Olivia Laing on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
In Conversation with Michael Kelleher for the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher.
Mike chats with Olivia Laing, winner of a 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, about the strange and confounding (and wonderful) pleasures of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.
For a full episode transcript, click here.
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Reading list:
Villette by Charlotte Brontë • Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy • The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
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From the episode:
Olivia Laing: She [Lucy Snow] has this very strange way of telling you things where she tells you a fantasy and then she says, “you can believe that.” And you go, “Oh, okay, Lucy. So it wasn’t like that at all, but you’re not gonna let me know.” She forces you to become a detective. And I think the reason I love this book, one of the many reasons, is it forces you to be a very active reader. You have to, all the time, weigh up everything everyone tells you, everything she tells you, and work out whether it’s true or not.
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Olivia Laing is the author of several books of nonfiction and fiction including The Garden Against Time and the forthcoming The Silver Book. The Lonely City (2016) was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and has been translated into 14 languages. The Trip to Echo Spring (2013) was a finalist for both the Costa Biography Award and the Gordon Burn PrizeLaing lives in Cambridge, England, and writes on art and culture for many publications, including The Guardian, The New Statesman, and The New York Times. Her debut novel Crudo was published by Picador and W. W. Norton & Company in June 2018.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
