Frances Wright — A Few Days in Athens with Tristra Yeager and Eleanor Rust

How do you engage with others in a polarized society? Early 19-century writer and freethinker Frances “Fanny” Wright offers an ostensible how-to manual in the witty didactic novel she penned at age 19, A Few Days in Athens. Wright’s radical ideas garnered her the praise of Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette and Walt Whitman, to name a few, but detractors dubbed her “The Red Harlot of Infidelity.” Tristra Yeager and Eleanor Rust, hosts of the 2024 podcast “Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical,” join us to discuss Wright’s historical importance and relevance to today’s political and cultural conversations.

Mentioned in this episode:

“Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical” podcast

A Few Days in Athens by Frances Wright

Views of Society and Manners in America by Frances Wright

Frances Wright’s grave in Spring Grove Cemetery

The Marquis de Lafayette

Thomas Jefferson

Walt Whitman

Epicurus

The Stoics

New Harmony, Indiana

Robert Owen

Robert Dale Owen

Nashoba Community

Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, KY

The Scottish Enlightenment

The Second Great Awakening

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated; please pardon typographical errors.

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our future bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit. com and click "Become a patron" to find out more. 

Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my co host, Kim Askew.

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone. Amy, the lost lady we'll be discussing today, Frances Wright, counted some big names among her ardent fans. The Marquis de Lafayette was her close personal friend, Mary Shelley was a chum, and even Walt Whitman sang her praises, noting that hers was, quote, “the sweetest and strongest mind that ever lodged in the female body.”

AMY: On the flip side of that though, Frances Wright, or “Fanny” as her friends called her, had a lot of haters too. Why? Because her radical ideas and ambitions sparked controversy. Ooh, Kim, this is gonna get exciting, I think. [sings] “Let's get radical, radical!” 

KIM: Sorry, listeners. You want to know who else admired Frances Wright? President Thomas Jefferson. In fact, seven pages of Jefferson's commonplace book feature excerpts he wrote down from Wright's philosophical didactic novel, A Few Days in Athens, a book she wrote when she was 19 years old. 

AMY: I know, imagine the guy that's responsible for the Declaration of Independence reading the work of a young Fanny Wright and thinking, “Ooh, that's good.” And by the way, it is good. I was doing the same thing as Thomas Jefferson. I was highlighting, like, half the pages in this book. It's great. So Frances Wright, she was kind of next generation Mary Wollstonecraft, you could say.And her life story takes a lot of really  interesting and noteworthy twists and turns. You could even say it turns a little “Xanadu.” I kid you not.

KIM: You're tempting me, but I won't sing it. Anyway, there's actually a podcast entirely devoted to the life and work of Fanny Wright, and we've got the host of that show with us today to give us the rundown on this remarkable writer and lecturer.

AMY: [sings] “Have to believe she is magic… nothing can stand in her way!” Sorry, guys, for some reason when I was, uh, writing this intro, Olivia Newton John was clearly on my brain. 

KIM: Okay, so before Amy launches into “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” I think maybe it's time to raid the stacks and get started! 

 [intro music plays]

 KIM: Our guests today, Tristra Yeager and Eleanor Rust, both have PhDs and are self proclaimed “history freaks,” which set them on the path a few years ago of discovering as much as they could about free thinking social reformer Frances Wright. The result of that quest is a podcast that debuted last year called “Frances Wright: America's Forgotten Radical.” 

AMY: Over the course of eight episodes, Eleanor and Tristra interview a number of scholars to track Fanny's story and put it into historical context. This podcast is a really great snapshot of America during the time Fanny was making waves. And it also relates her story to cultural conversations that we're still having today. So we highly recommend it. And when Tristra and Eleanor reached out to us about having this conversation, a few things really piqued my interest right off the bat. Number one, the fact that Fanny Wright is actually buried in my hometown of Cincinnati, and yet I had never heard of her. Two, the fact that she started an experimental Utopian community, which I think those kinds of communities are always interesting to hear about. And three, the fact that the teachings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, and Tristra, I think when you had emailed me, I just happened to be reading a book mentioned the Epicureans, so it was like a weird synthesis there in my brain. 

KIM: Yeah, and we're going to be zooming in today on that last bit because it ties into this remarkable book, the one Jefferson loved, A Few Days in Athens. Tristra, Eleanor, welcome to the show. We're so glad to have you.

 TRISTRA: We're so glad to be here. Thanks so much. 

AMY: So, Tristra, why don't you explain how the two of you first set your sights on Fanny Wright? And we're gonna call her Fanny, by the way. 

KIM: Yeah, we have to.

ELEANOR: Like her friends did!

 TRISTRA: Totally. I'm happy to share my “Fan-stan” journey. Um, I got obsessed with the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. I live about two hours away in Bloomington. And, uh, for about ten years, I read everything I could about it and was known to sort of go down there and wander around and all that good stuff. And one time I noticed an interesting sort of placard by the Working Men's Institute, and it said this was the home of Frances Wright. I'm like, “Who the hell is Frances Wright?” So Google, thank you, and I pull up her Wikipedia article. I'm like, “What? How come I've never heard of this woman? What? She, she did what?” And we'll get into more about why she's such an extraordinary person in, you know, early 19th century America. But my mind was blown. And I was a little bit obsessed, and I started reading everything I could about Frances Wright. Um, eventually, I dragged Eleanor into my rabbit hole-slash-obsession. And fortunately, she shares a lot of my interest in early 19th century writing and culture.  And the more we learned, the more, we became fascinated,

 AMY: Okay. So as I mentioned earlier, Fanny is buried in Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery, but she was born nowhere near that. So Eleanor, what do we know about her origins and what brought her to America?

ELEANOR: Well, she was born in 1795 in Scotland to a wealthy kind of middle class family, but she was orphaned at an early age and raised by other relatives in England. And I always picture her childhood as taking place in a Jane Austen novel, but maybe like with the annoying characters, not with the heroes and heroines, cause she found that society, you know, preparation for the marriage mart, you know, being focused on being demure and on manners, she found that really constraining and kind of empty, vapid. But she spent her teenage years instead in Glasgow, Scotland with family that was closer to her roots, and that brought her into an intellectual circle that really let her bloom. She was influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, kind of the tail end of this rationalist, scientific age, and that's where she started writing poetry and plays, including the first version of A Few Days in Athens that we're going to talk about later. At some point, she read a history of the American Revolution, which was still fresh. It was, you know, 20 years old by the time she was born, and she loved reading about this new country that was based on ideals of liberty and equality, very counter to the aristocratic, class stratified England that she was really chafing against. So, that was kind of on her mind as she came of age. And , that sort of America fandom brought her and her sister on a really extraordinary trip in their early 20s, by themselves, without a male relative, uh, Jane Austen would never, um, to America where they entered New York society. She put on one of her plays in a theater and rubbed shoulders with the great and the good in New York and around northern U.S. And that led to her knockout success, her first published book, Views of Society and Manners in America.

 KIM: Wow, she's so cool. 

AMY: I know, I can picture the movie version of this, like the two girls in their carriage on the cobblestones.

ELEANOR: Yeah. 

AMY: …making waves…

ELEANOR: Oh, yeah. Apparently her uncle really loved her mind, but when he heard they were going to America, apparently he hopped on a carriage to get to Liverpool to try to stop them. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, it's even more dramatic!

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: So, she ends up in the orbit of all these important people like the Marquis de Lafayette and several U. S. presidents. How does that come about?

TRISTRA: Well, if she was interested in someone's thoughts, she basically would go and introduce herself. As you can tell, she is a pretty precocious, outgoing gal in her youth. And when she came to America, it's hard for us to think of this now, especially in this day and age, but the U. S. was small. It was a fledgling nation, right? So, it was kind of easy to go and like speak before Congress. I mean, Robert Owen, the industrialist, who was very connected with Fanny Wright's views on things, also went and just like presented this big, crazy idea with this giant mock up of his utopian community. So, those kinds of things were happening on the regular. 

KIM: It's like the early days of Twitter.

TRISTRA: That's right. That's right. It was a cozy country back then, at least for, for white people.  You could definitely go in and just make the acquaintance of the fancy people pretty easily if you were from a privileged British background. And so that's exactly what happened. It was pretty interesting, though. I think, also to credit Fanny, she was very, very interested in making connections with people and in particular, men, in places of prominence. I mean, we could go into the psychology of that, but I also think she really wanted to find intellectual peers and to be taken seriously. And she wasn't afraid to sort of go up to somebody and ask for that. It's pretty extraordinary.

AMY: Okay, let's talk about this book she wrote, A Few Days in Athens. When I first picked it up, I was a little worried. I thought it was gonna be dry. More, maybe, like homework than pleasure reading. I mean, right? 

KIM: Amy, I totally thought the same thing. I texted you when I got the book and it came and I was like, “Uhhhh….” 

AMY: Yeah, I was like, “Trust me, you're gonna have fun with it.” Um, moral of the story, it is not dry at all. It has good pacing. It's actually quite funny at times, which we'll talk about. But it's also really astute and perceptive in its philosophy. And it reminded me of being back in college reading Plato. You know, it has that kind of framework of the Socratic dialogue. But Socrates is not the great thinker at the heart of the story. Tristra, why don't you explain the very basic plot of the book?

 TRISTRA: So the main, the sort of focal figure of this is Epicurus, and Eleanor being the classicist here will give you a much better explanation than I ever could. But the book itself is really interesting and I think for modern readers, kind of fun because it's framed as this sort of mysterious manuscript that's been found and translated, from Greek, which I kind of love that, uh, sort of historical fantasy, almost framework. But, the manuscript itself contains a very 19th century novel, which focuses on a young man, Theon, who is wandering around outside of extremely upset by these disturbing rumors. He hears about this guy Epicurus and his wayward school of quote unquote “philosophy,” which sounds a lot more like vice. And of course, as one does in a novel, he ends up bumping into Epicurus himself. It’s a very fun, kind of goofy, interaction. And he decides to go back with Epicurus and see what all the fuss is about and join him in his garden where men and women, free people and enslaved people all mix. So there he meets the beautiful and wise Leontium and has a long discussion with her and several other followers of Epicurus. And it's almost like one of those art films where you're at a dinner party and it's super fun. It's a lively read. You kind of get caught up in the conversation and it would almost kind of make a fun radio play. You'd have to update it a little bit for our modern sensibilities. 

KIM: Okay. So I'm probably not alone in only having thought about Epicurus in relation to food and wine. Can one of you give us the quick hits about who he was and what he taught, and how is this in contrast to the Stoics, who also factor into this book?

ELEANOR: So Epicurus was a Greek philosopher of the Hellenistic era at a time when Athens is just full of philosophy schools. And I love that in this book there are cameos from a bunch of other schools. So what sets Epicurus apart is something that you could call hedonism, although that also has a bad name. Basically, his fundamental rule is that you should pursue pleasure. The thinking is, that desire and needs are painful. So you really ought to satisfy them and attain pleasure. And so in his thinking, distress and hurt are really signs that you should avoid things that cause you distress and hurt. And then pleasure is a sign of something that you should pursue. This is not the same as just following every impulse or kind of, you know, lust. It's not about indulgence necessarily. The Epicurus of Fanny Wright's novel makes that very clear. The real Epicurus, you know, points out that if you do bad things, you will feel guilt. And guilt is also painful. Consequences still exist in this model of pleasure. And this contrasts with pretty much all the other philosophical schools, but the Stoics especially held that all the strong emotions are damaging passions. So the Stoic model is that you just squelch them with strict self control. You use reason and self control to attain a Stoic state of happiness that is basically like a kind of serenity. It's not affected by externals, which includes sickness and pain, like you face all of that in the same way. That's the Stoic goal. But there are other quirks to Epicurean philosophy. One is that all things in the universe are void or atoms. It's all matter or not matter, that includes the human mind and spirit. And the corollary of that is that there is no afterlife. For Epicurus, you don't go to heaven or hell. There's no divine punishment after you die. Every moral decision is a decision you base on the here and now, how you feel, how it affects other people, not on what are the gods going to do when you die. In his model, gods exist but have no effect on our world. and he focuses on knowledge that you gain from observation. You need to be doing reality checks. It's not all abstract reasoning. Throughout the ancient world, Greece, Rome, it's a popular philosophical school, but it goes against the religious structure of Greek and Roman society. And honestly, it really pisses off the Christians. So when the early Christian church takes over, they are all in for, you know, kind of Stoic style austerity and all in for the afterlife. And so they hate Epicurus. And most of what we know about the historical Epicurus is actually from the later writers who hated him.

KIM: That's so fascinating. 

ELEANOR: Yeah. And so that's how we get the bad rap. That's how we get, um, it's all focused on pleasure. I feel like it's kind of a slippery slope argument, right? (Well, if you are going to sate your needs and follow pleasure, obviously you're gonna end up with orgies.)

AMY: Right, and that's kind of the point of view that this young guy, Theon, at the start of the book. He has all these misinterpretations of it, as we all kind of do. To, like, kind of simplify what you're saying, it's like, I can see another person eating an ice cream cone and say, Oh, that ice cream cone would give me pleasure. So if I'm Epicurean, I will just take it. And then I will have the pleasure of eating the ice cream cone. But the whole philosophy is Well, if you take it, you're gonna A, feel guilt, which is not gonna give you pleasure. You're going to have public condemnation from other people. That's not going to give you pleasure. So pursuing pleasure doesn't mean in the immediate, but that's kind of what Theon is thinking. 

ELEANOR: Right. It's what Theon thinks, and it's also what Theon's Stoic friends think. Zeno is a character who's the founder of the Stoic school. He makes the same argument that, “Well, maybe Epicurus is a good leader who's going to make sure people stick to, like, the moderate thing, but what about when Epicurus is gone? Everybody's going to look at that and say, ‘Hey, I can do whatever I want!’” Whereas the Stoic school doesn't give you leeway. 

KIM: I think now is the time for us to read a little bit from A Few Days in Athens, because as Amy said earlier, the banter is actually quite witty. And there's some laugh-out-loud moments. 

AMY: Yeah, my favorite, and this happens a couple times throughout the book, Epicurus would kind of approach Theon… they’ve become friendly, so he'll be like, “Hey, you know, all my friends back at the beautiful garden where we hang, we're all just gonna be, like, sitting around and having a good time, like, would love for you to join us, but, I know you're scared of orgies, so… I don't want to intimidate you but we would love for you to hang out with us.” 

KIM: Totally, totally. It's hilarious. Epicurus is always, like you said, basically popping up out of nowhere at the start of chapters…

AMY: “Why HELLO…” 

KIM: “Didn’t mean to startle you.” And then the more Theon's engaging with Epicurus, the more admiration and understanding Theon has for him. I mean, there's a crush. 

ELEANOR: Oh yeah. It's kind of love at first  sight. Yes. 

AMY: I thought of him as kind of like “Sexy Jesus.”

KIM: Totally!  Rockstar Sexy Jesus.

AMY: The way he was so calm and cool and collected. And it's funny too, cause I've been watching a lot of “The Office” lately… 

KIM: The British one? 

AMY: No, the American one. And I kept thinking, Okay, Epicurus is kind of the Jim. He's funny, he's cool, he, like, has his wits about him. And then the Stoics are Angela. 

ELEANOR: Oh yeah. 

TRISTRA: I mean a little bit of Dwight even. 

KIM: Totally,

 AMY: I love, also, that Epicurus, he's just sort of like, “Hey, I don't need you to agree with me.” Like, here are the facts. Decide for yourself. And in fact, that is very important for him. You need to make your own decisions based on knowledge. 

KIM: Yeah, I mean it feels like this book is a good manual almost on how to engage with someone who doesn't share your beliefs or who doesn't see the world in the same way that you see it. And we kind of need that right now, right? 

 TRISTRA: Epicurus is always chiming in with like, “Yeah, Zeno, that guy's really smart!”

KIM: Yeah. completely. 

AMY: He's not denigrating the other side at all. 

KIM: He's not threatened. 

AMY: No. But then I also, there was a little voice inside my head, like, “Yeah, easier said than done,” right? I mean, he never encountered internet trolls. I would love to know how he would deal with, like, the internet, because would he finally lose his cool? I think he might. But Tristra, I did email you while I was reading this book, which was right around the time of the inauguration, and I said, God, this feels like therapy for enduring a second Trump presidency. 

TRISTRA: Yeah. Absolutely. Just calm, rational people having an interesting discussion based on deep knowledge and feelings. It feels like that discourse is absent from the public conversation right now.

KIM: Completely. 

AMY: And literally Frances Wright is spelling out, here's how you have these discussions, you know, not as arguments, but as rational discourse. 

 ELEANOR: As I was reading this, I was thinking about how Zeno the Stoic is, I mean, like you said, there's no insults. Nobody's like, “Oh man, that Zeno, he has it all wrong.” But he is an authoritarian. He's the kind of leader who is right. And is better than you. What he offers his students is a feeling of superiority over other people. And that's not something Epicurus… Epicurus invites you to participate, whereas Zeno kind of lays down the law. And Zeno is stern and judgmental, and Epicurus is welcoming and open and not acting as an authority. Um, and so I thought it was really great to see how an Epicurus could respond to a Zeno, right? And I also, there were a few things that came up in, I think it's mostly Epicurus' description of the difference about how Zeno is all about what men ought to be, but Epicurus is about what everybody can be. He says, “None but philosophers can be Stoics. Epicureans all may be.”

AMY: There's no exclusivity about it. 

ELEANOR: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, in the same passage, Epicurus says that “the doctrine of Zeno is sublime, and many great men shall come from his school…” (Fanny Wright's able to look ahead in history a little here), “...but an amiable world will come from my school.” Which do you want? A bunch of great men or an amiable world for everyone. And that's a key political difference still today.

TRISTRA: Another thing though, and I think this is a good, um, perhaps check on some of … I consider myself, uh, you know, someone on the Left. Um, I know it's a big surprise, um, but I think, though, I'm also seeing some very poor strategy and tactics coming from people with whom I share a lot of values, and also a lot of emotions that may be interfering with our ability to act. And I think Frances, like, through Epicurus, offers us some advice about how to pursue that. This is a quote that comes up a lot in discussing her philosophy of social and political change. This is, I think, Epicurus is saying this: “Our knowledge of human life must be acquired by our passage through it. The lessons of the sage are not sufficient to impart it.” (So don't just assume that because you have these beliefs and values in the abstract that you know what to do. You have to kind of do things in order to figure out how to make change.) “...Our knowledge of men must be acquired by our own study of them…” (Note, not judgment, but study.) “The report. of others will never convince us.” So we need to think for ourselves, but we need to test our hypotheses and proceed rationally and deliberately in a practical way. And not just like, you know, put yard signs up that have big, bold statements of our quote unquote values, right? Um, and I think that's a really important thing to keep us grounded right now when we can feel very torn about in the tempest of emotion and ideas that are supposed to distract us and supposed to make us fight with one another.

KIM: I love that. 

AMY: I have a follow up. on that, which was a quote that I highlighted, which is something that I struggle with personally, and so I know it's what I have to work on. But Frances Wright, as Epicurus here, um, said “The mode of delivering a truth makes, for the most part, as much impression on the mind of the listener as the truth itself. It is as hard to receive the wisdom from the ungentle as it is to love or even recognize virtue in the austere.” That's hard for me because, your snap instinct is to be like, “You're an idiot. You don't understand. You're uninformed.” But to attack that way, as much as it might make you feel good in the minute, and I know this to be true, it doesn't accomplish what you want it to accomplish when you approach someone with that attitude.

 ELEANOR: That's especially hard when it feels like the other side is starting from fundamentals that are so different, right? If the person you're arguing with just doesn't even want to address the questions, it could be hard to be that gentle teacher.

AMY: And it's hard, too, because this text and this philosophy promotes truth. You find the way through science and through what is true. It made sense then and it should make sense now but what is truth is now up in the ether. Like, you can't grasp at it anymore on both sides.

TRISTRA: I mean, postmodernism made some very rightful critiques of Enlightenment thought, but you can take things a little bit too far. And now we're starting to see, I think, the sort of ouroboros of we've basically undermined reason and highlighted subjectivity to such an extent that there's no way to pursue a rational argument together. Um, but maybe we need to be like, Okay, that was helpful, but we're going to pretend that reason exists for a little bit.

KIM: Let's have a new Age of Reason.

ELEANOR: I'm ready. 

TRISTRA: I'm all for it.

KIM: Yeah, completely. Yeah. So I picked up the book and started reading it and immediately was like, “Oh, yeah,” and even in Chapter One there's this part where Epicurus is praising Theon and Theon says “Do you want to make me vain?” And Epicurus says, “No, but I would make you confident. Without confidence, Homer had never written his Iliad. No, nor would Zeno now be worshipped in his portico.” Theon responds, “Do you then think confidence would make all men Homers and Zenos?” Epicurious: “Not all, but a good many, I believe thousands to have the seeds of excellence in them who never discover the possession. But we were not speaking of poetry and philosophy, only a virtue. All men certainly cannot be poets or philosophers, but all men may be virtuous.” There's a lot of things going on in there, but I thought that there was a feminist bent in that, too, because it's implying that people need the right conditions and encouragement to be able to flourish and obviously, historically women didn't have that in most cases.

ELEANOR: I love that quote too. I like that there's a little bit of stealth feminism in there, in that we haven't yet met any of the women who are students, in the garden. But we do! We meet, I think three, um, and Leontium is probably the most prominent. And along the way we learn that Leontium's status is that of a courtesan, and I use courtesan rather than prostitute because it's connected to a Greek social structure, that is probably most often compared to like the geisha in Japan, that a hetaira, a courtesan, is a practitioner of the arts who interacts with men in a different way than like a married middle class woman or aristocratic woman would. But she's an equal member of the group of scholars, maybe even one of the leading scholars, in the garden after Epicurus. And then there's a couple of other women who come along, too, including Epicurus's adopted daughter, and everybody can be a part of this. Everybody can be virtuous. Everybody can reason if you have that environment in which you're encouraged to reason, basically. I feel like that is a thread that comes through Fanny's writing about feminism, about women's education, about working people as well. Don't you think, Tristra? 

TRISTRA: Totally. yeah. I mean, she devoted a lot of her time in the late 1820s, early 1830s to education of craftspeople, working people in New York, by providing scientific lectures at next to no cost and inexpensive printed literature, et cetera. So just so people could learn about, like, chemistry, 

KIM: She is so punk rock. I can completely tell why you all got fascinated with her. She's incredible. I just can't get over the fact that she's writing about religion, philosophy, orgies, even though, you know, explaining that the orgies are necessarily happening… courtesans…. I mean, like, it's pretty cool for a 19 year old woman to be writing about this.

AMY: Yeah, and speaking of religion, let's get into that actually, because kind of the last third of the book is pretty disdainful of religion, I would say. So what she does is she employs the Epicurean paradox that there cannot be an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God. That those three elements cannot coexist, if you think about it. This felt to me like the most dangerous part of the book. It does seem like this would have outraged people. 

ELEANOR: I think this fact that this is framed as a translation of an early work, it kind of gives her a little distance. Um, but the sort of interest in Epicureanism definitely aligns with a certain strain of kind of atheistic or agnostic thought among thinkers and revolutionaries, mostly in the 18th century, you know, kind of the peak of the Enlightenment. But it's still a pretty “out there” position to take at this time. And over Fanny's lifetime, it actually becomes less and less acceptable to mainstream society to entertain this notion. During the course of her life, America enters what's called the Great Awakening. Is it the Second Great Awakening? I can't keep my Great Awakenings straight all the time. 

TRISTRA: Second Great Awakening, absolutely.

 ELEANOR: So over her lifetime, she's really seeing a shift from 18th century interest in the rational and interest in dissent from accepted religious institutions, to a much more conservative or, you know, restricted bet. And now, keeping in mind that in all of this, criticism of, like, the forms of a religious institution is kind of all over the place. there's lots of dissenting sects and schisms and things we would even think of as cults. Like, that's rife, especially in America. Um, America in the early Federal period seems to be where you go to have a cult or a commune. Um, So, you know, Methodists really arise out of 18th century dissent from the Church of England, But then also Mormons come out of 19th century, you know, religious ferment. So there's just a lot of different strands going along. But, Atheism — actually denying religion's power, and denying, like, an active god — is really unthinkable for British and American people. “Atheist” is actually one of the worst things you could call somebody. It's really considered the depth of moral depravity and madness by most people. Um, and so it really is, when Fanny herself takes on religion in her own voice, that's when things get ugly.

TRISTRA: And yeah, she called herself a free thinker, like many people did, who were extremely critical of religion up to what we would now consider atheism. Um, 

KIM: There's so much about Frances Wright outside of her writing that really bears mentioning, and we've alluded to a few things in this episode so far, but she was also an abolitionist, she was a newspaper editor, and not to mention a superstar public lecturer. There's no way we can touch on all of that today, but that's what your podcast is for, uh, right? So, I do think that we should touch on the fact that she did found a short lived utopian community, which is always interesting. So, Tristra, could you tell us a little bit about that?

TRISTRA: Oh, I'd love to, and I'll try to keep it short because I could go on and on about this. Um, in fact, I did in my own novel, um, trying to understand what it was like to live in this community that she founded. Um, she called it Nashoba, which is from…

AMY: Wait. You can plug your book.

KIM: Yeah, plug your novel!

TRISTRA: I am a very lost lady of lit, too… a future lost lady of lit. 

KIM: So are we. 

AMY: We all are. 

TRISTRA: I wrote a novel called Starfall, um, that takes on the history of New Harmony and the history of Nashoba, which was Frances Wright's, but I also have a future section. So there's like crosstalk between past and future. And the future section is also narrated by a woman, who returns to New Harmony, which has gotten a very strange reboot. It involves all sorts of fun things like AI and climate change and all that good stuff.

AMY: This is reminding me, I had forgotten, but at one point I had an idea for, like, a thriller that was gonna take place at the Shaker Village in, wherever that is in Kentucky, 

TRISTRA: Oh, Pleasant Hill!

AMY: Kind of, like, Witness or something, but …

TRISTRA: Oh, there are some Shaker hotties. Frances Wright's sister

hooked up with a Shaker. 

AMY: I feel like we could have a whole ‘nother discussion …yeah, exactly. But take us back to Nashoba.

TRISTRA: So, Nashoba was basically modeled on Robert Owen's communities in New Harmony and back in Scotland, in the idea that the focus was on education. And so what she wanted to accomplish was to prove through this model that you could unwind slavery without any injury to the enslaved or to the enslavers. So I think she really was taking her cues from seeing what had happened in Britain, when enslavers were basically paid off to free their enslaved people in the Caribbean. But she's like, Hey, there's gotta be a better way. And to our modern eyes, it seems a little bit problematic, but in the legal framework of the time, and where people were in America at the time, it was a very radical idea. So basically she and some of her friends bought land in western Tennessee, near modern day Germantown, Tennessee, outside of Memphis, and they decided to settle it with a mix of white and African American people. The enslaved people were still enslaved legally. They were quote unquote “purchased,” right? It's very problematic. However, the goal was to live side by side, to all work on this farm and to raise cotton, to have a store, to have school where people would be taught side by side. So there really was an attempt at this sort of interracial community, even if there were still some notes of white supremacy that we would find difficult to stomach nowadays. Um, and not surprisingly, things did not go very well. We go into a lot of depth in that in our podcast. It was a very complicated situation, and basically got her kicked out of high society. Yeah, it was pretty wild. Um, so you know, you can kind of see however, going back to A Few Days in Athens, it lays out the philosophical foundation for Nashoba. She wanted to create a version of this garden, I think. She didn't want to just write about this stuff, she wanted to prove, in action, that you could do these things, even if it didn't go the way she planned. So you’ve got to admire her for that. 

KIM: Yeah, really courageous. 

AMY: Yeah, and I feel like these kinds of communities never pan out, you know, like, nice try. She had the best intentions. Um, she did wind up… The enslaved people that were part of the community, she did wind up trying to do right by them.

TRISTRA: Yeah. So she took them to Haiti, which was at the time the only African diasporic republic where people of color could live in freedom. So she did her best, uh, was kind of the best option at the time.

AMY: Yeah. Okay, so we talked about her having a lot of haters by this point. Um, The Cincinnati Chronicle back in the day actually described Fanny as having, quote, “A brain from heaven and a heart from hell.” God, oh I can't believe that. 

ELEANOR: That's such a t shirt slogan. 

AMY: She also earned the nickname the “Red Harlot of Infidelity.” So let's talk about that last epithet. What's that about and why did so many people hate her this much?

TRISTRA: Well, the “harlot” part, again, came from just the fact that she would speak in front of mixed audiences and hang around with guys. Um, you know, she co edited a paper with Robert Dale Owen and there was always a little bit like, are they friends or are they not? And Robert Dale Owen was like, We're friends. Oh, we're friends. We're brother and sister. Um, and. Yeah, I think that's actually historically accurate. We don't have any evidence to the contrary. Um, but just that whole kind of behavior at the time was seen as sketchy, and wanting to speak in front of men was seen as overly bold. Um, so that's where the harlot part comes in. The “infidelity” part is because of her stance on religion. So it has nothing to do with adultery or being a bad spouse. Um, it has to do with, basically being an infidel, right? Being a non Christian. Um, And so, yeah, people really, really disliked her stance and really disliked that she was speaking publicly. And that was, yeah, extremely scandalous at the time, as odd as it may seem to us today.

KIM: So Frances Wright died in 1852 after slipping on a patch of ice outside her home in Cincinnati. The fact that she was so loved and also hated by so many influential people of her day, it's really hard to understand why she was completely unknown to us before you approached us about coming on the show. It's kind of mind boggling. What do you think contributed to her being so forgotten?

ELEANOR: Well, she did lose relevance later in her life. Her greatest period of fame was really in the 1830s, and there are a lot of ways in which she ended up being kind of forced to compromise on the values that she stated at that time. She got pregnant and got married, um, you know, against her firmly stated beliefs. But the consequences for having a child out of wedlock were just too dire for the child for her to [not] take that path. And she made some political compromises, um, there was really a turn against some of the things she was advocating. I think she… didn't she end up supporting Andrew Jackson, which seems like a really weird bedfellow in an election. It's a super complicated time with lots of turmoil. She was just out of fashion.

TRISTRA: And there was something with banking, like it had something to do with like the bank of the, you know, I don't know, I, I, I'm not into banking. 

AMY: Oh, like the William Jennings Bryan... 

ELEANOR: Yeah, exactly. “Cross of gold.” Yeah. And then there's that marriage of convenience. Their divorce got super, super ugly. Custody battles, fighting over inheritances. It drained her energy, her health, and her coffers. And that also led to a difficult relationship with her daughter, Sylva, who was in the best position to carry her legacy forward. And it seems like Sylva rebelled against her rebel mother by being pretty conservative. And so she attained a bunch of Fanny Wright's papers that were in friends' hands that were supposed to be published. And she sat on them. Instead of publishing, you know, a history that Fanny had been hoping to publish, she sat on them.

TRISTRA: And to make matters worse, the family had this big trunk filled with papers that included all these documents about Nashoba. Letters, and all sorts of personal things. And that trunk got lost. So researchers in the 1930s had access to it. and we're lucky that they took extensive notes, but we don't know what else was there.

KIM: Listeners, there's a trunk out there. There's a trunk!

TRISTRA: If you find a trunk filled with very interesting papers, please let me know. 

AMY: You guys in your podcasts, you kind of explore, in general, women getting forgotten. Listeners, I really want to point you in the direction of that podcast because you have a whole conversation that made me think more deeply than just like “patriarchy!” you know? There's a lot at play there. I'm actually interested now that I've read A Few Days in Athens to check out this other book that Fanny wrote when she was young, Views on Society and Manners in America, because I loved Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I thought that was a super interesting book, and this sounds like it's kind of in that same vein of an outsider looking in on America and giving their bird's eye perspective.

TRISTRA: It's really fascinating how positive Fanny was about America. Her writing is a real mix of these sorts of personal takes on things. There's this sort of high Romanticism in a lot of ways, but she also really appreciates (and I think this is something we need to appreciate as Americans) how much we love to argue with each other about politics and that everybody had an opinion. Even the simplest farmer. It's a great tradition for us to be somewhat polarized and yelling at each other. Um, if we take, you know, Fanny's point of view seriously, and I think that's really refreshing that like, Hey, we've always loved to argue. So yeah, I really recommend it. There's some beautiful, beautiful descriptions in there.

KIM: I can only imagine what Fanny would be thinking of “society and manners in America” these days. 

AMY: Yeah. Maybe she'd help us feel a little better. 

KIM: Yeah. 

TRISTRA: Oh, I bet she would. She'd have some interesting advice. Probably a little bit unconventional, and probably kind of like “Hey guys, get it together.”

AMY: And do something, like you said.

TRISTRA: Yeah.

KIM: Act. Don't just write or talk about it or complain about it. 

ELEANOR: Yeah.

AMY: That also makes me want to add, I recently saw that somebody posted (..we're talking about everybody just like performatively posting, but…) someone did post that studying the humanities can be an act of resistance in itself. And I do believe that. I think knowledge and understanding history is a form of power. So Tristra and Eleanor, the work that you've done to make Fanny accessible in podcast form is really important. And we do need to remember her as we figure out where we go from here. So thank you so much for telling us about her today.

ELEANOR: Thank you. And, uh, it's important to remember that radical thought and rationalism, all that is part of American history, too.

TRISTRA: Yeah. We're a nation of weirdos. And if anyone tells you anything different they probably have an agenda that you may not want to take seriously, 

KIM: Hear, hear! 

TRISTRA: We’re a bunch of freaky eccentrics, and any good reading of early 19th century American letters or memoirs will show you how weird we've always been. And that's why I love Americans.

KIM: I love that. I love that as a note to end on. This has been fantastic. I really love talking with you both about Fanny Wright.

ELEANOR: Thank you. 

TRISTRA: Thank you. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to give us a rating and review wherever you listen. Those five-star reviews really help people find us. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode for all of our subscribers. If you're interested in becoming one of those, go to lostladiesoflit.com and click Become a Patron. You can also subscribe to those episodes wherever you listen to our podcast. 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 Helmes and Kim Askew.