The first episode of this six-part series on the English novel looks at the role of the novel through the lens of female emancipation. Readings and contributions from award-winning contemporary novelists and experts to bring literary and historical context to some of the most influential novels ever written. Since Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela, published in 1740, the novel has been a predominantly female literary form, offering more opportunities to women writers than any other and turning a powerful lens on the full range and depth of women's lives. Yet novels that explore women's stories, characters and emotions have often been attacked as frivolous - and sometimes even by women themselves. However they are only frivolous to people for whom love, sex, friendship, family are trivial matters. There have been plenty of serious female novelists too, from George Eliot and Middlemarch to Constance Maud's propaganda novel No Surrender. The novel can be a powerful tool of social change as this series will show.
The second episode of this six part series looks at Women's rights which have been at the heart of so many of the most influential English novels. Using performed readings and with contributions from contemporary novelists and critics the series explores the power that novels continue to have today. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale has long been a famous rallying cry for feminism. The battle for women's suffrage was the subject of the propagandist novel No Surrender, written by Constance Maud in 1911. Powerful works like this were largely forgotten until feminist imprints like Virago republished them in the 1970s. And the rediscovery and the reprinting of Afro-American novelists such as, Alice Walker and her lacerating The Color Purple have brought issues of female emancipation to a whole new generation of readers all around the world.
This third episode of the series begins with one of the most famous portrayals of the poor and the destitute - Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, published in 1837. The story of class and social division has been a driving narrative since the very first novels in English appeared. Using performed readings and with contributions from contemporary novelists and critics the series explores the power that novels had in the past and still have today. This third episode of the series begins with one of the most famous portrayals of the poor and the destitute - Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, published in 1837. The 'Condition of England' novel, by British novelists such as Dickens,
Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell, whose Mary Barton is set in the industrial North of England, drew sharp attention to and pity for the lives lived by the have-nots in a 'two-nation' society. But, though sympathetic, these novels fell short of offering support for the aims of working-class movements. By the the next century, though, the voices of the workers had grown in strength and novels such as Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, published in 1914, pressed not just for reform and social change to take root.
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