Sarah Scott and the Dream of a Female Utopia
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2018
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A radical community of women set up in 1760s rural England is explored in an essay from New Generation Thinker Lucy Powell, recorded with an audience at the 2018 York Festival of Ideas.
Sarah Scott’s first novel, published in 1750, was a conventional French-style romance, the fitting literary expression of a younger daughter of the lesser gentry. One year later, she had scandalously fled her husband’s house, and pooled finances and set up home with her life-long partner, Lady Barbara Montagu. Her fourth novel, Millenium Hall, described in practical detail the communal existence of a group of women who had taken refuge in each other’s company and created an all-female utopia in rural England. On Lady Bab’s death, in 1765, Scott would attempt to create this radical community in actuality. Lucy Powell will explore the life, work, and far-reaching influence of this extraordinary writer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:34.8 | Hello, I'm Shahid Abari. |
| 0:36.5 | Welcome to Broadcasters of the Future on those we have forgotten, but really shouldn't have, a series of the essay program recorded for BBC Radio 3 in front of an audience at the York Festival of Ideas. |
| 0:49.3 | Lucy Powell is a freelance writer who was taught at University College London and the University of Westminster. |
| 0:55.2 | She's written about fictions emerging from British prisons in the 18th century. |
| 0:58.8 | She's a journalist who's reported on Shakespeare in the West Bank and India, |
| 1:02.7 | and she's presented radio programmes on a range of subjects, including a history of dreams |
| 1:06.5 | and the art and science of silence. |
| 1:09.0 | This year, that here in the UK we're marking the anniversary |
| 1:12.1 | of women, some women getting the vote, Lucy is here to remind us just how long that took |
| 1:17.3 | for us to achieve with the story of Sarah Scott and the dream of a female utopia. |
| 1:26.8 | Sarah Scott was a most retiring revolutionary. |
| 1:31.2 | She was the greatest proponent of the radical power of female friendship in the history |
| 1:37.1 | of English literature. If you haven't heard of her, you're in good company. |
| 1:42.3 | Neither, strangely enough, had Virginia Woolf. In a room of one's own, |
| 1:47.7 | her meditation on women and fiction through the ages, Wolf writes, I tried to remember any case |
| 1:54.6 | in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. They are confidants, of course, they are now and then |
| 2:02.7 | mothers and daughters, but almost without exception, they are shown in their relation to men. |
| 2:10.5 | Faced with this absence, Wolf has to imagine a novel in which two women are represented as |
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