Secret Life of Books

T.S. Eliot was a mid-west American living in London in the first decades of the 20th century, who wrote Dickens-inflected poems about fog, wind, damp evenings and the general gloom of English life (if you were a young, neurotic, over-educated, American male, that is). Eliot’s remembered in the same breath as Ezra Pound as a founding father of literary Modernism, but while very few people could quote a line from Pound, almost everyone will recognize some of these evergreen phrases from Eliot’s lugubrious output. “April is the cruellest month,” “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” “do I dare eat a peach?”; “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and “this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” But thing about Eliot is that he had an ear for a crowd-pleasing line, which is why he also ended up being one of the most important editors of the 20th century at the publishing house Faber and Faber, making the careers of many poets including WH Auden and Marianne Moore.Today you’ll be hearing about Eliot’s penchant for amateur theatricals, Paris, and the philosophy of Henri Bergson; and his pivot from being a high-minded Philosophy PhD student at Harvard to a wanker-banker at Lloyds in London. Next week we’ll focus on his turbulent relationship with the unhappy and unstable Vivienne, his first wife, his complicated feelings about Victorian and Elizabethan literature, and his conversion to high Anglican Christianity, which caused his good pal Viriginia Woolf to announce, “Tom is dead to me.”We claim whenever possible that all literary roads lead to the 1980s and Andrew Lloyd Webber. TS Eliot’s greatest poetic achievement is neither Prufrock nor The Waste Land, but Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which provided the Cats! Songbook.Genius as Mcavity the Mystery Cat and Rum-Tum Tugger are, TS Eliot’s immortality was truly sealed with the ubiquitous and appalling 80s soft rock ballad “Memory,” sung by Grizabella the once-beautiful feline who has fallen on hard times amid a load of oversized garbage bins. Memory is a mash-up of lines from Eliot’s early poems, and today we’ll find out exactly what it was that so attracted this young American to the burnt out ends of smoky days in early 20C London. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SLoB Book Club is back as Sophie and Jonty dive into Charles Dickens’ Bleak House with the help of special guest Bret Walker, SC – one of Australia’s most renowned lawyers.Dickens’ sprawling vision of a nation caught in the fog of corruption, in which human kindness and connection is almost but never quite extinguished, is as relevant today as ever. It contains some of his greatest characters - including the original virtue-signaller Mrs Jellyby, the sinister Mr Krook who collects women’s hair and Inspector Bucket - arguably the first fully-rounded detective in English fiction. It’s a social satire, a murder mystery and a comedy - all tied together by the nefarious Court of Chancery and the interminable case of Jarndyce & Jarndyce. This episode is devoted solely to Chapter 1. Sophie and Jonty look at what Dickens was up to immediately before and during its composition and ask: what exactly is the famous fog drifting over London in the opening lines? In the second half, as the fog curls into the Court of Chancery, we are joined by Bret Walker SC who explains what Chancery is, how it differs from other law courts, why there were real cases like Jarndyce & Jarndyce which lasted many decades, and why Dickens was so incensed by it all. If you want to read along with us over the next four months, then please subscribe – we will release fortnightly episodes from now on.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nobody expects the Victorian wombats! Given the title, listeners won’t be hugely surprised to hear there are goblins in today’s episode, but wombats!?!?Yes, the sleeper hits of this episode are our round, furry friends from Australia. Or, as the poet Christina Rossetti would put it in a poem to her family pet, gli umobatti. “Goblin Market” is already going to 11 on the weirdness scale, and we’ve said nothing of the fairies, goblins, sexual repression, feminine hysteria, class anxiety and evangelism coming your way. If you’re into High Victorian weirdness then, boy, this is the SLoB episode for you. Christina Rossetti was the daughter of an exiled Italian radical and sister of the famous painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and “Goblin Market” is her hit poem from 1862. 1862 was, incidentally, the same year in which, across the Atlantic, Emily Dickinson sent her poems to T.W. Higginson (asking if they breathe) and Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, improvised a story about a girl called Alice going underground. “Goblin Market” is a bizarre, rollicking, long poem about a young woman called Laura who “sucked and sucked and sucked” the “fruit globes” of some goblins - which is just an unnecessary erotic way of saying she ate some fruit - and wasted away, until saved by her sister Lizzie in a truly bizarre ceremony in which she licks sticky juice off her face.  Rossetti was inspired by John Keats and his theory of negative capability, and she was at the heart of London’s bohemian artistic elite, the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood. But she was also neurotic, austere and devoutly religious, turning her back on her brother’s louche goings-on in his house in Chelsea, where aesthetes slid naked down the bannisters and cavorted with his collection of exotic pets. But she did not turn her back on Gabriel Rossetti’s pet wombat, Top, named after his great university friend, the radical designer and writer William Morris. Come for the fruit globes, stay for the wombats in this edge-of-your seat SLOB episode.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In April 1819, the poet John Keats, aged 23, told his brother George that he was done with poetry. A few days later, he smashed out the first poem in what is arguably the greatest streak in literary history, with "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." This was followed in quick succession by four odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn." And then as summer faded, he had a thing to say about the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness in "To Autumn." Throughout this, he also wrote one of his most under-rated longer poems - the mini epic Lamia. All that in six months!God only knows what marvels 1820 might have had in store, but at the start of the year he suffered his first lung haemorrhage, confirming his fears of tuberculosis, and announced to his friend Charles Browne that he was dying - as indeed he was. Not only do Keats' Odes stand amongst the greatest in the English language, but their influence was unparalleled in that century. Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement that we associate with Walter Pater, William Morris and Oscar Wilde directly descend from Keats’ work, frequently quoting the final lines of "Ode to a Grecian Urn" as their credo: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’. So the big question in this episode is simply ‘how?’. How did the 23-year-old Keats manage to do it? What was going on in his life and his art, his friendships as well as the world at large to enable this to happen? And what is it that makes these poems so truly unforgettable? We’re going to be talking about madness, revolution and medicine in Regency England. We’re going to run through a brief history of birds - particularly nightingales - in English literature, and explain what an ode is and where it comes from? There’s love, friendship, laughter, despair, and something called Negative Capability, which is more exciting than it sounds.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1751, a little-known Cambridge academic called Thomas Gray published “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and became a household name. His poem was a funeral elegy about the sun going down over the graves of long-forgotten people whom Gray didn’t know. They happened to be buried in the same small country churchyard as his aunt and mother (and, eventually, himself), in the village of Stoke Poges. It was an instant smash, topping the literary charts and going into multiple reprints, editions, and translations - and spawning a minor sub-industry of satires and parodies.If you’ve ever heard of the “graveyard school” of poetry, Thomas Gray is its genius, and “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by far its most famous and influential poem.Gray had a huge impact on the Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Colerdige, Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Tennyson, Browning, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin were all indebted to him – and countless others.Generations of British schoolchildren know Gray’s poem by heart, so today Sophie and Jonty are digging up the dirt on this graveyard poem to ask what all the fuss is about. Why is this one of the most important and prized works in English poetry, and which heavy-hitter authors came before Gray, paving the way for this poetic game-changer?Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A special collaboration between Sophie and the celebrated writer and podcaster Gretchen Rubin, of Happier with Gretchen Rubin, recorded live from New York City. Join Sophie and Gretchen on a literary pilgrimage to the Upper East Side of New York, where they celebrate a shared favourite children's book, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by the extraordinary E.L Konigsburg.Sophie and Gretchen walk out on the streets of Manhattan and through the galleries of the Met, visiting favorite landmarks from the novel, and discussing what makes this children's book so perfect, both a glorious product of its time and place, and an immortalizing of the Met and New York City for future generations of children and their parents.It's part of a series Gretchen and her sister are doing called MOVE 26 in '26, to get readers and listeners exercising for at least 26 minutes a day, during 2026!Check it out here, and sign up:https://gretchenrubin.com/move26in26/And learn more about Gretchen and her work on a happier life here:https://gretchenrubin.com/Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Talent shows like The X Factor, Got Talent and their many spin offs began in the 1380s, not the 1980s! They were invented by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales at the end of a successful and glamorous diplomatic career in medieval Europe.This is the literary pilgrimage to top all literary pilgrimages, the imagined story of a group of medieval odds and sods, who meet up to in a London pub and walk to Canterbury Cathedral. The owner of the pub, a local MP named Harry Bailey (a real guy), decides that they’ll have a storytelling competition to pass the time while they travel. The winner will get dinner at, you guessed it, Harry's pub.No one had ever written anything remotely like this before, and Chaucer’s version of pub-mike night became a literary sensation.The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous works of English Literature ever, and a perennial favorite on "Intro to English Lit" syllabuses. It's written in Middle English, which isn't an easy read now, but has a lot of fascinating local color that has disappeared from modern English. In the first installment of our “Long(ish) Poems” series, Sophie and Jonty explain why the Canterbury Tales remains an evergreen literary staple, what makes Chaucer’s characters so brilliant, and what’s important about the "General Prologue" that kick-starts the whole tale cycle. [Editor's note: work on your titles, Geoffrey!]Here is Harvard's easy to use version of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English with a modern English translation: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2026 is the year of the Horse. It is also the Year of Classic Literature, thanks to the current crop of high-profile screen adaptations. And, when it comes to the classics, SLOB is all about the small screen. Most film directors have enormous egos. All too often they use a classic as a departure point to - frankly - just show off. To try and show they are as brilliant as the author. And we don’t like it! Or very rarely. Our hearts lie with the small screen. There the classics can unfold faithfully and with all the time they deserve. Think of the BBC’s adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch and Jane Eyre, as well as modern classics like Wolf Hall and Normal People. It’s fair to say that the breakout hit of the hour is the BBC’s adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister - a bold rewrite of Pride and Prejudice - starring Ella Bruccoleri, Richard E Grant and Ruth Jones. So, we’re delighted to have Janice on the show this week to talk about not only adapting Pride and Prejudice, but having her book in turn adapted for the screen. Anyone familiar with Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice will know that Elizabeth Bennet has a very unappealing younger sister called Mary, who - with Austen’s characteristic talent for cruelty - is portrayed as a plain-looking prig, unable to say the right thing, and generally lowering spirits with her moralising comments and sub-par musical performances. You might recall the famous Mr Bennet line spoken about Mary: "That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit."In this episode, we're joined by author Janice Hadlow to chat all about Mary, TOBS, and what it looks like when you champion the underdog.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To round out our series on high school novels we're jumping across the pond (aka the Atlantic Ocean) and skipping several decades to find ourselves in early 1990s Massachusetts. Welcome to the world of East Coast preppy culture, where Laura Ashley dresses, LL Bean canvas tote bags, goldfish crackers, classic rock, pink shorts and ties with whales on them, reign supreme. As with the other three school stories we’ve covered so far, the ultra-elite East Coast boarding school of Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2005 novel Prep is a microcosm of the nation at large - or at least a decent segment of it. Prep is set in the class-conscious world of New England and the boarding schools that are meant to produce the graduates of Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Sittenfeld, who, like her heroine Lee is from the Midwest, picks up the milieu of The Great Gatsby half a century later, and makes the characters are ten years younger. Picture Daisy and Tm Buchanan, Jordan Baker and Nick Caraway in high school, wondering if they should use a different deodorant, and whether they have the right haircut.Prep was The Secret History of American boarding school stories when it came out, an authentic glimpse into what really went on in these ultra privileged high school campuses. Curtis Sittenfeld would take on other iconic American stories in subsequent novels, rewriting the worlds of First Lady Laura Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton. With Prep she trained her excruciatingly detailed outsider-observer’s eye on the rituals, mores and social markers of America’s white elites. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.