Elizabeth Jane Howard, Brian Moore, and authors’ personal lives – welcome to episode 138!
In the first half of the episode, we do a question that Lindsey suggested: do we care about authors’ personal lives? It takes us to questions both of ethics and of privacy. In the second half, we pit The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore against The Beautiful Visit by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
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The books and authors we mention in this episode are:
Recommended! by Nicola Wilson
Hugh Walpole
J.B. Priestley
Sylvia Lynd
Clemence Dane
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Stasiland by Anna Funder
Crooked Cross by Sally Carson
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
Virginia Woolf
Stella Gibbons
Enid Blyton
Neil Gaiman
Mary Lawson
The Other Elizabeth Taylor by Nicola Beauman
Jane Austen
Dorothy L. Sayers
Don’t Look Round by Violet Trefusis
Echo by Violet Trefusis
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Elena Ferrante
Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley
J.K. Rowling
Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson
Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater
John Keats
Percy Shelley
Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann
Invitiation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann
R.C. Sherriff
The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore
The Great Victorian Collection by Brian Moore
O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker
The Sundial by Shirley Jackson
I don’t listen much to podcasts, but you tempted me with this one… such a vexed question these days.
I have a good collection of literary biographies, and I enjoy reading them, but the ones I really like are the ones that explore the trajectory of the author’s development as a writer. Sometimes that brings in aspects of their personal lives, but mostly not, and I do agree that the personal life of a living writer is not our business, and it’s not automatically fair game even after they’re dead, especially if they have family still living and especially living children.