Episode 275: The Literary Life of Angelina Stanford

Today on The Literary Life podcast, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks have a much-awaited conversation all about Angelina’s own literary life and education. Thomas gets to ask the tough questions and put Angelina on the spot in this episode! She begins by sharing her childhood love of books and what her favorite books were when she was young. They then discuss the turning point Angelina had when she read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. She also talk about the reason she so disliked literary analysis when it was introduced in high school and continues to speak out against the new criticism to this day.

Thomas and Angelina then turn to her experience in higher education and how she ended up studying and teaching literature. She highlights the impact Flannery O’Connor had on her, as well as studying with Burton Raffel. After describing her graduate school experience, Angelina shares how and why she walked away from that path to teach her own children and eventually start a school. Finally, looking at what House of Humane Letters, she talks about the joy and blessing of doing what she loves with people who care about the same books and ideas she does.

Please visit HouseofHumaneLetters.com to check out all the past and upcoming classes, conferences, and webinars mentioned in this episode.

Listen to The Literary Life:

Commonplace Quotes:

St. John said, “And the light shiners in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not understand it and cannot extinguish it. (I need the double meaning here of the word comprehend.) This is the great cry of affirmation that is heard over and over again in our imaginative literature, in all art. It is a light to lighten our darkness, to guide us, and we do not need to know, in the realm of provable fact, exactly where it is going to take us.

Madeleine L’Engle

The trouble with prejudice is, there’s usually a reason for it.

Olivia Manning, from The Great Fortune

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

by John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
   The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

Book List:

Amazon affiliate links included below

A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle

Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle

The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner

A Thousand and One Nights ed. by Mathers and Mardrus

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Nancy Drew Mysteries by Carolyn Keene

Beverly Cleary

The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Odyssey by Homer

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Mystery and Manners by Flanner O’Connor

Burton Raffel

Margaret Atwood

Northrop Frye

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Charlotte Mason

Dorothy L. Sayers

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Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

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