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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
Wuthering Heights
A ghostly face in the dark, a child’s hand through the window, a doleful cry: “I’d lost my way on the moor! - I’ve been a waif for twenty years!” Are we talking about Kate Bush’s 1978 hit single “Wuthering Heights”? No! It’s Emily’s Bronte’s 1847 novel of the same name, back as never before.
Heathcliff and Catherine are the doomed lovers in a novel that defied the rules of both realism and fantasy, and redefined the genre for post-Romantic readers.
An intergenerational love story of passion, trauma and violence, Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous tales about undying obsession of all time. Sophie and Jonty explain how this masterpiece came to be written by a young woman who barely left her family home in Yorkshire, living with her sisters and brother her whole life. Find out why Wuthering Heights a daring rewriting of the Bronte family’s own tragic secrets, and how a book set on a wild and windy moor, with no buildings or townships for miles on every side, came to be a novel not just about England, but a wider world of revolution and rebellion.
Content warning: some references to emotional and physical abuse, mental illness and suicide.
Further Reading:
- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Alexandra Lewis (2019).
- (includes letters, diary-entries, Charlotte Bronte’s introduction to the 1850 edition, contemporary reviews and critical assessments.)
- Juliet Barker, The Brontes: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family (Pegasus, 2013).
- Catherine Reef, Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne (2015).
- Christine Alexander (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Brontës. (Oxford University Press 2003).
- Deborah Denenholz Morse, 'The House of Trauma': The Influence of Frederick Douglass on Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 12/2021, Volume 140, Issue 1.
- Emma Soberano,“Heathcliff as Bog Creature: Racialized Ecologies in Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 03/2023, Volume 45, Issue 2.
