Novel Approaches
Episodes
‘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...
'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...
‘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...
‘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 ...
‘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...
‘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...
'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens
10 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...
‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot
13 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...
'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
15 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, ‘...
‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell
18 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...
'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
20 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’...
‘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...
'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 ...
‘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 virtuou...
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...