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PODCAST

Secret Life of Books

Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole

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

arts books

All Episodes

52:05

To Kill a Mockingbird

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/09/24

Within a year of its publication in 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird sold 2.5 million copies and has remained a much-loved classic by adults and children alike. What was it about this book that captured the public imagination at the time - and to this day? Harper Lee mined her own childhood in Alabama for this coming-of-age story of personal and social justice against a backdrop of Depression-era America. She worked and reworked several earlier drafts before achieving the crystal...

en

48:47

Wolf Hall

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/09/17

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 Century England. Mantel’s idea was to tell the story of Henry VIII and his disastrous marriages through...

en

52:59

Dracula

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/09/08

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 fact that Dracula had a long white mustache, and he made the beds and did the cooking at his at h...

en

50:45

Frankenstein

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/09/02

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 ci...

en

54:41

Wuthering Heights

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/08/26

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 passi...

en

53:30

SLOB: Wide Sargasso Sea Part 1

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/07/05

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 England and travelled around Europe, leading a bohemian life of love affairs, alcoholism and occasi...

en

45:20

SLOB Wide Sargasso Sea Part 2

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/07/05

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 of ‘pep’ pills (probably amphetamines), supplied by a local vicar, she finally completed the nove...

en

40:42

SLOB: Jane Eyre Part 2

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/07/02

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 brother Branwell sunk deeper into addiction. Determined that her life should not be a failure, ...

en

54:45

SLOB: Jane Eyre Part 1

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/07/02

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’. Charlo...

en

43:55

SLOB Gulliver's Travels Part 2

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/06/04

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 Jonty explain how Swift’s imaginings in Gulliver reflect the real-life love affairs and unrequite...

en

58:04

SLOB Gulliver's Travels Part 1

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/06/04

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, imaginary lands with tiny people and giant people, mad scientists and talking horses.In the first ...

en

65:35

SLOB: Macbeth

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/05/28

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 restage the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Find out just how close the Catholic conspirators led by Guido Fawk...

en

59:10

SLOB Alice in Wonderland

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/05/21

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, appalling board school, love of mathematics and photography, debilitating stutter and a not enti...

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0:53

SLOB Trailer 1

Secret Life of Books ·

2024/05/21

The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking,occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, professor ofEnglish at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts atthe BBC.Every week these virtuoso critics and close friends take an iconicbook and reveal the hidden story behind the story: who made it, theirclandestine motives, the undeclared stakes, the scandalous backstory andabove all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought...

en

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