Difficult women, messy histories, sharp company.
Deviant Women traces women whose lives or stories sat outside the approved script, from Forough Farrokhzad and Daphne du Maurier to Mary Shelley, Mary de Morgan, and Marie Laveau. It pairs biographical detail with loose, funny conversation that can move from publishing questions to goth language without losing the thread.
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Deviant Women is feminist biography with a taste for the unruly edge of culture. Its subjects come from history, myth, literature, and the contemporary world, but the show is less interested in tidy monuments than in women whose lives have been made messy by reputation, power, art, sex, family, belief, or scandal. The excerpts include Forough Farrokhzad, Daphne du Maurier, Mary Shelley, Mary de Morgan, Marie Laveau, and The Valiant Ladies of Potosi. That range matters. It lets the show move from Persian poetry to gothic fiction, from fairy tales to mythology, and from literary circles to the blurred border between history and myth. The register is conversational and sharp. It is not a museum label. A discussion of Farrokhzad can pause over how modernist form itself became controversial, while a discussion of du Maurier can hold marriage, publishing caution, risque fiction, and Rebecca in the same frame. Mary Shelley arrives through October, goth language, Geneva, Byron, Claire, Percy, John Polidori, and the crowded emotional weather around Frankenstein. Mary de Morgan brings family hardship, artistic lodgings, oral storytelling, and pre-Raphaelite circles into view. The show often cares about how women made work under pressure. It also cares about who got called improper for doing it. There are jokes, digressions, pop-culture callbacks, and unvarnished reactions, but the conversation keeps returning to the same core question: what happens when a woman refuses, or is refused, the expected shape of a life? That makes the show useful for listeners who want biography with texture rather than reverence. It is funny without flattening its subjects. It is serious without becoming solemn. Its best moments make history feel inhabited: crowded rooms, risky manuscripts, grieving families, strange reputations, artistic friendships, and women becoming legible on their own difficult terms.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants feminist cultural history with biography, literature, mythology, and irreverent conversation in the mix. It also suits someone comfortable with messy lives rather than polished hero stories.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its refusal to separate research from personality: literary and historical context sits beside jokes, pop-culture detours, and frank reactions. Similar shows may profile notable women; this one lingers on reputation, scandal, creative pressure, and the social rules around the subject.
Each fortnight, hosts Lauren and Alicia delve into a ‘deviant’ woman from history, fiction, mythology and the contemporary world: those who aren’t afraid to break the rules, to subvert the system, to explore, to seek and to challenge the status quo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mary Shelley's Geneva trip has an awkward invitation problem; Lauren and Alicia give you the backstory.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A teen-magazine quiz turns under-bed debris and sandwich hygiene into sharply judged nostalgia.
Australian teen magazines from the 90s and noughties become a tidy little archive of adolescent mess in "My Girlfriend Dolly." Jessa and Heidi work through a quiz about what might be hiding under the bed, what to do with a dropped sandwich, and how to respond to a period…
A sharp, lively look at how Farrokhzad's modernist form made a woman's poetic voice newly controversial.
Farrokhzad emerges here as a poet whose rebellion started on the page, with form doing as much work as biography. Deviant Women follows how her modernist style, individualism, and unmistakably female perspective made the collection controversial even before the wider question of…
A conversational look at Daphne du Maurier's early novels, marriage, and the private tensions that shaped Rebecca.
Daphne du Maurier's writing and private life sit side by side in this episode, which follows her marriage to Tommy, the birth of their three children, and the early novels that began to show her range.
Mary Shelley emerges from the tangled Geneva circle where gothic legend, ambition, and romantic confusion crowd the same room.
Deviant Women approaches Mary Shelley through the unruly Geneva circle that helped fix her place in gothic memory: Percy, Claire, Byron, John Polidori, and a tangle of lovers, ex-lovers, and almost-lovers orbiting one another in May 1816.
Mary de Morgan's fairy tales grow from grief, artist lodgings, and children asking for more.
Mary de Morgan's creative life comes through as a story shaped by grief, relocation, and the artistic company around her family. The episode works best when it stays close to her fairy tales as spoken stories, first shared with children in those circles, then gradually becoming…
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Jessa and Heidi spend the episode mining Dolly magazine's July 2002 issue, which puts Kirsten Dunst on the cover and promises a 16-page "Spill It A Secret" special.
Lauren and Alicia end season four of Deviant Women with Forough Farrokhzad, the Tehran-born Iranian poet whose work they describe as influential and controversial.
Deviant Women's Daphne du Maurier episode follows the writer from her 1907 London birth to the Egypt backstory that fed Rebecca.
["Deviant Women frames Mary Shelley as the \"queen of goths,\" the \"mother of horror,\" and the author of Frankenstein while Lauren and Alicia connect her to the female Gothic.", "The episode traces Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, William Godwin's anti-monarchy politics, and the way Mary Shelley grew up with her mother's portrait and books.", "It follows Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley's secret meetings at St.
Deviant Women opens by pausing on Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death, then pivots to Mary de Morgan instead of trying to chase the news cycle.
Hosts Lauren and Alicia introduce season four of their podcast about deviant women from history, mythology, literature, and the contemporary world, teasing upcoming episodes on Russian and French history.
Hosts Lauren and Alicia introduce season four of their podcast about deviant women from history, mythology, and literature, discussing their Patreon bonus content on embarrassing 90s selves.
Hosts Lauren and Alicia introduce their Christmas special, discussing their Fringe show and plans for a musical, before transitioning to the holiday theme.
Hosts Lauren and Alicia discuss a 'deviant' woman from history, fiction, mythology, or the contemporary world who challenges the status quo.
The hosts introduce a Halloween episode about a story involving devils, witches, conspiracies, and hysteria.
Hosts Lauren and Alicia introduce an episode about a deviant woman from 16th century Mexico, discussing their fascination with the conquistador era.
Hosts Lauren and Alicia introduce their podcast about deviant women from history, mythology, and literature, sharing personal anecdotes.
Hosts Lauren and Alicia discuss deviant women from history and contemporary issues like reproductive rights.