Celia Fremlin — The Hours Before Dawn with Emily Midorikawa
Send us Fan Mail “Things that go bump in the night…?” Try sleep-deprived mothers, for starters. British author Celia Fremlin recognized the...
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Lost Ladies of Lit
A book podcast hosted by writing partners Amy Helmes and Kim Askew. Guests include biographers, journalists, authors, and cultural historians discussing lost classics by women writers.
Episodes
20 of 249 episodesENCORE: Mary MacLane — I Await the Devil's Coming with Cathryn Halverson
Send us Fan Mail We're concluding our own "Hot Girl Summer" with the writer Mary MacLane, a defiant and wildly egotistical 19-year-old resid...
ENCORE WITH UPDATE: Brigid Brophy — The King of a Rainy Country
Send us Fan Mail If Brigid Brophy’s The King of a Rainy Country had a soundtrack, it might include the soft patter of rain on a garret windo...
ENCORE: Lucy Irvine — Castaway with Francesca Segal
Send us Fan Mail Our "sweltering summer" series continues this week with a re-play of a truly wild desert-island memoir. When Lucy Irvine an...
ENCORE: Miles Franklin — My Brilliant Career
Send us Fan Mail This week we're revisiting an Australian author — and the 1979 film adaptation of her work — which originally captured Kim...
ENCORE: Jane White —Quarry with Helen Hughes
Send us Fan Mail We're celebrating summer with another sultry, almost-suffocating novel from our podcast vaults, one clearly written with Wi...
ENCORE WITH UPDATE! Ruth Prawer Jhabvala — Heat and Dust with Brigitte Hales
Send us Fan Mail With Counterpoint Press's new editions of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's work (including her Booker-Prize winning novel Heat and Du...
Nettie Jones — Fish Tales with Hannah Eko
Send us Fan Mail First published in 1983 after being championed by Toni Morrison, Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales recounts one woman’s trauma-fill...
Josephine Tey — The Daughter of Time with Jennifer Morag Henderson
Send us Fan Mail Considered one of the greatest crime novels of all time, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time flipped 450 years of British...
Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry—The Tale of the Rose with Sara Kippur
Send us Fan Mail Though her high-flying literary husband took center-stage, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry was more than just the metaphorical “r...
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton — Who Would Have Thought It? with Quite Literally Books
Send us Fan Mail The first Mexican-American woman novelist to be published in English, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton chose a surprising subjec...
Juanita Harrison—My Great, Wide, Beautiful World with Cathryn Halverson
Send us Fan Mail Determined from a young age to escape the Jim-Crow South and see new places, Mississippi native Juanita Harrison managed, a...
Magda Szabó — Abigail with Deborah H. Sussman
Send us Fan Mail A literary icon in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó was relatively unknown to English-speaking readers until recent translat...
Mary Elizabeth Braddon — Lady Audley's Secret with Kristine Huntley
Send us Fan Mail Pass the smelling salts! Readers of the Victorian Era eagerly (or furtively) set scruples aside to read Mary Elizabeth Brad...
ENCORE and updates! Elizabeth Garver Jordan — The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Stories with Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan
Send us Fan Mail Her Life in Ink, a brand new biography by Sharon Harris about Elizabeth Garver Jordan, provides a good reason to plunder ou...
Hazel Hawthorne — Salt House with Allison Bass-Riccio and Livia Tenzer
Send us Fan Mail “Queen of the Dunes” Hazel Hawthorne was a Cape Cod legend who wrote about The Road nearly two decades before her one-time...
From Jane Austen to Zadie Smith — Advice from Women Writers for a More Productive 2026 (Encore Presentation)
Send us Fan Mail In this encore presentation, Kim and Amy take stock by dusting off a "New Year’s" episode from 1921, sharing secrets of wha...
Virginia Faulkner — Willa Cather Champion, with Brad Bigelow
Send us Fan Mail Virginia Faulkner had no family ties to that other famous Faulkner, but she is connected to another icon of classic America...
Katharine Lee Bates — "Goody Claus on a Sleigh Ride"
Send us Fan Mail Before penning the lyrics to “America the Beautiful,” Katharine Lee Bates shone a spotlight on the invisible (and not so in...
Djuna Barnes — Nightwood with Margaret Vandenburg
Send us Fan Mail Dark and disturbing, yet strangely redemptive, Djuna Barnes’s 1936 modernist masterpiece Nightwood left even its greatest c...