Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.

And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.

You can find a link in the description, or search close readings, wherever you get your podcasts.

... You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. And talking with me today is Erin Maglacklaki who teaches history at Sheffield.

She's the author of Venice's Intimate Empire, which was published in 2018, and she's currently working on a history of the female body. She has a piece in the latest issue of the LRB on the

long and sometimes surprising history of pregnancy testing and things around that from the 15th century to today.

It's a review of conceiving histories, trying for pregnancy, past and present by Isabel Davis.

Hello, Erin, and thank you so much for joining me again.

Hi, Tom. Thank you so much for having me.

So, have you brought a frog with you?

Thankfully, no.

No, no frogs anymore in pregnancy testing, thankfully.

I know. I was, when I read about this, yeah, this kind of mid-20th century form of pregnancy testing,

which was if a woman wanted to know if she was pregnant, you would

collect a urine sample in a glass jar, and it would be sent to this laboratory on Sloan

Street where they were keeping like hundreds of this specific species of South African frog,

...