Jessica Mitford’s Handbag

When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long after that moved to the US where she became a naturalised citizen and joined the Communist Party. The Mitford sisters wrote many books and even more have been written about them, but Carla Kaplan's scholarly new biography of Jessica is a welcome addition to the ‘Mitford industry’, according to Rosemary Hill, because she approaches her subject as an ‘American communist with an unusual background in the English aristocracy’. In this episode, Rosemary joins Thomas Jones to talk about Decca’s eventful life, her work as a civil rights activist and writer, and her complicated relationships with the other Mitfords. When asked whether the bond with her sisters had ‘stood between her and life’s cruel circumstances’, Decca replied: ‘Sisters were life’s cruel circumstances.’ Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/mitfordpod Listen and subscribe to Rosemary Hill’s Close Readings series: In Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(457)

Poetry and the Turning World: Weather

In Wordsworth’s 1807 description of ‘golden daffodils’, the breeze animates both the scene and the inner life of the speaker. Like many poets, Wordsworth turned to the weather to mediate between inter...

28 Juni 1h 14min

World Cup Cupidity

‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the last, but is th...

24 Juni 51min

Poetry and the Turning World: Divorce

Poets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal processes of legal separation can be successful material...

21 Juni 1h 18min

On Politics: What went wrong with HS2 (and almost everything else)

HS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two stations outside London and Birmingham at a projecte...

17 Juni 1h 4min

Poetry and the Turning World: Technology

When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar ...

14 Juni 1h 30min

Poetry and the Turning World: Work

Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by considering t...

10 Juni 1h 4min

On Politics: Myths of Populism

The transformations of European politics over the past twenty years, including Britain’s vote to leave the EU and the rise of post-Soviet strongmen, are often explained as part of a ‘wave’ of populism...

3 Juni 1h 12min

Jane Austen's ‘Emma’ and the art of misreading

What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of ‘Tristram Shandy’ in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelisti...

30 Maj 1h 8min