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.-- 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/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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BONUS: Reading Mrs Dalloway (with Alexandra Schwartz)
"Throw that party. Go for it. It's worth it."In today’s Mrs. Dalloway special episode, Sophie talks to Alex Schwartz, writer, critic and co-host of the New Yorker Magazine’s Critics at Large pod. On “Critics at Large’ she discusses the most urgent cultural matters, ranging from Sesame Street to the Pope to Meaghan and Harry to Ancient Rome. Which is why we knew we needed Alex on the show. It started when Sophie heard Alex discussing Jane Austen with a playful rigor that rarely comes with Austen-itis. Something made her think Alex would have great things to say about Mrs. Dalloway. And guess what? Woolf is Alex’s favourite writer. Hear what a critic at large thinks about dresses, flowers, being young and in love, and why it’s always worth throwing the party, and reading the classics.-- 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/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Virginia Woolf 2: To The Lighthouse
50 is the new 25!“To the Lighthouse” is Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece about summer holidays and the passage of time. It’s perhaps the greatest novel ever written about middle-age, published when Viriginia Woolf herself was middle aged, and recorded by Sophie and Jonty at the height of their middle aged powers. The novel was published in 1927, after “Mrs. Dalloway” and the “Common Reader” in 1925. It was an instant hit, sold twice as much as Mrs. Dalloway before publication and was immediately declared Woolf’s masterpiece, admitted by Woolf’s husband Leonard. Woolf herself wasn’t sure about some bits of it, but knew she’d nailed the dinner party scene at the novel’s centre, where the wonderful Mrs. Ramsay serves her guests a boeuf en daube for 14. Join Sophie and Jonty as they continue the story of Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary life and times, told through the details of how she came to write her greatest books. This week we trace her childhood, her summer holidays in Cornwall, her extraordinary, famous, demanding parents, and the beginnings of Woolf’s long struggle with mental illness. And of course we take plenty of detours into holiday cooking and … you guessed it, particle physics.-- 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/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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BONUS: Virginia Woolf, the not-so-Common Reader (with Alexandra Harris)
‘Think of a book as a very dangerous and exciting game, which it takes two to play at.’ For Virginia Woolf, reading wasn’t a passive act. It requires guts and ingenuity. At times one is locked in combat with a book, at others one is the ‘accomplice’ of a writer, like an accomplice to crime, aiding an act of daring imagination. Few people read as closely, as critically and joyfully as Virginia Woolf. For her, books were real relationships – and she famously dedicated Orlando to some of her favourite historical writers as well as her friends. To talk about Woolf as a reader, Jonty is joined by author and scholar Alexandra Harris. Alexandra is author of the acclaimed Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, Weatherland, The Rising Down and a study of Virginia Woolf. She is currently writing a book all about Virginia Woolf’s life as a reader. Together, Alexandra and Jonty talk about Virginia Woolf’s unique philosophy of reading and discuss some of her favourite books.Further reading:Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (Thames & Hudson, 2023) by Alexandra HarrisVirginia Woolf (Thames & Hudson, 2024) by Alexandra HarrisThe Rising Down (Faber & Faber, 2024) by Alexandra HarrisWeatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames & Hudson, 2015)-- 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/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Virginia Woolf 1: Mrs Dalloway
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not the Secret Life of Books, as we joyfully immerse ourselves in four of Woolf's greatest books to celebrate what is probably the most extraordinary middle-aged flowering of literary talent in history. Virginia Woolf was 43 when she published Mrs. Dalloway, 100 years ago in 1925. She went on to publish To the Lighthouse, Orlando and a Room of One's Own, to name only a few of her extraordinary achievements.To celebrate Mrs. Dalloway's centenary, Virginia Woolf's middle-aged burst of creative brilliance, and to tell the story of the other members of the Bloomsbury circle around her, we take a deep dive into Woolf and her work. Virginia Stephen was born in Victorian England to a famously literary and artistic family: both parents were fixtures in high end London intellectual society. But her childhood was turbulent as much it was illuminated by brilliance all around her. The young Virginia Stephen and her sister Vanessa were sexually and emotionally abused as children and young teenagers, and these early experiences contributed to Woolf's battle with mental illness, probably bipolar disorder. But her life was also filled with joy, including the joy of her marriage to Leonard Woolf and her love affair with Vita Sackville-West.One of many wonderful things about Woolf is that although she died relatively young she left a huge amount of writing behind her. 9 novels, 25 years of diaries, letters, lectures, essays and journalism. Join us for an extraordinary 20thC story of literary glamor and dazzling success, alongside terrible grief, suffering and trauma. We’ll meet many of the biggest names in Modernism, we’ll encounter some of the century’s most horrifying events, and one of fiction's greatest parties.-- 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/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Every book has two stories: the one it tells, and the one it hides.The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking, occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, an English professor at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC. Every week these virtuoso critics and close friends take an iconic book and reveal the hidden story behind the story: who made it, their clandestine motives, the undeclared stakes, the scandalous backstory and above all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew.-- 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: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLinkinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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