SYMHC Classics: Three Astonishing Belles

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday.

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Speaker 2: Something that came up in passing in the research for this week's episode on George Washington Williams was that he knew Richard T. Greener, first black graduate of Harvard and father of Belle DaCosta Green, and I thought, Hey, we talked about her on the podcast. She is one of the three women we discussed in this episode, Gertrude Belle, Ellian Belle Da Costa Green, and Dido Elizabeth Bell. It is Today's Saturday Classic and it originally came out on December eleventh, twenty seventeen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

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Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

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Speaker 2: Today we have another episode in which we're going to devote some time to three unique women, all of whom are notable in their way. And the two things that they have in common is that each of them has an element to their story that really surprised me in some way, and the other is that they each have the name Belle. If you're wondering, Hey, Tracy, why is this not a six impossible episodes, It's because a lot of the other bells were already taken. You will find Belle Boyd, Bell Star, and Bell Ganness in the archive, along with Gertrude Bell, whose name doesn't have the E on the end, and even the Bell which he was not a person. The three women today are Gertrude Bell Ellien, Belle DaCosta Green, and Dido Elizabeth Bell. Dido Elizabeth Bell is a frequent listener request, including more recently from Renee and Melissa. And then the other two are people I learned about kind of stumbled over in various travels. Gertrude Bell Ellien, known as Trudy, was born on January twenty third, nineteen eighteen. Her father, Robert, was a dentist who had immigrated from Lithuania and moved to New York at the age of twelve. Her mother, Bertha Cohen, had immigrated from a part of Russia that is now Poland when she was fourteen years old. The family was Jewish, and Robert was from a long line of rabbis. Ellien grew up in a Manhattan apartment adjacent to her father's dentistry practice, and when she was six, a younger brother, Herbert, was born Not long after that, the family moved to the Bronx, which was at the time considered more of a suburb than an actual part of New York City.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty three, Ellian graduated from high school, and her family at that point was in pretty dire financial streets. Like much of the rest of the country and in some cases, the world, they had suffered huge losses in the Great Depression, and her father had declared bankruptcy. Fortunately, though, because Elien had been such an exceptional student, she was accepted at Hunter College, which was at the time a tuition free women's college.

00:02:57
Speaker 2: Ellien's grandfather died of cancer that she graduated from high school, and she wanted to pursue a career that would let her fight the disease. But she also had kind of an aversion to dissection, so she got around this difficulty by studying chemistry.

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Speaker 1: Ellien graduated from Hunter College summa cum laude in nineteen thirty seven, but in spite of her excellent academic record, she couldn't find work as a chemist because of her gender. She got a job teaching biochemistry to nursing students at the New York Hospital School of Nursing but that was only a temporary position, with the course only taught once every nine months, and when she finally did find a job working as a lab assistant, it was unpaid and it slowly and gradually increased from zero to twenty dollars a week. She saved as much money as she could, and her parents gradually recovered from the Great Depression thanks to her father's loyal dentistry patients, so by nineteen thirty nine she had enough money to go back to school. She enrolled at New York University and the chemistry department as its only female master's degree student, earning her MS in nineteen forty one, not long after the United States entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We often talk about World War two as a time when more women were entering the civilian workforce because so many men were entering the military, and that's often discussed in terms of factory labor or wartime industries, but the same concept applied to other jobs as well. So during the war, Elian was finally able to get work as a chemist, starting out in the Quaker Made Company's quality control department. She didn't really.

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Speaker 2: Love doing this work, she was doing things like testing the acidity of pickles, and it was pretty repetitive, but it did give her a lot of practice at conducting tests quickly and efficiently and doing them accurately. When she felt like there wasn't anything else she could learn at Quaker Maide, she looked for another job and was hired in a research position at Johnson and Johnson, but that company shuttered the research lab when she'd been there for only about six months.

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Speaker 1: Then in nineteen forty four, she got a position doing what she had really wanted to do since high school, working as a research chemist at pharmaceutical company Burrow's Welcome, where she started out as an assistant to doctor George H. Hitchings.

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Speaker 2: Side note that after many moves and name changes, Burrow's Welcome is now glaxosmith Klein. This new role was really ideal for her. Hitchings encouraged her to learn as much as she could, including branching out from the field of chemistry. He progressively gave her more and more responsibility, and often when Hitchings got promoted, she got promoted into his old role. By nineteen sixty seven, she had risen through the ranks to become Burrow's Welcome's Head of Experimental Therapy, a position that she would hold until the end.

00:05:51
Speaker 1: Of her career. When Ellian started working at Burrow's Welcome, a lot of pharmaceutical research was carried out basically on a try, vile and error basis, but Elien and the rest of their team took a different approach, examining and then exploiting biochemical differences between healthy cells and pathogens so that they could develop targeted drugs.

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Speaker 2: While at burrows Welcome, Elien and Hitchings developed the first successful chemotherapy for the treatment of childhood leukemia. They developed the world's first anti rejection drug, which made kidney transplants possible between people who weren't related to one another. Elian also develops treatments for a number of other diseases, including gout, lupus, malaria, meningitis, and arthritis. In the late nineteen sixties, after she had become head of the Department of Experimental Therapy, Elien did pioneering work in anti viral drugs. The conventional wisdom at this point was that any drug that could successfully work against viruses would be far too toxic to be tolerated by the human body. The department's first breakthrough was a cyclovire, invented by Howard Schaeffer. A cyclovier, used to treat herpes, was the world's first truly successful targeted antiviral medication. There were a few other antiviral drugs at this point, but most of them had been developed as treatments for non viral diseases, they were discovered to actually have some antiviral efficacy, or they were broad spectrum treatments that were really hard on the patient. Ellien's work with a cyclovier included refining its development, as well as figuring out exactly why it worked, and then applying those findings to other drugs.

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Speaker 1: Elien's techniques also led to the development of a zidathymidine, more commonly known as AZT, which in nineteen eighty seven became the first drug approved by the FDA for the treatment of HIV. By the time AZT was developed, Elien had retired and was serving as scientist emeritus and consultant, so she had more of a supervisory role than a hands on one. Early in her career at Burroughs Welcome, Ellien had wanted to continue her education. She enrolled in the PhD proget Brooklyn Polytechnic, going to school part time while continuing to work. But after two years in the program, the dean told her she needed to choose between her job and her studies. She chose the job, and she never finished her doctorate. So she rose to these incredible heights with two strikes against her, the fact that she was a woman and the fact that she didn't have a PhD. Been her own words. Quote.

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Speaker 2: Years later, when I received three honorary doctorate degrees from George Washington University, Brown University, and University of Michigan, I decided that perhaps that decision had been the right one after all.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty eight, Gertrude Bell Ellion and George H. Hitchings were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the words of the Nobel Assembly, they quote demonstrated differences in nucleic acid metabolism between normal human cells, cancer cells, protozoa, bacteria, and virus. On the basis of such differences, a series of drugs were developed the block nucleic acid synthesis in cancer cells and noxious organisms without damaging the normal human cells. Ellien in that moment, became the fifth woman to earn a Nobel Prize in medicine, the ninth woman to earn a Nobel Prize in any science category, and one of a very few people to earn a Nobel Prize in the sciences without having a doctorate. As a side note, also receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in nineteen eighty eight was James W. Black, who developed beta blockers, which are used to treat high blood pressure and heart disease, and eight two antagonists, which are used to treat peptic ulcers. Ellien Is also listed on the patents for more than forty drugs. She received more than twenty honorary doctoral degrees, and in nineteen sixty eight she was awarded the Garvin Medal from the American Chemical Society, and in nineteen eighty five she earned the American Chemical Society Distinguished Chemist Award. She also earned the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor, the National Medal of Science in the Lemmelson MIT Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. In nineteen ninety one, at the age of seventy three, she became the first woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

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Speaker 2: She also served as a leader in several organizations dedicated to health and research, including serving on the board of directors of the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and the Multiple Sclerosis Society. She was also a member of the American Academy of Pharmaceutical Scientists, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Chemical Society, and the American Association of Cancer Research, also serving as its president. In addition to all of this, she did a lot of outreach to encourage children to study the sciences, especially girls. She was an avid traveler and photographer, and she also loved music that she subscribed to the Metropolitan Opera for forty years. Eventually, brose Welcome moved its headquarters to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Ellien moved as well. While in North Carolina, she taught at both the University of North Carolina and at Duke University in Durham. She died in Chapel Hill on Sunday, February twenty first, nineteen ninety nine, at the age of eighty one. I learned about her at the National Museum of Jewish American History in Philadelphia. I had never heard of her before, and it is amazing that she did such important and groundbreaking work in the field of chemistry, and especially in pharmaceutical chemistry without as would typically be expected a PhD. Like for her to be at that rank within the company without a PhD and also a woman, is amazing. Yeah, we're going to talk about another fascinating lady with the name Belle in just a moment, But first we're going to pause and have a little sponsor break. Beginning in about eighteen ninety, wealthy financier and banking titan John Pierpont Morgan Senior started amassing a huge collection of rare and antique books, artifacts and art, and other assorted treasures at his home at two nineteen Madison Avenue in New York City. He acquired a Gutenberg Bible on vellum, the first of three Gutenberg Bibles that he would go on to own. Also for Shakespeare, folios, signed manuscripts by John Keats and Charles Dickens, a fourteen fifty nine edition of The Man's Psalter.

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Speaker 1: On and on a very impressive collection. It was extensive and expensive as well as being impressive, so much so that in nineteen oh two, he commissioned an architect to build a library adjoining his home to house it all. And while he did seem to have the knowledge, taste, and money to build a good collection, he didn't really have a head for curating or organizing it. For that, he needed a librarian.

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Speaker 2: That librarian was bell to Costa Green, who he high in nineteen oh five when she was twenty two. Green born on December thirteenth, eighteen eighty three, was of Portuguese heritage. She'd been born in Virginia and grew up in Alexandria, and she'd gone directly from public school to working at the Princeton University Library in nineteen oh one or nineteen oh two. Although she had no prior training as a librarian, her time at Princeton had made her quite skilled at cataloging and reference work, and she'd had a lifelong affinity for rare books and illuminated manuscripts.

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Speaker 1: I would imagine that would seem like a dream job then, at least that is the biography that she probably gave to JP Morgan, who had been introduced to Green through his nephew Junia Spencer Morgan, Associate librarian at Princeton, and it is also the one she presented to the world at large, and you will still find some of those details in articles about her life.

00:13:51
Speaker 2: Green did go to public school and work in a Princeton University library, but biographer Heidi Artisan puts her birth at November twenty one, six, eighteen seventy nine, in Washington, d C. So slightly different place and also a little older. From there, her family moved to New York in eighteen eighty five, and then after graduating from high school, Green went on to Teachers College, as well as possibly taking a library apprenticeship at New York Public Library and a bibliography course at Amherst College.

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Speaker 1: And her name was not initially Belle Da Costa Green. It was Bell Marion Greener. Her father, Richard T. Greener, was the first black man to graduate from Harvard, the first black librarian and professor at the University of South Carolina, and a former dean at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, d C.

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Speaker 2: Green may have had some Portuguese ancestry. Her parents both had very like complexions, but the name the Costa and the change of her last name from Greener to Green both came after her father left the family and moved to Russia to take on a consular post. Race that was listed on Green's birth certificate was colored. It's virtually certain that Belle da Costa Green could not have gone on to the life that she had and the work that she did had she presented herself to the world as a black woman. Her father was able to rise to some prominence, largely thanks to when he was born. His admission to Harvard and his job at USC were products of reconstruction happening during the brief window when the nation made reluctant strides towards racial equality. But Bell de Coosta Green went to work for JP Morgan in nineteen oh six, well into the Jim Crow era. Even though the South has a much more notorious reputation for segregation and racist violence, segregation and racism were present in the rest of the nation as well, although often in a somewhat subtler way. We have a whole library of podcast episodes called not Just in the South that relate to this whole idea, which we will link to in our show notes. So after her father's depart Green, along with her mother and siblings, changed their last names with a brother, adding DaCosta to his as well. They distanced themselves from Richard T. Greener, his reputation and his color, and they joined the white world. For Bell's part, she had far more opportunity available to her as a white woman straight out of high school than is the daughter of a black Harvard graduate who had attended college and possibly completed a library apprenticeship. Can I take just a moment to talk about the idea of passing because it has come up Yeah, previous episodes a couple of times, like the idea of passing. So a person of color living within the white world as a white person has its connotation of deception and doing something wrong. But to be clear, what is wrong is the society that made it impossible for people of color to live the same life as white people had access to. So what she was basically doing here was just not playing by the rules that white society was establishing for people of color, doing her own thing. Yeah, it is one of those things that's sometimes framed as sort of sneaky, but when you look at it really as the comparative that Tracy laid out in these notes of like, here's a woman who is educated, she has all of these skills, she is super smart. But if she presents herself as black, she will never get this job. Versus saying, oh no, I'm just an enthusiast straight out of high school, but I'm white and gets the job. Like that's a pretty clear indicator of why passing became something that people tried to do. Yes, So, for her first three years working for Pierpont Morgan, Green spent most of her time sorting out this collection he had accumulated, organizing catalog and curating this whole haphazard mess into an actual private library, and then from there, while still acting as his personal librarian, she started traveling around the world on his behalf, basically as an acquisitions agent.

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Speaker 1: In this Green was highly confident and completely confident. Particularly in her early career. There was quite a bit of media coverage that painted her as a flibbertygibbet, but she carried herself with such assurance that it increasingly offset the fact that she was, to everyone else's eye, a twenty somethingter woman who had never been to college. She was also quite spylish and fashionable, playing up her so called quote exotic appearance. Reportedly saying, quote, just because I am a librarian doesn't mean I have to dress like one. She was openly flirtatious with everyone, and she had a string of lovers, rumored to include women and men. She was briefly engaged to a few of the latter. There were rumors that she was involved with Morgan himself, which she neither confirmed nor denied, just saying we tried when asked about it, like, what does that even mean? I don't know.

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Speaker 2: Her longest and most important relationship was with married art historian Bernard Berenson, who she wrote more than six hundred letters to between nineteen ten and nineteen forty four. Green also neither confirmed nor denied speculation about whether she had quote crossed the color line, which went on throughout her life. Instead, she lived exuberantly and passionately, presenting herself as a mysterious, intriguing woman with a sharp tongue and shrewd bargaining skills, who also became highly internationally respected for her work as a librarian and her ability to negotiate for new acquisitions.

00:19:34
Speaker 1: Belle de Costa.

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Speaker 2: Green expanded Pierpont Morgan's holdings into one of the finest private library collections in the world. By the time Morgan died in nineteen thirteen, his library contained six hundred rare and valuable volumes. It included an incredible collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, along with a sizable collection of books printed by William Caxton, in large part thanks to Green negotiating a private purchase the night before an entire set was supposed to be sold at auction, and one of her most famous acquisitions, she secured another caxpan An edition of La Morte d'erteur for forty two eight hundred dollars, which is a lot of money, but it is a whole lot less than the one hundred thousand dollars that Morgan had offered her to had authorized her to pay for it. After Morgan's death, Green's future was briefly uncertain. His son, JP Morgan Junior, known as Jack, was not particularly interested in his father's collection, but in about nineteen twenty he changed his mind, and Green resumed her travels to Europe to continue acquiring manuscripts, books and art, now hoping to develop the Morgan collection until it rivaled the world's finest public institutions and make it into something that the public could access. Jack Morgan ultimately agreed with this goal, and the Morgan Library became a public institution in nineteen twenty four, at which point Green became its He became its first director. For the next twenty four years, Bell de Costa Green worked to transform the Morgan Library into an internationally recognized center for academic study. She developed an information services department, a copying services department. She arranged public lectures and publications. She also continued to travel and acquire new works until nineteen thirty six, when her health started to decline.

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Speaker 1: She worked at the Morgan Library until her retirement in nineteen forty eight, and she died on May tenth, nineteen fifty. Although she was seventy one and the people in her life thought she was more like sixty seven, people wondered whether she had been ill or whether her lifestyle had contributed to her early death. She was a lifelong smoker and a heavy drinker, and she'd always burned the candle at both ends in a life of passion, travel and adventure.

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Speaker 2: The Morgan Library, which is now the Morgan Library and Museum, held an exhibition the year before her death which featured more than two a few hundred and fifty of the most notable items she had acquired for the library, and today her presence is still definitely felt there. There's including a piece about her in the free audio tour that you can get if you go to the Morgan, which is how I first learned about Harry. It was actually on my second trip to the Morgan. For whatever reason, my first time there, I hadn't flipped through to that part and I was there my second time around with my husband and he came over to me was like, hey, have you listened to this about the librarian? Listen to the one about the librarian. She sounds amazing, So we have one more amazing woman to talk about after one more quick sponsor break. Hanging in Schoon Palace in Perth, Scotland is a striking and beautiful portrait of two young women. The woman on the right is in a pink gown with a gauzy white overlay. It's pretty traditional, maybe even a little bit old fashioned for the time. She's holding a book in one hand and the other woman's farm in the other. Her expression is a little reserved, but it has kind of a playful, little smile. The woman on the left is dressed more exotically, a white satin dress with a silken blue shawl flowing back from her arms, and a white turban decorated with a fashionable ostrich bloom in a little gold embellishments. She's carrying a basket of fruit and holding one finger up to her cheek, wearing a decidedly mischievous expression. Given their clothing, their jewelry, and the setting, both women are clearly wealthy. They're also obviously fond of one another. The painting's composition suggests that they might be sisters and in what's most striking about the portrait, which dates back to the late seventeen seventies, is that the woman on the right is white and the woman on the left is black. In a dramatic departure from what would have been accepted at the time and what is really depicted in paintings from the time, it presents them as near equals.

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Speaker 1: That woman on the left is Dido Elizabeth Bell, and on the right is her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray. Both were grand nieces of William Murray, first Earl of Mansfield and the Lord Chief Justice of Britain, who, along with his wife, raised them at the estate of Kentwood House. Their fathers were two of Lord Mansfield's nephews. Lady Elizabeth Murray's father was an ambassador and her mother had died when she was still a baby, which is why she was being raised at Kenwood House. Dido.

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Speaker 2: Elizabeth Bell's father was a British Navy officer, Sir John Lindsay. Her mother was an enslaved woman named Maria, who Lindsay either stole or rescued, depending on who you ask, from a Spanish vessel in the Caribbean. We know virtually nothing concrete about Maria's life. We don't know whether she was bound from Africa to the Caribbean when Lindsay encountered the ship she was on, or whether she had already been in the colonies and then was being transported elsewhere.

00:25:04
Speaker 1: We don't even know what ship it was.

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Speaker 2: We also know virtually nothing about her connection to John Lindsay. It was extremely common for a ship's crew to rape enslaved women in transit, but it was unheard of for a British officer to return home with an enslaved woman who was carrying his child. Which, according to what the one surviving second hand account that we have, is what John Lindsay did.

00:25:31
Speaker 1: It would have been simple enough for Lindsay to set Dido and her mother up with comfortable living arrangements somewhere in London, the city's black community numbered about fifteen thousand in the eighteenth century, but instead he acknowledged his daughter and made arrangements for her to be brought up as a lady in a manner befitting his family and his station, and in seventeen seventy two, roughly eleven years after Dido's birth, he gave her mother land in Pensacola, Florida, suggesting both that she was free and that they had an ongoing relationship in the years after Dido's birth in seventeen sixty one. There is just so much we don't know here.

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Speaker 2: Belle and her cousin were raised, not quite as equals, but much closer to one another than one would have expected given Bell's birth and color. Lord and Lady Murray had no children, and while there's some debate about exactly what Bell's position was in the family, they seemed to have raised both girls as daughters. Household accounts show orders for things like bedding and dresses being ordered in paars. Dido was able to read and write, and seems to have had the same education that Elizabeth did.

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Speaker 1: At the same time, there were clear differences in their stations. Both ladies received an allowance, but Dido's was thirty pounds a year Elizabeth's was one hundred. At least some of the time, Dido was not allowed to eat with the family when they were entertaining guests, and she was also expected to work. She super the dairy and the poultry yard, and took dictation for Lord Murray's letters. All of this was pretty typical for how the aristocracy treated quote poor relations and out of wedlock children who they actually liked, but it was not at all typical for how the aristocracy treated people of color. Bell's life at Kenwood House and her relationship with the Lord Chief Justice drew some criticism. Lord Mansfield was already the subject of some scrutiny. He was a scot from a line of Catholic Jacobites, although he had distanced himself from Scotland and from his Scottish family in his young adulthood. Having his nephew's multi racial natural daughter living in his home and treating her with obvious familial affection raised even more eyebrows. This was particularly true when it came to Lord Mansfield's work as Lord Chief Justice, especially when it came to cases relating to slavery. In seventeen seventy two, Lord Mansfield heard what's known as the Summrset case. Charles Stewart, a customs official from Boston, had brought his enslaved servant, James Somerset with him to England. Somerset escaped, was recaptured, and was forced onto a ship bound for Jamaica to be sold back into slavery.

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Speaker 2: So the question was whether the capture and sale of Somerset was lawful. After a lengthy and often delayed process, Mansfield ruled, quote, no master ever was allowed here to take a slave by force to be sold abroad because he deserted from his service, or for any other reason whatsoever. Therefore the man must be discharged. This meant that enslaved people who had escaped their enslavement in England could not be recaptured and sold back into slavery, and more specifically, that James Somerset was free.

00:28:46
Speaker 1: Mansfield's ruling also noted that there was nothing in English common law specifically establishing slavery as legal, so the decision was widely misunderstood at the time as freeing all slaves in Britain immediately. There continues to be some debate about how it was put into practice at the time, but this was certainly more of a starting point than an ending point, bolstering the movement for abolition throughout the British Empire.

00:29:12
Speaker 2: So naysayers suggested that Mansfield's decision was influenced by the fact that Dido Elizabeth Bell was living in his home as a member of his family. It's certainly possible or even probable, that her place in his life shaped his views. At multiple points he described slavery as odious and unnatural, but his work as Lord Chief Justice was really dedicated to meticulously interpreting, clarifying, consolidating and following the law, particularly commercial law, and there are other cases where it's hard to imagine that he was thinking of Bell at all.

00:29:48
Speaker 1: For example, he was also involved in the case of the Zong Massacre, was a seventeen eighty one incident in which the crew of a slave ship threw more than one hundred sick and dying in slaved people overboard during an epidemic, claiming that this was necessary because the ship was running out of water. The ship's owners filed an insurance claim over the loss of their enslaved property, which was granted. Lord Mansfield held a hearing regarding the insurer's appeal in seventeen eighty three. Lord Mansfield did suggest that a new trial might be in order, largely because of evidence that the ship's captain and crew had passed up the opportunity to take on fresh water and had continued culling the enslaved people after rains had replenished the water supply, But he didn't really consider the question of whether this was murder. He approached it strictly from the perspective that the people on board were insured property, even at one point comparing them to horses. The insurers may be worried that another trial might lead to murder convictions stop pursuing the case, even though Mansfield, down in their favor didoh Elizabeth Bell lived with Lord Mansfield until his death in seventeen ninety three. At that point, his wife Elizabeth had also died, and the younger Lady Elizabeth Murray had married and left the house. Lord Mansfield left Bell five hundred pounds upon his death, plus one hundred pounds a year for the rest of her life. In his will, he also confirmed that she was free, so that there would be no doubt about it in anyone else's mind.

00:31:24
Speaker 2: It's also the way that he phrased that was not that he granted her her freedom, but that he confirmed it, so he was basically confirming something that already existed. The following year, Dido married a Frenchman named John Divinier, and they lived on land that had been left to her by her father, who by this point had also died, leaving one thousand pounds to his children, named in his will as Elizabeth and John. It's widely believed that this Elizabeth is died oh Elizabeth Bell and not another Elizabeth, even though Elizabeth.

00:31:54
Speaker 1: Was a really common name in that family.

00:31:56
Speaker 2: Obviously, John would have been either her brain or a half brother by another woman. John Lindsay had no children with his wife.

00:32:06
Speaker 1: Dido and her husband John had at least three children together, and could have lived comfortably on her income. There's little else about her in the historical record, but she died at the age of forty two in July of eighteen oh four.

00:32:20
Speaker 2: Her father's obituary in the London Chronicle, though, suggests that she was admired outside the family, and also sums up her story a little bit. It describes her as quote a mulatto who has been brought up in Lord Mansfield's family almost from her infancy, and whose amiable disposition and accomplishments have earned her the highest respect from all his Lordship's relations and visitants. There is also a highly fictionalized dramatization of her life, a film that came out a couple of years ago that's simply titled Bell.

00:32:51
Speaker 1: I watch that. It's enjoyable, but it.

00:32:53
Speaker 2: Is highly fictional, highly fictional life also at times maybe a little melodramatic.

00:32:59
Speaker 1: What a movie melodramatic?

00:33:02
Speaker 2: Ever, So, those are the three astonishing Bells that I found talk about on the podcast today. I'm not gonna disguise the fact I unabashedly love all of them. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at miss d History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen into your favorite shows.