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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
Frankenstein
Frankenstein is English literature’s great myth about Artificial Intelligence, 200 years before A.I. existed.
But the world’s most famous monster is nothing like you imagine. Who knew that he chops wood and reads Milton’s Paradise Lost? And who remembers if Frankenstein is the name of the monster, or the mad inventor who made him? Sophie and Jonty explain how and why a brilliant scientist's breakthrough in creating artificial life ends in high drama and rare seabird-sightings in the Arctic circle.
Frankenstein’s own creator, the young Mary Shelley, was English literature’s first nepo-baby. She was the daughter of two celebrity intellectuals, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the radical William Godwin. At age 8, hiding behind the sofa in her parents' living room, Mary heard Samuel Taylor Coleridge read aloud The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. She and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley would become the Brad and Angelina of Regency England, entangled with Lord Byron's circle. Come for the insightful literary analysis – stay for the sex scandals and family dramas.
Content warning: references to emotional and physical violence, incest, mental illness and suicide.
Further Reading:
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Penguin Classics, 2018.
- Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation (Farrah, Strauss and Giroux, 2010).
- Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley (Random House, 2015)
- The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, ed. Andrew Smith, (Cambridge UP, 2016)
