You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today I'm joined by Claire Wills, a professor of English at Cambridge, whose books include lovers and strangers,

an immigrant history of post-war Britain, and the best are leaving, immigration and post-war Irish culture.

She gave the second of this year's LRB winter lectures at Conway Hall on the 24th of February,

which is what we'll be talking about today. The lecture was a consideration of the stories that get told about abortion in fiction, film, court rulings and clinics.

You can watch it on the LRB YouTube channel and read the text in the current issue of the paper.

Hello, Claire, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast again.

Thank you for having me back.

You begin with a quotation from under discussion of Annie Erno's 1974 novel Les Armour-Veed, the empty

wardrobes, in which the narrator has an abortion and goes looking in books, in novels,

especially for a description of what she's experiencing, to help her, as she puts it,

get through these dirty moments.

But there's nothing. Books are silent on this topic, she says.

And then you pose a series of questions. Why should it matter that books have been silent on abortion? And in what way have they been silent? And what is it about realist plots that renders the reality of women's sexual lives invisible? So perhaps we could talk about some of those questions now, slightly out of order. First, in what way have books been silent about abortion?

Because Lesanne Waverid, of course, is itself a counter-example.

Yes. I think El No's title really refers not so much to wardrobes, in fact, as kitchen cupboards.

The novel is obsessed with food and what you put in your belly, whether it's, you know, food or fetuses.

There's a translation of the novel by Carol Sanders, which unfortunately I wasn't able to get a hold of.

But she translates the title as Cleaned Out, which I think it's just really brilliant, summing up of the tone and feel of the book.

But El Noe was writing in the early 70s during the campaign for abortion legislation in France.

And her character's problem is that she's been schooled in how to behave by reading novels.

But the novels she reads don't tell her about this kind of bodily experience,

what it means to go through and having an unwanted pregnancy and having to get an abortion.

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