J.R. Thorp on Learwife

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2022

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

A banished queen receives word that her husband and three daughters are dead. Learwife, a new novel by J.R. Thorp, picks up where Shakespeare’s King Lear leaves off: The queen is Berte, Lear’s wife and Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia’s mother, and she has been exiled in an abbey for the past fifteen years. Now, newly informed of her family members’ deaths, she remembers her life with them and tries to plot her way forward. Thorp talks with Barbara Bogaev about her inspirations (including Eleanor of Aquitaine, The English Patient, and a stray line from an Agatha Christie novel), her new backstories for Lear’s characters, and the roles of grief and nothingness in the book. J.R. Thorp is a librettist and writer working across a variety of forms, primarily with composers, choirs, orchestras, and musical organizations. Learwife is her first novel. It was published in the US by Pegasus Books in December 2021. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published January 4, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “All Her Mother's Pains and Benefits,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a trascript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Duncan O'Cleirigh at Blackwater Studios in Cork, Ireland.

Transcript

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0:00.0	They're Shakespeare's most famously dysfunctional family, and, as you may have noticed, they have one key piece missing.
0:13.2	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers Director.
0:23.1	In the world of what you might call Shakespeare adjacent art, it's not uncommon to find a character
0:29.4	who is mostly hidden. I'm thinking of Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet or Ophelia by Lisa Klein.
0:36.6	But what first-time novelist J. R. Thorpe has done with her new book
0:40.7	is to take that idea one step further. The novel is called Learwife, and it takes place entirely inside
0:48.6	the mind of the woman who was mother to Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia, the wife of King Lear, a queen named Berta.
0:58.0	As the novel begins, word of her family's death has just come to the Abbey where she spent
1:03.1	15 years in exile, largely alone with her thoughts. Through her musing and memories and
1:09.8	J.R. Thorpe's beautiful lyrical prose,
1:12.7	we get new and completely plausible backstories for some of the most well-known characters in
1:18.7	literature. Learwife was just published in the U.S. and J.R. Thorpe joined us from a studio in
1:24.9	Cork, Ireland, to talk about it. We call this podcast All Her Mother's Pains and Benefits.
1:31.3	J.R. Thorpe is interviewed by Barbara Bogave.
1:35.3	Full disclosure, until I read your book, I watched Lear, I don't know how many times,
1:41.3	and I read it, of course, but I just accepted unquestioningly that there's
1:45.8	no mother in this screwed up family. And now I'm really annoyed with myself. Was there an
1:51.9	aha moment for you when you asked, you know, where the heck is this queen? Well, it's funny that
1:57.9	you ask because I've been trying to pinpoint one moment where I realized she wasn't there.
2:03.5	And I think it was just sort of a gradual realization.
2:06.3	I got to a certain point in about 2015 where I started to get curious about,
2:11.6	okay, maybe there is a possibility for a story here, but surely she must be referenced somewhere in the play.
	...

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