In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who wants and suffers in a profoundly new (and American) way.
Deborah Friedell and Colm Toíbín join Tom to discuss the novel that established Henry James as ‘the Master’. They dissect James’s and his characters’ complicated motivations, the significance of his 1905-6 revisions, and the ways in which a ‘primitive plot’ irrupts in a painstakingly subtle and stylish novel.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Further reading in the LRB:
Colm Toíbín on Henry James:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n01/colm-toibin/a-man-with-my-trouble
Ruth Bernard Yeazell on Henry James’s life and notebooks:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n01/ruth-bernard-yeazell/the-henry-james-show
James Wood on The Portrait of a Lady:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/james-wood/perfuming-the-money-issue
Next time on Novel Approaches: 'Kidnapped!' by Robert Louis Stevenson.
LRB Audiobooks
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
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‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope
Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They settled on The Last Chronicle of Barset: a model example of Anthony Trollope’s gift for comedy, pathos, social commentary and masterful dialogue.
At the heart of Last Chronicle is a mystery: how did the impoverished Reverend Crawley get his hands on a cheque for £20 that no one can account for, and is he capable of theft? The scandal has dire repercussions not only for Reverend Crawley, but the whole county: his ostracision raises broader questions about inequity in the church; it sparks rifts between his daughter, her would-be husband and his parents; and it gives his young relative Johnny Eames an excuse to flee the entanglements of London high society for the continent, in search of the only man who may be able to solve the puzzle. Although it’s the final book in the Barchester series, Last Chronicle can be read as a standalone novel, and Tom and Dinah join Thomas Jones to explore its sensitivities, ambivalences and sheer readability.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Further reading in the LRB:
John Sutherland: Trollopiad
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n01/john-sutherland/trollopiad
Richard Altick: Trollope’s Delight
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/richard-altick/trollope-s-delight
Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Portrait of a Lady' by Henry James.
LRB Audiobooks
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
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'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens
'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. For this episode, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make 'Our Mutual Friend' one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Last Chronicle of Barset' by Anthony Trollope
Further reading in the LRB:
John Sutherland on Peter Ackroyd's Dickens: https://lrb.me/nadickens1
David Trotter on Dickens's tricks: https://lrb.me/nadickens2
Brigid Brophy on Edwin Drood: https://lrb.me/nadickens3
LRB Audiobooks
Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
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‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a reimagining of her life.
Ruth Yeazell and Deborah Friedell join Tom to discuss the novel and its protagonist Maggie Tullliver, for whom duty – societal, familial, self-imposed – continually conflicts with her personal desires. They explore the book’s submerged sexuality, its questioning of conventional gender roles, and the way Eliot’s satirical impulse is counterbalanced by the complexity of her characters.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Further reading in the LRB:
Rachel Bowlby on reading George Eliot: https://lrb.me/naeliot1
Dinah Birch on Eliot’s journals: https://lrb.me/naeliot2
Rosemary Ashton on Eliot and sex: https://lrb.me/naeliot3
Gordon Haight’s speech on Eliot at Westminster Abbey: https://lrb.me/naeliot4
Audiobooks from the LRB:
https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
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'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use.’ The poem she had in mind turned out to be her verse novel, Aurora Leigh, published in 1854, and described by Ruskin as the greatest long poem of the 19th century. It tells the story of an aspiring poet, Aurora, born in Florence to an Italian mother and an English father, who loses both her parents as a child and moves to England and the care of her aunt. From there she pursues her poetic ambitions to London, Paris, Italy and back to England while negotiating a traumatic love triangle between the vicious Lady Waldemar, the impoverished seamstress Marian, and the austere social-reformer Romney. In this episode, Clare is joined by Stefanie Markovits and Seamus Perry to discuss the wide range of innovations Barrett Browning deploys to fulfil her commitment to immediacy and narrative drive in the poem, and the ways in which she uses her characters to explore the extent of her own emancipatory politics.
Read the poem: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/56621/pg56621-images.html
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
Read more in the LRB:
John Bayley: https://lrb.me/nabrowning1
Ruth Yeazell: https://lrb.me/nabrowning2
Audiobooks from the LRB:
https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and guests discuss a selection of 19th-century (mostly) English novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, looking in particular at the roles played in the books by money and property.
Novels covered:
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
New Zealand