You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from the BBC.

This week we're looking at the life of someone described by a biographer as one of the most intelligent American women that ever lived. She's the novelist Edith Wharton. And my guest

who's chosen her is also, if I can say this without sounding patronizing,

another intelligent American, the social critic, political activist Naomi Wolf.

Naomi, welcome.

Let's talk about you for just a moment.

You became famous with your

latest book, The Beauty Myth published 20 years ago, which some have argued, launched a new wave of feminism.

A biography suggests, according to the publicity material, that the vagina has a fundamental connection to female consciousness.

What would Edith Wharton have made of such talk?

Well, since she was a woman of a completely different time period, one can't speculate, but one of the things I've argued in my academic work about Edith Wharton is that she was a sexual avant-gardeist and there's tremendous evidence in her work, especially her

mid and later work about this and what I look at in vagina is how she and other writers like

Christina Rosetti and the Brontes show an extraordinary awakening

...