The History of Literature podcast is a member of the Podglomerate Network and Lit Hub radio.

This episode is brought to you by Vonage. With Vonage Voice API, you get comprehensive

call analytics, virtual assistance, automated speech recognition, and text-to-speech benefits

across multiple languages. Developers can add smart voice functionalities into your app,

giving your customers an easier way to reach you, and you can start collecting real-time

data to drive more meaningful engagement to move your business forward. Learn more at Vonage.com.

Hello. We begin today with an arresting image. Quote in April 1894, a middle-aged gentleman

bearing a load of dresses, was rode to the deepest part of the Venetia Lagoon. A strange scene

followed, he began to drown the dresses, one by one. There were a good many, well-made,

tasteful, and all-dark, suggesting a lady of quiet habits in some reserve. The gondoliers

pole would have been useful for pushing them under the still water, but the dresses refused

to drown. One by one, they rose to the surface, their busts and sleeves swelling like black

balloons. Purposefully, the gentleman pushed them under, but silent, reproachful, they rose

before his eyes. End quote that comes from author Lindel Gordon writing in 1998, the middle-aged

gentleman in that vignette is none other than Henry James, trying to drown the dresses

of his fellow-writer, Constance Fenemore Wilson, who had recently died in what may have been

a suicide. And she was widely believed to be one of the greatest women-writers in English

at the time, the newspapers running her obituary compared her with all-time grates,

George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Brontes, and Wollsson. And yet hers is the name we sell

them here, the one whose books might not stand on our shelves. It's a haunting image,

this doomed woman, her few possessions, and a literary man there to try to submerge

what insisted on re-emerging. Henry James was her advisor, her protector, her mentor,

...