Exeter Fellow Dr Nicole King featured on BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines

Dr Nicole King, Peter Thompson Fellow and Tutor in English at Exeter College and Associate Professor of American Literature, has featured in two episodes of the BBC Radio 4 series Opening Lines, exploring Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind and its complex cultural legacy. 

Presented by John Yorke, the programme examines how books, plays and stories work, and how they continue to shape – and unsettle – modern audiences. Marking 90 years since the novel’s publication, the episodes revisit a work that has sold more than 30 million copies and was the bestselling American novel of the 20th century yet has become increasingly problematic for contemporary readers. 

In episode two, Dr King joins Professor Sarah Churchwell and writer Rachel Joyce to consider how the history of the American Civil War and its aftermath informs the novel’s storytelling. The discussion addresses Mitchell’s portrayal of slavery and the racist language embedded in the text, confronting the challenges of reading and adapting the novel today. 

In the third and final episode, the conversation turns to the themes of nostalgia and survival that shaped the book’s extraordinary success in 1936, at the height of the Great Depression. Together, the contributors reflect on the novel’s afterlife: whether it should be regarded as a classic of American fiction, an uncomfortable period piece, or something more complicated in between. 

Opening Lines is produced for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds by Pier Productions.  

The episodes are available to listen to on BBC Sounds.