S06E02 | Did You Hear?: Eavesdropping on 19th Century Women

C19: America in the 19th Century

In this episode, Susannah Sharpless (Cornell University) and Charline Jao (Cornell University) propose gossip as a scholarly approach and indulge their desire to talk about other people. Our hosts connect juicy tidbits from the lives of nineteenth-century women writers to questions about the role of biography, identification, and inference in scholarship more broadly. Jao explores the life of Rose Terry Cooke, whose short stories about tyrannical husbands and spinster life seem – at first glance – inconsistent with her own belief systems and later marriage. Sharpless takes us through the story of how interpersonal dislikes emerging from deep-seated political disagreements tore apart the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society at one fateful meeting in 1840. Engaging with the delightfully comedic aspects of these stories, the two also insist on deep historicist commitments as they present full pictures of the dynamic, messy nineteenth-century literary sphere, populated by narcissists, social climbers, and debauchées, and as well as dreamers and thinkers with a genuine faith in the power of language to create real change. Post-production support was provided by Julia W. Bernier (Washington & Jefferson College). Transcript available at https://bit.ly/S06E02GossipTranscript