Secret Life of Books

Published in 1961, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie tells the story of a charismatic and deeply narcissistic teacher in a girl’s private school in Edinburgh during the 1930s. Miss Brodie, who insists repeatedly that she is in the prime of her life - aka middle-aged - cultivates a ‘set’ of impressionable young girls who she can use as proxies to act out her own desires. On at least one occasion, when she encourages an impressionable young girl to fight for the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, this has fatal consequences. In the end, it is one of her own set who ‘betrays’ her to the headmistress Miss Mackay, providing the necessary intel to ensure her sacking.

The character of Miss Brodie isn’t the only thing memorable about this book. The prose is - as you would expect from a writer called Spark - electric. That is to say, both poetic and incredibly funny. She also manages to write an avant-garde non-linear account of Brodie’s supposed ‘prime’ that has its own propulsion. The novel darts around over a thirty year time period with an effortlessness and accessibility that even the greatest writers struggle to achieve.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was published first in the New Yorker. It was an immediate hit and reached canonical status when it was adapted into an Oscar winning film in 1969, starring Dame Maggie Smith and directed by Ronald Neame of Poseidon Adventure fame.

In this episode, we’re going to find out who betrayed Miss Brodie - and why. We’re also, as ever, going to delve beyond the book into the prime of Muriel Spark herself, uncovering the real Brodies who inspired her, how her earlier career as a biographer helped shape her approach to fiction, and why endings are always just beginnings.

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Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) wasn’t the first school fiction novel – that honour goes to a Sarah Fielding, sister of Henry Fielding, who published The Governess, or The Little Female Academy over a hundred years earlier. But, as is so often the case, it’s the man who takes the credit.

In this episode, Sophie and Jonty look at how Thomas Hughes’ nostalgic celebration of Rugby School in the 1830s super-charged school fiction as a genre for a century to come. Billy Bunter, Molesworth, St Trinian’s and even Hogwarts owe a large debt to Hughes’ novel.

The book tells the story of the eponymous Tom Brown, who goes to Rugby where he excels at rugger and cricket, is bullied by the dastardly Flashman, suffers various torments such as being ‘tossed in a blanket’ and ‘roasted over a fire’, gets the hot for his best friend’s mother and finally discovers evangelical Christianity through the inspiration of his headmaster, Thomas Arnold.

Perhaps what is most striking about Tom Brown’s School Days is that it is both familiar - because of the way it continues to influence school fiction today - but deeply, deeply alien. As Thomas Hughes makes clear, the point of England’s so-called public schools in the 19th Century wasn’t to give boys a rounded education but to prepare them for administration of the British Empire. Tom Brown learns a bit of Greek and Latin, but most of all to fight, boss people about, and quote without questioning propaganda about the benefits of colonialism to a subjugated people.

Thomas Hughes never quite got over the high-point of his Rugby years, but his enthusiasm makes even the most devout alumnus look half-hearted. In 1880, he founded a Utopian community in Tennessee called… you guessed it… Rugby, complete with croquet court and a ‘university’ named after Rugby’s legendary headmaster Thomas Arnold. Needless to say, the community failed in its intentions, although Rugby, Tennessee still exists.
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From the outset, there’s only one kind of honeymoon in classic literature, and it's disastrous. Honeymoons don't become fixed stars in the literary firmament until the early nineteenth century, but they begin as they go on - badly. The first literary honeymoon of the century is Maria Bertram's ill-fated tour with the fatuous Mr. Rushworth in Mansfield Park, with her jealous sister Julia Bertram third-wheeling. Next up we have Victor Frankenstein’s wedding trip to Evian with his bride Elizabeth. No sooner has the couple checked into the hotel and raided the minibar than Frankenstein’s Creature arrives and brutally murders his bride.
After that there’s a trio of hideous honeymoons in Bronte novels – Mr. Rochester’s horrific Caribbean jaunt with his first wife; a catastrophic European whirlwind in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (husband already philandering), and Heathcliff’s revenge honeymoon with Isabella Linton in Wuthering Heights. After that, it's all downhill with Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady.
Join Sophie and Jonty for a romp through some of the least romantic holidays in literary history. And we don’t just cover fictional honeymoons – there are some classic bloopers off the page too, involving the Victorian literati themselves having a bad time.
We rank the honeymoons according to our usual rigorous criteria: Tripadvisor rating (location, food, accommodation); Marital Bliss quotient (ie. how was the sex?); Frictionless Travel score and – of course – centrality to the narrative itself.
Join us on a 6-honeymoon literary package tour through England and abroad.

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'Although he was a brave and noble warrior, he did not often slay his own friends while drunk'. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty dive deep into the manosphere - aka Anglo-Saxon England - to look at one of foundational stones of English literature (although you need a bilingual dictionary to read it in the original). Composed sometime around the 8th Century CE, but not written down until much later, Beowulf is a nostalgic evocation of the north Germanic roots of the Anglo-Saxons. It recounts the adventures of the eponymous hero, who sails south from somewhere in modern-day Sweden to make his name by butchering monsters and telling everyone how great he is.

In the first adventure, Beowulf defeats a terrible monster called Grendel who is preventing the Danes from enjoying their mead at night. He succeeds - only to provoke the wrath of Grendel's much more fearsome mother. But in the end, she too is no match for our hero. Smash cut to fifty years later and Beowulf embarks on his last adventure to defeat a dragon who is terrorising his own people, the Geats.

Sophie and Jonty situate the Anglo-Saxons as a society, dissect Old English poetic forms, share highlights from the poem, make a total dogs dinner of pronouncing Anglo-Saxon names, and speculate what is really going on behind the carnage. They look at the influence of Beowulf in the works of JRR Tolkien, who took the concepts of Middle Earth, dragon lairs and Golem straight out of this poem. They ALSO look at its influence on - surprise reveal - Toni Morrison, who found Grendel's Mother far more interesting than Beowulf himself.

Translations:
Maria Dahvana Headley (2020) https://bookshop.org/p/books/beowulf-a-new-translation-maria-dahvana-headley/9892043?ean=9780374110031&next=t
Seamus Heaney (1999) https://bookshop.org/p/books/beowulf-a-new-verse-translation-seamus-heaney/e6ac56b104eaeed2?ean=9780393320978&next=t
J.R.R. Tolkein (1926) https://bookshop.org/p/books/beowulf-a-translation-and-commentary-christopher-tolkien/030a3c2a0fa27cea?ean=9780544570306&next=t
We also mention Toni Morrison's essay "Grendel and his Mother" in The Source of Self-Regard (2019) and JRR Tolkein's lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (1936).

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To close out our popular series on the great American novelist Toni Morrison, SLOB brings listeners a wonderful discussion with the novelist and Harvard literature Professor Namwali Serpell. Namwali is in the middle of book tour, having just published her highly acclaimed book of essays, "On Morrison," which garnered national and international attention for offering new ways to read and appreciate one of America's most important writers.
"On Morrison" is based on a class Namwali has been teaching for several years to her undergraduates at Harvard, in which they read many of Morrison's novels over the course of a single semester. In this conversation we talk about why Toni Morrison's novels became instant classics, why it really matters that her writing is often so difficult, what Namwali's experiences teaching Morrison in the classroom shows us about how we can address the reading crisis around the world, and how (as ever) classic literature especially offers us crucial ways forward.
Namwali Serpell, "On Morrison."
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