Many readers consider The Portrait of a Lady to be the greatest novel in English. But for some reason, James' fellow novelists loved to dump on him. Nabokov called him a "pale porpoise," and said his books were strictly for "non-smokers." Virginia Woolf, who knew him as a family friend, wrote, "we have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?" T.S. Eliot said that he had "a mind so fine no idea could penetrate it." Ouch.

Sophie and Jonty beg to differ. For once, we think Virginia Woolf got it completely wrong. Serialized simultaneously in America and Britain over 1880/81, A Portrait of Lady is one of the great peaks of English writing. It tells the story of Isabel Archer, an American heiress, who is determined to enjoy a life of travel and independence, only to fall into the clutches of a gaslighting con-artist called Gilbert Osmond.

James' first masterpiece is a gripping domestic thriller, which marked a revolution in the portrayal of women in literature, creating a heroine who is psychologically complex, outspoken, transgressive and determined not to be pinned down by Victorian moral standards.

It also marks a revolution in our understanding of the human mind. Henry James’ brother was the so-called Father of American Psychology William James. Both of them tackled the question of what really goes on in the mind in different ways. It has one of the best opening sections ever, and one of the most fascinating and ambiguous endings. It's not for the faint-hearted reader, sure, but it repays every moment of a reader's attention.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SLoB is turning 1! To celebrate, Sophie and Jonty re-read one of their all time favorites, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.

My Family and Other Animals (1956) is the beloved, hilarious, brilliant chronicle of a childhood idyll — which is also a series of comic disasters — set on the Ionian Greek Island of Corfu.

The memoir is the first part of a trilogy that includes Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods and Gerald Durrell wrote dozens of other books about his life as a naturalist and conversationist. 

But My Family was his break-out hit that made him into a celebrity-animal whisperer, and royalties from the book allowed him to establish the famous Jersey Zoo for wildlife conservation. Long before the zoo, however, came the celebrity animals of the Corfu years, whom we meet in this glorious memoir: Quasimodo the pigeon, Achilles the Tortoise, Aleko the seagull, Ulysses the Owl, Sally the Donkey, Widdle and Puke the puppies and of course, Roger the dog.

Sophie and Jonty dive into the story behind the story of everyone’s favorite animal story and learn what was really going on behind the scenes of this delightful but dysfunctional family. Find out why “Mother,” Mrs. Durrell, moved with her children to Greece after a life in British India and Bournemouth; learn about the full identity of the irascible and hilarious brother Larry, and hear what happened to the other Durrell siblings after they became famous.

And for all the beauty and bucolic happiness of Corfu in the 1930s, there was backdrop of complex and fascinating geopolitical unrest across the Eastern Mediterranean, which Sophie wants to discuss in much greater depth than Jonty has patience for.

Mentioned in the episode:

Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, The Garden of the Gods.

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet; Prospero’s Cell

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Salem’s Lot (1975) is Stephen King’s second published novel, and many would say it's his best. It tells the story of a plague of vampires running amok in a blue-collar town in New England and the band of heroes who come together to fight them. 

We’re aware that many listeners may not have read a Stephen King novel, although they will probably have seen - and enjoyed - a film adaptation, and may wonder what Salem’s Lot has to do with a podcast about classic books. 

This episode answers that question by telling the story of how and why Stephen King became the biggest horror writer in the world. Since his debut with Carrie in 1974, he has published 60 novels and sold over 400 million books. He is one of the most successful writers ever - and films adapted from his books and stories include The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining, Stand by Me and Misery - all landmarks of cinema based on brilliant writing. And though only one of these four books is a horror novel, in this episode we stay firmly in the horror lane and get to work figuring out what makes Salem’s Lot so enduringly gripping.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chocolate Mouse, anyone? Rosemary’s Baby was a smash hit on release - the best selling horror novel of the 1960s, eventually selling over 4 million copies. The year after publication it was adapted into one of the greatest films of the decade - directed by Roman Polanski with Mia Farrow as the eponymous heroine.  

At first glance, it seems that Ira Levin’s story was at odds with the prevailing spirit of free love - read the room, baby! But as we’re going to find out - the secret of Rosemary’s Baby is that it perfectly captured the spirit and anxieties of the age. Ira Levin would repeat the trick with the Stepford Wives in 1972 and The Boys From Brazil in 1976, but Rosemary’s Baby is his masterpiece. A book which is simultaneously an outlandish fantasy and one of the greatest novels about coercive gaslighting relationships. 

Sophie and Jonty ask a tough question: is Levin's depiction of a coercive relationship just too real? Do we come away feeling that Rosemary has real power and agency that speaks to us now, or is the book's depiction of domestic violence and misogyny and trapped in its own cultural moment just as much as the stuffed mushrooms and Gibsons the couple consume on the fateful night that the horror takes hold?

Content Warning: the book and film — and this conversation — contain descriptions of sexual violence, rape and abusive relationships.

Books and Film Referred to:

Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby

Roman Polanski, Rosemary's Baby

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Jane Austen, Emma

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Adrienne Rich, "In the Evening"

Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

Andrea Dworkin, Women Hating

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast

-- Follow us on our socials:

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/

bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who's afraid of American horror? Sophie and Jonty, for starters. To celebrate halloween, SLOB is taking a deep dive into three classics of the American Horror genre. We've chosen novels published after 1945, and we're asking how the war - and its many aftershocks and resonances in American domestic and political life - transformed horror as a literary genre. We won't spoil the surprises by telling you all the titles ahead of time. But be warned: read and listen at your own peril.

We’ll be looking at these books in chronological order. The first is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, published in 1959 and is now considered one of the most influential horror novels of all time. It is beautifully written, incredibly funny and genuinely scary. It's imbued with a spirit of cynicism and evil. As a result it disorientated many readers who knew Jackson not as a horror writer, but for her charming memoirs about life as a housewife in 1950s suburbia.

Join us as we enter the locked gates of Hill House and explore how this gripping, poignant, strange — and above all, scary — ghost story took shape and how Shirley Jackson came to be regarded as one of the greatest mid-century American writers.

Further Reading and listening:

Shirley Jackson, "Life Among the Savages" (1953)

Shirley Jackson, "The Haunting of Hill House" (1959)

Shirley Jackson, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" (1962)

Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, 2016

On the Road with Penguin Classics Halloween episode with Ruth Franklin: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-haunting-of-hill-house-with-ruth/id1549179379?i=1000633191567

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast

-- Follow us on our socials:

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/

bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonty and Sophie were separated by an ocean while Sophie and her family went back to New York and Jonty stayed in Sydney - so they made lemonade out of life's lemons, and created two miniature episodes about the great 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne.

Montaigne isn't just any old essayist — he's the man who invented the form, with three volumes of brilliant, surprising, constantly fresh and astonishingly modern sallies on every possible topic. To introduce Montaigne and unpack his brilliance and immense influence, Sophie talked to the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt. Meanwhile, Sydney-side, Jonty had a conversation with the historian and writer Rowan Tomlinson, a specialist on Montaigne and Renaissance studies at the University of Bristol. They take the Montaigne chat in many unexpected directions, and Jonty initiates discussion of the Reformation off his own bat, with Sophie nowhere to be found.

Further Reading:

The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, (Penguin 1993)

Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, (2011)

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast

-- Follow us on our socials:

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/

bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sophie talks to one of the world's leading literary scholars, who co-founded a whole branch of literary studies known as "The New Historicism," before reinventing Shakespeare for new generations of readers, and then turning the Roman poet Lucretius into an (almost) household name. Stephen Greenblatt is professor of English at Harvard University, he's a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of Will in the World, The Swerve, and a host of other acclaimed and brilliant books. Most recently he's the author of Dark Renaissance, the story of Shakespeare's rival and shadow double, Christopher Marlowe.

But today he talks about the writer he turns to whenever he thinks about what makes the Renaissance so distinct a period -- the age in which Europeans truly became modern. That writer is the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne is a stealth heavy-hitter, an MVP of classic literature who is now all too rarely read. To explain what makes Montaigne's influence and legacy so important, and why he's truly one of the GOATs, Sophie and Jonty have decided to bring you two companion conversations with a pair of very different scholars.

Further Reading:

Stephen Greenblatt, ed. Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays (2014)

Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakspeare's Greatest Rival (2025)

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012)

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast

-- Follow us on our socials:

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/

bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The label says what's in the tin: Secret Life of Books dives deep into weddings and funerals in literature, asking why they become iconic moments to hang a story on. Family strife, betrayal, love, passion, disappointment and hope are all bound up in these major life events where we see characters' true colors and desires writ large.

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast

-- Follow us on our socials:

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/

bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins published yet another giant sensation, this time pioneering the detective novel and mystery/heist genre. It was published in 1868 and serialised - just as The Woman White was - in Dickens’ All the Year Round, making it one of the most popular books of Victorian Britain. Jonty and Sophie will show how The Moonstone gave the world most of the key ingredients of the detective genre, which have remained unchanged ever since. The country house setting. The bungling local constabulary. The celebrated, ingenious but curmedgeonly investigator. A large cast of false suspects. Plenty of red herrings. A final twist in the plot in which the least likely suspects suddenly become implicated. It's all here.

If all The Moonstone did was shape a new genre of literature, we’d still be talking about it. But on top of that, Wilkie Collins’ masteripece is also a critique of colonialism, of the British caste system and Victorian morality. 

And it reveals a fascinating shadow story about Wilkie Collins and his life, including a long struggle with opium addiction that he used to treat pain, making this a novel written mostly in an hallucinatory state.

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast

-- Follow us on our socials:

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/

bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As part of our ongoing “That’s Classic!” series, we're joined by the wonderful Jennifer Egan to chat about the sensational thriller The Woman in White.

Jennifer is one of the most loved, admired and critically acclaimed writers in America, with fans all over the world. Jennifer is a Pulitzer Prize winner and was President of the vitally important PEN America. She's the author of many books, including the brilliant, genre-defying Visit from the Goon Squad and its follow up The Candy House. There's more than a touch of gothic in her writing, alongside the compelling social realism, so when we asked her to choose a classic that matters, we were thrilled that she chose Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White.

This gripping page-turner and perennial bestseller was published between 1859-60 in Charles Dickens’ serial All the Year Round. It's a gothic page-tuner about a mysterious young woman dressed entirely in white, who becomes the key to a thrilling tale of emotional entrapment and gaslighting in Victorian England. Jennifer joins Sophie in a brilliant discussion of why The Woman in White is such a literary touchstone, paving the way for modern thrillers including Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.

Further Reading:

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

Jennifer Egan, The Keep

Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.