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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: The Book that Changed Me

The Essay: The Book that Changed Me: Episode 1: Afua Hirsch on 'Wide Sargasso Sea'

Episode 1

Episode 1: Afua Hirsch on 'Wide Sargasso Sea'

The Book that Changed Me

Afua Hirsch on 'Wide Sargasso Sea'

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How journalist and writer Hirsch changed her view of Jean Rhys's novel.

Journalist and writer Afua Hirsch discusses Jean Rhys's novel - a book she first hated, which later helped shape her thinking on Britishness.

Journalist and writer Afua Hirsch discusses "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys, the story of the forgotten first wife of Mr Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. Encountering Rhys's novel aged 14, Hirsch detested her account of a Creole girl growing up in 1830s Jamaica. Re-reading it much later in life, she came to believe that "it is one of the most perfect books ever written in the English language. The sparsity of Rhys's painfully meticulous sentences, which so alienated the teenage me, touches me now - a writer myself - as the work of a genius." The novel helped shape her thinking on Britishness. "Race is everywhere. Its legacy is real and traumatic. You can't opt out of it or - as so many people in contemporary Britain attempt to do - claim not to see it."

Producer Smita Patel
Editor Hugh Levinson.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

People working in the arts discuss the books that inspired them in their careers

Series in which people working in the arts discuss the books that inspired them in their careers

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The Essay

The Book that Changed Me

Episode 1: Afua Hirsch on 'Wide Sargasso Sea'

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