It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Taurus Express. So Agatha Christie began her sleeper [car] hit, Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

All aboard! In the latest of SLoB's much-loved special episodes on surprising, fun, and always deeply revealing literary themes, Sophie and Jonty take an all-stations train journey through literary locomotion.

One of life's great pleasures is reading a good book on a train, as it rattles through scenic countryside. But what's more annoying than cramming onto a packed underground train at 8am, desperate for a moment with a book before work, only to be wedged between an armpit and a stroller? Trains are social levelers: a means of bringing unlikely people together; and often keeping them apart. Trains help tell stories about social divisions and distinctions in status, love affairs and heartbreak, unwanted changes in landscapes and the ever-increasing encroachments of modern life.

Tune in to find out why, in short, trains are at the heart of many great books, and why train travel turned out to be the ideal metaphor for the experience of reading modern fiction.

Books mentioned in this episode:

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, "The Signal Man"

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Graham Greene, The Little Train

Lev Grossman, The Silver Arrow

Edward Thomas "Adlestrop"

Jilly Cooper, Rivals

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In this final episode in SLoB's series on Virginia Woolf, Jonty talks to literary biographer Hermione Lee whose Virginia Woolf (1996) is perhaps the most respected account of her life and art in a world not short on them. Hermione talks about the challenges in writing about somebody who had such firm views on what a biography should and shouldn't be. Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was, after all, the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and one of her closest friends, Lytton Strachey, revolutionised biography as a form with Eminent Victorians. More importantly, she wrote a biography of her friend Roger Fry and many 'life studies' of the great writers. She also published two mock biographies in Orlando and Flush.

Finally, Jonty and Hermione talk about the end of Virginia Woolf's life by suicide in 1941. Despite the suffering she experienced because of her bipolar condition, hers was nonetheless a rich life full of joy and artistic achievement.

Recommended reading:

Virginia Woolf (1996) by Hermione Lee.

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We thought we’d be concluding our Virginia Woolf deep-dive with "A Room of One’s Own," but we’ve enjoyed this series so much we decided to extend. Today we’re looking at the book which many Woolf obsessives consider her masterpiece. Woolf published The Waves in 1931, just two years after her string of masterpieces, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and “A Room of One’s Own.” As Sophie and Jonty will tell you, it’s the Big Chill – or the Breakfast Club – of Woolf’s oevre. A story about a group of friends who go through their lives in and out of contact with one another, sharing many of their most profound and important experiences.

The sensation of reading The Waves is rather like being a pebble on a beach, rolled around by the waves of Woolf’s creative genius - not always knowing what is going on. While it's hugely brilliant, we think most readers will need a floatation device to help them cope with the swell of this experimental, unconventional narrative. To be our Virginia Woolf “life raft in residence” we invited Woolf scholar and all-round excellent writer and critic Alexandra Harris back onto the show to explain to us why The Waves is the novel that serious Virginia Woolf fans can't live without.

And don’t miss Alexandra’s own wonderful books, especially her recent The Rising Down, a beautiful and moving account of the Sussex landscape, and the lives and histories it contains within it.

Books by Alexandra Harris:

The Rising Down: Lives in a Landscape (Faber, 2024)

Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames and Hudson, 2015)

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists & the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (Thames and Hudson, 2010)

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