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Lady Chatterley's Bed Bugs

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BBC Radio 4 - Lady Chatterley's Bed Bugs

How the fascinating and disgusting lives of insects inspired modernist writers.

Dr Rachel Murray hunts down the creepy crawlies of modernism and discovers how the fascinating and disgusting lives of insects fuelled the imaginations of writers.

In the early 20th century, technological advances and scientific breakthroughs revolutionised our understanding of insects, bringing the swarming world of bugs into focus for the first time. As modernist writers searched for new ways of seeing the world, they drew on the insects that were all around them. 

Dr Rachel Murray explores this small but teeming world of inspiration for modernist writers, tracking a fascination with insects to the trenches of the First World War, where lice infested soldiers and men were killed like flies. We hear from entomologist Richard Jones on the prevalence, and downfall, of bedbugs and the excitement caused by bug mania in cinemas and laboratories throughout Britain. 

From this crawling context, literature emerged. Rachel speaks to Dr Michael Malay, who connects Marianne Moore’s precise poetry to her studies in biology and asks Dr Cari Hovanec if D.H. Lawrence was as parasitical as a mosquito.

We go on a moth hunt in Virginia Woolf’s garden at Monk’s House in Sussex and peer into the chaotic patterns of a beehive with writer and beekeeper, Helen Jukes, to discover how and why bugs opened up new worlds for modernist writers. 

Readings from Rich Willmott, Fotina Kate Theodore and Jack Thacker. 

Presenter: Dr Rachel Murray
Producer: Leonie Thomas
Executive Producer: Natalie Steed
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4

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