Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S6 Ep17: Bookshelfie: Mary Beard

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

World famous classicist Prof Mary Beard covers ageism, feminism, university fees, the role of children’s books, why men are obsessed with the roman empire and of course, her favourite books. She is also a television and radio presenter, trustee of the British Museum and the author of more than 20 books on classical history, feminism and academic life, including the bestsellers Pompeii, SPQR and Women & Power. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2018. In 2022 she retired from a 40-year academic career at the University of Cambridge. Her new book, Emperor of Rome, looks at the facts and fictions around the Roman rulers, from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus and is out now. Mary’s book choices are: ** Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit by Beatrix Potter **  The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo ** Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer ** Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas ** Poems and Fragments of Sappho Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season six of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Podcast. Every week, Vick will be joined by another inspirational woman to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and they continue to champion the very best books written by women. Don’t want to miss the rest of season six? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

At Harrison Healthcare, we know that lasting health starts with personalized care. We're not just a clinic. We're your partner in prevention, helping you achieve your health and longevity goals. Our expert team combines evidence-based medicine with the compassionate, unhurried care you and your family deserve. Today and for many years to come. When it comes to your health, you shouldn't settle for anything less than exceptional. Visit harrisonhealthcare.ca.ca.com.com. It was the first time that I'd read a novel about Roman Britain that made me see what you could do with fiction.

What Everisto did was actually show that you didn't have to do the posh version. It just opened my eyes, I think, to the possibility of engaging with the ancient world in a completely different way. With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast. Celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Vic Hope and I'm your host for Season 6 of Bookshelfy, the podcast that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction

to share the five books by women that have shaped them. Join me and my incredible guests as we talk about. about the books you'll be adding to your 2023 reading list. Professor Mary Beard is a world-famous classicist. She's also a television and radio presenter, trustee of the British Museum, and the author of more than 20 books on classical history, feminism and academic life,

including the bestseller's Pompeii, S-PQR and Women and Power. She was appointed a Dame commander of the British Empire in 2018. In 2022, she retired from a 40-year academic career, career at the University of Cambridge. Her new book, Emperor of Rome, looks at the facts and fictions around the Roman rulers from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus and is out now. Welcome to the podcast, Mary.

Thank you very much. Great to be here. I so often ask my guests about reading for pleasure versus work, whether it's for themselves or for research, fact versus fiction. And perhaps that's quite reductive. Is there actually a clear line between the two for you? Absolutely not. No, absolutely not. I mean, in some ways, you know, you could say all readings pleasure, could also say all readings work.

There is a difference, though, that there are some things that you choose to read just because you feel like it. And in a way, I suppose that's what for me counts as not work. But then so often what you choose to read just because you feel like it feeds ideas, into work, that even that boundary gets blurred. I have to confess, for many years, I have read very little just because I felt like it. It's mostly because I've been asked to read it or because I needed to read it. I quite recently retired.

And I think that one of the things that I would love to do is sit down on a Saturday morning and say, how not I'd like to read today. Purely for that reading. That's right. And that has not happened to me. I think it probably hasn't happened to me since I was about 20. Well, as you say, you never know where you're going to be inspired. So you could be reading for pleasure and it sparks something that you want to delve even deeper into.

Yeah. And I think also, you know, if you're a writer, you know, and I'm writing nonfiction about the Roman world, but all kinds of things just make you see what you're writing about differently. So they become inspirations. They become new ways of seeing your subject. And equally it goes the other way. You could be reading for research, for work, but it's hugely enjoyable. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think anybody who thought an academic career in the humanities was going to be for them if they didn't have a capacity to enjoy reading would have a pretty miserable life. Yeah. To something else, I think. When you do find that time to read purely because you feel like it, what sort of books do you gravitate? Well, as I said, I haven't done that for decades. So I've got no idea what it would be.

I mean, I have a kind of fantasy. I mean, I just got given Zadie Smith's new book and I thought, oh, that would be nice to read. So I suppose that was a thought, you know, that, oh, perhaps I'll read that. It's that feeling when you go into a bookshelf. Actually, I don't think it needs to be premeditated. Sometimes you just want to scorn. Gower, you just want to have a look around, see how you feel at the time. Yeah, and I think it's, you know, that's why we want bookshops, not just online stores, you know, of the sort we know all too well.

Because I know that they try online, try to make it easy for you to browse and you can read the first few pages of the book online. But it's certainly not the same as going into a bookshop. Seeing, well, you know, often the staff recommendations, I enjoy this, being able to pick it up and not be restricted to what they've chosen as. there, here is an extract you might enjoy. But just to kind of feel it, to think, do I want that? Do I want, do I want this book? I think that's quite a powerful emotion, I think. It's so true.

Whenever I've gone online to buy a book, I've known what I was going for. Yeah. I've known. I have never, I think, bought a book online just because I happen to see it. You know, and all those things, you go and you buy a book and it says other things you might enjoy. And I never look at them. No. Maybe there are people who do.

You might be right. I might enjoy them, but I don't know. You know, sorry, just because I'm buying this, you know, don't imagine you know what I would like. You know, another book that is a bit like it. Well, sorry, sunshine. Let me be the judge of this. So I think that's where bookshops are truly,

they're wonderful and you just hope that they survive in more or less the form they now are even better. I think it does look as if most, people, not everybody, but most people are a bit like us, that if you think, and you feel a bit guilty about this, you know, you think this is Saturday night at 10 o'clock, I need that book tomorrow, I'm afraid I go online. But the idea that that should be the only way of buying a book, I think it would be to be a terrible loss. And I think bookshops have responded, you know, hugely, enterprising to that sort of changed culture. Because, I think, I'm a lot of, You know, my new book on The Roman Emperor is just out. And a good half, the gigs that I'm doing to talk about it and publicise it are at bookshops. And they get huge numbers of people. So bookshops have become not just a place for buying books, but a place to have coffee,

but also a place to hear people talk about books and discuss books. And that's been a really great development. When I was a kid, bookshops didn't do events. They were just shops. Well, our producer Dawn was saying she was taking photos of you just the other night at your book signing in a bookshop. And she said that the number of young women who were there who were so excited to meet you, it's a really special, magical opportunity. All these signings are great. And you get a real buzz out of it because, you know, people don't come to them unless they want to meet you.

You don't go to a book signing in order to go up to the author to say, do you know, I hate your books, right? You know, you've got better things to do than that. You stay at home. You might tweet. You know, I hate her books. But you don't show up at the books, I think, do you? So you get people who want to talk to you for all kinds of different reasons. And it's really fun.

You get a real buzzer to them. Well, Mary, it's time to talk about your first book-shelphie book that you've brought today, which is the story of A Fierce Bad Rabbit by Beatrice Potter. Yes. This children's book was first published in December 1906. And it tells the tale of a wicked little rabbit who forcefully takes another rabbit's carrot, but soon loses his tail and whiskers after being fired upon by a hunter. Yes.

You said that this book was the first time that you understood a book could shock and terrify its reader. And you were just four years old. Is that right? Yes, it was about 1959. Very long time ago. I was looking at my shelves quite recently and I've still got my Beatrix Potter book. and then our kids had them and we added to them and then now there's grandchildren and they were look at them.

And, you know, of course there are some sorts of old favourites there like Peter Rabbit and the Flopsy Bunnies and Jamima Puddledug. But nothing sticks in my mind as much as this not quite so well-known story of a fierce bad rabbit because when I was four and I still find it pretty scary. You didn't want to, you wanted your mum to go on reading it to you, but you didn't because it was so awful. And there were all kinds of things that I now find quite funny about it. I mean, when the bad rabbit takes the carrot away from the good rabbit, Potter says, and he didn't say please. And you think, oh, here we are, learning etiquette here.

And the hunter comes along and he's a man with a gun. And I think what I now think was important about it to me was it showed me that books could be scary and terrifying, almost unreadable and yet really exciting at the same time. That, you know, one of the things that books did for you was upset you. And, you know, I think that that's quite an important lesson. And I think a lot of kids' books do that, actually. They're not cozy, touchy-feely books about everything going right.

It's one of the ways you learn about disaster and people doing things that are wrong and people that do things that are terrifying and that they shouldn't. And they take you into a much more complicated world than you might have experienced just in real life. I remember books triggering me. when I was little. It's sort of sparking in activism sometimes when you see that the world's not perfect. Yes.

And that maybe someone needs to change that. Yeah. I remember because my moral compass was so clear when I was young, I hadn't been sullied by compromise. Yeah. And it's what made me who I was, was them being shocking and terrifying at times. Yes.

Yeah. And particularly for kids, I think it's the interaction with the story. And, you know, what mum and dad say about it when they're reading to kids. I mean, so that I have a gut reaction against people saying, look,

that book is very old-fashioned. It's written by class prejudice, racial prejudice, etc. So we shouldn't read it. I think that we should actually be saying do you think that's right to the kids? Do you think

the reason that they shot that elephant was fair? So the books which have a kind of underlying ideology that we don't approve of can be the prompts to the most interesting discussions about good and bad and moral values and that kind of thing. I remember talking to Amanda and Gossi Adich about the book she read when she was a kid. And she read he did Blighton. And she said she was living in Nigeria. and this was a kind of foreign world,

but it was a world that she just leapt into. And now we would say, you know, you don't want to give a black kid living in Nigeria, Iniblighten, because it has nothing to do with their own life experience. You know, and I see that argument. But Chimamanda talking about the pleasure of discovering what a cucumber sandwich was, she'd got a huge amount out of this.

My mum always says that she truly believes that Jimamanda Ngozi Adichie was watching her child. She also grew up in Nigeria during the Biafran's Civil War and she believes that she was watching her and knew everything that she went through. And I think my mum would agree that it was an amazing thing to read these stories of England and sort of get this picture, which was then completely blasted when she arrived here. She was like, it's nothing like that. Yes. And it was, my mum didn't let me read, Inip Leighton, for all those reasons,

even though I was growing up in Shropshire, you know, because she thought it was, you know, full of class prejudice and, you know, just posh white kids going around having daring, do, adventures that were completely implausible. The result was that when I got my first book token, remember them, to spend, I went out and really maxed out, Enid Blyton and loved it for a bit. But I thought she kind of realized then that policing kids' literature

was not necessarily the way to go. Now there are certainly some exceptions to that, I think, but by and large, if you read the famous five or whatever, and then mum says, well, I wonder who made their tea? As they kind of turn up for the cucumber sandwiches and you don't see the staff or the cook, you can help kids read books against the grain. So who made those cucumber sandwiches?

And so you can have it both ways, I think. You can have the huge pleasure of that story and that fantasy. And at the same time, you can be prompted to think about what it's leaving out. You can teach kids about the ideology of the book. This is the brilliant thing about stories is there are a myriad ways that we can engage with them. Yeah. We can encourage kids to engage with them from all different angles. I think it's fine to get angry with them as well, you know, to say,

I think that's awful. You know, and you can do that with nice boy meets girl, princess and the pea kind of books where, you know, the passive princess is got finally by the prince. You know, and you can say, what did she thought about that really? She's right with it? Let's talk about the second book that you brought today, which is the Empress Babe by Bernardine Everista, who's absolutely brilliant. This is a verse novel published in 2001.

It's Everestown's second work of fiction. Based in London around 1800 years ago, it follows the story of Black Nubian teenage girls Laika who comes of age in the Roman period. Tell us a little bit about this book and why you chose it. Well, it was one of those really surprised books for me and it was one of those books that I was reading for work and I'd been asked to review it

and I thought, okay, I did a bit of reviewing for a bit of excellent. cash, I'll do this. And I looked at how it was described. A novel in verse by an author I've then not heard of. I mean, this was 2001, about a black woman from what is now Sudan in Roman Britain. You've got to be joking, I thought. I think particularly it was the idea it was a verse novel. Yeah.

You know, can't you at least write in prose? That sounds like you mad. Yes. This sounds mad, right? And I read it and I was absolutely entranced by it, by the fun of it, by how you could conjure up a world of Roman Britain that was multicultural, like it really was, actually, as we've come to see, that did have a feisty female heroine who was married to a slob of a white man

who was overweight and three times her age, who did have an affair with the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus who was visiting Britain at the time. And it was about the kind of city life of Roman Britain. They weren't just reclining in posh villas being waited on by slaves. This was sort of cheek by Jalstaff in Roman London. And it was the first time that I'd read a novel about Roman Britain that made me see what you could do with fiction about the ancient world.

Now, I'd read loads of other novels, Robert Graves' is I Claudius, that kind of thing. Some of them absolutely great. But what Everisto did was actually show that you didn't have to do the posh version, that you could have a wonderful time with the smell of the old markets in Roman London and people doing things they shouldn't and a woman who didn't like a bloke and it just opened my eyes I think to the possibility of engaging with the ancient world in a completely different way.

Helping us see the Roman Empire, Roman history differently and obviously I must bring up there's been a lot of talk recently about the Roman Empire. Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Even a TikTok trend about how often men think about it. What is it, do you think? What is it? I've been quite interested about this

because lots of people ask me, you know, what did I think was going on here? And eventually I thought, okay, I thought about it and I gave a few quotes. And I said very sort of low-key judiciously, I think that the Roman Empire is a bit of a safe space where men can have macho fantasies and it's okay. Because the classical world is okay, it's respectable.

And so you can fantasize about being a big, whole king bloke in relation to the Roman Empire. In a way that you couldn't about the Third Reich. You know, you couldn't say, I think about the Third Reich three times a day. you could not say that on TikTok. And I thought I'd been quite, you know, very low-key until I looked at what I still call Twitter responses to this.

And there were guys tweeting, having read this pretty low-key response, saying, oh, Mary Beards are tedious old hack, isn't she? Literally. And I thought, there's something more going on here. If your reaction to me saying this is a kind of safe space to have a certain kind of fantasy is to say Mary Beards a tedious old hag or left-wing scum or whatever, there is something more is at stake and I'm not quite sure what it is. What is it that you really want to say?

What is it that you really want to say? And I can't help thinking also that, you know, as a professional classicist, you know, part of me is quite pleased to think that there are people out there thinking about the Roman Empire a lot, but I think they need to read a bit more Bernadino Veristo than perhaps what they are reading. You communicate to audiences through every former TV, lectures, books, newspapers and of course social media, Twitter or I don't know if we're supposed to call it X now. It's very hard to call it X. It's hard. It's so silly. Has it always been a conscious effort to try and reach audiences in different and new spaces? I think so. I mean, I don't know how,

conscious, I think it was. But my mum certainly was very much of the view that if we're going back a bit now, and this is no longer the case that the country pays for you to be educated, you know, because students now, unlike what happened to me, have to pay. But the line that I was brought up on and then from my teachers in Cambridge was that the taxpayers paying for you to do this. and so you have a responsibility to people at large to pay back and a broadly soft socialist position about state education

and so I've always thought that I wanted to both wanted to and that it was an obligation, honestly, to share what you've been privileged to be taught with other people in general, whether those are little kids who are interested, in Roman Britain, whether they're, you know, people age 90, and of all kinds of different backgrounds and ethnicities and everything. And it just seems to me to be a no-brainer.

I don't think I've ever thought it out. It's just, it seems to be a basic principle for how the world is. Now, I think that in some ways has been disrupted by changing the funding of higher education. You can't say to students. Now the taxpayer is paying for you to do this because the taxpayer isn't. Bayleys is proudly supporting the women's prize for fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people.

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Start your free trial with Find My Past today at findmypass.com.com. and see what stories you can uncover. Your third book that you brought today is female eunuch by Jermaine Greer. This landmark book in the history of the women's rights movement was released in 1970 and became an international bestseller. Greer's thesis is that the traditional suburban, consumerist nuclear family represses women sexually and that this devitalizes them, rendering them eunuchs. When did you read this book? What impact did it have?

you? I must have read it very soon after it came out. I went to university in 73 and I'd already read it. What was odd about picking it is that you've just given a, I'm sure, a correct summary of its contents. I wouldn't now know what it said. I haven't read it for decades, but I remember the impact it had on me. And I partly don't want to go back and read it because I think I It could be the one would be a bit disappointed now, but I remember the cover of it. It's still on my bookshelves. And I remember it just made me think differently about what it was to be a woman. I read a little while before that with some impact, but not the same, partly because it really was quite big and quite French.

I read Simand de Beauvoir as a second sex. but Greer just was so in your face about what linked up with your own experience and your own fears and your own sense of self. The only bit I actually remember, and quite a lot of people do, because when you look at reviews now or people talking about it, they home in on it. I remember her saying, why do we find it so difficult to taste our own menstrual blood? You know, if you cut your finger, you'll suck it. And I don't think she really offers an answer to that, but I thought, wow. Yeah. That's quite a question to ask.

That is true, isn't it? That is true. Why is it? And so I think that it just made me know that the dissatisfactions and the kind of basic practical feminism that I suppose I'd learned at an all-girls school. and then later would at university. There were people who could really punch that in a way that you couldn't ignore. And it's funny, I suppose, that I haven't re-read it.

But it's, you know, I can close my eyes now and see the cover. And I can remember what it felt like to be a bit shocked. Sometimes we need to be a bit shocked. It's funny because so often on this podcast, my guest will bring a book that they love so much. They can't remember what happens. And it doesn't matter. It's the effect.

it had on them at the time and how it stayed with them, how it shaped them. You are often hailed as a role model to young women, and we were just talking before about how at the book signing the other evening, these young women were coming up to you and they really wanted to chat. They were so pleased and excited to meet you because perhaps of the impact that you've had on them in turn. What's your reaction to that? Well, I'm very pleased.

I didn't think I know what I want to be a role model. I think nobody does quite say that to do that, you know, but I think that in some ways by chance, things have happened to me and they've happened quite publicly, you know, like A.A. Gill's saying that I was too ugly for telly and that kind of stuff, that really has struck a chord. I mean, I think what these many young people are seeing about what I stand for, is that you can be a woman and it can be what you say and what you write that matters not what you look like or how you comport yourself that actually women can be judged on their brain power not just on their looks

and in a sense I suppose in some ways I was very lucky in a sense the idea that A.A. Gill when he started to say being too ugly for telly. The fact he was proved wrong. It was quite a victory. It didn't actually change very much. But it was a moment when we realized that the zeitgeist was altering, you know, that you could be over 50 and on telly. And that you didn't have to have had a lot of work done in order to do that.

I think that's quite important to make that point. You know, there's wrinkly old men, some of them, extremely. are on telly all the time. And, you know, I watch them. You know, I wouldn't want to get rid of David Attenborough heavens, you know. But we are coming to see that maybe some wrinkly old ladies can be on telly. And we can listen to them for what they have to say. That doesn't mean we agree with them.

It would be awful if we thought, you know, that we should agree with everything we hear. But we can engage with it and we want to hear what that person has to say. And I think that's what's important. I would like to think that scrutiny and criticism of women in the spotlight in the media is getting better. But I am so often proven wrong on a daily basis I see things that prove me wrong. And in particular, you've touched on it, you've mentioned it there. What can society do to tackle ageism? I think it is extraordinary that in some ways ageism is the last frontier.

I totally agree with you that we haven't got the treatment of women on telly at any age, sort of yet. Otherwise Lawrence Fox wouldn't be Lawrence Fox. But I am surprised at what people, and there are fewer of them, feel that they can say about me. I mean, even television critics can, you know, talk about me as an old witch. And I think that's less the case.

But there is still a, you know, a sense that, you know, you're sidelined and that you're fair game. Yeah. You're just fair game for that kind of snarky satire. You know, like the tedious old hag, right? line. Now, I don't know, I don't know what we can do, you know, and I think that old ages, you know, I'm 68, you know, some people say, oh, it's not to feel 70, but, you know, I'm on the way there, right? And it's a puzzling place to be because you feel in some ways, if you're lucky,

I think this, and if you're lucky means, I think partly if you've got a decent pension and have enough money, that if you're lucky, you can feel quite resilient. And, you know, people would say that we boomers had had it all too good. But at the same time, you're aware that you're not really noticed. You don't have any role models. If you look at – I mean, I often think, look at the adverts for the senior rail card, which I have, right? You know, and it's two old bittyers going off to see their grandchildren. And you think, I'm coming to London on my senior rail card because I've got things to do, you know.

And there isn't a kind of sense. You know, you're in the waiting room for the care home is the sort of general image. And I don't know how we change that. I heard on the radio very recently, Dame Stephanie Shirley, who was 90. I don't know very much about her, but she came here on Kinder Transport in the war and made a lot of money and has been a huge philanthropist. What I thought was amazing was that her voice sounded as you would never have been able to age her. We're only listening because we were in the car and had the radio on. My husband and I looked at each other.

Well, I didn't quite look, but we were driving. I said, wow, she's clever. Isn't she clever? And I thought, would we have said that? Would people have said that if they'd seen her? How does the bodily image go with the intellectual image? And how can we change that? And I think, you know, when Gill was horrible about me,

I thought that most people in the world would probably agree with him. Now, I wasn't right, some people did, no doubt, but I did a piece for the Daily Mail about older women and the reaction to his reaction to me. And I thought, look, if I write a piece for The Guardian, everybody will agree. Fishing to the choir. Johnny Wellis, come on, go to the mail, right? So I did.

And when the piece came out, I thought I am going to look at what's below the line on the online version. I am. And there were a few comments that were hostile to me, and that's, you know, fine, fair enough. the majority were positive in the male and I got the impression reading through them that they were also by women in their mid-50s and later and when Gill was horrible to me, he was actually being horrible to them.

The bit that they particularly liked in the comments was when I wrote, what does Gil think a 55-year-old woman? woman looks like, well she looks like me and she looks like them. And but it's still a very, you know, it's a very dangerous place to put your head above the parapet visually. It leads us quite aptly actually to talk about your fourth book today, which is purity and danger by Mary Douglas. Professor Douglas identifies the concern for purity as a key theme at the heart of every society in lively and lucid prose, she explains its relevance for the everyday reader

by revealing its wide-ranging impact on our attitudes to society, values, cosmology and knowledge. This book has been hugely influential in many areas of debate from religion to social theory. Why is that? It was the first proper anthropology book that I ever read. And it made me see that, okay, I was studying the ancient world. But studying the ancient world was about studying the world and that what people were saying and writing and thinking about in other disciplines could really inform the way I thought about the Greeks and the Romans.

And I'm sure I missed much of its complexity, as you've suggested, it's quite complex, but I'm sure I missed some of that. When I read it first, I was doing my PhD. But I remember just being struck with her ability to think about some things that I'd always taken for granted. What does being clean mean? What is purity? And one of the examples she has in the first chapter to get you into it, it was a bit like the German Greer moment in a way.

She said, why is gravy when it's on a plate fine? Why is gravy when it's on a tie dirty? And I'd never thought of that before, you know, I just thought. And so there was suddenly a whole world of potential analysis opened up to me about things having their right place, things being proper and organised and in a sense, in quotes, pure when they're in the place they should be. And when they're not in the place they should be, we treat them as dirt. I mean you could go, I don't think she used this example,

but also you could go to gardening, couldn't you? And you could say, what's a weed? Well, it's a plant we happen not to want where it is, right? There's no more kind of definition of it than that. It went on to develop that in all kinds of ways and to look at prohibitions, particularly religious prohibitions, particularly Jewish religious prohibitions. And she argued,

And people have contested this in all kinds of ways, and I've contested it, I think, since, that one of the problematic areas in social, cultural and religious life or problematic objects are those things which appear to cross categories that can't easily be classified as one thing or another. And they tend to get treated as very special, whether abominated or worshipped. and she has a famous example of the pangolin, which is the scaly antita, which has both got scales and walks on land. So it's part fish, part animal, and is hugely important in some religious cultures. And that really made me wonder whether there were things like that in ancient Rome. And, you know, in some ways, this is a very selfish way of seeing it.

It launched my career because that stage I was, working on the virgin priestesses, the vestal virgins in Rome, who kept the holy flame of the city and had to have perpetual virginity or at least 30 years of virginity. And they were buried alive if they were caught having had sex or whatever. I was trying to think what made them so special. And I just did a kind of absolutely Mary Douglas Light analysis said, look, actually, they're partly men. You know, they are made to be not fitting into categories.

They're partly women, but they don't have sex, and they have male privileges. And instead of just noticing that, it helped me say, so that's really at the centre of what they are. It's now a rather crude article that I wrote back in 1981, one, which argued that. But it did open up a huge, both for me and for some people who read it, it opened up a different anthropological way of thinking of the ancient world. And that was all down to Mary Douglas,

who I met once when she was very old and she was amazing. I feel like every brute that you brought today, there's something at the centre of it, but it's what it sparks. It's the ways that we engage right, back from the Beatrix potter all the way through to the Mary Douglas. What impact, what spark do you hope your work has on others? Well, I'm the worst person to judge that, aren't I? I mean, I think that if you say, look, you put your book at out in the world,

and then they're on their own. And as I'm sure some people's reaction to a fierce bird rabbit isn't my reaction. I think that there are people out there taking my books and taking some sort of message from in all kinds of different ways. I mean, women and power, I think, was important. It was a short book. You could read it at one sitting and it was saying, look, the ways we think about and silence women have gone back 3,000 years. Right. End off.

Now, we are not the first sexist culture. we are inheritors of ways of looking at women and thinking about them and classifying them that we aren't responsible for. Now, that doesn't give us a get-out-a-jail-free card, but it's a, oh, I'm just an inheritor of sexism, that's fine then. But it does make us or should make us think, what is it about history that encourages me to think in the way I do

and to become more reflective about ourselves and about how we can change that. Until you've seen that it's something that we've inherited, you can't work out what to do about it. And I think that by and large, it had the effect that I sort of, well, a bigger effect, I think, than I might ever have dreamed that it would have. As for the rest, you know, I simply don't know. It's up to you listening right now.

It's time to talk about your fifth and final bookshelfy book today, Mary, which is poems and fragments of sapphire. Yeah. Saffa was one of the greatest poets in classical literature, her lyric poetry is among the finest ever written. And although little of her work has actually survived and little has known about her, she is regarded not just as one of the greatest women poets, but often as the greatest woman poet in world literature. She lived on the island of Lesbos, around 600 BC. And even in her lifetime, her work was widely known and admired in the Greek world. Tell us why you've picked this. Well, if you spend your life working on the ancient worlds, you don't find many women's writing to read. In fact, there was a little bit more than Sappho, but not much. There once was, there was a whole strand of women's writing, but it sort of never made it through the Middle Ages. You know, people didn't copy it. It didn't become popular.

Some of those books must have been wonderful. I mean, if there's one book by a woman I'd really like to have from the ancient world, but which didn't survive. It is the autobiography of Nero's mum Agrippina. Now, what must that be like? But we still have some Sappho. We don't have very much of it. And it survives partly because it was copied on papyri in Roman East.

So we get some of it from literally Roman copies from Egypt. And it was also quoted by male authors who were wanting to analyse some of the poetic structure. And Sappho was hugely, hugely admired in antiquity. She was called the 10th muse. You know, there's usually 9 muses, but Sappho's the 10th. And, you know, I think that any woman who's working on the ancient world, we want to know what, you know, here is the woman's voice. For heaven say, read it. And of course, it's, I mean, it's not just wonderfully haunting.

A lot of it is love poetry, probably, though it's hard to pin this down, probably written to women. You know, and the term lesbian comes from the fact that Sappho lived on the island of Lesb. But what I think is so intriguing, and in the end I think it's very hard to answer it, is you read some of these poems, wonderful poems, about love, things that say, and don't imagine that this is the kind of poetry, they're much better than this, but, you know, some people think that an army is the best thing in the world. Some people think a battalion, a fleet of ships, I think it's the same. the one you love. It's the best. And you read them and you think, I think this poetry is written to subvert male ancient macho culture. I think it is. Now some people, and it's much debated, some people say, look, Sappho is hugely influenced by Homer. She's a kind of homeric rip-off, right? I think what Sappho is doing, and therefore she's a beacon for us all is,

is taking some of these Homeric themes and revealing them to be maybe admirable in some ways, deeply macho things. Now what would it be to say the person you love is more important than a fleet of ships? Well, we can understand that instantly. A lot of people in the world, in the Greek world, would not have understood that.

It's radical. It's really overturning. traditional male ideology. And so it's fun playing with it. I mean, it's terribly poignant because you don't have that much of it. And some of it is just these kind of extraordinarily elusive fragments where you just got three words. You know, spring, too long, gongula. And of course, you think, what was that about?

So it's a wonderful kind of. you know, nostalgic temptation. But it is, you know, it's saying if ever you want to know that there was female creativity in the past, there it is. It's back in 600 BCE, like it or not, guys. Just picking out those tiny fragments of Sappho's work, they can contribute to our understanding of our own culture, of our own history.

It's so important to tell the stories of women throughout history, to tell it in their words. And that's something that you have been so dedicated to. You've done so much. But what work are you most proud of, Mary? I think one's always proud of the one you've done most recently, actually. Because you still remember the kind of, you still remember the agonies that you went through. You still remember that, you know, the experience of seeing it in hardcover.

So I will say at the moment, and maybe this, I'm sure will change. it's Emperor of Rome. And it does sound, I suppose I should say this, it sounds a very macho title actually. You know, Emperor Rome, you think that this is going to be, well you might imagine, this was going to be a book about elite white male rulers. And they do have a place in this book.

But so do the women, the female slaves, the masses of the empress. So it's a book which, despite its title, makes you see that the world can't exist if it's just a male place. And Mary, just looking back through your career, and it's quite hard to pinpoint a moment that it starts, because as we said before, that interest in the world around you in our history, our culture,

it surely stems right back to four years old, you know, reading... Yes, bad rabbit. Bad rabbit. But would you have a piece of advice that you'd give to yourself, starting out on that journey? It's hard. I mean, I've been very lucky. And I've been very lucky, you know, in a non-planned way. I think in some ways I did the right thing that I was at an all-girls school

and I was at a single-sex women's college in Cambridge. And, you know, I'm not a... If I was inventing education again, I don't think I'd divide the sexist. You know, it seems odd. But for me, it gave me a huge kind of resilience. And I think not just self-confidence, because I think self-confidence is always the other side of kind of feeling of anxiety.

But I thought there is a project here. There have been women here before. I was taught not only, but by women who had made it and who had actually gone through a lot more than I had. And I was, you know, I realized that, you know, even though we've got a long way to go, there are blessings that we have to count. You know, I had maternity leave and maternity pay for a start, you know, whereas the people who taught me didn't, you know. They used to say, jokingly, you have to make sure you have your babies in the long vacation. And, you know, and things have come on.

And I think there's a load to do. But I was the beneficiary of what these women had fought for. and I feel very pleased to be in and I just hope that, you know, you can pay it forward a bit. Well, we do. We continue to pay it forward. I have one final question to ask you, Mary, if you had to choose one book as a favourite

from the five you brought today, we had a bad rabbit, the Empress Babe, Benadina Bristow, female eunuch, the germane Greer, purity in danger by Mary Douglas, and then your final book, which was poems and fragments of Sappho. Oh, blimey. It's hard.

It's hard. It's hard, you know, weighing up Sapphoversus a fierce bad, Is that I mean it's ridiculous? I tell you what, and I've got a reason for this, as long as I can have a dictionary of ancient Greek, I'll take Sappho in Greek because it'll last a long time and I can really start to think about it,

but I'll need a dictionary. So on its own, I would, I think perhaps choose the fierce bad rabbit, but I think that I will take Sappho plus a Greek dictionary. I'm giving you the Greek dictionary, and giving you Sappho and I would like to thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's been an absolute dream.

Thank you very much. It's been grateful. I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Bayley's and produced by Birdline Media. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.