Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S2 Ep15: Reclaim Her Name

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

Today’s book club is all about Reclaim Her Name – a 25 book collection Women's Prize for Fiction sponsor Baileys have re-printed with a twist.    Throughout history, female writers have had to write under male pen names for their work to be published or taken seriously. The Reclaim Her Name collection aims to give these women the credit they deserve. For the first time, Baileys is printing the real names of these women writers on their books.   Zing Tsjeng is joined by Catherine Nichols, an academic who has first-hand experience of writing under a male pseudonym, Kamila Shamsie, a British Pakistani writer and novelist who won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018 with Home Fire and finally, our Founder Director and international bestselling author Kate Mosse, who has been a key part of the research that went into putting this collection together. The reading list: Middlemarch by Mary Ann Evans (AKA George Eliot) Marie of the Cabin Club by Ann Petry (AKA Arnold Petri) Ye Game and Playe of Chesse and The Bicycle Race by Alice Dunbar Nelson (AKA Monroe Wright) We also have actor Tori Allen-Martin treating us to readings, plus an interview between Zing and Ann Petry's daughter. Every fortnight, join Zing Tsjeng, editor at VICE, and inspirational guests, including Dolly Alderton, Stanley Tucci, Liv Little and Scarlett Curtis as they celebrate the best fiction written by women. They'll discuss the diverse back-catalogue of Women’s Prize-winning books spanning a generation, explore the life-changing books that sit on other women’s bookshelves and talk about what the future holds for women writing today. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and this series will also take you behind the scenes throughout 2020 as we explore the history of the Prize in its 25th year and gain unique access to the shortlisted authors and the 2020 Prize winner. Sit back and enjoy. This podcast is produced by Bird Lime Media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At Harrison Healthcare, we know that lasting health starts with personalized care. We're not just a clinic. We're your partner in prevention, helping you achieve your health and longevity goals. Our expert team combines evidence-based medicine with the compassionate, unhurried care you and your family deserve today and for many years to come. When it comes to your health, you shouldn't settle for anything less than exceptional. Visit Harrisonhealthcare.ca.ca.com.com. I'm Zing Singh, your host for a special edition for the season of the Women's Prize podcast, coming to you every fortnight throughout 2020. Now, this year is the 25th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction, and you've joined me for a very special episode, which is brought to us by our long-term sponsors, Bayleys.

Today's book club is all about reclaim her name. A 25 book collection, Bayleys have reprinted with a twist. Now, throughout history, female writers have had to write under male pen names. for their work to be published or taken seriously. The Reclaim Her Name Collection aims to give these women the credit they deserve. For the first time, Bailey's is printing the real names of these women writers on their books. Today we're joined by some special guests to talk about a few of the books in more detail, such as Middlemarch by Mary Ann Evans, aka George Elliott, and Marie of the Cabin Club written by Anne Petrie,

the first ever black American woman to sell over 1 million copies of a novel. We'll also be exploring issues of gender equality in publishing that still exists today, including challenges we faced while looking for writers of colour, plus we'll be shining a spotlight on some truly brilliant female authors. Hello and welcome to a Reclaim Her Name episode of the Women's Prize for Fiction Book Club. Now, before we dive into that, our fortnightly reminder that we are still practicing social distancing, so this recording is being done remotely. So please excuse any minor sound hiccups. For the first time, Bayleys is printing the real names on the front covers of books by 25.

female authors who wrote under male pseudonyms during their lifetime. If any of the books pique your interest, you can download all 25 completely free. Just head to bailey's.com slash reclaim her name. Today we'll be focusing on three authors included in the list, Mary Ann Evans, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Anne Petrie. To discuss these brilliant women and much more, I'm joined by a bunch of amazing guests, Catherine Nichols, an academic who has first-hand experience of writing under their male pseudonym,

Kamala Shamsi, a British Pakistani writer and novelist who won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2018 with Homefire. And finally, our founder-director and international best-selling author Kate Moss, who has been a key part of the research that went into putting this collection together. And we also have actor Tori Allen Martin treating us to readings from three of the books from the collection. Catherine, Kate, Kamila, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. How are you all doing in lockdown?

well, semi-lockdown. I think we've self-exited it's ever so slightly, haven't we? Camilla, how have you found it? I've been writing, and usually when I'm doing that, I find my reading falls off, which is a peculiar state of affairs, but it's been good for writing. Kate, what about you? As a writer, I've been very becalmed. You know, because we were celebrating the 25th anniversary of the prize, and we're expecting to do all of those things, and I was expecting to have a book out,

and I was expecting to have a play on. I've done a lot of thinking and a lot of walking, actually, more than anything else. So I'm jealous of you, Kamala, that you've been writing and managed to still do that. And what about you, Catherine? Have you felt like you've been productive during this time off? Well, I've actually been experiencing one of the main experiences of many female writers, which is I've been keeping my kids alive. I have three school-age kids, and they are not at school.

So that's been, I don't know. Challenging. It's been a challenge, but it's also been. like you're spending time with people that expand your mind, but at the same time you can't actually write down any of the things that you understand about human nature that you've learned because you're constantly being pulled away and distracted. So we've got 25 books in this collection.

And I just wanted to ask, you know, you've seen the collection, you've seen the covers, which are very, very pretty. They're gorgeous, actually. How well known were these books to you? Had you previously read any of them? Well, obviously, as the founder director of the prize, I've been much more involved in the selection, which has all been done by Bailey's, especially commissioned team.

And one of the things that I think is so wonderful, you mentioned the cover zing, is that they are all commissioned by female illustrators as well. So there's this real sense, which is what the prize is all about, is standing by and with and for other women and supporting other women's creativity. But I was astonished. You know, when I thought I was going to know loads and loads of these. But in fact, I would say I only knew about half. and the research, particularly for writers, black writers, women of colour,

different types of writing, sort of biography and poetry from all over the world. That has been fabulous and really eye-opening. I'm just so thrilled that Bayleys is making these 25 for our 25th available for free so that lots of people will start to get to know the lesser-known names, not just the more famous like George Eliot, obviously, or George Sand. There's some very famous ones in here, but some real little discovery gems. I would say. What about you, Catherine? Were you familiar with any of the books in the collection from Reilly's? Really just the big names, but I found it incredibly moving to go through.

When you sent me the list, I went through and read about all the authors and kind of looked into their lives a little bit. None of them were supposed to be writers. All of them were writing against these significant obstacles, and they did. I even found their names moving because I was thinking about how Harper is such a popular baby name because everyone likes Harper Lee, but their names are actually obscured behind these pseudonyms. So all of these names that should have this kind of feeling of literary glamour, they're hidden. And so I actually found it very moving to think about pulling their names out. I have to confess, even looking at, you know, the copy of Middlemarch and not seeing George Elliott there and seeing Mary Ann Evans to me,

I was like, oh, this is what, this is the same person. And yet we're so used to seeing that name, that male name, George Elliott, on the cover. That was my first sort of response because I looked and I thought, oh my God, I haven't read any of these writers. And then sort of looked a little closer and thought, Marianne Evans sounds familiar. And it really did take me a moment of, oh, my God, that's George Elliott. And of course, it's a fact I've always known since I was a teenager

that George Elliott was Marianne Evans. And yet, seeing it on the cover of a book, I thought, I don't know that writer. Do you think this topic comes as a surprise to you at all? because it just feels like it's been accepted over the decades that women just had to write under the names of men without giving any real thought as to why that might be the case. I think what is really interesting that most of these books were books that are out of copyright, so they're of a particular period of history. And it is quite interesting looking at the biographies of the different writers,

that there are different barriers to women depending where they live in the world, what their race is, what their circumstances are. So there isn't one reason for using a male pseudonym. And I think, Carmen, you had quite a lot of thought about how different it was in sort of Pakistan and India and countries that you were more familiar with many of the writers. Yeah, because Kate and I had a conversation a while ago and she said, you know, are there their writers you can think of from South Asia, who women who wrote under male pseudonyms? And I thought, oh my God, what's wrong with my brain? I can't. And obviously there must have been many. and so then I asked my mother, which is always the thing I do in these circumstances,

and then we had a long conversation about it. My mother's a writer and a critic. And, you know, what we came to in the end was that actually it wasn't as far as we know, something that women were always writing, but that there was a sort of genre question so that things like the diary form were seen as, you know, the space where women should write, and things like poetry were very much for men. And of course, the thing about people, male pseudonyms is you only know about those if the works actually get published. So who knows

how many women writers were publishing things? I'm sure there were women writing poetry in the subcontinent and just not thinking or not finding a way to get it out there under male pseudonyms. But the male pseudonym thing didn't exist. And in fact, the only story I could think of was a wonderful writer called Isma Chuktai, who was an Urdu writer of the early 20th century, extraordinary feminist and brilliant writer. And the first time she published a work, everyone assumed that her brother, who was also a writer, had written it and for some reason he'd chosen a woman's pseudonym

and no one could quite understand why. But again, that idea of, well, it can't really be a woman writing this extraordinary, bold story. So it's sort of a similar story, even though it's in reverse. Right. So even when she did publish it under her own name, people went out of their way to attribute it to a man. Yeah, yeah. Unbelievable.

Well, we're going to talk about our first book that we've picked, which is Middle March by Marianne Evans, aka George Elliott. Born in 1818, she's considered one of the best writers in British history. Middle March actually was voted number one in a BBC poll for the greatest British novel, which tells you a little bit about what an acclaimed reader is. And Catherine, you've kindly said that you would give us a synopsis. Sure, yeah.

Well, so it's an ensemble cast. Like, I guess if it were a movie, it would be an ensemble cast. It's about Dorothea Brooke, who's a young woman in a small town in England in 1830s, when the trains come to town, basically. And it's sort of about how this society changes, how young people's lives and older people's lives change through these industrialization in England. And if you compare it. other novels about industrialization and trains in particular like Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, you can see that there's similar ideas about people's lives kind of opening up and the

possibilities of what they can do and maybe they want to buy more things, maybe they have different ways of making money, maybe they fall in love with people that live farther away than the next village. And in the case of Tolstoy or Floubert, that scene is just a like a disaster and young women who are exposed to nice things or other people that they could fall in love with, they'll die, you know. But then in Middle March, it's this incredibly valuable second chance for a lot of these characters that they aren't just stuck with a mistake that they made when they were 19. So I don't know if that's exactly a synopsis, but it's sort of there's young characters who all make mistakes, but then sort of they have opportunities to change those

mistakes and then there's older characters who are kind of still living with things decisions that they made when they were young. But they don't necessarily have a chance to revisit. I think that's a brilliant synopsis and a brilliant distillation of what I think a lot of people don't realise about middle march, which is in a way it's a novel about technology and how, you know, the march of technology shakes things up, especially for women like Dorothy. I always get this wrong. I always want to say Dorothy, like we're in Wizard of Oz. And it's also really interesting, don't mind me leaping in, that how powerful it is to see, as you say, a novel that is about industrialisation and technology in a way, a sort of very muscular, big, ambitious novel. And to see the woman's name on there rather than the invisible woman behind the male name, finally.

Let's hear an excerpt from Middlemarch. This is the actor Tori Allen Martin with a reading. The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottages, was generally in favour of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking, while Miss Brooks's large eyes seemed like her religion too unusual and striking. Poor Dorothea. Compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly wise. So much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonery or clock-face for it. Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her by this alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably reconcilable with it. Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure, she looked very little like a devotee.

Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms. She felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan, sensuous way and always looked forward to renouncing it. She was open, ardent and not in the least self-admiring, Indeed, it was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with attractions altogether superior to her own. And if any gentleman appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of seeing Mr. Brook, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia.

Sir James Chatham, for example, whom she constantly considered from Celia's point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good for Celia to accept him. That he should be regarded as a suited to herself would have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance. Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious hooker if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony, or John Milton, when his blindness had come on, or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure. But an amiable, handsome baronet who said exactly to her remarks, even when she expressed uncertainty, how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father and could teach you even Hebrew if you wished it.

These peculiarities of Dorothea's character caused Mr. Brooke to be all the more blamed in neighbouring families for not securing some middle-aged lady as a guide and companion to his nieces. But he himself dreaded so much the sort of superior woman likely to be available for such a position that he allowed himself to be dissuaded by Dorothea's objections and was in this case brave enough to defy the world. that is to say Mrs Cadwolder the rector's wife and the small group of gentry with whom he visited in the northeast corner of Lomshire so Miss Brooke presided in her uncle's household and did not at all dislike any authority with the homage that belonged to it and I must say that even after I discovered that George Elliott was a woman I just assumed she was a woman who happened to be called George

you know sort of in sort of in like an Enid Blighton and so when I realised that no it was actually the male George a pseudonym that Mary had adopted for the novel's sake. I was quite shocked because, for one thing, I don't know why we still print George Elliott when everyone knows it was Marianne Evans. Why do you think this is? It's an interesting one, isn't it?

Because I was thinking of the Brontes who originally published under male pseudonyms. But, you know, no one thinks of them as, you know, what are the name, Acton and Carabelle anymore. They became, yeah. Yeah, they became, you know, I suppose in their lifetime, they were able to claim their own names. Yeah, they were.

that was one of the differences. And Charlotte Bronte has written really interestingly about why they did it. She believed that authoresses were inclined to be looked down upon. And the weirdest thing about Emily, aka Ellis, was that when the book got a very mixed reception, Wuthering Heights, when it came out, because it was seen as amoral, apart from anything else, when it was discovered a woman had written it, one of the reviews said, I would kill myself if I had written this book. You know, that it was, you know, it was that sort of sense that it was not just a really difficult book, but a woman had sort of sallied her mind and all of these sorts of things. So the additions appeared in, not in Emily's lifetime, but in Anne and Charlott's, I think.

I mean, Catherine might know, I can't remember, but they came out as themselves really quite early. And Catherine, you actually have real life experience of writing or at least submitting work under a male pseudonym. Would you be able to talk a bit about that? Yeah. So it was several years ago now. I had a manuscript that I had, I mean, I had talked to my writer friends. I had talked to like all the various people in my life and they agreed like, this is it. You did it.

You know, and I had like a previous book that had had had some interest from agents. And so I felt like, okay, you know, I'll send it out and I'll get an agent and I'll sort of get to the next step with this manuscript. And as I sent it out, I found that I got even less interest. from agents in this new book that I thought was sort of bigger and more ambitious and more exciting than my previous work. I was so, so, so sad. And I kind of, I tried sending it out under a male pseudonym just because I had been reading all of these things about implicit bias. And I was like, well, what do I have to lose at this point, you know? And, like, just instantly I found that not only was the reception much warmer, but it was.

almost completely different. It wasn't just that they wanted to read the manuscript. It was like that they wrote more polite emails to me and they would include much more specific critique of the book if they had, you know, critical opinions. And those critical opinions just went much deeper into the content of the book itself rather than just kind of the surface, you know, like beautiful writing. Right. You know, shocking, really. I mean, just shocking. And out of how many, how many submissions did you get back kind of interest as your male pseudonym? Well, as Catherine, I got only two manuscript requests, which was, it was shocking. And then I think it was 17 under my male pseudonym for the same number of

letters. And again, I just kind of like rewrote my own history. Like from the first time I wrote a novel when I was, you know, in college, what if I'd had this level of critique? and this kind of politeness and seriousness about my work all along. You know, like it wasn't just one thing that it changed for me. It just kind of made me revisit everything that I had ever been told about myself in a certain sense, you know? Every creative writing class, you're always there with your female name and your female face and you're getting the sort of gendered version of critique.

My feeling was simultaneously shocking and unsurprisingly. Yes. You know, that there is a part of you that that does know. I mean, we just know that that the world is so deeply patriarchal in all its structures and its attitudes. And it's not just a case of it being at one level. It's at every single level. So Catherine, what you're saying is sort of that it's not just about that book and that submission, but you go back and and think through everyone who has ever said anything about your work in any setting and wonder. how your gender played into their responses. It's one of the reasons that we founded the women's prize in the first place was realizing that it wasn't simply a question of the route to market, which of course was much harder for black women and for women of colour, for working class women, you know, and there are still many issues to make it a more welcoming place

for every voice that has got something to say. But what we did discover very clearly was that people didn't really have a barrier to publishing women, but they did not honour and respect writing by women as literature or take it seriously. So that even though some 60% of novels published were authored by women in the UK when we were setting the prize up in the 1990s, fewer than 9% of novels ever shortlisted for major literary prizes were by women. So there was absolutely that sense of the lack of respect or seriousness

with which work by women was viewed. It was often seen as, yeah, books written by women are for women. whereas books written by men are for everyone because that is what literature is. So I agree with you, Kamala, it's shocking but not surprising because we know, as you say, that these patriarchal systems are very deeply entrenched and they start in our schools and universities and they continue on from there. I was going to say it was one of striking things a few years ago when I was looking at sort of book recommendations

where you have writers writing in to give sort of end-of-year recommendations in all the major newspapers. And I just did a sort of gender survey. And what was very clear was that the women were equally recommending books by men and women. Exactly. And the men were overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly recommending only books by other men. And it was so stark. And in the few cases where they were recommending books by women,

and there were very, very few cases, it would be women writing about things like war or women writing books about men. Yes. Catherine, I know you've asked. actually written about the whole experience of sending the manuscript out under Myosyodun for Jezebel, and I actually really recommend people read that to find out what happened next, as it were. But what did the entire experience leave you feeling? I imagine you must have been quite deflated. It made me angry just at first, and then it made me just

feel very aware of how little dignity there is in so many parts of being a woman in society, that either you're too young or you're too old or you don't look right, you're too hot or you're too ugly, whatever it is. Like you're never quite right for people to respect you. You're telling a story that is like too personal or it's not personal enough and why it's never going to be your turn to speak for humanity. And that what you're doing is always like for book clubs and it's never literature. and just even the word ambitious is like it can be used against you, you know, it's like that you're not kind of staying within your designated scope. And of course, nobody can quite agree on what that scope should be.

I haven't stopped having experiences where that experiment feels relevant. I wish I'd never had this experience at all, but given that I did, I can tell other people about it. And now I can do my real work with my eyes cleared. But it was like, I'm sure you all know this rather apocryphal story of the Vienna Phil, who were every year challenged on why there were no women in the orchestra at all. I mean, not a single one, not even the flautist, where it was famously, you know, many, many women were flautists. And they kept saying, well, it's just because the women aren't very good. You know, they just can't play their instruments and, you know, they're emotional and, you know, all of this sort of stuff.

Until they started to do the auditions blind behind a screen. and then they ended up with 60% of people being women. Because guess what? They were not too emotional to play their flute. And it was, so it's that. But I think it is, you know, beholden on all of us to kind of be there for each other and to speak out for other women, to make room at the table for other women, to have their say, to make sure that when we're doing anything,

that there are diverse voices, that there's always a woman on the platform. and if you can't do something yourself and you're asked to do it, never put the phone down without recommending another woman instead. And so I think that we all need to just use our pointy elbows to look at these things and to say, and this is why this, you know, the claim her name is so important, is to keep pushing back against the invisibility of women and how easy it is to make women invisible, particularly older women, I would say. So this is why these sorts of campaigns matter and all of us are so thrilled to be part of it, is because. because now they are there. They're going to be out on the shelves. And it changes everything when you think, oh, it's a woman behind that.

So we need to be positive and just keep fighting as well, I think. You know, keep saying the same thing and waving the feminist flag. And I think crucially as well, the entire collection is available for free. Exactly. And I think that is truly brilliant because I can't tell you the number of times where, you know, people have told me, oh, people don't want to spend money on books. They'd rather read things online. This is a kind of little experiment.

Like, come on, time to read online. You can read it on your phone. You can read on your iPad, whichever. Although, you know, I have to say I'm a really big fan of the way the books look. So I would like to get copies. Yeah. This podcast is made in partnership with Bailey's Irish cream. Bayleys is proudly supporting the women's prize for fiction

by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Baileys is the perfect adultery. whether in coffee, over ice cream, or paired with your favourite book. Next up, we have Marie of the Cabin Club, an early short story by the influential Harlem Renaissance writer Anne Petrie. Anne Petri, aka Arnold Petri, knew all about double lives because she lived one. Not quite to the extent of the spies in this short story, but as a black woman starting out in publishing, she took the disguise of a man.

Her cover was blown when she became the first African American writer to make it onto the bestseller list. with her novel The Street, which sold over a million copies and made her name. But this tale of espionage and romance in Harlem's smoky jazz scene has always remained under her male pen name. Kate, do you mind briefly summarising for our listeners what the book is about? Well, I'm just thrilled that we have Aunt Petrie on the list. She actually only died in 1997. And I am astonished that I don't know her work. So the street that you mentioned, which published in 1946, which was a debut novel,

is a complete phenomenon. You know, she really was one of the most famous writers in America post Second World War. We found this one short story that's never had her name on is just a joy. It's just a charming tale. A waitress in a Harlan jazz club who works every night and she falls in love with the trumpeter, who very gently every evening just walks her out of the club and make sure that she's okay and all of these sorts of things. And then one night something terrible happens and she's essentially kidnapped.

And it turns out the trumpet is actually a spy. And he's looking out for things going on in the club. And it's a really beautifully put together tale. You can imagine the smoke and the and the beer and the whiskey and the sound of the trumpet sort of echoing up through the Harlem night. And then there is this sudden twist. And it is a real masterclass in how to write a short story where everything is there in just, you know, a matter of a few hundred words.

And what did you make of the short story, Catherine? I loved it. I loved it. It was just such a pleasure. It was just like it was so precise. Every single sentence is taking you farther and deeper into this world and into the gentle, unjaded version of this jazz nightclub. It's not one that considers this a foreign or difficult to understand landscape.

It doesn't consider that these spies. are sort of hardened people at all. These are tender people who are gentle to one another and attentive to one another. And in a way that I just, it reminded me of fan fiction the way that it's just like pure enjoyment every single second. And tender is such a good word. Yeah, that's a beautiful word to describe it. And Camilla, what about you?

I mean, it's so wonderfully bared down as well in the writing. But the other thing I love is because yet there is this tenderness in it and there is this romance. And I mean that in the best possible way. And so often when you have stories where there is an element of romance and then there's the spy story, what happens is the spy story completely takes over. And she doesn't let that happen. You know, the spy story is sort of part of the sort of travails of romantic love, you know, that this might happen. You might be kidnapped. There might be a spy in all of that.

But what's going to happen to the love at the end of it? And I think that's sort of wonderful and felt really sort of fresh and thrilling. And you do get incredibly caught up in the whole thing. And then amazed by the end, by the brevity of it in terms of sort of words and just length, but how much she manages to get in there. I mean, you could make an entire movie very easily out of these sort of two or three thousand words. And that's exactly what I felt reading it. I felt as if she'd built this entire universe

that you could just see adapted for screen in some kind of glossy Netflix adaptation. But she's so economical with language that she does this all so quickly and so efficiently that she just draws you into that universe. Let's hold that thought and have a listen to Torrey Allen Martin with a reading from Marie of the Cabin Club by Anne Petrie.

No one had ever had to tell Marie the little cigarette girl at the cabin club when it was 1 a.m. But at that hour, Georgie Barr stepped into the spotlight and raised his trumpet to his lips. The high, thin, sweet sound that came out made her skin prickle and set her pulse to beating faster and faster. Tonight, as the last note died away, she shivered. It would be an hour before he played that unearthly music again, despite the applause still echoing and re-echoing through the narrow room. He would get a drink at the bar and then sit at a table with the white woman who waited for him every night.

She was so absorbed in watching the quick smile with which he greeted the bartender that she didn't see the fight when it began. When she looked, a giant of a man was throwing the contents of his glass at a smaller fellow standing next to him. You talk too much, he murmured. The little fellow walked towards the big man with something shiny in his hand. Look out, he's got a knife! Men backed away from the pair.

Marie saw Georgie reach for the knife. He was standing just in back of the top. tall man. Oh, he mustn't, she thought. As Georgie tried desperately to snatch it, the little fellow passed it to the big one. It was out of Georgie's reach for the fellow was too tall. She held her breath as the knife descended slowly. In another moment it would reach him. No more music. No more Georgie. She snatched a handful of cigarettes from her tray, hurled them full force into the tall man's face. His grip on the knife relaxed and it fell to the floor with a clatter. She ignored the sigh that went up from the crowd and reached out a trembling hand to support herself on the bar.

She was still shaking when Georgie's hand covered hers. You know you saved my life? He looked at her curiously and then added, Why? I don't know, she faltered. He was too close to her, closer than she'd ever thought of his being in her wildest dreams. She had only to bend an inch nearer to be in his arms. Are you all right?

She nodded her head. ever since she'd gotten the job at the club she'd wanted to talk to him, now that she had the chance, she was speechless. If there's anything I can do, let me know, will you? Yes, she said faintly, and made herself walk away from him towards the dressing room. When he played again, she watched him with a queer feeling of possession. If it hadn't been for her, he wouldn't be playing that miraculous music.

He held the last note so long that she held her breath with it and didn't start breathing again until it had died away. It left her with the feeling that he wasn't a man playing a trumpet, but a brown god who had bewitched the trumpet, turned it into a special kind of magic. It's a beautiful story. I mean, it really is perfect, because so often short stories feel kind of rushed,

and there is a real languor to this story, and you just believe that every night he stands there waiting, and he will put out his arm and she will put her hand on the arm and they will just walk. And it's all very innocent as well. Lovely. It's a langer, but it's a compact langer, which is sort of astonishing. Yeah. Yeah.

And I was wondering, you know, considering that, you know, she published us as Arnold Petri, it makes me wonder how people read it because, you know, would people have read it thinking a man wrote it and therefore, oh, you know, this is a spy story. It's not so much a romance story. if she'd published it as Anne, would people then have said, oh, this is more of a romance story, even though to me, the two go hand in hand, they feel very allied with each other.

It's really interesting, isn't it? Particularly because with short stories, they've often obviously gone to magazines. They're not in book forms, but it's a slightly different sort of publishing. I suspect that when the story appeared in the magazine, and she was very involved in many black and African-American publications in all sorts of different ways anyway,

She was clearly a very, very dynamic person. I think a lot of people would almost not notice the name at the top because they would just assume it had been written by a man and probably thought, oh, how lovely. You see, men can write romance too. I'm sure that it would be that way around. It's like, you know, would she be praised for being, you know, men can write women, you know, that sort of thing.

I mean, you know, I'm really keen to read a biography of Anne Petrie. So anybody out there who is a biographer either let me know that you've done one, or get on with it because, you know, I think that she's clearly an incredibly important person in American literature, and her name should be known by everybody. Well, actually, we can shed more light on the life of Anne Petrie. We spoke to her daughter, Liz, who in 2008, published At Home Inside, A Daughter's Guide to Anne Petrie. Well, she grew up in a tiny little town now called Old Saybrook, Connecticut. In Connecticut's about 105 miles.

east of New York. Her father had gone there to open a pharmacy in 1900, and she was born in 1988. Actually, he wanted her to take over the pharmacy, so they sent her to pharmacy school after she finished high school. And she did that for a number of years as she was beginning to write, but she gave that up as a career after she married my dad and moved to New York. So how did she end up becoming a writer? She was in high school and the class had read Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. And the final exam question was to write a two-page story about an interaction between Jeremy Cruncher. He's the man who dug up the bodies and the poor man's wife.

And she wrote this two-page story. she went off and didn't think any more about it for the weekend. And when she came back in, the teacher whom she didn't like very much held it up and said, I want to read you something. And she read my mother's story to the class. And my mother said, oh, she's going to say it's awful and never do anything like this. And this woman who did not like her looked her in the face and said, I really think if you want to, you could become a writer.

And that's how it started. Wow. So what was her journey towards eventually? publishing her work as a writer? Well, she struggled and struggled and actually she read a biography of somebody who was a lawyer but also wrote fiction. And he said that if he was starting out, he would go and sit in on a class taught by a woman named Mabel Louise Robinson at Columbia University. And my mother submitted some stuff because you had to try out for it or audition for it. And she was accepted. And after she took that class, I think it was actually two classes, she began publishing

regularly. And then eventually she got a fellowship from Houghton Mifflin, and they published her novel The Street, which became a million seller. And she was the first African-American woman to sell more than a million copies of a book. That is truly, truly incredible. I mean, even now, that number is incredible. Truly. So why do you think your mother used a male pseudonym to begin with? Did she ever mention the reason why to you? I was thinking about this.

I don't think I knew that story existed until after she died. She did it because she knew that men got published more frequently than women. So take me back to the early part of the 20th century, because I can imagine it must have been very difficult for African-American women to publish any kind of writing at this time. Well, she actually comes after the Harlem Renaissance. And during that period, I think it became easier. And she kind of followed in the footsteps of Nella Larson and Zorneal Hurston.

And there are a few others. But they're the two major ones. And they were publishing during the 1920s, which is the era of the Harlem Renaissance. And of course, she didn't move to New York until 1938. Do you recall her experiencing any form of racism, or sexism in her life, and how do you think that affected her work in literature? Absolutely, she experienced racism. She got called the N-word and chased off a beach in her hometown when she was a little girl.

Oh, God. When she was in her 70s and went to Hawaii to teach, but everybody had to have an identity card. and she went in to get the identity card, even though she was there basically as a visitor. And the woman, Mother had written, I think, black for ethnicity. And the woman across the desk said, what's this black? You're not black? Because, you know, we're not very dark. But nevertheless, we identify as African-American.

And so up until the 1970s, she was still experiencing. racism. And as far as the sexism, the one thing I remember that she said over and over again was every time she'd go somewhere to talk, somebody would say to her, well, what does your husband do? And she would look at the person and say, well, if I were a man, you wouldn't ask me what my wife does, and that was the end of the conversation. So how do you think your mother would feel to see her name reclaimed on her book for the first time. I think she would love it. I think anything that sends a message to people about how people interact with each other,

which is basically what that story is about, she would welcome. And I think she would be proud to be among great company. And I think the fact that, you know, more people don't know about her speaks to the kind of problem that we had trying to find women, colour for the collection itself. So I think that when we looked at over 3,000 authors with pen names, only a handful were from minority groups and many more were completely unidentifiable because there was a lack of paper records and there was anonymous publication. And, you know, I think that difficulty that we found trying to find more women writers of colour for the collection speaks to just how difficult it is for women from ethnically diverse backgrounds to get published at all. And I wonder how

much of that actually affected Anne, aka Arnold's life as a writer and as an author? Well, I mean, there are six black women and women of colour in the collection, which is fabulous. And sort of, so African American, there are Japanese, there's a Japanese writer, there's an English, Chinese writer, there's a Persian writer that, you know, so that there's a mixture. And I think what Carmel has said and also many of the people that we talk to was that being a person of colour or a black writer was a bigger barrier than being a woman. So many of the novels,

there are white middle class women who disguised their respectability, if you like, by using a male pseudonym. But the barriers to black women and to women of colour in America in particular were enormous. And the author that Carmel is going to talk about actively chose not just a male pseudonym but pretended to be a white man as well.

Well, and one factor as an American, it sort of stands out to me about the Anne Petrie's story is that she is talking about the way that race and gender intersect, that she is talking about both of those issues being the issues that are sort of pressing on this character's life. And I just think it's fascinating that, you know, sometimes, I guess, on social media, that kind of place we can talk about, you know, intersectional feminism as being something kind of new. But it really isn't at all. Absolutely. It's absolutely there in these much earlier texts. And you can see it as well. And I think in the short story, she makes a really big point out of naming the woman that the trumpeter sees every night, the mysterious woman as white. And immediately it kind of introduces this kind of racial tension into the story where it's like, you know, is this a romantic rival? What is this woman's deal? And, you know, part of that is the mystery that eventually unfolds as part of the story. It's always something that's, you know, you keep in the back of your mind.

And she's placed it there very deliberately, I think, to my kind of understanding of the text. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Lastly, we have two short stories by an American poet, journalist, and political activist who wrote under several male pseudonyms. Alice Dunbar Nelson, aka Monroe Wright, had reached a stalemate with publishers by the time she wrote this chess-themed romance. So she tried a male pen name instead. The daughter of a former son. slave, she was born free, but still experienced many hardships as a mixed-race woman in New Orleans.

She was determined to shine a light on racial oppression through her work. And Camilla, would you be able to give us a brief overview of the game and play of chess and the bicycle race, which are the two stories that are in the collection? In some way, these are quite distinct stories. One is set among the quite moneyed world of the summer season of Hamilton on the Bay. And the other one is saying, set in New Orleans, among, I think, the Creole community that she herself grew up in. But what they have in common is it's about fundamentally the humiliation of being enamored by someone who toys with you in both cases. She's such a fantastic writer. I read that first one,

Ye game and play of chess, and just wanted to send it to my writer friends. There are sort of three primary characters in it, Miss Riven and the Major. Ms. Riven adores the major. Ms. Riven adores the major, the major seems to enjoy the company of several women, including her. She tries to make him jealous with the professor. He's meanwhile paying attention to Miss Brown. And then there's the character of Chad, who's sort of the onlooker, who says at one point, the thing possessed the intricacies of a Wagnerian opera. And there's all sorts of very delightful sort of interplay between the characters.

But at the heart of it, there's also this seriousness of what it means. to be taken by someone and to be quite open about it and to have everyone see that you adore someone who doesn't adore you. Chad is this wonderful character because he isn't really integral to the story. We're told in the beginning that he's interested in Miss Riven and quite bitter that the major gets all the attention. But increasingly he becomes a commentator on a fair and the eyes through which we see it, the world.

and it's sort of narratively very smart and interesting. But beyond that, you're really gripped by them and you're really wanting Miss Riven to get the better of the major. And I'm not going to give away what happens in the ending, but it is just remarkable what she does at the end and you sort of let out this very large cheer. The bicycle race is sort of similar ground,

the genders are flipped because in this case, it's Stephen who loves Jacqueline, and Jacqueline is just, you know, she plays with him, but she's not that interested, but she pretends to be interested enough to give him hope. And they go to see this bicycle race in a rather cruel fashion. She places a bet with him, which she's sure she will win, and lets him know that what happens with their relationship

is sort of contingent on the outcome of this bet. And again, it's, you know, it's sort of quite taught and gripping. And there's an actual bicycle race in there, which is wonderfully written because you're really sort of gripped, sort of turn by turn, and who's going to win this race and everything that it carries along with it. I mean, I just think she's extraordinary and able to turn her lens on these very different kinds of worlds

with, I think, equal facility and real sort of intelligence and biting wit. Catherine, what did you make of these two stories? Oh, I completely agree with Kamala that the feeling of like a chess game of flirtation, the idea of who is going to make the next move and what is that next move was so, There was so much immediacy of that in both stories.

It was kind of difficult to read all of the spelled out, the dialogue being sort of in accents that she was describing by distorting the way that the words were spelled. And that's, in general, I think, fallen out of favor as a practice. And I think for good reason, I think that it made me uncomfortable to read. At the same time, I know that she was trying to tell us something about where she's writing from. And I wanted to connect with it and I just also found it, I found it difficult. I completely agree with the bicycle race. I thought it actually quite telling in terms of

the complications of race that when she's writing the scenes in Hamilton on the Bay, that the dialogue is sort of very straightforwardly and sort of spelled in the way you'd expected. Whereas when she's writing this world of New Orleans, which is her world. It is the world she grew up in. She feels a need to misspell words to show you that these characters are deviating from white pronunciation. And there's, of course, a sadness in that, in the fact that writers would feel the need to do that, because it is a way of saying,

yes, I know that what I'm writing, even though it may be my world, is not the accepted way of doing things. But I think that the tension of reading that is sort of, you know, I think there's a sort of thoughtfulness that arises from that about what it meant for writers to have to write in that. that way. Absolutely. Yeah. It kind of took me deeper. Like my discomfort kind of took me deeper into

the story for that reason because I was thinking like, what is she trying to show us here? And their eyes were watching God has some of that. Like there's, it's a practice that, you know, in some cases is considered more dignified. But at this case, it, I kind of had to push myself with it a bit. Kate, what about you? Well, yeah, I think that conversation is so, interesting because of course she was writing in the early part of the 20th century she died in i think 1935 and it was um that idea of texture that comes through the sound of the words not simply what the words are was very very popular um and important uh to denote all sorts of things obviously most significantly race but also in british writing of the time class so you see this is a very common trope if you like when

you have working class characters and they often have very clipped language and misspellings and all of this. For me, what I felt was I would love to hear it as a radio play because I think it's... Yeah, you know, because actually it's... Then it would be like music

rather than written text on the page for the dialect in a way. And you would get the quality of life and the sounds in the streets and the way that she had grown up listening to people talk and the way that people talk. And then it would be easy.

It would be very, very easy. It's harder to read, I think. Here's Tori Allen Martin with a reading from Ye Game and Play of Chess by Alice Dunbar Nelson. It was quite patent to everyone at Hamilton on the Bay that Miss Ruthven was in love with the major. Even if the lady had denied the fact,

which she did not, no one being bold enough to inquire concerning her feelings, she could not have hidden her decided preference for that portion of the sea breeze which enveloped the Major's handsome figure. As to the latter's feelings on the matter, they were enigmatical. He was used to the adoration of lovely damsels. For more seasons than the memory of that average summer girl doth count,

he had strolled down day after day from his quarters in the nearby fort and wreaked dire havoc with the hearts of innumerable damsels. As Chad feelingly remarked, it was a perpetual game of bowls with the Major making ten strikes all the while. The girls stood up in tens and the Major bowled them over, not even looking to see where they fell. Chad's remarks may have been in bitterness of spirit. He was young, only a lieutenant,

and was not always successful in his affairs. The Major, on the other hand, was 37 in good-looking, and as he was wont to say to the various maidens, had not been seriously in love since he had passed 19. Small wonder was it then that each fair maid considered it her particular duty to remedy this deficiency in his experience. Miss Ruthven arrived at Hamilton prepared to do serious havoc to the hearts of the military men stationed at the fort. Her stock and trade were a number of trunks filled with confections calculated to attract the military masculine eye.

A dainty figure, a spiritual face and a pair of appealing brown eyes surmounted by a fluffy gold-brown pompadour. Her record was of an unimpeachable character. Four seasons of Belle Dom in the city and three successful summer seasons established her reputation as a breaker of hearts. Alice Dunbar Nelson, I think, is probably one of the most interesting kind of more unknown writers because she was famously quite white passing and yet she always made a point of identifying as black. And at one point, I think she even got kicked out of a segregated train carriage because the train conductor refused to believe that she was black,

even though she told him that she was. And she spent her entire life advocating for civil rights. And yeah, at the same time, a lot of her work went unknown until I think her biographer met her niece. And her niece kind of pulled out this huge stack of stuff that she'd written and kind of resurrected her literary reputation. So I think Alistan Van Nelson is, you know, among all the amazing authors in this collection,

one of probably the best and one that probably needs the most amount of kind of reconsideration. One of the important things about doing a list, and of course we have 25 for our 25th year, and that was kind of one of the points about it, is that if you know one author on a list, it takes you into the list and it draws you in. And so they think, oh, well, I'll try another one then, and I'll try another one. And that sort of sense of creating a library of women, it's not just reclaim her name, but it's remember her name. And I think that that is what we all would like to see, sort of all these voices that have somehow not. not being held close and cherished, getting more women's voices and women's books back out there again.

Because they've always been there. This is not new writing. So it's not just the women's price today. It's all of the writers of the past. I mean, do all three of you still think there is a significant gender bias within the world of literature and publishing? Or do you think in your own personal experience, have you come up against it and has that kind of experience changed over time over the years that you've spent in publishing? I mean, I don't think that's quite a big question. So Catherine, here you go. Well, I mean, I do. I do think that there's still there's still like victories for us to to win, I think, as a as a society, really, not just even women. But I mean, as to why, I just think that the answer is so complicated and has to do with just the absolute foundations of how power is allocated in our society. all of our societies, all of our interlocking societies, I don't think that it's going to be any simpler than the full complexity of society to undo it all.

And what about you, Kamila? You know, publishing is not separate from the rest of the world. I don't know of a single industry where patriarchy doesn't exist. And, you know, we have to acknowledge it exists in women as well and in the way women respond to the world and respond to other women and men. So, of course, it does. But, I mean, we do also have to look at the victories.

And one of the things that I think is really striking is if you look at the major prize shortlists prior to the women's prize. And, you know, we're not talking about the 1930s. We're talking about the 1990s. It is extraordinary how male dominated those were, year after year after year. And it's, you know, it's now.

unthinkable that you would get these major prizes having all-male shortlists. And that is really, you know, Kate and her fellows coming along and saying, we're going to actually do something, make an intervention. And it's changed literary culture, I believe this very deeply. I mean, I started publishing when in 1998, when the women's prize was new. And there has been a sea change. But of course, it's not enough. And, you know, until the world is very different, we're going to carry on hearing,

stories like Gathrins about having to send things in under male pseudonym in order to be, have your work treated with respect. That's a lovely thing to hear, Carmelah. I think that sometimes discrimination and bigotry are hiding in plain sight and people don't call it out and therefore people think that maybe it doesn't matter. The existence of the women's prize meant that there was always a trigger each year, not just in books, but also in the wider arts about why are they no women. And when I was setting the prize up at the beginning and talking about it, there were two cries.

The first one was, yeah, but women are no good, because if they were any good, they'd be on the real price shortlists, you know. And the other one was, and I had more sympathy for this, we, older feminists said, we have spent a lot of time campaigning to be let into the room and you're taking us out of the room by setting up something that is women only, And I would always say it's not women only.

It's celebrating and honouring women for men and women who want to read. So it was a prize facing outwards. The other thing about not being women not being any good, it's exactly what Catherine has said, what Carmelagh has said, that the sort of the structural patriarchy, as it were, the way that things are laid down and not commented upon because it's how it's always been, means that often people don't even see the barriers that are there.

They genuinely believe that the best book will go on a short list without looking to see all of the things that have happened before that to make the choice. This is the beginning. All of these conversations are always the beginning of something else because until every woman who wants to publish can publish whatever she wants and be seen as an artist, not a woman from here, a woman who looks like that, a woman who represents this group, you know, that real luxury of simply being allowed to have

your work speaking for you, then we haven't finished. And that's why, you know, I will no longer be here, I'm sure, but the next 25 years of the women's prize, it's crucial that we don't let our guard down. We, you know, we protect the games that have been made and keep our pointy elbows making, you know, the doorway bigger for more women to come behind us. So what do you think needs to be done in literature and publishing to, you know, keep those doors open. Well, I think, I think change is happening. And I think, you know, in the last month, the Black Writers Guild has been founded, which is Black Writers and Writers of Color coming together to say, you know,

we have for a very long time be told our books won't sell beyond our communities, as it were. And it's always been rubbish. You know, I don't need to know about 19th century Russia to want to read Anna Karenina. I'm not a 19th century Russian soldier but guess what? My head is bigger than that. My heart is bigger than that. A great writer

can write standing in the shoes of anybody. So I think it's about that. It's about us as readers reading widely and celebrating and honouring what we read and writers being persistent in a way exactly what Catherine did.

You know, Emma McBride who won the prize for a girl is a half-formed thing. She wrote that novel over a very long period of time, and every time she offered it to somebody, people said, we don't think people want to read that. But rather than giving up, she kept saying, I don't think you're right. And I am going to carry on until the book that I want to write sees the light of day, and it took her a very, very long time, but she did it. So it's about persistence, and all of us using our voice to say, we need to pull up another chair here. We want to hear these other stories. You know, it's voting with our feet,

if you like. And Catherine and Carmelah, what about you? What would you change to make sure that we don't end up going back in time? I think that people often talk about the pipeline issues for publishing about how the low-level jobs in publishing are often unpaid or paid very little. And I think that that sort of limits who can afford to take those jobs, then who can afford to get the promotions eventually and become one of the people who tells the world what is realistic, which stories are universal. And I think that that's actually a very significant issue, because even just the work that we were looking at today, you know, Marianne Evans doesn't think that all a bright young woman can do is shop and die. And the Marion, the cabin club story,

it's like, what's the interesting part of the story about spies? Is it? you know, that they have guns or like shootouts or whatever. It's like, no, the interesting thing is, can this, this black woman be valued? Can she be seen by the man she has a crush on? That that's what, it's like, what's the interesting part of this picture? And I think you really need people to have more different perspectives as they're choosing the stories that get published. And, you know, and I think that the prizes are a big part of that. It's like all of the whole network of who gets published, who gets praised, who gets reviewed, all of these things.

I think we need to bring in more perspectives on what looks normal and what looks universal and interesting. And Kamala, what about you? You know, I think you have to call these things out where you see them. I think possibly we need to be less polite about it. I think possibly we need to shame men more. I have been on many, many judging panels. And there is very often the situation where you walk in the room, it's a big book prize, it's going to make all the difference to a writer.

And it's that same thing as you see with recommendations, which is the women judges are in favor of some of the books by women and some of the books by men. And the male judges are in favor of books by men. And by default then, because those are the ones that get agreed on. And then as a woman in the room, you often find yourself saying, oh, this is really all male. And then there's a kind of embarrassed scrambling around. And it's just exhausting that really at this point in time, we're having to shame men into actually considering that women might be able to be worthy of these prizes. And very often I've had these situations where, you know, you sort of push some women writers into the next stage. And then the male judges come back and say in astonished voices, God, that was really good.

And I think we need to talk more about that kind of thing. You know, we're all women in this conversation. There are a lot of women out there who are doing things like the women's prize, like the Vita count, all of that. But we need to start saying where the problem lies. And the problem doesn't lie in women's reading habits and tastes. And for people who don't know what the VEDA count is, do you mind giving a kind of quick summary of that? The Vita count basically looks at things like

who is being reviewed, who's getting the review space, and found that even though women are being published and women are being read, but the review spaces that have given to really serious works of fiction or nonfiction, overwhelmingly go to men or are overwhelmingly written by men, and they have now Vita accounts also around race, which is I think also very useful.

And it just shows, you know, who is being pushed forward? Who are the sort of the guardians of on the arbiters of taste? Who are they telling you are the serious books and the serious writers out there? And I think that's a very good reason to be a lot less polite and a lot more angry. Thank you so much, everyone who joined us for this panel. Thank you to Catherine, to Kate, to Carmila. I'm sure that what you've said has given a lot of people and hopefully some men as well, a lot of food for thought.

Thank you. I'm Zing Singh, and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast, brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. To download your free copy of any of the Reclaim Her Name collection, please head to baileys.com slash reclaim her name and join the conversation on our social channels at Women's Prize. Please click subscribe, and don't forget to rate and review this podcast. It really helps spread the word about the female talent you've heard from today.

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