Claire Bowditch

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97 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Claire Bowditch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Archive: Aphra Behn · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

And there's kinds of physical pleasures that we might associate with libertinism.

are kind of embodied in the widow ranter.

But on the other hand, she's a wealthy widow.

So she herself was transported as an indentured slave.

When she got to the colonies, she was bought off the boat to pay for her passage and as such had to work for the man who'd bought her.

The man who bought her married her within six months and he was a wealthy colonel there and had, I think she phrases it, the grace to die quite soon thereafter and leave her... Unassisted.

Sorry?

Unassisted, yes.

We have no evidence.

We have no evidence, yes.

We're good at that.

But

Yes, this old skeleton has the good grace to die and leave her this wealthy widow.

So on the one hand, she's enjoying all of these bodily pleasures, and on the other hand, she is in love with a colonel there called Daring, and she's worried that he wants her for her money.

And so she has to put him through these tests where she's checking his constancy and his motives because the fact that she's a wealthy widow leaves her with some problems.

On the subject of her as a fiction writer versus a playwright, I'd say that in her fiction, certainly, you get this sense of theatricality.

She's very good at describing bodies in space.

She's very good at describing expressions on people's faces in the way that she's scripted them.

or ready for her plays.

Yes, I think that she says that in the play that comes immediately after The Rover, Sir Patient Fancy, where there's a scene in which the wife of Sir Patient Fancy is trying to hide the lover that she's got stashed behind the bed whilst her husband is trying to find this lover.

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