618 A Year of Women's Diaries (with Sarah Gristwood) | Sharon Olds | My Last Book with Suzanne Scanlon

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

Arts, Books, History

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2024

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Women haven't always been given an equal chance to contribute to literature - but they were writing nevertheless, sometimes just for themselves. In this episode, Jacke talks to Sarah Gristwood (Secret Voices: A Year of Women's Diaries) about her new collection of extracts from four centuries of women's diaries. PLUS Jacke shares a poem by Sharon Olds and talks to Suzanne Scanlon (Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen) about her choice for the last book she will ever read. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.
0:07.0	Hello, it's a problem that's easy to define.
0:13.0	We look to literature to let us better understand the emotional lives of human beings we've never met and never could meet,
0:20.0	and yet, looking back over the course of history we have only a tiny fraction of
0:26.1	examples to choose from. So many people never put into fiction or verse what it was
0:31.8	like to be alive at a particular time and
0:34.3	place and to be a particular person. We know we have a relationship with the
0:40.0	Universal and the specific. We read about the Specific looking for the Universal, and we read
0:46.9	about the Universal and related to specifics.
0:51.3	What if we want some different specifics?
0:53.6	And what if the specifics were often off limits?
0:57.8	What if the era or culture did not have a literary tradition?
1:01.6	Well, then it's just gone, isn't it? We have to recreate what those
1:06.7	people were thinking using historians tricks like it must have been and it's likely that.
1:14.0	And here's our point for today.
1:16.0	What if, as Virginia Wolf cautioned,
1:19.0	so long ago,
1:20.0	women were dissuaded from participating in the creation of literature, denied by their society,
1:27.0	their family, or the publishing industry, or readership. We just subtract 50% of the emotional and intellectual experience
1:39.0	from our hypothetical bookshelf, don't we? Going forward, we can try to correct for it, but looking back,
1:46.0	it's just not there.
1:48.0	Or is it?
	...

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