I’ve been listening to the podcast, Bonnets at Dawn, almost since its inception and I absolutely love it. The hosts, Lauren Burke and Hannah K. Chapman have done such a wonderful job of building and maintaining a thriving community around that podcast. So when I heard they had collaborated on a book together, I was one of the first to pre-order a copy.
The podcast started out as Austen vs Bronte, which is what initially drew me to it, because I’ve always loved Austen and Charlotte Bronte. So I started listening and quickly fell in love. I learned a lot about Austen (Chapman worked for a while at the Austen museum in Bath) and the Bronte sisters (although I had read and loved Jane Eyre, I hadn’t read anything else by Charlotte and knew very little about her life, much less her sisters).
But neither Austen nor any of the Bronte sisters wrote very much, so the podcast ran out of content pretty quickly, but had built this thriving community, so they started exploring other women writers to discuss on the podcast, including Elizabeth Gaskell (who wrote Charlotte Bronte’s first biography), George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. They have yet to talk about Harriet Beecher Stowe *🥃* directly, but she keeps getting mentioned in passing, and I hope they end up devoting at least one episode to her eventually.
HBS notwithstanding, the more the podcast explored women writers of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, the more women they found who were often very successful in their lifetime, but were largely forgotten by history.
I’ve learned so much about all kinds of women writers from listening to this podcast and this graphic novel (illustrated by Kaley Bales) serves as a kind of highlight reel of the women the podcast has covered so far. Each one gets a brief biography to introduce them, followed by several pages giving a snapshot of their life in graphic-novel form. It’s educational, empathetic, and a delight to read.
Of course, while it’s all based on historical fact, much of it is the authors’ assumptions about conversations, feelings, reactions, etc. As the author’s themselves point out in their afterward, it’s what happens between the lines that makes up a life, and while they could only guess at what happened behind closed doors, l’m glad they made their guesses and used the opportunity to give the rest of us 21st-century readers a glimpse of how these women lived and worked. I’ll be first in line to buy their next book.