She spent time living alone in Geneva before moving to London, where she worked as the editor of a progressive literary journal named The Westminster Review. She began translating works of German theology into English and publishing short reviews in periodicals. As a young woman she became socially involved with a group of agnostics and political radicals. After this point she continued to read widely, the results of which are palpable in her writing, which is intellectually sophisticated and filled with references to a diverse array of knowledge.

She received an unusually extensive education for a girl at the time, although only up until the age of 16. Because my point of view was so fractured by the censorship, I just cannot conceive a story in Chinese.George Eliot was the daughter of an estate manager in Warwickshire. Nowadays, if I write a story in Chinese, I have to think in English and translate into Chinese. They also discuss her work as a novelist and what it’s like to be an Asian American during a period of highly visible anti-Asian sentiment.

In this episode, Yang Huang, author of the new novel My Good Son, joins Jacke for a discussion of her childhood in China, how censorship restricted her ability to imagine stories, and how George Eliot’s Middlemarch helped her break free from these limitations. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today? Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.

We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another.

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