Podcasts about Hermione Lee

Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote: “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence's best books aren't his novels, Frances's conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark.Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?And.Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark, is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome.Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on.Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work?Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end.[laughter]Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read.When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts. I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs.It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument.Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often.Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you.[laughter]Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk].Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos.Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book?Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers. I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing.Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing.Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary.Frances: Isn't it?Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed.Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude.I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work."When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules.Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them?Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay.Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson.Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography?Henry: Yes, I thought that was great.Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work.Henry: Yes.Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was.Henry: Yes.Frances: I just want to read him.Henry: He does have good range.Frances: He absolutely does have good range.Henry: Selina Hastings.Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford.I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong.Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb.Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one.Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think.Frances: Yes.Henry: Absolutely magical.Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it?Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes.Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge, especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge, is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps. I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge. I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out.Henry: Oh, I know. I know.Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary.Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book.Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it?Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time.Frances: Me too.Henry: Michael Holroyd.Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling.I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable.Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark?Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem.She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice.She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs]Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori.Frances: Yes.Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that.Frances: Like this disembodied voice?Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird.Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs].Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic?Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two.She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life.She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations.I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there.Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardinal Newman's paranoia. She liked Charlotte Brontë's paranoia, and she had paranoia. During her paranoid attack, she felt very, very interestingly, because nothing that happened in her life was not interesting, that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages. He was encoding these messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, in the program notes to the play, but also in the blurbs he wrote for Faber and Faber, where he was an editor. These messages were very malign and they were encoded in anagrams.The word lived, for example, became devil. I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn't that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don't think that that's unusual as a conversion experience. In fact, the only conversion experience she ever describes, you'll remember, is in The Girls of Slender Means, when she's describing Nicholas Farrington's conversion. That's the only conversion experience she ever describes. She says that his conversion is when he sees one of the girls leaving the burning building, holding a Schiaparelli dress. Suddenly, he's converted because he's seen a vision of evil.She says, "Conversion can be as a result of a recognition of evil, rather than a recognition of good." I think that what might have happened in this big cocktail of things that happened to her during her breakdown/conversion, is that a writer whom she had idolized, T.S. Eliot, who taught her everything that she needed to know about the impersonality of art. Her narrative coldness comes from Eliot, who thought that emotions had no place in art because they were messy, and art should be clean.I think a writer whom she had idolized, she suddenly felt was her enemy because she was converting from his church, because he was an Anglo-Catholic. He was a high Anglican, and she was leaving Anglo-Catholicism to go through the Rubicon, to cross the Rubicon into Catholicism. She felt very strongly that that is something he would not have approved of.Henry: She's also leaving poetry to become a prose writer.Frances: She was leaving his world of poetry. That's absolutely right.Henry: This is a very curious parallel because the same thing exactly happens to De Quincey with his worship of Wordsworth.Frances: You're right.Henry: They have the same obsessive mania. Then this, as you say, not quite a breakdown, but a kind of explosive mania in the break. De Quincey goes out and destroys that mossy hut or whatever it is in the orchard, doesn't he?Frances: Yes, that disgusting hut in the orchard. Yes, you're completely right. What fascinated me about De Quincey, and this was at the heart of the De Quincey book, was how he had been guided his whole life by Wordsworth. He discovered Wordsworth as a boy when he read We Are Seven, that very creepy poem about a little girl sitting on her sibling's grave, describing the sibling as still alive. For De Quincey, who had lost his very adored sister, he felt that Wordsworth had seen into his soul and that Wordsworth was his mentor and his lodestar.He worshipped Wordsworth as someone who understood him and stalked Wordsworth, pursued and stalked him. When he met him, what he discovered was a man without any redeeming qualities at all. He thought he was a dry monster, but it didn't stop him loving the work. In fact, he loved the work more and more. What threw De Quincey completely was that there was such a difference between Wordsworth, the man who had no genius, and Wordsworth, the poet who had nothing but.Eliot described it, the difference between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. What De Quincey was trying to deal with was the fact that he adulated the work, but was absolutely appalled by the man. Yes, you're right, this same experience happened to spark when she began to feel that T.S. Eliot, whom she had never met, was a malign person, but the work was still not only of immense importance to her, but the work had formed her.Henry: You see the Wasteland all over her own work and the shared Dante obsession.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's remarkably strong. She got to the point of thinking that T.S. Eliot was breaking into her house.Frances: Yes. As I said, she had this paranoid imagination, but also what fired her imagination and what repeated itself again and again in the imaginative scenarios that recur in her fiction and nonfiction is the idea of the intruder. It was the image of someone rifling around in cupboards, drawers, looking at manuscripts. This image, you first find it in a piece she wrote about finding herself completely coincidentally, staying the night during the war in the poet Louis MacNeice's house. She didn't know it was Louis MacNeice's house, but he was a poet who was very, very important to her.Spark's coming back from visiting her parents in Edinburgh in 1944. She gets talking to an au pair on the train. By the time they pull into Houston, there's an air raid, and the au pair says, "Come and spend the night at mine. My employers are away and they live nearby in St. John's Wood." Spark goes to this house and sees it's packed with books and papers, and she's fascinated by the quality of the material she finds there.She looks in all the books. She goes into the attic, and she looks at all the papers, and she asks the au pair whose house it is, and the au pair said, "Oh, he's a professor called Professor Louis MacNeice." Spark had just been reading Whitney. He's one of her favourite poets. She retells this story four times in four different forms, as non-fiction, as fiction, as a broadcast, as reflections, but the image that keeps coming back, what she can't get rid of, is the idea of herself as snooping around in this poet's study.She describes herself, in one of the versions, as trying to draw from his papers his power as a writer. She says she sniffs his pens, she puts her hands over his papers, telling herself, "I must become a writer. I must become a writer." Then she makes this weird anonymous phone call. She loved the phone because it was the most strange form of electrical device. She makes a weird anonymous phone call to an agent, saying, "I'm ringing from Louis MacNeice's house, would you like to see my manuscript?" She doesn't give her name, and the agent says yes.Now I don't believe this phone call took place. I think it's part of Sparks' imagination. This idea of someone snooping around in someone else's room was very, very powerful to her. Then she transposed it in her paranoid attack about T.S. Eliot. She transposed the image that Eliot was now in her house, but not going through her papers, but going through her food cupboards. [laughs] In her food cupboards, all she actually had was baked beans because she was a terrible cook. Part of her unwellness at that point was malnutrition. No, she thought that T.S. Eliot was spying on her. She was obsessed with spies. Spies, snoopers, blackmailers.Henry: T.S. Eliot is Stealing My Baked Beans would have been a very good title for a memoir.Frances: It actually would, wouldn't it?Henry: Yes, it'd be great.[laughter]Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Anything can happen. This is one of the reasons Spark was attracted to Catholicism because anything can happen, because it legitimizes the supernatural. I felt so strongly that the supernatural experiences that Spark had were real, that what Spark was describing as the spookiness of our own life were things that actually happened.One of the things I found very, very unsettling about her was that everything that happened to her, she had written about first. She didn't describe her experiences in retrospect. She described them as in foresight. For example, her first single authored published book, because she wrote for a while in collaboration with her lover, Derek Stanford, but her first single authored book was a biography of Mary Shelley.Henry: Great book.Frances: An absolutely wonderful book, which really should be better than any of the other Mary Shelley biographies. She completely got to Mary Shelley. Everything she described in Mary Shelley's life would then happen to Spark. For example, she described Mary Shelley as having her love letters sold. Her lover sold Mary Shelley's love letters, and Mary Shelley was then blackmailed by the person who bought them. This happened to Spark. She described Mary Shelley's closest friends all becoming incredibly jealous of her literary talent. This happened to Spark. She described trusting people who betrayed her. This happened to Spark.Spark was the first person to write about Frankenstein seriously, to treat Frankenstein as a masterpiece rather than as a one-off weird novel that is actually just the screenplay for a Hammer Horror film. This was 1951, remember. Everything she described in Frankenstein as its power is a hybrid text, described the powerful hybrid text that she would later write about. What fascinated her in Frankenstein was the relationship between the creator and the monster, and which one was the monster. This is exactly the story of her own life. I think where she is. She was really interested in art monsters and in the fact that the only powerful writers out there, the only writers who make a dent, are monsters.If you're not a monster, you're just not competing. I think Spark has always spoken about as having a monster-like quality. She says at the end of one of her short stories, Bang-bang You're Dead, "Am I an intellectual woman, or am I a monster?" It's the question that is frequently asked of Spark. I think she worked so hard to monsterize herself. Again, she learnt this from Elliot. She learnt her coldness from Elliot. She learnt indifference from Elliot. There's a very good letter where she's writing to a friend, Shirley Hazzard, in New York.It's after she discovers that her lover, Derek Stanford, has sold her love letters, 70 love letters, which describe two very, very painfully raw, very tender love letters. She describes to Shirley Hazzard this terrible betrayal. She says, "But, I'm over it. I'm over it now. Now I'm just going to be indifferent." She's telling herself to just be indifferent about this. You watch her tutoring herself into the indifference that she needed in order to become the artist that she knew she was.Henry: Is this why she's attracted to mediocrities, because she can possess them and monsterize them, and they're good feeding for her artistic programme?Frances: Her attraction to mediocrities is completely baffling, and it makes writing her biography, a comedy, because the men she was surrounded by were so speck-like. Saw themselves as so important, but were, in fact, so speck-like that you have to laugh, and it was one after another after another. I'd never come across, in my life, so many men I'd never heard of. This was the literary world that she was surrounded by. It's odd, I don't know whether, at the time, she knew how mediocre these mediocrities were.She certainly recognised it in her novels where they're all put together into one corporate personality called the pisseur de copie in A Far Cry from Kensington, where every single literary mediocrity is in that critic who she describes as pissing and vomiting out copy. With Derek Stanford, who was obviously no one's ever heard of now, because he wrote nothing that was memorable, he was her partner from the end of the 40s until-- They ceased their sexual relationship when she started to be interested in becoming a Catholic in 1953, but she was devoted to him up until 1958. She seemed to be completely incapable of recognising that she had the genius and he had none.Her letters to him deferred to him, all the time, as having literary powers that she hadn't got, as having insights that she hadn't got, he's better read than she was. She was such an amazingly good critic. Why could she not see when she looked at his baggy, bad prose that it wasn't good enough? She rated him so highly. When she was co-authoring books with him, which was how she started her literary career, they would occasionally write alternative sentences. Some of her sentences are always absolutely-- they're sharp, lean, sparkling, and witty, and his are way too long and really baggy and they don't say anything. Obviously, you can see that she's irritated by it.She still doesn't say, "Look, I'm going now." It was only when she became a novelist that she said, "I want my mind to myself." She puts, "I want my mind to myself." She didn't want to be in a double act with him. Doubles were important to her. She didn't want to be in a double act with him anymore. He obviously had bought into her adulation of him and hadn't recognised that she had this terrifying power as a writer. It was now his turn to have the breakdown. Spark had the mental breakdown in 1950, '45. When her first novel came out in 1957, it was Stanford who had the breakdown because he couldn't take on board who she was as a novelist.What he didn't know about her as a novelist was her comic sense, how that would fuel the fiction, but also, he didn't recognize because he reviewed her books badly. He didn't recognise that the woman who had been so tender, vulnerable, and loving with him could be this novelist who had nothing to say about tenderness or love. In his reviews, he says, "Why are her characters so cold?" because he thought that she should be writing from the core of her as a human being rather than the core of her as an intellect.Henry: What are her best novels?Frances: Every one I read, I think this has to be the best.[laughter]This is particularly the case in the early novels, where I'm dazzled by The Comforters and think there cannot have been a better first novel of the 20th century or even the 21st century so far. The Comforters. Then read Robinson, her second novel, and think, "Oh God, no, that is her best novel. Then Memento Mori, I think, "Actually, that must be the best novel of the 20th century." [laughs] Then you move on to The Ballad of Peckham Rye, I think, "No, that's even better."The novels landed. It's one of the strange things about her; it took her so long to become a novelist. When she had become one, the novels just landed. Once in one year, two novels landed. In 1959, she had, it was The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, both just completely extraordinary. The novels had been the storing up, and then they just fell on the page. They're different, but samey. They're samey in as much as they're very, very, very clever. They're clever about Catholicism, and they have the same narrative wit. My God, do the plots work in different ways. She was wonderful at plots. She was a great plotter. She liked plots in both senses of the world.She liked the idea of plotting against someone, also laying a plot. She was, at the same time, absolutely horrified by being caught inside someone's plot. That's what The Comforters is about, a young writer called Caroline Rose, who has a breakdown, it's a dramatisation of Sparks' own breakdown, who has a breakdown, and believes that she is caught inside someone else's story. She is a typewriter repeating all of her thoughts. Typewriter and a chorus repeating all of her thoughts.What people say about The Comforters is that Caroline Rose thought she is a heroine of a novel who finds herself trapped in a novel. Actually, if you read what Caroline Rose says in the novel, she doesn't think she's trapped in a novel; she thinks she's trapped in a biography. "There is a typewriter typing the story of our lives," she says to her boyfriend. "Of our lives." Muriel Sparks' first book was about being trapped in a biography, which is, of course, what she brought on herself when she decided to trap herself in a biography. [laughs]Henry: I think I would vote for Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means as my favourites. I can see that Memento Mori is a good book, but I don't love it, actually.Frances: Really? Interesting. Okay. I completely agree with you about-- I think Loitering with Intent is my overall favourite. Don't you find every time you read it, it's a different book? There are about 12 books I've discovered so far in that book. She loved books inside books, but every time I read it, I think, "Oh my God, it's changed shape again. It's a shape-shifting novel."Henry: We all now need the Frances Wilson essay about the 12 books inside Loitering with Intent.Frances: I know.[laughter]Henry: A few more general questions to close. Did Thomas De Quincey waste his talents?Frances: I wouldn't have said so. I think that's because every single day of his life, he was on opium.Henry: I think the argument is a combination of too much opium and also too much magazine work and not enough "real serious" philosophy, big poems, whatever.Frances: I think the best of his work went into Blackwood's, so the magazine work. When he was taken on by Blackwood's, the razor-sharp Edinburgh magazine, then the best of his work took place. I think that had he only written the murder essays, that would have been enough for me, On Murder as a Fine Art.That was enough. I don't need any more of De Quincey. I think Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is also enough in as much as it's the great memoir of addiction. We don't need any more memoirs of addiction, just read that. It's not just a memoir of being addicted to opium. It's about being addicted to what's what. It's about being a super fan and addicted to writing. He was addicted to everything. If he was in AA now, they'd say, apparently, there are 12 addictions, he had all of them. [laughs]Henry: Yes. People talk a lot about parasocial relationships online, where you read someone online or you follow them, and you have this strange idea in your head that you know them in some way, even though they're just this disembodied online person. You sometimes see people say, "Oh, we should understand this more." I think, "Well, read the history of literature, parasocial relationships everywhere."Frances: That's completely true. I hadn't heard that term before. The history of literature, a parasocial relationship. That's your next book.Henry: There we go. I think what I want from De Quincey is more about Shakespeare, because I think the Macbeth essay is superb.Frances: Absolutely brilliant. On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.Henry: Yes, and then you think, "Wait, where's the rest of this book? There should be an essay about every play."Frances: That's an absolutely brilliant example of microhistory, isn't it? Just taking a moment in a play, just the knocking at the gate, the morning after the murders, and blowing that moment up, so it becomes the whole play. Oh, my God, it's good. You're right.Henry: It's so good. What is, I think, "important about it", is that in the 20th century, critics started saying or scholars started saying a lot, "We can't just look at the words on the page. We've got to think about the dramaturgy. We've got to really, really think about how it plays out." De Quincey was an absolute master of that. It's really brilliant.Frances: Yes.Henry: What's your favourite modern novel or novelist?Frances: Oh, Hilary Mantel, without doubt, I think. I think we were lucky enough to live alongside a great, great, great novelist. I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is absolutely the greatest piece of narrative fiction that's come out of the 21st century. I also love her. I love her work as an essayist. I love her. She's spooky like Spark. She was inspired.Henry: Yes, she is. Yes.Frances: She learnt a lot of her cunning from Spark, I think. She's written a very spooky memoir. In fact, the only women novelists who acknowledge Spark as their influencer are Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, although you can see Spark in William Boyd all the time. I think we're pretty lucky to live alongside William Boyd as well. Looking for real, real greatness, I think there's no one to compare with Mantel. Do you agree?Henry: I don't like the third volume of the trilogy.Frances: Okay. Right.Henry: Yes, in general, I do agree. Yes. I think some people don't like historical fiction for a variety of reasons. It may take some time for her to get it. I think she's acknowledged as being really good. I don't know that she's yet acknowledged at the level that you're saying.Frances: Yes.Henry: I think that will take a little bit longer. Maybe as and when there's a biography that will help with that, which I'm sure there will be a biography.Frances: I think they need to wait. I do think it's important to wait for a reputation to settle before starting the biography. Her biography will be very interesting because she married the same man twice. Her growth as a novelist was so extraordinary. Spark, she spent time in Africa. She had this terrible, terrible illness. She knew something. I think what I love about Mantel is, as with Spark, she knew something. She knew something, and she didn't quite know what it was that she knew. She had to write because of this knowledge. When you read her, you know that she's on a different level of understanding.Henry: You specialise in slightly neglected figures of English literature. Who else among the canonical writers deserves a bit more attention?Frances: Oh, that's interesting. I love minor characters. I think Spark was very witty about describing herself as a minor novelist or a writer of minor novels when she was evidently major. She always saw the comedy in being a minor. All the minor writers interest me. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. No, they have heard Elizabeth Bowen has been treated well by Hermione Lee and Henry Green has been treated well by Jeremy Treglown.Why are they not up there yet? They're so much better than most of their contemporaries. I am mystified and fascinated by why it is that the most powerful writers tend to be kicked into the long grass. It's dazzling. When you read a Henry Green novel, you think, "But this is what it's all about. He's understood everything about what the novel can do. Why has no one heard of him?"Henry: I think Elizabeth Bowen's problem is that she's so concise, dense, and well-structured, and everything really plays its part in the pattern of the whole that it's not breezy reading.Frances: No, it's absolutely not.Henry: I think that probably holds her back in some way, even though when I have pushed it on people, most of the time they've said, "Gosh, she's a genius."Frances: Yes.Henry: It's not an easy genius. Whereas Dickens, the pages sort of fly along, something like that.Frances: Yes. One of the really interesting things about Spark is that she really, really is easy reading. At the same time, there's so much freight in those books. There's so much intellectual weight and so many games being played. There's so many books inside the books. Yet you can just read them for the pleasure. You can just read them for the plot. You can read one in an afternoon and think that you've been lost inside a book for 10 years. You don't get that from Elizabeth Bowen. That's true. The novels, you feel the weight, don't you?Henry: Yes.Frances: She's Jamesian. She's more Jamesian, I think, than Spark is.Henry: Something like A World of Love, it requires quite a lot of you.Frances: Yes, it does. Yes, it's not bedtime reading.Henry: No, exactly.Frances: Sitting up in a library.Henry: Yes. Now, you mentioned James. You're a Henry James expert.Frances: I did my PhD on Henry James.Henry: Yes. Will you ever write about him?Frances: I have, actually. Just a little plug. I've just done a selection of James's short stories, three volumes, which are coming out, I think, later this year for Riverrun with a separate introduction for each volume. I think that's all the writing I'm going to do on James. When I was an academic, I did some academic essays on him for collections and things. No, I've never felt, ever, ready to write on James because he's too complicated. I can only take tiny, tiny bits of James and home in on them.Henry: He's a great one for trying to crack the code.Frances: He really is. In fact, I was struck all the way through writing Electric Spark by James's understanding of the comedy of biography, which is described in the figure in the carpet. Remember that wonderful story where there's a writer called Verica who explains to a young critic that none of the critics have understood what his work's about. Everything that's written about him, it's fine, but it's absolutely missed his main point, his beautiful point. He said that in order to understand what the work's about, you have to look for The Figure in the Carpet. It's The Figure in the CarpetIt's the string on which my pearls are strung. A couple of critics become completely obsessed with looking for this Figure in the Carpet. Of course, Spark loved James's short stories. You feel James's short stories playing inside her own short stories. I think that one of the games she left for her biographers was the idea of The Figure in the Carpet. Go on, find it then. Find it. [laughs] The string on which my pearls are strung.Henry: Why did you leave academia? We should say that you did this before it became the thing that everyone's doing.Frances: Is everyone leaving now?Henry: A lot of people are leaving now.Frances: Oh, I didn't know. I was ahead of the curve. I left 20 years ago because I wasn't able to write the books I wanted to write. I left when I'd written two books as an academic. My first was Literary Seductions, and my second was a biography of a blackmailing courtesan called Harriet Wilson, and the book was called The Courtesan's Revenge. My department was sniffy about the books because they were published by Faber and not by OUP, and suggested that somehow I was lowering the tone of the department.This is what things were like 20 years ago. Then I got a contract to write The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, my third book, again with Faber. I didn't want to write the book with my head of department in the back of my mind saying, "Make this into an academic tome and put footnotes in." I decided then that I would leave, and I left very suddenly. Now, I said I'm leaving sort of now, and I've got books to write, and felt completely liberated. Then for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, I decided not to have footnotes. It's the only book I've ever written without footnotes, simply as a celebration of no longer being in academia.Then the things I loved about being in academia, I loved teaching, and I loved being immersed in literature, but I really couldn't be around colleagues and couldn't be around the ridiculous rules of what was seen as okay. In fact, the university I left, then asked me to come back on a 0.5 basis when they realised that it was now fashionable to have someone who was a trade author. They asked me to come back, which I did not want to do. I wanted to spend days where I didn't see people rather than days where I had to talk to colleagues all the time. I think that academia is very unhappy. The department I was in was incredibly unhappy.Since then, I took up a job very briefly in another English department where I taught creative writing part-time. That was also incredibly unhappy. I don't know whether other French departments or engineering departments are happier places than English departments, but English departments are the most unhappy places I think I've ever seen.[laughter]Henry: What do you admire about the work of George Meredith?Frances: Oh, I love George Meredith. [laughs] Yes. I think Modern Love, his first novel, Modern Love, in a strange sonnet form, where it's not 14 lines, but 16 lines. By the time you get to the bottom two lines, the novel, the sonnet has become hysterical. Modern Love hasn't been properly recognised. It's an account of the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, who was the daughter of the romantic, minor novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. His wife had an affair with the artist who painted the famous Death of Chatterton. Meredith was the model for Chatterton, the dead poet in his purple silks, with his hand falling on the ground. There's a lot of mythology around Meredith.I think, as with Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, he's difficult. He's difficult. The other week, I tried to reread Diana of the Crossways, which was a really important novel, and I still love it. I really recognise that it's not an easy read. He doesn't try, in any way, to seduce his readers. They absolutely have to crawl inside each book to sit inside his mind and see the world as he's seeing it.Henry: Can you tell us what you will do next?Frances: At the moment, I'm testing some ideas out. I feel, at the end of every biography, you need a writer. You need to cleanse your palate. Otherwise, there's a danger of writing the same book again. I need this time, I think, to write about, to move century and move genders. I want to go back, I think, to the 19th century. I want to write about a male writer for a moment, and possibly not a novelist as well, because after being immersed in Muriel Sparks' novels, no other novel is going to seem good enough. I'm testing 19th-century men who didn't write novels, and it will probably be a minor character.Henry: Whatever it is, I look forward to reading it. Frances Wilson, thank you very much.Frances: Thank you so much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

‘Our history of giving up – that is to say, our attitude towards it, our obsession with it, our disavowal of its significance – may be a clue to something we should really call our histories and not our selves', wrote Adam Phillips in a 2022 LRB piece, ‘On Giving Up'. Now developed and expanded into a book of the same title, Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up, and helps us to address the central question: what must we give up in order to feel more alive? Phillips was joined in conversation by Dame Hermione Lee.Find more events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspodBuy On Giving Up: lrb.me/givinguppod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When is giving up not failure, but a way of succeeding at something else? In his new book, which began as a piece for the LRB, the psychoanalyst and critic Adam Phillips explores the ways in which knowing our limitations can be an act of heroism. This episode was recorded at the London Review Bookshop, where Phillips was joined by the biographer and critic Hermione Lee in a conversation about giving up and On Giving Up, his approach to writing and the purpose of psychoanalysis.Find Phillips's 2022 piece On Giving Up and further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/ongivingupFind future events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's our 2023 review of the year. Join me (Kate), Laura and Phil as we look back over our favourites, from new releases to backlist gems. Find out our overall book of the year, plus the books we're looking forward to in 2024. If you're wondering what to read next, this is the show for you, with over fifty tried and tested recommendations. Support the show, get our weekly newsletter or join our monthly book club via Patreon. Follow us on Instagram or Threads Find full shownotes and a transcript on our website thebookclubreview.co.uk Book list Favourite New Release August Blue by Deborah Levy The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata, and we also discussed Snow Country Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks  Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton Now is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan   Favourite backlist title Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston Charlotte by David Foenkinos A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd   Favourite non-fiction This Much is True by Miriam Margolyes A House of Air (collected writing, ed. Hermione Lee) by Penelope Fitzgerald  The Palace Papers by Tina Brown How to Talk About Books you Haven't Read by Piere Bayard Carmageddon by Daniel Knowles  Free by Lea Ypi   Favourite Book Club Read Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell The Years by Annie Ernaux   Favourite comfort reads Went to London, Took the Dog by Nina Stibbe The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 191/2 Front Gardens by Ben Dark Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire Madensky Square by Iva Ibbotson Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell Going Zero by Anthony McCarten   Most disappointed by The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine (but do read Sabrina and Corina)   Patreon recommends Loot by Tania James Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen Cider House Rules by John Irving Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung The Axman's Carnival by Catherine Chidgey Not Now Not Ever by Julia Gillard All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey Machines Like Me by Ian McKewan Death and the Penguin by Andrei Kurkov The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Mytting   Overall Book(s) of 2023 Septology by Jon Fosse (and we mentioned Morning and Evening) Stay True by Hua Hsu How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff Monsters by Claire Dederer   Books we're looking forward to Arturo's Island by Elsa Moranti Rememberance of Things Past by Proust (vol. 3) Miss Benson's Beetle by Rachel Joyce Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford Tremor by Teju Cole The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut  

A wide ranging discussion of how to write about science and medicine in a biographical narrative, with some talk of other biographers including Kai Bird and Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee is an author who has already published eight books by the age of 18 years old. ICRT's Trevor Tortomasi chats with Hermione about finding motivation, writing 6,000 words per day, and challenging oneself to write as many kinds of stories and characters as possible. You can find Hermione's books here: https://www.amazon.com/Hermione-Lee/e/B097P7LZB4/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1 And she has shared her Facebook fan page, as well! https://www.facebook.com/authorhermionelee Thanks for listening! －－－－以下訊息由 SoundOn 動態廣告贊助商提供－－－－ 免費App下載，獲得即時新知：http://bit.ly/3PLq7ZY

Romani history and how mass murder is intertwined with a modern day pilgrimage site and the experiences of Portuguese Jewish communities are discussed by Matthew Sweet and his guests. Richard Zimler's talks about his latest book, The Incandescent Threads; Stuart Taberner reflects on the ways modern writers connect to the Holocaust; Victoria Biggs has been researching a pilgrimage site close to the a place of mass murder and Daniel Lee looks at the drawings left behind by the children of the Maison d'Izieu. Richard Zimler has written twelve novels that have been translated into twenty-three languages. The Incandescent Threads is the latest in his Sephardic Cycle, a group of works that explore the lives of different branches and generations of a Portuguese-Jewish family, the Zarcos. He was a finalist for the US Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award. Stuart Taberner is Professor of German Literature at the University of Leeds. He works on literary responses to the Holocaust and German Jewish identities. Daniel Lee is a senior lecturer in modern French history at Queen Mary, University of London, and the author of The SS Officer's Armchair. He is a BBC Radio 3 Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation Thinker. You can hear him on previous episodes discussing Writing a life and biography with Hermione Lee and Rachel Holmes https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000n6vj and looking at WWII radio propaganda and French relations https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hwz9 Victoria Biggs is La Retraite Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Durham. She researches memory, pilgrimage and the genocide of Roma people during the Holocaust. Producer: Ruth Watts

Edith Wharton ranks as one of the Gilded Age's most prolific and popular writers. In this episode, Professor Stacy Holden tells us about her research on Wharton's lesser known travelogue In Morocco, a revealing account of the author's travels to the French and Spanish colony. It tells us a great deal about American and European imperialism, and the Orientalism that pervaded her thinking.Essential Reading:Edith Wharton, In Morocco (1920).Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (2007).Recommended Reading: Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton's Writings from the Great War (2004). Alan Price, The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War (1996). Andrew Patrick, America's Forgotten Middle East Initiative: The King-Crane Commission of 1919 (2015). Andrew Priest, Designs on Empire (on the podcast in 2022). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, which originally aired in radio format on March 3rd, 2022, I explore some of the ideas presented in William Styron's 1990 book, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. I also talk about Virginia Woolf's experiences with depression, as presented in Hermione Lee's biography of her, and about Francis Weller's perspective on the illness, as presented in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow.

Let's talk about signing your name (hello, strange custom) and dig into Val Monroe's Thingies! This genius woman—the former beauty director of O, The Oprah Magazine—writes the extremely thoughtful and epically named newsletter How Not to F*ck Up Your Face, and we're fairly obsessed.   Sign up for Val's newsletter at valeriemonroe.substack.com immediately. This is the moving installment on Facetiming with her granddaughter.   Val had a bunch of reading (and audiobook-listening) recommendations: the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel, How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee, Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris (see also: Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris and Rewrites: A Memoir by Neil Simon), The News Sorority by Sheila Weller, The Overstory by Richard Powers, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.   For a companion newsletter to Val's, subscribe to Jessica DeFino's The Unpublishable.    Beauty-ish things Val raves about: her aminolevulinic acid treatment experience, Colorescience Sunforgettable Total Protection Brush-On Shield SPF 50, the French perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, Laura Geller Baked Foundation, and Tocca Florence Laundry Delicate.   Share your favorite Thingies at 833-632-5463, podcast@athingortwohq.com, or @athingortwohq. Please!   If you're in the mood for many more recs, there's a Secret Menu membership for that.   Download the Zocdoc app for free and book that doctor's appointment already. Get your birth control online with The Pill Club, which will make a $10 donation to Bedsider.org when you use our link. Feel fresh all day with Native and get 20% off your first order with the code ATHINGORTWO.   Produced by Dear Media

Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and one of the New York Times best 10 books of 2014). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. In 2003 she was made a CBE and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.   We met via Zoom to talk about the what, how and why of biography, and the role of the biographer. During our conversation I reference a book that Hermione wrote in 2009 called Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Topics covered include the practice of autopsy and portraiture; truth and fiction; empathy; conversation; selection and shaping; gossip, privacy and intrusion; the multiplicity of selves and identities; 'definitive' lives; vivid details; anecdotes; obsessional commitment, and detachment; Freud and psychoanalysis; unknowns and gaps; objectivity; Richard Holmes's memoir Footsteps; and Virginia Woolf. 

Tom Stoppard and William Shakespeare loom large in the canon of English drama. Two new books explore their lives, their work, their driving forces and their impact on theatre.

Tom Stoppard and William Shakespeare loom large in the canon of English drama. Two new books explore their lives, their work, their driving forces and their impact on theatre.

Tom Stoppard and William Shakespeare loom large in the canon of English drama. Two new books explore their lives, their work, their driving forces and their impact on theatre.

Narrator Louis Ozawa joins AudioFile's Robin Whitten to discuss FACING THE MOUNTAIN, Daniel James Brown's examination of Japanese American heroes in World War II. FACING THE MOUNTAIN is one of AudioFile's Best History & Biography Audiobooks of the year, and it shines much-needed light on the way those of Japanese heritage were treated during WWII. Louis's deft narration makes the stories even more compelling and harder to forget. Louis tells Robin about what has stayed with him about narrating this audiobook and how he prepared for the performance. Read our full review of FACING THE MOUNTAIN at audiofilemagazine.com. Published by Penguin Audio. 2021 Best History & Biography Audiobooks: FACING THE MOUNTAIN by Daniel James Brown, read by Louis Ozawa FOUR HUNDRED SOULS by Ibram X. Kendi, Keisha N. Blain [Eds.], read by JD Jackson, Kevin R. Free, January LaVoy, Robin Miles, Dion Graham, Angela Y. Davis, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and a Full Cast SOMERSETT by Phillip Goodrich, read by Robert Petkoff, Joe Morton, Simon Jones, Euan Morton, Nicola Barber, Phillip Goodrich [Note & Afterword] TOM STOPPARD by Hermione Lee, read by Steven Crossley TONY HILLERMAN by James Morris McGrath, read by George Guidall YOU DON'T BELONG HERE by Elizabeth Becker, read by Lisa Flanagan For the full list of 2021 Best Audiobooks, visit: audiofilemagazine.com Support for our podcast comes from Oasis Audio, publisher of Heavenly Mortal, a suspenseful story of the battle between light and darkness by Jack Cavanaugh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Horticultural Heaven: The Lives of Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and Penelope Fitzgerald Through Their GardensAcclaimed writer, reviewer, broadcaster, and prize-winning biographer Professor Dame Hermione Lee, former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, talks about the gardens – real and imaginary – of the writers whose lives she has written including Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Willa Cather. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Don't forget to subscribe to our channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/EddyLIVE #AuthorHermioneLee is a Taiwanese teen that has such an amazing grasp of the English language that she was able to write a best-selling fictional novel in English! #inthenameoftheotherworld is a story set in the magical Otherworld where Alexandria Richardson, a fourteen-year-old orphan, visits with three of her classmates. Let's find out what inspires Hermione to write and create these wonderful novels? Let's find out. Comment below with your comments and questions for Hermione. Follow Hermione: https://www.facebook.com/authorhermionelee/ Get your copy of In the name of the Otherworld here: Taiwan: https://www.books.com.tw/products/F018116070 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Name-Otherworld-Hermione-Lee-ebook/dp/B097NQG3SW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=VYUXO8XTLP23&keywords=in+the+name+of+the+otherworld&qid=1638261129&qsid=130-7345481-2386755&s=books&sprefix=in+the+name+of+t,stripbooks-intl-ship,329&sr=1-1&sres=1955086362,0919123708,0312372132,1789040140,0813109396,B00X593BUY,0939680866,0892361697,B08HG7DNLV,1427233276,B07HRTR82Q,0521834341,B00GWTMBY6 -------------------------------------------------Podcast recorded at Eddy's Cantina https://g.page/eddystianmu?share

The Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote The Bookshop, Offshore and The Blue Flower is far too celebrated – as the greatest novelist of her time, according to Julian Barnes, and many others – to be in need of a revival. But as Hermione Lee, her biographer, writes in the introduction to the LRB's new selection of Fitzgerald's writing for the paper, ‘though she started publishing biography and fiction late in life … she was an old hand as a literary journalist.' It is this Fitzgerald, ‘a reviewer, a writer of introductions, a literary judge, and a speaker on panels and at literary festivals', who is the subject of this special event to mark the publication of the LRB's latest Selections volume.Lee is in conversation with Susannah Clapp, who worked on many of her LRB pieces, and has described her as an ideal contributor who needed no ‘handling': ‘She wrote to length, she wrote to time, she wrote without fuss, she wrote a lot' – on subjects ranging from Alain-Fournier to Adrian Mole, Stevie Smith to Wild Swans – ‘always with a steady brilliance.'Introduced by Sam Kinchin-Smith, the LRB's Head of Special Projects. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Born in the former Czechoslovakia, Tom Stoppard became one of Britain’s most celebratedplaywrights, famous for his wit and intellectual dazzle in plays like Rosencrantzand Gildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia, and more recentlyLeopoldstadt. He wears success well, mixing with famous and glamorous friends, marryingtalented women and breaking up with them amicably. As he grows older, hispolitics shift, and he becomes interested in his hidden identity. In 2013 Stoppard invited distinguished biographer Dame Hermione Lee, well-known for her books on Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, to tackle his story. She goes at it with formidable stamina, delivering a portrait that is warm and engaging, together with in-depth insight into the themes of his plays. In this candid conversation with Caroline Baum, Hermione Lee explains how she used theprecious resource of his mother’s letters, examined his important friendship withVaclav Havel, and drew together his public and private selves.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sam Leith's guest on this week's podcast is the biographer and critic Hermione Lee. Her biography of Tom Stoppard is newly out in paperback, and she tells Sam about the decade of work behind Sir Tom's overnight success, his unexpected influences, and the challenge to a biographer of getting to the heart of this elusive genius.

My guest on this week's podcast is the biographer and critic Hermione Lee. Her biography of Tom Stoppard is newly out in paperback, and she tells me about the decade of work behind Sir Tom's overnight success, his unexpected influences, and the challenge to a biographer of getting to the heart of this elusive genius.

Tom Stoppard and William Shakespeare loom large in the canon of English drama. Two new books explore their lives, their work, their driving forces and their impact on theatre.

Tom Stoppard and William Shakespeare loom large in the canon of English drama. Two new books explore their lives, their work, their driving forces and their impact on theatre.

Tom Stoppard and William Shakespeare loom large in the canon of English drama. Two new books explore their lives, their work, their driving forces and their impact on theatre.

To celebrate the launch of her highly anticipated biography Tom Stoppard: A Life, venerated biographer Hermione Lee interviews Stoppard himself in an affectionate and witty accompaniment to the book.  The biographer and the playwright -- both knighted by the British crown -- talk through Stoppard's life from his childhood in Darjeeling, his experiences in the New York and London theatre worlds, and his most recent play Leopoldstadt, which delves into his own Jewish European heritage in new ways. Their rich and multi-faceted conversation also addresses the relationship between biographer and subject, and the ways in which we act or inhabit our own lives. (Recorded February 24, 2021)

From the appeal of trickster gods Anansi and Loki to the joy of comics and fantasy: Booker prize winner Marlon James and Neil Gaiman, author of the book American Gods which has been turned into a TV series, talk writing and reading with Matthew Sweet in a conversation organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature and the British Library. Neil Gaiman is an author of books for children and adults whose titles include Norse Mythology, American Gods, The Graveyard Book, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), Coraline, and the Sandman graphic novels. He also writes children's books and poetry, has written and adapted for radio, TV and film and for DC Comics. Marlon James is the author of the Booker Prize winning and New York Times bestseller A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Book of Night Women, John Crow's Devil and his most recent - Black Leopard, Red Wolf - which is the first in The Dark Star Trilogy in which he plans to tell the same story from different perspectives. Producer: Torquil MacLeod. You can find a playlist called Prose and Poetry featuring a range of authors including Ian Rankin, Nadifa Mohamed, Paul Mendez, Ali Smith, Helen Mort, Max Porter, Hermione Lee, Derek Owusu, Jay Bernard, Ben Okri on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh

Heather Clark discusses her new and highly praised biography of Sylvia Plath with celebrated biographer Hermione Lee, as well as Oxford University student, Lucy Cobold. They talk about the challenges of writing “big” biography (Clark's biography of Plath is over 900 pages); the importance of treating women like Plath and Virginia Woolf first and foremost as professional writers rather than patients; and the conscious decision to avoid certain loaded words (like ‘doomed' or ‘neurotic') when approaching a writer like Plath. Find out more about The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing: www.oclw.ox.ac.uk @OxLifeWriting. Heather Clark: https://heatherclarkauthor.com/ @Plathbiography Hermione Lee: http://www.hermionelee.com/ Works mentioned - Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Knopf, 2020) - Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Chatto & Windus, 1996). Artwork by Una. Edited by Charles Pidgeon. If you'd like to be more involved, access exclusive events and attend our virtual book club, then join our Friends Scheme. We also offer writing groups and mentoring to those working on their own life writing projects.

A first look at the new podcast series by the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Co-hosts Kate Kennedy and Katherine Collins introduce themselves and the podcast, indicating what listeners can expect to hear: interesting discussions with noted writers, biographers, and academics. Hermione Lee and Elleke Boehmer describe what we mean by life-writing as well as its importance as a vital cultural practice. Find out more about OCLW: www.oclw.ox.ac.uk @OxLifeWriting.

Tom Stoppard, one of the greatest living playwrights, is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism and fiction. His most acclaimed creations, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia and Shakespeare in Love, remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences. British biographer, literary critic and academic Hermione Lee’s latest work, Tom Stoppard: A Life, weaves Stoppard's life and work together into a vivid, insightful and always riveting portrait of a remarkable man. In conversation with author Chandrahas Choudhury, Lee talks about his life and draws on a wealth of new materials and on her many conversations with Stoppard.

How will we interact with computers in the future? When we finally evolve beyond keyboards, mice, touchscreens, and voice controls, what’s next? This month, Facebook hinted at how it’s thinking about the future of human-computer interactions. The company unveiled a concept for a wrist-worn wearable that can interpret the nerve impulses in the wearer’s arm to virtually mimic hand movements and finger taps. Also, we witnessed a debate about how facial recognition should be used in the AR glasses Facebook reportedly plans to release later this year. For this episode, we are joined by WIRED editor-at-large Steven Levy, who has written extensively about Facebook for WIRED, and in his book about the company, Facebook: The Inside Story, which is now out in paperback. We discuss Facebook’s vision of future interfaces, possible applications for these wearable devices, and whether Facebook has earned the public trust necessary to tap into people’s brain signals. Show Notes:  Steven’s book is now available in paperback. Read Lauren’s story about the wrist wearable concept. Read our original news story on the Facebook Portal’s launch, as well as Adrienne So’s story about how she grew to love the device during the pandemic. BuzzFeed News reported on Facebook’s internal meeting about AR glasses and facial recognition in late February. Recommendations:  Steven recommends Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee. Lauren recommends enabling the handwashing timer on your Apple Watch. Mike recommends the Showtime series City on a Hill. Season two starts on March 28.  Steven Levy can be found on Twitter @StevenLevy. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys. If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here. Also, If you buy one of the books we link to in these show notes, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is it possible to overlook the first home when it comes to writing about a person's life? Can a house reveal much about the inner life of its inhabitants? And why do we make pilgrimages to the homes of famous authors?

In this episode, Hermione Lee introduces biography, one of the most popular, best-selling, and widely-read literary genres. Learn more about Biography: A Very Short Introduction here:https://global.oup.com/academic/product/biography-a-very-short-introduction-9780199533541 Dame Hermione Lee is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College and a trustee of the Wolfson Foundation. She is a Fellow of the Royal … Continue reading Biography – The Very Short Introductions Podcast – Episode 21 →

Literary biographer and academic Hermione Lee joins Conor Gearty to discuss her work and latest book Tom Stoppard: A Life.SHAPE (Social sciences, humanities & the arts for people and the economy) is a new collective name for those subjects that help us understand ourselves, others and the human world around us.

Hermione Lee is the award-winning biographer, Tom Stoppard: A Life, is her new book on the famous playwright, Beau Williams & fellow poet Hazel Hogan on the 2 Meter Review, an anthology they created in response to the pandemic, Arlene Hunt recommends where to begin with Terry Pratchett, the creator of the Discworld series of comic fantasy novels.

德国浪漫主义诗人诺瓦利斯说“小说源自于历史的缺陷”。历史往往止步于难以被人们知晓的情感和体验，而小说作为这种“历史缺陷”的补充，也许最应该记录下那些站在“胜利者”阴影下的“失败者”们。有一位小说家，她一生的创作都着墨于那些“被生活打得七零八落”的“失败者”：住在船上的“逃避者”，在不需要书店的小镇开书店的“疯女人”……这位作家从不遮掩“不靠谱的人”身上的缺陷，也总是记得让“被打败的人”幸存下来。 这是英国作家佩内洛普·菲茨杰拉德，她的父亲是英国《潘趣》杂志主编，母亲是牛津萨默维尔学院校友会的主席，继母是著名插画师谢泼德的女儿，叔叔是在布雷奇利庄园破译德国恩尼格玛密码机项目的负责人。C·S刘易斯和托尔金是她的老师，蒂尔达·斯温顿和安娜·温特曾是她的学生。虽年近六十才动笔写作，但她第二本书《离岸》就获得了布克奖，去世后被评为“英国战后最好的作家之一”。曾出身显赫、少年得志的佩内洛普，后来却“跌落”到泰晤士河上的破驳船上——就像她在《离岸》中写的那些住在船上的人们。人生经历的强烈落差也许造成了她对“失败”的敏感，她甚至把人分成消灭者（exterminators）和被消灭者（exterminatees），并且主动选择站在被消灭者一方。 我们如何看待所谓的“失败者文学”？佩内洛普的人生经历与她的“失败者写作”有怎样的关联？晚年才开始写作，一度被认为是“打毛衣、做果酱的业余作家”，她是什么样的文坛“意外”？ 这期节目由专业安利佩内洛普的跳岛FM老朋友肖一之主持，还有王占黑、东来两位青年作家一起对话（捧哏）。从对佩内洛普和“失败者文学”的讨论中我们也引发思考：文学不可能存在胜利者的姿态？必然诞生于失败之中？ 【主持】 肖一之，文学研究者，上海外国语大学英语学院讲师。 【嘉宾】 王占黑，青年作家，最近出版新书《小花旦》。 东来，青年作家，出版有小说集《大河深处》。 【时间轴】 08:20 佩内洛普·菲茨杰拉德把把人分成“消灭者”和“被消灭者”，自己主动站在“被消灭”的一边 10:50 失败者与成功者二元对立背后的多层面：《离岸》中的人住在下沉、潮湿的破船上，他们自成一统，有自己的尊严 12:00 船屋上的边缘人、开书店的“疯女人”：佩内洛普笔下不遮掩缺陷的普通人 16:10 文学杂志停办、可能房租未缴清就匆忙从文学中心伦敦搬到海边小镇，佩内洛普的人生开始转折 22:16 书写“失败者”的佩内洛普：出身显赫、牛津毕业的她“跌落”到泰晤士河上的一艘破驳船 23:50 “失败者”的勇敢、希望和幸存：现实中自杀的男模，在《离岸》里最终冲进风浪 27:39 《书店》等作品中的“小大人们”：似乎未受贫困环境的影响，没有任何自怨自艾，对生活有自己的看法 31:45 碰到不喜欢的采访提问时，佩内洛普就开始打毛衣：“大家都会原谅一个打毛衣的老太太” 39:08 “小说源自于历史的缺陷”：以德国浪漫派诗人诺瓦利斯为蓝本的《蓝花》，佩内洛普认为自己写的都是历史小说 40:40 佩内洛普小说里浅浅的幽默笔调也许与家族遗传有关：在二战的炮火中饭桌上的香槟塞子被震开，全家人没有一个跑开，还说“要是每次都能这样开香槟就方便了” 42:00 佩内洛普有意把自己的生活与写作拉开距离，连她指定的传记作者都“无法靠近” 49:40 面对“业余作家”的评价，佩内洛普说“我到底要写多少本书，才算是一个职业作家” 51:40 文坛的“意外”、《离岸》获布克奖的争议：晚年才开始写作、被认可的佩内洛普说“我是一个从来没有年轻过的老作家” 【节目中提到的书】 《离岸》 [英]佩内洛普·菲茨杰拉德 著 《书店》 [英]佩内洛普·菲茨杰拉德 著 《无辜》 [英]佩内洛普·菲茨杰拉德 著 《蓝花》 [英]佩内洛普·菲茨杰拉德 著 《天使之门》 [英]佩内洛普·菲茨杰拉德 著 《早春》 [英]佩内洛普·菲茨杰拉德 著 The Golden Child by Penelope Fitzgerald Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald At Freddie's by Penelope Fitzgerald Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee 《斯通纳》 [美] 约翰·威廉斯 著 《帕特里克·梅尔罗斯五部曲》 [英] 爱德华·圣奥宾 著 【本期嘉宾推荐图书】 王占黑推荐 《儿子的大玩偶》 黄春明 著 北京联合出版公司 2019.10 “这本小说的主角是一个穿戴成小丑的样子讲广告的人，赚钱非常辛苦吃力，却被镇上的人讨厌。书里的很多人物也是乡土意义上的小人物，或者说失败者，每个人都在苦苦挣扎。” 东来推荐 《弦理论》 [美]大卫·福斯特·华莱士 著 林晓筱 译 浦睿文化|湖南文艺出版社 2019.07 “这是一本讲网球的书。作者是一个天分和缺陷都非常明显的人，个人的悲剧感也特别强。但这本书写得很潇洒、明亮，在书里你可以看到一个有神性的人，以及他为事物所赋予的价值感。” 【主理人】猫弟 【统筹&监制】Bake 【视觉设计】孙晓曦 【后期制作】王若弛 【音乐】上海复兴方案 片头 - Public Poet 片尾 - There and Then 【收听方式】 你可以在小宇宙、网易云音乐、喜马拉雅、蜻蜓FM、荔枝FM、轻芒小程序，以及Apple Podcasts、Castro、Pocket Casts等泛用型播客客户端上找到我们，订阅收听「跳岛FM」。 【联系我们】 微信公众号：跳岛FM 微博：跳岛FM 邮箱：tiaodaoFM@citicpub.com

This week we feature an archival interview from the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Leon Levy Center for Biography. Hermione Lee, distinguished British biographer, former president of Oxford University’s […]

Johnny interviews Sir Tom, while Dame Hermione - a leading literary biographer - gives a short introduction to her new book. Music: William Bolcom, Graceful Ghost Rag Thumbnail photograph by Marzena Pogorzaly

In our final episode of the season, we’re in New York City with one of the greats, Edith Wharton and her novel The Custom of the Country. We talk being frenemies with Henry James, half-assed ghosts, and why TCotC is a straight-up bop. Books Mentioned: Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome, The Reef; Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton. Resources: Dearest Edith (1929 New Yorker profile) Edith Wharton - Hermione Lee - Books - Review (Claire Messud, NYT) REWORKING WHARTON (John Updike, New Yorker) A Rooting Interest (Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker) The Jia Treatment (Jia Tolentino, New Yorker) Edith Wharton's Houses (Alexandra Lange, New Yorker) Ghost Tour of the Mount (J. Nicole Jones, Paris Review) Ghost Hunters (Full ep) Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and a Case of Anxiety of Influence (John Colapinto, New Yorker)

Biographers of Tom Stoppard, Sylvia Pankhurst and a little known SS soldier compare notes. How does the process differ if your subject is alive, if their story has already been enshrined in history, if they were active in the Nazi regime? Anne McElvoy talks to three authors about researching and writing a life history and the journeys it has taken them on from a Nazi letter discovered in an armchair, to the play scripts by a living dramatist who fled Nazi occupation in Czechoslovakia and has become part of the British arts establishment to the campaigning travels of a suffragette to Soviet Russia, Scandinavia, Europe & East Africa. Professor Dame Hermione Lee's latest biography is called Tom Stoppard: A Life. It's Book of the Week from October 5th on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. She has previously written on Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Penelope Fitzgerald. Rachel Holmes is the author of Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. Her previous book was Eleanor Marx: A Life Daniel Lee has written The SS Officer's Armchair: In Search of a Hidden Life. He teaches at Queen Mary, University of London and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn academic research into radio. Delve into our website and you can find episodes exploring Suffrage history with Fern Riddell and Helen Pankhurst amongst the guests https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09th2dt Programmes about German history including Neil Mcgregor and Philip Sands https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b079mcgf or Sophie Hardach and Florian Huber https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006sjx A debate about Jewish identity in 2020 with guests including Howard Jacobson and Bari Weiss https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fwqd And there's Hermione Lee looking at Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zt79p You can find more in the Prose and Poetry collection on the Free Thinking website. Producer: Ruth Watts

In celebration of the life, work and legacy of William Trevor, one of the giants of modern Irish fiction, authors Salley Vickers, Kevin Barry, Hermione Lee and BBC Radio 4 Books Editor Di Speirs read from and talked about their favourites of his novels and short fiction, to mark the publication of Last Stories (Viking). Trevor, who died in 2016, won the Whitbread prize three times, was five times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2014 was made Saoi by Aosdána, Ireland’s most prestigious artistic award. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Is it possible to overlook the first home when it comes to writing about a person's life? Can a house reveal much about the inner life of its inhabitants? And why do we make pilgrimages to the homes of famous authors?

Francesca Wade and Paul Mendez talk to Shahidha Bari about Queer Bloomsbury in a conversation run in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature who set up events in mid-June to mark Dalloway Day, inspired by the 1925 novel from Virginia Woolf. Claudia Tobin from the University of Cambridge looks at Woolf's writing on art and the vogue for still lives and compares notes with 2020 New Generation Thinker Lucy Weir from the University of Edinburgh, who has written a postcard exploring dance, stillness and movement in lockdown. Claudia Tobin's book is called Still Life and Modernism: Artists, Writers, Dancers. She was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting. You can hear her focusing on the academics Jane Harrison and Eileen Power in a Free Thinking episode called Pioneering women: academics and classics https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dj0g Paul Mendez's novel is called Rainbow Milk Lucy Weir is a Teaching Fellow, Modern and Contemporary Art, History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and is one of the 2020 New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the AHRC to select academics who can turn their research into radio. You can hear a discussion of the novel Mrs Dalloway featuring the writers Hermione Lee, Alison Light and Margaret Drabble with Philip Dodd https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zt79p and you can find a host of conversations for Dalloway Day on the website of the Royal Society of Literature https://rsliterature.org/ Producer: Robyn Read

We're being told to work from home if we can, so how is it going? Anna Harris who works for a marketing and advertising agency, and Caroline Whaley, the co-founder of a coaching consultancy aimed at women and leadership, discuss. Lara Lewington from BBC Click offers some tips and advice for staying in touch via tech. The Lives of Houses is a collection of essays which asks what a house can tell us about the person who lived there. Hermione Lee describes why we are so fascinated by the homes of famous literary figures. The Government has issued new guidelines on the personal protective equipment that should be used by NHS staff on the frontline. It's also said that it's important for social care staff to feel safe, and the new guidance will offer them information and reassurance. Christina McAnea, Assistant General Secretary of UNISON which represents thousands of workers in the sector, and Margaret Hodge MP for Barking and Dagenham, discuss. Kayleigh Llewyellyn is the writer and creator of a new BBC comedy drama series called In My Skin. Based on her own story of growing up in Wales, it follows 16 year Bethan as she negotiates her school life, sexuality, and hiding her mother’s mental illness from her friends and teachers. What does social distancing look like in one of the more remote parts of the UK? We find out through The Woman's Hour Corona Diaries with Angela Crawford from the Isle of Lewis. DIY hair care: the Dos and the Don'ts. Tanya Harrison is the founder of Harrison Hair Studio in Liverpool. She shares some tips if you’re eager to have a go yourself. Presenter: Jane Garvey Producer: Dianne McGregor

All professional and grassroots football matches across the country have been suspended due to the COVID-19 outbreak. As the men’s teams are forced from the pitch and income falls away what will happen to the women’s teams they supported? Jen O'Neill, editor of shekicks.net and Kerys Harrop, Captain of Birmingham City Ladies, discuss the issues. The Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, told Woman’s Hour at the start of the year that the system of support for the most vulnerable children was under strain. The Covid 19 crisis has put additional pressures on that system, with many vulnerable children now out of school and many of their services closed. She says that she’s especially concerned about one million children who were at risk -living in households which are not stable, where there might be domestic violence, drug or alcohol addiction, financial hardship and severe mental health issues. She explains what these children need now. The Lives of Houses – a collection of essays which asks what a house can tell us about the person who lived there. Hermione Lee describes why we are so fascinated by the homes of the famous and often long dead. And, as the word home takes on a new significance in this lockdown – how hard is isolation if you live alone and how can you avoid suffering from loneliness? Jenni speaks to Kate Shurety the executive Director of the Campaign to End Loneliness and Rosie Weatherley from the mental health charity Mind.

On this impossible episode of Oeuvre Busters, George and Liam welcome guest host Jose Rodriguez to discuss 2006's Mission Impossible Three, starring Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Michelle Monaghan, and, of course, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Topics covered: fulcrums vs. pendulums; Tom Cruise's thetan count; Liam's recent religious conversion; spy franchises, ranked! Plus: Ethan Hunt fucks the flag. Topics not covered: The biographical masterpieces of the one and only Hermione Lee. As the Guardian recently said in regards to her recent biography of Penelope Fitzgerald: "Lee is a master of that most neglected of literary genres: the literary biography. It is essential that she be read."Our guest host, Jose Rodriguez, is a brilliant filmmaker. Find his work below! DEAD-END (fiction short)https://vimeo.com/140514161ADOLESCENCIA (documentary short)https://vimeo.com/180646107Film Force (film collective run by Jose Rodriguez & Tim Noble)https://www.thisisfilmforce.comYou can find more OB content at www.oeuvrebusters.com. Also, please feel free to drop us a line, either via email or voicemail recording, at Oeuvrebusters@gmail.com. We are looking to incorporate feedback from our listeners during the show itself, so leave us some thoughts and we might share them on the podcast.Please don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review whenever and wherever you can. We appreciate all the love and support."Robobozo" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Simon speaks with Hermione Lee, the biographer known for her lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and Penelope Fitzgerald. She has chaired the judges of the Man Booker Prize, is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy, is published in the Guardian and regularly contributes to arts programmes on Radio 4. Until last year, Hermione was President of Wolfson College Oxford. Simon interviewed Hermione about her entry into academia, the process of writing biographies versus journalism, and the surprising misconceptions around biography as a genre. You can find us online at alwaystakenotes.com, on Twitter @takenotesalways, and on Facebook at facebook.com/alwaystakenotes. Our crowdfunding page is patreon.com/alwaystakenotes. Always Take Notes is presented by Eleanor Halls and Simon Akam, and produced by Nicola Kean. Zahra Hankir is our communities editor. Our music is by Jessica Dannheisser and our logo was designed by James Edgar.

Hermione Lee joins John and Andy to discuss the work of American novelist Willa Cather and, in its centenary year, her pioneering novel My Ántonia. John also talks about Wilding by Isabella Tree and Andy revisits one his favourite books, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair.

Dame Hermione Lee talks to Patrick Gale about Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald and the writing of biographies.

This week on StoryWeb: Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. I want to close out my multi-week focus on the Gilded Age with a consideration of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. Where Jacob Riis, Alfred Stieglitz, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser look at the grimier side of this famed period in New York City history, at the underbelly that the working class and poor, the immigrants, and the homeless faced as they made their way through daily life, Edith Wharton focuses her attention on the world she knew best: that of the privileged, moneyed class. It seems odd in a way to say I “love” The House of Mirth. After all, the main character, Lily Bart, endures such a difficult downward spiral amid the harsh, judgmental upper-class echelons of New York City. The young, flirtatious, life-loving, aptly named Lily doesn’t stand a chance against high Manhattan society, whether it is those with old money, such as her Aunt Peniston, or those with new money, such as the Trenors and Dorsets. Lily’s story – as hard as it is to witness – is told fully, drawn exquisitely against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue mansions. Written in 1905 – first as a serialized series in Scribner’s Magazine and then published as a book – The House of Mirth brings to life a New York that most of Wharton’s readers would not have had the privilege to know. But it is a world Edith Wharton knew intimately. Born Edith Newbold Jones, she came from the uber-rich family that gave rise to the saying “keeping up with the Joneses.” Wharton spent her whole life in that rarified, upper-crust elite. She knew firsthand its luxuries and privileges. She also saw the ways in which it was stultifying, demanding strict adherence to a rigid set of mores and ostracizing anyone who dared to go against those mores. Lily Bart is an interesting case in point. A poor relation, orphaned and without an income, Lily is forced to rely on her aunt, Mrs. Julia Peniston, one of the so-called Knickerbockers who hailed from old New York money. Thus, Lily is a kind of stepchild, a pampered beggar at the very altar of wealth. She has been raised in this world, but she doesn’t have a firm foothold in it, much less a steady stand in it. In her late twenties, the beautiful Lily is beginning to lose her bloom, and the pressure is on her to marry. But Lily can’t seem to make a match. She is still full of youth, life, energy – and she is also frivolous and flirtatious, too much for her own good according to the moneyed society in which she lives. Through a scandal involving money and sexual harassment, Lily falls precipitously from the tenuous grace she inhabits at the beginning of the novel. By novel’s end, she’s had a rough go indeed. Indeed, The House of Mirth virtually epitomizes The Gilded Age. At the novel’s opening, Lily Bart lives in that gilded world – a world dipped in a shining gilding of gold. The era gets its name from Mark Twain’s 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, in which the venerated social satirist makes clear that all that glitters is not gold. What appears to be gold – the lush luxuries of the moneyed class in Manhattan – is actually just thin gold gilding masking serious social problems. Scratch the gilding a bit, and you’ll see the rot, destruction, corruption, and despair underneath. So, too, with Lily and her downfall. Wharton scrapes the gilding off, shows the dirty reality of the world in which Lily lives. Wharton broke astonishingly new ground in The House of Mirth. Writing in the 1936 reprint of her novel, she said: When I wrote House of Mirth I held, without knowing it, two trumps in my hand. One was the fact that New York society in the nineties was a field as yet unexploited by a novelist who had grown up in that little hot-house of tradition and conventions; and the other, that as yet these traditions and conventions were unassailed, and tacitly regarded as unassailable. To learn more about The House of Mirth, check out Daily Kos’s take on it as well as “The Portrait of Miss Bart” in the New York Review of Books. You can view the illustrations from the original 1905 edition at the Edith Wharton Society website. If you want to explore Wharton in depth, you’ll want to read Hermione Lee’s biography of her. The website for Wharton’s home, The Mount, includes a biography and a consideration of her legacy, which inspired Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey. You can take a virtual tour of Wharton’s estate, the main house, the stable, and the gardens. C-SPAN’s two-and-a-half-hour special on Edith Wharton – broadcast from The Mount – is well worth viewing. You can read The House of Mirth for free online at Project Gutenberg – but if you’re like me, you’ll want to curl up in your favorite armchair with a hard copy of this delightfully long novel. One last resource is fascinating indeed – a 2007 article in the New York Times – but it reveals the ending of the novel. So wait until you’ve read The House of Mirth before you read “Wharton Letter Reopens a Mystery.” Visit thestoryweb.com/Wharton for links to all these resources. Listen now as I read Chapter 1 of Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel, The House of Mirth.   Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart. It was a Monday in early September, and he was returning to his work from a hurried dip into the country; but what was Miss Bart doing in town at that season? If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have inferred that he had come on her in the act of transition between one and another of the country-houses which disputed her presence after the close of the Newport season; but her desultory air perplexed him. She stood apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her to the platform or the street, and wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a very definite purpose. It struck him at once that she was waiting for some one, but he hardly knew why the idea arrested him. There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions. An impulse of curiosity made him turn out of his direct line to the door, and stroll past her. He knew that if she did not wish to be seen she would contrive to elude him; and it amused him to think of putting her skill to the test. "Mr. Selden—what good luck!" She came forward smiling, eager almost, in her resolve to intercept him. One or two persons, in brushing past them, lingered to look; for Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train. Selden had never seen her more radiant. Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her? "What luck!" she repeated. "How nice of you to come to my rescue!" He responded joyfully that to do so was his mission in life, and asked what form the rescue was to take. "Oh, almost any—even to sitting on a bench and talking to me. One sits out a cotillion—why not sit out a train? It isn't a bit hotter here than in Mrs. Van Osburgh's conservatory—and some of the women are not a bit uglier." She broke off, laughing, to explain that she had come up to town from Tuxedo, on her way to the Gus Trenors' at Bellomont, and had missed the three-fifteen train to Rhinebeck. "And there isn't another till half-past five." She consulted the little jewelled watch among her laces.     "Just two hours to wait. And I don't know what to do with myself. My maid came up this morning to do some shopping for me, and was to go on to Bellomont at one o'clock, and my aunt's house is closed, and I don't know a soul in town." She glanced plaintively about the station. "It IS hotter than Mrs. Van Osburgh's, after all. If you can spare the time, do take me somewhere for a breath of air." He declared himself entirely at her disposal: the adventure struck him as diverting. As a spectator, he had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied. "Shall we go over to Sherry's for a cup of tea?" She smiled assentingly, and then made a slight grimace. "So many people come up to town on a Monday—one is sure to meet a lot of bores. I'm as old as the hills, of course, and it ought not to make any difference; but if I'M old enough, you're not," she objected gaily. "I'm dying for tea—but isn't there a quieter place?" He answered her smile, which rested on him vividly. Her discretions interested him almost as much as her imprudences: he was so sure that both were part of the same carefully-elaborated plan. In judging Miss Bart, he had always made use of the "argument from design." "The resources of New York are rather meagre," he said; "but I'll find a hansom first, and then we'll invent something." He led her through the throng of returning holiday-makers, past sallow-faced girls in preposterous hats, and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles and palm-leaf fans. Was it possible that she belonged to the same race? The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him feel how highly specialized she was. A rapid shower had cooled the air, and clouds still hung refreshingly over the moist street. "How delicious! Let us walk a little," she said as they emerged from the station. They turned into Madison Avenue and began to stroll northward. As she moved beside him, with her long light step, Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair—was it ever so slightly brightened by art?—and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape? As he reached this point in his speculations the sun came out, and her lifted parasol cut off his enjoyment. A moment or two later she paused with a sigh. "Oh, dear, I'm so hot and thirsty—and what a hideous place New York is!" She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare. "Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in its shirtsleeves." Her eyes wandered down one of the side-streets. "Someone has had the humanity to plant a few trees over there. Let us go into the shade." "I am glad my street meets with your approval," said Selden as they turned the corner. "Your street? Do you live here?" She glanced with interest along the new brick and limestone house-fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes. "Ah, yes—to be sure: THE BENEDICK. What a nice-looking building! I don't think I've ever seen it before." She looked across at the flat-house with its marble porch and pseudo-Georgian facade. "Which are your windows? Those with the awnings down?" "On the top floor—yes." "And that nice little balcony is yours? How cool it looks up there!" He paused a moment. "Come up and see," he suggested. "I can give you a cup of tea in no time—and you won't meet any bores." Her colour deepened—she still had the art of blushing at the right time—but she took the suggestion as lightly as it was made. "Why not? It's too tempting—I'll take the risk," she declared. "Oh, I'm not dangerous," he said in the same key. In truth, he had never liked her as well as at that moment. He knew she had accepted without afterthought: he could never be a factor in her calculations, and there was a surprise, a refreshment almost, in the spontaneity of her consent. On the threshold he paused a moment, feeling for his latchkey. "There's no one here; but I have a servant who is supposed to come in the mornings, and it's just possible he may have put out the tea-things and provided some cake." He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with old prints. She noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window. A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains, and bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box on the balcony. Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs. "How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman." She leaned back in a luxury of discontent. Selden was rummaging in a cupboard for the cake. "Even women," he said, "have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat." "Oh, governesses—or widows. But not girls—not poor, miserable, marriageable girls!" "I even know a girl who lives in a flat." She sat up in surprise. "You do?" "I do," he assured her, emerging from the cupboard with the sought-for cake. "Oh, I know—you mean Gerty Farish." She smiled a little unkindly. "But I said MARRIAGEABLE—and besides, she has a horrid little place, and no maid, and such queer things to eat. Her cook does the washing and the food tastes of soap. I should hate that, you know." "You shouldn't dine with her on wash-days," said Selden, cutting the cake. They both laughed, and he knelt by the table to light the lamp under the kettle, while she measured out the tea into a little tea-pot of green glaze. As he watched her hand, polished as a bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails, and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist, he was struck with the irony of suggesting to her such a life as his cousin Gertrude Farish had chosen. She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate. She seemed to read his thought. "It was horrid of me to say that of Gerty," she said with charming compunction. "I forgot she was your cousin. But we're so different, you know: she likes being good, and I like being happy. And besides, she is free and I am not. If I were, I daresay I could manage to be happy even in her flat. It must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and give all the horrors to the ash-man. If I could only do over my aunt's drawing-room I know I should be a better woman." "Is it so very bad?" he asked sympathetically. She smiled at him across the tea-pot which she was holding up to be filled. "That shows how seldom you come there. Why don't you come oftener?" "When I do come, it's not to look at Mrs. Peniston's furniture." "Nonsense," she said. "You don't come at all—and yet we got on so well when we meet." "Perhaps that's the reason," he answered promptly. "I'm afraid I haven't any cream, you know—shall you mind a slice of lemon instead?" "I shall like it better." She waited while he cut the lemon and dropped a thin disk into her cup. "But that is not the reason," she insisted. "The reason for what?" "For your never coming." She leaned forward with a shade of perplexity in her charming eyes. "I wish I knew—I wish I could make you out. Of course I know there are men who don't like me—one can tell that at a glance. And there are others who are afraid of me: they think I want to marry them." She smiled up at him frankly. "But I don't think you dislike me—and you can't possibly think I want to marry you." "No—I absolve you of that," he agreed. "Well, then—-?" He had carried his cup to the fireplace, and stood leaning against the chimney-piece and looking down on her with an air of indolent amusement. The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement—he had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had no conversation but of the personal kind. At any rate, she was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up to his obligations. "Well, then," he said with a plunge, "perhaps THAT'S the reason." "What?" "The fact that you don't want to marry me. Perhaps I don't regard it as such a strong inducement to go and see you." He felt a slight shiver down his spine as he ventured this, but her laugh reassured him.     "Dear Mr. Selden, that wasn't worthy of you. It's stupid of you to make love to me, and it isn't like you to be stupid." She leaned back, sipping her tea with an air so enchantingly judicial that, if they had been in her aunt's drawing-room, he might almost have tried to disprove her deduction. "Don't you see," she continued, "that there are men enough to say pleasant things to me, and that what I want is a friend who won't be afraid to say disagreeable ones when I need them? Sometimes I have fancied you might be that friend—I don't know why, except that you are neither a prig nor a bounder, and that I shouldn't have to pretend with you or be on my guard against you." Her voice had dropped to a note of seriousness, and she sat gazing up at him with the troubled gravity of a child. "You don't know how much I need such a friend," she said. "My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other women—my best friends—well, they use me or abuse me; but they don't care a straw what happens to me. I've been about too long—people are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry." There was a moment's pause, during which Selden meditated one or two replies calculated to add a momentary zest to the situation; but he rejected them in favour of the simple question: "Well, why don't you?" She coloured and laughed. "Ah, I see you ARE a friend after all, and that is one of the disagreeable things I was asking for." "It wasn't meant to be disagreeable," he returned amicably. "Isn't marriage your vocation? Isn't it what you're all brought up for?" She sighed. "I suppose so. What else is there?" "Exactly. And so why not take the plunge and have it over?" She shrugged her shoulders. "You speak as if I ought to marry the first man who came along." "I didn't mean to imply that you are as hard put to it as that. But there must be some one with the requisite qualifications." She shook her head wearily. "I threw away one or two good chances when I first came out—I suppose every girl does; and you know I am horribly poor—and very expensive. I must have a great deal of money." Selden had turned to reach for a cigarette-box on the mantelpiece. "What's become of Dillworth?" he asked. "Oh, his mother was frightened—she was afraid I should have all the family jewels reset. And she wanted me to promise that I wouldn't do over the drawing-room." "The very thing you are marrying for!" "Exactly. So she packed him off to India." "Hard luck—but you can do better than Dillworth." He offered the box, and she took out three or four cigarettes, putting one between her lips and slipping the others into a little gold case attached to her long pearl chain. "Have I time? Just a whiff, then." She leaned forward, holding the tip of her cigarette to his. As she did so, he noted, with a purely impersonal enjoyment, how evenly the black lashes were set in her smooth white lids, and how the purplish shade beneath them melted into the pure pallour of the cheek. She began to saunter about the room, examining the bookshelves between the puffs of her cigarette-smoke. Some of the volumes had the ripe tints of good tooling and old morocco, and her eyes lingered on them caressingly, not with the appreciation of the expert, but with the pleasure in agreeable tones and textures that was one of her inmost susceptibilities. Suddenly her expression changed from desultory enjoyment to active conjecture, and she turned to Selden with a question. "You collect, don't you—you know about first editions and things?" "As much as a man may who has no money to spend. Now and then I pick up something in the rubbish heap; and I go and look on at the big sales." She had again addressed herself to the shelves, but her eyes now swept them inattentively, and he saw that she was preoccupied with a new idea. "And Americana—do you collect Americana?" Selden stared and laughed. "No, that's rather out of my line. I'm not really a collector, you see; I simply like to have good editions of the books I am fond of." She made a slight grimace. "And Americana are horribly dull, I suppose?" "I should fancy so—except to the historian. But your real collector values a thing for its rarity. I don't suppose the buyers of Americana sit up reading them all night—old Jefferson Gryce certainly didn't." She was listening with keen attention. "And yet they fetch fabulous prices, don't they? It seems so odd to want to pay a lot for an ugly badly-printed book that one is never going to read! And I suppose most of the owners of Americana are not historians either?" "No; very few of the historians can afford to buy them. They have to use those in the public libraries or in private collections. It seems to be the mere rarity that attracts the average collector." He had seated himself on an arm of the chair near which she was standing, and she continued to question him, asking which were the rarest volumes, whether the Jefferson Gryce collection was really considered the finest in the world, and what was the largest price ever fetched by a single volume. It was so pleasant to sit there looking up at her, as she lifted now one book and then another from the shelves, fluttering the pages between her fingers, while her drooping profile was outlined against the warm background of old bindings, that he talked on without pausing to wonder at her sudden interest in so unsuggestive a subject. But he could never be long with her without trying to find a reason for what she was doing, and as she replaced his first edition of La Bruyere and turned away from the bookcases, he began to ask himself what she had been driving at. Her next question was not of a nature to enlighten him. She paused before him with a smile which seemed at once designed to admit him to her familiarity, and to remind him of the restrictions it imposed. "Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?" He followed her glance about the room, with its worn furniture and shabby walls. "Don't I just? Do you take me for a saint on a pillar?" "And having to work—do you mind that?" "Oh, the work itself is not so bad—I'm rather fond of the law." "No; but the being tied down: the routine—don't you ever want to get away, to see new places and people?" "Horribly—especially when I see all my friends rushing to the steamer." She drew a sympathetic breath. "But do you mind enough—to marry to get out of it?" Selden broke into a laugh. "God forbid!" he declared. She rose with a sigh, tossing her cigarette into the grate. "Ah, there's the difference—a girl must, a man may if he chooses." She surveyed him critically. "Your coat's a little shabby—but who cares? It doesn't keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don't make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and if we can't keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership." Selden glanced at her with amusement: it was impossible, even with her lovely eyes imploring him, to take a sentimental view of her case. "Ah, well, there must be plenty of capital on the look-out for such an investment. Perhaps you'll meet your fate tonight at the Trenors'." She returned his look interrogatively. "I thought you might be going there—oh, not in that capacity! But there are to be a lot of your set—Gwen Van Osburgh, the Wetheralls, Lady Cressida Raith—and the George Dorsets." She paused a moment before the last name, and shot a query through her lashes; but he remained imperturbable. "Mrs. Trenor asked me; but I can't get away till the end of the week; and those big parties bore me." "Ah, so they do me," she exclaimed. "Then why go?" "It's part of the business—you forget! And besides, if I didn't, I should be playing bezique with my aunt at Richfield Springs." "That's almost as bad as marrying Dillworth," he agreed, and they both laughed for pure pleasure in their sudden intimacy. She glanced at the clock. "Dear me! I must be off. It's after five." She paused before the mantelpiece, studying herself in the mirror while she adjusted her veil. The attitude revealed the long slope of her slender sides, which gave a kind of wild-wood grace to her outline—as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing-room; and Selden reflected that it was the same streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such savour to her artificiality. He followed her across the room to the entrance-hall; but on the threshold she held out her hand with a gesture of leave-taking. "It's been delightful; and now you will have to return my visit." "But don't you want me to see you to the station?" "No; good bye here, please." She let her hand lie in his a moment, smiling up at him adorably. "Good bye, then—and good luck at Bellomont!" he said, opening the door for her. On the landing she paused to look about her. There were a thousand chances to one against her meeting anybody, but one could never tell, and she always paid for her rare indiscretions by a violent reaction of prudence. There was no one in sight, however, but a char-woman who was scrubbing the stairs. Her own stout person and its surrounding implements took up so much room that Lily, to pass her, had to gather up her skirts and brush against the wall. As she did so, the woman paused in her work and looked up curiously, resting her clenched red fists on the wet cloth she had just drawn from her pail. She had a broad sallow face, slightly pitted with small-pox, and thin straw-coloured hair through which her scalp shone unpleasantly. "I beg your pardon," said Lily, intending by her politeness to convey a criticism of the other's manner. The woman, without answering, pushed her pail aside, and continued to stare as Miss Bart swept by with a murmur of silken linings. Lily felt herself flushing under the look. What did the creature suppose? Could one never do the simplest, the most harmless thing, without subjecting one's self to some odious conjecture? Half way down the next flight, she smiled to think that a char-woman's stare should so perturb her. The poor thing was probably dazzled by such an unwonted apparition. But WERE such apparitions unwonted on Selden's stairs? Miss Bart was not familiar with the moral code of bachelors' flat-houses, and her colour rose again as it occurred to her that the woman's persistent gaze implied a groping among past associations. But she put aside the thought with a smile at her own fears, and hastened downward, wondering if she should find a cab short of Fifth Avenue. Under the Georgian porch she paused again, scanning the street for a hansom. None was in sight, but as she reached the sidewalk she ran against a small glossy-looking man with a gardenia in his coat, who raised his hat with a surprised exclamation. "Miss Bart? Well—of all people! This IS luck," he declared; and she caught a twinkle of amused curiosity between his screwed-up lids. "Oh, Mr. Rosedale—how are you?" she said, perceiving that the irrepressible annoyance on her face was reflected in the sudden intimacy of his smile. Mr. Rosedale stood scanning her with interest and approval. He was a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes fitting him like upholstery, and small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac. He glanced up interrogatively at the porch of the Benedick. "Been up to town for a little shopping, I suppose?" he said, in a tone which had the familiarity of a touch. Miss Bart shrank from it slightly, and then flung herself into precipitate explanations. "Yes—I came up to see my dress-maker. I am just on my way to catch the train to the Trenors'." "Ah—your dress-maker; just so," he said blandly. "I didn't know there were any dress-makers in the Benedick." "The Benedick?" She looked gently puzzled. "Is that the name of this building?" "Yes, that's the name: I believe it's an old word for bachelor, isn't it? I happen to own the building—that's the way I know." His smile deepened as he added with increasing assurance: "But you must let me take you to the station. The Trenors are at Bellomont, of course? You've barely time to catch the five-forty. The dress-maker kept you waiting, I suppose." Lily stiffened under the pleasantry. "Oh, thanks," she stammered; and at that moment her eye caught a hansom drifting down Madison Avenue, and she hailed it with a desperate gesture. "You're very kind; but I couldn't think of troubling you," she said, extending her hand to Mr. Rosedale; and heedless of his protestations, she sprang into the rescuing vehicle, and called out a breathless order to the driver.      

Galen Strawson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford deliverd the 2017 Isaiah Berlin Lecture at Wolfson College. The lecture was introduced by the College President, Hermione Lee. There occurred in the twentieth century the most remarkable episode in the whole history of ideas-the whole history of human thought. A number of thinkers denied the existence of something we know with certainty to exist: consciousness, conscious experience. Others held back from the Denial, but claimed that it might be true-a claim no less remarkable than the Denial. It is instructive to document some aspects of this episode, with particular reference to the rise of philosophical behaviourism, and the (connected) rise of a conception of naturalism that transformed the doctrine of materialism from a consciousness affirming-view into a consciousness-denying view. There is then a further task: to try to explain how it is possible that intelligent human beings should come to deny the existence of something that certainly exists.

Raymond Pierrehumbert, holder of the Halley Professorship of Physics at Oxford, gives the 2017 annual Wolfson Haldane Lecture. The lecture is introduced by Hermione Lee, College President. The Proterozoic is the period of Earth history extending from approximately 2.5 billion years ago to 550 million years ago, and makes up something over half of all Earth history to date. It begins with a dramatic rise in oxygen in the atmosphere, global “snowball” glaciations, and major disturbances of the carbon cycle, and ends with another period of carbon cycle fluctuations accompanied by the two Snowball glaciations; shortly after the exit from the second of these, the first multicellular life appears in the fossil record, and not long thereafter comes the Cambrian explosion. However, between the two eras of great climate disruption extends a period of about a billion years in which nothing much is happening, either from the standpoint of evolutionary innovation (insofar as visible for single-celled life in the fossil record) or from the standpoint of glaciation or biogeochemical cycling. This is the “boring billion” — the geological waiting room for the modern era of the Phanerozoic leading to the appearance of intelligent life on Earth. But what was the pacemaker determining the exit from the Boring Billion? Were we unlucky in the duration of the wait? Were we just lucky, and could it have been the Boring Two Billion? That would have in fact precluded the emergence of complex life on Earth, or any other planet orbiting a star like the Sun, since the gradual brightening of a Sunlike star over time throws an Earthlike planet into a runaway greenhouse state after about 4.5 billion years (roughly a half billion years from now), whereafter the planet loses its oceans and turns into an uninhabitable Venus-like world. Thus, the nature of the Boring Billion, and the factors that terminated it, have a very great bearing on whether we are alone in the universe. Dim red dwarf stars, which age more slowly than Sunlike stars, are known to have planets and perhaps offer more chances for complex life to emerge, but have their own challenges, which will also be discussed in this lecture.

100 years since its publication, Hermione Lee discusses The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf. In discussion with Thea Lenarduzzi from the TLS. Find out more: www.the-tls.co.uk See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Walter Scheidel, Professor of Classics & History at Stanford University, gave the 2013 annual lecture held in memory of eminent Roman historian Sir Ronald Syme Lecture. The lecture was introduced by College President, Hermione Lee.

“Biography is actually a quest for lives that speak to us” said biographer Hermione Lee. So what is the role of the biopic in contemporary film culture? What is it that we are looking for in the increasingly popular 'biopic' genre - films like Selma, Diana, Saving Mr Banks, 12 Years a Slave or The Wolf of Wall Street that claim to be based on real life events and aim to depict episodes in the lives of their protagonists? Pod Academy's film specialist, Esther Gaytan Fuertes, went to talk to Tom Brown and Belen Vidal, two lecturers in Film Studies at King’s College London, about their recent book, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, to find out more about this genre. Esther started by asking them if they felt the biopic was a neglected area in Film Studies.  Belen Vidal: Well, yes and no – it’s been studied but yes, perhaps it hasn’t been studied enough. The thing is that the biopic as a genre has always been there, I mean, it goes back to the beginning of film history. But the biopic has also cropped up as part of other genres and that’s the way it’s been looked at mainly by scholars -  as biopics that were part of the musical genre, or gangster films or Westerns... All those genres would have biographical elements or would occasionally do stories that are based on real characters, or real lives or people that existed. So, in a way, there’s been forming an idea of the biopic throughout film history as part of the popular genres, but the truth is that when Tom and I came into this project we also did it because we were interested that, in all this time, basically what we have is only two books, which are two excellent starting points to study the biopic, but it seemed very little considering the popularity of the genre. It’s worth mentioning that the first book that took the genre seriously or did a kind of serious comprehensive approach was George Custen’s book called Bio/pics: How Hollywood constructed public history – this was a book on the classical biopic, mostly films made in the 30s and 40s, and it focused on Hollywood. After that, recently we’ve had a book coming out by Dennis Bingham [Whose Lives are they Anyway?] about the biopic in contemporary film culture. And again this is a book that tackles the modern biopic - the biopic since the post war period and up to the contemporary moment. But, again, it’s very heavily leaned towards the English language. So we thought, why not doing a kind of more reviewing of the biopic in the last twenty years especially and how also the genre has spread, has become more visible internationally? Because what Tom and I were struck by was the huge number of films coming from very different national cinemas all marketing themselves as biographical films and many of them very often being immensely popular. If we think about La Môme (that was called La Vie en Rose) here, a French film about a French singer, Edith Piaf, making it all the way to the Oscars, all the way up to kind of the big time in Hollywood and it’s distributed all over the world. What were the conditions that were creating this appetite for biographical narratives and how these films are now becoming much more visible not only from Hollywood but from all over the world? So we wanted to study this phenomenon and say something about the biopic in contemporary film culture and that’s what the book is about. What approach do you adopt in your book to study the biopic? Belen Vidal: What we are really interested also is in the narrative structures, in the tropes that recur time and again. Is there such a thing as the poetics of the contemporary biopic? Is there such a thing as a kind of certain structures that are being used and reused time and again, new genres forming...? That’s what we were interested in when we were looking at the different chapters and bringing the work together and trying to find the different points in common between chapters that very often would tackle cycles and bodies of f...

Institute of English Studies Professor Dame Hermione Lee (President, Wolfson College Oxford) The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain is a non-profit organisation which aims to raise the profile of Virginia Woolf and promote the reading and di...

Institute of English Studies Professor Dame Hermione Lee (President, Wolfson College Oxford) The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain is a non-profit organisation which aims to raise the profile of Virginia Woolf and promote the reading and di...

J J Abrams describes his unorthodox new creation – S; Zadie Smith on her new story The Embassy of Cambodia; Kitty Empire gives her verdict on the new albums by Lady Gaga and Lorde; Matthew Macfadyen and Stephen Mangan on playing Jeeves and Wooster; Hermione Lee discusses her biography of writer Penelope Fitzgerald; movie-industry documentary Seduced and Abandoned reviewed; Neil Gaiman on his new Dr Who short story.

With Mark Lawson, including an interview with critic and writer Hermione Lee about her new biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, who published her first novel at the age of 60, and won the Booker Prize with her book Offshore at the age of 63. With the news of a massive find of Nazi looted art in a Munich flat this weekend, Mark speaks to art critic Bill Feaver and Head of Collections at the Berlin Jewish Museum Inka Bertz about the connection to the 1937 "Entartete Kunst" - the Degenerate art exhibition in Berlin which included work by Picasso, Paul Klee, Kandinsky and Nolde. J J Abrams, the creator of TV series Lost, discusses his latest work - S - a novel where the writing is not just between the lines but in the margins and in scraps of paper embedded between the pages. S tells the story of a book written by a mysterious author and two of its readers who correspond to each other via its yellowing pages. Abrams talks of its conception and why he handed the project to novelist Doug Dorst, while he worked on Star Trek and the new Star Wars movies. Fresh Meat returns to our screens tonight, joining the students at the beginning of their second year at university. John Yorke, former head of EastEnders and author of Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey into Story, joins Mark to reflect on how TV has used the passage of time to bolster plots and storylines. Producer Jerome Weatherald.

A Landmark edition in which Anne McElvoy and guests look at Alain-Fournier's celebrated and nostalgic tale of adolescent romance, Le Grand Meaulnes. Michèle Roberts, Hermione Lee and Patrick McGuiness examine it's enduring appeal and legacy from the poetry of its language, to the interlocking mysteries of its plot to the intriguing romantic life and early death of its author, and the story of the woman who inspired him. With readings by Peter Marinker.

With Mark Lawson.Tom Hanks reflects on saying no to film offers, playing real people, and his latest role in Captain Phillips, which depicts the ordeal of Richard Phillips, captain of a cargo ship taken hostage by Somali pirates in 2009. Captain Phillips is directed by Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Supremacy).It was announced today that Alice Munro has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. AS Byatt and Hermione Lee discuss the Canadian author, who writes short stories rather than novels.And Mark talks to the American artist Dana Schutz, whose colourful and fantastical paintings are on show at The Hepworth gallery in Wakefield.Producer Timothy Prosser.

Actress Tamsin Greig; Stephen Fry on Verdi and Wagner; Edna O'Brien, Colm Toibin, Michael Longley and Hermione Lee pay tribute to Seamus Heaney; reggae group UB40; comedians Nadia Kamil and Mary Bourke on how to make feminism funny.

Mark Lawson reflects on the life and work of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, whose death was announced today. Writers including Edna O'Brien, Colm Toibin, Michael Longley and Hermione Lee consider Seamus Heaney's long writing career, and there's another chance to hear part of a special Front Row interview, recorded before an audience on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Producer Stephen Hughes.

This Roundtable Discussion offers several ways into the life and work of Leonard Woolf from the perspectives of several academics. Hermione Lee and Anna Snaith build on the intersections of Leonard's work with Virginia Woolf's novels, while Elleke Boehmer and Nisha Manocha trace the Conradian elements of his writing. David Trotter explains why he understands Woolf's novel to be a 'primitivist' text, while Susheila Nasta brings Woolf's interactions with E.M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand and others to the fore.

Academy Discourse - Biographies and the Biographer's Task Professor Hermione Lee, CBE Friday, 7 October 2011, 6pm, Academy House Hermione Lee's previous books include biographical studies Elizabeth Bowen and Willa Cather, the internationally acclaimed biography Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton, long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. She is a well-known reviewer and broadcaster, and, in 2006, Chair of the judges for the Man Booker Prize. She is the first woman Goldsmiths' Professor of English at Oxford University, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She was awarded a CBE in 2003 for services to literature. www.ria.ie Disclaimer: The Royal Irish Academy has prepared the content of this website responsibly and carefully, but disclaims all warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy of the information contained in any of the materials. The views expressed are the authors' own and not those of the Royal Irish Academy.

Front Row launches the Cultural Exchange project: Tracey Emin discusses her favourite painting - Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid. Nick Park, creator of Wallace & Gromit, invites Mark Lawson to his new ride at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Hermione Lee assesses the new National Theatre production of Othello. Baroness Virginia Bottomley and Sir Peter Bottomley review The Politician's Husband. Photographer René Burri reflects on some of his most iconic images taken through the years. Ian Gillan and Ian Paice, of the band Deep Purple, discuss their new album Now What?!

With Mark Lawson Animator Nick Park has adapted his most famous characters Wallace & Gromit for the small screen, the big screen, the BBC Proms and now the theme park. He invites Mark to take a turn on his new ride - the Thrill-O-Matic - as it opens at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. More from the Cultural Exchange project, in which 75 leading creative minds share their passion for a book, film, poem, piece of music or other work of art. Tonight Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, selects the groundbreaking sci-fi novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. The 1937 book is a history of life in the universe, in which a human from England is transported out of his body and finds himself able to explore space and other planets. Considered by Arthur C Clarke as one of the finest science fiction books ever written, Star Maker also was loved by Winston Churchill and Virginia Woolf. Nicholas Hytner gives Othello a modern military setting, in a new staging starring Adrian Lester in the title role, with Rory Kinnear as Iago. Hermione Lee assesses whether this National Theatre production casts a fresh light on the play. ITV's latest sitcom, Vicious, features Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi as an elderly gay couple, with Frances de la Tour as their best friend. Writer and critic Philip Hoare has watched it and discusses whether Vicious lives up to its name. Producer Ekene Akalawu.

Matthew Sweet asks historian Charles Glass, author of a new book on deserters in World War Two, whether desertion is an act of sanity, and not - as some armed forces have tended to believe - a symptom of mental illness. He also talks to Ben Griffin of the organisation Veterans for Peace, who represents soldiers in current conflicts who seek a way out. Hermione Lee discusses the letters novelist Willa Cather didn't want you to read, and Sandra Hebron and Mary Wild review Pasolini's controversial film Theorem.

A Landmark edition in which Anne McElvoy and guests look at Alain-Fournier's celebrated and nostalgic tale of adolescent romance, Le Grand Meaulnes. Michèle Roberts, Hermione Lee and Patrick McGuiness examine it's enduring appeal and legacy from the poetry of its language, to the interlocking mysteries of its plot to the intriguing romantic life and early death of its author, and the story of the woman who inspired him. With readings by Peter Marinker.

Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, presents the 2013 Wolfson Haldane Lecture. The speaker is introduced by College President, Hermione Lee.

Institute of English Studies Professor Dame Hermione Lee (President, Wolfson College Oxford) The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain is a non-profit organisation which aims to raise the profile of Virginia Woolf and promote the reading and di...

Institute of English Studies Professor Dame Hermione Lee (President, Wolfson College Oxford) The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain is a non-profit organisation which aims to raise the profile of Virginia Woolf and promote the reading and di...

Renowned psychologist, literary critic and essayist Adam Phillips delivers a public lecture at Wolfson College on his work on 'Freud's Impossible Life'. The lecture is introduced by the College President, Hermione Lee.

The British-Libyan author Hisham Matar describes to a packed audience at Wolfson College the 'existential crisis' at the heart of contemporary Libyan national identity. The talk is introduced by Hermione Lee. The British-Libyan author Hisham Matar marked the first publication of his work in his home country by describing to a packed audience at Wolfson College the 'existential crisis' at the heart of contemporary Libyan national identity, and the corresponding existential exile embedded in the life of the writer. The lecture for the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) at Wolfson was introduced by OCLW Director and College President Hermione Lee, who recounted the thrill of discovering Matar's work while judging the 2006 ManBooker Prize, for which his debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted. The book was set in Gadaffi's Libya of 1979, and brought Matar literary acclaim and international prominence, leaving the novelist with the difficult task, Professor Lee observed, of negotiating the responsibility of the artist to the claims of world history.

Booker Prize winning novelist Alan Hollinghurst discusses fiction and biography in conversation with Hermione Lee at Wolfson College's Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW). Alan Hollinghurst gives an insight into the secrets of his fiction at Wolfson College's Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, speaking in conversation with College President and literary biographer Hermione Lee on the complex relationships between biographer and subject; lived experience and the attempt to record it, a subject he explores in his latest novel, The Stranger's Child. The conversation ranges over the changing attitudes to privacy charted through the historical span of the novel, the parallel liberation of biography and gay writing over the same period, the fallibility of the novelist's primary tool - memory - and the difficulty of acquiring a true understanding of the lives of others.

The inaugural lecture of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing was delivered by Micahel Wood, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He was introduced by Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson College and Director of the Centre.

With Mark Lawson. Michael Sheen stars in the Young Vic's new production of Hamlet. Director Ian Rickson sets the play in the Elsinore Mental Asylum, an institution the audience must also check in to. Hermione Lee reviews. Kelvin Mackenzie, former editor of The Sun, gives the critical verdict on Tabloid: a new documentary charting the way British newspapers covered the extraordinary tale of Joyce McKinney, a US beauty queen accused of imprisoning a young Mormon missionary in 1977. Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, talks about his long- awaited third novel: The Marriage Plot. He discusses how this novel is born of a previous abandoned book, and how a friendly competition with fellow American author Jonathan Franzen has spurred him on throughout his career. The British Library's collection of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts are on display together for the first time. The manuscripts were collected over 800 years by Kings and Queens of England. Writer A N Wilson reviews the exhibition. Producer Ellie Bury.

The 2011 Wolfson College Syme Lecture was given by Denis Feeney, Giger Professor of Latin and Professor of Classics, Princeton University. The speaker is introduced by College President Prof. Hermione Lee.

Philip Roth was honoured as the winner of The Man Booker International Prize 2011 at an awards dinner held at Banqueting House, Whitehall on Tuesday 28 June. Roth was unable to attend and the prize was accepted on his behalf by author and academic Hermione Lee

The 2010 Wolfson College Syme Lecture was given by Oxford Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History, Dame Averil Cameron. The speaker is introduced by College President Prof. Hermione Lee.

Slate's Audio Book Club. Stephen Metcalf, Meghan O'Rourke, and Katie Roiphe discuss the novel The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, along with a new biography of Wharton by Hermione Lee. We recommend, but don't insist, that you read The House of Mirth before listening to this audio program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Melvyn Bragg examines the 18th century idea of Sensibility. In Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, the lead character Yorick comforts a young woman who has been abandoned by a little pet goat that had proved as faithless as her lover. Yorick describes her effect upon his ‘sweet sensibility', “I sat down close by her, and Maria let me wipe the tears away as they fell, with my handkerchief. I then steeped it in my own - and then in hers - and then in mine - and then I wiped hers again - and as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. (I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me to the contrary.)”It seems a bit mawkish to us now but Sterne, Richardson and Mackenzie were all part of the ‘cult of sensibility' in the eighteenth century which elevated the sentimental novel to the height of literary art. Jane Austen's masterpiece, Sense and Sensibility, has traditionally been taken as a parody of sensibility. But what caused the rush to emotion that so infused and enthused the Sensibility movement and was Jane Austen really so critical of the expression of feeling?With Claire Tomalin, literary biographer and author of Jane Austen: A Life and The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English at University College London; Hermione Lee, Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford.

Melvyn Bragg examines the 18th century idea of Sensibility. In Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, the lead character Yorick comforts a young woman who has been abandoned by a little pet goat that had proved as faithless as her lover. Yorick describes her effect upon his ‘sweet sensibility’, “I sat down close by her, and Maria let me wipe the tears away as they fell, with my handkerchief. I then steeped it in my own - and then in hers - and then in mine - and then I wiped hers again - and as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. (I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me to the contrary.)”It seems a bit mawkish to us now but Sterne, Richardson and Mackenzie were all part of the ‘cult of sensibility’ in the eighteenth century which elevated the sentimental novel to the height of literary art. Jane Austen’s masterpiece, Sense and Sensibility, has traditionally been taken as a parody of sensibility. But what caused the rush to emotion that so infused and enthused the Sensibility movement and was Jane Austen really so critical of the expression of feeling?With Claire Tomalin, literary biographer and author of Jane Austen: A Life and The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English at University College London; Hermione Lee, Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford.