The Essay: Shakespeare's Sisters

Original version

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: Shakespeare's Sisters: Fanny Dickens

Shakespeare's Sisters

Fanny Dickens

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Shakespeare's Sisters, Fanny Dickens

The brilliant women whose success was often eclipsed by their more famous brothers.

Lucy Powell considers how convention was turned on its head in the life of Fanny Dickens, Charles’s older sister.

Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Lucy Powell tells the story of five brilliant women, all the siblings of renowned achievers in the arts and science, whose own success was overlooked – either by their own epoch, or by the annals of history ever since. Virginia Woolf famously reflected on the neglect of brilliant women with her fiction of "Shakespeare’s Sister".

The parents of Charles Dickens were so convinced that his sister Fanny would bring greatness to the family name that, unusually for the time, her education was privileged above her brother’s. Fanny was a gifted musician and one of the first women to win a place at the Royal Academy of Music. So, Lucy asks: why are Charles and Fanny not both remembered?

Produced by Debbie Kilbride
A Tempo & Talker production

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.

Lucy Powell explores the work of brilliant siblings through their relatedness to genius.

Lucy Powell, University of Oxford Leverhulme Fellow and former New Generation Thinker, explores the work of brilliant siblings through the lens of their relatedness to genius.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Essay

Shakespeare's Sisters

Fanny Dickens

Genres

Brand

Series

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3