Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class The Literary Life of Viola Roseboro' About this episode Viola Roseboro’ isn’t well-known today, but she played a big behind-the-scenes role in the careers of a lot of American writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, shaping what’s thought of as the American literary canon.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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1:16 Tracy V. Wilson? but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts. The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience.
1:59 Tracy V. Wilson? So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. When I was working on our episode about Elizabeth Bisland back in March, I stumbled across the name Viola Roseborough. And that last name was spelled R-O-S-E-B-O-R-O with an apostrophe at the end, and then nothing after the apostrophe. That's not something that happens in English language names very much, unless it's a name that ends in an S and that apostrophe is making it possessive. So I wondered who this person was and why her name was spelled that way. And my cursory look into it landed her on the shortlist. Viola Roseborough is not well-known today,
3:04 Tracy V. Wilson? but she played a big behind-the-scenes role in the careers of a lot of American writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including several writers who continue to be staples in English and English literature classes in the United States. By extension, she helped shape what is thought of as the American literary canon. Viola Roseborough was born on December 3rd, 1857, in Pulaski, Tennessee. That's in the south-central part of the state, roughly 15 miles from the border with Alabama. Pulaski is named for Casimir Pulaski, a Polish soldier who fought in the American Revolutionary War. Tracy has had him on her shortlist for quite a while.
3:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Viola was the only surviving child of the Reverend Samuel Reed Roseborough, known as Reed, and Martha Collier Roseborough, who, after their marriage, insisted that she was Mrs. Martha Collier Roseborough, not Mrs. Samuel Reed Roseborough. Yeah, I also read an account that said that she refused to have the part about "obey" in their marriage vows. She seems like she had very solid opinions. The Rosebrows were abolitionists, and that put them at odds with a lot of their neighbors. Pulaski is also where the original Ku Klux Klan was founded. And it put them at odds with some of their family members. This was a factor in their moving to Missouri when Viola was only a baby.
4:33 Tracy V. Wilson? From there, they moved to Illinois. And that's where they were when the Civil War started when Viola was four. Viola's father became a chaplain in an Illinois regiment of the US Army, and his parents disowned him for that. While Reed was in the Army, Martha supported herself and her daughter by teaching, sewing, and working at a hotel. The Civil War ended when Viola was seven. Martha took her back to Tennessee and visited her family while they waited for Reed to be discharged from the Army. He joined her in Tennessee, but before long, they went back to Missouri after he got a position as a minister at a congregationalist church there.
5:14 Tracy V. Wilson? After they moved, Martha invested some of the money that she had saved during the war in a small farm. When that farm started to struggle, that took the family finances with it, and she took Viola to Tennessee to get the advice of her brother, Arthur St. Clair Collier. He was a Democrat and had been a slaveholder before the Civil War, and she found him embroiled in an effort to unseat Augustus E. Alden, who was the radical Republican mayor of Nashville. Martha and her brother were really on opposite sides politically, and he seems to have thought that associating with his abolitionist sister would damage his reputation and any attempt that he might make to run for office.
5:58 Tracy V. Wilson? So Martha wound up going back to Missouri without getting a lot of help from him. Back in Missouri, Reed had some kind of dispute with some of the more influential members of his church congregation. And by the time Martha returned, it had started to seem like they would need to move again. Martha really loved the area of Tennessee where she had grown up and thought she had gotten an exceptional education there, and that's what she wanted for her daughter. So when she was offered a job at a school in Shelbyville, she went with Viola while Reed stayed behind in Missouri. But this didn't last long either. While Martha was waiting for the school year to start,
6:38 Tracy V. Wilson? she talked about a plan to spend her free time teaching Black children to read. That was something else that threatened her brother's political aspirations. Then she started trying to integrate the schools in Shelbyville, and that led to her being branded Meddlesome Mattie. She wound up taking Viola back to Missouri. But the family was not reunited there for very long. Reed went to work in Nevada and then to California. Several years passed, and in 1874, when Viola was 16, her mother took her back to Tennessee again so she could attend Fairmount College, which is a private women's college. Her father eventually got a job at a church in Tennessee,
7:23 Tracy V. Wilson? although not close enough to the college for them to all live together. While she was in college, Viola developed an interest in performing, starting out with giving dramatic readings. A write-up in the Winchester, Tennessee, Home Journal describes "a night of entertainment that was arranged for Carrick Academy", which was a boys' school. That write-up ends, quote, "We regret not getting there in time to hear the beautiful and intelligent Miss Roseborough, who never fails to deserve and elicit applause." By late 1878, Viola had gone beyond doing recitations at schools and was performing in public, including traveling to other states to do so.
8:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Eventually, she enrolled in theater classes in Cincinnati, Ohio. When it quickly became clear that her parents did not have the money to pay for these classes, she started writing articles for her uncle's newspaper, The Daily American, which was headquartered in Nashville. She made her acting debut, now in a staged play rather than a recitation or reading, in Nashville in May of 1879. Over the next few years, Roseborough tried to earn a living by both freelance writing and performing. Her parents really did not approve of this, especially the performing part, and it raised some questions among her father's church congregations. They did not think this was an appropriate career path
8:50 Tracy V. Wilson? for their minister's daughter. At the same time, her father was always on the lookout for positions at churches that would allow them to be closer to her, so Martha continued to move around with him as he tried to just stay near their daughter. Allegedly, this combined career of writing and performing is where Roseborough's unusual name spelling came from. She used the name Roseborough with the ending O U G H for the stage, while the shorter Roseborough ending in the O apostrophe was for her published work. It does seem like later in her life, she insisted on that apostrophe spelling, but her name appears with and without those last three letters in various publications
9:34 Tracy V. Wilson? and documents across the whole course of her life. Sometimes there's an assumption that the original spelling of her name was the longer one, but her father's name also appears as Roseborough minus that U G H at the end, and with no final apostrophe in a lot of official records, including his marriage license and his entry in the death index from the New York State Department of Health. Viola and her parents are all buried at Clifton Springs Village Cemetery in New York, and their markers all use that same shorter spelling, although with no apostrophe. But it's hard to draw a conclusion from that, since we don't really know who made the arrangements for those engravings on their markers.
10:19 Tracy V. Wilson? To return to Viola, for a while, she moved to Nashville to work for her uncle's newspaper. She was also in theatrical touring companies with starring roles in at least two melodramas, one called Two Orphans, which was set during the French Revolution, and another called The Light So London. In 1882, Roseborough moved to New York City, and she continued to divide her time between writing and performing. But in 1887, when she was about 30, she developed pneumonia. There are references to Roseborough being sick a lot in her own letters and in the accounts of people who knew her, and she also had trouble with her eyesight. This bout of pneumonia
11:00 Tracy V. Wilson? put an end to her time on stage, possibly because it affected her voice. From this point on, Viola Roseborough's career was a literary one. We'll talk more about that after a sponsor break.
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13:25 Speaker 06 Live Right, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
13:53 Tracy V. Wilson? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them
14:37 Tracy V. Wilson? more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
15:02 Tracy V. Wilson? From 1887 until about 1893, Viola Roseborough made a living as a freelance writer, selling stories and essays to publications like The Cosmopolitan and The Century Magazine.
15:15 Tracy V. Wilson? She also did some of the kind of stunt journalism that we talked about in our episode on Elizabeth Bisland and past hosts' episode on Nellie Bly. For example, she published an article in the New York World on December 11th, 1887, titled "Begging as an Avocation: An Adventurous Woman Goes Out Asking for Alms in the Street." It's probably unsurprising, based on that title, that this article came off as cluelessly insensitive. It starts with a discussion of how hard it is to find appropriately ragged clothes to pretend to be a beggar. Later on, she talks about how every time anyone gave her anything, she would immediately jam it into her pocket and, quote, "to possess
16:00 Tracy V. Wilson? a pocket seemed indicative of fraud." A couple of people were kind to her, but many just ignored her, and only women seemed to be willing to give her money. She wound up with 63 cents. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what she did with that money, because the one scan I was able to find of this article is completely illegible at the bottom. So she wrote that she was going to give this money to charity, but then the text becomes completely unreadable as she's sort of overthinking whether any of the people who gave it to her might be opposed to churches, or might be Protestant, or Catholic, or might just hate institutional charities.
16:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Rose Burroughs' first book, a collection of stories called Old Ways and New, came out in 1892, and it included work that had originally been published in Century Magazine. She dedicated this book to her mother, quote, "my earliest and still my best companion in the blessed world of letters." This was in spite of increasing tension between the two women. They were both proud and stubborn. Viola has been described as arrogant, and Martha was apparently prone to clipping out Viola's published articles, writing corrections on them, and then sending those corrections to her. Martha Roseborough died of cancer the year after the book came out and Reed Roseborough died in 1892.
17:27 Tracy V. Wilson? By that point, Samuel Sidney McClure had hired Roseborough as a reader. That happened in 1893. This started with a writing contest. McClure realized he had way too many manuscripts from those contest entries for him to read just by himself. And he brought Roseborough on because he already knew her. From there, she started working for McClure's magazine and for his other publishing ventures. McClure wrote of her in his autobiography, quote, "Miss Roseborough was of great service to the magazine in discovering promising material by unknown writers. She had a singularly open mind toward the manuscript bag, a natural attitude towards
18:10 Tracy V. Wilson? stories, which is rare in professional readers who, like everybody else in time, become the victims of their own tastes and their own successes and are therefore always hunting for the thing they themselves like best, instead of for the thing that new writers are writing best." Miss Roseborough seized upon the early stories of Oh, Henry, Jack London, Rex Beach, Myra Kelly, and the Emmylou stories when their writers were unknown, with as much sureness and conviction as if she had known what the end was to be in each case and exactly how popular each of these writers was to become. Ida Tarbell's work at McClure's magazine overlapped with Roseborough's.
18:55 Tracy V. Wilson? We talked about Tarbell and her exposé of Standard Oil, which was published in McClure's in a two-part episode in November of 2021. Tarbell and Roseborough were friends, and Tarbell had similar things to say about her in her own autobiography, quote, "By good fortune, McClure's in this period happened on a reader of real genius, Viola Roseborough, the only born reader I have ever known. I found her in the office after one of my frequent jaunts after material. It was as a talker that I first learned to admire and love her. Her judgments were unfettered, her emotions strong and warm, her expressions free, glowing, stirring, and she loved to talk, though only when she felt sympathy and understanding."
19:40 Tracy V. Wilson? She loved to share books, of which she read many, particularly in the biographical field. She wanted none but the best. No imitation, no mere fact finding. Her eagerness to let no good things slip, her consciousness of the all-too-little time a human being has in this world to explore its riches, made her rigid in her choice. An unsleeping eagerness to find talent and give it a chance, and secondarily, she said, to enrich the magazine, made every day's work with the unsifted manuscripts an adventure. If she found exceptional merit that was also suited to McClure's, she might weep with excitement. And she stood to it till faith grew in those less sure of the untried.
20:25 Tracy V. Wilson? We've talked about McClure and that magazine more in the context of muckraking journalism, but the magazine also developed a reputation for publishing very high-quality fiction, and a lot of that credit goes to Roseborough. She was the first person to read every fiction manuscript that arrived at the magazine. Her cultivating of unknown talent included people like William Sidney Porter, who published most of his work under the pen name O. Henry. Roseborough started corresponding with Porter while he was in prison for embezzlement and offered him her feedback over the course of about two years. Finally, she purchased his story Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking in 1899, and that was the first story that
21:08 Tracy V. Wilson? he ever published under that pen name. We did an episode on O. Henry that came out on December 21 of 2020. According to Ida Tarbell, when Roseborough first read a submission from Booth Tarkington, she went into S. S. McClure's office in tears, exclaiming, quote, "Here is a serial sent by God Almighty for McClure's magazine." That serial was Tarkington's first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana, which was published starting in May of 1899. The Gentleman from Indiana was later published as a book and became a bestseller for McClure, and Tarkington went on to be one of only four writers to earn the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice.
21:50 Tracy V. Wilson? The other three in that group are William Faulkner, near dear to my heart, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. A lot of sources credit Roseborough with discovering Jack London, who's most well-known for books like Call of the Wild and White Fang and the short story To Build a Fire. Roseborough did accept some of his early stories for McClure's, and McClure commissioned London's first novel, A Daughter of the Snows. But Jack London's work was already appearing in other publications, including Overland Monthly, which published really a pile of his stories before anything appeared in McClure's. S.S. McClure's interest in Jack London started after he read a piece that had been published in The Atlantic Monthly,
22:35 Tracy V. Wilson? and that was a piece that Roseborough had read and rejected. She had also rejected other early submissions of London's, although some of those rejections also included her very thoughtful feedback and advice about how to improve the stories structurally. McClure's magazine did play a role in London's early career, and an important role, but it doesn't seem like Roseborough really pulled him out of the slush pile, even though McClure himself made it seem that way in his autobiography. Roseborough definitely played a role in the literary career of Willa Cathar. McClure published Cathar's first volume of short stories, The Troll Garden, in 1905.
23:18 Tracy V. Wilson? And Roseborough's influence included helping to decide which stories to include. Later on, Cathar went through rounds of rejections on her 1918 novel, My Antonia. She finally sent it to Roseborough, who read it and told her she'd written the whole thing through the point of view of the wrong character, that it needed to come from the perspective of Jim Burden. Cathar rewrote it, and today, My Antonia is considered to be her first masterpiece. Later on, she earned the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One of Ours. Roseborough was 16 years older than Cathar and had been working for McClure's magazine for more than a decade when Cathar was hired for a staff position in 1906.
24:02 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of accounts give Roseborough a lot of the credit for this hiring decision. At first Cathar seems to have really admired and respected Roseborough as somebody with talent and experience and wisdom, but that shifted somewhat as they worked together at the magazine. Roseborough had a reputation for being generous and kind, but she could also be extremely blunt with her feedback. As paraphrased by a friend, she told Cathar that she was quote, "pouring out one dead pretentious story after another that nobody could read and she got published only because Mr. McClure knew she had genius." Roseborough also advised Cathar to quote, "write something she had some feeling about."
24:48 Tracy V. Wilson? When Cathar became managing editor of McClure's magazine, Roseborough suspected that she was publishing her own work without running it by anybody else, except maybe McClure himself. They didn't become enemies by any means. Their discussions around my Antonia were a decade after this, but it definitely became less of a mentor-mentee relationship. 1906 was a tempestuous year to be working at McClure's. About a month after Cathar started, most of the staff quit. They were dissatisfied with McClure's business and editorial decisions and with his ongoing womanizing, including having affairs with young women whose work he then published.
25:32 Tracy V. Wilson? This included his taking a trip across the Atlantic with both his wife Hattie and one of the other women on board, and Ida Tarbell, who was friends with Hattie. Kathar remained at the magazine after this mass exodus at McClure's. She had moved to New York to take the job. And as a newcomer, she probably didn't have the same emotional involvement in the situation as a lot of the people who had been there longer. She publicly supported McClure and dismissed the various allegations of womanizing. And Roseborough stayed as well. This may have been partly due to a sense of loyalty to McClure and to the magazine where she had worked so many years.
26:14 Tracy V. Wilson? But it's also possible that she was just shielded from a lot of that drama because she was almost never in the office. She would have manuscripts delivered to her at her apartment in New York or during the summers to her cottage on the coast of Massachusetts or Connecticut. Then she'd take the manuscripts outside and she would read them there. Sounds like a pretty dreamy working scenario. When she was in New York, she was particularly fond of working from Madison Square Park. If she needed to have a face-to-face meeting with someone, she would usually meet them there or at her home. Viola Roseborough was quite a character, which we will talk about more after a sponsor break.
26:57 Speaker 06 Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sykes proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
27:26 Tracy V. Wilson? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart ...Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
28:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Help vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
28:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jessi have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends
29:13 Tracy V. Wilson? proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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30:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Viola Roseborough certainly was not unique for preferring to be outside on a park bench rather than cooped up in an office all day. What was fairly unique was that she actually made it work. She relentlessly tried to live her own way and she's been described as a female bachelor. She never married, and if she ever had a romantic relationship with anyone, it's not mentioned in anybody's surviving writing, at least not that I could find. She did seem to like the idea of having a child, though, or more specifically, a son. While she was still acting, she and one of her castmates took in a boy who had run away. And later in her life, there were young men that she would describe as godsons or as
31:14 Tracy V. Wilson? almost like her adopted sons. For a while, Roseborough did well enough financially that she was able to afford her apartment in New York and at least one cottage near the ocean. She also traveled around the United States and she made a series of trips to Europe. But while she was making her own life and having a career, she was opposed to the suffrage movement and she viewed feminists with suspicion. This was another difference between her and her mother, who was a passionate advocate for women's rights. Roseborough smoked constantly, swore, and refused to wear a corset. She also loved Shakespeare and went to every play that she could. She carried around a gin bottle with the label still on it, which she filled with
31:58 Tracy V. Wilson? water so that she could have a drink whenever she got thirsty. This seems to have been about not just shocking people by appearing to drink gin out in public in the middle of the day, just spontaneously, but also because she was really fixated on staying well hydrated. She was also into yoga and eating raw foods, although that last part might have been mostly because she hated to cook, not for any philosophical reason, other than the hatred of cooking.
32:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Roseborough's friends called her VR, and her colleagues at McClure's called her Rosie. In both circles, she had a reputation for both talking very quickly and for being a witty and absorbing conversationalist. S. S. McClure said of her, quote, "When George Meredith talked, the air was full of flaming swords. When Robert Louis Stevenson talked, it was like the play of the Aurora Borealis. But I can't find any expression to describe that woman's talk. It is too varied." He also called her "the greatest conversationalist of her time." One friend is quoted as saying, quote, "Anybody who does not acknowledge that
33:11 Tracy V. Wilson? something is happening when Viola Roseborough is talking is stupid." Her friend Frances Perkins said of her, quote, "Of course, I remember her vividly, her conversation, her attitudes, her courage. Miss Roseborough was essentially an expressive person. She couldn't bear to enjoy things alone, and that is why she would ask me to go along with her, because she said, 'I like to go with you because you enjoy having me talk about it.'" Another of Roseborough's contradictions is that while she was friends with Frances Perkins, who was a labor advocate and secretary of labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Roseborough was opposed to social reform, and she denounced Roosevelt's New Deal.
33:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Roseborough's conversations that she was famous for were not necessarily nice. A friend once said she characterized the greatest defect of modern civilization as, quote, "The absence of any place where one could adequately insult people. Either you were in the relationship of guest and hostess, or you were both guests of someone else, and when you chanced upon each other at the Grand Central Station, there was no time for you were dashing for a train." For her own part, Roseborough liked to say, quote, "When conversation grows dull, I take charge of it." To return to her career, Roseborough wrote a novel called The Joyous Heart, which was published by McClure, Phillips and Company in 1903.
34:42 Tracy V. Wilson? McMillan published her short story collection, Players and Vagabonds, the following year, and she continued to work for SS McClure until 1911, when he lost control of McClure's magazine. She left the magazine at that point. Although her work had been focused on the magazine's fiction, she had also convinced McClure to publish a set of essays by her friend, John Lafarge, an artist who worked in a range of media, including stained glass. His work at Boston's Trinity Church came up in our episode on the history of spray paint last August. In addition to freelancing, Roseborough supported herself as a writer's consultant, kind of like an editor, offering writers feedback on their work and how to get it published.
35:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Two years after Roseborough left McClure's, rival magazine Colliers started running ads announcing that they had a new price of only five cents a copy, down from 10. They had a new publishing day of Tuesday rather than Thursday, a new distribution method, being that people could buy it at newsstands rather than having to subscribe, and a, quote, "new story editor." Colliers has engaged Miss Viola Roseborough, whose ability to choose stories needs no mention to the story-loving public. Roseborough's final book, Storms of Youth, was published by Scribner's in 1920. In 1921, McClure returned to his magazine, and Roseborough went back to work at it as well.
36:14 Tracy V. Wilson? While Roseborough seems to have had a gift for recognizing and nurturing the talent of writers, she did not have the same ability with money. She had a series of financial difficulties and lost her summer cottages and her ability to travel abroad. Things became increasingly difficult until 1928, when one of her former clients, Elizabeth M. Chamberlain, died and left Roseborough some money. This got Roseborough back on stable financial footing, and she did take at least two more trips to Europe after this. In the early 1940s, Roseborough had a falling out with Willa Cathar. Cathar asked Roseborough to return all
36:54 Tracy V. Wilson? All of her letters and Roseborough seems to have thought that Cathar was trying to erase all evidence of her influence on Cathar's work and career. This was not just about Roseborough's correspondence, though. In 1943, Cathar wrote a will specifying that her letters never be published in whole or in part. This applied to all of her correspondence, not just her correspondence with Roseborough. She was kind of gathering things up to protect them. Cathar died in 1947, and that request was honored until 2011, when the terms of her will expired. Viola Roseborough spent the last years of her life living alone in New Dorp, Staten Island.
37:39 Tracy V. Wilson? In addition to her lifelong poor vision, she lost much of her hearing and she developed arthritis in her hands, which she attributed to years spent rewriting people's work. She died on January 29, 1945, at the age of 87, after an illness of a few months. In the words of a review of the one book-length biography ever written of her, quote, "She died in poverty, but not in want, because many of her old friends saw to that." She had allegedly been working on a memoir called Let Me Tell You, which she does not seem to have finished, and no known manuscript of it has survived.
38:19 Tracy V. Wilson? It is possible but unclear that she may have converted to Catholicism during her last days. She had a fascination with Catholicism, and at various points after the 1910 death of John Lafarge, she reportedly said that if he had been alive, she would have allowed him to convert her. She also paid very close attention to how Willa Cathar's 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, was received by Catholics. In the last days of Roseborough's life, she refused to talk to the Protestant clergy who came to visit her, but she had multiple visits from her maid's priest. There is also some speculation that she may have been the inspiration
39:01 Tracy V. Wilson? for the character of Myra Henshaw in Willa Cathar's 1926 My Mortal Enemy. But that's not known for sure, and there are a lot of other people who might have possibly been the inspiration for it. Yeah, entirely possible, don't fully know.
39:19 Tracy V. Wilson? I find her fascinating, though. I do, too. And I also feel like I have big gaps in my understanding of her, which we will talk about on Friday.
39:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Do you also have some listener mail for us? I do also have listener mail. It is from Tanya and Tanya wrote, "Hi Holly and Tracy. I was just listening to your episode about the color blue and it reminded me that I recently watched someone making blue dye from woad. It was in an episode of Secrets of the Castle, a video series featuring Ruth Goodman, among other historians and archaeologists. Ruth is actually featured in a whole series of videos exploring life in various time periods. I think they would be right up your alley. My only complaint is that they are British and the DVDs do not typically play in American DVD players. Anyway, in Secrets of the Castle, they are living and working in the Guadeloupe Castle
40:13 Tracy V. Wilson? project in France. I'm just going to say I'm sorry if I said that wrong. I forgot there was French in here and I didn't look it up before I started reading this email. They're building a castle using 13th century techniques. I seem to remember that a large amount of old urine was also used when dyeing fabrics using woad-based dye. Did you uncover any mention of this in your research? I enjoy your show as much as I enjoy Ruth Goodman's history series. That's significant since I bought a new DVD player just to watch my British DVDs on. Keep up the great work. For pet tax, I'm attaching photos of my roosters, Barnaby, the colorful one, and Rusty, the golden one. I raised them along with seven hens from eggs that I incubated last spring."
40:59 Tracy V. Wilson? And then that was from Tanya. So, Tanya, I love that somebody has sent us rooster pictures. I do, too. I have questions. About the roosters? Yeah, only because, growing up on a farm, my experience with roosters was not cool. So, I'm curious if her roosters are sweet, because ours were not. What a good question. I think what I know of chickens in broadly, including roosters, is that they can be very mean to one another as they establish a hierarchy. Out in the, out in the chicken yard. Oh, yeah. No, we had a rooster growing up that we had, you know, several acres of land and a lot of it was
41:44 Tracy V. Wilson? woody. And if you were walking along, the rooster would go and hide in bushes and wait for you to pass. And then it would come out talons up like to attack you. Oh, no. My rooster experiences are not cool. I think they're so beautiful, but I'm curious, anytime I talk to somebody that has roosters of their own, what they're like behaviorally. A lot of cities that allow like urban chicken coops explicitly don't allow roosters. Correct. Because of their supposedly being noisy. Supposedly.
42:21 Tracy V. Wilson? I, I, I mean, they, they do tend to crow, but the chickens also make noise. So there's, and also I would say, I have neighbors whose barking dogs are at least as loud as a rooster could hypothetically be. Anyway, I wanted to read this email. Number one, because rooster pictures, that's great. But then also number two is that Secrets of the Castle and these other history shows that Ruth Goodman was on, they were some of my early, early COVID, like comfort binge watch. And they're these sort of living history shows in which Ruth Goodman, and usually there was like another historian
43:06 Tracy V. Wilson? and archaeologist, they would go live in the manner of a farmer from a specific time period. And then this one where they go to the castle in France, I don't remember anything about the dying of fabric in this particular show. It would not at all surprise me that large amounts of old urine were used for it. Because large amounts of old urine have been used for a lot of things historically, including a number of things involving textiles and dyes and fabrics and paper. I have definitely heard of it being used as a fixative. So it's not the pigment.
43:48 Tracy V. Wilson? It's like the same way. There are ammonia washes that people will do on dye processes now that are. Not urine-based, but so it makes sense because there's a high amount of ammonia in urine, so. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I think very fondly of Ruth Goodman and those TV shows. I watched them on streaming services. I do not have a DVD player specially bought to play British DVDs. And I also have really enjoyed the similar shows that have played on PBS with similar setups in the United States, although a lot of those were not necessarily a historian doing those things, but you know, regular people to pretend to live in whatever
44:31 Tracy V. Wilson? historical setting. I find those to be fun. So, thank you so much for this email and these pictures, Tanya. If you would like to send us a note, we're at [email protected] . If you would like to read the show notes of our show, you can go to our website, which is at missinhistory.com. And you can subscribe to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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46:20 Tracy V. Wilson? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else. Isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life.
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