← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
775 Celebrity Authorship in the Nineteenth Century (with Sarah Allison) | My Last Book with Emily Van Duyne
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
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Sarah Allison
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Jack Wilson
You.
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Sarah Allison
New Maybelline Serum Lipstick maybe it's Maybelline.
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Jack Wilson
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Sarah Allison
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Jack Wilson
Terms hello, Everyone laments that we no longer read, and certainly that seems to be true. When it comes to classic works and contemporary novels. They're still read, but not as much. But that doesn't mean that reading isn't happening. In some ways, maybe we read and write more. Gone are the days when I used to stare at the back of cereal boxes with my breakfast, desperate for something, anything, to read. Now I have news feeds and blogs and social media texts from friends, emails, words and words and words streaming into my eyes from the black rectangle I carry with me everywhere. It might not be War and Peace. It might not even be a magazine level short story. But it is words. If someone, a hundred years from now, wants to know about our lives as readers, they can focus on the handful of literary tent polls, the prize winners that sell copies in the tens of thousands if they're lucky. Or those future scholars could instead look at all those books plus the trillions of words that are read by human beings all day long. No, it's not Tolstoy. But these words tell us things. They make us laugh, sometimes even cry. They go viral. They expand our knowledge and our empathy. They move us. They're everything from expressions of love to angry rants to serious inquiries to hard news to idle chatter. They are our imprint on the world and the imprint that the world makes on us. Flashback to the 19th century they too had literature. We all know Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Hugo, Dickens and George George Eliot here in America, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe and Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc. Etc. But what about that other kind of words and writing? This was of course pre Internet, but was there a print culture that might be overlooked if we focus only on the handful of books that are still on the canon? Indeed, there was a whole array of print forms like antislavery writings, printed collections of author signatures, descriptions of writers, homes, biographies, travel writing, gift books, words and words and words. And out of these emerged literary celebrity. We'll talk to a scholar, Sarah Allison, who has explored all of this stuff and has written a book about what it all means today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. I'm glad you're here today. That was a longish introduction. So let's get right to the guest and then we're going to hear from a past guest for our My Last Book series. How about Emily Van Dyne? Speaking of literary celebrity, she was here to tell us about her love for Sylvia Plath and her reclaiming of Plath's legacy. And now she's going to tell us about her choice for the last book she will ever read. Will it be something by Sylvia Plath or will she look elsewhere? Stay tuned. But first, Sarah Allison. Okay. Joining me now is Sarah Allison, who is an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. She's the author of Reductive A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing, and she's here today to discuss her new book, the rise of celebrity, 19th century print culture and Anti Slavery. Sarah Allison, welcome to the History of Literature.
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Sarah Allison
Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here.
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Jack Wilson
So let's start a little bit with the methodology of your project. You writing the introduction. There are no charts in this book. Yeah. Charts drive the conception of every part of this project. What exactly was your project? What question did you set out to answer? And how did taking a quantitative approach help you answer it?
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Sarah Allison
Oh, thanks so much. So I was interested in the figure of the author and the way that our understandings of authors emerge both through fiction and through non fictional texts. And often in when we sort of do literary studies. The way that I've done literary studies has a lot to do with novels, poetry and drama, but from a sort of sociological perspective of literature, a systematic approach to thinking about the relationship between literature and society. We know that people read, as they do now, a lot of nonfiction. And so I was really Interested in the way that fiction and nonfictional forms, especially of writing, work together. And so I started thinking outside the author as the writer, the person who produces a work into the broader system of all the kinds of things they wrote, all of the people who were involved in producing the things that they wrote, and the way that genre worked as a kind of market, as the way that the market organizes literature. And so some of this is very old school bibliography. Right. That there are, you might think of book history asking some of these questions and sort of other ways of organizing books by numbers. How many there were, how many copies were sold, how much they cost to produce. So those are definitely quantitative methods as well. As there was a new algorithmic model that Ted Underwood was working with in his work on computational or large scale textual analysis or algorithmic criticism. Three names for that work. Comparing, trying to figure out if a model could tell fiction from nonfiction in a story. Like, if you feed it a 19th century book, can it tell if it's a novel or a biography?
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Jack Wilson
Right. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack there. So if I'm understanding you correctly, let's say we were talking about an author today who's being looked at 100 years or 150 years from now, and we want to know why this author, sort of the role that she played in today's culture. And maybe the author is very famous for a certain novel that she wrote. Let's say it was famous in 150 years because the novel is what they're all reading. It's become part of the canon. And what you're interested in would be sort of, again, projecting 150 years in the future would be to look back and say, well, actually, that Novel only sold 622 copies in her lifetime. But she was famous because her social media presence, she had a million followers, she wrote a cookbook that made her very famous, she appeared on some television shows, and she was a host of something, that kind of thing. So you're kind of saying if we're wondering why an author, the role that the author plays in our culture, it might be more than just the work that we view as the pinnacle of their literary output from a critical perspective. And it might be to do with more kinds of materials.
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Sarah Allison
Yes, exactly. And that's such a cool way of thinking about it, because if you think about how we encounter authors now, so in some ways it's about recouping liberating that author as they might have appeared and also recognizing that even for readers at the time like they would have brought their own kind of investments to that and had access to a specific constellation of those texts. Right. Because maybe I really love football. And so everything that I think about Taylor Swift is recorded through football. And so that readers then, like now, had a partial understanding of maybe all of the things that an author was producing. But that's exactly the perspective that I think computational or quantitative approaches can help us see. It can also help us see the sort of other players involved and other roles that people were playing. So in my book that's about literary celebrity and anti slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin is important because it helps to inaugurate anti slavery as a literary genre. Not only a political position, but a trending topic. But in my book, Stowe is important because she helps people edit other kinds of anti slavery compilations and she writes letters to British novelists who then become more involved in abolition. So they're also that it's authors aren't only producing texts, they are often really active players in a literary marketplace.
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Jack Wilson
Right. So we gave the example that I gave of 21st century, but I know, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald, his novel the Great Gatsby sold almost no copies. But he was extremely famous as a short story writer that the Saturday Evening Post in particular, the circulation was much bigger and he had a much bigger readership of people who knew him as the guy who, you know, every month or two landed a story that would arrive on their doorstep and they would read it aloud because they had nothing on, they had no television or anything to do. So what exactly was happening in the 19th century? I mean, I think of authors as supplementing their, their readership with lecture tours and maybe writing for periodicals, maybe some essays or some, you know, maybe even doing some journalism or. What were you finding and what did you feed into this algorithm machine of yours to be able to quantify what was going on with these authors?
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Sarah Allison
Yeah, so I really used this sort of figure as an author, of the author, as a way to think about these different kinds of work that they were doing. And so if you take a figure like Josiah Henson, so he publishes his first narrative after Frederick Douglass publishes his autobiography. So Josiah Henson is another self emancipated man who lives in Canada, has founded this all black community and he comes back and he writes a short pamphlet style autobiography that is published in order to raise money for that school. And so if you trace. So I used basic bibliography, right. To trace what happens with that text. So Harriet Beecher Stowe writes, then writes Uncle Tom's Cabin and gets all this criticism that there is no, there couldn't be a figure like Uncle Tom. You couldn't have such an upright spiritual figure as Uncle Tom. And she says, no, of course there is. And then when she writes her compendium of sources that are supposed to defeat the pro slavery people, and it's all kinds of documentary sources, which is another sort of bibliographic fact about anti slavery, is that we might think that the central form is the slave narrative, but a lot of the real political work happens through compendia of narratives that show the similarity or that document a systemic practice of slavery. So Stowe produces one of these. She's just a straight up editor who's pulling together examples, and she points to Josiah Henson. So Henson publishes that narrative to raise money for the school.
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Jack Wilson
The.
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Sarah Allison
Those pamphlets, including those by Douglass and Sojourner Truth, function like merch. When you give a lecture, you sell your book, Right. Which is relatable, perhaps from a 20th century perspective, but also something that was really in service of a cause. Right. It was the British American Institute that Hudson had founded in Canada. And so that was a sort of original purpose. Then Stowe calls attention to it to defend the validity of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In this edited edition, Key to Uncle to Hobbs Cabin, 1853, Stowe's publisher then picks up the story and issues a volume version that is both much more explicitly anti slavery and also much more explicitly engaging in some of the minstrelsy that Uncle Tom's Cabin exhibits. So that it's generically clear that this version of Henson's life, which is called the Truth, Stranger than Fiction is, has It Forward by Stowe, is in dialogue with Uncle Tom's Cabin. This comes out in 1858, and he starts touring as somebody who is an original of Uncle Tom. And then there's another issue later. And so this is computational, I would argue, in two ways. Like, one, you see the history of the book as it unfolds and over time, which I think can tell you a lot about the way that literary forms respond to history. But it also. I came to this because of Ted Underwood's algorithm, which was supposed to tell a novel from an autobiography, Right? And what happens is before the model gets good at its work, it's bad at its work. And so it created a list of things that it thought were novels, but it was not really thought. Of all the novels, I'm the least sure about this one. This one looks the least like a novel. And one of the things that Underwood says about this process is that a lot of things that the model isn't clear about, history isn't that clear about, literary scholars aren't that clear on. So on this list, I'm reviewing this as just a, you know, as a person, a 19th century scholar, and I see on it Josiah Henson's original narrative, the Life of Josiah Henson. And the flag goes off. Because in the 19th century, there's a lot of criticisms of slave narratives, that they are. That they are fictional, that they are sensationalizing slavery for political ends. And then in the 20 and 21st centuries, there's been a lot of literary criticism about the ways that the slave narrative absolutely is a lot like the novel. There's a lot of dialogue, there are a lot of, you know, there are adventures, there's reflection, there are a lot of novel like things. So that both the slave narrative is borrowing from the novel. And we know too that novels borrow from the slave narrative. And so I am like looking at this and I just realized the really sort of flagrant fact that like the algorithm did what I would never have done. Because when I think about biography and autobiography, I'm thinking about something like Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, which is all about the real story behind Jane Eyre. But here what I'm looking at is a narrative that precedes this major novel, which then gets picked up and recreated as an original truth following the novel, which was a new way for me of thinking about the way that the figure of the author gets put together by different forms interacting in history.
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Jack Wilson
Right. So the Harriet Beecher Stowe example feels almost like it would be almost one of a kind. But then when you were looking for other examples, were you finding particular publishers or publicists or lecture tour organizers or anything like that? That was names that were cropping up as, oh, this person was kind of promoting this type of author, or this person was being, in a sense, almost like a kingmaker to turn a writer into one of these literary celebrities.
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Sarah Allison
Oh, that's a cool twist to that question, because I was thinking that Jewett does. So John P. Jewett, who publishes Stowe and then publishes Henson and then also will publish some anti slavery annuals. Absolutely. Like it's. It's part of his list. Right. Or his brand to be thinking about anti slavery. But it's also true that once you start thinking about anti slavery, it's almost like as a literary genre, right. That's distinct from like the sort of radical, emancipatory political project, it really does become a genre anybody can play. So the politically active people are drawing on literary celebrities to add heft to the cause. And literary celebrities know that if they write in anti slavery, be it a poem or a travel narrative, that will sell. Right. So that there's ways that the genre itself becomes an actor because it becomes so widespread and so popular. So you get these 19th century editors saying the shelves are groaning with Uncle Tom's. Right. I mean, you can see Jewett himself doing an almost sort of copycat thing. And there are other books too that are reissued in the 1850s in the wake of Uncle Tom's Cabin that originally came out as shorter narratives in 1840. So yeah, I mean, the publishers definitely sense an opportunity. At the same time that you get authors promoting their work or their cause through self publishing, that is also still happening. I would never have thought I needed to learn so much about John Puncher Jewett. And then there is a very cool way, I think, that he helps us see publishing as a commercial enterprise. He ends up basically selling like elixirs. Oh, where is it? Okay, maybe I can't find it.
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Jack Wilson
So he's a publisher who is seeing a market for anti slavery forms of printed material, but then he ends up selling, I guess, using his, his network and his sales channels and so on to sell another product like an elixir.
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Sarah Allison
His experience with distribution. Ah, a purveyor of Peruvian spirit.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Sarah Allison
An agent for a safety match company and negotiator of patents before 1866 when he leaves Boston for New York City.
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Jack Wilson
Right. Okay, so this print culture, how effective was it in advancing the goals of the anti slavery movement? Did you feel like it was, it was being read by the right people who were in the right position to take action or were politically savvy and so on? Or was this more like a marketplace where people were reading it because these narratives moved them or were reading it like literature?
- [19:49]
Sarah Allison
There is a lot of work on this. I think that the two clearest anti slavery literary celebrities in the US would probably be Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass. Right. And it's both their racial and their gender identities are really important to the way that they are received and the kind of work that they do. Also, Harriet Beecher Stowe is so well known as a novelist and Douglass, we know, is a politician, an orator, a reformer, a newspaperman.
- [20:18]
Emily Van Dyne
Right.
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Sarah Allison
He's really central to a lot of the work that is pushing anti slavery forward, along with lots of other people, including people who are self emancipating. Right. But other kinds of political, organizational work. And their relationship is complicated. In my book, it comes out in a gift book, like the Christmas anti slavery bazaar gift book called Autographs for Freedom, which is in support of Douglass's camp, for which he writes his only short novel, the Heroic Slave. And Harry Beecher Stowe has a whole handful of contributions. And so I think you can really see people working together. I think the line between where consciousness raising, public discourse, public feeling. Right. In a time of, like, really deep cultural division, I certainly think that there's a way that literary work connects with that or might move the needle, and that it's a tool that we know that Douglass is using as well. Right. That anti slavery movement is working in forms that they know are popular, just as they would now. Like, what are the forms that people want to watch that will really energize or move them? And so that kind of like that connection between feeling and text and form, that is still, I think, a really fraught political question now was also in the 1990s, 19th century, the way that forms got deployed and causes could get deployed. For me, the computational methods are to try to get at this sort of chaos of the 19th century, like what I sometimes think of as the print culture sublime, that there are just so many forms that you can do. You can have. Their images are easy to circulate, and music is easy to circulate, and images and forms together, pictures of people, autographs of people, scenes at their houses, illustrations of what you're talking about. And then how easy it is to print and reprint, especially in the absence of international copyright, makes it that there is a really rich media landscape that people can mobilize in the work that they try to do. And the way that it actually kind of ends up going down is the surprise for me. Sometimes surprisingly less patterned than the two sort of paths that suggested myself going into the project, which is either the abolitionists use literary celebrity or literary celebrities use abolition. But instead, it is a lot of networks that are moving through nodes of people. Right. Connections among celebrities and collabs among celebrities and activists in sort of different frames.
- [23:02]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Sarah Allison. Ever since I started serving cut water canned cocktails to my guests. Hey. Hi. How are you? Yeah, going through. I've gone from host to hero. Thanks to Cutwater, I can make real, perfectly mixed cocktails in seconds. It's as simple as garnishing a glass, cracking my can of cut water open, and pouring it over ice, Cut water. Real cocktails, perfectly mixed. Copyright 2025 Cut Water Spirits San Diego, CA Enjoy responsibly. So, Sarah, we were just touching upon the anti slavery sublime, I think you called it, or the print culture sublime. So the. You mentioned a gift book and you've mentioned autographs a couple of times. What exactly are these books?
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Sarah Allison
There are a couple of pieces to the history. So autograph collecting is important, sort of from the romantic period on literary celebrity culture often we think really gets going with Lord Byron, the poet. And people are obsessed with his life, they're obsessed with his work and the intersection of his life and his work. People also want these fragments or collecting autographs of all kinds of celebrities, including politicians, states, people, writers, historically. And for the first time it's possible to collect them and print them as a collection like Poe. It is also a practice in the 19th century to have a friendship album, where I would have an album. And there are also commonplace books like in Jane Austen. Right. And Emma, they're passing around the notebook and they're collecting little, you know, sort.
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Jack Wilson
Of poems or sayings or passages. Right, right.
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Sarah Allison
Riddles or great passages. Exactly. From people. And you would pass that around and it becomes a record of your friends. But you can also compile them. And so a gift book is the sort of secret, the Christmas secret of the publication market. Right. And we know this best from Dickens Christmas Carol is that Christmas is a great time to sell books. And so you could compile annuals, which is like once a year I publish my annual. And these come in many different flavors. Like it can be my annual that has some really high paid names. So that I have. I've got a poem from Tennessee Cinema Annual. Right. And so you're going to buy it because there's a point from Tennyson, you also can have an annual that is exactly where 2025 is, exactly like 2024, but it has a different cover because people, the publishers could literally just slice off the binding and put a new binding on some old material and it would be sort of evergreen. And so there were gift books that you could buy a sort of luxury items, a nice gift for someone and then that becomes a form that gets sold at the literary bazaars. And so what happens if you put those together is something like Autographs for Freedom, which has facsimile. There's a lot of stone, there's a lot of Douglas, but there are also a lot of other political supporters in there from a good range of people. And so there, the autograph is Both the evidence of the person who wrote it as if they were a friend or as if it were a relic of their person. Right. Bringing you closer to their aura. And it's almost explicit political support. So you get a list of signatures like the Declaration of Independence, which actually doesn't circulate in the form that we know with the signatures until the 1820s. The original one was first distributed in print. Right. Which is the sort of. If you think of an 18th century Enlightenment ideal, it's the printing press that makes that kind of replication possible. But instead you have this collection of individuals that is both deeply personal but then political in the way that they're collected together and also collectible in a way that a gift book is a collectible. That you could have a beautiful list of all dozen plus volumes of another major annual, the Liberty Bell. Very beautiful gilded spines that you could have as like a display if you wanted.
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Jack Wilson
And to kind of bring this back around to what we were talking about earlier. It would also be a way for a personality around this author to kind of develop that, oh, I remember seeing so and so referenced in that gift book that I purchased that was about the such and such topic. And you kind of. You might learn some unfamiliar names or you might be reminded that so and so is also someone who writes books and that kind of thing. It would promote their celebrity.
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Sarah Allison
Exactly. And actually another of my sort of weird paths into this project was in fact a version of the Liberty Bell where they had asked Harriet Martineau, who was a British political economist, who then sort of gets on board with anti slavery and through her they end up getting two of the major. They get Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who is a super famous poet at the time, who writes a couple of poet poems specifically for that. And she hasn't done. She hadn't written on slavery before. And then she contributes these two poems that are become really well known in British literature, but weren't originally there. So she gets drawn for her name. But then also, as she has come down to us, those are some of the poems. Runaway Slaves at Pilgrim's Point is one of probably still the most taught poems of hers. And to see them in conversation with each other and to see them in a new context really does inflect what kind of celebrity they have and then will continue to have.
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Jack Wilson
Right, okay, so where does Poe fit into this? Because I've got here after reading your book, Edgar Allan Poe has a satire of autograph collecting. So what was his attitude toward all of this and what exactly was he.
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Sarah Allison
Taking on though There are a zillion things that are important to know about 19th century print culture, but one of the things is that American forms are often in dialogue with the British forms. So in Fraser's Magazine, a British literary magazine, they do this satire of autograph collecting where they have fake letters from all these famous authors. And so Poe does an American version of that, except for he includes the autographs. I don't know if we all understand that Poe can be a real jerk.
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Jack Wilson
Well, he. The way I think of it is he's very used to being the smartest person in the room in his life, and he kind of projects that into his. His literary dealing so that he's always kind of assuming that he's smarter than everybody that he. And often he is. But that doesn't necessarily mean, you know, he's. He's not infallible or anything, but he often comes across as being a little too. A little too full of himself.
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Sarah Allison
It can.
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Jack Wilson
Well.
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Sarah Allison
And it can sour the temper. That makes a lot to be smarter than everyone else in the room.
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Jack Wilson
So. Right, right. He's kind of impatient sometimes.
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Sarah Allison
Exactly. So when he does his version of the American edition, right, of this autograph example, he does what he calls hasty critical, or rather gossiping observations about each writer. And so he observes that W.L. stone, who is the editor of the New York Commercial Advisor, has a manuscript that is, quote, heavy and sprawling, resembling his mental character in a species of utter unmeaningness which lies like the nightmare upon his autograph. You can see here what Tamara Thornton has called, like this, like, romantic faith that, like, you will be revealed through your handwriting. Like, one reason you will want to collect authors handwriting is that it shows you something about who they really are. And so Poe is like, doing this, but he's doing it in a really critical way. And actually, so he does two series, and the second series is really much more clearly about his own role as editor. So the biggest autograph and the second one is his own. And it's at the top because he signs it, because he's more famous by this point. So he signs it and then the comments will be like, well, I have access to all of these because they're always coming across my desk. These autographs are piling on my desk. And you can see how central the editor becomes in his conception of sort of literary production. Like, some of us might think of Poe as somebody who writes short stories or poems, but in this work he really is interested in the critical work of the editor, which I think, which is really important for me in how we think about the author and literary history, both because Poe is doing different kinds of work himself, like as an author, and also because I think a person can forget how important editors are. And one major sort of methodological problem with 19th century literature is that there are so many compilations and also miscellanies. I want there to be genre, but the genre of a miscellany is like, here's five essays, seven letters, three poems and three translations of poems, plus another classical translation. What genre is that? How do we understand all of these forms? And some of them are anonymous and some of them are named. A lot of them are pseudonymous. Poe really shows how he's in the mania. He's doing the collection of autographs and he's satirizing the collection of autographs. And he's making himself really central to literary culture, even when he's collecting names like Irving and Cooper, like the biggest names in American literature at the time. Right. And he's making little jokes about how their handwriting is getting sloppy because they wrote too many books.
- [33:34]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay, so what did your work. What does it tell us about 19th century readers? That's another area that really interests me. So we think about the writers, we think about the works that are being produced. But how do you view the readership differently based on what you've been able to find that they were going out and buying and what they were consuming?
- [34:02]
Sarah Allison
That is a question that I think I began with the sense that they read really differently from us because they were so hungry to know the truth behind the fiction. Not everybody has always been saying this, but it's true that there was an attention to text that came at the expense of attention to context. And that for a long time, if you took a class on an author, you read at least one biography of that author. At the time that I was in graduate school, that wasn't happening. There was an expectation that you knew a lot about their intellectual context, or maybe that the context of, like, where they were writing their books. But it was not taken for granted that somebody's life was the key to their work, which for most 19th century readers, it frankly, was. So I think a lot about the life of Charlotte Bronte. There's Bronte's Jane Eyre. And then after Bronte dies, there had been a lot of controversy around Jane Eyre because she was in love with a married man. Right. Because you're not supposed to be in love with Mr. Rochester if you are Jane Eyre. And so the reviews of that book were really hostile. And then when Bronte dies, some of the reports, some of the aspersions on her character start getting recirculated. And so her father asks Elizabeth Gaskell, who is another major woman novelist, to write the biography of Charlotte Bronte, and in some way to set the record straight and clear her name as a virtuous woman. And her name is besmirched not by anything she did, but by the novel that she wrote. And so the sort of the history of Gaskell's novel or Gaskell's biography, sorry, even the reviewers say this is a biography written exactly like a novel. Right. And the feminist critics have said she's just rewriting Jane Eyre, but it's really engaged with Gaskell's biography, is really engaged with the material of Jane Eyre. She goes back to the school, she goes back to all these places and tries to uncover sort of the truth. And when the readers review that book, they say, you just can't imagine what it was like when Jane Eyre came out. We just had to know who could be the author. Was it a man or a woman who could have written this queer book? So it's like Gaskell's book presents itself as the sort of key to what really happened in Jane Eyre, which is a pretend book. And so when I was working on Gaskell's book, and I was like, surely they know about fiction not being true. But then I thought about it for about three seconds, and of course, people still are interested in interviews with author. They check books against Wikipedia. I personally will check a book against Wikipedia. Right. What is this about? Where exactly are we talking about these kinds of questions that you'd have an expectation of a factual basis for the fiction enough so that another person, Fitz James Stevens, is a. He's Virginia Woolf's uncle, among other things. But he also is really interested in evidence, and he thinks that the treatment of institutions isn't fair. So he puts Gaskell's biography and Jane Eyre, along with books by Charles Dickens and Reid, about how unfair it is to treat real institutions in fiction with the idea that fiction has the same responsibilities to accurate representation that nonfiction does. And so putting all of this together, or re. Encountering it, really helped me see that the author for readers then. And I think this is the thing, what makes what I learned about readers then is how much more like readers now I think they are, is how much they are building up the idea of an author from all of these different kinds of texts that they're encountering. And what makes it really strange to think about Someone like Jane Eyre or in fact, the character of Uncle Tom, who Obviously, in the 20th century, that character comes to figure, not a muscular Christianity, but a race traitor. That those characters can keep developing and that the author can keep developing alongside ideas about the character, different texts about the character, biographies, movies, and then the cultural narratives that we have about the authors themselves. So much of the interpretation of Charlotte Bronte as a writer has to do with her as a white woman and questions about her class and questions about where she's from. She's from Little Yorkshire. What's it like up there? It's the wild moors. Right. Her sister. We all read what her sister wrote. It was just really clarifying for me that the author isn't a figure that exists in dialogue with the work that they created, but in dialogue with all of the kinds of narratives circulating around them and all the different kinds of texts that they might have written and that get associated with them.
- [38:55]
Jack Wilson
Well, it seems like we still have that same hunger today. I know there's, you know, there's always pressure on writers to, you know, did this really happen? Did that really happen? And. And people will say, oh, this is a. This is about a divorce. But you didn't get divorced. How did you know how to write about this? And, you know, that kind of thing? It's something that just never. It seems to be part of the experience of reading fiction is wanting to know more about the person who was telling these stories.
- [39:30]
Sarah Allison
Yes. And I'm haunted by your Fitzgerald example and because, like, you think also about what. The kind of. Really what Wikipedia makes possible in terms of being able to familiarize yourself with a sort of totality of someone's production. Right. That there's a kind of weird transparency about what you write. If, in fact, you can read all the stories and then also the novel that people weren't reading, or you read the novel and then you. You go back and read all the stories in their kind of initial context. I think hunger is the right word and that. Yeah. You hear writers all the time say, you write fiction, they want to know what's true. You write nonfiction, they want to know what you made up.
- [40:08]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Right. Or. Or they want to know, you know, especially if you're. If you're someone who's kind of a celebrity. Well, who did you base this character on? Is this. Is this another author? Is this one of your friends? Is this. This someone we might know? Do we recognize this person in this book?
- [40:25]
Sarah Allison
Yeah. And I mean, when you think about, like, the sort of earliest novels, like when copyright is coming out the like Romana Clay, where the novel has a key and there's an index that tells you all the famous people you're reading about is still a great way to sell books.
- [40:40]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right. Okay, well, let's leave things there. The book is called the Rise of celebrity authorship, 19th century print culture and Anti slavery. Sarah Ellison, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [40:54]
Sarah Allison
Thank you so much.
- [41:11]
Jack Wilson
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- [41:50]
Sarah Allison
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Jack Wilson
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- [42:07]
Sarah Allison
Experience at an IMAX.
- [42:09]
Jack Wilson
Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parent. And finally today we hear from Emily Van Dyne, who was one of our favorite guests we've ever had here on the History of Literature podcast. Our conversation with her was so delightful that I couldn't wait to ask her the special question and to hear her response. Okay, we're joined now by Emily Van Dyne, author of the book Loving Sylvia Plath A Reclamation. Emily, 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.
- [43:09]
Emily Van Dyne
So the last book that I hope I get to read are Sylvia Plath's Missing Journals.
- [43:16]
Jack Wilson
Ooh, yeah. When we talked about Plath, you said, because Ted Hughes either destroyed them or put them where no one could have found them. And it made me think, ooh, is it possible that we could still have those to look forward to? Is that what you're getting at here?
- [43:35]
Emily Van Dyne
Yes, I am. And so well, because he claims only to have Burned the one. So there are two journals from the last two years of her life. He says that the one was lost and that he burned the other one. Now, he said that in the forward that he wrote to an abridged edition of her journals that was published in 1982. But there is a. An unsent letter that he wrote to the British scholar Jacqueline Rose in his archive at Emory University, where he says, like, actually, I didn't burn them. Oh, yeah. Now, yeah. And other Plath scholars that I'm close to just really doubt the veracity of that claim. They're like, that. His claim he burned them because they just essentially are like, I just can't see that. I just can't see him ever doing that because he, you know, treasured the things that she wrote so much. But also he was kind of mercenary about it. So, you know, he probably assumed it.
- [44:40]
Jack Wilson
Keep it in reserve in case he needed more money.
- [44:44]
Emily Van Dyne
Yeah, yeah. That's one kind of unfortunate argument.
- [44:47]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [44:48]
Emily Van Dyne
But, yeah, and then there are different stories about those journals. You know, some people think that Hughes's lover, Brenda Headen, had them because he. In the late 60s and early 70s, he had, like, two families, essentially, like, he was. He had his home that he had purchased with Plath, Court Green in the southwest of England, in Devon. And his second wife, Carol Orchard, was living there with Frida and Nicholas as children with Plath. And then he also bought this house called Lumbank, which was in West Yorkshire. And his lover, Brenda Haddon, and her children, some of whom people seem to think were Hughes's children as well, were living at Lumbank. And so he was kind of dividing the manuscripts. And so there are, like, rumors that Brenda Haddon had the journals at Lumbank and that maybe she still has them because she's still living.
- [45:47]
Jack Wilson
Well, if they do exist, they will be bestsellers, right? I mean, Plath. Not only is there interest in Plath, I've never seen anything she's ever written that was boring, or I'm sure they will be of interest, even independently of all of the interest in Plath. And so it does seem like if someone is holding them back, eventually people pass away and so on. So you may get your wish.
- [46:19]
Emily Van Dyne
I. You know, you never know. It would be extraordinary. The thing about those journals is they. I think what really matters about them is that because Hughes was so censorious about Plath's letters from the time that she was writing the Ariel poems, because she was writing about kind of all of his misdeeds to People. So we only got those in the last, I guess, seven years. Over the course of the last seven years, they were published in two different editions. But also, we don't have any other primary sources from the time. So, like when she was writing the Ariel poem, she was also writing in her journals, and we don't have those. And we do have her journals, you know, sort of almost up to that point. So we can look at the correspondence between her personal writing and the poems that she was putting out into the world. We can do that with the Colossus, and we can't do that with Ariel. And that. That would be amazing, I think.
- [47:15]
Jack Wilson
Do you think this is curiosity on your part, or do you think there will be a mystery revealed or that Plath will have something to say that you need to hear or would be beneficial to you to hear?
- [47:32]
Emily Van Dyne
What a good question. I mean, I think that more than anything, I would just love to see that mature voice, because that's what we see in the Ariel poems, right? Like, we see this person really come into their own artistically. And you can see it starting to come to light in the poems that she's writing throughout the late 50s and early 60s. And I love those poems, too. But then Ariel is something else, and it's. It's beautiful. It's just it. Those poems mean more to me than. Than any any other art in the world, you know, and I think they always will. Then they've done more for me personally. If art can do things for you, and I think it can, so I think it would be extraordinary to see how that develops in prose on the page. For me, it's not about gossip. I mean, it really isn't. I mean, I'm sure people are going to hear me say that and be like you, okay? But it's really.
- [48:29]
Jack Wilson
You'll score some points, you know, you'll. You'll have. Your. People will be thinking, oh, and that'll tell you the truth about what happened, and then you'll be proven right about some of the things you've said.
- [48:39]
Emily Van Dyne
We already know the truth about what happened. I mean, like, we have mountains of evidence about what happened. I'm using big air quotes in my dining room here, but, like, yeah, you don't know. What happened is their marriage fell apart. Hughes had multiple affairs. There were various incidents of interpersonal violence between the two of them that exacerbated it. He left her alone in the middle of nowhere with two babies, and she wrote a bunch of great poems. And then she went back to London to Try and have a writing career. And she got terribly depressed and she killed herself because it was freezing cold and she was isolated from a lot of people because of her estrangement from her very famous husband. And she was running out of money and her family was across the ocean. I mean, we know, like, there's not. You know, what I'm interested in is Pl. Words on the page. Because her ability to take this stuff of her experience and turn it into extraordinary poetry and prose is unlike any other writer that I know. That's what I'm interested in, the experience of reading. Sylvia Plath will never stop blowing me away. There are some days when I can just open up her collected poems or open up her diaries or open up the Bell Jar, and it's some kind of direct line into my consciousness. And I don't. I don't know why. And I know I am one of literally millions of people who have felt this way over the course of the last half century.
- [50:09]
Jack Wilson
Well, yes, but you know this story very well. And I don't know if how you're doing for money, but have you thought about doing a hoax? The journals.
- [50:26]
Emily Van Dyne
Oh, my God, what a funny. That's brilliant. You know, it's. So it's really quite coincidental that you say that, because. No, I certainly never thought about doing a hoax, But I am working on a novel about a young plat scholar in the early 1970s who gets a call from a woman in London because she's the scholars living in Brooklyn at the time, teaching at Brooklyn College. And the. This woman in London calls her and says, you know, I read your work on Plath and I want you to come to England. I have something I think you want to see. And it turns out to be those journals.
- [51:01]
Jack Wilson
Oh, right.
- [51:03]
Emily Van Dyne
And so she goes there and.
- [51:06]
Jack Wilson
All.
- [51:06]
Emily Van Dyne
Kinds of things happen.
- [51:08]
Jack Wilson
You get to explore that world without setting yourself up for scandal. And.
- [51:14]
Emily Van Dyne
Yeah, no, but the reason I mention it is that part of the book is that I've been trying to imagine little snippets of the journals and write them in Plais voice. So you must have a little Plathian moment there.
- [51:27]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so here's the question, though. We did say this was going to be your last book, and you are nowhere near the end of your life. And so. Yeah, let's hope. And so if the journals come out, are you going to save them or would you devour them right away greedily?
- [51:45]
Emily Van Dyne
Oh, my God. I will definitely read them immediately. I'll probably have toothpicks. It'll be like a I was going to say toothpicks popping my eyes open, but it'll be like a Clockwork Orange situation, you know.
- [52:01]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, you'll read them all through.
- [52:02]
Emily Van Dyne
It will have to fend for themselves.
- [52:07]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's leave things down. Emily Van Dyne, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [52:12]
Emily Van Dyne
Oh, thank you, Jack. What a joy. That was a great conversation.
- [52:20]
Jack Wilson
Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature podcast. My thanks to Emily Van Dyne and Sarah Allison for joining me today. You can learn more about the anti slavery movement and Sylvia Plath in our archives. Plenty of good episodes there on these rich topics. Speaking of rich topics, we're getting close to the end of our signup period for the History of Literature podcast tour and Emma and I can't wait to meet some of you and raise a glass to some of our heroes like Shakespeare, which we'll be doing at the Globe Theater and Dr. Johnson, which we'll be doing at his favorite pub, and Dickens and Wolf and C.S. lewis and Jane Austen and so many others will be joined by some special guests along the way too. So do check that out. You can follow the links@historyofliterature.com Next week we'll look at Mary Shelley's amazing Four Months in Bath and the story of a French woman, a best selling author in her day, whose novel has been unavailable in English for 200 years until now. We'll talk to the translator and editor. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [53:51]
Sarah Allison
What is healthy spirituality and how does it help us thrive? We explore these questions on the new season of with and for hosted by me, Dr. Pam King Within Four Bridges Psychology and spiritual wisdom to help you thrive, featuring conversations with experts like Self compassion pioneer Kristin Neff and author activist Parker Palmer. So go ahead, follow within four, hosted by Dr. Pam King wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about the future of healthcare? Tomorrow's Cure, the chart topping and Ambi Award finalist podcast from from Mayo Clinic brings it to you today. I'm Kathy Werzer and in this new season I sit down with researchers, doctors and industry experts who are leading the way in medical innovation. From cutting edge technology to breakthrough treatments, we'll explore how new solutions are improving and even saving lives. Follow Tomorrow's Cure wherever you listen to podcasts.