Showing results for "bbc" in Women's Fiction

A light-hearted comedy drama about a mother, daughter and grandmother living together under one roof – based on the stories by Guardian columnist Michele Hanson What does it feel like to be middle-aged? For Gillian it feels like being twenty-seven in your own head, sixty-five in the mirror...

Barbara Pym is one of the 20th-century's wittiest, and most underrated, novelists. Her perceptive comedies of manners, centred around the domestic lives and loves of unassuming middle-class Englishwomen, won her many devoted readers and saw her hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen. Yet she spent 15 years out of print in the 1960s and '70s, until Philip Larkin championed her work in the Times Literary Supplement. Her seventh novel was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and writers from Jilly Cooper to Alexander McCall Smith continue to laud her talent today.

Elizabeth Gaskell was one of Victorian England's pre-eminent female novelists. Admired by Charles Dickens, who described her as his 'dear Scheherazade', she mingled storytelling and social realism to superb effect in her highly acclaimed fiction. This comprehensive collection comprises dramas and readings of her finest works and some lesser-known pieces.

Irene Bruce spends her days pulling pints in Millport, the only town on the Isle of Cumbrae, a few miles off the west coast of Scotland. Frustrated and going nowhere fast, she yearns to escape to the mainland for a better life - or at least a bit of fun. Just over the water, there are clubs, cinemas and discos, so why is she stuck at home with tea, Scrabble and her boring sister Moira?

Dorothy L. Sayers' classic play cycle based on the life and times of Jesus Dorothy L. Sayers was best known for her mystery novels featuring aristocratic amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. But she was also a poet, playwright and committed Christian, and in The Man Born to Be King she combined art...

The eldest of the notorious Mitford sisters, Nancy Mitford was renowned for her comic novels of upper-class life. An aristocrat and socialite, she mingled with the 'Bright Young Things' in interwar London, and went on to satirise their foibles in razor-sharp, wickedly funny prose. Collected here are adaptations of her two best sellers, the semi-autobiographical The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, her delightful biography of Louis XV's chief mistress, and a pair of fascinating programmes exploring her own unconventional life.

The radio premiere of Erica Jong's uninhibited feminist classic about female sexuality. Isadora Wing has been married to psycho-analyst Bennett for five years. But she has become restless and yearns for men, for solitude, and for the perfect, guiltless, ‘zipless f**k’. Having overcome her...

Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires. This elegant and allusive novel established Molly Keane as the natural successor to Jean Rhys.

Based in the little town of Bridgeford, High-Lites salon boasts the most misanthropic hairdresser in Britain: sharp-tongued, mean-minded Bev. With the help of her soft-hearted (though slightly dim) assistant, Shirley, she tends to the tresses of a motley crew of local characters. As she cuts their hair, she finds out everything that's going on in their lives - and wastes no time in spreading some gossip of her own.

Five full-cast dramas by the celebrated Scottish writer Liz Lochhead, plus a short story Liz Lochhead is a widely recognised poet, playwright and performer. She was the Makar, Scotland’s national poet, between 2011 and 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2015. The six...

Full-cast dramatisations and original plays and stories from the award-winning author. Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker Prize 2019 with her novel, Girl, Woman, Other and the one-off Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award in 2025. The author of ten books, her 2013 novel Mr Loverman was...

Before Jane Austen, there was Fanny Burney. In the 1780s, she was England’s most celebrated female author, having achieved extraordinary success with two hit novels. She went on to become a royal servant, marry an exile from the French Revolution and undergo a gruelling mastectomy without the aid of anaesthetic – all events chronicled in her diaries, which were published posthumously to great acclaim. Contained here are dramatisations of her first and most famous novel, and her remarkable journals and letters.

A chilling collection of classic gothic horror and ghost stories adapted or written by women In this breathtaking collection of gothic horror and eerie tales, draw the curtains and pull the blankets close for two classic Victorian horror tales in new adaptations, Dracula starring Nicky Henson...

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a prolific author of novels, short stories and poetry, who also wrote a biography of T. H. White, translated Proust and was an authority on Tudor church music. A sharp, insightful storyteller, she was one of the 20th Century's most acute observers of English mores, and her work is infused with subversive themes reflecting her feminist and Marxist views. This comprehensive anthology includes dramatisations of her two best-known novels.

Two delightful detective dramas adapted from Jill Paton Walsh's bestselling books Award-winning author Jill Paton Walsh was well known for her four Lord Peter Wimsey novels that continued and completed Dorothy L. Sayers's much-loved series. These two cosy crime dramas introduce her own sparkling...

Fifteen highly original and darkly unsettling supernatural stories, performed by some of Britain's finest actresses 'This is what we know about The Hotel. It is bigger on the inside than on the outside. Do not go into Room 63. Doors and windows do not stay in the same places. The Hotel listens...

Two novels by the award-winning Canadian writer Carol Shields, dramatised for BBC Radio Carol Shields was one of Canada’s most renowned contemporary authors. Often compared to Jane Austen, her deft, witty and compassionate works depicting the everyday lives of ordinary people won her numerous...

Inspired by the novels of D.H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love, this ambitious quartet from Booker Prize-winning novelist A.S. Byatt charts the lives of the Potter family between 1953 and 1970. Set against the changing social and political landscape of England in the '50s and '60s, it follows the heroine, Frederica, from precocious teenager to TV talk-show host and from her Yorkshire home to the heart of swinging London.

10 dramas focusing on women's untold stories from history. This diverse, eclectic collection of plays explores an array of social, political and historical events from a female point of view. In these captivating dramas, we see the world through their eyes, giving us a fresh perspective on a...

The Waves: Terence Davies's dramatisation of Virginia Woolf's story. Episode 1: Louis, Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda recall their childhood and first steps into adulthood.Episode 2: Louis, Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda struggle to come to terms with life after Percival...