Richard Ovenden, OBE

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227 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 6 Feb

Richard Ovenden, OBE’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Secret Life of Books · Frankenstein in Oxford: A Conversation with Richard Ovenden, OBE · 6 Feb 2026 podcast

Well, the English faculty didn't exist at the time.

Oxford was an all-male institution.

It was there to educate the clergy, essentially.

And why would we want fiction by women?

So it's only when the English faculty is founded in the 1870s that the professors come to the Bodleian and say, you know, we're the first edition of the great novels of the early 19th century.

And we didn't have any.

And then a process of, you know, the Friends of the Bodleian is founded.

They go and, you know, seek to acquire the funds or to encourage people to give those books that were kind of missing from that layer.

So, you know, we had Dante in Italian.

but not Jane Austen.

That's the kind of backdrop.

And I think there's also been a focus for the Bodleian on local figures.

So, you know, alumni or local history of some kind around them.

And of course, Shelley was an undergraduate.

He was expelled in 1811 for writing a pamphlet called On the Necessity of Atheism.

Yes.

And at the time, of course, Shelley was a kind of, you know, troublesome undergraduate.

But he then obviously not long afterwards became a noted poet.

and a celebrated poet and a beloved poet as the 19th century progressed.

I think you're probably right there.

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