Secret Life of Books

Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole
  • 4.9 (112)
  • 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.

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  1. 12h ago

    Classic Australia 2: The Harp in the South by Ruth Park

    Ruth Park’s debut novel, The Harp in the South, was first serialized in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1947, provoking angry letters from outraged readers. The book was destined to become an Australian classic. The story follows an Irish Catholic immigrant family - the Darcys - living in the inner-city slum of Surry Hills, as they navigate domestic violence, child prostitution, racism, backstreet abortions, abduction, and alcoholism. Some readers objected to Park’s frank depiction of these social ills. Others claimed her story was exaggerated. And there was general outrage that an outsider - a blow-in from New Zealand, no less - should assume the right to air Sydney’s dirty laundry for all to see. But The Harp in the South is not a judgmental or moralizing novel. Park, who was living in Surry Hills at the time, simply depicted the world around her. There is no traditional plot to the story. We simply join the Darcys for around three years of their lives and grow to love them despite their flaws. Park finds beauty in the everyday and her prose is often most beautiful when describing unbelievable squalor. Her descriptions of rubbish and dirt are second to none. In this second episode in our Classic Australia season, we take a leap from Miles Franklin’s charming, sometimes naive, turn-of-the-century rural bildungsroman to Ruth Park’s urban, immigration story that became a template for many of the great Australian novels of the last fifty years, including Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap (more on that in a few weeks) and Tim Winton’s Cloud Street. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Classic Australia 2: The Harp in the South by Ruth Park

  2. 4d ago • Subscribers Only

    Bleak House Book Club: 14 & 15

    Every time we think we’re in the Bleak House endgame, Dickens busts out yet more twists and turns in his labyrinthine plot. This week, Esther receives her second proposal of marriage, arguably from a source just as unwelcome as Mr. Guppy himself. But this time Esther says yes. The reader, along with our pox-scarred heroine, will likely shed a few tears of regret and possibly outright revulsion at the news, depending on your sensibilities vis a vis nuptial decorum. But no sooner is Esther betrothed than she bumps into her former admirer Dr. Woodcourt, back from India, sporting a mahogany suntan, and looking for some local epidemics to quell. He need not look far. The unlucky Jo soon crosses his path, calling for some expert medical attention and more than a little bit of TLC. Cue some of the most wither-wringing scenes in all English literature, as a crack team of Dickens’s favorite characters flocks round the grateful Jo in his final days. These installments end with yet another bang, literally. A gun is fired late one moonlit night, and the suspects are many and various. The victim is none other than… well, you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out.

    Bleak House Book Club: 14 & 15

  3. 4d ago

    From Pemberly With Love. SLOB picks the next James Bond.

    In breaking, literary-adjacent news, Hollywood is about to do the final screen tests to choose the next James Bond. They’ve narrowed it down to just four actors, according to today’s Guardian. But what’s a tough decision for the motion picture studios is a simple decision for SLOB. We’ve cracked the Bond code. Each of these four rumored finalists has played at least one major role in recent adaptations of literary classics. So, Sophie and Jonty have put their classics know-how to the (screen) test, to ask which of these nineteenth-century literary heroes fits the bill for our post-Daniel Craig 007. Want a hint? The name’s Darcy. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    From Pemberly With Love. SLOB picks the next James Bond.

  4. Oct 20

    Classic Australia 1: My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

    In 1901, six self-governing British colonies in the Southern Hemisphere came together to form a single nation - Australia. In that same year, a 21-year-old woman from rural New South Wales published a book which gave voice to that new nation. The woman is the great Miels Franklin, and the book is My Brilliant Career. The novel’s heroine Sybylla Melvin, immortalized in the 1979 film by Judy Davis, is ebullient, clever, defiant, funny and brave. It’s a gripping story of her farming childhood, her family’s descent into poverty, her romance with a handsome jackaroo called Harry Beacham and - most of all - her determination to forge a career as an independent artist. The story is essentially Pride and Prejudice in Blundstones, which perhaps accounts for its enduring success. Sybylla herself is a proud atheist, socialist and feminist. This was not an image Australia necessarily wanted to project at the time, with one critic denouncing Sybylla as ‘distinctly unpleasant’. But The Bulletin celebrated it as ‘a book full of sunlight’, and pronounced it ‘the very first Australian novel to be published’. Most of all, young women around Australia found - at last - an author who spoke to their experience and Franklin spent a large part of the following years replying to the many letters of gratitude and appreciation that flooded in. This episode is the first in a series devoted to Australian classics. Today we’re asking just what it was that makes Sybylla Melvin such a compelling and evergreen heroine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Classic Australia 1: My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

  5. Oct 13

    SLoB & SLoBability: Diana Reid on adapting Austen's masterpiece for the screen

    Diana Reid is the hottest young screen adaptation-writer of the hour, and she wrote the screenplay for the delightful new Sense and Sensibility film with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esme Creed-Miles. Today she's joining us on SLOB to talk rom-coms, wild hair, muslins, ribbons, and learning self-restraint. The story of how we got Diana on our show is almost as meet-cute as the story of how she came to write the screenplay. You'll hear the whole story, and we'll go in deep on how Diana went from being a novelist to screenwriter almost overnight, and how Jane Austen herself taught her how to write the beats of a gripping story about two sisters who seem to be opposites and learn how to be more like one another. This version of Sense and Sensibility is true to the original and also windblown and yearningly impassioned, as any good modern rom-com should be. Hear about how Diana, along with the producer, director and actors made the magic happen as a team, over several months of shooting on location in the UK. Diana now lives in London, but grew up in Sydney, and indeed seems to have led a shadow life to Sophie. Diana's first novel, Love and Virtue, is set on the campus of Sydney University, and reminded Sophie not a little of her own heady days as an undergraduate. We talk about how novel-writing prepared Diana for screen-writing, and about how she managed to write three such different, accomplished, page-turning novels and a successful screenplay all before her 30th birthday! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    SLoB & SLoBability: Diana Reid on adapting Austen's masterpiece for the screen

  6. Oct 9

    Small-talk emergency kit: who the heck is Anne Carson?

    If you're wondering who this Anne Carson person is who just won the Nobel Prize, then SLoB is here to help. In this punchy 20-minute primer, we give you all the vital statistics and some choice extracts from Carson's poetry so you can sparkle and shine when her name comes up - as it surely must - at the weekend dinner table/pub/supermarket queue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Small-talk emergency kit: who the heck is Anne Carson?

  7. Oct 8 • Subscribers Only

    Bleak House Book Club: 12 &13

    Chapters 36-42 These are crucial pivot chapters, as we watch the book slowly shifting from being a novel about systems, institutions, and the people they betray, to being a pacy thriller about one character who emerges as a seriously bad egg. Lady Deadlock remains tormented by her not-so-secret-secret. Esther uses her disfigured face from smallpox to her advantage in ongoing skirmishes with Mr. Guppy. Even so late in the game, Dickens chucks another minor villain into the mix, with the ghastly Mr. Vholes, and his three amusingly boilerplate daughters, Emma, Jane and Caroline. Meanwhile our pal Richard Carstone is headed toward an act 2 low point. Is there any way he can turn things around? Certainly not with Mr. Skimpole by his side.

    Bleak House Book Club: 12 &13

  8. Oct 6

    Factory settings: Elizabeth Gaskell's North & South

    Elizabeth Gaskell might be the most underrated novelist of the 19th century. North and South was first published by Charles Dickens in Household Words from 1854-55. But Dickens and Gaskell came to blows over his heavy-handed editing style and misguided ending change. Manchester-based novelist Gaskell fought back against Dickens’ way of telling stories, to make the industrial working classes properly visible for the first time in literary history. She didn’t tell the Establishment what it wanted to hear, and she was considered a nuisance. Even The Leader - a radical newspaper that should have supported her - condemned North and South, saying that a woman could not ‘understand industrial problems’ and therefore had ’no right to add to the confusion by writing about it.’ By the 1950s, Gaskell was regarded as a minor novelist who, according to male critics, lacked the ‘masculinity’ to tackle poverty and social reform. But now, in the 21st Century, she has resumed her rightful place alongside Charles Dickens and George Eliot as one of the greatest Victorian writers. No one else - including Dickens and Eliot - understood what was going on in the great industrial cities better than Gaskell, nor what tactics might be necessary to heal the divisions in British society. All of which is unsurprising when we learn that Gaskell was from a radical dissenting family, and that she spent her adult life in Manchester not just writing novels and raising children, but participating daily in work to address the problems of poverty, hygiene and lack of education in Britain’s fastest growing city. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Factory settings: Elizabeth Gaskell's North & South
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4.9
out of 5
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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
    205
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Secret Life of Books
  • Show Website
    Secret Life of Books
  • Provider
    Sophie Gee

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