Backlisted - The True History of the First Mrs Meredith by Diane Johnson

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Episode #197 is dedicated to our late friend Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago, an author in her own right and, on a couple of memorable occasions, a former guest on Backlisted. Joining us are the writer Rachel Cooke and critic and editor Lucy Scholes. Under discussion: The True History of the First Mrs Meredith and Other Lesser Lives by Diane Johnson, first published in 1972 and reissued in 2020 by New York Review Books. Is this imaginative, funny, heartfelt, headstrong book a novel, a biography, an alternative history, a feminist polemic, a work of literary criticism or something else entirely? To which the answer is a far-from-straightforward: Yes. We hope you enjoy this conversation - and a unique book - as much as we did. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at patreon.com/backlisted Here is a synopsis by the publisher of The True History of the First Mrs Meredith and Other Lesser Lives by Diane Johnson "Many people have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table, in a clean neckcloth. He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. He remembers his own remarks, being a writer, and notes them in his diary. We forget that there were other family members at the table -- a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heart pounded with love, perhaps, or rage." So begins The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, an uncommon biography devoted to the other people at the table, the lesser lives of the Famous Writer's dependents, lives that are treated as episodes, if treated at all, in the life of the Famous Writer. But as Diane Johnson points out, "A lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one." Such sympathy, and curiosity, compelled Johnson to research Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith (1821-1861), the daughter of the artist Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) and first wife of the poet George Meredith (1828-1909). The life of the first Mrs. Meredith, treated perfunctorily and prudishly in biographies of Peacock or Meredith because it involved adultery and recrimination, is here exquisitely and unhurriedly given its due. What emerges is the portrait of a brilliant, well-educated woman, raised unconventionally by her father only to feel more forcefully the constraints of the Victorian era, and the contradiction between her capabilities and her circumstances. First published in 1972, Lesser Lives has been a key text for feminists and biographers alike, a book that reimagined what biography might be, both in terms of subject and style. Biographies of other "lesser" lives have since followed in its footsteps, but few have the wit, elegance, and empathy of Diane Johnson's seminal work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BetterHelp.com. meeting with friends before the show, we can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the drawing room of a small cottage in the Thameside village of Lower

Halliford, watching a family interact. It's 1853. An elegant woman holds a baby. The man complains bitterly of stomachache. There is a novel open on the table. Adolphe by Benjamin Constant. The tale of a young man who falls in love with an older woman. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today's episode of Backlisted is a little different. We're dedicating it to our friend and former guest, the legendary publisher and writer, Carmen Khalil, who died a year ago on the 17th of October, 2022. Carmen joined us on a couple of occasions, the first of which was to discuss Elizabeth Jenkins novel The Tortoise

and the Hare and as we as we tend to do on Backlisted we asked her where she was when she first read that novel and it's the question we always ask Carmen which is where were you when you first read this book? Do you remember? No, I don't. I don't remember. But I think I would have been living in Hammersmith. I think it would have been then, about 1980, something like that. And at that time I used to go and have supper regularly with

Rosamund Lehmann and Anita Brooker. why are you laughing? Andy's such a mess. I'm mopping my brow. I'm so thrilled. Please carry on. Can you imagine, listeners, how that wasn't just a good moment in the history of Batlisted.

It was one of the happiest moments of my recent life. Sitting with Carmen for a couple of hours and hearing her reminisce about the incredible work she did, friends she made and authors she knew. She very kindly read a copy of The Year of Reading Dangerously after she'd been on the podcast and sent me a really lovely, thoughtful letter about it afterwards, which obviously I treasure. So this show is dedicated to her. You heard her there. And the book we'll be discussing is one of her favourites

and the suggestion of her friend, Rachel Cook, who is back on Backlisted. And she's phoning us apparently from North London, which listeners will know is very unusual. Hello, Rachel. How are you? Hello. Rachel previously appeared on episode 11, all the way back in April 2016, which introduced us to David Seabrook's unforgettable All the Devils Are Here, and more recently with Carmen herself on episode 102, which was dedicated to the novelist Elizabeth Taylor.

Rachel writes and reviews regularly for The Observer, is the TV critic for The New Statesman, and since 2010 has chosen the graphic novel of the month, The Guardian. In 2014, Virago published Her Brilliant Career, Ten Extraordinary Women of the 50s. Next month, Seidenfelten-Nicholson published Kitchen Person, a collection of her Observer food columns. And in 2024, she will release the Virago Book of Friendship,

an anthology dedicated to the special pleasures, intensities, and pains that is female friendship. Two things I want to say to you, Rachel. The first is the pleasures, intensities and pains that is female friendship. What was it like being a friend of Carmen's? It was the best thing in the world. I mean, she was a pain in the arse. She's very difficult, but I think all the best people are difficult um but I got the

best of her really because I never had to work with her so I was only ever a friend and um we had a very very intense friendship she was um it's very hard to explain because she wasn't maternal at all, but she was maternal to me, I suppose. I really, really loved her. She would email me every single Monday morning to tell me what she thought of what I'd done in the day before's observer. day before's observer and um and as you can imagine I miss that very very much because uh she was my reader really and uh I feel you know she was absolutely you know she was brilliant she um she used to come here for Christmas we used to go on holiday we were very very close and I yeah I loved her and um it's like losing a very beloved person but also losing a huge library that has been knocked down and it for me it was I used to rolodex through her brain yeah and I really miss that um you know the book I'm working on at the

moment she would have been able to do it for me. And it's quite annoying that she's not around. Hey, did she ever read All the Devils Are Here? I don't think she did. Although she read everything in the whole world. I mean, it was bizarre. But I don't think she, I don't know if she did read that, no. It was bizarre.

But I don't think she, I don't know if she did read that, no. And how do you feel about, you know, you and we can claim a sliver of credit for bringing that book back into the world, you know? It's since you came onto Batlisted and talked about it seven, eight years ago, it's sort of achieved some status as a modern classic. How do we feel about that? We're still loyal to it, right? Yeah, I feel a bit proprietorial I'm always like that it's like well I I just that

was my book so just yeah what's out yes yes we know that uh no I mean, in general, obviously, I feel good about it. I feel happy about it. So many people have talked about that recording to me and about that book to me since. It was memorable for your puffin, if I'm not missing out. Yes, the puffin's still in the residence. A few listeners will be relieved. That is good. We're also joined today,

hooray, by Lucy Scholes. Hi, Lucy. Hi, everyone. Lovely to be back. Lucy is a backlisted regular and a notable Virago fan. This is Lucy's sixth appearance. Sixth. Having previously joined us to talk

about Barbara Cummings, Anita Bruckner, Penelope Fitzgerald, Jack Higgins. No, I'm only joking. Penelope Mortimer. Shirley Conran. Yeah, not Jack Higgins, Penelope Mortimer. That's strange, isn't it? And most recently in July for the episode on Margaret Drabble's The Millstone.

Lucy is a senior editor at Manali Editions, a series of paperbacks devoted to hidden gems. She hosts Our Shelves, the Virago podcast, and wrote the Recovered column for the Paris Review about out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn't be. A Different Sound, a collection of stories written by mid-century women writers that she selected and introduced, was published by Pushkin Press earlier this year. And Lucy, you wanted to come on this episode because although you never met Carmen, I think I'm correct in saying, clearly a lot of your work and your reading and your enthusiasms are connected to hers. Yes, absolutely. I owe her a great debt, as I do all the women who worked at Virago over the years.

So it's a great sadness, I think. I'm trying to think if I did. I think I might have bumped into her at a party occasionally, but I never got to know her at all. And that is a great sadness, especially hearing Rachel talk about her here. But yeah, she's been hugely influential in my reading life, and I suppose my writing life as well. Lucy, can you recall the first Virago modern classic that you read, or the first time you remember reading a book and thinking, this is interesting, this is published by this particular publisher, The Green Spine, what have you? Well, when you first asked me about that earlier, I was thinking, oh God, I actually can't remember

the first one I read. I was really embarrassed. But then listening to Carmen say she can't remember when she read something like The Tortoise and the Hare, I don't feel quite so bad now. But I think I would say that the first one that really made an impression on me was reading Dusty Answer by Rosamund Lehman,

actually, when I was an undergraduate. And I think it was probably the first time that I really clocked that, yes, this was a kind of green spine. This was a particularly kind of not just a brilliant book, but a brilliant book that really spoke to me in a very personal way that made me feel like it had been written just for me, exactly what you want out of a wonderful novel. And that sort of ignited my love for Rosamund Lehmann's work, which I kind of read through.

And I think that was probably the point at which I really started to look at more kind of recent work I think up until that point I'd read a lot of older stuff you know things that you might read when you're you know schooled for university things like that but I hadn't really come into my own reading sort of women of the late 20th century which has become the thing that I'm sort of most passionate about now so I think Virago was a way into that for me yeah and Rachel how about you you know in the in the 70s or 80s or or 90s I won't speculate I was going to say be careful yeah yeah I realized I realized that the ground went underneath me please carry on I mean of course one thing is that always was amazing to me was that

Carmen became my friend because if someone had told me when I was a girl that that would happen I wouldn't have believed it how I discovered the Virago books was obviously everyone knows I'm a professional Sheffielder and uh on Saturdays my dad used to take me to the bookshop W Hartley Seed. My parents were divorced and my father didn't know what to do with me on a Saturday. So every Saturday we would go to this bookshop. My dad used to go and like, you know, stare at the early William Boyds. And I used Stare longingly, right? Perfect. Rachel, perfect, perfect.

And I used to go off and, you know, wander around and as you will recall, the Viragos used to be on a sort of carousel. Spinner, yeah, yeah. It was really interesting in those days, books were sold so much by their identity, the imprint, the colophon, all of that. And that was, you know, Carmen's real marketing genius

because she really cared about the way the books looked. Anyway, they were on a kind of round thing. I don't think I read one for a long time. I was more into The Secret Seven, that kind of thing. But the first one I did read or I certainly looked at was Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith, whose poetry I liked because her poetry was very easy to read. So I thought, oh, this is good. I'm reading poetry, even though it's only like, you know, tiny. Of course, Novel on Yellow Paper is a different thing. I thought it was gibberish at the time.

And about 30 years later, I then wrote the introduction when Virago reissued it. So I don't know how that happened, but, you know, it's a good journey. Osmosis. Actually, you know what, Rachel? Novel on Yellow Paper has that opening sentence or line, read on reader and decide for yourself or i'm paraphrasing but that's not so very far away from the tone of the book we

are about to talk about john which is the book that rachel's chosen is the true history of the first mrs meredith and other lesser lives that was originally published in 1972 by Alfred A. Knopf in the US and the following year in the UK by William Heinemann and has been reissued in 2020 as a New York Review of Books classic. It's now acclaimed as a groundbreaking work of feminist history and it tells the story of Mary Ellen Peacock, the daughter of the romantic writer Thomas Love Peacock and wife of the celebrated Victorian novelist George Meredith. Raised in the heady atmosphere of the circle surrounding the poet Shelley, Mary Ellen was taught to question traditional morality and particularly that concerning the relationship between the sexes.

As a result she grew up with a strong sense of her own value and talent, very much at odds with the prevailing notions of what was appropriate for a young woman. Having lost her first husband at sea after just a few months together, she married the promising young writer George Meredith, who was seven years her junior. The marriage was a turbulent one, and after eight years, she left him having had an affair and a child with the pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallace, most famous now for his portrait of Chatterton on his deathbed. I'm sure as soon as I say that, it will come to your minds. let her see the child and by suggesting that she was immoral and unstable, ensuring that for most of the century that followed she became merely an embarrassing footnote to the so-called great men she was connected to. Diane Johnson's book changed that. By making creative use of primary sources

such as letters and commonplace books, she reconstructed Mary Ellen's inner life and in so doing not only delivered a vivid and revealing portrait of Victorian literary culture, but also flew a flag for all the lesser lives, particularly those of women that history has routinely ignored. And I would like to bring the attention of long-term listeners that this book begins with the discovery of a cache of Mary Ellen's letters in a suburban house in Purley in Surrey. Just a short drive in 1970, just a short drive from where I, as a toddler, was taking my first faltering steps.

And yet there is no mention of me in that introduction, presumably because as a Croydon resident, mine is a lesser life. We love this book. We absolutely love this book. Rachel, where, when did you first read this? Well, I had wanted to read it for a long time because a book I love is Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose, which is about Victorian marriages, George Eliot, people like that. And Phyllis Rose completely sort of copied.

I mean, Phyllis is open about this. She got the idea for her book from Diane Johnson's book. So I had wanted to read it for a long time but I hadn't really got around to it and then New York Review reissued it and the reason really why it came to my mind for today is partly because of what's it you know its subject connects to Carmen very much but in the summer of 2020 do you remember we had that weird reopening and there were a few months where we could all travel so long as you had all these, the right bits of paper.

And I took Carmen to the south of France to stay with some friends of ours, rather rich friends. Carmen was very sybaritic and absolutely loved to be entertained. This is a brief aside. We were in Terminal 5 at Heathrow. It was very, very quiet. Everyone was in masks, very few people around. It was very strange.

And suddenly the sound of Carmen, like a parrot, telling the entire airport that she couldn't wait to get to France because she needed to buy some knickers from Monoprix. This is imprinted in my mind. Anyway, we arrived in this amazing place where we were staying at Cap Benin. And I was reading Mrs. Meredith by then. And I said to Carmen, who was lying next to me, Carmen was like a lizard. She just loved to lie in the sun for hours. She didn't care about suntan lotion.

Or if you said, Carmen, I'm so worried you're going to get skin cancer, she'd say, darling, I'm Australian, as though that was an answer. And we were sunbathing and I was reading this book and I said, I'm reading this amazing book. I never really learned and I should have known. I said, have you heard of it? And she said, oh, darling, of course. Of course I've read it and I knew Diane.

So it's really a book that I read on the last holiday I was able to take with Carmen so it's special to me for so many different reasons and I think it's a masterpiece. Lucy had you read this book before and were you aware of it? I think i was aware of it a little bit i mean i was aware of diane johnson as a writer and i think i was vaguely aware of it on the sort of periphery of my vision but i have a confession i hadn't read it until you asked me to come on the show and i think i don't know i suppose another confession is that i'm always a little bit adverse to reading about the lives of victians in the romantics. It's never been a particular, probably not the right time to say this, but they've never been of particular interest to me. My interest much more lies in the 20th century and sort of women writers

in that era. However, I have a great, you know, you a great debt of thanks, Rachel, because this was just a fascinating book to me. I mean, in one way, I'm sure we're going to talk about this. I'm less interested in maybe the actual lives she's writing about, even though she makes them all sound wonderful. But the way that she talks about biography and the actual practice of biography in this book was sort of eye-opening and really wonderful. So it's made me maybe slightly rethink my choice about Victorian writers. John, were you aware of this book of Diane Johnson I was completely unaware of this book until I got the the email from Rachel suggesting it and I suppose the same way I was thinking well you know I it could be great I'd love footsteps by by the biographer Richard Holmes Richard Holmes

but I hadn't heard of this slightly the kind of the theme of this show obviously is that we find things that didn't know about that turn out to be masterpieces but it really really is i have not enjoyed a work of what i would call real real scholarship real scholarship but also one of the questions we're going to address is what what what the hell is it what is this book right this is one of the one of the subjects of i want to tackle good i would just like to say i'd never heard of this book i and for which i you know i actually apologize i feel embarrassed having read it that i that i wasn't aware of it because it's one of those books rachel and lucy that makes you fit exactly as you were saying it makes you feel it was written for you even though it clearly wasn't

written for me of all people i spent the whole thing thinking oh my goodness and and we'll come on to it she does something towards the end of the book, which for me shifted it from being a really good book into ascended into glory in the footnotes, which we'll come on to later, later in the show. This is what makes it all the more inexplicable that it's so obscure. Not just Phyllis Rose, who's written about it, and Vivian Gornick, who's written the introduction to the MYRB. it and Vivian Gornick who's written the introduction to the MYRB I found reviews by V.S Pritchett our former guest Hermione Lee our former guest Francesca Wade our former guest Tessa Hadley by Geoffrey Grigson not our former guest because he wasn't available by Margaret Drabble by Peter Aykroyd this This was a widely reviewed book, both on its original publication and on its republication, by extremely well-known writers.

All of those reviews, bar one, were very positive. And yet, it seems to float away. I'm going to say something a bit perhaps a bit controversial but I mean I read Tessa's piece um I think that this is a book that you need to write passionately about um I don't always feel like that I sometimes feel that people should really write criticism and they shouldn't bring themselves to it too much but I think that this is kind of an exception because if you just write about it as though it's a study of a dead Victorian then you get a strangely dusty review and the book is not dusty that's this she writes with incredible lightness about things that should be dusty,

but they just aren't. I actually wrote to the LRB after Tess's review appeared because I was so cross about it. And she's here today. They didn't print my letter unaccountably, but I think that this is one of those books it's sui generis you it's very hard to write about unless you do what we're kind of trying to do now which is to say my god this book is living in my heart and I can't quite explain why it's so interesting it's so moving

it's so huge in the things it encompasses the the number of people the number of eras the the the clothes the food the everything is in it it's an everything book and yet it's very short it's not a long book and I just think that all of those reviewers, you can imagine Aykroyd sort of, you know, right, you know, it doesn't work for that kind of criticism. I would just like to note that Peter, would you like to hear a bit of Aykroyd's review? Just going to make you cross, Rachel, and you're going to write to the Sunday Times in 1973. just going to make you cross, Rachel, and you're going to write to the Sunday Times in 1973. Mary Ellen was, to put it briefly, the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock and the wife of George Meredith. She was also the subject of the Modern Love Sonnets, and it was to be expected that her

role in literary biography would end there. We know from the example of Meredith himself how decent obscurity is to be preferred to a fame won at the cost of happiness. But Mrs. Johnson, for reasons that have had as much to do with women's liberation as with literary history, has written this life. The style is that which in a less enlightened age than our own would be called the feminine. This is not, of course, denigrating and on he goes. I would just like to note that 10 years after writing that review about a biography that cites the story about Thomas Chatterton based on the discovery of a cache of letters in an attic, Peter Aykroyd went on to write a novel that cites Thomas Chatterton on the basis of some letters found in an attic. It's a coincidence. It's a massive coincidence, clearly. But nevertheless, Rachel, this was one of the problems

that people have with this book, if they had a problem with it, is they don't know what it is. Even the recent reviews are saying, well, why does she do this why does she do that that's not good academic practice lucy did you find the refusal to adhere to a proper academic or generic template a barrier to enjoying the book? God, no. I mean, I found it absolutely thrilling. That's the point of this book, right?

Like that it does sort of throws everything that you think you're reading about biography. It throws everything you're thinking you're reading about the Victorians up in the air and you're sort of left trying to then put these pieces together. And yet she's doing it for you. And she's kind of putting together this collage right in front of you that is just illuminating and fascinating um and i think i was thinking a little bit when i read it about how much i wondered that when it was first published how much people were talking about it just as this sort of product of second wave feminism and thinking of it in that sense and that maybe in the process maybe missing some of the much more interesting things it's doing

and i think is probably very contemporary that I think what we're seeing in biography today we're starting to see writers pushing the boundaries and doing all sorts of interesting things whether they're putting themselves in the book or they're trying to think about how the genre itself can be stretched in different ways and yet you know here's Johnson doing it back in the early 70s. I so agree. It's a thing that Rachel, you were saying as well, the lightness of it. It feels so contemporary in terms of tone and trying to find a fresh way to approach potentially a very dusty subject. Yeah. Also the refusal to indulge in, you know, cheap psychoanalysing, which she always said is, you know, she described that

as she finds psychoanalysis in novels, meretricious, she had her work badly marked by Christopher Isherwood once, who said, this is terrible, you can't write this, because you have to explain why people do what they do. And you have to trace it back. And she said, you know, no, that's not what you have to do, you could do differently. So I think on all those levels, you know, no, that's not what you have to do. You could do it differently. So I think on all those levels, you're quite right, Lucy. It is extraordinarily contemporary. And the fragmentary style with which she builds what turns out to be, I think, a genuine picture of an entire, you get a sense of the age, more of the Victorian age than very few books I've ever read.

Isn't that what Vivienne Gornick says in the introduction? She says something about the genius of it lies and the decision to keep pulling people into the story of Mary Ellen George, so that finally an age stands revealed. Absolutely. And we come away from it. I mean, I come away from this book feeling like I know more about the Victorians than I do having read countless sort of more stuffy biographies or historical accounts. Rachel, you were talking earlier about the Victorians. So how does this contrast with other writing about the Victorians? Well, you'll all have your own views about this,

but I think that's something that has happened quite recently. And this actually applies to all historical biography. This idea of, well, we're all human beings we all love we all get our hearts broken many of us dislike cabbage and the point is that those things are true. But I think it's a really grave mistake to think that the Victorians are at all like us in the way that they think about the world and the way their minds work. And, you know, of course, that's why Mary Ellen's life was so hard, because she was operating within such rigid structures and it was very very hard to break out and one of the things that I think is genius about this book is the way it shows that the previous generation the sort of Shelley generation who her father's friends they were much more modern and free living and

interested in you know the idea that if you didn't get on you would separate you didn't have to stay married and the and then the victorians come along and they just react against that and it's very very repressive and i think that this book shows even as diane john Johnson is so, you know, the way she skips along and she makes jokes and all of that. And she herself is really whispering in your ear. But she never loses sight of the fact that Victorians are seriously weird. And they thought weird things. They did did weird things and they are hard to understand and she's attentive to that and she makes us attentive to that and of course that makes it so so much more rich to read about because it's not glib it's not pat nothing is

straightforward it just moves you so much and it makes what Mary Ellen goes through you know leaving aside all this crap about second wave feminism or whatever you just feel she was rather extraordinary and her extraordinariness is in this weird context Diane Johnson for me brilliantly and this has never really occurred to me makes the point that the Victorian era is you know the 19th century preceded by the 18th century in which Mary Ellen has the misfortune to be raised by her father Thomas Love Peacock in at the more libertarian avant-garde end of things which swings back wildly in the Victorian era to so she's she's out of time twice over which which seems to me really powerful as a you know an animating principle for a personality but also speaks to now actually in a really in a really fascinating way Rachel

this seems like a good moment to read the extract you wanted to. Okay. One of the things she does very well is she kind of steps out of the narrative and she gives these little mini lectures, but that lecture makes them sound preachy, which they're not, but she just gives you some notes and she asks you to think about various things. And here is her on the

Victorians. Common sense urges us to suppose that beneath the Victorians' public postures of rectitude, formality and reserve, beneath the bustles and beards, lurked beings much like ourselves. But closer inspection suggests that our sympathy is misplaced. They were not like us. People's psyches conformed as much as their manners did to the peculiar notions they created. Women did loathe sex and they did call their husbands by their surnames. they did call their husbands by their surnames. Husbands did suffer to feel base sexual impulses toward the pure creatures they married. And they did creep ashamedly off to prostitutes or became impotent, another widespread affliction of the time. And then she says, of the time and then she says everyone had headaches and lay about on sofas many households like the peacocks had someone crazy or invalid upstairs as often a victim of the bizarre

psychological patterns as of the pitiable medical ignorance then abounding she totally grasps the sort of you know it's what call, I have a shorthand for this, I call it the smelliness of Tennyson, because Tennyson was famously smelly, and Tennyson was very weird. And if you were talking about Victorians and how weird they are, I would say, ah, it's the smelliness of Tennyson. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this book is published in the early 70s. I assume this book seemed more confrontational in 1972 or 3 than it does to us now. The practice of illuminating the lives of the wives, partners,

girlfriends, or those in the shadow of quote-unquote great men was a much more radical project then than it probably seems now. I'm thinking, John, it predates Nora, a book about Nora Barnacle. It predates Claire Tomlin's book about Dickens' Wives. Or Lucy, when you read this, does this feel like it came before those books or after them?

Well, I think, like I said, I feel like it, for me, it feels like a very modern book. If you'd given this to me and not told me when it was published, I think, I mean, it could have been published yesterday. It would fit in with, I was thinking recently, I read the new Anna Funder book about, you know, George Orwell's first wife, which, Wifedom, which that's a really good example

of exactly the same sort of act trying to wrestle somebody out from under a much more famous figure. And a biography itself that really pushes the boundaries, a sort of act of imaginative empathy as much as it is a kind of recreation of an actual historical life.

So I think it could be written at any time. I mean, this is not exhaustive. I can't think of many books that are written earlier than it that do something similar. The only one that did vaguely swing to mind was A Sultry Month by Alethea Hayter.

I don't know if anyone's read that. And that's slightly different because it's not necessarily pulling out characters from underneath. I mean, the characters in that or the real people in that are all very well known. It is winding together

sort of a variety of lives in the same way. And it is animating them in a sort of narrative nonfiction manner, which I think works quite well here. But it's definitely not as kind of excitingly groundbreaking, I think, as what Johnson is doing. Because like Rachel was saying,

those asides that she kind of has to the reader, it's almost like she's breaking a fourth wall, right? She's kind of coming out of the character of the biographer or out of the character of the narrator and then becoming the biographer or vice versa. And saying to us, look at this differently, like what I'm telling you here. Yeah. You know, you need to take this with you need this little bit of information. I need this bit of pinch of salt with it.

That, I think, is really exciting to read. In her review in The Listener, 1973, Margaret Drabble, of course, it's an excellent analysis of the book. Margaret Drabble says, Diane Johnson is biased against Meredith, but at least she lets us see it and lets us see why. And I think that is one of the elements that must have seemed preposterous to some readers in the early 70s don't you think i mean i can't tell how well known and respected george meredith was in 1972 but he is almost unknown here in 2023 right so i was doing my degree from 1988 and most people didn't want to read Meredith because, you know, if you've got a choice between reading, you know, Diana of the Crossways and Tess of the Derbyvilles, you're going to read Tess of the Derbyvilles, right? Unless you're Andy Miller. Carry on, carry on, move on, move on. But one thing I do remember vividly was the tutors telling us that, you know, Meredith then was still spoken of as the kind of great modernist of the Victorians and as the feminist and that someone that Virginia Woolf admired. And one thing that I think is very interesting about this book

and why it speaks to me now is, as we know, we see the gap between what Meredith said about women and how he treated a woman. And that is very relevant to now where a lot of men are, I'm afraid, policing women and telling us, you know, I'm nicer than you. You've got to think this. You've got to think that. And the gap between what they say and what they do is quite marked in my view. And I think this book is very interesting on that.

on that. And I think that in the early 70s, you're right, Andy, that people would have still been thinking, even people who hadn't read Meredith, would have had this sort of, he had this veneer of, you know, well, he was modern and he wrote modern love and he understood that couples weren't necessarily compatible and all of that. And this makes you see his hypocrisy without ever saying he's a hypocrite, which would just be tedious. I think the lightness Lucy does her massive, it's a superb artistic choice because actually it doesn't feel vindictive.

It feels sort of a shruggingly amused statement of how she sees it realistically. Yeah, yeah. She's got such a light touch and such a wit. I want to pick up on something that Rachel said only about how witty the book is. And this is wonderful. So at the very end of the book,

that section where she gives brief lives and she gives the birth dates and death dates of the characters. And when you get to George Meredith, you know, it says, Meredith George, 1828 to 1909, important English novelist and poet. He was known in his day for his, quote,

advanced views on such matters on women's lot. And then of course, Mary Ellen Peacock Nichols comes underneath, 1821 to 1861, an unfortunate but courageous woman. I mean, it's sort of, it's such a wonderful kind of bit that you could just pass over and kind of forget, but these little nuggets of information, it is the kind of cleverness and the sharpness of it. But I was also going to say, I think Johnson, she wrote some kind of like academic dissertation on Meredith herself at one point,

didn't she? And then I listened to an interview and she says something like, you know, she wrote some kind of academic dissertation on Meredith herself at one point, didn't she? And then I listened to an interview and she says something like, you know, she was a fan of his, but by the end of writing this book, she came to absolutely hate the guy. So it certainly changed her heart over the course of it. Well, that's in the tradition of a great backlisted favourite that we've never actually made an episode about, which is Roger Lewis's Life and Death of Peter Sellers,

where the whole animus of that incredible book is how much Lewis comes to hate Sellers by the time he finishes writing it, built into the footnotes. And footnotes, of course, feature in this book as well, and we'll come on to those. But I know how much our listeners will want to hear about those footnotes. So please stay with us for a moment while we go to a break to hear from our sponsors. Welcome back. I would like to say to John Mitchinson,

one of the things that I loved about featuring, that we were going to talk about this book, is we have a longstanding belief on Backlisted that all the best books are books about other books. And it struck me that the true history of the first Mrs. Meredith is one of the best books about books that we've ever featured on this podcast, right? I mean, Rachel, you were saying about second wave feminism.

We should try and explain, I mean, Rachel, you were saying about second wave feminism. We should try and explain, I think, why this was perhaps radical in that context. But for me, reading it now, I was thinking, my goodness, this is so, so elegantly, wittily done to say to the reader, I barely know more than you do. Let's agree to pretend that we can recreate this world via something factual, which simultaneously is impossible without the introduction of fictional techniques. I thought that was magnificently done. Inspired conjecture, yeah. magnificently done inspired conjecture yeah but i mean one of the the things this one of the the most subtle things that i think the books about books things that johnson does here is she she you know we've had the outlaw bear outline of the story you know the marriage fails and

she leaves mered Meredith and has, and was probably already having the affair with the painter, Henry Wallace, and has a child with him. You know, the sense of her agency is really strong. And Meredith, really, after that, he can't stand even for people to mention her name. He's incredibly cross about her. And most biographers have left it at that, right?

But what Johnson does is shows that he can't leave. He can't leave her alone in his own writing. Not only does he write this quite weird sequence of sonnets called Modern Love, but continually through his career, he comes back to the issue of what happens between men and women and lies in marriage and uh and independence and beauty and all the things i mean she was an older woman and obviously she died after the marriage that she left she didn't have very long uh on her own she died at age 40 from renal failure um and that is perhaps also why she's kind of fallen out of the historical record but it's as a it's a book at a very deep level about how writing works at all both fiction and non-fiction and that's the thing i think that sets it apart from it's this is not a biography in my view. Yeah, well, I would like to ask you all, what is this book?

It arrives in your hands in the bookshop and you're only allowed one section to put it in. Where does it go? Does it go in women's writing, fiction, biography, lit crit or other? Other. It goes in one of those bookshops that has the weird system where you can never find the book you want but you always come across wonderful gems along the way

you could put it in all of those and in none of those and that's the genius of it right I sort of feel it is a biography she doesn't go too far so she does in she does imagine things she does you know what was that john said imaginative conjecture that's She knows when she can't be right. She doesn't know about wrongness, so she can make some guesses, but she knows when she should stop.

Certain things are not possible. And I think that that's one of the brilliant things about it, that it's like a tightrope walk, that she makes little guesses and she draws little pictures, but she never spoils it by saying something extreme. And I feel like if I was writing this book, I would ruin it because I'd say something like, Meredith was just a pig. And she never does that. You know, she.

That's what that's what podcasts are for, Rachel. I just do you see what I mean? It's incredibly well judged. Everything in it is kind of true. The facts are all true. Even when she pushes it diane johnson wasn't available to uh answer the question directly but here is a clip um of her talking about the relationship between truth and lies fiction and non-fiction um from a lecture that

she gave about 10 years ago one of its observations is that my hometown of Moline was a very quiet place. One passage describes how the most shocking thing that ever happened in Moline was that someone did once draw a rude chalk outline on the playground pavement of our Calvin Coolidge junior high school principal, Mr Congdon, with a 10-foot penis. When I sent a few chapters to my childhood friend, Alice Kago,

for verification of some facts, was our elementary school playground to the west of the school and so on, she wrote back several pages of objection. Logan School faces north-south, not east-west. Our Latin teacher was Miss McIntyre. And no one ever drew a rude picture of Mr. Cognit on the pavement. How disgusting. How could you make something like that up?

But no, I remember our amazed fascination and our discussions about whether we ought to rub it out and whether Mr. Cognit, what he would do if he saw it. Can we claim that something is true because we remember it that way? The unreliability of memory is well known. The safe disclaimer of fiction forestalls lots of indignation to say nothing of lawsuits. Scholars love to find the lies in bygone works of nonfiction, Dickens' exaggerations about the Blacking House, for example. But such inquiries are never really productive.

For what is truth, it's many levels. It's literal and emotional divergences. At some level, everything we write is true because it's true to our own perception. But we still have to be careful what we call it. We still have to be careful what we call it. We still have to be careful what we call it. That seems to me really wise, right? It doesn't have to be one thing,

but we have to be in the age of, you know, the crown. We have to be very clear about what it is we are doing. And Rachel, I agree with you. I think one of the almost, it feels to me, instinctive elements of this book is the way in which she knows it feels to me instinctively where to draw that line yes the judgment is not merely tonal but actually relevant to the the subject as well I mean I I was interested that you said that she said that she came to hate Meredith because one of the things I think about

the book is that it's so generous and that she has sympathy for everyone no matter really how badly they behave she sees that people are complicated obviously but also sometimes they can't help themselves uh you know they they do things that they probably know themselves are wrong but they that's what human beings are we're always kind of you know cocking things up for ourselves particularly when it comes to our hearts and the people that we love and um and i think that you know with meredith and all of them it's especially tender at the end where she writes about what Wallace did after she dies. And he just seems to be so, in many ways, sort of lovely,

but in another way, kind of distant and a bit like a trustafarian. But she's so generous, I think, to everyone in the book and as lucy said she notices everyone she seems to just have a very big heart as a writer what one of the one of the things i felt about the book after i read it was when i went into it i was like oh lesser lives okay that means um you know chambermaids or or women or passing characters but by the end of the book, I thought, no, she means, it does mean that, but it also means George Meredith. It also means the life as lived here in the way I can present it to you is a lesser life compared with Mary Ellen's life.

A great man isn't necessarily a good man. You know, that's one of the messages, I think, in it. But also a rebalancing of the account is very important. And it doesn't require a total reversal whereby a different set of people are demonized or marginalized. It just requires a subtle realignment. John? Yeah, I think that the subtlety is absolutely the thing and not going too far, as you said.

Some of us remember the, I think, ill-conceived fictional passages in Peter Aykroyd's Dickens biography. But, you know, she does take liberty. We love you, Pete. pete come on be a guest just i just can i just read this passage because it gives you the set that you did she this i think is pretty audacious for a for a book that is to some degree or other as i say it's a it's more more than a biography in some ways but she this is her imagining uh the the when mary ellen was buried there were very few people there her dad couldn't face hot thomas peacock couldn't face coming to

the funeral and went into a deep depression afterwards again which you don't often get out of the accounts that have been written since um since she died so this is visitation of ghosts at her grave. Next, some grislier shades appear, wet, dripping, adorned with seaweed and starfish and other regalia of the drowned. Two are young men whose permanently resentful expressions, fixed so at their deaths, are mitigated here by looks of sorrow and of cosmic anger in their glaring dead eyes. The first is young Lieutenant Nicholls, Mary Ellen's husband when she was 22. They were married for three months before his drowning. For him, she remains his beautiful bride.

He weeps. The other is the poet Shelley. He had told Peacock that the little stranger was introduced into a rough world. He shrugs, but his eyes sting. This Mary Ellen had been brave, but she was born in the wrong time. Like his contemporary Poe, Shelley thought there was nothing in the world so sad as the death of a young and beautiful woman. He grasped the arm of Edward Nicholls.

They had not known each other in life, but they find a certain camaraderie now. Of no importance to Mary Ellen, but of interest to us, are two other drowned and ghastly figures, a discreet distance away, diffidently attending Shelley and Nicholls. The one, pale and bloated, is Harriet Shelley, and the other is a one-armed sailor, whose name is not known. Seaweed decorates his dripping hair. Shrill and scolding voices, female voices, rustle of petticoats, brisk feet. Mary Shelley is the one in the wide skirt and the woman in the high-waisted Regency gown

is her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. They have pretty, pointed faces and thin lips. They are angry on Mary Ellen's behalf. Their impatient feet tap. They pace over the grave. Must it always be this way for women? Here was one they thought might persevere in women's name. She had promise.

She had courage. I mean, I think, A, that's a terrific bit of writing. But also, you'll go with her because she's making a very important point. I thought it was fascinating that Diane Johnson, 10 years after writing this book, pens a biography of the writer Dashiell Hammett, a great man who we featured on Backlisted, who also did awful things.

And that biography was authorised by Lillian Hellman, who made something of a name for herself after Hammett's death by saying, well, I contributed much to Dashiell's career. It seems implausible to me that she wasn't attracted to employing Johnson to do that job because of Johnson's work on this particular book. It seems like an obvious thing. Now, Rachel, I know you've read some of Diane Johnson's novels. She's had this very peculiar career. What sort of thing has she gone on to write? I read this book, Le Divorce.

Le Divorce, made into a film by Merchant Ivory. It's about Americans in Paris. It's a very kind of witty update on Wharton. It's a very kind of witty update on Wharton and Americans by Johnson's telling are a bit, they're a bit sort of, you know, they're gauche. They don't know what to eat. They don't know what to wear. They don't know how to have sex properly. Like Victorian. Yes, exactly. Boom. Exactly. And the French sort of, you know, teach if you if you are open hearted and young, then the French can teach you how to eat, have sex or, you know, wear a jacket properly, all of it. And they're very, really well plotted, really well written. And actually, the book that Mary Ellen is reading, which you referred to right at the beginning, John.

Adolphe. Adolphe. The epigram of each chapter is from Adolphe in Le Divorce. So she's so sophisticated. She can do anything. She can write these witty novels that are made into cheesy rom-coms but she can also do this digging into victorian life i mean i'm just completely in awe of her and she's written a memoir that i must read about the flyover states where she grew up and you couldn't the mind

boggles or what that will be like fly over lives that's cool yeah came out about 10 years ago yeah in fact she's still she's still. She's in her late 80s. She published a novel by a knot called Lorna Mott Comes Home in 2021. She herself says that when she dies, she'll be remembered for two things. The first is that she was on the same magazine entry course as Sylvia Plath, which Plath goes on to write about in The Bell Jar, and that it was obvious to her, Diane Johnson, and everyone there that Sylvia Plath was preternaturally talented

and was going to go on to be extremely famous. So she's a footnote to Plath's story, but also, and here's a clip, she's a footnote to another writer's story tremendously close to my heart. And Rachel, when you suggested Diane Johnson, I thought, Diane Johnson, I know that name. It can't be, can it? But it was. Here she is talking about working with Stanley Kubrick

on the screenplay for The Shining. It came about because he wanted to make a horror movie. He had investigated other genres, science fiction and so on. And now it was time to make a horror movie. So he read different things. And it came down to my novel, The Shadow Knows. And Stephen King's... The Shadow Knows.

The Shadow Knows, yes. And Stephen King's book, The Shining. And so he chose, for various reasons, chose The King, but in the process of having talked to me and Stephen King, probably decided I was more docile or, you know... A mistake on his part. That I was the one he wanted to work with him. So that's how it came about.

I just kept getting these phone calls from him every night at 11. So you were not physically together? No, just this strange man would call and want to talk about literature and everything. And when it finally got to the screen, did you see any of your work up there? Oh, sure. You did? Yeah, I wrote the script. Well, I understand that, but he went with it.

He didn't necessarily manipulate it through his own process. No, there were some changes. Well, he was very involved in the process all the way along. I wrote it in England, sitting around his house, basically. So there were no surprises by the time the script was finished. When it came to the shooting, he cut out a lot of Wendy's lines.

In fact, so the wife, Wendy, who ended up, the Shelley Duvall character, really has very little to say. In my version, she was more articulate. But apparently Kubrick hated her, or hated the way she was saying. They didn't get along, he and Shelley Duvall. And he didn't like the way she would say the lines.

And so he'd say, oh, then nevermind, cut that. So finally it came down to her just screaming a lot, basically. You probably remember. My favourite scene in The Shining is the scene where Shelley Duvall comes across the manuscript that her husband Jack Torrance has been working on, which says all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy over and over and over again for 500 pages and that's not in Stephen King's novel

that is an invention of Diane Johnson's brackets and Stanley Kubrick and it occurs to me listening to that that the process she so accurately pins in the first Mrs. Meredith then goes on to happen to her, which is, in one respect at least, she becomes a footnote to this battle between two quote-unquote great men, Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick. That idea that the author of the screenplay of The Shining, a woman, can be vanished in the shadow of two great men arguing with one another over the true meaning of The Shining

seems, and she predicts it in this book, it's a strange and uncanny thing i also read something or i listened to another interview i had with her where she said that um the link she thought between lesser lives and what she did writing on the shining was something to do with dropping character storylines like knowing when to stop when to like let someone go and put someone else up which i thought was quite fascinating because I hadn't at first you know hear about the shining and her involvement you think wow that's such a weird thing to do but obviously there's a lot there about writing and writers but I thought that was very interesting that script writing taught her

when to stop and start with stories well you know we we like a book about books on uh backlisted and shining is perhaps the greatest film ever about how awful it is to write a book so um i i i um rachel what i feel like we're i feel like we've done this the wrong way around do you think we should talk about feminism now well um there is something that i think is good about this book in um in in a feminist way which is that um a lot of the sort of you know with big quote marks around feminist biographies that i've read recently overstate the case of the woman. And I understand why they do that. But so for instance, if we were to take Eileen Orwell as an example, you know, she could have been a genius too, that kind of thing. And what I like about this book is that Diane Johnson doesn't make any that Diane Johnson doesn't make any great claims for Mary Ellen.

She says how clever and lively and witty she was and actually how independent she was. But she doesn't sort of say, you know, she was a genius and if only we could rescue her. And what's fascinating about it is that it's left to Mary Ellen's daughter to have a career because she ends up running this cookery school and she continues to run it even after she marries. And of course, she learned about cooking from her mother and her grandfather, Thomas Peacock, who were these great know, these great greedy pigs, a bit like me. And so I love that about the book that Diane Johnson, it's again,

a case of not going too far. She absolutely sees Mary Ellen, but she doesn't overstate her case. You know, she, and then she brings us Edith, the daughter right at the end, who's, you know she and then she brings us edith the daughter right at the end who's you know making pies and teaching people to make pies and that i just find that so wonderful there's something incredibly cheering and inspiriting about it for me that's wonderful is it and it's true to say i suppose the link with carmen is carmen's publishing it seems to me, was always motivated by, I remember her saying to us actually, John, was there something interesting about it? Was there something good about it?

Not was there something on message about it, though that obviously was an important part, but did it pass muster? Was it good? And I assume, Rachel, she liked this book even though it clearly was old news to her it was it feels so part of her project yeah I mean this is so her kind of thing and you're right about that I mean you know famously Carmen had this thing she used to talk about the Whipple line uh which is that she thinks that Dorothy Whipple was a shit writer and that she

would never be published. She would never be published by Virago. And of course, that makes Nicola Bowman, who runs Persephone, absolutely livid. But Carmen's view was things have to be interesting and good. And to just be something by or about a woman isn't enough, that that is in a way that's counterproductive. You know, that's how Carmen saw it. And I think that that's definitely the case with this book. As you say, it's not about formulaic reclamatory history. It's about whether it's well told.

For Carmen, it seemed to me it was always about the actual quality, the actual literary quality of the books that she was publishing. And that's why she used to get so annoyed about people writing certain men off, you know, on the grounds that they were, I've used the word already, pigs. And so she didn't go along with that because her view was, well, let's look at the book and we'll think about the book and then we'll think about the book and then we'll think about their character.

And that's definitely a play here, isn't it, that you don't come away loathing Meredith. In fact, I actually feel more curious about him than ever. Yeah. And I love looking at the pictures of him. He's rather a beautiful- looking man in my view. Don't objectify George Meredith. I'm going to do a Victorian hotties calendar.

Meredith at the centrefold. You could feature John with that beard. Do you know what, Rachel? Mitch has been making 197 episodes of this podcast so that finally someone will refer to him as a Victorian hottie. Do you know what, Rachel? Mitch has been making 197 episodes of this podcast so that finally someone will refer to him as a Victorian hottie. There you go.

I could not be more happy. I'm afraid that's all we've got time for. Thank you to Rachel for suggesting what I hope we've demonstrated as a Stone Cold classic. To Lucy for adding her usual depth and perspective to this discussion, to Nikki for making us all sound even more professional,

and of course to Carmen, who would surely have been lobbing in astute observations, brilliant insights, and marvellous gales of laughter had she been able to join us. If you'd like show notes with clips, links, and suggestions for further reading for this show, and the 196 that we've

already recorded please visit our website at backlisted.fm if you want to buy the books discussed visit our bookshop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop and we're still keen to hear from you on twitter facebook and instagram If you want to hear Backlisted early and without ads, subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits. If you subscribe at the lock listener level, for a third as much as the advance

offered for Thomas Peacock's never-to-be-published cookbook, The Science of Cookery, you'll get not one, not one, but two extra exclusive podcasts every month. We call it Locklisted because it began in the Wenlock Tavern just before lockdown. It features the three of us talking and recommending the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.

For those of you who enjoyed our What Have You Been Reading, Andy slot, that's where you'll now find it. Plus, Locklisters get their names read out, accompanied by lashings of thanks like this rob clucus thank you mimi smith thank you nick randall thank you andrew oakley thank you erin graham thank you sylvie erb thank you rachel dress the thank you sharon mcfee thank you sarah hodgkinson thank you henry giardina thank you thank you all for listening you're gonna hear uh another little bit from uh carmen one of carmen's appearances on bat listed

um we hope she's um agreeing with this or disagreeing with it or you know buying knickers in monoprix right at this moment. Anyway, thanks very much, everybody. John, anything you want to add? Yeah, good. Just to say on the knickers theme, I'm not going to read it out, but there is some brilliant footnote about ladies' underwear or the lack of ladies' underwear.

That is the one footnote we should have read out, guys. Well, come on. Let's have it and then we'll go. The speculation is, did she remove them to have sex with her underwear, to have sex with Henry Wallace? And the footnote says, if she removed them. Ladies often wore no drawers in those days, for drawers, though known, were new in 1856

and were thought to be masculine in that they imitated trousers. So the whole thing may have been simpler than we think. Not much is known about Victorian notions of propriety and dress for erotic occasions. Did they remove their clothing? Or only the better classes? Or only prostitutes? Much would depend too, no doubt, upon the season of the year.

That's a brilliant footnote. As the autumn nights draw in. All right. Thank you autumn nights draw in. All right. Thank you so much, Rachel. Thank you, Lucy. And thanks, everyone. We'll see you in a fortnight for Halloween.

Bye-bye. See you next time. Goodbye. Bye. Bye. Yes, but can we discuss now for about 24 hours, female masochism? Let us not draw breath on the subject. Let us drone on and on and on and on. I'm sure our producer will have something to say on that topic.

And you see, what is so extraordinary about Elizabeth Jenkins, she knew about it because she was an exemplar of it. Yeah. And that's what they do for their men, you know, in those days. In those days? They did. Because what they got as a reward was the protection of a great strong man with a door of an iron box. But many of the writers who wrote introductions to these novels

when I first published them now, what is it, 40 years ago? Republished them, sorry. Or a different class of writer. You know, it's wonderful to think how much women's lives have improved, because there's always the element of astonishment when you read a novel like this, to think what women suffered before everybody tried to change their lives in the Western world anyway.