A special bonus episode about the blockbuster phenom of Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday celebrations. Sophie’s guest is Professor Devoney Looser, one of the world’s leading Austen scholars, and the author of the brilliant Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, about the unscripted, occasionally unhinged world that Jane Austen really knew, and which influenced her writing.

We talk about why the Austen obsession has only gone from strength to strength, and Devoney looks ahead to Austenmania in 2026, with new screen adaptations coming to delight the fans.

Get the Book:

Devoney Looser, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, St Martin’s Press, 2025.

More fun coverage:

From Alexandra Schwartz, a SLOB guest, in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/jane-austens-uncommon-compassion

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/16/books/jane-austen-250th-birthday.html

Listen to our episode about Mrs. Dalloway with Alex Schwartz

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Best Valentine’s Day ever! SLOB’s “Wuthering Heights” watch-party. Sophie and Jonty take it character by character – inanimate characters included — to decide who are the winners and who are the losers in the Fennell-Robbie-Elordi mash-up adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel. And in the episode’s gripping second half they move onto the really meaty questions: race, class, sex, domestic violence, and pets.

As the movie poster says, Come Undone - with SLOB - this Valentine's season.

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Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast

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The storm clouds are gathering in anticipation of the Valentine’s Day release of Emerald Fennell’s raunchy film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The film has been described by one critic as “very horny, very sumptuous, and very demented.” Margot Robbie looks set to change the way we read this beloved classic, well, if not forever, for a few weeks during awards season.

It’s fair to say that anyone remotely connected to the world of classic literature is standing by, getting ready to jeer.

And it’s also fair to say that the film has propelled Wuthering Heights to become the most read classic of 2026. The New York subway, the London Tube and many other transport systems worldwide are dotted with earnest young people, proudly nose-deep in their Penguin Wuthering Heights.

If SLOB has a motto, it’s be prepared. To ready our devoted listeners for the big V. Day release, we’ve recorded a brand-new episode on Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte’s novel, which may just be the most unhinged, genre-busting, unputdownable classic in English, is back, bigger, better, and balmier than when SLOB recorded our first episode back at the very beginning of this podcast.

We drink deep, but always with our trademark cheeky humor, in Emily Bronte’s biography, the secrets behind the book’s writing, and why the Heathcliff-Catherine love-story it is most definitely not GOATED, as the kids say.

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Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast

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