The Girls of Slender Means
A Reading Life, A Writing Life, with Sally Bayley
00:00
The Importance of Progress
I recognise Joanna Child as a kind of young, spinsed, archetype who chucks up her head and recites poetry. I can feel my diaphragm opening and closing as I read those poetic lines. Muriel Spark includes those in her novels because she needs to be reminded of narrative thrust. To have that sense of movement through the body, that visceral expansion and contraction of air, that shaft or that draft of air coming down through your body, which of course is the business of recitation and elocution and rhetoric. And indeed this was the kind of education that I had. Again, I also had elocution lessons in the 80s, God knows where we
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