Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Hay, Daisy

Hay, Daisy

Daisy Hay is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter, and the author of Young Romantics,  Mr and Mrs Disraeli and Dinner with Joseph Johnson.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [21] 38; [23] 82; [24] 78; [28] 7; [32] 57; [36] 42; [40] 34; [41] 69; [45] 78; [51] 63; [56] 80; [60] 7; [64] 7; [73] 7; [77] 49; [80] 7

Browse articles

20231201093033 Daisy Hay on Jane Austen, Emma, Slightly Foxed 80

Arrows of Revelation

Daisy Hay on Jane Austen, Emma

Towards the end of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), the heroine Emma Woodhouse has a moment of blinding clarity. Throughout the novel she has been treating her old friend and neighbour, Mr Knightley, as little more than a familiar sparring partner. But as she learns that her friend Harriet is harbouring dreams of marriage with him, the scales fall from her eyes. ‘It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself!’
20230301100019 Gwen Raverat, Daisy Hay on Anthony Trollope, Palliser novels, Slightly Foxed 77

Political Life

Daisy Hay on Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels

In Slightly Foxed no. 73 I wrote about the solace I found, during the first year of the pandemic, in listening to Timothy West’s brilliant recordings of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels. I couldn’t bear to stop listening when I reached the end of The Last Chronicle of Barset, so I followed Plantagenet Palliser and the Duke of Omnium out of Barsetshire and into the books in which they take up starring roles. Originally labelled collectively as Trollope’s ‘parliamentary novels’, today this series is more commonly known as ‘the Palliser novels’ after the family whose domestic and political fortunes form its connecting thread.
20221015090019 Foxed Pod Episode 43 | Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Episode 43: Dinner with Joseph Johnson

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Bookseller, publisher, Dissenter and dinner-party host, Joseph Johnson was a great enabler in the late 18th-century literary landscape . . . Daisy Hay and Kathryn Sutherland join the Slightly Foxed editors to discuss Joseph Johnson’s life and work at St Paul’s Churchyard, the heart of England’s book trade since medieval times. We listen to the conversation around Johnson’s dining-table as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake debate the great issues of the day. And we watch as Johnson embarks on a career that will become the foundation stone of modern publishing. We hear how he takes on Olaudah Equiano’s memoir of enslavement and champions Anna Barbauld’s books for children, how he argues with William Cowper over copyright and how he falls foul of bookshop spies and is sent to prison.
20220301110000 Gwen Raverat from The Bedside Barsetshire, Daisy Hay on Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, SF Issue 73

A Year in Barsetshire

Daisy Hay on Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels

In the spring of 2020, amidst the early devastation of Covid-19, I found myself unable to read. I was grappling with the after-effects of an accident when the pandemic struck, so my concentration was already fractured by the time the streets fell silent. Deprived of the consolations of print, one April afternoon I pressed play on the first chapter of the audiobook of Anthony Trollope’s The Warden as I left the house for my daily walk. I did so without much expectation that the noise would do anything other than provide a mild distraction from the exigencies of the day, but within minutes the cathedral close of Barchester had opened up before me and I was hooked. What follows is an account of the year I spent among the inhabitants of Barsetshire, and of the solace I found in the connected stories of the Barchester novels.
20090901130716

Straw Hat with Red Plaits

Daisy Hay on the novels of L. M. Montgomery

Last summer, during a trip to Canada’s maritime provinces, my husband and I went on a literary pilgrimage. After attending a wedding in Nova Scotia we drove northwards across the Confederation Bridge to Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island. From the bridge we drove further north still, up to the Gulf of St Lawrence. We were looking for a settlement called Cavendish, and for a small, green-gabled farmhouse that draws visitors from all over the world.
20191201121856 Daisy Hay on Joyce Grenfell - Slightly Foxed Issue 64

Accepting an Invitation

Daisy Hay on Joyce Grenfell, Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure

Reading Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure this summer, the memory of my first acquaintance with her has been strong. I’ve heard the precise tones and emphases of her own reading in every line and I’ve realized what I didn’t before, namely that her story offers a wonderfully detailed and idiosyncratic account of life between the wars in Britain. Her narrative is punctuated with well-known names, but above all it offers a vivid sense of what it was like to inhabit a body at a particular point in time.
20181201153946 Daisy Hay, Barnaby Rudge - Slightly Foxed Issue 60

A Dickens of a Riot

Daisy Hay on Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge

Last year I decided that I felt like reading Dickens at Christmas. Resisting the temptation to turn to old and reliable fireside favourites, I alighted instead on Barnaby Rudge. It seemed a choice that would fulfil two purposes: quenching my thirst for some Dickensian delights while teaching me something of an episode about which I wanted to know more. Barnaby Rudge is a historical novel, one of only two such novels Dickens wrote. It was published in 1841 and was the work he planned the longest and most carefully. Yet it is rarely read today and wasn’t very popular when it was published either. One contemporary critic apparently dismissed it as ‘Barnaby Rubbish’.
20160901125459 Anna Trench. Daisy Hay on Mary Wollstonecraft

Letters from the Heart

Daisy Hay on Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

Over the past few months I’ve been immersed in a feast of late-eighteenth-century reading as I’ve meandered through the foothills of a new book project. I’ve had the delight of reacquainting myself with old friends and have made some new ones along the way as I’ve lived and breathed the turbulent events of the decade following the French Revolution through the eyes of some of the period’s most brilliant writers.
20150301125624

A Dizzy Romance

Daisy Hay on Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion

Endymion tells the story of Endymion and Myra Ferrars, a pair of improbably beautiful and good-natured twins, who are forced to make their own way in the world when their father loses his power and income in the aftermath of the 1832 Reform Act, which saw Tory MPs ejected from constituencies up and down the country in the first post-Reform general election. Throughout, Endymion’s story allows Disraeli to make fiction from the materials of his own political coming-of-age. The result is a novel which translates the great dramas of the nineteenth century to a human scale.
20140301141147

Honourable Rebel

Daisy Hay on Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels

Jessica Mitford found the act of sitting down to write formidably hard. ‘’Tis now 12:30 on the first day I was to really work all day on the book,’ she reported to her husband and daughter in May 1959. ‘As you can see, in spite of the good news I’m as bad as ever – ANYTHING to keep from it.’ The ‘good news’ was that after several attempts to place her book she had finally secured publishing deals in both Britain and the United States. The book in question was a memoir which she wanted at various points to call ‘Red Sheep’ and ‘Revolting Daughters’ but which is known today as Hons and Rebels.
20131201110622 Daisy Hay on Jane Eyre - Article in Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

Not So Plain Jane

Daisy Hay on Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre was the novel that opened my eyes to literature. It was the first classic I picked up that I couldn’t put down. I read it from cover to cover in one heady weekend when I was 13: I had a nightmare about Grace Poole on Saturday night, and a sulk on Sunday afternoon when my mother made me put it down to talk to some cousins who’d come for tea. By Sunday evening I was done and I knew, with a certainty I still remember vividly, that literature was my thing . . .
20111201155938 Laura, Louisa and Me. Slightly Foxed: Daisy Hay on Childhood Reading

Laura, Louisa and Me

Daisy Hay on her childhood reading

The Child that Books Built is the title of a memoir by Francis Spufford which explores the impact of books read in childhood by interspersing an account of Spufford’s own reading with excursions into history, philosophy and psychology. It beautifully articulates the formative nature of childhood literary exploration. ‘The words we take into ourselves help to shape us,’ Spufford writes. ‘They help form the questions we think are worth asking; they shift around the boundaries of the sayable inside us . . . They build and stretch and build again the chambers of our imagination.’

Buy related issues of Slightly Foxed