Mary MacLane — I Await the Devil's Coming with Cathryn Halverson

Long before 'Brat Summer,' America was taken with Mary MacLane, a defiant and wildly egotistical 19-year-old resident of Butte, Montana, whose confessional diary implored the “kind devil” to deliver her from a life of bourgeois boredom. Professor Cathryn Halverson from Sweden’s Södertörn University joins us for this episode to discuss MacLane’s life, angst and the reading public’s reaction to her adolescent intensity.
 
Mentioned in this episode:

I Await the Devil’s Coming/The Story of Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane (Project Gutenberg)

MTV’s “My So-Called Life”

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

Herbert S. Stone & Co.

Marie Bashkirtseff

The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff: I am the Most Interesting Woman of All Volume I and Lust for Glory Volume II

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

“Men Who Have Made Love to Me” 

I, Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane

Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly by Cathryn Halverson

Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West by Cathryn Halverson

Transcript

Episode 210: Mary MacLane (I Await the Devil’s Coming) with Cathryn Halverson

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes. And Amy, I think you probably stand in agreement with me in feeling incredibly grateful that our teenage diaries were never published for the entire world to see.

AMY HELMES: Oh my god. The angst! The misery! The unintentional comedy! There’s actually a project called Mortified that’s been around since the early 2000s where people go on stage and share excerpts from their old diaries or adolescent love letters or whatever with a live audience. Kim, have you been?

KIM: I thought we'd went together. I’ve been. I think we went together years ago. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s really funny. It usually takes decades for people to work up the courage to share these soul-exposing revelations from their past. (Sometimes humiliating!)

KIM: Yes, and that’s in sharp contrast to the lost lady we’re focusing on in this week’s episode, Mary MacLane. She willingly and eagerly published her confessional “diary” (I use that word in quotation marks — we’ll explain a bit later) soon after writing it at the age of 19. It covers a 10-month span in her life in 1901 in Butte, Montana. She originally titled the manuscript I Await the Devil’s Coming, but it was actually changed for publication to the more deceptively banal title The Story of Mary MacLane.

AMY: Mary MacLane is intense, sublime, defiant, morose, exhausting, a little bit scary, and funny as hell.

KIM: Yep. Sounds like a teenage girl, alright. But we should also mention that in terms of its literary merits, the book is beautifully written, it’s incredibly philosophic and speaks to issues that run much deeper than her own navel-gazing.

AMY: At the start of the diary, MacLane puts forth her mission statement like this: 

   I, of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel. 

   I am convinced of this, for I am odd.

KIM: Great opening lines. This is already feeling like a way-way-back machine episode of “My So–Called Life.” I can’t wait to dive into it with today’s guest. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Cathryn Halverson has a special interest in women’s writing and literature of the American West. Her published monographs include Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West; Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives; and Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly. She joins us today from Sweden where she is a senior lecturer at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Cathryn, thank you for joining us!

CATHRYN HALVERSON: Well, thank you for having me.

KIM: We want to give a special shout-out to one of our most supportive listeners and a previous guest on this show, Rosemary Kelty, for bringing Mary MacLane to our attention. Once you hear about this author and her unusual book, it’s hard not to want to pick up a copy. Cathryn, can you set the stage for us in terms of how MacLane’s debut title was received in 1902?

CATHRYN: Well, it was a mix.  Kind of looking over these collected reviews, it seems that more of the published reviews were negative than positive, but that's because the way readers responded to her was positive, and there were a lot of young women who were excited by her book. Um but also, literary people, too, were impressed by the writing and it really quickly entered the popular culture with all these parodies of it, products named after her and a lot of excitement about her and imitations too. 

KIM: Okay, so clearly love it or hate it, this book was a sensation. What did people find either so compelling in the book or so abhorrent?

CATHRYN: I mean, the biggest thing was that she wrote a book entirely about herself and was shamelessly egotistical about it. I mean, I'm sure she mentions her name virtually every page. And she doesn't really do much in the book. She just talks about herself and what she feels and what she does during the day and how she wanders around the city of Butte and the outskirts. So it was that kind of self absorption that troubled people, plus the claims she makes. She says that she's a genius, that she's brilliant, that she doesn't belong in Butte, she belongs somewhere else. And these things were probably true, but it was also rather obnoxious. But inspiring, too, to other girls and women who maybe felt the same. 

AMY: Yeah, classic teenage girl. So when I first started reading it, without knowing much about it, I took it at face value as her diary. But this isn’t exactly a diary in the way we might typically think of it, right?

CATHRYN: Right. I mean, she was inspired by other books published by women about themselves, especially Marie Bashkirtseff, this Russian woman in France who had published in around 1890  her published journals. So Bashkirtseff had actually published a real diary (it's enormous) with this account of daily life. And then MacLane. took that model and pared it down. When I was looking over the book again, it's surprising how undiary-like it is. It's more like a fable. Some of it does seem very staged, and the repetition and the focus on her emotions and thoughts, as opposed to what she was doing. And the giveaway, of course, that it's not really a diary is that she states several times that she was writing a book. She hopes this book will make her enough money to leave Butte and interestingly, she even goes back to the book after it must have been in production because she refers her readers to the frontispiece portrait and she says, you know, this is a picture of me. Note my beautiful figure, but I should say that I have handkerchiefs stuffed in the bosom of my dress to give myself a little extra padding. So, I mean, she knew that  photo would be on the book. So it's not only she was planning on writing a book, but I think she was going back and editing it and inserting things. So it was quite deliberate. 

AMY: Yeah, you can sense the calculated quality of it as you're going along and then you are sort of like, okay, this isn't her genuine day to day diary, even though it probably does include real elements of her day.

KIM: Didn't some people even think it was maybe a parody or a hoax? 

CATHRYN: Yeah, there's these statements like, maybe this is a roast on this new fad for women writing about themselves in that way, and when I first began researching I mean, this one reviewer referred to the “naked soul lady” genre, but I hadn't heard of that “naked soul lady” genre, so I was trying to figure out what they were even referencing, because now, I mean, we know about MacLane, but we don't know about these antecedents who came before her. So yeah, they wondered. And some wondered if it was a man, and, and the fact that she was from Butte, so far away, there's this feeling that, you know, we don't know what's happening there. So somebody supposedly went to Butte and asked around and figured out she was a real girl who just graduated from high school. 

AMY: You mentioned Marie Bashkirtseff. MacLane actually name-drops her in the diary, pointing out that she has some “fan-girl” portraits of her on her bedroom wall. But she also boasts that she, Mary, is far superior to Marie. She writes: “Where she is deep, I am deeper. Where she is wonderful in her intensity, I am still more wonderful in my intensity….” Listeners, in case you haven’t noticed, Mary has no shortage of ego. She repeatedly calls herself a genius. She’s audacious, and you love her for it. At one point she even has one diary entry, February 19, that just says, “Am I not intolerably conceited?” So she’s laughing about it, you know?

KIM: Totally, but at the same time, she’s also wallowing in angst, rage and despair. She’s feeling completely out of place, misunderstood and alone. Rather than beseeching God for help (a la Judy Blume’s Are You There, God, it’s Me, Margaret?) she pleads with the devil to come to her aid. (Hence her original title I Await the Devil’s Coming.) Cathryn, can you talk about her fascination with the devil?

CATHRYN: I can, yes. Um, she repeatedly asks the kind devil to “deliver me,”  and she specifically says, you know, when I think of the devil, I don't think of that red person with the tail and the or the pointy, whatever. But I think of the hyper masculine, brutal man who will, you know, embrace me and give me this intense relationship. So she says that. At the same time, you know, in a complicated way, she's associating him with the landscape, the Montana landscape. She talks about the red devil and the red line of the sun, and they're out there together, but she also associates the landscape with herself. So somehow the devil ends up potentially being her own sexuality kind of run wild. I don't know. It does seem complicated. And then there's the fact that she's actually quite racist, and her representations of Native Americans, whom she calls the “Red Indian,” are disturbing. Um, so she empties out the landscape from those Native people, and then she puts the Red Devil in instead. So it's, it really feels very multi-layered, and as you say, originally, supposedly, she had that as her title, I Await the Devil's Coming.  

AMY: So you mentioned it briefly, but there’s this passage in the book (it’s a two-page, prayer-like incantation) where she beseeches the devil to save her from a whole list of everyday dumb crap. I’ll read just some of it:

“From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs “limbs”; from bedraggled white petticoats: kind Devil deliver me.” …. “From red note-paper; from a rhinestone-studded comb in my hair; from weddings: kind Devil deliver me.” …. “From pleasant old ladies who tell a great many uninteresting, obvious lies; from men with watch-chains draped across their middles; from some paintings of the old masters which I am unable to appreciate; from side-saddles: kind Devil deliver me.” Then after an exhausting list of these things she hates, she concludes “But, kind Devil, only bring me Happiness and I will more than willingly be annoyed by all these things.”

So what's her beef here? What does this all signify in terms of the bigger picture? What's she looking for?

CATHRYN:  Well, I mean, she was in a really boring situation. Uh, I mean, the reputation now, maybe, is that Butte was this wild,  raucous place, and in fact, at the time, it was. It had more millionaires due to the copper mines than any place in the country, and it had all of these immigrants and people from everywhere, and, and she has some nice chapters in her text describing scenes on the streets of Butte, but she was very middle class, so she was observing some of that, but not participating. And there wasn't much for her to do. And as that passage that you read suggests, she was in a very stuffy, conventional society. And in some ways at the time among the middle class, Butte was more conventional than Eastern societies because there was this kind of defensiveness that we're not going to be these rough Westerners. We're going to be proper. It's very funny, the passage you read, with all those details about this really oppressive conventionality, and she had nothing to do. She was super smart. She graduated from high school, which  wasn't uncommon, but nor was it standard. She had anticipated continuing her education elsewhere, but there wasn't any money for it. So she was stuck at home. She had several brothers and sisters, a stepfather she didn't like, her mother that she said she had nothing in common with. And the house is really very small. Um, when I visited it, as I recall, it's a duplex  and you can imagine these six people crammed in there. And I was thinking when she wanted to write, where would she go? There wasn't a Starbucks. She couldn't hang out at the bar. Um, maybe she  could go out into that wasteland around Butte and settle down with her pen, but she had very little privacy, and again, very little to do. 

AMY: I love that word “wasteland,” because when she does go outside and she describes it for the reader, it's just this utter stillness. And she describes the beauty and she's kind of taken with  the landscape but yeah, you just get this almost apocalyptic boredom, like you said, um, that's a great way of describing it. 

CATHRYN: I mean, this land had been mined, and then the mines had moved on, so  it was blighted. It wasn't just that it was this open undeveloped landscape. It was ruined, really.  But somehow she goes out and makes it her own, and she identifies with that, um, throughout. And then she does find these, you know, moments of beauty, especially in the sky, or in small details, like a flower. But overall, you know, she describes these mine shafts, and dark, drippy, poisonous puddles,  and all sorts of things. This wasn't like Glacier National Park. This barren nothingness of Butte has turned her in on herself. So because there's no outer stimulation or because it's so barren and desolate, then she needs to go interior, which in a way contradicts other sections of the book where she describes the streets of Butte, which are very lively and heterogeneous. And, and there's a lot going on there, but she does write about it in that way. And of course,  many of her reviewers made that conclusion too. Like this book could only come out of Butte, but it's interesting to me that at the same time, she manages to present Butte as just a very small and average and typical town that could be anywhere. So even though at the time, Butte was really distinct culturally and historically, she can make it sound more like it's middle town Indiana or anywhere in the country. So it's kind of interesting the way it goes back and forth between being very regional and just provincial.

AMY: Right, right.

KIM: Okay. So her affinity for the devil reminds me of another book we’ve covered on this podcast, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes: or The Loving Huntsman. The “loving huntsman” in that book is also Satan, and he’s a savior heartthrob kind of figure. Likewise, MacLane describes the devil as a sexy soul mate, “a man with whom to fall completely, madly in love.” She has a very sensual longing for the devil, but at the same time, there are clear indications in the book that she was attracted to women. What do we know about this, Cathryn?

CATHRYN: You know, she mentions it quite a lot. Her second book, I, Mary MacLane, which was published in 1917 after she came back to Montana, no longer quite so healthy and spent the next seven years living in that same house. And that book she says things like, “I have lightly kissed and been kissed by lesbian lips.” So she's not hinting; she's pretty open about it. And it seems like she did live with this woman, this older writer in Boston for some years. Maria Louise Pool, who in her day was famous as a regionalist writer of New England, so there are these sort of indications of these different relationships, um, that didn't really, that wasn't really what people seem to be reacting against, right? It was more the egotism. and these claims to genius and the self-absorption; they didn't really seem to mind these references. 

AMY: I know, I think as a modern reader looking back at this time period, we always think like, oh, they must have been completely shocked  by the same sex attraction, but it was kind of more accepted.

CATHRYN: Uh, yeah, she was at this transition period, I think, between this idea of, you know, these passionate friendships between women and something else. And Lillian Faderman, in her history, has written about MacLane in that context. Um, and you know, she likes her English teacher. I think that felt pretty tame maybe just to have this crush on your English teacher who now has left and she's in Boston. And apparently when MacLane went out to visit her, she wasn't very warmly received since she did make her kind of notorious, this “Fanny” about whom I've never been able to find very much. 

AMY: Yeah, let's, let's get into a little more biographical info about her. So she was born in 1881 in Winnipeg, Canada before ending up in Butte. What else do we know, Catherine, about her upbringing and family life? You said she didn’t get along with her mom?

CATHRYN: I don't know if she didn't get along with her. She just felt she didn't have much in common. I think it was more the stepfather that she had issues with. But, they were in Canada. They left. There was some, um, Native uprising the Reiss Rebellion in Winnipeg, that made it, um, untenable for them. Then they were in Fergus Falls, Minnesota for some time. And I think by the age of ten, she was in Butte. And around then her father died and he was this figure. It interests me that she doesn't really bother trying to mythologize her father. He was called “Flatboat MacLane,” and he freighted, supposedly materials all the way from Fargo, North Dakota up to the Arctic (I'm not sure exactly how) and he was a gambler and had all these big ambitions, so he seems a sort of romantic figure, but she completely doesn't want to have anything to do with him, and he died, but she doesn't want to mythologize him as part of her. She felt no connection or she claims with her brothers and sisters. She does say something like, “Do you think it would affect me in the slightest if they all died?” But instead she creates these other genealogies for herself, you know, with Marie Bashkirtseff, um, Napoleon. She claims that what she is is Highland Scotch and makes a kind of romantic portrait out of that, but she claims the rest of her family, they're not Scotch, only she is. Um, so she makes these different connections, but none of them have much to do with the immediate people around her, except when she goes out into the streets of Butte. But she claims she has these connections with these people, immigrant working women like this old Cornish woman and she get along, and there's another woman and they get along and she has a feeling of connection with this African American woman or so she imagines. And so she creates these links with people of a different class status than she is or her family.

AMY: She likes the idea of being an “other.” We get the sense that her family bonds are a bit tense from one diary entry where she rages about the toothbrushes lined up in the bathroom: “In this house where I drag out my accursed, devilishly weary existence, upstairs in the bathroom on the little ledge at the top of the wainscoting there are six tooth-brushes.” She describes them all and says which belongs to which family member. Then she says, “The sight of these tooth-brushes day after day, week after week, and always, is one of the most crushingly maddening circumstances in my fool’s life…. Never does the pitiable barren contemptible damnable narrow Nothingness of my life in this house come upon me with so intense a force as when my eyes happen upon those six toothbrushes…. I am not undergoing an Inquisition, nor am I a convict in solitary confinement. But I live in a house with people who affect me mostly through their tooth-brushes — and those I should like, above all things, to gather up and pitch out the bath-room window — and oh, damn them, damn them!”

KIM: Oh my God. I mean, on the one hand, I like totally get it. And on the other hand,  it must have been hell to live with her.

AMY: Totally!

KIM: I wonder what her family thought? Oh my god.

AMY: I read that section to my 12-year-old son. He was like off to the side playing with Legos or something while I was reading it, and he just kind of stopped and looked up at me  and said, “I think she sounds like she needs some therapy.” Yeah. How much of this Catherine is performative? 

CATHRYN: Yeah, I mean, we don't know, do we?

KIM: It seems very real, that part.  I mean, it's the little things that can really annoy you, right? 

AMY: Everybody has their thing that sets them off. Yeah. For her, it’s the toothbrushes.

CATHRYN: She also says elsewhere that she really enjoys washing the bathroom — cleaning the bathroom, and scrubbing the floor. It's quite good for her woman's body, and it's a good time to contemplate those different issues.

AMY: I can see girls all over the country reading this, living in big families and small houses, and being like, “damn straight!” You know? Like, I can feel moments like that resonating with young girls. Women everywhere, really.

CATHRYN: I mean, by the time she was writing it, she was 19, so  part of her issue was that she wasn't so young, so she'd outgrown…

AMY: … She wanted out. Yeah.

CATHRYN: And she didn't have much to do. As she says, her mother was pretty into the housekeeping. Um, she didn't need to do that. Um, so she describes all these little domestic tasks she does, but they're all about herself. She describes getting a steak and getting asparagus or cooking an egg. But she doesn't seem to be, you know, cooking for other people. So none of her work seems necessary.

AMY: Given how shocking, sexy and rebellious the book seems, I think it’s hilarious that she initially sent it to a publisher of Evangelical literature. 

CATHRYN: Yeah, that's hard to figure out. It's hard, especially because again, I mean, this was her manuscript. It wasn't just a printout. She was sending her manuscript to someplace that you presumably would just throw it away, but they passed it along to the ideal publisher as it turns out, this Herbert S. Stone and Company who, not so long ago had published Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Which is fiction, a novel, but also about a woman who rebels and doesn't fit into her society. So   I'm sure that was what encouraged them to take her book. Because the reader of her manuscript,  Lucy Monroe (sister of Harriet Monroe, the poet), she had been the reader that recommended Stone publish The Awakening, and she was also MacLane's reader. So I think that's the link.

AMY: Got it.

KIM: So after imploring the devil to come save her, it turns out that Mary rescued herself. The book’s immense success gave her the money to move away from Butte. Where did she go from there, Cathryn?

CATHRYN: She first, um, I think she took a little trip in Chicago, but then she had this publicity tour in the East and Boston and New York. They thought about sending her to Europe, but that didn't happen. Um, and so she, um, you know, had these sort of publicity events and did end up settling in Boston for some years and from there shifted to New York where she lived for a number of additional years doing some freelance work and still trying to capitalize on that name. And originally she had a lot of money. and was doing very well, but she spent it. She spent it, and supposedly she gambled and she lived well, and she quickly became broke and spent a lot of time imploring not the devil, but her publishers to pay back some of the money they still owed her from the book, like a thousand dollars. Um, so she was away in the East Coast for about seven years until finally she got scarlet fever and I believe it was her hated stepfather who came out to New York to take her back to Butte, which is where she stayed for quite a few more years. And now, whereas that first book is all about how healthy she is and so sensual and so vital, the second book is more, you know, now I'm broken in health and my hair is no longer curly. And she figures herself as a kind of a nun in the same household. But she did get that third book published while she was there, that kind of sequel that no one pays any attention to except me. 

AMY: Well, yeah, because you're rooting for the protagonist of the first book to get out. So that's kind of sad almost. She did try her hand at screenwriting too, right?

CATHRYN: Right. And she got out. I mean, she was back in Butte for some years and then got out again. And then she was in Chicago, which is where she lived for the remainder of her life. And she had published an article called “Men Who Have Made Love to Me.” And it was about being courted by these different inappropriate like, I can't remember the names, the Callow Youth was one, and I think the Successful Businessman was another. So there was this movie that she wrote and starred in, a silent film based on that article, supposedly, also called Men Who've Made Love to Me, and  it sort of had some good publicity, but that's really been lost. There are no extant reels of that film, so we don't know so much about it. And originally, they thought they'd have a few films, but it was just that one. And then things got kind of rough for her financially. 

KIM: That would be cool to see that movie though. That sounds interesting.

AMY: I know. It's so sad how many of those old films are just gone.  Um, okay, and then so speaking of sad, she died from tuberculosis in Chicago at the age of 48. Her authorial voice in this particular book is so  unforgettable. Um, Catherine, why do you think she's fallen through the cracks in terms of being more widely remembered today? 

CATHRYN: Well first, I don’t think it's established that it was tuberculosis. 

AMY: Oh, okay.

CATHRYN: It's hard to figure out what exactly happened. Um, she died either maybe of some cancer, if not TB, or if, you know, there's some hints of suicide, but, it's not clear. 

KIM: Okay. 

CATHRYN: I don't know…. I mean, I was at a conference and I mentioned to a graduate student working on MacLane that I was going to be on this podcast, The Lost Ladies of Lit. And her first response was, “She's not lost.” 

AMY: All of you, academic types! You guys know everybody, but we lay-people. We're like, “Who?!”

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

CATHRYN: It's true. It's true. Because like yesterday, I was going to make a case like she's not lost, and so I was doing some research and actually  there isn't so much scholarship about her.  It's periodic. Like she keeps getting rediscovered. And originally in the 70s and 80s, it was more in the context of Montana. Like one of the earlier profiles of her was in Montana

Magazine of Western History. Um, so that was the first context. And then more in the last ten years, it's definitely been about the sexuality. And you see her on these websites about bisexual writers and figures. And she's also inspired these creative people to write novels based on her life or screenplays. For a while there was someone in Australia and if you looked up Mary MacLane, everything was happening in Australia with some play or novel, I'm not sure. You know, she wouldn't fit so easily into an American literature classroom because of genre. Although she could, I mean… in like American autobiography or life narrative, but you know, who gets remembered, who gets forgotten. Well, that's what you do, right?    Every time I teach her or introduce her, everybody loves her. And I also meet people who have stories similar to my story, which is being in the stacks in the library and pulling out this red volume and wondering “What is this?” and seeing her picture and having those opening lines, you know, “I of womanhood of 19 years age, whatever, we'll now begin to make a story.”

So it's very compelling, so I'm not sure why she wouldn't be known to the general public, except  there's so many books that aren't known, 

AMY: You mentioned earlier that she had products named after her. What, what were some of those things?

CATHRYN: Yeah, there was like, supposedly, the Butte drugstore had the devilish, up to date drink, the Mary MacLane Highball with or without ice cream. Supposedly the Butte baseball team was called the Mary MacLanes.  Um, there were some things that she refers to and kind of angrily like, she refers to, like, a paper-cutting knife would be named after her and there's nothing she could do about it, that she was going to be commercialized. So she did enter the culture in that way.  And later she got criticized for not being Mary MacLane-esque. You mentioned performativity, and later she was criticized for not being enough of a “Mary MacLane,” and falling short of that image. 

AMY: It’s like when you meet Will Ferrell and you want him to be “Will Ferrell,” you know?  When you meet Mary MacLane, you want her to be like this angsty 19-year-old.  Um, my one regret from this episode is that we don't have time, there are so many passages in this book that I highlighted that were so memorable, be they serious or profound or comic. It was really maddening for me to not be able to incorporate everything we wanted to in this episode, but I'm gonna circle back next week in a bonus episode with some more of my favorite passages from the book. And I also am going to talk a little bit more about her idol that we spoke of, Marie Bashkirtseff.  I will say now that you say that Marie's book is, like, ginormous, I'm gonna have to skim it. Um, but while we have you, Cathryn, is there any other passage from MacLane’s book that you would like to share with us that you particularly love?

CATHRYN: Yeah, we can end with the passage with which she ends her book. And listening to you and reading the passages that you chose, I'd forgotten how funny she is. I mean, it's really pretty hilarious, but also the way it kind of alternates with this poignancy and this urgency. so maybe that contributed to her appeal too. So I will read this last paragraph.  And this is also where she's. reminding us that she's very deliberately writing this book \ for reasons. So she writes:

None of them, nor anyone, can know the feeling made of relief and pain and despair that comes over me at the thought of sending all this to the wise, wide world. It is bits of my wooden heart broken off and given away. It is strings of amber beads taken from the fair neck of my soul. It is shining little gold coins from out of my mind’s leather purse. It is my little old life tragedy. It means everything to me. Do you see? — it means everything to me. It will amuse you. It will arouse your interest. It will stir your curiosity. Some sorts of persons will find it ridiculous. It will puzzle you. But am I to suppose that it will also awaken compassion in cool, indifferent hearts? And will the sand and barrenness look so unspeakably gray and dreary to coldly critical eyes as to mine? And shall my bitter little story fall easily and comfortably upon undisturbed ears, and linger for an hour, and be forgotten?  Will the wise, wide world itself give me, in my outstretched hand, a stone. 

AMY: Love her. How genuine she is.

KIM: The imagery is so great too, I mean, the wooden heart and the strings of amber beads is beautiful. Listeners, let’s not forget her! Go read this book and marvel at it! And thank you, Cathryn, for spending some time with us today to help us better understand it.

CATHRYN: Well thank you. It was really enjoyable.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you are a Patreon subscriber, I will meet you back next week with more  about Mary MacLane and her teenage idol, the artist Marie Bashkirtseff.  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 Amy Helms and Kim Askew.