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Sophie talks to Richard Ovenden, OBE, the 25th Bodley’s Librarian at Oxford, about the manuscript of Frankenstein, one of the most extraordinary, and fascinating, literary treasures of all time. Richard is head of Oxford’s Bodleian, as well as the University's libraries, museums, and even botanical gardens. Though Richard isn’t personally dusting off the attic vases or planting the bulbs, he does still spend huge amounts of time with rare books and manuscripts. In this thrilling bonus episode he talks about how the Bodleian came to own the manuscript of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, along with the large, fascinating, and often very weird collection gathered from the Shelley family and their friends over several generations. This is an amazing behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the world’s great libraries, why old books really matter, and why SLOB was right all along that Percy Bysshe Shelley is bad news. To see the manuscript, go to the Digital Bodleian: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/53fd0f29-d482-46e1-aa9d-37829b49987d/ Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Published in 1970, written by an unknown new writer, The Bluest Eye is the great African American novelist Toni Morrison’s debut. It remains in many ways her most radical. It’s one of the most banned books in America since its publication – for its unflinching, explicit depictions of domestic abuse, racial and sexual violence in small town America.   Morrison wrote openly about Black sex and Black violence, challenging the increasingly celebratory tone of American literature in the late 1960s. Reviewing her in the New York Times, the legendary critic John Leonard recognized just how important Morrison’s voice would be. ““The Bluest Eye” is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black; the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been ‘designed specifically to murder possibilities,” he wrote. “She does it with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.”   Morrison would go on to write many Modernist-inflected literary tours de force, including Song of Solomon and Beloved, and is the first and only Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. We’ll be taking deep dives into Morrison’s work across four special episodes of SLOB, for Black History Month. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dorothea's back from her Roman Holiday, Tertius Lydgate still wants to flirt with Rosamond Vincy without consequence, and Fred Vincy is tearing about town recklessly spending other people's money. Mary Garth remains acerbic, funny and understated as ever. The courses of true love, inheritance, medical reform and local politics are not running smooth. Our Middlemarch friends, young and old alike, are casting around for other people to blame for their own misfortunes. Book 3 is subtitled "Waiting for Death." But just whose deaths are we waiting for? On the face of it, it's old Peter Featherstone, the rich, bedridden troublemaker, soon to die without an heir. Who will get his considerable assets? The night before he dies, he asks Mary Garth, SLOB's favorite heroine-in-waiting, to burn one of his two wills, thus changing his beneficiary at the 11th hour. But Mary, principled and stubborn, refuses. The consequences of her scruples will be far-reaching. Fred Vincy falls gravely ill and is misdiagnosed by the local quack. Lydgate has to step in, giving himself a chance to spend more flirty time with the enchanting Rosamond, and giving Sophie the chance to do an extended riff on typhoid fever (earning her the name "Typhoid Sophie." ) Jonty counters with a bravura set-piece on the motif of the labyrinth in Middlemarch. The hits just keep coming in this installment. Peter Featherstone isn't the only character to be circling the drain. Mr. Casaubon has heart trouble, and can't hope to live long unless he strictly follows doctor's orders. So far, he isn't doing so. Meanwhile Will Ladislaw reappears, working as the editor of Mr. Brooke's local newspaper, the Pioneer — roughly equivalent to the Village Voice in the heyday of NYC counter-culture. Cue a set-piece from Sophie and Jonty on the role of newspapers in reform-period Britain. Will's reappearance gets the town gossips going, speculating about the real reasons for his joining forces with Dorothea's uncle. And Eliot throws her romantic readers a bone, treating us to an off-the-cuff conversation between Will and Dorothea in the Lowick drawing-room, with impulsive over-sharing on both sides. Throughout all this we observe the masterful blueprints of Eliot's plotting and structure emerging in all their breathtaking complexity. Tune in to marvel at the depth of the characterization and Eliot's uncanny capacity to bring her readers into the living presence of real, fallible, funny, turbulent, struggling fellow humans.

A serial killer on the loose in the foggy, battle-scarred streets of London after the Second World War. Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is Bleak House meets 1984 meets Silence of the Lambs. In this last in the current Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty looks at how Allingham - more, perhaps, than the other Queens of Crime - evolved her craft to suit the changing world around her. She dials back the importance of her aristocratic front-man sleuth Campion (who she first introduced in 1929) to focus more on the grizzled, working-class detective Charlie Luke. This book is a stepping stone out of Christieland into the world of PD James and Ruth Rendell. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With the release of Chloe Zhao's rapturously acclaimed film Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's much-loved 2020 novel, SLOB re-releases one of our earliest episodes. Hamnet is a beautiful, lyrical novel about Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, and the early death of their son, Hamnet. O'Farrell refocussed Shakespeare's story on the women who are usually only glimpsed at the edges of his life, reinventing Anne Hathaway as a vivacious, sexy, creative and compelling full character. In doing so she reimagines Hamlet the play as a mediation on family, love, and loss, organized around Shakespeare's wife. Our Hamnet episode itself is a historical curiosity. #18, in the earliest days of our podcast, it's officially SLOB juvenilia. We've changed and grown in the last year, and we owe everything to our listeners who tell us how it is and how it should be. Please tell us what you think about Hamnet, book or film, by jumping on our Patreon chat: https://www.patreon.com/messages/9473d46b4c7d4e59be6239f82a3e8115?mode=campaign&tab=chats Whether you plan to see the film or not, this book has stayed in the zeitgeist ever since it was published. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Murder is Announced (1950) was Agatha Christie’s 50th published book. So when better than the 50th anniversary of her death to celebrate one of her greatest works - and introduce Miss Marple into the back SLobalogue? In this third episode in our Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty skip daintily from one side of the Second World War to the other to see if - and how - Agatha Christie’s plots and characters were impacted by the devastation.  What we find is an England down-at-heel. Austerity. Rationing. Widespread poverty. Deserters roaming the country. Paranoia and fear of foreigners. When a murder occurs at the (still) charming village of Chipping Cleghorn, the local police are all at sea. The problem is nobody really - truly - knows their neighbours anymore and are people who they say they are? Enter Miss Marple, the Victorian relic with a mind like a sink, to put everything straight - and remind us all that Agatha Christie truly has no peer when it comes to an elegant and rollicking good crime story.  Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we continue to ascend Mt. Middlemarch, with Book Two. Eliot keeps Dorothea, Casaubon and the alluring Will Ladislaw waiting in the wings, and instead takes deep dives into characters who, in a less ambitious novel, would remain minor players. We learn the complicated backstory of Fred Vincy, a man who in most novels would stay a throwaway pleasure-seeker, but here becomes the love-interest for Mary Garth, one of the novel's profound moral centers. We also get involved in the developing story of Tertius Lydgate, the talented but flawed young doctor, who thinks he can flirt with the local beauty Rosamond without consequences. We see the complexity of Rosamond, too, a woman who in other novels is satirical fodder. Lydgate also fancies he can stay a neutral figure in Middlemarch politics, and quickly learns that he's wrong. A brilliant sequence plays out in which he has to choose between two candidates for a hospital chaplain, and we realize that one of Eliot's most fascinating characters, Camden Farebrother, is going to have a tough road ahead of him. At last, we return to Dorothea, on her honeymoon in Rome. This is one of Eliot's most bravura set pieces, jump-cutting between POVs, including, brilliantly, Casaubon himself. We won't spoil the details, but let it be understood that every moment of this sequence, in which the contest between Casaubon and Ladislaw gathers momentum, is as good as a trip to the Eternal City itself. And readers will have a lot more fun than Dorothea on her real honeymoon. The episode ends on a cliffhanger: had Dorothea accompanied Sophie on her own recent trip to Rome, would she (like Sophie) have had two gelatos a day?

This week, for the second of our episodes on the Queens of Crime, we travel by steamer with Ngiao Marsh and her celebrated detective Roderick Alleyn, who decides to go on holiday in Marsh's native New Zealand — no trivial undertaking for an Englishman in the 1930s. Alleyn comes to NZ for the mountains and rivers, but stays for the bloody and highly innovative murder of a theater impressario, whose company is touring from London with the magnificent leading lady Carolyn Dacres. P.D. James, a second gen Queen of Crime herself, wrote that ‘the method of death in a Ngaio Marsh novel tends to linger in the memory.’ Much about this novel lingers in the memory, including the remarkable descriptions of New Zealand's scenery and perhaps most of all Marsh's decision to bring Maori culture and traditions to the forefront of the story. In Vintage Murder, Marsh creates a tension between three factions - the imperial mentality of the touring theater company, the colonial subservience of the New Zealand police force, and the irrepressible agency of Maori culture. And while Roderick Alleyn has everyone metaphorically sipping together at the end, those tensions remain unresolved. Vintage Murder is a great thriller AND a disturbing portrait of late British imperialism.  Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Runcie is author of the acclaimed Grantchester Mysteries - the focus of six books and a hugely successful ITV television series - following vicar-sleuth Sidney Chambers in his sleuthing career from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. James talks to Jonty about where he finds the gold in the Golden Age of Crime. In particular, Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. He then talks about the inspiration behind the Grantchester Mysteries, which develops into a conversation about his father - who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1980s - and the trials and tribulations of the Church of England in the late 20th Century. The Grantchester Mysteries are: Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (2012)Sidney Chambers and The Perils of the Night (2013)Sidney Chambers and The Problem of Evil (2014)Sidney Chambers and The Forgiveness of Sins (2015)Sidney Chambers and The Dangers of Temptation (2016)Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love (2017)The Road to Grantchester (2019) As well as discussing many books from the Golden Age, James and Jonty both enthused about David Kynaston's brilliant and ongoing 'Tales of a New Jerusalem' cycle of history books focused on Britain after the Second World War. The cycle, which started with Austerity Britain (2007), has been a big influence on Grantchester. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last year, the SLoBlight lingered briefly on Agatha Christie when we celebrated the centenary of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from 1925. This book, more than any other, heralded the start of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction between the two world wars.  Taught, short and fraught with menace, these novels were in large part a response to the chaos and brutality of the First World War. The public needed order and diversion. Highly regulated games became popular - contract bridge, crosswords, Mah Jong - and so did detective fiction. These games indeed frequently appear in As the initiation ceremony to the Detection Club shows, detective fiction was a sort of literary game - with clear rules of engagement and a puzzle for the reader to unravel.  In this mini-series on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction we’re looking at what happened after Roger Ackroyd. As the 1930s darkened with the great depression, the rise of fascism and - dare we say it - the rather bleak view of human nature contained within Freudian psychoanalysis, so too did detective fiction. At the forefront of these changes were the so-called Queens of Crime - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is the Mount Everest of Victorian fiction. A book so brilliant and monumental that it’s taken us a year of planning to take it on. But as we close out 2025, we’ve established our Middlemarch base camp and started the climb. To put it another way, we’ve recorded an episode in which we treat listeners to the story behind the story of the greatness that is Mary Ann Evans, the woman who became George Eliot. Middlemarch is, in many people’s opinions, the greatest novel in English. To help understand why it’s so amazing, how Eliot learned to write like this, and her life as a reader, writer, daughter and lover (plus, the story behind her pen name), we give you this primer episode. Starting this Friday, we have new subscriber-only episodes every two weeks about Middlemarch itself, going book by book through this magnificent classic. This is how Eliot meant Middlemarch to be read - through 8 stages. One for each of the serialized volumes that ran through 1871 and 1872 before the book was published as a whole in 1874. Join up for the bookclub by becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon, and come along with us for the adventure. Books discussed in this episode: George Eliot, Middlemarch George Eliot’s translated works: David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined; Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity; Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life George Eliot, Adam Bede George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss George Eliot, Silas Marner George Eliot, Romola George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical George Eliot, Daniel Deronda Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At last we launch the Middlemarch Book Club! Every two weeks for the next 4 months, we'll publish another installment as we read MM together, book by book, and chat about it on our Patreon site. Today, Book 1: in which we meet the major players, and the plot twists begin, when sister Celia spots an enigmatic stranger painting in the garden of Lowick House.

It won't come as a surprise to SLOB fans that the literary classics invented Christmas. But if you've got your finger on the buzzer and are already mouthing the words "Dickens, A Christmas Cracker" think again. We take you back to Christmas Eve, somewhere in North Wales, around about 1385 (brrrr). Cue the giant, jolly yet murderous Greene Knight, who shows up in the local mead hall, and issues a complicated and charmingly allegorical seasonal challenge to the Knights of the Round Table. From there we pay visits to the frankly unsatisfactory Christmases of the English Renaissance (wet, high-fiber pudding porridge, anyone?), the austere anti-Christmases of Puritan England, the weak-tea Christmas-adjacent efforts of the eighteenth-century, and then — boom — the advent of Victorian Christmas excess, with trees, fairy lights, turkeys, and giant inflatable santas in every front yard. We wish all our beloved SLOB listeners a Merry Christmas, and whether you celebrate or not we know you'll find the Cracker a veritable trove of literary trinkets and tidbits. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As the old year wanes, so does SLOB's season of subscriber only episodes on the history of English sonnets. It's been a splendid ride, from Sir Thomas Wyatt to W.B. Yeats, with many highlights in between. Early on, we read the most famous sonnet in the language, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," by William Shakespeare, and discovered that it's far more surprising and fresh than a jaded tenth grade English classes would ever imagine. Finally, to round out our sonnet sequence, we bring you the Scottish poet and playwright Carol Ann Duffy's "Anne Hathaway" from her 1999 collection The World's Wife. It's a sexy, gorgeous, feminist rewriting of a Shakespearean sonnet, in the voice of Shakespeare's wife, who famously inherited only the "second best bed" when her celebrated husband died. It's the end of the sonnet sequence, but it's only the beginning for SLOB subscribers. Join us over the next 4 months as we do a deep dive Book Club reading of George Eliot's Middlemarch, her late masterpiece of "provincial life," which many consider the greatest novel of all time.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know that Jane Austen has a big birthday this week -- her 250th to be exact. Happy Birthday Jane! Over here on SLOB we're throwing Jane a party, and we've invited guests. They're truly the guests of honor. The women who made Jane Austen. You may not know all of their names, or any of them. We introduce some literary superstars from their own day, who influenced Austen's craft, storytelling, irony and encouraged her appetite for wild, subversive stories. We tend to see Austen as a lone genius, carving out a voice for women in a world where they were often unheard. She was, in fact, just a particularly brilliant member of a wider social and literary movement. She was great, and she was great because she stood on the bonnets of giantesses.  Please meet the bolters, bad-asses, barn-stormers, bold adventurers. The bloody-minded and the bloody-brilliant. Writers and books mentioned in the episode: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister Delarivier Manley, The New Atlantis Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote and Henrietta Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance; The Romance of the Forest; The Mysteries of Udolpho; and The Italian Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women; A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark; Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman Frances Burney, Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets and The Old Manor House Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, Harrington and Belinda. Jane Austen, The Beautifull Cassandra (juvenilia) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.