The Essay

Soldiers fighting in the Crimean War lapped up this story and it also influenced the young William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones who read it at Oxford. The Heir of Redclyffe, published in 1853, reflects the mid-Victorian trend for medievalism and resurgence of High Church Anglicanism, combining gothic melodrama with sharply observed social realism, sprightly dialogue and wry humour. Although Charlotte M Yonge came to be associated mainly with domestic realism, in her long career (1823–1901) she worked across a wide range of genres, writing biographies, histories, children's books, and novels from historical epics to long-running family sagas. In Yonge's bicentenary year, New Generation Thinker Clare Walker-Gore argues that now is the time to rediscover this brilliant and neglected woman writer.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Urbanisation, migration and ‘folk language’ are explored in the 1984 novel by Latife Tekin. The story is a carnivalesque fusion of contrasts like its title – where ‘Berji’ conjures images of an innocent shepherdess and ‘Kristin’ of a sex worker. There’s blind old Güllü Baba, rumoured to cure the ills caused by a nearby factory’s chemical wastewater. There’s Fidan of Many Skills, rumoured to know all the ‘arts of the bed’. There’s the rumour of roads, jobs, and clean water coming to Flower Hill: they never materialise. In his foreword to Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, John Berger crowns ‘rumour’ its ultimate storyteller. New Generation Thinker Sarah Jilani looks at the way the inhabitants of Flower Hill make sense of their disorienting transition from village life to shantytown in the story from one of Turkey's most influential female authors writing today.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Poet, abolitionist, and activist for women’s rights, Frances EW Harper was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States, producing 80 poems, various articles, sketches, serialised books and short stories and a novel printed when she was aged 67. New Generation Thinker Xine Yao looks at her career, focusing on this 1892 novel Iola Leroy. It tells the story of a Black mixed race woman who survives the Civil War, experiences romances and has to navigate the post-emancipation world and it explores ideas about science, education, evolving forms of anti-Black racism, and women's social responsibilities. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Arrested by military intelligence, Philip Wylie (1902-1971) went on to become an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee for Atomic Energy. At least nine films have been made out of stories he published which ranged across topics including ecology, science fiction and the threat of nuclear holocaust. New Generation Thinker Sarah Dillon reads his short story The Paradise Crater. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone.Olivia's final essay is about the end of the tradition of religious orders. Ireland has fallen out of love with the Catholic Church. Hardly a month goes by without more revelations of harsh treatment of girls in institutions run by nuns and of sexual abuse of boys in institutions run by brothers and priests. Nuns have to deal with being despised in a country that used to see them as saints. ‘Before, we were on a pedestal we didn’t deserve’ one nun said to Olivia. ‘Neither do we deserve the gutter. But we took the pedestal, so now we have to take the gutter.’Presenter Olivia O'Leary Producer Claire Cunningham A Rockfinch production for BBC Radio 3

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone.In her fourth essay, about nuns and politics, Olivia describes the conservative Roman Catholic state Ireland was in the Sixties. Communism was seen as the greatest enemy and hospitals and schools were run by Catholic nuns as a way of imposing church rule and keeping the state out of people’s lives. However, it was nuns who swung to the left when the second Vatican Council pushed for a more modern, liberal church, and missionaries coming back from South America preached that the church should be siding with the poor. Many nuns left their comfortable convents to live with the poor. They sat down in front of trucks coming to evict Travellers. They protested against President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 visit because of his support for right-wing regimes in Central and South America. They criticised governments and demanded social justice. They abandoned respectability and many of the more conservative priests and bishops thought they were making a show of themselves. They continued to make a show of themselves.Presenter Olivia O'Leary Producer Claire Cunningham A Rockfinch production for BBC Radio 3

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone.In her third essay, about class in the Irish Catholic Church, she describes how girls from poor backgrounds, particularly young pregnant girls, suffered harsh mistreatment in the institutions the nuns ran and felt the sharp end of their obsession with purity. How could the nuns who had been so good to Olivia belong to the same orders who punished girls whose only ‘sin’ was that they were poor or illegitimate, or that they got in trouble?Presenter Olivia O'Leary Producer Claire Cunningham A Rockfinch production for BBC Radio 3

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone.In her second essay, Olivia describes the education which the nuns gave her, which was first class. These were almost the only university-educated professional women she and her classmates knew, and they wielded power. They ran big organisations and took a real interest in Irish women’s education when the state did not. They were often more ambitious for girls than their parents were.Presenter Olivia O'Leary Producer Claire Cunningham A Rockfinch production for BBC Radio 3

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. In her first essay, Olivia recalls her 12-year-old view of nuns: their long black clothes, their heads encased in stiff linen, their obsession with prayer and the Virgin Mary and purity - and making sure that girls would never see one another naked. Olivia is one of the last generation who went to a boarding school run by nuns and, like many other Irish families, she had an aunt who was a nun.Presenter Olivia O'Leary Producer Claire Cunningham A Rockfinch production for BBC Radio 3

Environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth travels to the Arctic ice and tundra to look for the ways people and animals shape each other’s lives.In this episode, she journeys to the Yukon River, to see how the history of salmon connects to the present - and shows how even those of us living far away have a relationship with the fish of this great river.Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian and writer who spends much of her time in Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. Her work draws on archives, ecology, and experience of the landscape to ask how places and people change each other.Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when, at 18, she moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon. For two years, she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, tracked bears, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra.In this essay series she brings us into the intertwined pasts of people and animals of the lands and waters around the Bering Strait - the ice-studded stretch of ocean between Alaska and the Russian far east.She shows how dogs, whales, walruses, caribou, and salmon have helped make history - and in turn, how people have changed how they value and relate to creatures finned and furred. From shifts in the culture of whales to how reindeer flummoxed Soviet plans and dogs’s emotions mattered to the British Empire, each essay is a journey into how paying attention to the environment and the animals within it helps us better understand history, the nature of change, and our place in the world.Writer and reader Bathsheba Demuth Producer Natalie Steed A Rhubarb Rhubarb Production for BBC Radio 3