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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Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women – that’s my impression.

That’s what Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary after delivering the lectures that became “A Room of One’s Own,” arguably the most important feminist manifesto of the twentieth century. Students attending the lectures reported they were a total snooze; one eyewitness actually fell asleep. But another said that the spectacle of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West arriving at the Girton College literary society together was the most glorious and glamorous vision she’d ever seen.

When Woolf published the revised version in 1929 as "A Room of One's Own," she confirmed her brilliance, inventiveness, wit and lightness of touch yet again. She also made her most provocative claim to date: the patriarchy must be defeated so that the voices of unheard women writers across centuries can live through the awakened voices of women writing today. As Sophie and Jonty discover, one cannot read the stirring, impassioned final lines of “A Room of One’s Own” without a tear.

This is also the essay in which Woolf imagines Shakespeare’s sister Judith and the fate that might have awaited her had she been as talented and ambitious as her brother. Woolf gives us unforgettable accounts of good and bad meals at two Oxbridge colleges, and a devastating take-down of the anger and inaccuracy of histories and anthropology books by men, which she reads in the British Museum.

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Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, a gender-defying historical romance, in 1927, when her intimate friend and lover Vita Sackville-West left London to join her diplomat husband Harold Nicholson in Tehran. Orlando is a love-story set across 300 years of English history, starting in the Elizabethan court and finishing in 1920s England. It features an irresistible protagonist who is both woman and man; a writer and a lover; an aristocrat and a commoner. The novel gifts us a joyful romp through English literature, with lots of cameos from writers who have appeared on the Secret Life of Books.

Orlando is also a meditation on the nature of novels themselves, explaining how Woolf’s Modernist style emerges from the great literary works of the past.

Woolf said that she wrote Orlando “sitting over the gas in her sordid room” while Vita capered about in the sunny climes of the middle east. But that sordid room gave rise to one of English literature’s great queer love-stories and reconstructions of Woolf's beloved city of London, across three centuries of transformation.

Jonty and Sophie pursue many eccentric critical hunches, explaining why you can't read Orlando without knowing about solar eclipses, the mini ice-age of the late seventeenth century, Lytton Strachey's semen - or Jonty's favorite hobby-horse, the decline of the English aristocracy.

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"Throw that party. Go for it. It's worth it."

In today’s Mrs. Dalloway special episode, Sophie talks to Alex Schwartz, writer, critic and co-host of the New Yorker Magazine’s Critics at Large pod. On “Critics at Large’ she discusses the most urgent cultural matters, ranging from Sesame Street to the Pope to Meaghan and Harry to Ancient Rome. Which is why we knew we needed Alex on the show.

It started when Sophie heard Alex discussing Jane Austen with a playful rigor that rarely comes with Austen-itis. Something made her think Alex would have great things to say about Mrs. Dalloway. And guess what? Woolf is Alex’s favourite writer. Hear what a critic at large thinks about dresses, flowers, being young and in love, and why it’s always worth throwing the party, and reading the classics.

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50 is the new 25!

“To the Lighthouse” is Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece about summer holidays and the passage of time. It’s perhaps the greatest novel ever written about middle-age, published when Viriginia Woolf herself was middle aged, and recorded by Sophie and Jonty at the height of their middle aged powers.

The novel was published in 1927, after “Mrs. Dalloway” and the “Common Reader” in 1925. It was an instant hit, sold twice as much as Mrs. Dalloway before publication and was immediately declared Woolf’s masterpiece, admitted by Woolf’s husband Leonard. Woolf herself wasn’t sure about some bits of it, but knew she’d nailed the dinner party scene at the novel’s centre, where the wonderful Mrs. Ramsay serves her guests a boeuf en daube for 14.

Join Sophie and Jonty as they continue the story of Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary life and times, told through the details of how she came to write her greatest books. This week we trace her childhood, her summer holidays in Cornwall, her extraordinary, famous, demanding parents, and the beginnings of Woolf’s long struggle with mental illness. And of course we take plenty of detours into holiday cooking and … you guessed it, particle physics.

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‘Think of a book as a very dangerous and exciting game, which it takes two to play at.’

For Virginia Woolf, reading wasn’t a passive act. It requires guts and ingenuity. At times one is locked in combat with a book, at others one is the ‘accomplice’ of a writer, like an accomplice to crime, aiding an act of daring imagination. Few people read as closely, as critically and joyfully as Virginia Woolf. For her, books were real relationships – and she famously dedicated Orlando to some of her favourite historical writers as well as her friends.

To talk about Woolf as a reader, Jonty is joined by author and scholar Alexandra Harris. Alexandra is author of the acclaimed Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, Weatherland, The Rising Down and a study of Virginia Woolf. She is currently writing a book all about Virginia Woolf’s life as a reader.

Together, Alexandra and Jonty talk about Virginia Woolf’s unique philosophy of reading and discuss some of her favourite books.

Further reading:

• Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (Thames & Hudson, 2023) by Alexandra Harris
• Virginia Woolf (Thames & Hudson, 2024) by Alexandra Harris
• The Rising Down (Faber & Faber, 2024) by Alexandra Harris
• Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames & Hudson, 2015)

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

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