E.D.E.N. Southworth — The Hidden Hand with Rose Neal

Dastardly villains are no match for Capitola Black, the audacious heroine at the center of E.D.E.N. Southworth’s 1859 bestseller, The Hidden Hand. Readers so admired this literary tomboy’s pluck that Capitola became a popular baby name for decades and inspired the name of a California town. Yet few readers today are familiar with Southworth, one of the highest-earning authors of her day (to whom Louisa May Alcott even gave a subtle nod in Little Women). Rose Neal, author of a brand new biography on Southworth, joins us this week to discuss the writer who gave 19th-century young women permission to imagine lives free from convention and restraint.

Mentioned in this episode:

E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Story of America’s Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Author by Rose Neal

The Hidden Hand by E.D.E.N. Southworth

The Company of Books bookstore 

Retribution by E.D.E.N. Southworth

The Deserted Wife by E.D.E.N. Southworth

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Elizabeth Blackwell

Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

The Saturday Visitor

The National Era

John Greenleaf Whittier

Jane Swisshelm

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Transcript

This transcript is autogenerated and may contain typos.

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

AMY HELMES: Before we dive into today's episode, we want to recognize the first ever Lost Ladies of Lit Book Club. They convene at a nonprofit used bookstore called The Company of Books in Alexandria, Virginia. And the Club actually uses our episodes as sort of their jumping off point for each particular author. Thus far they have covered Elsie Robinson, Hilma, Wolitzer, and I believe Zitkala-Sa. I want to give the founding member of that book club Julia Valentine a shout out. And we're actually in talks to eventually bring some of them in for an episode , which will be great. So if you're in the Alexandria, Virginia area, go find the Lost Ladies of Lit Book Club at The Company of Books. Or maybe this will inspire some of you guys elsewhere to start your own club 

KIM: I love Julia and I love that this book club is happening. It's like a dream come true to hear that people are listening and discussing the podcast. It's amazing. For Amy and I, at least these lost ladies of lit are a real antidote to some of the heaviness that feels really hard to escape right now. And being able to get curious and lose ourselves in these amazing books is actually helping keep us sane and we hope it's doing the same for you, and from some of the listeners we've heard from, I believe it is. So it's really great.

AMY: So with that said, let's get back to our regularly scheduled programming, we've got a literary heroine for the ages. “Though she be but little, she is fierce!”

KIM: our heroine is uncowed by the most dastardly of villains, she's also completely hilarious. And a clap back queen of the highest order.

AMY: Combine a sassy Shirley Temple with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you'll end up with something approximating Capitola Black, the shining star in E.D.E.N. Southworth bestselling novel, the Hidden Hand. This book is more than 160 years old, but I'll tell you what, it remains a rollicking good time.

KIM: It is over the top in the best way possible, and you can't help but pump your fist at Capitola’s swashbuckling exploits. She made such an impact on American readers when the book was published in 1859, that the name Capitola actually was a favorite name for baby girls for decades.

AMY: And a town in California is also named after her. I was familiar with that town, but I had no idea it had any connection to a literary character, let alone one. So audacious and fun. 

KIM: Southworth published more than 50 novels in total and was one of the highest earning authors of the 19th century. Yet neither of us had read anything by her until now. The author of a brand new biography on Southworth hopes to reintroduce the world to this prolific writer who, like Capitola, challenged societal norms and never waited for a man to save her. She saved herself from the perils of life using not a pistol or a saber, but her pen.

AMY: So with Black Donald and his gang of bandits hot on our heels, there's no time to waste! Let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Today's guest, Dr. Rose Neal, spent more than 12 years researching the life and work of E.D.E.N. Southworth, making her a preeminent scholar on this particular lady of lit. Her work culminates this month with the release of E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Story of America's Famous Forgotten 19th-Century Author. It's the first full -ength biography of Southworth published by Lyons Press. Amy and I were thrilled to be able to provide a cover blurb for this book. Rose, we're so happy to welcome you to the show.

ROSE: Hi, Kim. Hi, Amy. It is such an honor to be on your show, and thank you so much for the review you gave my book. It's just quite exciting to be here today. 

AMY: Well, we're happy to help in any way, and obviously we're excited to get the word out. So the E.D.E.N. in Southworth's pen name (we know it's quite a mouthful) it stands for Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitt. And her name kept popping up a little bit in the history of this podcast. You know, when I would be researching other authors, I'd see that name and sort of make a mental note. But I think that these women come to the podcast exactly when they are supposed to, because we have the benefit of your knowledge now. When did you first discover her and what made you want to tell her story?

ROSE: Well, in 2007 I had gone back to school at the University of Central Oklahoma to work on my master's degree. I. And I took a class by Dr. Pamela Washington called 19th Century American Women Writers. One of the required books was The Hidden Hand, and we had to read some other books that I did not care much for. Um, one of them was Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World, and I think I might have read The Hidden Hand right after Susan Warner's. And it was such a contrast in female characters. Um, Elizabeth Montgomery in Susan Warner's book just cries and cries for 500 pages. It was really, really hard to get through. And then I get to The Hidden Hand, and it is so much fun. She makes such a commentary on women, on the aristocracy, on kind of the male patriarchy and all of those traditions. And so I started thinking, “Oh my goodness, what else did she write?” And so then I started reading other novels by her. And every novel I kept thinking, “How does she come up with all this stuff?” I mean, it's really, really good. And it made me wonder, “Well, what was her life like?” And so I started researching and at first, I mean, there really is not much biographically that you can find about her, and most of what you can find about her was really a script that she created about her own life in order to kind of hide in plain sight her very controversial themes that she hid kind of in the book. So, that's kind of how it all started.

KIM: That's so perfect. “The hidden hand.”

AMY: Yeah, I wouldn't have been able to sit down and read a book this lengthy if it was just heroines in peril and, like you said, crying all the time and, “Oh, dear me, whatever shall we do?” you know? She really flips the script on that, which is kind of what everyone else at the time was writing.

ROSE: Right. 

AMY: And that's why this book was such a treat. I read The Hidden Hand at the same time that I happened to be reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island with my son, and I couldn't help but notice the similarities. He actually started publishing a few decades after she did, but just the tone of the book, like the cliffhangers, these feats of daring do the action, these wiley villains who are treacherous, but kind of lovable… it's really easy to compare her to him and it makes me wonder what degree of popularity did she really have, because it seems like you could compare her to some of these big name male writers at the time.

ROSE: She was literally a household name. By the 1860s, 1870s, she was one of the most famous writers in America. She wrote so many novels. We still aren't really sure how many novels that she wrote, but we know she had clearly over 50 novels to her name, which is more than Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain combined. Louisa May Alcott in Little Women is actually referring to Southworth when Jo writes a story, right, and uses a pen name of S-L-A-N-G.

KIM: And that's why? Oh, that's great!

ROSE: That's how popular she was. Everybody knew who she was. So when Alcott did that, it was a little bit of an insult to Southworth using all those initials. But it was something where you really couldn't miss the reference.

KIM: But it also shows how popular she was.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. It's poking fun, but it's also a tribute to Southworth.

ROSE: Exactly.

KIM: I mean, it's so crazy. When I was a kid I read Treasure Island over and over. I would've loved to have had…

AMY: Have had the girl version! That's what this is!

KIM: Yeah, exactly. 

ROSE: When I worked on my bachelor's degree, way back when, I really was of the impression, because of the writers that we were given to read in school, in college, that there really weren't any women writers. And then to find out during my master's studies, not only were there writers like Southworth, there were so many of them that like Nathaniel Hawthorne, he once told his editor if it just wasn't for this “damn mob of scribbling women,”I could get my stuff read. And I just, that's one of my favorite quotes ever, because she was really at the top of that list of the mob of scribbling women. 

KIM: Wow. So let's back up and talk about her life a little bit. We'll start with the fact that she was born in 1819 in Washington DC were there any traces of Capitola in little Emma?

ROSE: There were. She had a lot of family that lived in St. Mary's in Maryland. And her grandma used to take her and her mother and her sister on these trips to see family who lived on these very grand, large estates. And Emma wasn't much of a socializer. She considered herself very plain, very almost like Jane Eyre, in contrast to her sister. (Her father dubbed her little sister, his dove eye darling.) And so instead of being yeah, in the company of her cousins and aunts and uncles, she would go wandering out in the woods where she learned how to ride horses and shoot arrows and row boats, climbing trees. So she was very much a rough and tumble little girl, which is just like so many of those early characters, not just Capitola, but there was, you know, Netty Starbrite, Hagar Winters, and lots of other characters that she had created a decade before she got to Capitola. So there's lots and lots and lots of these little girls who looked just like her when she was growing up. 

KIM: That's great. And then as a young adult, she supported herself with a variety of jobs, including teaching, which actually took her to the Cincinnati area. That's Amy's hometown listeners.

AMY: Yeah, shout-out to Cincy. Cincinnati at this time period was kind of the place to be. It was like a. Cultural hub of people that were doing important neat things, which is why when she was living here, she befriended a few women who would go on to big time acclaim, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, and also Elizabeth Blackwell, who was America's first female doctor. Emma also met here a bright and ambitious inventor named Frederick Southworth, whom she eventually married. And in this era, marriage pretty much represented (in theory at least) safety, security, and happiness. But our man Frederick didn't really deliver on that, did he Rose?

ROSE: He did not. He didn't think too much about, you know, providing financial security for a wife and children.

AMY: He was a head-in-the-clouds kind of guy. You know, he always was thinking about his next great scheme, like they had two kids and he's off wanting to go pursue his dreams. And so he does, he leaves her, right?

ROSE: The worst thing is to me is, like…. I wanted to make him good. I researched everything I could find about him. So like, he does achieve some success but the worst thing was when Emma was eight months pregnant with their second child and he decides, “I'm gonna go to Brazil and look for some kind of clay that's going to be the next big thing for producing better, cleaner energy.” And he just left her there with a 3-year-old son and eight months pregnant. I'm like, “Who does that?” But he did, and he didn't come back really, ever. He came back to the United States off and on and was kind of a thorn in her side, but they never lived together after that. The youngest daughter never knew him. 

AMY: Yeah, he went completely awol basically. So where does this leave Emma? We'll call her Emma, not E.D.E.N. Where does this leave Emma?

ROSE: Well, it leaves her in desperate need of making a living. Um, she had taught school before she married Frederick, and so after she has her daughter, she starts looking for employment. Her mom and her stepdad, who weren't really a lot of help because they were very much against the marriage to Frederick to begin with, they did step in and helped get her a teaching job in Washington, D.C.. Uh, her grandmother sent her one of her slaves, named Mandy, to live with Emma to help take care of the kids so that she could work. Um, but I mean, teaching was very, very, very, I mean, it's bad now, but it was even worse back then as far as being able to not only support herself, but also have to support those children. To be abandoned by your husband, people would look at you with a raised eyebrow going, “What did you do? What kind of wife were you that made your husband want to leave you?” And so it was this kind of this concept of being a fallen woman, and so she was really desperate to avoid that kind of perception. It was really important for her to have to construct this different image of her than this abandoned woman. 

KIM: How did this lead to her first foray into writing?

ROSE: Well, so she was in this really desperate situation this one Christmas time. She can't afford clothes for her kids. She doesn't know how she's gonna put food on the table, and she was feeling especially lonely and depressed and sad. And she started thinking about all these wonderful stories that she grew up hearing, when she was a child from her father figure (who was actually also one of her grandmother's slaves) um, that she referred to as Uncle Biggs. And she remembers as a child that Uncle Biggs would put her and her sister on his knees, and he would tell her these fantastical, wonderful stories. And she started thinking, “I wonder if I could write stories and maybe make a little extra money?” And so she started her very first short story based on one of the stories that she had heard as a child and sent it off to The Saturday Visitor, um, which was a publication in Philadelphia, I believe. And it got accepted. 

AMY: And then her first big break was a novel or, I guess, a serialized novel, right? Tell us about that.

ROSE: Right. Um, so Snodgrass, who was the editor and proprietor of The Saturday Visitor, he sold his publication to Gamaliel Bailey, who retitled it, The National Era. Well, Snodgrass said, “Hey, you need to look at this E.D.E.N. Southworth and her stories, 'cause I think this would be a really good addition for the continuation of The National Era.” And so he did, he liked it, he printed it and she wrote some more for him. But she hadn't been paid, so she stopped writing 'cause she was like, “I've got to do stuff where I can make money.” And so he visited her one evening and said, oh, um, John Greenleaf Whittier, who's a very famous poet and was also a co-editor of the national era, he said, “John Greenleaf, Whittier noticed that you haven't been submitting any stories.” And he goes, “I think that's probably 'cause we owe you money.” So he gave her this giant amount of money and he said, “would you continue writing for us?” And so they put their heads together and decided, you know, what would she write next? And she decided that moral retribution was gonna be kind of the overriding theme of this story called “Retribution.” She initially didn't intend on it becoming a full-length book, but she kept writing. And the more she wrote, the more ideas she got. And so at one point she writes to Whittier and she said, “Hey, if this is getting too long, I can stop it now if you want, but it won't be finished.” And he goes, “Well, our readers keep buying it, so keep writing it.” And so it grew and grew and grew until it was a novel-length, um, publication. 

KIM: What other themes or messages for women do you think she was incorporating into her writing and how are readers responding to these themes?

ROSE: So she's definitely got lots of themes of abandonment, of betrayal, of, uh, domestic abuse, domestic violence. advocating against capital punishment (she thought that was really bad)... She was very abolitionist… She was, um, very much for physical education because women were often taught that they needed to lace up those corsets and make your feet and your waist as skinny as possible. And she's like, “No, that's killing women. They need fresh air. They need sunshine. They need to run and play.” She never wrote an introduction except this one novel, which was The Deserted Wife. And she writes this whole introduction about the importance of physical education for young girls. So women's response to that is that they loved it. She became very successful. 

AMY: It's funny because you're listing all these topics, that would seem so serious and upsetting, you know, rape and domestic abuse, all these things that you're like, “Oh God.” And yet we're saying that The Hidden Hand is extremely fun.

ROSE: It is fun. That was just the surface dressing, because it was all of this other stuff that's going on underneath.

KIM: A spoonful of sugar. 

ROSE: Exactly. 

ROSE: What's really funny is like her mostly male critics [who objected to] what she wrote, they were objecting to the sentimentality and unrealistic love stories. It's like, oh, if you really knew what she was writing, you would have been even more…. I mean, her editors in those, those scenes obviously saw that. But uh, a lot of the other critics, they just totally missed what she was really saying. 

AMY: She's like, “Focus over here.” And then meanwhile she's like, “Hey ladies, let's talk.” 

ROSE: That's exactly what she was doing. 

AMY: What was her calculus as her writing career’s taking off? Um, she starts to actually have worries about what if Frederick comes back.

ROSE: By 1850, she knew he was back in the United States. And she knew that because of the law, which basically gave all rights to everything she earned and owned to him. I mean, he could come in and clean her bank account out. He could get copyrights for all of her books before she had copyrighted them. He could have really, really disrupted her livelihood. And so I think that was another reason that she really worked hard to construct this image of herself. She often said, you know, that “I'm a widow in fate, not in fact.” And I think largely because that's what she needed the public and her readers to believe “Oh, I'm just this little woman with two children to support,” and she kind of branded herself that way, which again, also helped to hide the messages that she kept, slipping into her books, but she definitely was trying to stave off Frederick as long as she could. 

KIM: Okay, so we'll circle back more to her life in a little bit, but let's leap into our discussion about The Hidden Hand because it's just so much fun, as we said. So, it was first serialized in The New York Ledger in 1859, and I can just imagine readers were champing at the bit for each new chapter. It's got a little bit of everything. It's got ghost sightings, criminal hijinks, a sentimental love story. There's an insane asylum, danger, intrigue, and as we said, just plenty of laugh out loud moments. 

AMY: I mean, that sounds like crazy town — and it kind of is. Um, it is full of crazy coincidences, totally farfetched scenarios, and yet I ate it up with a spoon. And without giving away too many spoilers, Kim and I are going to try to just distill this book into its very basic premise, which is hard to do because there’s a lot going on.

KIM: Yeah, we'll try. 

ROSE: Plot, subplot, sub-sub-plot.

KIM: Totally. Yeah. The novel begins with a dramatic deathbed confession. It's conveyed to a very grumpy, rich bachelor from Virginia, Major Ira Warfield. He then treks to New York City to investigate and he immediately encounters this ragamuffin newsboy, who is in trouble with the law. Only the newsboy is actually a girl in disguise: Capitola Black. She's dressed like a boy because it's the only way she can find odd jobs for a bit of change. She's constantly fearing for her safety and survival. I love a grumpy old man, Kim. You know this about me. So I loved major Ira Warfield, as curmudgeonly as he was. 

KIM: I loved him too.

AMY: His reactions and the way he speaks is so funny. 

KIM: It is so dramatic. 

AMY: It's over the top. So when he finds out that Capitola, this newsboy, is actually a little girl, his reaction is to just keep saying “What? What? what, what, what, what?” He must have said it like 12 times. It made me laugh out loud. So he's kind of charmed by this little girl in spite of himself, and he does not want to see her condemned to the workhouse at Blackwell's Island, which is gonna be her fate. So he decides to bring her back to his magnificent estate in Virginia, Hurricane Hall. This part of the story goes “Little Orphan Annie” right away. Capitola is so cute and cheeky, and she brings out the soft side of Cranky Pants Major Warfield. And she's like, “I think I'm gonna like it heeeere,” EXCEPT…in her bedroom, she discovers under the rug a hidden trap door that leads to a deep, dark, scary pit. And she's like, “Huh. What's this all about?”

KIM: Hello Gothic novel touch right off the bat! But it's like, it so fits in that you're just like, “Okay, yeah, there's a big, huge pit in her room covered up with the rug.”

AMY: And the great thing is when she lifts up the trap door and sticks her head down there you realize like, “Ph, this is a different kind of girl. She's not scared of things.”

KIM: Oh, she's so brave. She's so brave. And it's one of the things Major Warfield loves about her. So, speaking of Major Warfield, he has secretly figured out that his orphan ward is connected to the very same deathbed revelation he heard about at the start of the novel. (Everything's connected, as we said.) The reader realizes by this very unique birthmark on the palm of her hand that Capitola is the rightful heiress to a nearby manor house in a deep dark glen called the Hidden House, which is purported to be haunted. And I just have to say the names of all the places like Hurricane Hall, there's like a Devil's something…

AMY: The Devil's Punch Bowl. 

KIM: Devil's Punch Bowl. Like the place names are so evocative. It's awesome. 

AMY: Yeah. Okay. So residing at the Hidden House is our antagonist, Colonel Gabriel LeNoir.

KIM: I mean, the name is perfect there, right? 

AMY: He had murdered Capitola's father and is now living off that fortune that should belong to Little Capitola. when LeNoir realizes that the baby he thought he left for dead is now back in the neighborhood, he hires the notorious criminal Black Donald to kidnap and kill Capitola. Black Donald is awesome. He is, uh, he, he has a whole gang of pirate like bandits who are at his service. He's kind of that mustache twirling villain that you'd find in an old silent movie. 

ROSE: I mean, you realize pretty early on, he's not the villain. The real villain is Craven Le Noir, the son of the one that did the original dastardly deeds. Southworth creates this duel scene between Craven Le Noir, and Capitola that I think is one of the most rip-snorting parts of the novel where she challenges Craven to a duel. Because she asks the villagers, “Defend my honor.” And they go, “No, we won't do that.” So she challenges Craven to a duel. He thinks it's a big, giant joke. And she just unloads her gun in his face, and he falls off of his horse. So she rides into town reports like, “I've shot this guy. Um, you need to go get him.” And so they bring him back and everybody's going, “I can't believe you killed him. You killed him!” So there's this part in the scene where she's just incredulous that no one has figured it out. She says, “Is not anyone here cool enough to reflect that if I had fired six bullets at that man's forehead and everyone had struck, I should have blown his head to the sky? Will not somebody at once wash his face and see how deep the wounds are?” So finally, the doctor cleans off his face and realizes that he's just been shot with peas and he's not seriously hurt at all, except before all of that could be discovered he confesses everything he has done to her, and so he actually becomes the laughing stock of the entire village. And I just love the way Southworth has her heroine just turn everything upside down on her head. And really what she's telling women is in a very hysterical way, you don't need these men. You can defend your honor yourself. 

KIM:Yep. totally. 

AMY: That moment where she challenges him to the duel, and it's like “We fight at dawn…” that's the first time a woman has ever been in a scenario like that in my imagination. You just don't think of that happening. And it was outrageous and impressive and funny, yes, too. And the great thing about Capitola is, she gives you confidence. You're never worried that anything's gonna happen to her because she always makes it through. She's such a badass. 

KIM: Yeah, totally. There's all this extreme melodrama happening, and that's typical in books from this era, as we said. But I think her humor and this brash attitude you're talking about, it keeps it from feeling too old fashioned. So I think this would be a good time Rose to showcase the humor we're talking about. Do you have a favorite Capitola moment? 

 ROSE: Oh, there was one where Black Donald, to try and get closer to Capitola, he pretends to be a peddler 

KIM: Oh yeah. I love that. 

ROSE: He shows up at Hurricane Hall and the housemaid, whose name is Mrs. Condiment. Is that not hilarious? 

KIM: That's great. Yeah.

ROSE: She brings him into the house, and Capitola finally figures out that you're not a peddler. You're actually Black Donald. And so he realizes he's been discovered and so he starts to run out of the house. Well, Capitola, she raises the alarm. She says, “Pursue him. Catch him. Come with me, you cowards. Will you let a robber and a murderer escape?” She ran out and overtook the outlaw in the middle of the hall with the agile leap of a little terrier. She sprang up behind him, sees the thick collar of his pea jacket with both hands and drawing up her feet, hung there with all her weight, crying, “help! Murder. Murder help come to my aid. I've caught Black Donald!” He could have killed her instantly in any one of a dozen ways. He could have driven in her temples with the blow of his sledgehammer fist. He could have broken her neck with the grip of his iron fingers. He only wished to shake her off without hurting her. A difficult task, for there she hung a dead weight at the collar of his coat at the back of his neck. I just think that is just such a hilarious scene. I could just imagine this little bitty girl. And here is this notorious, infamous, like you said, pirate-like villain. 

AMY: And the more he interacts with her, the more respect he has for her. He's like, “gosh, this girl, she's really standing up to me.” But my favorite part of that scene where she jumps on his back is that when Major Warfield finds out what happened, he's the one that's like “Capitola, my heroine! My queen!” Like he's thanking her the way normally, uh, damsel in distress would thank her knight in shining armor. It's this old, rich guy, major Warfield, who's actually saying that to Cap. Like, oh my gosh, you saved my whole house from being plundered. How can I ever repay you? It's again, turning the whole trope on its head.

ROSE: It does, and I mean there is actually a damsel in distress in this book. 

AMY: Oh, yes! We're not even focusing on the subplot, which has the kind of more traditional, um, female characters. Right. Because she really, Southworth really does, um, feature women of all strides, you know, 

KIM: Yeah, it very much reminds me of a Dickens novel where you have like the sweet, homemaker family at one place and then the rich family but they're all connected.

ROSE: But I think she needs that. I think she has to show Clara Day as her foil in that. She is the traditional, well educated, well behaved, you know, just wants to follow all the rules. It puts her, actually, puts her in quite a lot of danger, doesn't it? 

AMY: And when Clara is in the most grave danger, it's Capitola who saves her.

ROSE: Exactly. Because once again, Craven LeNoir, you know, he's got his sights set on marrying Clara Day for her money, and they in essence kidnap her and they're holding her hostage until the wedding day. And lo and behold, who comes to rescue her but Capitola, and that's where we get the whole moment with the Capitola hats where Capitola goes, “Look, we're about the same size. we should just switch clothes and then you can leave and I'll take care of this for you girlfriend. You don't have to worry about it.” And Clara's like, “How am I ever gonna pull off being you?” And she's like, “Oh, it's not about the clothes. Let me give you a little lesson.” And she puts on this riding hat, which, the riding hat really becomes very famous in real life. But she says, pull your cap over your eyes, throw back your head, walk with a little springy sway and swagger as if you didn't care a damson for anybody. And there I declare, nobody could tell you for me. And so that's how Clara escapes and gets away, is she learns how to walk with this little sway and swagger.

KIM: I can so those imagine all these little kids are all playing their Capitola Black. I mean, yeah, it's so cool.

ROSE: My biggest desire, and I've looked and looked and can't find it, I would love to find a Capitola hat. Or least a picture of a Capitola hat.

AMY: Yeah, I looked online too to try to see what that would look like, and the Google search wasn't helping. 

ROSE: The closest thing I found, which is the front of this book that I have that you see Capitola wearing her riding hat, and I think, 'cause that became a woodcut image in the serial. And so I think her hat was modeled on this hat right here. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: I kept thinking of Capitola as like the Bugs Bunny outsmarting Wile E. Coyote. She had such a cavalier attitude and like, sense of humor about it all the time. And like you said, Kim, there's a little something for everyone that you're picturing reading this around the fireplace, right? So the grandmas and the moms might be enjoying the love story. The kids are loving all the action and, you know, the dads are laughing at these gangs of bandits. She really covers the gamut.

KIM: Yeah. The book features depictions of enslaved black people at Hurricane Hall. They are verbally berated by Ira Warfield a lot, but he's all bark and no bite. Still it doesn't make for the most comfortable reading today. How should we view Southworth's own understanding of slavery during this contentious time in American history? Let's give it a little context. 

ROSE: Um, I love her and I even get cringe moments in some of those scenes where it's hard to take off my 21st century glasses, put on 19th century glasses, but that's really what you have to do or you do think, like Jane Swisshelm, who was one of her contemporaries accused her of being a hypocrite because she had Mandy living in her home and Mandy was a slave. Um, so it's, it's really a very complicated, very, difficult thing to try to get across today. to really understand that she truly was an abolitionist. She abhorred slavery. So even though she considered it an abhorrent institution, she saw that many families felt very fondly towards the enslaved people that lived with them. Almost like I think Southworth felt towards Mandy, almost familial. She was like a little sister more than she felt like a slave. But she did know and was very well aware and conscientious of the fact that she was a slave. And so how to stop it, right? It's like you had these very staunch abolitionists who said, we need to end it, we need to end it now. but there was a whole cadre of them that believed that emancipating the slaves was gonna take time and it was gonna take education So, uh, I think Southworth in her novels, not so much in Hidden Hand, 'cause I don't think she does that there, but in her first novel in Retribution, she writes about kind of this complexity of slavery and how oftentimes this concept that you could just let him go just free him. It's not as easy as what we want it to be. Her situation with Mandy was very complicated because her grandmother Dorothy was her owner and allowed Mandy to come live with her. When Dorothy, her grandmother died, her grandmother willed Mandy to Southworth's younger sister Charlotte. And so even then, Southworth had no legal power or authority to emancipate Mandy. And so it was just a very difficult situation that a lot of abolition men and women found themselves in on how to achieve emancipation and that freedom that was thought. 

AMY: If you're looking also at The Hidden Hand, I mean it is Major Warfield who is keeping these people enslaved but I mean, she's saying the whole time how antiquated Major Warfield is, how old fashioned, how he's stuck in his ways. So, you can almost imagine for yourself and hope that Capitola, you know, as the new generation would not be like that.

KIM: Yeah, She likes to take care of herself.

ROSE: That's true. Like she doesn't depend on any of the slaves to care for her. The unfortunate nature of that is that The Hidden Hand became wildly successful as a play too. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

ROSE: And that when it was performed on stage as a play, you often had major characters performing those roles in blackface. The audiences of the time thought it was funny. Today we don't think that's funny. There's not a funny part of that. But again, you've gotta understand that's a different society and a whole different perspective. Um, because this play was performed all over the world. It was in New York and Boston and London. I mean, thank goodness we learn and we move forward and we live in a different society now. But I think she did her part the best way that she knew how. We also have to remember she wrote for an abolitionist newspaper, The National Era. She was one of the leading contributors to this publication. She knew she was going to make enemies. It's easy to stand for something when you don't have anything to lose, but she had everything to lose. She alienated a lot of family and friends. She could have lost her job. She was standing firm on what she believed, and I think that might be the most courageous moment of her life was when she chose to write for this publication, when it could have meant her ruin. 

AMY: So that's helpful. 

KIM: Yeah, definitely. 

AMY: It kind of gives us a little more context. And I think if you read the whole scope of her work, you're gonna see her opinions come out, um, more fully. 

ROSE: Right. 

KIM: So Southworth published so many books, but in older age, she died in 1899 at age 80, she began to see the popularity for her books waning. They were deemed too sensational, too staged, too sentimental. 

ROSE: Well, I would like to say this, and it's kind of criticizing the woman that I just really love. But in 1876, she struggled with health problems. One of the reasons that her health suffered so much is she as always was putting way too much on her plate. At one point they thought that she was gonna die then, and so she took some time off, she got better. And she was so wildly famous, she had the plot down perfectly of her sentimental books. And she started to realize, “I don't need to work so hard. I just wanna get my money and be grandma. I can just write this wonderful little love story and they'll still sell.” Yeah, and they did. And so as time went on, that became a lot more trite. I would never advise anyone to read her later novels I mean, I guess if you just want that sentimental, sappy, Hallmark movie kind of read, which, I mean, I like Hallmark movies too, so that that's what you're gonna get. You're not gonna get all the real contentious issues. And so as time went on, those started to really fall out of fashion. In the latter half of the 19th century, women were more educated and they were like, “Now what? Does it always have to end happily ever after?” And Southworth, she just kind of doesn't get it. She doesn't realize that that time has come to an end. 

AMY: Yeah, sometimes churning out the books doesn’t work in your favor in the long run. 

KIM: Yeah. 

ROSE: I just wonder if she would've had just a little more vim and vigor left in her if she wouldn't have done something like Kate Chopin's The Awakening. I think she had it in her. I think she could have done something like that, but I think she just realized I don't have to.

KIM: So you wouldn't pick one of her later books necessarily as another book for our listeners to read, but after The Hidden Hand, what's the next book you would recommend?

ROSE: The Deserted Wife is really good. Um, Susan Harris, who was one of the early Southworth experts, she did a lot of reading and writing about The Deserted Wife, and she calls it Southworth’s spiritual biography. And so it follows a lot of the same storyline of Southworth’s real life. And so it's a really good read. It's got a lot of like the “standup and fight” moments, but it's not satirical really. I don't know, other than Miriam, the Avenger, uh, The Hidden Hand… Those are about the only two that are just this satirical stuff. Um, in fact, that's what got her in trouble with a lot of those earlier ones is that she wasn't satirical. She didn't know how to play the game. And so that's why The Hidden Hand, like, she really learned how to play this game where she could get this message across and no one was the wiser except for the women that were reading them. 

AMY: I’m glad you suggested The Hidden Hand of all of these because it's so utterly entertaining and I will never forget Capitola. She is seared in my memory, with so much fondness. 

KIM: Yes. I'm a complete fan. 

AMY: I want to thank you, Rose, for having done all this hard work to share Southworth's life story. I know it was a labor of love for you, and we really enjoyed having the time with you today to talk about her. I only wish I had discovered her sooner, but now we've got her. I can check out more. Thanks for joining us!

ROSE: Thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun. 

AMY: And I am going to make it make it my mission to figure out that Capitola hat and what it looks like, and, and find one 

ROSE: If you find the capitola hat, let me know! 

AMY: I want a jaunty hat with a feather that flies over. I can totally picture. It. So that's all for today's episode. I'll be back next week with a bonus episode for all of our subscribers. If you would like to get in on that action, all you have to do is go to lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron.” If subscribing isn't an option for you, you can also purchase individually any of our bonus episodes. Just go to our Patreon page to find out more. Kim and I will be back in two weeks with an all new lost lady. We'll be talking about Jesse Redmond Fauset's Plum Bun, which has been newly republished by a brand new company focused on reissuing forgotten American women authors. So we're so excited to have them join us. You won't wanna miss it. 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.