S1E5 - Episode Five The Prisoner

S1E7 - Episode Seven The Rebel

The writer Colette was so famous in her homeland of France that when she died there in the 1950s, Colette was honored to a state-funeral. Her most famous novella “Gigi” was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie, whilst her novel “Cheri” was made into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer.   Colette’s personal life also made headlines: one night, whilst working as a nude music hall performer at the famed Moulin Rouge club, Colette and her then lover, the niece of Emperor Napoleon the Third, apparently sparked a near audience riot, when she and her lover simulated sex onstage.

S1E6 - Episode Six The Trailblazer

Edith Wharton, the American Gilded-Age writer, born into opulence, often “wrote what she knew”. And “who” Edith knew were millionaires - corporate titans who traveled the world and who’d never get on their knees to scrub a toilet bowl all around its rim. Edith also knew about, and wrote about, living within an emotionally cold, sexless marriage (a theme underscoring her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The Age of Innocence”). And Edith knew about affairs; her lust-filled poem “Terminus” written by her beneath warm crumpled sheets, the morning-after she experienced shenanigans with a well-known cad.

S1E5 - Episode Five The Prisoner

John Cleland was born in England in 1710 into a family with literary connections: his father, a civil servant, friends with Alexander Pope - the second most-quoted-writer in “The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations”. Yet John Cleland wound up in prison writing and re-editing his manuscript, for what became, FANNY HILL. The notorious oft-banned novel famed for its colorful descriptions of massive appendages.

S1E4 - Episode Four The Satirist

Satirist Jonathan Swift is best known for his blockbuster novel “Gulliver’s Travels”, yet Swift also wrote scatological lewd poems - one of which you’ll hear today.   You'll also discover more about Jonathan Swift's life: prior to him ascending church ranks to become Dean of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, some scholars speculate that Jonathan Swift's wet-nurse, when he was a babe, kidnapped him.

S1E3 - Episode Three The Clerics

John Donne and Robert Herrick, English clerics born in the late 1500s, were renowned for their rude poetry. John Donne, prior to becoming Dean of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, was a former gentleman privateer who attempted to seize gold held within the bowels of Spanish galleons at sea. Robert Herrick, meanwhile, from his pretty parish in Devon loved nothing more than writing odes to women’s breasts before re-dipping his inky quill into his pot to pen another sermon.