Close Readings

Who’s afraid of realism? Three stories by Anton Chekhov

30 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details...

London Revisited: The Medieval Capital

23 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes began settling across England in the wake of the Roman retreat in the early fifth century, the city they found on th...

Narrative Poems: ‘Paradise Lost’ (Book 9) by John Milton

16 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When Milton came to describe Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit, he knew he couldn’t rely on suspense to grip the reader. Instead, he used multi...

Nature in Crisis: ‘Blue Machine’ by Helen Czerski

09 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us ...

Who's afraid of realism? 'Notes from Underground' by Fyodor Dostoevsky

02 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established ...

London Revisited: Mosaics, Archers and a Walled Garden

23 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

After Roman London was hit by a catastrophic fire in about 125 AD, perhaps the result of another local revolt, it entered a new period of sophisticati...

Narrative Poems: 'Venus and Adonis' and 'The Rape of Lucrece' by William Shakespeare

16 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Like Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare made good use of his time off when the theatres were shut for plague in 1593. 'Venus and Adonis' appeare...

Nature in Crisis: ‘The Light Eaters’ by Zoë Schlanger

09 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In The Light Eaters (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and re...

Who's afraid of realism? 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert (part two)

02 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on i...

London Revisited: Roman Beginnings

26 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The year London was founded will always be disputed, but the most recent archaeological evidence suggests the Romans had created the first settlement ...

Narrative Poems: 'Hero and Leander' by Christopher Marlowe

19 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

'Hero and Leander' was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author...

Nature in Crisis: ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson

12 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th centur...

Who's afraid of realism?: 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert (part one)

06 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. T...

The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes

31 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and ...

Novel Approaches: ‘New Grub Street’ by George Gissing

29 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast o...

Novel Approaches: ‘New Grub Street’ by George Gissing

29 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast o...

Novel Approaches: 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens

24 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when...

Novel Approaches: ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens

24 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when...

Love and Death: Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mick Imlah

22 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James B...

Fiction and the Fantastic: A Taxonomy

15 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Though the last twelve episodes have taken Marina Warner and her interlocutors through many worlds and texts, no series could ever encompass the full ...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

08 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthou...

Novel Approaches: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ by Thomas Hardy

01 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impove...

Next Year on Close Readings: Realism, Nature, Narrative Poems and a history of London

29 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year: ‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and gu...

Love and Death: Thom Gunn and Paul Muldoon

24 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Thom Gunn’s career as an elegist was tied closely to the onset of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, during which he saw many of his friends die. Despi...

Fiction and the Fantastic: Two Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin

17 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When the polymorphous writer Ursula K. Le Guin died in 2018, she left behind novels, short stories, poetry, essays, manifestos and French and Chinese ...

'The Sovereignty of Good' by Iris Murdoch

10 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son’s choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effo...

Novel Approaches: ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson

03 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped began life serialised in a children’s magazine, but its sophistication and depth won the lifelong admiration ...

Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Auden, Arnold and Schuyler

27 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When poets elegise other poets, the results are often more about self-scrutiny and analysis of the nature of poetry than about grief. Matthew Arnold c...

Fiction and the Fantastic: J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter

19 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both ...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Fall' by Albert Camus

13 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired Frenc...

Novel Approaches: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James

05 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Ar...

Love and Death: 'Surge' by Jay Bernard and 'In Nearby Bushes' by Kei Miller

29 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known ...

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington

21 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Leonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, h...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir

15 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the...

Novel Approaches: ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope

07 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bo...

Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy

31 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a w...

Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

24 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer wh...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre

17 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What is an emotion? In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written a...

Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens

11 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooz...

Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson

03 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or ...

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley

28 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary She...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger

21 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole...

Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot

14 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘d...

Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more

07 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Wa...

Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg

02 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documen...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James

23 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William Ja...

Novel Approaches: 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

16 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘...

Love and Death: 'In Memoriam' by Tennyson

09 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was...

Fiction and the Fantastic: Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen

03 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained pa...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche

26 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rathe...

Novel Approaches: ‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell

19 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relat...

Love and Death: Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more

12 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath im...

Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Franz Kafka

04 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has com...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley

28 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradle...

Novel Approaches: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray

21 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’...

Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell and Bishop

14 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwini...

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll

07 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill

31 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preo...

Novel Approaches: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë

24 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar...

Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray

17 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Writ...

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino

10 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossi...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

03 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely...

Novel Approaches: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock

24 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle ...

Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop

17 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle betwe...

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, an...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach

03 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-cent...

Novel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen

28 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness,...

Love and Death: Milton's 'Lycidas'

20 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Milton wrote ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, at the age of 29, to commemorate the drowning of the poet Edward King. As well as a great pastoral elegy, it is a ...

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’

13 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Thousand and One Nights is an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation...

Conversations in Philosophy: 'Fear and Trembling' by Søren Kierkegaard

06 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most ...

Introducing ‘Novel Approaches’

05 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics...

Introducing ‘Love and Death’

04 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry introduce Love and Death, a new Close Readings series on elegy from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss why th...

Introducing ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’

03 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Marina Warner is joined by Anna Della Subin to introduce Fiction and the Fantastic, a new Close Readings series running through 2025. Marina describes...

Introducing 'Conversations in Philosophy'

02 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

James Wood and Jonathan Rée introduce their new Close Readings series, Conversations in Philosophy, running throughout 2025. They explain the title o...

Political Poems: ‘Little Gidding’ by T.S. Eliot

28 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out ...

Among the Ancients II: Marcus Aurelius

24 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For their final conversation Among the Ancients, Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones turn to the contradictions of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher M...

Medieval LOLs: Gwerful Mechain’s ‘Ode to the Vagina’

18 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For the final episode of their series in search of the medieval sense of humour Irina and Mary look at one of the most remarkable women authors of the...

Coming next year on Close Readings

16 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As our Close Readings series come to an end this year, you’re probably wondering what’s coming in 2025. We’re delighted to announce there’ll b...

Human Conditions: ‘Sister Outsider’ by Audre Lorde

10 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the final episode of Human Conditions, Brent and Adam turn to Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, a collection of prose with exceptional relevance t...

On Satire: 'A Far Cry from Kensington' by Muriel Spark

04 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the final episode of their series, Colin and Clare arrive at Muriel Spark, who would never have considered herself a satirist though her writing w...

Political Poems: ‘Station Island’ by Seamus Heaney

28 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As an undergraduate, Seamus Heaney visited Station Island several times, an ancient pilgrimage site traditionally associated with St Patrick and purg...

Among the Ancients II: Apuleius

24 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Apuleius’ ‘Metamorphoses’, better known as ‘The Golden Ass’, is the only ancient Roman novel to have survived in its entirety. Following t...

Medieval LOLs: 'Tales of Count Lucanor' by Juan Manuel

18 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If you’re looking for advice on sustaining a marriage, or robbing a grave, or performing liver surgery, then a series of self-help stories by a 14th...

Human Conditions: ‘Black Music’ by Amiri Baraka

10 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 'Black Music', a collection of essays, liner notes and interviews from 1959 to 1967, Amiri Baraka captures the ferment, energy and excitement of th...

On Satire: 'A Handful of Dust' by Evelyn Waugh

04 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no...

Political Poems: 'The Prelude' (books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth

28 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for...

Among the Ancients II: Juvenal

24 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, we tackle Juvenal, whose sixteen satires influenced libertines, neoclassicists and early Christian moralists alike. Conservative to a...

Medieval LOLs: Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, Part Two

18 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Mary and Irina resume their discussion of Boccaccio’s Decameron, focusing on three stories of female agency, deception and desire. Alibech, an aspi...

Human Conditions: ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ by Aimé Césaire

10 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Brent Hayes Edwards talks to Adam about Aimé Césaire's 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century anti-colonial thou...

On Satire: 'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde

04 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

By the end of 1895 Oscar Wilde’s life was in ruins as he sat in Reading Gaol facing public disgrace, bankruptcy and, two years later, exile. Just te...

Political Poems: 'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice

28 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In his long 1938 poem, Louis MacNeice took many of the ideals shared by other young writers of his time – a desire for relevance, responsiveness and...

Among the Ancients II: Tacitus

24 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Annals, Tacitus’ study of the emperors from Tiberius to Nero, covers some of the most vivid and ruthless episodes in Roman history. A masterclas...

Medieval LOLs: Boccaccio's 'Decameron', Part One

18 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to t...

Human Conditions: ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ by W.E.B. Du Bois

10 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam discuss the ‘ur-text of Black political philosophy’, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Spanning autobiogra...

On Satire: Byron's 'Don Juan'

04 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acrop...

Political Poems: 'Goblin Market' by Christina Rossetti, feat. Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones

28 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose...

Among the Ancients II: Lucan

24 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero....

Medieval LOLs: 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle'

18 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curio...

Human Conditions: ‘Hope against Hope’ by Nadezhda Mandelstam

10 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in e...

On Satire: Jane Austen's 'Emma'

04 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sen...