Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A publisher who founded Virago and championed women's writing, now managing director of Chatto and Windus.
On the island
Eight records
I love American music. I love country and western. And I love Soul. But this music of Raikuda is tex-mex. And the reason I chose it is that because you can only choose eight records, and I couldn't have any Latin American music? TexMex combines all that's wonderful about American music to me. And it's got that wonderful singing and sighing guitar. Love it.
Had to have an Australian song on the Desert Island. This is my favourite Australian traditional song. And the other very important thing about it for me is it's an Irish Australian song, which is the milieu in which I was brought up.
Un Ballo in Maschera (love duet from Act II)
Plácido Domingo and Josephine Barstow
This is my favorite Verdi tun Ballo in Maskera. I love Italian opera best of all. I know that I should have chosen Mozart, but I prefer Italian opera because I love those voices.
This was agony to choose because um Both all Beatles were my heroes, but particularly John Lennon and Paul McCartney. But I couldn't really choose one where where they both sang that I loved as much as this particular one, which is Paul McCartney singing Hey Jude.
All my life I've loved Cole Porter, Lawrence and Hart, all those wonderful American songwriters, Gershwin. It was terribly difficult to choose one of them I loved the best, but I think Coleport is the master, and the thing I love about Ethel Merman is the way she belts it out.
I had to choose something from the war because the Second World War was the most important thing in all my generation's life, really. … my mother used to raise money for the Free French … Also because I love Josephine Baker. And this song she sang towards the end of the Second World War … this song came to represent Free France.
He's a Good Man to Have Around
I've always been very, very fond of Sophie Tucker and Mae West. Because they take all those wonderful women's songs, or men's songs, but songs of the twenties and thirties and send them up. … In this song, Sophie Tucker sends it up. It's called He's a Good Man to Have Around.
Adagio in E-flatFavourite
I came late to classical music, but it's given me enormous pleasure. And a particular friend of mine gave me a Schubert tape about a year ago. And ever since I've become obsessed with Schubert, and every Saturday and Sunday I play it, and a tremendous peace descends upon me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
9:01What did the nuns do to you [at boarding school]?
I think what I really despise them for it was is the narrowness of their view of life and the fear. that they instilled into the children under their control. Basically fear of hell, fear of sin, and lack of joy in being alive. And to this day, it doesn't matter that I ignore what they taught me, and I don't mean all of them, there were some good nuns. I always think that God is after me. I certainly do. I think God is after me with a scythe and a. Anything he can lay his hands on to smite me down, because I've said fi. … There's nothing I can do about it. That's the way they brought me up.
Presenter asks
13:27Why didn't [your experience at] Melbourne University offer you the liberation you were looking for after the nuns?
I think in some way it did, but I still lived in that that ghetto sort of world and I was living at home and being a good girl. So it didn't really do anything much for me. The one thing it did do for me, though, was I read Australian history is a sort of sub thing. And it that changed my politics'cause my family were extremely conservative. And I read Well if you study Australian history, you have to do all these original documents because it's not a very long history. And it wasn't aboriginal history, it was the history of transportation. and how the people came then. I used to sit in the library with tears pouring down my cheeks. I had no idea. You know, the suffering recorded in those original documents terrible. … I think it it made me a a political animal. That it that changed my life.
The keepsakes
The book
Henry Handel Richardson
this is the one that gave me the most intense joy, because it came as such a surprise. She's a completely neglected writer. ... this novel, Morris Guest, is a novel of Erotic Obsession absolutely suffused with music.
The luxury
Because it's Got a lot of music in it. It's Irish and terribly funny and wonderful, wonderful movie, so I think I'll take the commitments.
Presenter asks
15:37Was all of that the thinking behind the founding of Virago – to demonstrate that there are classics by women which had been neglected?
Yes, and uh but it was also because most of the people who ran publishing houses were men. And their taste was different. I do think that whilst a vast number of men read novels by women, um, a vast number don't or didn't value them sufficiently.
Presenter asks
18:05It was the feminists who attacked you – they felt you were exploiting feminism to make money. Why?
I think that would have been only a part of the uh feminist movement, which is rather like it uh in in that way, like all political parties, it has bits and pieces and lefts and rights and centres, and there would have been a sort of purist section. Of the movement, such as it was, because thank God the feminist movement wasn't like a political party that might have said that, and it did. I think that you're right. They thought one was ripping off. their purity of vision, but not all of them. Most feminists are.
Presenter asks
19:33Where would you put yourself on the feminist spectrum?
I would find it very difficult, as I certainly don't reject men. On the other hand, every time I think Oh, I cannot tolerate another mention of the word feminism. Something extraordinarily irritating happens, or you read something in the newspaper, some tremendous piece of misogyny, and I'm back on the barricades again. I think basically, because of my experience as a businesswoman, I am on the barricades for the rest of my life because I really do feel that um Women haven't got the opportunity. all the treatment that they should have even today. And every time I'm lulled into security, as I say, I'm reminded that this is the case. So I think perhaps I'm a suffragette barricade feminist.
Presenter asks
28:16What more do you want to do, or do you feel you've already done more than you might have expected?
Oh no, there's lots of things I want to do, but I don't think that they relate particularly to work. The things I want to do is I want to listen to a lot more music, particularly classical music. I want to paint. I want to garden more, I want to cook more. And I want to see many more movies. all the things that my reading have made difficult.
“I always think that God is after me. I certainly do. I think God is after me with a scythe and a. Anything he can lay his hands on to smite me down, because I've said fi.”
“To be a lady seems to me the worst thing in the world to be.”
“I think perhaps I'm a suffragette barricade feminist.”
“Every time I think, Come and you must do this differently, pull yourself together, within five minutes I'm not, you see, so what I've done is try to accept it instead of saying I'm going to be otherwise.”
“I would perhaps have liked to have been married. But it's a very, very tentative um Yes, but only in the most romantic sense, you know, mister Rochester no no I don't think I'd like the practical side of it.”