616 Madwomen and Literature (with Suzanne Sca...

Jacke kicks off the episode with an analysis of T.S. Eliot's underappreciated poem of urban alienation, "Preludes." Then scholar and translator Kate Deimling (The Story of the Marquis de Cressy by Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni) tells Jacke about an eighteenth-century Frenchwoman who was ...  Show more

As fans of the novel know, Frankenstein began with a flash of insight during an ill-fated holiday near Geneva in the summer of 1816, when the young woman then known as Mary Godwin contributed the modern-day Promethean tale to the ghost stories being shared by married lover Percy ...  Show more

From To The Lighthouse to Mrs Dalloway, the writing of Virginia Woolf shook up literary norms and challenged societal ideas about what it meant to be a woman. In this 'life of the week' episode, Francesca Wade discusses the impact of Woolf's work, and the key moments of her life ...  Show more

"What is more precise than precision? Illusion." I talked with my friend, the scholar Siobhan Phillips, about Marianne Moore's poem "Armor's Undermining Modesty." Siobhan Phillips is a professor of English at Dickinson College, where she teaches courses on American literature of ...  Show more

A new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet has been released in a world in which his voice and vision feel as resonant as ever before. In ten letters to a young person in 1903, Rilke touched on the enduring dramas of creating our lives — prophetic musings a ...  Show more

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 the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, ye ...  Show more