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 British novels from ‘Mansfield Park’ to ‘New Grub Street’, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property.

Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.

Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.

To listen to the full series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠

The full list of texts for the series:

Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen

Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray

North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell

Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot

Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens

The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) by Anthony Trollope

Washington Square (1880)/Portrait (1881) by Henry James

Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy

New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing