N for Novels

The piano has played a starring role in some the nation's best loved novels, acting as a signifier of everything from social class to seduction. Professor John Mullan guides listeners through some of the most memorable novelistic piano moments, starting with Jane Austen's Persuasion - where the piano finds itself at the centre of a plot typically fraught with issues of class and gender, then on to Emily Bronte's Jane Eyre, where Blanche Ingram puts the piano to use as a 19th century flirtation technique in her quest to impress the brooding Mr Rochester. In EM Forster's A Room with a View and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, it's the experience of listening to the piano - or not listening to it - that enables the novelists to shine a revealing light on their characters. Featuring Juliet Stevenson.