Gilded-Age gossip meets Edith-Wharton-style scandal in the 1927 Fifth-Avenue tell-all Tragic Mansions by Mrs. Philip Lydig (a.k.a. the fashionable socialite Rita de Acosta Lydig). Find out what prompted this glamorous doyenne to dish t...

A literary icon in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó was relatively unknown to English-speaking readers until recent translations of her work opened the door to her powerful storytelling. In today’s episode we focus on her 1970 novel Abigail<...

Amy shares updates on previous book recommendations and contemplates how the ups and downs women encounter in life might differ from the archetypal “hero’s journey” described by Joseph Campbell. Jungian-oriented psychotherapist Maureen Murdock ...

Pass the smelling salts! Readers of the Victorian Era eagerly (or furtively) set scruples aside to read Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret — the title of which was enough to tempt even the most puritanic...

Amy and Kim hightailed it to the theater to catch an opening-night screening of the new Emerald Fennell-directed "Wuthering Heights" starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. (We procured front-row seats and alcoholic drinks to prepare ...

Her Life in Ink, a brand new biography by Sharon Harris about Elizabeth Garver Jordan, provides a good reason to plunder our podcast vault this week to revisit an episode about this star journalist, editor and mystery author. Jordan’s ...

American novelist Olive Higgins Prouty served as both benefactress and mentor to a young Sylvia Plath —  she’s depicted in The Bell Jar as the elderly patroness Philomena Guinea. Knowing that Prouty helped procure and pay for Plat...

“Queen of the Dunes” Hazel Hawthorne was a Cape Cod legend who wrote about The Road nearly two decades before her one-time tenant, Jack Kerouac. A uniquely feminine precursor to Beat literature, her novel Salt House captures Bohemian l...

She wrote a book in defense of traditional homemaking — only to pen an about-face reckoning decades later when her 40-year-marriage went belly-up. In this episode, Amy discusses Disregard First Book author Terry Martin Hekker, who pass...

In this encore presentation, Kim and Amy take stock by dusting off a "New Year’s" episode from 1921, sharing secrets of what makes their writing partnership work and turning to famous women writers — including Nancy Mitford, Isabelle Allende, A...

Amy elaborates on the reading goals she’s set for herself in 2026 to help center her distracted mind, including her mission to read at least one poem a day. The compelling joint biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, Romantic Ou...

Virginia Faulkner had no family ties to that other famous Faulkner, but she is connected to another icon of classic American literature. A young flapper who made an authorial splash with the New York literati (earning comparis...

Charming devils have a way with words, especially when penned by savvy satirists. In this week’s bonus, Amy explores some literary works that put an almost-friendly spin on the Prince of Darkness, including C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letter...

Before penning the lyrics to “America the Beautiful,” Katharine Lee Bates shone a spotlight on the invisible (and not so invisible) labor tackled by an unsung Christmas heroine, Mrs. Claus. Bates’s 1888 poem “Goody Claus on a Sleigh Ride” imagi...

In this follow-up to last week’s episode on Djuna Barnes, Amy recounts her own fleeting experience as a “stunt reporter” and recommends a recent release of Djuna Barnes’s short stories from McNally Editions. Having glimpsed a copy of Barnes’s <...

Dark and disturbing, yet strangely redemptive, Djuna Barnes’s 1936 modernist masterpiece Nightwood left even its greatest champion, T.S. Eliot, a bit bewildered. Guest Margaret Vandenburg, an expert in modernism, post-modernism and gen...

The works of British writer Dinah Brooke are having a renaissance thanks to two recent reissues by McNally Editions: Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady and Lord Jim at Home (first published in 1971 and 1973, respectively.) Having ...

Likened to a fresh Yorkshire breeze, Malachi Whitaker’s year-in-the-life memoir And So Did I, published in 1939, is a quirky spirit-quest juxtaposing wry humor and contemplative observations amidst the impending threat of global confli...

From a vaudeville act and star turn in Hollywood to a heartbreaking thwarted elopement, we’re willing to bet there’s a lot you don’t know about Helen Keller, author and advocate for the blind, deaf and disabled. Tune in to this week’s ...

In this special episode, Kim and Amy recount their recent visit to The Sitting Room, a unique library and literary salon in Sonoma, CA, dedicated to women's literature. Trip highlights included a stay at a Julia-Morgan-designed architectural ge...

A curious used-book find recently led Amy on a quest to find out the historical significance of a Shameless Hussy Press title from 1976: Calamity Jane’s Letters to Her Daughter. Are these poignant letters from the Wild West legend to h...

Republished this year by Valancourt books, Rosalind’s Ashe’s 1976 gothic thriller Moths is a spine-chilling tale of supernatural seduction featuring a femme fatale who lures men to their deaths like lepidoptera to a flame. Gothic lit e...

Grab your 10-gallon hat for this week’s episode as Amy dives deep into Edna Ferber's Giant, a novel that strongly critiqued racial inequity and exposed the unjust treatment of Mexican Americans and immigrants — a conversation that cont...

Often called “the lesbian Bible,” Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness has been sparking debate for nearly a century. Banned in the UK after an infamous obscenity trial, the book remains a lightening rod for readers — som...

Blood sport or poetry in motion? Amy relcutantly weighs in on the sport of boxing this week, reciting Mrs. Elwood Nickerson’s ballad about a historic prize fight in 19th-century England between the British boxer Tom Sayers and America’s “Benici...