Inviolable Voices: Stories of Writers and Literature

Dante Alighieri wrote one of the greatest literary works of all time: The Divine Comedy, of which the first section, the Inferno, is likely the greatest part. This episode tells the story of how he got there - a few years before he started the Comedy, he was one of the most important politicians in his beloved Florence. Dante might have continued along those lines and never written this work, but he had the misfortune of being born during a particularly troubled period of the Middle Ages, when Florence was riven by conflict and the papacy reached something of a crisis point. Less than ten years after he entered politics, he was exiled from the city he loved, never to see it again. But this tragedy gave Dante the anger and indignation he needed to write down his stunning vision of the afterlife: and the world its inhabitants had formerly occupied.

Listen in for the story of Daphne du Maurier's World War II years. The year before WWII started, du Maurier felt like she was a pretty lucky person. She was happily married to an honest, upstanding WWI hero and had just written her biggest critical and commercial success: the 1938 novel, Rebecca. The war changed nearly every aspect of her life, though. The long separation from her soldier husband gave her the space to evaluate her marriage for the first time, and she was not happy with what she saw. This was in part triggered by a strange affair she had with an impotent married man throughout much of the war, which set her up, after the war, to have a wandering eye for women. Ultimately, she realized the one being that she could really love was one that she could only borrow, never own: the Cornwall house Menabilly, which she had loved from afar since her early 20s (it's the inspiration for Rebecca's Manderley), but finally had the chance to inhabit during the war.

This is Part 2 of 2 episodes on one of the greatest literary battles in history. This week, hear all about the showdown between Alexander Pope, the greatest poet of his age, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a gifted poet and adventurer. Pope, a man with a genius for friendship, never turned his back on a close friend - except for Lady Mary. The reasons that she ended up being served this singular fate are shrouded in mystery (something that hasn't stopped people from speculating, at times quite wildly), but they spawned a feud that led Pope to accuse Lady Mary of being a carrier of venereal disease and an all-around loose woman, in very public poems, and that led Lady Mary to respond with poems that accused the hunchbacked Pope of having been cursed by a just God with an appearance that matched his personality. Through this feud, each author fell victim to the spirit of an age so conflicted that bickering became second nature. This episode also covers these conflicts, between persecuted English Catholic and fearful English Protestant, and between the two political parties in England, one of which (Lady Mary's) consolidated power during the first decades of the eighteenth century, and one of which (Pope's) lost it almost entirely. Pope and Lady Mary were both caught up in these problems, in ways that caused each a lot of heartbreak and sorrow.