I was so pleased to be asked to write about interwar aristocratic circus goth Lady Eleanor Smith and her first novel Red Wagon for the literary website Neglected Books. Neglected Books editor Brad Bigelow (a terrific Hon) and I were on the same City Lit biography writing course last year and both have subjects who lived in Lincoln, Nebraska at around the same time. I’m sure Gordon MacRae and Virginia Faulkner would have attended some of the same events, though I don’t know if they would have had much in common beyond both being Republicans.
Anyway, my piece on Lady Eleanor Smith can be found here. My favourite detail about her is that she lived in Chelsea with a black cat called Satan – that’s what I call #Goals. I also need to watch the Gainsborough Pictures adaptation of her novel The Man in Grey. I went to primary school opposite where the Hoxton Gainsborough Studios once stood and a James Mason expert has informed me it’s ‘enjoyably terrible’.
Julia Rank 