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Hello, I'm Joanna Biggs, one of the editors on the London Review of Books, and a month before

lockdown, I spoke with Mary Wellesley about the idea of the island, blessed and not so blessed.

I should say we had no idea at the time that we were soon to be stranded inside our own homes.

She reviewed Islands in the West, classical myth and the medieval Norse and Irish

geographical imagination by Mateus Eagler in the issue dated the 5th of March 2020, but the

conversation ranges from Robinson Crusoe to the Fire Festival. All the pieces we mention about

anchoresses, menageries and Gawain in the Green Night can be read online at

nrb.co.uk. Mary, why this essay, why islands? Well, I suppose that islands have this kind of

magical appeal. When you look out over a seascape and you see an island there's something so inviting about it um i don't know if

you remember that moment at the beginning of the heart of darkness where conrad talks about the welded join

between the sky and the sea and islands feel like this place of rupture on that join this kind of

strange uncomfortable place in this liminal zone.

John Keats wrote this really wonderful sonnet called to Elsa Rock, which is about an island in

southwest Scotland. He wrote it in 1818 on a walking tour. And he talks about the island

as a kind of union between the infinities of sky and sea.

And I think that captures a lot of their magical status.

There they sit somehow uncomfortably on that welded join.

But specifically the Blessed Island, these kind of imaginary perfect

places that exist or don't exist. And I was sort of thinking about, I made a list of reading

your piece of all the different things that make a Paradise Island. Food, sex, a gentle climate,

...