Novel Approaches

Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and guests discuss a selection of 19th-century (mostly) English novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, looking in particular at the roles played in the books by money and property.

Novels covered:

Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen

Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray

North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell

Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot

Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens

The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) by Anthony Trollope

Washington Square (1880)/Portrait (1881) by Henry James

Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy

New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing

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Update frequency: every 27 days
Average duration: 22 minutes
Episodes: 10
Years Active: 2025

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‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope

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 Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victori…

00:16:22 | Sun 07 Sep 2025

'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens

'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 ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow…

00:17:27 | Sun 10 Aug 2025

‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot

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 ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the …

00:16:49 | Sun 13 Jul 2025

'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

‘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, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digr…

00:17:55 | Sun 15 Jun 2025

‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell

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 relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn roma…

00:25:04 | Sun 18 May 2025

'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout t…

00:32:52 | Sun 20 Apr 2025

‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë

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 depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘…

00:26:38 | Mon 24 Mar 2025

'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock

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 he rejects the expectation that novelists should rev…

00:34:59 | Mon 24 Feb 2025

‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen

On one level, ‘Mansfield Park’ is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814…

00:31:53 | Tue 28 Jan 2025

Introducing ‘Novel Approaches’

Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century Briti…

00:07:57 | Sun 05 Jan 2025

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