37: Rewriting the Script: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath with her acclaimed biographer Heather Clark

There is nothing more exciting than seeing children captivated by the magic of stories, and for many of us there’s no better children’s storyteller than Rosemary Sutcliff. Rebeka Russell, publisher of Manderley Press, joins us to share her enthusiasm for the author who inspired her love of literature at a young age and reads from her favourite of Sutcliff’s many books, The Armourer’s House. Our second guest, Sam Leith, author of The Haunted Wood: The History of Childhood Reading, then takes us into the enchanted world of children’s books and we discuss the importance of both childhood reading and reading to children. Sam’s insights into the development of stories, from oral storytelling to myths, legends, folklore and fairytales, are fascinating and explain how the endless retelling of stories lies at the core of children’s books. The themes that run through such books (adventures, escape from the structure of adult life and facing the dangerous world on your own) resonate throughout Sutcliff’s work. Although she did not learn to read until she was 9, her mother read Celtic and Saxon legends to her, which fed her imagination and inspired her love of folklore and history. As a child Rosemary suffered from chronic juvenile arthritis and as a result was severely disabled. Like other authors with a difficult childhood, her books always feature a character who is different and is often left on the sidelines, and in her signature she incorporated a dolphin as a symbol of freedom. Initially trained as an artist and miniaturist, she had an extraordinary attention to detail which is reflected in her books’ vivid descriptions of both people and places. From the perfection of her memoir Blue Remembered Hills (available from Slightly Foxed) to her historical novels about the Roman occupation of Britain, the Dark Ages, and Norman and Tudor times, Sutcliff’s extraordinary imagination lives on in the canon of children’s writing. This episode’s recommended reads were Carlo Rovelli’s On the Equality of All Things, Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s autobiography A British Childhood and Susan Hill’s series featuring the detective Simon Serailler.

The Mitfords continue to fascinate us, thanks to the witty novels, biographies and letters they wrote, their political involvement on both left and right, and their brush with world history. Rarely a year goes by without another Mitford documentary, film or television series, a volume of letters or a biography. In our latest podcast our emphasis moves from the girls to their mother – matriarch of one of the most outrageous, controversial, influential, glamorous and intriguing families of the twentieth century. Sydney Redesdale (née Bowles), known by her family as ‘Muv’, was never going to have a conventional life. Her mother died when she was 7, and from the age of 14 she ran her father’s house. She fell in love with David Mitford (later Lord Redesdale) as a teenager and they married in 1904. Of their seven children, Nancy, Pamela, Tom, Diana, Jessica, Unity and Debo, two became bestselling authors, one was imprisoned and two lost their lives as a result of the Second World War, and their political views ranged from fascism to communism. Sydney was the original Mitford girl, from whom much of her daughters’ legendary strong will, self-confidence and extremism was born. Nancy’s satires of aristocratic life between the wars, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, portray Sydney as Aunt Sadie, vague and rather disconnected, but in fact Sydney was a divisive character and her daughters squabbled about the nature of the ‘real Muv’ for even longer than they argued about their own political differences. Our guests on this podcast are two modern Mitfordians, Rachel Trethewey, biographer, historian and author of Muv: The Story of the Mitford Girls’ Mother, and Frances Donnelly, broadcaster, writer and contributor to Slightly Foxed. Alongside discussion of Sydney and the difficulties of writing about someone with whom you disagree and find hard to like at times, the guests and our editors choose their favourite Mitford titles. Summer reading recommendations include R. C. Sheriff’s The Fortnight in September and Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June.

Norman Lewis, who died in 2003 at the age of 95, was one of the twentieth century’s most adventurous travellers and one of its most brilliant and compelling writers. He was also prolific, producing fifteen novels, twenty highly praised travel books and hundreds of influential newspaper articles. So why isn’t he better-known today? The Slightly Foxed team put this question to Julian Evans, a distinguished writer and traveller himself, author most recently of Undefeatable: Odessa in Love and War, and of Semi Invisible Man, the definitive biography of Norman Lewis. Julian took his title directly from his subject, who described himself as a ‘semi-invisible man’, a watcher from the sidelines who hated personal publicity. It was a lesson Norman learned from a hard childhood in which, as a clever boy growing up in the North London suburbs, he was severely bullied at school. His spiritualist parents, shattered by the deaths of his two older brothers, sent him to stay for some time with his Welsh grandfather and three disturbingly eccentric aunts, an interlude he described in his autobiography Jackdaw Cake.

Wartime bomber pilot, champion jockey, racing journalist, bestselling novelist, Dick Francis truly was a legend. The Slightly Foxed team join Dick’s son Felix and renowned racing commentator Derek Thompson (‘Tommo’ to his fans) to talk about the modest man who left school at 15 but went on to write thrillers set in the world of racing that have sold more than 60 million copies in 35 languages. Dick grew up with horses and riding was in his blood, though he didn’t become a professional jockey until he was 26, an age when many jockeys are retiring. But he quickly became one of the most successful National Hunt jockeys (and Champion Jockey in 1953–4), riding winners for top owners including the Queen and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. And it was the spectacular collapse of the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch beneath him on the point of winning the Grand National in 1956 that finally persuaded Dick to retire from racing and begin a new career, first as a journalist and then as a writer of endlessly inventive crime fiction. So how did he do it? The novels, with their evocative titles – Dead Cert, Decider, Bolt, Hot Money – take you straight into the world of old-fashioned racing with its toffs and touts and inevitable shady characters. According to Felix, the writing of them was always a partnership, with Dick, a born storyteller, producing the plots and the atmosphere and his wife Mary as brilliant researcher and editor. Felix, too, helped with writing and research, and after Dick’s death in 2010 he was persuaded by Dick’s literary agent to keep the Francis ‘brand’ alive. He is now the author of 19 bestselling ‘Dick Francis’ novels, bringing the racing scene up to date with a female jockey as the heroine of his latest, Dark Horse. Along with Dick Francis’s story of talent, courage and sheer determination – one he told himself in his autobiography The Sport of Queens – the team enjoyed added anecdotes and insights into the world of racing from ‘Tommo’, and an ending that had us on the edge of our seats.

There has never been a literary family quite like the Brontës. In our autumn podcast Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth in Yorkshire, joined the Slightly Foxed team to discuss the story of the family’s life there.