The Literary Life Podcast

On today’s episode of The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina and Thomas wrap up their series on the satirical comedy Tartuffe by Jean-Baptiste Moliere. If you want to listen in to the read along of this play, you can view replays on the readings on the House of Humane Letters YouTube channel. Angelina and Thomas start off the conversation on the play reviewing the idea of enchantment and the classical structural elements of this play as suggested by Aristotle. We finally meet Tartuffe himself, and Angelina and Thomas both cringe and laugh at his over-the-top antics.

Check out the schedule for the podcast’s summer episodes on our Upcoming Events page.

In June Mr. Banks will be teaching a 5-day class on St. Augustine, and in July Dr. Jason Baxter will be teaching a class on Dostoevsky. Angelina will also be teaching a class on Harry Potter in August! Also, don’t miss the launch the HHL publishing wing, Cassiodorus Press! Sign up for the newsletter at HouseofHumaneLetters.comto stay in the know about all the exciting new things we have coming up!

Commonplace Quotes:

Moliere…reached perfection through a strange apprenticeship of vagabondage following an excellent middle-class birth among the tradesmen of Paris, imprisoned for debt, tramping the roads with the strolling players, starting his own small theater and failing, meeting men of every kind…In that knowledge he became a master.

Hilaire Belloc, from Monarchy: A Study of Louis XIV

A man is angry at a libel because it is false but at a satire because it is true.

G. K. Chesterton

Fools are my theme. Let satire be my song.

Lord Byron The Burial of Moliere

By Andrew Lang

“Dark and amusing he is, this handsome gallant, Of chamois-polished charm, Athlete and dancer of uncommon talent— Is there cause for alarm In his smooth demeanor, the proud tilt of his chin, This cavaliere servente, this Harlequin? “Gentle and kindly this other, ardent but shy, With an intelligence Who would not glory to be guided by— And would it not make sense To trust in someone so devoted, so Worshipful as this tender, pale Pierrot? “Since both of them delight, if I must choose I win a matchless mate, But by that very winning choice I lose— I pause, I hesitate, Putting decision off,” says Columbine, “And while I hesitate, they both are mine.” Book List:

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

Don Juan by Moliere

Don Juan by Lord Byron

Enthusiasm by Ronald Knox

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks delve into a new literary series as we read the comedic play Tartuffe by Jean-Baptiste Moliere. If you want to listen in to the read along of this play, you can view replays on the readings on the House of Humane Letters YouTube channel. Thomas begins the conversation on this play by setting up the cultural and literary context in which Moliere was working, as well as some more biographical background on the author and actor himself. Angelina points out some differences between satire and didacticism. She and Thomas also talk about the influence of Roman comedy in Moliere’s playwriting.

Angelina introduces Act 1 with a question of how Moliere shows the audience what to think of Tartuffe before the character himself ever comes on stage. Thomas talks a little about the characters we first meet, and Angelina highlights the references to enchantments as they read through key portions of these opening scenes. Join us again next week when we will finish up this entertaining play!

If you weren’t able to join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination“, you can still purchase the recordings and find out what you missed! Also, don’t miss the launch the HHL publishing wing, Cassiodorus Press! Sign up for the newsletter at HouseofHumaneLetters.com to stay in the know about all the exciting new things we have coming up!

Commonplace Quotes:

He had the comic vision of himself as well as of the rest of humanity. He might mock the vices of the world, but he could also mock himself for hating the world, in the spirit of a superior person, on account of its vices.

Robert Lynn, from his essay “Moliere” in Books and Authors

We think old books are strange; but we are the aliens.

Dr. Jason Baxter The Burial of Moliere

By Andrew Lang

Dead–he is dead! The rouge has left a trace
On that thin cheek where shone, perchance, a tear,
Even while the people laughed that held him dear
But yesterday. He died,–and not in grace,
And many a black-robed caitiff starts apace
To slander him whose Tartuffe made them fear,
And gold must win a passage for his bier,
And bribe the crowd that guards his resting-place.

Ah, Moliere, for that last time of all,
Man’s hatred broke upon thee, and went by,
And did but make more fair thy funeral.
Though in the dark they hid thee stealthily,
Thy coffin had the cope of night for pall,
For torch, the stars along the windy sky!

Book List:

Menaechmi, or The Twin-Brothers by Plautus

Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to a new episode of The Literary Life podcast and an interview with special guest Dr. Vigen Guroian, retired professor of Religious Studies and Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia and author of twelve book and numerous scholarly articles. Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks discuss with Dr. Guroian the new edition of his book, Tending the Heart of Virtue. They start out talking about how the first edition of this book came about, which leads into a discussion about the current approach to fairy tales and children’s stories in both academia and the publishing industry.

Other topics of conversation include the problem with reducing stories down to a moral, story as mystery, the place of fairy tales in classical education, and the Biblical literacy of the authors of fairy tales. Dr. Guroian also shares his thoughts on people like John Ruskin and Rudyard Kipling. Finally, he shares some suggestions on finding good editions of fairy tale collections. (Scroll down for links to his book recommendations.)

Commonplace Quotes:

It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

C. S. Lewis, from Reflections on the Psalms

Reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.

C. S. Lewis

Inertia has served them so well that they did not know how to relinquish it.

E. M. Forster, from Pharos and Pharillon

“Happy children,” say I, “who could blunder into the very heart of the will of God concerning them, and do the thing at once that the Lord taught them, using the common sense which God had given and the fairy tale nourished!” The Lord of the promise is the Lord of all true parables and all good fairy tales.

George MacDonald, from The Elect Lady The Spring

By Thomas Carew

Now that the winter's gone, the earth hath lost Her snow-white robes, and now no more the frost Candies the grass, or casts an icy cream Upon the silver lake or crystal stream; But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth, And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree The drowsy cuckoo, and the humble-bee. Now do a choir of chirping minstrels bring In triumph to the world the youthful Spring. The valleys, hills, and woods in rich array Welcome the coming of the long'd-for May. Now all things smile, only my love doth lour; Nor hath the scalding noonday sun the power To melt that marble ice, which still doth hold Her heart congeal'd, and makes her pity cold. The ox, which lately did for shelter fly Into the stall, doth now securely lie In open fields; and love no more is made By the fireside, but in the cooler shade Amyntas now doth with his Chloris sleep Under a sycamore, and all things keep Time with the season; only she doth carry June in her eyes, in her heart January. Book List:

Tending the Heart of Virtue, 2nd Edition by Dr. Vigen Guroian

Reflections on the Psalms by C. S. Lewis

Pharos and Pharillon by E. M. Forster

The Elect Lady by George MacDonald

The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin

The Lost Princess or The Wise Woman by George MacDonald

The Victorian Fairy Tale Book ed. by Michael Patrick Hearn

The Classic Fairy Tales ed. by Iona and Peter Opie

The Classic Fairy Tales ed. by Maria Tatar

Brothers Grimm: Selected Tales trans. by David Luke

The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm trans. by Jack Zipes

Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories trans. by Erik Christian Haugaard

Den Lille Havfrue og andre historier/The Little Mermaid and Other Stories by Hans Christian Andersen, trans. by Tony J. Richardson

Hans Christian Anderson: Fairy Tales trans. by Tina Nunnally

“Fairy Tale Wars” by Vigen Guroian

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life Podcast, we bring you another episode in our “Best of” series in which Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks discuss the importance of reading old books. They begin the conversation by addressing head on the idea that old books are irrelevant. They touch on the fact that when we use the phrase “old books” we mean not just any piece of literature from the past, but those which have stood the test of time.

It’s not too late to join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination” happening this week! During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Commonplace Quotes:

So, when his Folly opens
The unnecessary hells,
A Servant when He Reigneth
Throws the blame on some one else.

Rudyard Kipling

I am informed by philologists that the “rise to power” of these two words, “problem” and “solution” as the dominating terms of public debate, is an affair of the last two centuries, and especially of the nineteenth, having synchronised, so they say, with a parallel “rise to power” of the word “happiness”—for reasons which doubtless exist and would be interesting to discover. Like “happiness”, our two terms “problem” and “solution” are not to be found in the Bible—a point which gives to that wonderful literature a singular charm and cogency. . . . On the whole, the influence of these words is malign, and becomes increasingly so. They have deluded poor men with Messianic expectations . . . which are fatal to steadfast persistence in good workmanship and to well-doing in general. . . . Let the valiant citizen never be ashamed to confess that he has no “solution of the social problem” to offer to his fellow-men. Let him offer them rather the service of his skill, his vigilance, his fortitude and his probity. For the matter in question is not, primarily, a “problem”, nor the answer to it a “solution”.

L. P. Jacks, Stevenson Lectures

Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C. S. Lewis To Walter de la Mare

by T. S. Elliot

The children who explored the brook and found
A desert island with a sandy cove
(A hiding place, but very dangerous ground,

For here the water buffalo may rove,
The kinkajou, the mungabey, abound
In the dark jungle of a mango grove,

And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree –
The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)
Recount their exploits at the nursery tea

And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn
Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,
At not quite time for bed?…

Or when the lawn
Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return
Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,
The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;

When the familiar is suddenly strange
Or the well known is what we yet have to learn,
And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance,
Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range
At witches’ sabbath of the maiden aunts;

When the nocturnal traveller can arouse
No sleeper by his call; or when by chance
An empty face peers from an empty house;

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?
The whispered incantation which allows
Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

By you; by those deceptive cadences
Wherewith the common measure is refined;
By conscious art practised with natural ease;

By the delicate, invisible web you wove –
The inexplicable mystery of sound.

Book List:

The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life, our hosts talk about their favorite poems and poets. Cindy starts off by sharing the early influences on her developing a love of poetry. Thomas also shares about his mother reading poetry to him as a child and the poetry that made an impression on him as a child. Angelina talks about coming to poetry later in life and how she finally came to love it through learning about the metaphysical poets.

Cindy and Thomas talk about the powerful effect of reading and reciting poetry in meter. Thomas also brings up the potential of hymn texts as beautiful, high-ranking poetry. From classic to modern, they share many poems and passages from their most beloved poetry, making this a soothing, lyrical episode. If you want to learn more, check out Thomas’ webinar How to Love Poetry.

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.” You can visit the HHL Facebook page or Instagram to find the post to share and enter our giveaway for a $20 discount code! During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Commonplace Quotes:

The knowledge-as-information vision is actually defective and damaging. It distorts reality and humanness, and it gets in the way of good knowing.

Esther Lightcap Meek

Perhaps it would be a good idea for public statues to be made with disposable heads that can be changed with popular fashion. But even better would surely be to make statues without any heads at all, representing simply the “idea” of a good politician.

Auberon Waugh

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock–to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you use large and startling figures.

Flannery O’Connor Reading in War Time

by Edwin Muir

Boswell by my bed,
Tolstoy on my table;
Thought the world has bled
For four and a half years,
And wives’ and mothers’ tears
Collected would be able
To water a little field
Untouched by anger and blood,
A penitential yield
Somewhere in the world;
Though in each latitude
Armies like forest fall,
The iniquitous and the good
Head over heels hurled,
And confusion over all:
Boswell’s turbulent friend
And his deafening verbal strife,
Ivan Ilych’s death
Tell me more about life,
The meaning and the end
Of our familiar breath,
Both being personal,
Than all the carnage can,
Retrieve the shape of man,
Lost and anonymous,
Tell me wherever I look
That not one soul can die
Of this or any clan
Who is not one of us
And has a personal tie
Perhaps to someone now
Searching an ancient book,
Folk-tale or country song
In many and many a tongue,
To find the original face,
The individual soul,
The eye, the lip, the brow
For ever gone from their place,
And gather an image whole.

Book List:

A Little Manual for Knowing by Esther Lightcap Meek

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake

The Book of Virtues by William Bennett

Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc

When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne

Now We are Six by A. A. Milne

Emma by Jane Austen

Oxford Book of English Verse ed. by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Immortal Poems of the English Language ed. by Oscar Williams

Motherland by Sally Thomas

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

In anticipation of our upcoming sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination,” this week we are re-airing a previous episode with Jason Baxter, our conference’s special keynote speaker. Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks sit down for a special conversation with Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis. Jason is a speaker, writer, and college professor who writes primarily on medieval thought and is especially interested in Lewis’ ideas. You can find out more about him and his books at JasonMBaxter.com.

Our hosts and Jason discuss a wide range of ideas, including the values of literature, the sacramental view of reality, why it is important to understand medieval thought, the “problem” of paganism in Lewis’ writings, and how to approach reading ancient and medieval literature.

Commonplace Quotes:

My part has been merely that of Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, who busied himself in clearing the moss, and bringing back to light the words, on the gravestones of the dead who seemed to him to have served humanity. This needs to be done and redone, generation after generation, in a world where there persists always a strong tendency to read newer writers, not because they are better, but because they are newer. The moss grows fast, and ceaselessly.

F. L. Lucas

It is the memory of time that makes us old; remembering eternity makes us young again.

Statford Caldecott

It is my settled conviction that in order to read old Western literature aright, you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature.

C. S. Lewis, from “De Descriptione Temporum”

What then is the good of–what is even the defense for–occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feeling which we should try to avoid in our own person?…The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves…[In] reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

C. S. Lewis Victory

by C. S. Lewis

Roland is dead, Cuchulain’s crest is low,
The battered war-rear wastes and turns to rust,
And Helen’s eyes and Iseult’s lips are dust
And dust the shoulders and the breasts of snow.

The faerie people from our woods are gone,
No Dryads have I found in all our trees,
No Triton blows his horn about our seas
And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon.

The ancient songs they wither as the grass
And waste as doth a garment waxen old,
All poets have been fools who thought to mould
A monument more durable than brass.

For these decay: but not for that decays
The yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man
That never rested yet since life began
From striving with red Nature and her ways.

Now in the filth of war, the baresark shout
Of battle, it is vexed. And yet so oft
Out of the deeps, of old, it rose aloft
That they who watch the ages may not doubt.

Though often bruised, oft broken by the rod,
Yet, like the phoenix, from each fiery bed
Higher the stricken spirit lifts its head
And higher-till the beast become a god.

Book List:

Beauty in the Word by Stratford Caldecott

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis

The Art of Living: Four Eighteenth Century Minds by F. L. Lucas

Transposition by C. S. Lewis

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

The Divine Comedy by Dante

Nicholas of Cusa

The Life of St. Francis of Assisi by St. Bonaventure

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

Confessions by St. Augustine

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks are joined by Atlee Northmore to explore the various screen adaptations based on Howards End by E. M. Forster. They begin the discussion with the question of what is the good of translating one art form, in this case a book, into another art form, such as a screen play. They talk about the beauty of the Merchant Ivory film adaptation, while critiquing the casting and chemistry of the cast, sharing their favorite and least favorite scenes. In contrast, they praise the BBC-Starz series for its excellent adaptation, although it missed some important things that the 1992 film did include. Atlee also highlights some of the ways in which the screen adaptations serve as subtle visual cues for ideas from the story. In the end, Angelina, Thomas, and Atlee share thoughts on enjoying a film as a stand-alone work of art versus judging it as an adaptation of a novel.

There are still spots open in many of the classes at House of Humane Letters, so if you or your student are interested in taking something, head over to houseofhumaneletters.com to register today!

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.” You can visit the HHL Facebook page or Instagram to find the post to share and enter our giveaway for a $20 discount code! During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Commonplace Quotes:

Every poet, in his kind, is bit by him that comes behind.

Jonathan Swift, from “Critics”

Narrative prose, especially the novel, has taken, in modern societies, the place occupied by the recitation of myths and fairy tales in traditional and popular societies. Furthermore, the ‘mythic’ structure of certain modern novels can be discerned, demonstrating the literary survival of major mythological themes and characters.

Mircea Eliade

Now, doesn’t it seem absurd to you? What is the good of the ear if it tells you the same as the eye? Helen’s one aim is to translate tunes into the language of painting and pictures into the language of music. It’s very ingenious, and she says several pretty things in the process, but what’s gained, I’d like to know?

E. M. Forster, from Howards End Cargoes

By John Masefield

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, Dipping through the tropics by the palm-green shores, With a cargo of diamonds, Emeralds, amythysts, Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores. Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, Butting through the channel in the mad March days, With a cargo of Tyne coal, Road-rails, pig-lead, Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays. Book and Link List:

From Pharos from Pharillon by E. M. Forster

Howards End (1992)

Howards End (BBC-Starz)

Howards End Episode 1

The Remains of the Day

The English Patient

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to The Literary Life Podcast and the final episode in our our series on Howards End by E. M. Forster. Today Angelina and Thomas seek to sum up the book and wrap up their thoughts on the way Forster weaves this story. The open with some comments on the almost allegorical nature of Howards End, then talk about the words “only connect” and their meaning in the context of the book. They discuss the problem of Helen and Leonard’s relationship and the romance of pity. Other topics of the conversation are the crisis point between Mr. Wilcox and Margaret, the contrast between Charles and Tibby, the fate of Leonard Bast, and the future of Howards End.

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.” During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Commonplace Quotes:

Life without dragons would be tame indeed.

Desmond MacCarthy, “The Poetry of Chesterton”

Howards End is a novel of extraordinary ambition and wide scope. Written in prose with the texture of restrained poetry, it is consummately controlled and sure of purpose. It is Forster’s most complexly orchestrated work to its date, and it smoothly manipulates imagery and symbolism, plot and character, into an organic whole. In so doing, it gracefully integrates social comedy, metaphysical explorations, and political concerns. Howards End tests Forster’s liberal humanism, finds it wanting, and proposes a marriage of liberal values to conservative tradition. Without destroying the practical contributions of progressivism, it forcefully attacks the mindless materialism that yields rootlessness and spiritual poverty.

Claude J. Summers, from E. M. Forster Finis

By Marjorie Pickthall

Give me a few more hours to pass With the mellow flower of the elm-bough falling, And then no more than the lonely grass And the birds calling. Give me a few more days to keep With a little love and a little sorrow, And then the dawn in the skies of sleep And a clear to-morrow. Give me a few more years to fill With a little work and a little lending, And then the night on a starry hill And the road's ending. Book List:

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and our series discussing Howards End by E. M. Forster. This week Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks cover chapters 26-34. Together they continue to talk about the ideas Forster is presenting in the book as seen in this section, including Howards End as a character, the echoes of Wind in the Willows (thanks to Jen Rogers!), Helen’s idealism, Margaret and Henry’s conflict, the idea of rootedness, and more.

On March 7, 2024 you can join Thomas and his brother James live for a webinar on King Alfred the Great. Register today at houseofhumaneletters.com. The webinar recording will also be available for lifetime access after that date.

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.” During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

If you want to get the special literary themed teas created by our Patron Erin Miller, go to adagiotea.com to check them out!

Commonplace Quotes:

Everything has been said already; but since nobody was listening, we shall have to begin all over again.

Toutes choses sont dites déjà; mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.

Andre Gide, from “Narcissus”

It is under these “present conditions” of materialism, urbanization, and cosmopolitanism that Howards End poses the question, “Who shall inherit England?” This question is given a lyrical resonance shortly after Margaret tells Helen of her intention to marry Henry. The two women, visiting Aunt Julie at Swanage, gaze across Poole Harbor and watch the tide return. “England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising sea,” the narrator records, and then asks: “What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her change of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who had added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity?” These questions are at the heart of the book. More crudely stated, they ask whether England belongs to the imperialist or to the yeoman, to those who see life steadily or to those who see it whole, to the prosaic or to the poet. Put another way, they ask whether the inheritors of England are to be people of action or vision.

Claude J. Summer, from “E. M. Foster” To E. M. Forster

By W. H. Auden

Here, though the bombs are real and dangerous, And Italy and Kings are far away, And we're afraid that you will speak to us, You promise still the inner life shall pay. As we run down the slope of Hate with gladness You trip us up like an unnoticed stone, And just as we are closeted with Madness You interrupt us like the telephone. For we are Lucy, Turton, Phillip, we Wish international evil, are excited To join the jolly ranks of the benighted Where Reason is denied and Love ignored: But, as we swear our lie, Miss Avery Comes out into the garden with the sword. Book List:

Theodore Dreiser

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina and Thomas continue our series on Howards End by E. M. Forster with a discussion of chapters 17-25. In opening the conversation on this chapter, they consider the various houses and ask the question of what role Howards End plays in this whole story. They also delve into the seemingly unlikely romance between Margaret and Mr. Wilcox and the complexity of their personalities, as well as the reactions of their family members. Other ideas they share are about the seen and the unseen, connections versus transactions, and more! Keep listening next week as we cover chapters 26-34.

On March 7, 2024 you can join Thomas and his brother James live for a webinar on King Alfred the Great. Register today at houseofhumaneletters.com. The webinar recording will also be available for lifetime access after that date.

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.” During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Commonplace Quotes:

Sapiens est qui novit tacere.

Wise is he who knows when to keep silence.

St. Ambrose, from De Oficibus Ministrorum (On the Duties of the Clergy)

But “Only connect” was the exact phrase I had been leading up to, and it has been precious to me ever since I read Howards End, of which it is the epigraph. Perhaps, indeed, it is the theme of all Forster’s writing, the attempt to link a passionate skepticism with the desire for meaning, to find the human key to the inhuman world about us, to connect the individual with the community, the known with the unknown, to relate the past to the present, and both to the future.

P. L. Travers, from “Only Connect” To My Dear and Loving Husband

By Anne Bradstreet

If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold, Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay; The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then while we live, in love let’s so persever, That when we live no more, we may live ever. Book List:

The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories by E. M. Forster

Selected Stories by E. M. Forster

What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story by P. L. Travers

The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to The Literary Life Podcast and our second episode in our series on E. M. Forster’s book Howards End. This week, Angelina and Thomas cover chapters 8-16, continuing their discussion of the book and the overarching concept of “Story” along the way. In talking about different plot points and characters, Angelina and Thomas make some comparisons between the two couples presented in these chapters and share some thoughts on the friendship between Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox. Angelina points out that Forster is doing some medieval things in this story, as we will see as we go on further. They also bring out more of the significance and symbolism of Howards End the place in the story.

If you want to check out our previous episodes on two of E. M. Forster’s short stories, you can find those here:

Episode 17: “The Celestial Omnibus”

Episode 99: “The Machine Stops”

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.” During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

This March you can join Thomas and his brother James back for a webinar on King Alfred the Great. You can sign up at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

[The Greeks] were children with the intellects of men.

R. W. Livingstone, from The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us

It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story considered in itself. Granted the story, the style in which it should be told, the order in which it should be disposed, and (above all) the delineation of the characters, have been abundantly discussed. But the Story itself, the series of imagined events, is nearly always passed over in silence, or else treated exclusively as affording opportunities for the delineation of character. There are indeed three notable exceptions. Aristotle in the Poeticsconstructed a theory of Greek tragedy which puts Story in the centre and relegates character to a strictly subordinate place.

C. S. Lewis, from On Stories A Selection from “Terminus”

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is time to be old,

To take in sail:—

The god of bounds,

Who sets to seas a shore,

Came to me in his fatal rounds,

And said: “No more!

No farther shoot

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.

Fancy departs: no more invent;

Contract thy firmament

To compass of a tent.

There’s not enough for this and that,

Make thy option which of two;

Economize the failing river,

Not the less revere the Giver,

Leave the many and hold the few.

Book List:

Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster

The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster

Wendell Berry

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to a new series on The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford and husband Thomas Banks. This week they begin talking about E. M. Forster’s book Howards End, giving some introductory information about Forster and also cover the first seven chapters of the book. Thomas shares some background on the Bloomsbury Group authors in contrast to their Victorian predecessors. Angelina highlights the literary tradition of naming books after houses and invites us to consider the importance of place in this story as we go forward.

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.” During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Also, The House of Humane Letters is expanding to include more classes, and pre-registration for returning students and registration for new students opens soon. Sign up for their email list to find out when you can sign up at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

E. M. Forster, Howards End

Howards End is Mr. Forster’s first fully adult book. It is richly packed with meanings; it has a mellow brilliance, a kind of shot beauty of texture; it runs like a bright, slowish, flickering river, in which different kinds of exciting fish swim and dart among mysterious reedy leptons and are observed and described by a highly interested, humane, sympathetic, often compassionate, and usually ironic commentator. The effect is of uncommon beauty and charm; the fusion of humor, perception, social comedy, witty realism, and soaring moral idealism, weaves a rare captivating, almost hypnotic spell; and many people think it (in spite of the more impressive theme and more serious technique of A Passage in India) Mr. Forester’s best book.

Rose Macaulay, The Writings of E. M. Forster The Pity of It

By Thomas Hardy

April 1915

I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar From rail-track and from highway, and I heard In field and farmstead many an ancient word Of local lineage like 'Thu bist,' 'Er war,' 'Ich woll', 'Er sholl', and by-talk similar, Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird At England's very loins, thereunto spurred By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are. Then seemed a Heart crying: 'Whosoever they be At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we, 'Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame; May their familiars grow to shun their name, And their brood perish everlastingly.'

Source: Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems (Palgrave, 2001)

Book List:

Howards End by E. M. Forster

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

Rose Macaulay

Dorothy Parker

Virginia Woolf

George Eliot

Matthew Arnold

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Wendell Berry

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life, Angelina and Thomas sit down with Cindy to chat about her new book Beyond Mere Motherhood: Moms Are People, Too. First Cindy shares some of what she has going on this year, and Angelina officially introduces the 2024 Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.”

Cindy shares how this book came to be and what the process was for developing the ideas she wanted to put into words. Angelina and Thomas bring up different aspects of the book that stood out to them as important messages for mothers. Cindy talks about her approach to encouraging moms toward tackling life-long learning without the overwhelm and anxiety.

Commonplace Quotes:

“Bairns are a queer kind of blessing sometimes,” remarked the mother.

George MacDonald, from Salted with Fire

One of the disadvantages of setting up a man as a god, is that his lapses from rectitude may be quoted by his worshippers in justification of their own.

Bernard Allen, from Augustus Caesar

May the gods give you everything that your heart longs for. May they grant you a husband and a house and sweet agreement in all things, for nothing is better than this, more steadfast than when two people, man and his wife, keep a harmonious household, a thing that brings much distress to the people who hate them, and pleasure to their well-wishers, and for them the best reputation.

Homer, from The Odyssey To My Mother

by Christina Rossetti

To-day’s your natal day,
Sweet flowers I bring;
Mother, accept, I pray,
My offering.

And may you happy live,
And long us bless;
Receiving as you give
Great happiness.

Book List:

My Early Life by Winston Churchill

Possession by A. S. Byatt

Howards End by E. M. Forster

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to another episode in our “Best of The Literary Life” podcast series. Today on The Literary Life Podcast, our hosts Angelina and Cindy chat with “superfan” Emily Raible about her own literary life. Emily is a homeschool mom, an avid reader, birdwatcher, baker and probably Angelina’s most loyal student. In telling the story of her reading life, Emily talks about her childhood and how she was not a reader as a young person. She shares how she finally started getting interested in reading through Janette Oke and Hardy Boys books. Then she tells about borrowing books from a local family’s home library and starting to fall in love with true classics.

After getting married to an avid reader, Emily started going through her husband’s own library during her long hours at home alone. Even after she became of lover of reading, Emily still didn’t define herself as a real reader. Emily shares her journey to becoming a homeschooling parent, how she learned about Charlotte Mason and classical education, and her first time meeting Angelina and Cindy. They continue the conversation expanding on the feast of ideas, what it means to be a “reader,” and how we learn and enter into the literary world throughout our lives.

If you are listening to this on the day it drops, there is still time to grab a spot for Thomas Banks and Anne Phillips’ webinar on Herodotus taking place today January 30, 2024. Head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com/webinars where you can sign up! Of course, you can also purchase the recordings to tune in after the webinar is released.

If you missed the 2020 Back to School Conference with Karen Glass, you can still purchase the recording at MorningTimeforMoms.com.

Also, our Sixth Annual Literary Life Online Conference is coming up in April 2024. The theme is “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity” with keynote speaker Jason Baxter. You can learn more and register now at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

But the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see, if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.

G. K. Chesterton

Time can be both a threat and a friend to hope. Injustice, for example, has to be tediously dismantled, not exploded. This is often infuriating, but it is true.

Makoto Fujimura

The poet is traditionally a blind man, but the Christian poet, and story-teller as well, is like the blind man whom Christ touched, who looked then and saw men as if they were trees but walking. This is the beginning of vision, and it is an invitation to deeper and stranger visions than we shall have to learn to accept if we are to realize a truly Christian literature.

Flannery O’Connor Armies in the Fire

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The lamps now glitter down the street;
Faintly sound the falling feet;
And the blue even slowly falls
About the garden trees and walls.

Now in the falling of the gloom
The red fire paints the empty room:
And warmly on the roof it looks,
And flickers on the back of books.

Armies march by tower and spire
Of cities blazing, in the fire;—
Till as I gaze with staring eyes,
The armies fall, the lustre dies.

Then once again the glow returns;
Again the phantom city burns;
And down the red-hot valley, lo!
The phantom armies marching go!

Blinking embers, tell me true
Where are those armies marching to,
And what the burning city is
That crumbles in your furnaces!

Book List:

Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton

Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura

Rascal by Sterling North

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Poppy Ott by Leo Edwards

Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

The Once and Future King by T. H. White

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkein

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

Agatha Christie

James Patterson

Tom Clancy

Harry Potter series

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Howards End by E. M. Forster

The Divine Comedy by Dante (trans. by Dorothy Sayers)

Illiad and Odyssey by Homer

Dorothy L. Sayers

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

Why Should Businessmen Read Great Literature? by Vigen Guroian

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

Arabian Nights

Are Women Human? by Dorothy Sayers

Confessions by Augustine

Beatrix Potter Treasury

Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Babe the Gallant Pig by Dick King-Smith

Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast this week, we will wrap up our series on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Our hosts, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas walk through the last two acts of the play, sharing their thoughts on the structure and ideas presented here. Angelina talks about why she thinks Shakespeare resolves the different conflicts the way he does. They discuss the importance of the play within the play, the fairy tale atmosphere, and the unreality of time and space. Cindy and Angelina both bring up plot points that feel slightly problematic to them. Angelina highlights the theme of harmonizing discord and bringing order from disorder.

To sign up for Thomas Banks and Anne Phillips’ webinar on Herodotus taking place January 30, 2024, head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com/webinars.

Find Angelina’s webinar “Jonathan Swift: Enemy of the Enlightenment” at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Even though the spring 2022 Literary Life Conference “The Battle Over Children’s Literature” featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian is over, you can still purchase the recordings at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Revolutionaries always hang their best friends.

Christopher Hollis

It is easy to forget that the man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only be enamored of a woman, but also to be enamored of the sonnet.

C. S. Lewis

For the end of imagination is harmony. A right imagination, being the reflex of the creation, will fall in with the divine order of things as the highest form of its own operation; “will tune its instrument here at the door” to the divine harmonies within; will be content alone with growth towards the divine idea, which includes all that is beautiful in the imperfect imagination of men; will know that every deviation from that growth is downward; and will therefore send the man forth from its loftiest representations to do the commonest duty of the most wearisome calling in a hearty and hopeful spirit. This is the work of the right imagination; and towards this work every imagination, in proportion to the rightness that is in it, will tend. The reveries even of the wise man will make him stronger for his work; his dreaming as well as his thinking will render him sorry for past failure, and hopeful of future success.

George MacDonald Earth’s Secret

by George Meredith

Not solitarily in fields we find Earth's secret open, though one page is there; Her plainest, such as children spell, and share With bird and beast; raised letters for the blind. Not where the troubled passions toss the mind, In turbid cities, can the key be bare. It hangs for those who hither thither fare, Close interthreading nature with our kind. They, hearing History speak, of what men were, And have become, are wise. The gain is great In vision and solidity; it lives. Yet at a thought of life apart from her, Solidity and vision lose their state, For Earth, that gives the milk, the spirit gives. Book List:

Fossett’s Memory by Christopher Hollis

A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald

A Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life podcast, we continue our “Best of” series discussing Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with coverage of Act 3. Angelina talks about the pacing of this act and the importance of the characters’ madcap, lunatic behavior. She also highlight’s Shakespeare’s wrestling with the relationship between the imagination and art and reality. Thomas highlights the structure of the play as reflecting a dreamlike state. Cindy shares some of her thoughts on being concerned about making sure our children know what is real and pretend.

To sign up for Thomas Banks and Anne Phillips’ webinar on Herodotus taking place January 30, 2024, head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com/webinars.

Find Angelina’s webinar “Jonathan Swift: Enemy of the Enlightenment” at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Even though the spring 2022 Literary Life Conference “The Battle Over Children’s Literature” featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian is over, you can still purchase the recordings at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.

Samuel Pepys, describing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in his diary

Or the lovely one about the Bishop of Exeter, who was giving the prizes at a girls’ school. They did a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the poor man stood up afterwards and made a speech and said [piping voice]: ‘I was very interested in your delightful performance, and among other things I was very interested in seeing for the first time in my life a female Bottom.’

C. S. Lewis in a conversation with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss

Still, if Homer’s Achilles isn’t the real Achilles, he isn’t unreal either. Unrealities don’t seem so full of life after three thousand years as Homer’s Achilles does. This is the kind of problem we have to tackle next–the fact that what we meet in literature is neither real nor unreal. We have two words, imaginary, meaning unreal, and imaginative, meaning what the writer produces, and they mean entirely different things.

Northrop Frye A Dream

by William Blake

Once a dream did weave a shade O'er my angel-guarded bed, That an emmet lost its way Where on grass methought I lay. Troubled, wildered, and forlorn, Dark, benighted, travel-worn, Over many a tangle spray, All heart-broke, I heard her say: "Oh my children! do they cry, Do they hear their father sigh? Now they look abroad to see, Now return and weep for me." Pitying, I dropped a tear: But I saw a glow-worm near, Who replied, "What wailing wight Calls the watchman of the night? "I am set to light the ground, While the beetle goes his round: Follow now the beetle's hum; Little wanderer, hie thee home!" Book List:

Of Other Worlds by C. S. Lewis

The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

The Golden Ass by Apuleius

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life podcast and our “Best of” re-air of the series on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After kicking off the episode with their commonplace quotes, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas start digging into the play itself. Thomas brings up the importance of the timing of this story being midsummer. Angelina gives a little background into the names and characters in this play as well as some of the major ideas we can be looking for in the story.

To sign up for Thomas Banks and Anne Phillips’ webinar on Herodotus taking place January 30, 2024, head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com/webinars.

Find Angelina’s webinar “Jonathan Swift: Enemy of the Enlightenment” at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Even though the spring 2022 Literary Life Conference “The Battle Over Children’s Literature” featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian is over, you can still purchase the recordings at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.

John Dryden, in a letter to Jonathan Swift

It would be difficult indeed to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the phrase “merrie England”, though some conception of it is quite necessary to the comprehension of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In some cases at least, it may be said to lie in this, that the English of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, unlike the England of today, could conceive of the idea of a merry supernaturalism.

G. K. Chesterton

And yet, there are people who say that Shakespeare always means, “just what he says.” He thinks that to find over and under meanings in Shakespeare’s plays is to take unwarranted liberties with them, is like a man who holds the word “spring” must refer only to a particular period of the year, and could not possibly mean birth, or youth or hope. He is a man who has never associated anything with anything else. He is a man without metaphors, and such a man is no man at all, let alone a poet.

Harold Goddard Advice to Lovers

by Robert Graves

I knew an old man at a Fair Who made it his twice-yearly task To clamber on a cider cask And cry to all the yokels there:-- "Lovers to-day and for all time Preserve the meaning of my rhyme: Love is not kindly nor yet grim But does to you as you to him. "Whistle, and Love will come to you, Hiss, and he fades without a word, Do wrong, and he great wrong will do, Speak, he retells what he has heard. "Then all you lovers have good heed Vex not young Love in word or deed: Love never leaves an unpaid debt, He will not pardon nor forget." The old man's voice was sweet yet loud And this shows what a man was he, He'd scatter apples to the crowd And give great draughts of cider, free. Book List:

Amazon affiliate links

“Battle of the Books” by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to this new season of The Literary Life podcast! During the month of January 2024, we will be re-airing our series of episodes on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

This week we bring you an introduction both to William Shakespeare and his play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hosts Angelina, Cindy and Thomas seek to give new Shakespeare readers a place from which to jump into his work and more experienced readers eyes to see more layers in his stories. Cindy begins with some perspective on how to start cultivating a love for Shakespeare. Angelina shares her “hot take” on whether you should read the play or watch the play. They suggest some books for further digging into Shakespeare’s works, and Angelina gives an overview of the format of his comedies. Thomas goes into some detail about Roman comedy.

Next week we will be back with a discussion of Acts I and II of the play.

Even though the spring 2022 Literary Life Conference “The Battle Over Children’s Literature” featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian is over, you can still purchase the recordings at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

To sign up for Thomas Banks and Anne Phillips' webinar on Herodotus on January 30, 2024, head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com/webinars.

Commonplace Quotes:

If certain tendencies within our civilization were to proceed unchecked, they would rapidly take us towards a society which, like that of a prison, would be both completely introverted and completely without privacy. The last stand of privacy has always been, traditionally, the inner mind….It is quite possible, however, for communications media, especially the newer electronic ones, to break down the associative structures of the inner mind and replace them by the prefabricated structures of the media . A society entirely controlled by their slogans and exhortations would be introverted because nobody would be saying anything: there would only be echo, and Echo was the mistress of Narcissus….the triumph of communication is the death of communication: where communication forms a total environment, there is nothing to be communicated.

Northrop Frye

No writer can persist for five hundred pages in being funny at the expense of someone who is dead.

Harold Nicolson

Originality was a new and somewhat ugly idol of the nineteenth century.

Janet Spens Unwisdom

by Siegfried Sassoon

To see with different eyes
From every day,
And find in dream disguise
Worlds far away—

To walk in childhood’s land
With trusting looks,
And oldly understand
Youth’s fairy-books—

Thus our unwisdom brings
Release which hears
The bird that sings
In groves beyond the years.

Book List:

Amazon affiliate links

“The Practice of Biography” by Harold Nicolson

The Modern Century by Northrop Frye

An Essay on Shakespeare’s Relation to Tradition by Janet Spens

Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit

Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb

Tales from Shakespeare by Marcia Williams

Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories by Leon Garfield

Stories from Shakespeare by Marchette Chute

Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

Shakespeare’s Problem Plays by E. M. Tillyard

Shakespeare’s Early Comedies by E. M. Tillyard

Shakespeare’s History Plays by E. M. Tillyard

Great Stage of Fools by Peter Leithart

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life today, Angelina and Thomas preview the upcoming season of the podcast and what books you can expect them to cover in 2024. We have some short books and exciting new series coming up in the new year, and you can scroll down for Amazon affiliate links to all the books planned.

The House of Humane Letters is currently having their Christmas sale until December 31, 2023. Everything is now 20% OFF, so hop on over and get the classes at their best prices now. In addition, you can still sign up for Atlee Northmore’s webinar “A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: How to Read Star Wars.”

If you missed it, go back to last month’s episode to get all the information about our 2024 Reading Challenge, Book of Centuries.

Books Mentioned:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Howards End by E. M. Forster

Tartuffe by Jean-Baptiste Moliere, trans. by Donald M. Frame

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

Harry Potter, Book 1 by J. K. Rowling

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life today, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas recap their reading from the past year. They first share some general thoughts on their year of reading and what sorts of books they completed. Other questions they discuss are on what books surprised them, what “low brow” books they read, and more! Come back next week for a preview of all the books we will be covering in the podcast in 2024. Stay tuned to the end of the episode for an important announcement!

Cindy is currewntly offering at 20% OFF discount throughout the holidays. Use coupon code “advent2023” on MorningTimeforMoms.com/shop until January 2024.

The House of Humane Letters is currently having their Christmas sale until December 31, 2023. Everything pre-recorded is now 20% OFF, so hop on over and get the classes at their best prices now. You can now also sign up for Atlee Northmore’s webinar “A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: How to Read Star Wars.”

If you missed it, go back to last month’s episode to get all the information about our 2024 Reading Challenge, Book of Centuries.

Commonplace Quotes:

Life was a hiding place that played me false.

Lascelles Abercrombie, from “Epitaph”

But if man’s attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him, every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact, he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him, and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world–an idol.

Robert Farrar Capon, from The Supper of the Lamb

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?

W. H. Auden, from The Dyer’s Hand On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

by John Keats

O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute! Fair pluméd Syren! Queen of far away! Leave melodizing on this wintry day, Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute: Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute, Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay Must I burn through; once more humbly assay The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit. Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion, Begetters of our deep eternal theme, When through the old oak forest I am gone, Let me not wander in a barren dream, But when I am consumed in the fire, Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire. Books Mentioned:

English Literature in the 16th Century by C. S. Lewis

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Trumpet Major by Thomas Hardy

The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott

Anne of Geierstein by Sir Walter Scott

The Victorian Cycle by Esme Wingfield-Stratford

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson

The History of Tom Jones, Foundling by Henry Fielding

The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great by Henry Fielding

The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith

The Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell

Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

Our Island Story by H. E Marshall

English Literature for Boys and Girls by H. E. Marshall

1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman

Dave Berry Slept Here by Dave Berry

The Harry Potter Series by J. K. Rowling

Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh

The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P. D. James

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

World Enough and Time by Christian McEwen

An Anthology of Invective and Verbal Abuse edited by Hugh Kingsmill

Encyclopedia Brown books by Donald J. Sobol

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

The Woman in Me by Brittany Spears

Sackett Series by Louis L’Amour

The Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour

Madly, Deeply by Alan Rickman

Counting the Cost by Jill Duggar

Spare by Prince Harry (not recommended)

Sir John Fielding Series by Bruce Alexander

Literary Life Commonplace Books

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week’s episode of The Literary Life we bring you a special interview with Jenn Rogers! Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins talk with Jenn about her own literary life and how she learned the things she is now passing on to others through The House of Humane Letters. Jenn shares how languages and literature were a part of her life from a young age as a child of missionaries in the Dominican Republic and homeschooled in a Charlotte Mason style. She also shares how surprising challenges ended up opening a door for her family to use AmblesideOnline and other resources, using their imaginations and creativity in getting a great education.

The House of Humane Letters is currently having their Christmas sale until December 31, 2023. Everything is now 20% OFF, so hop on over and get the classes at their best prices now. In addition to the sale, you can also sign up for Atlee Northmore’s webinar “A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: How to Read Star Wars.”

Cindy is also offering at 20% OFF discount throughout the holidays. Use coupon code “advent2023” on MorningTimeforMoms.com/shop until January 2024.

Commonplace Quotes:

But if literature teaches us anything at all, it is this, that we have an eternal element free from care and fear which can survey the things in life we call evil with serenity, that is, not without appreciating their quality but without any disturbance of our spiritual equilibrium. Not in the same way, but in some such way, we shall all doubtless survey our own story when we know it, and a great deal more of the Whole Story.

J. R. R. Tolkien, from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

This final argument is an indication of how monastic writers like Ælfric sought to understand the cycle of the seasons. They wanted to read and interpret the natural world, to learn to recognize the meaning God had planted in it. They saw time and seasons, from the very first day of the world, as carefully arranged by God with method and purpose, so they believed it would be possible to organize the calendar, not according to the randomness of custom and inherited tradition, but in a way that reflected that divine plan.

Eleanor Parker, from Winters in the World

It is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words and that words are products, not of nature, but of a human society which uses them for a thousand different purposes. In modern societies where language is continually being debased and reduced to nonspeech, the poet is in constant danger of having his ear corrupted, a danger to which the painter and the composer, whose media are their private property, are not exposed. On the other hand, he is more protected than they from another modern peril, that of solipsist subjectivity; however esoteric a poem may be, the fact that all its words have meanings which can be looked up in a dictionary makes it testify to the existence of other people Even the language of Finnegan’s Wake was not created by Joyce ex nihilo; a purely private verbal world is not possible.

W. H. Auden, from The Dyer’s Hand Cliche Came Out of Its Cage

by C. S. Lewis

You said 'The world is going back to Paganism'. Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes, And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem. Hestia's fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush Arose (it is the mark of freemen's children) as they trooped, Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance. Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods, Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men, Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing. Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions; Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears ... You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop. Or did you mean another kind of heathenry? Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth, Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm. Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound; But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods, Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand, Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them; For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, And every man of decent blood is on the losing side. Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits Who walked back into burning houses to die with men, Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim. Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs; You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune). Books Mentioned:

The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 3 by C. S. Lewis

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life today, we wrap up our series on The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas begin the conversation with C. S. Lewis’ critique of Sayers’ work, both what he agreed with and disagreed with in this book, as well as touching on Tolkien’s idea of artists as sub-creators. Cindy talks about what it is like writing a book in relation to Sayers’ thoughts on the subject of authorship. Thomas shares why he took issue with part of her examples of scalene triangles and the Trinity in relation to aesthetic failures. Angelina shares her dilemma with this same portion, and they discuss the principle they think Sayers was trying to illustrate.

The House of Humane Letters is currently having their Christmas sale until December 31, 2023. Everything is now 20% OFF, so hop on over and get the classes at their best prices now. In addition to the sale, you can also sign up for Atlee Northmore’s webinar “A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: How to Read Star Wars.”

Cindy is also offering at 20% OFF discount throughout the holidays. Use coupon code “advent2023” on MorningTimeforMoms.com/shop until January 2024.

If you missed it, go back to last week’s episode to get all the information about our 2024 Reading Challenge, Book of Centuries.

Commonplace Quotes:

Truth herself will, at the promptings of Nature, break forth from even unwilling hearts.

“Veritas ipsa cogente natura etiam ab invitis pectoribus erumpit.”

Lactantius, from Divine Institutes, Bk. II

Curiosity may elicit facts, but only real interest may mold these facts to wisdom.

Anna Botsford Comstock, from Handbook of Nature Study

I must therefore disagree with Miss Sayers very profoundly when she says that ‘between the mind of the maker and the Mind of the Maker’ there is ‘a difference, not of category, but only of quality and degree’ (p. 147). On my view there is a greater, far greater, difference between the two than between playing with a doll and suckling a child. But with this, serious disagreement ends.

This is the first ‘little book on religion’ I have read for a long time in which every sentence is intelligible and every page advances the argument. I recommend it heartily to theologians and critics. To novelists and poets, if they are already inclined in any degree to idolatry of their own vocation, I recommend it with much more caution. They had better read it fasting.

C. S. Lewis, from Image and Imagination Thoughts

by Thomas Beddoes

Sweet are the thoughts that haunt the poet’s brain Like rainbow-fringed clouds, through which some star Peeps in bright glory on a shepherd swain; They sweep along and trance him; sweeter far Than incense trailing up an out-stretched chain From rocking censer; sweeter too they are Than the thin mist which rises in the gale From out the slender cowslip’s bee-scarred breast. Their delicate pinions buoy up a tale Like brittle wings, which curtain in the vest Of cobweb-limbed ephemera, that sail In gauzy mantle of dun twilight dressed, Borne on the wind’s soft sighings, when the spring Listens all evening to its whispering. Books Mentioned:

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

Home Economics by Wendell Berry

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast, we have a very special 200th Episode for you! Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks are joined by their Patreon Friends and Fellows for a live episode recording to launch the 2024 Reading Challenge! This year’s challenge theme is “Book of Centuries” and features a timeline of literary periods from which you can choose works to read throughout the next year. The discussion featured suggestions for each literary period and century, and you can get the complete list of book and author suggestions right here. (Due to the length of this list, we will not be adding hyperlinks this week, so please see the document to find any book titles and authors you want to explore.) As usual, there will also be a kids’ version of the reading challenge!

To download a PDF version of the adult reading challenge, click here. To download a PDF of the kids’ version, click here.

The House of Humane Letters is currently having their Christmas sale until December 31, 2023. Everything is now 20% OFF, so hop on over and get the classes at their best prices now. In addition to the sale, you can also sign up for Atlee Northmore’s webinar “A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: How to Read Star Wars.”

Cindy is also offering at 20% OFF discount throughout the holidays. Use coupon code “advent2023” on MorningTimeforMoms.com/shop until January 2024.

Commonplace Quotes:

Chaucer had the rare gift of an author of liking people he did not respect.

G. K. Chesterton, from Chaucer

Modern education promotes the unmitigated study of literature and concentrates our attention on the relation between a writer’s life, his surface life, and his work. That is the reason it is such a curse.

Madeleine L’Engle, from Walking on Water

A very famous writer once said, “A book is like a mirror. If a fool looks in, you can’t expect a genius to look out.”

J. K. Rowling Whitsunday

by George Herbert

Listen sweet Dove unto my song, And spread thy golden wings in me; Hatching my tender heart so long, Till it get wing, and fly away with thee. Where is that fire which once descended On thy Apostles? thou didst then Keep open house, richly attended, Feasting all comers by twelve chosen men. Such glorious gifts thou didst bestow, That th’earth did like a heav’n appear; The stars were coming down to know If they might mend their wages, and serve here. The sun which once did shine alone, Hung down his head, and wisht for night, When he beheld twelve suns for one Going about the world, and giving light. But since those pipes of gold, which brought That cordial water to our ground, Were cut and martyr’d by the fault Of those, who did themselves through their side wound, Thou shutt’st the door, and keep’st within; Scarce a good joy creeps through the chink: And if the braves of conqu’ring sin Did not excite thee, we should wholly sink. Lord, though we change, thou art the same; The same sweet God of love and light: Restore this day, for thy great name, Unto his ancient and miraculous right. Books Mentioned:

200th Episode Literary Life Book Suggestions

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Due to illness among our hosts and holiday travel plans, we are airing a Best Of Series episode this week instead of our previously planned episode on The Mind of the Maker. Please enjoy this lighthearted discussion as you prepare for your Thanksgiving feasting, and join us right here next week for a very special 200th episode featuring our Friends and Fellows and introducing the 2024 Reading Challenge!

Today on The Literary Life Podcast we bring you another fun episode in our “In Search of the Austen Adaptation” series. Hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks are joined by resident film aficionado, Atlee Northmore to discuss film adaptations on Sense and Sensibility. The conversation opens by revisiting the question of what makes a good adaptation of a book when translating it for the screen. They talk about the challenges of showing modern audiences the characters and situations as Jane Austen meant them to be understood. Atlee gives a brief overview of the lesser known film adaptations, as well as a more in depth discussion of the 1995 and 2008 versions. You can access the PDF he created with links to watch here.

Commonplace Quotes:

Sound principles that are old may easily be laid on the shelf and forgotten, unless in each successive generation a few industrious people can be found who will take the trouble to draw them forth from the storehouse.

Thomas Ruper, as quoted by Karen Glass

His senile fury was not exhausted by endless repetition.

Eric Linklater

‘Remember, no one is made up of one fault, everyone is much greater than all his faults,’ and then she would add with a smile: ‘I find it much easier to put up with people’s faults than with their virtues!’

Charlotte Mason, as quoted by Essex Cholmondeley

The great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, some duty neglected, some failing indulged, impropriety, indelicacy, generous candor, blameable distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason. These are the concepts by which Jane Austen grasps the world. In her we still breathe the air of the Rambler and Idler. All is hard, clear, definable; by some modern standards, even naïvely so. The hardness is, of course, for oneself, not for one’s neighbours. It reveals to Marianne her want ‘of kindness’ and shows Emma that her behaviour has been ‘unfeeling’. Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen’s is at once less soft and less cruel.

C. S. Lewis Selection from With a Guitar, To Jane

by Percy Shelley

Ariel to Miranda:-- Take This slave of music, for the sake Of him who is the slave of thee; And teach it all the harmony In which thou canst, and only thou, Make the delighted spirit glow, Till joy denies itself again And, too intense, is turned to pain. For by permission and command Of thine own Prince Ferdinand, Poor Ariel sends this silent token Of more than ever can be spoken; Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who From life to life must still pursue Your happiness,-- for thus alone Can Ariel ever find his own. From Prospero's enchanted cell, As the mighty verses tell, To the throne of Naples he Lit you o'er the trackless sea, Flitting on, your prow before, Like a living meteor. When you die, the silent Moon In her interlunar swoon Is not sadder in her cell Than deserted Ariel. Book List:

In Vital Harmony by Karen Glass

The Story of Charlotte Mason by Essex Cholmondeley

Robert the Bruce by Eric Linklater

C. S. Lewis’ Selected Literary Essays edited by Walter Hooper

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today’s episode of The Literary Life is a continuation of our series covering The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas discuss chapters 6-8 this week, which they acknowledge are probably the most difficult portions of this book so far. Angelina starts off with some questions she has about why chapter six in included and how it fits with other arguments she has already made earlier. Thomas reads and expands on a passage about the autobiographer and his art. Angelina makes a distinction between moral goodness and artistic goodness in works of fiction and art. Cindy highlights the idea of justification and something being “out of true.”

Coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers’ webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

Commonplace Quotes:

My friend, the Scottish poet and translator Alastair Reid, carries a lifetime’s worth of poems—an entire small library—in his head. “Do you memorize them?” someone asked him once. “No,” he answered gravely. “I remember them.”

Christian McEwan, World Enough and Time

The book everywhere exhibits the style and temper for which the author was both loved and hated. The essays are full of cheerful energy. The young people would call them ‘bonhomous’.

By a bonhomous writer they mean one who seems to like writing and what he writes of, and to assume that his readers will mostly be people he would like. I think that this last assumption is what infuriates them.

C. S. Lewis, Image and Imagination

If you are not careful…you’ll be a genius when you grow up and disgrace your parents.

Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden The Bird and the Tree

by Ruth Pitter

The tree, and its haunting bird, Are the loves of my heart; But where is the word, the word, Oh where is the art, To say, or even to see, For a moment of time, What the Tree and the Bird must be In the true sublime? They shine, listening to the soul, And the soul replies; But the inner love is not whole, and the moment dies. O give me before I die The grace to see With eternal, ultimate eye, The Bird and the Tree. The song in the living green, The Tree and the Bird– O have they ever been seen, Ever been heard? Books Mentioned:

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Support The Literary Life:

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Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

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On The Literary Life Podcast today, Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks continue discussing Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker. In today’s conversation, they cover the ideas in chapters 3-5, including the following: the creative process in relation to the members of the Trinity, the relationship of the writer to his own creation, the misconception of art as self-expression, the problem with poetic justice, and much more!

If you missed the live webinar Can Dante’s Inferno Save the World? with Dr. Jason Baxter, you can still purchase the recording. Also, coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers’ webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

Commonplace Quotes:

He remained altogether inimitable, yet never seemed conscious of his greatness. It was native in him to rejoice in the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triumphs.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, from “The Death of Robert Louis Stevenson”

Only one hour of the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

Rose Macaulay, as quoted by Christian McEwan in World Enough and Time

The unity of a work of art, the basis of structural analysis, has not only been produced solely by the unconditioned will of the artist, for the artist is only its efficient cause: it has form, and consequently a formal cause. The fact that revision is possible, that the poet makes changes not because he likes them better but because they are better, means that poems, like poets, are born and not made.

Northrop Frye, from Fables of Identity Nondum

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself." ISAIAH xlv. 15. God, though to Thee our psalm we raise-- No answering voice comes from the skies; To Thee the trembling sinner prays But no forgiving voice replies; Our prayer seems lost in desert ways, Our hymn in the vast silence dies. We see the glories of the earth But not the hand that wrought them all: Night to a myriad worlds gives birth, Yet like a lighted empty hall Where stands no host at door or hearth Vacant creation's lamps appall. We guess; we clothe Thee, unseen King, With attributes we deem are meet; Each in his own imagining Sets up a shadow in Thy seat; Yet know not how our gifts to bring, Where seek Thee with unsandalled feet. Books Mentioned:

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks are kick off a new series on The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. Before discussion the book itself, Angelina gives a little biographical information on Sayers for those who are new to her and her work. They begin talking about the book with the preface and Sayers own purpose in writing it. Cindy shares a little about her first reading of The Mind of the Maker when she was a young newlywed and the impact it made on her. Thomas points out the “laws” Sayers outlines and reads some important quotes from this section.

If you are listening to this episode on the day it drops, it’s not too late to get in on today’s live webinar Can Dante’s Inferno Save the World? with Dr. Jason Baxter. You can also purchase the recording any time if you missed the live class. Also coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers’ webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

Episode 9: “Are Women Human” by Dorothy L. Sayers

Episodes 5-8 on Gaudy Night

Episode 62: The Literary Friendship of Dorothy and Jack

Commonplace Quotes:

Think not, Mistress, more true dullness lies

In Folly’s cap, than Wisdom’s grave disguise.

Alexander Pope, from “The Dunciad”

We do not own stories, and when we try to limit them, squeeze the life out of them, lose the love that gave them to us, and fall back into that fatal human flaw–pride, hubris–we are right back to Adam and Eve, who listened to the power of the snake instead of the creativity of God.

Madeleine L’Engle, from Bright Evening Star

This is the first “little book on religion” I have read for a long time in which every sentence is intelligible and every page advances the argument.

C. S. Lewis, in a review of Mind of the Maker Reason Has Moons

by Ralph Hodgson

Reason has moons, but moons not hers, Lie mirror'd on the sea, Confounding her astronomers, But O! delighting me. Books Mentioned:

Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

“Learning in Wartime” by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast this week as we wrap up our series of discussion on C. S. Lewis’ novel Out of the Silent Planet. Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks are covering from chapter 16 to the end of the book in today’s episode. After sharing their commonplace quotes, Angelina starts the conversation comparing the ideas in Gulliver’s Travels with what Lewis is doing in this book. Thomas quotes a passage from the Aeneid in Latin as they talk about the parallels to Out of the Silent Planet. The structure of the medieval romance is seen fully as we finish the story, as noted by Angelina. She and Thomas also point out more connections with Paradise Lost. Cindy brings everything together with some thoughts on the unraveling of modernity.

Join us next week as we kick off a new series on The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers!

House of Humane Letters is thrilled to announce an all new webinar from Dr. Jason Baxter coming October 31st! Register today for Can Dante’s Inferno Save the World? Also coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers’ webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

Commonplace Quotes:

But unlike most artists, Ruskin valued the seeing more than the doing. “The sight is more important than the drawing,” he said. “The greatest thing a human being ever does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what he saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands of people can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion—all in one.”

from The World Enough and Time, by Christian McEwan

Build, build your Babels black against the sky-

But mark yon small green blade, your stones between,

The single spy

Of that uncounted host you have outcast;

For with their tiny pennons waving green

They shall storm your streets at last.

F. L. Lucas, from “Beleaguered Cities”

The old universe was wholly different in its effect. It was an answer, not a question. It offered not a field for musing but a single overwhelming object; an object which at once abashes and exalts the mind. For in it there is a final standard of size. The Primum Mobile is really large because it is the largest corporeal thing there is. We are really small because our whole Earth is a speck compared with the Primum Mobile.

C. S. Lewis, from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature Science-Fiction Cradlesong

by C. S. Lewis

By and by Man will try To get out into the sky, Sailing far beyond the air From Down and Here to Up and There. Stars and sky, sky and stars Make us feel the prison bars. Suppose it done. Now we ride Closed in steel, up there, outside Through our port-holes see the vast Heaven-scape go rushing past. Shall we? All that meets the eye Is sky and stars, stars and sky. Points of light with black between Hang like a painted scene Motionless, no nearer there Than on Earth, everywhere Equidistant from our ship. Heaven has given us the slip. Hush, be still. Outer space Is a concept, not a place. Try no more. Where we are Never can be sky or star. From prison, in a prison, we fly; There's no way into the sky. Books Mentioned:

The Secular Scripture by Northrop Frye

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, our hosts continue their discussion of C. S. Lewis’ science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet, covering chapters 6-15. Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks begin by sharing their commonplace quotes, including some heated debate about sausages, then dive in to this section. They start by looking at Ransom’s need to let go of some of his own modern preconceptions and categories, in spite of being steeped in the classics. Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy also discuss a variety of other themes, including: the contrasts between Lewis and Tolkien in world-building, Lewis’ crafting a medieval tale in the genre of modern science fiction, and the problems with Ransom’s anthro-centric perspective.

House of Humane Letters is thrilled to announce an all new webinar from Dr. Jason Baxter coming October 31st! Register today for Can Dante’s Inferno Save the World? Also coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers’ webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up nowand save your spot!

Commonplace Quotes:

It is to me inconceivable that Nature as we see it is either what God intended or merely evil; it looks like a good thing spoiled.

C. S. Lewis, from Letters of C. S. Lewis

What do you usually do when you are shut up in a secret room, with no chance of getting out for hours? As for me, I always say poetry to myself. It is one of the uses of poetry–one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances of that kind, or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night. You will find poetry most useful for this purpose. So learn plenty of it, and be sure it is the best kind, because this is most useful as well as most agreeable.

Edith Nesbit, from The House of Arden

Lewis began the trilogy as a conscious critique of what he called “Wellsianity,” a philosophy that applies Darwinism to the metaphysical sphere, believing that humans may evolve into a new species of gods, spreading from world to world and galaxy to galaxy. Though one finds this quasi-religious belief sometimes called “Evolutionism” in Olaf Stapledon, G. B. Shaw, and C. H. Waddington, Lewis found it most fully embodied in Wells’ novels, and he set out to produce a Wellsian fantasy with an anti-Welsian theme. Lewis’ Ransom books contrast so sharply from other stories of space voyages that Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin credit him with inventing a new genre: “anti-science fiction.”

from Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis, edited by Thomas L. Martin A Selection from “I Saw Eternity the Other Night”

by Henry Vaughn

I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright; And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, Driv'n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world And all her train were hurl'd. Books Mentioned:

Kingsley Amis

William Morris

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast, Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas bring us the first installment in their series of discussions about C. S. Lewis’ science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet. Angelina shares some background on how Lewis began writing this book and what he set out to do through the genre of science fiction within the form of a romance. In looking at the historical time period in which he was writing, Thomas brings out the transcendent quality of Lewis’ message. They talk about Ransom’s character and his embodiment of the “old ways.” Cindy points out the Dante-esque details of the beginning of Ransom’s journey.

Other themes our hosts discuss are the problem of eugenics, the study of philology, the similarities in setup with First Men in the Moon, the enchantment of modernity, medieval cosmology, and so much more!

House of Humane Letters is thrilled to announce an all new webinar from Dr. Jason Baxter coming October 31st! Register today for Can Dante’s Inferno Save the World? Also coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers’ webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

Commonplace Quotes:

“I’m with Orwell,’ said Strike. “Some ideas are so stupid, only intellectuals believe them.”

Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling)

An age of discovery…is apt to loathe established institutions, and be filled with spiritual arrogance.

Agnes Mure Mackenzie, The Kingdom of Scotland

It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies hid in a hideous paper-backed edition, wholly unnoticed by the cognescenti, while any “realistic” drivel about some neurotic in a London flat–something that needs no real invention at all, something that any educated man could write if he chose, may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious book–as if it really mattered. I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return: but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.

C. S. Lewis, from a letter to Joy Davidman, Dec. 1953 A Selection from New Heaven and New Earth

by D. H. Lawrence

I was greedy, I was mad for the unknown. I, new-risen, resurrected, starved from the tomb starved from a life of devouring always myself now here was I, new-awakened, with my hand stretched out and touching the unknown, the real unknown, the unknown unknown. My God, but I can only say I touch, I feel the unknown! I am the first comer! Cortes, Pisarro, Columbus, Cabot, they are nothing, nothing! I am the first comer! I am the discoverer! I have found the other world! Books Mentioned:

On Stories by C. S. Lewis

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis

The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and a brand new episode for this fall season! This week Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas begin this series of episodes on science fiction stories, beginning with some background on H. G. Wells and his book The First Men in the Moon. This sets the scene for us as we then continue on next week with the opening of a discussion of C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet.

Thomas gives some biographical background information about Wells, and Angelina shares some distinctives of the science fiction genre and its sub-categories. Cindy highlights how much Out of the Silent Planet truly is a derivative of The First Men In the Moon with Lewis putting forward a very different premise.

House of Humane Letters is thrilled to announce an all new webinar from Dr. Jason Baxter coming October 31st! Register today for Can Dante’s Inferno Save the World?

Commonplace Quotes:

One of the very best things about the world is that so little of it is me.

Andrew Grieg

He could bear anything except to be silenced. Like most violent controversialists, he believed himself to be the pattern of meekness and good temper.

Ronald Knox, from Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

Mr. Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message.

G. K. Chesterton Astrophil and Stella 31: With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies

by Sir Philip Sydney

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies! How silently, and with how wan a face! What, may it be that even in heav'nly place That busy archer his sharp arrows tries! Sure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case, I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me, Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit? Are beauties there as proud as here they be? Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess? Do they call virtue there ungratefulness? Books Mentioned:

World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down by Christian McEwan

From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne

Ursula K. Le Guin

Isaac Asimov

Michael Crichton

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On this week’s episode of The Literary Life, we bring you another installment in our “Best of” Series. Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks continue their discussion of J. R. R. Tolkien’s short story “Leaf by Niggle“. If you missed the Back to School 2020 Conference when it was live, you can still purchase access to the recordings at MorningTimeforMoms.com. Angelina opens the book chat highlighting Tolkien’s mirroring of Dante’s Divine Comedy with Niggle’s journey, and our hosts move through a recap of the story. The questions we should be asking as we read are whether this story deals with the recovery of our vision and whether it ends with a eucatastrophe.

Cindy brings out more of the autobiographical nature of this story for Tolkien. Angelina tosses around the idea that Parish and Niggle may be doubles and be a picture of Tolkien’s two selves. Thomas talks about what Niggle has to do in the “purgatory” section of the story. They also talk about the themes of art and the artist, sub-creation, and redemption. Come back next week to hear a discussion about why we ought to read myths.

Commonplace Quotes:

It is when a writer first begins to make enemies that he begins to matter.

Hilton Brown

Kill that whence spring the crude fancies and wild day-dreams of the young, and you will never lead them beyond dull facts—dull because their relations to each other, and the one life that works in them all, must remain undiscovered. Whoever would have his children avoid this arid region will do well to allow no teacher to approach them—not even of mathematics—who has no imagination.

George MacDonald

There were people who cared for him and people didn’t, and those who didn’t hate him were out to get him. . . But they couldn’t touch him. . . because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deidre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees.

Joseph Heller On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet

by Samuel Johnson

Condemned to Hope’s delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.

Well tried through many a varying year,
See Levet to the grave descend;
Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of every friendless name the friend.

Yet still he fills Affection’s eye,
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind;
Nor, lettered Arrogance, deny
Thy praise to merit unrefined.

When fainting Nature called for aid,
And hovering Death prepared the blow,
His vigorous remedy displayed
The power of art without the show.

In Misery’s darkest cavern known,
His useful care was ever nigh,
Where hopeless Anguish poured his groan,
And lonely Want retired to die.

No summons mocked by chill delay,
No petty gain disdained by pride,
The modest wants of every day
The toil of every day supplied.

His virtues walked their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found
The single talent well employed.

The busy day, the peaceful night,
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;
His frame was firm, his powers were bright,
Though now his eightieth year was nigh.

Then with no throbbing fiery pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.

Book List:

Rudyard Kipling by Hilton Brown

A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Letters from Father Christmas by J. R. R. Tolkien

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to another episode of our “Best Of” Series on The Literary Life with Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks. Both this week and next, our hosts will be discussing J. R. R. Tolkien’s short story “Leaf by Niggle“.

Angelina sets the stage with a little historical background on Tolkien’s writing of this story as well as some thoughts on allegory and how to read a fairy tale. She talks about this story as an exploration of the struggle of the ideals and demands of art against the demands of practical life and the question of whether or not art is useful. Cindy shares her ideas about the importance of the Inklings for Tolkien to get his work out into the world. Angelina shares about the type of journey on which the main character, Niggle, is called to go on in this story. As you read, we encourage you to look for how Tolkien harmonizes the different tensions within the story.

Commonplace Quotes:

Here are some of the points which make a story worth studying to tell to the nestling listeners in many a sweet “Children’s Hour”;––graceful and artistic details; moral impulse of a high order, conveyed with a strong and delicate touch; sweet human affection; a tender, fanciful link between the children and the Nature-world; humour, pathos, righteous satire, and last, but not least, the fact that the story does not turn on children, and does not foster that self-consciousness, the dawn of which in the child is, perhaps, the individual “Fall of Man.”

Charlotte Mason

The essay began by noting that total war was underway, with fighting not only “in the field and on the sea and in the air,” but also in “the realm of ideas.” It said: “The mightiest single weapon this war has yet employed” was “not a plane, or a bomb or a juggernaut of tanks”–it was Mein Kampf. This single book caused an educated nation to “burn the great books that keep liberty fresh in the hearts of men.” If America’s goal was victory and world peace, “all of us will have to know more and think better than our enemies think and know,” the council asserted. “This was is a war of books. . . Books are our weapons.”

Molly Guptill Manning, quoting from the essay “Books and the War”

In everything I have sought peace and not found it, save in a corner with a book.

Thomas à Kempis Milton

by Edward Muir

Milton, his face set fair for Paradise,
And knowing that he and Paradise were lost
In separate desolation, bravely crossed
Into his second night and paid his price.
There towards the end he to the dark tower came
Set square in the gate, a mass of blackened stone
Crowned with vermilion fiends like streamers blown
From a great funnel filled with roaring flame.
Shut in his darkness, these he could not see,
But heard the steely clamour known too well
On Saturday nights in every street in Hell.
Where, past the devilish din, could Paradise be?
A footstep more, and his unblinded eyes
Saw far and near the fields of Paradise.

Book List:

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason

When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

Planet Narnia by Michael Ward

The Company They Keep by Diana Pavlac Glyer

Smith of Wooten Major by J. R. R. Tolkien

Farmer Giles of Ham by J. R. R. Tolkien

Letters from Father Christmas by J. R. R. Tolkien

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War by Joseph Loconte

Spirits in Bondage by C. S. Lewis

Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life podcast, we bring you another episode from the “Best of” series vault, our discussion of J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories“. Tune in again over the next two weeks as we continue the conversation with Tolkien’s short story Leaf by Niggle. If you missed the 2020 Back to School conference that Cindy introduced in this episode, you can still get the recording at MorningTimeforMoms.com.

Angelina sets the stage for this discussion by orienting us to the context for the essay by Tolkien as a critique of what is considered a fairy story. She points out the difference between cautionary tales like those by Charles Perrault and the German folk and fairy tales collected by the Grimm Brothers. Our hosts highlight Tolkien’s definition of true fairy stories, ones that take place in the “perilous realm” and involve a journey element. He critiques Andrew Lang as including many stories as fairy tale that are not truly fairy stories. They also discuss topics from the essay including sub-creation, magic and spells, suspension of disbelief, and children’s responses to fairy stories.

Commonplace Quotes:

One should forgive one’s enemies, but only after they are hanged.

Heinrich Heine

The German folk soul can again express itself. These flames do not only illuminate the final end of the old era. They also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past. If the old men do not understand what is going on, let them grasp that we young men have gone and done it. The old goes up in flames. The new shall be fashioned from the flame of our hearts.

Joseph Goebbles

Human beings are not human doings.

Nigel Goodwin Into My Heart an Air That Kills

by A. E. Houseman

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those far remembered hills,
What spires, what towns are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot go again.

Book List:

When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning

Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura

Roger Lancelyn Green

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Bandersnatch by Diana Pavlac Glyer

The Company They Keep by Diana Pavlac Glyer

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

Phantastes by George MacDonald

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today we are pleased to bring you a special episode focusing on the importance of a good translation when reading works originally written in other languages. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are joined for this conversation by Dr. Anne Phillips, who has a BA in Latin and Greek and a Doctorate in Classical Studies and teaches Latin at the House of Humane Letters. They start out with the question of basic principles for determining what makes a good translation. Angelina brings up C. S. Lewis’ review of Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey and the principles he sets forth. Anne shares her experience with reading classic works in their original languages and how much richer and more enjoyable it is for her. Another topic they cover is the challenge of translating poetry.

Angelina, Thomas, and Anne both share some of their least liked translations of classical Greek and Latin works, as well as some recommendations for better translations. They also talk about finding good translations of Old English and Middle English works.

Thomas is also teaching a webinar along with Michael Williams on the modern poets W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot on September 28th. You can now register at House of Humane Letters.

Commonplace Quotes:

He had the successful portrait painters essential gift and saw men, with few exceptions, as they liked to see themselves.

C. V. Wedgwood

In my opinion value-judgements in literature should not be hurried. It does a student little good to be told that A is better than B, especially if he prefers B at the time. He has to feel values for himself, and should follow his individual rhythm in doing so. In the meantime, he can read almost anything in any order, just as he can eat mixtures of food that would have his elders reaching for the baking soda. A sensible teaching or librarian can soon learn how to give guidance to a youth’s reading that allows for undeveloped taste and still doesn’t turn him into a gourmet or a dyspeptic before his time.

Northrop Frye

A good translation is one that lets Homer sing.

Thomas Banks

There is a sense in which everything is untranslatable. A man may write what is as good or even better than the original, but from the nature of the case it cannot be precisely the same thing. There are even moments when one feels it is something of a desecration to translate at all, but that is surely over-scrupulous, a weakness which, if all had yielded to it, would certainly have left the world poorer.

Walter Headlam Ode 5, Book 1: To Pyrrha

by Horace, trans. by John Milton

What slender youth, bedew’d with liquid odors, Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave, Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou In wreaths thy golden hair, Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he Of faith and changed gods complain, and seas Rough with black winds, and storms Unwonted shall admire! Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold, Who, always vacant, always amiable Hopes thee, of flattering gales Unmindful. Hapless they To whom thou untried seem’st fair. Me, in my vow’d Picture, the sacred wall declares to have hung My dank and dropping weeds To the stern god of sea. Books Mentioned:

Velvet Studies by C. V. Wedgwood

The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

The Children’s Homer by Padraic Colum

The Odyssey trans. by Richmond Lattimore

The Iliad trans. by Richmond Lattimore

The Aeneid trans. by Sarah Ruden

A. E. Stallings

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Beowulf trans. by Burton Raffel

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight trans. by Burton Raffel

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, trans. by Burton Raffel

The Landmark Heroditus trans. by Andrea L. Purvis

The Landmark Thucydides trans. by Richard Crawley

The Landmark Xenophon trans. by John Marincola

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast, we wrap up our discussion of The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton. After sharing their commonplace quotes, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas dive right in to the last section and share their various thoughts on finishing this book. Angelina and Thomas talk about some of Chesterton’s thoughts on Impressionism in the arts. Cindy and Thomas make some connections with the old rhyme about “Monday’s Child.” They talk about more of the allegorical elements that are clearly spelled out by Chesterton, as well as many other relations they make to other stories, including the one great story.

Be sure to join us next week when we have a special episode about why translation matters with Dr. Anne Phillips!

Angelina is teaching a class on How to Read Beowulf August 28-September 1, 2023. Get in on this mini-class at House of Humane Letters.

Thomas is also teaching a webinar along with Michael Williams on the modern poets W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot on September 28th. You can now register at House of Humane Letters.

Commonplace Quotes:

Almost everywhere and almost invariably the man who has sought a cryptogram in a great masterpiece has been highly exhilarated, logically justified, morally excited, and entirely wrong.

But it is all detail; and detail by itself means madness. The very definition of a lunatic is a man who has taken details out of their real atmosphere.

The truth is, I fear, that madness has a great advantage over sanity. Sanity is always careless. Madness is always careful.

G. K. Chesterton, from The Soul of Wit

Looking for an author’s life in his books is vulgar anyhow, and can be most misleading.

L. P. Hartley, from A Perfect Woman

Perhaps it is not worthwhile to try to kill heresies which so rapidly kill themselves, and the cult of suicide committed suicide some time ago. But it should not wish it supposed as some think I have supposed, that in resisting the heresy of pessimism, I have implied the equally morbid and diseased insanity of optimism. I was not then considering whether anything is really evil but whether is really evil, and in relation to the latter nightmare, it does still seem to me relevant to say that nightmares are not true and that in them even the faces of friends may appear as the faces of fiends. I tried to turn this notion of resistance to a nightmare into a topsy-turvy tale about a man who fancied himself alone among enemies and found that each of the enemies was, in fact, on his own side and in his own solitude.

G. K. Chesterton, on The Man Who Was Thursday The End of the World

by Dana Gioia

“We're going,” they said, “to the end of the world.” So they stopped the car where the river curled, And we scrambled down beneath the bridge On the gravel track of a narrow ridge. We tramped for miles on a wooded walk Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk. Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore. We came to a bend, where the river grew wide And green mountains rose on the opposite side. My guides moved back. I stood alone, As the current streaked over smooth flat stone. Shelf by stone shelf the river fell. The white water goosetailed with eddying swell. Faster and louder the current dropped Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped. I stood at the edge where the mist ascended, My journey done where the world ended. I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky, The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

“The End of the World” from Interrogations at Noon. Copyright © 2001 by Dana Gioia. Reprinted for educational purposes only.

Books Mentioned:

W. Summerset Maugham

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

The Human Beast by Emile Zola

Theodore Dreiser

Jack London

On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters by Hilaire Belloc

Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On the Literary Life podcast this week Angelina, Cindy and Thomas continue their series on G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Before diving into the plot of these chapters, our hosts discuss the similarities and differences between Chesterton and Kafka’s works of fiction. Thomas gives some historical context on anarchy as well as assassinations in the time period of this book. Angelina points out the Dante-esque language in this section, as well as the continuing themes of chivalry. Cindy highlights the character of Sunday and how he looms large, quite literally, over everyone’s imaginations in the story. Some other thoughts our hosts discuss include modernity’s mindset as it relates to the atmosphere of this story, the idea of the underdog fighting against all odds, and the humorous moments that break some of the tension. Be sure to come back next week when we wrap up our series on The Man Who Was Thursday.

If you missed our 2023 Back to School Conference when it was live, you can still go back and view the recordings when you purchase access to the conference at MorningTimeforMom.com.

Angelina is teaching a class on How to Read Beowulf at the end of August 2023. Get in on this mini-class at House of Humane Letters.

Thomas is also teaching a webinar along with Michael Williams on the modern poets W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot on September 28th. You can now register at House of Humane Letters.

Commonplace Quotes:

It’s important, too, that everything that has a story, such as a myth, should be read or listened to purely as a story. Many people grow up without really understanding the difference between imaginative and discursive writing. On the rare occasions when they encounter poems or even pictures, they treat them exactly as though they were intended to be pieces of more or less disguised information. Their questions are all based on this assumption: “What is he trying to get across?” “What am I supposed to get out of it?” “Why doesn’t someone explain it to me?” “Why couldn’t he have written it in a different way so that I could understand him?” The art of listening to story is a basic training for the imagination.

Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination

The biographer is there to explain rather than to judge. To get a clear view of a man we do not need to be told if his actions were good…but how and why he came to do them.

Lord David Cecil, “Modern Biography”

Or read again The Man Who Was Thursday. Compare it with another good writer, Kafka. Is the difference simply that the one is ‘dated’ and the other contemporary? Or is it rather that while both give a powerful picture of the loneliness and bewilderment which each one of us encounters in his (apparently) single-handed struggle with the universe, Chesterton, attributing to the universe a more complicated disguise, and admitting the exhilaration as well as the terror of the struggle, has got in rather more, is more balanced: in that sense, more classical, more permanent?

C. S. Lewis, “Period Criticism” Selection from Paradise Lost, Book 1

by John Milton

Innumerable force of Spirits arm’d

That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,

His utmost power with adverse power oppos’d

In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav’n,

And shook his throne. What though the field be lost?

All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield:

And what is else not to be overcome?

Books Mentioned:

The Oxford Book of Christian Verse ed. by Lord David Cecil

On Stories by C. S. Lewis

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Day of the Assassins by Michael Burleigh

The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton

The Song of Roland trans. by Dorothy L. Sayers

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

King Lear by William Shakespeare

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to the Literary Life podcast this week and our new series on G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas open with their commonplace quotes, as usual, then proceed to setting up the background for this book and the man Chesterton himself. Thomas also shares Chesterton’s poem to E. C. Bentley that opens this book and gives a brief explication of the poem. Following this, our hosts recap each chapter in the first section. Angelina makes several connections to Paradise Lost in this section, as well as pointing out the romantic and chivalric quest elements in the story. Cindy highlights the fact that we also have the fair maiden character here. Join us again next week when we will cover chapters 5-10 as events become even more strange.

If you missed our 2023 Back to School Conference when it was live, you can still go back and view the recordings when you purchase access to the conference at MorningTimeforMom.com.

Angelina is teaching a class on How to Read Beowulf at the end of August 2023. Get in on this mini-class at House of Humane Letters.

Thomas is also teaching a webinar along with Michael Williams on the modern poets W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot on September 28th. You can now register at House of Humane Letters.

Commonplace Quotes:

Had her mother been somebody else’s mother she would perhaps have admired her unreservedly.

L. P. Hartley, A Perfect Woman

When a child is reading, he should not be teased with questions as to the meaning of what he has read, the signification of this word or that; what is annoying to older people is equally annoying to children.

Charlotte Mason

And there is…Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffeeroom, view from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories“ GKC

by Walter de la Mare

Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way,

Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest;

The mills of Satan keep his lance in play,

Pity and innocence his heart at rest.

Books Mentioned:

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

John Le Carre

Graham Greene

Oscar Wilde

Franz Kafka

John Buchan

Thursday Next Series by Jasper Fforde

Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast we have a fun “Best of” Series episode for you from our collection of “In Search of the Austen Adaptation” podcasts! On this episode our hosts Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are joined by Atlee Northmore, and together they are debating which film version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is the best. Atlee shares some of the history of the Pride and Prejudice adaptations that were made for TV and film. Angelina highlights different ideas of what makes a good film adaptation of a book. Cindy brings up the importance of the casting, and Angelina talks about why she still feels like no film has gotten Mr. Darcy right. She also talks about the difficulty of embodying the virtues that Jane Austen gives her characters. Our hosts critique each major movies from over the decades, sharing what they like and dislike about each one.

Click here to download the PDF Atlee created for all the Pride and Prejudice film adaptations.

Commonplace Quotes:

If we cannot get the better of life, at any rate, we can be so free as to laugh at it.

Desmond MacCarthy

Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.

Virginia Woolf

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

G. K. Chesterton

Never judge a book by its movie.

Anonymous False Though She Be

by William Congreve

FALSE though she be to me and love, I'll ne'er pursue revenge; For still the charmer I approve, Though I deplore her change. In hours of bliss we oft have met: They could not always last; And though the present I regret, I'm grateful for the past. Book List:

The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On today’s “Best of The Literary Life” episode, Angelina and Cindy interview Caitlin Bruce Beauchamp. In addition to being an AmblesideOnline homeschool graduate and a lover of the humanities, Caitlin is a busy wife and a mother of young children. In their conversation, Angelina, Cindy and Caitlin dive into the deep end from the start, discussing the purpose of beauty. They talk about Caitlin’s early reading life and how she came to love books. She shares how she had to learn some humility in her reading life as an adult.

Angelina asks Caitlin how she finds the time to keep up her reading life amidst the responsibilities of mothering. Cindy and Caitlin talk about the importance of feeding your mind with other people’s ideas instead of taking the road to self-pity. The ladies discuss the timing of reading certain books to children and the great joy of watching children blossom as they listen to the right kinds of stories. Caitlin shares some of the books she reads to get out of a slump, as well as some other favorites and current reads.

Commonplace Quotes:

In his memoir Suprised by Joy Lewis described his ideal daily routine to be reading and writing from nine until one and again from five until seven, with breaks for meals, walking, or tea-time. Apart from those six hours of study every day, he also enjoyed light reading over meals or in the evening hours. All in all, Lewis’ preferred schedule seemed to include seven or eight hours of reading per day!

David C. Downing and Michael G. Maudlin, in the preface to The Reading Life

To be seeking always after the useful does not become free and exalted souls.

Aristotle

The years to come – this is a promise –

will grant you ample time

to try the difficult steps in the empire of thought

where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.

But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding,

than this deepest affinity between your eyes and the world.

The flock thickens

over the roiling, salt brightness. Listen,

maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world

in the clasp of attention, isn’t the perfect prayer,

but it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt,

is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,

but of pure submission. Tell me, what else

could beauty be for? And now the tide

is at its very crown,

the white birds sprinkle down,

gathering up the loose silver, rising

as if weightless. It isn’t instruction, or a parable.

It isn’t for any vanity or ambition

except for the one aloud, to stay alive.

It’s only a nimble frolic

over the waves. And you find, for hours,

you cannot even remember the questions

that weigh so in your mind.

Mary Oliver, selection from “Terns” In the Bleak Midwinter

by Christina Rossetti

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshiped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

Book List:

The Reading Life by C. S. Lewis

Poetics by Aristotle

The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Happy Hollisters by Jerry West

Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace

Stories from The Faerie Queen by Jeanie Lang

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Silence by Shusako Endo

Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery

Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Middlemarch by George Eliot (the Audible version read by Juliet Stevenson)

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

Light in August by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane

Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane

Elizabeth Goudge

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, our hosts Angelina, Cindy and Thomas sit down for a chat with twin sisters Addison and Ella Hornstra. Together they have been given a literary home education, and this fall they will continue that journey at New College Franklin. Angelina introduces the Hornstra ladies and she and Thomas tell a little bit about having them as students. Cindy also shares how she met the Hornstra family. Then they dig into the girls’ reading journeys from the beginning of their learning to read all the way to their current reading lives. Some of the topics that come up in this conversation are: reading content beyond your understanding, owning your reading life, the problem with using the wrong approach to literature, the dangers of modern education for uniquely gifted students, the power of just reading well, and so much more.

Come explore, with seasoned moms, the things that stand the test of time in our homeschools at this year’s Literary Life Back to School Online Conference. In addition to our hosts, Donna-Jean Breckenridge and a panel of home educating parents and their adult children, will be bringing encouragement and insight to help you on your homeschool journey. This year’s conference will be live online on August 2-5, with recordings available for those who cannot join live.

Commonplace Quotes:

It is bad to spend too many hours over either a microscope or telescope or in gazing fixedly at some one distance range. The eyes need change of focus, and so does the imagination. There has been in modern Europe a shocking riot in misuse of the imagination. The remedy is to learn to use it. But the same kind of people who would like to bandage a child’s eyes lest it should learn to squint like to bandage the imagination lest it should wear itself out by squinting.

Mary Everest Boole

Away from the immense, cloistered in our own concepts, we may scorn and revile everything. But standing between earth and sky, we are silenced by the sight.

Abraham Heschel

In nature, the bird who gets up earliest catches the most worms, but in book collecting, the prizes fall to birds who know worms when they see them.

Michael Sadlier

The madman, of all men, lives most in a world of his own.

E. J. Oliver

Symbols are the nature speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words.

Edmund Spenser Sonnet XIX: On His Blindness

by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait.” Books Mentioned:

The Philosophy and Fun of Algebra by Mary Everest Boole

Thunder in the Soul by Abraham Heschel

A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes

Coventry Patmore by E. J. Oliver

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

Beatrix Potter

Mistmantle Chronicles by M. I. McAllister

Redwall Series by Brian Jacques

Poppy Series by Avi

The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White

Ralph Mouse Series by Beverley Cleary

The Cat of Bubastes by G. A. Henty

In Freedom’s Cause by G. A. Henty

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Gene Stratton Porter

The Chronicles of Prydain Series by Lloyd Alexander

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Phantastes by George MacDonald

The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and the final episode in our series on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. This week, Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas open with a discussion of the difference between Jacobites and Whigs and how that contrast is played out in this story. Angelina and Cindy compare the characters of David Balfour and Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island and how they display honor. Angelina addresses moralizing stories versus making a moral observation of a story. Thomas gives a summary of the last several chapters of Kidnapped and makes some comment on the lawyer Rankeillor. They highlight more of the epic romance elements found in this book, as well.

Check out our Upcoming Events page to see the schedule for the rest of the summer and into fall.

Join us for the 5th Annual Back to School Conference with your hosts, along with special guest speaker Donna-Jean Breckenridge this August 2-5, 2023. Learn more and register at morningtimeformoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

But in these days we are forced even against our will to judge everything, even plays, morally. A crowd of artists and aesthetes have declared in this age that art is immoral; but the fact plainly and obviously remains that there never was a time in the history of the world when art was so moral. If there be a fault in the popular criticism of the day, it is that it is far too much so.

G. K. Chesterton, The Soul of Wit

Man is by nature so dissatisfied an animal that he must always be acclaiming something that he fondly believes to be new.

Charles Petrie, The Four Georges

But though the thing is to be criticised (and admired) strictly as an adventure story, there are sidelights of interest about it considered as a historical novel. It carries on a rather curiously balanced critical attitude, partly inherited from the attitude of Sir Walter Scott, the paradox of being intellectually on the side of the Whigs and morally on the side of the Jacobites.

G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson Scotland’s Winter

by Edwin Muir

Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the hill
Helmed in his winter casket,
And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky.
The water at the mill
Sounds more hoarse and dull.
The miller’s daughter walking by
With frozen fingers soldered to her basket
Seems to be knocking
Upon a hundred leagues of floor
With her light heels, and mocking
Percy and Douglas dead,
And Bruce on his burial bed,
Where he lies white as may
With wars and leprosy,
And all the kings before
This land was kingless,
And all the singers before
This land was songless,
This land that with its dead and living waits the Judgement Day.
But they, the powerless dead,
Listening can hear no more
Than a hard tapping on the floor
A little overhead
Of common heels that do not know
Whence they come or where they go
And are content
With their poor frozen life and shallow banishment.

Books Mentioned:

The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

David Balfour/Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy continue their discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, covering chapters 7-18. After sharing their commonplace quotes, Thomas opens the conversation with a brief synopsis of chapter 7. Angelina notes the increase in danger and violence in this section of the book, and our hosts talk about the roguish character of Alan Breck. They make many comparisons between Kidnapped and Treasure Island and highlight the other-world atmosphere Stevenson creates while staying in the real world. Cindy mentions some of the conflict between the Campbells and MacDonalds, and Thomas fleshes out a little more of this aspect of Scottish history.

Join us for the 5th Annual Back to School Conference with your hosts, along with special guest speaker Donna-Jean Breckenridge this August 2-5, 2023. Learn more and register at morningtimeformoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Mr. Roger Lancelyn Green, writing in English not long ago, remarked that the reading of Rider Haggard had been to many a sort of religious experience. To some people this will have seemed simply grotesque. I myself would strongly disagree with it if ‘religious’ is taken to mean ‘Christian.’ And even if we take it in a sub-Christian sense, it would have been safer to say that such people had first met in Haggard’s romances elements which they would meet again in religious experience if they ever came to have any. But I think Mr. Green is very much nearer the mark than those who assume that no one has ever read the romances except in order to be thrilled by hair-breadth escapes. If he had said simply that something which the educated receive from poetry can reach the masses through stories of adventure, and almost in no other way, then I think he would have been right.

C. S. Lewis

The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was that romance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far more important than mere occurrences: that one was the soul of our life, the other the body, and that the soul was the precious thing.

G. K. Chesterton, from Varied Types

What do you usually do when you are shut up in a secret room, with no chance of getting out for hours? As for me, I always say poetry to myself. It is one of the uses of poetry–one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances of that kind, or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night. You will find poetry most useful for this purpose. So learn plenty of it, and be sure it is the best kind, because this is most useful as well as most agreeable.

E. Nesbit, from The House of Arden A Selection from Rob Roy’s Grave

by William Wordsworth

Thou, although with some wild thoughts
Wild Chieftain of a savage Clan!
Hadst this to boast of; thou didst love
The liberty of man.

And, had it been thy lot to live
With us who now behold the light,
Thou would’st have nobly stirred thyself,
And battled for the Right.

For thou wert still the poor man’s stay,
The poor man’s heart, the poor man’s hand;
And all the oppressed, who wanted strength,
Had thine at their command.

Books Mentioned:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard

The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to a new read along series on The Literary Life Podcast! This week Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy will begin their discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, covering chapters 1-6, as well as giving some background information on the beloved author and the historical setting of this book. Angelina talks about the life of R. L. Stevenson, and Thomas sets the historical stage for the story. We also get a glimpse into the form of the novel as a romance from some clues Stevenson gives at the outset. Cindy highlights the foreboding in the song of a woman David Balfour passes on the road. They look more closely at David’s plight, the role of the usurping uncle, and Stevenson’s excellent storytelling.

Come back next week to get in on the discussion of chapters 7-18.

You are not too late to participate in Thomas’ mini-class on G. K. Chesterton taking place live or later from June 26th through July 7th. Register at HouseofHumaneLetters.com today!

Commonplace Quotes:

Perhaps it is a mistake to suppose that metaphors can be invented. The real ones, those that formulate intimate connections between one image and another, have always existed; those we can invent are the false ones, which are not worth inventing.

Jorge Luis Borges, An Essay on Hawthorne

The tragedy of King Lear, in some of its elements perhaps the very greatest of all the Shakespearean tragedies, is relatively seldom played. It is even possible to have a dark suspicion that it is not universally read; with the usual deplorable result, that it is universally quoted. Perhaps nothing has done so much to weaken the greatest of English achievements, and to leave it open to facile revolt or fatigued reaction, than the abominable habit of quoting Shakespeare without reading Shakespeare.

G. K. Chesterton, from and introduction to The Spice of Life

Truth is a stern mistress, and when one hath once started off with her one must follow on after the jade, though she lead in flat defiance of all the rules and conditions which would fain turn that tangled wilderness the world into the trim Dutch garden of the story-tellers.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke Epitaph on a Jacobite

by Thomas Macaulay

To my true king I offered free from stain
Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.
For him, I threw lands, honours, wealth, away.
And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.
For him I languished in a foreign clime,
Grey-haired with sorrow in my manhood’s prime;
Heard on Lavernia Scargill’s whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees;
Beheld each night my home in fevered sleep,
Each morning started from the dream to weep;
Till God who saw me tried too sorely, gave
The resting place I asked, an early grave.
Oh thou, whom chance leads to this nameless stone,
From that proud country which was once mine own,
By those white cliffs I never more must see,
By that dear language which I spake like thee,
Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear
O’er English dust. A broken heart lies here.

Books Mentioned:

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton

Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952 by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. by Ruth L. C. Simms

The Soul of Wit by G. K. Chesterton, ed. by Dale Ahlquist

The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle

George MacDonald

Andrew Lang

Sir Walter Scott

C. S. Lewis

Alfred de Vigny

Alessandro Manzoni

Alexandre Dumas

The Sacketts Series by Louis L’Amour

Roger Lancelyn Greene

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas wrap up their discussion of C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce with the final chapters 11-14. Cindy and Angelina talk about the dangers of familial love becoming the end-all-be-all, as well as Lewis’ exploration of Dante’s idea of sin. They go in depth with this exploration of sin as a distortion of something that might naturally seem good and the way Lewis pairs people to demonstrate that in these chapters. Angelina talks about the medieval view of ordered man versus the disordered man and how that relates to the man with the horse. They wrap up with the importance of stories in depicting truth in a veiled way, instead of only theological argument and discourse, in helping us live out our faith in a properly ordered way.

Until next time, check out our Upcoming Events page to view our schedule and see what we will be reading together over the next few months!

Commonplace Quotes:

We chose from the library shelves any book of Tales for the Young, and took much pleasure in prophesying the events. We could rely on Providence to punish the naughty and bring to notice the heroism of the good, and generally grant an early death to both. Why was there a bull in a field? To gore the disobedient. Why did cholera break out? To kill the child who went down a forbidden street. The names told us much: Tom, Sam, or Jack were predestined to evil, while a Frank could do nothing but good. Henry was a bit uncertain: he might lead his little sister into that field with bravado, or he might attack the bull to save her life at the cost of his own. We had bettings of gooseberries on such points.

M. V. Hughes

Exaggeration is one of art’s great devices.

J. B. Priestley

Hell is inaccurate.

Charles Williams There is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods

by Lord Byron

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Book List:

A London Child of the Seventies by M. V. Hughes

Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc

An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley

The Good Companions by J. B. Priestley

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Paradise Lost by John Milton

A Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

Mere Motherhood by Cindy Rollins

The Allegory of Love by C. S. Lewis

A Woman of the Pharisees by François Mauriac

Perelandra by C. S. Lewis

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, our hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks discuss chapters 7-10 of C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Angelina points out the way in which Lewis uses the “newcomer” character to explain the world he has created. They discuss the various personalities Lewis presents who choose not to take the journey to heaven, sharing how these sketches often hit a little too close to home.

They also talk about the influence of George MacDonald on Lewis and his role in this story. Thomas helps us make some connections with Lewis and Virgil, as well as explaining some of the references made by MacDonald’s character. Cindy points out how our loves can be entryways into either heaven or hell. Join us again next week as we finish up our discussion of The Great Divorce together!

There is still time to sign up for Thomas’ upcoming mini-class on G. K. Chesterton taking place live from June 26th through July 7th. Register at HouseofHumaneLetters.com today!

Commonplace Quotes:

Meanwhile, you will write an essay on self-indulgence. There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.

Evelyn Waugh

Shame belongs, rather, to the bookish recluse who knows not how to apply his reading to the good of his fellows or to manifest its fruit to the eyes of all.

Cicero

It is simply my lifelong experience—that men are more likely to hand over to others what they ought to do themselves, and women more likely to do themselves what others wish they would leave alone. Hence both sexes must be told “Mind your own business,” but in two different senses!

C. S. Lewis To a Skylark

by William Wordsworth

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!
Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye
Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,
Those quivering wings composed, that music still!

Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine;
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

Book List:

Letters to an American Lady by C. S. Lewis

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Pro Archia Poeta by Cicero

Farmer Giles of Ham by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

George MacDonald

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Psychomachia by Prudentius

Holy Living and Dying by Jeremy Taylor

Satires of Circumstance by Thomas Hardy

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, our hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks discuss chapters 2-6 of C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Angelina reminds us as we begin this exploration of Lewis’ narrative not to read too much theology into the details of this dreamlike world he creates. Cindy points out the similarities between these chapters and his descriptions at the end of The Last Battle. Thomas highlights the passage on Napoleon from chapter 2, showing what Lewis envisioned hell to be like. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas talks about the description of the land near heaven, the various characters’ responses, as well as the weight of the actual environment and Lewis’ picture of those who people it.

Be sure to check out Thomas’ upcoming mini-class on G. K. Chesterton taking place live from June 26th through July 7th. Register at HouseofHumaneLetters.com today!

Commonplace Quotes:

We long for paradise because we were created for paradise. We were created to live in an environment that cooperates with, not fights against, our desires. We were created for Eden, a place we’ve never been, and so we desire a perfect life full of healthy relationships.

Julie Sparkman

Anyone who puts himself forward to be elected to a position of political power is almost bound to be socially or emotionally insecure, or criminally motivated, or mad.

Auberon Waugh

“The secret is not to dream,” she whispered. “The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and now I am real. I know where I come from and where I’m going. You cannot fool me anymore. Or touch me. Or anything that is mine.”

Terry Pratchett The Stricken Deer

by William Cowper

I was a stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charg’d, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I found by one who had himself
Been hurt by th’ archers. In his side he bore,
And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts,
He drew them forth, and heal’d, and bade me live.
Since then, with few associates, in remote
And silent woods I wander, far from those
My former partners of the peopled scene;
With few associates, and not wishing more.
Here much I ruminate, as much I may,
With other views of men and manners now
Than once, and others of a life to come.
I see that all are wand’rers, gone astray
Each in his own delusions; they are lost
In chace of fancied happiness, still wooed
And never won. Dream after dream ensues,
And still they dream that they shall still succeed,
And still are disappointed; rings the world
With the vain stir. I sum up half mankind,
And add two-thirds of the remainder half,
And find the total of their hopes and fears
Dreams, empty dreams. The million flit as gay
As if created only like the fly
That spreads his motley wings in th’ eye of noon
To sport their season and be seen no more.

Book List:

Unhitching from the Crazy Train by Julie Sparkman

Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

“Unspoken Sermons: The Last Farthing” by George MacDonald

The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

The Personal Heresy by C. S. Lewis and E. M. Tillyard

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

Tramp for the Lord by Corrie Ten Boom

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Brook Kerith by George Moore

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, Cindy Rollins, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks begin their series on The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. Today you are going to get a crash-course in Medievalism through Lewis’ story, and we hope you will enjoy this book as much as our hosts do. Angelina kicks off the discussion even while sharing her commonplace quote, sharing some information about the epigraph and front matter. She gives us some historical context, both for where this books comes in Lewis’ own timeline, as well as some ideas of the journey of the soul and medieval dream literature.

Thomas gives some background on Prudentius and his allegorical work The Psychomachia. Angelina goes into some comparisons between The Great Divorce and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Thomas talks about Nathanial Hawthorne’s short story The Celestial Railroad as a satire of Pilgrim’s Progress. Also, if you haven’t read and listened to E. M. Forster’s Celestial Omnibus, see Episode 17. As they get into discussing the Preface, Thomas give us some information on William Blake. We will be back next week with a discussion on Chapters 2-6.

Be sure to check out Thomas' upcoming mini-class on G. K. Chesterton taking place live from June 26th through July 7th. Register at HouseofHumaneLetters.com today!

Commonplace Quotes:

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern the falsity.

Simone Weil, from “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God“

A poet is not a man who says “look at me”, but rather a man who points at something and says “look at that.”

C. S. Lewis

No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it–no plan to retain this of that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.

George MacDonald, from “Unspoken Sermons: The Last Farthing“ MCMXIV

by Philip Larkin

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day–

And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word–the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Book List:

The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald

The Personal Heresy by C. S. Lewis and E. M. Tillyard

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Divine Comedy by Dante

Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

The Holy War by John Bunyan

Ourselves by Charlotte Mason

A Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

In this conversation, Angelina and Cindy talk all things related to the detective novel. Why do we love detective fiction so much? What are the qualities of a good detective novel? What is the history of detective fiction, and how did World War I bring about the Golden Age of the genre? Angelina and Cindy answer all these questions and more. Be sure to scroll down for links to all the books and authors mentioned in this episode!

Commonplace Quotes:

Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry, for the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end. The Muses will submit to no marriage of convenience.

C. S. Lewis

One of these days I shall write a book in which two men are seen to walk down a cul de sac, and there is a shot, and one man is found murdered, and the other runs away with a gun in his hand, and after twenty chapters stinking with red herrings, it turns out that the man with the gun did it after all.

Dorothy L. Sayers The Listeners

by Walter De La Mare

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveler’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveler;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveler’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Book List:

The World’s Last Night by C.S. Lewis

The Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise, and Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Nancy Drew #45: The Spider Sapphire Mystery by Carolyn Keene

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Footsteps at the Lock by Ronald Knox

Agatha Christie

Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe

The Moonstone and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

The Albert Campion Series by Margery Allingham

The Roderick Alleyn Series by Ngaio Marsh

The Flavia de Luce Series by Allen Bradley

The Inspector Appleby Mystery Series by Michael Innes

The Daughter of Time and Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey

Murder Fantastical by Patricia Moyes

The Cormoran Strike Series by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

Alexander McCall Smith

Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Series by Laurie King

Chief Inspector Gamache Series by Louise Penny

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Chronicles of Brother Cadfael Series by Ellis Peters

The Inspector Adam Dalgliesh Series by P.D. James

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast with Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks, we have a very special episode for you. Our hosts are joined by guests Dan Bunting and Anthony Dodgers, both of whom are pastors, for a discussion on why pastors should read fiction books. Dan is also host of the the Reading the Psalms podcast. Angelina starts off the conversation by asking why these men would prioritize taking literature classes. Anthony shares about his own literary life journey and how rediscovering literature has helped him personally. Dan talks about the book club that he and a couple of his pastor friends have and what kinds of books they read together. They discuss many other deep topics and crucial questions that we hope will be encouraging and thought-provoking to everyone who listens to and shares this episode.

If you want to get the replays of the 2022 Back to School Conference, “Education: Myths and Legends” with special guest speakers Lynn Bruce and Caitlin Beauchamp, along with our hosts Cindy Rollins, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks, you can learn more at Morning Time for Moms.

Commonplace Quotes:

If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.

C. S. Lewis, from “Our English Syllabus”

How am I a hog and me both?

Flannery O’Connor

He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times.

Freidrich Schiller

Whoever wants to become a Christian, must first become a poet.

St. Porphyrios of Kafsokalivia

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in press or pulpit, who warn us that we are “relapsing into paganism”. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity “by the same door as in she went”, and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past, and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.

C. S. Lewis, from “De Descriptione Temporum” A Boy in Church

by Robert Graves

‘Gabble-gabble, . . . brethren, . . . gabble-gabble!’ My window frames forest and heather. I hardly hear the tuneful babble, Not knowing nor much caring whether The text is praise or exhortation, Prayer or thanksgiving, or damnation. Outside it blows wetter and wetter, The tossing trees never stay still. I shift my elbows to catch better The full round sweep of heathered hill. The tortured copse bends to and fro In silence like a shadow-show. The parson’s voice runs like a river Over smooth rocks, I like this church: The pews are staid, they never shiver, They never bend or sway or lurch. ‘Prayer,’ says the kind voice, ‘is a chain That draws down Grace from Heaven again.’ I add the hymns up, over and over, Until there’s not the least mistake. Seven-seventy-one. (Look! there’s a plover! It’s gone!) Who’s that Saint by the lake? The red light from his mantle passes Across the broad memorial brasses. It’s pleasant here for dreams and thinking, Lolling and letting reason nod, With ugly serious people linking Sad prayers to a forgiving God . . . . But a dumb blast sets the trees swaying With furious zeal like madmen praying. Book List:

Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh

Asterix Comics by René Goscinny

Tin Tin by Herge

Sigrid Undset

Giants in the Earth by Ole Rolvaag

Roald Dahl

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

John Donne

George Herbert

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

Graham Greene

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse edited by Donald Davie

Waiting on the Word by Malcolm Guite

Word in the Wilderness by Malcolm Guite

Neil Gaiman

Bill Bryson

Ursula Le Guin

Terry Pratchett

Reflections on the Psalms by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast, our hosts Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are joined by their podcast producer Kiel Lemon to chat about her own literary life. Kiel and her husband, along with their two children, live in West Virginia where they homeschool and enjoy the outdoors together whenever they can. After sharing commonplace quotes and how Angelina and Cindy met Kiel, they dig in to her background in reading. They also talk at some length about making use of audio books and speak to the concern parents have about audio versus physical books.

Kiel gives a shout out to her high school English teacher for giving her a good foundation in the classics and poetry. She also shares some of her early attempts to give herself a literary education in early adulthood, and Angelina asks Kiel why she was so drawn to old books. They also discuss the challenges of a dry time she went through when she wasn’t reading much at all and how to get out of a reading slump. Some other topics they touch on are disciplined versus whimsical reading, keeping multiple books at the same time, going through the AmblesideOnline curriculum with children, and more.

To find out more about Thomas’ summer class on G. K. Chesterton and sign up for that, go to houseofhumaneletters.com. To register for Cindy’s summer discipleship session, visit morningtimeformoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?…Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power?

Annie Dillard, from The Abundance: Narrative Essays New and Old

My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.

Jane Austen

A man living at the bottom of a well will think the sky is small.

Han Yu

Recent psychological research, together with a number of other contributory factors, has influenced us to emphasise–possibly to over-emphasise–the importance of the unconscious in determining our actions and opinions. Our confidence in such faculties as will and judgement has been undermined, and in collapsing has taken with it a good deal of our interest in ourselves as responsible individuals.

Dorothy L. Sayers, from Introductory Papers on Dante The Land of Story-Books

by Robert Louis Stevenson

At evening when the lamp is lit,
Around the fire my parents sit;
They sit at home and talk and sing,
And do not play at anything.

Now, with my little gun, I crawl
All in the dark along the wall,
And follow round the forest track
Away behind the sofa back.

There, in the night, where none can spy,
All in my hunter’s camp I lie,
And play at books that I have read
Till it is time to go to bed.

These are the hills, these are the woods,
These are my starry solitudes;
And there the river by whose brink
The roaring lions come to drink.

I see the others far away
As if in firelit camp they lay,
And I, like to an Indian scout,
Around their party prowled about.

So when my nurse comes in for me,
Home I return across the sea,
And go to bed with backward looks
At my dear land of Story-books.

Books Mentioned:

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

The Real Mother Goose by Blanche Fisher Wright

The Odyssey by Homer

Howards End by E. M. Forster

Cormoran Strike Series by Robert Galbraith

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge

Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis

“Kate Crackernuts” retold by Joseph Jacobs

Beowulf trans. by Burton Raffell

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Bess Streeter Aldrich

Gene Stratton-Porter

Poems That Touch the Heart ed. by A. L. Alexander

Black Plumes by Margery Allingham

To the Far Blue Mountains by Louis L’Amour

The Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoire by Louis L’Amour

Redwall Series by Brian Jacques

Continuing the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

Kidnapped by Robert Lewis Stevenson

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcom back to The Literary Life Podcast and our discussion of P. G. Wodehouse’s Code of the Woosters. This week Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy finish up the book, covering chapters 10-14. After sharing their commonplace quotes, they start the chat by talking about what exactly the “Code of the Woosters” is for Bertie. Cindy brings up Wodehouse’ good experience in boarding school and how that comes out in his stories. Angelina reminds us again of the Roman comic structure that sets the form for this type of story. Thomas highlights some connections between Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, and P. G. Wodehouse. They also enjoy recounting the moments when Bertie thinks of himself of a detective and compares himself to Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, et al.

Find annotations for the slang, quotes, etc., for The Code of the Woosters here.

To find out more about Thomas’ summer class on G. K. Chesterton and sign up for that, go to houseofhumaneletters.com. To register for Cindy’s summer discipleship session, visit morningtimeformoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The books that should be set before children are books of play and ceremonial, and pomp and war: the whole gloria mundi, the whole pageant of history, full of blood and pride, may safely be told them–everything but the secret of their own incomparable influence. Children need to be taught primarily the grandeur of the whole world. It is merely the whole world that needs to be taught the grandeur of children.

G. K. Chesterton, from The Speaker, November 24, 1900

Each be other’s comfort kind:

Deep, deeper than divined,

Divine charity, dear charity,

Fast you ever, fast bind.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “At the Wedding March”

I find that my personal animosity against a writer never affects my opinion of what he writes. Nobody could be more anxious than myself, for instance, that Alan Alexander Milne should trip over a loose boot-lace and break his bloody neck, yet I re-read his early stuff at regular intervals with all the old enjoyment and still maintain that in The Dover Road he produced about the best comedy in English.

Did you read Milne’s serial in the Mail? I thought it good. Nothing happened in it, but the characters were so real. I wonder how a book like that sells. Do people want a story or not?

P. G. Wodehouse Pippa’s Song

by Robert Browning

The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearl’d;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!

Books Mentioned:

P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters edited by Sophie Ratcliffe

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Oscar Wilde

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life Podcast our hosts, Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks, continue discussing P. G. Wodehouse’s Code of the Woosters together, covering chapters 5-9 today. They share some similarities in Wodehouse’s work to Shakespearean and Roman comic characters. Some of these stock characters are the couple, the helpful servant, the unhelpful servant, the irritable old man, and more. Angelina shares her take on Wodehouse’s ability to complicate the comedic form. Cindy makes a comparison between the ease created by habits in life and form in stories. Delighting in Wodehouse’s skill to turn a phrase, our hosts share many humorous passages throughout this episode, so be sure to stay tuned to the end to catch it all.

Find annotations for the slang, quotes, etc., for The Code of the Woosters here.

To find out more about Thomas’ summer class on G. K. Chesterton and sign up for that, go to houseofhumaneletters.com. To register for Cindy’s summer discipleship session, visit morningtimeformoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The gentleness and candour of Shakespeare’s mind has impressed all his readers. But is impresses us still more the more we study the general tone of sixteenth-century literature. He is gloriously anomalous.

C. S. Lewis

He wrote to Sheran: What do you find to read these days? I simply can’t cope with the American novel. The most ghastly things are published and sell a million copies, but good old Wodehouse will have none of them and sticks to English mystery stories. It absolutely beats me how people can read the stuff that is published now. I am reduced to English mystery stories and my own stuff. I was reading Blandings Castle again yesterday and was lost in admiration for the brilliance of the author.

P. G. Wodehouse, as quoted by Frances Donaldson

You notice that popular literature, the kind of stories that are read for relaxation, is always very highly conventionalized…Wodehouse is a popular writer, and the fact that he is a popular writer has a lot to do with his use of stock plots. Of course he doesn’t take his own plots seriously; he makes fun of them by the way he uses them; but so did Plautus and Terence.

Northrop Frye

…when you go to his residence, the first thing you see is an enormous fireplace, and round it are carved in huge letters the words: TWO LOVERS BUILT THIS HOUSE. Her idea, I imagine. I can’t believe Wells would have thought of that himself.

P. G. Wodehouse, in a letter to William Townend Fashion’s Phases

by P. G. Wodehouse

When first I whispered words of love,
When first you turned aside to hear,
The winged griffin flew above,
The mammoth gaily gamboll’d near;
I wore the latest thing in skins
Your dock-leaf dress had just been mended
And fastened-up with fishes fins –
The whole effect was really splendid.
Again – we wondered by the Nile,
In Egypt’s far, forgotten land,
And we watched the festive crocodile
Devour papyrus from your hand.
Far off across the plain we saw
The trader urge his flying camel;
Bright shone the scarab belt he wore,
Clasped with a sphinx of rare enamel.
Again — on Trojan plains I knelt;
Alas! In vain I strove to speak
And tell you all the love I felt
In more or less Homeric Greek;
Perhaps my helmet-strap was tight
And checked the thoughts I fain would utter,
Or else your robe of dreamy white
Bewildered me and made me stutter.
Once more we change the mise-en-scene;
The road curves across the hill;
Excitement makes you rather plain,
But on the whole I love you still,
As wreathed in veils and goggles blue,
And clad in mackintosh and leather,
Snug in our motor built for two
We skim the Brighton road together.

Books Mentioned:

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century by C. S. Lewis

P. G. Wodehouse, A Biography by Frances Donaldson

The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye

Arabian Nights trans. by Burton Richard

The Renaissance Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On this episode of The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks, are introducing P. G. Wodehouse’s entertaining book, Code of the Woosters. This week they will cover chapters 1-4. Our hosts start the conversation sharing some interesting tidbits about P. G. Wodehouse the man, as well as the Wodehousian world in general. Then they begin discussing the story, highlighting Bertie’s code of manners that sets up so many problematic situations and Jeeves’ unflappable mastery of every circumstance. Find annotations for the slang, quotes, etc., for The Code of the Woosters here.

To find out more about Thomas’ summer class on G. K. Chesterton and sign up for that, go to houseofhumaneletters.com. To register for Cindy’s summer discipleship session, visit morningtimeformoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

A craftsman is excellent in his craft according to his degree of attainment towards its end and his use of the means toward that end. Now the end of writing is the production in the reader’s mind of a certain image and a certain emotion. And the means towards that end are the use of words in any particular language; and the complete use of that medium is the choosing of the right words and the putting of them into the right order. It is this which Mr. Wodehouse does better, in the English language, than anyone else alive, or at any rate, than anyone else that I have read for many years past.

Hilaire Belloc

Mr. Wodehouse has created Jeeves. He has created others, but in his creation of Jeeves he has done something which may be respectably compared to the the world of the Almighty in Michelangelo’s painting. He has formed a man filled with the breath of life…If in, say, fifty years Jeave and any other of the that great company – but in particular Jeeves – shall have faded, then what we have so long called England will no longer be.

Hilaire Belloc

For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man; no ‘aboriginal calamity.’ His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. The chef Anatole prepares the ambrosia for the immortals of high Olympus. Mr. Wodehouse’s world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

Evelyn Waugh

[This critic] has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha; but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneraled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

P. G. Wodehouse from In Memoriam A. H. H.

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

But who shall so forecast the years
And find in loss a gain to match?
Or reach a hand thro’ time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d,
Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground,

Than that the victor Hours should scorn
The long result of love, and boast,
`Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn.’

Books Mentioned:

The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton

Summer Lightning by P. G. Wodehouse

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life Podcast we are pleased to bring you another “Best Of” series replay of one of our most popular episodes. Today our hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks tackle the tough questions so many people ask about reading stories dealing with magic. First off, Angelina affirms the need to discernment and the desire to steer clear of that which would be a stumbling block for our children. Cindy shares a little about her own concern when her children were very young. Then they set the groundwork by defining some terms and considering the kinds of questions we need to ask, beginning with Scripture and the church fathers. Be sure to listen to the end when Angelina, Cindy and Thomas suggest some criteria for evaluating magic elements in books before handing them to their students.

Commonplace Quotes:

I am not conscious of having ever bought a book from a motive of ostentation.

Edward Gibbon

There is no language and no knowledge without symbol and metaphor. Two consequences arise from this: one is that we require imagination both to make and to interpret symbols, and the other is that symbols themselves beckon us through language to that which is beyond language. In other words, symbols are energized between the two poles (as Coleridge would say) of immanence and transcendence.

Malcolm Guite

Incidentally, we do not know of a single healthy and powerful book used to educate people (and that includes the Bible) in which such delicate matters do not actually appear to an even greater extent. Proper usage sees no evil here, but finds, as an attractive saying has it, a document of our hearts. Children can read the stars without fear, while others, so superstition has it, insult angels by doing the same thing.

Wilhelm Grimm The Queen Mab Speech

by William Shakespeare

O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Over men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon spokes made of long spinners’ legs,
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the smallest spider web;
Her collars, of the moonshine’s wat’ry beams;
Her whip, of cricket’s bone; the lash, of film;
Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees;
O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometimes she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail
Tickling a parson’s nose as ‘a lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice.
Sometimes she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscades, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes.
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
This is she!

Book List:

Memoirs of My Life by Edward Gibbon

Faith, Hope, and Poetry by Malcolm Guite

Wings and the Child by Edith Nesbit

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life, we are bringing you another “Best of The Literary Life Podcast” episode. This week’s featured guest is Timilyn Downey, who will be a keynote speaker at this spring’s Literary Life Online Conference. Hosts Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins dig into how Timilyn became a lifelong reader. Timilyn shares about the incredibly literary childhood education that she had without even realizing it at the time. She also tells the story of her trip to London during college, then goes into how she used a literary approach in her teaching career. Timilyn also describes her journey to homeschooling and the role that God’s grace clearly played in where she is now.

Register now for our 5th Annual Literary Life Online Conference coming up April 12-15, 2023, Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time. Get all the details and sign up today at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was not as programmatic or formal as its name suggests, but rather evolved out of a series of pub discussions and informal get-togethers.

Carolyn Weber

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.

Charles MacKay

On a Saturday afternoon in winter, when nose and fingers might be pinched enough to give an added relish to the anticipation of tea and fireside, and the whole week-end’s reading lay ahead, I suppose I reached as much happiness as is ever to be reached on earth.

C. S. Lewis from “Among School Children”

by William Butler Yeats

VII Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts—O Presences That passion, piety or affection knows, And that all heavenly glory symbolise— O self-born mockers of man's enterprise; VIII Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? Book List:

The Rossetti’s in Wonderland by Dinah Roe

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Little Britches by Ralph Moody

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

The Arabian Nights by Muhsin Mahdi

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Mere Motherhood by Cindy Rollins

Morning Time by Cindy Rollins

Tending the Heart of Virtue by Vigen Guroian

D’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths by Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

We are back on The Literary Life Podcast this week to wrap up our series on Shakespeare’s Othello with a discussion of Acts 4 and 5. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas begin the conversation looking at how the avalanche that began at the climax in Act 3 now continues until the curtain drops. Beginning with her commonplace quote, Angelina expands on the idea that this play uses images of the temptation and fall of man. Thomas reads from Othello’s speech in illustration of how disordered he has become. Once again in these acts we see Desdemona’s innocence and goodness. Iago’s parallels to the storm and to Satan are further illustrated, as well. Cindy, Thomas, and Angelina share their several thoughts on the ending of the play.

Register now for our 5th Annual Literary Life Online Conference coming up April 12-15, 2023, Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time. Get all the details and sign up today at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

It is observed that “a corrupt society has many laws”; I know not whether it is not equally true that an ignorant age has many books. When the treasures of ancient knowledge lie unexamined, and original authors are neglected and forgotten, compilers and plagiaries are encouraged, who give us again what we had before, and grow great by setting before us what our own sloth had hidden from our view.

Samuel Johnson, from The Idler, Essay #85

It is very important again that the child should not be allowed to condemn the conduct of the people about him. Whether he is right or wrong in his verdict is not the question. The habit of bestowing blame will certainly blunt his conscience and deaden his sensibility to the injunction “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

Charlotte Mason, from Home Education

If the precise movement of Eve’s mind at this point is not always noticed, that is because Milton’s truth to nature is here almost too great, and the reader is involved in the same illusion as Eve herself. The whole thing is so quick, each new element of folly, malice, and corruption enters so unobtrusively, so naturally, that it is hard to realize we have been watching the genesis of murder. We expect something more like Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here”. But Lady Macbeth speaks thus after the intention of murder has already been fully formed in her mind. Milton is going closer to the actual moment of decision. Thus, and not otherwise, does the mind turn to embrace evil. No man, perhaps, ever at first described to himself the act he was about to do as Murder, or Adultery, or Fraud, or Treachery, or Perversion; and when he hears it so described by other men he is (in a way) sincerely shocked and surprised. Those others “don’t understand.” If they knew what it had really been like for him, they would not use those crude “stock” names. With a wink or a titter, or in a cloud of muddy emotion, the thing has slipped into his will as something not very extraordinary, something of which, rightly understood and in all his highly peculiar circumstances, he may even feel proud. If you or I, reader, ever commit a great crime, be sure we shall feel very much more like Eve than like Iago.

C. S. Lewis, from A Preface to Paradise Lost Desdemona

by George Gissing

I see thee, Desdemona, pale and cold
As the pluck’d lily that uncared for dies,
Thy lips the seat of silence, and thine eyes
Deserted shrines of chastity; behold,
Their lamp is quenched, their oracles untold;
Calm is thy bosom, which no more shall rise
And fall with love’s sweet rapture or sad sighs,
And thy hands clasp’d in prayer shall ne’er unfold
Silent and still; yet in that silence speaks
A voice more eloquent than passion’s tongue,
The mute reproach upon thy innocent face,
Which chases from his breast who did thee wrong
The spectre of blind wrath, and in his place
Despair, for all thy sorrows vengeance wreaks.

Books Mentioned:

Othello by William Shakespeare

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

The Soul of Wit by G. K. Chesterton, edited by Dale Ahlquist

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

Ignatius Critical Editions of Shakespeare plays

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and our series covering Shakespeare’s play Othello. This week Angelina, Thomas and Cindy talk about the end of Act 2, review Act 3’s major plot points, and discuss the bigger ideas present in this and all Shakespeare’s stories. Thomas brings out the similarities between Don John in Much Ado About Nothing and Iago in Othello. Angelina highlights the significance of the placement of the wedding dance and the discord occurring within the form of the play. Cindy points out the importance of reputation in this section of the play. Other concepts they talk about include: the character of a warrior, the issue of race in this play, Iago’s deception of Othello, Desdemona as a picture of innocence, and so much more.

Register now for our 5th Annual Literary Life Online Conference coming up April 12-15, 2023, Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time. Get all the details and sign up today at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The notion of cosmic order pervades the entire Fairy Queen and prompts such a detail as Spenser’s iteration of the phrase “In a comely rew [row]” or “on a row.” The arrangement is comely not just because it is pretty and seemly but because it harmonises with a universal order.

But the negative implication was even more frequent and emphatic. If the Elizabethans believed in an ideal order animating earthly order, they were terrified lest it should be upset, and appalled by the visible tokens of disorder that suggested its upsetting. They were obsessed by the fear of chaos and the fact of mutability; and the obsession was powerful in proportion as their faith in the cosmic order was strong. To us chaos means hardly more than confusion on a large scale; to an Elizabethan it mean the cosmic anarchy before creation and the wholesale dissolution that would result if the pressure of Providence relaxed and allowed the law of nature to cease functioning. Othello’s “chaos is come again” or Ulysses’s “this chaos, when degree is suffocate,” cannot be fully felt apart from orthodox theology.

E. M. Tillyard

The world will always believe Shakespeare’s version of these events.

Andrew Lang

All the men in history who have really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed upon the past.

G. K. Chesterton Could Man Be Drunk Forever?

by A. E. Housman

Could man be drunk for ever
With liquor, love, or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down of nights.
But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.

Books Mentioned:

Othello by William Shakespeare

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

A Short History of Scotland by Andrew Lang

The Soul of Wit by G. K. Chesterton, edited by Dale Ahlquist

The Malcontent by John Marston

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

Ignatius Critical Editions of Shakespeare plays

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks, we have our second episode covering Shakespeare’s play Othello. Today’s episode is a discussion of Acts 1 and 2. Our hosts talk about the problem of Iago’s antagonism toward Othello, the way in which Shakespeare asks “what if?” to develop new treatments of old stories, the question of Othello’s ethnicity, Shakespeare’s method of building up layers of disorder in the story, the theme of people out of harmony with the community, plus so much more!

Register now for our 5th Annual Literary Life Online Conference coming up April 12-15, 2023, Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time. Get all the details and sign up today at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

It has only been for a short time, a recent and disturbed time of transition, that each writer has been expected to write a new theory of all things or draw a new wild map of the world. The old writers were content to write of the old world, but to write of it with an imaginative freshness which made it in each case look like a new world. The poets taught in a continuous tradition and were not in the least ashamed of being traditional. Each taught in an individual way with a perpetual slight novelty, as Aristotle said, but they were not a series of separate lunatics looking at separate worlds. One poet did not provide a pair of spectacles by which it appeared that the grass was blue, or another poet lecture on optics to teach people to say that the grass was orange. They both had the far harder and more heroic task of teaching people to feel that the grass is green. And because they continue their heroic task, the world, after every epoch of doubt and despair, always grows green again.

G. K. Chesterton

Our age was cultivated thus at length;
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.
Our builders were with want of genius curst;
The second temple was not like the first.

John Dryden

The atmosphere of the homeschool is on the mother’s face.

Lynn Bruce My Pretty Rose Tree

by William Blake

A flower was offered to me,
Such a flower as May never bore;
But I said “I’ve a pretty rose tree,”
And I passed the sweet flower o’er.

Then I went to my pretty rose tree,
To tend her by day and by night;
But my rose turned away with jealousy,
And her thorns were my only delight.

Books Mentioned:

Othello by William Shakespeare

The Soul of Wit by G. K. Chesterton, edited by Dale Ahlquist

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On this episode of The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks, our hosts introduce their new series on Shakespeare’s play Othello. They share some tips and strategies for those new to Shakespeare, both as independent readers and for reading along with children. Angelina also talks more specifically about how to approach reading a Shakespearean tragedy. Finally, our hosts respond to the idea that Shakespeare plays should be watched, not read. Join us back here next week to dive into the discussion of Othello!

Register now for our 5th Annual Literary Life Online Conference coming up April 12-15, 2023, Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time. Get all the details and sign up today at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The devils come because the half-gods go,

But in the end the gods, the gods return.

Humbert Wolfe

I was rereading chapter 14 of Surprised by Joy, and there it was, the opening quote from George MacDonald: “The one principle of hell is – ‘I am my own’.”

Andrew Johnson

A convention is a form of freedom. That is the reality that the realists cannot get into their heads. A dramatic convention is not a constraint on the dramatist; it is a permission to the dramatist. It is a permit allowing him to depart from the routine of external reality, in order to express a more internal and intimate reality. . . .

But as Shakespeare had the liberty of a literary convention, he can make Macbeth say something that nobody in real life would say, but something that does express what somebody in real life would feel. It expresses such things as music expresses them; though nobody in those circumstances would recite that particular poem, any more than he would begin suddenly to play on the violin. But what the audience wants is the emotion expressed; and poetry can express it and commonplace conversation cannot. . . .

The realist is reduced to inarticulate grunts and half-apologetic oaths, like an apoplectic major in a club.

G. K. Chesterton Iago

by Walter de la Mare

A dark lean face, a narrow, slanting eye,
Whose deeps of blackness one pale taper’s beam
Haunts with a flitting madness of desire;
A heart whose cinder at the breath of passion
Glows to a momentary core of heat
Almost beyond indifference to endure:
So parched Iago frets his life away.
His scorn works ever in a brain whose wit
This world hath fools too many and gross to seek.
Ever to live incredibly alone,
Masked, shivering, deadly, with a simple Moor
Of idiot gravity, and one pale flower
Whose chill would quench in everlasting peace
His soul’s unmeasured flame — O paradox!
Might he but learn the trick! — to wear her heart
One fragile hour of heedless innocence,
And then, farewell, and the incessant grave.
” O fool! O villain! ” — ’tis the shuttlecock
Wit never leaves at rest. It is his fate
To be a needle in a world of hay,
Where honour is the flattery of the fool;
Sin, a tame bauble; lies, a tiresome jest;
Virtue, a silly, whitewashed block of wood
For words to fell. Ah! but the secret lacking,
The secret of the child, the bird, the night,
Faded, flouted, bespattered, in days so far
Hate cannot bitter them, nor wrath deny;
Else were this Desdemona. . . . Why!
Woman a harlot is, and life a nest
Fouled by long ages of forked fools. And God —
Iago deals not with a tale so dull:
To have made the world! Fie on thee, Artisan!

Books Mentioned:

Othello by William Shakespeare

London Sonnets by Humbert Wolfe

The Soul of Wit by G. K. Chesterton, edited by Dale Ahlquist

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb

Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit

Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories by Leon Garfield

Stories from Shakespeare by Marchette Chute

Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to this week’s episode of The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks. This week our hosts share their discussion of Plato’s Ion. This episode serves as an introduction on how to read Plato as well as an opportunity to consider what Socratic dialogue is and is not. Thomas gives some background on Plato as a person as well as his writing of dialogues. Angelina shares her thoughts on why the term “Socratic method” as it is used today is not actually a good teaching technique.

In talking about the text of Ion, Thomas explains what a “rhapsode” is and lets us know that this piece of dialogue is supposed to be humorous, rather satirical in nature. Another background topic related to the conversation is the ancient idea of atheism in contrast to our modern definition. To wrap up, Thomas gives a few suggestions for continuing your reading of Plato.

Register now for our 5th Annual Literary Life Online Conference coming up April 12-15, 2023, Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time. Get all the details and sign up today at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The job of a Christian parent is not to produce godly children. The job of the Christian parent is to be a godly parent.

Christopher Yuan

A few people have ventured to imitate Shakespeare’s tragedy. But no audacious spirit has dreamed or dared to imitate Shakespeare’s comedy. No one has made any real attempt to recover the loves and the laughter of Elizabethan England. The low dark arches, the low strong pillars upon which Shakespeare’s temple rests we can all explore and handle. We can all get into his mere tragedy; we can all explore his dungeon and penetrate into his coal-cellar; but we stretch our hands and crane our necks in vain towards that height where the tall turrets of his levity are tossed towards the sky. Perhaps it is right that this should be so; properly understood, comedy is an even grander thing than tragedy.

G. K. Chesterton, from Illustrated London News, April 27, 1907

Nothing stands still for us. This is our normal state, albeit the one most contrary to our proper inclination

Blaise Pascal The Fall of a Soul

by John Addington Symonds

I sat unsphering Plato ere I slept:
Then through my dream the choir of gods was borne,
Swift as the wind and splendid as the morn,
Fronting the night of stars; behind them swept
Tempestuous darkness o’er a drear descent,
Wherein I saw a crowd of charioteers
Urging their giddy steeds with cries and cheers,
To join the choir that aye before them went:
But one there was who fell, with broken car
And horses swooning down the gulf of gloom;
Heavenward his eyes, though prescient of their doom,
Reflected glory like a falling star,
While with wild hair blown back and listless hands
Ruining he sank toward undiscover’d lands.

Books Mentioned:

Phaedrus by Plato

Othello by William Shakespeare

Out of a Far Country by Angela Yuan and Christopher Yuan

The Soul of Wit by G. K. Chesterton, edited by Dale Ahlquist

Pensées by Blaise Pascal

Five Dialogues by Plato

Selected Myths by Plato

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast, we bring you another fun Literary Life of…episode. Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy’s guest today is Lia Techand, our first international guest on the podcast. Lia, a German born in Kyrgyzstan, currently serving with her husband as a missionary in Australia, along with their two book-loving children. We start off the interview hearing Lia tell about her young life and how she started loving English literature. She talks about her parents and grandparents’ reading lives and the legacy of loving books that they left for her. She also shares how literary analysis and symbolism teaching in high school and college challenged her enjoyment of literature. Lia tells about how she stopped reading in university because she was too busy but then started reading again once she became a mother.

Lia and Angelina share some examples of crazy literary theory that is taught in university programs, and how that confused and discouraged Lia so much. She also tells the story of finding The Literary Life podcast and taking classes with Angelina. They wrap up the conversation with some encouragement for readers looking for the meaning in the stories they read.

Join us next time for a discussion of Plato’s Ion, led by Mr. Banks!

Register now for our 5th Annual Literary Life Online Conference coming up April 12-15, 2023, Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time. Get all the details and sign up today at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

A story is a work of art. Its greatest use to the child is in the everlasting appeal of beauty by which the soul of man is constantly pricked to new hungers, quickened to new perceptions, and so given desire to grow…

The storyteller…has, in short, accomplished the one greatest aim of story-telling,–to enlarge and enrich the child’s spiritual experience, and stimulate healthy reaction upon it.

Of course this result cannot be seen and proved as easily and early as can the apprehension of a fact. The most one can hope to recognize is its promise, and this is found in the tokens of that genuine pleasure which is itself the means of accomplishment.

Sara Cone Bryant, from How to Tell Stories to Children

Every thirty years a new race comes into the world–a youngster that knows nothing about anything, and after summarily devouring in all haste the results of human knowledge as they have been accumulated for thousands of years, aspires to be thought cleverer than the whole of the past. For this purpose he goes to the university, and takes to reading books–new books, as being of his own age and standing. Everything he reads must be briefly put, must be new, as he is new himself. Then he falls to and criticizes.

Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Men of Learning”

What has drawn the modern world into being is a strange, almost occult yearning for the future. The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longed for heaven.

Wendell Berry, from The Unsettling of America

In these days, when Mr. Bernard Shaw is becoming gradually, amid general applause, the Grand Old Man of English letters, it is perhaps ungracious to record that he did once say there was nobody, with the possible exception of Homer, whose intellect he despised to so much as Shakespeare’s. He has since said almost enough sensible things to outweigh even anything so silly as that. But I quote it because is exactly embodies the nineteenth-century notion of which I speak. Mr. Shaw had probably never read Home; and there were passages in his Shakespearean criticism that might well raise a doubt about whether he ever read Shakespeare. But the point was that he could not, in all sincerity, see what the world saw in Home and Shakespeare, because what the world saw was not what G. B. S. was then looking for. He was looking for that ghastly thing which Nonconformists call a Message.

G. K. Chesterton, from The Soul of Wit: G. K. Chesterton on William Shakespeare Still ist de Nacht

by Heinrich Heine

Still is the night, and the streets are lone,
My darling dwelt in this house of yore;
‘Tis years since she from the city has flown,
Yet the house stands there as it did before.

There, too, stands a man, and aloft stares he,
And for stress of anguish he wrings his hands;
My blood runs cold when his face I see,
‘Tis my own very self in the moonlight stands.

Thou double! Thou fetch, with the livid face!
Why dust thou mimic my lovelorn mould,
That was racked and rent in this very place
So many a night in the times of old?

Books Mentioned:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Astrid Lindgren

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner

The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer

Agatha Christie

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Margery Allingham

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason (section on Goethe)

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

Beatrix Potter

Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc

Struwwelpeter in English Translation by Heinrich Hoffman

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas are back on The Literary Life Podcast today with another discussion in our series on Aristotle’s Poetics. Sharing their commonplace quotes leads into the conversation about why reading this work still matters to our understanding of how to read literature. Thomas and Angelina talk about the problem of literary critics who claim Shakespeare violates Aristotle’s “rules” for plays. Cindy’s question as to why we read the ancients is another topic of this conversation.

Join us next time when we will have another Literary Life of... guest interview. Then we will be back the next week with a discussion of Plato's Ion.

Thomas will be teaching a webinar on Jean Jacques Rousseau on February 24th. You can learn more and register at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Register now for our 5th Annual Literary Life Online Conference coming up in mid-April, Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time. Get all the details and sign up today at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Episodes Mentioned Today:

Antigone Series Introduction

The Trojan Women Series Introduction

Why Read Pagan Myths

Why Read Fairy Tales

Commonplace Quotes:

The best way to get to know the world is to live in it. The next best is to break your leg and read Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” in bed.

Christopher Hollis, from Dr. Johnson

Sensible parents are often distressed at this want of conscience in children; but they are not greatly at fault; the mature conscience demands to be backed up by the mature intellect, and the children have neither the one nor the other. Discussions of the kind should be put down; the children should not be encouraged to give their opinions on questions of right and wrong, and little books should not be put into their hands which pronounce authoritatively upon conduct.

Charlotte Mason, from Home Education

The Classical emphasis, established in Aristotle is esthetic (“hieratic”) in the sense that it is focused on the thing made, and assumes an emotional balance or detachment which we see in such aspects of it as catharsis. The fundamental conception of this approach is that of “imitation,” which is concerned with the relation of the poem to its context in nature. The other emphasis…is psychological rather than esthetic, and is based on participation rather than on detachment. It thinks of a poem as an “expression,”…rather than as Aristotle’s techne or artifact, and its fundamental conception, corresponding to “imitation,” is “creation,” a metaphor which relates the poet to his context in nature.

Northrop Frye, from The Well-Tempered Critic Sonnet 23

by William Shakespeare

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart,
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharg’d with burthen of mine own love’s might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
⁠O, learn to read what silent love hath writ;
⁠To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast this week, our hosts continue their series of discussions on Aristotle’s Poetics. Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas share some pertinent commonplace quotations to open the episode, then dive into this week’s text, beginning with Aristotle’s definition of “tragedy.” Thomas expands on the idea of catharsis, and Angelina outlines Aristotle’s necessary elements of a story. Cindy shares her thoughts the distinction between poetry and history. They talk about the form and sequence of a story and why these are so important in Aristotle’s view. In working out the definition of terms, our hosts also correct some common and crucial misconceptions.

Thomas will be teaching a webinar on Jean Jacques Rousseau on February 24th. You can learn more and register at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Register now for our 5th Annual Literary Life Online Conference coming up in mid-April, Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time. Get all the details and sign up today at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

He was happier using the knife than in trying to save the limb.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, from “In the Children’s Hospital”

Here the term moral imagination refers very loosely to a way of looking at life, or as Vigen Guroian puts it, “the process by which the self makes metaphors out of images given by experience, which it then employs to find and suppose moral correspondences in experience.”

With this in mind, it makes sense to regard reading stories aloud to one’s children the archetypal act of the trivium. One is simultaneously remembering a tradition, revealing the Logos, and by voice inflection and gesture dramatizing a story to communicate the meaning heart to heart.

Stratford Caldecott, from Beauty in the Word

It is true that “our way” of misreading the romances is very recent. In the nineteenth centure, even in the Edwardian period, a serious response to the ferlies seems to have been easy and almost universal. Even now it is common among the elderly. Most of my generation have all our lives taken these things with awe and with a sense of their mystery. But a generation has grown up which really needs the corrective that Mr. Speirs is offering. For whatever reason–a materialistic philosophy, anti-romanticism, distrust of one’s unconscious–gigantic inhibitions, have, with astonishing rapidity, been built up. The response which was once easy and indeed irresistible now needs to be liberated by some sort of mental ascesis.

C. S. Lewis, from “De Audiendis Poetis” Selection from “An Essay on Criticism”

by Alexander Pope

‘Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill;
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ offence
To tire our patience, than mislead our sense.
Some few in that, but numbers err in this,
Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss;
A fool might once himself alone expose,
Now one in verse makes many more in prose.

‘Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
In poets as true genius is but rare,
True taste as seldom is the critic’s share;
Both must alike from Heav’n derive their light,
These born to judge, as well as those to write.
Let such teach others who themselves excel,
And censure freely who have written well.
Authors are partial to their wit, ’tis true,
But are not critics to their judgment too?

Book List:

Othello by William Shakespeare

Beauty in the Word by Stratford Caldecott

Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C. S. Lewis

The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis by Jason Baxter

MacBeth by William Shakespeare

The Odyssey by Homer

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On this episode of The Literary Life podcast, our hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks open a new series of discussions about Aristotle’s work on story, Poetics. After sharing this week’s commonplace quotes, Thomas gives us some background on Aristotle and his time. Angelina points out the importance of differentiating between Aristotle’s work Rhetoric and Poetics and how they are applied. She and Thomas also talk about the problem of translating the Greek word “mimesis.” They discuss Aristotle’s thoughts on the characters in comedy and tragedy, as well as the complex concept of “arete.”

Thomas will be teaching a webinar on Jean Jacques Rousseau on February 24th. You can learn more and register at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Register now for our 5th Annual Literary Life Online Conference coming up in mid-April, Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time. Get all the details and sign up today at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The supreme imaginative literature of the world is a survival of the fittest ink blots of the ages, and nothing reveals a man with more precision than his reaction to it.

The men who have loved Shakespeare best and have kept him most alive have all been Cadwals.

Harold Goddard

When we are young we all think we are going to remake the world…But in the end it is the world which remakes most of us.

Bruce Marshall

It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story considered in itself. Granted the story, the style in which it should be told, the order in which it should be disposed, and (above all) the delineation of the characters, have been abundantly discussed. But the Story itself, the series of imagined events, is nearly always passed over in silence, or else treated exclusively as affording opportunities for the delineations of character. There are indeed three notable exceptions. Aristotle in the Poetics constructed a theory of Greek tragedy which puts Story in the centre and relegates character to a strictly subordinate place. In the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, Boccaccio and others developed an allegorical theory of Story to explain the ancient myths. And in our own time Jung and his followers have produced their doctrine of Archetypes. Apart from these three attempts the subject has been left almost untouched…

C. S. Lewis The Dead of Athens at Chalcis

by Simonides, trans. by F. L. Lucas

We died in the glen of Dirphys.

Here by our country’s giving

This tomb was heaped above us high on Euripus’ shore.

Twas earned, for young we lost the loveliness of living.

We took instead upon us the bursting storm of war.

Book List:

The Meaning of Shakespeare, Vol. 1 by Harold Goddard

The Fair Bride by Bruce Marshall

On Stories by C. S. Lewis

Northrop Frye

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

Pamela by Samuel Richardson (not recommended)

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on the podcast, we bring you another of our “Best of The Literary Life Podcast” episode replays. On today’s episode we delve into the literary life of the mysterious Mr. Banks.

Cindy begins the interview asking Thomas about his family background and the influence of his parents on his own reading life. He shares about many of the books he loved in childhood and how that shaped his tastes in literature. He also talks about how he approached school learning as opposed to his personal reading. Angelina asks Thomas to tell about how he fell in love with poetry and how he ended up going to college even though that was not his original goal. He also shares more about his reading as an adult, as well as his habit of commonplacing quotations.

Commonplace Quotes:

…but I was glad to sing again too; it had been a greater loss that I realized in that particular wintering which saw the waning of my voice. It wasn’t about the vanity of being able to trill out a fine song; it was about the joy of singing for its own sake.

Katherine May

Michael explains to Adam in the last book of Milton’s Paradise Lost, that tyranny exists in human society because every individual in such a society is a tyrant within himself, or at least is if he conforms acceptably to his social surroundings.

Northrup Frye

The Gods that are wiser than Learning

But kinder than Life have made sure

No mortal may boast in the morning

That even will find him secure.

from “A Rector’s Memory” by Rudyard Kipling Time, Real and Imaginary

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On the wide level of a mountain’s head,
(I knew not where, but ’twas some faery place)
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails out-spread,
Two lovely children run an endless race,
A sister and a brother !
This far outstripp’d the other ;
Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
And looks and listens for the boy behind :
For he, alas! is blind!
O’er rough and smooth with even step he passed,
And knows not whether he be first or last.

Book List:

Wintering by Katherine May

The Double Vision by Northrop Frye

Classics to Grow On book set

Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carol

Beatrix Potter books

Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Oxford Book of Children’s Verse

Praeterita by John Ruskin

The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun by J. R. R. Tolkien

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

The Saga of the Volsungs by Anonymous

The Adventures of Tintin by Herge

Encyclopedia Brown by Donald J. Sobol

The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott

Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare

The Complete Poems of John Keats

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Hardy the Novelist by David Cecil

Hawthorne’s Short Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis

P. D. James

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea by Mishima (not recommended)

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to another episode in our “Best of The Literary Life Podcast” series. Today on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins tackle the topic of fairy stories, discussing the what, why and how of reading them. Angelina shares the distinctive characteristics of fairy stories in contrast to other types of stories, such as myths. They deal with the question of whether fairy tales are “escapist”, the influence of the Grimm brothers scholarly work on interpreting fairy stories, and allowing the story to unveil its deeper truths without forcing meaning onto it.

Angelina gives an illustration of how to see the gospel messages in fairy tales by talking us through the story of Sleeping Beauty. She refutes the ideas that fairy tales are about human romance or are misogynistic. She also highlights some of the Enlightenment and Puritan responses to fairy tales that still linger with us today. Cindy and Angelina also discuss some common concerns such as the magical, weird, or scary aspects of fairy tales. Angelina also makes a distinction between folk tales, literary fairy tales, and cautionary tales.

Other Literary Life series openers referenced in this episode:

Episode 20: An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

Episode 71: Phantastes by George MacDonald

Episode 30: The Literary Life of Caitlin Beauchamp

Commonplace Quotes:

After a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never on word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction rapt and oblivious of all the world beside.

C. S. Lewis

Children are not deceived by fairy tales. They are often and gravely deceived by school stories. Adults are not deceived by science fiction. They can be deceived by stories in women’s magazines.

C. S. Lewis

Both fairy stories and realistic stories engage in wish fulfillment, but it is actually the realistic stories that are more deadly. Fairy stories do awaken desires in children, but most often it is not a desire for the fairy world itself. Most children don’t really want there to be dragons in modern England. Instead, the desire is for they know not what. This desire for something beyond does not empty the real world, but actually gives it new depths. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods. The reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

C. S. Lewis Ancient History

by Siegfried Sassoon

Adam, a brown old vulture in the rain,
Shivered below his wind-whipped olive-trees;
Huddling sharp chin on scarred and scraggy knees,
He moaned and mumbled to his darkening brain;
‘He was the grandest of them all—was Cain!
‘A lion laired in the hills, that none could tire;
‘Swift as a stag; a stallion of the plain,
‘Hungry and fierce with deeds of huge desire.’

Grimly he thought of Abel, soft and fair—
A lover with disaster in his face,
And scarlet blossom twisted in bright hair.
‘Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace? …
‘God always hated Cain’ … He bowed his head—
The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead.

Book List:

Phantastes by George MacDonald

The World’s Last Night by C. S. Lewis

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

“On Three Ways of Writing for Children” by C. S. Lewis

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

The Princess and The Goblin by George MacDonald

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at Angelina Stanford – House of Humane Letters.

Find Cindy at MorningTimeforMoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at Cindy Rollins – Writer. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life Podcast, we have another installment in our “Best of The Literary Life Podcast series. This week’s replay is a special chat our hosts Angelina and Cindy had with Wendi Capehart. Wendi passed away in 2022, and this episode is in honor of her memory. Wendi was an adventurous mom of many and lived throughout Asia for many years. She spent the last several years enjoying the life of an at-home librarian, caring for her disabled daughter, and cherishing time with her 15 grandchildren. She also served on the AmblesideOnline Advisory board since its founding.

Angelina starts off the conversation asking Wendi about her reading life beginning with her childhood memories of reading. Wendi talks a little about how books helped her survive and heal from the trauma of living in an abusive situation. They also discuss what the difference was for Wendi in leisurely reading and reading for school. Wendi shares some of the reasons she began homeschooling her own children, as well, and how she kept reading voraciously even after she became a mother.

Angelina and Wendi talk about the brain and changing your reading habits to digest and enjoy more challenging books. Wendi shares how she built a library while one a military budget and moving frequently. They talked about too many things to cover in this summary, but you can scroll down for the many book titles mentioned in this episode!

Commonplace Quotes:

“We’re all fools,” said Clemens, “all the time. It’s just we’re a different kind each day. We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.”

Ray Bradbury

Where science does not teach a child to wonder and admire it has perhaps no educative value.

Charlotte Mason

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with tremendous difference–that it really happened–and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth, where the others are men’s myths. That is, the pagan stories are God expressing himself through the minds of poets, using such images as he found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through real things.

C. S. Lewis If Only I Were King

by A. A. Milne

I often wish I were a King,
And then I could do anything.

If only I were King of Spain,
I’d take my hat off in the rain.

If only I were King of France,
I wouldn’t brush my hair for aunts.

I think, if I were King of Greece,
I’d push things off the mantelpiece.

If I were King of Norroway,
I’d ask an elephant to stay.

If I were King of Babylon,
I’d leave my button gloves undone.

If I were King of Timbuctoo,
I’d think of lovely things to do.

If I were King of anything,
I’d tell the soldiers, “I’m the King!”

Book List:

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Towards a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis by Alan Jacobs

Honey for a Child’s Heart by Gladys Hunt

Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne

The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas

Gene Stratton Porter

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

Jane Austen

The Little Prince by Antione de Saint-Exupéry

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

The Heroes by Charles Kingsley

The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

The Chestry Oak by Kate Seredy

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

The Rescuers by Marjorie Sharp

The Borrowers by Mary Norton

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

Booth Tarkington

Ben Hur by Lew Wallace

The Bears of Blue River by Charles Major

Thornton W. Burgess

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at MorningTimeforMoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to this episode in our “Best of The Literary Life Podcast” series, this time replaying our very first episode! In this inaugural episode, Cindy and Angelina introduce the podcast and what they mean when they talk about having a “literary life.” Each of them share how stories have shaped their personal lives, as well as how they believe stories have the power to shape culture.

You can find and listen to the other 3 introductory episodes of The Literary Life mentioned in this replay at the links below-

Episode 2: The Interview Episode

Episode 3: The Importance of Detective Fiction

Episode 4: Gaudy Night, Ch. 1-3

Although the online conference mentioned at the end of this episode has long since come and gone, you can still purchase the replay at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before.

C. S. Lewis

The storyteller is one speaking out of memory, out of more than memory, speaking out of a trust left to the memory of the one speaking.

Padraic Colum The Truisms

by Louis MacNeice

His father gave him a box of truisms
Shaped like a coffin, then his father died;
The truisms remained on the mantlepiece
As wooden as the play box they had been packed in
Or that his father skulked inside.

Then he left home, left the truisms behind him
Still on the mantlepiece, met love, met war,
Sordor, disappointment, defeat, betrayal,
Till through disbeliefs he arrived at a house
He could not remember seeing before.

And he walked straight in; it was where he had come from
And something told him the way to behave.
He raised his hand and blessed his home;
The truisms flew and perched on his shoulders
And a tall tree sprouted from his father’s grave.

Book List:

An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

The Stone of Victory and Other Tales by Padriac Colum

Stratford Caldecott

Essay on Man by Alexander Pope

For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

Elizabeth Gaskell

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Joseph Pieper

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, our hosts look back on their reading lives over the past year. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas each share a commonplace quote, then they each share a little about how they approach reading in a way that fits with the demands of their busy lives. Each of our hosts talks about their literary surprises, their most outstanding reads of the year, disappointing books they read, and their personal favorite podcast books from 2022. Angelina also reiterates why reading rightly is so important to us all!

Don’t forget to join us for the 2023 Reading Challenge! Get your books and Bingo cards ready!

Commonplace Quotes:

A good story isn’t told to make a point. A good story reflects the World God created. The point makes itself.

Timothy Rollins

“Blessed be Pain and Torment and every torture of the Body … Blessed be Plague and Pestilence and the Illness of Nations….

“Blessed be all Loss and the Failure of Friends and the Sacrifice of Love….

“Blessed be the Destruction of all Possessions, the Ruin of all Property, Fine Cities, and Great Palaces….

“Blessed be the Disappointment of all Ambitions….

“Blessed be all Failure and the ruin of every Earthly Hope….

“Blessed be all Sorrows, Torments, Hardships, Endurances that demand Courage….

“Blessed be these things–for of these things cometh the making of a Man….”

Hugh Walpole

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends –
if by God’s mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and chat,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker’s art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.

J. R. R. Tolkien, from “Mythopoeia” A Selection from “The Secular Masque”

by John Dryden

All, all of a piece throughout; Thy chase had a beast in view; Thy wars brought nothing about; Thy lovers were all untrue. 'Tis well an old age is out, And time to begin a new. Book and Link List:

Episode 60: Why Read Pagan Myths

Episode 124: The Abolition of Man (beginning of series)

Fortitude by Hugh Walpole

The Killer and the Slain by Hugh Walpole

The Old Ladies by Hugh Walpole

Cherringham Mystery Series by Matthew Costello and Neil Richards

The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards

Anthony Berkeley

Ronald Knox

Rex Stout

Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Light Thickens by Ngaio Marsh

Henry the Eighth by Beatrice Saunders

The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Captive Flames by Ronald Knox

The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin

The Most Reluctant Convert by David C. Downing

The Truth and Beauty by Andrew Klavan

The Man Who Knew Too Much by G. K. Chesterton

The Rosettis in Wonderland by Dinah Roe

Just Passing Through by Winton Porter

The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories ed. by Martin Edwards

The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P. D. James

Edmund Crispin

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley

Dorothy L. Sayers by Colin Duriez

The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis

The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris

The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis by Jason Baxter

Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

I Live Under a Black Sun by Edith Sitwell

The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist

You Are Not Your Own by Alan Noble

Dune by Frank Herbert

The Twist of the Knife by Anthony Horowitz

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley (not recommended)

The Witness of the Stars by E. W. Bullinger (not recommended)

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast this week, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are joined by Atlee Northmore to talk about film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Atlee guides us through the timeline of Dracula film adaptations and, together with our hosts, talks about why these have fallen short of the book and how they have distorted people’s view of this story.

Head over to the HouseofHumaneLetters.com to get in on their sales through the end of 2022.

Check out the sales on past online conferences this Christmas over at MorningTimeforMoms.com.

Find Atlee’s list of Movies and Their Literary Roots in pdf form here. You can also view an infographic of his Dracula film adaptation timeline here.

Commonplace Quotes:

The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.

George MacDonald, as quoted in A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War

With all his passion for art he was not inclined to glorify the artist or to conceive of him as a superman producing masterpieces in his lonely pride. He thought of him rather as a workman who gave more than was asked from him from love of his work.

Arthur Clotton-Brock

Descartes did not begin with memory, with ‘Grammar’: he went straight to Thinking before going through Remembering.

Stratford Caldecott

The cinematic Dracula, however, is generally bereft of metaphysical gravity. It is his seductive humanity that fascinates. Close examination of the cinematic Dracula reveals a gradual stripping away of his metaphysical attributes and a progressive tendency to humanize him, until, at the end of this evolution, he is transformed into a postmodern tragic antihero in revolt against the injustice of the Christian God.

Jack Trotter, “The Cinematic Dracula: From Nosferatu to Bram Stoker’s Dracula Hamlet’s Advice to the Players

by William Shakespeare

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

Book List:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling

Beauty in the Word by Stratford Caldecott

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War by Joseph Loconte

William Morris: His Work and Influence by Arthur Clutton-Brock

Dracula (Ignatius Critical Edition) by Bram Stoker

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast our hosts introduce the 2023 Reading Challenge! Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are excited to share with you about all the categories on this year’s Literary Life Bingo Reading Challenge! You can download your own copy of the challenge here, as well as check out our past reading challenges. Scroll down in the show notes to see a list of the links and books mentioned in this episode. You can use the hashtag #LitLifeBingo on social media so we can all see what everyone is reading in 2023!

Don’t forget to shop the House of Humane Letters Christmas Sale now through the end of the year.

The Literary Life Back to School online conference recordings are also on sale at Morning Time for Moms right now.

Commonplace Quotes:

Much that we call Victorian is known to us only because the Victorians laughed at it.

George Malcolm Young, from Portrait of an Age

I think that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body.

Joseph Addison Thunderstorms

by William H. Davies

My mind has thunderstorms, That brood for heavy hours: Until they rain me words, My thoughts are drooping flowers And sulking, silent birds. Yet come, dark thunderstorms, And brood your heavy hours; For when you rain me words, My thoughts are dancing flowers And joyful singing birds. Book and Link List:

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie

Episode 14: “The Adventures of a Shilling” by Joseph Addison

Episode 3: The Importance of Detective Fiction

Episode 16: “Why I Write” by George Orwell

Reading Challenge Downloads

The Letters of Jane Austen by Jane Austen

Abigail Adams: Letters ed. by Edith Gelles

The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple ed. by G. C. Moore Smith

Few Eggs and No Oranges by Vere Hodgson

Letters to an American Lady by C. S. Lewis

Letters of C. S. Lewis by C. S. Lewis

Letters from Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien

Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor ed. by Sally Fitzgerald

Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman by Lord Chesterfield

The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Saga of the Volsungs by Anonymous

The Vision of Sir Launfal by James Russell Lowell

Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Ramayana of Valmiki ed. and trans. by Robert and Sally Goldman

The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton

P. D. James

Edmund Crispin

Alan Bradley

Patricia Moyes

Peter Granger

Rex Stout

Sir Walter Scott

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Mythos by Stephen Fry

The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

P. G. Wodehouse

The Last Days of Socrates by Plato

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis

Champagne for the Soul by Mike Mason

Edges of His Ways by Amy Carmichael

The Footsteps at the Lock by Ronald Knox

Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey

Jane Austen

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson

Heroes by Stephen Fry

Troy by Stephen Fry

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

The Mabinogion trans. by Sioned Davies

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green

Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson

Cindy’s List of Literature of Honor for Boys (archived webpage)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

The Man Who Knew Too Much by G. K. Chesterton

The 39 Steps by John Buchan

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

The Well Read Poem

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

The Truth and the Beauty by Andrew Klavan

The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill

Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

Jacob’s Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill

The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis by Jason Baxter

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

Q’s Legacy by Helene Hanff

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast this week, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are back to wrap up their series on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They open with their commonplace quotes then begin diving into the major plot points and the connections being made. Angelina and Cindy discuss what happens to Mina, especially in relation to the idea of the New Woman versus the Angel in the House. Thomas and Angelina talk about Dracula’s background and his connection with Satan seen more clearly here at the end of the book. They all share thoughts on the Christian images that are increasingly brought out as the story line progresses.

Head over to the HouseofHumaneLetters.com so you don’t miss out on their Christmas sale. Kelly Cumbee will also be teaching a course on The Chronicles of Narnia and medieval cosmology in February, and registration is now open.

Now is the time to get your copy of Hallelujah: Cultivating Advent Traditions with Handel’s Messiah in time for celebrating Advent with your family. You can also get a recording of the Advent to Remember webinar at MorningTimeforMoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Rumor is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wav’ring multitude,
Can play upon it.

William Shakespeare, from Henry IV, Part 2

There is the double tragedy of the prophet–he must speak out so that he makes men dislike him, and he must be content to believe that he is making no impression whatsoever.

Ronald Knox

Be wary of all earnestness.

John D. MacDonald

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

G. K. Chesterton, from The Red Angel The To-be-forgotten

by Thomas Hardy

I I heard a small sad sound, And stood awhile among the tombs around: "Wherefore, old friends," said I, "are you distrest, Now, screened from life's unrest?" II —"O not at being here; But that our future second death is near; When, with the living, memory of us numbs, And blank oblivion comes! III "These, our sped ancestry, Lie here embraced by deeper death than we; Nor shape nor thought of theirs can you descry With keenest backward eye. IV "They count as quite forgot; They are as men who have existed not; Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath; It is the second death. V "We here, as yet, each day Are blest with dear recall; as yet, can say We hold in some soul loved continuance Of shape and voice and glance. VI "But what has been will be — First memory, then oblivion's swallowing sea; Like men foregone, shall we merge into those Whose story no one knows. VII "For which of us could hope To show in life that world-awakening scope Granted the few whose memory none lets die, But all men magnify? VIII "We were but Fortune's sport; Things true, things lovely, things of good report We neither shunned nor sought ... We see our bourne, And seeing it we mourn." Book List:

The Deep Blue Goodbye by John D. MacDonald

Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain

The Odd Women by George Gissing

Beowulf trans. by Burton Raffel

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Our hosts are back on The Literary Life podcast today to continue our series on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This week we are covering chapters 12-17, and in the introduction to this episode, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas discuss the purpose of the Gothic novel in reorienting us to realize there is more to the world than the physical and empirical. As they cover the plot in these chapters, other ideas shared are the effective blending of modern technology with ancient wisdom in fighting evil, the many mythological and fairy tale elements in this story, the contrast between the true woman and the false woman, the parallels to Paradise Lost, and so much more.

Sign up for the mailing list at HouseofHumaneLetters.com so you don’t miss out on the upcoming Christmas sale. Kelly Cumbee will also be teaching a course on The Chronicles of Narnia and medieval cosmology in February, and registration is now open.

Now is the time to get your copy of Hallelujah: Cultivating Advent Traditions with Handel’s Messiah in time for celebrating Advent with your family. You can also get a recording of the Advent to Remember webinar at MorningTimeforMoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

He was one of that not uncommon sort of men who, when they want something, must believe that they are right in wanting it.

Milton Waldman

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe–
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked of the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!”
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

Eugene Field, from “Wynkin, Blynken, and Nod”

During the period when the forces of Christianity were nearly spent and materialism had dislodged spiritual values, the Gothic novelists planned their novels with an awareness of the Deity and the consciousness of a just fate. The villains learn in due course that the wages of sin is death.

Devendra Varma Sonnet 71

by William Shakespeare

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell.
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.

Book List:

Rod of Iron by Milton Waldman

The Gothic Flame by Devendra Varma

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life podcast today and our series on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This week Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks cover chapters 8-11 of the book. Angelina explains both the “New Woman” and “Angel in the House” ideas of the Victorian era and makes some observations about Dr. Seward’s interactions with Renfield in contrast to the nuns ministrations to Jonathan Harker. We are also introduced to Dr. Van Helsing in this section of the book as the foil for Dracula, and we quickly learn that he is more than just a medical man. Our hosts discuss Stoker’s own medical knowledge and both the historical and metaphorical context of the blood transfusion procedures in these chapters.

Thomas will be offering a webinar on Henry VIII and his times, which you can register for at HouseofHumaneLetters.com. Kelly Cumbee will also be teaching a course on The Chronicles of Narnia and medieval cosmology in February, and registration is now open.

Now is the time to get your copy of Hallelujah: Cultivating Advent Traditions with Handel’s Messiah in time for celebrating Advent with your family. You can also get a recording of the Advent to Remember webinar at MorningTimeforMoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Once the imagination has been awakened, it is procreative. Through it we can give more than we were given, say more than we had to say. This is a beautiful double proposition, that art enlarges our repertoire for being, and that it further enables a giving onwards of that enriched utterance, that broadened perception.

Lewis Hyde

The passions are more powerful than the gods. If the gods speak, which they seldom do, the passions drown their voices.

Walter Savage Lander

The gods love blood.

Leconte de Lisle What can the world be to him who lives for thought, if there be no supreme and perfect Thought? None but such poor struggles after thought as he finds in himself? Take the eternal Thought from the heart of things, no longer can any beauty be real, no more can shape, motion, aspect of nature, have significance in itself or sympathy with human soul. George MacDonald A Dream Within a Dream

by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Book List:

Beauty in the Word by Stratford Caldecott

The Gifts of Reading by Robert Macfarlane

The Gift by Lewis Hyde

Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage Landor

A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life Podcast this week, our hosts continue with part 2 of their series on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. After sharing their commonplace quotes, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas begin discussing how to properly read Dracula and other books written in this tradition. (Hint: It’s not the Freudian or psychoanalytical approach!) Angelina argues that Bram Stoker was trying, among other things, to reintroduce the traditional forms and metaphors into the modern era. Thomas shares the dark etymology of the name Dracula and how that relates to the image of Satan in this character. Cindy brings up Jonathan’s memory of Mina when he is in his darkest moments and the power of love against evil.

Now is the time to get your copy of Hallelujah: Cultivating Advent Traditions with Handel’s Messiah in time for celebrating Advent with your family. You can also get a recording of the Advent to Remember webinar at MorningTimeforMoms.com.

Thomas will be offering a webinar on Henry VIII and his times, which you can register for at HouseofHumaneLetters.com. Kelly Cumbee will also be teaching a course on The Chronicles of Narnia and medieval cosmology in February, and registration is now open.

Commonplace Quotes:

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Samuel Johnson

For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness the universe. In the fabric of habit in which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer.

And now it is all gone–like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediæval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world.

James Anthony Froude

A man no more creates the forms of which he would reveal his thoughts, than he creates thoughts themselves. For what are the forms by means of which a man may reveal his thoughts? Are they not those of nature?…What springs there is the perception that this or that form is already an expression of this or that phase of thought or of feeling. For the world around him is an outward figuration of the condition of his mind; an inexhaustible storehouse of forms whence he may choose exponents…The meanings are in those forms already, else they could be no garment of unveiling.

George MacDonald A Selection from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.

I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.

Book List:

A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald

The History of England, from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth by James Anthony Froude

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

Studies in Words by C. S. Lewis

Wilkie Collins

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On this week’s episode of The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina Stanford is joined as always by Thomas Banks and Cindy Rollins for the opening of their series on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Today our hosts focus on the background and historical context for this piece of literature, as well as going over the highlights of the first two chapters. They talk about the question of the role of the monster in literature in modernity versus its historical interpretation. Understanding the form of the Gothic novel and the time period in which this book was written are important aspects of approaching Dracula.

Keep listening next week for more about how to read this book. We will be covering chapters 3-7.

Get the latest news from House of Humane Letters by signing up for their e-newsletter today!

Commonplace Quotes:

And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere modernity cannot kill.

Bram Stoker

That children should have the peace of God as a necessary condition of growth is a practical question. If we believe it is their right, not to be acquired by merit nor lost by demerit, we shall take less upon ourselves and understand that it is not we who pasture the young souls. The managing mother who interferes with every hour and every occupation of her child’s life, all because it is her duty, would tend to disappear. She would see with some amusement why it is that the rather lazy, self-indulgent mother, is often blessed with very good children. She, too, will let her children be, not because she is lazy, but being dutiful, she sees that, give children opportunity and elbow room, and they are likely to become natural persons, neither cranks nor prigs. And here is the hope for society–children so brought up are hardly likely to become managing persons in their turn, inclined to intrude upon the lives of others and be rather intolerable in whatever relation.

Charlotte Mason

Men of science spend much time and effort in the attempt to disentangle words from their metaphorical and traditional associations. The attempt is bound to prove vain, since it runs counter to the law of humanity.

Dorothy Sayers Ghosts

by Elizabeth Jennings

Those houses haunt in which we leave
Something undone. It is not those
Great words or silence of love

That spread their echoes through a place
And fill the locked-up, unbreathed gloom.
Ghosts do not haunt with any face

That we have known; they only come
With arrogance to thrust at us
Our own omissions in a room.

The words we would not speak they use,
The deeds we dared not act they flaunt,
Our nervous silences they bruise;

It is our helplessness they choose
And our refusals that they haunt.

Book List:

The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Wake Not the Dead by Johann Ludwig Tieck

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Vampyre by John Polidori

Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer

Carmilla by Sheridan Lefanu

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life Podcast this week, our hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks sit down for a special conversation with Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis. Jason is a speaker, writer, and college professor who writes primarily on medieval thought and is especially interested in Lewis’ ideas. You can find out more about him and his books at JasonMBaxter.com.

Our hosts and Jason discuss a wide range of ideas, including the values of literature, the sacramental view of reality, why it is important to understand medieval thought, the “problem” of paganism in Lewis’ writings, and how to approach reading ancient and medieval literature.

Be back next week when we will begin digging into Bram Stoker’s Dracula together and learning more about this late Victorian Gothic novel. It’s not what you might think!

Get the latest news from House of Humane Letters by signing up for their e-newsletter today!

Commonplace Quotes:

My part has been merely that of Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, who busied himself in clearing the moss, and bringing back to light the words, on the gravestones of the dead who seemed to him to have served humanity. This needs to be done and redone, generation after generation, in a world where there persists always a strong tendency to read newer writers, not because they are better, but because they are newer. The moss grows fast, and ceaselessly.

F. L. Lucas

It is the memory of time that makes us old; remembering eternity makes us young again.

Statford Caldecott

It is my settled conviction that in order to read old Western literature aright, you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature.

C. S. Lewis, from “De Descriptione Temporum”

What then is the good of–what is even the defense for–occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feeling which we should try to avoid in our own person?…The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves…[In] reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

C. S. Lewis Victory

by C. S. Lewis

Roland is dead, Cuchulain’s crest is low,
The battered war-rear wastes and turns to rust,
And Helen’s eyes and Iseult’s lips are dust
And dust the shoulders and the breasts of snow.

The faerie people from our woods are gone,
No Dryads have I found in all our trees,
No Triton blows his horn about our seas
And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon.

The ancient songs they wither as the grass
And waste as doth a garment waxen old,
All poets have been fools who thought to mould
A monument more durable than brass.

For these decay: but not for that decays
The yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man
That never rested yet since life began
From striving with red Nature and her ways.

Now in the filth of war, the baresark shout
Of battle, it is vexed. And yet so oft
Out of the deeps, of old, it rose aloft
That they who watch the ages may not doubt.

Though often bruised, oft broken by the rod,
Yet, like the phoenix, from each fiery bed
Higher the stricken spirit lifts its head
And higher-till the beast become a god.

Book List:

Beauty in the Word by Stratford Caldecott

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis

The Art of Living: Four Eighteenth Century Minds by F. L. Lucas

Transposition by C. S. Lewis

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

The Divine Comedy by Dante

Nicholas of Cusa

The Life of St. Francis of Assisi by St. Bonaventure

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

Confessions by St. Augustine

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On this week’s episode of The Literary Life Podcast, our hosts wrap up their series on Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Angelina opens the conversation about the book by highlighting Dickens’ masterful ability to tie up all the loose ends in his stories. They cover not only the major plot points here at the end of the book, but talk about the craft of Dickens and continue to teach us how to read this type of story. We see each character’s full arc and the positive changes that come when people choose repentance versus the fate of those who remain stubbornly on the road to destruction.

Join us next time for a special conversation with Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis.

After that, we will be digging into Bram Stoker’s Dracula together and learning more about this late Victorian Gothic novel. It’s not what you might think!

Head over to MorningTimeforMoms.com to get signed up for Dawn Duran’s webinar on “A Reasoned Patriotism,” taking place later this week!

Get the latest news from House of Humane Letters by signing up for their e-newsletter today!

Commonplace Quotes:

It is not the business of poetry to go about distributing tracts.

Andrew Lang

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people of very ordinary literary ability that they could write excellent continuations of The Screwtape Letters.

Fred Sanders

In the Bible, the opposite of Sin, with a capital ‘S,’ is not virtue – it’s faith: faith in a God who draws all to himself in his resurrection.

Robert Farrar Capon

Reviewers who have not had time to reread Milton have failed for the most part to digest your criticism of him, but it is a reasonable hope that of those who heard you in Oxford, many will understand henceforward that when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted.

C. S. Lewis Say not the Struggle nought Availeth

by Arthur Hugh Clough

Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.

Book List:

The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis

Between Noon and Three by Robert Farrar Capon

A Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

The Gifts of Reading by Robert MacFarlane

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life this week our hosts cover the next section of Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Angelina opens the conversation highlighting the structure of the book and the storytelling devices Dickens uses in this book. Cindy talks about the failure of educational systems in general, and the confrontation between Louisa and her father. Thomas shares a little about Jeremy Bentham and his utilitarian economic theory in relation to Hard Times. One of the main points they discuss in today’s episode is the importance of motherhood and the quiet work that goes on in the family unit.

Head over to MorningTimeforMoms.com to get signed up for Dawn Duran’s webinar on “A Reasoned Patriotism.”

Commonplace Quotes:

Persuasion enters like a sunbeam, quietly and without violence.

Jeremy Taylor

To me the greatness of the story, the horror of the story, and the threat to humanity the story portrays lie in the fact that Frankenstein has usurped the power, not of God, but of women. He has made a man without a mother. His science has eliminated the principle of femininity from the creation of human life.

Through the miracle of science a woman can now medicate her body so that men may use it for pleasure without consequence or attachment.

Andrew Klavan

In the first place, we naturally wish to help the students in studying those parts of the subject where we have most help to give and they need help most. On recent and contemporary literature their need is least and out help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor’s assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse’s assistance in blowing his own nose.

C. S. Lewis, from “Our English Syllabus” Death and the Lady

by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

TURN in, my lord, she said ;
As it were the Father of Sin
I have hated the Father of the Dead,
The slayer of my kin ;
By the Father of the Living led,
Turn in, my lord, turn in.
We were foes of old ; thy touch was cold,
But mine is warm as life ;
I have struggled and made thee loose thy hold,
I have turned aside the knife.
Despair itself in me was bold,
I have striven, and won the strife.
But that which conquered thee and rose
Again to earth descends ;
For the last time we have come to blows.
And the long combat ends.
The worst and secretest of foes,
Be now my friend of friends.

Book List:

Holy Living and Dying by Jeremy Taylor

The Truth and the Beauty by Andrew Klavan

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life this week and the continuation of our series on Hard Times by Charles Dickens. After some autumnal chit-chat, our hosts Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas dive into the plot of the end of Book 2. They open discussing Stephen’s fate and Tom Gradgrind’s destructive, devouring nature. They highlight Mrs. Sparsit and her similarities to a harpy and other imagery surrounding her denoting evil. Some other ideas discussed are good intentions with bad results, the concept of the fallen woman in Victorian times, Louisa’s homecoming and confession, and the failure of a formula in imparting virtue.

Head over to MorningTimeforMoms.com to get signed up for Dawn Duran’s webinar on “A Reasoned Patriotism.”

Commonplace Quotes:

Beware of the superficial knowledge of cold facts. Beware of sinful ratiocination, for it kills the heart, and when heart and mind have died in a man, there art cannot dwell.

Caspar David Friedrich

I don’t think they are noticeably worse at reading or writing than they were all those decades ago, though they’re less likely to have a lot of experience with the standard academic essay (introduction, three major points, conclusion) — which I do not see as a major deficiency. That kind of essay was never more than a highly imperfect tool for teaching students how to read carefully and write about what they have read, and, frankly, I believe that over the years I have come up with some better ones.

Alan Jacobs, from Snakes and Ladders

The hours of unsponsored, uninspected, perhaps even forbidden, reading, the ramblings, and the “long, long thoughts” in which those of luckier generations first discovered literature and nature and themselves are a thing of the past.

C. S. Lewis, from “Lilies that Fester” A Daughter of Eve

by Christina Rossetti

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.

My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It’s winter now I waken.

Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm’d sweet to-morrow:—
Stripp’d bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.

Book List:

The World’s Last Night: and Other Essays by C. S. Lewis

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Esther Waters by George Moore

Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell

Pictures from Italy by Charles Dickens

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

The Literary Life Podcast’s new episode this week continues our series on Hard Times by Charles Dickens. After Angelina ties up a few loose ends from Book 1, Thomas leads us into Book 2 and introduces us to Mr. Harthouse. Cindy highlights the dangers of not allowing children learn self-government as illustrated in the character of Tom Gradgrind. They then look again at Stephen Blackpool and his position as the martyr in the story. Our hosts also discuss Dickens’ focus on demonstrating the problems facing people in his day, not moralizing or trying to present solutions.

Head over to MorningTimeforMoms.com to get signed up for Dawn Duran’s webinar on “A Reasoned Patriotism.”

You can also get the replay of Angelina’s mini-class on The Taming of the Shrew at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

It is ill for a country, Gentlemen – I fear we must acknowledge it – when her destiny passes into the guidance of professors.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, from “Studies in Literature”

It is the old story. Utilitarian education is profoundly immoral in that it defrauds a child of the associations which should give him intellectual atmosphere.

Charlotte Mason

That evil may spring from the imagination, as from everything except the perfect love of God cannot be denied. But infinitely worse evils would be the result of its absence. Selfishness, avarice, sensuality, cruelty, would flourish tenfold; and the power of Satan would be well established ere some children had begun to choose. Those who would quell the apparently lawless tossing of the spirit, called the youthful imagination, would suppress all that is to grow out of it. They fear the enthusiasm they never felt; and instead of cherishing this divine thing, instead of giving it room and air for healthful growth, they would crush and confine it–with but one result of their victorious endeavors–imposthume, fever, and corruption. And the disastrous consequences would soon appear in the intellect likewise which they worship. Kill that whence spring the crude fancies and wild day-dreams of the young, and you will never lead them beyond dull facts–dull because their relations to each other, and the one life that works in them all, must remain undiscovered. Whoever would have his children avoid this arid region will do well to allow no teacher to approach them–not even of mathematics–who has no imagination.

George MacDonald The Golf Links

by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.

Book List:

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason

A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life Podcast, our hosts continue their series on Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas open the conversation with their commonplace quotes, which all lead into the discussion of Hard Times. They start out highlighting once again the fairytale and allegory aspects of this story, including the setting of Coketown. Together they talk about the two sides of Sissy Jupe’s education, along with the situations and portrayals of the other key characters in this section. A large part of the discussions centers around the ideas of input and output versus sowing and reaping.

Purchase the recordings of our 2022 Back to School Conference at MorningTimeforMoms.com. That is also where you can get signed up for Dawn Duran’s webinar on “A Reasoned Patriotism.”

You can also get the replay of Angelina’s mini-class on The Taming of the Shrew at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The ways of authorship are dusty and stony, and the stones are only too handy for throwing at the few that, deservedly or undeservedly, have made a name.

Andrew Lang, from “How to Fail in Literature”

To taboo knowledge is not to secure innocence. We must remember that ignorance is not innocence, and also that ignorance is the parent of insatiable curiosity.

Charlotte Mason

Early in 1851, Dickens suggested in Household Words that a second exhibition be held of “England’s sins and negligences.” When he finally went to the Crystal Palace, he described it as “terrible duffery.” He wrote in July 1851, “I find I am used up by the exhibition. I don’t say there is nothing in it. There is too much. I have only been twice. So many things bewildered me. I have a natural horror of sights, and the fusion of so many sights in one has not decreased it. I’m not sure that I have seen anything but the fountain and perhaps the Amazon. It is a dreadful thing to be obliged to be false, but when anyone says, ‘Have you seen…?’ I say, ‘Yes’, because if I don’t he’ll explain it, and I can’t bear that.

Julia Baird, quoting Charles Dickens from “Ode On a Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy”

by Thomas Hood

Ah me! those old familiar bounds!
That classic house, those classic grounds
My pensive thought recalls!
What tender urchins now confine,
What little captives now repine,
Within yon irksome walls?

Ay, that’s the very house! I know
Its ugly windows, ten a-row!
Its chimneys in the rear!
And there’s the iron rod so high,
That drew the thunder from the sky
And turn’d our table-beer!

There I was birch’d! there I was bred!
There like a little Adam fed
From Learning’s woeful tree!
The weary tasks I used to con!—
The hopeless leaves I wept upon!—
Most fruitless leaves to me!—

The summon’d class!—the awful bow!—
I wonder who is master now
And wholesome anguish sheds!
How many ushers now employs,
How many maids to see the boys
Have nothing in their heads!

Book List:

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason

The Ink Black Heart (Cormoran Strike Book 6) by Robert Galbraith

Victoria: The Queen by Julia Baird

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On this week’s episode of The Literary Life, we begin our fall series on Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas start out the book chat by covering some of the differences between this book and other novels of his, as well as how to approach Dickens in general. They also discuss misrepresentations of Dickens as a social reformer, the allegorical and fairy tale elements of his works, and what keys to look for as you read through Hard Times. Thomas talks about Utilitarianism in educational reform, and Cindy highlights the ideas of Charlotte Mason in connection with Victorian times. Angelina brings out the references to imagination in these first chapters and the danger of distorting the child’s imagination.

Purchase the recordings of our 2022 Back to School Conference at MorningTimeforMoms.com. That is also where you can get signed up for Dawn Duran’s webinar on “A Reasoned Patriotism.”

You can also get the replay of Thomas’ webinar on Evelyn Waugh or register for Angelina’s mini-class on The Taming of the Shrew at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

But already the Utilitarian citadel had been more heavily bombarded on the other side by and lonely and unlettered man of genius. The rise of Dickens is like the rising of a vast mob. This is not only because his tales are indeed as crowded and populous as towns: for truly it was not so much that Dickens appeared as that as hundred Dickens characters appeared.

G. K. Chesterton, from The Victorian Age in Literature

The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is–what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used.

C. S. Lewis, from A Preface to Paradise Lost

Never be without a really good book on hand. If you find yourself sinking to a dull, commonplace level, with nothing particular to say, the reason is probably that you are not reading, and therefore, not thinking.

Charlotte Mason, as quoted by Essex Cholmondeley in The Story of Charlotte Mason from “Among School Children”

by William Butler Yeats

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Book List:

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Life of Our Lord by Charles Dickens

A Child’s History of England by Charles Dickens

“Why Should Businessmen Read Great Literature?” by Vigen Guroian

“The Fantastic Imagination” by George MacDonald

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life Podcast we bring you another fun episode in our “In Search of the Austen Adaptation” series. Hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks are joined by resident film aficionado, Atlee Northmore to discuss film adaptations on Sense and Sensibility. The conversation opens by revisiting the question of what makes a good adaptation of a book when translating it for the screen. They talk about the challenges of showing modern audiences the characters and situations as Jane Austen meant them to be understood. Atlee gives a brief overview of the lesser known film adaptations, as well as a more in depth discussion of the 1995 and 2008 versions. You can access the PDF he created with links to watch here.

You are not too late to join in this year’s Back to School Online Conference! Go to MorningTimeforMoms.com to register and get in on the great talks, always live or later!

Commonplace Quotes:

Sound principles that are old may easily be laid on the shelf and forgotten, unless in each successive generation a few industrious people can be found who will take the trouble to draw them forth from the storehouse.

Thomas Ruper, as quoted by Karen Glass

His senile fury was not exhausted by endless repetition.

Eric Linklater

‘Remember, no one is made up of one fault, everyone is much greater than all his faults,’ and then she would add with a smile: ‘I find it much easier to put up with people’s faults than with their virtues!’

Charlotte Mason, as quoted by Essex Cholmondeley

The great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, some duty neglected, some failing indulged, impropriety, indelicacy, generous candor, blameable distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason. These are the concepts by which Jane Austen grasps the world. In her we still breathe the air of the Rambler and Idler. All is hard, clear, definable; by some modern standards, even naïvely so. The hardness is, of course, for oneself, not for one’s neighbours. It reveals to Marianne her want ‘of kindness’ and shows Emma that her behaviour has been ‘unfeeling’. Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen’s is at once less soft and less cruel.

C. S. Lewis Selection from With a Guitar, To Jane

by Percy Shelley

Ariel to Miranda:-- Take This slave of music, for the sake Of him who is the slave of thee; And teach it all the harmony In which thou canst, and only thou, Make the delighted spirit glow, Till joy denies itself again And, too intense, is turned to pain. For by permission and command Of thine own Prince Ferdinand, Poor Ariel sends this silent token Of more than ever can be spoken; Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who From life to life must still pursue Your happiness,-- for thus alone Can Ariel ever find his own. From Prospero's enchanted cell, As the mighty verses tell, To the throne of Naples he Lit you o'er the trackless sea, Flitting on, your prow before, Like a living meteor. When you die, the silent Moon In her interlunar swoon Is not sadder in her cell Than deserted Ariel. Book List:

In Vital Harmony by Karen Glass

The Story of Charlotte Mason by Essex Cholmondeley

Robert the Bruce by Eric Linklater

C. S. Lewis’ Selected Literary Essays edited by Walter Hooper

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast with Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks, we have a very special episode for you. Our hosts are joined by guests Dan Bunting and Anthony Dodgers, both of whom are pastors, for a discussion on why pastors should read fiction books. Dan is also host of the the Reading the Psalms podcast. Angelina starts off the conversation by asking why these men would prioritize taking literature classes. Anthony shares about his own literary life journey and how rediscovering literature has helped him personally. Dan talks about the book club that he and a couple of his pastor friends have and what kinds of books they read together. They discuss many other deep topics and crucial questions that we hope will be encouraging and thought-provoking to everyone who listens to and shares this episode.

Join us for the 2022 Back to School Conference, “Education: Myths and Legends” happening live online this August 1st-6th. Our special guest speakers will be Lynn Bruce and Caitlin Beauchamp, along with our hosts Cindy Rollins, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks. Learn more and register today at Morning Time for Moms.

Commonplace Quotes:

If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.

C. S. Lewis, from “Our English Syllabus”

How am I a hog and me both?

Flannery O’Connor

He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times.

Freidrich Schiller

Whoever wants to become a Christian, must first become a poet.

St. Porphyrios of Kafsokalivia

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in press or pulpit, who warn us that we are “relapsing into paganism”. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity “by the same door as in she went”, and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past, and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.

C. S. Lewis, from “De Descriptione Temporum” A Boy in Church

by Robert Graves

‘Gabble-gabble, . . . brethren, . . . gabble-gabble!’ My window frames forest and heather. I hardly hear the tuneful babble, Not knowing nor much caring whether The text is praise or exhortation, Prayer or thanksgiving, or damnation. Outside it blows wetter and wetter, The tossing trees never stay still. I shift my elbows to catch better The full round sweep of heathered hill. The tortured copse bends to and fro In silence like a shadow-show. The parson’s voice runs like a river Over smooth rocks, I like this church: The pews are staid, they never shiver, They never bend or sway or lurch. ‘Prayer,’ says the kind voice, ‘is a chain That draws down Grace from Heaven again.’ I add the hymns up, over and over, Until there’s not the least mistake. Seven-seventy-one. (Look! there’s a plover! It’s gone!) Who’s that Saint by the lake? The red light from his mantle passes Across the broad memorial brasses. It’s pleasant here for dreams and thinking, Lolling and letting reason nod, With ugly serious people linking Sad prayers to a forgiving God . . . . But a dumb blast sets the trees swaying With furious zeal like madmen praying.

Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh

Asterix Comics by René Goscinny

Tin Tin by Herge

Sigrid Undset

Giants in the Earth by Ole Rolvaag

Roald Dahl

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

John Donne

George Herbert

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

Graham Greene

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse edited by Donald Davie

Waiting on the Word by Malcolm Guite

Word in the Wilderness by Malcolm Guite

Neil Gaiman

Bill Bryson

Ursula Le Guin

Terry Pratchett

Reflections on the Psalms by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast our hosts give an update on their progress with the “Two for ’22” Literary Life Reading Challenge. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas share their commonplace quotes, then begin going over each category and talking about their progress and the various books they have chosen so far. Scroll down in the show notes for all the book titles mentioned and affiliate links to them on Amazon.

Download the adult reading challenge PDF here, and the kids’ reading challenge PDF here. The Literary Life Commonplace Books published by Blue Sky Daisies are always available for purchase, as well!

Join us for the 2022 Back to School Conference, “Education: Myths and Legends” happening live online this August 1st-6th. Our special guest speakers will be Lynn Bruce and Caitlin Beauchamp, along with our hosts Cindy Rollins, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks. Learn more and register today at Morning Time for Moms.

Check out Episode 3: The Importance of the Detective Novel.

Commonplace Quotes:

Nobody seems great to his dwarf.

Par Lagerkvist

What is true of nature is also true of freedom. The half-baked Rousseau-ism in which most of us have been brought up has given us a subconscious notion that the free act is the untrained act. But of course, freedom has nothing to do with the lack of training. We are not free to move until we have learned ot walk. We are not free to express ourselves musically until we have learned music. We are not capable of free thought unless we can think. Similarly, free speech cannot have anything to do with the mumbling and grousing of the ego. Free speech is cultivated and precise speech, which means that there are far too many people who are neither capable of it nor would know if they had lost it. A group of individuals who retain the power and desire of genuine communication is a society. An aggregate of egos is a mob.

Northrop Frye

He had had a choice, after all. The army had been keen to keep him, even with half his leg missing. Friends of friends had offered everything from management roles in the close protection industry to business partnerships, but the itch to detect, solve, and reimpose order on the moral universe could not be extinguished in him. He doubted it ever would be.

Robert Galbraith The Composer

by W. H. Auden

All the others translate: the painter sketches A visible world to love or reject; Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches The images out that hurt and connect. From Life to Art by painstaking adaption Relying on us to cover the rift; Only your notes are pure contraption, Only your song is an absolute gift. Pour out your presence, O delight, cascading The falls of the knee and the weirs of the spine, Our climate of silence and doubt invading; You, alone, alone, O imaginary song, Are unable to say an existence is wrong, And pour out your forgiveness like a wine. Book List:

The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist

The Well-Tempered Critic by Northrop Frye

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason

Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

Poet’s Corner by John Lithgow

Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott

The Wise Woman by George MacDonald

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris

Phantastes by George MacDonald

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott

Evelina by Fanny Burney

The Boys by Ron and Clint Howard

The Most Reluctant Convert by David C. Downing

Dorothy L. Sayers by Colin Duriez

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

An Old Man’s Love by Anthony Trollope

She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare

Timon of Athens by Williams Shakespeare

The Trojan Women by Euripedes

Antigone by Sophocles

The Rehearsal by George Villiers

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis by Jason M. Baxter

The Oxford Inklings by Colin Duriez

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks

Wintering by Katherine May

The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Aeneid by Virgil

A Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell

The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards

DC Smith Investigation Series by Peter Grainger

Nero Wolfe Series by Rex Stout

Anthony Horowitz

Simon Serrailler Series by Susan Hill

P. D. James

The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley

The Leavenworth Case by Anna Catherine Green

Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley

David Bentley Hart

Joseph Epstein

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to this long awaited return of The Literary Life podcast and a new “Literary Life of…” interview episode with Angelina, Cindy and their guest Jone Rose. Jone is a “super-fan” of the podcast and is a homeschool mom living in North Carolina. Today Angelina starts off the interview asking about Jone’s childhood reading life and school experience. Jone shares how her own adult literary education didn’t start until after she had been homeschooling her own children for several years. In addition to discussing the redemption of Jone’s own education, they talk about what her reading life looks like now, how narration helps make connections and increase understanding, asking better questions, and so much more!

Join us for the 2022 Back to School Conference, “Education: Myths and Legends” happening live online this August 1st-6th. Our special guest speakers will be Lynn Bruce and Caitlin Beauchamp, along with our hosts Cindy Rollins, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks. Learn more and register today at Morning Time for Moms.

Commonplace Quotes:

Surely this great writer would provide me with a definitive definition which showed me all the answers. He didn’t, and I was naive to expect him to. Generally, what is more important than getting watertight answers is learning to ask the right questions.

Madeleine L’Engle

Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become named; and naming is one of the impulses behind all art, to give a name to the cosmos we see, despite all the chaos.

Madeleine L’Engle

I am inclined to think that her work is in danger of being overlaid by too many interpreters and the simplicity of her message needs preserving.

Essex Cholmondeley from Ode: Intimations of Immortality

by William Wordsworth

Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. Book List:

Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle

What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy

The Story of Charlotte Mason by Essex Cholmondeley

Brother Cadfael Series by Ellis Peters

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis

The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

In this week’s episode of The Literary Life, our hosts wrap up their series on The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Angelina, Thomas and Cindy talk about these final chapters of the book, covering some key ideas such as the siren song of the Sea Rat, Toad’s inability to see himself rightly, the echoes of Homer’s Odyssey, examples of bad discussion questions, and what makes this such a lasting book.

It’s not too late to join Cindy’s Summer Discipleship group! Head over the MorningTimeforMoms.com to register.

Thomas will be teaching an introductory course on Russian Literature in July 2022. Learn more and register at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Secrets had an immense attraction for him, because he never could keep one.

Kenneth Grahame

It is a reasonable hope that those who heard you in Oxford, many will understand henceforth that when the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching, but adoring, and that which we take for the didactic is often the enchanted.

C. S. Lewis

A childhood without books–that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.

Astrid Lindgren Mr. Toad’s Song

by Kenneth Grahame

The world has held great Heroes,
As history-books have showed;
But never a name to go down to fame
Compared with that of Toad!

The clever men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed.
But they none of them knew one half as much
As intelligent Mr. Toad!

The animals sat in the Ark and cried,
Their tears in torrents flowed.
Who was it said, ” There’s land ahead ” ?
Encouraging Mr. Toad!

The Army all saluted
As they marched along the road.
Was it the King? Or Kitchener?
No. It was Mr. Toad!

The Queen and her Ladies-in-waiting
Sat at the window and sewed.
She cried, ” Look! who’s that handsome man? “
They answered, ” Mr. Toad. “

Book List:

Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

Seacrow Island by Astrid Lindgren

Wild Wood by Jan Needle (not a recommendation)

The Golden Age by Kenneth Grahame

Pagan Papers by Kenneth Grahame

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast this week, our hosts are joined in their discussion of The Wind in the Willows by Kelly Cumbee. Angelina, Cindy, Thomas and Kelly talk about chapters 7-8, focusing special attention on a section of this book that presents a potential problem for some readers. Angelina opens with background on the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the concept of “the Numinous,” and the popularity of the Pan character in Edwardian times. Thomas gives us a classical picture of who Pan was in mythology. Kelly then speaks to the Medieval understanding of the figure of Pan and the pastoral tradition along with their connections with Christ. They also address concerns over neo-paganism in relation to this book. If you want more discussion on mythology in literature, tune in to Episode 60: Why Read Pagan Myths.

Cindy’s 2022 Morning Time for Moms Summer Discipleship group is now open for registration. The theme this year is “Laughter and Lament.” Head over to morningtimeformoms.com to find out more and sign up!

Thomas will be teaching an introductory course on Russian Literature in July 2022. Learn more about his classes, as well as Kelly Cumbee’s classes, and register at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Dictionaries are like watches. The worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Samuel Johnson

“Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is the nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”

Bram Stoker

This malady of unbelief, again, is common to serious minds, educated to examine all things before they know the things they criticise by the slow, sure process of assimilating ideas. If we would but receive it, we are not capable of examining that which we do not know; and knowledge is the result of a slow, involuntary process, impossible to a mind in the critical attitude. Let us who teach spend time in the endeavour to lay proper and abundant nutriment before the young, rather than in leading them to criticise and examine every morsel of knowledge that comes their way. Who could live if every mouthful of bodily food were held up on a fork for critical examination before it be eaten?

Charlotte Mason

Suppose you were told that there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told “There is a ghost in the next room,” and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is “uncanny” rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply “There is a might spirit in the room” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking–described as awe, and the object which excites it is the Numinous.

C. S. Lewis To Find God

by Robert Herrick

Weigh me the fire; or canst thou find
A way to measure out the wind?
Distinguish all those floods that are
Mixed in that wat’ry theater,
And taste thou them as saltless there,
As in their channel first they were.
Tell me the people that do keep
Within the kingdoms of the deep;
Or fetch me back that cloud again,
Beshivered into seeds of rain.
Tell me the motes, dust, sands, and spears
Of corn, when summer shakes his ears;
Show me that world of stars, and whence
They noiseless spill their influence.
This if thou canst; then show me Him
That rides the glorious cherubim.

Book List:

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason

The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis

Letters to Children by C. S. Lewis

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life podcast, our hosts continue their discussion of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas kick off the book discussion by clarifying some confusion over the definition of a picaresque novel. They share some thoughts on the how stories communicate to us in a unique way that cannot easily be expressed in any other way. Other ideas brought up in this episode are the following: the home as a refuge from the world, the centrality of food and drink, friendship with an addict, the problem of trying to use books to teach virtue, and more!

Cindy’s 2022 Morning Time for Moms Summer Discipleship group is now open for registration. The theme this year is “Laughter and Lament.” Head over to morningtimeformoms.com to find out more and sign up!

Thomas will be teaching a webinar on Napoleon Bonaparte later this month, as well as an introductory course on Russian Literature in July 2022. Learn more and register at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

A work of art speaks a truth we can’t speak outright: the truth of the human experience. Love, joy, grief, guilt, beauty–no words can communicate these. We can only represent them in stories and pictures and songs. Art is the way we speak the meaning of our lives.

Andrew Klavan

He is led more by his ears than his understanding, taking the sound of words for their true sense…His ill-luck is not so much in being a fool, as in being put to such pains to express it to the world, for what in others is natural, in him (with much ado) is artificial.

Thomas Overbury, in “A Mere Scholar”

Granted that the average man may live for seventy years, it is a fallacy to assume that his life from sixty to seventy is more important than his life from five to fifteen. Children are not merely people: they are the only really living people that have been left to us in an over-weary world. Any normal child will instinctively to agree with your own American poet, Walt Whitman, when he said: “To me every house of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.”

In my tales about children, I have tried to show that their simple acceptance of the mood of wonderment, their readiness to welcome a perfect miracle at any hour of the day or night, is a think more precious than any of the laboured acquisition of adult mankind…

Kenneth Grahame To Althea, from Prison

by Richard Lovelace

When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates,
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the Grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair,
And fettered to her eye,
The Gods that wanton in the Air,
Know no such Liberty.

When flowing Cups run swiftly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with Roses bound,
Our hearts with Loyal Flames;
When thirsty grief in Wine we steep,
When Healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the Deep
Know no such Liberty.

When (like committed linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, Mercy, Majesty,
And glories of my King;
When I shall voice aloud how good
He is, how Great should be,
Enlargèd Winds, that curl the Flood,
Know no such Liberty.

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron bars a Cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage.
If I have freedom in my Love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such Liberty.

Book List:

The Truth and Beauty by Andrew Klavan

First Whisper of “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

“On Three Ways of Writing for Children” by C. S. Lewis

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Children and Books by Mayhill Arbuthnot and Zena Sutherland

The Adventure of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Grahame. Angelina, Thomas and Cindy set out to introduce this book in its historical and literary context, as well as address a few of the challenges people may have on their first reading of The Wind in the Willows. They also discuss some other pertinent topics such as Edwardian cultural concerns, the form of this novel, the rebirth images in the opening chapters, and the echoes of this book in other literature.

Cindy’s 2022 Morning Time for Moms Summer Discipleship group is now open for registration. The theme this year is “Laughter and Lament.” Head over to morningtimeformoms.com to find out more and sign up!

Thomas will be teaching a webinar on Napoleon Bonaparte later this month, as well as an introductory course on Russian Literature in July 2022. Learn more and register at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

There is no vice so simple but assumes/ Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.

William Shakespeare, from The Merchant of Venice

A boat will not answer to the rudder unless it is in motion. The poet can work upon us only as long as we are kept on the move.

C. S. Lewis, from his Preface to Paradise Lost

One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and, if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can’t criticize it, because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning. When you sit down to it, don’t be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgement on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worth: I don’t know, but it is you who are on trial.

A. A. Milne Sonnet to the River Otter

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!
How many various-fated years have passed,
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled
Lone manhood’s cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
Ah! that once more I were a careless child!

Book List:

The Golden Age by Kenneth Grahame

Dream Days by Kenneth Grahame

The Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. M. Barrie

Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

Our Island Story by H. E. Marshall

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers

P. G. Wodehouse

Leisure the Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Kenneth Grahame: A Biography by Peter Green

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Our Literary Life podcast hosts are back this week, along with Atlee Northmore, to wrap up their discussion of The Enchanted April with some thoughts on the various film adaptations of this enchanting book. After expanding on their commonplace quotes, Angelina, Cindy, Thomas and Atlee start the film talk with the “dreadful” 1935 RKO version. Then they move on to dig in to how Enchanted April was and brought to the big screen in 1991 and why it worked so well as an adaptation of the novel.

Our next book will be The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham, starting May 17th, so be sure to join us for that as well!

Cindy’s 2022 Morning Time for Moms Summer Discipleship group is now open for registration. The theme this year is “Laughter and Lament.” Head over to morningtimeformoms.com to find out more and sign up!

Thomas will be teaching an introductory course on Russian Literature in July 2022. Learn more and register at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that; and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself. It seems to be very difficult for many people to understand the reality and intensity of literary experience.

Northrop Frye

Education is always an individual endeavor. In terms of a future renewal, much of it will depend on a commitment to individualism, something that has been much maligned in recent years. We hear so much trendy, tedious talk about how bad individualism is and how we need to think in terms of “the group.” The problem is that the group usually offers conformity, not genuine community.

Morris Berman

And yet, we are still being taught that fairy tales and myths are to be discarded as soon as we are old enough to understand “reality.” I received a disturbed and angry letter from a young mother who told me that a friend of hers with young children gave them only instructive books. She wasn’t going to allow their minds to be polluted with fairy tales. They were going to be taught the “real world.” This attitude is a victory for the powers of this world. A friend of mine, a fine storyteller, remarked to me, “Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God Who told stories.” Yes, God Who told stories.

Madeleine L’Engle

The general fate of sects is to obtain a high reputation for sanctity while they are oppressed, and to lose it as soon as they become powerful.

Thomas Macaulay To Italy

by Percy Shelley

As the sunrise to the night, As the north wind to the clouds, As the earthquake's fiery flight, Ruining mountain solitudes, Everlasting Italy, Be those hopes and fears on thee. Book List:

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye

The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

The History of England by Thomas Macaulay

Tea with the Dames documentary

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcatst, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas continue their discussion of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, on chapters 12-22. Angelina and Thomas begin the conversation sharing some thoughts on modern literature and why we don’t hear of modern authors like Elizabeth von Arnim among “the academy.” Cindy tells us what stood out to her most in the second half of the book and the surprising turns von Arnim takes in the storyline. Angelina and Thomas also talk about the types of books they enjoy, and Cindy brings up the longings and fears of the various characters. The metaphors and fairy tale concepts found in this book are, of course, major topics of the conversation.

Return next week when we will discuss the film versions of The Enchanted April. Our next book will be The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham, starting in May, so be sure to join us for that as well!

Cindy’s 2022 Morning Time for Moms Summer Discipleship group is now open for registration. The theme this year is “Laughter and Lament.” Head over to morningtimeformoms.com to find out more and sign up!

Thomas will be teaching an introductory course on Russian Literature in July 2022. Learn more and register at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

Quentin Crisp

Here is a matter which sometimes causes uneasiness to parents: they are appalled when they think of the casual circumstances and chance people that may have a lasting effect upon their children’s characters. But their part is, perhaps, to exercise ordinary prudence and not over-much direction. They have no means of knowing what will reach a child; whether the evil which blows his way may not incline him to good, or whether the too-insistent good may not predispose him to evil. Perhaps the forces of life as they come should be allowed to play upon the child, who is not, be it remembered, a product of educational care, but a person whose spiritual nurture is accomplished by that wind which bloweth whither it listeth.

Charlotte Mason, Formation of Character

Chaste and ardent eros for the Beautiful is the first task of human life, and falling in love with Beauty is the beginning of every adventure that matters.

Timothy Patitsas

To be sure, there are limits and patterns governing the transposition of beauty into truth, such that it can never be mapped fully in the reductive way some would insist. It was never my desire to write a truth-first book about the beauty-first approach to ethics. Beauty creates its own structure, a form that may not be perfectly linear and symmetrical, but which is still harmonious and beneficial, and in its odd way, perfectly accurate. Through the surprising order of the beautiful, reason participates in and discloses living mystery as mystery. That is, when it starts with an eros for the beautiful, reason is able to announce to the world what mystery is, that which interprets and changes us, just when we manage to engage with it and interpret it.

Timothy Patitsas Summer Dawn

by William Morris

Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips, Think but one thought of me up in the stars. The summer night waneth, the morning light slips, Faint and grey 'twixt the leaves of the aspen,
betwixt the cloud-bars That are patiently waiting there for the dawn: Patient and colourless, though Heaven's gold Waits to float through them along with the sun. Far out in the meadows, above the young corn, The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun; Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn, Round the lone house in the midst of the corn, Speak but one word to me over the corn, Over the tender, bow'd locks of the corn. Book List:

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

The Ethics of Beauty by Timothy Patitsas

Katherine Mansfield

Barbara Pym

The Narnian by Alan Jacobs

Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life podcast with Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks. This week our hosts begin their discussion of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, covering chapters 1-11. Thomas gives some interesting biographical information about von Arnim, and Angelina shares some perspective on appreciating the art and the life of artist. Cindy highlights the fact that we see only caricatures of the women in England, and it isn’t until they get to Italy that we begin to see their real selves. Angelina also points out that all the women are on identity quests in this story. Angelina unpacks some of the metaphors in this book and the Dante-esque images, in addition to the key place beauty has in the story. Commonplace Quotes:

Whoso maintains that I am humbled now

(Who await the Awful Day) is still a liar;

I hope to meet my Maker brow to brow

And find my own is higher.

Frances Cornford, “Epitaph for a Book Reviewer”

“(The) sufferer is by definition a customer.”

Wendell Berry, from The Art of the Commonplace

Beauty will save the world.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Sonnet 98

by William Shakespeare

From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue, Could make me any summer’s story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew: Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; They were but sweet, but figures of delight Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those. Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away, As with your shadow I with these did play. Book List:

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, our hosts are bringing you another “Literary Life Of” interview episode. This week’s guest is Kay Pelham, a lifelong reader, veteran homeschooling mother, and accomplished pianist. After sharing their commonplace quotes, Angelina, Cindy and Kay dig into their conversation about the journey of Kay’s reading life. She shares a little about her family of story-tellers and readers, her personal reading versus school studies, and how her reading life changed as a young adult. Kay also talks about how she came to homeschool using Charlotte Mason’s philosophy. The discussion turns to Kay’s self-education journey as an older adult and she gives encouragement for anyone coming to this later in life. You can read Kay’s own thoughts on books and more at KayPelham.com.

Join us this spring for our next Literary Life Conference “The Battle Over Children’s Literature” featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian. The live online conference will take place April 7-9, 2022, and you can go to HouseofHumaneLetters.com for more information.

Commonplace Quotes:

When children come to school, they can read and speak. When they leave school they can do neither the one nor the other.

Arthur Burrell, from “Recitation, the Children’s Art” in The Parent’s Review

It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western Literature aright, you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature.

C. S. Lewis

Mythology is the embryo of literature and the arts, not of science, and no form of art has anything to do with making direct statements about nature, mistaken or correct. Similarly, as science does not grow out of mythology, so it can never replace mythology. Mythology is recreated by the poets in each generation, while science goes its own way.

Northrup Frye Mozart

by Maurice Baring

The sunshine, and the grace of falling rain,
The fluttering daffodil, the lilt of bees,
The blossom on the boughs of almond trees,
The waving of the wheat upon the plain—
And all that knows not effort, strife or strain,
And all that bears the signature of ease,
The plunge of ships that dance before the breeze
The flight across the twilight of the crane:
And all that joyous is, and young, and free,
That tastes of morning and the laughing surf;
The dawn, the dew, the newly turned-up turf,
The sudden smile, the unexpressive prayer,
The artless art, the untaught dignity,—
You speak them in the passage of an air.

Books Mentioned:

Creation and Recreation by Northrup Frye

If I Were Going: The Alice and Jerry Basic Reader by Mabel O’Donnell

My Bookhouse edited by Olive B. Miller

Tending the Heart of Virtue by Vigen Guroian

The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Boys by Ron and Clint Howard

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On today’s episode of The Literary Life, our hosts wrap up their series on The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis. Angelina kicks off today’s conversation about chapter 3 with more exploration and clarification of the concept of “the Tao.” Cindy talks about the importance of respect for the past and how much we have lost by letting go of that. Thomas highlights the fact that so many education theorists were men who never had reared children and the difference that a mother’s experience makes. One of the main themes of this discussion is the state of education and Lewis’ prescient insight into our current cultural climate. Lewis also goes beyond criticizing scientism by laying out his vision for good science.

We will be back next week with a “Literary Life of…” interview with a surprise guest. After that we will take a short break for the conference, and return in April with a read along of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim.

Join us this spring for our next Literary Life Conference “The Battle Over Children’s Literature” featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian. The live online conference will take place April 7-9, 2022, and you can go to HouseofHumaneLetters.com for more information.

Commonplace Quotes:

Only in destroying I find ease for my relentless thoughts.

Satan in Paradise Lost, by John Milton

…the fact that the story does not turn on children, and does not foster that self-consciousness, the dawn of which in the child is, perhaps, the individual “Fall of Man.”

Charlotte Mason

The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result.

C. S. Lewis, in That Hideous Strength Who Has Seen the Wind?

by Christina Rossetti

Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by. Book List:

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast this week, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas continue their series of discussions on The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis. They open the conversation with their commonplace quotes and give us a working definition of debunking. You can also read a fantastic post on debunking from Kelly Cumbee’s blog here. Other topics of this conversation include “the tao,” objective reality, utilitarianism, finding wisdom, and how this book speaks to our current culture.

Kelly Cumbee will be teaching a webinar on The Tempest by William Shakespeare this Thursday, March 17, 2022 at 5pm Eastern, so head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com to register today.

Join us this spring for our next Literary Life Conference “The Battle Over Children’s Literature” featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian. The live online conference will take place April 7-9, 2022, and you can go to HouseofHumaneLetters.com for more information.

Commonplace Quotes:

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

A Scottish proverb, as quoted by Joseph Addison

“Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”

“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

C. S. Lewis

Do not remove the ancient landmark which your fathers have set.

Proverbs 22:28 (NKJV) Inexpensive Progress

by John Betjeman

Encase your legs in nylons, Bestride your hills with pylons O age without a soul; Away with gentle willows And all the elmy billows That through your valleys roll. Let's say goodbye to hedges And roads with grassy edges And winding country lanes; Let all things travel faster Where motor car is master Till only Speed remains. Destroy the ancient inn-signs But strew the roads with tin signs 'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!' Command, instruction, warning, Repetitive adorning The rockeried roundabout; For every raw obscenity Must have its small 'amenity,' Its patch of shaven green, And hoardings look a wonder In banks of floribunda With floodlights in between. Leave no old village standing Which could provide a landing For aeroplanes to roar, But spare such cheap defacements As huts with shattered casements Unlived-in since the war. Let no provincial High Street Which might be your or my street Look as it used to do, But let the chain stores place here Their miles of black glass facia And traffic thunder through. And if there is some scenery, Some unpretentious greenery, Surviving anywhere, It does not need protecting For soon we'll be erecting A Power Station there. When all our roads are lighted By concrete monsters sited Like gallows overhead, Bathed in the yellow vomit Each monster belches from it, We'll know that we are dead. Book List:

The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast this week, our hosts begin a much-anticipated series on The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis. Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy share their commonplace quotes to open the discussion, then they give some background on this particular work. They talk about the ideas behind the “new criticism” approach to literature and why it is so problematic. Angelina and Thomas expand on the significance of the concept of the sublime. Cindy shares some thoughts on learning to identify and to produce good writing. Angelina helps us connect Lewis’ points about ordo amoris with our current day dilemmas. Other topics touched on in their conversation are the nature of objective reality, the tripartite soul, the medieval view of Reason, debunking the ideal of honor, and so much more.

Join us this spring for our next Literary Life Conference “The Battle Over Children’s Literature” featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian. The live online conference will take place April 7-9, 2022, and you can go to HouseofHumaneLetters.com for more information.

Commonplace Quotes:

The modern state exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good–anyway, to do something to us or make us something. Hence the new name “leaders” for those who were once “rulers.” We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, “Mind your own business.” Our whole lives are their business.

C. S. Lewis, from “Is Progress Possible?”

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.

May Sarton

In truth, he wished to command the respect at once of courtiers and of philosophers, to be admired for attaining high dignities, and to be at the same time respected for despising them.

Thomas Macaualy Duty Surviving Self-Love, The Only Sure Friend Of Declining Life. A Soliloquy

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Unchanged within, to see all changed without, Is a blank lot and hard to bear, no doubt. Yet why at others' Wanings should'st thou fret? Then only might'st thou feel a just regret, Hadst thou withheld thy love or hid thy light In selfish forethought of neglect and slight. O wiselier then, from feeble yearnings freed, While, and on whom, thou may'st--shine on! nor heed Whether the object by reflected light Return thy radiance or absorb it quite: And tho' thou notest from thy safe recess Old Friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air, Love them for what they are; nor love them less, Because to thee they are not what they were. Book List:

The History of England from the Accession of James II by Thomas Macaulay

The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

God in the Dock by C. S. Lewis

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Our hosts are back on The Literary Life podcast this week with another fun episode in our series “In Search of the Austen Adaptation.” In this episode, Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas are joined again by Atlee Northmore to discuss the several film versions of Jane Austen’s Emma. To start the conversation, Angelina highlights the challenges of adapting Emma to film. Atlee outlines the major film adaptations of Emma. Then they discuss the ups and downs of the various adaptations, as well as casting, personal favorites and production choices.

Join us this spring for our next Literary Life Conference “The Battle Over Children’s Literature” featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian. The live online conference will take place April 7-9, 2022, and you can go to HouseofHumaneLetters.com for more information.

Commonplace Quotes:

In all our literary experience there are two kinds of response. There is the direct experience of the world itself, while we’re reading a book or seeing a play, especially for the first time. This experience is uncritical, or rather pre-critical, so it’s not infallible. If our experience is limited, we can be roused to enthusiasm or carried away by something that we can later see to have been second-rate or even phony. Then there is the conscious, critical response we make after we’ve finished reading or left the theatre, where we compare what we’ve experienced with other things of the same kind, and form a judgment of value and proportion on it. This critical response, with practice, gradually makes our pre-critical responses more sensitive and accurate, or improves our taste, as we say. But behind our responses to our literary experience as a whole, as a total possession.

Northrup Frye

Reason thus with life:

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing

That none but fools would keep.

William Shakespeare

A boat will not answer to the rudder unless it is in motion; the poet can work upon us only as long as we are kept on the move.

C. S. Lewis

The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool, her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and sense which she had in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, sincerity which are among the most delightful things on English literature.

Virginia Woolf Selection from “Epistle to a Lady, Of the Characters of Women”

by Alexander Pope

Say, what can cause such impotence of mind? A Spark too fickle, or a Spouse too kind. Wise wretch! with pleasures too refin’d to please; With too much spirit to be e’er at ease; With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought: You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live. Book List:

Emma by Jane Austen

Tending the Heart of Virtue by Vigen Guroian

The Educated Imagination by Northrup Frye

Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare

Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast, we are bringing you another Literary Life of interview episode. This week’s guest is Timilyn Downey, and together with hosts Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins dig into how Timilyn became a lifelong reader. Timilyn shares about the incredibly literary childhood education that she had without even realizing it at the time. She also tells the story of her trip to London during college, then goes into how she used a literary approach in her teaching career. Timilyn also describes her journey to homeschooling and the role that God’s grace clearly played in where she is now.

Join us this spring for our next Literary Life Conference “The Battle Over Children’s Literature” featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian. The live online conference will take place April 7-9, 2022, and you can go to HouseofHumaneLetters.com for more information.

Commonplace Quotes:

The founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was not as programmatic or formal as its name suggests, but rather evolved out of a series of pub discussions and informal get-togethers.

Carolyn Weber

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.

Charles MacKay

On a Saturday afternoon in winter, when nose and fingers might be pinched enough to give an added relish to the anticipation of tea and fireside, and the whole week-end’s reading lay ahead, I suppose I reached as much happiness as is ever to be reached on earth.

C. S. Lewis from “Among School Children”

by William Butler Yeats

VII Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts—O Presences That passion, piety or affection knows, And that all heavenly glory symbolise— O self-born mockers of man's enterprise; VIII Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? Book List:

The Rossetti’s in Wonderland by Dinah Roe

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Little Britches by Ralph Moody

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

The Arabian Nights by Muhsin Mahdi

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Mere Motherhood by Cindy Rollins

Morning Time by Cindy Rollins

Tending the Heart of Virtue by Vigen Guroian

D’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths by Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB