Secret Life of Books

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.