The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies who may or may not have been called Homer. Leaving aside these mysteries, what is the Odyssey really about, why is it so violent and why is Odysseus himself - the lord of the lies - such an unlikeable hero?

Who better to navigate this intellectual Scylla and historical Charybdis than the world’s best-loved classicist Mary Beard? Sophie and Jonty listen in admiration as Mary describes discovering The Odyssey aged 14 - a self-proclaimed swot with aspirations to be scruffy and cool (or, in Sophie’s parlance, a ‘dag’). How it - or at least the several incidents in which Odysseus’ wife Penelope is told to shut up and go to her room by her own son - inspired Mary’s best-selling book Women and Power. And how the whole poem, which begins with the word ἄνδρα (man), is a riff on toxic masculinity millenia before Andrew Tate was even in a twinkle in Zeus’ eye.

And listen, pithy mortals, to Jonty as he repeatedly mangles Ancient Greek names, particularly the ‘Laestrygonians’, to Sophie as she - for the first time in this podcast - tries and fails to make a convincing link to The Reformation, and to all of us as we advocate the benefits of an oil rubdown every evening.

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink

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Further Reading:

Emily Wilson, trans, The Odyssey

Mary Beard books:
Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2019)

Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2013)

The Parthenon by Mary Beard (Harvard University Press, 2002)

Support the show

Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.

Co-hosts Sophie and Jonty bare all in a bonus SLoB live ep! After months of rummaging through the dirty laundry of the great writers, it is only fair that we turn a critical eye back upon ourselves - and reveal the secret life of the Secret Life of Books.

In this bonus episode, recorded to mark our official launch before a live audience in Sydney’s iconic Gleebooks, Sophie and Jonty get raw. After briefly discussing why we started SLoB and why the classics matter, we get down to the serious questions: which literary character do we most fancy? Who would we least like to be stuck in a lift with? And who, out of Jonty and Sophie, makes the best bolognese?

Discover why, despite being published by Penguin ‘Classics’, Morrissey’s Autobiography is not and never will be a classic. While Sophie admits to a reading gap so embarrassing it will surely - SURELY - end her career as an English professor. Which book will it be? Listen to find out.

This episode - unashamedly, nay proudly, self-indulgent - is the closest to a mission statement we’ll ever do, so strap yourselves in to discover (drum-roll) the secret life of the Secret Life of Books.


-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/

bluesky: @secretlifeofbookspodcast

Recommended reading:

Henry James, Wings of the Dove
Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Support the show

Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.

Henry Tilney: is he yet another of Jane Austen’s Bad Men, or the stealth MVP with his interest in dress fabrics and interior decorating? Northanger Abbey is Austen’s funniest, most unabashedly joyful and silly novel. It’s also where Jane gets meta – with lots of speeches about what novels are and why we love reading them.

Sophie makes the case that Catherine Morland is the most under-rated heroine in the Austen canon, an upbeat Fanny Price without the sad backstory. Jonty enthuses about the hero Henry Tilney’s interest in gothic fiction, and admits to having a soft spot for the ghastly John Thorpe, the fast-driving, hard-drinking braggart who gets in the way of Catherine’s path to happiness. Despite this, Sophie and Jonty wish him well and will indulge in a side-argument about the likely name of his future wife.

And there’s more! Austen was a secret revolutionary, embedding all sorts of ideas about world revolutions and slave rebellions into this charming novel. We talk about whether Austen's famous satire on gothic novels, the massive bestsellers of the 1790s, is in fact the greatest, and most bestselling gothic novel of them all.

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

X: @SLOBpodcast

@sophieggee

@ClaypoleJonty

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/

Further Reading:

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, intro. Claudia Johnson (Oxford, 2003)

Clare Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, (1997)

Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings, (1995). A great book about the female novelists who influenced Austen, discussed in this episode.

Rachel Cohen, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, (FSG, 2020)

Tom Keymer, Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics (Oxford, 2020)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” (Critical Inquiry 1991)

Support the show

Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.