Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century British novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property.
The first episode will come out on Monday 27 January, on Austen’s Mansfield Park.
To listen to the full series, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.
Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.
The full list of texts for the series:
Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen
Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray
North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell
Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Anthony Trollope (TBD)
Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot
Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens
Washington Square (1880) / Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James
Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy
New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing
