Novel Approaches
Today: #105 in Arts, Ireland on our combined chart.
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Latest episodes
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‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson
November 3, 2025 · 16 minRobert 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…
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‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James
October 5, 2025 · 58 minIn 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…
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‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope
September 7, 2025 · 16 minTrollope 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…
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'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…
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‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot
July 13, 2025 · 17 minThe 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…
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‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell
May 18, 2025 · 25 minIn ‘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…
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'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
April 20, 2025 · 33 minThackeray'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…
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‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë
March 24, 2025 · 27 minWhen 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…
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'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock
February 24, 2025 · 35 minThomas 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…
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‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen
January 28, 2025 · 32 minOn 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…
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Introducing ‘Novel Approaches’
January 5, 2025 · 8 minClare 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…

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