Secret Life of Books

Hello Thomas Cromwell. And Hello Lev Grossman, best-selling author of The Magicians trilogy, the Silver Arrow children’s books, and now The Bright Sword , who joins Sophie and Jonty as THEIR FIRST EVER GUEST to talk about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall . Published in 2009 to immediate acclaim, Wolf Hall reinvented historical fiction and changed the way we see Henry VIII and the Tudor court of 16th Cent...

Twenty-first century vampires are the brooding, sparkly anti-heroes of Twilight and Ann Rice— all pointy teeth and hair-product. But they used to be much weirder, scarier and sexier than that. Bram Stoker’s world-changing 1897 novel Dracula is one of the most erotic and thrilling novels in English literature—despite having the most boring opening pages—and it’s crammed with secrets, including the...

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...

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 fantas...

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea , published in 1966, is a bold riposte to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre , humanising the mad woman in Mr Rochester’s attic. It is less than 150 pages, but took Rhys 30 years to write - one of the most agonising literary births in history.  Jean Rhys was born on the Caribbean island of Dominica in 1890 and identified as ‘white Creole’. As a young woman, she moved to...

It should have taken a year. It took thirty. In writing Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys endured several mental breakdowns, was arrested numerous times for verbal and physical violence, served time in prison, lost two husbands and suffered a heart attack. All the time, she came to increasingly identify with her heroine, making the inevitable tragedy of the ending all the harder to write. With the aid...

When Charlotte Bronte arrived in Brussels at the age of 26 to attend finishing school, she had no idea she would fall desperately in love with the director: Constantine Heger.  Heger - a strange, mercurial character - would prove the model for Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre. On returning to Haworth Parsonage, she wrote obsessively to and about him, while her plans to open a school floundered and her br...

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, causi...

As we learned in episode one, Gulliver’s Travels is the gloriously unhinged invention of the dirty-minded genius Jonathan Swift, who was also the greatest defender of Ireland under English rule. Swift was a man of contradictions - to put it mildly - a clergyman and patriot who wrote some of the most explicit and shocking poems and essays of all time. In our second episode in this series Sophie and...

Gulliver’s Travels is one of the most popular books of all time, but it’s no mere child’s tale. It’s the GOAT of political satires – mad, dirty and brilliantly cutting, written in 1726 by Jonathan Swift, an Anglo-Irish clergyman and perhaps the most notorious writer of his age. Join us to learn more about the fictional adventures of Swift’s creation Lemuel Gulliver, who finds himself in strange, i...

Macbeth, which actors superstitiously call the Scottish Play, is one of Shakespeare’s shortest and most exciting dramas. It’s also the most horrifying. Join Sophie and Jonty to find out why a play set in 11th-Century Scotland is really about the biggest issues of the day in King James I’s new court in 1606 London. Learn how Shakespeare is taking a major risk using an old tale of kingship to restag...

Alice in Wonderland is one of the most widely translated and quoted books in the world, and yet it is - quite literally - nonsense. How was it ushered into the world and why did it travel quite so far?  Lewis Carroll, or Charles Dodgson to his mum and dad, was born in the north of England in 1832. Somehow, the unique circumstances of his life - a wild imagination, hatred of Victorian morality...

The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking, occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, professor of English 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 undec...