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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.

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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

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The Woman in White was a sensation when it was serialised in Charles Dickens’ magazine All The Year Round in 1859 and 1860. It begins with an uncanny late-night meeting on the road to London between a young man and a woman dressed entirely in white. It ends with a sensational cat and mouse game between a villain and his pursuers. One of the unsung secrets of Wilkie Collins's novel is the brilliant, unorthodox counter-heroine Marian Halcombe. Another is that Wilkie Collins identified with disfigurement and disability, and used the woman in white to explore some of his own sense of being an outsider.

At the time it Collins's novel belonged to new kind of writing called sensation fiction, which today we call thrillers. It aimed to shock the public by preying on their deepest anxieties, going beyond the facade of Victorian respectability to show ordinary families riven by secrets, including illegitimacy, adultery, madness and criminal activity. The literary inheritors of The Woman in White today are novels like The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl.

Find out how it all started - and why The Woman in White is still a compulsive page-turner 150 years later.

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For several weeks we've been recording a subscribers-only mini series on the history of the sonnet in English. Sonnets are crowd-pleasers - short, sometimes sweet, and they always deliver a lot of bang for the reading buck.

Today, one of the world's great living poets, Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer Prize winner and former poetry editor of the New Yorker, joins us to talk about the pleasures and challenges of this glorious short form.

Paul has recently compiled a spectacular anthology of sonnets, Scanty Plot of Ground, published this month by Faber in the UK.

Making this episode free for all because it's such a special conversation and gateway back into reading the classics.

Listeners to our show can order the book from faber.co.uk and enter the code Podcast25 for a discount with UK shipping.

Paul Muldoon, ed, Scanty Plot of Ground, Faber 2025

Paul Muldoon, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2025

Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006

Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004

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It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Taurus Express. So Agatha Christie began her sleeper [car] hit, Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

All aboard! In the latest of SLoB's much-loved special episodes on surprising, fun, and always deeply revealing literary themes, Sophie and Jonty take an all-stations train journey through literary locomotion.

One of life's great pleasures is reading a good book on a train, as it rattles through scenic countryside. But what's more annoying than cramming onto a packed underground train at 8am, desperate for a moment with a book before work, only to be wedged between an armpit and a stroller? Trains are social levelers: a means of bringing unlikely people together; and often keeping them apart. Trains help tell stories about social divisions and distinctions in status, love affairs and heartbreak, unwanted changes in landscapes and the ever-increasing encroachments of modern life.

Tune in to find out why, in short, trains are at the heart of many great books, and why train travel turned out to be the ideal metaphor for the experience of reading modern fiction.

Books mentioned in this episode:

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, "The Signal Man"

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Graham Greene, The Little Train

Lev Grossman, The Silver Arrow

Edward Thomas "Adlestrop"

Jilly Cooper, Rivals

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In this final episode in SLoB's series on Virginia Woolf, Jonty talks to literary biographer Hermione Lee whose Virginia Woolf (1996) is perhaps the most respected account of her life and art in a world not short on them. Hermione talks about the challenges in writing about somebody who had such firm views on what a biography should and shouldn't be. Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was, after all, the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and one of her closest friends, Lytton Strachey, revolutionised biography as a form with Eminent Victorians. More importantly, she wrote a biography of her friend Roger Fry and many 'life studies' of the great writers. She also published two mock biographies in Orlando and Flush.

Finally, Jonty and Hermione talk about the end of Virginia Woolf's life by suicide in 1941. Despite the suffering she experienced because of her bipolar condition, hers was nonetheless a rich life full of joy and artistic achievement.

Recommended reading:

Virginia Woolf (1996) by Hermione Lee.

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We thought we’d be concluding our Virginia Woolf deep-dive with "A Room of One’s Own," but we’ve enjoyed this series so much we decided to extend. Today we’re looking at the book which many Woolf obsessives consider her masterpiece. Woolf published The Waves in 1931, just two years after her string of masterpieces, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and “A Room of One’s Own.” As Sophie and Jonty will tell you, it’s the Big Chill – or the Breakfast Club – of Woolf’s oevre. A story about a group of friends who go through their lives in and out of contact with one another, sharing many of their most profound and important experiences.

The sensation of reading The Waves is rather like being a pebble on a beach, rolled around by the waves of Woolf’s creative genius - not always knowing what is going on. While it's hugely brilliant, we think most readers will need a floatation device to help them cope with the swell of this experimental, unconventional narrative. To be our Virginia Woolf “life raft in residence” we invited Woolf scholar and all-round excellent writer and critic Alexandra Harris back onto the show to explain to us why The Waves is the novel that serious Virginia Woolf fans can't live without.

And don’t miss Alexandra’s own wonderful books, especially her recent The Rising Down, a beautiful and moving account of the Sussex landscape, and the lives and histories it contains within it.

Books by Alexandra Harris:

The Rising Down: Lives in a Landscape (Faber, 2024)

Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames and Hudson, 2015)

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists & the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (Thames and Hudson, 2010)

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Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women – that’s my impression.

That’s what Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary after delivering the lectures that became “A Room of One’s Own,” arguably the most important feminist manifesto of the twentieth century. Students attending the lectures reported they were a total snooze; one eyewitness actually fell asleep. But another said that the spectacle of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West arriving at the Girton College literary society together was the most glorious and glamorous vision she’d ever seen.

When Woolf published the revised version in 1929 as "A Room of One's Own," she confirmed her brilliance, inventiveness, wit and lightness of touch yet again. She also made her most provocative claim to date: the patriarchy must be defeated so that the voices of unheard women writers across centuries can live through the awakened voices of women writing today. As Sophie and Jonty discover, one cannot read the stirring, impassioned final lines of “A Room of One’s Own” without a tear.

This is also the essay in which Woolf imagines Shakespeare’s sister Judith and the fate that might have awaited her had she been as talented and ambitious as her brother. Woolf gives us unforgettable accounts of good and bad meals at two Oxbridge colleges, and a devastating take-down of the anger and inaccuracy of histories and anthropology books by men, which she reads in the British Museum.

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Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, a gender-defying historical romance, in 1927, when her intimate friend and lover Vita Sackville-West left London to join her diplomat husband Harold Nicholson in Tehran. Orlando is a love-story set across 300 years of English history, starting in the Elizabethan court and finishing in 1920s England. It features an irresistible protagonist who is both woman and man; a writer and a lover; an aristocrat and a commoner. The novel gifts us a joyful romp through English literature, with lots of cameos from writers who have appeared on the Secret Life of Books.

Orlando is also a meditation on the nature of novels themselves, explaining how Woolf’s Modernist style emerges from the great literary works of the past.

Woolf said that she wrote Orlando “sitting over the gas in her sordid room” while Vita capered about in the sunny climes of the middle east. But that sordid room gave rise to one of English literature’s great queer love-stories and reconstructions of Woolf's beloved city of London, across three centuries of transformation.

Jonty and Sophie pursue many eccentric critical hunches, explaining why you can't read Orlando without knowing about solar eclipses, the mini ice-age of the late seventeenth century, Lytton Strachey's semen - or Jonty's favorite hobby-horse, the decline of the English aristocracy.

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