Joanne Harris
speaker
101 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Joanne Harris’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It is Shirley Jackson's book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I discovered about five years ago.
I should have read it as a teenager, but I missed it somehow.
I think partly because she's largely underappreciated as an author.
But it's a wonderful book.
To me, it is the forerunner of all kinds of things.
Things like The Wasp Factory, I think, wouldn't quite have existed without it.
And John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure.
I think it's the intersection point here.
And because I live...
20 miles from Howarth.
To me, it also has resonances of the Bronte sisters.
And it is about two sisters called Constance and Mary Catherine Blackwood.
And Constance is the good sister, the sage one, the one who likes cooking, the one who looks after everybody.
And Mary Catherine, who is called Mary Cat, is the wild one, the younger one, who has a peculiar outlook on life, who is perfectly happy to run wild, who has various rituals to keep their house safe.
And it needs keeping safe because they have been the victims of a family tragedy.
Six years ago, half of their family was poisoned at dinner.
It was assumed at the time that Constance did it, but she was found innocent.
But now they are shunned by the community.
And so it's a kind of gothic mystery story set within a rigid little community in New England with these two rather codependent sisters living alone.
Constance can't leave the property.
Showing 1–20 of 101 · page 1 of 6
Next →