Welcome to the LRB podcast. If you subscribe to the LRB, you can get the first 12 issues for just £12.

To find out more, go to lrb.me forward slash listen. That's LRB.m.m.m. forward slash listen.

Hello. I'm Joanna Biggs, one of the editors at the London Review of Books, and I'm here today with

Susan Pedersen, Professor of History at Columbia, to talk about the life and writing of the British

playwright Sheila Delaney. In the latest issue of the London Review, dated the 4th of June 2020,

Susan reviews Celina Todd's new biography of Delaney, Tastes of Honey, as well as a new

edition of Delaney's play, A Taste of Honey, which premiered at the Theatre Royal Stratford East

in May 1958. Delaney was only 20 at the time, and this her first play went on to the

West End and Broadway and to be made to a movie by Tony Richardson,

starring Rita Tushingham in her first role.

Susan, your piece opens with the play.

What's so extraordinary about it?

How does it still live for you?

The play, I think, is remarkable for a number of reasons.

Both because it really defies convention, both in terms of

what we might call women's writing, and in terms of what was the kind of script for new and

exciting work at the time, which sort of fell into the angry young man category.

When we think of women's fiction, we think of the marriage plot, boy meets girl, there's a

kind of resolution. This goes back to Austin and, you know, you see it everywhere. And the

angry young man script is very different. It's very much about young men

in rebellion against the kind of what they see as the kind of boring conventionality of 50s

Britain, but also really against the marriage plot. There's a sense in plays

...