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Secret Life of Books

Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole
  • 4.9 (64)
  • BOOKS
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

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.

  1. Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights": is the hype worth it?

    19H AGO

    Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights": is the hype worth it?

    Best Valentine’s Day ever! SLOB’s “Wuthering Heights” watch-party. Sophie and Jonty take it character by character – inanimate characters included — to decide who are the winners and who are the losers in the Fennell-Robbie-Elordi mash-up adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel. And in the episode’s gripping second half they move onto the really meaty questions: race, class, sex, domestic violence, and pets. As the movie poster says, Come Undone - with SLOB - this Valentine's season. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    53 min
  2. Middlemarch 4: only connect

    5D AGO • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Middlemarch 4: only connect

    This week we continue our ascent of Mount Middlemarch with Book 4: “Three Love Problems.” The three love problems, of course, are Dorothea and Casaubon, Lydgate and Rosamond, and Fred and Mary. But with Eliot the label never really says what's in the tin. What we're learning in this book is that intimate, domestic actions and small gestures are always also connected to the big picture of politics, social conditions, and the nation at large. We might think that Casaubon’s dislike of Will is just a matter of petty jealousy, of an older man for a younger, or that Will’s slightly sneaky efforts to keep the relationship going with Dorothea are incidental to the political health of Britain. What we learn, though, is that these personal dynamics and character traits are shaping local, and ultimately national politics. We’ll start realizing that the cost of Rosamond’s linen handkerchiefs, for her wedding trip, will alter the course of Lydgate’s scientific inquiries and the town's medical advancements, and that whether Mary Garth moves to York to take a teaching job depends on whether Dorothea is persuades her uncle to restore his tenants’ cottages. We’re starting to understand at this point in the novel that everything is connected to everything else. Novels might be a domestic, intimate, personal form of storytelling, but there’s no such thing as purely personal or domestic emotions and actions. Political reform and scientific advancement might seem to belong to larger systems of power than small human vanities and petty vengeances, but alas, they are interdependent. All human impulses and feelings shape the lives of others, and the bigger affairs of the nation and the world. But Eliot knows better than to bog down in affairs of state, descriptions of rent-rolls and rotten boroughs. We want to know what kind of china the Lydgates will chose, and how Dorothea will bear living in the same house as Mr. Casaubon. The book ends with one of the most moving and finely turned moments in the novel, as Dorothea and her husband are briefly reconciled. But how long can their truce last, while Will Ladislaw continues to work for Mr. Brooke, constantly finding ways to cross paths with his cousin's wife?

    51 min
  3. Wuthering Heights: Is this really the greatest love story of all time?

    FEB 10

    Wuthering Heights: Is this really the greatest love story of all time?

    The storm clouds are gathering in anticipation of the Valentine’s Day release of Emerald Fennell’s raunchy film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The film has been described by one critic as “very horny, very sumptuous, and very demented.” Margot Robbie looks set to change the way we read this beloved classic, well, if not forever, for a few weeks during awards season. It’s fair to say that anyone remotely connected to the world of classic literature is standing by, getting ready to jeer. And it’s also fair to say that the film has propelled Wuthering Heights to become the most read classic of 2026. The New York subway, the London Tube and many other transport systems worldwide are dotted with earnest young people, proudly nose-deep in their Penguin Wuthering Heights. If SLOB has a motto, it’s be prepared. To ready our devoted listeners for the big V. Day release, we’ve recorded a brand-new episode on Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte’s novel, which may just be the most unhinged, genre-busting, unputdownable classic in English, is back, bigger, better, and balmier than when SLOB recorded our first episode back at the very beginning of this podcast. We drink deep, but always with our trademark cheeky humor, in Emily Bronte’s biography, the secrets behind the book’s writing, and why the Heathcliff-Catherine love-story it is most definitely not GOATED, as the kids say. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1h 9m
  4. Frankenstein in Oxford: A Conversation with Richard Ovenden, OBE

    FEB 6

    Frankenstein in Oxford: A Conversation with Richard Ovenden, OBE

    Sophie talks to Richard Ovenden, OBE, the 25th Bodley’s Librarian at Oxford, about the manuscript of Frankenstein, one of the most extraordinary, and fascinating, literary treasures of all time. Richard is head of Oxford’s Bodleian, as well as the University's libraries, museums, and even botanical gardens. Though Richard isn’t personally dusting off the attic vases or planting the bulbs, he does still spend huge amounts of time with rare books and manuscripts. In this thrilling bonus episode he talks about how the Bodleian came to own the manuscript of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, along with the large, fascinating, and often very weird collection gathered from the Shelley family and their friends over several generations. This is an amazing behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the world’s great libraries, why old books really matter, and why SLOB was right all along that Percy Bysshe Shelley is bad news. To see the manuscript, go to the Digital Bodleian: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/53fd0f29-d482-46e1-aa9d-37829b49987d/ Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    32 min
  5. Toni Morrison 1: The Bluest Eye

    FEB 3

    Toni Morrison 1: The Bluest Eye

    Published in 1970, written by an unknown new writer, The Bluest Eye is the great African American novelist Toni Morrison’s debut. It remains in many ways her most radical. It’s one of the most banned books in America since its publication – for its unflinching, explicit depictions of domestic abuse, racial and sexual violence in small town America.   Morrison wrote openly about Black sex and Black violence, challenging the increasingly celebratory tone of American literature in the late 1960s. Reviewing her in the New York Times, the legendary critic John Leonard recognized just how important Morrison’s voice would be. ““The Bluest Eye” is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black; the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been ‘designed specifically to murder possibilities,” he wrote. “She does it with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.”   Morrison would go on to write many Modernist-inflected literary tours de force, including Song of Solomon and Beloved, and is the first and only Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. We’ll be taking deep dives into Morrison’s work across four special episodes of SLOB, for Black History Month. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1h 10m
  6. Middlemarch 3: It's not me, it's you

    JAN 29 • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Middlemarch 3: It's not me, it's you

    Dorothea's back from her Roman Holiday, Tertius Lydgate still wants to flirt with Rosamond Vincy without consequence, and Fred Vincy is tearing about town recklessly spending other people's money. Mary Garth remains acerbic, funny and understated as ever. The courses of true love, inheritance, medical reform and local politics are not running smooth. Our Middlemarch friends, young and old alike, are casting around for other people to blame for their own misfortunes. Book 3 is subtitled "Waiting for Death." But just whose deaths are we waiting for? On the face of it, it's old Peter Featherstone, the rich, bedridden troublemaker, soon to die without an heir. Who will get his considerable assets? The night before he dies, he asks Mary Garth, SLOB's favorite heroine-in-waiting, to burn one of his two wills, thus changing his beneficiary at the 11th hour. But Mary, principled and stubborn, refuses. The consequences of her scruples will be far-reaching. Fred Vincy falls gravely ill and is misdiagnosed by the local quack. Lydgate has to step in, giving himself a chance to spend more flirty time with the enchanting Rosamond, and giving Sophie the chance to do an extended riff on typhoid fever (earning her the name "Typhoid Sophie." ) Jonty counters with a bravura set-piece on the motif of the labyrinth in Middlemarch. The hits just keep coming in this installment. Peter Featherstone isn't the only character to be circling the drain. Mr. Casaubon has heart trouble, and can't hope to live long unless he strictly follows doctor's orders. So far, he isn't doing so. Meanwhile Will Ladislaw reappears, working as the editor of Mr. Brooke's local newspaper, the Pioneer — roughly equivalent to the Village Voice in the heyday of NYC counter-culture. Cue a set-piece from Sophie and Jonty on the role of newspapers in reform-period Britain. Will's reappearance gets the town gossips going, speculating about the real reasons for his joining forces with Dorothea's uncle. And Eliot throws her romantic readers a bone, treating us to an off-the-cuff conversation between Will and Dorothea in the Lowick drawing-room, with impulsive over-sharing on both sides. Throughout all this we observe the masterful blueprints of Eliot's plotting and structure emerging in all their breathtaking complexity. Tune in to marvel at the depth of the characterization and Eliot's uncanny capacity to bring her readers into the living presence of real, fallible, funny, turbulent, struggling fellow humans.

    45 min
  7. Queens of Crime 4: The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham

    JAN 27

    Queens of Crime 4: The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham

    A serial killer on the loose in the foggy, battle-scarred streets of London after the Second World War. Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is Bleak House meets 1984 meets Silence of the Lambs. In this last in the current Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty looks at how Allingham - more, perhaps, than the other Queens of Crime - evolved her craft to suit the changing world around her. She dials back the importance of her aristocratic front-man sleuth Campion (who she first introduced in 1929) to focus more on the grizzled, working-class detective Charlie Luke. This book is a stepping stone out of Christieland into the world of PD James and Ruth Rendell. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1h 6m
  8. To See or Not to See? Hamnet tune-up session

    JAN 23

    To See or Not to See? Hamnet tune-up session

    With the release of Chloe Zhao's rapturously acclaimed film Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's much-loved 2020 novel, SLOB re-releases one of our earliest episodes. Hamnet is a beautiful, lyrical novel about Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, and the early death of their son, Hamnet. O'Farrell refocussed Shakespeare's story on the women who are usually only glimpsed at the edges of his life, reinventing Anne Hathaway as a vivacious, sexy, creative and compelling full character. In doing so she reimagines Hamlet the play as a mediation on family, love, and loss, organized around Shakespeare's wife. Our Hamnet episode itself is a historical curiosity. #18, in the earliest days of our podcast, it's officially SLOB juvenilia. We've changed and grown in the last year, and we owe everything to our listeners who tell us how it is and how it should be. Please tell us what you think about Hamnet, book or film, by jumping on our Patreon chat: https://www.patreon.com/messages/9473d46b4c7d4e59be6239f82a3e8115?mode=campaign&tab=chats Whether you plan to see the film or not, this book has stayed in the zeitgeist ever since it was published. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    50 min
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4.9
out of 5
64 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    140
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Secret Life of Books
  • Show Website
    Secret Life of Books
  • Provider
    Sophie Gee

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