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Hello, and welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Thursday, November 5th.

This is Hannah Rosen, co-editor of Double X, and I'm here with my co-co-editor, Emily Bazelon,

who's in New York, actually, And with me here today is Margaret Talbot

from The New Yorker. And we are going to do a book club today. And the book we're discussing is the

children's book by A.S. Buy it, which is not at all a children's book, but a 700-page sprawling novel and a very interesting one.

AS Byde, if you might remember, is the author of Possession, which came out in 1991, was a bestseller and was more recently made into a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

And the children's book is quite different.

It's set in the Edwardian era and takes us to World War I.

And it basically, it centers around the character of Olive Wellwood, who's a children's book author,

and the matriarch of a sort of large and growing brood and involves sort of her extended relatives, her cousins,

and her kind of bohemian proto-hipy, can we call them, circle of friends.

So let's begin by discussing the central character of Olive, Wellwood, who's she was born sort of lower class. She's a minor's

daughter and kind of, but is now a kind of upper class matriarch and writer. So Margaret, can you

just tell me a little bit about your impressions of her and what she's like and kind of what,

you know, just sort of what type she is in the novel.

Sure.

She, as you say, comes from this background that's been quite difficult, quite rough.

Her father and brother were killed in the minds, but she's really tried to put it past her as much as possible.

She's beautiful and intelligent, and as a young woman, a young student, she meets this kind of dashing Fabian socialist named Humphrey, who she marries and who's wealthy and allows her to live a life of wealth and privilege in this sort of beautiful, you know, arts and crafts appointed house on their estate, which is called Toad Fright.

Right.

And together, although the Together is a little bit of a misleading term, they have seven children.

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