Tuesday 23 June 2009

Monday 22 June 2009

The Massacre featured on BBC R4's Today programme

You can listen to the feature about Inchbald's suppressed play The Massacre on Radio 4's Today programme:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8112000/8112223.stm

and you'll find a biography of Inchbald, with a bibliography, on the Chawton House Library website:

http://www.chawtonhouse.org/library/biographies/inchbald.html

Tuesday 9 June 2009

Elizabeth Inchbald in production

Last year the Theatre Royal Bury St. Edmunds toured productions of Elizabeth Inchbald's Wives as they were and Animal magnetism, and the Reading Group had an enjoyable evening watching them in the audience at the Haymarket, Basingstoke. These two productions were laugh-out-loud comedies and the success of this revival has led to the Theatre Royal reviving Inchbald's tragedy The Massacre:

http://secure.theatreroyal.org/PEO/site/theatre_info/index.php?nav=usp

The performances are from June 23 - 27 2009. Hopefully, it will go on tour and reach as wide as possible an audience.

Monday 8 June 2009

Orange news

A second posting today, as I catch up with news about women writers and readers - at the beginning of this month the Orange Prize was won by Marilynne Robinson and her novel Home http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/03/marilynne-robinson-orange-prize. This April I was in Iowa City for the British Women Writers Conference 2009 and had an interesting conversation with a woman over my supper one evening about the work of Marilynne Robinson. Robinson teaches at the University of Iowa and the city has a vibrant community of creative writers.

Dorothy Whipple on the BBC

I have just discovered that Radio 4 is running a series of readings from Dorothy Whipple's The Closed Door http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0084038. Persephone Books have re-published Whipple's books http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/pages/authors/?id=48 and their list includes The Closed Door http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/pages/titles/index.asp?id=105 among other titles including the increasingly popular Someone at a Distance. The episode I listened to was 'Family crisis', a story in which an unmarried daughter in her late 20s can no longer be taken for granted.