Hermione Lee
Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford
5 episodes
Covers topics in categories such as:
A Room of One's Own
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Virginia Woolf's highly influential essay about women and literature: "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
30 March 2023
Also featuring: Michele Barrett, Alexandra Harris
Edith Wharton
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Wharton's novels, which explore the world of the privileged in America's Gilded Age, in which she lived, written in hindsight and with little mercy.
4 October 2018
Also featuring: Bridget Bennett, Laura Rattray
Culture19th-century American poetsMembers of the American Academy of Arts and LettersGerman–English translatorsKnights of the Legion of HonourAmerican autobiographers20th-century American women writersNovelists from New York (state), 19th-century American novelistsGhost story writers, 19th-century American short story writers19th-century American women writers, American women poetsMrs Dalloway
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925.
3 July 2014
Also featuring: Jane Goldman, Kathryn Simpson
Bohemianism
Melvyn Bragg discusses how a 19th century Parisian artistic philosophy re-emerged in the 20th century in the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury and Chelsea, as a lifestyle choice for a middle-class clique.
9 October 2003
Also featuring: Virginia Nicholson, Graham Robb
Sensibility
Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosophy of the 18th century literary cult of sensibility, how it merged into romanticism and why it was so often connected with illness, melancholia and nerves.
3 January 2002
Also featuring: Claire Tomalin, John Mullan