About this episode

The episode explores the connections between Robert Browning's poem and the characters and themes in Rowling-Galbraith's Hallmarked Man.

Nick Jeffery read Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a Victorian epic poem about a murder mystery in 17th Century Italy, to test a theory. John Granger’s best guess after surveying the chapter headings of Hallmarked Man last September was that, of all 77 sources for the 139 epigraphs in Strike8 , Browning’s poem was the most likely to hold a secret message or special meaning inside it. John had said something similar about another Browning poem and Ink Black Heart , Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and Nick had confirmed that through his own reading and confirmation by Rowling herself . He thought John’s track record of spotting important epigraph sources merited a test reading .He published his findings on Friday in a post titled ‘ The Ring and The Book – A Rowling Reading .’ In brief, the murder in Browning’s poem is a point-to-point model for the Ironbridge murder mystery in Hallmarked Man with characters in Rowling-Galbraith’s book — most notably, Chloe Griffiths, Tyler Powell, and Ian Griffiths — having their astonishing equivalents in Ring . The less obvious but more important links between the two are in their implicit feminism and other messages: Both…

People in this episode

Host: John Granger

Guest: Nick Jeffery

Topics covered

• epigraph analysis
• literary connections
• feminism in literature
• murder mystery
• patriarchal critique
• legal system satire

Keywords

• Browning
• epigraphs
• literary analysis
• Rowling-Galbraith
• Hallmarked Man
• feminism
• murder mystery
• patriarchy
• legal critique

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Ring and the Book, Hallmarked Man, Ink Black Heart, Aurora Leigh

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