Episode description

Rejected by her usual publisher, Farewell Leicester Square is a novel by Betty Miller, written in 1935, exploring antisemitism, Jewishness and "marrying out". Marghanita Laski may now be best known for her contributions to broadcasting on programmes like The Brains Trust but was also a published author of many stories including The Victorian Chaise-Longue and Little Boy Lost. Both writers have now been republished by Persephone Books. Matthew Sweet's guests are the novelist Howard Jacobson, the academic Lisa Mullen and the author Lara Feigel. They explore the writers' lives and why they both abandoned writing fiction to focus on literary biographies. At the end of the discussion Howard Jacobson tells listeners “I very rarely hear people describing a novel that makes me want to read it - in fact if there is any listener out there who now does not want to read Marghanita Laski they are heartless.”

Producer: Fiona McLean

Betty Miller published 7 novels including Farewell Leicester Square and On the Side of the Angels (1945) and a biography of Robert Browning (1952). Marghanita Laski's books include To Bed with Grand Music (1946), Tory Heaven (1948), Little Boy Lost (1949), The Village (1952) and The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953), biographies of Jane Austen and George Eliot . She was also a prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

On the Free Thinking programme website you can find a collection of episodes exploring prose, poetry and drama including previous discussions featuring Howard Jacobson, Lara Feigel and Lisa Mullen