Secret Life of Books

A special bonus episode about the blockbuster phenom of Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday celebrations. Sophie’s guest is Professor Devoney Looser, one of the world’s leading Austen scholars, and the author of the brilliant Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, about the unscripted, occasionally unhinged world that Jane Austen really knew, and which influenced her writing.We talk about why the Austen obsession has only gone from strength to strength, and Devoney looks ahead to Austenmania in 2026, with new screen adaptations coming to delight the fans.Get the Book:Devoney Looser, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, St Martin’s Press, 2025.More fun coverage:From Alexandra Schwartz, a SLOB guest, in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/jane-austens-uncommon-compassionhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/16/books/jane-austen-250th-birthday.htmlListen to our episode about Mrs. Dalloway with Alex Schwartz Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Best Valentine’s Day ever! SLOB’s “Wuthering Heights” watch-party. Sophie and Jonty take it character by character – inanimate characters included — to decide who are the winners and who are the losers in the Fennell-Robbie-Elordi mash-up adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel. And in the episode’s gripping second half they move onto the really meaty questions: race, class, sex, domestic violence, and pets.As the movie poster says, Come Undone - with SLOB - this Valentine's season.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The storm clouds are gathering in anticipation of the Valentine’s Day release of Emerald Fennell’s raunchy film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The film has been described by one critic as “very horny, very sumptuous, and very demented.” Margot Robbie looks set to change the way we read this beloved classic, well, if not forever, for a few weeks during awards season.It’s fair to say that anyone remotely connected to the world of classic literature is standing by, getting ready to jeer.And it’s also fair to say that the film has propelled Wuthering Heights to become the most read classic of 2026. The New York subway, the London Tube and many other transport systems worldwide are dotted with earnest young people, proudly nose-deep in their Penguin Wuthering Heights.If SLOB has a motto, it’s be prepared. To ready our devoted listeners for the big V. Day release, we’ve recorded a brand-new episode on Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte’s novel, which may just be the most unhinged, genre-busting, unputdownable classic in English, is back, bigger, better, and balmier than when SLOB recorded our first episode back at the very beginning of this podcast.We drink deep, but always with our trademark cheeky humor, in Emily Bronte’s biography, the secrets behind the book’s writing, and why the Heathcliff-Catherine love-story it is most definitely not GOATED, as the kids say.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sophie talks to Richard Ovenden, OBE, the 25th Bodley’s Librarian at Oxford, about the manuscript of Frankenstein, one of the most extraordinary, and fascinating, literary treasures of all time. Richard is head of Oxford’s Bodleian, as well as the University's libraries, museums, and even botanical gardens. Though Richard isn’t personally dusting off the attic vases or planting the bulbs, he does still spend huge amounts of time with rare books and manuscripts.In this thrilling bonus episode he talks about how the Bodleian came to own the manuscript of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, along with the large, fascinating, and often very weird collection gathered from the Shelley family and their friends over several generations.This is an amazing behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the world’s great libraries, why old books really matter, and why SLOB was right all along that Percy Bysshe Shelley is bad news.To see the manuscript, go to the Digital Bodleian: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/53fd0f29-d482-46e1-aa9d-37829b49987d/Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Published in 1970, written by an unknown new writer, The Bluest Eye is the great African American novelist Toni Morrison’s debut. It remains in many ways her most radical. It’s one of the most banned books in America since its publication – for its unflinching, explicit depictions of domestic abuse, racial and sexual violence in small town America. Morrison wrote openly about Black sex and Black violence, challenging the increasingly celebratory tone of American literature in the late 1960s. Reviewing her in the New York Times, the legendary critic John Leonard recognized just how important Morrison’s voice would be. ““The Bluest Eye” is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black; the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been ‘designed specifically to murder possibilities,” he wrote. “She does it with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.” Morrison would go on to write many Modernist-inflected literary tours de force, including Song of Solomon and Beloved, and is the first and only Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. We’ll be taking deep dives into Morrison’s work across four special episodes of SLOB, for Black History Month.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A serial killer on the loose in the foggy, battle-scarred streets of London after the Second World War. Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is Bleak House meets 1984 meets Silence of the Lambs. In this last in the current Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty looks at how Allingham - more, perhaps, than the other Queens of Crime - evolved her craft to suit the changing world around her. She dials back the importance of her aristocratic front-man sleuth Campion (who she first introduced in 1929) to focus more on the grizzled, working-class detective Charlie Luke. This book is a stepping stone out of Christieland into the world of PD James and Ruth Rendell.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With the release of Chloe Zhao's rapturously acclaimed film Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's much-loved 2020 novel, SLOB re-releases one of our earliest episodes.Hamnet is a beautiful, lyrical novel about Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, and the early death of their son, Hamnet. O'Farrell refocussed Shakespeare's story on the women who are usually only glimpsed at the edges of his life, reinventing Anne Hathaway as a vivacious, sexy, creative and compelling full character. In doing so she reimagines Hamlet the play as a mediation on family, love, and loss, organized around Shakespeare's wife.Our Hamnet episode itself is a historical curiosity. #18, in the earliest days of our podcast, it's officially SLOB juvenilia. We've changed and grown in the last year, and we owe everything to our listeners who tell us how it is and how it should be.Please tell us what you think about Hamnet, book or film, by jumping on our Patreon chat: https://www.patreon.com/messages/9473d46b4c7d4e59be6239f82a3e8115?mode=campaign&tab=chatsWhether you plan to see the film or not, this book has stayed in the zeitgeist ever since it was published.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Murder is Announced (1950) was Agatha Christie’s 50th published book. So when better than the 50th anniversary of her death to celebrate one of her greatest works - and introduce Miss Marple into the back SLobalogue? In this third episode in our Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty skip daintily from one side of the Second World War to the other to see if - and how - Agatha Christie’s plots and characters were impacted by the devastation. What we find is an England down-at-heel. Austerity. Rationing. Widespread poverty. Deserters roaming the country. Paranoia and fear of foreigners. When a murder occurs at the (still) charming village of Chipping Cleghorn, the local police are all at sea. The problem is nobody really - truly - knows their neighbours anymore and are people who they say they are? Enter Miss Marple, the Victorian relic with a mind like a sink, to put everything straight - and remind us all that Agatha Christie truly has no peer when it comes to an elegant and rollicking good crime story. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, for the second of our episodes on the Queens of Crime, we travel by steamer with Ngiao Marsh and her celebrated detective Roderick Alleyn, who decides to go on holiday in Marsh's native New Zealand — no trivial undertaking for an Englishman in the 1930s. Alleyn comes to NZ for the mountains and rivers, but stays for the bloody and highly innovative murder of a theater impressario, whose company is touring from London with the magnificent leading lady Carolyn Dacres.P.D. James, a second gen Queen of Crime herself, wrote that ‘the method of death in a Ngaio Marsh novel tends to linger in the memory.’ Much about this novel lingers in the memory, including the remarkable descriptions of New Zealand's scenery and perhaps most of all Marsh's decision to bring Maori culture and traditions to the forefront of the story. In Vintage Murder, Marsh creates a tension between three factions - the imperial mentality of the touring theater company, the colonial subservience of the New Zealand police force, and the irrepressible agency of Maori culture. And while Roderick Alleyn has everyone metaphorically sipping together at the end, those tensions remain unresolved. Vintage Murder is a great thriller AND a disturbing portrait of late British imperialism. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Runcie is author of the acclaimed Grantchester Mysteries - the focus of six books and a hugely successful ITV television series - following vicar-sleuth Sidney Chambers in his sleuthing career from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. James talks to Jonty about where he finds the gold in the Golden Age of Crime. In particular, Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. He then talks about the inspiration behind the Grantchester Mysteries, which develops into a conversation about his father - who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1980s - and the trials and tribulations of the Church of England in the late 20th Century.The Grantchester Mysteries are:Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (2012)Sidney Chambers and The Perils of the Night (2013)Sidney Chambers and The Problem of Evil (2014)Sidney Chambers and The Forgiveness of Sins (2015)Sidney Chambers and The Dangers of Temptation (2016)Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love (2017)The Road to Grantchester (2019)As well as discussing many books from the Golden Age, James and Jonty both enthused about David Kynaston's brilliant and ongoing 'Tales of a New Jerusalem' cycle of history books focused on Britain after the Second World War. The cycle, which started with Austerity Britain (2007), has been a big influence on Grantchester.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last year, the SLoBlight lingered briefly on Agatha Christie when we celebrated the centenary of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from 1925. This book, more than any other, heralded the start of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction between the two world wars. Taught, short and fraught with menace, these novels were in large part a response to the chaos and brutality of the First World War. The public needed order and diversion. Highly regulated games became popular - contract bridge, crosswords, Mah Jong - and so did detective fiction. These games indeed frequently appear in As the initiation ceremony to the Detection Club shows, detective fiction was a sort of literary game - with clear rules of engagement and a puzzle for the reader to unravel. In this mini-series on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction we’re looking at what happened after Roger Ackroyd. As the 1930s darkened with the great depression, the rise of fascism and - dare we say it - the rather bleak view of human nature contained within Freudian psychoanalysis, so too did detective fiction. At the forefront of these changes were the so-called Queens of Crime - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is the Mount Everest of Victorian fiction. A book so brilliant and monumental that it’s taken us a year of planning to take it on. But as we close out 2025, we’ve established our Middlemarch base camp and started the climb.To put it another way, we’ve recorded an episode in which we treat listeners to the story behind the story of the greatness that is Mary Ann Evans, the woman who became George Eliot. Middlemarch is, in many people’s opinions, the greatest novel in English. To help understand why it’s so amazing, how Eliot learned to write like this, and her life as a reader, writer, daughter and lover (plus, the story behind her pen name), we give you this primer episode.Starting this Friday, we have new subscriber-only episodes every two weeks about Middlemarch itself, going book by book through this magnificent classic. This is how Eliot meant Middlemarch to be read - through 8 stages. One for each of the serialized volumes that ran through 1871 and 1872 before the book was published as a whole in 1874.Join up for the bookclub by becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon, and come along with us for the adventure.Books discussed in this episode:George Eliot, MiddlemarchGeorge Eliot’s translated works: David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined; Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity; Benedictus de Spinoza, EthicsGeorge Eliot, Scenes of Clerical LifeGeorge Eliot, Adam BedeGeorge Eliot, The Mill on the FlossGeorge Eliot, Silas MarnerGeorge Eliot, RomolaGeorge Eliot, Felix Holt, The RadicalGeorge Eliot, Daniel Deronda Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It won't come as a surprise to SLOB fans that the literary classics invented Christmas.But if you've got your finger on the buzzer and are already mouthing the words "Dickens, A Christmas Cracker" think again.We take you back to Christmas Eve, somewhere in North Wales, around about 1385 (brrrr). Cue the giant, jolly yet murderous Greene Knight, who shows up in the local mead hall, and issues a complicated and charmingly allegorical seasonal challenge to the Knights of the Round Table.From there we pay visits to the frankly unsatisfactory Christmases of the English Renaissance (wet, high-fiber pudding porridge, anyone?), the austere anti-Christmases of Puritan England, the weak-tea Christmas-adjacent efforts of the eighteenth-century, and then — boom — the advent of Victorian Christmas excess, with trees, fairy lights, turkeys, and giant inflatable santas in every front yard.We wish all our beloved SLOB listeners a Merry Christmas, and whether you celebrate or not we know you'll find the Cracker a veritable trove of literary trinkets and tidbits.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know that Jane Austen has a big birthday this week -- her 250th to be exact. Happy Birthday Jane!Over here on SLOB we're throwing Jane a party, and we've invited guests. They're truly the guests of honor. The women who made Jane Austen. You may not know all of their names, or any of them. We introduce some literary superstars from their own day, who influenced Austen's craft, storytelling, irony and encouraged her appetite for wild, subversive stories.We tend to see Austen as a lone genius, carving out a voice for women in a world where they were often unheard. She was, in fact, just a particularly brilliant member of a wider social and literary movement. She was great, and she was great because she stood on the bonnets of giantesses. Please meet the bolters, bad-asses, barn-stormers, bold adventurers. The bloody-minded and the bloody-brilliant.Writers and books mentioned in the episode:Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His SisterDelarivier Manley, The New AtlantisEliza Haywood, Love in ExcessCharlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote and HenriettaAnn Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance; The Romance of the Forest; The Mysteries of Udolpho; and The ItalianMary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women; A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark; Maria; or, the Wrongs of WomanFrances Burney, Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla and The WandererCharlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets and The Old Manor HouseElizabeth Inchbald, A Simple StoryMaria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, Harrington and Belinda.Jane Austen, The Beautifull Cassandra (juvenilia) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are you a cat-person or a tyger-person? William Blake was both. Find out why such a big fuss about "The Tyger," which never fails to show up in google searches for the best poem in English. "The Tyger" has a lot going for it: short, punchy, mystical and definitely about a tiger. But beyond that, everything is up for grabs. Who was this William Blake, not just one of the most loved poets of all time, but among the strangest. Had he actually seen a tiger in 1794, or is his tiger a metaphor for other powerful, scary, orange things, like the French Revolution, child-labor, or other Romantic Poets? Why were tigers in the news at the time, and what does Blake's poem have to do with much-loved mechanical tiger in the Victoria and Albert museum? Sophie and Jonty discuss Blake's quirky brilliance as an illustrator, his similarity to Chagall, his early life and late obsession with John Milton, and the literary rarity of Blake's being both a Great Poet and a Nice Guy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stephen King and Shirley Jackson agree that The Turn of the Screw is the GOAT of ghost-stories. It’s a gripping, excellently creepy potboiler about a mad governess and a pair of haunted children in a scary Victorian country house.Henry James already had 14 novels and a load of short fiction behind him when he wrote The Turn of the Screw, and he channeled his talent for opaque, ambiguous storytelling to come up with one of the most truly chilling psychological thrillers ever written.The novella – yes we’re happy to report that this is a short read – was serialized over three months in a magazine called Collier’s Weekly and then reprinted with another story as The Two Magics. It was a hit, which it needed to be because avid listeners to SLOB will remember that the 1890s in London was a competitive time for supernatural page turners. We’re looking at you, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Find out why this is the decade of the unputdownable classic Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the world's favorite novelists, on his own favorite novelist. Colm Toibin has written many beloved novels, for which he has won many prestigious prizes. The novels include Brooklyn and Long Island; The Magician and The Master. This last is Colm's fictional recreation of Henry James' extraordinary career-save in which he bounced back from the failure of his West End play, Guy Domville, to write, in rapid succession, several of the greatest masterpieces of 19thC fiction. It takes confidence imaginatively to inhabit the mind and creative life of Henry James, the writer who, more than anyone before him, worked out how to inhabit his characters' minds and creative lives. Not only does Colm pull it off in The Master, he repeats the trick in many other novels, giving us characters of immense emotional and psychological depth. Sophie and Jonty quickly realized why Colm had felt able to tackle the ultimate challenge of mind-reading Henry James. Colm, it quickly emerges, is a staggeringly astute literary critic and craft-teacher. Aspiring writers, masters of their craft, and curious readers alike will be blown away by the fluency and virtuosity of Colm's account of what he's learned from Henry James, his own development as a writer, and much more.Colm Toibin, The Master, Brooklyn, Long Island. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Many readers consider The Portrait of a Lady to be the greatest novel in English. But for some reason, James' fellow novelists loved to dump on him. Nabokov called him a "pale porpoise," and said his books were strictly for "non-smokers." Virginia Woolf, who knew him as a family friend, wrote, "we have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?" T.S. Eliot said that he had "a mind so fine no idea could penetrate it." Ouch.Sophie and Jonty beg to differ. For once, we think Virginia Woolf got it completely wrong. Serialized simultaneously in America and Britain over 1880/81, A Portrait of Lady is one of the great peaks of English writing. It tells the story of Isabel Archer, an American heiress, who is determined to enjoy a life of travel and independence, only to fall into the clutches of a gaslighting con-artist called Gilbert Osmond. James' first masterpiece is a gripping domestic thriller, which marked a revolution in the portrayal of women in literature, creating a heroine who is psychologically complex, outspoken, transgressive and determined not to be pinned down by Victorian moral standards. It also marks a revolution in our understanding of the human mind. Henry James’ brother was the so-called Father of American Psychology William James. Both of them tackled the question of what really goes on in the mind in different ways. It has one of the best opening sections ever, and one of the most fascinating and ambiguous endings. It's not for the faint-hearted reader, sure, but it repays every moment of a reader's attention. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SLoB is turning 1! To celebrate, Sophie and Jonty re-read one of their all time favorites, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.My Family and Other Animals (1956) is the beloved, hilarious, brilliant chronicle of a childhood idyll — which is also a series of comic disasters — set on the Ionian Greek Island of Corfu.The memoir is the first part of a trilogy that includes Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods and Gerald Durrell wrote dozens of other books about his life as a naturalist and conversationist. But My Family was his break-out hit that made him into a celebrity-animal whisperer, and royalties from the book allowed him to establish the famous Jersey Zoo for wildlife conservation. Long before the zoo, however, came the celebrity animals of the Corfu years, whom we meet in this glorious memoir: Quasimodo the pigeon, Achilles the Tortoise, Aleko the seagull, Ulysses the Owl, Sally the Donkey, Widdle and Puke the puppies and of course, Roger the dog.Sophie and Jonty dive into the story behind the story of everyone’s favorite animal story and learn what was really going on behind the scenes of this delightful but dysfunctional family. Find out why “Mother,” Mrs. Durrell, moved with her children to Greece after a life in British India and Bournemouth; learn about the full identity of the irascible and hilarious brother Larry, and hear what happened to the other Durrell siblings after they became famous.And for all the beauty and bucolic happiness of Corfu in the 1930s, there was backdrop of complex and fascinating geopolitical unrest across the Eastern Mediterranean, which Sophie wants to discuss in much greater depth than Jonty has patience for.Mentioned in the episode:Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, The Garden of the Gods.Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet; Prospero’s Cell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Salem’s Lot (1975) is Stephen King’s second published novel, and many would say it's his best. It tells the story of a plague of vampires running amok in a blue-collar town in New England and the band of heroes who come together to fight them.  We’re aware that many listeners may not have read a Stephen King novel, although they will probably have seen - and enjoyed - a film adaptation, and may wonder what Salem’s Lot has to do with a podcast about classic books.  This episode answers that question by telling the story of how and why Stephen King became the biggest horror writer in the world. Since his debut with Carrie in 1974, he has published 60 novels and sold over 400 million books. He is one of the most successful writers ever - and films adapted from his books and stories include The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining, Stand by Me and Misery - all landmarks of cinema based on brilliant writing. And though only one of these four books is a horror novel, in this episode we stay firmly in the horror lane and get to work figuring out what makes Salem’s Lot so enduringly gripping. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chocolate Mouse, anyone? Rosemary’s Baby was a smash hit on release - the best selling horror novel of the 1960s, eventually selling over 4 million copies. The year after publication it was adapted into one of the greatest films of the decade - directed by Roman Polanski with Mia Farrow as the eponymous heroine.  At first glance, it seems that Ira Levin’s story was at odds with the prevailing spirit of free love - read the room, baby! But as we’re going to find out - the secret of Rosemary’s Baby is that it perfectly captured the spirit and anxieties of the age. Ira Levin would repeat the trick with the Stepford Wives in 1972 and The Boys From Brazil in 1976, but Rosemary’s Baby is his masterpiece. A book which is simultaneously an outlandish fantasy and one of the greatest novels about coercive gaslighting relationships. Sophie and Jonty ask a tough question: is Levin's depiction of a coercive relationship just too real? Do we come away feeling that Rosemary has real power and agency that speaks to us now, or is the book's depiction of domestic violence and misogyny and trapped in its own cultural moment just as much as the stuffed mushrooms and Gibsons the couple consume on the fateful night that the horror takes hold?Content Warning: the book and film — and this conversation — contain descriptions of sexual violence, rape and abusive relationships.Books and Film Referred to:Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby Roman Polanski, Rosemary's BabyF. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great GatsbyJane Austen, EmmaJ.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the RyeTom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the VanitiesBetty Friedan, The Feminine MystiqueCharlotte Bronte, Jane EyreAdrienne Rich, "In the Evening"Valerie Solanas, SCUM ManifestoAndrea Dworkin, Women HatingJulia Kristeva, Powers of Horror -- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who's afraid of American horror? Sophie and Jonty, for starters. To celebrate halloween, SLOB is taking a deep dive into three classics of the American Horror genre. We've chosen novels published after 1945, and we're asking how the war - and its many aftershocks and resonances in American domestic and political life - transformed horror as a literary genre. We won't spoil the surprises by telling you all the titles ahead of time. But be warned: read and listen at your own peril.We’ll be looking at these books in chronological order. The first is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, published in 1959 and is now considered one of the most influential horror novels of all time. It is beautifully written, incredibly funny and genuinely scary. It's imbued with a spirit of cynicism and evil. As a result it disorientated many readers who knew Jackson not as a horror writer, but for her charming memoirs about life as a housewife in 1950s suburbia.Join us as we enter the locked gates of Hill House and explore how this gripping, poignant, strange — and above all, scary — ghost story took shape and how Shirley Jackson came to be regarded as one of the greatest mid-century American writers.Further Reading and listening:Shirley Jackson, "Life Among the Savages" (1953)Shirley Jackson, "The Haunting of Hill House" (1959)Shirley Jackson, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" (1962)Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, 2016On the Road with Penguin Classics Halloween episode with Ruth Franklin: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-haunting-of-hill-house-with-ruth/id1549179379?i=1000633191567-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonty and Sophie were separated by an ocean while Sophie and her family went back to New York and Jonty stayed in Sydney - so they made lemonade out of life's lemons, and created two miniature episodes about the great 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne.Montaigne isn't just any old essayist — he's the man who invented the form, with three volumes of brilliant, surprising, constantly fresh and astonishingly modern sallies on every possible topic. To introduce Montaigne and unpack his brilliance and immense influence, Sophie talked to the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt. Meanwhile, Sydney-side, Jonty had a conversation with the historian and writer Rowan Tomlinson, a specialist on Montaigne and Renaissance studies at the University of Bristol. They take the Montaigne chat in many unexpected directions, and Jonty initiates discussion of the Reformation off his own bat, with Sophie nowhere to be found.Further Reading:The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, (Penguin 1993)Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, (2011)-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sophie talks to one of the world's leading literary scholars, who co-founded a whole branch of literary studies known as "The New Historicism," before reinventing Shakespeare for new generations of readers, and then turning the Roman poet Lucretius into an (almost) household name. Stephen Greenblatt is professor of English at Harvard University, he's a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of Will in the World, The Swerve, and a host of other acclaimed and brilliant books. Most recently he's the author of Dark Renaissance, the story of Shakespeare's rival and shadow double, Christopher Marlowe.But today he talks about the writer he turns to whenever he thinks about what makes the Renaissance so distinct a period -- the age in which Europeans truly became modern. That writer is the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne is a stealth heavy-hitter, an MVP of classic literature who is now all too rarely read. To explain what makes Montaigne's influence and legacy so important, and why he's truly one of the GOATs, Sophie and Jonty have decided to bring you two companion conversations with a pair of very different scholars.Further Reading:Stephen Greenblatt, ed. Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays (2014)Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakspeare's Greatest Rival (2025)Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012)-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The label says what's in the tin: Secret Life of Books dives deep into weddings and funerals in literature, asking why they become iconic moments to hang a story on. Family strife, betrayal, love, passion, disappointment and hope are all bound up in these major life events where we see characters' true colors and desires writ large.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins published yet another giant sensation, this time pioneering the detective novel and mystery/heist genre. It was published in 1868 and serialised - just as The Woman White was - in Dickens’ All the Year Round, making it one of the most popular books of Victorian Britain. Jonty and Sophie will show how The Moonstone gave the world most of the key ingredients of the detective genre, which have remained unchanged ever since. The country house setting. The bungling local constabulary. The celebrated, ingenious but curmedgeonly investigator. A large cast of false suspects. Plenty of red herrings. A final twist in the plot in which the least likely suspects suddenly become implicated. It's all here.If all The Moonstone did was shape a new genre of literature, we’d still be talking about it. But on top of that, Wilkie Collins’ masteripece is also a critique of colonialism, of the British caste system and Victorian morality. And it reveals a fascinating shadow story about Wilkie Collins and his life, including a long struggle with opium addiction that he used to treat pain, making this a novel written mostly in an hallucinatory state.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As part of our ongoing “That’s Classic!” series, we're joined by the wonderful Jennifer Egan to chat about the sensational thriller The Woman in White.Jennifer is one of the most loved, admired and critically acclaimed writers in America, with fans all over the world. Jennifer is a Pulitzer Prize winner and was President of the vitally important PEN America. She's the author of many books, including the brilliant, genre-defying Visit from the Goon Squad and its follow up The Candy House. There's more than a touch of gothic in her writing, alongside the compelling social realism, so when we asked her to choose a classic that matters, we were thrilled that she chose Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White.This gripping page-turner and perennial bestseller was published between 1859-60 in Charles Dickens’ serial All the Year Round. It's a gothic page-tuner about a mysterious young woman dressed entirely in white, who becomes the key to a thrilling tale of emotional entrapment and gaslighting in Victorian England. Jennifer joins Sophie in a brilliant discussion of why The Woman in White is such a literary touchstone, paving the way for modern thrillers including Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.Further Reading:Wilkie Collins, The Woman in WhiteJennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad Jennifer Egan, The Candy House Jennifer Egan, The Keep Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Woman in White was a sensation when it was serialised in Charles Dickens’ magazine All The Year Round in 1859 and 1860. It begins with an uncanny late-night meeting on the road to London between a young man and a woman dressed entirely in white. It ends with a sensational cat and mouse game between a villain and his pursuers. One of the unsung secrets of Wilkie Collins's novel is the brilliant, unorthodox counter-heroine Marian Halcombe. Another is that Wilkie Collins identified with disfigurement and disability, and used the woman in white to explore some of his own sense of being an outsider.At the time it Collins's novel belonged to new kind of writing called sensation fiction, which today we call thrillers. It aimed to shock the public by preying on their deepest anxieties, going beyond the facade of Victorian respectability to show ordinary families riven by secrets, including illegitimacy, adultery, madness and criminal activity. The literary inheritors of The Woman in White today are novels like The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl.Find out how it all started - and why The Woman in White is still a compulsive page-turner 150 years later.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For several weeks we've been recording a subscribers-only mini series on the history of the sonnet in English. Sonnets are crowd-pleasers - short, sometimes sweet, and they always deliver a lot of bang for the reading buck.Today, one of the world's great living poets, Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer Prize winner and former poetry editor of the New Yorker, joins us to talk about the pleasures and challenges of this glorious short form.Paul has recently compiled a spectacular anthology of sonnets, Scanty Plot of Ground, published this month by Faber in the UK.Making this episode free for all because it's such a special conversation and gateway back into reading the classics.Listeners to our show can order the book from faber.co.uk and enter the code Podcast25 for a discount with UK shipping.Paul Muldoon, ed, Scanty Plot of Ground, Faber 2025Paul Muldoon, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2025Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Taurus Express. So Agatha Christie began her sleeper [car] hit, Murder on the Orient Express (1934).All aboard! In the latest of SLoB's much-loved special episodes on surprising, fun, and always deeply revealing literary themes, Sophie and Jonty take an all-stations train journey through literary locomotion. One of life's great pleasures is reading a good book on a train, as it rattles through scenic countryside. But what's more annoying than cramming onto a packed underground train at 8am, desperate for a moment with a book before work, only to be wedged between an armpit and a stroller? Trains are social levelers: a means of bringing unlikely people together; and often keeping them apart. Trains help tell stories about social divisions and distinctions in status, love affairs and heartbreak, unwanted changes in landscapes and the ever-increasing encroachments of modern life.Tune in to find out why, in short, trains are at the heart of many great books, and why train travel turned out to be the ideal metaphor for the experience of reading modern fiction.Books mentioned in this episode:George Eliot, MiddlemarchHenry David Thoreau, WaldenCharles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, "The Signal Man"Leo Tolstoy, Anna KareninaBram Stoker, DraculaAgatha Christie, Murder on the Orient ExpressJ.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's StoneGraham Greene, The Little TrainLev Grossman, The Silver ArrowEdward Thomas "Adlestrop"Jilly Cooper, Rivals-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this final episode in SLoB's series on Virginia Woolf, Jonty talks to literary biographer Hermione Lee whose Virginia Woolf (1996) is perhaps the most respected account of her life and art in a world not short on them. Hermione talks about the challenges in writing about somebody who had such firm views on what a biography should and shouldn't be. Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was, after all, the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and one of her closest friends, Lytton Strachey, revolutionised biography as a form with Eminent Victorians. More importantly, she wrote a biography of her friend Roger Fry and many 'life studies' of the great writers. She also published two mock biographies in Orlando and Flush.Finally, Jonty and Hermione talk about the end of Virginia Woolf's life by suicide in 1941. Despite the suffering she experienced because of her bipolar condition, hers was nonetheless a rich life full of joy and artistic achievement.Recommended reading:Virginia Woolf (1996) by Hermione Lee.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We thought we’d be concluding our Virginia Woolf deep-dive with "A Room of One’s Own," but we’ve enjoyed this series so much we decided to extend. Today we’re looking at the book which many Woolf obsessives consider her masterpiece. Woolf published The Waves in 1931, just two years after her string of masterpieces, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and “A Room of One’s Own.” As Sophie and Jonty will tell you, it’s the Big Chill – or the Breakfast Club – of Woolf’s oevre. A story about a group of friends who go through their lives in and out of contact with one another, sharing many of their most profound and important experiences.The sensation of reading The Waves is rather like being a pebble on a beach, rolled around by the waves of Woolf’s creative genius - not always knowing what is going on. While it's hugely brilliant, we think most readers will need a floatation device to help them cope with the swell of this experimental, unconventional narrative. To be our Virginia Woolf “life raft in residence” we invited Woolf scholar and all-round excellent writer and critic Alexandra Harris back onto the show to explain to us why The Waves is the novel that serious Virginia Woolf fans can't live without.And don’t miss Alexandra’s own wonderful books, especially her recent The Rising Down, a beautiful and moving account of the Sussex landscape, and the lives and histories it contains within it.Books by Alexandra Harris:The Rising Down: Lives in a Landscape (Faber, 2024)Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames and Hudson, 2015)Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists & the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (Thames and Hudson, 2010)-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women – that’s my impression.That’s what Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary after delivering the lectures that became “A Room of One’s Own,” arguably the most important feminist manifesto of the twentieth century. Students attending the lectures reported they were a total snooze; one eyewitness actually fell asleep. But another said that the spectacle of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West arriving at the Girton College literary society together was the most glorious and glamorous vision she’d ever seen.When Woolf published the revised version in 1929 as "A Room of One's Own," she confirmed her brilliance, inventiveness, wit and lightness of touch yet again. She also made her most provocative claim to date: the patriarchy must be defeated so that the voices of unheard women writers across centuries can live through the awakened voices of women writing today. As Sophie and Jonty discover, one cannot read the stirring, impassioned final lines of “A Room of One’s Own” without a tear.This is also the essay in which Woolf imagines Shakespeare’s sister Judith and the fate that might have awaited her had she been as talented and ambitious as her brother. Woolf gives us unforgettable accounts of good and bad meals at two Oxbridge colleges, and a devastating take-down of the anger and inaccuracy of histories and anthropology books by men, which she reads in the British Museum.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, a gender-defying historical romance, in 1927, when her intimate friend and lover Vita Sackville-West left London to join her diplomat husband Harold Nicholson in Tehran. Orlando is a love-story set across 300 years of English history, starting in the Elizabethan court and finishing in 1920s England. It features an irresistible protagonist who is both woman and man; a writer and a lover; an aristocrat and a commoner. The novel gifts us a joyful romp through English literature, with lots of cameos from writers who have appeared on the Secret Life of Books.Orlando is also a meditation on the nature of novels themselves, explaining how Woolf’s Modernist style emerges from the great literary works of the past.Woolf said that she wrote Orlando “sitting over the gas in her sordid room” while Vita capered about in the sunny climes of the middle east. But that sordid room gave rise to one of English literature’s great queer love-stories and reconstructions of Woolf's beloved city of London, across three centuries of transformation.Jonty and Sophie pursue many eccentric critical hunches, explaining why you can't read Orlando without knowing about solar eclipses, the mini ice-age of the late seventeenth century, Lytton Strachey's semen - or Jonty's favorite hobby-horse, the decline of the English aristocracy.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"Throw that party. Go for it. It's worth it."In today’s Mrs. Dalloway special episode, Sophie talks to Alex Schwartz, writer, critic and co-host of the New Yorker Magazine’s Critics at Large pod. On “Critics at Large’ she discusses the most urgent cultural matters, ranging from Sesame Street to the Pope to Meaghan and Harry to Ancient Rome. Which is why we knew we needed Alex on the show. It started when Sophie heard Alex discussing Jane Austen with a playful rigor that rarely comes with Austen-itis. Something made her think Alex would have great things to say about Mrs. Dalloway. And guess what? Woolf is Alex’s favourite writer. Hear what a critic at large thinks about dresses, flowers, being young and in love, and why it’s always worth throwing the party, and reading the classics.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

50 is the new 25!“To the Lighthouse” is Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece about summer holidays and the passage of time. It’s perhaps the greatest novel ever written about middle-age, published when Viriginia Woolf herself was middle aged, and recorded by Sophie and Jonty at the height of their middle aged powers. The novel was published in 1927, after “Mrs. Dalloway” and the “Common Reader” in 1925. It was an instant hit, sold twice as much as Mrs. Dalloway before publication and was immediately declared Woolf’s masterpiece, admitted by Woolf’s husband Leonard. Woolf herself wasn’t sure about some bits of it, but knew she’d nailed the dinner party scene at the novel’s centre, where the wonderful Mrs. Ramsay serves her guests a boeuf en daube for 14. Join Sophie and Jonty as they continue the story of Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary life and times, told through the details of how she came to write her greatest books. This week we trace her childhood, her summer holidays in Cornwall, her extraordinary, famous, demanding parents, and the beginnings of Woolf’s long struggle with mental illness. And of course we take plenty of detours into holiday cooking and … you guessed it, particle physics.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘Think of a book as a very dangerous and exciting game, which it takes two to play at.’ For Virginia Woolf, reading wasn’t a passive act. It requires guts and ingenuity. At times one is locked in combat with a book, at others one is the ‘accomplice’ of a writer, like an accomplice to crime, aiding an act of daring imagination. Few people read as closely, as critically and joyfully as Virginia Woolf. For her, books were real relationships – and she famously dedicated Orlando to some of her favourite historical writers as well as her friends. To talk about Woolf as a reader, Jonty is joined by author and scholar Alexandra Harris. Alexandra is author of the acclaimed Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, Weatherland, The Rising Down and a study of Virginia Woolf. She is currently writing a book all about Virginia Woolf’s life as a reader. Together, Alexandra and Jonty talk about Virginia Woolf’s unique philosophy of reading and discuss some of her favourite books.Further reading:Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (Thames & Hudson, 2023) by Alexandra HarrisVirginia Woolf (Thames & Hudson, 2024) by Alexandra HarrisThe Rising Down (Faber & Faber, 2024) by Alexandra HarrisWeatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames & Hudson, 2015)-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not the Secret Life of Books, as we joyfully immerse ourselves in four of Woolf's greatest books to celebrate what is probably the most extraordinary middle-aged flowering of literary talent in history. Virginia Woolf was 43 when she published Mrs. Dalloway, 100 years ago in 1925. She went on to publish To the Lighthouse, Orlando and a Room of One's Own, to name only a few of her extraordinary achievements.To celebrate Mrs. Dalloway's centenary, Virginia Woolf's middle-aged burst of creative brilliance, and to tell the story of the other members of the Bloomsbury circle around her, we take a deep dive into Woolf and her work. Virginia Stephen was born in Victorian England to a famously literary and artistic family: both parents were fixtures in high end London intellectual society. But her childhood was turbulent as much it was illuminated by brilliance all around her. The young Virginia Stephen and her sister Vanessa were sexually and emotionally abused as children and young teenagers, and these early experiences contributed to Woolf's battle with mental illness, probably bipolar disorder. But her life was also filled with joy, including the joy of her marriage to Leonard Woolf and her love affair with Vita Sackville-West.One of many wonderful things about Woolf is that although she died relatively young she left a huge amount of writing behind her. 9 novels, 25 years of diaries, letters, lectures, essays and journalism. Join us for an extraordinary 20thC story of literary glamor and dazzling success, alongside terrible grief, suffering and trauma. We’ll meet many of the biggest names in Modernism, we’ll encounter some of the century’s most horrifying events, and one of fiction's greatest parties.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Martin Amis’ Money, Thomas Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero… These books are often cited as defining works of the 1980s - serious works of literature that captured the spirit of the age. They are all great books, but spare a thought too for Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾. Like The Diary of a Nobody, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole is a fictional work, following just over a year in the life of a teenage boy in the city of Leicester in the Midlands of England. Adrian falls in love with a girl at school called Pandora, embarks on a career as a self-proclaimed ‘intellectual’, witnesses his parents’ affairs, separation and eventual reunion, and spends a lot of time examining his spots and measuring the size of his 'thing'. All this happens against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s government, the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana, and the Falklands War. The author Sue Townsend was a comic writer, but she uses her comedy - as all the best satirists do - to explore difficult themes. In her case: poverty, domestic abuse and the disintegration of the Welfare State. This is the last in SLoB's series on male diarists through the centuries (and, yes, there will be a follow-up series soon looking at female diarists). The significance of each diary is that it creates space for a previously unheard voice in British culture (Pepys and the Middle Classes, Boswell and Scottish youth, The Diary of a Nobody and the lower-middle-classes). Adrian Mole's voice is that of an impoverished teenage boy far from the capital. Unlike - say - Oliver Twist - he is not a passive victim, but possesses immense agency. He may not be the first of his type, but he is probably the first to be a best-seller. The Secret Diary sold 2 million copies in its first three years - and, as of date, around 20 million in total. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty discuss how and why this deceptively throwaway book took a nation by storm, why it deserves greater prominence as a serious work of literature, and they even reveal the exact length of Adrian’s ‘thing’ as measured (repeatedly) by himself.Texts mentioned...Mr Bevan's Dream: Why Britain Needs Its Welfare State (1989) by Sue TownsendThe Female Eunuch (1970) by Germaine GreerThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas AdamsWuthering Heights (1847) by Emily BronteJust William (1922) by Richmal CromptonSons and Lovers (1913) by DH LawrenceRivals (1988) by Jilly CooperTV: Friday Night, Saturday Morning (1979). BBC2. Debate between Malcolm Muggeridge and Monty Python-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This special episode on a great modern classic was recorded live at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2025. Very few novels can genuinely claim to have changed a nation’s consciousness. The Secret River, written by Kate Grenville and published in 2005, is one of those books. It put a spotlight on a side of white settler experience that Australians had been brought up to ignore - the violence, murders and genocide. By questioning her ancestors, Kate Grenville encouraged thousands of Australians with British ancestry to do likewise. Many of us have done so as a consequence of this book, wondering if those heroic pioneers we heard about at a grandparent’s knee were really quite as heroic as all that.Kate Grenville, The Secret River, The Leiutenant, Sarah Thornhill.Kate Grenville, Searching for the Secret River, Unsettled. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is a cheat. It's not a real published personal diary, but a satire on published diaries. It’s a fiction, but it’s a fiction that tells us a lot about fact. Published 1892, The Diary of a Nobody is about London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son William Lupin, and numerous friends and acquaintances. Most of all, it's about upwardly mobile lower middle class life in London at around the time of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. But the Grossmiths showed a side of life and a kind of comedy those other writers wouldn't touch. That's what made Diary of a Nobody a huge bestseller.The Grossmith brothers were cultural barometers of their day. George Grossmith was the most famous character actor in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas, and a stand-up comic, sketch writer, performer and artist. He wrote hit 18 comic opera, 600 songs, and endless short sketches. Weedon Grossmith (where is that name now?) was also a successful artist, writer, performer and actor.In this episode we'll see a side of Victorian London we haven't delved into until now. Sophie and Jonty feel their oats as upwardly mobile creatives, or Upper Middle Bogans as we're called in Australia. And if anyone listening thinks that SLOB has turned SNOB, that's because The Diary of a Nobody was an unprecedentedly playful and loving look at the domestic anxieties, commuter travel, office politics and food and drink of a highly specific slice of class society in Victorian Britain.This episode reveals what isn’t being talked about in the great books of the period. Sophie and Jonty ask why the Grossmith Brothers used the diary form to write their satire, and how this book in the inheritor of Samuel Pepys and James Boswell's voices. We'll learn how this diary shows the faultlines, tensions and unresolved issues about Victorian masculinity, making Diary of a Nobody a mini masterpiece.Books mentioned in this episode:George and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody.Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; The Picture of Dorian GrayEvelyn Waugh, Decline and FallHG Wells, The History of Mr. Polly, Love and Mr. LewishamGeorge Gissing, New Grub StreetBill Watterman, Calvin and HobbesJim Davis, GarfieldJohn Gay, The Beggar’s OperaGeorge Orwell, Keep the Aspisistra FlyingHerman Melville, Bartlby the ScrivenerWilkie Collins, The MoonstoneE.M. Forster, Howards EndHanif Kureshi, The Buddha of SuburbiaVirginia Woolf, “Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Brown” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Not if it was the summer holiday that Jonty's family went on to Menorca when a stomach bug ripped through their local village. Or the ill-fated beachside retreat amid a lacerating tropical storm that Sophie took with her mother and sister to mourn her father's death.Classic literature stages endless scenes of summer holidays, some successful and delightful, others, erm, less so. In this joyful episode to celebrate the northern hemisphere summer, Sophie and Jonty travel from the idyllic to the catastrophic by way of a varied and surprising collections of classics taken from many time periods. As they journey through summer suns, winds and rains, they begin to realize just how many writers have used hot weather and family holidays to depict the rich complexities of the human heart and the transformations their characters must undergo in the course of literary narrative. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A bonus episode to share the extraordinary detail and richness of the real-time, live-streamed account James Boswell gives us of his first love affair in 1760s London. This may be the closest we can ever come to understanding what passion was like in an age of sexual libertinism and STDs before antibiotics. In our last episode, we talked about Boswell’s long-lost London journal of 1762-63, finally published in 1951. We talked briefly about Boswell’s fling with an actor called Louisa. In this bonus episode, we want to do full justice to that story because it is an astonishing document. We are all familiar with the way that story-tellers - from Jane Austen to Bridgerton - depict 18th century seduction scenes, but Boswell gives us the real thing, transcribing dialogue as and when it happened. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s London, 1763 - we're paying a visit to the most fashionable, literary, sexy, filthy, glamorous capital in the world. The 22 year old James Boswell, born and raised on a large country estate outside Edinburgh, has escaped his ambitious and pushy Presbyterian parents and arrived in London. They want him to follow the family footsteps and become a lawyer. He wants a commission in the guards - which means that he wants to loaf around London in peacetime wearing a smart uniform and getting paid. But more than that, he wants to make a splash – to leave his mark among the great writers and artists of his day. Boswell will go on to write the "Life of Samuel Johnson," maybe the greatest biography ever written, and the founding text in modern biography. But in 1762 he’s having trouble getting a start on his career. When this journal was discovered hidden away in a house in Aberdeen in the 20th century, the full extent of Boswell’s literary genius was finally understood. The "London Journal" was published to instant notoriety and celebrity, because of Boswell’s tell-all sexual adventures and total frankness about his efforts to make a mark on literature, and his own life.We see Boswell in company with the most celebrated artists and writers of the day, and we hear about his adventures with his most treasured possession – a reuseable eighteenth-century condom, fabricated from sheeps' intestines. Content warning: this episode includes scenes of sexual violence. Books referred to in this episode:James Boswell, London JournalJames Boswell, Life of Samuel JohnsonJames Boswell and Samuel Johnson, Journal of a Tour to the HebridesSamuel Johnson, Johnson’s DictionarySamuel Johnson, RasselasSamuel Johnson, Lives of the PoetsLaurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram ShandyDavid Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human UnderstandingJohn Hunter, A Treatise of Venereal DiseaseAdam Smith, The Wealth of NationsJoseph Addison and Richard Steele, the Tatler and The Spectator-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to London in the swinging sixties. One man fights off a towering inferno, navigates a zombie apocalypse, and an invading fleet of evil foreigners, while doing an extraordinary amount of shagging along the way. But we’re not talking about Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. This is the Diary of Samuel Pepys, written in the - flip that 9 upside down - 1660s of Restoration Britain.  Pepys’ contribution to history, literature and the modern soul is second to none, but it was his reforms to the navy that made him a big cheese in his day. And, speaking of cheese, this is a man who loves his parmesan - as we’ll be discovering. Without very little precedence to draw upon, Pepys - a nobody at the time - sat down on 1 January 1660 and spilled his soul and most intimate secrets onto the page in a way nobody had done before. He kept it up for the next ten years, giving us a front row seat at the frivolous court of King Charles II, the Great Fire of London, the horrific plague of 1665, and the bosoms of many unfortunate women who willingly or otherwise faced his advances. Join us for the the first episode in a series about personal diaries from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s and 1900s. Books mentioned in this episode:Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel PepysJohn Evelyn, The Diary of John EvelynJoseph Addison and Richard Steele, the SpectatorClaire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled SelfSophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Literary Imagination -- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- especially for Jane Austen. On and off the page, Austen paid a lot of attention to the breakfast table. In real life, Austen woke before her family, played the piano and got the breakfast ready, before retreating to write for the rest of the morning. And in the novels this meal is no less foundational: it's when we get to see the characters as they really are, sometimes up and about for hours before downing a boiled egg and a piece of toast, barely managing to consume a thin piece of bread and butter, or shoveling up pork, eggs and coffee after a morning's ride. Breakfast is the least formal meal of the day, so we see lots of interactions that can't happen at dinner, lunch or supper, when servants are present. At all times, Austen pays meticulous attention to what gets eaten, how, and why, and of course what is revealed about all of her characters when they sit down to table.Join us for a joyful romp through Austen's meals, in a studio recording of a session Sophie and Jonty presented at the Sorrento Writers Festival in April 2025, with the world-renowned Austen scholar Clara Tuite, whose "Thirty Great Myths About Jane Austen", co-authored with Sophie's Princeton colleague Claudia Johnson, is a must-read for any Janeite. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode - the last in our series on Oscar Wilde - we tell the story of the melodramatic, mediagenic, mad, melancholy end of Oscar Wilde's writing life and glittering career as the cleverest man in Britain, after his string of smash hit plays, culminating in "The Importance of Being Earnest." Almost as the curtain went up on his masterpiece he filed a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Alfred Douglass, Wilde's lover. It was the beginning of a series of legal, emotional and financial disasters for Oscar Wilde, and led to the last of his great works: The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In previous episodes we looked at Wilde's break-out collection of fairy tales (the Happy Prince), a novel (Dorian Gray) and his greatest play. With The Ballad of Reading Gaol Wilde's career culminated, and ended, with a long poem. It tells the story of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, who murdered his girlfriend and was executed at Reading Gaol, where Wilde was also incarcerated, in July 1896. With "Reading Goal," Wilde's most distinctive literary device, the paradox, stops being a force of subversive delight, and becomes a grim, philosophical reflection on the impossibility of happiness. The poem was published in 1898 under the name C33, which was Wilde’s prison name. It seemed to herald a new beginning for Wilde - the work of a reflective, penitent and compassionate artist - but it was actually his swan song. He was unable to write anything else before his death at the age of 46 in 1900.Works referred to in this episode:Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” (1898) De profundis (pub. 1905)John Betjeman, The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel (1937)John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)Anon. Newgate Calendar, or The Malefactors' Bloody Register, (1774)Susan Fletcher, Twelve Months in an English Prison, (1883)Marcus Clark, For the Term of His Natural Life, (1872)Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)William Wordsworth, the “Lucy” poems (1798-1801)Ballads by Keats, Byron and the Border poets (18C)John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)John Milton, De doctrina christiana (written 17C, pub 1825) and the Divorce Tracts (1643-45)William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1896)Edward Carpenter, “Civilization, Its Cause and Cure” and other essays (1889)D.H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (1828)E.M. Forster Maurice, (written 1913-14, pub. 1972)Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin, Freedom Magazine (founded 1886)-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Published in 2018, Lisa Genova’s Every Note Played follows the experiences of renowned concert pianist Richard Evans from the moment he is diagnosed with a form of Motor Neurone Disease, or MND, to his death less than two years later. It is a confronting, blow-by-blow account of the physical deterioration caused by MND, but also a testament to humanity’s capacity for empathy, love and redemption. In this special episode, recorded in support of MotorOn (which raises funding for MND research), Jonty talks to Professor Dominic Rowe - director of the Macquarie University Centre for MND and one of the world’s leading experts in MND. When Every Note Played begins, Richard is recently divorced from his wife Karina, but neither have been able to move on from their anger and endless emotional ruminating. But when Richard is diagnosed, Karina becomes his primary carer. Over the last months of his life, they learn to forgive one another and move on - one towards death, the other towards creative rebirth. Every Note Played is the fifth novel by Lisa Genova, who made her debut with the bestselling Still Alice in 2007. Still Alice was adapted into a film, with Julianne Moore giving an Oscar winning performance in the title role as the 50 year old Alice who develops onset dementia. Richard Glatzer directed the film while suffering from advanced MND - and he died a few months after release. Inspired by Glatzer, and their friendship, Genova wrote Every Note Played.Content warning: this episode is a frank conversation about a subject some may find disturbing.For more information about MND, please go to: Macquarie Centre for MND Research - www.mndnsw.org.au - the site has links to info lines and information packs If you are interested in donating to MotorOn and supporting the work of the Macqueries Centre for MND Research, please go to www.motoron.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed in 1895 at the sumptuous St James' Theatre in London, was Wilde’s last, and without question his greatest piece of dramatic writing. The handbag, the cucumber sandwiches, the Bunburying and the first class ticket to Worthing all come together to create a timeless classic that has been rarely out of performance since its debut.It was a smash-hit from the moment it opened, but even as the lights went up, Wilde was grabbing the spotlight in the press and the courts with his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde's young gay lover Bosie.None of this is apparent on first viewing "Earnest," which seemingly refuses to be serious. It's a farce and a romance and a fairy tale -- but it's also a radical confession of homosexual attraction and a bitter satire on Victorian morality and domestic politics. It’s also a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience which was itself a parody of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement in England.Content warning to listeners: reading this play – and possibly just listening to this episode - will cause you to irritate your family members by attempting aphoristic remarks and epigrammatic witticisms.Books and writers mentioned in this episode:Oscar Wilde: A LIfe (2021) by Matthew SturgisSodomy on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde Times (2012) by Morris B KaplanOscar Wilde, Vera, or, The Nihilists; Salome; The Importance of Being Earnest; Lady Windermere's Fan; A Woman of No Importance; The Ideal Husband.Oscar Wilde, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H."; "The Decay of Lying"; "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"; "The Critic as Artist"Bram Stoker, DraculaShakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream; Much Ado About NothingRichard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal; The RivalsOliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to ConquerHenry Arthur Jones, The Silver King; Saints and SinnersArthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. TanquerayCharles Dickens, George Eliot, Emile ZolaHenrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler; The Doll's HouseGeorge Bernard Shaw, The Philanderer, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Pygmalion Leo Tolstoy, Anna KareninaMary Shelley, Frankenstein-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gretchen Rubin is one of America’s best known and best-loved writers on how to be happy. She published her evergreen classic The Happiness Project in 2009, and it was an instant hit. She’s followed it with many more books on the habits of happiness, and she’s also co-host of a hit podcast Happier, which she hosts with her sister, the writer Elizabeth Craft. Today we’re talking about Gretchen’s take on Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s only novel, which is packed with sometimes brilliant and sometimes merely glib aphorisms and witticisms. We talk about why pithy sayings are so appealing, whether they are ever really true, and why Wilde was so obsessed with this kind of writing. A companion episode to episode 63 on the book itself. Mentioned on this episode: Gretchen Rubin: The Happiness Project, Life in Five Senses, Happier and Home and Secrets of Adulthood.Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft: Happier the podcast.Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.