Gretchen Rubin is one of America’s best known and best-loved writers on how to be happy. She published her evergreen classic The Happiness Project in 2009, and it was an instant hit. She’s followed it with many more books on the habits of happiness, and she’s also co-host of a hit podcast Happier, which she hosts with her sister, the writer Elizabeth Craft.

Today we’re talking about Gretchen’s take on Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s only novel, which is packed with sometimes brilliant and sometimes merely glib aphorisms and witticisms. We talk about why pithy sayings are so appealing, whether they are ever really true, and why Wilde was so obsessed with this kind of writing. A companion episode to episode 63 on the book itself.

Mentioned on this episode:

Gretchen Rubin: The Happiness Project, Life in Five Senses, Happier and Home and Secrets of Adulthood.

Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft: Happier the podcast.

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel, and it caused a sensation. It was used as evidence in Wilde’s trial for the crime of “gross indecency” in 1895. The conceit of the story is famous – a portrait grows old and corrupt while its human subject remains eternally youthful. But who knows what really happens in this famous modern myth?

Sophie and Jonty talk about the influence of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Jonty throws around some exciting legal phrases like the Criminal Law Amendment Act. There’s plenty of discussion of Wilde’s personal obsession with home interiors, as well as a debate about why Wilde is so indebted to Dickens when he’s always going on about his contempt for matters of morality. Find out how a novel that is quintessentially about London is also about Wilde’s Irish identity, and what kind of wallpaper Oscar Wilde had in his student digs at Oxford. As the arch-aphorist and aesthetic rogue Henry Wotton would say, this podcast episode “has all the surprise of candour,” so find out what really happens in this legendary modern myth.

Books referenced or mentioned in this episode:

Oscar Wilde: A LIfe (2021) by Matthew Sturgis

Sodomy on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde Times (2012) by Morris B Kaplan

Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)

Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” and “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889)

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)

Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864); Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870); Around the World in Eighty Days (1872)

Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

H.G. Wells The Time Machine (1895) War of the Worlds (1898)

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Jill Lepore is one of America’s most renowned intellectuals. She’s Professor not only of American History, but also of Law at Harvard University; she's a staff writer at the New Yorker, and still finds time to write some of the most renowned history books of the 21st Century, including the magisterial and monumental These Truths: A History of the United States, the brilliant Secret History of Wonder Woman and Sophie’s personal favourite, a history of King Phillip’s War and the origins of American identity.

For the first 100 days of the new US presidency, Jill Lepore turned to the classics-- the Penguin Little Black Classics to be exact. In these miniature volumes of great writing, Jill found the imaginative intelligence, resilience and sense of ordinary pleasures she needed to abide with what's going on across America -- and at Harvard specifically -- as a result of Trump's turbulent regime. Listen and learn how the classics reconnect us with deep truths that we might "hold to be self-evident," but which have so often been under threat across human history.

Books mentioned in this episode and published in Penguin Little Black Classics:

The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio (~1350)

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire," Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)

Anon. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue (late 13C)

Wailing Ghosts, Pu Songling (c.1640)

"A Modest Proposal," Jonathan Swift (1727)

Tang Dynasty Poets (c8C)

"On the Beach at Night Alone," Walt Whitman (1856)

A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, Kenko (13C)

"The Eve of St Agnes," John Keats (1819)

"Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls," Marco Polo (c1300)

"Caligula," Suetonius (121 CE)

"Olalla," Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)

The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)

"Trimalchio's Feast", Petronius (c.60 CE)

Inferno, Dante (14C)

"The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale," Geoffrey Chaucer (c1390)

Essais, Michel de Montaigne (1580)

"The Beautifull Cassandra," Jane Austen (1788)

Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey

"The Maldive Shark," Herman Melville (1888)

Socrates’ Defence, Plato (399 BCE)

"Goblin Market," Christina Rossetti (1862)

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Few writers have blurred the boundaries between life and art quite so spectacularly as Oscar Wilde. In his writing, he challenged the moral standards of the time, advocated for Irish Nationalism and demanded tolerance of homosexuality. He wrote about decadence and the corruption of youth before going out in a fireball of scandal of his own making, his reputation shattered in the infamous trial that followed.

So, was Oscar Wilde the great genius of his day or just a rather talented man with a knack for publicity? Was he a martyr in the history of gay activism, or just a self-absorbed pain in the arse? These are just some of the questions Sophie and Jonty are asking in the first of a four part series on Oscar Wilde.

In this first episode, they look at his early years and how cultural and political movements of the time shaped his first great work - the seemingly timeless fairy-tales of The Happy Prince and Other Stories. Into these stories, Wilde condensed years of scholarship, literary criticism and the development of a personal aesthetic and philosophy. It is a short book and deceptively simple because these stories - like all the best fairytales - conceal deeper truths about human experience. Most importantly, through them Wilde found his voice as a writer, unleashing the extraordinary creative outpouring of the following ten years.

Texts referred to:

Oscar: A Life (2018) by Matthew Sturgis

Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll

Children’s and Household Tales (1812) by the Brothers Grimm

Doctor Faustus (c.1594) Christopher Marlowe

Patience (1881) by Gilbert and Sullivan (extract from 1961 recording with John Reed)

Study of the Greek Poets (1873) by JA Symonds

Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) by Walter Pater

Social Life in Greece (1874) by John Pentland Mahaffy

David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens

Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens

Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker

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Jilly Cooper’s Rivals (1988) is the ultimate bonkbuster - a story of professional rivalry in the Cotswold’s fast-set with lashings of sex thrown in. It follows a wide cast of characters as they jostle for power, conduct affairs with one another’s spouses, eat terrible 1980s food and listen endlessly to Chris de Burgh’s Lady in Red.

Rivals was marketed as an airport book back in the day, but beneath the brash cover is a sophisticated story that draws in surprising ways from classic literature to create what is now considered to be a modern classic.

Sophie and Jonty why they are so drawn to Rivals, what we can learn about the 1980s from reading it today, and the ways in which it engages with a wide range of literary influences, including Austen, Trollope and Yeats, but also Valley of the Dolls and the works of Jackie Collins and Danielle Steele.

BOOKS DISCUSSED/ALLUDED TO:

Rivals (1988) by Jilly Cooper

Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen

The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) by WB Yeats

A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975) by Anthony Powell

Barchester Towers (1857) by Anthony Trollope

Possession (1990) by AS Byatt

Oscar and Lucinda (1988) by Peter Carey

Bilgewater (1977) by Jane Gardam

Middlemarch (1872) by George Eliot

Cocktail (1988) screenplay by Heywood Gould

Lady in Red (1986) by Chris de Burgh

Valley of the dolls (1966) by Jacqueline Susann

The Bitch (1979) by Jackie Collins

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The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest surviving works of literature - an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, stitched together from fragments going back as far as 2100BCE. It tells the story of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, his friendship with the wild man Enkidu, and his attempts to come to terms with his own mortality. Although incomplete, the essence of the story - and many passages - are preserved thanks to the work of dedicated Assyriologists past and present.

To discuss this extraordinary work, Sophie and Jonty are joined by Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Underland (2019) and now Is A River Alive? (2025). Rob has been obsessed with Gilgamesh for many years - what it has to tell us about humanity and the environment.

BOOKS REFERRED TO:

The Epic of Gilgamesh (1999) translated by Andrew George

Gilgamesh: A New English Version (2004) by Stephen Mitchell

Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (2021) by Sophus Helle

We Have Never Been Modern (1991) by Bruno Latour

Camera Lucida (1981) by Roland Barthes

Civilization and its Discontents (1930) by Sigmund Freud

The Country and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams

People of the River (2021) by Grace Karskens

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Emily Dickinson is probably the most famous female poet in the world. And yet – at least according to Dickinson mythology – her work could easily have gone unpublished. She wrote 1800 poems but published only 10 in her lifetime. Instead, she bound them into little bundles of paper, tied with kitchen string. These were found after her death by her sister Lavinia and after many stops and starts the first collection was published in 1890 by her friend and mentor, the critic and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It was an instant hit with 11 editions in less than 2 years.

The spontaneity and freshness of the poems appealed to readers, as well as their fragmentary, transient, unfinished quality, as though they were moments of thought or feeling, grabbed out of thin air.

She wrote about death and life, ordinary objects, the natural world, light, air, love and god with a kind of improvisational vim that proved timeless.

The legend of Dickinson is more flamboyant than the writing, which is precise, miniaturist and modest. In this episode Sophie and Jonty talk about the relationship between Dickinson’s world in Amherst and her world on the scraps and fragments of paper she wrote on; the tensions between her reclusive persona and her prolific and highly professional writing life; her disdaining publication and her making sure that it would happen, and the ambiguities of her most intimate relationships. How has such a quiet and unforthcoming poet destined to become one of the most relatable, personal and confessional voices in the history of world poetry?

Books etc referred to in this episode:

Martha Ackmann These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

Cristanne Miller and Karen Sánchez-Eppler Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson

Diana Fuss The Sense of An Interior

Lisa Brooks The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte, “No Coward Soul Am I”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and On Heroes

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod

Isaac Watts, Hymns

Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department.

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