The Secret Life of Books

Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and Great Expectations are just a few of the classic works of fiction that we all know and love. But how well do we really know them? In this series, presenters revisit original manuscripts and diaries of the authors themselves to reveal new insights into classic literature.

10 Votes (7.4)

2014 HD 30min United Kingdom English Ended
Documentary

Credits:

S1E1 - Great Expectations 2014-09-02

Great Expectations has often been considered one of Charles Dickenss greatest works. EastEnders screenwriter Tony Jordan explores Dickenss success as a serial writer and how Dickens could never keep his own personal problems out of his novels.

S1E2 - Shakespeare's First Folio 2014-09-09

Actor Simon Russell Beale has dedicated most of his professional life to the work of one man: The Bard, William Shakespeare. In Shakespeares time, original manuscripts were thrown away, so without The First Folio, many of Shakespeares works would have been lost forever.

S1E3 - Mrs Dalloway 2014-09-16

English writer Virginia Woolf is one of the most fascinating novelists of the twentieth century. Presenter Alexandra Harris explores Woolfs 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway and how the writing reflected the unstable society following the World War One.

S1E4 - The Mabinogion 2014-09-23

The Mabinogion is a collection of 11 ancient folk tales that is considered Wales most important contribution to European literature. Cerys Matthews explores the fascinating history of the collection and how it influenced fantasy such as J.R.R. Tolkiens Lord of the Rings.

S1E5 - Jane Eyre 2014-09-30

Novelist Bidisha Mamata first read Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre when she was a teenager and was captivated by Janes liberating journey into adulthood. But upon revisiting the book, Bidisha challenges the romanticism of Brontës classic novel.

S1E6 - Frankenstein 2014-11-02

Mary Shelleys Frankenstein has become synonymous monsters and the dangers of science without morals. Author and scientist Professor Alice Roberts returns to the original text to explore the myths of the novel and what Shelley originally intended Frankenstein to be about.

S2E1 - The Faerie Queene 2015-10-13

Dr Janina Ramirez unravels Edmund Spensers Elizabethan epic The Faerie Queene to reveal how this fantasy world of elves, nymphs and questing knights was written in the midst of the brutal Tudor occupation of Ireland, and how the writers growing disillusionment with the conflict was coded into the poems restless vers

S2E2 - Edward Lear's Nonsense Songs 2015-10-19

Nicholas Parsons, a lifelong fan of Edward Lear, revisits the book that gave the world The Owl and the Pussycat to explore the fine line between joy and melancholy in Lears writing and discover how the epileptic, bronchial, asthmatic depressive pioneered a new kind of poetry that married brilliant wordplay with astonishing artwork.

S2E3 - The Mill on the Floss 2015-10-25

Multi-award-winning actor and director Fiona Shaw explores the genesis of her all-time favourite book, The Mill on the Floss, and discovers how the scandal that caused George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans) to take a male pen name was also played out in the plot of her classic novel about a womans thwarted intellectual ambitions and conflicting sexual desires.

S2E4 - Confessions of an English Opium Eater 2015-11-02

Performance poet and former heroin addict John Cooper Clarke explores Thomas de Quinceys autobiographical classic Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and discovers how his fellow Mancunians addiction memoir avoids the cliches of modern misery-lit in favour of something much more unsentimental and psychologically complex.

S2E5 - Cider with Rosie 2015-11-09

Best-selling chronicler of modern country life, Joanna Trollope traces the roots of her favourite book Cider with Rosie to uncover how Laurie Lee blended fact and fiction in his wistful elegy to a disappeared rural world - and reflect on why a book with such dark, hard-edged undercurrents continues to have such a popular appeal.

S2E6 - Swallows and Amazons 2015-11-16

Former journalist and keen amateur sailor John Sergeant takes to the water in the wake of the plucky young heroes of Arthur Ransomes Swallows and Amazons, and learns how a globe-trotting foreign correspondent and acquaintance of Lenin and Trotsky came to perfect a new, more authentic kind of childrens literature that featured real children doing real things in real places.