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Arts

Novel Approaches

by London Review of Books

Today: #105 in Arts, Ireland on our combined chart.

Chart positions today · Ireland

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Ranking history · Ireland

Latest daily rankings: Oct 13. New rankings will appear after the next update.

History builds daily. We started tracking this show on the Arts, Ireland chart recently, so the trend line appears after a second day of data.
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DateCombined RankApple PodcastsCastbox
Oct 13#105#109#71

Latest episodes

  • ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson

    November 3, 2025 · 16 min

    Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped began life serialised in a children’s magazine, but its sophistication and depth won the lifelong admiration of Henry James. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising, Kidnapped follows young…

  • ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James

    October 5, 2025 · 58 min

    In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who…

  • ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope

    September 7, 2025 · 16 min

    Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They settled on The Last…

  • 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens

    August 10, 2025 · 17 min

    'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the…

  • ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot

    July 13, 2025 · 17 min

    The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a…

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  • 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

    June 15, 2025 · 18 min

    ‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a…

  • ‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell

    May 18, 2025 · 25 min

    In ‘North and South’ (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the self-made capitalist John…

  • 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray

    April 20, 2025 · 33 min

    Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation…

  • ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë

    March 24, 2025 · 27 min

    When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and…

  • 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock

    February 24, 2025 · 35 min

    Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters…

  • ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen

    January 28, 2025 · 32 min

    On one level, ‘Mansfield Park’ is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of…

  • Introducing ‘Novel Approaches’

    January 5, 2025 · 8 min

    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…

Full episode archive on Apple Podcasts →

About the show

Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and guests discuss a selection of 19th-century (mostly) English novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, looking in particular at the roles played in the books by money and property. Novels covered: 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 Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) by Anthony Trollope Washington Square (1880)/Portrait (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