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Secret Life of Books
Every book has two stories: the one it tells, and the one it hides.
The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking, occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, an English professor at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC.
Every week these virtuoso critics and close friends take an iconic book and reveal the hidden story behind the story: who made it, their clandestine motives, the undeclared stakes, the scandalous backstory and above all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew.
Just for example: did you know that Macbeth was a direct response to a terrorist plot against King James I—and Shakespeare himself was connected to the plotters? That Charles Dickens almost died in a railway accident in 1865, but climbed out through a window, rescued his mistress, tended to the sick and dying—then went back to retrieve the manuscript for Our Mutual Friend? That Jane Austen observed the parties and balls of Regency England from above: she towered a full eight inches taller than the average woman of her time?
The Secret Life of Books draws on two lifetimes of readerly expertise, but it’s also deeply user-friendly: you’ll feel like a guest at the best dinner party of the year.
These are brilliant people who’ll make you feel brilliant, too.
With the help of some high-profile guests, Sophie and Jonty won’t just transform the classics, they’ll bring to life the great events and movements in world history wars and revolutions, breakthroughs and triumphs and disasters—seen in the new light of great art rediscovered. This is a podcast for readers and book groups, students and teachers of literature, but it’s also for fans of history and biography, and anyone who’s excited by dazzling, deeply knowledgeable minds working hard and having the time of their lives.
Secret Life of Books
Jane Eyre Part 1
What on earth was going on in the parlour of Haworth Parsonage in the Yorkshire Moors that caused three sisters to write three of the greatest novels in history within a year of one another? This is the question running through this four-part series of the Brontes.
In this first episode, Sophie and Jonty look at the impact of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre the moment it was published in 1847, causing even the mealy-mouthed Queen Victoria to praise it as ‘intensely interesting’.
Charlotte’s life was marred by tragedy: the death of her mother, then her two oldest sisters. She and her remaining sisters, Emily and Anne, created an imaginary world for themselves to hide from the worries of the world. But as they grew older, they were faced with that particularly Victorian problem: what to do with your life if you are a woman without money or any prospect of marriage?
Charlotte would ultimately funnel all these tragedies and conundrums into her masterpiece. But we end this episode on a cliffhanger with Charlotte heading off to Brussels to acquire the right qualifications to open a girls’ school at the parsonage, little knowing that she was about to fall headlong - and disastrously - in love.
Recommended reading: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Deborah Lutz (Norton, 2016); Claire Harman, Charlotte Bronte: A Life (Viking, 2015); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic (Yale University Press, new edition 2000); Christine Alexander, ed., Oxford Companion to the Brontes, (Oxford UP, 2006).
