Ann Schlee (Rhine Journey) with Sam Johnson-Schlee and Lucy Scholes

Pack your steamer trunks! We’re traveling to 19th-century Bavaria this week by way of Ann Schlee’s 1980 historical novel Rhine Journey, newly republished by McNally Editions. This Booker-Prize nominated travel tale features vivid period details, sultry psychological thrills and a protagonist on the brink of a personal revolution, all sewn up in a vibe that reads like a German twist on “A Room With a View.” Author Sam Johnson-Schlee joins us to discuss the life and work of his grandmother, who passed away in November at the age of 89. Also joining the conversation is McNally Editions’ Lucy Scholes. 

Mentioned in this episode:

McNally Editions 2024 edition of Rhine Journey by Ann Schlee

Daunt Books 2024 edition of Rhine Journey by Ann Schlee 

Living Rooms by Sam Johnson-Schlee

A Room With a View by E.M. Forster

“Celebrating Ann Schlee and Rhine Journey: ‘a tale of female rage and agency’” by Lucy Scholes

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 87 on Kay Dick

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 51 on Rosamond Lehmann

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 184 on Elizabeth Taylor Vs. Elizabeth Taylor

Landscape artist Nick Schlee

The Vandal by Ann Schlee

Ask Me No Questions by Ann Schlee

Transcript

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off the work of forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, joined by my cohost, Amy Helmes. 

AMY HELMES: The novel we're discussing today, Rhine Journey by Ann Schlee, hadn't originally been on our radar. But when McNally Editions sent us a copy earlier this year (they are reissuing it this month) I found myself unable to put it down. It's giving me A Room With a View, only Germany.

KIM: Yeah, and longtime listeners of this podcast will know that anything that draws a comparison to E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, one of our favorite books and films, is an instant winner in our eyes. Rhine Journey is a work of historical fiction set in 1851, but it was actually written in 1980 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize the following year.

AMY: Honestly, you could have told me this book was written in the mid-19th century, and I wouldn't have blinked. It feels so completely and wonderfully of that era.

KIM: Absolutely. And in the foreword to McNally Edition's republication of this novel, author Lauren Groff admits that she did a double take upon learning the publication date. She writes, “Rhine Journey is graceful, economical, and emotionally acute, but to me, the most astonishing aspect of this novel is the precision with which Schlee replicates the customs, language and atmosphere of 1851.” Yeah, that's absolutely true.

AMY: And we would have loved to have been able to ask Ann Schlee herself how she worked this literary magic, but sadly she passed away last November at the age of 89. Her grandson, author Sam Johnson Schlee, has graciously agreed to join us today to talk about Ann's life and work, and he's joined by a favorite guest of this show, Lucy Scholes. Ready to kick off this “journey,” Kim? 

KIM: Yeah, my bags — or should I say steamer trunks — are packed. Let's go!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Today's first guest, Sam Johnson Schlee, is an academic at London South Bank University and a writer of memoir and literary nonfiction about the politics and culture of everyday life. He is the author of the 2022 book Living Rooms, which examines how we choose to live in and furnish our homes, as well as the connection between place and the personal. Sam's latest book, Hot House, will be published by Faber and explores the history of central heating in homes. Sam, welcome!

SAM JOHNSON SCHLEE: Thank you very much. Yeah, really nice to meet you, and it's very exciting to come on and speak about this book because obviously I care about it a great deal.

KIM: Also joining us today in conversation is McNally Editions editor and literary critic Lucy Scholes, who has joined us on this show for prior conversations about Rosamond Lehmann, Kay Dick and both Elizabeth Taylors. In addition to reflecting on titles once shortlisted for the Booker Prize in her series, “The Booker Revisited,” she's also the editor behind a recently published collection of short stories from mid century women writers called A Different Sound. Lucy, welcome back to the show. We always love having you on.

LUCY SCHOLES: It's always such a pleasure to be here, though I fear your listeners are going to get sick of me at this rate.

KIM: No way. No way. It's always our pleasure.

AMY: Okay. So Sam, you were very close to your grandmother and she features in your first book, Living Rooms, because you actually lived with her and your grandfather (the landscape painter Nick Schlee) for part of your childhood. Did you have any awareness of Ann as a writer as a kid? 

SAM: Very much so. I mean, something that was always very important to me from a very small age was her writing shed, which is what we called it. For a while it was a shed, and then it moved into the house, and it had a very particular smell. In this wooden house, everything smelled slightly of cedar. And it was full of books and pictures of her children, but it was such an incredible place to go and find her. It was often my job to go and find her when it was time to have a drink at the end of the day. Sometimes she would be asleep, with her head in her notebook, and it felt like this kind of incredibly special world of writing and of thinking. And I'm really grateful that I had that experience of being able to be in that world with her. Sitting on the window seat in there asking her questions, sometimes about literature or sometimes about what was going on in my life, was always really important to me. So yeah, my brother and I were very lucky to grow up in the household with her, as well as my grandfather. He's still going. We give him a bit more of a hard time.

KIM: Aw. What was your first experience reading Rhine Journey?

SAM: I actually spent most of my life not reading my grandmother's books. It always made me feel, I think, a bit embarrassed, a bit anxious. I tried to read them lots of times and never quite brought myself to do it. Um, in the last sort of 10 years of her life, her health fluctuated quite a lot, and I took myself aside and said, “You've really got to read one of your grandmother's books,” because she had such a role in shaping my life, my intellectual world. So I read Rhine Journey in an afternoon, I think in the middle of lockdown or one of our lockdowns. And I very quickly forgot that it was written by my grandmother, which I think was always what I was nervous about. It was this perfect, crystalline novel, you know? It's just an unbelievable piece of literature. 

KIM: Yeah, I completely agree. And it's not surprising to me that you would say that you were just sucked into it, because it takes you into the world so quickly. We'll talk about it more as we get into the discussion of the novel, but yeah, that didn't surprise me that you said that. So let's talk a little bit about her early life. Ann Schlee was born Ann Cumming in Connecticut in 1934. Her mother was American and father was a major general with the British military. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about the early part of her life and how that might have shaped her as a writer?

SAM: Yeah, I mean, she's very much a child of empire, in a way that I probably don't want to find out too much about. But I mean, her father, Duncan, who I never met, but he was, I think, a very influential person in her life. And she was born, as you say, in Connecticut, but she spent quite a lot of time in her youth traveling with him. So she lived in the Sudan for a while, and in Egypt. There's a fantastic picture of her with an anteater. Somebody they visited had a pet anteater. She spent a lot of time, I think, being out of place and in different places, and some of her later books actually deal with that kind of legacy of empire. But Rhine Journey… 

I don't want to kind of do a literary analysis of my grandmother, but I think it has this sense of solitariness or being kind of in tense or close relationships with family, and perhaps it comes something from that childhood and that upbringing. I think something about her childhood and that feeling out of place made her a real watcher, a real observer of people. And she told stories like she writes as well, always with these acute — sometimes too acute — ability to kind of pin someone down so you know exactly who they were. 

AMY: That makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking, too, about the book and how other people could have written that story and it probably would have been 

four times as long. But she just has the ability to so succinctly nail down the characters, not needing to say too much more. You know, it's actually not

a very long book, all told. So we know also, right, that she met her husband while they were both at Oxford.

SAM: Yes. Um, I think he pretended he'd forgotten a pencil and used that as an excuse to get a conversation going with her. Although after Oxford, they went to America and he asked her to marry him. Uh, he sort of followed her out there. She was in New York with a friend teaching somewhere and um, she said “maybe,” and then went away on a trip that he says was three months long and she says was three weeks long. So she did make him, um, struggle.

AMY: Okay, so then the couple returned to England in 1957, where they eventually settled with their four children in a house in Wandsworth, which is in South London, I guess, from what I looked up. Is this the same house that you lived in?

SAM: No, that's where my mum grew up. It's a house on Wimbledon Park Road that later was used as the set for a television show about people losing weight; I can't remember what it was. It was very peculiar for everyone. Um, no, I never went there. I knew them in a house called Galvey, which was a wooden house outside of London. It's quite a remarkable place. Um, my understanding of Wimbledon Park Road was that it was similarly ramshackle. Apparently, a journalist asked her when she was shortlisted for the Booker what the prize money would go to, and she said that she would use it to mend the roof, which I don't think ever happened. So that's the tragedy of her not winning the Booker Prize.

AMY: Could never do those home renovations.

SAM: Yeah.

AMY: Okay, so Rhine Journey was the first novel that Ann wrote for adults, But Lucy, she was doing some writing prior to this. Can you tell us about it?

LUCY: Yeah, I don't know an awful lot about it, I have to say, but she did write five children's novels, which The Vandal won the 1980 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. So that was the year before Rhine Journey. Um, I haven't read any of them. I don't think they're in print at the moment, and children's books always sort of fall off the radar slightly if you don't read them when you're at the right age, I think. But I'm interested to know, Sam, did you read these when you were growing up? Were you at all aware of them? Or was it just the adult novels you stayed away from?

SAM: I'm sure I made some attempts to read them. I remember a library copy of one called Ask Me No Questions in our school library, and, um, there were copies around the house, but we were never sort of encouraged to read them, particularly. And I know my mum and her siblings have funny relationships with them because they all sort of find themselves as children in the children's books. 

LUCY: Oh, that's such a strange thing! I think when I first got in touch with her to talk about republishing Rhine Journey, she did tell me that she used to get up very early in the mornings to write these books before she got the kids ready. And obviously her life was very busy with four children and she was always doing bits of teaching and things. So she said she got up very early to write, um, first thing in the morning while everyone was still asleep, which I thought was probably a rather wonderful calm moment of the day, I imagine. 

KIM: So, let's start talking about Rhine Journey, which was published in 1980, and she dedicates the book to “my companions on the Rhine in the summer of 1977.” Sam, do we know anything about this trip?

SAM: Yeah, um, it was my great-grandfather, Duncan Cumming, um, my grandfather, Nick Schlee, and my grandmother, Ann. And on the trip, my grandmother, as she did, spent a lot of time watching the other families on the river cruise that they were taking. And I think there was a particular family that she watched. It was definitely a trip with lots of kind of inspiration and things to observe.

AMY: So the events of this novel are set in the Rhineland in the summer of 1851. Lucy, why don't you tell us a little bit about the historical backdrop and how it relates to the kind of tense psychological plot of the book?

LUCY: Yeah, so I think what she really does here is a sort of stroke of storytelling genius, really, and it's quite a feat of narrative misdirection, because she opens the novel with this very brief historical note that looks to just be setting up this kind of broader context of the era and the setting. And then she says, but none of my characters are really interested in this. They're all too busy thinking about themselves. And so you sort of also dismiss it, too. And you're immediately drawn into their lives, into the main character's kind of interiority. We have Charlotte, who is a middle-aged spinster traveling with her brother and his family. They're in Germany, it's about three years after, um, Europe has been sort of convulsed by workers’ revolutions. And in Germany these were very harshly suppressed, and this is also the period where Karl Marx himself has fled Cologne to London. And he's sort of suspected of fomenting revolutionary plots, and people are getting very worried about revolutionaries sneaking across borders. So there's a sort of general sense of that going on in the background. but as far as we're aware to begin with, the characters themselves are not massively interested in this. 

KIM: So, the book actually opens with the Morrison family. They're about to disembark from the boat that's brought them into the town of Koblenz in Prussia. And Charlotte is being chastised by her brother because she's not keeping her eyes on the luggage. And it's really wonderful, this first chapter, because all of a sudden you're instantly grounded in this family dynamic, which is really interesting. 

AMY: Yeah, I mean, like I said earlier, within a sentence or two, you're suddenly like, “Oh, I have this guy's number already.” Her older brother, Charles, is kind of a bloviator, and you sense in Charlotte that she's kind of speaking through gritted teeth with him.

KIM: Yeah, he's paying for the trip, and so it's almost like the traveling companions we've read about in other novels of that period where she kind of has to do work almost, but she's also a family member. So that dynamic is definitely there, and it's a bit awkward and causes tension immediately.

AMY: I mean, even her brother's wife says, “Oh, there you are,” to Charlotte, and you're suddenly like, “Oh, Charlotte's like their servant.”

KIM: Exactly. Yeah. 

AMY: “Where have you been? I need you for something.”

KIM: Yeah. We have the literal baggage; she's in charge of it. And she's also like extra “baggage” for the family. It's like, how is she fitting into this trip? 

LUCY: But we also learn quite quickly that she is at this sort of a very important moment in her own life, right? That she has been, not in service, she wasn't a servant, but she was a housekeeper for somebody, an older gentleman, who's died and left her some money. And now she has to make a decision about what she's going to do in the future. And that is hugely important because in a weird way, this is her brother and his wife almost sort of auditioning her to come and live in the house with them And she's not a 20th century heroine. She is a 19th century woman who feels the draw of society's expectations. And so this is really hard for her to kind of wrestle with. 

SAM: I was reading it again today, and I think in one sense, it's very much a period piece. In another sense, I think the things that happen in the book foreshadow some of the transformations of gender in the 20th century. In that sense, it feels like a modernist book. Something that works so well about the book and gives it such significance and weight that it carries very lightly, if that makes sense — there are these huge moments of almost dreamlike imagery that really gives it the sense of modernism. Like, I'm thinking particularly, and it's not giving away too much, it's quite early in the book, the scene of her remembering going into a garden and kissing a peony. It's this breathtaking, almost surreal juxtaposition. I know that my grandmother was a great fan of modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, who play with interiority and the dreamlike and things in a similar way. And I think that increases throughout the book, building this incredible kind of psychological tension. 

KIM: Absolutely. Let's give our listeners an idea of what the book sounds like. It's at the beginning, while the boat's docking, Charlotte notices something that unmoors her personally. Sam, do you want to read that?

SAM: She was left on a deck, too congested with the wide dark skirts of the lady passengers for her to press on to the pile of luggage forward of the mast. But, optimistic by nature, trained in the belief that people left in charge of things were infallible, she had no fears at all that the strong young men surrounding the luggage with ropes would fail to lower it over the side, where subsequently they would find it. 

   A space occurred near her at the rail. She fitted herself into it, placed her gloved hands side by side on the polished wood of the rail, and stared down at the scene below. 

   It was at that moment — when the throb and vibration of the engine ceased, the brass bell jangled their arrival, and the steamer made its shuddering contact with the land — that Charlotte felt a sudden intense pain in what she had been taught to believe was her heart. 

   The crowd on the shore stared upwards at the passengers. At one moment their faces were no more than pale shapes among the white scarves of the peasant women and a cluster of spiked brass helmets flashing in the last of the day's sun; at the next, eyes, mouths became distinct, upturned, searching. Then pain brought tears to the eyes so that the whole scene wavered and started on a course of disintegration, as if invisible fumes of some rising conflagration had drifted between herself and the shore. All this because near the space cleared for the gangplank, she had seen, for the first time in twenty years, the face of a man called Desmond Fermer.

AMY: Well done. Thank you. Let's talk about that passage a little bit, because first of all, she appeals to every sense, you know? The glittering 

brass helmets of the soldiers; the clank of the bell; the hubbub of the crowd… you know, you feel it all, you feel like you're there. And also that line at the beginning, “She was trained in the belief that people left in charge of things were infallible.” That line is so pivotal for what's happening between her and her brother. 

KIM: Mm-hmm.

SAM: The other thing I really noticed reading that is how long the sentences are. I think they become shorter and shorter throughout the book to a point of some really spikey bits of writing in the final chapter of the book. And I think, again, there's this transformation of the character from this very Victorian voice into something more edgy by the end.

AMY: Oh, that's fascinating. Okay, so Charlotte's standing on the edge of the boat. She has this moment, that kind of takes her breath away because she sees in the crowd on the shore this complete stranger who bears a vague resemblance to someone from her youth. But in reality, he is a man called Edward Newman, whose own family of four the Morrison family will continue to cross paths with during the course of their travels. 

KIM: Yeah. And she just continues to get distracted by him to the point of I think you would start to say obsession. She's privately freaking out, trying to hold it all together for appearance's sake. That's what is expected of her, right? She's also expected at the same time to keep this guardian-like eye on her 17 year old niece. Sam, could you talk a little bit more about Ellie, her niece, and how she contributes to Charlotte's emotional spiral?

SAM: Yeah, she's an interesting figure, isn't she? I think Charlotte has this… envy is not quite the right word, but there's this feeling of great anxiety in their relationship, which is at once loving and really difficult. Early in the book, there's this really brilliant scene, I think, with Ellie, who wants to wear her hair up to go to dinner. And it does this fantastic job of animating something about the repression of Victorian sexuality. And really, Ellie doesn't have a big role in the book, but her presence kind of brackets the whole book in a way that I think is very beautiful at the end.

LUCY: They are very close in many ways, you know — they're literally sharing a hotel room, that's the kind of way it's set up. But also, Ellie, obviously, is a reminder to her of what she hasn't lived, a life she hasn't lived, and that's complicated.

KIM: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

AMY: As we talked about before, there's really no stray sentence. Everything written has a purpose and it feels like it cinches you, as the reader, closer and closer to Charlotte and her journey of self-discovery. And along the way, there are a lot of recurring motifs that pop up too. So we often see Charlotte looking at herself in the mirror… locks and keys are referenced a lot and the phrase “you aren't yourself” is repeated several times. “It seems like you aren't yourself today,” you know? 

LUCY: Isn't that such a fascinating idea? She's constantly being told she's not herself. And this is a book in which she's struggling to work out who she even is, right? That's the point. She doesn't know who she is, she's not trusting of herself, and she's being told by other people what she should and shouldn't do. That is what her life has been up to this point. She has still these constraints on her and it's so cleverly done, I think, with these moments of, you know, like you said, Sam, these very modern contemporary-feel kind of moments of interiority, but then she has to snap back into being this 19th century woman. Ann sort of walks this really taut and spare tightrope constantly. It's brilliant.

KIM: Yeah.

SAM: I think it would be so easy to make a wrong reading of this text and say that Charlotte is on the edge of some kind of breakdown, that there's something kind of awry, because there is this slippage between dream and reality and between fantasy and real life. But I don't think Charlotte's ever particularly frightened by that thing that's happening to her, these things happening to her. It's all just presented as part of the way that she's thinking through this knotty problem, I think.

AMY: I love the way she ties in the sightseeing to the personal journey. In the first chapter, we have this sense that something's going to break wide open, and you actually see a drawbridge. Everybody standing by is watching the drawbridge lift up. Later there's the church, and she notices that construction has stopped on a portion of it, and it's almost like construction has stopped on Charlotte. And she's stuck in her life. And then, you know, some important things happen inside the church later on. But Sam, your own book, Living Room, sort of talks a lot about place and the importance of it, and there's some moments in the book, too, where Charlotte's kind of envisioning what her future could look like, and it just made me think of your book a little bit.

SAM: Yeah. I quote part of Rhine Journey in my book, which is a piece at the end where she talks about inhabiting this cottage. Can I read it actually? Can I find the lines?

AMY: Absolutely, I would love that.

SAM: So this is from literally the last couple of pages, but I don't think it is a spoiler. Um, “She pictured to herself those whitened cottage rooms where she might quietly extend herself, and, moving from room to room, meet and recognize herself in forms unaltered by the pressures of others upon her.”

I mean, it's such a beautiful, I think, expression of what it can be to dwell somewhere and what it can mean to find a place where you can, um, where she puts it perfectly, extend yourself into it and meet yourself in it. And this is in contrast to what she's being encouraged, or you said maybe auditioned for living with her brother and sister in law, to have this space just kind of her own. It's about what it will do for her sense of self to be able to occupy space on her own terms. And you know, if you think about this moment in the 19th century, and again, this is something that I've written about a bit, it's at the height of chintziness. So the idea of white walls is sharply in contrast to what the home of her family is likely to have been like. So there's a great sense of something far more interesting than just freedom. 

LUCY: It's a sort of psychic space as well, right, isn't it? It's a physical realm in which she can exist, but it's also a realm in which her psyche is allowed to rest. Her narrative train of thought is always being interrupted by someone coming into a room or someone asking her a question and that's not what she dreams of for this space, right?

SAM: It's in contrast to the other space that really compels her, when you mentioned the cathedral in Cologne, where she's been told that she's not allowed to go by her protestant brother. She feels that she's been tricked by this space and by the glamor of the space, and I think that's again, sharply in contrast with these white walls of this cottage, that maybe what she's searching for is not some kind of heightened feeling of the cathedral, but instead something much more still, where she can kind of rest, you said, I think, Lucy, which I think is perfect.

KIM: Yeah. Without the clutter of everyone's expectations, all their history, all their knowledge of her from the past, it's just her. This will not be the only time that I read this novel. I feel like there's so much more. I was so into the story and it, in some ways, it was a quote unquote “page turner” for me, you know? Because I wanted to find out what was happening. There is a lot of tension in it as well. So you want to find out what's going to happen and you're just enthralled by it, but I feel like I need to read it again and again to really dig into the psychology. There are so many layers. We did talk in our intro about how vivid and believable the book is as historical fiction, and it's a great strength and beauty in the book. Do either of you have any thoughts on why or how Ann was so good at nailing these details? I mean, 

it feels like it was written in the time that it's set.

LUCY: I'd love to know what her research process was for it. You read so much historical fiction that sometimes the research drowns out the story and people are so desperate to put details in, you know, that they found out, but this novel wears it so lightly. I don't suppose she ever told you about any of the research?

SAM: I asked her about it, after I read the book, but she didn't tell me very much. I think she probably did a lot, but she's quite self-effacing. I mean, she's incredibly well-read. She read so much fiction, and she had a life of teaching and reading behind her. So her uncle, Walter Houghton, was a professor of English literature in America. He wrote a book called The Victorian [Frame] of Mind that I think probably, until relatively recently, is the kind of tome that English students are still asked to occasionally kind of dig out and consult. (Because I know that my grandmother still got small royalties check from the book every year, which she was quite pleased that was still coming through.) She told me when I asked her about the book, this aspect of it, she said that he did not think that this was how Victorian people spoke or conducted themselves. And she said with great glee, I think it was about an email that Lucy had sent her, or maybe it was Lauren's introduction to the book, that when they talked about how real that Victorian setting felt, it made her feel a great sense of satisfaction. I think she would have liked to have been able to show that to her uncle.

LUCY: It's one of the things that all the reviews at the time picked up on. I mean, she got a lot of very good reviews for the novel, but so many of them picked up on the fact that period detail was beautifully and kind of brilliantly done. So, I hope that when she heard it recently, it was just reiterating something that people had already been telling her.

SAM: Definitely. 

KIM: right. 

SAM: I mean, she was so thrilled to know that the book was being republished. She died in November, but I think Lucy got in touch maybe about six months before then. So she knew it was happening. She saw the cover proofs. She'd really been involved in the whole process, but she was so excited that it was finding an audience again. And she couldn't believe it. As I said, she'd had a stroke about 10 years ago, and if you were not paying attention, you might think that she was sort of not always all there, but she really was. So she was very interested in what was happening and just completely thrilled. 

KIM: I'm so glad, Lucy, that you reached out to her and this all happened and she got to have this resurgence of, you know, knowing that it was going to be back in print and everything. Because I mean, it was nominated for a Booker Prize. The other nominees included Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwen, and Salman Rushdie. He won that year for Midnight's Children. So, can we infer that it was a commercial success at the time it came out, or no?

LUCY: I don't know the exact sales figures. But as I said, it got very good reviews at the time. There were quite a few of them. And I suspect that if it did sort of fall off the radar relatively quickly after that, it was not because of any other reason than I think it was maybe a very particular era of writing and a particular era when Rushdi, McEwen, you know, Ishiguro, like, there's a lot of up-and-coming, young, particularly male, writers who are really kind of appearing on the literary scene here in England. And I suspect that this didn't get the sort of fanfare that maybe they were getting. But clearly at the same time, you know, it was nominated for the Booker, and it was very, very, very worthy of its nomination as far as I'm concerned, and readers seem to enjoy it. Did she ever talk to you about what it was like to go to the award ceremony or what it felt like to her to be amongst the [other writers?] Because some of the names… I know Rushdie is kind of young at that point, but you know, Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing, these are big, big names at the time.

SAM: Yeah, I don't know. She was always quite shy of those kinds of events, but I think she was pleased that the book was received well by her peers. Jane Gardam wrote a really brilliant essay about Ann's writing and particularly Rhine Journey in Slightly Foxed, a while ago. And that, I know, was something that she really cherished, and I think she really, really wanted to be seen as a writer, you know, by her peers. Um, and I'm sure the Booker was a big thrill in that regard. By the way, if there are any screenwriters listening, I do think Rhine Journey would make the most terrific film or miniseries, I think.

AMY: Absolutely. 

SAM: I think though, um, I know that she was disappointed her last manuscript didn't get published — her last novel. And I think she had difficulty with the fact that her writing was viewed as kind of unfashionable. So I think that would have been the early 2000s was the last time she sent a book out. And the thing that she had back was that people loved it, but it was not something that could be published in that moment. I think actually now, if she was writing these books now, I think they would be being received very well. So I'm really pleased that Rhine Journey’s being republished. She was always publishing, always writing, always thinking. And when I went into her study just after she died, one of the favorite things that I saw was a box file that just said on the side of it “plots.” All of these unrealized stories and plots that haven't been found. I think there are lots of

short stories she published actually out there, but I haven't read any of them. My aunt said some of them are very weird. 

KIM: That just makes me want to read them even more!

LUCY: Yeah. Tell me more! I'm very interested. 

AMY: It's these family anecdotes that are so fantastic and why we're so glad you joined us. I mean, we learned things that we would never have known just trying to figure out on our own. You really brought her to life for us. It's been a wonderful discussion.

KIM: So, listeners, this month McNally Editions is reissuing Rhine Journey, and it's also being republished by Daunt Books in the UK. You have to put this on your summer reading list. And I already read Room with a View annually, so I'll probably be adding Rhine Journey to my annual reading list. I loved it that much. So thank you both.

LUCY: It's been my pleasure. It's been great to listen to Sam talking about Ann, and I'm looking forward to new readers discovering it and enjoying it as much as you've done. 

SAM: Thank you so much.

KIM: So that's all for today's episode. If you're listening in real time, that is July of 2024, this marks our last new episode for the summer. Amy and I are embarking on some traveling with our families, but we're also going to be hard at work getting ready to bring you new episodes and many more “lost ladies” this fall.

AMY: If you've been considering subscribing to get access to extra episodes, you can do so either through Patreon or wherever you listen to us. Now would be a really great time because we've got half a year's worth of bonus episodes archived there that you can enjoy while we're away. And of course I'll be posting new ones in the coming weeks.

KIM: Thank you as always for listening. We hope all of you have a fun rest of the summer, and please follow us or subscribe to our newsletter to keep in touch. We love to hear from you.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.