Novel Approaches: ‘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 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://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n07/rachel-bowlby/waiting-for-the-dawn-to-come
Dinah Birch on Eliot’s journals:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n10/dinah-birch/no-wonder-it-ached
Rosemary Ashton on Eliot and sex:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n03/rosemary-ashton/two-velvet-peaches
Gordon Haight’s speech on Eliot at Westminster Abbey:
http://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n14/gordon-haight/gordon-haight-s-speech-in-westminster-abbey-on-21-june-when-a-memorial-stone-to-george-eliot-was-unveiled
Next episode: ‘Our Mutual Friend’ by Charles Dickens.
2025/7/14
16:49
2025/7/14
16:49
Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more
As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an ancient legacy. Spanning 160 years and energised by competing ideas of art and war, these soldiers, carers and civilians are united by a need that Mark and Seamus suggest is at the root of poetry, to memorialise the dead in words.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Poems discussed in this episode:
Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night
Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57
Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’
https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar2/poem/vergissmeinnicht/
W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death
Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/ice-cream-man/
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Epitaphs of the War’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war
Further reading in the LRB:
Ian Hamilton on Keith Douglas’s letters:
http://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n03/ian-hamilton/tough-guy
Jonathan Bate on war poetry:
http://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n22/jonathan-bate/players-please
Poems by Michael Longley published in the LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/michael-longley
Next episode: Family elegies by William Wordsworth, Denise Riley, Anne Carson and Robert Lowell.
2025/7/07
12:09
2025/7/07
12:09
Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg
James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and Margarita', written between 1928 and 1940, also hinges around a pact with Satan (Woland), who arrives in Moscow to create mayhem among its literary community and helps reunite an outcast writer, the Master, with his lover, Margarita. In this episode, Marina and Adam look at the ways in which these two ferocious works of comic horror tackle the challenge of representing fanaticism, be it Calvinism or Bolshevism, and consider why both writers used the fantastical to test reality.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff
Further reading in the LRB:
Liam McIlvanney on James Hogg:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n22/liam-mcilvanney/about-myself
Michael Wood on Bulgakov:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n20/michael-wood/sympathy-for-the-devil
2025/7/02
32:13
2025/7/02
32:13
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James
Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally delivered as a lecture and intended not so much as a defence of religion as an attack on anti-religion. James’s target was the ‘rugged and manly school of science’ and the kind of atheism ‘that goes around thumping its chest offering its biceps to be felt’. In this episode Jonathan Rée and James Wood look at the intellectual environment William James was working in, and against, in the second half of the 19th century, and its parallels in the ‘new atheism’ of today. They also discuss the extraordinary upbringing William (and his novelist brother Henry) received and the advice he offered to anyone contemplating suicide in his essay ‘Is life worth living?’
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Read more in the LRB:
Helen Thaventhiran: William James's Prescriptions
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/helen-thaventhiran/no-dose-for-it-at-the-chemist
Michael Wood: William James and modernism
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n18/michael-wood/understanding-forwards
Richard Poirier: Williams James's pragmatism
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n19/richard-poirier/copying-the-coyote
2025/6/23
17:29
2025/6/23
17:29
Novel Approaches: '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 all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna
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Close Readings is a new multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books. Two contributors explore areas of literature through a selection of key works, providing an introductory grounding like no other. Listen to some episodes for free here, and extracts from our ongoing subscriber-only series.
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RUNNING IN 2025:
'Conversations in Philosophy' with Jonathan Rée and James Wood
'Fiction and the Fantastic' with Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis
'Love and Death' with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford
'Novel Approaches' with Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and other guests
ALSO INCLUDED IN THE CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION:
'Among the Ancients' with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones
'Medieval Beginnings' with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley
'The Long and Short' with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry
'Modern-ish Poets: Series 1' with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry
'Among the Ancients II' with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones
'On Satire' with Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell
'Human Conditions' with Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards
'Political Poems' with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry
'Medieval LOLs' with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.