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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If we go way back to Flaubert and Madame Bovary, of course I was talking about Flaubert's style and the various innovations and so on of Flaubert's style, but also I was talking about the danger of Flaubert, that's to say,
Santberg's image of the realist as someone who sort of cuts with a scalpel into the bone of society.
And it seems to me that this extraordinary novel, and indeed the novels throughout the 20s and 30s that Jean Rees wrote, achieve amazing things on both fronts.
And I hope you would agree with me, Miranda, that they open up new available realities
things that we didn't know about or that readers, that Jean Rees' readers may not have known about until they first discovered them in her fiction.
And at the same time, these novels, particularly Voyage in the Dark, do fantastic things with both what we might think of as sort of standard realism, the grammar of realism, you know, free and direct style, people coming in and out of rooms, conversations, dramatic scenes, wonderful conversation that she captures brilliantly.
She's really good at speech.
Along with...
What has to be said is sort of remarkable brilliance with effectively stream of consciousness.
We'll get to all that in a minute.
One way of setting up, I think, this sort of repertorial expansion is to – last month we talked about Virginia Woolf.
It's to remind listeners of something that Virginia Woolf famously says towards the end of her book, A Room of One's Own.
And that's where she starts thinking about a new kind of –
feminist, perhaps also queer literature.
She thinks of a novel in which there are two women, Chloe and Olivia, who are working in a laboratory.
Wouldn't that be amazing?
And wouldn't it also be amazing, says Wolfe, if one encountered the sentence in such a novel, Chloe liked Olivia?
Well...
You have to say that Jean Rhys in Voyage in the Dark and in the other novels, we may not find exactly in Rhys' work the sentence, Chloe liked Olivia.
But from, say, Voyage in the Dark alone, we will discover that in order to have an abortion in 1914,
Showing 461–480 of 815 · page 24 of 41
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