For this episode, John and Andy are joined by the novelist and scholar Janet Todd, known especially for her biographies and editions of early women writers. She has published books on Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson and Aphra Behn. Her most recent novel, published by the Fentum Press earlier in 2020, is Don't You Know There's a War On? In 2018, Fentum also published her memoir Radiation Diaries, described by Hilary Mantel as ‘frank, wry and unexpectedly heartening’.

The second guest is Simon James, Professor of Victorian Literature at the Department of English Studies, Durham University. He has published and edited work on H. G. Wells, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and the Victorian bestsellers Trilby and The Sorrows of Satan. He regularly contributes to the Durham Book Festival was the Principal Investigator on the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education for Arts Council England. Simon's PhD was mostly on George Gissing.

The book under discussion is The Odd Women by George Gissing, first published in three volumes by Lawrence & Bullen in 1893, and along with New Grub Street and Demos, accounted by Gissing himself as one of his three best books. Before that Andy explores insomnia through The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey (published by Vintage) and John is excited by Luis Sagasti’s short but profound novel, A Musical Offering published by Charco Press.

Books mentioned:

George Gissing - The Odd Women; New Grub Street; In the Year of Jubilee; The Whirlpool
Janet Todd - Radiation Diaries; Don’t You Know There’s a War On?; Aphra Benn: A Secret Life
Simon James - Unsettled Accounts: Money & Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing
Samantha Harvey - The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping; Dear Thief; The Western Wind
Philip Larkin - High Windows
Luis Sagasti - A Musical Offering; Fireflies
Thomas Bernhard - The Loser
Jane Austen - Mansfield Park