WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.980 I want to start today with a bit of a ghost story. 00:00:03.200 --> 00:00:05.660 Oh, I love a ghost story. Right, but not the 00:00:05.660 --> 00:00:07.620 kind with rattling chains or haunted houses. 00:00:08.439 --> 00:00:11.740 This is a literary ghost story. It's about someone 00:00:11.740 --> 00:00:15.500 who was... by every metric available in the 19th 00:00:15.500 --> 00:00:19.179 century, a massive celebrity. Huge. A total juggernaut. 00:00:19.539 --> 00:00:22.160 Exactly. I mean, she published a novel every 00:00:22.160 --> 00:00:24.480 single year for 30 years. She was a favorite 00:00:24.480 --> 00:00:26.980 of Charles Dickens. Her books were sold in New 00:00:26.980 --> 00:00:30.079 York, London, Leipzig. She was the definition 00:00:30.079 --> 00:00:32.060 of a household name. And yet, if you were to 00:00:32.060 --> 00:00:34.100 walk into a university English department today 00:00:34.100 --> 00:00:36.979 and ask about Harriet Parr. Or even her pseudonym, 00:00:37.259 --> 00:00:39.859 right? Homely. Yeah, homely. You ask about either 00:00:39.859 --> 00:00:41.920 of those names today, and you would likely be 00:00:41.920 --> 00:00:44.219 met with total silence. Which is just wild to 00:00:44.219 --> 00:00:46.159 me. That's what makes this deep dive so weird. 00:00:46.759 --> 00:00:48.840 We aren't looking at some underdog who was discovered 00:00:48.840 --> 00:00:51.539 later, you know, like a Van Gogh situation. Right, 00:00:51.659 --> 00:00:53.530 someone who was ahead of their time. We're looking 00:00:53.530 --> 00:00:56.070 at a Titan who just completely evaporated. We 00:00:56.070 --> 00:00:58.409 have all her biographical records, the publication 00:00:58.409 --> 00:01:01.750 history, the reviews from the era. So the mission 00:01:01.750 --> 00:01:04.109 for today's deep dive is to figure out how you 00:01:04.109 --> 00:01:07.390 can be that big and then just vanish. It's a 00:01:07.390 --> 00:01:10.030 great question. And to figure out who Harriet 00:01:10.030 --> 00:01:12.209 Parr was, I think you really have to understand 00:01:12.209 --> 00:01:14.150 the where and the when. Tilt the scene for us. 00:01:14.269 --> 00:01:17.829 So she was born in York in 1828. And looking 00:01:17.829 --> 00:01:21.810 at her early life, she fence a very specific 00:01:21.810 --> 00:01:25.310 demographic profile that fueled the whole Victorian 00:01:25.310 --> 00:01:27.409 publishing engine. Right. The commercial traveler 00:01:27.409 --> 00:01:29.709 father. Yes. Her dad was a commercial traveler. 00:01:29.829 --> 00:01:32.709 So they were middle class, respectable, but definitely 00:01:32.709 --> 00:01:36.129 not rich. And crucially, she never married. Which 00:01:36.129 --> 00:01:39.069 in the 1850s presents a pretty distinct economic 00:01:39.069 --> 00:01:41.459 problem for a woman. It does. It means you have 00:01:41.459 --> 00:01:43.640 to work to support yourself. And for a woman 00:01:43.640 --> 00:01:46.140 of her social standing back then, the options 00:01:46.140 --> 00:01:48.280 were incredibly limited. You couldn't just go 00:01:48.280 --> 00:01:50.780 work in a factory or a shop without entirely 00:01:50.780 --> 00:01:53.159 losing your social cast. So she did what Charlotte 00:01:53.159 --> 00:01:56.140 Bronte did, what Sony educated but poor women 00:01:56.140 --> 00:01:58.799 did. She became a governess. It really is the 00:01:58.799 --> 00:02:01.060 default setting for Victorian protagonists, isn't 00:02:01.060 --> 00:02:03.379 it? It is the absolute cliche, yeah. But here's 00:02:03.379 --> 00:02:04.760 the difference I noticed when looking through 00:02:04.760 --> 00:02:07.239 the sources. When we think of the quote unquote 00:02:07.239 --> 00:02:10.069 governess writer, We immediately think of the 00:02:10.069 --> 00:02:13.469 Brontes, writing these dark, stormy, passionate 00:02:13.469 --> 00:02:17.590 books on the moors. But Parr seems... Very different. 00:02:17.969 --> 00:02:19.969 Very, very different. The Brontes wrote from 00:02:19.969 --> 00:02:22.990 a place of intense, almost suffocating isolation. 00:02:23.789 --> 00:02:26.110 But Parr, she seems to have viewed writing strictly 00:02:26.110 --> 00:02:28.150 as a career move. A way out of the governess 00:02:28.150 --> 00:02:31.050 life. Exactly. Her first book, Maude Talbot, 00:02:31.389 --> 00:02:34.650 hits the shelves in 1854, and it worked. It's 00:02:34.650 --> 00:02:36.969 sold. And once she realized she could actually 00:02:36.969 --> 00:02:39.250 sell books, she turned into an absolute machine. 00:02:39.449 --> 00:02:41.069 Machine is the right word. I was looking at the 00:02:41.069 --> 00:02:43.069 bibliography and it's exhausting just to scroll 00:02:43.069 --> 00:02:47.169 through. From 1854 to 1883, she produced roughly 00:02:47.169 --> 00:02:50.780 one novel a year, consistently. Always with the 00:02:50.780 --> 00:02:53.120 same publisher too, Smith, Elder & Company. That 00:02:53.120 --> 00:02:55.759 consistency is the first real clue to her success. 00:02:56.039 --> 00:02:57.840 And honestly, perhaps for later disappearance 00:02:57.840 --> 00:03:00.840 too. In the Victorian literary market, reliability 00:03:00.840 --> 00:03:03.979 was a major commodity. She wasn't agonizing over 00:03:03.979 --> 00:03:06.599 every sentence for five years? No, not like a 00:03:06.599 --> 00:03:09.219 flow bear or someone like that. She was producing 00:03:09.219 --> 00:03:12.819 content for a very hungry market. To use a modern 00:03:12.819 --> 00:03:14.900 term, she was essentially a reliable content 00:03:14.900 --> 00:03:17.939 creator. A one -woman Netflix, dropping a new 00:03:17.939 --> 00:03:20.919 season every year right on schedule. Most of 00:03:20.919 --> 00:03:23.500 this was published under the name Homely, but 00:03:23.500 --> 00:03:25.520 the source has mentioned she sometimes used her 00:03:25.520 --> 00:03:30.240 real name, Harriet Parr. Why the split? Was she 00:03:30.240 --> 00:03:33.639 trying to hide her gender with Homely? No, Homely 00:03:33.639 --> 00:03:36.300 is obviously female -coded or at least neutral 00:03:36.300 --> 00:03:37.960 enough that it didn't really matter. It wasn't 00:03:37.960 --> 00:03:40.159 like George Eliot trying to be taken seriously 00:03:40.159 --> 00:03:42.639 as a man. Right. The split seems to be all about 00:03:42.639 --> 00:03:45.180 branding, which is a concept we think of as modern, 00:03:45.199 --> 00:03:48.099 but it was very much alive back then. Homely 00:03:48.099 --> 00:03:50.740 was the brand for fiction. It promised a certain 00:03:50.740 --> 00:03:52.900 type of story to the reader. But when she wrote 00:03:52.900 --> 00:03:55.219 nonfiction. Right, like her history of Joan of 00:03:55.219 --> 00:03:58.280 Arc in 1866. For that, she used Harriet Parr. 00:03:58.400 --> 00:04:01.439 The life and death. That's the one. It suggests 00:04:01.439 --> 00:04:04.139 she compartmentalized her work, Homely pays the 00:04:04.139 --> 00:04:06.120 bills with the novels, and Harriet Parr does 00:04:06.120 --> 00:04:08.759 the serious intellectual heavy lifting. It's 00:04:08.759 --> 00:04:11.439 a fascinating distinction. It implies she knew 00:04:11.439 --> 00:04:14.250 exactly what she was doing. She wasn't just struck 00:04:14.250 --> 00:04:17.110 by sudden inspiration, she was actively managing 00:04:17.110 --> 00:04:19.790 a portfolio. Managing a portfolio is a perfect 00:04:19.790 --> 00:04:21.589 way to phrase it. Let's talk about the quality 00:04:21.589 --> 00:04:23.990 of that portfolio, because it's really easy to 00:04:23.990 --> 00:04:26.990 dismiss high -volume writers as just hacks. But 00:04:26.990 --> 00:04:29.769 she had a seal of approval that is basically 00:04:29.769 --> 00:04:33.310 the Victorian gold standard. Oh yes, Charles 00:04:33.310 --> 00:04:35.930 Dickens. Dickens didn't just tolerate her, he 00:04:35.930 --> 00:04:38.670 actually bought her work. He was an active fan. 00:04:38.889 --> 00:04:41.509 You have to remember Dickens was a magazine editor 00:04:41.509 --> 00:04:44.449 just as much as he was a novelist. He ran Household 00:04:44.449 --> 00:04:47.110 Words and later all the year round. He needed 00:04:47.110 --> 00:04:49.389 good material to fill those pages every week 00:04:49.389 --> 00:04:51.750 and he had a very high bar. And getting into 00:04:51.750 --> 00:04:53.889 the Christmas number of a Dickens magazine, that's 00:04:53.889 --> 00:04:56.079 a huge deal, right? It was the Super Bowl of 00:04:56.079 --> 00:04:58.660 Victorian publishing, the Christmas edition sold 00:04:58.660 --> 00:05:02.079 in massive numbers, and Dickens bought three 00:05:02.079 --> 00:05:04.259 stories from her specifically for these issues. 00:05:04.439 --> 00:05:06.220 We're talking about titles like The Poor Pensioner 00:05:06.220 --> 00:05:10.220 in 1855 and The Club Night in 1860. Yeah. If 00:05:10.220 --> 00:05:11.740 you were in the Christmas number, you were being 00:05:11.740 --> 00:05:14.759 read by everyone, from the Queen all the way 00:05:14.759 --> 00:05:17.920 down to the local shopkeeper. There's one specific 00:05:17.920 --> 00:05:20.759 detail about her work with Dickens that I found 00:05:20.759 --> 00:05:24.079 absolutely wild in the research. It's about a 00:05:24.079 --> 00:05:26.699 hymn. Can you walk us through this? Because honestly, 00:05:26.839 --> 00:05:28.939 it sounds like an urban legend. It really does. 00:05:28.980 --> 00:05:31.720 But it's a documented fact. In one of her stories, 00:05:31.899 --> 00:05:35.100 she needed a character to sing a hymn. So instead 00:05:35.100 --> 00:05:37.759 of quoting a real one that already existed, she 00:05:37.759 --> 00:05:40.720 just wrote some lyrics that fit the scene. Right. 00:05:40.860 --> 00:05:43.279 Just a plot device. Exactly. Just text on a page 00:05:43.279 --> 00:05:45.819 to move the story along. But the public completely 00:05:45.819 --> 00:05:47.829 latched onto it. They didn't see it as fictional 00:05:47.829 --> 00:05:50.410 text. They saw it as a spiritual truth. Someone 00:05:50.410 --> 00:05:52.649 set it to music. Yes, someone set it to music 00:05:52.649 --> 00:05:55.029 and it started getting passed around. And eventually 00:05:55.029 --> 00:05:58.430 this piece of prop writing from a Home Lee story 00:05:58.430 --> 00:06:00.870 ended up being included in actual Protestant 00:06:00.870 --> 00:06:03.430 hymnals in both Britain and the United States. 00:06:03.569 --> 00:06:06.149 That is bizarre. That's like a song a character 00:06:06.149 --> 00:06:08.829 hums in a Marvel movie ending up in a Catholic 00:06:08.829 --> 00:06:12.279 mass 20 years later. It is. But it shows the 00:06:12.279 --> 00:06:14.720 permeability of culture back then. Literature 00:06:14.720 --> 00:06:17.500 wasn't just entertainment. It was moral instruction. 00:06:17.899 --> 00:06:20.759 If a sentiment in a novel felt true or holy to 00:06:20.759 --> 00:06:23.120 people, they just adopted it. It didn't matter 00:06:23.120 --> 00:06:24.639 that it came from a commercial fiction writer. 00:06:24.740 --> 00:06:27.319 Not at all. So she has the volume. She has the 00:06:27.319 --> 00:06:29.459 Dickens endorsement. She has the massive cultural 00:06:29.459 --> 00:06:32.220 impact. But we really need to talk about the 00:06:32.220 --> 00:06:36.680 why. Why was she so incredibly popular? Because 00:06:36.680 --> 00:06:39.019 when I read descriptions of her plots today, 00:06:39.399 --> 00:06:42.490 they sound Well, they sound incredibly safe. 00:06:42.769 --> 00:06:44.810 This brings us to the most important economic 00:06:44.810 --> 00:06:47.610 factor of the era, and probably the real reason 00:06:47.610 --> 00:06:50.550 for her massive success. We need to talk about 00:06:50.550 --> 00:06:53.310 Moody. Charles Edward Moody, the man who owned 00:06:53.310 --> 00:06:55.850 the library. Though library is almost too small 00:06:55.850 --> 00:06:58.410 a word for what it was, Moody's select library 00:06:58.410 --> 00:07:01.769 was a monopoly. In the mid -19th century, novels 00:07:01.769 --> 00:07:04.230 were prohibitively expensive to buy outright. 00:07:04.709 --> 00:07:07.629 A standard novel cost 31 shillings and six pence. 00:07:07.769 --> 00:07:10.250 Which was a lot. That was more than a week's 00:07:10.250 --> 00:07:12.670 wages for a skilled clerk. It was a luxury item. 00:07:12.870 --> 00:07:15.230 So nobody actually bought books. Very few people 00:07:15.230 --> 00:07:17.810 bought new novels. They rented them. You paid 00:07:17.810 --> 00:07:20.629 a guinea year to subscribe to Moody's and you 00:07:20.629 --> 00:07:23.589 could take out one volume at a time. Moody controlled 00:07:23.589 --> 00:07:26.410 the entire distribution pipe in London. Wow. 00:07:26.509 --> 00:07:29.170 If he didn't stock your book, you literally didn't 00:07:29.170 --> 00:07:31.889 have an audience. He was the algorithm before 00:07:31.889 --> 00:07:34.230 algorithms existed. And I'm guessing Moody had 00:07:34.230 --> 00:07:36.550 a very specific taste in what he stocked. Very 00:07:36.550 --> 00:07:39.990 specific. He viewed himself as the ultimate guardian 00:07:39.990 --> 00:07:43.370 of middle class morality. He famously refused 00:07:43.370 --> 00:07:46.009 to anything that a parent couldn't read aloud 00:07:46.009 --> 00:07:48.370 to a daughter in the drawing room. So no sex, 00:07:48.610 --> 00:07:51.629 no scandal, no radical politics. None of it. 00:07:51.709 --> 00:07:53.850 And this is where Harriet Parr becomes an absolute 00:07:53.850 --> 00:07:56.470 genius of the market. She didn't just write for 00:07:56.470 --> 00:07:58.889 Moody, she optimized for him. There's a quote 00:07:58.889 --> 00:08:01.350 from a contemporary review in the sources that 00:08:01.350 --> 00:08:03.790 describes her work as strictly conforming to 00:08:03.790 --> 00:08:07.529 decency, depicting, quote, shy maidens and their 00:08:07.529 --> 00:08:09.970 decent love problems. It sounds kind of scathing 00:08:09.970 --> 00:08:12.069 to us now, doesn't it? Decent love problems. 00:08:12.149 --> 00:08:15.670 It sounds so boring. It does. But to Moody, that 00:08:15.670 --> 00:08:18.579 description was money in the bank. It meant zero 00:08:18.579 --> 00:08:21.000 complaints from his wealthy subscribers. It meant 00:08:21.000 --> 00:08:23.100 the book was perfectly safe to ship to every 00:08:23.100 --> 00:08:25.560 Vicarage in England. Wait, the economics go deeper 00:08:25.560 --> 00:08:27.699 than just being safe, right? You mentioned the 00:08:27.699 --> 00:08:30.500 price earlier, 31 shillings. That was specifically 00:08:30.500 --> 00:08:33.100 for a three -decker. Right. The triple -decker 00:08:33.100 --> 00:08:37.220 novel, three separate volumes. Moody loved this 00:08:37.220 --> 00:08:40.240 format for a very cynical business reason. Let 00:08:40.240 --> 00:08:42.080 me guess, he could lend them out separately. 00:08:42.340 --> 00:08:45.529 Exactly. If a novel is split into three volumes, 00:08:45.649 --> 00:08:47.990 he can lend it to three different paying subscribers 00:08:47.990 --> 00:08:50.929 at the exact same time. Subscriber A has volume 00:08:50.929 --> 00:08:53.450 one, subscriber B has volume two, subscriber 00:08:53.450 --> 00:08:56.350 C has volume three. He literally triples his 00:08:56.350 --> 00:08:59.110 inventory efficiency. That is devious. It's brilliant 00:08:59.110 --> 00:09:01.250 capitalism. But it kind of ruined the art form 00:09:01.250 --> 00:09:03.789 for a while because authors had to fill three 00:09:03.789 --> 00:09:06.490 whole volumes just to get paid by the publishers. 00:09:06.629 --> 00:09:09.889 You get these bloated, incredibly slow moving 00:09:09.889 --> 00:09:12.419 plots. And Harriet Parr was good at this. She 00:09:12.419 --> 00:09:14.940 was a master of the triple decker. She could 00:09:14.940 --> 00:09:17.039 take a decent love problem and stretch it out 00:09:17.039 --> 00:09:19.559 over 900 pages without the whole thing collapsing. 00:09:20.440 --> 00:09:23.139 That is a serious technical skill, even if it 00:09:23.139 --> 00:09:24.820 doesn't make for thrilling reading for you and 00:09:24.820 --> 00:09:28.200 me today. So she was providing content in the 00:09:28.200 --> 00:09:31.179 truest sense of the word, filling the exact container 00:09:31.179 --> 00:09:33.519 that the distributor demanded. Precisely. She 00:09:33.519 --> 00:09:36.240 was filling the bucket Moody provided. But here's 00:09:36.240 --> 00:09:39.179 the curveball that completely threw me. If she 00:09:39.179 --> 00:09:42.409 was the reigning queen of the boring, decent, 00:09:42.830 --> 00:09:46.830 three -volume drawing room novel, how do we explain 00:09:46.830 --> 00:09:50.230 To Flongbo? Ah, To Flongbo. This is honestly 00:09:50.230 --> 00:09:52.070 my favorite part of her bibliography because 00:09:52.070 --> 00:09:54.129 it feels like a sudden psychological break. The 00:09:54.129 --> 00:09:57.149 titles alone are hallucinogenic. We had the wonderful 00:09:57.149 --> 00:09:59.250 adventures of To Flongbo and his elfin company. 00:09:59.450 --> 00:10:01.850 And the sequel to Flongbo's journey in search 00:10:01.850 --> 00:10:04.009 of ogres. It's such a massive pivot. You have 00:10:04.009 --> 00:10:05.990 to imagine, she spends her days writing about 00:10:05.990 --> 00:10:08.370 these shy maidens in drawing rooms, adhering 00:10:08.370 --> 00:10:10.649 to strict realism and strict Victorian morality. 00:10:11.070 --> 00:10:12.789 But in her children's books, the gloves just 00:10:12.789 --> 00:10:14.950 completely come off. I read some of the synopsis. 00:10:15.049 --> 00:10:17.149 There are characters called the Ant Spite and 00:10:17.149 --> 00:10:20.629 the Black Cap and the Giant's Well. It feels 00:10:20.629 --> 00:10:23.649 decidedly indecent, or at least unrepressed. 00:10:23.899 --> 00:10:26.580 That's the beauty of Victorian fairy tales. It 00:10:26.580 --> 00:10:29.779 was the one single genre where women were actually 00:10:29.779 --> 00:10:32.019 allowed to be weird. You couldn't have a monster 00:10:32.019 --> 00:10:34.440 in a drawing room novel, but you could absolutely 00:10:34.440 --> 00:10:36.919 have one in a fairy tale. So it was an outlet 00:10:36.919 --> 00:10:40.519 for her. Exactly. It suggests that Harriet Parr 00:10:40.519 --> 00:10:43.360 had a much wilder imagination than her mainstream 00:10:43.360 --> 00:10:46.019 novels led on, but she suppressed it most of 00:10:46.019 --> 00:10:48.259 the time to pay the rent. And interestingly, 00:10:48.600 --> 00:10:50.799 the fairy tales had a much longer shelf life. 00:10:51.049 --> 00:10:53.909 Legends from Fairyland was actually reissued 00:10:53.909 --> 00:10:57.210 as late as 1907, years after she died. These 00:10:57.210 --> 00:10:59.870 beautiful Art Nouveau illustrations. Which makes 00:10:59.870 --> 00:11:02.149 total sense when you think about it. Decent love 00:11:02.149 --> 00:11:04.470 problems age poorly. They're tied to the very 00:11:04.470 --> 00:11:08.129 specific social rules of 1860. But a journey 00:11:08.129 --> 00:11:11.690 to find ogres? That's timeless. Right. The fantasy 00:11:11.690 --> 00:11:14.090 work bypassed the moody filter entirely and connected 00:11:14.090 --> 00:11:16.250 with something a bit more primal. I want to zoom 00:11:16.250 --> 00:11:18.970 out to her global reach before we get to the 00:11:18.970 --> 00:11:21.490 end of her life because she wasn't just a London 00:11:21.490 --> 00:11:24.149 phenomenon. The NOS mentioned she was published 00:11:24.149 --> 00:11:27.750 in Leipzig by a firm called Tauchnitz. Why does 00:11:27.750 --> 00:11:30.690 that matter? Bernhard Tochnitz is a key piece 00:11:30.690 --> 00:11:33.370 of the publishing puzzle here. He was a German 00:11:33.370 --> 00:11:35.889 publisher who realized that British tourists 00:11:35.889 --> 00:11:38.370 traveling through Europe wanted something to 00:11:38.370 --> 00:11:40.250 read on the train. So he cornered the travel 00:11:40.250 --> 00:11:43.610 market. He did. He bought the rights to popular 00:11:43.610 --> 00:11:46.269 English novels and printed these cheap paperback 00:11:46.269 --> 00:11:49.149 editions to be sold at railway stations all across 00:11:49.149 --> 00:11:51.110 the continent. She was writing the airport novel. 00:11:51.330 --> 00:11:54.110 Before airplanes, yes. If you were a wealthy 00:11:54.110 --> 00:11:56.830 Brit on the grand tour, sitting on a train from 00:11:56.830 --> 00:11:59.629 Paris to Vienna, You were probably reading a 00:11:59.629 --> 00:12:02.690 Tauschnitz edition. And Harriet Parr was a staple 00:12:02.690 --> 00:12:05.049 of that collection. Which proves she wasn't just 00:12:05.049 --> 00:12:07.710 a library author. Not at all. She was a mass 00:12:07.710 --> 00:12:10.269 market commercial juggernaut. People genuinely 00:12:10.269 --> 00:12:12.590 wanted to read her to pass the time. So we have 00:12:12.590 --> 00:12:15.450 this massive career. She eventually retires to 00:12:15.450 --> 00:12:16.909 Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, which is very 00:12:16.909 --> 00:12:20.450 respectable. She dies in February 1900. And then 00:12:20.450 --> 00:12:24.350 silence. The books stop printing. The name vanishes. 00:12:25.149 --> 00:12:28.159 Why didn't she survive? Dickens survived. The 00:12:28.159 --> 00:12:30.879 Brontes survived. Why not Parr? I think the data 00:12:30.879 --> 00:12:33.360 for death is almost too perfect as an explanation. 00:12:34.000 --> 00:12:37.779 February 1900. The Victorian era is quite literally 00:12:37.779 --> 00:12:40.399 ending. Queen Victoria herself dies less than 00:12:40.399 --> 00:12:42.960 a year later. Wow, the timing is crazy. Harriet 00:12:42.960 --> 00:12:45.879 Parr was so perfectly calibrated to her specific 00:12:45.879 --> 00:12:49.000 moment, to Moody's library, to the specific morals 00:12:49.000 --> 00:12:51.419 of the mid -Victorian middle class, she couldn't 00:12:51.419 --> 00:12:53.480 exist outside of it. She was a creature of her 00:12:53.480 --> 00:12:55.399 ecosystem. When the ecosystem died, she died. 00:12:55.539 --> 00:12:57.860 Exactly. Dickens survives because he challenged 00:12:57.860 --> 00:13:00.580 the ecosystem. He wrote about poverty, the legal 00:13:00.580 --> 00:13:02.639 system, the human condition, things that are 00:13:02.639 --> 00:13:04.679 still very real problems today. The Brontes wrote 00:13:04.679 --> 00:13:06.840 about deep psychological trauma. But Parr wrote 00:13:06.840 --> 00:13:09.250 about comfort. Yes, she wrote about how things 00:13:09.250 --> 00:13:11.970 should be according to the strict rules of 1860. 00:13:12.470 --> 00:13:14.470 When those rules changed, the books just became 00:13:14.470 --> 00:13:16.450 irrelevant. It's the difference between a mirror 00:13:16.450 --> 00:13:19.110 and a painting, isn't it? She was a mirror reflecting 00:13:19.110 --> 00:13:22.269 the audience back to themselves. Once the audience 00:13:22.269 --> 00:13:25.009 changes, the reflection is gone. That's a brilliant 00:13:25.009 --> 00:13:27.759 way to put it. And historically, we don't tend 00:13:27.759 --> 00:13:30.259 to study the mirrors. We study the people who 00:13:30.259 --> 00:13:32.820 broke them. Which brings up a really uncomfortable 00:13:32.820 --> 00:13:35.679 question for us today. We look back at the Victorians 00:13:35.679 --> 00:13:37.879 and laugh at their shy maidens and their obsession 00:13:37.879 --> 00:13:40.519 with decency. But we have our own obsession, 00:13:40.580 --> 00:13:43.220 don't we? We certainly do. And that's the provocative 00:13:43.220 --> 00:13:45.059 thought I'm really left with after looking at 00:13:45.059 --> 00:13:47.639 all this. Harriet Parr wasn't a hack. She was 00:13:47.639 --> 00:13:50.600 a bestseller. She gave the people exactly what 00:13:50.600 --> 00:13:53.080 they wanted and what the moral guardians of her 00:13:53.080 --> 00:13:55.500 time approved of. So who is doing that right 00:13:55.500 --> 00:13:57.240 now? That is the question for you listening. 00:13:57.639 --> 00:14:01.320 Who is the Harriet Parr of 2026? Who is the author 00:14:01.320 --> 00:14:04.620 currently topping the bestseller lists, who feels 00:14:04.620 --> 00:14:07.220 incredibly essential, who perfectly reflects 00:14:07.220 --> 00:14:10.139 our current values and morals, but who will be 00:14:10.139 --> 00:14:13.000 completely unintelligible to a reader in 100 00:14:13.000 --> 00:14:15.559 years? That's actually terrifying. You're asking 00:14:15.559 --> 00:14:18.460 who is the safe choice today that we mistakenly 00:14:18.460 --> 00:14:22.100 think is important art? Yes, we think we're reading 00:14:22.100 --> 00:14:25.419 the greats. But statistically, most of us are 00:14:25.419 --> 00:14:27.700 reading Harriet Pars. We are reading the books 00:14:27.700 --> 00:14:30.139 that comfort us, that affirm our current worldview, 00:14:30.659 --> 00:14:33.460 just like the Victorians did. And history is 00:14:33.460 --> 00:14:35.159 very cruel to comfort. I'm going to be staring 00:14:35.159 --> 00:14:37.200 at my bookshelf very suspiciously tonight. As 00:14:37.200 --> 00:14:39.820 you should. That's a wrap on our deep dive into 00:14:39.820 --> 00:14:42.259 the invisible bestseller. It's a pretty stark 00:14:42.259 --> 00:14:45.460 lesson in fame, economics, and how quickly the 00:14:45.460 --> 00:14:47.899 world moves on. Thanks for joining us for the 00:14:47.899 --> 00:14:49.139 deep dive. Thank you.