James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close reading series from the London Review of Books.
I'm James Wood, and this month we're discussing Muriel Spark's brilliant, beautiful, compact novella, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961.
And in all sorts of ways, it's a perfect book for our series.
It's also very personal.
It's a very personal book for me and one I deeply love.
It may be the one I most love on our list of books going back to Madame Bovary.
It's perfect, I think, because it drags with it many of the elements, the grammar of realism that we've been discussing from the beginning of the series, but adds, as one might expect from an adventurous and innovative writer writing in the 1960s, what we might call a sort of postmodern element or twist to that realist grammar.
The realist grammar is pretty obvious.
There's a wonderfully vivid brilliance that Spark shows in what we were calling flat characterization.
That would be a sort of Dickensian caricature.
We were discussing it in relation to some of the minor characters in Mrs. Dalloway, for instance.
Brilliant, vivid, almost caricatural characterization.
Fabulous use of our old friend, free and direct style, close third person.
We're going to discuss that.
But quite a lot of the novel is essentially narrated in third person, but from the implied perspective of a 12-year-old schoolgirl.
Fabulous details, which we're going to get into in a minute.
And in the most basic sense, in the most basic realist sense, it offers a recognizable and veridical account of the world.
This is, as everyone acknowledges, Muriel Sparks' autobiographical novel about her own schooling in 1930s Edinburgh and about a teacher who was very important to her and her friends.
But it's weirdly close to the novel that I was just discussing a month ago with Patricia Lockwood, Nabokov's Panin.
And not just because the whole of The Prime and Miss Jean Brodie was published in The New Yorker, as were several chapters of Panin.
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