classics, I think that the other genres, more quotidian genres or popular genres, have influenced my writing as well.

[Jack Wilson]

Right now, it seems like with children who are big readers, they either have a kind of mentor figure, a librarian, a teacher, a parent or someone, an older sibling, someone who is saying, you should read this and you should read this and putting books in their hand. Or there is this experience of going into a library and someone saying, yeah, go ahead and check out whatever book you want. You can explore. This is up to you. This is where your imagination gets to take you toward whatever book is. Is appealing to you. Were you one or the other of those kids?

[Rachel Feder]

It's interesting. I think I was both kids. But now that you mention it, a lot of the classics that I mentioned, the early childhood ones, were certainly given to me or even read to or with me by my parents. And some of them, Mrs. Dalloway, I read in school. The Great Gatsby, I read in school and didn't had a mixed response to it. But then I, decades later, decided to work out. But we'll get to that, I'm sure. Yes. So I would say both, you know, now, as a teacher, I. As someone who gets to work with graduate students and also then undergrads who are just kind of coming into their identities as the undergrads, that is, my graduate students are, I learn as much, if not more from them as they do for me. That's. That's for sure. I'm really with my undergrads, too. But, you know, they're at a different stage of life where they are coming into their identities as writers and thinkers and scholars. And it's such a delicate balance between, you know, just pressing books into their hands all the time and then leaving this kind of openness that. This sense that I don't necessarily know what book is for them.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Yeah. I had that experience once when I was in college, and I. I was a tutor for two. I guess it was three young people who were all English as a Second Language students. That's what we called it in those days, anyway. And the teacher of the class. I had the three older kids in the class, and the teacher was busy with the kindergartners and the first graders, but these kids were in fourth or fifth grade. And she said to me, why don't you take them down to the library and help them pick out a book to read? And I just felt like this overwhelming sense of opportunity and responsibility that I wanted to make sure I got it right and to find the right book that would really resonate for them and hopefully open some doors. But it was not easy. I didn't think that I could just grab a book that I knew I liked. I had to find one that fit them.

[Rachel Feder]

Do you remember what you picked?

[Jack Wilson]

Well, I don't remember for two of them, but I remember that one of them, who was from Mexico, loved dogs. And I kind of, with some trepidation, gave her where the Red Fern Grows and, oh, wow. Sort of saying, like, you might love this, but, you know, I worried a little bit because it's also such a heartbreaking book. She loved it, and she. Yeah, it was such a moment for her. I think she ended up. She invited her parents to the school so they could meet me, and she wanted me to come to one of her play that she was in. And I think it really did help connect the two of us as teacher and student that she felt like, oh, this guy must get me that. He gave me this book which she loved as much as she did.

[Rachel Feder]

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. She felt like you saw her. Right, Based on the literary recommendation. Yeah. That's beautiful.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Okay. So when did you start writing poetry?

[Rachel Feder]

High school.

[Jack Wilson]

High school? Yeah.

[Rachel Feder]

Specifically, poetry in high school.

[Jack Wilson]

Were you a teen poet in the 90s? Is that where this is headed?

[Rachel Feder]

But I'm in Daisy. But I'm not Daisy.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay.

[Rachel Feder]

It's really funny, because my every other book that I've ever written has so much of myself in it. I mean, Harvester of Hearts, it's peer reviewed literary criticism. It's an academic monograph. And I talk about my feelings about Dirty Dancing, and I talk about my marriage and motherhood. Like the details of childbirth. Right. Like everything. I'm so. In everything I write. And in this book, which is a narrative poetry collection about a teenager who writes poetry, I. It's really. It's not. And there's a kind of like, ethnographic take on girlhood that's in it. Someone who knew me growing up or knew me when I was younger might read it and say, oh, I wonder if this is that coffee shop. Or, you know, I wonder if this is that swim hole. Or. Oh, this quality of this person. I think there was a person with that quality. There's this kind of shrapnel of lived experience in it. But it really is something else in a way that I've never written a character in that way before. And written. Even just to say written, it feels like. It almost feels like I just sort of channeled her somehow.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Rachel Feder]

I don't want to sound too woo for the. For the history of literature. She really isn't me.

[Jack Wilson]

She isn't you. But it's a world that you knew. Yeah, Right. Okay.

[Rachel Feder]

So anyway, yes, I started writing poetry in high school. I had a purple. Purple notebook where I did sort of clean copies of all my favorite poems, which is actually still on my bookshelf on my desk where I write, which is very. Also kind of out of character because I'm. I'm not sentimental. I don't keep things. I get rid of clutter, I don't keep drafts. But I have this little notebook and. Yeah, that's where it started.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, okay. And then you went to college, and I guess you must have gone to grad school as well. And at some point you started writing literary criticism, too. And you mentioned Harvester of Hearts and Motherhood under the sign of Frankenstein. I mean, I'm really drawn to that book just from the title alone, because I hadn't really realized until I did some work with Frankenstein how close the Frankenstein experience is to parenthood. That, you know, I think I had always just focused on kind of the mad scientist aspect of it and the Promethean aspect of playing God, and here's your creation. But actually, there's a lot to parenthood that is kind of Promethean in a way. You did kind of create life and you did Play God, and you end up with this creature, which is one way of putting it, who didn't ask to be here and who maybe is confused about his or her role in the world and looking to you. And you feel this sort of ownership and this pride, but also this feeling of, but I don't control this individual. And I'm responsible, but I'm not responsible ultimately, for this thing that I gave life to. And I hadn't really connected it with motherhood as much as I probably should have before. But your book, it sounds like that gave you a lot of room for rumination and thinking about kind of how it all fit together.

[Rachel Feder]

There's a long critical history of thinking about motherhood and birth and reproduction in relation to Frankenstein, and there's so much so that there is actually metacritical take on how writing about motherhood and birth and feminism and womanhood in relation to Mary Shelley and Frankenstein reflects particular moments. And so, for me, that book was this really just capacious space for me to think about my own. My own coming into motherhood, what it meant to relate that to literary history, to have this text that I was and remain so obsessed with and was sort of processing the experience through by myself and with my students, but then also to reflect on the critical archive and think about the stories that are hard to tell about how we come to understand literary history, the ways in which personal attachments, critical feuds, personal experiences of the critic, writing that's in other genres that never kind of makes it into print. All of this other stuff going on in the critical archive around literary criticism about canonical text sort of invisibly shapes our understanding of literary history. So it was a very open and connective experience where I was just thinking through a lot, a lot about literary criticism and theory and Mary Shelley, and what does critical history have to do with our understanding of literary history? But then also, what does embodied history have to do with intellectual history? We tend to separate them, but you can't, as you stop and think about it.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Rachel Feder]

So it was a big experiment.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Okay. I want to also ask you about editing Dracula for the Norton Library, and in particular, a quote of yours where you said that you endeavored to capture the found evidence aesthetic of the first edition. What exactly does that mean?

[Rachel Feder]

That project took a bit of a circuitous route, where at first, when I. I'm a scholar of the Gothic, and I'm a scholar of monster narratives in some capacity, I'm interested in the history of vampire literature specifically, in many ways. But I'm not a Stoker Scholar. And my understanding, kind of entering into that project was that other people were preparing the text, and I was going to get a kind of copy of an edition of the novel that it would then be my job to annotate and add explanatory notes and write an introduction so that the text itself would sort of be received. And for various logistical reasons that you know, having to do with the press, that shifted, and I found myself inside of Dracula doing the text edit.

[Jack Wilson]

Oh.

[Rachel Feder]

And becoming, like, attached to Stoker's typos and arguing that they needed to be put back if they were cleaned up. And copy editing.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Rachel Feder]

You know, really just kind of in the text. It's interesting because the novel itself is so metatextual, and you're always. You're always in a different voice or in a different media. You're in a different medium. You're in. One character has spoken this and recorded it, and another character has typed it up. The narrator, the question of the narrator is always so slippery. And I'd always taught the novel many, many times before I did this project, and I had always kind of let that wash over me in this experiential way and discussed it with my students. And really being in the text was. It was so immersive. It was really this, like, paper world, if that makes sense. Because when you're in the novel, you are in the stack of evidence in all its many forms that the world, no matter how modern it is, no matter how modern, even if you have a typewriter. Right. But like the modern world, and even if you have telegram, like, the world is haunted by the past. And that experience I had of editing it, I really wanted to preserve that as much as possible. So I tried to keep things as close as I possibly could, almost obsessively so, perhaps to the first edition.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. It sounds like you would have been happy to be running a small press and putting out a copy where you could have the COVID and everything would be the kind of the tactile experience of somebody who was opening that first edition for the first time.

[Rachel Feder]

Well, so I was so grateful to the team at Norton. They let me make it yellow. It was really important to me that the novel be yellow, because the first edition is yellow. And almost every edition of Dracula has a black and, you know, a black and red cover. Right. Horror and blood and darkness and that. That's not all that's happening. There's decadence and paper and the hope at Sunrise and the forbidden, corrupting novel of, you know, Dorian Gray, like You're in this whole complicated Gothic Revival moment when you're in Dracula. And so I got everything I wanted from my project. Well, nothing that I wanted, which was edit the text, which I did not think I was doing, but then everything I wanted in terms of fidelity to the original. And then my notes are pretty sparse. I didn't want to be distracting. It's an imagined world, after all. And then my introduction is basically a theory of the gothic. And so my friend Nan, when she looked at it, she said it looks minimalist, but it's secretly maximalist. And I think that's a pretty good description of a lot of my stuff.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right.

[Rachel Feder]

Yeah. So that's my edition of Dracula in a nutshell.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, well, let's move to the third monster in your monster trilogy. We have Frankenstein, we have Dracula, and fitting right in is Mr. Darcy. So the Darcy myth. What leads you to argue that Darcy is a bit more monstrous than he's often given credit for?

[Rachel Feder]

Well, so first, to qualify, you know, I love Mr. Darcy. We all love Mr. Darcy. It's less about Darcy as a monster and more about the ways in which our ideas of romance, much like Jane Austen, are deeply informed by the gothic. But we've forgotten. We've forgotten. And so it's not to say that. I mean, I do think there's a compelling reading of Darcy as rather more troubling than he might at first appear. Yeah, there's a reading that I offer in the book that has to do with. If you look at. If you kind of flip the novel a little bit and think about Lydia as a Gothic heroine who ultimately gets chained to this predator as kind of the price of the work, of the marriage plot and Mr. Darcy's role in that. I think there is a much more darker reading available. It's not to say that that's the only reading or the best reading, or that we can't love Darcy as we do, but rather that it's important to think about these romance tropes as complicated and deeply informed by their engagement with literary history that includes these much darker tales and these monster narratives, and not to just idealize a trope and a type of romantic figure without keeping those. Those dangers in mind.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, we see it in the Brontes, too. Right. It's like this. This Byronic hero or this. You know, we might ultimately decide that this person is good and has a good heart and has been misunderstood, but our initial appearance with our initial encounter with them is often kind of stormy and that they appear to be brooding and Sullen and maybe dark and dangerous and harboring secrets and that kind of. And it does kind of. I mean, on the one hand, it makes for a great story and you can kind of look at it and say, well, that's a great way to set up the plot and so forth. But it also kind of makes us ask the question, what is it about romance that makes us, that makes this story so appealing to us? Why do we like that idea that the hero is kind of like this at the beginning, seen through the heroine's eyes and so forth? It tells us how scary love can be and what marriage ultimately is. Is it about taming a beast or. There's a lot there to bring back.

[Rachel Feder]

Yeah, well, and with, you know, with the Brontes, there's, there are a lot of things. Reader. I married him. Lol. Yeah, right. I know he, I know he kept his first wife in Locked in the Attic, but I can fix him very. I mean, with the Brontes, with particularly Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were right there with Dracula in that kind of Victorian Gothic Revival moment where I think a lot of the kind of cruelty and danger is more palpable. But then it's also informed by this Byronic fantasy. Interestingly, the person who did briefly marry Lord Byron, which, it didn't go so well for her, had read Pride and Prejudice and really liked it or at least, you know, commented that it was fashionable and things like that. So, you know, I do think that there's this kind of game that these narratives can play that can give a sort of false expectation.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back with more and hear more about Rachel Fedor's take on Daisy from the Great Gatsby. Right now, the Home Depot has spring deals under $20. So no matter what you're working on, the deals are blooming at the Home Depot with savings on plants, flowers, soil and more. Then light up your outdoor space with Hampton Bay string lights was $34.99. 1997, now only 1999. And get the grill going with two 16 pound bags of Kingsford charcoal. Was 1998, now only 1788. Don't miss spring deals under $20 now through May 7th at the home Depot. Subject to availability valid on select items only. This episode is brought to you by Chevy Silverado. When it's time for you to ditch the blacktop and head off road, do it in a truck that says no to nothing. The Chevy Silverado trail boss get the rugged capability of its Z71 suspension and 2 inch factory lift, plus impressive torque and towing capacity, thanks to an available Duramax 3 liter turbo diesel engine where.

[Rachel Feder]

Other trucks call it quits.

[Jack Wilson]

You'll just be getting started. Visit chevy.com to learn more. Okay, we're back. So, Rachel, the Great Gatsby turns 100 years old in 2025. You and I are having this discussion on the eve, so to speak, of 2025. We're in December, but your book comes out in April. Daisy, as far as I can tell, she was born around 1899 or so. And you've reimagined her pretty much a hundred years later. I guess there's a teen poet, or maybe not a teen poet. Born when in 1980. She's a teen poet in the 90s, so I guess she would have been. You moved her forward about 80 years. But I guess my first question is, why Daisy? What made you think that the character of Daisy had something worth looking into?

[Rachel Feder]

You know, I mentioned before this book was really the closest experience I've ever had to like orphic, poetics. Just a. Just a whole. A thing that just came to me.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Rachel Feder]

And I, I never set out to write about the Great Gatsby or about Daisy, but I think I've had a bone to pick with the novel since I read it when I was a teenager myself. And yeah, I wrote the first draft very, very quickly. But the book has been with me for a long time. And now it's finally Daisy's making her way into the world to meet, hopefully her readers in April 2025. So right around the exact centennial, so late December 2018, early January 2019. So if you think about, you know, what's happened just in the world a long time ago.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Rachel Feder]

My dad sent me, he either emailed me or texted me an article about the Great Gatsby coming into the public domain. And I looked at it and thought, oh, that's interesting. And of course, lots of Gatsby takes have come out since then. Retellings and in all different genres. And then I think I just had sort of a dream and I woke up and I texted or called my friend McCormick Templeman, who's definitely a mentor of mine when it comes to writing. And I told her the idea and she said, drop everything and write it. And I emailed my agent. We had other things in the works. And I said, hey, I have this idea. And to her, my wonderful agent, Becky Lejeune, to her great credit, she just said, you know, sounds fun. Like, just send it to me when, you know, basically like, go do it and we'll figure it out was the message. So I dropped everything and I wrote that first draft of the collection in a week, which is so bananas to me, like a full length poetry collection. And it just poured out of me. And there would be details that would pop up that I would say, oh, I've been there. You know, like, oh, yeah, I remember that. Oh, that song. I remember. You know, Eagle Eyed Cherry. I remember. Yeah, no doubt. Tragic Kingdom, like, of course. Or I remember, oh, that blue dress. Or, oh, that person. But it was just these little details.

[Jack Wilson]

So you were. It was like you were channeling a voice and then you had the side of your brain that could observe what was coming out of the voice's mouth, so to speak.

[Rachel Feder]

Yeah. It was so strange. Jack Spicer, toward the end of his life, spoke about this theory of dictation where you have furniture in your mind. And I'm paraphrasing, I'm sure, poorly. And when you write poetry, a Martian comes into the room and, like, rearranges the furniture. It was the closest I've ever had to that type of experience. And she's. I mean, Daisy is a very complicated person. We have very little in common. But I. She really just kind of came to me whole cloth, and I. I don't know, you know, Is she Daisy Buchanan from the Great Gatsby? I don't know. In. To some extent, yes. She's occupying this space where she is sounding the chasm that is left by, you know, sort of the silence of Daisy, the silence of her inner world. But I also think, and this is not to say I don't love the Great Gatsby, but I also think that she is every teen girl reading the Great Gatsby in a way. Right. That there's this. Yeah, right. That she's sort of. She's perched on this knife's edge where she's informed by questions, you know, by the paradoxes of. Of purity and privilege and precarity. And as a girl, in her world, she's an emblem. Or as, you know, as a girl reading the Great Gatsby might see Daisy as this emblem.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Rachel Feder]

And at the same time, she is not. She's not fully comfortable. She claims it, in some ways, of her power, but she also braces against it.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Well, you said you think that for a long time you've had a bone to pick with Gatsby. Is it. I mean, do you feel like Daisy was, you know, a stereotype? Was she. Was she Not a fully formed character. Did you not like the way she was, the role that she played in the narrative? Or what was the source of the bone that you wanted to pick?

[Rachel Feder]

I did say that. I think, you know, the Great Gatsby, you can. One can have all kinds of critiques of it, but I think it's perfect. Not, I don't mean perfect that I think everything about it is great, or I co sign everything about it, or I think everything about it holds up, but it's sort of formally complete in the right, like Goethe elective affinities kind of way, like as a mathematical problem or what have you. So by bones to pick, I don't mean that I have. That I want to pick it apart, but rather that this idea of the beautiful fool, right, that this kind of, what is the role of the beautiful fool archetype? And what would it mean to occupy that role within the intellectual and literary history that is girlhood? And within a classic, right, a tortured love story, an elegy for lost American dreams. Like, what would it mean to say, okay, you want a beautiful fool? I'll give you a beautiful fool. And then kind of crack the crystal.

[Jack Wilson]

All around you, right? It's probably the biggest problem I have with Fitzgerald, and it's why he was my favorite writer when I was 19 or 20. And then I feel like I kind of grew out of him. And I just had a conversation with Mike, which we are going to run at the start of the new year. So this will already have been out by the time people hear this conversation you and I are having. And we are looking at the story Winter Dreams, which is kind of a proto Gatsby. And there's a character in there who was based on the same real life person that Daisy was based on and has a lot of similarities. And he even lifted some of the descriptions and so on and used it in the Great Gatsby. But the problem, as I was researching the story, I came across this quote by Fitzgerald where he said, there are only two real stories. Every story can be boiled down into two basic stories. And he said Cinderella and Jack the giant killer. And then he said the charm of women and the courage of men. And I just thought, you know, I think that's the problem I have with his women characters is the charm of women. They come onto the page and we're supposed to be a little bit dazzled by them. There's sort of a stand in character, the narrator or another male character who's completely bowled over by them. But then what Is charm. What does that do? You know, there's no action there. There's no character. There's no growth. There's no. It's just charm. And then. And then what happens? Charm, we know, eventually fades as beauty fades. And as. As we see the. The real person underneath and we see their flaws and all of that. But. But that narrative is. Does not give the woman anything to do. It's only the observer who has a kind of epiphany or something about the woman. And it just feels like the characters are so inert, and so, you know, they don't have the agency that the courage of men would have. I also have a problem with Fitzgerald's idea of courage because his characters tend to be just people who admire the charm of the women. And I don't see a lot of courage there. But it just feels like he kind of had this idea. He was maybe so impressed by some of the women he met, so dazzled, and he didn't kind of take a step back and see if that would really give those women characters much to do.

[Rachel Feder]

That's fascinating. And I love that idea of turning that word charm on its head. So it's not just charm as appeal. Right. As the thing that kind of belongs to the perceiver or is experienced by the perceiver, but charm in the other sense. The charm as an active verb. Charm, then the way you charm a snake. Charm as a kind of power to agitate the world that is dependent on a certain adoration that you think that gives you power but simultaneously disempowers you. The adoration of people around you.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. I can seduce and I can control, but ultimately I'm. I can't do anything to achieve my own happiness. All I can do is kind of bewitch the people around me.

[Rachel Feder]

And the. Yeah. And the way that. That undoes the narrative and kind of undoes the love story even feels like the wrong. Right. But the kind of. The way that. The way that novels and fiction more generally is classically so often structured by this question of pairing off. And what does it mean when the dynamic has to do with that. Charming and charming in two senses. So that control is always sort of fluctuating and the power of the one is defined by the attention of the other. And then how do you affect. And so that was something that I was playing around with. So a kind of. That weird. I mentioned sort of having a weird dream and waking up and having to write it. And I don't want to spoil my own book, but one of my Guiding questions was, okay, when. When that fatal car accident happens at the end of the Great Gatsby, What's. What's going on there? To what extent is that sort of predetermined by the forces of the narrative? To what extent is that determined by the relationship and will? You know, the various sort of wills and desires of the characters? Like, how can we complicate that? It's already so dark. And what would it mean to lean into its darkness? And how would that let us see Daisy differently?

[Jack Wilson]

Now, when you were, I'm gonna say, channeling Daisy. I don't know if that's the right verb, but when you.

[Rachel Feder]

Let's go for it.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay. When you were channeling Daisy, were the other characters from the book popping up? I mean, did you see her take on Gatsby or Nick or Tom or Jordan or any of the other people? Were you re. Envisioning the events from the novel, or was she kind of off on her own, having a different set of experiences?

[Rachel Feder]

Mm.

[Jack Wilson]

The.

[Rachel Feder]

So it's an. It's a narrative poetry collection, and it certainly follows quite closely the plot of the novel to the extent that it's not officially a verse novel, It's a poetry collection told from this kind of Persona. But I think one could also call it a verse novel. So we're following the plot in terms of. I think that Tom and Jay and Nick are quite true to the original. Interestingly enough, Daisy's New. They are quite true to the original, in my opinion, to my reading of the original. And I tried as much as possible, you know, in. As I mentioned, I wrote this years and years ago in a week. And then I basically revised it and lived with it and reimagined it through many different seasons of my life over the course of several years. But in that kind of initial writing, I resisted the urge to go back to the Great Gatsby and kind of write with it beside me as a companion, because it felt important to me that. Because I had that formative experience of reading the novel as a teenager, it felt important to me that the J. I met when I was a teenager and the Nick I met when I was a teenager and the Tom I met when I was a teenager were all there. And so I. Actually, there is. You know, I ended up engaging with the text in a. In a deeper way later. And there are. I limited myself to two erasure poems, but there is an erasure. The first poem in the collection is an erasure of the first chapter of the Great Gats, and then the Penultimate poem in the collection is an erasure of the last chapter of the Great Gatsby. And those are two of my absolute favorite poems in the collection. But when I wrote that first initial draft, I wanted to linger in that space of the memory of reading and knowing those characters. Jordan was. If there is a character who kind of represents a critical take on the Great Gatsby, then I would say it's Jordan. I think that there's a lot of queer coding of Jordan in the original, which is. In my version, she is queer. And then she has this relationship with a new character who just kind of came to me, who it was great to meet and who plays a really key role. One of my absolute favorite characters, Gretchen. And then the Jordan also was a site for me to work through some of my thinking about the role Jewishness plays in Fitzgerald's novel. And if the novel is to some extent about whiteness and like the problem of whiteness, the contours of whiteness in America, I think Jewishness functions in the original as this kind of like, very close other to whiteness in interesting ways. And so Jordan was sort of the site of those explorations of the queerness of the original, of the other Jewishness as other to whiteness that occurs in the original. So she's really in there. I feel like she's a person I know. Like she really came through also. But where there's a kind of critical apparatus, a lot of that happens in her character and in what. And her character has certainly challenging and tragic elements to her life, but also is very liberated, a kind of freer best friend figure for Daisy.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. And famously the Great Gatsby. Everyone. It's like drilled into everyone from a young age. That Great Gatsby is about the American dream. Do you think? Would you say that about your book, Daisy? Is it about the American Dream?

[Rachel Feder]

Yeah, I think it's an elegy for the hope of the 90s in a lot of ways. You know, it's such a. Such a different moment. And there's. It's. The book is very 90s, like, deeply and profoundly 90s. And the. From the constructions of wealth to the pressures that are on Daisy and Tom, all of that is really kind of period coded. But then there's also just this kind of explosive sense of possibility that really does not promise to pan out. And so, yeah, I think, you know, maybe the 90s are our 20s in a way.

[Jack Wilson]

I was just going to say, I mean, yeah, it kind of is. Right? It's the moment before the Crash or the moment before 911 and the fall of the towers. It's that sort of, I think, of those years of the 90s and the whole Clinton administration, for example, it's just a time of. We didn't have the kinds of conflicts that we had before and after. And it was almost a frivolous time. If you look at the amount of time that was spent on Monica Lewinsky and O.J. simpson, it suggests a world where you're kind of sitting around with nothing more serious than that on the news. Is an era I don't know if we'll ever see again.

[Rachel Feder]

I mean, which is a critique. Like, that's a critique as well, right. The 90s weren't any simpler than the 20s were in terms of the work of the systems of violence and injustice and oppression. It's like a glorious. The Velcro glitter things that one put in one's hair in the 90s. Like, it's a. It's a halo imagined way of thinking about history, but also from a particular privileged position. And then especially as a young person kind of coming into adulthood, coming up into the world, into an American adulthood, I think based on one's life and one's circumstances, there was just a. Could be such a different feeling of hope and possibility. And so, yeah, I think the era functions for me, I think, in a way that feels resonant. That's something about the book that feels quite resonant with the original.

[Jack Wilson]

Would you say that the difference between a daisy in the 90s and a daisy in the 20s would be that the daisy in the 90s would be more self aware about her position and her role in the world? Or would you say that we're misreading the daisy of the Great Gatsby and the daisies of the 1920s and not giving them enough credit for being maybe more self aware than F. Scott Fitzgerald might have made her?

[Rachel Feder]

I think, well, F. Scott Fitzgerald, daisy, who knows? But I certainly think that a daisy in the 20s could be just as self aware. You know, it's interesting as someone who a lot of my critical and literary scholarship focuses on the history of women's writing. And so it's interesting to think about how, you know, we read Wollstonecraft. I'm actually noticing with my students, I think people are reading Wollstonecraft less and less in high school, which is a great shame, but we forget, like, how messy Wollstonecraft was, right? And that Wollstonecraft was writing this incredible political philosophy, entering into this male dominated, you know, Discourse field and founding a school with her, you know, and like all of this, and then was also struggling with mental health crises and with all of this hardship and with very, very messy love affairs. And like all of, you know, was really just a real person who braced against convention and was like not perfect in any way. And the idea that the foremother of feminism was like, I'm just going to say, like a messy queen. Right. Particular listener with that I think is so important because. And part of what I'm looking at in Daisy is this purity myth. That's something that Daisy's really dealing with is this idea of whether by caving to certain pressures and or following her own impulses and desires, she is somehow not as she seems or is not as she's supposed to be. And I'm really interested in this idea of representative women in literary history and cultural and intellectual history and this desire to kind of lionize them. And everyone wants. I'm a Shelley scholar. I love Mary Shelley as much as. As much as the next person who wrote a book about Frankenstein while immediately postpartum. And also there's this great desire to claim Mary Shelley as this early feminist figure. She wasn't always. She wasn't always supportive of the women around her. She was not always those things. And the kind of this idea that there's this complexity that in large part due to our critical conventions, but then also just due to how we think and talk about women, this complexity that has been lost or that can kind of easily slip away, all of this is to say, I think a flapper claiming her independence in the 1920s could be just as much of an agitator and perhaps just as troubling as my daisy of the 1990s.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, that may be so, but I think we can agree F. Scott Fitzgerald was not the person to write that Daisy. So we are lucky that we have Rachel Feder who can come along and kind of write the record. The book is called Daisy. Rachel Fader, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Rachel Feder]

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

[Jack Wilson]

And finally today we hear from Francesca Peacock, a biographer of Margaret Cavendish, that wondrous 17th century author who wrote plays and poetry and early science fiction, who was also a scientist herself. After Francesca Peacock and I discussed the revolutionary life of Margaret Cavendish, I asked Francesca this special question. Okay, we're joined now by Francesca Peacock, author of a biography of the pioneering 17th century author. I feel like I should call her authoress based on her most famous quote Margaret Cavendish. Francesca. This question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.

[Rachel Feder]

So I was thinking about this question earlier and I was thinking if I knew it was going to be the last book I would ever read. Probably not. Things are not going that well. Either it's a nuclear apocalypse or I'm not very well. So I was thinking I would probably want a book, which is very comforting. One of my favorite books in the world that I always read whenever I'm struggling is Dodie Smith's I Kept the Castle, which was published in 1948. And it's kind of a classic of 20th century literature about a family living in a very ramshackle falling down castle in the English countryside. And it starts off with a girl who says, I'm writing this sitting in the kitchen sink and she describes her life and her family and everything that happens. And it's absolutely glorious. It's incredibly idyllic, but also incredibly very sad and very moving.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. I'm not familiar with the book I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Is this one that you read when this is a children's classic?

[Rachel Feder]

I don't know. I don't know if it is a children's classic or not. I did read it as a child, but I have the same copy and I read it in the box whenever I'm stressed. So I think it probably is. But it's also brilliant, definitely for adults to read as well.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. I'm seeing here that Dodie Smith also is famous for writing the 101 Dalmatians.

[Rachel Feder]

Yes, she is. Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, I'm going to have to check out Dodie Smith and I Capture the Castle.

[Rachel Feder]

Perfect.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay. Francesca Peacock, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Rachel Feder]

Thank you so much. It's been lovely.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, there we go. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. A couple of mentions in this episode. It's not a book I'm familiar with, but I certainly know the 101 Dalmatians. My thanks to Francesca Peacock for joining me today and of course to Rachel Feder for being such a wonderful guest. A lot going on in that mind of Rachel Faders. If you noticed a lot of literature in there swirling around, it was very fun to talk to her and her book is fun too. Daisy, do check it out. Oh, boy. Our next episode is a special one. Just me on that one with some original music and some Emily Dickinson. All of us chasing butterflies. And then it's back to Fitzgerald with Mike Palindrome, a two part episode where we read and analyze what is probably the craziest story in all of Fitzgerald's output. It's up there anyway, diamond as big as the Ritz. Then we get serious again with Emerson. We travel to the ancient world and many other excursions we're taking. Aren't we lucky to be such literary travelers? I consider myself lucky anyway, at least in certain respects. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

[Rachel Feder]

Foreign.

[Jack Wilson]

Of the Bachelor was ridiculous. Lest we forget, this past season of Love is Blind. I know. At least there's always sex in the city to keep us warm and fuzzy at night. Always watching it back 25 years later has been the best. Why are we so obsessed with watching people fall in love on tv? Every week on our podcast, Two Black Girls, One Rose, we break down your favorite TV shows centering modern dating, love and relationships. Come ready to unpack the mess and have a laugh with us. I'm Justine. And I'm Natasha. See you every week on all podcast platforms. Hey everyone, it's Danielle from National Park After Dark, the chart topping podcast that's received over 42 million downloads. If you love the great outdoors or are just morbidly curious about what can go wrong out there, this this is the show for you. Each week on National Park After Dark, my co host and I dive into the darker side of nature. Epic survival stories, tragic history, animal encounters, and yes, even some paranormal encounters. But it's not all chills and thrills. We also share inspiring tales and our passion for protecting the wild places we all love. So lace up your hiking boots and take a walk on the dark side of the wilderness with us on National Park After Dark.