← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
776 Mary Shelley in Bath (with Fiona Sampson) | My Last Book with D.G. Hampton
01:09:54
Loading summary
Transcript128 lines
- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hey folks, winter has been crushing. Isn't it time to get out of the house and meet some people? Why not join us for the History of Literature Podcast tour which will be in early May? This year we're headed to London, Oxford and Bath to see where Virginia Woolf and Dr. Johnson and Mary Shelley all spent their days and nights. Our days and nights will be full of nice accommodations, nice meals, invigorating train trips, and of course, the bubbling conversations that can happen between me, the show's producer Emma, and listeners to the podcast like you. Plus, we'll be joined along the way by some of your favorite guests who will greet us in various locations to tell us about what we're seeing. So check out the itinerary@historyofliterature.com or at the website of our partner, John Shores Travel. That's S H O R S with no E but make sure you sign only a couple of weeks left. March 1st is the last day. Hope to see you soon. We heard you. Nine years of bring back the snack wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the hot honey snack wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Hello. Today on the podcast, the four incredible months that the woman we know as Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, spent hiding out to help an acquaintance. What she was doing in Bath, who else was with her and who wasn't, what she accomplished and what else happened to her. It is a breathtaking period in the life of this amazing woman and she was just 19. We'll talk to poet and biographer Fiona Sampson about Mary Shelley and Bath today on the history of of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Mary Shelley. This is a wonderful bite sized piece of the history of literature. It's almost like those movies where they take some liberties and and combine events that happen to someone over a 10 year period and they put them into a single season or a single day, all it collapses all into two hours and it makes the movie dramatic. But historians wag their fingers and say, well, you know, this didn't all happen in such a compressed time period. Come on, she didn't meet so and so until later and this other dramatic thing was still years away. But in this case, the drama makers, or in this case our biographer can wag her finger back at the naysayers and say this really did happen and it was really in this short of a period of time, four months. What does that mean? Why do we care? There's a phrase that Fiona wrote. I can't remember if I mentioned this during the interview, but it was on my mind when I was talking to her and it's been on my mind for weeks now. Fiona was describing these four months and she says, quote, everything that has remained fluid until now in both Mary's character and her life is solidifying and becoming inescapable. End quote. And that phrase filled me with excitement, but also a kind of melancholy. Mary Shelley was in her late teens when all this happened. I remember what it was like to be 16 and 17 and so on. 18, 19, all the way up to, let's say, 25. And how a four month period could mean everything. Middle aged people and older folks think of time in 10 year blocks or 20 year blocks. Man, the 18 years I lived with my parents or the 21 years that I had kids living under my roof, that's a pretty big chunk of a life. The 12 years that I spent in between, that's looking at life on a big scale. Big chunk scale. But when you're 19, four months is a big chunk. You might be in a new house, you might have a new job, Maybe it's a semester in school, maybe your first semester at college. Wow, how momentous of a four months is that? Or it could be a summer job that, that changes everything that you'll never forget. Maybe it's a four months where your relationship is deepening or you see a relationship ending or you fall in love in those four months you live. But there's this feeling that you have at that age that everything is wide open. You can be anything, anyone, go anywhere. This is the time when all that happens. When you're six years old, doors seem like they're open. You say, when I grow up, I want to be an astronaut or a football player or a billionaire or a zookeeper. That's really wide open, that's full of possibilities. But are you really that free? When you're six years old, you're also, you're living in someone else's house. You have their structure imposed on you. That's not where you chose to live. And you're going to school every day. That's not something you really decided. Your meals most likely are paid for and cooked by someone else. It seems like every door is open. Astronaut, zookeeper, and so on. All that's still on the table. But those doors are far away. When you're in that period of freedom, after you've just crossed into adulthood, though, in your late teens, let's say things are different now. You have every door opened in college. You think, I can major in anything I want. It's all up to me. A couple things might be out. Professional athlete, let's cross that one off. But most other things are still in. And I could. I could get married to any one of the billion single women in the world, or men on the. Anyone on the planet. I could live here or not here. I could live somewhere else, somewhere bigger or smaller. I could live in an apartment, a house, a hut. I could travel. Or I could put down roots. I can look for work. But listen to that. Listen to me. Every one of those things is a choice. And you can combine a bunch of them, but a lot of them are mutually exclusive. You might marry one of a billion different people. You're not going to marry one billion of them. You'll marry one. 999,999,999 doors close. You might decide to be a doctor. Hooray. But you probably won't be a park ranger, too. Most zookeepers do not moonlight as astronauts. Here's the quote again. This is about Mary Shelley's life in these four months in Bath. Everything that has remained fluid until now, in both Mary's character and her life is solidifying and becoming inescapable. A very exciting period. I can't compare my own life with Mary Shelley's. She was a world historical figure born into literary celebrity, with two famous writers as parents, further cementing her spot in literary history, thanks to her relationship with Percy Shelley. All that alone would be enough to make her a pretty important figure. But none of it is necessary to say that she deserves our attention because she has also earned her place in our pantheon of literary heroes all on her own, through merit, not connections. By being the author of Frankenstein and other books as well. And here she is in a period where everything is fluid. Her circumstances and her character. That's another part of this I haven't mentioned. Are you an optimistic person? Are you a dreamer? Someone other people rely on, think of as steady? Are you a good friend? Are you selfish or flighty, responsible, ambitious? All that is forming too, even as you're deciding where to live and who to be with and all the rest. Now, I can't compare with Mary Shelley, but I can remember those four month periods where I felt like this, like fluidity was turning into solidity. My first four months at college were like that my move to Italy was like that, age 20, or the move to Taiwan, age 21, probably even more. These were all wild times, periods of chaos and formation. And I haven't even mentioned what probably wins the four months when I traveled across China into Tibet, walked around the Holy Mountain, returned to Kathmandu and flew to see a friend in Morocco. The friend who has now been my wife for 25 years. This June, fluidity becoming solid and inescapable. I became who I was somewhere in there in those four month periods. But enough about me. We're here for literature, and there's nobody better to discuss than Mary Shelley and what she went through in these four months. And there's no better person to discuss it with than our guest today, Fiona Sampson. Okay. Joining me now is Fiona Sampson, a senior research fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, and a professor emerita at the University of Roehampton. She's also a poet, a literary biographer and writer about place. She's here today to discuss Mary Shelley, whom Fiona wrote about in her highly acclaimed biography, In Search of Mary Shelley, the Girl who Wrote Frankenstein. Today, I'm going to zero in on the four eventful months that Mary Shelley spent in Bath, which Fiona also focused on when writing an introduction for the book Mary Shelley in Bath. Fiona Sampson, welcome to the history of literature.
- [10:17]
Fiona Sampson
It's absolutely great to be here with you.
- [10:20]
Jack Wilson
So what drew you to the story of Mary Shelley? There are certainly plenty of interesting people and writers to write about, including just in the Romantic period. What was it that compelled you? And was there a particular moment when you knew that you wanted to spend so much time writing about her?
- [10:37]
Fiona Sampson
Well, there were two things really, Jack. One is an answer that I used to give a lot, and I feel, in a sense, vindicated. I feel I don't need to give it so often now. And that Mary Shelley had become a little bit culturally inaudible. Everyone knew Frankenstein. They knew particularly the James Whale film and everything that follows on from that. You know, everything from manga comics to musicals, Rocky Horror Picture Show. And although it's great to see a myth lodge in our culture, I felt that Mary herself, the author, was being forgotten. In fact, when I was at school, what we were taught was an effect that Mary had the idea, but it was realized by Percy Bysshe Shelley, her husband. So there was a sense of wanting to retrieve her. Now, in the years since the bicentenary of Frankenstein 2018, I think that has shifted a bit. I think there is more Mary Shelley awareness. And for example, Del Toro, you know, who's just done another sumptuous Frankenstein film, you know, is a big Mary Shelley fan. He has a shrine to her, apparently. So there is less need, I think, to retrieve her for the canon. But the other answer is a much more pragmatic and writerly one, which is that it was a commission. So I ended up writing a soup to nuts birth to grave biography, but I tried to make it much more inhabited than is usually the case, but without fictionalizing at all. So I tried to be really adventurous in my research and look at those details, like what. What's in the natural world? What's the phase of the moon? Is it a very moonlit night when something happens? What's the weather like? And also to think more contextually and politically, what's happening, for example, in 1816, when Mary Shelley and as she would become. And everybody in the cohort ends up having their writing competition, which produces Frankenstein, what's happening in geopolitics around them? So I tried to make it much less a procession of names and facts, a much more. This is what she would have been surrounded with. This is what it might have been like to be there without fictionalizing, which is quite a balancing act.
- [13:00]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. And it really does come through in your book, In Search of Mary Shelley. It is a wonderful read. I would commend it to everyone. But it also makes me think that it's a little bit daunting because we only have a limited amount of time, so that's a nice transition to the four months, which is a pretty good, but very eventful. I don't know if we'll get to everything in these four months, but for anyone who wants the entire life, certainly they should check out your biography, because it does give that wonderful immersion into Mary Shelley's life and gives you a lot more context than you might otherwise get. But let's talk about Bath on the podcast. We've talked a few times about Mary Shelley before, and we've talked about things leading up to that famous stay on the shores of Lake Geneva, and we've talked about the moments during the famous stay and the genesis of Frankenstein and so on. And this picks up the story in the aftermath. So my first question was going to be, who was mary shelley on September 10, 1816? But I guess I should preface that by saying she was actually Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on that day, 19 years old. But why don't you sketch out for us kind of where she was in her writing life and in her personal life?
- [14:21]
Fiona Sampson
Yes. Thank you. And thank you for liking the book. Yes, I think it's really fascinating that we now discover that Frankenstein was largely written in Bath because we associate Bath, well, literary Bath, with Jane Austen and novels, which are comedies of manners. And Frankenstein is not only an earlier book, but it sort of powers through all of that. And it does so partly, I guess, because Mary Shelley, Mary Godwin was then still a teenager when she, even when she'd finished a book and she was a woman and therefore less educated than the male writers of her time. And so there is a freshness about the language, there's a kind of sense of the voice of the autodidact. And we see that on September 10th we see this teenager arriving in Bath and she has around her sort of all the accoutrements of her chaotic private life rather than being in a book lined room, even though the first thing she does is to try and find lodgings and those lodgings turn out to be above a lending library. So, you know, there are books, but they will of course be trashy, easy reads insofar as there was such a thing in those days. She arrives on her stagecoach, having made the journey from London after Geneva and the famous Villa Diodati encounter and so on. And she's in Bath because her stepsister Claire needs to be hidden away from London, which would be their normal, you know, homecoming. And Clare needs to be hidden away from London because she's pregnant by Byron, she's going to have that famous child, Allegra. And Mary, being the other woman in the entourage, is sort of forced into the same as it were, social hibernation as Clare away from London, looking after her and will do until the baby comes. But of course Bath isn't really social hibernation. On the contrary, it's rather a social hub, as we know from Austin et al. So it's kind of a mist, it's a misstep, in fact. And the lending library is in the Abbey churchyard, right next door to the Pump Rooms where everyone comes to take the waters. In other words, it's not in some kind of bosky corner far away from Bath, it's right in the centre. In fact, it's no longer there because, you know, in the decades afterwards, the Roman baths at Bath were rediscovered and excavated and reconstructed and they were right under the house where Mary stayed, which she didn't know, she didn't know, nobody knew, nobody knew that Roman bars were there. So there is Mary facing a church, quite a, you know, church and society. She's surrounded by all the things that she has actually transgressed against, because she is, as you said, a Godwin and a Wollstonecraft. And that means that she is the daughter of parents who were famous and notorious political radicals, who, Wollstonecraft, we know about the rights of woman, but she was also an advocate of the rights of man. She was pro the French Revolution and indeed had had her first child infant in the Revolution. And Godwin is a great radical utilitarian, whose political justice, published four years before Mary was born, advocates the taking down of all the traditional structures which he sees stifling the individual, including the chur and including the monarchy and society. So. And one of the reasons that Mary has run away with Percy Bysshe Shelley into this literary, but also very, as we would say, bohemian, chaotic, morally unconventional life, is because Percy was her father's disciple and she thought she was inheriting the family mantle by doing so.
- [18:22]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [18:22]
Fiona Sampson
But then she's this revolutionary teenager surrounded by the establishment, and it's an extraordinary.
- [18:29]
Jack Wilson
Setup and she's got this. She's got literary gold with her. She's got this manuscript that's not yet published. But she seems determined. You talked about her having the air of an autodidact. She seems determined to educate herself in ways that will help her improve the story of Frankenstein.
- [18:50]
Fiona Sampson
Yes, Jack, exactly. So she's been on a trajectory of self improvement since, well, all her life. But when she got together with Percy Bysshe In 1814, she began to study the classics. She felt she had a kind of intellectual, if not arrogance, confidence to. She felt she could catch up with his Eton and Oxford education and become his equal in the translation of the Greek and Roman classic Latin classics, which is basically what education was then. And so her reading journals are full of classics. And then once she gets to Bath, her reading journals shift and she begins to read fiction, contemporary fiction, and she reads Popular Science, the equivalent then of Popular Science. So she reads Introduction to Chemistry by Sir Humphry Davy, who was in fact also a family friend. Bath, being this social nexus, is one of the places in Britain, the other one obviously being London, where the fashion for public scientific lectures, and indeed demonstrations of gimmicks, such as passing an electrical current through a corpse, either of a prisoner or of a dead animal, causes that body to twitch and move. And Bath is one of the places alongside London where these demonstrations go on and Mary attends these demonstrations. And in terms of reading novels, of course, what we forget when we think about Frankenstein is that he's such an early novel in the history of the novel, that's to say, the form that we all relaxed into, the realistic storytelling that goes from beginning to end and is in order and is a 19th century invention, really. You know, before that you have epistolary novels, novels and letters like Richardson, Tom Brown, School Days, and you have Tom Jones. You have these novels which start off by kind of throat clearing and saying.
- [20:44]
Jack Wilson
This is how I know what I know. Yeah, right, right. And this is who I am telling you this. This is why I'm telling you such a long story. It's because I'm writing a letter or here's manuscript that I found, or all of those things. And certainly it seems to have given Mary some ideas as well, because as you point out, it's one thing to say, well, we could tell it from the point of view, maybe the monster is not such a great idea, but certainly you could tell it from the point of view of the Doctor. But then if you want to talk about what happens to the Doctor, how do you get that into the mix? And so there's this sort of framing that happens around it. And a lot of this could have come out of her readings of, you know, Richardson and Sir Walter Scott. And we have such a nice record of what she was reading. Let's talk a little bit about the chaos in her life, because certainly, I mean, at one point, I think you say from a distance, it could be mistaken for the perfect life, that she's there and she's reading and she's working on what will become a masterpiece and so on. But on the inside, I mean, she is in love with Percy Shelley, who's still married to someone else, and she's now in this because of this role she's playing with Claire Claremont. She's distant from him, he sort of is coming and going. She's got to navigate that in her letter writing and through the visits. She's got a father who, although he is a champion of free love and everything, I've never really understood why he didn't embrace it with his daughter, if he just thought she was too young or if for some reason he disapproved of Percy. I guess Percy Shelley was married, so he didn't maybe love that, but it seems like if anyone at that time was going to be sympathetic to her, it would be him. But instead he kind of cuts her off. She's also dealing with Claire Claremont, who had kind of thrown herself at Byron and then he indulged it and then he discarded her. And I think his quote about when he found out she Was pregnant. Is. Is the brat mine? And so she's got all of this swirling and we haven't even talked yet about. There's a couple of tragedies that are about to happen. But just in the. Even before that, how did she cope with all of this? Did it seem to her like things were spiraling out of control and that it was, you know, that she was a victim in some sense of circumstance and. And that all this was unfair, or did she just kind of accept this as well? This is life and it's. It's sometimes messy, but I will get on with it and. And do what I can. She certainly seems to have developed a good strategy for how to deal with Percy and kind of figure out a way to sort of flatter him without nagging him and kind of telling him, you know, I know you don't exactly want to be pinned down, but I do love you and want to see you and all of that. So what was her mental state during this period?
- [23:49]
Fiona Sampson
That's such an interesting question, isn't it? And, of course, the swirl leads to the tragedies. And I know we'll go on and talk about that in a moment. Well, I think that one thing we shouldn't forget is how young she was.
- [23:58]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [23:59]
Fiona Sampson
You know, when you are less than 20, you know, you do have a sort of inexhaustible. Not just energy, but fundamentally, some optimism, some sense that nevertheless, despite precedent, despite circumstance, it will turn out all right for you. And then there is. Yeah, her relationship with Percy, which is complicated because it's so simple. Which is to say that she, as you say, is very much in love with him. And it takes her almost to the end of their relationship, really, to understand that he is no longer in love with her and that he is not faithful to her. She turns out to be a very loyal person, a very loyal friend, but also a very loyal partner. And so you're right, absolutely. That thing about how she learns to. Or she has an instinct for managing Percy by kind of flattering him with her adoration, but at the same time, kind of slipping in a question, well, when are you coming home? Because he isn't there with Percy and Bath Percy visits, but a lot of the time he's away in London. And one of the things he may have been doing in London is rekindling his relationship with his wife, Harriet. So there is a great sort of sense of uncertainty and instability at the heart of Mary's romantic partnership and some sadness, and I think that perhaps some of that sadness is there in the Frankenstein's creatures great monologue, saying that without love, without being part of human society, I am nothing. My life is unbearable. Therefore, you created me in a. You. You made a mistake when you created me the way you did. And therefore you, Frankenstein, are responsible and you're responsible for when I turn the bad, all of that. So I think there's something of that sadness in there. But one of the things she does try and push back to Percy about is Claire. Claire Claremontis, she's now styling herself because Clare has been, in a sense, the third wheel from the very moment of their elopement. Claire has always been there and fairly obviously, Percy has reveled in this. After all, when they first ran away in 1814, it was to found an ideal community in Switzerland, they thought. And one of the ideals, in fact the main ideal, seems to have been free love. So that was Percy plus two teenagers. And he also, in fact, wrote from the journey to invite his wife to join him. So that would have been Percy plus three women.
- [26:32]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. And Claire was just a few months younger than Mary Shelley, and she was very pretty.
- [26:39]
Kathy Werzer
She.
- [26:39]
Fiona Sampson
Yeah, well, she may have been. Oh, okay. I mean, she was. I think what she was was pretty in a different way from Mary. I think Mary was quite classical in her looks and I think that Clare was probably more pretty, but I also think Clare was much more charming. I think that Mary, reading her letters, may have been almost slightly so emotionally literal minded that she was almost. Not quite Asperger's Y, but almost where anyway. Certainly very naive and straightforward. And I think Clare knew absolutely how to dance the dance of the seven veils, and she knew how to be a muse and that's what she wanted to be. And I think the evidence points to the fact that once she found she really couldn't have Percy or couldn't have him all to herself, that's why she sort of flung herself, as Byron said, at Byron, because before she ran after Byron, which triggered all the Villa Didati and then eventually Frankenstein and so on, she had been sent away at last by Percy for a few months to real seclusion in Devon. And it's just about the right amount of time for her to have had a child and then handed it over, as it were, to awareness, seems quite lightly. But we don't know. I never make claims, but to show one's working, one might say that.
- [27:58]
Jack Wilson
Do you think that was the suspicion that Mary might have had?
- [28:00]
Fiona Sampson
Yes, I think so. And I think Mary actually writes to Percy saying, you know, everything would Be great in absentia clarae. You know, if only Claire weren't here. Percy won't do it. But. But in Bath, Clare, actually, because Mary has settled right in the centre of things, is living at a different address at long last. She's still in Bath, but she's in a more suburban. You know, she's further on the outskirts. And so Mary does, in a sense, at least have her day to herself. I mean, she's got a maid with her and she's got, of course, her son Wilmous with her, but she's not got Clare, as it were, in the room all the time. And that is obviously a great liberation.
- [28:40]
Jack Wilson
Right? I mean, here I am talking about chaos. I know when I had children and they were under the age of two, that was the only thing that monopolized all of my time. I didn't even mention that as yet another thing. She's got this little one, which in some ways I feel like he seems almost like kind of a consolation for her in terms of her relationship with Percy, that they at least have this. She can kind of say, you know, he misses you and here's what he does now, and that kind of thing. And it gives her a way of maybe letting some of that emotion out and saying, you know, I know that if I come on too strong, you might push me away, but I can be effusive when it comes to telling you about our child.
- [29:30]
Fiona Sampson
Yes, that's true. And she obviously takes for granted there will be lots of babies as a result of the relationship, you know, because William is her second child. The first one is born apparently prematurely, though I think not. I personally think the evidence suggests that Mary was pregnant earlier than she realized and lived only for a fortnight or so. And by the time Mary leaves Bath and completes Frankenstein, she will be pregnant again. So she. She's writing some of Frankenstein while pregnant. I think we shouldn't forget that there's lots of babies in the mixture.
- [29:59]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [30:00]
Fiona Sampson
Claire's baby is finally born in the spring. That, you know, that goes well. The little girl, you know, lives for a few years, so. And at that point, they are released. And very quickly, within days, Mary's back in London with Percy. In other words, she really, really. The stay in Bath away from Percy was not voluntary.
- [30:18]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay. I want to take a break and then talk about some of these two huge tragedies and one other big event that happens that we haven't yet talked about. But before we do that, I just wanted to point out, when we talk about Mary and how she's navigating this relationship with Percy. Here's something I took from your book. She calls him her sweet elf in letters to him. And what you pointed out, which I found really insightful, is how skillful that is chosen what a skillful writer she is in choosing that nickname for him. Because in effect she's saying others might view this aspect of your personality as a weakness or a flaw, that you're flighty or that you're hard to pin down. But instead I'm going to say that that is exactly what I'm affectionate about. And she's kind of implying, I'm not going to try to change you. I love who you are and I will love those things about you. And I thought that is really, for a 19 year old who had every reason really to be kind of put upon or to say, you need to come and see me more. And, you know, she had reasons to give to him. And instead the way she kind of manages this through her letters was really feels very mature from a relationship perspective.
- [31:46]
Fiona Sampson
Yes, that's such a lovely thing to say. And I think that's absolutely true. Yes. I think she never saw him as a shelter or a provider. And although he did provide financially, he wasn't very good at that either because he didn't have an income. His money came from bonds secured against his future inheritance, which would be baronetcy. So he was always having to go to sort of money lenders and get another of these bonds and he always miscalculated the money. And so. And so it's quite clear that Mary did the looking after. And obviously her motherhood was kind of a fairly, in emotional terms, was a fairly natural extension of that. I mean, the thing that she really couldn't forgive Percy for, I think, was the death of their little girl. You know, that sense of the child would not have died if Percy had not demanded Mary's presence on the other side of Italy in order to secure an alibi for the fact he was on his own with Clare in Byron's villa. I mean, that the sort of gratuitous squandering of the child's health and life and in other words, the maternity, that kind of straightforward. Yeah. To love is to care for someone was very much how Mary was built.
- [32:58]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's take a quick break. We're just getting started. We have a couple of deaths coming up. We have a birth, a marriage, a pregnancy. So let's take a quick break and come back with more from this incredibly tumultuous period. Okay. I love this. Fiona Sampson is so much fun. And we're dreaming of Beth now, aren't we? Jane Austen's place. Did those two ever meet? Jane Austen and Mary Shelley? Their lives overlapped chronologically and so did their locales. We don't have a record of them ever meeting one another, though. And we don't know what Jane Austen thought of Frankenstein. We can't know. It came out one year after Jane died in 1817. Would have been a clashing of worlds for those two to meet. Jane Austen was of the landed gentry, and Mary Shelley, who was 20 years younger, was from bohemian circles, free thinkers, artists, philosophers, poets. I'm not sure who would be more comfortable or uncomfortable had they met. Jane Austen must have been familiar with Mary's famous parents. I think we do know that she read Mary Wollstonecraft, for example. But Mary Shelley doesn't seem to have read any of Jane's novels, which had come out in the years before Frankenstein. She was perhaps too busy with classical and philosophical works and some scientific ones. But while we're dreaming of Bath, it is incredible to think of the two of them there at nearly the same time, walking those streets and seeing those shops and being around those waters, living among those residents of Bath, reading the same books and thinking about the latest intellectual topics, one suspects. And while we're dreaming of this, we can also do what we can to make our dream come true, to actualize our dream. Let's go to Bath. Let's visit these places before it's too late for us, people. Let's go see where Dickens wrote and Dr. Johnson and where Shakespeare put on his plays. Let's go to Literary England and let's do it in May of this year. It's a modest proposal for everyone out there who thinks it might be fun to celebrate spring of 2026 with a small group of fellow travelers, all listeners to the History of Literature podcast, as well as me and my wife, Emma, who is the producer of the show. We're going to make this happen. And we'll hear from the local experts who will tell us about what we're seeing. And we'll meet up with some of your favorite guests from the podcast, some of the authors and professors and scholars who have joined us over the years. We'll shake hands and smile and ask our questions and crush a cup together. A toast to these writers who have meant so much to all of us. Okay, if you would like to learn more, we have a link on our web page, our website, historyofliterature.com right on the front page. Or you can go to our show notes for this episode. There'll be a link there. Or you can visit John Shore's Travel. That's S H O R S. But people, you only have two weeks to decide. March 1 is the last day you can sign up. Everything's fluid now, but it will become solid and inescapable. Is that exciting? Maybe a little too exciting. Well, maybe I'm getting too old if I think it's too exciting. I like the fluidity, but if something is going to become solid and inescapable, I'd rather be on the commitment to adventure side and not the solidity of not taking a chance. If that's you two, then please do consider joining us on the tour. It's going to be fun and we would love to have you. Okay, a quick break to hear from our sponsors and then we'll get back to our talk with Fiona Sampson.
- [37:11]
Advertisement Voice
Ready to relax in your dream bath retreat without the stress of figuring out every detail yourself? At the Home Depot, your bath upgrade is covered shop fully designed rooms and curated bath collections to go from inspiration to transformation fast. Savings of up to 40% will make it easier on your budget. And find everything you need from tubs to toilets and haul the tile in between to bring your vision to life. The Home Depot Dream Baths built here.
- [37:41]
Jack Wilson
How old were you when you realized.
- [37:43]
Fiona Sampson
You were the son of a president?
- [37:44]
Jack Wilson
I don't think anyone's ever asked me that before.
- [37:46]
Advertisement Voice
FX's love story, John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bassette.
- [37:50]
Jack Wilson
I didn't think I could love someone like this until you.
- [37:53]
Advertisement Voice
From executive producer Ryan Murphy.
- [37:55]
Fiona Sampson
It's not a question of if I.
- [37:56]
Kathy Werzer
Want to spend the rest of my life with you. It's if I'm cut out to be.
- [38:00]
Fiona Sampson
Mrs. JFK Jr. FX's love story, John.
- [38:04]
Advertisement Voice
F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bassette. Watch now on FX, Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus for bundle subscribers.
- [38:23]
Jack Wilson
Okay, we're back. So we are only up to 8 October, and Mary Shelley receives a letter from Fanny. Her journal entry for that day is just letter from Fanny, which really only begins to tell the story of what's going on on October 8th and October 9th. Who was Fanny and what was this letter?
- [38:47]
Fiona Sampson
So Fanny is that loop back to Mary Wollstonecraft having Mary's mother having her first child in France and in fact then being abandoned by the American father of that child, Gilbert Imlay, who was a blockade runner and general all round bad thing? I think so. Fanny was born In France. So Fanny is just a few years older than Mary, Four years older. And Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died of result of giving birth to our Mary, which meant that Fanny then had no natural parent and no natural parent in the household in which she grew up. So there are in fact three girls in that household. There's our Mary, there's Fanny, who is not related to Godwin, and there is Claire, and also there's Claire's brother, who is the daughter of Godwin's second wife. And so both Mary and Claire have a natural parent in that household and they are stepsisters, you know, not so. But Fanny is profoundly an orphan. And in the family lore also, she is seen as plain and therefore sort of unmarriageable. It's poor Fanny. And what's very interesting about that idea that Fanny is plain in the context of her father being American, is, is that I found the contemporary newspaper reports of her demise, which I'm trying not to utter a spoil. And she is described as dark complexioned, which is really interesting. So one doesn't know what Imlay's background was and heritage, but it's interesting that Fanny is regarded as sort of unmatchable because she's dark. So Fanny's alternative, as it was for so many young women, as we know from early 19th century novels, is to teach, which actually is what Mary Wollstonecraft had done. And there is a plan for Wollstonecraft's sisters, surviving sisters, so Mary and Fanny's aunts to open a school in Ireland and they tell Fanny that she can come along and teach there too. Wonderful. You know, an adventure of her own, a new start. But then because of Mary's running away with Percy and her two illegitimate babies, and because of consorting with the notorious Lord Byron, who's had to leave England, not for political reasons, but because of what was revealed about his private life in his divorce trial, suddenly Fanny is tainted with a lack of respectability. I mean, bad enough that her parents weren't married and so on. And the aunts turned down the offer. They withdraw the offer, yeah.
- [41:38]
Jack Wilson
Did Mary know that that was the reason why they withdrew the offer?
- [41:42]
Fiona Sampson
I'm not sure that she knew. She cannot not have known, really. She must have known. And in answer to your earlier question about why was Godwin so disapproving of Mary running off with Percy unmarried? Yes, obviously partly it was because Percy was married and had a child, let's not forget, and his wife was pregnant, so effectively two children by the Time, you know, by the time he and Mary had gone away. But also there were knock on ramifications for the rest of the family who were only just holding onto respectability. Partly that was Godwin's fault because Godwin had written a posthumous memoir about Mary Wollstonecraft in which he revealed that actually she did live by her ideals. In other words, she had had a child out of wedlock, she lived in revolutionary France and so on. And that did terrible damage to Wollstonecraft's reputation for, I mean, at least a century. So this tenuous respectability, which of course in early 19th century Britain is not just a question of, you know, it's not just something nice, it's not just a comedy of manners, it is financial and therefore it is survival. Because if you can't be part of the kind of commerce and mutual sort of interchange of respectable society, you are on the streets. So very practical ramifications for the Godwin household. So Fanny, of course, writes to tell Mary that her hopes have been dashed. At least we presume that's what it says. Within less than 24 hours, Fanny is dead. What happens is that Fanny goes to the Welsh port of Swansea, which is where you sail from, to get to Ireland. So it's where the aunt sailed from. But it doesn't seem necessarily she's actually trying to follow the aunts, more that it's something symbolic. Because what's very strange about it is that she doesn't take the normal, the most efficient, least tiring, most cheapest, most direct route by stagecoaches from London to Swansea. She goes instead to Bath and changes coaches there. And we know that again from these newly discovered notices of the discovery of her body in Wales, because, you know, a witness was traveling on the same coach as her and said she got on at Bath and she said she'd come from Bath. And the same witness says that she had with her a man's handkerchief, a big red handkerchief. So why did she go to Bath? Well, obviously she knew that Mary and at that moment, as it happened, Percy were in Bath. We knew she knew that because she wrote to them and also because they were sisters and loving sisters and they were in touch.
- [44:32]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [44:33]
Fiona Sampson
So what did she do in Bath? Did she just wanna see where Mary lived or was there some kind of appeal that she made to Mary and Percy or just Percy or just Mary? Did she think, well, if I can't be respectable, then let me be part of your household, let me be bohemian with you guys. Or was she in love with Percy? We don't know. And although it's convenient to speculate that she was in love with Percy, I think that's too. I think that's too easy a conclusion to jump to. It may be true, but it may be not. But what we do know is that in Mary's journal, which has quite scant entries, there's a careful entry for the day that Fanny was in Bath, that Mary had an art lesson. And although it's a different day of the week from her usual day of the week, and that she went for a walk to South Parade, which is like, it's a five minute walk from Abbey Churchyard. Why has she inscribed this alibi into her journal? And we know she did think of her journal as public record. She was conscious of that.
- [45:30]
Jack Wilson
She was a celebrity already.
- [45:32]
Fiona Sampson
She was aware. Exactly. She was aware at least that her family was celebrity.
- [45:36]
Jack Wilson
Her family was.
- [45:37]
Fiona Sampson
Right, yeah.
- [45:37]
Jack Wilson
And she writes in the evening, a very alarming letter comes from Fanny on the 9th. And that again, it really underplays things. And Godwin had also gotten a letter from Fanny that so alarmed him that he raced to Bath.
- [45:55]
Fiona Sampson
Yes, that's right.
- [45:56]
Jack Wilson
But he didn't look up Percy or Claire or Mary, I guess because he was being stubborn and didn't want to or something. But he was looking for Fanny. They could have helped him look for her or something. It's amazing that they didn't coordinate that.
- [46:13]
Fiona Sampson
I mean, he was not speaking into Mary in Percy, you know, I mean, they were, you know, there was an.
- [46:17]
Jack Wilson
Absolute estranged, I guess, and. But you'd think that a letter that alarming might have thawed the chill a little bit from his perspective. But instead they never connect and then they receive the news that Fanny has gone on to Swansea and has committed suicide.
- [46:36]
Fiona Sampson
Well, they don't know that she's committed suicide.
- [46:38]
Jack Wilson
Oh, they just know that she's died.
- [46:40]
Fiona Sampson
Yeah, but, you know, how does he know that? It's likely to be something terrible.
- [46:43]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right.
- [46:44]
Fiona Sampson
And the suicide is of course hushed up because that's yet another scandalous thing.
- [46:49]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [46:49]
Fiona Sampson
Suicide is a. Is a crime. Although it's of course hilarious because you're dead. So, I mean.
- [46:54]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right.
- [46:56]
Fiona Sampson
How can you then be, you know, sentenced? But. And so it's yet another scandal. And that's what's so interesting, of course, about the newspaper reports, because they didn't have a name attached to them. And that was what was so amazing about finding them, because, I mean, they report on the body was found, she had, you know, some brown bees with her and they talk about the you know, her stays had embroidered into them her mother's initials, mwg. You know, so, I mean, just astonishing and very moving, but the name is never the newspapers of the time, never. And public discourse at the time never attached this suicide to Fanny. There was no public linkage.
- [47:34]
Jack Wilson
Right, right. Ah, okay, so let's jump ahead to December, and we have two very huge events that happen on the 15th of December. Mary Records News of the death of Harriet Shelley, Percy's wife. So what happened to Harriet and how did that affect Percy and Mary?
- [47:58]
Fiona Sampson
Yes, and so Harriet is another piece of collateral damage. It's very strange because, you know, I became a huge admirer of Mary Shelley and I think she had great personal integrity and great, you know, ideals and political beliefs, but certainly her life with Percy or Percy's life produced terrible collateral damage. So Harriet, who with whom Percy had eloped when she was 16, just as he ran away with Mary when she was 16, has killed herself. She has thrown herself in the Serpentine, which is an ornamental lake in Hyde park in London. So quite a public place to kill yourself. If you just wanted to slip away, you would probably jump into the Thames. Traditional method of 19th century suicide, I'm afraid, and murder. So she. She leaves a note, she kills herself. She kills herself at night. It's December. So she will know that it's not a gesture because, I mean, the water's really, really cold.
- [48:58]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [48:59]
Fiona Sampson
She is very heavily pregnant for the third time.
- [49:03]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. She's 21 years old.
- [49:06]
Fiona Sampson
That's all. I mean, so. And why does she kill herself? Well, one reason is that she has no means of support because her family, rather than rallying around her when Percy abandoned her for Mary, have sort of taken the line of, well, you know, you made your bed, you got to lie in it. You know, it's your foolish choice, which. So she has no support from him, from them. And Percy will tell friends that she therefore became a call girl. She know she. She prostituted herself. And so. But it seems possible that she prostituted herself to Percy.
- [49:46]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, well, she also, Percy claimed that the child that had. That she was pregnant with was not his. Although it does seem like. I don't know if it's evidence or if it's circumstantial, but it does seem like it probably was his child. It may have been, yeah.
- [50:07]
Fiona Sampson
It seems exactly one. You know, again, the historian. One can't be. One can't make the claim, but one can certainly suggest how highly likely it is. One can look at how highly likely it is that the child was Percy's, because Percy's been spending so much time in London and we know he's an elf and can't look after himself. So who's he been with? Not his family, who are down in Sussex, which is in the south of England, and in any case have sort of disowned. Well, they haven't disowned him, but they're really, really disapproving of his lifestyle because he tried to get Harriet to come along and be part of this free love community back in 1814. So we know he hasn't broken the chain, as it were. He's quite happy to have more than one woman on the go. And because the suicide note specifically, you know, says to Percy, you know, you've broken my heart. Now, Percy can finesse that away as, oh, you broke my heart when you left for Mary. But if he's been playing her along in recent months, you know, that that makes it all the more likely that she's going to kill herself because of him. So the immediate, of course, she's left two children, two small children, right?
- [51:13]
Jack Wilson
Percy's children, Percy's children.
- [51:15]
Fiona Sampson
More collateral damage. And Percy's response is immediately to marry Mary, not because, oh, I love you so much, I'm now free to marry you, but because he hopes that that way he, the Lord Chancellor, will give him custody of his children.
- [51:34]
Jack Wilson
Right, I need to show that I've got something stable. And exactly the reason why I was chuckling is because we, in the book that we're talking about, Mary and Bath, we get Mary's journals and journal entries and her entry for December 30 is, A marriage takes place on 30th December. Which is almost like putting it into the passive voice.
- [51:57]
Fiona Sampson
Absolutely. It's so funny, isn't it? It's so embracus. But obviously she was delighted. And of course, what really delighted her was they got married in London and Godwin and Mary Jane, his wife, turned up because once she's married to him, Godwin no longer needs to disown them.
- [52:13]
Jack Wilson
Right?
- [52:13]
Fiona Sampson
He can own them. And indeed, he doesn't just own them, but fairly soon he's kind of. And if he did, for the rest of Mary's life, he's pushing her for opportunities for publishing for himself. He's. He's trying to get money from Percy. So he not only owns them, but he tries to, you know, get what he can from them. But then, on the other hand, he was struggling, and that's what families are for.
- [52:34]
Jack Wilson
So.
- [52:34]
Fiona Sampson
Yes. So Mary and Percy marry, which means that William becomes. William has his father's name, so does the child that Mary is by now pregnant with. And so will the only child of the four of them. Of the four that Mary will have who survives is called Percy Florence, because he was born in Florence, who then, eventually, long, long in the future, will inherit the title and the estate that Percy doesn't survive to inherit. So Percy's father outlives him. Sir Timothy Shelley. So the marriage actually secures all sorts of things, but it doesn't even secure Mary's financial security in her widowhood, because, you know, it's probably no spoiler to point out that Percy is dead just before he turns 30. So Mary is only 25. She's a widow at 25 and must survive for the rest of her life because the family then want to take custody of her surviving child, and she refuses. And so they will only loan her a sort of very meager subsistence allowance, only for the child, not for herself, and borrowed, lent against the future estate so that she doesn't acquire financial security through the marriage, but she does acquire respectability of a kind, and her children acquire, as it were, legitimacy.
- [53:55]
Jack Wilson
Right. And she's very excited, as you said in a letter to Byron. She says, you know, you can now call me Mary Shelley. And.
- [54:03]
Fiona Sampson
And she's in love. I mean, she's still in love, even though so much has already happened in her young life.
- [54:09]
Jack Wilson
And just keeping with this time frame, that was December 30th, and then on January 12th, she writes in her journal, Four Days of Idleness, which is her way of saying that Claire has given birth to Byron's daughter.
- [54:24]
Fiona Sampson
That's right. And Mary attends and. Yes, looks after her and so on. Exactly, yes.
- [54:28]
Jack Wilson
And so she's. And Mary's pregnant again, but this kind of concludes the time in Bath. So I guess the question is, I mean, with all of that happening, how much was she able to work on Frankenstein? My understanding is she wrote Chapter four there, at least, and she seems to have gone through other things as well. So how was she so productive?
- [54:51]
Fiona Sampson
Well, one answer is because despite all of this, she actually had more time in Bath than she'd had before. I mean, she was, you know, they were. They were in Switzerland and they were.
- [55:02]
Jack Wilson
Traveling back in Bath. They just had to lay low.
- [55:04]
Fiona Sampson
Actually, she did a lot of the actual writing out of Frankenstein in Bath. And one of the things we were talking about, framing devices in novels and so on, and one of the things that she discovered was that really she'd Written a short story, at best a novella. And in order to make it long enough for book publication, she needed to find a way to lengthen it. And that is the other reason for the framing devices. So the book grew not just because she wrote a sort of a further chapter in the further adventures of Frankenstein and his creature. Obviously she couldn't, because there's a full stop at the end of the book, but she wrote the frame around what happens, the central tragedies, partly in order to lengthen the book. So she was doing a lot of the actual composition, producing the actual novel while she was in Bath. And we shouldn't forget, too, that Frankenstein would not be the first book of hers to be published, and that once she was back in London, which I know is after the end of our Mary Shelley and Bath, but I count as the 1814 trip, the travelogue.
- [56:05]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [56:05]
Fiona Sampson
The elopement trip, as it were. Although not an elopement because they didn't get married. It becomes, yes, History of Six Weeks journey. So she's also tweaking that while she's in Bath, although she's only reproducing letters she wrote at the time, really, she's just topping and tailing them. And she adds in a couple of Percy's poems. Nevertheless, she's also. So she's really thinking of herself. She's got, as it were, in Virginia Woolf's terms, a room of her own. She's got a desk of her own. She's got a writer's desk. And she is doing the work of a writer for the first time properly.
- [56:38]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [56:39]
Fiona Sampson
And it's Frankenstein that emerges from that.
- [56:42]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. It is an incredible period in a writer's life. I wanted to talk a little bit about the difference between Mary's journal and Percy's journal. And I had a particular date here of Sunday, October 6, and Shelley, Percy Shelley writes on that. His entry for the day is, on this day, Mary put her head through the door and said, come and look, here's a cat eating roses. She'll turn into a woman. When beasts eat these roses, they turn into men and women, which gives a picture of Mary that is so playful and energetic and, you know, imaginative. And then Mary's entry from October 6th is Red Clarendon All Day. Finish the 11th book. Shelley reads Tasso.
- [57:34]
Fiona Sampson
Yes.
- [57:35]
Jack Wilson
It's so matter of fact. And so it is, you know.
- [57:39]
Fiona Sampson
Yes.
- [57:40]
Jack Wilson
It's like, where's the cat? Where's the roses?
- [57:42]
Fiona Sampson
Yes, exactly. She definitely does expunge a lot of her personality, and, I mean, all her Novels. I mean, let's not forget she as well as first science fiction, she wrote the first dystopian novel, you know, the Last man. And she wrote big historical, carefully researched novels in the style of Walter Scott. And she became a literary biographer and so on. So there's a kind of conscientiousness about her, you know, a kind of taking writing seriously, which is really striking, I think. And it means there's a certain amount of self effacement. You know, this is not a lady who's dabbling and we've got her belles let for know how charming they are. This is someone who has a quite a strong vocation and a strong sense of the literary and the intellectual life as something if not discrete, then at least clearly identifiable. And of course there's that very late, that late and very sad journal entry when she says, you need to be something great and good was the precept my father gave me. And she says that she's failed in that because she hasn't become a great philosopher and so on. So yeah, I think, yeah, I think it's very. It's so sad that she doesn't give us herself in her journal.
- [58:58]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [59:00]
Fiona Sampson
And maybe if she had been a little bit more unbuttoned, she would have had more fun in her writing life, who knows? But you know, life is very. All our lives are very constrained by circumstance, aren't they? And I mean, that was so true in the 19th century when, you know, health was such a extraordinary overriding trump cards, you know. You know, obviously no antibiotics, there's no, you know, there's no anesthetic, there's no understanding of hygiene and, and yes, antiseptic, there's none of these things. And so from one day to the next you can catch a small cold and you're dead. You know, it's.
- [59:34]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Oh, and pregnancy and childbirth is incredibly dangerous. She had her own example of losing her mother and it was something like 25% of childbirths ended in death or something, including for the mother. And here's someone who's planning to have several kids, so.
- [59:53]
Fiona Sampson
Well, she may not be planning. She's having them.
- [59:54]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [59:55]
Fiona Sampson
I mean, one of the things that I don't really understand is why they didn't use birth control. I mean, you know, given the risks for the woman and given that birth control was known to. Not only to radical intellectuals like the Godwin Wollstonecraft household, but it was also known to the gentry. So I mean, you know, it was perfectly possible. But Percy was perhaps Selfish.
- [60:17]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so my last question. I've never been to Bath, but I am going in May as part of the History of Literature podcast tour. We're going to be taking a small group to London and Oxford and Bath. And of course, the big draw was Jane Austen. But I am just as inspired now by Mary Shelley's time in Bath, and I'm really excited about it. There is a Mary Shelley reading list that is provided at the back of the book Mary Shelley and Bath, and it lists all of the books that Mary was reading during this period. And I was going to ask you, aside from the obvious choice of Frankenstein, is there a particular book you'd recommend that I read when I visit Bath in May? And would something from Mary Shelley's reading list be a good choice?
- [61:07]
Fiona Sampson
Well, I guess the answer to the question is, do you want to read something that makes you think about Bath, or do you want to read something that sets the scene for Mary's life? And if it's the latter, I would read Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb, which is her rumour about her affair with Byron.
- [61:28]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right. And that was something that, that Mary. That's on her list.
- [61:34]
Fiona Sampson
It's on her list for 1816. Yes. I mean, it happens that my book that's in press now is about George sand, comes out in the States in June with Norton. But my next book after that is Rousseau, and I see that she was reading the letters in Emile during 1816. So of course I would be quite fond of the idea of your reading some Rousseau because also Mary Wollstonecraft was a Rousseauian. You know, her ideas about education and child centered education came from Rousseau. So. But yeah, I think the lady Caroline Lamb, you know, she. Who called Byron mad, bad and dangerous to know.
- [62:08]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, yeah, right. Well, that's an excellent choice. And of course I also have In Search of Mary Shelley, which I will take that along with me as well. The book is called Mary Shelley and Beth, published by Manderley Press. Fiona Sampson, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [62:24]
Fiona Sampson
It's a great pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
- [62:34]
Advertisement Voice
Monster Energy, everybody knows White Monster, Zero Ultra. That's the OG it kicked off this whole zero sugar energy drink thing. But Ultra is a whole lineup now. You've got Strawberry Dreams, Blue Hawaiian Sunrise and Vice Guava. And they all bring the Monster Energy pump. So if you've been living in the white can branch out. Ultra's got a flavor for every vibe, and every single one is Zero Sugar. Tap the banner to learn more New Year, New Me. Cute, but how about New Year, New Money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers, giving you time to to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're going to crush Start the year off right. Download the Experian app Based on FICO Score 8 model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details.
- [63:31]
Fiona Sampson
Experian.
- [63:33]
Kathy Werzer
This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at redfin.com, own the dream.
- [64:04]
Jack Wilson
And finally today, let's do a My Last Book DG Rampton was here, Australia's Queen of Regency Romance to talk about some of her influences, including Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. But what will happen when the fluidity of choosing any book you want to read turns into the solidity and inescapability of choosing the last book you will ever read? What will our Queen turn to in that moment? Let's find out. Foreigning me now is Australia's Queen of Regency Romance best selling author DG Rampton. Diana 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.
- [65:04]
DG Rampton
Oh, that is such a good question. I'd never, ever thought about this before. But look, I'm I'm all about positive energy and making people feel good, including myself. And I. I love reading books with happy endings and with humor in them. I want to be made to laugh. So for my final book, I would definitely want romance. And I want to laugh. So ideally, maybe a mashup. Maybe a mashup between Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and which is just so gorgeous. But also Georgette Heyer's Pharaoh's Daughter and Regency Buck. So those two mashed up with Pride and Prejudice would make this most gorgeous book. I would love to read that as my last book.
- [65:56]
Jack Wilson
We didn't talk too Much about. We talked about Jane Austen and her sense of humor and her wit, and we briefly touched on it with Georgette Heyer. But was she a kind of. I mean, was she. Did she have kind of a biting wit? Did she have the kind of banter that we see in Jane Austen's books?
- [66:19]
DG Rampton
I would say she has more.
- [66:21]
Jack Wilson
More.
- [66:22]
DG Rampton
More of whatever Jane Austen has. She has more.
- [66:25]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [66:25]
DG Rampton
Jane Austen did do a lot of observational stuff, and it was a lot of. It was quietly intelligent a lot of the time, and there was humor in it, but it wasn't all the way throughout the book in every paragraph. Whereas with Georgette Heyer, the wit and the humor is there from start to finish. Yeah, she's a little bit more overt with us, so you're just chuckling along. And she's quite sharp as well. So sharp with her humor. Like, she doesn't mind going after some of her characters. So I really love that. So, yeah, in a way, if you want to feel good and have more humor in a book, I would probably go to Georgette Heyer first.
- [67:12]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. And you mentioned the happy endings and Jane Austen's. I mean, her plots, often they come to a conclusion with such a satisfying snap, almost like a lid closing on a music box or something. Is Georgette Heyer, does she have a similar way of tying things up and giving us a satisfying conclusion?
- [67:35]
DG Rampton
Oh, completely. She's brilliant at it. Like, the way that she manages to tie up all the loose ends and just bring about a happy conclusion to her story is just wonderful. And that's why it's a little bit of a serotonin hit. Like, as a romance author, you're almost like a drug addict. You need the serotonin hit that these stories give you. And Georgia Heyer does that. Like, she just wraps it up so beautifully, and the romance is there, and it's so satisfying at the end that that's why people get addicted to romance stories.
- [68:09]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [68:10]
DG Rampton
It is like a drug.
- [68:11]
Jack Wilson
Right. But I can see this as a problem for you choosing this as your last book, because it's going to be hard to close that book and then not feel like you're being cheated by not being able to open up the next one.
- [68:25]
DG Rampton
I'll go out on a happy note. I don't mind if I know I'm going anyway. Like, you know, go out with a bang.
- [68:35]
Jack Wilson
Okay. DJ Rampton, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [68:40]
DG Rampton
Thank you, Jacob. It's been a real pleasure.
- [68:47]
Jack Wilson
Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to DG Rampton and Fiona Sampson for being here. What a lucky person I am to talk to such smart people all the time. With more on the way, we'll be talking to a high school teacher who's been assigning Proust to his students. Ambitious project on his part, and to our frequent guest Bob Blaisdell about Chekhov's writing advice. We'll also look at a pair of little known writers who were famous in their day. What happened to them? And a writer who was probably the most famous person in the world in his day, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. One of the closest things, maybe the closest thing we've ever had to a philosopher king. We'll hear about the groups of early Soviets who loved Lawrence Stern, often in secret. And we'll learn about the Cherokee novelist John Rollin Ridge, who was part of the gold rush and then wrote about a notorious Mexican bandit. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [70:19]
Kathy Werzer
Curious about the Future of Healthcare? Tomorrow's Cure, the chart topping and Ambi Award finalist podcast from Mayo Clinic brings it to you today. I'm Kathy Werzer and in the 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. What is healthy spirituality and how does it help us thrive? We explore these questions on the new season of Within Four, 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.