SUPPORT BACKLISTED ON PATREON

Andy and John are joined by publisher Alexandra Pringle, the Editor-in-Chief of Bloomsbury Publishing for 20 years and now Executive Publisher. She began her career on the art magazine Art Monthly and joined Virago Press in 1978 where she edited the Virago Modern Classics series, becoming Editorial Director in 1984. In 1990 she moved to Hamish Hamilton as Editorial Director and four years later left publishing to become a literary agent. She joined Bloomsbury in 1999. Her list of authors includes Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, Esther Freud, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sheila Hancock, Khaled Hosseini, Celia Imrie, George Saunders, Kamila Shamsie, Patti Smith, Kate Summerscale and Barbara Trapido. She is a Patron of Index on Censorship, a Trustee of Giffords Circus and the charity Reprieve, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The main book under discussion is The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy, her second novel (out of fourteen) first published by William Heinnemann in 1924 re-issued by Vintage in 2014 and adapted for the screen no fewer than three times.

Before that Andy continues his exploration of British modernism with Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists & the Imagination from Virgina Woolf to John Piper while John grapples with time through the subtle, eloquent prism of Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time.

Books mentioned:

Margaret Kennedy - The Constant Nymph; Troy Chimneys; Lucy Carmichael
Alexandra Harris - Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists & the Imagination from Virgina Woolf to John Piper; Weatherland: Writer & Artists under English Skies
Carlo Rovelli - The Order of Time
J.A. Baker - The Peregrine
Hetty Saunders - My House of Sky: The Life of J.A. Baker
Rosamund Lehmann - Dusty Answer
Dodie Smith - I Capture the Castle
Elaine Dundy - The Dud Avocado
Rafeella Barker - Come and Tell Me Some Lies
Esther Freud - Hideous Kinky
Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers
Sofka Zinovieff - Putney
Barbara Comyns - The Vet’s Daughter; Their Spoons Came From Woolworth’s
Rose Macaulay - The World My Wilderness
Edith Wharton - The Children
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Emily Eden - The Semi-Detached House; The Semi-Attached Couple
Jane & Mary Findlater - Crossrigs

Other links:

Gifford’s Circus
Front Row BBCR4 discussion of The Constant Nymph featuring Dr Anne Manuel
Clothes in Books: The Constant Nymph
Penelope Fitzgerald on The Constant Nymph (LRB 1983)
The Constant Nymph (1943) movie