Episódios
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Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Further reading in the LRB:
P.N. Furbank: Nesting Time
https://website.lrb-intranet.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n02/p.n.-furbank/nesting-time
D.A.N. Jones: The Old Feudalist
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n12/d.a.n.-jones/the-old-feudalist
John Bayley: Pine Trees and Vicars
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n07/john-bayley/pine-trees-and-vices
Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist
Next episode: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and Confessions of an Unrepentant Sinner by James Hogg.
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For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is really for: to forget what we already know. ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ was written in 1874, when Nietzsche was 30, and was published in a collection with three other essays – on Wagner, David Strauss and the use of history – that has come to be titled Untimely Meditations. In this episode Jonathan and James consider the essays together and their powerful attack on the ethos of the age, railing against the greed and power of the state, fake art, overweening science, the triviality of universities and, perhaps above all, the deification of success.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
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Read more in the LRB:
David Hoy on Nietzsche's life:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n01/david-hoy/different-stories
J.P. Stern on 'Unmodern Observations' (or 'Untimely Meditations'):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n16/j.p.-stern/impatience
Jenny Diski on Elisabeth Nietzsche:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n18/jenny-diski/it-wasn-t-him-it-was-her
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In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the self-made capitalist John Thornton, she is forced to reassess her assumptions about justice and propriety. At the heart of the novel are a series of righteous rebels: striking workers, mutinous naval officers and religious dissenters.
Dinah Birch joins Clare Bucknell to discuss Gaskell’s rich study of obedience and authority. They explore the Unitarian undercurrent in her work, her eye for domestic and industrial detail, and how her subtle handling of perspective serves her great theme: mutual understanding.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Read more in the LRB:
Dinah Birch: The Unwritten Fiction of Dead Brothers
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n19/dinah-birch/the-unwritten-fiction-of-dead-brothers
Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Secret-keeping
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n16/rosemarie-bodenheimer/secret-keeping
John Bayley: Mrs G
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/john-bayley/mrs-g
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Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial ways. The genre of self-elegy, in which poets have reflected on their own passing, is a small but eloquent one in the history of English poetry. In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider some of its most striking examples, including Chidiock Tichborne’s laconic lament on the night of his execution in 1586, Jonathan Swift’s breezy anticipation of his posthumous reception, and the more comfortless efforts of 20th-century poets confronting godless extinction.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Read more in the LRB:
Jacqueline Rose on Plath:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n16/jacqueline-rose/this-is-not-a-biography
David Runciman on Larkin and his father:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n03/david-runciman/a-funny-feeling
John Bayley on Larkin
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n08/john-bayley/the-last-romantic
Matthew Bevis on Hardy:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare
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In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary imagination in the 20th century as it confronts the nightmares of modernity. In this episode, Marina Warner is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss the ways in which Kafka extended the realist tradition of the European novel by drawing on ‘simple forms’ – proverbs, wisdom literature and animal fables – to push the boundaries of what literature could explore, with reference to stories including ‘The Judgment’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘A Report to the Academy’.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Franz Kafka (trans. Michael Hofmann): Unknown Laws
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n14/franz-kafka/short-cuts
Rivka Galchen: What Kind of Funny is He?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n23/rivka-galchen/what-kind-of-funny-is-he
Judith Butler: Who Owns Kafka?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-kafka
J.P. Stern: Bad Faith
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n13/j.p.-stern/bad-faith
Next episode: Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found at Saragossa and stories by Isak Dinesen.
Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist
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T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent his entire career as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where his only obligation was not to get married. Yet in over fifty years of slow, meticulous writing he articulated a series of unusual and arresting ideas that attacked Kantian and utilitarian notions of duty and morality. In this episode, Jonathan and James look at Bradley’s polemic against John Stuart Mill, ‘My Station and Its Duties’, and other essays in Ethical Studies, which challenge the idea of morality as a product of calm reasoning arrived at by mature, rational minds. For Bradley, morality is a characteristic of communities, determined by people’s differing needs at various stages in their lives, and the universal need for self-realisation can only be achieved through those communities.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Read more in the LRB:
Frank Kermode on Eliot and Bradley:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n17/frank-kermode/feast-of-st-thomas
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Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex story of fractured families, bad marriages and the tyranny of debt. In this episode, Colin Burrow and Rosemary Hill join Tom to discuss Thackeray’s use of clothes, curry and the rapidly changing topography of London to construct a turbulent society full of peril and opportunity for his heroine, Becky Sharp, and consider why the Battle of Waterloo was such a recurrent preoccupation in literature of the period.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Read more in the LRB:
John Sutherland on Thackeray:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n02/john-sutherland/wife-overboard
Rosemary Hill on 'Frock Consciousness':
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n02/rosemary-hill/frock-consciousness
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The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop returned repeatedly to the elegy to commemorate old friends and settle old scores.In this episode, Mark and Seamus turn to elegies for poets by poets, tracing the intricate connections between them. Lowell, Berryman and Bishop’s work was offset by a deep commitment to the literary tradition, and Mark and Seamus identify their shared influences and anxieties.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Find further reading in the LRB:
Mark Ford: No One Else Can Take a Bath for You
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n07/mark-ford/no-one-else-can-take-a-bath-for-you
Karl Miller: Some Names for Robert Lowell
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n09/karl-miller/some-names-for-robert-lowell
Nicholas Everett: Two Americas and a Scotland
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n18/nicholas-everett/two-americas-and-a-scotland
Helen Vendler: The Numinous Moose
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/helen-vendler/the-numinous-moose
Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist
Next episode: Self-elegies by Hardy, Larkin and Plath.
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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular.
Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the many puzzles of the Alice books. They discuss the way Carroll illuminates other questions raised in this series: of dream states, the nature of consciousness, the transformative power of language and the arbitrariness of authority.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Marina Warner: You Must Not Ask
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n01/marina-warner/you-must-not-ask
Dinah Birch: Never Seen A Violet
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n17/dinah-birch/never-seen-a-violet
Marina Warner: Doubly Damned
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n03/marina-warner/doubly-damned
Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist
Next episode: The stories of Franz Kafka, with Adam Thirlwell.
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
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Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a deeply repressed man who knows that he’s deeply repressed, coming to terms with the uncompromising educational experiment his father subjected him to as a child – described by Isaiah Berlin as ‘an appalling success’. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Mill’s startlingly honest account of this experience and the breakdown that ensued in his 20s, and the boldness of his life and thought from his views on socialism and the rights of women to his unwavering devotion to his wife, Harriet Taylor, the co-author of 'On Liberty' and other works.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Further reading in the LRB:
Sissela Bok on Mill's 'Autobiography':
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n06/sissela-bok/his-father-s-children
Alasdair MacIntyre: Mill's Forgotten Victory
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n20/alasdair-macintyre/john-stuart-mill-s-forgotten-victory
Panbkaj Mishra: Bland Fanatics
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n23/pankaj-mishra/bland-fanatics
Next Episode
F.H. Bradley's 'My Station and Its Duties' can be found online here:
https://archive.org/details/ethicalstudies0000brad/page/160/mode/2up
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When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of Heathcliff’s mysterious origins and ‘obscene’ wealth, of Cathy’s ghost, bad weather, gnarled trees, even gnarlier characters and savage dogs, they discuss the book’s intricate structure, Brontë’s inventive use of language and the extraordinary hold that her story continues to exert over the imaginations of readers and non-readers alike.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Read more in the LRB:
David Trotter: Heathcliff Redounding
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n09/david-trotter/heathcliff-redounding
John Bayley: Kitchen Devil
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n24/john-bayley/kitchen-devil
Alice Spawls: If It Weren’t for Charlotte
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n22/alice-spawls/if-it-weren-t-for-charlotte
Patricia Lockwood: What a Bear Wants
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n16/patricia-lockwood/pull-off-my-head
Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist
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Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and their peculiar emotional power. They discuss Gray’s ambiguous sexuality, his procrastination and class anxieties, and where his humour shines through – as in his elegy for Horace Walpole’s cat.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Further reading in the LRB:
John Mullan: Unpranked Lyre
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n24/john-mullan/unpranked-lyre
Tony Harrison: ‘V.’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n01/tony-harrison/v
Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist
Read the texts online:
https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/sorw
https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/elcc
https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/odfc
Next episode: Mid-20th century elegies: Berryman, Lowell, Bishop
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Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Salman Rushdie: Calvino
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n17/salman-rushdie/calvino
James Butler: Infinite Artichoke
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12/james-butler/infinite-artichoke
Jonathan Coe: Calvinoism
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n06/jonathan-coe/calvinoism
Next episode: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode, Jonathan and James consider Emerson’s use of the circle to demonstrate an idealistic philosophy rooted in the natural world, in which individuals are bounded by self-created horizons, and the extent to which this fits with Transcendentalist notions of progress and independence. They also discuss what his other essays, including ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘Art’ and ‘Nature’, have to say about the importance of thinking one’s own thoughts, and why Emerson had such a powerful influence on writers as varied as Nietzsche, Saul Bellow and Louisa May Alcott.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Read 'Circles' here:
https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/circles/
Read more in the LRB:
Tony Tanner on the life of Emerson:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n10/tony-tanner/arctic-habits
Colin Burrow on the American canon:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n22/colin-burrow/the-magic-bloomschtick
Next episode: John Stuart Mill's Autobiography
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Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thames before heading up the river to Wales. Their debates cover, among other things, the Captain Swing riots of 1830, the mass dissemination of knowledge, the emerging philosophy of utilitarianism and the relative merits of medieval and contemporary values. In this episode Clare is joined by Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer to discuss where the book came from and its use of ‘sociable argument’ to offer up-to-date commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Read more in the LRB:
Thomas Keymer on Peacock
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n03/thomas-keymer/bring-some-madeira
Paul Foot: The not-so-great Reform Act
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n09/paul-foot/shoy-hoys
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This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop we find that tension at its most acute. Mark and Seamus consider the way each poem deals with the traditional demand of the elegy for consolation, and what happens when the form and language of love poetry subverts elegiac conventions.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Read the poems here:
Ben Jonson: On My First Son
https://lrb.me/jonsoncrld
Anne Bradstreet:In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet
https://lrb.me/bradstreetcrld
Geoffrey Hill: September Song
https://lrb.me/hillcrld
Elizabeth Bishop: First Death in Nova Scotia
https://lrb.me/bishopcrld
Read more in the LRB:
Blair Worden on Ben Jonson
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/blair-worden/the-tribe-of-ben
Blair Worden on puritanism
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/blair-worden/the-tribe-of-ben
Colin Burrow in Geoffrey Hill:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n04/colin-burrow/rancorous-old-sod
Helen Vendler on Elizabeth Bishop
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/helen-vendler/the-numinous-moose
Next episode:
Two elegies by Thomas Gray:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44302/ode-on-the-death-of-a-favourite-cat-drowned-in-a-tub-of-goldfishes
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Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting point of Arabic fairytale: ‘It was and it was not’? In this episode Marina and Anna Della discuss Gulliver’s Travels as a text in which empiricism and imagination are tightly woven, where fantastical realms are created to give different perspectives on reality and both writer and reader are liberated from having to decide what to think.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Terry Eagleton:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n16/terry-eagleton/a-spot-of-firm-government
Clare Bucknell: Oven-Ready Children
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n02/clare-bucknell/oven-ready-children
Thomas Keymer: Carry Up your Coffee Boldly
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n08/thomas-keymer/carry-up-your-coffee-boldly
Next episode: Marco Polo’s Il Milione and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the religion of humanity. In this episode, Jonathan and James discuss the ways in which the book applies this thought to various aspects of Christian doctrine, from sexual relations to the Trinity, and consider why Feuerbach would never have described himself as an atheist. They also look at George Eliot’s remarkable translation of the work, published only thirteen years after the original, which not only ensured Feuerbach’s influence in the Anglophone world but invented a new philosophical vocabulary in English for German thought.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Further reading in the LRB:
James Wood: What next?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n08/james-wood/what-s-next
Terry Eagleton: George Eliot
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n18/terry-eagleton/biogspeak
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On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money.
In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.
Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.
Next episode: Clare Bucknell and guests on Thomas Love Peacock’s Crotchet Castle.
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Milton wrote ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, at the age of 29, to commemorate the drowning of the poet Edward King. As well as a great pastoral elegy, it is a denunciation of the ecclesiastical condition of England and a rehearsal for Milton’s later role as a writer of national epic. In the first episode of their new series, Seamus and Mark discuss the political backdrop to the poem, Milton’s virtuosic mix of poetic tradition and innovation, and why such a fervent puritan would choose an unfashionable, pre-Christian form to honour his friend.
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Read more in the LRB:
Colin Burrow (on the 'two-handed engine'):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n05/colin-burrow/shall-i-go-on
Freya Johnston (on Samuel Johnson's criticism):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/freya-johnston/own-your-ignorance
Maggie Kilgour (on the young Milton):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/maggie-kilgour/pens-and-heads
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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