Virginia Faulkner — Willa Cather Champion, with Brad Bigelow

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 comparisons to a young Dorothy Parker), Faulkner later switched gears, devoting the second half of her life to shaping The University of Nebraska Press into a powerhouse publishing institution. Her dedication to scholarship on Willa Cather helped solidify Cather in the pantheon of great American writers. We’re joined for this discussion by neglected books champion Brad Bigelow, whose biography Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts was recently published by Bison Press.

Mentioned in this episode:

Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts by Brad Bigelow

2026 Pilgrimage Reading Group

Purchase the Pilgrimage Series by Dorothy Richardson

Neglected Books website

Friends and Romans by Virginia Faulkner

Willa Cather

A House is Not a Home by Polly Adler

University of Nebraska Press

My Hey Day (The “Princess Tulip” Stories) by Virginia Faulkner

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott

Eugene Meyer

Bernice Slote

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 59 on Gertrude Trevelyon

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 116 on Dorothy Richardson

Lost Ladies of Lit Ep

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our 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. 

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

AMY: Today's episode is gonna be a bit of a departure from the sort of authors we typically cover on the show, but we promise this is gonna be a really interesting episode. Today's “lost lady,” Virginia Faulkner, tried on two very different hats in the world of literature. . In her early twenties, she was an insouciant literary “it” girl who partied with the likes of Tallulah Bankhead and Greta Garbo, pulled up an occasional chair at the Algonquin Round Table, parroted High Society divas for Town and Country magazine, and helped one of New York's most famous madames write a bestselling memoir.

KIM: Hmm. I would never associate any of this with the name Faulkner.

AMY: Good point, Kim. She actually has no connection whatsoever to William Faulkner, but she does have an interesting connection to another well-known American author, which gets me to the second act, quote unquote, of Virginia Faulkner's professional life. So she took a decidedly more serious and academic turn transforming the University of Nebraska press into the publishing powerhouse that established Willa Cather in the pantheon of great American writers. Virginia was a little Cather obsessed, you might even say,

KIM: Okay, so we wanna shout out to all the academic presses out there. They shine spotlights on so many forgotten women writers.

AMY: Yes. And we've got a returning guest joining us today who also knows a lot about forgotten women writers. And the fact that he is Virginia Faulkner's biggest cheerleader convinced us that we needed to know more about this literary wunderkind turned ivory tower editor. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Brad Bigelow, is a longtime friend of this podcast. Listeners. You've heard us mention his name dozens of times, I'm sure.

AMY: I know, I'm sure sometimes our listeners are sick of us saying his name, but it's alliterative and it's fun to say: Brad Bigelow.

KIM: We do name-drop him a lot.

AMY: So Brad joined us previously on the show to discuss the writer Gertrude Trevelyan and Dorothy Richardson. And I already mentioned this to our Patreon listeners a few months ago, but Brad was instrumental in publishing a new complete edition of Richardson's 13-volume Pilgrimage series, which we cannot recommend enough. And Brad, I will just say that my mother-in-law just this week asked me what I would like for Christmas, and I did a little, [sings] “I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want!” It was this collection — because I've been eyeing it. And I said, “You can get this for me for both my Christmas and birthday present,” and so she ordered it and she's like, “All right, all 2,374 pages are coming your way.”

KIM: She gets an award for that.

AMY: Yes. Yes. Um, and Brad also just kicked off a free, year-long Pilgrimage reading group, and it's not too late to get in on that. And maybe now I will, since I'll have all of the books at my disposal. So this is how it works, you guys, you meet up online to discuss one book from this series each month. So basically you're covering the whole Pilgrimage series throughout the course of the year with Brad. All the sessions are recorded, so it's easy to keep up, no pressure if you have to miss one. Everybody needs to go on the Pilgrimage pilgrimage in 2026. I think it's a good way to distract yourself from all the craziness of life right now. So go to readingpilgrimage.com and click on “2026 Group” and you'll learn more about that.

KIM: Okay. And in addition to all that amazing stuff, Brad is also the author of a brand new biography on today's lost lady. It's called Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, and it's published by Bison Press. That's an imprint that Faulkner herself helped launch at the University of Nebraska Press. Brad, welcome back to the show. We're so glad to have you here.

BRAD BIGELOW: Thank you, Kim, and thanks to both of you for having me on again.

AMY: I've said this a lot of times on the podcast. I find reading biographies on more obscure lives to actually be more satisfying in a lot of ways than reading biographies of very well-known people. It comes with a lot more surprises. It's all new to me. I end up having this massive respect for the biographer who I know is usually working from far less available material. There's a lot more sleuthing required and something about that really appeals to me. So while Virginia Faulkner was a complete unknown to me before your book came along, obviously she was not unknown to you. How did you learn about her and what made you think that she was worthy of her own biography, Brad?

BRAD: I first stumbled across Virginia (and I felt like I came to know her well enough in the course of the research to be on a first-name basis, with her, although I'm sure she would disagree) when I read her collection of Princess Tulip stories, My Heyday, which is a book from 1940. As I usually do, I tried to find out something about the author and there wasn't much about her. But I found a short entry in a reference book and it said she worked for The Washington Post. She published several novels. She worked for MGM, she wrote stuff for magazines, Broadway and radio. Then she's an editor at the University of Nebraska Press. And I thought, “That's a strange career path.” And I knew there had to be something more to it. When I decided to go back and investigate that kind of left-hand turn that she took in her life, I learned that there were some interesting things that happened that led her to make that change. And so that title, A Life in Two Acts, is really a response to a famous line by F. Scott Fitzgerald, that “there are no second acts in American lives.” In Virginia's case, after years of enjoying success and critical acclaim like Fitzgerald, but you know, on a smaller scale, she essentially started her life over again and she decided she wasn't the writer she wanted to be, and discovered that instead, she was a brilliant editor.

KIM: So Virginia Faulkner was born in 1913 in Lincoln, Nebraska, and that's also where Willa Cather lived as a young woman. Faulkner was identified at an early age as incredibly intelligent. You tell us in your book, Brad, that one of her first accomplishments as a writer was reviewing Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop for her high school newspaper. Talk about foreshadowing! But for as accomplished as she was, she was also a bit of a handful. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that?

BRAD: Well, she certainly was by Nebraska standards at the time. So she was part of the flapper generation. You know, this generation of young, independent spirited, wild-living women who were, you know, one of the key symbols of the Jazz Age. People like Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby. But she lost her mother when she was 14, and her father was kind of not the disciplinarian. He didn't feel like reigning her in. And soon she turned into one of the wild girls of her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. She had her own car. She was notorious for speeding around town with a cigarette in one hand, and the other hand on the wheel.

KIM: Love it!

AMY: Yeah. And we're talking a little bit about Fitzgerald here, but at the same time it was also making me think a lot about Ursula Parrot's teenage years; she was a previous lost lady that we've covered on this show. And it was fun to discover that Virginia Faulkner actually went to finishing school in Italy and while there she translated Ursula Parrot's Ex-Wife, a great novel, into Italian. And when I saw that connection in your book, I was like, “Okay, I'm not just imagining this.” There is a vibe, you know? 

KIM: And I love that she chose that book. How like, you know, kind of rascal-ish that she chose that? I love it. Yeah.

BRAD: Yeah. She was definitely getting in the face of the woman who ran the school. So, after her mother died, she was really just kind of running wild. And her father decided to send her to a finishing school that he'd been recommended in Rome, Italy. And her choice of Ex-Wife, this book about divorce and drinking and infidelity… Well, it's just, you know, it's not the sort of thing that a finishing school matron would be happy with. The main thing that she got from that time in Rome, though, I argue, is not so much polish of armor. So she kind of adopted what she saw Italian men doing, which is this attitude called. In Italian sprezzatura, which is this sort of bottomless self-confidence combined with, a take it or leave it attitude. And that became how she presented herself to everybody, except for a very few people that she would let into her inner circle and put her guard down with.

AMY: I love that her dad is like, “I have this girl that's a little bit hard to control, let me send her to uh… I don't know. How about Italy?”

KIM: I know. Complete the most passionate… Yeah, 

AMY: Have you not read A Room With a View?!!!

KIM: Completely, completely. I love it. So tragically, um, you know, she had already lost her mother at a young age. Now Virginia's father passes away just before Virginia returns to the States in 1931. And at this point, something is telling her that returning to a life in her native Nebraska would be a wrong turn. You might say that two different “Radcliffes” offered her a new way to live. Do you wanna talk about that a little bit, Brad?

BRAD: Sure. Exactly. I mean, she literally got off the boat in New York and there's no father to greet her. And she goes back on the train to Nebraska alone. So she couldn't wait to get out of there. And she had been offered a scholarship to Radcliffe when she graduated from high school. And she kind of set it aside because her mother had just died. Um, and so she reached out to it as an escape route. And sometime while she was attending Radcliffe, she decided to model her, look at least on that, of the English lesbian writer, Radclyffe Hall, who was in the news at those times because her novel, The Well of Loneliness, which was one of the first, open discussions in fiction of a lesbian relationship. And so, uh, she was very open about being a lesbian, and she deliberately adopted men's clothes and sort of a male look, and there's a photo of Virginia that was taken towards the end of her time at Radcliffe, and if you compare that side by side with Radclyffe Hall, you would say, I understand who this woman is modeling herself after 

AMY: And also in that photo in particular, isn't she a knockout? She's so striking looking in that photo. Yeah. Alright, so tell us a little bit more then about how her writing career took off. You know, we have this “Lincoln lady” fresh off the farm, in Nebraska, although it wasn't really a farm. But how does she go from that to becoming “the next Dorothy Parker” which is what people were calling her?

BRAD: Right. Well, when she was going to Radcliffe, she didn't really fit in with a lot of the women going there, but she did bond with a woman named Florence Meyer, the oldest daughter of Eugene Meyer. At that time he was just about to buy The Washington Post, the newspaper. Eugene Meyer was also the father of Katherine Graham, who of course was the post publisher in the Watergate era. So Florence Meyer brings Virginia down to their family estate for a college weekend. And Eugene Meyer is just so impressed by her wit and her intelligence that he says, “Hey, I'm buying this newspaper. Why didn't you come to work for me as a writer?” And she didn't want to really go back to Radcliffe so she said, “Great!” But even as she's in Washington and writing for The Post, she's working on this novel that sort of fuses her observations from the time she was in Italy, including the rise of Mussolini and the fascists with her kind of signature wisecracking conversation. And this is the novel that became Friends and Romans. She's 21. She gets a contract from Simon and Schuster. So she decides to resign from The Post and head to New York and try to make it as a writer in “the smart set,” so to speak. And there she jumped right into the middle of this. generation of people like Parker and Robert Benchley and James Thurber, who are just quick-witted and great, funny writers.

AMY: Friends and Romans, we did not read that for this episode. It's hard to get, right? 

BRAD: It's super hard to get, yes. 

AMY: It's too bad because it sounds like it would be a very good representation of her sparkling wit, as you said.

KIM: Yes, I would love to read that. 

AMY: …to not be able to get our hands on it is … annoying.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so she's 21, as you said. She is now the toast of New York, and she ought to have been flying high, especially given that everyone who was anyone wanted to fete her. But life wasn't necessarily a bowl of cherries as the famous song goes, was it Brad?

BRAD: Right. And you know, the single thing that convinced me that I had to write this book was early on in the process I got a copy of a bunch of her early letters to her brother, from the archives in Lincoln, Nebraska. And there's a letter there that she wrote her brother just after she decided to quit The Washington Post. And on the one hand she was trying to reassure him that yes, she seriously thought she would be able to make a living as a writer in New York, but she was also very clear-eyed about the creative challenge she was facing. And she says, and this is quoting from the letter: “All I've been doing is high-class wisecracking in the literary world. And while it happens, the world loves it now and may for some time still, I've gone as far as I can being a smarty. If I'm ever going to be any good she then concludes I'll have to give up this smart, know-it-all line for something a little kinder and truer.” And I think the next 15 years of her life were just these repetitive cycles of taking the easy money for the high class, wise-cracking and avoiding the hard work of writing something that was truly a little kinder and truer. And so she was 21 when she wrote this letter and it still astonishes me in its maturity.

KIM: Yeah. The self-awareness of that.

AMY: And also: I'd be fine just sticking with the shallow… like the fact that she wanted to go further and I'm like, “No, just give me the money and let me be like hanging out at the Round Table. That's fine.” There's more depth to her clearly than there is to me. 

KIM: No, no, no. 

AMY: But we should mention, too, that while she was living in New York, she crossed paths with another one of our previous lost ladies of lit, and that's Tess Schlesinger, who wrote The Unpossessed. So tell us a little bit about their friendship, Brad.

BRAD: Well, in a way, that relationship was kind of typical of Virginia's relationships with a lot of the famous people she encounters in New York and Hollywood. So Virginia's letters to her brother are full of mentions of places she goes and things she does with Tess Schlesinger, who had had several books published by Simon Schuster right in lockstep with when Virginia Faulkner's books came out. But when I asked Peter Davis, who is Tess Schlesinger's son, about Virginia, he didn't recognize the name and he said her mother never mentioned her and the name doesn't come up in any of her papers. You know, that's sort of symptomatic. So if you look at when she was at MGM, for example, she was teamed up with this German expat named Godfried Reinhardt, who was the son of a very famous theater director named Max Reinhardt. And they produced practically nothing in two and a half years working as a team at MGM. And I think honestly, that a lot of it was Godfried was more interested in sleeping his way through the German expat community in Hollywood than he was with coming up with material from movie scripts. And she actually walked away from her contract with MGM because she said, essentially, I'm not doing anything here.

KIM: Yeah, I wonder if she had had a different partner. And I mean, it's funny because she obviously has a talent for writing a punchline type, copy, so it seems like she would've been a real natural for writing for TV sitcoms or something like “Laugh In.” She was maybe just a little ahead of her time, I think. In any case, after her first novel, success came in fits and starts for Faulkner. But one thing she had already seen steady success with was a series of “Princess Tulip” stories that you had mentioned for Town and Country Magazine. The first of these debuted in 1937. Tell us about Princess Tulip. (I love the name.) What was the appeal, Brad?

BRAD: So Princess Tulip was what I call a gate crasher extraordinaire. So she was this character that Virginia would have her traveling around the world, and wherever she would go, she would kind of insert herself into society. And the ironic thing was a lot of the satire going on in those stories was satire of exactly the sort of lifestyle that Town and Country was celebrating. So you would see a Princess Tulip story mocking how silly people were in a particular situation. And then you would see, you know, “Mr. And Mrs. Russell Thorndyke traveling at Cannes,” or something like that. Uh, so, she wrote a couple dozen of these stories over a long period of time from ’37 to, uh, ’49. Every one with Princess Tulip kind of going to a different place in the world: the Arctic, the Soviet Union, India, Louisiana, et cetera. And these are really just excuses for Virginia to craft jokes and take pot shots at the rich and stupid. And to be honest, it'd be nice to see a Princess Tulip in today's, you know, billionaire-inundated world.

KIM: I agree.

AMY: The premise reminds me almost like of a children's book series, but for grownups, you know, like an “Amelia Bedelia goes to Paris,” that sort of thing where when you flip open the magazine you're like, “Oh, here we go.”

BRAD: Yeah, absolutely. 

AMY: Yeah. So they were pretty cute. Um, so another critical writing project that would set her up for the second stage of her life as editor was helping to polish the biography of a famous New York madame, Polly Adler. Brad, why don't you explain.

BRAD: So Polly Adler, uh, she ran the biggest and the hottest call girl operation of jazz-based New York. But by the 1940s, she left the sex trade and she was trying to start a second career by writing a memoir. Unfortunately she was a terrible writer. In fact, several editors said, “I don't know how you could tell this story and be so boring about it!” So about the time that she was really hitting the wall with shopping the book around, Virginia comes back to New York after having spent over a year in a mental asylum getting treated for depression and alcoholism. And she steps off the train and her one-time partner, a composer named Dana Suesse who was also friends with Polly Adler says, “Hey, Virginia, you're great at livening you up text. So why don't you work with Polly and see if you can't, you know, inject a few wisecracks into her memoir and get it sold?” She took a look at it and she realized it would be a lot of work to put that into a decent package. And it ended up being almost a two-year project. She took no money for it, and she often said that was the smartest decision she ever made because Polly Adler was notorious for having endless demands, and she said, uh, you know, it was nice to be able to occasionally tell Polly “I'm not getting paid for this,” and hang up the phone. Uh, so this book finally comes out in ’53 under the title, A House is Not a Home and it was one of the biggest best sellers of the 1950s. Everybody bought it. I had a woman tell me that her mother bought it and then proceeded to put the dust jacket of a Pearl Buck novel around the book so that she wouldn't be seen reading that nasty Polly Adler 

KIM: Wow. It was hugely successful, but they didn't realize she was involved in the writing of it.

BRAD: That's right. For a long time, in fact, the 2006 reissue of A House is Not a Home questions whether or not Virginia had anything to do with the book.

KIM: Wow.

AMY: Well, you set the record straight. Good. 

KIM: Yeah. Okay, we're gonna now dive into “Act Two” of Virginia’s story. This actually takes place back in Lincoln, Nebraska. So how and why, Brad, does she end up back in the hometown she had once been so desperate to escape? What happened?

BRAD: Well, so she's in New York. She's finishing up the first round of work on the Polly Adler book and she realizes, “Hey, if I stay here, I'm just gonna fall back into this trap of writing this lightweight stuff and I'm gonna hate myself and I'm gonna go back into, you know, an asylum.” So she goes out to Pacific Grove, California, rents a motel room, and she kind of stays there as a hermit for three years. And she kind of just reflects on what is it she wants to do with her life. So she's going through, uh, you know, a midlife crisis of a sort. And while she's reflecting, she immerses herself in the work of a Nebraska writer who did, in her opinion, consistently and with great art write things that were “kinder and truer.” And that was Willa Cather. And I think Virginia felt that she was making some kind of a breakthrough as she was doing this work on Cather. She was finding lots of stuff in it. But apparently her brother thought she was spiraling into a black hole, and so he says, I'm gonna bring you back. And, uh, well, he didn't really have a plan of what was gonna happen next. He just wanted to keep a closer eye on her. And as soon as she arrived, or as soon after she arrived, she runs into the director of the University of Nebraska press. The director says, “Hey, we're looking at putting together this anthology of Nebraska writing. Would you be interested in taking on the project?” And she takes on that project and she produces this book that's still available called Roundup: The Nebraska Reader. And she found that work of assembling and shaping the book and getting it to print, she really found that was something that resonated in a strong way with her and that she felt was like a valuable act as opposed to giving something that people could chuckle over for 15 minutes and then go on with their life. So it was something she realized, “Hey, this is something I actually respect.”

AMY: Hmm. What was the press like when she arrived? How did she transform it? What makes you think that this was her important contribution?

BRAD: Well, the press was on the skids, frankly, and there was serious talk about just shutting it down and moving on. But two things came together. Two people came together to save it. First there was Virginia, who saw the potential that the press could do for building the reputation and legacy of the state and its literature and history, and also an outlet for the people at the university. and then secondly, there was the arrival in the late fifties of a new director, a guy named Bruce Nichol, who had zero publishing experience, but he was a nut for Western history. He super understood the politics of the university and Nebraska as a state. And, uh, he was a kind of a genius for public relations. And in the space of a couple years, the press went from publishing like two or three books a year to over 50 and went on to over a hundred in the course of a decade or so. And so many of the authors that I interviewed said that working with Virginia, that she had this in innate sense of how to take an idea or a rough manuscript and really turn it into a rock solid, well-published book. And as those books started to come out of the press, it started to really achieve this reputation of being a serious academic press, providing cultural value in many ways.

KIM: So we did a prior episode on Edith Lewis. She was another lost lady of lit. She was in a long-term relationship with Cather. Decades before Cather scholars in the 1980s began to speculate that she was a lesbian, Virginia had this all figured out. So can you talk about why she kept her theory close to the vest as it were?

BRAD: Yeah. Well this is one of the fascinating aspects of Virginia's story. So the thing she's focused on when she's huddled in at this little motel room in Pacific Grove was that Willa Cather’s writing revealed, as Virginia believed unknowingly, that she was a lesbian. And this is purely through what we would call close reading today. So fast-forward to the 1960s. She's at the University of Nebraska Press. She sees that the press can be an outlet to start building up a library of what we might call Catheriana. So Cather-related books, which are the sort of thing you would see establishing a writer's place in the canon. And suddenly the last thing she wants to do is throw a headlight on Catherine's sexuality. Because 1960, Lincoln, Nebraska… that would've killed all of those projects. And she was starting to also cultivate a relationship with Alfred Knopf, who was one of Cather's publishers. And she was starting to build trust with the Cather family that she was gonna need to work with if she was going to see these books come into print. And you can see kind of this change in approach in two letters that I quote in the book. The first one, she writes a woman named Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who was a friend of Cather’s. She wrote a memoir about her. And the first letter, which is the one written from Pacific Grove, is this really manic letter talking about all these things that Virginia has found in Sergeant's book about signs about Cather. And Sergeant must have seen that letter and gone, “Who is this nutzoid?” Uh, and then you fast-forward to the Sixties where now Virginia says, “Hey, I'd like to reissue Elizabeth Shepley's Sergeant’s memoir about Cather. So I need to get her to sign the permissions over to us. So I have to get her to trust.” So her tone is now sober, it's courteous, it's deferential, and you know, she's saying, “Trust me, I will put Cather on a pedestal. I won't smear her reputation.” And unfortunately, she kind of painted herself into a corner she couldn't get out of for the rest of the time that she was working on these Cather projects.

AMY: It's true though. It would've been hard for anybody at that point in time to have outed Cather. I mean, Edith Lewis was keeping it completely shut down, right? And Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, we should mention, her sister was Katharine Sergeant, who wound up being Katharine S. White, who was a famous literary editor for The New Yorker, who we did a previous episode on last year. So I love how all these things kind of intertwine and, um, interconnect. But yeah, I mean, I think she had to do that or she wouldn't have been able to accomplish any of her work because she just wouldn't have had access to the Cather stuff that Edith Lewis was holding onto, right?

BRAD: Absolutely. 

AMY: So, much like Cather’s relationship with Edith Lewis, Virginia Faulkner ended up finding a similar romantic connection with a colleague at the University of Nebraska. Tell our listeners, Brad, about Bernice Slote. She features heavily in your book, but you almost in a way think that she could have her own book. She was pretty impressive, too!

BRAD: Yeah, she was a remarkable woman. And, uh, you know, one of the great things about working on this biography was to get to know a lot more about Bernice Slote and how much she had accomplished herself, even though her name is even less known today than Virginia Faulkner. Well, Bernice was kind of the polar opposite of Virginia in many ways, even though they were born and raised literally like 10 miles apart from each other. So they're both Nebraska-born girls. But Bernice, she worked her way up from teaching public school in these little Nebraska towns to getting a position in one of the very few women on the faculty at the University of Nebraska. She wrote very serious poetry that was published in, everywhere from like Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping to Poetry magazines. Really a lot of it is more substantive work than anything that Virginia produced in her time. And so when Virginia meets Bernice and they start talking about Virginia's vision for these Cather projects, she started to realize this is really the perfect person to work with. She's smart enough, she's sensitive enough. She understood what it meant to be a creative artist, she also understood what it took to produce world-class scholarship. And so their collaboration, which was underway by 1960, it was the center of their lives for really the next 20 years until Virginia died in 1980.

KIM: So we have a lot of university professors who enjoy this podcast, and I think this section of your book, Brad, is something they'd find really relatable because we have these two brilliant women. They're navigatingd (and I'd say also often worn down by) this sometimes-frustrating politics of academia.

AMY: Yeah. What do you think these two women offered one another in terms of their professional and emotional support? Because like you said, they were quite different personalities. And also what did their teaming up accomplish for Willa Cather studies at large?

BRAD: Well, Virginia was definitely the catalyst. She could always see the potential in these projects. She had a very clear vision of where she wanted to take Willa Cather, and she wanted to essentially take away all the adjective qualifiers in front of Willa Cather, great writer. So she didn't want her to be treated as a regional writer or a woman writer, or God forbid, a lesbian writer. She wanted her to just be a great writer at the world level. She really wanted to push that vision of Cather as being accepted into the canon at a global level. Uh, but Virginia struggled with alcoholism and depression all of her life. And she would work at a manic pace, and then she would have this period of burnout, whereas Bernice was like a classic Midwest farm girl. She was used to getting up every morning doing her chores, whether she loved it or not. So she was the one who would hold down a full load of classes and serve on whatever committee got thrown her way. And oh, by the way, she was also the one who edited the very prestigious literary magazine, The Prairie Schooner, for almost 20 years. So their strengths and weaknesses complimented each other and it really allowed them to work together. Where Virginia would hit a wall, Bernice would pick it up and keep moving forward with it until Virginia was ready to kick back in again. And between the two of 'em, they were able to assemble this body of Cather studies, collections of, uh, unpublished work by Cather, scholarly editions of some of Cather's work, which has now become The Cather Editions, which the press is still publishing which are these pivotal, archival editions, authoritative texts of Cather's work. And that all started from the work of Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner.

AMY: I will say, Brad, that reading your book inspired me to dip my toe back into Willa Cather. I had read My Antonia, which is the one that everybody's supposed to read, you know? And then I kind of stopped there, like, oh, okay, I get it. I get what she's doing there. But after reading this book, I went back and read O Pioneers and Death Comes for the Archbishop. So I'm getting back into Willa Cather as a result of learning about Virginia's obsession with her. Like, okay, if Virginia was this obsessed, let me go back and re-examine Willa Cather a little bit more. That's been fun.

BRAD: Yeah.

AMY: So speaking of Virginia Faulkner being an editor, I love this quote from one of the writers who she worked with during her time at the press. This was a University of Nebraska professor who had contributed an introduction to a book they were working on, and he recalled: I thought my introduction was perfect and I was proud of it. It came back dripping blood. Not one sentence had escaped her sharp eye, nor her immense storehouse of factual information. But then he goes on to say, Not a single one of her red marks failed to improve those sentences, which only a day before I had been so proud to have written.

KIM: Oh my God. Wouldn't you love to have her as an editor? I mean, it would be hard, but it would be totally worth it. It sounds like she was really phenomenal at what she did. In the episode we did on the New Yorker editor, Katharine S. White whom we mentioned earlier, um, we talked about her reputation of being formidable. Do you think Virginia also had an intimidating side 

BRAD: Absolutely. She put the fear of Virginia Faulkner, “mean lady editor,” in more than a few authors. She could take hold of a manuscript like a junkyard dog with a bone, and she knew how to stare people down. Several writers talked about meeting with her in her office that she's got a cigarette in the hand and she's blowing smoke in their face and just giving the dead eye stare saying, “This is the way it's gonna be.” But as I relate in the book, sometimes she took that too far. And in one case, uh, a guy named Bill Curran, who put together a pivotal collection of Cather’s early journalism, uh, I mean, their relationship got to the point where she was so heavy-handed in her criticism he practically got to the point of suicide. And I have to say, writing this book, I often felt like I had those mean-lady editor eyes burning into me as I was putting it together.

KIM: The pressure! Oh my gosh. 

BRAD: Oh she would've rejected this book out of hand.

KIM: “Dripping blood.”

BRAD: Yeah.

AMY: Um, yeah, she seems like the phrase “pick your battles” … she did not know the meaning of that. That like for her it was like “Every battle I must win.” And she didn't think about the ramifications of what it was doing in terms of interpersonal relations sometimes.

KIM: Yeah. Okay, so Virginia died in 1980. Brad, how hard was it for you to piece together her life, her story? How long did it take you?

BRAD: Well, I started my research in 2020 and it took almost four years. Now, partly that's because all of the archives that I would have to visit were shut down during the pandemic, and partly because I was following, uh, Robert Caro's admonition to turn every page. Now her brother Ed was a remarkable guy. In fact, her personal letters that have survived are mostly due to Ed because he kept every piece of paper that he had. Unfortunately, one of the stories I learned was that Ed was keeping his papers, Virginia papers, and actually the archives of Prairie Schooner Magazine in his basement. And sometime in the Seventies, his water heater leaked and they took whole loads of stuff. So it's funny, in his papers and in her papers, there's this gap of … nothing's there. So one of the things I had to do was to piece together information from other sources. One of the most invaluable sources I had were letters that her partner during the Forties, the composer Dana Suesse. Dana Suesse, wrote her mother faithfully, uh, like a weekly letter of “Here’s what's going on, Mom.” And through those, I could start to put together the chronology of where they went and what they did. Because there was nothing in Virginia's letters reflecting that. So I feel like I relied a lot on secondary sources in the sense of it's not Virginia saying “I did this,” et cetera. Uh, so there's one thing I feel like I could do a great job in court assembling a case based on circumstantial evidence. 

KIM: [laughing] That's great.

AMY: It makes me think too about future generations now that we don't correspond that way, and how much more difficult it's going to be to trace history as a result, right? I mean, there's emails and they're all ostensibly saved, but I just don't think we'll have the same sort of access.

BRAD: They're saved, but is anybody archiving in a way that they can be turned over for future? It's a very valid concern. 

KIM: And is there anything good in them? 

BRAD: Well, that's the “turn every page” rule, which is sometimes the most boring letter suddenly has something that catches your eye and fills in a blank in the overall mosaic of a person's life.

AMY: Well, I think you did a really good job with your book at giving us the full arc of Virginia's life and at the risk of sounding really hokey here, her narrative sort of reminds me a little bit of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (if you were to substitute Nebraska for Kansas), because this is a woman who went out exploring the wider world in search of fulfillment and excitement. And she did have some truly amazing adventures, only to realize that her heart's true desire was in her own backyard of Nebraska. 

BRAD: I come back to the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that I mentioned at the beginning about no second acts in American lives. I think Virginia shows that there can be second acts, but it may require you're turning your back on the things that win you fame and money, and that's a tough choice to make.

KIM: Brad, is there anything else we haven't mentioned about her that you'd like to make sure we include?

BRAD: Well, I can't let this opportunity pass without throwing out the teaser that anybody who reads the book will learn how Virginia got married in the middle of the night to a total stranger in 1935 after getting blind drunk with Talulah Bankhead.

KIM: All right. Well, if that is not a reason enough to get this book! 

AMY: Also that takes me back to shades of Ursula Parrott, who was up to similar escapades in her lifetime. Yeah. So Brad congratulations on the publication of this biography. It's clear this was a labor of love for you, and we loved finding out about both Virginia and Bernice. Virginia's story in particular is a great reminder that you never have to be stuck in a particular box. And sometimes, pivoting can lead to the greatest fulfillment.

KIM: Hear, hear! Always lovely to have you on, Brad.

BRAD: Well, thank you both so much for inviting me. It's just a thrill to see other people get to learn about both of these remarkable women.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. We'll be back in two weeks, but if you hate waiting that long, consider becoming a member of our Patreon community. For a nominal monthly fee you'll get access to our twice-monthly bonus episodes, or you can purchase any bonus episodes and pay as you go.

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AMY: 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.