The Working Class Library is the Bee’s podcast. Each month, a writer joins Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, and Claire Malcolm, CEO of New Writing North, to discuss a book and decide whether it deserves a place on the shelves of our imaginary library of great books by and about ordinary people.
In our second episode, novelist Louise Doughty drops in to consider Hilary Mantel’s 2003 memoir Giving Up the Ghost.
Readers who came to Hilary Mantel after her double-Booker-winning success with Wolf Hall made her a star of the literary world may not be aware that she grew up in a working-class home in a Derbyshire mill town. She, however, said many times that that background had a decisive influence on her as a person and a writer, and in Giving Up the Ghost she shows how. In the end, her status as a working-class woman almost leads to her death. Her memoir prompts the question, how much things changed – or not?
Thoughts? Comments? Thoughts apprehended from a spiritual plane? Please share them with us on our social media channels.
Books Mentioned
- Louise Doughty – A Bird in Winter, Platform Seven, Apple Tree Yard, Whatever You Love, Fires in the Dark, Stone Cradle
- Hilary Mantel – Every Day is Mother’s Day, Beyond Black, Vacant Possession, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, A Place of Greater Safety, The Mirror and the Light, Fludd, A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing
Georgia Poplett
Comments