'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digre...
15 Juni 202517min
‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell
In ‘North and South’ (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn roman...
18 Maj 202525min
'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout th...
20 Apr 202532min
‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë
When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘N...
24 Mars 202526min
'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reve...
24 Feb 202534min
‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen
On one level, ‘Mansfield Park’ is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 ...
28 Jan 202531min
Introducing ‘Novel Approaches’
Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century Britis...
5 Jan 20257min
