She’s the woman who has set Lit Twitter alight, or – as the Guardian can exclusively reveal! – the women who have. The Bougie London Literary Woman account (@BougieLitWoman), with 14,000 followers and counting, has delighted the bookish with its parody tweets of an archetypal culottes-wearing, jam-making BBC Radio 4-listening (and yes, probably Guardian-reading) type. Or, as the bio describes the persona: “A 20-something seabird adrift on the tides of London. Can be found devouring literature, swimming wild and scribbling.”
Recent examples include bons mots such as: “Have retreated to the coast for the year’s fallow week to commune with my Joan Baez records. “May I have this dance?” I ask the sea, but coyly she does not reply.”
And these:
Thrilled to have finally contracted this season’s cough; it plays so perfectly into my fantasy of being the glamorously consumptive daughter in a country house novel
— Bougie London Literary Woman (@BougieLitWoman) January 4, 2019
A devotional Sunday morning spent at my personal house of God, the LRB bookshop. This devout parishioner is delighted to confirm that, as always, there is more than one Good Book to be found therein
— Bougie London Literary Woman (@BougieLitWoman) November 25, 2018
To part with even one of my books would simply cleave me in two. How does Marie Kondo dare look her remaining volumes in the eye, knowing that she has cast out one of their less comely sisters?
— Bougie London Literary Woman (@BougieLitWoman) January 7, 2019
I’ve secreted a little punnet of blueberries into the pub beneath the folds of my trench coat
— Bougie London Literary Woman (@BougieLitWoman) November 18, 2018
Fans of the account include novelists such as Charlotte Mendelson; editors at British Vogue; multiple publishing PRs and bibliophiles UK-wide. The names of the authors remain unknown, although many fans have attempted to sleuth. Some, I am told, have guessed correctly – and been sworn to secrecy. The two women behind BLLW also mention a surprising number of suitors: “Which goes to show that even if you are an explicitly fictional, non-existent parody woman, you somehow still get DM slides from creepy men.”
The Bougie London Literary Woman character existed for a long time before her first online appearance, they tell me: “As long as we’ve been friends, we’ve always invented characters to amuse each other, and BLLW has existed between us for a few years now. We noticed the rise of a particular cadence people used to talk about culture and lifestyle online, ourselves included. The way we leave a sort of artful trail of cultural-capital breadcrumbs of ourselves all over the internet.”
Did they expect the account to be so popular? “It’s been a very nice surprise. It feels a bit like having given birth to a precocious, fully grown daughter. Or like channelling some sort of extremely rarefied spirit.”
The authors demur when asked to reveal any more about their true identities, which is probably a good thing, because it would ruin the character’s essence. Instead, here is an exclusive Guardian quickfire interview with BLLW herself:
What is the most overrated book? And the most underrated?
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Hartley’s The Shrimp and the Anemone.
Kindle or never?
The K word is a mot interdit in our household.
Handmade quilt or vintage floral blanket?
I am a collector of all things, but it is my cedar chest of linens that I would save in a fire. In summer I sleep under adapted French antique tablecloths that I buy by the sackload whenever I am in Lyon; in winter, I like the institutional sternness of a blanket.
Ladies’ pond or lido?
The ponds. There is no substitute for a swim truly thicketed with green; and one cannot nurture delusions of being the mysterious second wife in a 19th-century novel in Brockwell.
Vita or Virginia?
How could you bear to separate them, even in the hypothetical! But I suppose: Vita whenever I am out in a new pair of shoes; Virginia when, a few hours later, I am confronted with the agony that not a soul encountered has mustered a compliment for them.
Keats House or Freud museum?
Both! The perfect afternoon’s stimulation for the heart and then the mind, followed by a ramble up the Heath to the Spaniard’s Inn, to warm my cockles in the very place where Keats warmed his.
Smythson or Moleskine?
I buy all my stationery in Florence; English paper lacks a certain verve.
Which of the Cusk trilogy?
My heart belongs, invariably and contrarily, to The Bradshaw Variations.
Do you have any tips or advice for your beloved followers?
Carpe librum.
