Determined from a young age to escape the Jim-Crow South and see new places, Mississippi native Juanita Harrison managed, as a working-class Black woman, to cultivate her own version of a grand world tour, paying for her globe-trotting by picki...

Gilded-Age gossip meets Edith-Wharton-style scandal in the 1927 Fifth-Avenue tell-all Tragic Mansions by Mrs. Philip Lydig (a.k.a. the fashionable socialite Rita de Acosta Lydig). Find out what prompted this glamorous doyenne to dish t...

A literary icon in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó was relatively unknown to English-speaking readers until recent translations of her work opened the door to her powerful storytelling. In today’s episode we focus on her 1970 novel Abigail<...

Amy shares updates on previous book recommendations and contemplates how the ups and downs women encounter in life might differ from the archetypal “hero’s journey” described by Joseph Campbell. Jungian-oriented psychotherapist Maureen Murdock ...

Pass the smelling salts! Readers of the Victorian Era eagerly (or furtively) set scruples aside to read Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret — the title of which was enough to tempt even the most puritanic...